“Well, if you like trippy, life of the mind shit, this is probably your jam.
I do not like trippy, life of the mind shit.
Basically, this entire thing is a dream. Sort of. And as a great writer once said, “Don’t write dreams into your stories. A dream can be anything. It can be a snake rolling a donut down a hole.”
I agree. Because dreams are basically little TV episodes you make up. They’re fiction. And if you put a dream into fiction, you’ve got fiction inside of fiction. Which is totally unnecessary because it’s fiction from the get-go, so whatever you wanted to accomplish through the dream in fiction, you’re probably better off doing it within the “reality” of the fiction.
It’s also weird because if a dream is interpreted in fiction, it can only work two ways: One is that the dream is interpreted, and the interpretation doesn’t play out, so basically it’s a waste of time. The other is that the dream is interpreted “correctly” and the thing that is suggested by the interpretation comes to pass. Which would be interesting in real life, but it’s absolutely meaningless in fiction because you’ve set up both the dream AND the “reality” surrounding the dream.
So you could have a detective story where the detective dreams what happened at a crime scene. This dream could be incorrect, which is uninteresting, or it could be correct, which APPEARS interesting, but then the reader will be aware that the dream coming true is not actually interesting because the dream and the reality around it are both fictions created by the same person.
Fictional drug trips and drunkenness work the same way. It can be meaningful or meaningless in the context of the story, but if it’s meaningless, why is it in the story, and if it’s meaningful, it’s merely a creation of the writer.
And like in this book, mental illness that causes hallucinations or multiple personalities, as perceived by the afflicted person, just don’t work. Because some of the shit is “real” and some is nonsense, and there’s no difference in terms of the functionality of the story.
This book could basically end with Moon Knight waking up and going, “Wow, what a weird dream” and it would function exactly the same and make more sense. “