Customer Reviews

The Dream Oracle: A Unique Guide to Interpreting Message-Bearing Dreams

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This book is beautifully illustrated by someone who is a master of Photoshop and has used it to produce vividly dreamlike composite images. That was what I enjoyed most about it.

Keith Hearne is a scientist, but the science in the book is not that strong; in fact its factual content is sometimes questionable and usually a bit superficial and naive. For example, at one point the authors discuss an ancient Hindu belief that the last dream of a series in one night should be the one you interpret when predicting the future and comment that this presumably had been arrived at by a long process of observation. This shows extreme naivite about ancient processes of thought. It is much more likely that the rule was arrived at by some process of "logic" such as "The last dream is closest to the future event in time, so it will be the best one to use."

Their survey of ancient thinking about dreams is very much once over lightly and perpetuates some myths, such as the idea that the Aboriginal "dreamtime" was like the western Golden Age or paradisal creation period - a mythical period at the beginning of time. My understanding is that in fact Aboriginals consider the dreamtime to be still continuing today, as a kind of alternate reality (I may have it wrong too, but I'm not writing a book on dreams; if I was I'd talk to an Aboriginal before committing myself).

Their survey of modern thinking and research is not much more in depth, despite the fact the Hearne is himself a dream research scientist. I found it an interesting sidelight that Hearne claims to have originated the idea of signalling with one's eyes from inside a lucid dream, something that Stephen LaBerge also claims to have thought of rather than (as Hearne implies) getting the idea from Hearne. This is probably one of those heated scientific priority controversies, and Hearne may well be in the right; LaBerge's book (Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming) is still much better than his, and so is Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life by Marc Ian Barasch, if you want a broader overview.

Cool pictures though.