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Dream I Tell You
"I used to feel guilty at night. I live in, I always used to live in two countries, the diurnal one and the continuous very tempestuous nocturnal one.... What a delight to head off with high hopes to night's court, without any knowledge of what may happen! Where shall I be taken tonight! Into which country? Into which country of countries?"―Hélène Cixous, from Dream I Tell You
For years, Hélène Cixous has been writing down fragments of her dreams immediately after awaking. In Dream I Tell You , she collects fifty from the past ten years. Cixous's accounts of her dreamscapes resist standard psychoanalytic interpretations and reflect her lyrical, affecting, and deeply personal style. The dreams, reproduced in what Cixous calls both their "brute and innocent state," are infused with Cixous's humor, wit, and sense of playfulness.
Dreams have always been a crucial part of Cixous's writing. They are her archives and it is with them that she writes. Without dreaming, Cixous writes, "I would crumble to dust." As in many of her other texts, Cixous's mother, father, daughter, and friends populate this work, which offers artistic and provocative meditations on the themes of family, death, and resurrection. Scenes of a daily life-getting a haircut, caring for her child, preparing for work-become beautifully and evocatively skewed in Cixous's dreams. She also writes of dreams, both amusing and unsettling, in which she spends an evening with Martin Heidegger, has her lunch quietly interrupted by a young lion, flees the Nazis, and tours Auschwitz.
The "you" of the title is fellow philosopher and friend Jacques Derrida, to whom these texts are addressed. The book reflects on many of the subjects the two grappled with in their work and in the deconstruction of psychoanalysis, literary production, subjectivity, sexual difference, and the question of friendship.
For years, Hélène Cixous has been writing down fragments of her dreams immediately after awaking. In Dream I Tell You , she collects fifty from the past ten years. Cixous's accounts of her dreamscapes resist standard psychoanalytic interpretations and reflect her lyrical, affecting, and deeply personal style. The dreams, reproduced in what Cixous calls both their "brute and innocent state," are infused with Cixous's humor, wit, and sense of playfulness.
Dreams have always been a crucial part of Cixous's writing. They are her archives and it is with them that she writes. Without dreaming, Cixous writes, "I would crumble to dust." As in many of her other texts, Cixous's mother, father, daughter, and friends populate this work, which offers artistic and provocative meditations on the themes of family, death, and resurrection. Scenes of a daily life-getting a haircut, caring for her child, preparing for work-become beautifully and evocatively skewed in Cixous's dreams. She also writes of dreams, both amusing and unsettling, in which she spends an evening with Martin Heidegger, has her lunch quietly interrupted by a young lion, flees the Nazis, and tours Auschwitz.
The "you" of the title is fellow philosopher and friend Jacques Derrida, to whom these texts are addressed. The book reflects on many of the subjects the two grappled with in their work and in the deconstruction of psychoanalysis, literary production, subjectivity, sexual difference, and the question of friendship.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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237 people want to read
About the author
Hélène Cixous
195 books863 followersHélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.
She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.
She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 5, 2018
evet bitmek bilmedi, rüya kitaplarını seviyorum, değişik seviyelerde tanıdığım yazarların, felsefecilerin rüya kitaplarını okudum okuyorum ama bu rastaladığım en sıkıcı rüya kitabıydı...
bir de acı olan, bu kadıncağızın kurgu veya kurgu dışı hiçbir eserinin çevrilmemiş olması, yazımına müdahale edemeyeceği tek şey olan rüyalarını çevirmişler ve kadını unutmuşlar...
bir de acı olan, bu kadıncağızın kurgu veya kurgu dışı hiçbir eserinin çevrilmemiş olması, yazımına müdahale edemeyeceği tek şey olan rüyalarını çevirmişler ve kadını unutmuşlar...
January 27, 2022
This "book of dreams without interpretation" began as a joke. It was at a dinner with Michel Deloreme. Give me a book says this dream of an editor. For fun I say: "What about fifty dreams?" And so it was accomplished to my amazement. It came about as a joke, nor could it have been otherwise. For however black and bloody these brief lives, dreams, may be, they are always also for the sake of laughter.
To the pleasure of suffering add the pleasure of the ridicule that surrounds the dreamer. Here's who I am too in reality? (For the dream unveils reality, does it not?) This woman on the verge of failure and presumption, now full of good will, now full of vanity? So be it. I accept this display of my foibles and weaknesses, my secret wounds, to which I owe my efforts at dignity and the sublime.
To the pleasure of suffering add the pleasure of the ridicule that surrounds the dreamer. Here's who I am too in reality? (For the dream unveils reality, does it not?) This woman on the verge of failure and presumption, now full of good will, now full of vanity? So be it. I accept this display of my foibles and weaknesses, my secret wounds, to which I owe my efforts at dignity and the sublime.
