THE GIFT OF DREAMS: A Christian View
By
A disarmingly intimate excursion into pop psychology. Lindskoog has spent some 25 years accumulating dream-lore, partly from books, partly from her own prodigiously fertile subsconscious; and now she guides us through this chaotic but intriguing collection. She skims the history of oneirocriticism from Plato to Progoff. She examines her own dreams from Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Perlsian, etc., perspectives. She studies dreams in the Bible, dreams of famous people, precognitive dreams--and just for good measure she throws in a summary of scientific dream research, REMs and all that. This constitutes a Christian view in the loose sense that a) Lindskoog is a Christian; b) she is also a grateful and enthusiastic dreamer; c) she reads her dreams as messages of comfort and intimations of immortality. Her piety is open-minded and unobtrusive, but in the end it is Lindskoog's personality--warm, bright, witty, slightly scatterbrained--rather than any religious faith, that structures the book and makes it go. Readers may object to the way she flits from dream to dream (hers, her friends', C. S. Lewis'), and from author to author (Aristotle, Thomas Merton, the Talmud), but the stream of curious stories and apt quotations never slackens. Quirky, lively, absorbing.