“Imagination”

IMAGINATION. “What did you mean by the story about Tamina on the children’s island?” people ask me. That tale began as a dream that fascinated me; I dreamed it later in a half-waking state, and I broadened and deepened it as a I wrote it. Its meaning? If you like: an oneiric image of an infantocratic future. (See: INFANTOCRACY.) However, the meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded. By insisting on decoding him, the Kafkologists killed Kafka.