My Education: A Book of Dreams.

One of the unexpected pleasures of this delightful slim volume of Burroughs fragments is the personal tone of many of its entries. "Today as I make my bed at 10 A.M., I am thinking that I am by and large a very happy man. People and critics like to think of me in despair because they hate to think of anyone whose way of life they disapprove of as being happy." It's not an idea that he dwells on, his happiness, but it adds an oddly friendly dimension to what is in part a catalogue of flickering little glimpses of horror. You can't ever accuse Burroughs of sentiment; the acid always bubbles through. "I will say that anything that is truly mine cannot be stolen," he writes, then goes on, "Which is a lot of bullshit, of course. You can tell when some old wise guy is going to shit out some wisdom on you. 'My son, what is truly yours will always be yours. And I will always be with you.' Uh. . . . Nice old vampire."

In Burroughs' book of dreams, we come upon many of the nice old vampire's familiar preoccupations. Aliens, opiates, pale boys, guns. Cats, travel, precognition. Hotels. He sees a three-foot centipede, red and translucent, come into the room and rub itself against the doorjamb like a cat. "My God, I am about to pet a centipede! I petted it. It turned around and went away through an invisible diaphragm." There's the Death Dwarf with skeleton face who keeps the shrunken heads of CIA agents in a grass hut. There are children who turn into rats that bite him. There are people who grow meat on their own bodies, "and it is an awesome sight to see a self-eater dipping into a hole on top of his skull and eating the raw brain, with an expression of ever-increasing idiot relish." Then, for those who enjoy excretory yarns, there's the story of the man who had a rich wife ("loaded with it up the ass") who farted and shat at their dinner parties. The guests were "mostly upper-class English faggots" who "outvied each other in discretion." This hilariously disgusting piece emerges from some psychic dimension where memory, imagination, and the unconscious overlap in layers, cross-fertilizing, metamorphosing; you sense the writer in the process of giving narrative shape to the mind's formless clay.

Occasionally a "pure" dream occurs, characterized by an uncanny sort of banality rendered sinister by association and repetition. For example, "The most persistent recurring dream, almost nightly, is the unsuccessful attempt to obtain breakfast or any other kind of food for that matter, except very occasionally some utterly unpalatable dish. Usually service is rudely refused." Inability to get breakfast, writes Burroughs, is a defining characteristic of the Land of the Dead, that "dreary claustrophobic area." Intriguing glosses on imagery from the fiction abound; Burroughs may reveal, say, that the door dogs in the Dead Roads trilogy come from The Unbearable Bassington, by the Edwardian satirist Saki. Comus Bassington is followed into a room by a little black dog. It's a death omen - the same dog followed his father just before he was thrown from a horse and killed. Burroughs puts his door dogs to work with greater gusto than Saki did, integrating them utterly into his own schemes, but it's fascinating to catch sight of his medieval imagination in its seeding process.

Family and friends are much in evidence. We see a good deal of Burroughs' parents, particularly his father. Also Mort, his brother, plus familiars like Herbert Huncke, Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, and Michael Emerton, to whom the book is dedicated. A distinguished poet is treated somewhat ambivalently in his various appearances: "I attend a party and dinner at Columbia. Allen Ginsberg is there and rich. Has founded some sort of church."

Elsewhere Burroughs deals with the label "literary outlaw," given him by his biographer, Ted Morgan: "To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of. I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment, or hotel room." Burroughs' homelessness, his unheimlich nature, runs strong in this assembly of fragments. The recurring inability to find breakfast is symptomatic of a restless alienation, a dislocation. "I have never felt close to any cause or people . . . to affiliate myself with any such aggregate would be an act of brazen dilettantism that I could not begin to carry off." In the next paragraph he wonders why he cannot get names straight. The answer: "Because I have no name."

This, in a way, is the key. Burroughs' unease at having to live in "the eternal lavatory of a dead universe" drives him to discover the other places, the cities of the red night, the Western lands. My Education makes you vividly aware of Burroughs as a being who has long since abandoned a reality bound by strict laws of time, space, and identity. Instances of ESP and precognition are plentiful here. He ponders the mystery of the Mary Celeste, visits Whitley Strieber, then affirms the reality of aliens. He describes the two routes to immortality, with an aside from Lord Jim - the remark of the French naval officer to the effect that Jim has run away "mais il a laisse son cadavre en place."

At the root of it all is Burroughs' rejection of scientific dogmas, the most basic of which, he says, is the claim that the unaided human will can produce no physical effects. He himself has seen weather magic, has even performed it. The dogma that denies such possibilities he calls "the Immaculate Rot." He includes in the Rot the idea of mortality, and rejects that too: "As soon as you realize the planet and your body constitute an almost escape-proof jail . . . you have a possibility of escape."

He is never didactic about any of this. The writing, as always, is sparklingly mordant, sardonic, amazing. His monsters are as exquisite as ever. In places he's very funny. One of the many political dreams - those preoccupied with ideas of conspiracy and social control - starts thus: "We have taken over a small country. I want to be Chief of Police. Wouldn't you?"

Patrick McGrath's most recent novel is Dr. Haggard's Disease (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), and he is currently working on a novel called Asylum, to be published next year.