How to know that you've spent too much time reading Anthony Powell

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I'm going to use the fact that the New York Review of Books blog has recently been running a series of posts on dreams--a topic that longtime readers know is dear to my heart--as an excuse to share a dream from last week. Today's NYRB post is from Tim Parks, who writes of his many dreams about water and says that "It is impossible not to wish to interpret or somehow understand intense dreams." Well, there's a very simple interpretation of the dream I'm going to share today: I've read A Dance to the Music of Time too many times.

The experience of duality is common to dreams, possibly even fundamental. A person is a stranger, yet also your cousin. An object is ordinary, yet also horrifying. While it's impossible to convey the full experience of a dream--impossible even to retain it for long ourselves--I can tell you one thing about a lot of my dreams: they're simultaneously something I'm experiencing and something I'm reading. The dream world, for me, is often made of words.

That was definitely the case with the dream I'm about to describe. While I'm sure that a substantial amount of accuracy has been lost to the transition to the waking, typing world, what follows are, to the best of my ability to recall them, the actual words I remember from my dream as it unfolded, simultaneously events in space and words on a page:

Tired from the hours of sleep lost to preparation for the day's exercises, I hoped to pass the General's door unnoticed, but the fates, busy, one might reasonably suppose, in the larger theater of war, were not with me. "Captain Jenkins," came the call from the office. "Captain Jenkins!"

I took the minimum number of steps into the office that military etiquette required. "Yes, sir?"

"I've been going over the map for today's exercise, and I've discovered something."

Was he proud? Chagrined? Sleeplessness was not helping me to read what hid beneath his graying guardsman's mustache. "Yes, sir?"

"I'd thought it was fifty miles we'd be covering. I was sure it was fifty miles--I've done it before, and I knew it was fifty. But it's not: it's thirty-seven."

"Indeed, sir?"

"Thirty-seven! But I'm so used to fifty . . . and it's such a solid number! So . . . we're just going to say it's fifty nonetheless. We'll be doing fifty miles today, Captain--but fifty short miles. I doubt the men will mind." Stroking his mustache, the Generale lowered his head and chuckled quietly to himself as he folded his map, clearly amused by the ever-reliable reactions of the enlisted man through history. "No, no, I doubt the men will mind a short mile or two."

"Indeed, sir."

Indeed. Sleep well, folks.

Through gates of horn and ivory, or, Entering the realm of the Oneiroi

{Photos by rocketlass.}

October brings longer nights, and, in the upper Midwest, with its clouds and storms, darker nights. More time for dreaming; more time for nightmares.

In The Terrors of the Night (1594), Thomas Nashe writes of dreams:

There is no man put to any torment, but quaketh & trembleth a great while after the executioner hath withdrawn his hand from him. In the daye time wee torment our thoughts and imaginations with sundry cares and devices; all the night time they quake and tremble after the terror of their late suffering, and still continue thinking of the perplexities they have endured.

I am a light sleeper. When my brother recently mentioned being woken by the ticking of his wife's watch as it lay on a table a floor below, I nodded in recognition. So while I am fortunate enough to dream extravagantly, my dreams tend not to take me over completely, not to disorient me on waking. I don't know the terror expressed in the passage below, which begins Charles Baxter's novel The Feast of Love (2000):

The man--me, this pale being, no one else, it seems--wakes in fright, tangled up in the sheets.

The darkened room, the half-closed doors of the closet and the slender pine-slatted lamp on the bedside table: I don't recognize them. On the opposite side of the room, the streetlight's distant luminance coating the window shade has an eerie unwelcome glow. None of these previously familiar objects have any familiarity now. What's worse, I cannot remember or recognize myself. I sit up in bed--actually, I lurch in mild sleepy terror toward the vertical. There's a demon here, one of the unnamed ones, the demon of erasure and forgetting. I can't manage my way through this feeling because my mind isn't working, and because it, the flesh in which I'm housed, hasn't yet become me.

I was led to the Baxter passage by Grace Dane Mazur's remarkable short book on the concept of the hinge, Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination (2010), where she writes, about it and other works:

The openings of some contemporary American masterpieces show the same sort of liminality and entrancement [as Proust] and also an intricate imbalance leading to a sort of structural instability--that state where things are so precarious that something has got to happen. This structural instability can come from being on the edge, or simply being on edge, and is often accompanied by uneasiness, excitement, fear.

In one of the wonderful echoes that reading multiple books at once can generate, I had just that morning been reading Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States (2007), which links Proust and Kafka in a chapter that begins,

At this point, it is also important to rethink the idea of real life.

Describing an early draft of the opening of The Trial, Thirlwell writes, of the moment after the two officials enter Joseph K.'s room:

Joseph K., however, is quick to set things straight. He establishes friendly terms. "The strange thing is," says Joseph K., chattily, "that when one wakes up in the morning, one generally finds things in the same places they were the previous evening. And yet in sleep and in dreams one finds oneself, at least apparently, in a state fundamentally different from wakefulness*, and upon opening one's eyes an infinite presence of mind is required, or rather quickness of wit, in order to catch everything, so to speak, in the same place on left it the evening before."

But, as Thirlwell explains, Kafka deleted that portion of the scene:

This conversation between Joseph K. and the guardes who have come to take him away, in which K. reports what someone once told him, that waking up is the "riskiest moment," because after all, "if you can manage to get through it without being dragged out of place, you can relax for the rest of the day"--this conversation disappeared.

The omission, Thirlwell argues, is key: what separates Kafka's reflections on the disorientations of sleep from Proust's contemporaneous ones ("How then, searching for one's thoughts, one's personality, as one searches for a lost object, does one recover one's own self rather than any other? . . . One fails to see what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings one might be, it is on the being one was the day before that unerringly one lays one's hand.") is that Kafka never cues us to look to sleep's dislocations:

Ratehr than speculating on the fact that falling asleep might be ontologically dangerous, Joseph K. now wakes up in a world which is exactly like a dream. Like a dream, it does not feel like a dream at all.

And, as a lived dream in the world, it is, inescapably and inevitably, a nightmare.

In Hinges, Mazur writes,

All these temporal and psyhic perversities combine to put us in an unstable situation in which something, everything, is bound to happen. We, and the characters, have entered into the world of the story, which is clearly a different world from our own.

The same could be said for the world of the dream. Anything could happen--at least up to that moment when, as Paul Bowles put it ins Without Stopping: An Autobiography (1972), "a dream ceases to be a neutral experience and declares itself a nightmare." If we're lucky, at that moment we wake up, or at least begin to receive some intimations that this reality is not reality, and there will be an end to it. A way out.

Which brings me back to the opening, and the sense, on waking, that we have to quickly set the world to rights or risk being permanently unmoored. John Aubrey, in his endlessly diverting and useful Miscellanies Upon Various Subjects (1696), has an entry that suits, under the heading of "Of One's being divided into a Two-fold person":

In dreams it is a sign of death, because out of one are then made two, when the soul is separated from the body.

Sleep is a prefiguring of death,  a dream a hope for countering it, a nightmare a marker of our fears of it. There is a way out, a gate made neither or horn nor of ivory but of bleached bone, through which one day we'll all pass.

