MWF 2010 authors on… dreams

Carol Bacchi

I am fascinated by the writing process. ‘What has this to do with dreams?’ you may well ask. In a recent interview in The Age, Bret Easton Ellis says: ‘So much of writing is like a dream, you’re not conscious …’. This reminded me of what Siri Husvedt describes in her new book The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves as the phenomenon of ‘automatic writing’, ‘the feeling that words are being dictated to the author rather than actually composed’, that a kind of collective unconscious helps us along. This, of course, is not to deny the agony of composition.

Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.