100 books like The Dream Master

I loved Margaret Atwood’s book, a cautionary story that shows how the extreme distortion of religious ideologies can lead to devastating outcomes. Offred endures unimaginable hardship under the guise of religious piety, but the reality is much more twisted.

Her determination to survive in such harrowing circumstances is inspiring and challenges us to reflect on our views and norms. 

Cliff Jones Jr. has threaded together an impressive anthology with Mirrormaze: A Dreampunk Anthology. I think the structure of the book with prompts to guide you through the maze makes this anthology distinctive. The stories cover a variety of genres but are always tied to that central topic, dreams.

There are many outstanding stories that I found interesting in their structure and content, but I won’t give anything away to influence your choices, you have to determine your own gems. The stories are well written, enjoyable, they make you reflect and with almost 30 stories, there are many viewpoints of what constitutes a ‘dream’.

It took me several weeks to meander my way through the maze, I’d jump in every time I had free time. I love short story anthologies, you can read a couple, be carried away to an imagined time and place, fall back to reality, until… show more.

David Mitchell is a master of dreaming up non-linear, mind-bending, genre-blending stories that fuse fantasy and reality, so he has plenty of candidates for this list. I chose Number9Dream, a wonderful and genuinely bizarre coming-of-age novel that keeps the reader constantly asking if any of this is real. With gangster battles, kamikaze diaries, deadly floods and earthquakes, family tragedy, a stuttering “Goatwriter,” and (spoiler) a concluding chapter that is a blank page, this is, on the surface, the dazzling tale of a Japanese student searching for a father he’s never met. But from the opening chapter, where Eiji fantasizes about outrageous ways to confront his father’s lawyer in her place of work, but never does, the reader quickly senses that this strange journey will forever change those open-minded souls brave enough to embark on it.

I love Ursula LeGuin’s fiction, and for me, this is the best book—a brilliant examination of how power can corrupt, even when one’s motives start out good. An unscrupulous psychologist uses his patient’s extraordinary skill to reshape the world with dreadful consequences.

The author takes a fascinating concept and subtly weaves it with deep questions about morality and the nature of good and evil. LeGuin was a masterful writer, and in this book, she created a story that I still reread once a year without fail.

Once again, Ann Faraday offers practical and easy-to-use dream interpretation advice with a total absence of 'woo-woo.' It consistently reminds dreamers of the importance of personalising their dream interpretation rather than seeking out generic meanings in book form or online. 

Above all, this book truly demystifies dream work and empowers dreamers to believe that they don't need to consult a dream therapist, psychiatrist, or analyst to understand their dreams. They can use simple tools and techniques to understand the meaning of their night vision, their inner therapist, for themselves. 

I am including this book for its fascinating presentation of dreamwork, a timeless state where past, present, and future meet, offering you glimpses into your future every single night in your night vision. Written by journalist and science fiction writer Eric Wargo, reading it will most certainly stretch your mind and inspire your dream work. 

In centuries past, dreams were regarded as oracles predicting future outcomes, but that approach fell out of favour with the Freud and Jung revolution firmly placing dream decoding as a psychological personal awareness and growth tool.

Wargo does not discourage dreamers from working with their dreams as self-help tools, but he does present a powerful case for all dreams being potentially precognitive, offering an insight into potential futures.

Season of Mists is my favorite of Gaiman’s graphic novels from his stellar Sandman run. Death, Dream’s older sister, appears at the end of the first arc and proved to be a fan favorite from that first on-page appearance. She’s a lovely, sweet, and utterly kind incarnation of the boundary that severs this life from whatever comes after. Gaiman creating a comforting presence out of an idea that terrifies most people. She’s charming in this installment, forcing her brother to face his misdeeds with compassion and honesty. It’s no wonder she is one of the only people in his family that Dream listens to!

Thomas Ligotti is one of the few writers whose work genuinely, profoundly scares me. His vision is underscored by an all-too-convincing commitment to pessimistic philosophy (which is accessibly detailed in his 2010 book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race). Songs of a Dead Dreamer is haunted by the philosophical outlooks of E. M. Cioran, Arthur Schopenhauer, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allan Poe, but Ligotti’s fixation on marionettes, dolls, and the illusory nature of human agency is singular and distinctive. This is a masterpiece of existentially disturbing dark literature.   

This has it all. Every time I see the cover I think of the house where I grew up and I can picture the scene in the lounge on Christmas morning where I’m sorting the presents into piles for when my grandparents arrive, while watching this on BBC2. One year I got given it as a book, and it was a different experience to read it, but just as lovely.

Elizabeth Knox is a world-class writer with an exceptional imagination and her fantasy novel, Dreamhunter, is a great introduction to her work. Set in an alternative past, dreamhunters harvest dreams which are transmitted to the public for entertainment and therapy – or worse. Fifteen-year-old Laura Hame must enter The Place of Dreams to uncover what happened to her missing dreamhunter father and in the process reveals how the government has used dreams to control an ever-growing population of convicts and political dissenters. Those who love Philip Pullman or Garth Nix won’t be disappointed.