“I I call everything a story, I do not distinguish between genres,” writes Pedro Almodóvar in his introduction to The last dream – supposedly the veteran Spanish filmmaker’s first short story collection, though of course that description is not entirely accurate. Compiled from what is presumably a dense and disparate archive of prose written between the late 1960s and the present, the book’s dozens of selections artfully mix imaginative fiction with candid personal essays and the odd self-reflexive curio that lies somewhere in between. A tight, orderly foray into literature was never to be expected from the 74-year-old, whose utterly unique cinema thrives on chaotic melodrama and surging, sensual abandon. If The last dream The unruliness is not surprising—it is a double-edged sword in both its form and its rewards—but the occasional crystal-clear scarcity is.

Almodóvar invites readers to consider the book as a replacement for the more detailed memoirs he adamantly refuses to write. This notion seems fanciful at first reading. The first story, The Visit, describes a transgender woman’s bloody campaign of revenge; other stories early on deal with queer Catholic vampirism and a strange matryoshka-style re-imagining of Sleeping Beauty. The last dream later takes a more complete, if still amorphous, form with bits of straightforward autobiography. The common thread here is the restless jumble of Almodóvar’s imagination and narrative, with sexual, spiritual and cinematic fixations that, we sense, intrude into his everyday life as much as his art.

In one story, Confessions of a Sex Symbol, his thoughts on Andy Warhol are filtered through the perspective of a fictional female character, Patty Diphusa, “a porn star in the photonovel business.” Another, the spare, wistful confessional Memory of an Empty Day, revisits the Warhol theme from the diary-like perspective of Almodóvar himself, with little difference between the two trains of thought. The ego collapses into alter ego and vice versa; we are to believe that the filmmaker lives with multiple internal monologues going on at any given time. He writes best, though, when writing directly as himself, as in the title piece—a sharp, bruised six-page reflection on his mother’s death, in which practical considerations of shrouds and family reunions are disrupted by nagging insecurities (did she ever like his films?) and reflections on what she might have dreamed of before she died. This raw, conversational simplicity is refreshing, and the book offers the opportunity to express something that Almodóvar cannot express behind the camera.

The fictional pieces, on the other hand, mostly read like early treatments for films he either made or never made, which is not always to their advantage. The aforementioned The Visit is clearly a rough, even naive blueprint for Poor trainingthe director’s biting, shapeshifting 2004 study of abuse and trauma in Catholic schools, which itself was rich in personal experience—but the story has none of the film’s narrative or emotional complexity. It also features the collection’s ponderous prose, though perhaps the translation accounts for a sentence in which the narrator declares he is “overwhelmed” by “stunning cocktail dresses.” Too Many Gender Swaps is more of an interest to the director’s cultists: a witty reflection on artistic collaboration and homage (just a stone’s throw from plagiarism, the narrator notes wryly) in which you can see the roots of both his glorious 1999 Tennessee Williams riff Everything about my mother and his melancholic autofiction from 2019 pain and fame.

But we can only wish he’d made a film out of The Mirror Ceremony, a silly, sarcastic, rather nasty doodle about the consequences of a disillusioned Count Dracula’s entry into an austere Italian monastery. Oddly, Almodóvar never made a straight horror film, and it’s easy to imagine what this would have looked and sounded like – although reading such ideas on paper tends to reveal the lack of sensory detail (his signature saturated primary color blocking, for example, or his flowery use of music) that they would have on screen. The last dream has its charms – some of them sensational, some more moving – but at no point does it suggest an artist who has so far missed his calling.

• The last dream by Pedro Almodóvar, translated by Frank Wynne, is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). To support the Guardian And observer Order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Shipping charges may apply.