Dreaming and Storytelling by Bert O. States Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1993,  x + 219 pp., $26.95

In Dreaming and Storytelling, Bert O. States carries forward themes that he introduced in The Rhetoric of Dreams , especially that of dreaming as a primary act of imagination, “the ur-form of all fiction” (p. 3). In the earlier book, he compared dream imagery to classic rhetorical tropes. In the current one, he attempts a “comparative poetics of dreams and waking fictions” (p. 7) in order to ascertain the similarities and differences between these two narrative modes. The inquiry leads him into sophisticated issues of psychology, narratology, and dream theory, all focused on dreaming as experience rather than as the royal road to the unconscious.

Without exactly repudiating Freudian theories of dream interpretation, States works from a phenomenological position, stalking the dream to its place of origin, which he believes is “just slightly above the point where electrochemistry turns into psychology” (p. 5). Primary to his inquiry is what he considers a creaturely need for narrative, a biological necessity common, he says, to man and animals. So powerful is the human need for narrative order that even storytelling in the wide-awake state is not entirely voluntary. Both dreams and fictions serve our need for ways of knowing and experiencing not available through pragmatic intelligence. Only through such artistic channels as dreaming and storytelling can we reach certain kinds of meanings. Dreams, then, offer not the paraphrasable kind of concept provided by cognition, but felt meaning or grounded emotion. Dreams are a form of experience rather than texts of encoded meanings.

After examining one of the dream's most salient characteristics, bizarreness, and comparing it with instances of the marvelous and the uncanny in fiction, the author concludes that dream distortion is simply “an act of thought that draws two (or more) different things together in an atmosphere where semantic accountability