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 Zoran Kuzmanovich Gennady Barabtarlo, ed. Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 232 pp. ISBN 9780691167947. "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards" I take my title from Carrol's Through the Looking-Glass and my text from Gennady Barabtarlo, ed. Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 232 pp. ISBN 9780691167947. There are dreams, daydreams, bad dreams, and broken dreams, but whenever they are told by the dreamers themselves, those narratives usually fail to generate in the audience the same high level of interest the tellers have in the telling of their dreams. On the other hand, premonitory, precognitive, or proleptic dreams have been the stuff of literature and religion for millennia, and they usually do not fail to catch our attention. Even if we set aside the prophetic dreams, visions, and revelations of the better known Biblical dreamers (Daniel, Joseph, Isaiah), the possibly precognitive dreams of the scientists are instructive: Niels Bohr's dreams yielded a good guess about the structure of the atom, Einstein's sledding dreams somehow made him understand the usefulness of the speed of light as a variable in his equations, August Kekulé's ouroboros dream served as a breadcrumb trail to the discovery of the benzene ring. The dreams of the scientists named above may suggest merely that when their neocortical circuits were activated by the self-generated electrical oscillations necessary for such activation, the product (dreams) may have been directed precisely by the respective scientists' preoccupation with the schemata they were trying to develop while awake. In other words, their conscious minds may be working overtime; as a result, sensory stimuli are never entirely turned off as in the sleep of those of us who are not obsessed with finding a solution to various mysteries of the universe. But those dreams may also suggest that dreaming is a portal by which the future reveals itself in fragments to the present or influences the past (if by the past we mean fragments of our lives that turn up in the present of our dreams). So if dreams can be predictive, sleep must be thought of as the cheapest form of time travel. At the end of 1964, suspecting that he was having just such precognitive dreams, Vladimir Nabokov set out to record them based on the regimen prescribed by the British philosopher and aeronautics engineer J.W. Dunne in his 1927 book, An Experiment with Time. On 118 index cards Nabokov went on to recount 64 dreams (some his, some Véra's). He even deemed some of them precognitive. In Insomniac Dreams, Prof. Gennady Barabtarlo makes those dreams and Nabokov's analyses of those dreams available to the public and adds a significant set of signposts for future scholars. Coming as it does after the 2009 publication of The Original of Laura (and even echoing its graphic look by reproducing as illustrations some of the index cards Nabokov used), Insomniac Dreams runs the risk of also duplicating the great disappointment and vague embarrassment caused by the publication of The Original of Laura, the book Nabokov was writing when he died in 1977. One opens Insomniac Dreams dreading that it will be yet another jumble of fragments and crude notes that form most of The Original of Laura and provide unwelcome evidence of Nabokov's magic either having reached its expiration or having depended a great deal on revision as the magician's assistant. Luckily, that is not the case, and the book is an outstanding scholarly resource. Barabtarlo has not only collected, reproduced, and annotated those dreams, but he has also carefully and without agenda connected their content to events in Nabokov's life and to scenes in Nabokov's books. Barabtarlo has also compiled an impressive collection of all the dreams from Nabokov's books and even Nabokov's records of his actual dreams that were not a part of the 1964 experiment. The collection offers ample demonstration of Nabokov's preoccupation with the mysteries of time and of the role...