A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
Medical tag
Altered States
Trance, ecstasy, visions, mystical or dissociative states without a named drug.
Works
Meg Murry is a stubborn, clumsy, unhappy girl with glasses and braces who is doing badly at school, and whose physicist father has been missing for more than a year on secret government work. On a stormy night she comes down to the kitchen of the family's country house to find her mother, a scientist, and her five-year-old brother Charles Wallace, an uncannily gifted child the village thinks is slow.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
On a hot summer afternoon Alice, bored beside her sister on a riverbank, sees a White Rabbit in a waistcoat take a watch out of its pocket and hurry down a rabbit-hole. She follows, falls slowly down a long well past cupboards and bookshelves, and lands in a hall of locked doors.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731 at the monastery of Jarrow, tells how the peoples of Britain received the Christian faith. A dedication to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria explains that history offers good examples to imitate and bad ones to shun, and names his informants, chief among them Abbot Albinus of Canterbury and the priest Nothelm, who searched the papal archives in Rome.
The Enneads collect Plotinus's treatises as arranged by his student Porphyry into six groups of nine. They do not form a continuous textbook, but they return again and again to a metaphysical pattern: all reality proceeds from the One, through Intellect, to Soul, and the philosophical life is a movement of return toward unity.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
Lectures on Revivals of Religion is Finney's manual of revival as method. Where Edwards treats awakening as a surprising work to be interpreted cautiously, Finney argues that revivals are not miracles in the sense of being beyond means.
Tintern Abbey, as the poem is usually called, is a meditation in blank verse spoken on the banks of the River Wye a few miles upstream of the ruined Cistercian abbey on the border of England and Wales. Its first title dates it to 13 July 1798, when Wordsworth was on a walking tour with his sister Dorothy, and it was printed that autumn as the last poem in Lyrical Ballads.
Lord of the Flies follows a party of British schoolboys, aged roughly six to twelve, whose aeroplane is shot down over a tropical island during an unnamed atomic war. No adult survives.
Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening.
On Fairy-Stories is Tolkien's defense of fairy-story as a serious form of imaginative art. He begins by rejecting narrow definitions that identify fairy tales with children, small supernatural beings, dreams, or mere folklore collection.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
Orlando is a comic, fantastical biography of an English nobleman and poet who lives from the last years of Elizabeth I to the eleventh of October 1928, ageing only about twenty years and becoming a woman along the way. The book opens with the sixteen-year-old Orlando slashing at a Moor's head in the attic of his family's enormous house in the country.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
Saint Joan is Shaw's chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl from Domrémy who led the French against the English in the Hundred Years' War. In Scene I, set in 1429 at the castle of Vaucouleurs, the blustering squire Robert de Baudricourt is talked by Joan, and by his own officer Poulengey, into giving her a horse and an escort to the Dauphin; when she leaves, the hens that had stopped laying begin again.
Whitefield's Selected Sermons preserve the voice of the eighteenth century's most famous evangelical itinerant. His preaching emphasized new birth, heartfelt conversion, human sin, Christ's mercy, and the immediate demand that hearers respond.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
Silas Marner is George Eliot's short novel of a lonely linen-weaver restored to human fellowship by a child. In his youth Silas belonged to a strict dissenting congregation at Lantern Yard in a northern manufacturing town, where he was respected for his piety and for the cataleptic fits the brethren took for spiritual visitations.
This paired entry sets Jonathan Edwards's most famous terror sermon beside his narrative of revival in Northampton and neighboring towns. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is often remembered for its imagery of danger, wrath, and suspended judgment, but its structure is theological before it is theatrical.
