Product Description

What is dreaming? What causes dreaming? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? Modern science has given us a new and increasingly clear and complete picture of how dreaming is created by the brain.This picture is important not only for understanding dreaming itself, but also for a science of consciousness and of mental health and illness. This book focuses on dreaming to introduce the reader to sleep laboratory science and to the cellular and molecular mechanismsof sleep. It shows how the new science of dreaming affects theories in psychoanalysis, and how it helps to understand the basis of mental illness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #898228 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-18
• Released on: 2003-02-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 180 pages

From Booklist
People have always been intrigued by the contents of dreams, seeking to interpret their meaning as either divine messages or the coded communiques of repressed desires, a la Freud, but what about the formal features of dreams, asks Harvard psychiatry professor and sleep expert Hobson. Dreams have specific perceptual, cognitive, and emotional qualities that set them apart from waking consciousness--loss of awareness of self, loss of orientation, loss of directed thought, reduction in logical reasoning, and poor memory--that correspond, as it turns out, to specific modes of brain activity. As Hobson meticulously matches dream features to brain chemistry, he cajoles readers into replacing mystical interpretations with an understanding of the evidence indicating that our precious dreams are the results of the brain's routine processing of an overwhelming amount of memory. Initially this perspective may seem reductively mechanical, but Hobson, who quotes extensively from his own 116-volume dream journal, doesn't deny that dreams offer clues to the psyche, and the complex workings of the brain are every bit as entrancing as the most dazzling of dreams. Donna Seaman
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Review
`a cool outline of modern knowledge' New Scientist

`For the excitement of science at the frontiers of consciousness theory and research. Allan Hobson's book is warmly recommended.' Vincent Deary, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher
numerous line drawings