"What is the most terrible dream you have ever had?" Tolstoi asked me.
I rarely have dreams and remember them badly, but two have remained in
my memory and probably will for the rest of my life.
I dreamt once that I saw the sky scrofulous, putrescent,
greenish-yellow, and the stars in it were round, flat, without rays,
without lustre, like scabs on the skin of a diseased person. And there
glided across this putrescent sky slowly reddish forked lightning,
rather like a snake, and when it touched a star the star swelled
up into a ball and burst noiselessly, leaving behind it a darkish
spot, like a little smoke; and then the spot vanished quickly in the
bleared and liquid sky. Thus all the stars one after another burst
and perished, and the sky, growing darker and more horrible, at last
whirled upwards, bubbled and bursting into fragments began to fall
on my head in a kind of cold jelly, and in the spaces between the
fragments there appeared a shiny blackness as though of iron. Leo
Nicolayevitch said: "Now that comes from a learned book; you must have
read something on astronomy; hence the nightmare. And the other dream?"
The other dream: a snowy plain, smooth like a sheet of paper; no
hillock, no tree, no bush anywhere, only--barely visible--a few rods
poked out from under the snow. And across the snow of this dead desert
from horizon to horizon there stretched a yellow strip of a hardly
distinguishable road, and over the road there marched slowly a pair of
grey felt top boots--empty.
He raised his shaggy, were-wolf eyebrows, looked at me intently and
thought for a while.
"That's terrible. Did you really dream that, you didn't invent it? But
there's something bookish in it also."
And suddenly he got angry, and said, irritably, sternly, rapping his
knee with his finger: "But you're not a drinking man? It's unlikely
that you ever drank much. And yet there's something drunken in these
dreams. There was a German writer, Hoffmann, who dreamt that card
tables ran about the street, and all that sort of thing, but then he
was a drunkard--a 'calaholic,' as our literate coachmen say. Empty
boots marching--that's really terrible. Even if you did invent it, it's
good. Terrible."
Suddenly he gave a broad smile, so that even his cheek bones beamed.
"And imagine this: suddenly, in the Tverskaya street, there runs a card
table with its curved legs, its boards clap, clap, raising a chalky
dust, and you can even still see the numbers on the green cloth--excise
clerks playing whist on it for three days and nights on end--the table
could not bear it any longer and ran away."
He laughed, and then, probably noticing that I was a little hurt by his
distrust of me:
"Are you hurt because I thought your dreams bookish? Don't be annoyed;
sometimes, I know, one invents something without being aware of it,
something which one cannot believe, which can't possibly be believed,
and then one imagines that one dreamt it and did not invent it at all.
There was a story which an old landowner told. He dreamt that he was
walking in a wood and came out of it on to a steppe. On the steppe
he saw two hills, which suddenly turned into a woman's breasts, and
between them rose up a black face which, instead of eyes, had two moons
like white spots. The old man dreamt that he was standing between the
woman's legs, in front of him a deep, dark ravine, which sucked him in.
After the dream his hair began to grow grey and his hands to tremble,
and he went abroad to Doctor Kneip to take a water cure. But, really,
he must have seen something of the kind--he was a dissolute fellow."
He patted me on the shoulder.
"But you are neither a drunkard nor dissolute--how do you come to have
such dreams?"
"I don't know."
"We know nothing about ourselves."
He sighed, screwed up his eyes, thought for a bit, and then added in a
low voice: "We know nothing."
This evening, during our walk, he took my arm and said:
"The boots are marching--terrible, eh? Quite empty--tiop, tiop--and the
snow scrunching. Yes, it's good; but you are very bookish, very. Don't
be cross, but it's bad and will stand in your way."
I am scarcely more bookish than he, and at the time I thought him a
cruel rationalist despite all his pleasant little phrases.