Book of Dreams

Book of Dreams is Jack Kerouac’s record of his dream life, a parallel autobiography of the soul, the sleeper’s On the Road:

I got my weary bones out of bed & through eyes swollen with sleep swiftly scribbled in pencil in my little dream notebook till I had exhausted every rememberable item …

Awake of asleep, Jack’s mind spun the web of relationships that were the substance of almost everything he wrote:

In the book of dreams I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about.

Lost love, madness, castration, cats that speak, cats in danger of their lives, people giving birth to cats, grade school classrooms, Mel Torme, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Tolstoy and Genet all make repeated appearances,

Book of Dreams is Jack Kerouac’s record of his dream life, a parallel autobiography of the soul, the sleeper’s On the Road:

I got my weary bones out of bed & through eyes swollen with sleep swiftly scribbled in pencil in my little dream notebook till I had exhausted every rememberable item …

Awake or asleep, Jack’s mind spun the web of relationships that were the substance of almost everything he wrote:

In the book of dreams I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about.

Lost love, madness, castration, cats that speak, cats in danger of their lives, people giving birth to cats, grade school classrooms, Mel Torme, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Tolstoy and Genet all make repeated appearances, lending the collection a repetitive, nonprogrammatic logic and exposing an unfamiliar sort of vulnerable beauty in Kerouac’s iconic persona.–Publishers Weekly

There is much to lament in the saga of his life, and quite a bit is surprising.–Michael Kammen, Los Angeles Book Review

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights), Scattered Poems (City Lights), and Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).