Bert O. States (1929–2003)

Dreaming and Storytelling provides a fair to middling overview of the characteristics of dreams and how they fit in with the nature of fiction. Bert States discusses the contributions of many who have written in the field of dream analysis and he tries to meld this with aspects of fiction writing, and the synthesis is okay as far as it goes. This book was published in 1993 and thus it predates many of the "quirky dreamy novellas" that have appeared in the past few years, like Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, James Cowan's The Mapmaker's Dream, Calvino's Invisible Cities, not to mention older fiction like George DuMaurier's Peter Ibbetson and Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, plus the whole body of medieval dream visions. There is a fairly vast body of fictional literature that contains dreams or purports to be the record of dreams, and with the exception of Kafka's Metamorphosis and the Biblical dream of Joseph, the author neither acknowledges any of this nor does he compare specific literary dreams with those reported as actual dreams. So much of the discussion compares actual dreams as reported by Freud and others with various theoretical approaches to literary interpretation, and specific examples of dream fiction are ignored.

Still, this brief summary does help to identify some of the properties of dreams and how they relate to storytelling in general.

Of course, many psychologists beginning with Freud set great store by the meaning of dreams. Others view dreams as "simply odd things that happen to us at night, sometimes pleasant, sometimes terrifying, not to be taken too seriously." Similar things can be said about our reading of fiction. We read for plot, suspense, significance of this or that aspect, or for what we can learn about human nature, science, history, etc.

Interestingly, States points out that the Biblical Joseph "used the dream to foretell the future; Freud used it to retell the past." Thankfully, most fiction is not in the foretelling business at all.

The most prominent characteristic of dreams is their bizarreness, while only a limited segment of fiction fits into that category and not all of it is dreamlike. Surrealist fiction comes to mind, and magic realism, although most of that is not so much bizarre as merely a gentle challenge to one's willingness to suspend disbelief.

Another point about dreams is that they don't have a beginning, middle and ending except in the telling. They are typically fragmentary and seem to be centered in the middle. There is no lead-up to what transpires and no graceful denouement. Here is where actual dreams are quite different from fictional depictions. As Francine Prose said about reading Bruno Schulz and Felisberto Hernandez, reading them is less like reading about a dream than being in one. But Schulz's dream scenarios all have beginnings, middles and endings. It is the endings that most feature the bizarreness of a dream state.

Schulz's stories demonstrate elements of Chaos Theory, which according to Dreams and Storytelling, has much to say about the bizarreness of dreams: "the dream, like the weather, is a chaotic and complex system: it is unpredictable in the sense that one cannot tell where it is going."

Another idea put forth concerns the role of "characters" in dreams. He cites the study done by Vladimir Propp on the Morphology of the Folktale, which analyzes the common components of a hundred fairytales and then goes into the analytical literature concerning figures in dreams. He acknowledges that applying a study of folktales to dream work is not conventional, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Somewhat related to this, he spends a whole chapter discussing archetypes and how they function both in stories and in dreams. Somewhat related are the "scripts" that are followed in everyday living that are sometimes violated in dreams, thus causing conflict. The discussion shows how conventional scripts are at the basis of conflict in a great deal of literature, particularly when two or more scripts clash, thereby putting a character in an untenable situation. For example, Hamlet is trapped between at least two behavioral scripts. "Dreams and fictions tend to be about the wages of getting out of step with the scripted world, of differing interpretations of the same script, or of a collision of personal goals with established scripts."

In a chapter on "Meaning in Dreams and Fictions," the author quotes Milton Kramer: "Meaning does not exist in dreams but is brought to them from some external system of meanings."

One of the interesting points dividing dreams from fiction is that in dreams no creativity is involved. Dreams seem to be a function of environment, while fiction uses that environment to create stories. Dreams are not created, they just are.

In the Conclusion, the notion of "intentional, encoded or symbolic messages" in dreams is discounted. I am somewhat surprised at this. Since dreams are completely visual experiences, in my own dreams I have noticed that certain types of images seem to stand for certain other types, sort of like rebuses. For example, you have seen puzzles where a picture of an eye plus a heart plus a ewe sheep are translated to mean "I love you." To just dismiss that aspect of dreams does not ring true for this reader at least.

Of course, fiction is full of "intentional, encoded or symbolic messages."

One notion that is not discussed at all in this book is the idea of "great dreams" as opposed to the everyday static that makes up one's dreaming. Many people have had the experience of an extraordinary dream that may carry with it an almost archetypal importance. And by the same token, certainly there are many examples of great and extraordinary novels and stories that can have a similar impact. The author seems rather dismissive of the whole notion of archetypes as anything special or out of the ordinary, so that may account for this omission.

On the whole, this was an interesting book, and it did help to clarify my thinking about dream fiction.… (meer)

The author discusses theatre as phenomenon, experienced through the senses. The experience of theatre uses sight and sound to create an emotional sensation rather than just a literary work. We become engaged with theatre; it is more immediate and we are more responsive to it than movies or books. The book is a decent discussion of the subject, but a bit pompous, with constant use of large phrases that the reader is assumed to know; unfortunately, most of these were not in my dictionary, and though there were only four or five of them, it can make the reading hang together less. I was able to come to a decision about what I thought they might mean from context; however, for those five-dollar words I did know the meaning for, or was able to find in my dictionary, I felt there were a number of other words that could have been used in their place to make the work a bit more accessible.… (meer)