I was shocked and astonished to discover how uninterested my lucid dream characters were in responding to my questions or in helping on any level.
He's still got a painfully lucid, bereft main character: Owen Monroe, a depressed Anglo-Indian teacher in London, nearly 40, whose students' heads are "full of mobile phone numbers and contraception, hip-hop lyrics, diets, the gaggle of celebrities having a permanent soirée in their brains".
She had channelled all the clever and lucid parts of her character into the self that sat alone at a writing desk, waiting for an angel to appear.
These are more than dusty stabs in the late sun: Bragg's interview with Benedict Cumberbatch, for example, presents an articulation of Hamlet's character as lucid and unpretentious as the actor's Barbican performances.
Mr. Cumming's delivery of the major soliloquies is forthright and lucid but oddly weightless: the character's descent into depravity has been sketched in brisk, light strokes that dissipate quickly, as if drawn in invisible ink.
"She had planned to pursue a life of helping people, which was true to her personality and character," said Leah Lucid, a close friend who was to have roomed with her next semester.
Among the thousands of travel books on Italy, there are a few masterpieces of rapturous or humorous prose: in English, the writings of D.H. Lawrence on Sardinia, on Etruscan Italy, and on the Italian character are more lucid and less strained than other of his prose cogitations.
As a counterpoint to these dark fictional explorations, I'm greatly enjoying the lucid, reasoning intelligence and vivid character sketches in English Voices (Simon & Schuster), a collection of Ferdinand Mount's essays on literature and history and politics, that speaks with depth and sophistication to our political moment.
Another recurring character in Brown's lucid dreams is a deer-headed woman.
I remember once in a lucid dream coming across a dream character that was a two-faced, disembodied head that lived in a box.