Patrick's own writings are the narrow bridge between the global St. Patrick's Day figure and a real late Roman Christian voice. The Confessio begins with a self-portrait of abasement: Patrick calls himself a sinner, unlearned, rustic, and contemptible to many.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement. The saint layer is late antique and medieval.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. It opens with the preliminary communication on hysterical symptoms, then presents case histories including Anna O., Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, and Elisabeth von R., followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is the life story of a Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, dictated in his late fifties and carried from his birth on All Saints' night in 1500 to 1562. It opens with Cellini's claim that anyone who has done excellent work and is honest should write his own life after forty, and with his ancestry and childhood: his father Giovanni, a musician and maker of instruments, wants him to be a flute-player, and once boxes his ears so that he will remember the salamander they have seen in the fire.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
The Golden Ass is a comic, erotic, violent and religious novel about curiosity transformed into degradation and salvation. Lucius, a young man fascinated by magic, travels in Thessaly, a region famous for witches.
The Idiot tells what happens when a man of complete goodness and simplicity enters the money-driven society of St. Petersburg in the late 1860s. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the last of an old noble family, returns to Russia after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, where Dr. Schneider treated him for the epileptic illness that left him so slow as a child that people called him an idiot.
The Journey of the Mind into God is Bonaventure's compact map of contemplative ascent, written after meditation on Francis of Assisi's vision of the six-winged seraph at La Verna. The work is structured around six stages, corresponding to the seraph's wings, by which the mind rises through creation, the self, and the names of God before passing beyond conceptual mastery into ecstatic union.
The Jungle Book is a collection of seven animal stories, each followed by a song or poem. The first three tell of Mowgli, a man's cub raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills of central India.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last Battle tells of the end of Narnia, some two hundred years after the reign of Caspian X. Beside Caldron Pool, under the great waterfall in the far west, lives Shift, a clever, ugly old Ape, with his simple friend Puzzle the Donkey, whom he bullies. When a lion's skin washes down the falls, Shift sews it into a coat for Puzzle and, showing him by firelight in a stable on a hill, announces to the Narnians that Aslan has returned.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote at the command of her confessors, so that they could judge whether the extraordinary graces she reported came from God. It follows her from childhood in Avila to the founding of the convent of St. Joseph in 1562, and in its middle chapters becomes a treatise on prayer.
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness.
The Moonstone, subtitled A Romance, tells the story of a great yellow diamond taken from India and the year of suspicion that follows its disappearance from an English country house. A Prologue, drawn from a family paper, describes the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the officer John Herncastle seizes the jewel from Tipu Sultan's treasury, killing its guardians; one dying Indian warns that the Moonstone will have its vengeance.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
The Silver Chair begins behind the gym at Experiment House, a muddled modern boarding school where bullies rule. Jill Pole is crying there when Eustace Scrubb, much changed since his voyage on the Dawn Treader, tells her about Narnia.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
The Story of a Soul is the autobiography of Thérèse Martin, a young Carmelite nun of Lisieux in Normandy, written at the request of her superiors in the last years of her short life and published a year after her death. In the library text, Thomas N. Taylor's 1912 translation, it is arranged in eleven chapters addressed to her sister Pauline, by then Mother Agnes of Jesus, and framed by a prologue on her parents and birth and an epilogue on her final illness.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The Stranger is a short novel in two parts narrated by Meursault, a young shipping clerk in Algiers in French Algeria, who reports what he sees and feels in plain, flat sentences and seldom explains himself. Part One, in six chapters, covers about eighteen days.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
The book, known in Italy as Il Milione and in early French manuscripts as the Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), is less a diary than a geography of Asia as the Polos knew it, organized by route and region and told in the voice of Rustichello, who often addresses the reader directly. The Prologue tells how the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, trading in the Crimea and on the Volga in the 1260s, were carried by war farther and farther east until envoys brought them to Kublai, the Great Kaan of the Tartars, who questioned them about the Pope and the Christian faith and sent them back to Rome asking for a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre.
The trial records of Joan of Arc are not a saint's life in the ordinary devotional sense. They are hostile legal documents that accidentally preserve one of the most vivid medieval voices.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Amory Blaine, the only son of the wealthy, eccentric Beatrice Blaine and her ineffectual husband Stephen, is raised in luxury, travels with his mother, and grows up handsome, clever and sure of his own superiority. After two years in Minneapolis and a spell at a New England boarding school, where he is unpopular and then a football hero, he goes to Princeton, drawn by its glamour.
