THE NIN HOTLINE

Saturday July 12, 2003

NIN.com page 6 - The Lathe of Heaven Ch. 7

On Echoing the Sound, amlah6 noted that the un-Googleable text found on 6th page of nin.com is actually an excerpt from the beginning of the seventh chapter of Lathe of Heaven, credited by LeGuin to Victor Hugo:

Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there's a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense. Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, on the occult continuation of infinite nature....Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe....The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss...and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.
-V. Hugo, Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea)