Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Charles Rycroft believes that dreams are no guilty fantasies, no abnormal states, but innocent flights of the imagination, released from the censorship of the waking mind. In this intelligent, searching study he clears a path through the many debates which have arisen since Freud about the nature and symbolism of dreaming, exploring different theories and discussing dreams of every kind, from nightmares and fear of flying, to problem-solving and prophecies. Consistently interesting, these essays take us from the simple physiology of sleep and dreams, to such curious areas as the dreams of animals, and to wider subjects such as the relationship of dreams to the literary imagination.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Polite/benign departures from the canon of Freud and lung by a seasoned English analyst with a lifetime of dream listening and dreaming experience to draw upon. The ""innocence"" of the title means Rycroft doesn't hold with Freud that dreams are neurotic symptoms in symbolic form, denizens of the Id disguised to hide the lusts that lie therein. Nor does he think it makes any sense to divide the Unconscious into the Personal and Collective ... la lung. Rather, dreams are intrapersonal communications; a self talking to a self in a ""form taken by the imagination."" Rycroft elaborates a brief taxonomy and typology of dreams, which, when not arbitrary, produces such profundities as ""recurrent dreams indicate the existence of an unsolved problem""; ""It is my impression that people have more anxious dreams during adolescence, during midlife crisis, and during the throes of personal and professional upheavals. . . ."" Body symbolism is of great significance in dreams, Rycroft contends, and artifacts (such as houses) are often metaphors of the body. Ultimately, dream contents are linked to the life cycle (which is why Freud harped on their sexual connotation since sex is a part of every stage from birth to death). Interest picks up with a few case histories and dream analyses, including Freud's ""Irma"" dream, and the dream of Jung which revealed to him the Collective Unconscious. In the last chapter, Rycroft discusses the relationship between dreams and literary imagination, citing Coleridge and Gerard Manley Hopkins in particular, and enlarging on Keats' concept of ""negative capability""--the ability to allow oneself uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, a receptivity akin to the dream state. The best advice comes in a postscript: ""Dreams are best understood. . . if one forgets all theories about them. . . but instead responds to them as glimpses of the dreamer's total imaginative fabric."" That, and a few supporting remarks, could have made a nice essay--not a book. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.