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In my dreams, I often encounter rectangular spaces that seem to carry elusive meanings. These spaces have been tremendously evocative for me, and have found their way into my poetry as recurrent allusive images, almost captured. As a result, I was particularly intrigued to encounter similar images in Doris Lessing's novel Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), in which both narrator and reader are tantalized by the imminence of meaning lurking in the hidden spaces within. In this novel, set in a futuristic world in which the normal boundaries of “civilized existence” are breaking down, the narrator experiences the breaking down of her interior walls as well, as her reverie takes her beyond the walls of her actual domicile, into the spaces beyond/within the wall, in which images of memories of self and other, and self-in-other, await. These experiences have the uncanny air of waking dreams: It would seem that at times entry into this realm is beyond the narrator's control, whereas at other times she appears able to move into it at will. However, even if she can imagine herself into this world, she has little control over the landscapes themselves, which seem to change according to their own rules and regularities.
In many ways, this novel takes the form of a dream within a dream, of a life that has been led by a woman who must both undream and redream her self in order to come to accounts with her life: its myriad meanings and possibilities. Multiplicity of meaning both obscures and reveals (Ricoeur, 1970). As we communicate through interactive metaphors, the distance of perspective is introduced, providing a “potential space” (Ogden, 1985)