Cirrus@Austlit

'Fiction and dreams have a complicated, even toxic, relationship. Fiction is already a simulation of reality, with varying degrees of fidelity to The Real; and likewise, the process of reading, much like dreaming – and indeed writing – involves a theatrical envisioning of images in the mind. But dreams are maligned as narrative devices. Henry James’s fin-de-siècle advice – “tell a dream, lose a reader” – is aggressively ignored in print and on screen where, in the hands of plot-minded dramatists, dreams are no longer the anarchic spontaneities of the unconscious. Rather, they are tamed and subdued in the service of advancing plot or revealing character, and thus lose the allure of the uncanny.' (Introduction)