dreamer state

The dreamer state is the defining psychological condition of the unnamed narrator in Fyodor Dostoevsky's "White Nights," a mode of existence in which a person withdraws from real life into a self-created world of fantasy, substituting vivid inner dramas for genuine human connection. The narrator explicitly identifies himself as a "type" and a "dreamer," and his extended confession to Nastenka on the Second Night provides the most detailed anatomy of this condition in all of Dostoevsky's early work. The dreamer state is characterized by acute loneliness, a rich but exhausting imaginative life, a painful awareness of its own unreality, and a profound ambivalence toward the ordinary world it has abandoned.

Identity and Definition of the Dreamer

The narrator introduces the dreamer state to Nastenka as a "type" — "an original, it's an absurd person" — and then elaborates with a formal, almost pedantic definition. The dreamer, he says, "is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort" who settles in some inaccessible corner of Petersburg, "as though hiding from the light of day." Once there, he grows to his corner "like a snail, or, anyway, he is in that respect very much like that remarkable creature, which is an animal and a house both at once, and is called a tortoise." The dreamer's room is invariably painted green, grimy, and reeking of tobacco smoke. When a rare visitor arrives, the dreamer meets him with "embarrassment, changing countenance and overcome with confusion, as though he had only just committed some crime within his four walls" — as though he had been forging counterfeit notes or writing verses to be sent to a journal with an anonymous letter. The visitor, in turn, becomes tongue-tied and eventually seizes on a nonexistent errand to flee, swearing never to return, while the dreamer is left like "an unhappy kitten treacherously captured, roughly handled, frightened and subjected to all sorts of indignities by children." Nastenka immediately recognizes that this description must have happened "word for word" to the narrator himself, and he confirms it with the gravest face.

The Dreamer's Daily Rhythm and the Goddess of Fancy

The dreamer's day has a characteristic rhythm. The narrator describes one hour he likes extremely: the hour when work and duties are over and everyone is hurrying home to dinner. At that hour, the dreamer paces along after the others, but a "strange feeling of pleasure" sets his pale, crumpled face working. He is "rich now with his own individual life; he has suddenly become rich." The "Goddess of Fancy" (a reference to Zhukovsky) has already "with fantastic hand spun her golden warp and begun weaving upon it patterns of marvellous magic life," bearing him to the "seventh crystal heaven" far from the granite pavement. If stopped and asked where he is, he will remember nothing and flush with vexation. He starts and looks round with horror when a respectable old lady asks him for directions. Fancy capriciously weaves everyone and everything — the old woman, curious passers-by, a laughing child, peasants on barges on the Fontanka — into its canvas "like a fly in a spider's web." Only after returning to his den, when Matrona clears the table and gives him his pipe, does he come to himself, recalling with surprise that he has dined without knowing how. The whole kingdom of fancies then drops to pieces "without a trace, without a sound, floats away like a dream." But a vague sensation stirs his heart, and a swarm of fresh phantoms arises. The book picked up at random drops from his hand before the third page; imagination is again at work, and a new world opens. "A fresh dream — fresh happiness! A fresh rush of delicate, voluptuous poison!"

The Content of Dreams and the Dreamer's Self-Deception

The narrator catalogs the varied subjects of his dreams: the lot of the poet, first unrecognized then crowned with laurels; friendship with Hoffmann; St. Bartholomew's Night; Diana Vernon; playing the hero at the taking of Kazan by Ivan Vassilyevitch; Clara Mowbray; Effie Deans; the council of the prelates and Huss before them; the rising of the dead in "Robert the Devil"; Minna and Brenda; the battle of Berezina; the reading of a poem at Countess V. D.'s; Danton; Cleopatra "ei suoi amanti"; a little house in Kolomna; and a little home of one's own with a dear creature who listens on a winter's evening, "opening her little mouth and eyes as you are listening to me now, my angel." The dreamer believes that real life is "poor pitiful life," not foreseeing that the mournful hour may strike when for one day of that pitiful life he would give all his years of phantasy. He desires nothing because he is "superior to all desire," because he has everything, because he is "the artist of his own life, and creates it for himself every hour to suit his latest whim." At some moments he is ready to believe that all this life is not a delusion but "concrete, real, substantial." The pulse quickens, a tear starts from the dreamer's eye, his pale moist cheeks glow, and whole sleepless nights pass like a flash. The dreamer unconsciously believes that "real true passion is stirring one's soul," that there is "something living, tangible in one's immaterial dreams." The narrator describes an elaborate fantasy of love — a garden, a queer ancestral house, a morose old husband, a parting, a reunion in a palazzo in the hot south, a mask removed, a cry of "I am free" — and then asks whether all of that can have been a dream. The answer is yes, and the intrusion of reality — a visitor who shouts "My dear boy, I have this minute come from Pavlovsk" — shatters the entire edifice.

The Dreamer's Self-Awareness and Suffering

The dreamer is not merely a passive fantasist; he is acutely aware of the cost of his condition. He tells Nastenka that he has lost all his best years and that his life is "a crime and a sin." At times such misery comes over him that he feels incapable of beginning a life in real life, having lost "all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real." After his fantastic nights come moments of "returning sobriety, which are awful." He hears the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around him and sees that life for others "is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another," while fancy is "spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun." The inexhaustible fancy grows weary and worn out with continual exercise; one outgrows one's old ideals, and they shatter into fragments and dust. The soul longs for something else, and the dreamer rakes over his old dreams "as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart." He is forced to celebrate the anniversary of his own sensations — the anniversary of what never existed in reality — because those foolish dreams are no more and he has nothing to earn them with. He wanders like a shadow about the streets of Petersburg, remembering that here just a year ago he wandered just as lonely and dejected, and asking himself where his dreams have gone, what he has done with his years, whether he has lived at all. He foresees gloomy solitude, old age trembling on its crutch, and then misery and desolation, with his fantastic world growing pale and his dreams falling "like the yellow leaves from the trees."

The Dreamer's Encounter with Reality and Its Aftermath

The narrator's four nights with Nastenka represent his most intense encounter with real life. He tells her that God has sent her as his "good angel" to show him what he has lost, and that now, sitting beside her and talking to her, it is strange to think of the future — "there is loneliness again, again this musty, useless life." He blesses her for enabling him to say that for two evenings, at least, he has lived. When Nastenka, after the Lodger's return, gives him a farewell kiss and then leaves with the Lodger, the narrator is left "utterly crushed." The next morning, a wet day, he receives her letter. She asks forgiveness, tells him she is to be married the following week, and asks him to remain a friend and brother. The narrator reads the letter over and over; tears gush to his eyes. He looks at Matrona and suddenly pictures her as decrepit, and his room as grown old like her — the walls discolored, the spiders' webs thicker than ever. The house opposite seems old and dingy, the stucco peeling, the cornices cracked. He sees the whole vista of his future: himself, fifteen years hence, older, in the same room, just as solitary, with the same Matrona grown no cleverer. Yet he refuses to bear a grudge. He wishes Nastenka a clear sky and a bright, untroubled smile, and blesses her for the moment of blissful happiness she gave to "another, lonely and grateful heart." The final line of the story — "My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man's life?" — is the dreamer's ultimate judgment on his own existence: a single moment of real connection is enough to redeem a lifetime of solitude and fantasy.