Nobody noticed when thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. When her skeleton was discovered three years later, her television was still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of Joyce's life- not even a photograph. Who was Joyce Vincent? And how could this happen to someone in our day and age- the so-called age of communication? Dreams of a Life is Carol Morley's quest to discover who Joyce was and how she came to be so forgotten.