BOOKS
471
Book of Dream s.
Here indeed is the Reich who sho t down fl ying
saucers, who concocted a curiously Mani chean vision o f universal
strife, who pulled h is son within these fantasies and turned him
ironicall y into a heavil y armored, deepl y disturbed soldier in hi s own
p riva te army. No t long after hi s fa ther 's dea th in the Lewisburg prison ,
young Reich happens to see the science fi cti on film ,
Th e Fl y,
and in its
gro tesque plo t (a scientist experimenting with molecular transmu ta–
tion ends up with the head of a housefl y) the outline of hi s famil y life
suddenl y looms before him. "Right there in the movie, people were
laughing at how incredibl e
Th e Fl y
was when sitting right there in the
middl e o f the crowd was someone who had been through something
like tha t and it was rea\. " But how real is this perception of Reich 's
unhappy fa te? Having for a moment risked a point of view and clearl y
sta ted tha t he is the son of Dr. Frankenstein who grew up as an ac tor
in side a horror film , Peter Reich immedia tely defl ec ts the validity of
that feeling and blurs its implicit accusa ti on . "Reich was insane, they
said . But who was to judge? Did fl ying saucers actuall y chase Apo llo,
our as tro naut-heroes, strea king towa rd the moon?" The question o f
Reich 's science, whether it is valid or simpl y hocus-pocus, disguised
art, and therefore dangerous science, is left as a ques tion in
A
Book of
Dreams.
So, too, necessaril y, is Wilhelm Reich 's own sense o f himself
as a martyr, the modern Giordano Br uno. Except as an overwhelming
p resence, an omni scient voice, Reich remains outside hi s son 's baffl ed
purview.
The problem with
A Book of Dreams,
then , is tha t its writer has
no t yet disentangled himself from its underl ying bad dream-this
terrifying vi sion of the father's other face with its all-seeing eyes and
cl utching mandibles. The result is a n arra ti ve so constrained in its taut
ambivalence tha t it must perforce exist in fragments, leap back and
forth in time, always move in order to evade conclusions. Reich 's
dreams are used to sna tch up anecdo tes and crea te moods ; they do no t
lead toward revela ti on and understa nding. Dusan Makavejev' s
WR :
T he Mys teries of the Organ ism
is mentioned, young Reich imagin es
the kind of film he would make (principall y of the landscape a t
Orgonon ), but we never learn wha t he thought of Makavejev's ingeni–
ous film . T he Oranur episode, where one of Reich 's experiments with
radium went dangerously as tray, is diml y remembered, no t understood .
Reich 's own expl anations and ideas are typically presented in the
simplistic form of pa ternal advi ce- as though this were the onl y Reich
to which the son h ad access . Frozen to his childish view of Wilhelm
Reich and either unwilling or unable to probe his fa ther's work, P eter
Reich h as fin all y littl e to say or record in this book, except to trace
