A Book of Dreams

Did any of this really happen? When Peter Reich published A Book of Dreams in 1973, his father, Wilhelm Reich, had been rediscovered as, at the very least, a prophet of the sexual revolution - but also quite possibly the discoverer of a hitherto unknown form of energy, called Orgone. (These aspects of his work were related: Good sex makes the Orgone flow.) The older Reich died in a federal prison in 1957, prosecuted, or by some account persecuted, for claiming that Orgone technology could cure cancer. Peter was 12 at the time.

Answering the basic question about Reich - i.e., "genius or madman?" - isn't really the point of A Book of Dreams, which is the most haunting memoir I have ever read. The son says he has no competence to judge his father's claims about Orgone Energy. In the preface to an edition reissued in 1989 (the last one, and now unfortunately out of print) he admits to "still hedging" on the matter.

What certainly was real, in any case, was the aura of discovery and adventure radiating from his father - as well as the sickening terror of watching the laboratory ransacked by G-men, and the complex experience of mourning a father rediscovered by others as a counterculture hero.

This is a book about growing up with a magician: a loving but mysterious father, powerful in his command of the secrets of the universe, but also vulnerable in ways that a boy of 8 or 9 could never imagine. I trust A Book of Dreams, not as a definitive statement of the truth about Wilhelm Reich, but for how it captures the feelings of childhood, when the frontier between reality and imagination can be easily crossed. In the son's own words: "Perhaps the story, released now and no longer secret, generates some energy of its own."

my piece for "Recommended Reading: Critics' Picks," Newsday, 27 May 2007