Night Life: The Interpretation of Dreams

Charles Darwin, in a chance remark, compared dreams to involuntary poetry. Hudson uses this insight as the starting point for his own method of dream analysis. Like poems, he says, dreams are ambiguous, and the attempt to ""read'' a dream as if it were a poem may help us ferret out its multiple meanings. Hudson puts forward his theory as a synthesis of rival camps: on the one hand, Freud and Jung saw dreams as messages from the subconscious having therapeutic value; on the other, behaviorists view dreams as meaningless tatters the mind produces when it is temporarily out of gear. Dreams do have meaning, Hudson maintains, but their symbols and signs will mean different things to different people. This British psychology professor elegantly builds his arguments with the aid of thought-diagrams, dream transcripts and passages from novels and poems. His belief that Freud's psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation owes a debt to the ancient Greeks is intriguing. (February 24)