The Dream Diary’s Strange Fate

Cajal’s last will and testament bequeathed his scientific materials to his disciples at the Cajal Institute and his personal belongings to his family. The mysterious dream book of Santiago Ramón y Cajal was not among the two thousand extant manuscripts; scholars generally assumed that the unpublished work was lost during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, Cajal’s unfinished dream book was not a formal manuscript but, rather, a collection of loose sheets of used paper and notes composed in the margins of newspapers and magazines. It was never formally published as a book. Just before he died, Cajal surreptitiously handed over this material to José Germain Cebrían, who dutifully typed up the scattered diary into a proper manuscript, although Cajal’s calligraphy often was illegible, including numerous errors, deletions, and blank spaces. The dream diary finally surfaced in November of 2014 when Cajal’s work became public domain.