DREAMS: The Dark Speech of the Spirit

There is no room in an Aristotelian universe for dreams; but a neo-Platonic universe is something else again, and it is to that complex of Enneadic spiralings into the noÖtic unknown that the Reverend Kelsey refers, sometimes consciously, in this ""Christian Interpretation"" of dreams. Kelsey basically agrees with Jung that ""dreams offer contact with a realm that seems to be the same as the spiritual realm described by the church"" and his book is a plea for the church to return to its pre-Aristotelian faith in dreams as symbols of spiritual portent. The major part of the work is a history of nocturnal phantasmata, from the times of the Greeks and Romans to the exploration of dream phenomena by modern psychology; this is by far the best part of the book. The remainder of the material is an ad hominem pleading for ""a return to the Christian interpretation of dreams"" via the psychologist's good offices, and it is too fragmentary to give more than a hint of what Kelsey has in mind. On the whole, the book is a readable, and sometimes intriguing, mixture of conjecture, misinterpretation of the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, and able application of the findings of modern science to the dark corners of Christian experience. The reader cannot avoid the impression, however, that the author reached his conclusions long before he attempted to establish his premises.