Dream Diary 1975: Introduction
Napoleon reportedly said that if you wanted to understand a man then you needed to look at the world in the year he was twenty. I like to think that Andre Breton might have said, a century later, that if you want to understand a person you need to look at the dreams they had when they were twenty. Although I think Nappy has it, what I am going to post, throughout 2025, are my dreams from the year 1975, during which I was twenty. I’m not entirely sure why I want to do this. The little Letts Diary, its spine split from the effort of typing it up, sits by the laptop now, and it offers a secret, not-quite-private counterpart to the ‘daytime’ 1975 diary, one which I used to write my ‘autrebiography’, Words Out Of Time. (See here for details: Pages: My REF description of my book Words Out of Time: autrebiographies and unwritings ) In fact, the entry for Sunday 7 December 1975 finds its way into it, and the unforgettable dialogue from Monday 10 February 1975 was used in the sound collage that introduces the second issue (1976) of my tape magazine 1983. But apart from these surfacings the rest has remained unused. Possibly I was going to use the dream images for poems (probably I did, there are a couple of references to a poem ‘Vision’) and it does carry a sort-of title at its end: the solipsist’s headparty. There are occasional attempts to note repeated motifs, but I’ve not typed up much of this ‘explanatory’ matter.
It is a fascinating project – though I am aware that, contrary to an actual remark of Andre Breton, who says we love telling each other our dreams, there is nothing more boring than somebody else’s dreams. (Both facts are true, I think!) I shall risk that. After all, I don’t expect anyone to read them all. What I think I love about the dreams is their complete uselessness. An obsolete psychology is not worth examining, of course. The language is simple, note-like transcriptions, with a simple vocabulary (‘big’-‘small’ appears frequently), and no attempt at polish, along with certain assumptions. Place names (curiously focused on the Sussex part of my life, not the excitements of university in Norwich) offer atmosphere. People are named with an assumed understanding of the person’s character. (I’ve changed some names. I’m also surprised about how many of the persons named I’m still in touch with.)
The process of posting these entries contains the irony that something so private, and 50 years old, is made public on the world wide web, on their meaningless fiftieth anniversaries.
Whether I ‘do’ anything with them is another question, or are they going to just simply escape, as did my similar ‘daytime’ project of posting my 1969 diary here in 2019? See here: Pages: Introduction to Letts Schoolboys Diary 1969. Some of the entries read like Ian Seed’s wonderful prose poems, re-written by somebody with basic language skills and no sense of literary style. In a sense, they were reminders for texts that never materialised, for ‘a book of dreampoems’ as the text says, and to ‘do’ anything with them now is quite a different task. For in only a few cases do I retain a memory of the dream itself. I have an open mind about them. Just to check, as I write this, I wondered whether I wrote any introductory matter to match the solipsist’s headparty at the text’s conclusion, and I found this as evidence of intent on the diary’s fly-leaf: ‘in which i will record my dreams / coincidences and other strange things [these ‘things’ don’t survive January] possibly (but not necessarily) for use in literary form later’. It is just possible that ‘later’ has finally arrived!
9th December 2024
The first post for 1 January 2025:
