Bert States, professor of dramatic arts at the University of California, has written a provocative, erudite, yet clinically naive book on dreams; a text modeled, in more than a passing way, on Freud's On Dreams. His primary tools of investigation are the classic tropes, that is, metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor and irony—read within a phenomenological framework. This approach is particularly manifest in his critique of the Freudian approach to dream interpretation, with its basic reliance on the concept of repression and with what the author characterizes as an homunculus understanding of the unconscious. The dream, States says, is the reported dream, via language; it is what is manifestly says, an example of “involuntary poetry” so to speak. We can, it is argued, dispense with the ideas of censor and of repression as unnecessary postulates, but not with the need to read the figures of speech and the significance of images used.