A parable

‘I dreamed I had in front of me’, he wrote, ‘this marvellous text which contained the narrative of a number of my dreams. Each dream had been condensed into a separate phrase and it was these phrases, strung together, that formed the text. Every phrase was pregnant with possibilities and meanings of a magical kind. I was both admiring this text and trying to explain it to someone. The person I was explaining it to may have been Gerard de Nerval, or maybe in the dream I was Nerval. As I woke up, there was one phrase in my head, the only one I can now recall. It was “The scent of Cybele”. At that moment all I knew about this phrase was that it was not one of the phrases in the text I had dreamed.’

— John Welch