review

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What if Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't have a dream license?

a book review by Eric Jackson

Nocturnes: Tales From The Dreamtime

by W. E. Gutman

Authorhouse, Bloomington IN and Milton Keynes, England (2006)

233 pp, $16.95 in paperback

ISBN 1-4259-5951-2

Frank Zappa's Brain Police were plastic. Willy Gutman's Dream Enforcement Agency and Dream Licensing Authority are flesh and blood bureaucrats, and they better not catch you having unauthorized dreams.

So is the Grand Omnipotent Dreamer a hitleresque or stalinoidal dictator?

Hardly. This is a satire and a book of philosophy, set in bizarre dreamscapes, about a most democratic regime, one in which the grown-up playground bullies are the in crowd that has the votes. If you like Ralph Reed, you'll probably find the prospect of voting for the Grand Omnipotent Dreamer's slate attractive too.

And the Reverend King? His famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial would be taken as Exhibit A by people who inhabit office cubicles and tear the wings off of insects. They don't give civil rights subversives dream licenses, and it's a big deal to tell anyone that you have a dream when not possessed of even a third class dream license. And if you have one of those and your dream is like Dr. King's, there are functionaries and judges whose job it is to get your permit revoked.

Americans don't tend to read philosophy books, but Gutman, an American by choice,  was born in Paris where people do. And what authority impedes the sale and popularity of this book? Why, the small group of corporations that controls the overwhelming majority of book publishing and, purporting to speak for the invisible hand of a market that their fingers manipulate, blow books like this off for having no commercial potential. Kinda like the record companies did to Frank Zappa until someone figured that there were enough mutations out there to make a pool of eager buyers.

Willy Gutman, a veteran reporter who grew up learning to deny that he was a Jew in several languages, saw the world with the US Navy and later as a publicist for the Israeli government and after that as an observer of Central America's horrors, has important things to say. He says some of them in this work of fiction, which tells some terrible truths about the human condition in general and the compulsion of so many people to conform in particular.