Dream Writing
U. of Kent, Canterbury, Oct. 15-16-2005
[CFP]

“Beat Dreams? The Books of Dreams of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs”

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Bent Sørensen, Aalborg University, Denmark

 

In 1961 Jack Kerouac published a Book of Dreams containing a number of hastily scribbled accounts of dreams Kerouac remembered immediately after waking up from a period of sleep. Strangely the book contains both a “Foreword” and a “Preface”, both penned by Kerouac, explaining its genesis in almost identical terms. The two introductory texts do, however, contradict one another both in the details of the process of dream collation and writing (“They were all written spontaneously, non-stop” (Foreword) vs. “When I woke up from my sleep I just lay there looking at the pictures that were fading slowly. As soon (one minute or so) as I had assembled them […] I got my weary bones out of bed & […] scribbled in pencil in my little dream notebook till I had exhausted every rememberable item.” (Preface)), and in the sets of political or religious implications Kerouac wishes to draw from the universal experience of dreams (“The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together shall we say in one unspoken Union and also proves that the world is really transcendental which the Communists do not believe because they think their dreams are ‘unrealities’ instead of visions.” (Foreword) vs. “That is because the subconscious mind (the manas working thru from the alaya-vijnana) does not make any mental discriminations of good or bad, thisa and thata, it just deals with the realities.” (Preface)) Thus, the spontaneity emphasised in the Foreword is replaced by a more mediated process of assembly in the Preface’s account, and the anti-Communist discourse of the Foreword is replaced by a Buddhist credo in the Preface.

 

Kerouac’s Book of Dreams can be read as an exercise in the vindication of his own poetics of spontaneity which he detailed in a number of manifestoes for prose writing and living. Dreams to Kerouac were guaranteed unmediated and uncensored experience to be channelled straight onto the page. In contrast his fellow founder of the Beat lifestyle and circle of writers known as the Beat Generation, William Burroughs, used his My Education – a Book of Dreams from 1995 as a form of memoir writing to stand in lieu of the autobiography he never wrote. While My Education also contains actual dream transcripts, based on “hastily jotted notes on scraps of paper and index cards and pages typed with one hand”, the dream segments are interrupted by ‘locators’ dating and explaining some of the dream entries. These locator paragraphs function as the editor instance required but often left implicit in autobiographical writing. My Education is, however, typical of Burroughs’ writing style with its notorious cut-ups of existing texts palimpsested on with new writing, emanating more or less spontaneously from Burroughs’ both creative and selectively editorial mind. It is also very different from the dream writing of Kerouac which never explicitly admits to being edited or re-written. While Kerouac argues that his Book of Dreams can be read as a continuation of his autobiographical and confessional novels (“The heroes of On the Road, The Subterraneans, etc. reappear here doing further strange things for no other particular reason than that the mind goes on”), Burroughs deliberately manifests and emphasises the real-world correlative to his writing in My Education. The two dream books thus represent two different strategies within the shared didactic endeavour of all confessional writing: one strategy, Kerouac’s, is implicit (except in the introductory texts) and the other, Burroughs’, is explicit in its insistence that autobiography is meant to instruct the reader in matters of general significance concerning life and how to live it.