From faroutmagazine.co.uk
If you’re an interesting person, it might be reasonable to presume you’d have more interesting dreams. If you’ve seen more of the world, interacted with a variety of people, achieved great things, gone through great hardships, then the little screensaver program in your brain is gonna have all those details on file and ready to simulate for you anew.
For Vladimir Nabokov, a trilingual refugee of the Russian Revolution who wound up among the most celebrated 20th-century novelists in America, there was almost too much dream material to pull from. By the time he was an older man living in Switzerland in the 1960s, Nabokov had a sense that some bizarre and potentially enlightening shit was going on while he was snoozing. The trouble was that he wasn’t snoozing enough. The long-time insomniac struggled to get his rest, and when he did slip into REM, his dreams came and went into the ether, rarely remembered in the morning.
So, with plenty of time on his hands as the cheques from Lolita sales continued to roll in, Nabokov gave himself a personal challenge to start a dream diary. It ultimately lasted for 80 days, beginning in the autumn of 1964, and it left us with some interesting insights into how the mind of a brilliant storyteller managed the production of its own theatrical subconscious.
As part of the project/experiment, Nabokov made a list of some things he described as “curious features of my dreams,” some of which could certainly be classified as curious features of most people’s dreams, including “exact clock-time awareness but hazy passing of time feeling” and “great difficulty in recalling a complete dream, even in outline.”
Nabokov might have been a tad more unique, however, in that he was routinely able to recall “verbal details” from his dreams with great clarity, and generally experienced “fairly clear, logical cogitation” while in the dream state.
This adds some helpful context to a reading of one of Nabokov’s dream journal entries, such as this one, first published by the Princeton University Press in 2018’s Insomniac Dreams: Experiments in Time, and later featured at diariesofnote.com.
“My mother is upset about something, and everything my father says makes it worse,” Nabokov wrote on November 7th, 1964, recalling the concluding scene of one dream. “He gives me a bound volume of the Illustration or Graphic. I turn the pages, sitting with legs crossed.”
Adding, “My mother, on the verge of tears, quietly leaves the room (we seem to be abroad in a hotel or a villa, my parents are young, but I am a grown man). My father follows her. I hear his voice going on and on in the next room. ‘Ne descendez pas si vous êtes indisposé, et tous seront contents’ (an impossible scene in the real past). I feel dreadfully embarrassed and cannot decide whether to concentrate on the magazine (where there is a chess diagram on the right side page) so as not to hear what is being said, or shut the heavy volume and go away. He also says something about her wishing only that a street be named after him.”
It’s interesting enough to see a 65-year-old man describing such a vivid re-encounter with a younger version of his deceased parents. When you translate the French portion of the diary entry, though, it adds another level of weight to the account. Nabokov’s father, who was a wealthy statesman back in pre-revolution Russia, is perhaps making a compassionate statement to his mother: “If you are unwell, then don’t come down, it will make everybody happy.”
But Nabokov’s journal adds an immediate note about this in parentheses next to the French dialogue: “an impossible scene in the real past.” In other words, Papa Nabokov was never the type to speak so empathetically. Or, if you read the French statement more sarcastically, it confuses matters all the more. Either way, Nabokov felt it was out of character; a distorted, surreal perspective on his dad.
Fortunately, when he woke up from that mildly disturbing dream, Nabokov was still a rich author living in the Alps. All was relatively alright.
