On Dreams

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Afflicted with sudden blind spots in her right eye, Maureen Thorson consults her doctor. Her diagnosis is AZOOR (acute zonal occult outer retinopathy), a rare condition that has no known cause and is surprisingly difficult to confirm. Because the afflicted eye appears normal, the problem cannot be directly observed-except by the patient herself.

Faced with the possibility she may lose her sight, Thorson goes looking for answers, reading and thinking her way through art history, science, poetry, folklore, myth, and film. She engages with Aristotle, who claims that menstruating women stain mirrors red simply by looking at them. She bristles equally at the romantic notion of the blind poet and the clairvoyant one. She desperately wants to assert control. "Writing can't save you from going blind," she acknowledges, but it "offers the reductive simplicity of narrative, with its seductive endings, tidy resolutions."

Maybe. When authoritative sources turn out to be mistaken, what then? When oft-quoted wisdom is revealed to be apocryphal, can it still ring true? And when her vision mysteriously clears, as unexpectedly as it dimmed, can she even claim she's been ill? Throughout the essays in On Dreams, Thorson finds herself repeatedly asking not only "what is reality?" but "whose reality?"