A specialist in the dream world

The dream world is becoming my specialty. Henry [Miller] has gathered together all his dreams and is rewriting them, transforming them, expanding them. He wants to use them as the climax to Black Spring. He wants to recapitulate the themes of the book via the dreams. He came to me the first time with two pages which seemed off-tone to me. He wanted the animal realism of his dreams, and he introduced vulgar music-hall dialogue. It was not obscene, as some dreams are, but consciously and wordily vulgar. “The obscenity of the dream,” I said, “is different. It is one of erotic images, or sensations, but it has no vocabulary. There is no dialogue in the dream, and very few words. The words are condensed like the phrases of poems. The language must be a kind of non-language. It cannot be everyday language. The dream happens without language, beyond language.” Then Henry wrote the third part, or the third batch, and experimented with irrational language, getting better and better as he went along, while I watched for the times when he fell out of the dream.

—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One: 1931-1934