ABSTRACT
In his explorations of childhood memories and their emergence in the adult dreams and nightmares of his opium addiction, Thomas De Quincey drifted further than most autobiographers from recognizable landmarks of experiences in day-to-day life. De Quincey nevertheless sought to retain the striking and recurrent images of his dreams and deserves credit as the first conscientious autobiographer of the interactions between conscious and subconscious experience. As an autobiographer, he was clever enough to arm self-representation with satire. The autobiographer seeks to retrieve, idem in alio, the phantom images of perception, memory, and imagination. As autobiographer De Quincey abrogated the authorship of his life story to opium and opium dreams, and to Wordsworth and Coleridge, the idols of his imagination and the influential rivals of his literary aspirations. His prose is woven of literary allusions and grand rhetorical flourishes; his construction of self drifts into confusions of identity and alterity.
