The Rules of Dreaming by Bruce Hartman

THE RULES OF DREAMING is the story of a young psychiatrist, a blackmailer, and some patients at the Palmer Institute, a private mental hospital in upstate New York.  The story begins when a schizophrenic patient with no musical training—21-year-old Hunter Morgan—sits down at the piano and plays a fiendishly difficult piece of classical music for his psychiatrist, Dr. Ned Hoffmann, and Nicole P., a beautiful graduate student who has checked herself into the Institute after a brief mental breakdown.  Nicole soon returns to her tiny apartment, where she struggles to put her life back together, but in follow up visits she perceives Dr. Hoffmann’s life spinning out of control as he falls under the spell of three irresistible women.  Meanwhile a blackmailer named Dubin follows the trail of these events back to a tragedy that occurred seven years earlier: the apparent suicide of an opera singer named Maria Morgan—the mother of Hunter Morgan and his twin sister Antonia—on the eve of her debut at the Met.  

Nicole becomes convinced that the opera Maria Morgan was rehearsing—Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann—is the key to all the weird events that have been happening at the Institute.  It seems to be taking over the lives of Maria Morgan’s two schizophrenic children, the doctors who treat them and everyone else who crosses their paths, until all are enmeshed in a world of deception, delusion and death.  Nicole discovers that she too has been assigned a role in the drama, and along with Dubin she sets out to solve the mystery of Maria Morgan’s death and its uncanny consequences. 

I’m putting the finishing touches on another mystery which will be out this fall.  There are several other books in the pipeline: a different kind of literary mystery, a comedy and a philosophical thriller.  I’m trusting that my readers will follow me into different areas without worrying too much about genres and such.  I am incapable of doing the same thing twice. 

Although The Tales of Hoffmann is central to the plot of The Rules of Dreaming, you don’t have to like opera or know anything about it—most people don’t, including most of the characters—to understand or enjoy this book.  I made sure of that.

This one: I’ve never told a lie.

Stony silence. 

I don’t mind criticism; I’ve received a lot of it over the years and it’s been very valuable to me.  If someone reads your book and there’s something about it they really don’t like, that’s something you want to know about.  However, I react badly to a review if it appears that the reviewer didn’t actually read the book. If the reader read the book and didn’t understand it, that’s my fault.  If the reader read the book and just didn’t like it, I can live with that.  Differences of opinion are what make horse races.

I doubt if that will ever happen.  In any case it would be a very boring book.

Yes.  I change them around a lot.  Names have a certain feel to them, and of course they are often words that mean or suggest something in one language or another.  For example, in The Rules of Dreaming one of the main characters, the blackmailer, is named Dubin.  I chose that name because it suggests doubt and reticence, and it resembles “Dupin,” the Parisian police inspector in several of Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories. 

I don’t know if other writers do this, but I try to make sure I don’t have two characters’ names start with the same letter.  I also try to vary the number of syllables in the names.  Often we don’t read the whole name; we see the first letter and skim over the rest.  I realized that when one of my kids, who must have been about eleven at the time, read a children’s version of the Iliad and told me about the exploits of “the guy with the long name that starts with ‘A’”! 

So far there have been two: Perfectly Healthy Man Drops Dead, and The Rules of Dreaming.  Titles consisting of two words seem to be in vogue right now, at least in the mystery field.  I think that will soon pass.  Those two-word titles have punch but they rarely memorable.

Starvation and probable divorce, if you are depending on it for your livelihood.

Pears.

I assume you’re talking about fictional characters.  In that case the answer is only four. 

I once ran over a possum with my car.  Couldn’t sleep for a week.

Only once.  I was dressed up as Dracula for a Halloween party when a car crash occurred out on the street.  I slinked outside and asked the nearest police officer, in my best Transylvanian accent, if any blood had been spilled in the accident.  The officer was not amused.    

In high school.  You may find this shocking, but in those days we didn’t carry automatic weapons.  

Today, with all the surveillance cameras around, the only way to do it would be in a public place disguised as someone else.

Too late for that.  At this point I’d just like to stop growing up.

Tequila straight up.

No.  I’ve had some jobs like that and they don’t do your dreams any good.

The question is, does a deity believe in me?

Barefoot only.

Mickey Rourke.

I wish I knew.

I was the model for a character in an off-Broadway play many years ago.  Not a flattering portrait.  More recently I think I was a character in one of Lisa Scottoline’s novels.  I’m afraid to read it. 

The most powerful challenge is to relate to your characters with what can only be described as a loving attitude.  You have to empathize with them, even the evil ones—perhaps especially the evil ones.

Yes, though perhaps not in the usual way.  I only write a book if it revolves around ideas and themes I’m interested in.  Once I’ve identified those, I read up on them.  This may mean reading other novels, biographies, books on philosophy or literary criticism.  To me that’s one of the most rewarding parts of writing novels: the focus it gives to your reading.

For The Rules of Dreaming, I did a lot of research on The Tales of Hoffmann and on E.T.A. Hoffmann, the 19th-century German writer who is the protagonist of the opera and whose tales form its basis.  This included reading many of Hoffmann’s works and visiting the E.T.A. Hoffmann home and museum in Bamberg, Germany, as well as viewing several productions of the opera.  

I don’t write about my childhood but I’m sure it had a big impact. 

There’s always someone smarter, funnier, and better looking than you. 

Constantly.

Yes, I’ll admit that I do.  I don’t consider it finished until I can admire it.

Humans need to understand the world through stories.  When all is said and done, that’s the only way we can understand our lives.

Less so than I used to be. 

This one is going on far too long.  I think I’m going to stop answering your questions.

I don’t know that it matters very much.  I could be doing other things that would be more beneficial to other people or to the world than writing murder mysteries.  I’m moving away from mysteries into a more philosophical and socially conscious type of writing.  We have more than enough murder and violence in our society without my adding to it, even fictionally.  

I think (or at least hope) that when the history of our era is written, they will marvel at the incessant representations of murder and violence that we entertain ourselves with.  What was the matter with these people? 

Yes.  I’ve been happily married to the woman I love for many years.

At least once, usually more.  It’s like the limit of your vision.  You see it every time you open your eyes.

Never.

Other writers.

Other writers.

Other writers.

The smile on a new mother’s face.

Kirkus Reviews calls it, “A mind-bending marriage of ambitious literary theory and classic murder mystery… An exciting, original take on the literary mystery genre.” (For the full Kirkus review, please see: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/bruce-hartman/rules-dreaming-re-review/