Novel, İletişim Publishers
152 pages, 2003
Dream Diary / Summary
Haluk lives a monotonous life in a flat in Istanbul. However, in his dreams, he witnesses another person’s life. As he enters the life he sees in his dream, he begins to move away from his own life and from himself.
Haluk is a quiet young man living in Istanbul and earning his living by translating for economy magazines. He has neither a special interest nor an interesting side to his life… The only strange thing is his witnessing in his dreams the daily life of a man he does not know. Or rather he is a different person in his dream. This life that he peeks at in his dreams is monotonous like his own. The disturbing part of these dreams is that these people that Haluk does not normally know he knows very well at that point. At first Haluk does not worry about these dreams. But things begin to change colour with his falling in love with a woman in the life in his dreams. With the increasing effect of the dreams that haunt him, he has two separate lovers, two separate social circles and two separate lives. Haluk is forced to turn into some kind of dream detective.
Haluk lives alone on the top floor of a four-storey building. He learns by accident that one of his neighbours is a specialist in dreams. He visits the wise, elderly professor, Ünsal Bey, and tells him his dreams. Ünsal Bey is interested in the subject. He asks Haluk to write his dreams in a notebook so that he can analyze them. Every time he wakes up Haluk writes down his dream and begins to keep a kind of dream diary.
Haluk’s malaise increases with his beginning to encounter the details of the life in his dream in his life awake. Reality and dream are no longer two clear separate worlds as they were before. The boundary between has become badly blurred. He recognizes the sitting room of another flat to which he goes down one evening for an apartment meeting. And then one day he sees one of the inhabitants of his dream on a steamer. Each of these disturbing meetings is a shattering experience for him.
The sounds coming from the other flats confirm with a certainty to leave no place for doubt the events he sees in his dream and complement them in a nerve-wracking way. The apartment begins to turn into Haluk’s mind and the floors into the layers of his consciousness. The separate floors in the building are like separate personalities in one brain. Haluk is now as much of a stranger to the narrator as are the other inhabitants of the apartment. He breaks off in turn from his friends, his family, his lover and from himself. He shuts himself away at home. He does not answer the phone or the door. Now there are only dreams. The friends in his dream and his lover… Haluk, whose mental health has really deteriorated, tries with the help of sleeping tablets to remain constantly in a dream and confront the real owner of the life in his dream.