I am thinking my dream diary will form a book of prose poems. I dislike dream imagery in (other people's) poems, though. A dream can be dull, like my own "dull mafia" dream, but a much worse problem is the spurious narrative cohesion of a linguistically transparent and symbolically portentous dream. Is there anything more insufferable? Someone whose dreams come out as perfectly written absurdist fables? The interpretation of dreams is equally misguided: a search for religious or psychoanalytic symbols, a disregard for the real importance of the dream, its textures. Most writers will use the same wispy, "dream-like" texture for all their dreams, or recount them deadpan. The idea that someone would associate me with that vile genre of literature is intolerable to me.
One uses the fragments of memory one has, the few phrases that one remembers, with no illusion that they are true to the dream itself. The dream should not be too well written, too well remembered.
3 comments:
"The idea that someone would associate me with that vile genre of literature is intolerable to me."
- I just love this sentence. :-)
Recently, I had a dream where you told me that my second book was phenomenal. I told you that I hadn't written it yet. And then you said, "Of course, you have. I have read it, and it's brilliant."
That was a very pleasant dream.
You have already written it in the sense that you have the work habits that will make it happen. I have already read it because I have absolute confidence that you will get it done.
Thank you for the vote of confidence! Because my personnel committee gently informed me that my plans were insanely ambitious.
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