Where Was It Before the Dream?: Time Loops and Interpretation

This is a book about a mind-bending new way of interpreting imaginative literature. Writers often draw on dreams for their inspiration, and those dreams are often precognitive, foreshadowing upheavals in the writer's future. It means that literature may often be prophetic, and that standard critical approaches focused solely on an author's prior influences or present life context are inadequate to fully understand the miracle of literary creation. This exercise in "psychic deconstruction" examines the works and lives of six imaginative (and in most cases, dream-inspired) writers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, J. R. R. Tolkien, Stanislaw Lem, Joan Lindsay, and Franz Kafka. Wargo shows that some of their greatest masterpieces-Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Tolkien's The Hobbit, for instance, as well as Kafka's The Metamorphosis and The Trial and Lindsay's beloved Australian classic, Picnic at Hanging Rock-were premonitions of how the author would look back upon their work or career