- from Forewarnings, pg. 7
April 4, 2024
dilin felsefi ve felsefi-komik "zenginliklerinden" çabucak ürken muhalifleri diken diken etmek istemediğini belirten yazar aslında neredeyse bunu yapıyor gibi.
rüya kavramı her zaman ilgimi çeken bir olgu olmuştur denk geldikçe de okumaya çalışırım bi de yazar kadın olunca hemen yapıştım. başta konseptin çok iyi olduğunu düşünmüştüm ama okumak pek kolay olmadı.
herhangi bir arkaplan bilgisi olmayınca pek de ilgi çekici olmadı ve beni saramadı rüyalar kitabı. evet bazı hisleri aldım but i mean who are these people?? okuyucu için sadece bir sürü rastlantısallık bir yerde.
kötü bir yazar olduğunu kesinlikle düşünmüyorum. kitap benlik değil diyelim
rüya kavramı her zaman ilgimi çeken bir olgu olmuştur denk geldikçe de okumaya çalışırım bi de yazar kadın olunca hemen yapıştım. başta konseptin çok iyi olduğunu düşünmüştüm ama okumak pek kolay olmadı.
herhangi bir arkaplan bilgisi olmayınca pek de ilgi çekici olmadı ve beni saramadı rüyalar kitabı. evet bazı hisleri aldım but i mean who are these people?? okuyucu için sadece bir sürü rastlantısallık bir yerde.
kötü bir yazar olduğunu kesinlikle düşünmüyorum. kitap benlik değil diyelim
August 9, 2018
Dreams are not interesting without any background knowledge - i mean, who are these people? Just a bunch of randomness for the reader, for the author it can have meaning. Ended up being boring.
October 30, 2007
Bound to be a favorite of poets, voyeurs and shrinks alike, Dream I Tell You is a selection of fifty dreams from prolific French writer Hélène Cixous’ ten years of dream journals. Themes explore familiar dream topics like death, birth, love, intrusion, unpreparedness and war. Babies, pets, colleagues, crowds, wild animals, Cixous’ family (dead and living) and strange dream beings populate her visions. Her unedited, half-awake accounts of her unconscious maintain the poetic and emotive logic of dreams. Such an approach creates some confusion—readers enter so openly into Cixous’ mind that characters are never introduced or explained beyond their names—leaving unclear whether Thessie is a child, dog or cat. But it also suspends enough objectivity to enjoy Cixous’ visceral experiences vicariously. The reader shares in her terror and suspense as she navigates a violent world under Nazi control and in her perplexity as she deciphers mysterious markings on abandoned babies in the underworld.
Cixous’ poetic writing resonates with humor, irritation, wonder and fear. She conjures fantastic dreamscapes, like a bed in a glass room in a snowstorm, and eerie nightmarish scenes, like an overpopulated cemetery city built of worm-eaten stairs. But the real joy of the book comes from relishing Cixous’ passionate, flamboyant writing in its rawest form, which offers gems like “For the moment I felt him nearby, in the left part of the house, a marvelous guest, as if in the left side of my chest.”
Cixous’ poetic writing resonates with humor, irritation, wonder and fear. She conjures fantastic dreamscapes, like a bed in a glass room in a snowstorm, and eerie nightmarish scenes, like an overpopulated cemetery city built of worm-eaten stairs. But the real joy of the book comes from relishing Cixous’ passionate, flamboyant writing in its rawest form, which offers gems like “For the moment I felt him nearby, in the left part of the house, a marvelous guest, as if in the left side of my chest.”
June 18, 2014
I thought the concept was good but the actual reading of this book took longer than I had intended. The first obvious reason that it was a difficult read was that it was translated from French, so there will always be some difficulty in the change of language. The next part I am still not sure if I like it or not but it made reading the book much harder for me; it was not edited into a story and I know what you're going to say and I understand that these are dreams but for someone who does not know the author personally the mention of names was useless. An example would be that I was under the impression that the author's cat was actually a person until almost half way through the book. The dreams were raw and powerful in the fact that they were straight from the bed where they were dreamt but to me, the reader, it seemed confusing because the dreams weren't in any kind of order and the descriptions of people and places were seriously lacking for me to get a strong mental image of what was going on.
March 23, 2008
As an academic who keeps a dream diary by the side of my own bed, I found this exceedingly fun to read. Beyond her gorgeous writing, what's fun about this is that Cixous has very common themes in her dreams: forgetting or ruining her lecture notes, disapproving of others' public behaviors, elusive sexuality, awkward social events, odd encounters with friends and loved ones and so on. The difference, of course, is that her world is far more accomplished, interesting and glamorous than my own!
July 29, 2016
I don't really know what to say about this one except that it's basically Helene Cixous' dream journal. But, she is a fairly good poetic (if not very abstract) writer. Only someone with her writing style can make her own dreams seem interesting and compelling. Most of her dreams range from the haunting to the outright bizarre. I'm kind of glad I typically don't have the dreams she's had *knocks on wood*. It would be hard to live in a mind quite like hers.
June 29, 2013
a book about 50 dreams. each abouta few pages in length. the writer wrote them almost immeediatley after having them in the dark. she elarned to capture some interestin detail but on the whole i found this ridiculously boring or maybe iwas missing something. not worth reading even though it is a small book.
January 24, 2008
beautiful, intense, complex and at times unpalatable--my favorite combination
January 11, 2011
Devouring.
April 14, 2012
Review to come. So strange.
August 8, 2012
some of my thoughts on it embedded here: http://www.5cense.com/12/numb_daze_3.htm
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews