Insomniac Dreams: The Dreamer Cannot Be His Own Final Reader

“Does not connect very sharply.” Nabokov wrote this on January 3, 1965, while considering whether news about an old letter of his bore any relation to a dream recorded eight days earlier. It is the last entry in an experiment that had begun in October: each morning he tried to rescue a dream on an Oxford card, then watched the following days for an event that might have supplied its material in advance. The last card offers neither a revelation nor a decisive failure. Its small concession to uncertainty is an oddly fitting end to a search for evidence that time might run both ways in sleep.

The experiment was what first drew me to Insomniac Dreams. I expected something of the writer whose novels can make a detail return pages later and change an earlier scene. Reading the records, I often felt let down. Some dreams have startling particulars—a museum visitor eats the exhibits by mistake, and a traveler discovers at the border that his passport is in a drawer back in Montreux. Yet the writing is usually a record before it is prose made for another person. A remembered fragment can be followed by “Blank,” “Could not recall,” or, after three empty nights, “Three sterile nights in a row!”

The little system of signs meant to grade promising correspondences also falls away. After skipping four nights, Nabokov explains that he had not taken down the banal dreams. Even this private archive is selected by the person it hopes to study: no later reader can retrieve the dismissed nights to check whether an ordinary dream became interesting afterward. The sustained procedure ends, although he would still write down dreams on other occasions.

Gennady Barabtarlo, who assembled the cards and surrounded them with commentary, gave me more to read in that thinning record than I found in many of the dreams themselves. His most useful insight begins with the intended reader: the diary accounts had none, while dreams Nabokov sent to Véra were already shaped for someone, and those admitted to his memoirs were worked with the care of fiction.

A 1936 letter tells Véra that he dreamed their little boy was ill, then ends in a declaration of love; the fear has an addressee. In the memoir, a child lying awake follows a line of light from Mademoiselle’s room as it weakens and finally disappears.

The reader lives through the waiting, instead of receiving a note that insomnia occurred. A card written before breakfast has, unfortunately, another obligation: to keep an unstable memory from disappearing without rearranging it too soon. My disappointment remains a fair response to the reading experience, though it cannot be a verdict on Nabokov’s powers as a novelist. The very instructions of the experiment asked him to record before interpreting.

The museum with more than one past

On October 17 Nabokov dreamed he was listening to the director of a small museum while absentmindedly eating its specimens. They seemed like dry pastries but were rare soils kept in a wooden tray. His worry quickly shifts from what he has swallowed to the empty compartments and the difficulty of restoring their contents. The place then becomes a clinic, and a mispronounced word, “menace,” causes another small injury when he corrects the speaker. Upon waking he recorded a recent impression: he had read about dried edible mushrooms offered to visitors at an exhibition. He could already name one source for part of the dream.

Three days later, a French television program about soils caught him by surprise. Samples appeared in little bags and a tray; the images seemed to him so close to his dream that he called the episode his “first incontestable success” in the experiment. He even specified the peculiar feeling: the film seemed the dream’s source, had the film come first. This is a valuable account of recognition, but a feeling about the direction of time cannot establish its direction. The TV program shares the dream’s material; it does not account, by itself, for the director, the museum office, or the fear of having damaged the collection.

Here the editor makes his most illuminating intervention. Barabtarlo identifies an earlier arrangement of museum director and strange exhibits in Nabokov’s own 1939 story “The Visit to the Museum.” The dream may be drawing on a fresh reading about mushrooms and an old fictional scene; a later broadcast prompted Nabokov to recognize another likeness. The earlier story does not disprove a relation to the later film. It does make “incontestable” impossible to retain: the resemblance belongs to several histories, and the dreamer attends to only some of them at each moment. Barabtarlo’s finding gives the book something stronger than an answer to the experiment, as it makes visible the unequal positions from which an experience can be read.

The reader who comes afterward

An experiment performed on oneself makes the dreamer both subject and observer. Barabtarlo extends this predicament into a literary relation: a character must move through events in sequence, while a reader can turn back to an earlier page with knowledge of what came later. His comparison becomes especially persuasive because the museum card is still there, beside Nabokov’s confident note about the broadcast. The editor can put the 1939 story, the 1964 dream, and the television program on the same table. Nabokov in October 1964 could not occupy that later position, however extraordinarily good his memory was.

This advantage also changes what the editor is capable of getting wrong. In another dream, a woman says “St-Martin”; Nabokov’s waking note connects the odd name with Menton, Cap Martin, and Montreux. Barabtarlo adds the later St-Martin funeral facility where Nabokov’s body would be cremated. The connection has an eerie force, and I understand why it draws his attention. The older geographical associations, however, remain on the same card. A later event can make a fragment newly suggestive without showing that the dream anticipated it. The reader who can move freely across decades has a temptation the dreamer lacks: the ending is known, and the beginning can be arranged to point toward it.

That is the human difficulty this unusual book leaves open. A private record captures what its writer could honestly observe, including the gaps and dull repetitions; by the time another person can see more, that person also knows too much to look innocently. Barabtarlo’s prose is at its best when it holds both advantages in view. His comparison of the records with the letters and memoirs explains why a dream needs an addressee to become literature. His discovery in “The Visit to the Museum” shows how a life can conceal a prior pattern from the person living it. His more distant correspondences make me cautious about the hunger to complete such a pattern after the fact.

The final card, then, deserves its weak verb. Nabokov had preserved a possible relation without sharpening it to satisfy the experiment. Barabtarlo gives us the later reader’s power to connect more sharply, and the museum episode shows why that power matters. The card also leaves a standard by which to resist him: a resemblance may be exact, partial, or too eager. Between the note written before its aftermath and the book made with an ending already in sight, Insomniac Dreams lets us feel how difficult it is to read an experience while still inside it—and how difficult it remains once we have come out.

Sources

Vladimir Nabokov, Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov, compiled, edited, and with commentaries by Gennady Barabtarlo (Princeton University Press, 2018): “Chronic Condition,” “Dreamer’s Log” (October 17 and 20; January 3), “More Dreams,” and the conclusion. Barabtarlo supplies the comparisons with the 1939 story, the diary/letter/memoir distinction, and the St-Martin reading. Edition record.