What are dreams? A random sequence of scenes, trivial or
	tragic, viatic or static, fantastic or familiar, featuring more or
	less plausible events patched up with grotesque details, and re-
	casting dead people in new settings.
359.05	In reviewing the more or less memorable dreams I have had
	during the last nine decades I can classify them by subject matter
	into several categories among which two surpass the others
	in generic distinctiveness. There are the professional dreams and
	there are the erotic ones. In my twenties the first kind occurred
359.10	about as frequently as the second, and both had their intro-
	ductory counterparts, insomnias conditioned either by the over-
	flow of ten hours of vocational work or by the memory of
	Ardis that a thorn in my day had maddeningly revived. After
	work I battled against the might of the mind-set: the stream of
359.15	composition, the force of the phrase demanding to be formed
	could not be stopped for hours of darkness and discomfort, and
	when some result had been achieved, the current still hummed
	on and on behind the wall, even if I locked up my brain by an
	act of self-hypnosis (plain will, or pill, could no longer help)
359.20	within some other image or meditation—but not Ardis, not

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	Ada, for that would mean drowning in a cataract of worse
	wakefulness, with rage and regret, desire and despair sweeping
	me into an abyss where sheer physical extenuation stunned me
	at last with sleep.
360.05	In the professional dreams that especially obsessed me when
	I worked on my earliest fiction, and pleaded abjectly with a very
	frail muse ("kneeling and wringing my hands" like the dusty-
	trousered Marmlad before his Marmlady in Dickens), I might
	see for example that I was correcting galley proofs but that
360.10	somehow (the great "somehow" of dreams!) the book had al-
	ready come out, had come out literally, being proffered to me
	by a human hand from the wastepaper basket in its perfect,
	and dreadfully imperfect, stage—with a typo on every page,
	such as the snide "bitterly" instead of "butterfly" and the mean-
360.15	ingless "nuclear" instead of "unclear." Or I would be hurrying
	to a reading I had to give—would feel exasperated by the sight
	of the traffic and people blocking my way, and then realize
	with sudden relief that all I had to do was to strike out the
	phrase "crowded street" in my manuscript. What I might
360.20	designate as "skyscape" (not "skyscrape," as two-thirds of the
	class will probably take it down) dreams belongs to a subdivi-
	sion of my vocational visions, or perhaps may represent a preface
	to them, for it was in my early pubescence that hardly a night
	would pass without some old or recent waketime impression's
360.25	establishing a soft deep link with my still-muted genius (for we
	are "van," rhyming with and indeed signifying "one" in Marina's
	double-you-less deep-voweled Russian pronunciation). The
	presence, or promise, of art in that kind of dream would come
	in the image of an overcast sky with a manifold lining of cloud,
360.30	a motionless but hopeful white, a hopeless but gliding gray,
	showing artistic signs of clearing, and presently the glow of a
	pale sun grew through the leaner layer only to be recowled by
	the scud, for I was not yet ready.

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	Allied to the professional and vocational dreams are "dim-
	doom" visions: fatidic-sign nightmares, thalamic calamities, men-
	acing riddles. Not infrequently the menace is well concealed, and
	the innocent incident will turn out to possess, if jotted down
361.05	and looked up later, the kind of precognitive flavor that Dunne
	has explained by the action of "reverse memory"; but for the
	moment I am not going to enlarge upon the uncanny element
	particular to dreams—beyond observing that some law of logic
	should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after
361.10	which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the liv-
	ing organism of a new truth ("Tell me," says Osberg's little
	gitana to the Moors, El Motela and Ramera, "what is the precise
	minimum of hairs on a body that allows one to call it ‘hairy'?").
	Between the dim-doom and the poignantly sensual, I would
361.15	place "melts" of erotic tenderness and heart-rending enchant-
	ment, chance frôlementsof anonymous girls at vague parties,
	half-smiles of appeal or submission—forerunners or echoes of
	the agonizing dreams of regret when series of receding Adas
	faded away in silent reproach; and tears, even hotter than those
361.20	I would shed in waking life, shook and scalded poor Van, and
	were remembered at odd moments for days and weeks.
	Van's sexual dreams are embarrassing to describe in a family
	chronicle that the very young may perhaps read after a very
	old man's death. Two samples, more or less euphemistically
361.25	worded, should suffice. In an intricate arrangement of thematic
	recollections and automatic phantasmata, Aqua impersonating
	Marina or Marina made-up to look like Aqua, arrives to inform
	Van, joyfully, that Ada has just been delivered of a girl-child
	whom he is about to know carnally on a hard garden bench
361.30	while under a nearby pine, his father, or his dress-coated
	mother, is trying to make a transatlantic call for an ambulance
	to be sent from Vence at once. Another dream, recurring in its
	basic, unmentionable form, since 1888 and well into this century,

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	contained an essentially triple and, in a way, tribadic, idea. Bad
	Ada and lewd Lucette had found a ripe, very ripe ear of Indian
	corn. Ada held it at both ends as if it were a mouth organ and
	now it was an organ, and she moved her parted lips along it,
362.05	varnishing its shaft, and while she was making it trill and moan,
	Lucette's mouth engulfed its extremity. The two sisters' avid
	lovely young faces were now close together, doleful and wistful
	in their slow, almost languid play, their tongues meeting in
	flicks of fire and curling back again, their tumbled hair, red-
362.10	bronze and black-bronze, delightfully commingling and their
	sleek hindquarters lifted high as they slaked their thirst in the
	pool of his blood.
	I have some notes here on the general character of dreams.
	One puzzling feature is the multitude of perfect strangers with
362.15	clear features, but never seen again, accompanying, meeting,
	welcoming me, pestering me with long tedious tales about other
	strangers—all this in localities familiar to me and in the midst of
	people, deceased or living, whom I knew well; or the curious
	tricks of an agent of Chronos—a very exact clock-time aware-
362.20	ness, with all the pangs (possibly full-bladder pangs in disguise)
	of not getting somewhere in time, and with that clock hand
	before me, numerically meaningful, mechanically plausible, but
	combined—and that is the curious part—with an extremely
	hazy, hardly existing passing-of-time feeling (this theme I will
362.25	also reserve for a later chapter). All dreams are affected by the
	experiences and impressions of the present as well as by memories
	of childhood; all reflect, in images or sensations, a draft, a light,
	a rich meal or a grave internal disorder. Perhaps the most typical
	trait of practically all dreams, unimportant or portentous—and
362.30	this despite the presence, in stretches or patches, of fairly
	logical (within special limits) cogitation and awareness (often
	absurd) of dream-past events—should be understood by my
	students as a dismal weakening of the intellectual faculties of

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