Description
Book SynopsisAre dreams merely odd things that happen to us at night, sometimes pleasant, sometimes terrifying, but not to be taken too seriously? Is there any reason to think about them at all, other than in terms of questions such as ''Why should Aunt Sarah turn into a bird and invite us all to dinner in her sycamore tree?
In this witty and eminently readable book, Bert O. States rethinks both the meaning of dreams and the relationship between dreaming and the telling of stories. Dreams constitute a private literature of the self, he says, thatdespite their seeming lack of order or structurecan help us to understand the very nature of shared literature.
Observers have often pointed out narrative elements that are common to dreams and storiesincluding cinematic visual techniques and such plot devices as reversals of fortune and paired villains and antagonists. Drawing on current work in such fields as neurobiology, cognitive psychology, literary theory, and dream theory, States asks
Trade Review
Dreaming and Storytelling is both intriguing and complex. We are not only art-making animals but also dream-producing animals, compelled to interpret and re-create our life through imaginative forays and retrievals, even while asleep, and this book explores the complex and ambiguous relationship between dreaming and storytelling.
* Modern Language Review *
Bert O. States's Dreaming and Storytelling aims at a kind of phenomenological flattening. It seeks to remove from our descriptions of dreaming the idea of hidden intentions and unconscious motivations, the seductions of the buried archetype, of the occulted or repressed meaning. It questions commonplace pictures of surface and depth. Dreaming and Storytelling is a very personal book; it offers pieces of the author's conversation with himself, a report about his own dreams, an attempt to put into dialogue a number of writers he has read and struggled over, an assessment of doubts and suspicions.
* Comparative Literature Studies *
States' comparison of dreams to the structures and archetypes of waking narratives makes excellent use of narrative theory and is laden with provocative insights.
* Psychoanalytic Books: A Quarterly Journal of Reviews *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. The Problem of Bizarreness
2. Beginnings, Middles, and Endings
3. The Master Forms
4. Scripts and Archetypes
5. Meaning in Dreams and Fictions
ConclusionReferences
Index
