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CHAPTER 1

PART 1

CHRONIC CONDITION

DREAM, MEMORY

Time is ... — but this book is about that.

— J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time

ON OCTOBER 14, 1964, in a grand Swiss hotel in Montreux where he had been living for three years, Vladimir Nabokov started a private experiment that lasted till January 3 of the following year, just before his wife's birthday (he had engaged her to join him in the experiment and they compared notes). Every morning, immediately upon awakening, he would write down what he could rescue of his dreams. During the following day or two he was on the lookout for anything that seemed to do with the recorded dream. One hundred and eighteen handwritten Oxford cards, now held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, bear sixty-four such records, many with relevant daytime episodes.

The point of that experiment was to test a theory according to which dreams can be precognitive as well as related to the past. That theory is based on the premise that images and situations in our dreams are not merely kaleidoscoping shards, jumbled, and mislabeled fragments of past impressions, but may also be a proleptic view of an event to come — which offers, as a pleasant side bonus, a satisfactory explanation of the well-known déjà vu phenomenon. Dreams may also be a fanciful convolution of both past and future events. This is possible because, according to this proposition, time's progress is not unidirectional but recursive: the reason we do not notice the backflow is that we are not paying attention. Dreamland is the best proving ground.

Thirteen years prior, on January 25, 1951, Nabokov had a heart-tweaking dream about his father at the piano in their old St. Petersburg home, playing some notes of a Mozart sonata with one hand, looking sad and baffled at his son's attempted literary joke: Turgenev calls, somewhere, a forty-five-year-old man an old man, whereas he, Vladimir Nabokov, is already fifty-two. On waking up and recording it, Nabokov inserts "almost" before "fifty-two," then writes that his father was killed when he was fifty-two as well. The coincidence is indeed astounding: when Nabokov had that dream, he was exactly the same age as his father was on the day of his death, give or take two days.

Next he outlines a plan for what appears to be a sequel to his book of memoirs that was soon to be published.

This is another thing I ought to write, with especial stress on the sloppy production — any old backdrop will do etc. — of dreams.

1. The Three Tenses

2. Dreams

3. The one about the central European professor looking for a job.

The first item — a hull of a short story about one man's present, past, and future love affairs — he sketched in the same notebook the day before. The third item was to become his third American novel, Pnin: this is its first heartbeat. The item in between reflects his enduring desire to prepare his dreamvisions for publication, a project never realized as such, even though versions of his dreams appear in many of his writings (collected in part 4).

On February 14, 1951, his memoir Conclusive Evidence (of his "having existed," as he explains in the preface to the definitive 1966 edition, retitled Speak, Memory) is published. Four days later, he makes notes for a prospective sequel, now boldly letting the cooperative work of memory and imagination share the table of contents:

I see quite clearly now another book, "More Evidence"— something like that —"American Part"

1. Criticism and addenda of "Conclusive Evidence"

2. Three Tenses

3. Dreams

4. MCZ and collecting (merge back into Russia)

5. St Mark's (with full details)

6. Story I am doing now

7. Double Talk (enlarged)

8. Edmund W.

9. The assistant professor who was never found out (Cross, Fairbanks)

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. Criticism and addenda to this.

It is very likely that Nabokov meant to mold his later dream experiment into a literary form as well, perhaps with a view to incorporating excerpts into his second book of autobiography.

DUNNE AND HIS THEORY

1.

The hypothesis behind Nabokov's experiment was advanced by John W. Dunne, a pioneering early twentieth-century British aeronautical engineer, eccentric writer, and original thinker. Between 1901 and 1914 Dunne invented and constructed a "heavier-than-air" flying apparatus for military reconnaissance, which went through ten iterations, both mono- and biplanes, from the D.[unne]1 to D.10. It had an arrowhead body, with wings swept back as in the modern delta designs, and had no tail, which, paradoxically, lent the plane an amazing stability. Dunne could control it by applying throttle alone by foot, his hands free to take notes in flight.

