Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction

What is dreaming, and what causes it? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? Replacing dream mystique with modern dream science, J. Allan Hobson provides a new and increasingly complete picture of how dreaming is created by the brain. Focusing on dreaming to explain the mechanisms of sleep, this book explores how the new science of dreaming is affecting theories in psychoanalysis, and how it is helping our understanding of the causes of mental illness. J. Allan Hobson investigates his own dreams to illustrate and explain some of the fascinating discoveries of modern sleep science, while challenging some of the traditionally accepted theories about the meaning of dreams. He reveals how dreaming maintains and develops the mind, why we go crazy in our dreams in order to avoid doing so when we are awake, and why sleep is not just good for health but essential for life.

[...]... those associations Thus, it is true that the unusual spray-painting device resembles an agricultural tool; it is also true that Richard’s transformed face is, first, that of another Vermont farmer neighbour, Napoleon Carter, and later a calf (Richard and his dairy farmer father, Marshall, had many calves); and it is remarkably true that Shakespeare himself celebrated the transformation of characters... The radical change in emphasis, from the analysis of content to the analysis of form, exemplifies what scientists call a paradigm shift (a rapid change in pattern or theory) Through a formal approach, we found an entirely new and different way of looking at a familiar phenomenon Whereas previously students of dreaming had invariably asked ‘What does the dream mean?’, we asked what the mental characteristics... have owned since 1965 Richard Newland is the son of my farmer neighbour, Marshall Newland, with whom I have had a long and complicated but successful and gratifying relationship In spite of 3 What is dreaming? hat; a calf face – as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the ad for which did not include the calf!); and as far as I can tell, never Dreaming widely divergent priorities we have managed to get along... brain and the mind As we see in Chapters 4 and 5, this change in mode is affected both chemically and by selective brain deactivation The net effect is that, in dreaming (compared with waking), some mental functions are enhanced while others are diminished It’s as simple as that! And every bit as complicated Does everyone dream? All human beings who have been studied in sleep labs have Dreaming brain... the Nightcap, a home-based sleep monitor that allows us to know what state the participants were in before their reports, to compare spontaneous awakening with experimental awakening reports, to obtain abundant data from each person, and, best of all, to obtain reports in natural settings (Figure 1) Using this approach we have been able to accomplish two feats that have never before been attempted... the same individuals when awake and asleep 13 Dreaming Summary It is ironic to note that the first task of a science of the mind – to describe, define, and measure polar states of consciousness such as waking and dreaming – has only recently assumed a serious status Although artists and poets have long championed this approach and have appropriately celebrated the differences between conscious states,... needs a much more elaborate explanation to account for its description of events, many of which never happened and never could have happened Brain activation, which must be powerful, and highly selective, can account for some aspects – the hallucinatory imagery and the associated movements, for example But activation cannot account for the bizarreness and the loss of logical reasoning If brain 9 What... frame as the visions that their dreams inspired In modern art, the surrealists expressed through their wild paintings the conviction that dreaming was a more authentic state of consciousness than waking Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and René Magritte all painted in dream language Dali was the most surreal, Ernst the most psychoanalytic, and Magritte the most neuropsychological of these artists At the... such as these have the great advantage of being easy and inexpensive to obtain, numerous, and, to me at least, undeniably authentic Even though I have no recall of these dreams until I read the reports, I have the reports and I see in them the striking formal features that I have emphasized in this chapter Other dream journals The best dream journal that I have found is called The Dream Journal of... recall and the naturalism of the dream recalled For example, more positive emotion is found in post-awakening reports, indicating that we normally sleep right through our more pleasant dreams, whereas our unpleasant ones are more likely to awaken us and tilt the scales towards negative emotion A major disadvantage of sleep lab reports is that they are very expensive to obtain and tend to come almost exclusively . condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN. RIGHTS David DeGrazia ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes ART HISTORY Dana Arnold ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland THE