Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams

Gathering evidence from such diverse sources as a sleep laboratory and a night on a mountain, an exploration of the fragile borderline between night and day provides understanding of the language of dreams and how dreams affect our waking selves.

Alvarez begins this delightful, serendipitous meditation on night, darkness, sleep, dreams and night life by discussing his own childhood terror of the dark, in a home seething with nighttime quarrels, and his middle-age addiction to sleep. He then visits an English sleep research lab, where he has his sleep monitored; travels to New York City to ride in a police squad car with cops on night patrol; and captures the nocturnal rhythms of London and of a Tuscan farmhouse in the Italian Appennines. In graceful, insightful prose, Alvarez (The Savage God: A Study of Suicide) analyzes imagery of light and dark from Shakespeare to John Cheever; scrutinizes the dream theories of Freud and Jung; examines dreams as a source of inspiration for Coleridge, Ionesco, Don DeLillo, French surrealists and scientists and inventors; and mulls the late-Victorian passion for ghost stories. His observation, "Night contains whatever you care to put into it," serves as an apt keynote for this kaleidoscopic excursion.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Michael Vincent Miller, a psychologist and family counselor, defines intimate terrorism as a "two person civil war" that develops when a previously loving relationship deteriorates into a battle for power and position. The partners manipulate their complementary anxieties to threaten, rouse each other's fears and anxieties, and, in the worst case, become violent. Miller claims that much of the pervasive decay is caused by our culture, including the death of the myth of romantic love and the changing sex roles in our society. He uses case studies taken from his private practice and from contemporary literature, pop culture, and the headlines to explore his thesis. There are extended discussions of the O. J. Simpson case, the custody battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, and The Great Gatsby. This is an insightful, thought-provoking, yet overwhelmingly depressing book, with only one of the case-study couples apparently reconciled, and that very tentatively. The book is leavened only by the epilogue, in which Miller suggests developing an ironic point of view on romantic and conjugal love; unfortunately, David Letterman seems a poor substitute for Cupid. George Needham

Scared of the dark? The author of the best-selling The Savage God (LJ 4/1/72) here examines our response to night, eventually linking it to creativity.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.