The overarching objectives of the frontline sleep researchers who co-authored this book are to sift the truth from the myths of dreams, and to narrate the the history of our understanding of this mysterious phenomenon. Admitting that ‘there is no consensus among dream researchers as to what counts as a dream‘, the authors conceived it as ‘any mental experience that occurs during sleep‘, and as ‘any thoughts, feelings, or images that come into our awareness while we sleep’. With this perspective, the book covered a range of what it referred to as ‘important and meaningful experiences‘ – from ‘isolated sensations or thoughts’, to ‘epic otherworldly journeys’. The book also chronicled the roles that dreams have played in human culture and religion, demonstrating how these have defined our conceptions of the world and the universe. A metaphysical tone also comes across with such themes as lucid, precognitive, telepathic and paranormal dreams. The book’s key message however is this-worldly, promoting the sense of the dream world as a place ‘to explore your past and better prepare you for an uncertain future‘ (pages x-xi, 1-2 and 11, 51, 227-260, 265 and 269).
A key theme of the book is its documentation of the evolution of our scientific understanding of dreams. In this account, the authors traced the turning point to ‘one cold December night in 1951′ when Eugene Aserinsky, a hard-up student of the foremost sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman, recorded awake electrical eye movement activity from his eight-year-old son who was ‘sound asleep‘. This observation, the authors said, led to the realisation that sleep has rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM phases. The book then described how, four years later, Kleitman and another student, William Dement, linked REM sleep with vivid dreaming. The authors went further to describe REM sleep as ‘a unique brain and body state that is not seen at any other time of the day or night‘, during which ‘the brain’s careful regulation of a host of bodily functions seems to go offline‘. In their masterly discussion, the authors provided an enlightening discussion of the cycles and stages of sleep, documenting such fascinating facts as ‘we probably are dreaming most of the night’; ‘we dream in all stages of sleep’; babies enter REM sleep faster than adults; and REM dreams are ‘longer, dreamier, more bizarre, and more emotional‘ than non-REM dreams (pages 41-50, 80 and 247).
One of the most engrossing themes of the book is its exploration of the contents of dreams. This narrative covered the fifty-five categories of typical dreams which the authors said include nightmares, recurrent dreams, sexual dreams, dreams of ‘failing an examination’, and ‘dreams of being attacked or pursued‘. Asserting that there is a logic to even the most bizarre dreams, the book explained that such factors as people’s daytime concerns and activities influence the types of dreams they experience, and that ‘our dreams are almost never an accurate replay of daytime events’. The authors also explored how gender affects dream content, for example when they said that women’s dreams tend to be set indoors and men’s outdoors, and that physical aggression, sexual experiences, and finding money are more frequent in men’s dreams. They also added that women have an equal number of male and female characters in their dreams, but that men have ‘twice as many male characters’ (pages 55 and 132-157).
Just as the book explored the physiology of sleep, it also discussed the sleep disorders that are associated with dreaming. For example, the authors reviewed nightmares in the context of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – a condition in which they said dreams uniquely recur with ‘realistic replay of the actual traumatic event’. They further explained that the nightmares in PTSD result from ‘specific failures of sleep both to weaken emotional responses to traumatic memories and to promote their integration with older memories’. Another intriguing dream disruption the book reviewed was REM sleep behaviour disorder, a condition in which ‘sleep behavior and dream content are almost always in agreement’ because ‘the paralysis that normally accompanies REM sleep breaks down‘ and people therefore ‘act out their dreams’. Other dream-related phenomena and disorders which the book reviewed included epic dreaming, sleep walking, sleep paralysis and narcolepsy (pages 48, 84 and 204-226).
The most academic aspect of the book is perhaps its exposition of why people dream, and the most important function of dreams that it promoted was their role in ‘emotional and memory processing‘. Arguing that emotions and memory are the physiological activities of sleep that are ‘most tightly tied to dreaming’, the authors explained that dreams help to smoothen out the ‘rough edges‘ from painful memories of stressful events, thereby helping to prevent the development of PTSD. Another constructive function of dreaming the book discussed was how it ‘facilitates our waking creativity‘, the authors explaining that it does this by ‘directly facilitating problem-solving‘, and by helping ‘the creative exploration of associative neural networks‘. The authors illustrated the role of dreams in creativity with relevant historical anecdotes, such as those of Otto Loewi, Dmitri Mendeleyev, Thomas Edison, August Kekulé, Mary Shelley and Paul McCartney. They further discussed the techniques which they said help to ‘harness the creative potential of dreams’, and these included dream incubation and dream exploration – a method of finding the meanings of dreams (pages 60-74, 74-75, 91-92 and 176-203).
The Doctors Bookshelf 