Heart of Darkness explores something truer, more fundamental, and distinctly less
     material than just a personal narrative. It is a night journey into the unconscious,
     and confrontation of an entity within the self. Certain circumstances of Marlow’s
     voyage, looked at in these terms, take on a new importance. The true night journey
     can occur only in sleep or in a waking dream of a profoundly intuitive mind. Marlow
     insists on the dreamlike quality of his narrative. "It seems to me I am trying to tell
     you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the
     dream - sensation." Even before leaving Brussels, Marlow felt as though he "was
     about to set off for center of the earth," not the center of a continent. The
     introspective voyager leaves his familiar rational world, is "cut off from the
     comprehension" of his surroundings, his steamer toils "along slowly on the edge of a
     black and incomprehensible frenzy." As the crisis approaches, the dreamer and his
     ship moves through a silence that "seemed unnatural, like a state of trance; then
     enter a deep fog." The approach to this Kurtz grubbing for ivory in the wretched
     bush was beset by as many dangers as though he had been an enchanted princess
     sleeping in a fabulous castle." Later, Marlow’s task is to try "to break the spell" of
     the wilderness that holds Kurtz entranced.