[In her foreword to Sleep Has His House, Kavan wrote:]

If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are born. Sleep Has His House describes in the nighttime language certain stages in the development of one individual human being….

The book is, in effect, a sort of autobiography of dreams, charting the stages of the subject's gradual withdrawal from all interest in and contact with the daylight world of received reality. Anna Kavan's 'night-time language' is in no way obscure; on the contrary, her dreams are as carefully notated, as lucid as paintings by Dali or...