Burroughs' Dreams Build on Past
My Education Portrays Vivid Landscape of William Burroughs' Past
The book My Education was written at the end of Burroughs' life and presents an interesting look back to the dreams, people and places that he experienced.
My Education, by beat writer William S. Burroughs, is his last book, and it presents as close to a memoir as he ever wrote. It was written in the 1990s and presents dreams he has had at least since the 1950s. The book is populated by various people in his life, some of whom most readers have heard of including Allen Ginsberg and Paul Bowles. It is a very frank and detailed rendering of his dreams, and it provides a way for the reader to see for him or her self how dreams look when mapped out in a work of literature, as opposed to a theoretical account as is found in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. The literary approach that Burroughs takes is to mirror the feeling of waking up and remembering a dream just had, including some of the conscious thoughts surrounding it, but never to make any over-arching conclusions about them.
Dreams Offer Means to Understanding Past
The book starts out by explaining a dream Burroughs had of a woman bureaucrat in an airport who tells him “you haven’t had your education yet.” He says this dream took place in 1959 after the publication of Naked Lunch. Burroughs published the book in 1995 when he was in his early eighties so if he was ever going to have an education, it should have been by then. The last line of the book “There is a change… Can I get it all straight?” suggests that Burroughs is still trying to understand his past. The dreams in the book provide a means of structuring his past as they are built on real events in his life.
From Tangiers to Kansas
The book is dotted with the landscape of Burroughs’ dreams and explanations that go with it in order to make the dreams accessible. He gives enough background to enliven the nugget of the dream, but not much. The people in his dreams get repeated throughout the book, forming sequences and patterns that are disclosed but not analyzed. There are also descriptions which Burroughs is well known for such as drugs, homosexuality, and strange, foreign places like Tangiers, Marrakesh, even his “Cabin on the Lake.” Burroughs was a native of Missouri, so his exotic locations are coupled with descriptions of the American heartland - like his two-bedroom house in Kansas - a sharp contrast with his flamboyant traveling life.
Why Someone Else's Dreams are Not Boring
Taking the surreal and turning it on its head, Burroughs manipulates dreams into reality rather than reality into dreams. The effect is rich and hypnotic, but still relatively easy to follow. Burroughs’ lifestyle is enough to make one spin, but instead he simply plots it out like a dull assortment of vegetables in need of a dip. The soothing effect of his writing draws the reader through the different people and places, images and moments, until one gets the sense it all matters, the desire to tell the truth in this intimate concoction. It is not so much the writing as the person behind the writing which makes it all come together. His argument is that someone else’s dreams are not boring “if one can specify degrees of reality, more real by the impact of unfamiliar scenes, places, personnel, even odors.” Well, short of smelling a copy of My Education, read it while enjoying a sip of tobacco from your hookah.