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham.
Watership Down is the epic of a small band of rabbits who leave their home to found a new one. In the Sandleford warren in Berkshire, a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver, who has visions, sees the field covered in blood and begs his brother Hazel to warn the Chief Rabbit, the Threarah, who dismisses them.
Passages
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, Athens and constraint
A Midsummer Night's Dream gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is early modern psychology: love-melancholy, altered perception, sleep, dreams, and the boundary between enchantment and madness
- A Wrinkle in Time, Chapters 8–9
Charles Wallace lets IT into his mind and speaks with its voice; Meg feels IT's rhythm pressing on her own thoughts.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter VI
Pap's delirium tremens in the cabin: visions of snakes, terror of the dead, and his chase of Huck with a clasp-knife.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter I
Alice checks whether the DRINK ME bottle is marked poison before tasting it, then shrinks to ten inches high.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter II
Alice grows to over nine feet, weeps a pool, and doubts her own identity, testing her memory with multiplication and geography.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter V
The Caterpillar with his hookah gives Alice the mushroom whose two sides make her grow or shrink; her neck stretches above the trees.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. I
Romain Rolland's oceanic feeling explained as an infantile ego-feeling persisting alongside the adult ego; pathological states in which the boundary between ego and world becomes uncertain.
- Confessions, Book VIII.5, 8–12
The chain of habit, the divided will, physical agitation in the garden, and the conversion.
- Death in Venice, Chapter I
Aschenbach, unable to rest after a morning's work and missing his midday sleep, walks out and experiences a hallucination-like vision of a tropical swamp.
- Death in Venice, Chapter V
The dream of the Dionysian rite, described as a bodily and mental experience that crushes Aschenbach's resistance.
- Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali), Sufism (opening) and The Reality of Inspiration
Drunkenness and the doctor's knowledge of it; ecstasy and dreams as states beyond ordinary perception.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 22–23
Descent into the Cave of Montesinos and Quixote's report of dream-like visions.
- Dracula, Ch. 6–8 (Mina's journal)
Lucy's sleepwalking in Whitby and the night Mina finds her on the churchyard bench.
- Dracula, Ch. 14
Van Helsing invokes Charcot and hypnotism to persuade Seward to open his mind to the inexplicable.
- Dracula, Ch. 23–26
Van Helsing hypnotises Mina at sunrise and sunset to track Dracula through her psychic link.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, tomb and fortress episodes
Demonic assaults, terrifying visions and endurance under attack structure ascetic combat.
- Early Christian Lives, Jerome, Life of Hilarion
Fasting, travel, miracles and demonic confrontations define the holy man’s authority.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, Shepherd of Hermas, Visions
Visionary encounters call the church to repentance and moral repair.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Life of St. Francis, Ch. XVII
The stigmata at La Verna are the major medieval case of sanctity written onto the body.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book V, Chapter XII
Drythelm, who seemed to have died, revives and describes a vision of the places of the dead, then lives as a penitent monk.
- Enneads, Soul and embodiment
Enneads gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance is indirect but real: passions, embodiment, purification, attention, and the divided self make philosophy a therapy of perception
- Essays, On Socrates' Personal Deity
Speculation on how Socrates' inner divine sign communicated with him, a classical discussion of voices and inner signs.
- Essays, Moral and Political (selection), Of Superstition and Enthusiasm
Superstition traced to weakness, fear and melancholy; enthusiasm to presumption, luxuriant health and strong spirits.
- Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lectures on anxious sinners
The handling of conviction and distress illustrates the deliberate intensification of spiritual anxiety.
- Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Verse paragraph 2
Remembered landscape gives sensations felt in the blood and heart and tranquil restoration, then a trance-like mood in which bodily motion seems suspended.
- Lord of the Flies, Chapter 8
Simon's waking vision before the pig's head ends in a faint.
- Lord of the Flies, Chapter 9
The ritual dance in the thunderstorm becomes a group frenzy in which Simon is killed.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Morning, Regent's Park
Septimus sees Evans behind the railings, hears the sparrows sing in Greek and believes he must not cut down trees, while Rezia tries to follow Dr. Holmes's advice to make him notice real things.
