Navigating the city of the mind and other strange things
Brisbane turns surreal in a novella and short stories by poet and psychiatrist Andrew Leggett.
Andrew Leggett’s In Dreams and Other Stories plunges the reader into a hallucinatory Brisbane where the rational and the irrational coexist in uneasy proximity.
Most of the book is taken up by the novella In Dreams, a psychological thriller that merges forensic precision with intense dream logic. Through the eyes of neurologist and poet Garrick Willis, Leggett maps a city as much of the mind as of geography – a neon-lit terrain shaped by trauma, eroticism and premonition.
Local readers will be fascinated by Leggett’s Brisbane, which is rendered with documentary detail and surreal intensity. Familiar landmarks – the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane railway stations, Garrick’s home on Dornoch Terrace and femme fatale Jade’s house in Kangaroo Point – anchor the characters’ movements through a city that morphs between present, memory and nightmare.
where everyday life and dreamscapes merge with the disorienting suburban menace of a David Lynch film
West End’s Boundary Street and Fortitude Valley’s Brunswick Street are some of the stages where everyday life and dreamscapes merge with the disorienting suburban menace of a David Lynch film. This sense of layered realism grounds the book’s psychological complexity in recognisable urban texture, making the fantastic both disturbing and plausible:
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“… the stranger slumped a little into the seat, his teeth clacking together as his jaws chomped. The man came around with a start … to Garrick, the diagnosis was immediately evident … After the train slid to a halt at Dutton Park Station, Garrick grabbed his briefcase and strode off towards the barriers. He was not usually so determined to make his way across the Translational Research Institute campus towards building 15, at the hub of a hospital designed to look like the Starship Enterprise warping its way through hyperspace …”
Leggett, who holds qualifications in both psychiatry and psychotherapy, draws deeply on his professional understanding of the mind’s workings in these stories. Medical terminology becomes a lyrical vocabulary for mapping fractures in the self – synapses, neurotransmitters and sleep states all perform as metaphors for desire and dread.
His prose alternates between clinical restraint and poetic flourish: Garrick analyses dreams with diagnostic precision even as they overwhelm him with images he cannot understand or escape. The novella lingers on the unsettling overlap of body and imagination, particularly in moments of sexual and psychic intensity, where visions of violence erupt from intimacy itself.
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As Garrick’s world unravels under the influence of Jade and the predatory Nick Myshkin, In Dreams becomes a meditation on guilt, complicity and the limits of reason. Haunted by a premonition he cannot fully understand, Garrick is forced to confront whether simply foreseeing harm – and hesitating to act – might corrode his own moral consciousness.
In Part Two, seven further short stories extend Leggett’s exploration of the psyche into an array of strikingly different settings including Toowoomba, France, Glasgow, Parramatta and the infamous Marlborough Stretch on the Bruce Highway.
Despite their brevity, these pieces deliver the macabre, the ironic and the unexpected with customary precision and emotional force. Each revisits Leggett’s central preoccupations – dreaming, mortality and the fragile boundaries between inner and outer worlds.
Critics have compared Leggett to David Lynch and Bret Easton Ellis – his writing exudes atmospheric dread and cinematic strangeness. Yet beneath the horror lies a poet’s ear and real compassion. Leggett’s third poetry collection, Losing Touch (Ginninderra Press, 2022) has this same fusion of lyricism and psychological insight.
In Dreams and Other Stories is a disturbing and beautifully controlled work that confirms Andrew Leggett as a writer capable of transforming the local into the mythic and locating the haunted corridors of the mind within Brisbane’s familiar streets, shadowy places and landmarks. This is a compelling read.
In Dreams and Other Stories by Andrew Leggett, Ginninderra Press, $34.99
ginninderrapress.com.au/product/in-dreams-and-other-stories
Dr Jane Frank is a Brisbane poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Gardening on Mars (Shearsman Books, 2025).
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