DREAM TIME Chapters From the Sixties <i> by Geoffrey O’Brien (Viking: $15.95)</i>

While remembered as a series of events, the 1960s were experienced much as journalist Geoffrey O’Brien portrays them here--as a state of mind. “Dream Time” isn’t the first book to recall the era as a tumble of emotions as well as events. But other recent histories, such as those by Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin, portray the movement in an unrealistically flattering light, chronicling passions and convictions of the counterculture elite--bright activist leaders--rather than the hip hoi polloi. O’Brien, in contrast, studies ordinary people caught up in an “utterly passive and utterly unstoppable” cultural movement, to use an expression for the Taoist concept of water. The tone is ironic, as in this depiction of a young 1960s audience watching a spy film: “In the darkness of the movie theater freedom stirred muddily, fumbling in the balcony or yelling at the close-up of an actor.”

O’Brien’s prose sometimes slips into the overly dismissive style of contemporary American novels like “Less Than Zero”: “A tight strapless gown or a trench coat was not a garment, it was a state of being,” he writes in a style that mocks its subjects by exaggerating their convictions--elevating the author, of course, in the process. Throughout most of “Dream Time,” though, O’Brien seems to be standing with the activists, alienated by the way the Establishment integrates even the most tumultuous events into the framework of the normal: “Their response to, say, the death of Bobby Kennedy is to compartmentalize the event by taking obsessive note of its trivia--What time did it happen? How long a delay before it hit the wire services? How did Walter Cronkite react--and thereby repulse it from boarding their reality.” All the while, of course, O’Brien is keenly aware that the activists are also condemning themselves to inaction by believing that dreams alone would bring direction. “Everybody knew who the enemy was,” O’Brien writes, “but it was somewhat harder to envision what would happen after the enemy had been knocked off.”