TRAUMA AND DREAMS

TRAUMA AND DREAMS
Deirdre Barrett, ed.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996
272 pages, hardback, $35.00
ISBN 0-674-90552-0

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

--An eight-year-old boy was burned severely while he and two other children were playing with gasoline and matches. In the hospital, he dreams his house blew up and no one is there to help him. With the help of a child psychiatrist, he focuses on how scary and out of control he felt without his parents after the accident occurred.

--A firestorm in the Oakland, California hills in 1991 reduced more than 3,000 homes to ash and left more than 5,000 people homeless. Researchers recruited 28 of those who lost their homes, and 14 whose homes were spared, to keep two-week dream journals. They found, to their surprise, that persons whose homes were left standing had more nightmares, depression, and intrusive thoughts than those who lost them, a reflection of survivor guilt. The "lucky" survivors of traumatic events, the researchers suggest, may need extended emotional support.

--A mourner greets a deceased person in a dream. The deceased says, "Don't worry, I'm fine;" tells the mourner not to sell the house; or even provides a "gift," such as instructions on where to find something. Survivors report that dreams providing comfort, advice, or gifts are among the most pleasant they experience. Such dreams typically occur as the active period of mourning draws to a close.

This edited volume addresses dreams associated with a wide variety of traumatic situations: in children, following events such as burns or incest, and in adults, following wars and natural disasters, as well as after stressful events of daily life such as divorce, bereavement, or surgery.

Contributors include prominent sleep and dream researchers, such as Peretz Lavie, Ernest Hartmann, and Rosalind Cartwright, as well as noted physician-writers, such as Robert Jay Lifton and Oliver Sacks. Editor Deirdre Barrett is assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. The book includes a number of scientific studies, with tables and statistics, but the text is largely straightforward and accessible to the general reader.

The common theme here is that dreams are an exquisitely accurate barometer of our waking moods. "Dreams constitute a unique window on trauma and its effects," Barrett notes. The book, she says, describes "the rich variety of ways in which dreams can give voice to the unspeakable and begin to restore the savaged."