INTRODUCTION

As I chose examples from Michel Leiris's dream-journal for the World Dream Bank, I mostly went short. I had to scan and hand-correct them, they're full of French words with diacritics... and I'm lazy. But this long, complex dream stood out, because Leiris explains its sources--at least some! His annotation came decades after the dream, after he'd undergone psychoanalysis; did therapy influence him? Maybe, but he violates midcentury Freudian orthodoxy; he does link some motifs to his day in 1933, and some to his childhood--Freud would approve--but, he says at least two (coffee and thorns) came from the next day.

Past, present and future casually blend, as if the dreaming mind lives outside linear time... this dream model isn't Freud's, Adler's, or even Jung's, but J.W. Dunne's! I suspect Leiris read An Experiment with Time, for the parallels are too close. My own dreams often blend time like this; how could I resist?

COFFEE AND THORNS

In the company of E. Tériade and very likely Albert Skira (then joint directors of the magazine Minotaure whose second issue was devoted to the ethnographic mission from which I had just returned), I am proceeding through the underground passageways of an immense rock formation. Tériade is acting as the guide and we visit some "churches beneath the crypts," gothic-style chapels crudely carved into the rock like rough alveoli (probably inspired by the rocky Breton coast with its jagged wayside crosses, as well as by the churches of Lalibala, ethnographic curiosities I am familiar with by reputation). One of these chapels contains a block of stone that has scarcely been hewn and is supposed to represent a chimera or some other monster of human dimensions, a sort of gargoyle not unlike the ones that used to be shown to me for my viewing pleasure on postcards or on sightseeing trips.

Some time elapses and the chapel is no longer a crypt. No vault (even though today I am unable to positively maintain that there was an open sky over the place). But fairly high overhead, the interior of the edifice is encircled by some sort of balcony, the kind one sees around certain hotel lobbies or dance halls.

In fact, the building is indeed a hotel: at the center of the nave that constitutes its lobby there is a harmonium at which a musician is sitting--a purely visual character to whom my memory will ascribe no sound whatsoever. All the rooms opening out onto the balcony are situated high enough over the lobby so that the noise of the mass will not disturb their guests.

The harmonium is placed in such a fashion that it can also be used for jazz when the lobby is turned into a dance hall. My companions and I take a table near the dance floor and have coffee. A bit of coffee spills into my saucer and, despite the rules of etiquette, I pour it back into my cup, thus rescuing this precious liquid that I have always found too great a delicacy to waste.

Then I go see the sights of Paris like a tourist, visiting Notre-Dame in the company of someone I got along with very well during high school (a boy named after one of the four Evangelists and whose good behavior hid a rather sharp sense of humor). The cathedral is enormous and makes up a single building with the Sainte-Chapelle. A guide (a professional this time) leads the group of visitors through the stairways.

My friend and I, more eager to play hooky than to listen to the guide, each sneak off on our own to see whatever it is he refuses to show us. In the course of my explorations, I happen across a stairway that leads up to a jube [balcony above/behind the cross in some churches--Ed.], which is in fact a long banquet table (a possible reminder of an event that took place the previous day: a banquet given at Trebeurden to inaugurate a monument to Aristide Briand). I have to pick my way among the place settings without disturbing their layout, taking care not to prick myself on the table decorations that seem to be made out of thorny branches. By a stairway that leads down from the middle of the table, I leave the jube--this jube that seems to have been set up for some jubilee--and I join my confederate down in the nave.

We then proceed to a public square which is the terminus of the 248 bus, the place where my wife and I had arranged to meet. But a map posted in the bus shelter shows that the terminus of the 248 is located on another square. Given this fact, I wonder how we will manage to join up. Should I wait here or go to the correct terminus?

1933/9/4

I awake and have breakfast in the hotel room that we must leave the following day to return to Paris. As I am washing, I look at the breakfast tray that my wife has placed in front of the fireplace--as she usually does when we're finished. Next to the teapot and empty cups lie two branches of thistle she had tossed there while tidying up. I remember that the jube appeared to be a banquet table on which some thorny branches (probably) had been arranged. Shortly thereafter, I look at the tray again and notice a pack of Gillette razor blades I had forgotten I had tossed there after having given the last blade to my wife's brother. I connect the presence of these Gillettes (i.e., objects that can wound you) to my fear of the thorny branches in the dream.

1961

As I write this all up, basing it on notes that are more than twenty-five years old, I am struck by a detail whose singularity stands out for me only today. The numerals 2, 4, 8 in the number of the bus are the first three integers in a geometric progression based on the number 2. And indeed, duality seems to be the connecting thread in this dream: the co-directors of the magazine Minotaure; the double function of the hall I'm in, at once church nave and hotel lobby; the twinning of Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle; the doubling of the bus terminus, representing a threat to the reconstitution of my wife and myself as a couple.

Was it not a fact that the two or so years I had spent travelling had practically estranged us? Was it not true that from that point on my professional life would find itself between two stools, seeing as how my work as an ethnographer would now be superadded to my activities as a writer? It also seems that, both in the dream as a whole as well as in the small events that followed it in the morning, everything was so arranged as to emphasize the progressive development of the idea of the square or rectangle: implicitly introduced by the roughly hewn block of stone, it becomes more evident with the balcony surrounding the nave or lobby, is further accentuated by the jube-banquet table and, upon waking, is finally concretized by the breakfast tray.

There is also a certain schoolish element to the dream, immediately apparent by the presence of an old schoolmate of mine, which perhaps provides the key to its construction. Its structure, which could strike one as derived from an arithmetic or geometry lesson, is schoolish, as is its content: the erudite mention of the crypts of Lalibala, an allusion to the new field of knowledge I had just begun specializing in; the high-schoolish episode with the jube (probably a deformed image of a reproduction of' the jube of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont glimpsed in some history textbook); the grade-schoolish evocation of Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle (which I believe our older sister made my brother and me visit, along with other Parisian monuments, so that our days off from school would at least serve some educational purpose).

An analysis of this sort is, of course, not without its risks and at any rate can only account for a small portion of the facts. But perhaps this kind of analysis offers the means, as it were, to solidify the dream by providing it with a certain logic and by erasing the gap between life and dream through the discovery of their common roots--just as I had discovered among the tea cups cluttered on our breakfast tray a prolongation of the dream sequence in which I was unwilling to let a single drop of coffee go to waste.

SOURCE: Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris (1961; 1987 translation by Richard Sieburth) p.76-80. Original entry untitled; I also added section headings and some paragraph breaks.

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