The trends in aircraft construction before World War I were veering sharply away from his design, and, beset by congenital heart illness, Dunne abandoned aviation. After a period spent devising new and improved ways of dry-fly fishing (Dunne published, in 1924, an influential book on the subject of making artificial flies "translucent," the way fish would see the real flies through sunlight), he turned to research that would allow him to explain to his satisfaction a strange series of dreams that he had had since his youth and that, as he discovered, others had experienced, too. He studied contemporary theories of Time, from C. H. Hinton's What Is the Fourth Dimension? (1887) to Bergson and Freud, on one hand, and to Planck and Einstein, on the other. Encouraged by H. G. Wells, an old friend of his, he came up with a detailed general theory, which he published in 1927 as An Experiment with Time (by a curious coincidence, the same year that Heidegger published Sein und Zeit, perhaps his most profound work). Dunne's book has gone through numerous editions, the best being the revised third, published in 1934 with numerous reprints, of which Nabokov owned one. The book caused considerable stir in scholarly philosophical circles and had an ideological influence on a number of contemporary anglophone writers, notably Aldous Huxley and J. B. Priestley, and perhaps less obviously on James Joyce, Walter de la Mare, and T. S. Eliot.

Dunne developed and honed his theory of serial Time in several later books, some with titles that could have caught Nabokov's attention, although there is no evidence that Nabokov read them: The New Immortality (1938) and especially Nothing Dies, published in 1940, the year Nabokov with his wife and son migrated to America from Europe, in which violent death became as ordinary and predictable as foul weather.

2.

Dunne's Experiment with Time is peculiar on all sides. It is utterly original in premise, composition, and style, the latter owing in part to the fact that the author is not a professional literatus bound by conventions. He puts the practical application of his hypothesis before the hypothesis. He sprinkles his narration with rhetorical questions of the type "Can we now be certain that [yclept] be true?", and answers them with an immediate and firm "Yes, we can," dispensing even with customary qualifiers. He uses italics with annoying frequency, as if always suspecting that the reader's attention is flagging and every now and then tugging at his sleeve ("... the argument is based upon the hypothesis ..."; "... a three-dimensional observer ..."). He dismisses competitive theories for which he has no use — that is, almost all of them. Nevertheless, his slim book makes for fascinating reading.

The introduction is doubtless one of the most idiosyncratic ever written. "The general reader will find the book demands from him no previous knowledge of science, mathematics, philosophy, or psychology," Dunne writes. "It is considerably easier to understand than are, say, the rules of Contract Bridge. The exception is the remainder of this Introduction." The real exception for this reader, however, is the second, theoretical, part of the book filled with baffling figures, some distinguishable only by an addition of an arrow point to what was just a line in the previous diagram.

Dunne straddles a curiously uncomfortable ridge, clear of both physics and metaphysics. Of the former he says, shrewdly: "Physics is ... a science which has been expressly designed to study, not the universe, but the things which would supposedly remain in that universe if we were to abstract therefrom every effect of a purely sensory character." In other words, physical science principally ignores the subjective observer, the word Dunne likes to emphasize. Physics is not interested in sensory perceptions, including the sense of time. The observer must be removed, for he is "a permanent obstacle in the path of our search for external reality." For Dunne, the human observer is a cardinal element of the entire system.

On the other hand, Dunne states in the introduction that his theory is decidedly free of mysticism, clairvoyance, or prophecy, that it is not "a book about 'occultism' and not a book about what is called 'psycho-analysis,'" after which he nonchalantly announces that "incidentally, it contains the first scientific argument for human immortality. This, I may say, was entirely unexpected." Forsooth.

This philosophical ambiguity informs the entire exposition, which does not seem to trouble Dunne in the least. He presents a long string of dreams, astonishing in their exact precognition of a subsequent event or situation, then proceeds to show, in mathematical terms, that this wonder is universal and perfectly logical. There is a dreamlike quality to his explanations. He admits that "the incidents in question mimicked to perfection many classical examples of 'clairvoyance,' 'astralwandering,' and 'messages from the dead'" (his mention of the latter must have caught Nabokov's eye, since a much subtler version of the spiritual interference was the subject of many of Nabokov's metaphysical plots.) Early on, Dunne proposes that "the idea of a soul must have first arisen in the mind of primitive man as the result of observation of his dreams. Ignorant as he was, he could have come to no other conclusion but that, in dreams, he left his sleeping body in one universe and went wandering off into another."

It is not unreasonable to assume that Nabokov turned the pages of the book's second, theoretical, part faster. The chapters that follow the dream puzzles and the experiment précis are written in a quaint, hard-boiled yet lively, even blithe, diction, but what started as a promisingly great detective story now turns into a complex of applied algebraic formulas that use up much of the Latin alphabet and are illustrated by drab diagrams. Here is a good example — a sentence Proustian in length, Carollian in its calm desultoriness:

If, then, G'G" represents that state of the cerebrum where it first (in Time I) becomes sufficiently developed to allow the ultimate observer to perceive psychological effects, and if H'H" represents the place where (in Time I) that cerebrum ceases its useful activity and disintegrates, we may say that observer 2 can observe the whole of his ordinary, waking, Time I life, from birth to death, but that, for some reason to be determined, he allows his attention to follow observer 1 in that individual's journey from left to right (from birth to death) along field 2.

