The Dream Dwellers

Reviews the book, Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter (1970). This book is organized into three major sections, Setting, Theory; Practice; and a conclusion; Verdict. The author seeks to isolate those elements in the verbal and visual images and dreams of opium-addict writers which were not common to the dreams of other contemporary writers. To these nineteenth century Romantics, dreams were a revelation of a reality which could form and influence waking life, while the dream process was a parallel and model of the process of poetic creation. Urbane, informative, and admirably written, the book makes clear why Alethea Hayter is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)