This catalogue of dreams in Asylum Piece anticipates the scope of Anna Kavan's fictional writing; the ‘machines in the head’ from her first collection of stories, the ‘hot, heavy’ tropical visions of Let Me Alone and Who Are You? and the ‘ice-age dream’ of her last and best-known work. Kavan's oblique, often oneiric prose consistently resists simplified interpretations that relegate its fantastic elements to dream; her characters never wake up to reality and if her narrator can ‘scarcely tell true from false’, the reader is left in the same quandary. But dream and its relation to conscious life, and to fiction, is a recurring theme in her writing. Her representations of blacked-out and night-time worlds in her 1940s stories, including those induced through narcosis and narco-analysis, developed into a sustained engagement with sleep and the unconscious in Sleep Has His House (published in the USA as The House of Sleep). This surrealist novel continues the gothic trope of Kavan's earlier writing and draws on existentialist and psychoanalytic theory, shaped by her close association with Karl Bluth and Ludwig Binswanger. Continuing and expanding her exploration of fractured and uncertain identity into a postwar context, Kavan pushed her linguistic and narrative experiment in new directions, but always with an eye to representations of subjective reality, inflected by her treatment with psychotropic drugs and her long-term heroin use. Time, which had begun to behave strangely in her wartime writing, also continues to take an odd turn in her postwar fiction.

In her final review for Horizon in early 1946, Kavan decried a cultural impulse to look backwards, which she identified as beginning during the war and continuing beyond it.