Summary

Nabokov paints himself as a child with unique idiosyncrasies. He recalls always having aural hallucinations—dreamlike hallucinations where he can hear figures talking, often in English, in an overheard conversation. He doesn’t recall anything significant about these conversations overheard, except that he could hear them. And when he would try to focus on seeing these conversations they were simply gray figures in a mist, a ghostly outline of a person.

Another one of Nabokov’s interesting abilities is what he calls “colored hearing”: each sound has a particular color to him. As a child he did not find this peculiar because his mother said that she shared a similar trait and she spoke to him as if this were what every child experienced. It wasn’t until later in life that he learned it was not something everyone perceived.

Though his mother was...