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Vladimir Nabokov

In late 1964, inspired by J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, novelist Vladimir Nabokov started an experimental dream-journal, seeking examples of predictive dreams (recently published as Insomniac Dreams). I find his results less impressive than Dunne's (or mine, when I tried the same experiment 1983-84), but interesting nonetheless; see Breakaway Island and Eating Soil Samples. But he had odd dreams all his life, including one of the longest-term predictive dreams I've ever found, Harry and Kuvyrkin: a gulf of forty years between dream-promise and fulfillment.

RELATED TOPICS: JW Dunne's dream experiments - JB Priestley's collection of time-glitches -- a dream from my own Dunne-experiment: Alp Vark -- See also the full INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

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BLUE DROP: by Vladimir Nabokov; 1966/1/7, a dream-prose-poemlet
The supreme mystery which we learn after death is that the cosmos with all its galaxies is a blue drop...
CAUTION: HIPPIE DIPPIE
BREAKAWAY ISLAND: by Vladimir Nabokov; 1964/11/5, a travel-anxiety dream turned predictive
Hurry to the station to catch the train--or is it a sky tram? a ship? a hill? an island?
Climb its flank, but fissures open--it breaks up. I'm adrift. Next day, on TV...
EATING SOIL SAMPLES: by Vladimir Nabokov, 1964/10/17, a possible predictive dream.
In a museum, I absent-mindedly eat crumbly bricks I think are pastry; they really are rare soil-samples...
Three days later, I see a TV show I thought was on children. Wrong; it's on soil samples--that turn into eatables...
HARRY AND KUVYRKIN: by Vladimir Nabokov, 1916, a punning long-term predictive dream.
Nabokov's uncle left him a fortune but the Revolution took it. He dreamed his uncle said "I shall return to you as
Harry & Kuvyrkin." 40 years later filmmakers Harris & Kubrick paid Nabokov a fortune for the rights to Lolita...
TWO DEATH NOTICES: by Vladimir Nabokov; 1939/6/9 & Oct. 1945, two apparently predictive dreamlets
Khodasevich (1939): I dreamt a call announced my friend was dead. Really he was still alive--but not for long...
Sergey (1945): My brother died in January but the news took months to reach us. Just before it did, I dreamed...
TWO GUILLOTINES: by Vladimir Nabokov, 1973/1/9, a sustained hypnogogic delusion
Half awake, Nabokov interprets shadows as guillotines and believes he and his wife will be executed...


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