Only after a long while did the influence, the pernicious influx of the
thought waves emanating from hundreds of convict minds, begin to play on
my mind. I never imagined that convict habits and thoughts could touch
me or have any effect on my inmost thoughts, my better self. During the
day, in fact, when the conscious mind was active, nothing seemed to
effect my habitual, set and crystallized character, my old trend of
mental, moral and intellectual associations.
Only in the last month, during my sleep or half-sleep, did I recognize
the ascendency of the magnetic, unhealthy, collective thoughts of the
prison. They arose slowly, like poisonous miasmas, insidious and
permeating, with a persistency that amazed my startled and thoroughly
alarmed consciousness.
Thoughts, images, desires, which I had been used from my youth and all
through my life to consider unhealthy, degenerate or simply unworthy of
my attention, came sneaking into my subconscious mind, in the form of
disgusting, appalling, terrifying dreams. The back yard of my mind had
begun to register and absorb all the wretched, unclean, monstrous,
unmentionable yearnings, desires and actions of the collective prison
dreams; it was inhaling the moral stench which arose as from a "cloaca
maxima."
I thought of all the weak, unbalanced, receptive young minds which must
have been corrupted by this intangible, powerful magnetism; and of how
this unnatural, abnormal, degrading prison life began in any absorbent
or indifferent temperament a slow corrosion and led to a complete and
effective disruption and destruction of all moral and intellectual
integrity.
I felt as if hundreds of unspeakable and undreamed of sins, taking shape
of gliding snakes, noiseless and black, with glittering eyes and fiery
tongues, were descending upon me, winding round my body and my legs and
arms, fastening their pin-like fangs in my flesh to poison my brain and
body.
And I thanked my stars and my fate and my power of will when the last
night of my sentence arrived to relieve me of an oppressive, suffocating
succession of nightmares.
I did not sleep one solitary wink, but how rosy, exquisite,
exhilarating, radiant, were the thoughts that filled me on that prison
cot, how transparent those bars seemed on that last night, never to be
forgotten, like the first night I spent in that horrible dungeon.