A favourite Kerouac book I read at college whilst at Leicester's Fine Art Dept.  Earlier I had started reading Kerouac whilst studying GCE's at Witney Tech College not starting out, as so many must have done before me, with 'On The Road' but with 'Lonesome Traveller' and 'Dharma Bums' but this edition a City Lights special as I recall is especially important to me [I still have it somewhere and at the time it was considered a rarity over here in the UK) and it helped me start the Dream Club at Fine Art school . . . . several students and a lecturer (printmaker Roy Bizley as memory serves, who I liked enormously) met to discuss dreams, poetry and so on and we explored the idea that you can train yourself to remember ones dreams by the technique I think divulged therein or certainly that Jack used. We got pretty good at improving our recall and wrote certain dreams down and then read them to each other . . . . . my favourites from this period were from fellow student the wonderful Carol Jones who went on to successful administration in the arts at Nottingham I think. Her dreams were amongst the most vivid I had ever heard of and invariably made us all howl with laughter! She was a good friend and I miss her. My dreams at the time and frankly now are as dull as wallpaper by comparison but that's another story. Wherever she is I wish her well.

“I’m a lonely independent man with no ties, no hopes, bleak tricks to make a living, full of death, indecision, sedentary laziness and worst of allI don’t know why I’m on earth and what I should do to satisfy not any craving inside myself but some kind of craving in the sky, the lostcloud sky.”

Jack Kerouac, Book of Dreams, 1961