Comments on: What dreams will come? And will they mean anything?

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:09:20 +0000

Here are a few that come to mind (though I’m choosing to ignore whatever you might mean by “realist”):

1. Demi Moore’s 2000 Film Passion of Mind. Haven’t seen it but the concept has potential: When she sleeps she dreams another life, then when, in that life, she goes to sleep, she wakes to the first life. And she can’t know which is real.

2. In Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, the main character dreams a dream and each time he dreams it he gets closer and closer to the reveal, which has to do with an angry ghost’s message. Those deepening dream sequences remain one of the most frightening things I’ve ever read. (Sadly though, the book as a whole falls flat at the end.)

3. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga did dozens of interesting things with dreams throughout its run. One of the most striking to me was the concept of Eternal Waking, but truly—the way he used dreams are legion.

4. Speaking of comics, DC just did a fascinating thing with a Sunday-comics style run of stories. One of the weaker strips was “Wonder Woman,” but in it, the hero is sent on tasks in her dreams, learning experiences — the dreams functioned almost as a saferoom for learning and striving.

But I’m with you. I think dream has a lot of potential. I’m going to take this post as a manifesto and see what I have to dream.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:43:11 +0000

One of my favorite television series in any genre, Kanon, can be viewed as pure psychological melodrama, or as a series of overlapping dreams, or as the recollection of actual events. The less weighty The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Beautiful Dreamer plunge squarely into "Am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am a man" territory.

By: Lisa Torcasso Downing

Lisa Torcasso Downing — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:49:04 +0000

You mentioned biblical-style dreams, so I’ll go there as opposed to purely sleepy-time dreams. Its been a while since I’ve read this, but I wonder if Potok’s _I am the Clay_ would fit what you’re after. The main character is a Jewish army chaplain during the Korean war and he has dreams/visions that impact the character and, therefore, the story. Can’t recall details. But a good read, especially for those who only think of Potok as writing child protagonists. One of my favorite Potok works.

By: Th.

Th. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:52:50 +0000

I also reading Steven Graham Chapman’s “Long Red Road” which blends the real world and the characters’ dreams and visions so thoroughly I can’t always tell one from the other.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:37:37 +0000

If by "dramatically weighty," we mean that the plot turns on the substance of the dreams (rather than the dreams simply being melodramatically ponderous), then The Path of Dreams certainly qualifies (and it keeps improving!). My sister was nice enough to offer that it "captures the transcendental nature of religion," noting that "to capture the awe of a religious conversion/experience, the event has to be approached sideways."

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:34:12 +0000

The first thing that comes to mind is Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint-Anthony, although it’s almost more hallucination all the way through than proper realist work. Another one, maybe, is Tyrone Slothrop, in Gravity’s Rainbow, a character constantly plagued by various dreams and paranoid visions. Also, an interesting dream episode at the end of W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo.

By: Chase

Chase — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:15:23 +0000

completely missed the realist part. . . ‘fraid I got nothing then

By: Chase

Chase — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:03:06 +0000

I would recommend Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. The story is driven by a man who is terrified to sleep because his dreams have the power to reshape reality. If he dreams that his bothersome aunt never lived with his family because she died in a car accident, he’ll wake up 6 months after his aunt’s funeral and he’ll be the only person who realizes there’s been a change. Eventually, he finds himself on a psychologist’s couch. But instead of helping him, the psychologist learns how to bend this poor man’s dreams to his own ends, and that’s when it all begins to fall apart. It’s not a bad read and I think there have been a few movie adaptations, yet I haven’t seen them.

By: Th.

Th. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:43:55 +0000

Here are a few that come to mind (though I’m choosing to ignore whatever you might mean by “realist”):

But I’m with you. I think dream has a lot of potential. I’m going to take this post as a manifesto and see what I have to dream.