''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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the waking state I feared so much
appeared there in a shimmering refraction...;
their voices, their
step, the expression of their eyes
and even of their clothes - acquired
an exciting significance; to put it
more simply, in my dreams the world
would come alive, becoming so captivatingly
majestic, free and ethereal,
that afterwards it would be oppressive
to breathe the dust of this painted
life (IB, 82).
His dreams, then, show him clearly the ideal realm
that is the original of our so-called reality. They
allow him to see clearly what he only vaguely knows
in waking life and what he finds so hard to put into
words. Dreams are for him proofs of the reality be-
hind this world of imitations; they are "a foreglimpse
and a whiff of it" (IB, 83). He knows that dreams, to
others the very essence of irreality, are in fact
semi-reality, sleep taking us a step in the direction
where reality itself is to be found. Whereas sleep
and its dreams take us nearer reality, thus nearer
real life, waking life leads us away from it. In*its
turn, it is therefore a semi-sleep,
...
an evil drowsiness into which penetrate
in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights
of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery
of the mind... (IB, 83).
In it the ideal images of the real world appear as
"senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium"
(IB, 32).
This escapes the notice of everybody but Cincinna-
tus. The ordinary minds give shapes and substance to
these crazy dream images; for them they are real. The
others have, in fact, so much become part of this
copy-imitation-dream world that they are themselves