“I suddenly became strangely inebriated. The external worldbecame changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain inrelief;they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing.Even self-perception and the sense of time were changed. When theeyes were closed, colored pictures flashed past in a quickly changingkaleidoscope. After a few hours, the not unpleasant inebriation,which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared.what had caused this condition?”

“As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings.”

“Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one more time. They were people.... The stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart's desire...but only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted.”

“By embracing your subconscious, you gain a different way of seeing and experiencing—an expanded perception that opens a doorway, not only to lucid dreams, but also to the mythic dimension. As in lucid dreams, you see yourself or others with new eyes; your senses awaken and grasp an experience more fully than ever before; suddenly, you find your ears are open to hear with a deeper understanding.”

“Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.”

“…inebriation brings about for an hour or two a state of subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; everything is reduced to appearances and exists only as a function of our sublime self.”