Opium dreams filled the Gothic imagination with oriental monsters

Evidence

The dreams and nightmares that inspired Gothic tales were often fueled by drug use. De Quincey’s nightmare took him to Africa, Indostan, and Egypt, a subconscious journey filled with monsters likely induced by opium consumption: … I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos, I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the iblis and crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 457

Categorization

• FICTION: De Quincey’s hallucinated descent into Asia — being worshipped and sacrificed, idol and priest — is a ready-made scene for any narrative about the West dreaming its own monstrous other.
• QUESTION: How much did orientalist drug literature itself manufacture the ‘East as nightmare’ trope that later contact with real Muslims had to contend with?