There is a sort of adage passed down from writing teacher to student, usually after workshopping a student story where the last paragraph involves the main character waking up only to discover the previous thirteen or twenty-three pages have all been a dream. Oftentimes there is an alarm clock involved.

The adage goes something like this: “Nobody cares about your dreams. Nobody wants to read about them. Knock it off with this dream nonsense.”

The problem with dreams is that they can mean anything and nothing. They’re tough to interpret and to really get the significance of the dream you often need a lot of information about the dreamer. Symbols in dreams are so incredibly specific to the dreamer that without that information it just seems, well, weird.

Knowing all this, reading the first volume of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, Preludes and Nocturnes was kind of tough. I cared roughly fifty-percent of the time, which seems about right. Because when someone tells me about a dream they had, I care for exactly half the amount of time it takes them to tell me the dream.

Read the rest on MN Reads.