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.

Children’s Dreams teaches readers how to understand and appreciate memorable “big dreams” of childhood. The book introduces readers to the basic psychology and neuroscience of dreaming, then discusses dreams from early childhood through adolescence, exploring why we dream and how dreams can help us enhance creativity and make sense of our lives.

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.

This book aims to present a study on the actuality and empirical value of Freuds dream theory, even if through the analysis of a specific part of it - the hypotheses about childrens dreams. It provides a systematic description of Freuds observations on child dreaming and presents the results obtained from four empirical studies on childrens dreams that the author conducted during the span of a decade. These studies (two conducted in school settings, one in a home setting, and one based on a questionnaire completed by parents) allow an empirical judgment on Freuds main hypotheses on child dreaming: the hypotheses on formal aspect of childrens dreams, the relationship between dream bizarreness and development of the superego functions, and the issue of wish-fulfilment dreams. The author concludes that it is possible to test empirically Freuds hypothesis on the early forms of dreaming and that this test is not irrelevant for an empirical judgment of certain more general statements of Freuds dream theory (e.g. the dream censorship hypothesis).

Domhoff's neurocognitive model helps explain the neural and cognitive bases for dreaming. He discusses how dreams express conceptions and concerns, and how they are consistent over years and decades. He also shows that there may be limits to understanding the meaning of dreams as there are many aspects of dream content that cannot be related to waking cognition or personal concerns. In addition, the book includes a detailed explanation of the methods needed to test the new model as well as a case study of a comprehensive dream journal. Particularly valuable is a discussion of a new system of content analysis that can be used for highly sophisticated studies of dream content. In this provocative book, Domhoff sets forth a convincing argument that will encourage a resurgence in dream research among both new and established cognitive psychologists and neuropsychologists.

A comprehensive neurocognitive theory of dreaming based on the theories, methodologies, and findings of cognitive neuroscience and the psychological sciences. G. William Domhoff’s neurocognitive theory of dreaming is the only theory of dreaming that makes full use of the new neuroimaging findings on all forms of spontaneous thought and shows how well they explain the results of rigorous quantitative studies of dream content. Domhoff identifies five separate issues—neural substrates, cognitive processes, the psychological meaning of dream content, evolutionarily adaptive functions, and historically invented cultural uses—and then explores how they are intertwined. He also discusses the degree to which there is symbolism in dreams, the development of dreaming in children, and the relative frequency of emotions in the dreams of children and adults. During dreaming, the neural substrates that support waking sensory input, task-oriented thinking, and movement are relatively deactivated. Domhoff presents the conditions that have to be fulfilled before dreaming can occur spontaneously. He describes the specific cognitive processes supported by the neural substrate of dreaming and then looks at dream reports of research participants. The “why” of dreaming, he says, may be the most counterintuitive outcome of empirical dream research. Though the question is usually framed in terms of adaptation, there is no positive evidence for an adaptive theory of dreaming. Research by anthropologists, historians, and comparative religion scholars, however, suggests that dreaming has psychological and cultural uses, with the most important of these found in religious ceremonies and healing practices. Finally, he offers suggestions for how future dream studies might take advantage of new technologies, including smart phones.

First published in 1985. This book summarizes the findings of empirical dream psychology and interprets them from a cognitive-psychological perspective.

51 Essays on Books, Authors, Words, Politics, et al. And an annotated reading list of 30 favorite books "for a very long trip."

This book presents three lectures by Allan Hobson, entitled “The William James Lectures on Dream Consciousness”. The three lectures expose the new psychology, the new physiology and the new philosophy that derive from and support the protoconsciousness hypothesis of dreaming. They review in detail many of the studies on sleep and dreaming conducted since the days of Sigmund Freud. Following the lectures are commentaries written by scholars whose expertise covers a wide range of scientific disciplines including, but not limited to, philosophy, psychology, neurology, neuropsychology, cognitive science, biology and animal sciences. The commentaries each answer a specific question in relation to Hobson’s lectures and his premise that dreaming is an altered state of consciousness. Capitalizing on a vast amount of data, the lectures and commentaries provide undisputed evidence that sleep consists of a well-organized sequence of subtly orchestrated brain states that undoubtedly play a crucial function in the maintenance of normal brain functions. These functions include both basic homeostatic processes necessary to keep the organism alive as well as the highest cognitive functions including perception, decision making, learning and consciousness.

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.