Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov ed. by Gennady Barabtarlo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov ed. by Gennady Barabtarlo Derek Lee gennady barabtarlo, ed. Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 202. In Vladimir Nabokov's 1969 novel Ada, the nonagenarian Van Veen begins Part II, Chapter 4 with a seemingly simple question: "What are dreams?" His first answer is fairly straightforward: "A random sequence of scenes, trivial or tragic, viatic or static, fantastic or familiar, featuring more or [End Page 124] less plausible events patched up with grotesque details, and recasting dead people in new settings."1 But then Van goes on to argue that over the course of his life he has learned dreams are so much more, something akin to an uncanny visual language riddled with so many clairvoyant and prophetic elements that if properly organized into a larger pattern, they transcend mere randomness to form "the living organism of a new truth."2 Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this metaphysical line of musing is that Van's belief in a "new truth" actually derived from Nabokov's own history of dream experimentation. Nabokov was a lifelong insomniac and lucid dreamer who eventually came to believe his visions contained information about the future. Starting in October 1964, he began testing this eccentric hypothesis by recording his nightly dreams on A6 index cards for nearly three straight months, for the expressed purpose of comparing them with real-world events. This was far more than your standard dream journal—it was a scientific experiment on the nature of precognition. Gennady Barabtarlo's Insomniac Dreams is a remarkable account of Nabokov's dream experiment and his broader fictional and nonfictional inquiries into the oneiric. This concise study is an invaluable resource for Nabokov scholars, with Barabtarlo sharing intimate details of Nabokov's sleep schedule, dreams fragments, and family life that were only previously locatable in the author's archives at the New York Public Library. Moreover, it will appeal to supernatural scholars and enthusiasts given its arcane, even bizarre content. Critics of the occult and the paranormal will find it especially compelling since the dream log is essentially a real-time record of a citizen science experiment in prognostication. Nabokov proves a radical empiricist of the very first order here, willing to examine his dream experience of time on open terms rather than attempting to pigeonhole them within dominant physical and philosophical paradigms of chronology. As such, we as readers gain more than just a novel look into a literary giant's life. We obtain access to the insights, possibilities, frustrations, and dizzying logic that comes with exploring the science of dreams. The theoretical foundation for Nabokov's dream study is introduced in Part I. Most readers will not be familiar with the chronological work of John W. Donne—I certainly wasn't. Donne was an early-twentieth-century British aeronautical engineer who was fascinated by the temporal theories of Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. In 1927, he published An Experiment with Time, an unorthodox text that piqued the [End Page 125] interest of several literary figures, including J. B. Priestley, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, and eventually Nabokov. According to his theory of "serial time," Donne rejected linear and even relative notions of time common to modern physics, positing instead that time was best construed as a series of layers that could travel both forwards and backwards. He further argued that dreams contained "images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions" (12). As such, they represent a threshold through which we can understand the deeper reality of time, as well as the immortality of the human soul. Heady stuff, indeed. As an engineer, Donne also provided a practical methodology for analyzing the precognitive nature of dreams, which involved keeping a journal by one's bed to record dreams immediately upon waking and then verifying them against actual events. Part II represents the core of Insomniac Dreams and offers the entirety of Nabokov's experiment on "reverse memory" as conducted while staying at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland. Barabtarlo provides complete transcriptions of...