26 April 1826. Wednesday Night. This Morning a little before three suffered one of my most grievous and alarming <Scream->Dreams—and on at length struggling myself awake found just such a focus of Ferment just above the Navel as if the Dæmon of Aqua Fortis had just closed in with the Genie Magnesia, or as if a Chocolate Mill were making a Water-spout dance a reel in dizzy-frisk.—It is strongly impressed on my mind, that I shall imitate my dear Father in this as faithfully as Nature imitates or repeats him in me in so many other points—viz. that I shall die in sleep […]
Since I first read Swedenborg’s De Coelo et de Inferno ex Auditis et Visis, every horrid Dream, that I have, my thoughts involuntarily turn to the passage […] (indeed to the whole Book I am indebted for imagining myself always in Hell, i.e. imagining all the wild Chambers, Ruins, Prisons, Bridewells, to be in Hell)—Sunt Spiritus, qui nondum in conjunctione cum Inferno sunt: illi amant indigesta et maligna, qualia sunt sordescentium Ciborum in Ventriculo*—Swedenborg had often talked with them, and driven them away, & immediately the poor Sleeper’s frightful Dreams were removed, they being the spiritual Linguifacture of these Toad-Imps’ whispers.
Since I first read Swedenborg’s De Coelo et de Inferno ex Auditis et Visis, every horrid Dream, that I have, my thoughts involuntarily turn to the passage […] (indeed to the whole Book I am indebted for imagining myself always in Hell, i.e. imagining all the wild Chambers, Ruins, Prisons, Bridewells, to be in Hell)—Sunt Spiritus, qui nondum in conjunctione cum Inferno sunt: illi amant indigesta et maligna, qualia sunt sordescentium Ciborum in Ventriculo*—Swedenborg had often talked with them, and driven them away, & immediately the poor Sleeper’s frightful Dreams were removed, they being the spiritual Linguifacture of these Toad-Imps’ whispers.
Entry 5360, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.
* There are spirits that are not yet conjoined with Hell: they love things undigested and malignant such as befouled victuals in the belly.
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