Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep

by J. Allan Hobson

Book Overview

What is dreaming? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? In this fascinating book, Harvard researcher Allan Hobson offers an intriguing look at our nightly odyssey through the illusory world of dreams.
Hobson describes how the theory of dreaming has advanced dramatically over the past fifty years, sparked by the use of EEGs in the 1950s and by recent innovations in brain imaging. We have learned for instance that, in...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192803042
• ISBN13: 9780192803047
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Review of Hobson's Dreaming

I've not yet read Hobson's fuller work, the Dreaming Brain, but I assume that this work was designed as a concise version of this thicker scientific work. To this end, Dreaming succeeds. Hobson write clearly, and includes several entries from his own dream diary to make the work even more personal and interesting. The title accurately describes the content of this work; Hobson focuses on dreaming, but also touches on sleep in general. I wish this volume would have ben more highly organized. Also, because there is a strong theory contesting the content of Hobson's own, I feel it would have been appropriate to acknowledge and refute Solms directly. Instead, Hobson lightly mentions this counter-theory, and dismisses it in a sentence or two.

forget your freud

Forget Freud. Save any money you might spend on the couches of his psychoanalytic priests who divine sophisticated interpretations of the content of your dreams. In this slender volume Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who specializes in sleep research, uses the latest in neurobiology to supercede what he considers the "scientifically naive and flawed ideas" of the psychoanalytic tradition of the ostensibly hidden meanings of dreams. Instead of chasing content analysis as the holy grail of dream theory, he proffers what he calls a formal analysis of dreams. Dream content varies from person to person, but their formal properties are virtually identical in everyone --emotional salience, perceptual or visual vividness, bizarre logic and cognition, and difficulty in recall. In the Freudian tradition a person's dream is precisely not what the dreamer experiences it to be; instead, it is an encoded, veiled, and mysterious message that must be decoded (for a price, of course). Dreams are unconscious or repressed desires that bubble up when the ego is asleep. There is, thus, a separation between the dreamer and the dream, the brain and the mind, the ego and the id. Hobson dismisses this Freudian analysis of dream content as a "hopeless fantasy," and he admits that he wants to "discredit Freud emphatically." To do this he proposes the unapologetically reductionistic notion that the mental mind-physical brain is one and the same thing (or, our minds are "functional states of our brain"). Dreaming, then, is nothing more or less than the spontaneous, self-activation of the mind-brain during sleep. Why the brain self-activates just so, we do not know. Nor can we be sure about any purpose of such neurological functions, if there are any. The difference between waking and sleeping is one of brain chemistry, our mental state being "a constantly negotiated compromise between the poles of waking sanity and dreaming madness." Thus, "we do not dream because our unconscious wishes or drives would, if undisguised, wake us up. We dream because our brains are activated during sleep." Hobson uses a number of examples from his own dream journal to illustrate his points, along with sleep lab reports from science research, and home-based reports. One feature that I especially enjoyed was the nine "sidebar" boxes that interact with common, popular questions. Do animals dream? Probably. Do we dream in color? Yes. Do blind people see in their dreams? It depends. Are men's and women's dreams different? No. Hobson has also done a fine job avoiding academic jargon; he writes in an unusually accessible style. If Hobson is right that Freud is wrong, I find it comforting to know that any number of my "bad dreams" can be explained by simple brain chemistry rather than by foreboding, speculative and expensive interpretations by so-called experts.

Decent

This is a decent book on dreaming. It answered many of the questions that I might have raised about the subject. It does so in an informed and easy-to-read manner. It is not stuffed with references (both pro and con). Much of the medical science is filtered so that the person-on-the-street will understand it. Many sidebars answer some basic questions. The headings are brief and accurate, making it easy to skim and find answers to questions. Overall, a worthwhile reading. Recommended.

What Dreams Mean, Scientifically

Everyone is interested in dreams. If you are lucky enough to remember one, it will be something you think about upon awakening and perhaps through the day. Dreams are strange, frightening, and funny enough that it isn't at all uncommon to tell a friend, "Guess what I dreamt last night?" if there is a peculiar dream that bears relating. Most of us are convinced that dreams mean something. It used to be thought that gods communicated their intentions to us via dreams. Other people insisted that dreams could predict the future, and there were dream books in which you could look up the subject of your dream, say "cat," and find that dreaming of a cat was a certain prediction for maybe riches or maybe love. Freud's thoughts about dreams were close to this sort of thinking; the content of a dream had hidden meanings that were available for interpretations. But everyone who looked to dream content for meaning was looking in the wrong place, according to J. Allan Hobson in _Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep_ (Oxford). Not the content of dreams, but the form involved and the neurological basis for it are where the meanings of dreams lie.Dreams are characterized by visual hallucinations, emotionalism, disorientation, and other characteristics of delirium. Hobson makes the case that we do not have to wait for senility or brain damage to descend into delirium, but we do it every night. Careful analysis of what happens to the brain in dreaming indicates some basic neurobiology. Dreaming represents an alternate form of consciousness represented by alternate neurochemical functioning within the dreaming brain; noradrenaline and serotonin in particular, chemicals that neurons use between each other as signal transmitters, are shut off in the dreaming brain in the parts that would allow a waking brain to direct thoughts, make decisions based on experience, and so on. Brain scanning has revealed that the regions of the brain involved in vision and in emotional reactions are quite busy in dreams, but the areas governing decision-making and judgment are quiet. The state of Rapid Eye Movement, when dreams are most likely, seems to be important in consolidating memories and in giving children rehearsal for action, enabling them to become their own agents when awake. These REM activities are what is important, and will need much more research; what we dream is not exactly a random side effect of the brain's REM work, but the content of the dream seems to defy scientific interpretation. Freud's concentration on content, and his insistence that there was a wish drive producing the dream, and a censorship function that made the dream bizarre so that we could handle the wishes in a distorted form, has been a bedrock of psychoanalysis, but has not leant itself to confirmation the way science is done now. For Hobson, who does his research in the sleep labs at Harvard, the dream is not symbolic, nor is it wish fulfillment, nor a process of censo

The Neuroscience of Dreaming

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.