A few quotes, a few comments. From SWANN'S WAY.

"I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book." Thinking while asleep would seem to be in dream, and while the sentence has its cloying, self-regarding aspect, it has a dream aspect as well. Dream, despite what Freud and others have said, does have a kind of curious objectivity to it. You're there, if only as observer, but the world of dream has little or no interest in the dreamer, drags the dreamer by the scruff of his fears over a rough road often.

"the vast structure of recollection." Not willy-nilly and, of course, not complete. A structure, which implies a builder. At the moment, we might think of Proust as the structurer, but maybe there's another.

"an unceasing monologue which was her [Aunt Leonie's] sole form of activity." No comment. Well, maybe this is the other structure.

Another moment where I think we get a glimpse of the author in one of his characters: "My grandmother alone found fault with him [M. Legrandin] for speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book."

In praise of the novelist, he says: "for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them." What he doesn't say is the same holds true for the novelist, or any good writer. He/she, too, has to wait AND to pursue the joys and sorrows for a long time to be able to write well of them.