Having returned from Mainz, where he had been working as a journalist, and about to leave again for his native Le Havre, Georges Limbour--author of L'Enfant polaire and of those Soleils bas decorated by André Masson's prodigiously acute and airy etchings--was sharing my room in mother's apartment for a few days.

Portrait of Michel Leiris by Man Ray, 1930

Around two in the morning, I wake up and see Limbour sitting on the couch he'd been using as a bed, casting a bewildered gaze around the room. The couch seems to be completely enveloped in gauze, as if covered with mosquito netting. When I ask him what's the matter, Limbour replies that he thought someone had hung drapery around the couch so as to imprison him. At which point the illusion vanishes.

The word rêve (dream) has something cobwebby to it, as well as something akin to the gossamer veil that clogs the throats of persons suffering from the croup. This is no doubt due to its sonority and to certain formal connections between the v and the circumflex accent that precedes it (this accent being nothing more than a smaller, inverted v); hence the idea of interlacing, of a finely woven veil.

Dreams are spiderlike, given their instability on the one hand and their veil-like quality on the other. If dreams are like the croup, it is probably because they are linked to the notion of nocturnal disturbances (like those bouts of false croup from which I suffered during the night as a very small child).

EDITOR'S NOTE

Leiris was friends with most of the Surrealists, and his dreams show it. Here, if I understand him, he's saying his friend Georges dreamed fabric swathed the couch he slept on, he woke confused and still feeling wrapped in gauze... and somehow Leiris sees for a moment through his friend's half-dreaming eyes.

His exploration of the sounds and shapes of the word rêve I find irrelevant, for it applies to any dream by any French speaker; if the gauziness of rêve shaped this dream, why not every dream? Or whatever you call this...

What do I call it? An empathic flash, a moment of seeing what his friend did--before Georges (and possibly Michel, too) woke fully, and the two minds settled into their separate waking personas, where it isn't mere gauze walling us off, but habits and rules (and egos!) enforcing sharp boundaries. By day.

But then I'm a primitive; after logging a thousand such psychic dreams myself, I can't dismiss shamanic tradition so readily; it explains liminal experiences like this better than Leiris's word games. Of course it violates current physics--unless you view Georges and Michel as a large, sleepy pair of particles. Denying people the same quantum links that you grant photons seems silly to me, literally narrow-minded--scolding the spirit back into the skull. Ghost in the shell! Only some of us leave our shells. Furtively. At night. Like an octopus in a jar, unscrewing the lid from inside, creeping across the lab...

SOURCE: Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris (1961; 1987 translation by Richard Sieburth) p.12. I added title.

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