The Dallergut Dream Department Store

(by Miye Lee, Translated by Sandy Joosun Lee)

What if dreams didn’t just come from your mind, but were things you could buy at a store? What if you could only go to that store while you were asleep, and you would have no memory of it when you woke up? That’s the premise of The Dallergut Dream Department Store, and the novel follows a new employee, Penny, from when she’s prepping for her job interview to her first days working at the store and beyond. Each floor of the store sells different kinds of dreams, and each dream is created by a dream designer/director, each of whom has their own style/specialty. There are dreams of everyday life (“quick getaways, hanging out with friends, and enjoying good food”) and dreams for naptime (whose audience consists mostly of animals and babies); there are flying dreams and dreams where a dead loved one visits you and dreams meant to help you work through trauma. You pay for your dreams after the fact, in a little bit of whatever emotion the dream caused you; emotions, in the world of this book (or at least the part of it related to dreaming) are traded like commodities.

I mostly read this on the plane to New Orleans and the plane home, and it was a perfect airplane read for me: cozy, engrossing, and not too stressful (though there was a part that made me tear up). I think in other circumstances I might have found this a bit simplistic/sappy (with phrases like “overcoming hardships in the past makes people who they are now: survivors and heroes”), but as in-flight reading material, it totally worked for me.