Emily Dickinson On Drugs? Emily Dickinson's poems often make me ponder her mental stability. Sometimes I wonder if she was psychotic or on some kind of mind-altering drugs. In Dickinson's poems "I felt a funeral in my brain," "My life closed twice before its close," and "Because I could not stop for Death," we shall see whether or not Mr. J's theory of her insanity stands true. In the piece "I felt a funeral in my brain," she views her own funeral in her head. At one point she thought, "My mind was going numb;" now I strongly believe that one has to be on "crack" to write a line like this.