In January 1984 I went to see a classic play called The Game of Croquet. I had a seat in the front row of the stalls and I felt a little nervous because a few days before in the opening scene Paul Scofield, who played the leading role, had inadvertently sliced a croquet ball into the stalls and blooded a spectator in one eye. However on this night nothing unfortunate happened.

I found myself listening to a very interesting dialogue. The play was about three students who for final exams had to go to the house of an old academic and attend a party where each would be judged on his behaviour. One of the three was obviously very shy.

The academic proved to be most friendly, and he seemed to be helping the shy one through his paces--helping him in fact to grow up and become adult. The dialogue ran easily and amusingly. I felt as though I were making it up myself.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Classic Greene. The play's so well-written "I felt as though I were making it up myself." Modest as always! And of course, he mocks how his dream is an entirely internal simulation, that he made up The Game of Croquet, but fails to realize it in the dream. But is that true? Greene writes in his intro to A World of My Own:

There is another side to what we call dreams, very interestingly exposed in J.W. Dunne's Experiment with Time. They contain scraps of the future as well as of the past. I have already written of how at the age of seven I dreamed of a shipwreck on the night the Titanic went down, and again nine years later I witnessed another disastrous shipwreck in the Irish Sea. As I look through the long record of my dreams I note time and again incidents of the Common World that have occurred a few days after the dream. They are too trivial to include here, but I am convinced that Dunne was right.

Telling dreams is tricky--the waking mind can misperceive or misinterpret the dream experience--but it's rarely emphasized there's a third party involved: the intended reader. Greene elbows the audience here--but an audience whose beliefs he didn't actually share. At least at moments.

I'm sensitive to this issue, since my dreams are frequently predictive, clairvoyant and telepathic; but I too was raised in an oneiroskeptical society, so I often assume inexplicable dream-elements are symbolic and internal. And then find (the next day, or the next) they're not.

--Chris Wayan

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