The dreams of fiction - column

National Review, Nov 25, 1988 by D. Keith Mano

"Psychologist Patricia Garfield believes that if a person is consciously working on a problem, 'It is very likely that his or her unconscious will continue working in the dream state, drawing on all inner resources to put together new combinations and present them.' " (Landscapes of the Night, by Christopher Evans)

THE LATE Christopher Evans had a provocative thesis about dreaming It was, he thought, some sort of obligatory homework. Even a secure, wellfed house cat practices fundamental mouse-catching techniques each night in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Your brain is a computer, more or less. When "off-line" in sleep, the machine will review old software (Basic Human, one might call it), shunting obsolete material aside and adding data gathered that day. What you "see" is perhapss a random perhaps particularly worrisome, portion of this regular review. When anxious we sleep longer because difficult information must be dream-assimilated and understood for the mind to achieve fundamental equilibrium.

Analogies between dream work and fiction-writing are obvious enough and often made. Both, after all, resort to metaphor or symbol; both are highly colored. I would o further and submit that they are, in fact, the same process: one unconscious and spontaneous, the other conscious but dependent, nonetheless, on dream mechanics. Dreaming, indeed, may have provided primitive man with license to treat a material universe imaginatively. Take away the precedent of dream and human perception might have been frozen in literalism. The dream taught men that there was a parallel universe