Mr Muo's Travelling Couch - the stuff of dreams

I picked up this book by Dai Sijie at Takashimaya during the plant shutdown week (the several days between Christmas and New Year's day 2005). This would be the first non-fiction book that I would read to the end all year. The first few pages went by easily enough on the first night's read. I resumed the second day, a dreary rainy evening, which followed a day in which non-stop rains pelted the already sodden earth.

Evening turned into night, then into early morning and I, unable to put the book down, completed it at 3 in the morning, completely wide awake. Quite a trip.

While reading, I had been trying to make sense of the book, and in parts, it actually did make sense. But with the story all done, and the newly won luxury to step back and see it as a whole, I realised that it was not unlike many dreams I have gotten caught up in, over lo these many nights of slumber.

During the time of dreaming, the dream events seem so completely logical. So real.

Yet on waking, seen in the harsh light of reality, I discover that the management presentation or the marketing plan I had been formulating in my sleep that seemed so brilliant just minutes before was actually quite unusable in the real world. My profound work degenerating into the silly and nonsensical at the speed of thought.

So perhaps that's what the author tried to do? Construct a novel that read basically like a dream, where once immersed, the logic and the flow of events seem sensible and logical, but on waking, one finds it was a passing of time that did little for the hard, material side of ourselves. Yet perhaps the dream did something for the part of our minds that need the spell of insanity and the parts of the body that need the corresponding nightly immobilization.

You can obtain a good synopsis of the book from Amazon's site, and this spares me the task of reproducing it here.

Suffice to say, the main character, Mr Muo, is an odd specimen, believing he can help others with their lives through explaining their dreams to them using the tools and ideas of Freud and Lacan. He takes to the road, a pychoanalyst in rural china, in search of the one thing he needs to help free his two imprisoned girlfriends from the clutches of a corrupt official - a virgin maiden.

Living mostly in his world of academic knowledge, he is stunted and awkward and lacking in healthy relationship experience. Yet be believes himself superior to the unlearned masses. He is forced by circumstances to discover himself through his interviews with his "customers" - an array of peasants, workers and a 50 year old policewoman.

The idea of stories and dreams being tightly related was expounded brilliantly by Neil Gaiman in his Sandman series. But although Gaiman introduced realistic snippets of dreams (an oxymoron, surely) in some of his storylines, there were very few that came across as entire dream episodes.

Reading Mr Muo made me think back to odd dream snippets, that many years after the dreaming, that are still fresh and vivid in my mind. Or so I think. I recall being in a boat gliding through dark caverns, and looking up, glanced at a joke painted on a sign mounted at the entrance to a cave. It was the funniest joke I'd ever come across in my life, and I promised myself that when I awoke, I would recall the joke and publish it. To this day, I can't for the life of me figure out what that joke was. But this I know... it was absolutely hilarious.

There's much more that can be said about dreams. The songs. The dark side. The images. The symbolism. Dreams are fascinating. Why do we dream? Do we need to? Were I truly enlightened, would dreaming still be necessary?