Transparent things
How Vladimir Nabokov disproved John Dunne’s dream theory
The fiction al poet John Shade, in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, has a dream of a white fountain. Being a student of dreams, he imagines the fountain to be a sign of eternal life. When he reads an article about a woman who had a similar dream, he eagerly searches for her, to compare their experiences. Sadly, he learns that in the article he read, the fountain was nothing but a typo. In truth, the woman had actually seen a mountain.
That was Nabokov’s joke on those who take dreams too seriously. But, being a genius of language and literary invention, Nabokov saw dreams as a language that might tell us something. He even shared the one that half the world must have experienced – far into adulthood, he notes, “finding ourselves in the old classroom, with our homework not done because of having unwittingly missed 10,000 days of school.”
That’s a routine case of misplaced anxiety, of course. Some current problem, of greater or lesser seriousness, is poured by our mildly neurotic unconscious into one of the painfully recalled dramas of our youth. But Nabokov, while friendly to suggestions from dreams, stopped short of Sigmund Freud’s dreamschemes. He considered Freud simple-minded and liked to call him “the quack from Vienna.”
Even so, Nabokov ( 1899–1977), made a point of studying his own dreams, as we learn from a current book, Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time ( Princeton University Press). He was fascinated with the theory of John Dunne, a British philosopher who theorized that a dream might predict something about the future as well as depicting the past.
Nabokov’s fiction having always demonstrated his deep fascination with time, he thought of testing the Dunne theory that time may go in reverse. Could a later event inspire an earlier dream?
One day in 1964, Nabokov determined to test the theory for three months, writing his dreams down on index cards every morning. Edited by Gennady Barabtarlo, a Nabokov specialist at the Univer- sity of Missouri, Nabokov’s notes offer an unrehearsed glimpse of a great writer’s imagination. Barabtarlo includes in the book a sample of dreams that appear in Nabokov’s published writing.
Dreams can be powerful if often baffling symbols, though sometimes they can be what one critic calls detritus from the landfills of our minds. When they are nonsensical we may find ourselves annoyed with what another Nabokov character calls “the dream-manager.”
In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes his fondness for turning the themes of his stories in on themselves. His chronology, more often than not, has a warp, or more than one. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use,” he said, “to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.” His notes show us an authentic, vulnerable Nabokov, shorn of his normal confidence, questioning his every thought.
He jots down a dream about dancing with his wife Vera. “Her open dress, oddly speckled and summery. A man kisses her in passing. I clutch him by the head and bang his face with such vicious force against the wall that he almost gets meat-hooked, on some fixtures on the wall ... Detaches himself with face all bloody and stumbles away.”
Sometimes Nabokov’s dreams deal with the grandest issues. One day he awakens having learned that “the cosmos with all its galaxies” is a blue drop in the hollow of his palm. That, he says, deprives us all of “the terrors of infinity.” He dreams about his father, who was killed in 1922 during a botched assassination plot against someone else. His dream is on a beach and Nabokov is worried about his father being sunburned.
The idea of time flowing backwards in the dream world doesn’t play out in Nabokov’s experience, but we can all share in his more traditional way of executing “a spatial reversal of time.” That happens whenever we re-read a book, he says, and I agree. I still have my much- loved Nabokov books and must get down to re-reading them.
NABOKOV WAS FASCINATED WITH JOHN DUNNE’S THEORY THAT DREAMS PREDICT.