"Our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep," or, In dreams

"I had dreams, not nightmares but musical dreams, dreams about transparent questions . . . "--from Amulet, by Roberto Bolano

1 I was reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which I've not read.

"I think dreams have a great many sorts of explanation. Once the Freud virus has, as it were, got into you, you keep on looking at things in that way. But surely there's a lot of pure accident in dreams. One has kinds of obsessions and fears that can't be given a sexual meaning. I think the inventiveness and details of dreams are amazing."--from From a Small Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch

2 I am playing basketball with the Chicago Bulls. I take a pass and fling up an outside shot, which misses abysmally. I turn around to find Michael Jordan shaming me by wagging a long finger, while Dennis Rodman is doubled over, gripping his knees in helpless laughter.

"The Atlantes, according to my sources, never eat any living thing, and never dream, either."--from The Histories, by Herodotus

3 At my nephew's ninth birthday party I was surprised to notice two guests whose attendance I certainly had not expected: Marcel Proust and Eloise of the Plaza. I got the sense that they'd somehow been invited in error, that it was quite possible that they knew no one at the party aside from each other. That wasn't really a problem, however, as they gave the impression of being the sort of close friends who need little to no outside contact. Huddled together in a corner, they sipped from the tiny teacups of my niece's tea set and quietly shared private, gossipy jokes that caused them now and again to break out in skeins of poorly muffled giggles.

"I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel."--from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust

4 I am running a marathon in some anonymous but lovely European mountain town. The course, which winds through the narrow, wandering late-medieval streets of the town, is convoluted and difficult to follow, but that difficulty, in the early part of the race, is a help, giving my mind something to focus on aside from the details of my exertion. But around mile twelve I realize quite suddenly that I'm all alone, the body of fellow runners having silently slipped away somewhere along the course. It's clear that I've take a wrong turn and left the course behind. Worried, I look around, hoping to find a guide or a map. All I see is a quaint-looking pastry shop spilling a warm glow of candlelight onto the crooked sidewalk. I enter the pastry shop, conscious of the salty sweat caking my body, and, with apologies for my gross condition, I ask the baker whether he might happen to have a map of the marathon course. Smiling, he reaches into the display case and selects a cookie baked in the shape of an elephant balancing on a ball. He pokes a pudgy finger at the intricate lines that, pressed into the cookie, make up the design. In a voice tinged with a vaguely Germanic accent, he says, "You simply follow these lines." The cookie is a map of the route; the route forms the shape of an elephant balancing on a ball.

With a smile on my face and a cookie in hand, I leave the shop and begin to trot back toward the course.

"It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being unusually restless, and unusually real. He dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion's footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances in her course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light--really changed, much as he had dreamed--and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet."--from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens

5 One of the editors at my workplace had arranged for some prominent authors to give lectures on their craft to the entire office. First up were Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. They took turns speaking, and they actually had fairly interesting things to say about each other’s work. Hemingway was surprisingly self-effacing, and Conrad was exactly as I expected: formal, precise, and thoroughly serious.

It was only after I’d returned to my office following the lecture that I remembered that both Hemingway and Conrad were long dead. “Of course!” I thought. “Those must have been professional impersonators!”

I ran for the front desk, hoping to catch them before they left. Conrad was gone by the time I got there, but Hemingway was just stepping into the elevator. “Wait!” I shouted. “Who do you do when you’re not doing Hemingway?”

Hemingway turned. Then, smiling, he ripped off his mask, held it aloft, and jauntily shouted, "Yourcenar!”

"Against fearful and troublesome dreams, nightmare and such inconveniences, wherewith melancholy men are molested, the best remedy is to eat a light supper, and of such meats as are easy of digestion; no Hare, Venison, Beef, &c. not to lie on his back, not to meditate or think in the day time of any terrible objects, or especially talk of them before he goes to bed. For, as he said in Lucian after such conference, I seem to dream of Hecate, I can think of nothing but Hobgoblins; and, as Tully notes, for the most part our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep, which Ennius writes of Homer: as a dog dreams of an hare, so do men dream on such subjects they thought on last."--from The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton

6 I was at the zoo, watching a gorilla very close up through the bars of his cage. He gave me a quizzical look, tugged at his earlobe, then pointed at my earlobes while mouthing the word, "Earring?" I stared for a second, then remembered that I was wearing a big, gold pirate-style hoop in each ear.

"There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality. When the sleeper awakes, this emissary of his habit assures him that his 'personality' has not disappeared with his fatigue."--from Proust, by Samuel Beckett

7 I am reading James Boswell's Life of Johnson and find a typo that somehow turns an ordinary sentence into some sort of prognostication about my brother's life. As I read it I am amused but impressed, and I remember that Johnson himself left a cryptic note about dreams and brothers in his diary. The entry for January 23, 1759, the day of his mother's funeral, includes the line, "The dream of my Brother I shall remember." Johnson's brother, Nathanael, had died at only twenty-four, a possible suicide; his sole surviving letter is an indictment of Samuel for his harsh treatment.

"It makes a difference whether your dreams usually come true or not. . . . See then if you can follow my example, and give a happy interpretation to your dream."--from a letter to Suetonius Tranquillus by Pliny the Younger

8 I was at Wrigley Field to watch a Cubs game, and, as game time approached, I got out my scorebook to take down the starting lineup. The public address announcer began to rattle off the Cubs lineup. "Leading off, and playing right field . . . a sesame ball." I wrote it down. "Batting second, and playing second base, a furry kitten." I wrote it down. "Batting third, and playing first base, Stacey Shintani." On hearing my wife's name, I threw down my pencil and exclaimed to my seatmate, "They're trying to throw this game!"

"My earliest memory is of a dream. It was in the house where we lived when I was three or four years of age. I dreamed I was asleep in the house in an upper room.

Then I awoke and came downstairs and stood in the living room. The lights were on in the living room, although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. It was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad."--from "Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)," by Anne Carson

9 I was reading—and greatly enjoying—Anthony Powell's’s biography of Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was only after I woke up that I remembered that Powell never wrote a biography of Burton; that was Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, who serves as Powell’s stand-in.

"In some ways a narrative is like a dream. You don't analyze a dream--you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes makes you anxious. A narrative is just the same--you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it into a package called fiction which allows other people to dream. Fiction warms the hearts and minds of the readers. So I believe that there is something deep and enduring in fiction, and I have learned to trust the power of narrative."--Haruki Murakami, from a lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2005

10 I dreamed that Van Morrison was at a dinner party I was attending with about a dozen other friends. After dinner, he got up to play a few songs. He ran through a somewhat perfunctory "Moondance," then asked me if I would accompany him on vocals and guitar for a couple of numbers. I don't play guitar, and while I do like to sing, I'm far from a good singer. But, unwilling to refuse Van Morrison, I got up and faked my way through "The Way Young Lovers Do," strumming and singing along. I was sufficiently nervous that I forgot nearly half the lyrics, but Van sang them all beautifully.

