Loana

But who can say that everything I remembered in the course of this sleep really happened? Maybe my mother and my father had different faces, maybe Dr. Osimo never existed, nor Angelo Bear, and I never lived through the night in the Gorge. Worse, I dreamed even that I woke up in a hospital, that I lost my memory, that I had a wife named Paola, two daughters, and three grandkids. I never lost my memory, am some other man --God knows who-- who by some accident finds himself in this state (coma or limbo), and all these figures have been optical illusions caused by the fog, which was nothing if not the sign that my life was but a dream. That is a quotation. And what if all the other quotes, those I offered the doctor, Paola, Sibilla myself, were nothing but the product of this persistent dream? Carducci and Eliot never existed, nor Pascoli nor Huysmans, nor all the rest of what I took for my encyclopedic memory. Tokyo is not the capital of Japan. Not only did Napoleon not die on St. Helena, he was never born, and if anything else exists outside of me it is a parallel universe in which who knows what is happening or has happened. Perhaps my fellow creatures --and myself-- are covered in green scales and have four retractile antennae above our single eye.

Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.