Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind

by Owen J. Flanagan

Book Overview

What, if anything, do dreams tell us about ourselves? What is the relationship between types of sleep and types of dreams? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Or are dreams simply meaningless mental noise--"unmusical fingers wandering over the piano keys"?

With expertise in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Owen Flanagan is uniquely qualified to answer these questions. In this groundbreaking work, he provides both an accessible survey...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195126874
• ISBN13: 9780195126877
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The title is very misleading!

The book is well written and the thesis is very basic: dreams are noise organized by your brain in a desperate attempt to bring chaos to order but some insights can be gleaned from the noise and how your brain organizes it. What I find disturbing is that, as far as I can discern, Flanagan does not believe in souls. He does not subscribe to the homunculus theory of something other than the human brain that gives us consciousness. He vacillates on the issue of God etc. and has a tendency to use the word "robust" a little too often but his style is accessible to the reader. So, why the title? Maybe a trivial consideration but I think it is important to convey to a potential reader through the title an incredibly compacted summation of the contents of the book. I like that he shoots Freud out of the water to a large extent because it is time to dispense with the psychoanalytical drivel that seems to have permeated so much of the average persons concept of the mind. All this having been said, I enjoyed the book and I would recommend it.

Focus on the physiological

"Dreaming Souls" clearly lays out an anti-Freudian way of viewing dream content. Flanagan's focus on dreams as "free-riders" that coincidentally join us each night when we sleep is a fascinating way to interpret the latest in sleep science. He offers his Laws of Dream Science to help explain the bizarre nature of our dreams without giving them undeserved (in his opinion) importance to our everyday lives. His IUD scale measures the incongruity, uncertainty, and discontinuity found in most dreams. The descriptions of our physiological processes during sleep are presented in easy-to-understand language, with diagrams and an occasional photograph to help discuss these complex ideas. A Duke University professor, Flanagan adroitly explains difficult concepts in simple terms that even a C-student freshman could understand (which may or may not be a good thing for you). Despite this small complaint about style, the substance of this book is so overwhelmingly important that anyone the least bit interested in sleeping, dreaming, Freud, or consciousness should read it. Leslie Halpern, author of Dreams on Film: The Cinematic Struggle Between Art and Science and Reel Romance: The Lovers' Guide to the 100 Best Date Movies.

a seminal work on dreams i would give it a 4.5 if i could

owen flanagan does it once again in a great naturalistic work that sketches a controversial but logical theory in a controversial field. With experience in the philosophic, neuroscientific, and psychological fields owen is more than capable of proving his theory that dreams are not spandrels of sleep, they are fitness enhancing and although a biproduct of evolution are self expressive. He tackles all the neccessary and interesting questions from all his fields and creates an overal complex but clear and illuminating work that is a extreme pleasure to read

A Better Way To Consider Dreams

Flanagan delivers a theory of dreams that could largely supplant the psychodynamic dream theories of Freud, Jung and others of this ilk. Freud, as is well known, thought dreams release socially unacceptable desires that got repressed in our waking lines. Dreams are a royal road to the dynamic, meaningful unconscious. Is an intimidating theory that makes it prudent either to forget dreams or keep them to oneself, or save to disclose in the confidentiality of therapy. Jung's theories were not so narrowly based, but nonetheless he touts dream material as personally laden messages cast up from the deep coils of our personal and collective unconscious minds.Flanagan has a much friendlier, sensible view based on modern findings about how our brains actually work, as well as an extensive survey of actual dream content, information not available in the early 20th Century when Freud and Jung cranked out their dream theories. Flanagan's book is well worth the effort to understand. I will attempt a few highlights so as to whet your appetite to learn more directly from his book.One key concept is that our brains evolved within social groups of our early ancestors. We need to make sense of things while awake, especially what's what in our own social group. We are tuned to take gossip and make the best story we can of it. We're storytellers one and all, making up a story and calling it what actually happened. We hear and see whatever fits in with the stories we have constructed over time.The brain never turns off. Flanagan credits as dreams any mentation we have while not awake. Let me attempt report to you Flanagan's idea of dreaming in the rapid eye movement part of sleep. If you observe a sleeping person whose eyeballs are moving back and forth under their lids, and then wake the person suddenly, usually the person will report mentation that has a storyline. Flanagan points out that the rapid eye movements are controlled by neurons in the pontine brainstem (rather than a result of a dreamer looking at images of the dream), so rapid eye movements are indicative of PGO waves originating in the pons (P) from neurons that move the eyes. These neurons also signal the lateral geniculate (G) body in the thalamus and the occipital cortex (O), which is the main visual processing area of the brain. The PGO waves are also involved in the neurochemical stockpiling of neurotransmitters secreted by neurons. The puzzle of sleep is far from being completely solved, but most likely restoring the stockpiles is a major function. Prolonged lack of sleep does lead to fuzzy brain functioning. The PGO waves stimulate neurons all over the brain to get on with producing neurotransmitters, and all sorts of mentation bubbles up. However, Flanagan reasons: "but there is no reason...to think that the content of the mentation of the PGO waves is causally related to these processes. The mentation that occurs is mostly noise-at least as measured against what one is t

An important book on the 100 year mark of Freud's theory.

On the 100th anniversary of Freud's THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, the philosopher/scientist Owen Flanagan has given readers a facinating synthesis of natural selection and depth psychology in the form of an original theory regarding the purpose and function of dreams. Written in a lively and conversational style, the book dissects such disparate dream-work hypotheses as Freud's, Hobson's and Crick's on its way to a realistic yet human understanding of Hamlet's rub. Dreams are not evolutionary adaptations and do not contribute to the species' survival; they are simply by-products of the neuro-chemical goings-on of sleep, but they do reveal ouselves to ourselves and contribute to personality and identity. This book is a worthwhile companion to Antonio Damasio's THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS from a neurological perspective and Gordon Globus' DREAM LIFE, WAKE LIFE from a philosopical one. Flanagan elaborates on the epistomological musings of Descartes (how can we know if we are ever truly awake and not dreaming?), the moral dilemma of St. Augustine (can we truly sin in deams?) and the objectivity challenge of Daniel Dennet (do we actually dream at all or just invent the dream story upon awakening?) While there are interesting examples of dream interpretation here, readers should not look for deep symbolism, creativity wonder stories, Jungian archetypes or a how-to book on decoding one's own dreams. Neither does this book really have much to say about the general evolution of consciousness outside of dreams--Damasio's is the place to go for that. But this is good reading on the cognitive structure of dreams and it is science straight up--an important book as our dreams, along with our lives, move into the next millenium.