William S. Burroughs often suggested that one’s dreams are a valuable target for the writer to plunder. But what he never said, nor made explicit, was how the dreams of others might provide a writer with direction and material. And yet it happened to him: the dream of a literary character, as it occurs inside a novel of the past, appears to have given Burroughs a massive treasure cache.

The dream is Raskolnikov’s, in Crime and Punishment. And it brings William S. Burroughs to life. His whole...