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MEMO
To: Paul Lippmann, author
FROM: Irwin C. Rosen, reviewer
I think that one of the most important ideas you share in Nocturnes is that, upon hearing a dream, the listener is most helpful when he or she doesn't try to “nail it” (i.e., to tear off mentally in search of its correct meaning or its proper interpretation), but instead enters into a “conversation” with the dreamer—a relaxed, non-pursuing excursion in which the dream can reveal its own place and purpose in the dreamer's life.
Well, here I was, an unconscionably long time ago, faced with the weighty job of reviewing your remarkable book for the readers of this journal. And I proceeded to behave just as I thought a diligent reviewer should. I filled pages of a legal pad with notes. I highlighted and underlined and put exclamation points, question marks, and comments in the margins. And the more scrupulously I did all those reviewer things, the farther I felt myself departing from the points that you were making in the book and, more importantly, from its spirit.
Where you were beckoning toward a receptive, playful, “unfolding” approach to the dream, one that goes beyond evenly suspended attention, I, in my attempt to be a meticulous, knowing (and impressive) reviewer, was doing everything that you cautioned us not to be and do in listening to and responding to dreams. So I stepped out of the role of reviewer with its mavenish scrutinizing and hypervigilant attitude (like the one that too often characterizes our approach to dreams) and instead decided to “allow the book to happen to me” the way you suggest we approach dreams, and to “converse with you”—and, hopefully, with those who will read the book and these comments.
I also discovered that I was (as you urge dream-listeners to try not to do) sedulously pureeing your thoughts in the blender of my own theoretical system—a deeply valued, and I believe clinically effective, set of ideas formed during nearly fifty years of training and work at the Menninger Clinic