Doubles, Glitches, Hallucinations, Dreams: Nine Books that Feature David Lynchian Deja Vu

I don’t remember my dreams much these days. It might be age. Or screens. Or the low-grade brain damage humming in the zeitgeist. I live in Los Angeles, which doesn’t help. The Dream Factory, uncanny valley, wellness cult, freeway nightmare. It’s a city that begs to be hallucinated. Many people oblige.

Then I rewatched Mulholland Drive. And realized I’d been living in it the whole time. Doubles, glitches, erotic dread, narrative dead-ends. It didn’t feel like watching a film. It felt like the film was watching me, a little disappointed. Since then, reality’s felt miscast. Someone’s been playing me slightly wrong.

Mulholland Drive is a mystery and a mood: lush and recursive, fractured and erotic, its story folding in on and around itself like psychedelic origami. Lynch opened that space for me, a slit in the real, a velvet hallway with no exit.

I stepped into it with my book. Mulholland Dive opens, “It was the year us girls had a feminine desire to go missing.” I think I wrote it to trace that flicker. To linger in the shimmer between self and story, city and dream. Poetry was the only form that could drift with me. Dissociation, as it turns out, makes a weirdly elegant compass.

Like the film that inspired it, the book circles intimacy, illusion, blondes and brunettes, the psychic architecture of Los Angeles. Also: subjectivities merging. Also: faux fur and rot.

Here are a few books that helped me stay in the fevered logic while I wrote.

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Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny

Freud’s alone in his train compartment when a sudden jolt swings open the door to the adjoining washroom, revealing an elderly man in a dressing gown and traveling cap standing on the threshold. For a brief, chilling moment, Freud believes a stranger has wandered into his private space. Then comes the realization—the man is himself.

This is the uncanny: when something familiar, like your face, appears out of place and out of context. When your own reflection gets there first. When it looks back, wrong. Recognition curdles. You’re both guest and ghost. I think about it more than I should.

(A Lynchian jump scare refracted through psychoanalysis.)

Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Lol loses her mind behind some plants at a summer ball and never quite gets it back. Years later, she drifts through a marriage, a garden, a town, until she starts haunting a hotel where her old friend is having an affair.

Lol doesn’t interrupt. She just lies in a rye field and watches her friend reenact the same betrayal that broke her. Time folds. Desire fragments. The story glances in the mirror and sees someone else. Textual ketamine.

(Diane Selwyn, if she’d gone translucent instead of tragic.)

Leslie Scalapino, The Front Matter, Dead Souls

Starts like a detective novel, then the detective quits. She realizes the world is too corrupt to investigate. Fair enough. The prose is so tonally neutral it starts to feel paranormal. Everything’s equally weighted: war crimes, subway rides, dogs, a black wave with a sumo bob, helicopters. Los Angeles.

You start to feel like reality is just a concept Scalapino has politely declined. Chronology steps out for a cigarette. Identities appear, blur, and exit before they’re formed. It’s not confusing. It’s simply what happens when the inside and outside switch places and decide not to switch back.

(California dread refracted through a poet’s lens. Structure dissolves, language hums along, nothing holds still.)

Joyelle McSweeney, Flet

A grief-soaked hallucination disguised as a play, or maybe an opera, or maybe a primal scream. This book snorts syntax and barfs up prophecy. A milk-sweating, vision-choked anti-narrative that hacked my neurons and replaced them with a wet market of metaphors.

McSweeney’s language moves like a drugged animal in a fluorescent tunnel—half divine, half municipal. Reading it felt like waking up mid-surgery and realizing the operation was on your shadow. Also, it’s very funny, in the way radiation is funny.

(What if the blue box in Mulholland Drive started speaking in tongues?)

R.D. Laing, Knots

Therapy, if therapy was an escape room. You get trapped inside little dialogue loops that seem profound and then sinister and then stupid and then too real. It’s like if a pun had a personality disorder.

(Perfectly enjoyable if you enjoy being gaslit by a crossword puzzle.)

Anna Kavan, Ice

Hard to say whether this one’s about heroin or cold weather, but I read it during an infernal summer in Iowa and felt like a drugged semi-corpse being spooned by a glacier. Pleasant.

(Feels like tracking your self through a dream made of crushed codeine and glass.)

Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles

This is what happens when you let your superego go a bit feral. Everyone’s looking for liberation but ends up in situations that feel like a séance gone wrong. It’s a haunted house of ethics with all the doors open and the gas still on. I reread it whenever I want to feel like I’ve sinned tastefully.

(Characters wander into liberation and end up somewhere else entirely, but politely.)

Miranda July, “The Swim Team” (No One Belongs Here More Than You)

In my favorite story, a woman wants to teach swimming to some elders. Problem: she doesn’t have a pool. Solution: bowls of salted water on her linoleum kitchen floor.

Students lie on their stomachs. They stick their faces in the bowls and move their limbs like they’re in an ocean. I tried it, just to see if it was plausible. Unfortunately, I forgot to lift my head to breathe. Luckily, my dog came by and licked both me and the water dry.

(Bleak whimsy in a linoleum dimension. Almost spiritual, mostly damp.)

Joanna Ruocco, Dan

I read this during lockdown, which felt right since it takes place in a town that may not be real. The protagonist Melba lives in Dan, a sleepy village where the rules of physics, grammar, and cause and effect have all quietly retired. Everyone is gentle but wrong. The weather is wrong. The dentist is very wrong.

At one point, I think Melba merges with the carpet, but politely. It’s sweet, eerie, and uncomfortably relatable.

(Dan is Twin Peaks translated by a sentient rotary phone trying its absolute best.)

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Mulholland Dive by Vanessa Roveto is available via Clash Books.