"and when he awoke it was as if he had awakened in hell. It WAS hell — "the hell of conscious failure,

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon.

For once reality and his brains came into contact and the result was fatal.

The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions.

His brain convulsed,
his mind split open.
Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings
and launchings came over him,
he staggered and flapped desperately,
he was revolted by the thought of known places
and dreamed strange migrations.

The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum.

Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself!

I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness.

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

He had that horrifying clarity of vision that comes just before death.

with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

I was in a state of witless shock, as though flames had suddenly enwrapped and paralyzed me so that for a moment I had no mind, no memory.