A 1964 diary in which Vladimir Nabokov recorded more than 50 of his dreams – ranging from the erotic to the violent to the surreal – is about to be published for the first time.



“Intensely erotic dream. Blood on sheet,” the novelist writes on 13 December 1964. “End of dream: my sister O, strangely young and languorous … Then stand near a window, sighing, half-seeing view, brooding over the possible consequence of incest.”

Another entry sees him recording a dream in which he is dancing with his wife Vera. “Her open dress, oddly speckled and summery. A man kisses her in passing. I clutch him by the head and bang his face with such vicious force against the wall that he almost gets meat-hooked, on some fixtures on the wall (gleaming metal suggestive of ship). Detaches himself with face all bloody and stumbles away.”

The author, who struggled with insomnia all his life, began the dream diary after reading the British philosopher John Dunne’s An Experiment With Time, in which he advances a theory that dreams can sometimes be inspired by future events.

According to the Nabokov expert Gennady Barabtarlo, a professor of literature at the University of Missouri who has compiled and edited the diary, Nabokov’s experiment “followed the pedantic guidelines he found in the singularly rum and once very influential little book by John Dunne, an eccentric British philosopher of genius”.

“The chief object was to prove that in dreamland, that twilight zone between material and spiritual realms, timeflow goes backwards as it were, from effect to cause,” said Barabtarlo. “To give a rough example: the evening paper brings the news that in New York a Muslim ploughed into a crowd in a lorry. You vaguely remember your dream last night and check the record: indeed, you saw yourself on a tricycle hurtling downhill trying desperately, but failing, to avoid hitting a girl you knew in college. According to Dunne’s theory, it wasn’t your dream that previewed the actual event but the reverse – it was that horrific event that led to your dreaming that dream the night before. Nabokov was keenly interested in this theory and its ramifications and set out to put it to trial in that 1964 experiment.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of Nabokov’s dream transcriptions. Photograph: From the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Copyright © the Dmitri Nabokov Estate. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC

For a period of 80 days, the author of Lolita wrote down everything he could remember of his dreams as soon as he woke up, amassing 118 index cards recording 64 dreams. The text is reproduced in the book Insomniac Dreams, alongside material placing the experiment in the context of his life and writing.

The results were inconclusive, Barabtalo continued, particularly as “in several instances Nabokov failed to notice a staring similarity between his dream’s plotline and that of his earlier fiction, Russian or English”.

In one example, Nabokov declares an “incontestable success” in his experiment when he has the “absolutely clear feeling” that a dream set in a museum was inspired by a film he saw on television three days later. In the dream, Nabokov listens to a museum director while absentmindedly eating samples of rare soils which he had taken to be “some kind of dusty insipid pastry”.

“What he fails to register,” Barabtalo writes in Insomniac Dreams, “is that his dream distinctly and closely followed two scenes in his 1939 short story The Visit to the Museum: the dreamlike encounter of the narrator with the museum’s director in his office, and the odd exhibits in the local museum that looked like spherical soil samples, the chief subject of his dream.”



A scattering of the dreams has been published before, but Barabtalo said he had wanted to bring out a complete edition ever since coming across the cards in a thick ring-binder containing some drafts for Nabokov’s 1969 novel, Ada or Ardour. “The 1964 experiment, and the lines of thoughts it bred, seem to have engendered the kernel from which Nabokov’s largest novel, Ada, was to evolve next, for its foundational section, part four, is a tract on the ‘texture of time’.”

There are also connections between the dreams and the novel that are a little more direct, he continued, adding that “a good number of Nabokov’s characters’ dreams, collected in part four of my book, appear to be tweaked versions of his own”.