Villette, directed dreaming

In Charlotte Brontë’s book Villette, her heroine, Lucy Snowe, accidentally takes too much opium, and spends an evening intensely tripping. When Ms Brontë was asked how she, a parson’s daughter in a remote Yorkshire village, could accurately describe what opium felt like, she said that every night, before she went to bed, she deliberately thought about this particular scene as she fell asleep. On the third night of trying this, she dreamt the entire scene in its entirety, with all the sensations and visions Lucy had.
Of course, this could have been a way of covering up the fact that her brother was an opium addict, and she probably got the facts from him. She did say, however, that she often used this method when she wasn’t sure how to write a scene, or how a character thought or felt. Many creative types use directed dreaming when they’re stuck.