Experimental Studies of Dreaming: Edited by Herman A. Witkin and Helen B. Lewis. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967. 242 pp.

The rapid growth of the scientific study of sleep and dreaming during the past fifteen years has led in many directions, including the physiological and to some extent chemical delineation of several qualitatively different sleep states. The editors of the present volume are most interested in explaining the implications of this body of research for a psychological understanding of the dream and its relationship to the dreamer.

This is a pleasant, highly readable, hard to define little volume. Although there are five separate authors, the result is not the frequent and unsatisfactory attempt at summarizing a field by sticking together a conglomerate of unedited papers by a variety of experts, each writing on his own sub-area. The book consists of four chapters: two general review articles, followed by two papers which are in effect reports of recent research projects, one dealing with dream recall and the other with incorporation of presleep material into dreams. Much of the material in the first two articles, by Frederick Snyder and by Charles Fisher, may already be familiar to readers who have any knowledge of recent sleep research; the material in the last two papers, by Goodenough and by Witkin and Lewis, will be new to most. The book will be especially useful to persons who are interested in the work of the latter authors and who can use the first two articles as background.

Snyder's chapter, In Quest of Dreaming, is a lucid and unimpeachable review of the biology of dreaming, i.e., the physiological characteristics of the D-state or REM-state. Fisher's chapter presents a thorough discussion of possible psychoanalytic implications of recent biological research which deserves a thorough reading. Dr. Fisher unfortunately feels that recent biological studies denigrate or demote dreaming itself to a sort of meaningless epiphenomenon. This is not the case. The dream is as fascinating now as it always has been. Undeniably, the principal recent advances ha