Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices

Michael Ruby

In Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices, the poet Michael Ruby records three strands of our most elusive experiences: The involuntary memories of bygone times and places that day and night flash across our minds; the mysterious inner voices heard in the last seconds before sleep; and the imaginary experiences called dreams, most of which we forget on waking. Fleeting Memories and the hypnagogic Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep, the first and third books of this trilogy, are among the first literary forays into two unsounded terrains of consciousness; while the second book, the hyperrealist Dreams of the 1990s, joins the dream books of such French writers as Leiris and Perec, and the Americans Kerouac and Burroughs. Taken together, Ruby’s trilogy is a unique fusion of personal history, fiction and poetry that not only rescues unplumbed psychic experience, but also exults in the laughter, terror and baffling innuendos of unbidden utterance. With an uncanny ability to elicit our own most elusive moments of consciousness, this book is an instigation and guidebook for readers in their own explorations of the psyche.