Then he launched into Sam Cooke's "That's Where It's At," and suddenly everything was right: I happened across the right chords, was even able to throw in some simple, but convincing finger-picked flourishes, and Van and I sounded stunningly good singing together.

"He was also terrified with manifest warnings, both old and new, arising from dreams, auspices, and omens. He had never been used to dream before the murder of his mother. After that event, he fancied in his sleep that he was steering a ship, and that the rudder was forced from him: that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into a prodigiously dark place; and was at one time covered over with a vast swarm of winged ants, and at another, surrounded by the national images which were set up near Pompey's theatre, and hindered from advancing farther; that a Spanish jennet he was fond of, had his hinder parts so changed, as to resemble those of an ape, and having his head only left unaltered, neighed very harmoniously. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus flying open of themselves, there issued from it a voice, calling on him by name."--from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius

11 I was rereading Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, in the pages of which I encountered a book I hadn't noticed on my first reading: Ghost Whim, by Robin Anne Powter.

According to Nabokov's narrator, Ghost Whim is a cultural history of dreaming . . . but before I could learn what would happen if I read a nonexistent cultural history of dreaming inside an actual novel inside a dream, I woke up.

"Night comes when you least expect it. You are making dinner or working late, you look out the window and the sky is already dark. The arrival of night can be elusive, mysterious, and in the city we don't often see it, though we always know when it has fallen. In the country night takes its time. A glorious sunset might flag its approach, yet it seems we can never pinpoint its exact arrival. Nightfall is a subtle process."--from Acquainted with the Night, by Christopher Dewdney

Over at my temporary quarters

A reminder: I'm still filling in, with some solid co-bloggers, for Quarterly Conversation editor Scott Esposito at his Conversational Reading blog. Yesterday I wrote about a new series of short-story collections from Harper Perennial by some old masters, which JRSM of the Caustic Cover Critic blog put me on to. The Stephen Crane volume, which I heartily recommend, has an absolutely splendid title, taken from one of the stories: An Experiment in Misery.

Come to think of it, the tone of that title is entirely of a piece with most of the others in the series: the Dostoyevsky is A Disgraceful Affair, the Melville is The Happy Failure, and even Tolstoy's Family Happiness doesn't come close to fooling anyone, does it?

On a totally unrelated note: last night I dreamed that the New York Review of Books Classics series had published another book by Elaine Dundy to coincide with their re-issuing of The Old Man and Me. This one, however, was a big, thick travel guide . . . to Michigan's sparsely populated Upper Peninsula. Is it possible to imagine a region where Dundy would be more out of place?

Coleridge the Dreamer

I've mentioned before that I love footnotes? And dreams? Then let's just dive into a post about a wonderful footnote from Adam Sisman's The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The footnoted scene occurs in 1796, when the young Coleridge was touring the countryside to drum up subscriptions for a new political and literary periodical, of which he was to be the editor (to the surprise and dismay of his friends, who doubted his reliability: "Of all men, Mr Coleridge was the least qualified to display periodical industry," laments his friend and publisher Joseph Cottle (which makes me picture Coleridge as one of those bloggers who gives up after half a dozen posts)). Having been invited to the house of a dissenting minister for an evening of friendly conversation, he made the mistake of smoking some opium beforehand,

which left him feeling so ill that on arriving at the minister's house pale and sweating profusely, he sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon. At length "he awoke from insensibility" and looked around the room, blinking in the light of the candles that had been lit in the interim. One of the gentlemen present asked him if he had read a newspaper that day. "Sir," he replied, rubbing his eyes, "I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest." The ludicrous incongruity of this remark produced a general burst of laughter, and during the remainder of the evening those present joined in attempting to convince Coleridge "in the most friendly and yet most flattering expressions that the employment was neither fit for me, nor I fit for the employment."

To this scene, entertaining enough in itself, Sisman appends the following:

Hazlitt (who of course was not present) gives another account of what seems to have been the same occasion, in which Coleridge awoke on a sofa and then "launched into a three hours' description of the third heaven, of which he had had a dream."

Now, though I am one of those people who unquestionably takes pleasure in recounting his dreams, I do think I would have the good sense to stop well before I'd entered the third hour--though I suppose my friends are welcome to set me straight in the comments, if they see fit.

But, then again, I suppose I've never dreamed Kubla Khan, either, have I? Three hours of confusion and banality here and there in exchange for such a poem isn't that much to ask, no?

"The truth is that I have no revelations to offer," or, Going back to Borges

{Photo by rocketlass.}

A critic can feel he's done his job well when he sends you back to a favorite author, inspired by and armed with fresh insight. Jeremy at Readin has done just that with a recent series of brief, thoughtful posts on a series of lectures delivered by Borges in the 1970s; Borges fans should start here, then scroll through the next couple of weeks of Jeremy's posts.

He's sent me back to Borges's Seven Nights (1980), which collects seven lectures delivered by Borges in Buenos Aires in 1977; given my preoccupation with dreams, I turned immediately to the lecture on nightmares. While family commitments will keep me from writing a full post this weekend, I want at least to share this passage, in which Borges simultaneously conveys and analyzes the creepiness of a particular nightmare:

I remember a certain nightmare I had. It took place, I know, on the Calle Serrano, I think at the corner of Serrano and Soler. It did not look like Serrano and Soler--the landscape was quite different--but I knew that I was on the old Calle Serrano in the Palermo district. I met a friend, a friend I do not know; I saw him, and he was much changed. I had never seen his face before, but I knew his face could not be like that. He was much changed, and very sad. His face was marked by troubles, by illness, perhaps by guilt. e had his right hand inside his jacket. I couldn't see the hand, which he kept hidden over his heart. I embraced him and felt that I had to help him. "But, my poor Fulano, what has happened? How changed you are?" "Yes," he answered, "I am much changed." Slowly, he withdrew his hand. I could see that it was the claw of a bird.

The strange thing is that from the beginning the man had his hand hidden. Without knowing it, I had paved the way for that invention: that the man had the claw of a bird and that I would see the terrible change, the terrible misfortune, that he was turning into a bird. It also happens in dreams that are not nightmares: they ask us something, and we don't know how to answer; they give us the answer, and we are astonished. The answer may be absurd, but in the dream it is exactly right. Everything has been prepared. I have come to the conclusion, though it may not be scientific, that dreams are the most ancient aesthetic activity.

There's so much to like here: the dream itself; the dream-language description of the friend as "a friend I do not know"; and, most interesting, Borges's easy isolation of the self-deceiving role of surprise in dreams, and its relationship to the tug between expectation and surprise in external narrative. I'll be thinking about this--and about ghost stories--when I head to bed tonight.

A Saturday miscellany

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Some reading notes for your Saturday, held together, as you'll see, by the slimmest of threads:

1 As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm fascinated by the topic of dreams. So I've been paying particular attention to Shelley's dreams as I've been reading Richard Holmes's biography of the poet this past week. Shelley was a troubled sleeper from childhood, prone to sleepwalking and vivid dreams--and quite possibly, depending which of his friends you believe, waking visions--that fueled his poetic embrace of the ghostly and the macabre. At one point in the biography, Holmes quotes a passage from an account by Shelley's cousin Tom Medwin that reads like a cross between Borges and the Arabian Nights:

At this time Shelley was ever in a dreamy state, and he told me he was in the habit of noting down his dreams. The first day he said, they amounted to a page, the next to two, the third to several, till at last they constituted the greater part of his existence.

