French writer Georges Perec kept a dream-journal in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Initially reluctant, in 1973 he published it (with some authorial cuts) as La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams. In fact it contains more; about that many nights, but up to eight dreams or dreamlets per night.

The back cover calls it "the world's first 'nocturnal autobiography'"..."capturing a universal experience for the first time". Untrue; Kerouac's Book of Dreams dates to 1961; Nancy Price's excellent Acquainted with the Night, 1949; Anna Kingsford's mystical "Dreams and Dream-Tales"... 1878!

Nor is Perec's dream-experience universal. Very French! Unromantic affairs, complaints about inadequate cheese, guys acting tough but over-intellectualizing, even two separate instances of... mimes! (No, really: 71 & 81.) And Jewish, in a place & time vividly recalling the Holocaust.

Perec is known for wordplay and idea-play (his best-known book, A Void, omits the letter E). His dreams are tricky; the translator struggles to figure out what peculiarities are Perec the waking writer, what the dream, and what mere chance. Perec never explains.

Not totally representative, the examples below show my preference for the surreal... and the clear. Relatively clear. This is Perec.

The order below is chronological, as in the book (except for #39, The Stone Bridge, a friend's dream, which Perec grouped with a few other such).

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