Observations placeholder
Nabokov, Vladimir - Speak, Memory - Hallucinations and visons
Identifier
004054
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
From Speak, Memory
As far back as I remember myself (with interest with amusement, seldom with admiration or disgust), I have been subject to mild hallucinations. Some are aural, others are optical, and by none have I profited much.
The fatidic accents that restrained Socrates or egged on Joaneta Darc have degenerated with me to the level of something one happens to hear between lifting and clapping down the receiver of a busy party line telephone.
Just before falling asleep, I ofetn become aware of a kind of one sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts. It is a neutral, detached anonymous voice, which I catch saying words of no importance to me whatever - an English or Russian sentence, not even addressed to me, and so trivial that I hardly dare give samples, lest the flatness I wish to convey be marred by molehill of sense.
This silly phenomenon seems to be the auditory counterpart of certain praedormitory visions, which I also know well.