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; Booklist
Other reviews
This is a cool outline of modern knowledge about dreams, a subject of popular myth and superstition, and an explanation of what is really happening in our brains when we dream. Most people have heard of REM dreams, those vivid ones that occur periodically through the night, but there are other dreams that show that the brain is far from entirely switched off during the rest of sleep time. It's busy processing, sorting out adaptive information, working off-line, says J. Allan Hobson, and not disconnected.
Hobson tells us in Dreaming that both "waking and dreaming consciousness" are controlled by chemical systems in the brain. Throughout he uses his own dreams, recorded over many years, as examples while showing how the science of sleep has evolved over the past 50 years. Along the way, Freud takes a battering.
--Roy Herbert; NewScientist.com
If one is looking for a book that is a cookbook for the interpretation of dreams or a guide to the collective conscious of dreams, then keep on searching. However, if you are seeking an introduction to the science of dreams, the underlying physiological and chemical basis of dreaming, then look no further.
J. Allan Hobson provides an excellent introduction to neuroscience models of dreaming and their application to common psychological phenomena such as disruptive dreams, learning, and dream consciousness. Very informative and very readable.
-- James A. Simmons; Amazon.com