Confessions is a remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the ‎'‎Church of Opium‎'‎‎.‎ Thomas De Quincey consumed daily large quantities of laudanum ‎(‎at the time a legal painkiller‎)‎‎,‎ and this autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes his surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings through London‎,‎ along with the nightmares‎,‎ despair and paranoia to which he became prey‎.‎ The result is a work in which the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams‎,‎ memory and imagination are seamlessly interwoven‎,‎ describing in intimate detail the mind‎-altering pleasures and pains unique to opium‎.‎