Roland Tual (a real charmer, with a fine nose for a good read and above all a dazzling conversationalist) maintains in the course of one of our frequent literary discussions that Parny is a far greater poet than Baudelaire. I strongly object to this (even though I am in fact no fan of Baudelaire's--I prefer and shall continue to prefer Nerval).

Michel Leiris, probably by Man Ray, 1930

When I wake up, my breakfast is brought to me as usual with my daily newspaper Le Journal, which the concierge has slipped under the apartment door with the rest of the mail. The newspaper carries a story whose hero, an elegant and cultivated man, displays on his bookshelves at home--among other tomes indicating his intelligence and taste--the Elegies of Parny (the name evoking lamé fabric and cotton prints from Jouy) right next to Les Fleurs du Mal.

The authors of Chansons madécasses and A une Malabaraise are the only two writers mentioned in the story, just as they were the sole topic of the dream conversation.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Leiris was friends with most of the Surrealists, and his dreams show it. Here, though, the content is, for once, mundane (just friends discussing books)--but it's paranormal! A different sort of transgression. Though one he experienced repeatedly.

But then, nearly all published dream-journals have at least a handful like this; the same for the hundreds of unpublished dreamworkers I've met. Get serious (which I'll arbitrarily define as "collect dreams for over a year, or 1000 dreams") and apparent psychic dreams quit looking like flukes; they're a normal if infrequent dream type. Sample size matters! Skeptics are amnesics. Or just lazy.

SOURCE: Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris (1961; 1987 translation by Richard Sieburth, p. 20

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