States' comparison of dreams to the structures and archetypes of waking narratives makes excellent use of narrative theory and is laden with provocative insights. -Psychoanalytic Books: A Quarterly Journal of Reviews Dreaming and Storytelling is both intriguing and complex. We are not only art-making animals but also dream-producing animals, compelled to interpret and re-create our life through imaginative forays ... Read moreand retrievals, even while asleep, and this book explores the complex and ambiguous relationship between dreaming and storytelling. -Modern Language Review Bert O. States's Dreaming and Storytelling aims at a kind of phenomenological flattening. It seeks to remove from our descriptions of dreaming the idea of hidden intentions and unconscious motivations, the seductions of the buried archetype, of the occulted or repressed meaning. It questions commonplace pictures of surface and depth. Dreaming and Storytelling is a very personal book; it offers pieces of the author's conversation with himself, a report about his own dreams, an attempt to put into dialogue a number of writers he has read and struggled over, an assessment of doubts and suspicions. -Comparative Literature Studies Show Less