Are there two nights in each night?

Photo Courtesy of Fordham University Press

Freud. Blanchot. Beckett. Joyce. Is there a link between fiction and dreams?

From the influential The Interpretation of Dreams through Blanchot’s idea of dividing each night into two nights: the one in which our physical body sleeps and “the other night” that each dreamer spends within dreams -- until we arrive at Finnegan’s Wake, the central concern of the dream persists in many pivotal works of European literature.

Commencing from Freud’s argument that each dream is a form of writing, Herschel Farbman, author of The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing and Restlessness in Twentieth Century Literature (published by Fordham University Press, 2008) offers a scholarly analysis about locating that place we all know well, (but may not remember), where the poet is “stripped of laurels, encounters the non-poet in him or herself” to join everyone else on common ground. This common ground is, of course, the dream world.

Farbman’s account of the restlessness in literature through a Freudian and sometimes Derridian lens raises interesting questions about the images we see in dreams. Are they truly images? Or is dream imagery a “pictographic script” forcing us to confront a kind of writing?

He eloquently argues that this nightly journey into the dream is the place in which we share language. In sharing language, through this universal experience, we also share a sense of loss because we cannot remember our dreams upon waking. Yet, when we do, we lose some parts in the telling of each dream. This experience, according to Farbman, is essentially literary.

For those who appreciate entering a philosophical arena filled with some of the most challenging elements of literature and the idea of the dream, Farbman’s book will not disappoint. Although evidently it is not a page turner in the summer reading-by the beach-sense, it is undoubtedly a piece that turns the wheels of the thinking and dreaming mind by drawing lucid parallels between the dream, responsibility, ethics and language. It is the type of book that requires time and patience with a challenging pay off.  His rigorous readings of European literature offer students of literature, or those who simply enjoy asking the big questions, a chance to link our fascination with dreams to the pleasure of fiction.

Now imagine that, “dreams may be thought of as a kind of writing in which everyone is involved, every night” as Farbman suggests. What do you write about in your dreams?

Herschel Farbman is a lecturer in French and English School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.