Opium and Dream, 2013

Opium has been known for at least 6,000 years. Poppy tea is mentioned in ancient texts as a remedy for banishing sorrows and easing grief. Opium consumption reached its peak in the second half of the 1800s and was widespread in both Asia and Europe. As Thomas De Quincey wrote in his autobiography "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater": "The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to conceive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience..."