The Variety of dream experience : expanding our ways of working with dreams /

This sophisticated collection of 15 essays by experts on dream analysis will appeal to students of the behavioral sciences and to informed lay readers. The authors of the essays all are acquainted with editor Ullman's unique approach to dream work, which involves informal group analysis and enactment of dreams. Their main goal is to put dream work back into the public domain by showing the variety of ways in which dreams can influence and enrich our lives. The contributors come from a range of professions, including political science, cultural anthropology, creative writing, teaching, and art, and each lucidly describes the beneficial impact dream analysis can have in diverse fields and in society as a whole. Personal anecdotes and dream interpretations lend support and interest to the broader theoretical discussions advanced herein. An erudite, illuminating investigation. References; no index. MB. 154.63 Dreams

This series of articles by psychiatrist Ullman and the students of his dream workshops concerns the use of dreams outside the clinical setting. The articles range from descriptions of group dream work, which seem more analogous to human potential groups than to group therapy, to the use of dreams in diverse settings from anthropological field work to classroom creative writing. A section on dreams in their more traditional clinical use is noteworthy for coauthor Limmer's article on her own struggles with illness, but most of the clinically oriented material is rather elementary and of limited use for professionals in the field. The book will be of greatest interest to lay readers and to nonpsychiatric professionals whose work touches on dream analysis. Paul Hymowitz, Cornell Medical Ctr., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

For the most part, an interesting collection of articles on recent experiments with the employment of group analysis of dreams in diverse, in some cases unlikely, fields of endeavor. Ullman of the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center (coauthor of Working With Dreams, 1979) and psychotherapist Limmer initially reject the mystique that dream analysis must remain solely in the domain of psychotherapists and proceeds to describe a variety of ways in which a lay group's analysis of dreams can be employed for a variety of creative and practical activities. Presenting their experiences, as the discovery of enhancements to various fields, e.g., visual arts, creative writing, the study of literature, theology, cultural anthropology, psychohistory, political science, and even computer science, 14 authors report on specific examples of group exploration of dreams, or give their views on the value of dream analysis, as applied to their particular field of work. With an emphasis on the creative convolutions of the metaphors designed by the sleeping mind, most of the articles include narrations of specific dreams, explanations of interpretations made within the group framework, and the utilization of these discussions in the context of the particular field of interest. The depth of insight, as well as the pertinence of the material to the overall thesis of the book, vary from author to author, and are at times reduced to the obvious presented as groundbreaking observation; the most unusual directions are offered in the articles of John Wikse and Ullman, who both present ideas about the use of group explorations of dreams as a means of providing a broader comprehension of social patterns and global problems. Considering the intriguing elements of dream study, and the universal experience of this phenomenon, probably of broad interest. But the going can be slow. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.