The Borrowed Dreams of Dubliners

Dreams have a history of being read as texts; but how should we read texts when they purport to dream? Here I think about oneiric moments in Dubliners defined broadly—nightmares, ecstasies, reverie. The idea is that when Joyce's Dubliners wander away in their minds, they enter books beyond their own: a kind of literary unconscious that contaminates the diegetic plane. If true, this challenges a tendency to read Dubliners as compositionally distinct from Joyce's later works, confirming (as others have suggested before) that the author's propensity for purloinment and forgery was a continual preoccupation, though one with fluctuating visibility and varying methods of formal acknowledgment.