I love dreams, but the great Michael Chabon hates them. The opening of his new essay in the New York Review of Books about unconscious narratives:

“I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.

Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. ‘I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna,’ you begin, ‘only it wasn’t really Lake Michigan…,’ and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.

Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors.”