On a sunny afternoon I am lying with Cinderella in a small clearing in the Nedoŝín grove (we're kissing).

Cinderella is wearing nothing more than a sheer dress of white etamine (as if transparent); several times she reminds me she's not wearing underclothes (she has on white flats without socks); she looks completely white to me (magnificent long legs bared to mid-thigh); it occurs to me that she should be tanned from being out in the sun (I tell her this, and she hikes up her dress a bit further).

On her crotch I discover five snails clinging to her skin and pubic hairs, and when I uncover her belly I see another stuck to her navel (and when she completely undresses for me I find another snail under her breasts and another in her armpit).

I kiss her again and we make love...

EDITOR'S NOTES

This is the only explicit sex dream in Styrsky's journal, and it's with neither his real-world lover Toyen (who dressed and acted like a man--polar opposite to this pale princess in a nightie), nor his dead half-sister Emilie (his muse, who he longed for incestuously in other dreams). Why a folktale figure like Cinderella? Maybe it's economic. Cinderella's the poor stepsister treated like a servant in her own home who goes from rags to riches. Styrsky and Toyen never were big financial successes like Picasso or Dalí...

But that's my speculation. What makes it certain that this is no simple sex fantasy are those snails! Are they parasitic, like snails infesting a garden, something to clean up in his life before a consummnation with success can happen? Or are they a harvest of humble but nutritious food in the lean war years? Or symbols of slow spiral growth through dreamwork, à la Jung?

And... does he pick them off, or let them be?

Curiously, the painting's from 1937, well before the dream-text, date July 1940. Presumably then it's a recurring dream--the same seven parasites cling in the same spots. Not identical--not a living girl but a broken statue, not a short gauzy nightgown but a long toga... and the seven hangers-on aren't snailshells but... birdnests?

SOURCE: Dreamverse by Jindrich Styrsky (Twisted Spoon Press, 2018), p109; primary source Sny, 1925-1940 ("Dreams, 1925-40") posthumously published (1970).
TITLE: Styrsky titled all his dreams "Dream of..."; I shortened to avoid a logjam under D.

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