Dreams

Today I was reading Naguib Mahfouz's The Dreams and really enjoying it. It recalled a lot of surrealist poems I've read and really nicely blends elements of the fantastic and the quotidian - just like dreams. It's a book of short shorts, though it's sad to say that more happens in them than in many longer short stories I've read.

In the introduction it said that relating and interpreting dreams is a big part of Arabic culture and literature. I thought, though, of all the times someone would bring a poem about a dream into workshop. Some people generally dismiss anything labeled as a dream. I suppose you could say that it's because dreams only happen in one person's head and thus cannot be shared. I don't believe that though. And in reading Mahfouz, I could relate to some of his dreams, not because I'd had similar ones, but because the syntax, so to speak, was the same. The way you can "remember" something in a dream that isn't real either, the way dead people appear and you forget that they're dead, the way people turn into other people and it all seems normal. I think dreams are also a way of approaching a subject you don't want to talk about. Reading the dreams of Mahfouz put me as a reader into the very interesting role of being the interpreter of dreams. Funny, I just remembered that the etymology of interpret eventually leads back to trading.

Thank goodness some of my classmates ignored the whole "tell a dream, lose a reader" dictum and went ahead and wrote fantastic dream poems.