While the thought of the writing of a dream journal consuming one's life is scary enough, after that the account moves into the positively uncanny:

One morning he told me he was satisfied of the existence of two sorts of dreams, the Phrenic and the Psychic; and that he had witnessed a singular phenomenon, proving that the mind and soul were separate and different entities--that it had more than once happened to him to have a dream, which the mind was pleasantly and actively developing; in the midst of which, it was broken off by a dream within a dream--a dream of the soul, to which the mind was not privy; but that from the effect it produced--the start of horror with which he waked--must have been terrific.

2 Which leads me to a dream I had last week: I was in a boat, possibly a police launch, cruising purposefully up the East River on a chilly night. We were looking for a body . . . and Nero Wolfe was with us. I think that's how I realized that it was a dream: no force on earth, I told myself, could get Nero Wolfe to leave his townhouse and board a boat for a wintry nighttime cruise up the East River. That said, I bet he would have found what we were looking for had I only stayed asleep a little longer.

3 Speaking of Nero Wolfe, he tosses off a line in Some Buried Caesar that's been lingering in my mind since I read the novel a couple of weeks ago. Dismissing some complaints about a ruse he'd employed, he says,

Victor Hugo wrote a whole book to prove that a lie could be sublime.

I'm far from a Hugo expert, and a tiny bit of research didn't turn up any obvious answers, so I put the question to the audience: what book is Wolfe talking about?

4 Though I've only lost about half a dozen books in my life, strangely enough two of them were Victor Hugo novels: back in high school, I had mass market paperbacks of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and both of them disappeared when I was partway through them. Perhaps one of my classmates was a secret Hugo fan?

I've thus never finished either one, though I'll admit that my enjoyment of ridiculously long books has led me to eye Les Miserables at the bookstore on occasion--I'm willing to listen to arguments on its behalf if anyone has any to offer.

5 Finally, on the topic of books I've never finished: nearly four years ago I read about four hundred pages of The Count of Monte Cristo while on a weekend road trip. I was surprised to find that nearly everything I knew about the novel--the frame-up, the imprisonment, the escape--happened in the first three hundred or so of those pages, which were great fun, on par with the best parts of The Three Musketeers. But the next hundred pages proved a bit of a slog: where I was expecting the Count to instantly and implacably begin wreaking vengeance, instead he embarked on a series of improbable picaresque adventures. So I put the book away, unsure that I had the patience for another nine hundred pages of such swashbuckling.

So, I ask any Monte Cristo fans out there: was I wrong? Should I take up the Count's story once more?

6 Now that I think about it, this list comes distressingly close to being a perfect example of how my mind works: I may not be a social butterfly, but I plead guilty to being a mental one.

In dreams

About six weeks ago, as the result of a tipsy promise to a friend, I read Infinite Jest for the first time, after years of pointedly avoiding it, having believed that no matter how much I admired David Foster Wallace's essays, his fiction was unlikely to appeal to my tastes. To some extent, I was right: Infinite Jest frustrated me (The Wheelchair Assassins) nearly as often--though not as deeply--as it stunned and moved me (the PGOAT, David Gately, Kate Gompert, Hal). Yet at the same time, I've not been able to shake the novel; ever since I turned the last page (and well before Wallace's death made it inescapable) it was hovering in the back of my mind.

Even so, when I woke this morning from two successive dreams about Infinite Jest, my first thought was that I had in no way deserved them--that I knew countless people, all bigger fans and better readers of Wallace, who should have gotten to dream these dreams instead of me. I suppose the best I can do is share them.

First, I dreamed that I was standing with Pemulis and Hal looking down on the courts at Enfield Tennis Academy from above as some people below shuffled the bleachers around. Suddenly, Pemulis and Hal noticed a pattern to the arrangement of the bleachers that replicated something they'd seen in a druggy vision--and they instantly lit out at top speed to execute some large-scale plan that up to that moment they hadn't quite understood. In the context of the dream, this obviously involved some of the later, unchronicled events that are hinted at or mentioned in the novel (like the night that David Gately helps Hal dig up Himself's head); it seemed instantly to open up new avenues for understanding all the ambiguities that Wallace scattered throughout the book.

Moments after that dream faded, I dreamed that Infinite Jest was actually a video game, and that by playing it long enough and well enough, I had been awarded a secret code that would unlock a whole slate of new characters. I entered the code, and as a list of dozens of names began scrolling down the screen, I shivered in awe, which woke me.

What left me so astonished on waking was how well these dreams seemed to fit with the expansive complexities of the novel. The emergence of patterns, the hope (or sometimes dangerous delusion) that there's more information, more knowledge, more something hidden somewhere, if only one can figure out how to get at it. And it seems right for a novel so concerned with how and what we throw away (or wish to throw away)--actual garbage, damaged people, poisonous memories, crippling desires--to crop up in dreams, which so often seem to serve as a combination of Norton Disk Doctor and small intestine for our weary minds. I thrilled to the memory of them all day.

"The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

One night last week I dreamed that a previously unknown and unpublished story by Vladimir Nabokov, called "H. H. in Eden," had come to light. Even as I was dreaming, I was trying deliberately to remember the details of the story as I read it; the usual half-lucidity of my dreaming self allowed me to know that the only place "H. H. in Eden" actually existed was in my head. Though on waking I lost the rich language of Nabokov--which, heartbreakingly, was fully realized in the dream--I retained the basic outline of the tale.

What I remember of it is this:

Humbert Humbert, having somehow escaped the fate described for him in the introduction to Lolita, manages to trick the Archangel Michael into letting him slip into the long-vacant Eden to escape the hash he has made of his life. Once past Michael and his flaming sword, however, Humbert is surprised to discover that Eden, rather than being depopulated . . . is full of other Humberts. Somehow {and here is where my ability to translate the logic of dreamlife begins to break down} that brings home to Humbert the painful realization that Michael hadn't been fooled at all, and that he'd let Humbert, not into Eden, but into Purgatory.

And there, with that somewhat metaphysical take on an O. Henry twist, the story ended. If only I could get back to that specific dream--but we so rarely find our way back to the same dreams twice, to what Proust called the "second apartment that we have, into which, abandoning our own, we go in order to sleep." I fear that the summary above is all our world is likely to enjoy of "H. H. in Eden."

The dream reminded me that I haven't yet presented a link to a pleasantly strange article by Hilary Mantel that appeared in the Guardian a while back, in which she tells of a story that, Coleridge-like, she pulled straight from a dream. Explains Mantel,

Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4am and typed it on to the screen. The story was called "Nadine at Forty". In its subject matter, in its tone, its setting, it bore no relation to anything I have ever written before or since. It extended itself easily into paragraphs, requiring little correction and not really admitting any; how could my waking self revise what my sleeping self had imagined? By 6am I had finished. I was shaking with fatigue.

