The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books Read Free

and my senses were bemused by an irrepressible feeling of exhaustion. A strange, contradictory mixture of panic and total indifference overcame me: I wanted to live and die at the same time.
    It was in this of all situations, dear friends, when I was no longer capable of rational thought, that a fundamental realisation dawned on me: my success, my meteoric career, my life and ambitions, my existing oeuvre, my literary prizes and multitudinous editions – all were outweighed in importance by a breakfast croissant. For me, the arbiter between life and death was a cheap confection of flaky pastry, a mixture of common flour, sugar, yeast and butter.
    And that, despite my dramatic predicament, made me laugh. Mine wasn’t a joyous, optimistic laugh, as you can imagine, merely a short, embittered ‘Hah!’. It did, however, suffice to remedy the disastrous situation in my oesophagus.
    For, thanks to my laughter, the croissant leapt in my throat, as it were, and headed for my stomach with renewed momentum. This time it slid down with ease and disappeared into my alimentary tract in the regulation manner. The cream flowed after it, almost clearing my airways. Having coughed and trumpeted the remainder through my nostrils, I was able to breathe once more.
    ‘Bwaaah!’ I gasped like a drowning man who has just made it to the surface. Oxygen! The best things in life are free! At once exhausted and relieved, I flopped down on a kitchen chair and clutched my chest. My heart was beating like a corps of drums. Heavens alive, I had escaped a totally ridiculous demise by a hair’s breadth! That confounded croissant had very nearly ruined my biography:
    ‘Yarnspinner chokes to death on a croissant!’
    ‘Zamonia’s greatest writer carried off by puff pastry!’
    ‘Obese Golden Quill Prizewinner found dead in a pool of cream!’
    ‘Heavyweight among Zamonian writers succumbs to a featherweight specimen of the baker’s art.’
    I could picture the headlines as easily as I could the critic Laptantidel Laptuda’s spiteful obituary in the
Grailsundian Gazette
. They would have engraved a croissant on my tombstone!
    It wasn’t until I went to mop my perspiring brow that I realised I was still clutching the letter in my paw, claws buried deep in the paper. Curse the thing! Into the fire with it! I got up to hurl it into the fire, then stopped short. Just a moment! What were the words that had disconcerted me so? Sheer agitation had driven them from my mind. I took another look.
    This is where the story begins
.
    I had to sit down again. I knew that sentence and so, my faithful friends and companions, do you! You also know what it meant to me, my life and my work to date. Who had written this letter? No, I couldn’t afford simply to burn it, even though it had nearly killed me. I read on.
    I read the letter from beginning to end, every last word of its ten closely written pages. What was in it apart from that riveting opening sentence? Well, my friends, that can easily be summarised in two words: almost nothing. Those ten pages contained almost nothing significant, important or profound.
    Almost
nothing, mark you.
    For there was one other short sentence of note: the one that formed a postscript to the whole rigmarole. Only four words, but they were destined to turn my life completely upside down.
    First things first, though. The letter dealt with a writer confronted by a blank sheet of paper and suffering from
horror vacui
. An unknown author paralysed by writer’s block? What a cliché! How many letters on this subject had I received? Too many, for sure, but I had never read one that handled the basic idea with such a lack of originality and inspiration or was so plaintive and self-pitying, depressing and disconsolate. Even bleak pieces of writing can attain artistic greatness, but this one resembled the twaddle talked by a self-centred patient who happens to sit next to you in a doctor’s waiting room and bores you with his trivial