"The most sustained and artful literary recreations of
the dream state I know occur in Bruno Schulz’s stories, especially in
'Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, ' which, in Celina Wienewska’s
elegant translation, unfolds in the present tense and in the straightforward
tone of someone describing a dream on the psychoanalyst’s couch or at the
breakfast table. Consider this summary of the story’s opening sections: Joseph,
the narrator, sets out on a long, halting, and peculiar train journey, then
arrives in a desolate landscape and finally at the sanitorium, where he has
booked a room. He is eyeing the cakes in the restaurant when he is called to
see the doctor. It turns out that Joseph has come to see his father. But there
is some uncertainty, as there so often is in dreams, about whether his father
is living or dead. Joseph’s father is dead, the doctor says, but not to worry,
all of the sanitorium patients are also dead, and none of them know it."
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