October 3, 1994
Greene (1904-1991) had extraordinarily vivid, fertile, inventive dreams, judging from these excerpts from the dream diaries he kept between 1965 and 1989. The novelist/essayist's dreams of espionage included a mission to Nazi Germany, where he rammed a poison cigarette up Joseph Goebbels's nose, and a secret assignation with Kim Philby. In other dreams he met three popes; took a disagreeable boat ride to Bogota with Henry James; conversed with Castro, Khrushchev, Oliver Cromwell, Jean Cocteau and Solzhenitsyn; witnessed a massacre of children in Syria; produced a blank-verse play with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. He dreamed of his mother's death, of a talking kitten, of committing murder and robbery. This curious, entertaining diary lets us glimpse the feverish inner life of an intensely private man, providing an uncanny mirror-image of Greene's novelistic obsessions, insecurities and moral preoccupations. In the introduction he divulges that a number of his short stories evolved directly from dreams.