This is a daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation from 1948. It charts the stages of the subject's gradual withdrawal from all interest in and contact with the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence, and youth are described in a night-time language""-a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations, suggesting that we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams, but these thoughts can only be sharpened, or decoded, by contemplation in the dark. In the tradition of de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, and Coleridge, this is a fascinating clinical casebook of Kavan's individual obsessions and the effects of drugs on her imagination. ""A near masterpiece in the imaginative speculations of those whose paradise simultaneously contains their hell.""--The Times.