MIRACLES IN AMERICA <i> by Sheila Kohler (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 175 pp.) </i>

Sheila Kohler was born in South Africa, studied psychology in Paris and lives in New York. The 13 short stories in this collection don’t reflect that experience directly so much as transform it into dreams.

Like dreams, Kohler’s stories have sharp details and vague outlines. They are narrow and obsessive, yet hint at wider meanings. Like dreamers, her characters, mostly women and children, float almost devoid of context in generic, mostly urban settings, in privileged comfort, in a subtle but all-pervading malaise, sometimes in myths of somebody else’s making.

“The odd thought struck me . . . that I had before me, leaning over me, breathing down on me, Snow White’s stepmother.” The narrator, a patient in a Swiss hospital, rejects this idea as “a passing fancy.” The older woman is recruiting her as a “distraction,” possibly sexual, for a distinguished local couple. There are no obvious parallels with the fairy tale, but the patient has hair “almost the color of ebony”; there is mention of “the shiny apple” that “promised nothing favorable,” and the story ends with the patient falling unconscious.

The creature on the living-room rug at night that seems to be drawing a young South African girl into a terrifying embrace may be the tokolosh, the evil spirit mentioned by a black servant boy, but its “small beringed hands” are those of the girl’s mother. The landowner in a tropical country who displays his wife’s corpse to a visitor almost certainly murdered her. The wife in Paris who spies on her husband’s rendezvous with another woman later dances with what may be the same woman and feels that she has healed the breach in her marriage. The middle-aged scientist who experiments with the restorative effects of snake venom is herself strangely rejuvenated by two sinister men who rent her an apartment and entangle her in marriage.

Individually, these stories are striking, if sometimes hard to interpret. Together, they strike much the same notes over and over. Only rarely does Kohler indulge us with sharp, realistic dialogue and even humor--a quality that she usually keeps tightly bandaged, under wraps.