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It’s interesting – or, if you wish to go by the supernatural, about which this is, uncanny – how certain issues mark their own time. For a while now, powers above the mundane and worldly have been discussed through literature.

For instance, one of the FM stations that is quite happy to talk about traffic jams, had a guest speaking on the subject, resurrecting the 1999 publication, Beloved Witch by Ipsita Ray Chakraverti.

Soon after, a newspaper article carried a mention of the fascination dreams, their import and their interpretation in Delhi-based painter and writer Bulbul Sharma’s Banana Flower Dreams. Like Trishanku, a major player here, her protagonists, spirits past this birth or about to be born, occupy a world which is shared, through their dreams, by some of the living.

It’s certainly a time for resurrections, and ask not why. But perhaps, there is more of a higher order guiding such thoughts, than just coincidence!

Soon after the dialogue talked about practicing the willing suspension of disbelief, there came another discussion, this time a little vociferous about giving the rational within each of us, right of way. Dreams, said the speaker, are probably caused by different degrees of indigestion. And the human mind goes and makes so much about them.

Just as one was mulling over that and wondering if Freud and Jung and all their successors had got the anatomy of their body of research really, really wrong, came the launch of another dream book.

This one, Queen of Dreams, is by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, whose dreams took her from Calcutta to California. It’s also about expat exasperation about the very basis of existence, the ABCD or the American Born Confused Desi syndrome. Yes, it’s another in the genre that Bharati Ray, launching the book, pointed out politely has been the Muse of so many from Bharati Mukherjee to Jhumpa Lahiri.

An unfortunate fact about today’s book launches is the thought that most publishers now just seem to want a mention of the event, only a short report of the launch and who held it up before popping flashbulbs and to the accompaniment of polite applause.

They don’t seem to be too interested in a true review, since invited journalists are seldom given the option of reading the book before the launch. All they are handed is a press release and sometimes, even that is grudged the reporter. Or perhaps they believe journalists will recommend the book on the basis of what the invited guests gush over.

Had it not been for enterprising journalists whose love of reading leads them to pick up the publications for their own read and for a few publishers who still believe in old world reviews, reading would soon be reduced to another Page Three event.