Winner Whiting Writers' Award Winner Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction Finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America's whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the '90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that's nothing less than extraordinary. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart. Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe.

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.

For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious: through the process of interpretation, the manifest and sometimes bewildering content of dreams can be traced back to the unconscious representations underlying it. But can we understand dreams in another way by considering how the unconscious is structured by our social experiences? This is hypothesis that underlies this highly original book by Bernard Lahire, who argues that dreams can be interpreted sociologically by seeing the dream as a nocturnal form of self-to-self communication. Lahire rejects Freud’s view that the manifest dream content is the result of a process of censorship: as a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is the symbolic arena most completely freed from all forms of censorship. In Lahire’s view, the dream is a message which can be understood only by relating it to the social world of the dreamer, and in particular to the problems that concern him or her during waking life. As a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is an intimate private diary, providing us with the elements of a profound and subtle understanding of who and what we are. Studying dreams enables us to discover our most deep-seated and hidden preoccupations, and to understand the thought processes that operate within us, beyond the reach of our volition. The study of dreams and dreaming has largely been the preserve of psychoanalysis, psychology and neuroscience. By showing how dreams are connected to the lived experience of individuals in the social world, this highly original book puts dreams and dreaming at the heart of the social sciences. It will be of great value to students and scholars in sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis and to anyone interested in the nature and meaning of dreams.

A comprehensive survey of contemporary approaches to understanding dreams. If you can have only one book on dreams, this is the one to have.

First published in 1991. An introductory guidebook to dream interpretation which will be of interest to analysts and therapists both in practice and training and to a wider readership interested in the origins and significance of dreams. This book should be of interest to dream psychology analysts, therapists, counsellors, and the general reader.