These dreams were mostly written in the summer of 2020 and the spring of 2021, with final revisions and alterations made in the winter of 2022/2023.
In writing them, alongside the obvious fairy tale and folkloric inspirations for many of the individual dreams, I was inspired by the collected dreams of Sultan Murad III, 12th ruler of the Ottoman Empire (as translated and presented by Ozgan Felek at The Sultan’s Dreams Project); the short stories The Dream Of The Butterfly, by Zhang Zhou, and The Infinite Dream Of Pao-Yu, by Ts’ao Hsueh Ch’in; the wonderful art of Frances MacDonald and Virginia Frances Sterrett (both of whom deserve to be much more widely known); the novels The Blind Owl, by Sedegh Hedayat, and The Affirmation, by Christopher Priest; and the film Waking Life, written and directed by Richard Linklater.
The phrase “last night as I slept, I dreamt” can be found in the poem Last Night As I Was Sleeping by Antonio Machado; while the phrase “the dust of the world still clings to me” in The Hundred And Thirty Ninth Dream is taken from The Records Of A Weather-Exposed Skeleton by Bashō.
