In this fascinating book, Harvard researcher Hobson offers an intriguing look at the nightly odyssey through the illusory world of dreams. Hobson describes how the theory of dreaming has advanced dramatically over the past 50 years, sparked by the use of EEGs in the 1950s and by recent innovations in brain imaging. 20 illustrations.

Rev. ed. of: Dreams and the growth of personality. 2nd ed. c1985.

Learn the methods used by mystics and seers worldwide to awaken consciousness in the dream state. Among the ancient mystics, shamans, Egyptians, Tibetans, and even modern investigators like Carl Jung, consciousness and the dream state have been of the utmost spiritual and psychological importance. Astral projection, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences and vision quests are all part of the extensive practical science of Dream Yoga, the sacred knowledge of consciously harnessing the power of the dream state. Any sincere practitioner who actively utilizes the clues in this book can open the doors to the inner dimensions of nature and the soul, and thereby come to know the truth of the mysteries that exist beyond the reach of our physical senses. * Provides step-by-step guidance leading to personal experience in the internal worlds * Explains how to remember dreams and how to understand them * Filled with examples from all the world’s religions Chapters include: Consciousness, The Awakening of Consciousness, Fascination, Sleep, Remembering Oneself, Complementary Practice, Patience and Tenacity, On Dreams, Dreams and Visions, Key of SOL, Dream Yoga Discipline, Special Nourishment to Develop the Power of the Memory, Tantric Dream, The Return Practice, The Four Blessings, The Guardian Angel, Hod (The Astral World), The Science of Meditation, Chapter 13: Dream Interpretation, Types of Dreams, Rules for Dream Interpretation, Astral Projection, The Astral Body, Useless Dreams

You come to a fork in the road. On the right is the path to the world created by all minds. This is the objective world, the public world. On the left is the path to the world created by your own mind, your own unconscious. This is your dream world, your private world. Your dream world changes every time you go sleep. There is no continuity of space and time. The objective world, by contrast, stays the same every time you wake up. There is complete continuity of space and time. That's the difference between an objective, public experience and a subjective, private experience. Your consciousness is designed for facing the public world. It becomes drastically disoriented when it faces the private world. Yet it also has the chance to do something astounding – to enter and probe your own mind and discover all of its greatest and deepest secrets. How else will you know yourself if you don't know your own mind? Only dreams can take you there. It's time to delve into the mysteries and extraordinary powers of dreams.

A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate—either in the waking state or in a lucid dream—we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives.

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. And in Dreaming Souls he provides both an accessible survey of the latest research on sleep and dreams and a compelling new theory about the nature and function of dreaming. Flanagan argues that while sleep has a clear biological function and adaptive value, dreams are merely side effects, "free riders," irrelevant from an evolutionary point of view. But dreams are hardly unimportant. Indeed, Flanagan argues that dreams are self-expressive, the result of our need to find or to create meaning, even when we're sleeping. Rejecting Freud's theory of manifest and latent content--of repressed wishes appearing in disguised form--Flanagan shows how brainstem activity during sleep generates a jumbled profusion of memories, images, thoughts, emotions, and desires, which the cerebral cortex then attempts to shape into a more or less coherent story. Such dream-narratives range from the relatively mundane worries of non REM sleep to the fantastic confabulations of deep REM that resemble psychotic episodes in their strangeness. But however bizarre these narratives may be, they can shed light on our mental life, our well being, and our sense of self. Written with clarity, lively wit, and remarkable insight, Dreaming Souls offers a fascinating new way of apprehending one of the oldest mysteries of mental life.

David Foulkes is one of the international leaders in the empirical study of children’s dreaming, and a pioneer of sleep laboratory research with children. In this book, which distills a lifetime of study, Foulkes shows that dreaming as we normally understand it—active stories in which the dreamer is an actor—appears relatively late in childhood. This true dreaming begins between the ages of 7 and 9. He argues that this late development of dreaming suggests an equally late development of waking reflective self-awareness. Foulkes offers a spirited defense of the independence of the psychological realm, and the legitimacy of studying it without either psychoanalytic over-interpretation or neurophysiological reductionism.