Book Review

Seeing in the Dark: Reflections on dreams and dreaming

N Engl J Med 1997; 337:1326-1327October 30, 1997

Article

Seeing in the Dark: Reflections on dreams and dreaming
By Bert O. States. 265 pp. New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1997. $32.50. ISBN: 0-300-06910-3

There are a lot of books about dreams and dreaming. These usually fall into two categories: those written by therapists, who use dreams to aid their understanding of their individual patients, and those written by researchers, who investigate dreams as a normal activity of the sleeping brain. These two types of books come out of different traditions of method. The first uses the extensive pursuit of the dreamer's waking associations to help make sense of the dream for the purpose of bringing more control to a disordered life, while the second uses the sleep laboratory and the controls of science to study all the dreams of the night for the purpose of discovering general principles about how this mental process works.

This book is different. The author is neither a therapist nor a sleep researcher. He is an emeritus professor of literature. What he sets as his task is to think through the ways we make dream images out of memories and string them together into a narrative form, without awareness or choice. His method lies somewhere between those of the therapist and those of the researcher. He uses armchair introspection into his own dream life aided by an extensive familiarity with the literature on creative writing. To this he adds his knowledge of the literature on dreams from research and therapy, gained as a senior editor of the journal Dreaming (New York: Human Sciences Press).

What is remarkable about this book is that, without a laboratory or a patient to work with the author develops a coherent picture of the state-of-the-art thinking of what dreams are about (emotion) and why it is that we can have some themes in common (we are all more human than otherwise), yet couch them in different images (we each develop a unique set of memory representations attached to the experiences that evoke common emotional responses). What is more, he believes that the understanding of dreams is not to be looked for in dream symbols, but in the obvious, by following the clue of feeling. It is emotion that triggers a particular memory network and that determines what will lead to what, as the dream progresses.

What is new about the book is not so much what the author has to say about how dreams are made but the way he links this activity to creative writing in fiction, poetry, and drama. The book is rich in examples and delightful in its humor and erudition. The symbols, particularly sexual symbols, that Freud relied on he replaces with analogies and metaphors, as being more useful. He admits the role of “day residue” as a matter of course; more recent experience is likely to enter the dream on its way to long-term storage.

The main problem he tackles is the way dreams manage to achieve a narrative structure. Here he turns to the neuroscientist Rudolfo Llinas's proposition that “wakefulness is nothing other than a dream-like state modulated by the constraints (of) sensory inputs.” This normalizes dream activity as basic and links it to fiction writing. In both, we cut ourselves off from the demands of reality and allow the elements of memory — people, places, and objects — to evolve a plot by relating them in terms of emotional memory systems. Emotions are the key that unlock particular boxes of images, and the dream is composed by our learned expectations that recombine the elements into something novel, ruled by what belongs together emotionally. Does this answer the problem of dream structure? Not to the satisfaction of the researcher. There is still much to understand about the working of the mind asleep. This book may stimulate some to address this area. In any case, it is one that the intelligent, non–dream professional can read with enjoyment and from it learn how to view dreams in the wider context of creative thinking.

Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D.
Rush–Presbyterian–St. Luke's Medical Center, Chicago, IL 60612-3868