- On Fairy-Stories, Fantasy and sub-creation
On Fairy-Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is oblique: tolkien treats imagination as recovery from dulled perception and as consolation amid suffering rather than as pathology
- On the Road, Part Four
Driving into Mexico, the companions smoke marijuana with a local youth and experience the landscape in an altered state.
- Orlando: A Biography, Chapter 2 (opening)
The seven-day trance after Sasha's flight, the failed folk remedies, and Orlando's altered memory on waking.
- Orlando: A Biography, Chapter 3
The second trance in Constantinople, a doctor's useless remedies, and the waking change of sex announced by the trumpets of Truth.
- Pensees, Fragment 552, Section VII
The Mystery of Jesus: Christ's self-inflicted agony in Gethsemane, the sleeping disciples, and the voice that says physicians will not heal.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 244a–245c
The four kinds of divine madness, contrasted with madness arising from human disease.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scenes 1 and 3
The Friar describes the potion's effects; Juliet, alone with the vial, fears poison, suffocation in the vault and madness among the bones.
- Saint Joan, Preface, Joan's Voices and Visions; Joan a Galtonic Visualizer
Shaw argues that Joan's voices were the form her own reasoning took and distinguishes her from patients who act on commanding voices.
- Saint Joan, Scene I
Robert says her voices come from her imagination; Joan replies that this is how God's messages come.
- Selected Sermons, Reports around outdoor preaching
Crowd tears, trembling, and silence became contested evidence for revival or enthusiasm.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', middle entries
A doctor's demonstration of hypnotic suggestion on the narrator's cousin in Paris.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part One, 'With the Samanas'
Years of fasting, self-mortification and meditative self-loss, which Siddhartha comes to see as temporary escape like intoxication.
- Silas Marner, Chapter I
Silas's cataleptic trance at the dying deacon's bedside and the brethren's reading of his fits as visitations.
- Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and A Faithful Narrative, Faithful Narrative, descriptions of awakenings
Reports of distress, tears, joy, and communal spread show revival emotion as an interpretive challenge.
- St. Patrick's Writings, Confessio X
The voice from Ireland is a central religious experience that later psychology might compare with conversion and vocation narratives.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr. Lanyon's Narrative
Lanyon inventories the drawer of white salt, the blood-red liquid and the notebook of experiments, then watches the visitor drink and transform.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case
Jekyll describes his first dose, its physical agonies, and the sense of lightness, recklessness and freedom from conscience that followed.
- Studies on Hysteria, Anna O. case
Breuer's case history centers on catharsis, speech, dissociation, and the making of a therapeutic legend.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 111, Arts. 3–4
How angels or demons can move the imagination and senses, set against natural causes of dream-visions and hallucinations in disturbed humours.
- The Aeneid, Book 6
The Sibyl’s possession and Aeneas’ descent to the dead frame prophecy as an altered state.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapter LXIV
The necromantic conjuring in the Colosseum and the terror of the participants.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapters CXVIII-CXXII
Despair in the dark dungeon, an attempt at self-destruction stopped by an unseen force, and the vision of the sun.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, prologue
Dionysus announces his punitive arrival and the women’s ecstatic departure to the mountain.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, first messenger speech
The bacchants nurse animals, strike the ground for water and wine, and tear cattle apart.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, Pentheus disguised
Pentheus’ desire to spy is manipulated through cross-dressing, fascination and altered perception.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 11
The vision of Krishna's universal form, which leaves Arjuna terrified, bewildered and trembling.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §1
Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §2
Contrast between Greek Dionysian festivals and the sexual licence and cruelty of barbarian orgies, which Nietzsche calls a mixture of lust and cruelty.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §7
The lethargic gulf of oblivion after Dionysian ecstasy; return to everyday reality brings nausea and an ascetic, will-paralysing mood; art as a healing enchantress.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Rome section ('Sinbad the Sailor')
Franz eats hashish in the Count's grotto on Monte Cristo and experiences vivid visions.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 12
Three days of screaming, the sensation of being pushed into a black sack, then light and the end of fear.
