By Meg Miller | Friday, August 15, 2014 - Off the Shelf

For about three months a couple of years ago I slept with my computer in bed with me. On one pillow—my softest pillow—I’d lay my head, and on the pillow directly beside me I’d lay down my computer, which would hum softly and blink silently until eventually clicking off completely. When my boyfriend slept over, I’d reluctantly move the laptop to my desk on the other side of my bedpost. But if it were up to me it was within arms reach, ready for me should I wake up and want to record my dreams in what Hélène Cixous calls “my most brute and innocent state.”
A feminist writer, poet, playwright, literary critic and all around “grande dame of intellectual France” (Publishers Weekly), Hélène Cixous is an avid dream-recorder herself. She keeps a notebook in a drawer to the left of her bed—“my box of dreams”—and jots down her dreams immediately after waking. “The dream dictates I obey eyes closed,” she says of her hazy pre-dawn ritual. “The hand in the dark writes as best it can, hurtles along, going off track. Once it is done, the dream slips itself into the dream box and I get up. Dozens of dreams later…it comes time to read them.” In 2007 she published 50 of these dream fragments in a “book of dreams without interpretation.” The dreams are not edited or arranged in any sort of order. The book is slender with a watercolor-stained cover. It’s title is a command: Dream I Tell You.
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