A Book of Dreams

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Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality. The book is split into halves with the first welded together by the framing episode of a motorcycle accident in France and the anesthetic gas that precipitates the dream state where all its ideas swirl together. But this book isn't that, it's understandably too close to what happened and I guess I'm after something straighter and more detached. He got into ever more serious trouble with the government, and holed himself up in a lab with a gatehouse, where his son could keep watch and raise the alarm in the event of a raid by the police.

I then learned that another musical idol of mine, Kate Bush, has a song (and music video) about this book as well: "Cloudbusting". Reich believed his Cloudbuster could be used to fight against aliens, who he believed were attempting to destroy the Earth. After fleeing the Nazi regime to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, Reich eventually settled down in the United States, where he began on a series of inventions and theories which made his colleagues question his sanity. This occurs very near the beginning of the book and is a feat never quite repeated in the rest of it. The writing, especially the sequences from the point of view of Peter as a child, is so beautiful and really captures his childlike thoughts and voice in a rare way, and the awesome awe and respect he felt for his father.There are moments of genuine poetry in A Book of Dreams, owing to the substantial portion written from the perspective of a precocious kid. A Book of Dreams inspiró a Kate Bush a escribir una de las mejores canciones de los 80, por ser un libro bellísimo, narrado desde la perspectiva limpia e inocente de un niño que recuerda la vida de su padre. It reminded me of Richard Brautigan and similar authors from the 1970s: chronology and point of view lurch all over the place, reality and fantasy merge and are hard to disentangle. He began as a student of Sigmund Freud, but, whereas Freud believed that sexual repression was necessary to provide the structure and driving force for civilisation, Reich believed that it was at the very heart, not only of many psychological and physical ailments, but that it is part of a destructive tendency in human behaviour which at times expresses itself through the murder of the healthiest individuals – e.

Wilhelm Reich can divide opinions, and Peter moves away from the controversy with this honest telling of his family, whereby we meet Wilhelm as a father, rather than a scientist/doctor/con man etc.

In some ways this book reminds me of The Glass Castle in that much of it is in the voice and point of view of a young child relating the imaginative way they coped with a father who lived outside of the norm. If you haven't gathered already from some of these lyrics, this is a very unusual book about a very unusual childhood.

He also built other devices, such as "cloud-busters", which were supposed to direct orgone into clouds and make it rain. There's many a wretched passage in the book, with Peter struggling with loss and identity in the aftermath of his fathers passing. and then, the next time I heard "Cloudbursting" by Kate Bush (one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite singers), it all fell into place. Both the song and the book convey the author's sense of despair at, as he sees it, letting his father down and not being able to protect him. The book is short, slim, and important, written by a man whose careers spanned journalism and child daycare according to the jacket.

The writing is tender and emotional; you can tell Peter may have had a hard time understanding and processing his childhood once he reached adulthood and reflected on what happened. While Freud viewed sexuality as something to be controlled and repressed, Reich viewed sexuality as something to be practiced freely, even coining the phrase "the sexual revolution".

He is well-known for his theories regarding the Orgone Energy and for starting the health fad surrounding accumulators. This famous book, the inspiration behind Kate Bush's 1985 hit song 'Cloudbusting', is the extraordinary account of life as friend, confidant and child of the brilliant but persecuted Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. I felt compelled to read this when I became obsessed with the song “Cloudbusting” by the Staves, a cover of a song Kate Bush wrote about this book. And it's very unusual, beautiful book, written by this man through the eyes of himself when he was a child, looking at his father, and the relationship between them. I still dream of Orgonon, I wake up crying, you're making rain and you're just in reach when you and sleep escape me.If you are looking for a book about Wilhem Reich or his work by someone who knew him best, this isn't it. And in the end, the book gave me the same unfinished and sad feeling as the song: that Peter can never fully get past the yearning for the magical ideals he lived in childhood, or let go of his need for the closeness he had for his father, both of which are irretrievably gone.