Part of what draws me to Mantel as a writer is her ability to plausibly--and yet chillingly--convey, both in fiction or memoir, uncanny moments; in this particular tale, there's still another unexpected creepy turn to come once she's transcribed the story from her dream brain to her computer.

I should also point out the nice recent piece on sleep in the London Review of Books by regular contributor Jenny Diski. Diski is a lover of sleep, while I only reluctantly make my daily peace with its necessity, but her column is wonderfully decriptive and anecdotal, her description of the borderlands of sleep--forevermore owned by Proust though they may be--sufficiently enchanting to justify reading the whole article:

Coming to, coming round. Slowly. Holding onto sleep, then hovering in hypnoland for as long as you can. Jung almost redeems himself from creepy spiritus munditude with the story in which he asks his new patient, a pathologically anxious, blocked writer, to describe his day in detail. ‘Well, I wake, get up and . . .’ ‘Stop,’ Jung says. ‘That’s where you’re going wrong.’ Not likely to be true, but perfectly correct. The hinterland between sleeping and waking is what compensates for having to start and get through the day, blocked writer, besieged schoolteacher or sullen secretary as I’ve been in my time.

Finally, a prize* awaits the first person who can tell me where I took this post's headline from.

*Prize to be your choice of one of two books I've discovered multiple copies of recently in my house: Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles or the second volume of Tolstoy's letters. This is, after all, a low-rent blog, which fact prizes will necessarily reflect.

Though Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances doesn't appear anywhere in this dream, I promise that's what this dream is about.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Right before I went to bed last night, I read for a while from Rivka Galchen's impressive and strange new novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008); as I read, I found myself reminded, more than anything else, of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995), a book I read on its publication thirteen years ago and in a certain sense haven't stopped thinking about since. It's a giant mess of a book that partakes of nearly equal parts Kafka and Chaplin, about a pianist who is perpetually finding life interfering with life, small everyday distractions and failures of memory wreaking havoc on his efforts to be a good husband, father, and artist.

Ultimately The Unconsoled is as frustrating as it is memorable; I tend to think of it as a magnificent failure--yet one whose very ambition has shadowed all of Ishiguro's subsequent novels, showing them up for the circumscribed, disappointingly minor works that they are. {Though I should be clear that I'm in a definite minority here, as the consensus view of Never Let Me Go (2006) in particular is that it was brilliant.} I haven't stopped rushing to the bookstore to buy Ishiguro's novels the minute they're available, but so far I'm still waiting for him to write something as impressive as The Unconsoled.

Which brings me to my dream. Along with my parents, brother, sister, and rocketlass, I had decided to swim across Lake Michigan. Though the dream didn't offer an explanation, I had also decided to carry my copy of The Unconsoled with me. So I was more or less swimming one-armed, switching off every once in a while but always keeping one hand above the waves, the book--a 500-plus-page hardcover--clutched tightly. Fortunately, it turns out that not only is Lake Michigan not nearly as wide as one might think when standing on Montrose Beach looking east, but it also features quite a few spots where it's shallow enough that a swimmer can touch down and rest for a moment before plowing on. Carrying my book, and not being a particularly strong swimmer to begin with, I took full advantage of the shallow spots along the way.

When I reached the Michigan shore, I settled down on the beach to read the still-dry book as a sort of reward for my impressive accomplishment. Not wanting to damage the jacket with sand, I pulled it off the book . . . only to discover that back in 1995 when I had last read The Unconsoled, I had for some reason decided to drape a chapati around the cloth binding under the jacket; as you might imagine, after thirteen years, the chapati and the binding both were pretty gross.

And that's my dream about Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances. Maybe it makes you want to read it?

Dreaming of the Imaginary Library

1 My initial list of books that only exist within novels featured one, Sebastian Knight's The Prismatic Bezel, for which we even have a review in hand. In Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian Knight's brother explains that the book only received one review, a five-and-a-half-line notice in a Sunday paper:

The Prismatic Bezel is apparently a first novel and as such ought not to be judged as severely as (So-and-So's book mentioned previously). Its fun seemed to me obscure and its obscurities funny, but possibly there exists a kind of fiction the niceties of which will always elude me. However, for the benefit of readers who like that sort of stuff I may add that Mr. Knight is as good at splitting hairs as he is at splitting infinitives.

2 In a comment to the original post about imaginary books, MomVee from Watering Place said that she has always wanted to read The Horn of Joy, by Matthew Maddox, which is featured in Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

Off the top of my head, the one that I'd most like to read is Borage and Hellebore, the critical biographical study of Robert Burton written just after World War II by Nick Jenkins, narrator of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Or possibly the mysterious The Book of Three, from which Dallben draws his often troubling knowledge of forthcoming events in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain--though I have a bad feeling that it would turn out to be some stultifying mix of Nostradamusy vagueness and Tolkienien genealogical portentuousness.

And what about you folks?

3 The night after I wrote the post about the imaginary library, I dreamed that I was rereading Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, in the pages of which I encountered a book I'd failed to note in my post: Ghost Whim, by Robin Anne Powter.

According to Nabokov's narrator in my dream version of Laughter in the Dark, Ghost Whim is a cultural history of dreaming . . . but before I could learn what would happen if I read a nonexistent cultural history of dreaming inside an actual novel inside a dream, I woke up. But now I really want to read that book!

4 This final item has nothing to do with an imagined book, but I can't resist adding it--my excuse is that it ties in to the discussion of Nabokov because it might have been triggered by a conversation Ed Park and I had last night about the ape that is discussed at the end of Lolita. It's another dream, this one from a brief doze on the bus on the way home today:

I was at the zoo, watching a gorilla very close-up through the bars of his cage. He gave me a quizzical look, tugged at his earlobe, then pointed at my earlobes while mouthing the word, "Earring?" I stared for a second, then remembered that I was wearing a big, gold pirate-style hoop in each ear.

Going all the way back to vaudeville days . . . that had to be the gorilla my dreams, right?

And that's all for tonight, because I have no choice but to go spend the rest of the evening reading Roberto Bolano. I'm 200 pages into The Savage Detectives and it's proving ridiculously difficult to put down.

The perils--and rewards--of reading before bed

{Tree of Crows, by Caspar David Friedrich}

From The Notebooks of Robert Frost (2007), edited by Robert Faggen

A book should chiefly represent a state the author was in while writing. Half the authors wrote in no particular state at all.

I don't know whether my state affects my writing, but my writing definitely affects my state, especially when I write--or even think about writing--just before going to sleep. On those nights, I'm doomed to dream in pages, words, and tangled sentences in need of an editorial machete. Usually little remains of my efforts on waking except the weariness I'd intended to leave behind.

Last night's book-induced restless sleep was, however, unusually worthwhile. An e-mail conversation with Ed Park had started me thinking about writers' notebooks, which made me perk up when I came across this line from John Aubrey's life of Thomas Hobbes--

He walked much and contemplated, and he had in the head of his cane a pen and ink-horn, carried always a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it.

That led me to Frost's notebooks, and this line:

These are not monologues but my part in a conversation in which the other part is more or less implied.