- The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio
The Divine Comedy gives this tag concrete force through dante is rich for the history of mind: despair, fear, grief, bodily torment, purgative healing, visionary states, and spiritual therapy structure the journey
- The Golden Ass, Book 3
Lucius applies the wrong magical ointment and becomes a donkey while retaining human mind.
- The Golden Ass, Books 4–6
Cupid and Psyche explores forbidden sight, trials and divine affliction inside the larger transformation plot.
- The Golden Ass, Book 11
Isis restores Lucius through ritual procession and roses, framing recovery as religious initiation.
- The Idiot, Part II, Chapter V
The extended description of Myshkin's pre-seizure states, his reflection on whether a diseased state can yield a true insight, and the fit on the hotel staircase.
- The Journey of the Mind into God, Through the world
The Journey of the Mind into God gives this tag concrete force through the work is not clinical, but its language of the mind, affection, illumination, ecstasy, and disciplined desire belongs to philosophy as therapy
- The Jungle Book, Kaa's Hunting, at the Cold Lairs
Kaa's hunger dance in the moonlight entrances the Bandar-log, who walk toward him against their will.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Bisclavret'
The baron's periodic transformation into a werewolf and his confession to his wife.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Eliduc'
Guilliadun falls into a deathlike swoon and is revived with a red flower used by a weasel to restore its mate.
- The Last Battle, Chapter 9: The Great Meeting on Stable Hill
Ginger swaggers into the stable and bolts out terrified, unable to speak; the Talking Beasts watch him become a dumb animal.
- The Last Battle, Chapter 13: How the Dwarfs Refused to Be Taken In
The Dwarfs sit in the open country convinced they are in a dark stable, and Aslan's feast tastes to them like stable fodder.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Apology 31c–d; 40a–c
Socrates' divine sign, an inner voice that only ever restrains him, and its silence on the day of the trial.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapter V
The crisis in her father's house: about four days insensible, the last anointing, and her family's belief that she was dead.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapters XVIII-XX
Union and rapture described with attention to their bodily effects: loss of sensation, coldness, and the body lifted or held motionless.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapter XXIX, §§ 16-17
The vision of the angel with a fiery spear and her description of a pain that is spiritual but shared by the body.
- The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Symptom lectures
Anesthesia, paralysis, contracture, amnesia, and crises are treated as disturbances of function and synthesis.
- The Moonstone, Third Narrative, Chapter X
Jennings lays out his proposal with quotations from Carpenter and from Elliotson's Human Physiology on memory under intoxication.
- The Moonstone, Fourth Narrative
Jennings' journal records his own opium dreams and pain, the preparation of the house, the forty-minim dose, and Franklin's trance-like reenactment.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 4-7
Pym's confinement in the Grampus hold combines darkness, foul air, hunger, thirst, fear and possible delirious misperception.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Final chapters
The flight from Tsalal into the polar unknown produces terror, exhaustion and visionary perception at the edge of narrative collapse.
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter VIII
Mass poisoning by wild honey: dose-dependent intoxication, vomiting, diarrhoea, inability to stand, delirium and collapse, with recovery after a day and convalescence over three to four days.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter VIII: The Relations of Minds to Other Things
Hysterical anaesthesia and blindness, Janet's and Binet's experiments, automatic writing and the secondary or subconscious self.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IX: The Stream of Thought
Interruptions of consciousness under nitrous oxide and other anaesthetics, in epilepsy and fainting, and how the edges of experience merge across the gap.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Prussian Officer, III-IV
The orderly wanders feverish and hallucinating in the heat, collapses, and dies in hospital; the doctors notice the bruises and say nothing.
- The Silver Chair, Chapter 12: The Queen of Underland
The Queen's green powder, sweet smoke and thrumming dull the travellers' minds until Puddleglum stamps on the fire and the pain of his burnt foot clears his head.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, opening
The inhabitants are said to live in a continual reverie, subject to trances and visions, and haunted by the nightmare.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto V, Hiawatha's Fasting
Seven days of fasting with exhaustion and visions before the wrestling with Mondamin.
