Book Review: Dream Magic
Title: Dream Magic
Author: Sirona Knight
Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco
Copyright: 2000
Rating: 1/5
Summary: This is a book to teach you how to work spells with a dream theme.
Alright so to start off, let me just say this book sucked and was not worth the $1.50 I paid at Goodwill for it. In this first chapter, our lovely Ms. Knight describes what she calls “dream altars” which are basically Wiccan altars. She describes “Dream magic tools” which include things like athames and other Wiccan tools. She does not ascribe them to Wicca, nor does she bother to go into any information about Wicca. She treats the tools, altars, and circle setups as her own invention. She talks also about “dram magic timing”, which again is astrological corespondences and is hardly unique to her “dream magic”.
Dream magic itself is never really defined. In one moment, dream magic is magic done to achieve your dreams for the future, but then she constantly refers to the kinds of dreams you get while you are sleeping. Again, all components and tools she describes are taken directly from any Wicca 101 text without source, without reference, and without describing any of the cultural frameworks from which these ideas are taken. While she never specifies they are unique to her “dream magic” field, she does indeed imply it by her refusal to notate and provide sources.
After the first few chapters describing the various tools of “dream magic”, Ms. Knight has divided the rest of the book up into spells. Each spell has a catchy title, like “Tonight’s Adventure: Living Long Dream Spell”. She goes into some ramble about the subject of the spell, lists the items you’ll need for it, and then into some weird thing she calls “spinning the spell”, as if there is some right or wrong way to cast it. In my personal opinion, she is using the word “spinning” instead of “cast” to try to give the book a more dreamlike feel. She doesn’t succeed, and it just sounds like she’s making stuff up. The categories for these spells are love, money and success, self-empowerment, health, beauty, and wellness, practical, and divine.The spells themselves could come out of any grimoire you’d find at Barnes and Noble.
All the spells all centered around a dreamlike theme, but suddenly we see nothing of the kind of dream you have when you make goals and plans for the future.
Honestly, I have not read any other of Sirona Knight’s books, but after this book I certainly won’t be. She does not use citations, does not bother to explain context when this book is obviously of the 101 category, and tries to present old material in a new guise.
She does include a bibliography, but any of us who have ever written papers for school know that you can slap on sources to a bibliography, never cite them, and just make the list look impressive.
There is nothing in this book that is truly unique. As I said before, it’s the same old witchcraft basics wrapped up in a starry blanket.I feel that if she had to kept to her theme, of working with the night and the moon and stars she would have done a better job. As it is, there is too much in this book that is unnecessary. Perhaps this book would have been better suited to a higher level of witchy education (e.g. those of us beyond 101) and she could have left out the entry level nonsense and focused more on what I had assumed the book was going to be about based on comments/kudos from respected authors and the jacket, which is working with the subconscious through dreams. Perhaps more focus on dream-states and altered consciousness would have been in her favor. While it is easy to postulate on what she could have done, the fact is she didn’t do it, and what she did do is certainly sub-par.
Save yourself some money, and don’t buy this book, even from a goodwill.
Thoughts? Opinions? Did I royally screw this one up?
(Source: dreammagicbookreview)
