Seeing in the dark: reflections on dreams and dreaming

What is the relationship between waking experience and dreams, and between dreams and literary creativity? In this book, Bert States explores the nature of dream imagery, the metaphorical processes in dreaming, and the nature and source of dream narrative. Challenging the classical psychoanalytic view that dreams represent censored wishes, he argues instead that dreams are nonrepressive, unplanned constructions, the most integral use of the images at hand. Dreams are a phenomenon of mind and, like art, are manifestations of a biological need to convert experience into structure, says States.