--and then to Lord Byron's journals, which reminded me that it was past time for bed:

Tuesday, December 7, 1813

Went to bed, and slept dreamlessly, but not refreshingly. Awoke, and up an hour before being called; but dawdled three hours in dressing. When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation),--sleep, eating, and swilling--buttoning and unbuttoning--how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a doormouse.

So off to bed, where I dreamed about trolling the Internets in search of quotations about writers' notebooks to dress up some writing of my own. The dream Internet came through in spectacular fashion, offering up two slightly different epigrams from Aristotle:

The world is my notebook, and time is my pen.

The world is a notebook, and I am the pen.

On waking, I quickly used the waking world's Internet to confirm that Aristotle said no such thing--in his extant writings, that is. Who's to say that my dream Internet hasn't indexed the corpus of Aristotle's lost writings? Either way, it seems like a good night's work.

From The Notebooks of Robert Frost

Maybe sometimes in the morning when I first wake up I am sometimes free

"So inly swete a sweven," or, A passel of dreams

{The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of, John Anster Fitzgerald (1858)}

1 Saturday was my nephew's ninth birthday, and that night I dreamed about the party we'd attended for him that afternoon. The dream, however, featured two guests who hadn't attended the actual party: Marcel Proust and Eloise. The two of them seemed--not, I think, inaptly--to be great friends, spending the whole party sitting next to each other, sipping from the tiny teacups of a child's tea set and quietly sharing private jokes that caused them to break out in skeins of shared giggles. I'm sure you can imagine the smile I wore on waking.

Proust himself would have me doubt their identities--might they have been other people, real people from my life, in masquerade? He takes up the question in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919, translated by James Grieve in 2002):

I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel.

But the underlying simplicity and gentleness of this dream belie Proust's natural suspicions: the dream seemed to have no hidden message, was transmuting no disguised anxiety. In this case, I find myself agreeing with what Iris Murdoch said in a 1983 interview with John Haffenden, collected in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003):

I think dreams have a great many sorts of explanation. Once the Freud virus has, as it were, got into you, you keep on looking at things in that way. But surely there's a lot of pure accident in dreams. One has kinds of obsessions and fears that can't be given a sexual meaning. I think the inventiveness and details of dreams are amazing.

I'm sure Eloise and Proust were simply Eloise and Proust, linked, I can only imagine, because while in New York in September I read a few pages of Mary Ann Caws's Proust while in view of the Plaza Hotel, where Eloise presumably still makes her home. And from now on I'll imagine her there taking catty, gleeful tea with her friend Marcel.

2 Murdoch was a master of employing believably obscure, layered, and organic dreams in her novels; at their best, their richness allowed her to obliquely suggest reams about her characters in remarkably compressed form. But she wasn't interested, at least on the day of the above interview, in sharing her own dreams. When asked to supply an example, Murdoch--usually a very accommodating and open interview subject--responded, "I don't think I will." And she didn't.

3 Though it's hard to imagine Samuel Johnson having much truck with Freud, perhaps Freud could have reassured Johnson on the place of sexual dreams, if the following anecdote, first recounted by one of Johnson's closest friends, Hester Thrale, in her Anecdotes (1765), is to be believed. Here's how Richard Holmes relates it in his Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993):

Johnson came fretfully back from seeing Hester's son to school, suddenly immersed in memories of his own adolescence. "'Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered my heart was communicated in a dream.' 'What was it, Sir?' said I. 'Do not ask me,' replied he, with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation.

Again, this may just be the Freud virus speaking, but I think I have to disagree with the good Doctor: not every dream should be shared with one's mother.

4 A far more enigmatic dream turns up in Johnson's diary entry for January 23, 1759, the day of his mother's burial. The bulk of the entry is a prayer for his mother's soul and for the improvement, through meditation on her example, of his own. But Johnson closes with a brief, suggestive, unforgettable line:

The dream of my Brother I shall remember.

Donald Greene's note to that line in the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Major Works offers a partial explanation:

Nathanael Johnson died suddenly and mysteriously at the age of twenty-four, just at the time Samuel and David Garrick left for London; suicide has been suspected. His one surviving letter, written not long before his death, complains of his harsh treatment by his brother.

The dream itself, however, goes unannotated and unexplained. Boswell doesn't note it--and quite possibly didn't even know about it; Nathanael barely registers in the Life of Johnson, rating five mentions, the first of which flatly states that he "died in his twenty-fifth year."

Perhaps the dream was the travail of a single night, relatively unimportant. But just as Johnson resolved to remember the dream, by the troubling simplicity of that final line he has guaranteed that I will remember it, undreamt and unknown, as well.

5 I'll close with some lines from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370) that are never far from my mind because on first reading them fifteen years ago, I fell for the Middle English word for dream, "sweven," and have never forgotten it. It seems an appropriate way to end this post, since my dreams, like my daily life, are shot through with words--the magical, intoxicating power of which forms the one sweven from which I expect I'll never have to wake.

I hadde unneth that word y-sayd
Right thus as I have told hit yow,
That sodeynly, I niste how,
Swich a lust anoon me took
To slepe, that right upon my book
I fil aslepe, and therwith even
Me mette so inly swete a sweven,
So wonderful, that never yit
I trowe no man hadde the wit
To conne wel my sweven rede.

A neo-Jamesian folkmeos

{Ford Madox Brown, The Dream of Sardanapalus, 1871}

When I started this blog a bit more than two years ago, I didn't specify that I would only write about reading I did while awake . . . so today you get a post about a dream. There was actual reading in the dream, and it included some figures who've figured prominently in this blog already, so it seems relatively justifiable, but I still feel as if I should apologize to the large percentage of the population that has the good sense not to share its dreams.

The origin of the dream is simple: before bed, I spent an hour or so engrossed in Richard Stark's The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), the second of his many novels starring Parker the bank robber. The Parker novels are essentially novels about work, wrapped up in mundane detail--but because most of us readers work office jobs, we enjoy watching Parker go through all the planning and overplanning that underlies a successful heist.

Because I tend to take the tone and language of whatever I'm reading before bed straight into my dreamlife, soon after turning off the light I found myself in the midst of planning a heist. I was working with Parker, who was his usual hyper-professional self, and we were ticking off all the set-up elements that were incidental--yet crucial--to our heist. We had created false names, rented cars, stolen license plates, bought unregistered guns, timed police shifts and guard routes. More unusual, though, was that for this heist to work we'd had to create and produce an issue of a highbrow literary magazine.

Parker's every action in Stark's novels demonstrates that he knows what any conscientious worker learns at some point: that one cuts corners, however seemingly minor, at one's own risk. Rushed or incomplete efforts have a way of coming back to bite you--and in the case of a bank robbery, those unpleasant surprises are likely to lead to prison or death. It should therefore be no surprise that under Parker's direction our heist team produced a first-rate literary magazine. No faking here. It was well-planned, well-edited, well-designed, and full of interesting articles.

