I am a nonsense lit crit generator

[kittenscribble]

I think in words, you know. I mean actual words, each neatly typed out. Whenever I hear a new word, I have to know how it is spelled; otherwise I cannot call it up again. I confuse titles when they look visually similar, such as Requiem for a Dream and Remains of the Day. Or Return of the Dead.

My dreams are as confused a jumble of images and actions as anyone else's, but once in a while they are also reading material. I distinctly remember a dream I had back in high school: I was trapped inside a building, and the building collapsed in a cloud of dust and noise. My view zoomed out as the building fell. Somewhere above and to the right of the debris, in neatly typewritten text, the narration concluded: "…and then she died."

Dead and therefore purposeless, I floated above the dream-landscape in vague puzzlement until my alarm clock beeped me awake.

Anyway. I bring this up because I dreamt book reviews today.

See, I take the Book World section of the Washington Post to work every Monday and read it over lunch. (It's a fun change from the other stuff I have to read all day.) I only read for as long as it takes me to eat, which is why one issue can last me all week. I then nap for the remainder of the lunch hour, partly because I perpetually get too little sleep and partly because my stomach is full and comfortable. This afternoon my brain apparently hadn't had enough Book World; I dreamt in book reviews, text scrolling across the surface of my mind. Nameless critics praised the flowing prose of equally nameless authors, calling out several illustrative sentences. Characters and plot points were dissected, the accuracy of historical details debated. When I woke, I was unsure of whether or not I had slept at all.

It's not real, though. The dream-reviews of the dream-books are nothing more than nonsense text, in this case strung together in the language of book critics. Sometimes while dreaming I've tried to concentrate harder on what I'm reading, on the actual words, trying to commit them to memory; upon close inspection, the words never make any sense.

Still. It's an odd feeling, waking with fading ghosts of words in my head. I know that they're meaningless, but I still want to keep them.

Comments

[pseudotheist.livejournal.com]

So, does this confirm or debunk the myth that you can't read in your dreams? Did you actually read "and then she died..." or did you jsut know that's what it said? I'd always thought it was a goofy sort of myth, but one that I'd never be able to figure out, cause I never remember my dreams, but some time last month I actually woke up remembering a dream where I was "reading" something, and it was definately nonsensical...

[kittenscribble.livejournal.com]

There's a little of both, I think. The narration of the death was definitely readable, being a simple record of current events. But whenever words are introduced as a prop - when I'm reading pages of print in a dream, say, or typing it onto a computer screen - then it's total nonsense.

[bkleber.livejournal.com]

I've never heard the "can't read in a dream" thing, and ihave frequently read in dreams and had it been 100% coherant. The time that it stops making sense is when I start to wake up, when the dream starts to fade out... but when I'm in a true dream state, it's completely intelligible writing that I encounter.