In My Spare Time I Forget My Dreams
Explore the intersection of dreams and forgetting with our curated list, featuring William S. Burroughs' *My Education* and Jack Kerouac's *Book of Dreams*—essential reads for spare time.
Book
Book of Dreams
by Jack Kerouac
"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." Excerpt: WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I'm stopped by smiling threesome of cats who've disengaged themselves from the general fairly crowded evening street of brown lights, coke stands, tortillas-Unmistakably going to steal my bag-I struggled a little, gave up-Begin communicating with them my distress and in fact do so well they end up just stealing parts of my stuff…. We walk off leaving the bag with someone-arm in arm like a gang to the downtown lights of Letran, across a field- 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 Roa, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Scattered Poems, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes, and Scripture of the Golden Eternity.
Book
My Education
by William S. Burroughs
My Education is William S. Burroughs's final collection, first published two years before his death in 1997. It is a book of dreams, written over several decades and as personal and close to a memoir as we will see. The dreams cover themes from the mundane and ordinary -- conversations with his friends Allen Ginsberg or Ian Sommerville, feeding his cats, procuring drugs or sex -- to the erotic, bizarre, and visionary. Always a rich source of imagery in Burroughs's own fiction, in this book, dreams become a direct and powerful force in themselves. "Mr. Burroughs has lost none of his irreverence or wit, but in recent years he has acquired an elegant, elegiac tone." – The New York Times
