Dreams and Destinies, the Rosetta Stone of Marguerite Yourcenar's canon,
is an intimate journal of her dreams. In Dreams and Destinies Yourcenar
has provided us with the most daring, yet least conventional form of
autobiography, a form that allows the reader to view her life refracted
through the poetic sensibility of her own sleeping mind. In recording
her dream life, Yourcenar wanders through a picture gallery of the soul,
pausing before ruined cathedrals filled with candles, dark ravines that
hold dead bodies, and still reflecting pools located deep inside soaring
gothic churches. Her dreams are populated by men, women, and children as
well as animals and mythical creatures. Available for the first time in
English in the way that she intended upon her death, Dreams and
Destinies is a reminder from one of the greatest writers of the
twentieth century that the dreams we create are with us forever.