When I was 16, I read “First Love,” by Vladimir Nabokov. He describes a trip on the Nord Express train, which went from St. Petersburg to Paris. “I would put myself to sleep by the simple act of identifying myself with the engine driver,” Nabokov wrote. And then comes a dream. “In my sleep, I would see something totally different—a glass marble rolling under a grand piano or a toy engine lying on its side with its wheels still working gamely.” That glass marble rolling under the grand piano made me want to be a writer.

Nabokov is one of the great dreamers, the great lost-time recapturers, of the twentieth century, and Speak, Memory, his autobiography, where the marble passage appears in book form, is, I think, his masterpiece. Another section of the book, “Portrait of My Uncle,” has a strikingly beautiful ending: “The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.” This is Nabokov at his best: full of love and heartbreak—not arrogant and summarily dismissive, not weirdly transfixed as he sometimes was by skin blemishes (wens, warts, and hairy moles)—a man who, though he had lost his country, was recreating it now as if at a picnic in a park on the family estate near St. Petersburg, unfurling a blanket of hyperrealistic description on which he set out the long-lost but freshly burnished soup spoons and ladles of his Russian childhood, a “stereoscopic dreamland” wherein certain specific sunsets and windowscapes and birch-dappled garden pathways still existed and would always exist, rendering the terrible dislocations of totalitarian violence irrelevant.

“I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues,” Nabokov wrote in this autobiography, and to good purpose: In the long paragraphs of Speak, Memory, every brimming mirror-flash glows eternally, and no spiraling subparticle of one’s life is ever truly lost. “I confess I do not believe in time,” Nabokov wrote. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.”

And here’s a funny thing about that memoir. Speak, Memory was written, so it seems, under the influence of an aeronautical engineer and avid fly fisherman named John W. Dunne. Beginning in the 1920s, Dunne set the literary world on fire with a now more or less forgotten theory of dreams that he termed “serialism.” Actually Dunne’s serialism offered three theories bundled into one—one big, clock-melting, brain-squashing chimichanga of pseudoscientific parapsychology—a theory of time, a theory of immortality, and a theory that dreams could predict the future. Dunne’s book, published in 1927, was called An Experiment With Time, and it went into several editions. “I find it a fantastically interesting book,” wrote H.G. Wells in a huge article in The New York Times. Yeats, Joyce, and Walter de la Mare brooded over its implications, and T.S. Eliot’s publishing firm, Faber, brought the book out in paperback in 1934, right about the time when Eliot was writing “Burnt Norton,” all about how time present is contained in time past and time future, and vice versa.

In November 1964, Nabokov noted “curious features” of his dreams. Estate of Dmitri Nabokov/ Princeton University Press

Dunne’s Experiment seems to have become one of the secret wellsprings, or wormholes, of twentieth-century literature. J.B. Priestley believed that An Experiment With Time was “one of the most curious and perhaps most important books of the age,” and he built several plays around it. C.E.M. Joad, the philosopher and radio personality, said of the book: “It can be recommended to everybody who wishes to learn how to anticipate his own future.” C.S. Lewis wrote a short story, “The Dark Tower,” using Dunne’s ideas. J.R.R. Tolkien found the book helpful as he imagined Middle Earth’s elven dreamtime. Agatha Christie wrote that it gave her a “truer knowledge of serenity than I had ever obtained before.” “Everybody in England is talking about J.W. Dunne, the man who made dreams popular,” reported a newspaper columnist in 1935, though he warned that the innumerable geometrical charts would drive the reader “loco.” Robert Heinlein cited Dunne’s theory in his novella “Elsewhen” in 1941. In 1940, Jorge Luis Borges reviewed the book. “Dunne assures us that in death we will finally learn how to handle eternity,” Borges wrote. “He states that the future, with its details and vicissitudes, already exists.” Dunne brought out several follow-up books to An Experiment With Time. One of them, published in 1940, had a memorable title: Nothing Dies.