Jonathan W. White

This book is something of a throwback to the once-popular subgenre of psychohistory, to the point that the Library of Congress classifying it as Psychology seems apt. The author is a capable writer, or will be when he gets the definition of 'penultimate' right, but the book represents a good idea which somewhere went a little off the tracks; the subtitle promises to inform us about 'sleep', darkness', and 'dreams', but after a glancing treatment in the first chapter, the first two named subjects don't appear very often. Or at all, really. Thus we encounter innumerable recollections of dreams which, as dreams will be, are somewhat repetitive. The book reminds moderns of how obsessed with dreams as prophecy or omen the Civil War generation was as well as evidencing, if accurate, that they had a lot more facility in recalling dreams than the man of today possesses. Although the author presents his subjects' claims of religious or prophetic significance dispassionately on the face of it, one does eventually suspect that he has at some level a touch of buyin to these rather dubious claims.… (altro)