THE DREAM ADVENTURE

If you can imagine the TV series, Twilight Zone, sharpened by master craftsmen, both ancient and modern, and spooked-up more philosophically than psychologically, you'll have a soupcon of the sophisticated shudders that weave in and out these dandy , embracing such Chinese exquisites as Chuang-Tsu and Su-Shih, a pithy part of Apuleius, a Marco Polo manuscript, all gaga gardens and ghouls, a Kipling presentation of parallel dreams, Gautier's glittery Gothic study of a split personality, a way-out science fiction fable, a one-page parable from Jorge Luis Borges, and Nabokov's slightly spoofing evocation of a sinister museum. None are anthology repeaters, with the exception of Maugham's Lord Mountdrago, and that for all its superior suavity should be put to pasture. Of course, all are, in one way or another concerned with dreams: the world of multiple images and impressions, its metaphysics (when the illusion? where the reality?), its dialectics (the revelation that the dreamer himself may be a fiction in the dream of another, etc., etc.), its symbols of death, destiny, double-agents. There's a heavy handed introduction from the editor and a fancy epilogue, all Left Bank cafe-chic.