Fiction. Sy Kirschbaum has spent almost twenty years in Prague translating legendary Czech dissident Jan Horak's samizdat masterpiece, Blue, Red, Gray. On the cusp of finishing, he is called back to his Maine hometown to see his troubled former lover, Ida Fields, now the wife of their childhood friend Gabe Slatky. But before he can see her, Sy must meet with Gabe for an evening at a local bar, an encounter that becomes a test of their old friendship and their dueling accounts of reality. In the conversation that follows, narratives of past and present--of art and life--interweave...

This book traces the intersection of dreams and power in order to analyze the complex ways representations of dreams and paradigms of dream interpretation reinforce and challenge authoritarian, hierarchical structures. The book puts forward the concept of the dreamscape as a pre-representational space that contains anarchistic attributes, including its instability or chaotic nature and the lack of a stable or core selfhood and identity in its subjects. The book situates this concept of the dreamscape through an analysis of the Daoist notions of the “transformation of things”...