The Dream and the Text, a collection of essays on dreams as they are discussed in literature, sounds like a good idea. I fully expected to find it informative as well as entertaining. Unfortunately, the book did not live up to expectations.

As with all collections, some chapters are better than others. I enjoyed some of them, particularly those written by the psychoanalytically informed. But by and large the text is difficult to read and boring. Much of it appears clumsy and confusing, using words invented by the authors rather than those whose meaning analysts have long taken for granted, for instance, the term “doubling” for