« Instantaneous! He remembered all he had ever read in popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamt in the instant of waking; of the whole past life lived with frightful intensity by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up, screaming, for the last time. The inexplicable mysteries of conscious existence beset Chief Inspector Heat till he evolved a horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture could be contained between two successive blinks of an eye. »
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent