Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices

Overview

The book, a short trilogy in prose and poetry, carefully documents three varieties of unconscious experience: fleeting memories, dreams, and inner voices heard before sleep. The book, which takes a quite different approach than Jung's similarly titled _Memories, Dreams, Reflections_, is meant to be both experimental and readable. The first and third parts, Fleeting Memories and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep, are the first extensive literary treatments of two vast realms of psychic experience, and thus the work as a whole might be of enduring significance. Fleeting Memories was temporarily lost in a severely damaged building across the street from the World Trade Center, where Ruby worked as a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal, and includes a low-key preface about that experience. While the middle book, Dreams of the 1990s, is not the first dream book ever written-Leiris, Kerouac and Burroughs come immediately to mind-it takes its place as a strong hyperrealist entry in that genre, as well as interacting unpredictably with Fleeting Memories.

Author Biography

Author of four books - At an Intersection, Window on the City, The Edge of the Underworld and Compulsive Words - Michael Ruby is also the editor of Washtenaw County Jail and Other Writings by David Herfort. A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University's writing program, he as an editor of U.S. news at The Wall Street Journal.