TRACKS IN THE WILDERNESS OF DREAMING: Exploring Interior Landscape Through Practical Dreamwork

A Jungian analyst's rambling descriptions of how he employs dreams to dive into the depths of the human soul, especially his own. That Bosnak takes dreaming very seriously is shown in the opening chapters, in which the author is roughing it in the Australian outback in an attempt to trade dreams and dream lore with an enigmatic Aboriginal spirit doctor. Ordinarily, Bosnak conducts a private practice specializing in dreamwork in Cambridge, Mass., and runs workshops in which participants select one person's fresh dream and work on it together. Bosnak describes his dreamwork at two of these workshops in detail, demonstrating the process he has developed for such group explorations. He then gives instructions for performing solitary dreamwork, offering his own work as an example. He describes how he keeps a dream log, tapes the individual pages together, and then, using ruler and pencil, connects similar images, thus identifying recurring themes. The task is then to use these themes to reminisce about the past and later to write about them in various genres--poetry, stories, letters, travelogues, etc. The text includes numerous examples of such writing; an appendix has his log of over 50 dreams he had in one seven-week period during which he probed his feelings about his father's death. Such dreamwork, Bosnak asserts, can lead to a ""transformative confrontation with reality."" Perhaps so, but don't expect instant success. As a how-to-do-it-yourself book, this is only for the very highly motivated and seriously introspective. For the merely curious, it offers intensive analysis of several people's dreams, a strange trip inside the imagination of a primordial lizard whose dreaming the Aborigines say created the Australian landscape, but finally, rather too much of Bosnak's exposed psyche. Primarily for Jungians.