"Dreams must be recorded as they come, spontaneously."

Book of Dreams is Jack Kerouac's record of his dreamlife, a parallel autobiography of the soul, the sleeper's On the Road: "I got my weary bones out of bed & through eyes swollen with sleep swiftly scribbled in pencil in my little dream notebook till I had exhausted every rememberable item. . . ."

Awake or asleep, Jack's mind spun the web of relationships that were the substance of almost everything he wrote: "In the Book of Dreams I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about." His novels were diaristic, and his diaries were novelistic. Jack Kerouac was writing the myth of his time:

WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I'm stopped by smiling threesome of cats who've disengaged themselves from the general fairly crowded evening street of brown lights, coke stands, tortillas---Unmistakably going to steal my bag---I struggled a little, gave up---Begin communicating with them my distress and in fact do so well they end up just stealing parts of my stuff. ... . . We walk off leaving the bag with someone-arm in arm like a gang to the downtown lights of Letran, across a field---

In 1961 City Lights published excerpts from Jack Kerouac's "private dream diary." This new edition--with almost twice as many dream accounts--marks the first publication of the complete manuscript as Kerouac intended it.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights), Scattered Poems (City Lights), and Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).