One time bassist and music journalist Thomas Wictor continues the journey he began in Ghosts and Ballyhoo, chronicling the dreams and nightmares that populated his sleep. Transparent and unrelentingly honest, the dreams and the people in Wictor’s life emerge in visceral detail. There are times when the conscious and unconscious moments in the journey are impossible to distinguish…
Wictor’s book does not chronicle a method for analyzing those dreams, nor does it offer a therapeutic or spiritual analysis of those dreams. Hallucinabulia is, instead, a living archive, a journey shared with brutal honesty and without pat answers, but one that ends in hope.
—Reverend Dr. Frederick W. Schmidt, Jr.
Director of Spiritual Formation and Anglican Studies
Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality
Southern Methodist University, Perkins School of Theology
Hallucinabulia: the Dream Diary of an Unintended Solitarian is part memoir, part dream journal, chronicling the suffering and eventual liberation of a wildly imaginative and hurting mind… In the hands of a less talented writer, the very notion of publishing a dream journal could evoke mild curiosity at best, and at worst, could come across as an act of pure narcissistic indulgence. Wictor, however, succeeds at maintaining relevance. The dreams are symptoms of the psychiatric, physiological, and neurological hardships he faced…
Wictor is an honest and effective writer who has essentially offered himself up for complete dissection. His dreams range from comically nonsensical to utterly terrifying, with plenty of strangeness and, occasionally, joy, in between.
—Clarion Review
Dreams? More like nightmares! Reading the Scott Thunes-centric portions of this book were like looking into my own brain and seeing little pictures of Tom everywhere. Not a pretty sight. I saw somebody read this book on the Last Train to Bookville, and they were— It’s too horrible to repeat. Ok, I’ll tell you: They were dead, black blood dripping down their jaw, eye sockets empty except for worms squirming, and they were smiling. Tom Wictor wasn’t going to write any more, forever.
—Scott Thunes
Frank Zappa band and the Mother Hips
Thomas Wictor’s penetrating self-awareness exposes the connections between ultra-realism and complete fantasy. Literary self-mutilation has never been so rewarding or enlightening. Hallucinabulia is a tantalizing slice!
—Stephen Jay
Solo artist and “Weird Al” Yankovic band
In spite of the dreamer’s clear distress at the time, some of the dreams are horrific, a few are poignant, others, laugh-out-loud hilarious. Themes of failure and humiliation, self-loathing and frustrated helplessness strike universal chords, though showbiz celebrity cameos (Bill Cosby, Jennifer Aniston, Emma Thompson, a miniaturized Sean Connery, Charlie Sheen in hell) are a bit further afield. Readers intrigued by bizarre, Inception-style voyeurism of a well-traveled writer/musician’s innermost recesses should dare venture into this Nightmare on Wictor Street.
Remembered, surreal dreams become the prose equivalent of Salvador Dali paintings and films.
—Kirkus Reviews
