A Book of Dreams

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Anyway, I'm still keen to learn more about Reich, because his ideas were interesting, and while clearly a lot of what he ended up believing was nonsense, there's apparently something in some of what he did, and there was something weird going on with the FDA smashing his orgone accumulators and him dying in prison and all. When I found out it inspired the song and also the music video for CLOUDBUSTING by Kate Bush I had to read this book. Me parece una historia apasionante, escrita por un hombre real con emociones reales, con una belleza descriptiva que cautiva a cualquiera que lo lea y lo invita a soñar. Peter Reich is the son of Wilhelm Reich, one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century.

Well, the Dad's ideas and inventions became ever more, well, worrying, including his design for a machine to burst the clouds and make it rain ("But every time it rains, you're here in my head. There is something intimate about being allowed to witness this very private reflection, and for this reason the book is as emotionally compelling as it is absolutely strange.He also built other devices, such as “cloudbusters”, which were supposed to direct orgone into clouds and make it rain. 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. The short memoir is a series of memories from Peter’s secluded childhood at Orgonon, a sprawling property in the New England where Peter spent his days roaming the countryside and serving as a soldier in his father’s war against the aliens. Like many, I picked this up because I’m a big Kate Bush fan and was excited to read a story about a father son relationship, rain machines and other magical things. 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.

While my childhood was vastly different from Peter’s, reading this book reminded me of a lot of the experiences that I probably took for granted as a kid. He was given responsibility in this cosmic war by operating the cloudbuster, a machine that could control the weather. Peter, his son, shared with his father the revolutionary concept of a world where dream and reality are virtually indistinguishable, and the sense of mission which set him and his followers apart from the rest of the human race. 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. Peter Reich regales us with tales from his childhood spent largely with his doctor/psychologist/scientist/inventor/eccentric father Wilhelm Reich.

Peter Reich is the only son of Wilhelm Reich, a famously strange pseudo-science philosopher active in the mid-20th century. The later pages howl with young Reich's pain and the difficulty of coming to terms with his father: genius or madman? In the span of owning this book since this summer and adding it to this list, I have read it three times prior to deciding to put it down for a while. If you haven't gathered already from some of these lyrics, this is a very unusual book about a very unusual childhood.

Unbeknownst to him, some of the accumulators where moved to New York, and, as a result, he was put on trial for contempt of court. I agree with what I originally said in that Peter struggled to process his unconventional childhood. His Dad was a demented scientist who developed a luminous but toxic paint, all taces of which had to be destroyed. I did psychology A-level before it was all glowing brains and no-one was making much of a pretence to know anything definitive about the mind, and we covered a whole bunch of theories that I'm guessing don't get a lot of class time today. One finds themselves constantly asking whether what one is reading is meant to be reality, or a dream, or under water, or in the sky.Reich also believed that human energy (orgasmic energy, in particular) could help control the weather. In his writing, Peter celebrates the love between a father and son while also exploring the trauma he faced as a result of his father's eccentric beliefs.