I'm in search of the title of a novel I read in the '70s. A man falls asleep and each night lives a full lifetime. He realizes he has awoken in the present day when sees a white curtain blowing in window.


The business about a man waking up and seeing a curtain waving in a breeze makes me pretty sure that the story you're remembering is “Mind Partner” by Christopher Anvil. The text is available online. The protagonist repeatedly lives out a full life and dies, only to wake up in the same room. E.g.

He breathed his last breath in satisfaction.



This could be The Dream (1924) by H. G. Wells, although there is only a single dreamed lifetime actually recounted in the book. Most of the books is spent on a description of this dream. In the epilogue, the narrator, Sarnac, uses the dawn light leaking around the curtain at the entrance to his room as a metaphor for his awakening back in his own native time.

From the plot summary, per Wikipedia:

In circa 4,000 A.D., a biologist named Sarnac is taking a holiday among mountains and lakes with his lover, Sunray. With four other holiday travellers, they visit some 2,000-year-old "ancient remains [of war dead] that had recently been excavated" in a nearby valley. A little later, after a brief afternoon nap, Sarnac awakens from "a very vivid dream." The rest of the novel consists of Sarnac's recounting of the dream, with occasional discussion of its particulars with his companions. Sarnac's dream brings with it total recall of the complete life of Harry Mortimer Smith. Smith's life and the institutions that structure it are the subject throughout the novel of a running commentary from the point of view of the achieved Utopia of 2,000 years later.

Harry Mortimer Smith was born in 1891 or 1892 in the fictional town of Cherry Gardens, in an area bordering the South Downs on the southern English coast. His father is a greengrocer who has trouble supporting his family because of the ignorance of birth control. He profits from the sale of produce from the nearby estate of Lord Bramble, where Harry Mortimer Smith's mother's brother, Uncle John Julip, works as head gardener.


Harry and his sister Prue go with their widowed mother to a boarding house in the central London district of Pimlico run by Matilda Good, a friend of the family. Wells was proud of some of the minor characters he sketched in this part of The Dream.





Your Answer

