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This little book constitutes a welcome addition to the relatively meager Italian psychoanalytic literature. It is a part of a series which presents scientific subjects of contemporary interest in a simple and popular form. The author has managed to condense in a few pages what is absolutely essential in the psychoanalytic theory of the dream. In the first two chapters (The Dream Across the Ages and The Dream in Folklore), Dr. Servadio has undoubtedly been helped in his task by Freud's historical survey in The Interpretation of Dreams. The theory presented is also fundamentally Freud's classic theory. Some more recent hypotheses and theories are introduced here and there. There is, for instance, a chapter on telepathic dreams and an extremely condensed summary of Stekel's, Adler's, and Jung's points of view.
It would be unreasonable to expect from this type of presentation original ideas or critical elaborations. If one keeps in mind the limited scope of the book (and of the series of which it is a part), particularly in a country with strong biases against psychoanalytic thinking, it serves its purpose admirably. Interested Italian readers will gain from reading this book an idea of the scientific value of the psychoanalytic theory of the dream and may perhaps be stimulated to deepen their knowledge in the field.