Dreaming Myself, Dreaming a Town (Field Notes from the Land of Dreams)

Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary book...
Review: I have to say that this is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. It touches so eloquently on that feeling I think we all have at times that there exists some mysterious, perplexing symmetry or intricate correlations (for lack of a better description)from which our experiences/perception of our world emerge. I had begun keeping a dream journal just about a month before I began Ms. Watkins' book, and yet I'm already amazed at how much knowledge, how much potential understading is at our very fingertips every night, every time we close our eyes. Amazing worlds right there within our very minds to explore, worlds of infinite experience our culture has taught us to ignore. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in dreams, the unknown, or has ever even thought about the nature of our reality, of our experience. I would be very interested to find out if any other such large-scale dream collection/analysis experiements have ever been carried out. I wonder if people are afraid to try for fear of their world turning inside out, for fear of negating everything they've ever believed about the nature of reality.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting and Great
Review: There are so many books on dreaming these days, and so much over-hyped new agey fluff. I read this a few years ago and it's one of the most important books on dreaming ever written (I think) and someone should try to do something with it, republish it or introduce it as part of a college course or SOMETHING.

It is a study of dreams submitted by an entire community and they often fit together like pieces of a giant mosaic, showing that we all dream the future, or pieces of it, all the time, only no one takes the time to pay attention much less is there a central authority monitoring them to see what they are saying.

I can't forget the many premonitions of a drowning tragedy that so many people caught glimpses of in their dreams, yet of which no one was really consciously aware. Dreams may be one of the great human potential sources that goes untapped. What if ordinary people learned to dream like shamans? The potential is there.

If you have a serious interest in dreaming (and aren't just browsing for some slick entertainment) you should obtain this (even if it's throught interlibrary loan, like me) and read it.

It really is an unknown classic. The woman who wrote this should be rewarded in some way for a really great contribution to dream literature.