Bedtime Stories

By Stefan Kanfer

THE OXFORD BOOK OF DREAMS

Chosen by Stephen Brook Oxford; 268 pages; $16.95

Some authors inescapably suggest animals: Hemingway is a lion, Tolstoy a bear, Colette a cat. Anthologist Stephen Brook is a crow. For The Oxford Book of Dreams he has ranged over four millenniums and most of the dry surfaces of the globe in search of recorded visions. The result is a nest of glittering curiosities, some of rare value, others plucked from the dustbin of history, where they belonged. Moreover, although the collection offers hundreds of entries, it also has inexcusable gaps. The dreams of Pharaoh's servants are here, interpreted by Joseph, but they represent one-half of the biblical citations. Where is Jacob's ladder or Matthew's account of the wise men "warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod"? Brook's accent is more literary than historical, but even here he falters. Lewis Carroll's dream books of Alice are justly represented, but James Joyce's monumental portrait of the unconscious, Finnegans Wake, is accorded two lines. Joseph Heller (Catch-22) is indulgently granted six entries; the great dreamer Poe is given two.

Despite this disproportion, The Oxford Book of Dreams is an irresistible sampler. Reading Artemidorus (circa A.D. 150) is like eavesdropping in the imperial marketplace: "Someone dreamt that he had an iron penis. He fathered a son who killed him. For iron is consumed by the rust that it produces from itself." Freud's claim that the ancient Greeks had sensed what he had systematized is borne out by eerie resonances. In Aeschylus' drama, Orestes describes a snake "as though human ... its gaping mouth clutching the breast that once fed me ... it then mingled the sweet milk with curds of blood." John Ruskin has a serpent nightmare: "It rose up like a Cobra--with horrible round eyes and had woman's, or at least Medusa's, breasts. [It] fastened on my neck." The origins of tabloid astrology can be traced to the predictions of Astrampsychus (circa A.D. 350): "Gladness of mind shows that you will live abroad"; and Napoleon 's Book of Fate (circa 1860): "For a young woman to dream that she is embraced by a gorilla means that she will have one of the handsomest and wisest men for a suitor."

What the anthology lacks in depth it more than makes up in breadth. The collected figments venture from Homer: "Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: one ... of honest horn, and one of ivory" to John Updike: She repeated her dream "at breakfast. He was moved, beholding his daughter launched into another dimension of life, like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery." Throughout, Brook is keenly aware of the terror and distress that reside in dreams: his categories include Nightmare, Violence, the Absurd and Frustrations. Together they should engender enough insomnia for a lifetime. Instead, precisely the opposite occurs. For in the vastness of sleep, all countries are contiguous and all generations contemporary, their nightly symbols--animals, the sensation of flight, erotic pursuits--varying little from the pre-Christian epoch to the present. That disclosure makes this nightmarish, violent, absurd and frustrating book oddly reassuring: a flawed compendium, but an ideal companion for the bedside. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.