On Dreams of Books and Books of Dreams

Sometimes, I dream of magic books.

Sometimes, it’s another Chronicle of Narnia, an eighth book that somehow I never knew about until now. It has the same cream-and-parchment paperback binding as my own copies, with a Pauline Baynes illustration in jewel tones on the front cover. Just by handling it, I know in my dream that it contains adventures as exciting as the islands visited by the Dawn Treader, mystery as deep as the fate of Prince Rilian in The Silver Chair.

Other times, the book masquerades in familiarity. I find it in my parents’ basement, a book I seem to recognize from childhood, an edition I’d forgotten about until that moment. It’s usually the sort of book I received when I was a girl: paperbacks, thick and square, like composition books. When I find them, I’m overcome with nostalgia. I remember reading the book, loving it, but nothing else. I want to open it there and then, re-live the joy of it. I remember large serifed text and sunny summer afternoons curled up on my bedroom floor, but no content, no story or facts or words.

What’s strange about these dream books is that they’re almost as satisfying as reading: they leave me with the feelings I get about books, even if all the rest of it, the stuff I thought was important like plot and language, vanishes.

It’s similar to the story in the Magician’s Book that Lucy reads in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. While searching a magical book for the spell that will make the strange invisible island creatures visible again, Lucy finds that she can only read the pages in sequence, and that once a page has been turned, she can’t flip back and re-read the previous one. Partway through, she encounters a spell for refreshing the spirit, which turns out to be a story.

In fact, it turns out to be the best story she’s ever read, so good she immediately wants to flip back and read it again. But she can’t. And even as she basks in the feelings it gave her, the particulars of the story slip her mind, so that all she can remember is that it was about “a cup, a sword, a tree, and a green hill.”

But Lucy never forgets how the story made her feel. For the rest of her life, Lewis tells us, she judged all other stories by the forgotten one from the Magician’s Book. A “good” story became one that reminded her of it.

I do love plot: I adore locked rooms, murder mysteries where everyone has a guilty secret, clever twists, strange developments that make sense when you finally learn which way to look at them. And I love characters, too: lonely geniuses, bickering love interests, devious antagonists, and steadfast friends.

Sometimes, though, I love them so much that I forget what actually draws me to stories: how they make me feel.

I joined Goodreads only last year, which isn’t enough time to find and “rate” (in the hopes of improving my recommendations rather than any sense of grading or judging these titles) all the books I’ve ever read. When I browse through other people’s lists, I constantly find entries I’ve already read.

And a lot of the time, I know I’ve read a book. I have a gut reaction to the title and cover: I remember that I really liked it or thought it was “meh” or didn’t enjoy it at all. I have no problem filling out an accurate-measure-of-my-feelings star rating. But I can’t for the life of me tell you what it’s about or who the main character is. If I Google it or click over to the book’s own page, the summary usually sparks my memory, but the details of plot and character weren’t what first came to mind.

Likewise, I really have no idea what happens at the end of some of my favourite books. Diana Wynne Jones is one of my all-time favourite authors, but damned if I know how A Tale of Time City or The Lives of Christopher Chant ends, beat by beat. I’m certain the general plot resolves happily and satisfactorily, but I’d fail the English-class “why did Chrestomanci say he followed them?” quiz. I’ve read both books more than once, recently, and I remember the premises of both, but the endings slip from my mind.

Because what I do remember is that essence of books distilled in my dreams, or in Lucy’s experience with the Magician’s Book. I remember the sense of mystery. Of possibility. Of charm and doors opening. Of the feeling when you walk into the woods at night no matter whether or not you believe in ghosts, or the one of sitting inside on a cozy wooden floor on a summer day, with motes of dust swirling in the sunbeams and nothing you have to do for weeks and weeks.

Some of the authors whom I love, I love for precisely that reason: Edward Gorey and Tana French and John Bellairs excel at that creepy sense of incomprehensible wrongness lurking just out of sight. They evoke all the stories they aren’t telling as well as the ones they are.

And, I think, that’s why no matter what comes out on the page, what I write never measures up to the germ of an idea in my head. Because when I’m thinking of a plot or set of characters, I can indulge in how they make me feel. That’s what I want to write about. Sometimes that gets lost in the nitty-gritty of plot beats and word choices.

It’s funny that for someone like me, who relies on and thinks in words, framing everything in language, the ineffable can be so much a part of what I strive for.

Because my words will melt away once the covers close. My characters breathe ink; in the real world, they can survive no more than can a fish out of water. My knotted plots unravel as time pulls on the loose threads of memory.

But the way they all come together and make my reader feel something — that outlasts anything I can ever diagram in my notes or revise for the third time.

I will never read the magic books from my dreams. But I can remember what’s most important about them anyhow.