Type Dreams

"What did you dream about?"

     He tried to think.

     "I can't remember. All kinds of things." They had vanished forever. No one would ever know.

    (One moment. So the world does not consist only of visible events – seen or unseen – but also of that myriad of necessary dreams that the sun allows to exist on the shadowed side of the earth and drags without interruption across the surface of the planet, then, in the circumambulating morning, causing them to evaporate again like the dew. In the daylight, only art can preserve that nocturnal, pearly condensate. And in all the universe this takes place only on this one celestial body, in this one solar system. This by way of parenthesis.)

— Harry Mulisch, from Hoogste Tijd ["Last Call"] (translation: Adrienne Dixon) written 1987