**One of Bill Gates' Top Five Book Recommendations* The wondrous and illuminating story of humankind's quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev's dream of the Periodic Table. In 1869 Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev was puzzling over a way to bring order to the fledgling science of chemistry. Wearied by the effort, he fell asleep at his desk. What he dreamed would fundamentally change the way we see the world.Framing this history is the life story of the nineteenth-century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke after conceiving the periodic table in a dream-the template upon which modern chemistry is founded and the formulation of which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science. From ancient philosophy through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream. In this elegant, erudite, and entertaining book, Paul Strathern unravels the quixotic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements.

An alternative dream dictionary?What does that mean?Many dreams are night parables-stories with special meaning. One essential step in understanding these stories is figuring out what the individual elements mean. What does the whale mean? What about the underwater car?But dream elements don't always have the same meaning every time.Where most dream dictionaries tell you what to think about the different elements, Dream Elements by John E. Thomas tells you how to think about them. An element can change depending on the context, so learning how to think metaphorically is an important key when you want to know the true meaning of your dreams.This book is filled with potential meanings of common dream elements, but it also shows you how to think about dream elements in general. So the next time you dream-whether the elements are found in this book or not-you will have a much better chance of determining what your dream means.

People have always been fascinated and intrigued by what goes through the mind as we sleep. This book explains the most successful dreamwork methods; the major types of dream; how dreamwork can improve your relationships and inner life; and why dreams are so powerful and healing.

Covers 2,000 topics, including people, events, places and objects and gives short explanations and interpretations of their appearance in your dreams.

Many contemporary neuroscientists are skeptical about the belief that dreaming accomplishes anything in the context of human adaptation and this skepticism is widely accepted in the popular press. This book provides answers to that skepticism from experimental and clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and anthropologists. Ranging across the human and life sciences, the authors provide provocative insights into the enduring question of dreaming from the point of view of the brain, the individual, and culture. The Functions of Dreaming contains both new theory and research on the functions of dreaming as well as revisions of older theories dating back to the founder of modern dream psychology, Sigmund Freud. Also explored are the many roles dreaming plays in adaptation to daily living, in human development, and in the context of different cultures: search, integration, identity formation, memory consolidation, the creation of new knowledge, and social communication.

Presents an alphabetical listing of more than twenty-five thousand of the most common dream interpretations and symbols, explaining how dreams convey messages about the past, present, and future.