MILTON KRAMER, A PSYCHIATRIST AND SLEEP PHYSICIAN WHO BEGAN HIS CAREER DURING WHAT CAN BE CALLED THE “PIONEERING EARLY DAYS,” HAS BEEN A dedicated and enthusiastic dream researcher for decades. He has now written a book primarily for mental health professionals, as he stated in the preface, in order to provide them “a systematic scientific basis for understanding the dream as a psychological event…and a method for examining the dream text to extract a figurative meaning for the reported dream.” In the final chapter he states that “the central message of this exploration is that the dream report is a highly organized and well constructed rendering of an experience that occurred during sleep.”
This book covers, in large part, such topics as dreams and psychological differences; normative dreams, typical dreams, and repetitive dreams; psychopathologic dreams and dreams in psychopathologic states; the reactive nature of dreaming; dreams and waking thought; and dream meaning. The process and technique of “dream translation” is a central theme, as acknowledged by the author, who commented that his teaching course on Dream Translation was the foundation of the book.
The Dream Experience contains important information with interesting case examples, has a comprehensive bibliography, and reveals a breadth of interest and knowledge on the part of the author; but for many readers this book will be challenging to read with sustained attention. The style of writing is not concise, paragraphs can be too long, there can be many consecutive pages without subheadings, and there is the lack of virtually any tables (with two small exceptions) to support and highlight the data being presented and discussed in the text. Rating scales are mentioned and statistics presented in the text, including correlations that prompt comments by the author, but the lack of tables detracts from the effectiveness of reporting the data.
Dr. Kramer makes the following statements at the end of the preface: “I have concluded that dreaming is a selective affective regulator, sort of an emotional thermostat that changes affect across the night. The significance of changing affect across the night is that how you feel on arising in the morning is a major determinant of your psycho-motor functioning.” Those who read this book should determine to what extent these conclusions are justified by the data presented.
Footnotes
Disclosure Statement
The author has indicated no financial conflicts of interest.