Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-521-58316-0. £37.50 (US$64.95).

A full-length study of Coleridge's concern with dreams has long been a desideratum. Select writings, especially the notebook entries recording dreams and commenting on them, have been studied for such varied purposes as elucidating Coleridge's poems, assessing the effects of his opium use, revealing his ambivalence about women, evaluating his psychological insight, and determining his place in the history of oneirology. But before the appearance of Coleridge on Dreaming, no book was wholly occupied with surveying and interpreting Coleridge's oneirological writings, and it looked as if Coleridge's inability to 'devote an entire work to the subject of Dreams' (a hope he expressed in The Friend) had extended to his critics. Hitherto the most comprehensive examination of Coleridge and dreams took the form of a special double-issue of the psychological journal Dreaming, edited by David Miall and Don Kuiken. But precisely because this was a collection of essays by divers hands, it was not expected to demonstrate a uniformity of approach or even of subject. A book by a single author, in contrast, may reasonably be expected to demonstrate one kind of uniformity or the other. Let me define these terms for the present context. Uniformity of approach would consist either in interpreting Coleridge's recorded dreams themselves (whatever one conceives dreams to be) or in interpreting his comments about his dreams, but not in doing both. Uniformity of subject would consist in confining one's attention either to dreams, as products of the nocturnal mind, or to 'dreams', as products of the waking mind (i.e. poetic constructs), but not in treating both as if they were the same. A psychoanalytic study, because it is uniform in approach and assumes that both dreams and poem can reveal the contents of the unconscious, may neglect the formal differences between the texts it studies. But an 'historical exploration', which seeks to investigate 'Coleridge's responses to his dreams and to contemporary debates on the nature of dreaming' (I quote from the dust-jacket blurb of Coleridge on Dreaming), needs to adhere to both uniformities, so to speak. It has no business interpreting Coleridge's dreams for him or interpreting his poems as if they were dreams, for neither kind of interpretation contributes to an understanding of his relation to contemporary oneirology. By these criteria of assessment, Coleridge on Dreaming is a disappointment. The problems begin on the title page with the concepts of dreams and medical imagination, neither of which is sufficiently defined in the book. The failure to distinguish between the literal and metaphorical use of the word dream, for example in the discussions of drama (pp. 33-7) and Christabel (pp. 46-7), permits in turn a more serious confusion between different senses of the word imagination. Thus on the one hand imagination is identified with association, as when we are informed that in 'Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Soul (1791), dreams are seen as the product of the imagination, which is the tendency in the 'human mind to associate or connect its thoughts together'' (p. 17), while on the other it is identified with the formative power that Coleridge theorized in explicit rejection of associationism (pp. 183-202). Admittedly, Coleridge himself confused the issue by occasionally using the word imagination indiscriminately, and by falsely opposing imagination (conceived in German idealist terms) to fancy (conceived in British empiricist terms). But these facts make it especially imperative for the critic to sort out, rather than to reproduce, the confusion. If there is one respect which Coleridge is perfectly consistent, it is in his insistence on the suspension of volition, …