Which was good, because our heist went sour in the planning stages, and we called it off. Dejected, I sat in what ought to have been the getaway car, and my only consolation for the wasted money and time was the thought that I could at least read our magazine. So I opened it to the lead article, a double interview in which Anne Carson and a male contemporary American novelist (whose name I knew during the dream, but whose identity was lost to me on waking) walked through a forest and talked. Though I remember flipping through the magazine hoping to find a photo of the notoriously camera-shy Carson--to no avail--I recall nothing about the article except for the following passage, which I reproduce more or less as I read it in my dream, editorial notes as they were in the dream magazine:

CARSON: So in what way would you say you're most nineteenth-century?

MALE NOVELIST: [Chuckles sheepishly] Well, to be honest, it's probably my belief in a neo-Jameseian folkmeos. [A neo-Jamesian folkmeos is a belief that a male artist's domestic concerns naturally ought to be addressed by the women of a household. One can surely assume that the Alice Jameses, especially were they alive today, would have had some sharp comments about that belief.--Eds.] And how about you? How are you most nineteenth-century?

CARSON: Oh, goodness--I never even quite make it to the end of the eighteenth century!

"Folkmeos" appears to be a wholly made-up word--what it has to do, really, with William or Henry James I have no idea. More interesting is that despite the fact that I concentrated very hard on remembering all the details of the dream--and in particular that word--and even described the whole dream to my coworker Carrie, highlighting "folkmeos," by early afternoon I couldn't recall the word without Carrie's assitance. The mind really does want--and, presumably, need--us to forget our dreams.

I don't know that there's any other lesson here, other than to be careful what you read in bed. I do, however, promise not to turn dream reading into a regular feature of this blog.

In the realm of the Oneiroi

{Albrecht Durer, Traumgesicht (Dream Vision), 1525}

From Christopher Dewdney's Acquainted with the Night (2004):

Night comes when you least expect it. You are making dinner or working late, you look out the window and the sky is already dark. The arrival of night can be elusive, mysterious, and in the city we don't often see it, though we always know when it has fallen. In the country night takes its time. A glorious sunset might flag its approach, yet it seems we can never pinpoint its exact arrival. Nightfall is a subtle process.

On the longest day of the year, it seems good to return, however haphazardly, to dreams; with the night losing, for now, its perpetual battle against the day, the powers of the Oneiroi, sons of Hypnos who serve as the rulers of dreaming, are surely at low ebb.

Besides, I'm going away for a few days to the country on a camping trip, and what better inducement to memorable dreams can there be than a night under stars and true, velvety darkness, the distractions of the city left behind?

From Three Poems (1972), by John Ashbery:

it needs pronouncing. To formulate oneself around this hollow, empty sphere . . . To be your breath as it is taken in and shoved out. Then, quietly, it would be as objects placed along the top of a wall: a battery jar, a rusted pulley, shapeless wooden boxes, an open can of axle grease, two lengths of pipe. . . . We see this moment from outside as within. There is no need to offer proof.

I don't actually know whether dream plays a role in Ashbery's writing process, but so often his poetry bears that half-submerged, almost . . . swamp-like quality of a dream, slowed and perhaps logically inexplicable yet organic and right. Proust might argue that it doesn't matter whether dream consciously plays a part. Samuel Beckett explains, in his Proust (1931):

There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality. When the sleeper awakes, this emissary of his habit assures him that his "personality" has not disappeared with his fatigue.

Dream memory, however, necessarily diverges from real memory when we get to the area of prophetic or warning dreams. My favorite of those is a dream from our only known presidential dreamer, Lincoln, a dream so famous that it's simply known as Lincoln's Dream. It comes to us from Lincoln's friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon. In his Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 (1895) he relates that a few days before his assassination Lincoln told him the following:

About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalgue on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers, 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

Even understanding as I do the reasonable questions about the story's veracity--let alone about the purported significance of a man in constant danger dreaming about his death--the chills induced by that dream take me right back to my childhood self, awake in the dark, scared by nightmares. But from Richard N. Current's The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958), I recently learned of another allegedly prophetic dream ascribed to Lincoln, this one noted by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles in his diary:

It occurred on April 14, 1865. That morning Lincoln held a Cabinet meeting, and the occasion was especially dignified by the presence of General Grant, fresh from his victory at Appomattox. The President was hoping for news from General Sherman in North Carolina, where a Confederate army still was in the field. To the Cabinet conferees Lincoln remarked that he had no doubt news soon would come and would be good. For, he said, he had had a dream the previous night. It was a dream he had in advance of almost every important event of the war--always the same dream. In it he "seemed to be moving in some singular, indescribable vessel," and he "was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore."

That night, Lincoln was shot.

I know I risk getting deep into the "And he had a secretary named Kennedy!"-style weeds here, but that dream, too, I find chilling. Yet whereas the first dream, when analyzed, seems a bit too pat, too perfect, this dream is the opposite: it spooks not so much because it seems prophetic as because it seems so vague--so deeply, utterly true to the texture of dream. I can feel the beat of the waves against the bow, see the wisps of cloud and fog obscuring the destination, imagine the odd patience that suffuses the lonely, quiet journey, the way the question of a final destination flits in and out of the dreamer's brain, strongly grasped one moment, lost and forgotten the next.

Imagine if Lincoln had been a lucid dreamer, like the Marquis Leon Hervey de Saint-Denys, who, as Christopher Dewdney explains in Acquainted with the Night, first brought lucid dreaming to widespread attention with his 1867 Dreams and How to Guide Them. Dewdney relates one of the Marquis' stories:

On coming out of a theater, I got into a hackney carriage, which moved off. I woke up almost immediately, without remembering this insignificant vision. I looked at the time on my watch. . . . and after having been completely awake for ten or fifteen minutes, I fell asleep again. It was here that the strange part of the dream began. I dreamed that I woke up in the carriage, which I remembered perfectly well having entered to go home (in the dream). I had the impression that I had dozed off for about a quarter of an hour, but without remembering what thoughts had passed through my mind during that time.

Surely the Oneiroi would be pleased to learn of the Marquis' confusion; at least they would know for sure which Marquis is dreaming and which Marquis is awake.

In looking up the Oneiroi, I learned that one of them, Phantasos, whose name means "apparition," appears in dreams as inanimate objects--which would help to explain those occasional dreams people have where ordinary, everyday items are infused with paralyzing horror. But I don't want to lead any readers to that sort of dream tonight, so I'll close with some more John Ashbery, a bit from Flow Chart (1991) wherein the vaguely ominous dream is held in abeyance:

But at times such as
These late ones, a moaning in copper beeches is heard, of regret,
not for what happened, or even for what could conceivably have happened, but
for what never happened and which therefore exists, as dark
and transparent as a dream. A dream from nowhere. A dream
with no place to go, all dressed up with no place to go, that an axe menaces, off and on, throughout eternity.

Sleep well. If you have good dreams, you might send them off to the proprietors of the Annandale Dream Gazette.

On dreams

From The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 1: Inferno (1308), translated by Robert M. Durling:

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to
myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost
Ah, how hard a thing it is to say what that wood
was, so savage and harsh and strong that the
thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter that death is little more so! But to
treat of the good that I found there, I will tell of
the other things I saw.
I cannot really say how I entered there, so full of
sleep was I at the point when I abandoned the true
way.

