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Dreams matter. They have been continuously a part of the human experience in its manifold states and sensibilities. We remember and forget them, keep them secret and report them, sing about them, write of them, study them, analyze them, and, almost always, philosophize about them. Central to what one might justifiably call the preoccupation with the dream is the curiosity fundamental to the need of the human mind to
know, understand, and explain itself. And “knowing” the mind is part of the conundrum of “knowing” life.
One answer to this need to know, elegant because of its simplicity, is the aphorism “life is a dream.” This adage converts the most complex physical, sensate, and mysterious corporal event, human existence, into what is considered by many to be the most complex, ephemeral, abstract, and mysterious psychic event, the human dream. Why exchange one unknowable for another? And why this one in particular? Perhaps because all of us—primitives, ancients, children, moderns, sophisticates—intuitively know that this form of thought, the dream, means to tell us something, something so essential that one might even consider it a metaphor for life itself. Most of us need to know about life as well as to know about the dream. The dream is “smaller.” Can we know it?
Harry T. Hunt seems to think so. He has progressed in his studies as a cognitive psychologist from understanding states of consciousness to studying and describing the dream. It is a natural progression and one he has obviously made with care and precision. The Multiplicity of Dreams, while not claiming to be definitive, travels far and wide. It does so theoretically, temporally, culturally, and philosophically as Hunt attempts to develop some unifying principles for this diffuse phenomenon, the dream.
His book offers an extensive review of the literature, scientific and otherwise. This review sets the stage for his elaborate attempt at offering an historical overview, culminating in the critical integrat