Dreamways

Title: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation
Author: William H. Gass

In his elegantly written and fascinating volume, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999, Basic Books, New York), translator and essayist William H. Gass takes the reader on a thought-provoking and fascinating journey into the world of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, considered by many to be one of the best 20th European century poets. His fascinating explorations of Rilke’s writings, their structure, history and meaning, have much in common with methods of exploring the world of dreams.  read more »

Title: Lush Life: A Novel
Author: Richard Price

"A Kaleidoscopic Perspective on a Murder, and Dreams Lost and Found.“  This recent newspaper headline, psychedelically effusive, caught my eye.  As did the subheadline above the article’s continuation on a second page: "Kaleidoscopic Perspective on a Dreamer’s Murder.“  These dream-related headings announce a review of Lush Life, the latest novel by Richard Price (one of the writers for the critically acclaimed and now ended HBO series, The Wire) written by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times (04 Mar 08).

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Title: The Essential Rumi (Penguin Classics)
Author: Jelaluddin Rumi

In the wake of another month of near-dreamlessness I turned to Rumi's poems. Letting the book fall open I found The Guest House to be just the nudge toward balancing my perspective that sleep dreams so often provide:

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

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Title: Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages
Author: Mark Abley

"The dodo and the passenger pigeon have fresh company every month: since human beings began to dream and talk their way across the earth, thousands of species of animals and plants have died out, and today many thousands of others are at risk.“ These words appear in Mark Abley‘s fascinating and disturbing book, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2003, Houghton Miflin Co.), where he explores the beautiful dream that is each language spoken by humans and the nightmare that is the extinction of hundreds and thousands of these languages under the onslaught of bi  read more »

Title: Maus a Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History
Author: Art Spiegelman

In his classic graphic novel about the waking nightmare that was the East European Jewish experience in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Vol. 1 My Father Bleeds History (1986, Pantheon, New York), Art Spiegelman has the father of the title recount a dream he experienced in the midst of being incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp. This novel's has a dream-like quality in that the Jews of the story are portrayed as mice, with the gentiles pictured as cats. It is the U.S.

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Title: The Bingo Palace (P.S.)
Author: Louise Erdrich

The following is a dream I had while reading Louise Erdrich's book, The Bingo Palace. The story is set on the North Dakota Chippewa Reservation in contemporary time. In the dream I was one of the characters or a piece of all of them. I too was trapped by our culture, the long history and the poverty. The white social worker came into my bedroom to find me sleeping and when I awakened, I saw what she saw - the piles of clothing in my closet that only a few days before had been organized and on hangers.

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Title: Einstein's Dreams
Author: Alan Lightman

"For the past several months, since the middle of April, he has dreamed many dreams about time. His dreams have taken hold of his research. His dreams have worn him out, exhausted him so that he sometimes cannot tell whether he is awake of asleep. But the dreaming if finished. Out of many possible natures of time, imagined in as many nights, one seems compelling. Not that the others are impossible. The others might exist in other worlds."

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Title: Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages
Author: Mark Abley

"The location of a language, from an Aboriginal perspective, was decided in the Dreamtime.“ In this concise yet mysterious sentence, Mark Abley puts into words – English words - a formulation of the understanding of self and the world that distinguishes Austalia’s First Peoples from Europeans. This wondrous world view also explains why their interactions with European interlopers have proven so heinously destructive for aboriginals.

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Title: Flight: A Novel
Author: Sherman Alexie

"My memory is strange that way. I often remember people I’ve never met and events and places I’ve never seen.“ These words, spoken by Zits, the endearing and prickly protagonist of Sherman Alexie’s delightful and bittersweet novel, Flight, set the tone for the structure and action of this vivid and engaging story. Readers are put on notice that they will embark upon a wild visionary magic carpet ride through the darkest of nights, the ultimate destination of which is a place of light, healing and wholeness.

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Title: Killer Dreams
Author: Iris Johansen

The back cover of the paperback version of this thriller titillates and teases the prospective reader: „As one of the nation’s top sleep therapists, Sophie knows how dreams can kill. She specializes in the life-threatening night terrors that her son suffers from – but even his worst nightmares don’t compare with the all-too-real terror that’s about to begin.“ And, indeed, the realm where the various intertwined lives of the novel bump up against each other violently is the world of sleep and dreams.

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