Even an earnest reader might feel, halfway through this serpentine sentence, that his "cerebrum ceases its useful activity and disintegrates"— a marked difference from the previous mode of narration, especially the brisk and engaging description of his strange dreams.

3.

Dunne recounts that his first unusual dream of the series took place at a Sussex hotel at 3:30 a.m. in 1899. It is hard to imagine that Nabokov, born that year, could hold back a smile at the coincidence when he read that. That first dream, notably, had to do with time: Dunne dreamed that his watch had stopped, then awoke to discover that his watch lying on the chest of drawers had stopped at precisely the same time, to the minute, as the watch in his dream. The second episode took place in Sorrento, when in a semiwaking state he saw a mental projection of the clock face that he could not see physically, showing the exact time. There is a curious analogy to both of these episodes in Nabokov's 1937 short story "Cloud, Castle, Lake," in which the main character "slept badly the night before the departure. And why? Because he had to get up unusually early, and hence took along into his dreams the delicate face of the watch ticking on his night table" (Stories, 430).

Three ever more striking and inexplicable incidents of precognitive dreaming followed, causing Dunne to suspect that his case was what was known as identifying paramnesia: unwittingly making up a preceding dream to match a later waking experience. Starting with the fifth, in 1904 — in which he saw a devastating fire of a building in singular detail, then read, in the evening paper, a report of a big fire at a rubber factory near Paris with an uncanny number of the same dreadful details as in his dream — he began to set down such dreams right upon awakening, which was to become the chief requirement of his experiment, to make certain that no "identifying paramnesia" was at work.

Dunne's sixth perplexing dream occurred also in 1904, in an Austrian hotel with the curious name Scholastika. (It may be worth noting that most of these dreams happened while the dreamer was sleeping in hotel beds; during his experiment, and for the rest of his life, Nabokov held residence in Montreux Palace hotel.) At that point Dunne realized that these dreams would have "exhibited nothing in the smallest degree unusual" had they happened on the nights "after the corresponding events," but they occurred on the "wrong," i.e., preceding, nights (all italics are Dunne's). Thus he understands that the events he sees in the dreamland are displaced in time.

The seventh installment had to do with a 1912 monoplane crash in which his friend perished near Oxford: at the same time that very morning, in Paris, Dunne saw that very man wrecking his plane in a field but walking away from the crash. He thought that this new striking evidence could be, if one were so inclined, taken for a message from the "spirit-world" or a "phantasm of the dying"; the quotation marks are Dunne's, to signify that he himself did not believe in any of these concepts — unlike Nabokov, who did, and who likely ticked the phrases in the margins of his copy.

The last item Dunne records occurred in the autumn of 1913, when he saw in a dream a train wreck, again in precise detail. Half a year later, on April 14, 1914, the mail train Flying Scotsman jumped the parapet.

The descriptions of the dreams are meticulous, methodical, level-headed; they appear reliable, although unexplained oddities crop up here and there. It is unclear, for instance, why all eight dreams reported in the book were "carefully memorized" and not written down at once. Instead of the exact dates on which they occurred, Dunne usually gives seasons or just the year, which stands in strange disagreement with the general precision of the presentation.

Dunne realized very early on that he might be able to discover some entirely new aspect of the structure of Time. The dreams themselves were not out of the ordinary, but he saw that "large blocks of otherwise perfectly normal personal experience [were] displaced from their proper positions in Time."

4.

The experiment proper is laid out methodically in part 3 of Dunne's book. He was looking for evidence that his predictive dreams were neither abnormal nor peculiar to him alone, but pointed to the previously overlooked aspect of Time and thus must be common to all. People, he noted, tend to forget their dreams upon awakening or else "fail to notice the connection with the subsequent, related event." Occasionally snatches of old dreams surface: there may lurk a plausible explanation of what is known as a déjà vu, a sequence of events seen in a dream but utterly forgotten until the event happens in waking life, sometimes years later.

Dunne therefore concludes that dreams generally are composed of "images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions." His prime argument is that the world is stretched out in time but we have a curiously distorted notion of it, "a view with the 'future' part unaccountably missing, cut off from the growing 'past' part by a travelling 'present moment,'" a habitual fallacy owing to a "purely mentally imposed barrier which existed only when we were awake."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Insomniac Dreams"
by .
Copyright © 2018 THE ESTATE OF DMITRI NABOKOV.
Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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