As I've said before, coincidences sometimes become connections, and with dreams on the brain after reading Robert Herrick's "The Vine," dreams were what I seemed to keep stumbling across (better than into, I suppose) this week.

First, in reading a review of Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006) by Christian Caryl in the March 1, 2007 issue of the New York Review of Books, I was struck by the following passage from a lecture Murakami delivered at a Cambridge, Massachusetts church in 2005:

In some ways a narrative is like a dream. You don't analyze a dream--you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes makes you anxious. A narrative is just the same--you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it into a package caleld fiction which allows other people to dream. Fiction warms the hearts and minds of the readers. So I believe that there is something deep and enduring in fiction, and I have learned to trust the power of narrative.

This seems to jibe with my assessment of Murakami's writing from back in the summer. I opened that post by recounting a dreamstory from Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams, and I followed it by arguing in favor of letting things sometimes just be what they are in Murakami's work, letting the inexplicable remain unexplained. The meaning is there--and for each book I could give some guesses at it--but it isn't to be extracted; it's of a piece with the presentation, hewing to an internal, organic logic that bears more resemblance to dream than to reality. It blunts our usual attempts to understand and only delivers up sense once we've begun to succumb to Murakami's own patterns of thought and causality.

I then was reading Anne Carson's wonderfully strange book, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005). Opening an essay called "Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)," which travels from Homer, Socrates, and Aristotle to Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, and Tom Stoppard, is the following:

My earliest memory is of a dream. It was in the house where we lived when I was three or four years of age. I dreamed I was asleep in the house in an upper room.

Then I awoke and came downstairs and stood in the living room. The lights were on in the living room, although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. It was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad.

Later in life, when I was learning to reckon with my father, who was afflicted with and eventually died of dementia, this dream recovered itself to me, I think because it seemed to bespeak the situation of looking at a well-known face, whose appearance is exactly as it should be in every feature and detail, except that it is somehow, deeply and glowingly, strange.

The dream of the green living room was my first experience of such strangeness, and I find it as uncanny today as I did when I was three. But there was no concept of madness or dementia available to me at that time. So, as far as I can remember, I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping. I had entered it from the sleep side. And it took me years to recognize, or even to frame a question about, why I found this entrance into strangeness so supremely consoling. For despite the spookiness, inexplicability, and later tragic reference of the green living room, it was and remains for me a consolation to think of it lying there, sunk in its greenness, breathing its own order, answerable to no one, apparently penetrable anywhere and yet so perfectly disguised in the propaganda of its own as to become in a true sense something incognito at the heart of our sleeping house.

Despite very different surface tones and effects, the works of Murakami and Anne Carson (who won me as a fan ten years ago by describing in a poem the taste of a metal screen door as "medieval") share an organic strangeness, an underlying sense that one thing follows another not because anyone expects or asks it to but simply because that's what it does.

Lewis Carroll refined that sort of logic, running it through his memories of the operations of a child's mind, in creating Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Things happen in Wonderland for reasons that are not immediately obvious, but when Alice challenges the creatures she finds there they can always explain their actions--and their logic, though frequently frustrating, is very hard to refute. I may be forgetting something, but I don't remember Alice ever winning an argument in Wonderland--do you?

Says D. J. Enright, who is the one who got me thinking about Alice, in his Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995):

What is essential to children's books--as distinct from some others--is good sense. . . . Without a basis of logic, or at least a strong presence, fantasy is mere whimsy.

That, I would argue, goes the same for dreams: no matter how impenetrable their underlying rules and assumptions may be once we're awake, while we're within the dream we can feel the press of them, the lines of causality that keep us from being all that troubled by what would otherwise be inexplicable.

Enright returns to Alice:

"The reader looks in vain for any immediate reason why Alice should have dreamt such a dream or for any very edifying result deriving from it": Illustrated Times, 16 December 1865, reviewing Alice in Wonderland. But easy to see why the author chatted fluently to children and started to stammer as soon as grown-ups came on the scene.

Finally, because it's fun to end with a scare, I'll leave you with a dream a friend of mine had many years ago. I'll call her Mona, rather than her real name, since I've not ever asked her if I may write about this dream:

After sitting up late into the night reading in bed in her little room at the top of the stairs, Mona drifted off to a troubled sleep. At about the midpoint of the night, she was abruptly awakened by a scraping, creaking sound; the window by her bed was being slowly pushed up. She turned her head, but then her muscles froze completely.

An arm slipped through the narrow opening, and, feeling its way with its fingers across the sill and onto the bedcovers, like a blind elephant searching out food with its trunk, it began plucking at the tousled covers, looking for Mona. After a few seemingly endless moments of being frozen in terror, Mona let loose with a blood-curdling scream; jerking upright, she woke up. The window was closed. It had all been a dream.

Breathing hard, heart pounding, Mona attempted to collect herself. As she reached to turn on her lamp, her window scraped open, and an arm pushed through, reaching out for her. She screamed again . . . and she woke up again.

This time, Mona left her bedroom and sat on the staircase for a while, lights blazing, and smoked some cigarettes. She slept the rest of the night on the couch.

Sleep well.

Three dreams

1) I dreamed that one of the editors at my workplace had arranged for some prominent authors to give lectures on their craft to the entire office. First up were Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. They took turns speaking, and they actually had fairly interesting things to say about each other’s work. Hemingway was surprisingly self-effacing, and Conrad was exactly as I expected: formal, precise, and thoroughly serious.

It was only after I’d returned to my office following the lecture that I remembered that both Hemingway and Conrad were long dead. “Of course!” I thought. “Those must have been professional impersonators!”

I ran for the front desk, hoping to catch them before they left. Conrad was gone by the time I got there, but Hemingway was just stepping into the elevator. “Wait!” I shouted. “Who do you do when you’re not doing Hemingway?”

Hemingway turned. Then, smiling, he ripped off his mask, held it aloft, and jauntily shouted, “Yourcenar!”

2) I dreamed that I was reading—and greatly enjoying—Anthony Powell’s biography of Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). It was only after I woke up that I remembered that Powell never wrote a biography of Burton; that was Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, who serves as Powell’s stand-in.

Realizing that I would never get to read the book I’d been enjoying so much in my dream was substantially disappointing and not a good way to start the day.

3) This one is Stacey’s dream. Friday morning, before we left to visit my parents for the weekend, she told me, “Last night, I dreamed that you were bringing fifty books on this trip.”

From Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

Against fearful and troublesome dreams, nightmare and such inconveniences, wherewith melancholy men are molested, the best remedy is to eat a light supper, and of such meats as are easy of digestion; no Hare, Venison, Beef, &c. not to lie on his back, not to meditate or think in the day time of any terrible objects, or especially talk of them before he goes to bed. For, as he said in Lucian after such conference, I seem to dream of Hecate, I can think of nothing buy Hobgoblins; and, as Tully notes, for the most part our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep, which Ennius writes of Homer: as a dog dreams of an hare, so do men dream on such subjects they thought on last.