Message

EDNOTE. NABOKV-L thanks Dmitri Nabokov for sharing the items below and attached. J.W. Dunne's _An Experiment with Time_ (many editions & reprintings) led VN to his own experiments to determine dream evidence bearing on the nature of time. The material below is a fascinating sample.

----- Original Message -----

From: Dmitri Nabokov

To: NABOKV-L

Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 9:17 AM

Subject: Nabokov, Dunne, and dreams

In the context of Aaron Bradford's posting of Bastille Day, feel free to post all of the following, including the attachment.

The attachment contains a dream my father had on the night from November 23rd to November 24th, 1964. Something to honor VN's hundredth birthday had been requested by David Remnick of the NEW YORKER and he was very pleased to publish VN's transcription of a dream. Some time thereafter Anthony Stadlen, in connection with his Inner Circle Seminar titled Psychotherapy Without Psychologism, approached me about the possibility of utilizing some VN dreams in one of his London lectures. All this led me to transcribe from handwritten index cards and begin carefully examining my father's resulting dream book, some 110 triple-spaced pages mainly of his own dreams but also in part of Véra Nabokov's, meticulously recorded in late 1964 and early 1965, in an effort to reproduce some of the phenomena described in J.W. Dunne's "An Experiment with Time". I used a portion of Father's dream material in a couple of my California lectures. Otherwise it is unpublished. As one might imagine, it contains much that it is stunning. I have not yet decided exactly how to deal with it. It begins thus:

Re Dunne Oct. 14, 1964

The following checking of dream events was undertaken to illustrate the principle of "reverse memory". The waking event resembling or coinciding with the dream event does so not because the latter is a prophecy but because this would be the kind of dream that one might expect to have after the event. If the succession of dream and waking event were reversed[,] approximations are marked by underlined dates in red[,] and indubitable repetitions thus[symbol?].

Curious features of my dreams:

1) Very exact clock time awareness but hazy passing-of-time feeling

2) Many perfect strangers - some in almost every dream

4) Fairly sustained, fairly clear, fairly logical (within special limits) cogitation

5) Great difficulty in recalling a complete dream even in outline

6) Recurrent types and themes

1) Professional & vocational (in my case: literature, teaching and lepidoptera)

2) Dim-doom dreams (in my case fatidic-sign nightmares,[sic] (thalamic calamities, menacing series and riddles)

3) Obvious influences of immediate occupations & impressions (olympic games etc)

4) Memories of the remote past (childhood, emigré life, school, parents)

6) Erotic tenderness and heart-rending enchantment

Followed by transcriptions of the dreams.

Best greetings to all,

DN, assistant expert