Back in the late 70s, I encountered and read the classic work, “Altered States of Consciousness”, edited by Charles Tart. Among essays concerning hallucinagenic drugs, William James’ use of nitrous oxide, and magic mushrooms, was Frederik Van Eeden’s 1913 essay entitled “A Study of Dreams”[1]. In it, he described recording, classifying, and analyzing some 500 dreams over a 17 year period. He also mentioned that he “condensed [his ideas] into a work of art — a novel called ‘The Bride of Dreams.’ The fictitious form enabled me to deal freely with delicate matters, and had also the advantage that it expressed rather unusual ideas in a less aggressive way.” Intrigued by this reference, I begin searching for his novel.
I scoured the used bookstores in Berkeley, some of whom directed me back to my neighborhood’s pre-eminent used-bookstore (Green Apple) — of course, this was the first store I checked. Following this, I checked my local library, which didn’t have a copy, and then went to the San Francisco Main Library, which again didn’t have it. However, after I filled out a request form, they said that they’ll do their best. A bit later, I received a postcard notifying me that a copy was available. Once I retrieved the book, I discovered that it was on inter-library loan from ... the Library of Congress! Unfortunately, I also noticed that it was published in England in 1913 and inferred that it was unlikely that many copies exist. Thus, after I read it, I used a copy machine....
In the early 80’s, when I was on London, I sought out the publisher to ask them about the book (— I don’t remember if it was on Charing Cross Way ;). Unfortunately, none of them knew the book, and there were apparently no records dating back that far (— over the years I’ve heard that the business practices of publishing houses are ... less than rigorous). Needless to say, I also scoured the used book stores in London for the novel, as well as the shops in New York on my way back home, but to no avail.
Thus, I recently scanned and processed the novel’s pages through Omnipage Pro and Microsoft Word. I became habituated to a slightly older (and European) form of English, including spellings and grammatical conventions. (...And I discovered that the novel resonated even more for me now than when I first read it.)
(The WinZip/PKZip file contains the novel’s spelling dictionary and its Rich Text Format representation.)
If you are inclined to help by proof-reading, to give you a flavor for OCR shortcomings you might encounter, here is a list of some of the problems I’ve (mainly) found and fixed:
I’d also appreciate a list of errors denotated by page and line number. (Note that I’ve provided a list of the errors detected so far in errata.txt.)
Regardless, I hope that you enjoy the novel!
...Martin