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Rating: 
Summary: good fiction
Review: Donner is one of Castanada's "inner circle diciples" that has dropped out of sight. This book is just a continuation of the Castanada mythos. Fun reading, but certainly not something to take serious as being real or as a way of life.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: I am a Castaneda fan (big time) and also enjoyed Taisha Abelar's book. But this book was a terrible waste of time and money. First of all, there are NO TEACHINGS in this book whatsoever. Secondly, the book is primarily about how confused she is as to where she is - I kid you not. If you want to read a monument to self-importance, this is it. Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Worth a second read
Review: I like this book for the very fact that there are no teachings. Although I enjoy Castaneda's teachings, he can get very bogged down and frustrating. Books are the western way for learning, but "experiencing" is worth more than a thousand words in any book, especially, if one is to receive any training in shamanism, etc, or for that matter medicine, law, psychology, etc. Castaneda writes well, but is still just an intensely involved anthropologist in his projects.I also wouldn't say this book was a waste of money (buy it second-hand...). And, self-importance is the irony of this book - of any of Castaneda's books. In fact, if I remember correctly, Don Juan constantly reprimands Castaneda for being so self-important. I enjoyed the stories and EXPERIENCES of this book and the descriptions of the sorcerers. Florinda's descriptions made these people come to life and not remain flat, one-dimensional persona. Who would have thought that Casteneda by any other name, was funny and NOT entirely a self-absorbed person. I enjoyed the unfolding of Florinda's learning experience and her descriptions of dreaming awake. Go ahead and read the book for its own merit - she writes fluently on a difficult subject.
Rating:
Summary: Worth a second read
Review: I like this book for the very fact that there are no teachings. Although I enjoy Castaneda's teachings, he can get very bogged down and frustrating. Books are the western way for learning, but "experiencing" is worth more than a thousand words in any book, especially, if one is to receive any training in shamanism, etc, or for that matter medicine, law, psychology, etc. Castaneda writes well, but is still just an intensely involved anthropologist in his projects. I also wouldn't say this book was a waste of money (buy it second-hand...). And, self-importance is the irony of this book - of any of Castaneda's books. In fact, if I remember correctly, Don Juan constantly reprimands Castaneda for being so self-important. I enjoyed the stories and EXPERIENCES of this book and the descriptions of the sorcerers. Florinda's descriptions made these people come to life and not remain flat, one-dimensional persona. Who would have thought that Casteneda by any other name, was funny and NOT entirely a self-absorbed person. I enjoyed the unfolding of Florinda's learning experience and her descriptions of dreaming awake. Go ahead and read the book for its own merit - she writes fluently on a difficult subject.
Rating: 
Summary: Great as an intro to sorcery or in conjunction w/ Castaneda
Review: If you've read Carlos Castaneda's body of work and are looking for further descriptions of the sorcerer's world, "Being in Dreaming" is a great way to go. Florinda Donner-Grau is an elegant writer, but she accomplishes this without losing the directness that marked Castaneda's writing. This book is a look at sorcery from the perspective of a woman -- but it focuses more on the abstract aspects of sorcery than Taisha Abelar's book, much more akin to "The Eagle's Gift" and "The Fire From Within." On the other hand, if you've never read any of these books before, this is an excellent place to start -- especially if you're a woman. The author doesn't assume any knowledge of the world of sorcery, and more or less presents her experiences from the ground up, making it very much accessible to anybody. All you'll really need is an open mind and a surplus of energy, and the very act of reading this book will become a transient act of sorcery itself.
Rating:
Summary: eye openning
Review: in my opinion one of the best books in castaneda series-if i may call it that.
as soon as i read the book-(and the other dreaming book by castaneda) i started having vivid dreams. after a while i could actually manipulate the dream. not long after that i was to wake up in dream- still sleep yet and i could see the room clearly from different perspectives. then i started to precieve other things which kind of scared me. i stopped. that was 4 years ago. i re-read the book again this week. i am going to start dreaming.
Rating: 
Summary: Good if you have read Castenada
Review: This the first book i read relating to the whole Castaneda universe, and i found it to be a good introduction. What they refer to as sorcery in the aforementioned series of books, is a practice in which one realizes that the observed external world is really a perception depending on his own mind, and bending his own mind to jump to other versions of reality, for the purpose of unlocking hidden mental abilities. This book doesn't have any deep teachings, as other reviewers have noted, but it contains a lot of good philosophical primers that may be interesting to someone who is first getting to know about the world of 'sorcery'. This is because the main character in this book is a typical girl of our culture. The other characters in the witches' world spend a lot of the book making fun of her and poking holes in her western values and beliefs. While they're initating this character into their strange new world in such a way, they're really initiating you, the reader. I also found the account of the wild dreams the girl travels through, to be highly entertaining, and at least as interesting as Castaneda's tales. (The one complaint i have with the book is how when the girl asks a very relevant question about something strange they are telling her about, the characters often brush her off promising to explain later, which they never end up doing.)
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: With this book, Florinda Donner (FD) gives us another view of the sorcerer's world revealed in the works of Carlos Castaneda (CC) - the way of knowledge ; the warriors path. As with CC's books it was a difficult book for me to put down. Unlike CC, however, FD's presentation is much more of a view from the outside, only entering that world for brief periods. Perhaps because FD is a woman, or maybe because she is not a "nagual", her tales of power bring that world to the reader in a unique way. It's the same world, seen through a different pair of eyes. Eyes which, for me, could more likely have been my own. In one sense, "Being In Dreaming" is more believable than the stories of CC. The tales have a more ordinary, real-life quality, while still being told artfully and with a great sense of adventure and humor. This same real-life quality, however, in a sense makes it more difficult to accept the juxtaposition of such people to our day-to-day reality. Throughout most of the book, it's easy to think (of the characters in "Being In Dreaming") things like "those people are crazy", or "they're just irresponsible non-conformists". But by the end of the book, our own phantom-like nature becomes clear, and one is left with the haunting realization that it's we, not they, who are not seeing "ourselves and our surroundings for what we really are: breathtaking events that bloom into transitory existence once and are never to be repeated again". Where CC's works are like high explosives, shattering the ego at it's foundation, "Being-In-Dreaming" is like a subtle, consistent chipping-away at that same foundation. While the ego has the capacity to totally rebuild itself; to simply "forget" the blasts of CC, FD's stories enter the reader's mind and remain, like those small plants that grow in the cracks of huge boulders, eventually cracking them to pieces. The subtitle, "An Initiation into the Sorcerer's World", is a very good description. Read with caution.
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