Tennyson

"I have never had any revelation through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name) I have frequently had quite up from boyhood when I have been all alone. This had often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently till all at once, as it were outof the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest; utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is uttlery beyond words?" Life of Tennyson, on Luminous Sleep