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In a recent paper on the neuropsychology of dreaming (Solms, 1995) three elements stand out as “essential to the conscious experience of dreams: (1) symbolic operations, (2) spatial thought, (3) inhibitory mental control” (p. 57). The research findings reported verify Freud's assertion that dreams occur so as to protect sleep and that “in dreams, the primary ‘scene of action’ of mental life shifts retrogressively…” (p. 61) from the frontal cerebral regions organized around normal waking cognition toward the perceptualmnestic systems. The central challenge of dream analysis is how to bridge the gap between these very different modes of thought (those of the conscious experience of the dream and of the retrogressive shift of mental life during the dream) and impose waking meaning on sleeping thought.
Translation from spatiovisual mentation to language-based cognition is a complex task that is accomplished by way of many routes, often quite circuitously. Freud and Jung each had theories of technique of dream analysis as well as of dream composition itself. And although dreams as the royal road to the unconscious is frequently called into question, dreams remain fascinating psychological events to patients and therapists alike (not to mention poets and scientists).
New Directions in Dream Interpretation comprises seven papers (with an introductory chapter), each of which allows its author ample space to explicate his or her technique of dream interpretation. Gayle Delaney, the editor and one of the contributors, is the codirector (with Loma Flowers) of an eponymous center for the study of dreams. Delaney is also the founding president of The Association for the Study of Dreams. She has written three books on dreams, one of which, at least, seems to be for the lay reader. Delaney “believes” in the dream and its place in our personal and