- The Story of a Soul, Chapter III
The illness of 1883 with terrors, apparent delirium and torpor, Marie's nursing, and the cure she attributes to the smile of the Virgin.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter VIII
Sigmund can eat venom without harm, while Sinfjotli can bear it only on his skin; later, after the wolf-skin fight, Sigmund sees a weasel heal its fellow with a leaf and uses the same herb on Sinfjotli's throat.
- The Stranger, Part One, Chapter 6
The sun, glare and sweat that overwhelm Meursault as he approaches the spring and fires the revolver.
- The Symposium, Symposium setting
The guests regulate drinking after earlier excess, making intoxication part of the social frame.
- The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2; Act 2, Scene 1
Prospero charms Miranda asleep, and Ariel brings a heavy, sudden sleep on all the courtiers except Antonio and Sebastian.
- The Travels of Marco Polo, Book I, Chapters XXIII-XXIV
The Old Man of the Mountain gives his young followers a sleeping potion and carries them into his garden paradise.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc, Condemnation trial, first voice testimony
Joan describes onset, fear, time of day, location, light, and auditory experience, giving material often cited in medical speculation.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism
The four marks of mystical states; alcohol as the exciter of the 'Yes function'; nitrous oxide and ether revelations; epileptic auras and the darker 'diabolical mysticism' of insanity.
- The Waves, Rhoda's soliloquies
Rhoda repeatedly experiences terror, unreality and separation from ordinary social identity.
- This Side of Paradise, Book One, Ch. 3 ('The Devil')
Amory's vision of a ghostly figure in a New York apartment and his flight through the streets.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Part I, Chapter XXII, Aegri Somnia
Aronnax and his companions fall into a sudden, irresistible sleep after a meal, apparently drugged, during an unexplained encounter.
- Villette, Ch. XXII
Lucy sees the nun in the garret and Dr. John speaks of spectral illusion as a possible effect of long mental conflict.
- Villette, Ch. XXXVIII
Lucy is given a sweet drink containing a strong opiate; instead of sleep it brings excitement, and she walks out to the moonlit park festival.
- Watership Down, Part I, opening chapters
Fiver's vision of the field covered in blood and his collapse into fear before the flight from Sandleford.
Quotes
“Take up and read; Take up and read”
“I was in an agitation which approached a delirium”
“I saw that Sufism consists in experiences rather than in definitions”
“Take the pencil and write under my name, ‘I forgive her.’”
Frequently cited
“While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.”
Frequently cited
“Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.”
“Rogamus te, sancte puer, ut venias et adhuc ambules inter nos”
“so that sometimes while asleep a man may judge that what he sees is a dream, discerning, as it were, between things, and their images”
“Indeed, the commotion of the spirits and humors may be so great that such appearances may even occur to those who are awake, as is seen in mad people, and the like”
Frequently cited
“But the world's Wise are not wise, Claiming more than mortal may”
Frequently cited
“There may be many shapes of mystery, And many things God makes to be, Past hope or fear”
“It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness”
“There are some, who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such phenomena as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the consciousness of their own health”
“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.”
Frequently cited
“There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.”
“A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death's door”
Frequently cited
“A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land and to pervade the very atmosphere.”
“A solemn air, and the best comforter To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains”
“Pass that by. I was thirteen when I had a Voice from God for my help and guidance. The first time that I heard this Voice, I was very much frightened; it was mid-day, in the summer, in my father's garden”
“If I were in a wood, I could easily hear the Voice which came to me. It seemed to me to come from lips I should reverence. I believe it was sent me from God”
“I would He might send me yet more, so that it might be discerned that I am come from God and that it is He Who hath sent me”
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”
“Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”
Frequently cited
“our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different”
“Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map”
“The shepherd however bit as my cry had admonished him; he bit with a strong bite! Far away did he spit the head of the serpent—: and sprang up”
“Ah! the sedative had been administered. In fact, they had given me a strong opiate.”