In a review of La Boutique Obscure, a dream diary by Georges Perec, Tom Jokinen remembers another famous attempt:
Graham Greene also kept a dream diary, which was published after his death in 1991 as A World Of My Own. As Malcolm Bradbury points out in his review for the New York Times, Greene believed in worlds beyond what he called “The Common World” of shared reality: he believed in the mysteries that exist “in the bathroom cupboard, in secret tunnels under the ground, in the labyrinthine world of espionage, in the realm of sexual deceit,” and in dreams. As a Catholic, albeit a Catholic troubled by the arbitrary constraints of the earthly church, he believed too in the world we’re not meant to see except through Revelation. The diary is a stealth autobiography of Greene’s life in the dreamworld. … In an odd way, both A World of My Own and Perec’s La Boutique Obscure are works of non-fiction.
David Auerbach considers Perec’s final dream in the book – “Perec and his father chased, captured, and imprisoned by Nazis in short, punchy scenes”:
Ending the dream journal where and when he did was wise. “I thought I was recording the dreams I was having,” Perec writes in the book’s introduction. “I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them.” As Perec hints, the dreams recounted in La boutique obscure chart out not just his recurrent obsessions but also a linear narrative about dreaming, telling a story about the journal itself and the pain that went into its composition, a pain that ultimately stems from the author’s loss of both his parents in World War II. By the end of the book, Perec’s dreams are crying out for him to stop writing them down.
You can read some excerpts from Perec’s journals here and Sasha Archibald’s analysis of Perec’s dreams here.
The Dish 