Are dreams a mash of cognitive nonsense, or do they speak to our lives in a meaningful way? Can they tell us things we otherwise wouldn’t have known? Michelle Herman explores these questions in a revealing narrative about her life, complete with vivid accounts of her dreams--disjunctive, conflicting iterations of non-reality that feature emaciated animals, the apocalypse, and age-morphing grandparents. Around these she merges the intellectual (Jung and Freud) and neurochemical study of dreams. The paradox of this piece is that Herman admits that most people aren’t interested in hearing about each other’s dreams, and yet she pulls readers by the hand into her dream life, and her waking life, neither of which escape analysis. But she remains engaging by forcing the random, obscure, and unshapen nature of dreams (and life) into a compelling story. --Paul Diamond
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