No Dreams in Fiction?

I knew a person, a published writer and former friend, who I tried a bit of co-writing back about 20 years ago who kept wanting to put in dream sequences. I never went for them. I thought they were a copout, a bit of a cliché, and our writing projects came to nothing. Dashiell Hammett has Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key analyzed a dream which provides the novel's title and I have always thought this the weakest part of that novel.  Nowadays, with the sleep apnea I cannot remember my dreams.

Then I was looking at The Age and found Charlotte Wood's Novelists are told not to include dreams. This writer argues differently. She makes a good argument for including a character's dream and the best argument against doing so:

Hearing someone else’s dream in its entirety can quickly grow dull, but I’ve sometimes remembered images from other people’s dreams for years. And having a highly vivid dream life myself, I’ve always been irritated by the widely accepted prohibition on dreams in fiction. “Tell a dream, lose a reader,” Henry James is supposed to have said, possibly apocryphally. But when dreaming is such an important part of so many inner lives, it seems odd – even a kind of lie – for fiction to pay it no attention or pretend it doesn’t happen.

I do understand why fictional dreams are frowned upon; we all know how boring and meaningless our dreams are to others, no matter how fascinating they might be to us. But I’m always gratified when a writer breaks this rule, as Helen Garner did in her classic 1977 novel Monkey Grip, which is filled with detailed accounts of narrator Nora’s dreams. Partly I like the simple, truthful mess of them, and Garner’s trust in the reader to take an interest in every meander of Nora’s psyche. It’s consistent with Garner’s trademark willingness to expose the private, unmediated, uncontrolled self – the very thing that has drawn admiring readers to her work for so long. Take that, Henry. 

There is, though, one compelling reason to leave dreams out of fiction, and that is the impossibility of inventing a convincing dream. The conscious mind, or mine at least, can’t help but try to impose some narrative or semi-rational order on the invented dream’s images or events. A made-up dream so often lacks the deep chaos or mystery of a real one, and the result is a ploddingly obvious – and needless – telegraphing of an internal malaise.

I also like this: 

The work of artists is to welcome this unknowing, to allow that the spaces between things—between, say, a dream and a fairytale placed side by side—contain mystery and significance, not just emptiness.

Maybe that is not what I understood until my crackup, or maybe it is something I forgot, but there cannot be emptiness for that leaves only a soul-devouring nihilism.