Carole Levin's latest text brings us into the fluid, illusory, confusing, and conflicting world of early modern dreams, dreamers, and dream theory. Dreams, according to Levin, exhibit the “individual as well as cultural psyche,” and Levin includes examples of highly individualized dreams as well as those expressing the “significant issues of a historical period” (1). Levin attempts to show how early modern dreams are both strikingly similar to our own, and vastly different. Levin avoids using Sigmund Freud's and Carl Jung's theories, but instead she builds her own “theoretical framework using primarily early modern writers and dreams” (5). As her primary sources, Levin calls upon diverse texts: early modern books devoted to dream theory, drama, diaries, letters, familial histories, chronicle histories, and political and religious tracts. Levin notes the difficulty in her research and the possible unreliability of sources: dreams and waking visions are often confused, and the terms are fungible; writers often claim difficulty in fully remembering or adequately describing their dreams; and it is often difficult to discern between dreams “reported honestly” and those “clearly invented” (7).

In the first chapter, “1605, the Year of Three Dreams,” Levin deftly weaves together three distinct dream narratives, concerning dreams of discovery, prophecy, and criminality, with the political unrest of James I's ascension. Although James I ignored the importance of dreams, Levin demonstrates that many early modern English people were not of that mind-set and did believe that dreams could be prophetic. Levin uses these three dreams to move into a broader survey of murders caused or prevented by dreams, as well as people who simply dreamed of murder, to consider the turbulent times of James's early reign.

The second chapter, “Theorists and Practitioners: Dreaming about the Living and the Dead,” begins with Abraham de la Pryme, a botanist and folklorist, recounting a common folktale type of a man whose dreams eventually lead him to discover a large treasure in his own backyard. From this simple narrative, Levin delves into her most sprawling and complex chapter, which moves circuitously like dreams themselves. Levin considers early modern dream theory at large, utilizing the many books on dream interpretation and discussing how a dream's significance varied based on gender, age, bodily humors, and diet, or the length of time asleep, the time of night, or time of year of the dream. Levin closely studies the dreams of some of England's most famous astrologers and dream interpreters, such as John Dee and Simon Forman, and one young magician who leaves his study of the craft after being haunted by a friend's ghost in his dreams. This young scholar, Abraham de la Pryme, decided to study botany instead and became the source for the dream that opens the chapter.

“Religion and Witchcraft,” the third chapter, considers the religious turmoil under the Tudors and early Stuarts. Both Catholic and Protestant hagiographies recount the dreams of martyrs, and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular allowed readers to learn the dreams of Old Testament biblical characters. Angels, demons, and Christ often came to visit dreamers, and this is one of the points where confusion occurs between what is a dream and a vision. The chapter ends with a focus on dreams and deaths allegedly caused by witches.

The fourth chapter, “Sexuality, Power, and Dreams of a New Dynasty,” is the most conventionally literary, as Levin incorporates the dreams found in several early modern dramas. Levin focuses on the dreams of the monarchs and dreams about the monarchs in these plays alongside the accounts given in chronicle histories and contemporary personal reports to paint a complex view of the issues of power, marriage, and succession. As a strong feminist scholar who works with problematic ideas of female monarchy in her other major works, Levin creates an especially interesting dialogue between the dreams of and about the queens in these works. Levin continues the focus on dreams about and by early modern monarchs, especially Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, in the final, and most scholarly, chapter, “Sacred Blood and Monarchy,” to showcase the “sites where religion and politics, death and power, intersect” (130). She recounts both actual dreams of nobles and laypeople about the monarchs as well as Elizabeth's own dreams revolving around the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and anti-Elizabeth Catholic propaganda that depicts Elizabeth's nightmares as both witchlike and bloodied.

Levin's cultural study is accessible to those unfamiliar with the politics and social customs of early modern Europe but is still interesting to those immersed in political, literary, and historical considerations. Her narrative and argument often move in a fluid, dreamlike state, but, ultimately, these dreams teach us about the fears, hopes, desires, and concerns of early modern people on both personal and grand scales.