The new mind science revolution sweeping the world is providing astonishing new insights into almost every aspect of our daily lives. But where did it all come from? One answer, as Allan Hobson now demonstrates in his elegant masterpiece 13 Dreams Freud Never Had, is the simple act of waking up and thinking about our dreams. 
Freud ushered in the modern era of neuroscience when he set out on his great Project for a Scientific Psychology in an effort to bring science to the world of our imaginations. One of the first sites of his investigation was the interpretation of dreams. Freud believed dreams resulted from an elaborate effort of the mind to conceal unacceptable instinctual wishes welling up from the unconscious when the ego relaxes its prohibition of the id in sleep. But modern neuroscience, including Hobson's own research, has shown this understanding of the brain to be wrong. As Hobson lucidly explains, the bizarre nature of our dreams has nothing to do with repressed emotion as Freud taught; it results from the way the brain is physically built. Chemical mechanisms in the brain stem, which shift the activation of various regions of the cortex, generate these changes. Here is an amazingly clear window on how thoughts are actually created from our memories of experiences. 
Each chapter of this book begins with notes describing a dream taken after Dr. Hobson awoke from it. Dr. Hobson discusses how the dreams can be interpreted given the circumstances of his waking life. Each chapter then shows how that interpretation fits into the physical structure of the brain—for instance, why movements our bodies make and movements we see in our mind's eye are so much a part of how we think. 
Allan Hobson and other brain researchers have, over the last several decades, been constructing a new neurocognitive model of the mind. With the unique perspective of one the revolution's leading researchers, this superb book delivers a fresh, vivid, and compellingly personal overview of how that new science of the mind is being built.

13 Dreams Freud Never Had: The New Mind Science

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Hobson, J. Allan

Psychology & Counseling

Pi Press

The Dreaming Brain

Self-Help

Dreams

Penguin Books, Ltd.

What is dreaming, and what causes it? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? Replacing dream mystique with modern dream science, J. Allan Hobson provides a new and increasingly complete picture of how dreaming is created by the brain. Focusing on dreaming to explain the mechanisms of sleep, this book explores how the new science of dreaming is affecting theories in psychoanalysis, and how it is helping our understanding of the causes of mental illness. J. Allan Hobson investigates his own dreams to illustrate and explain some of the fascinating discoveries of modern sleep science, while challenging some of the traditionally accepted theories about the meaning of dreams. He reveals how dreaming maintains and develops the mind, why we go crazy in our dreams in order to avoid doing so when we are awake, and why sleep is not just good for health but essential for life.

Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction

Religion & Spirituality

Oxford University Press

What is dreaming? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? In this fascinating book, Harvard researcher Allan Hobson offers an intriguing look at our nightly odyssey through the illusory world of dreams. Hobson describes how the theory of dreaming has advanced dramatically over the past fifty years, sparked by the use of EEGs in the 1950s and by recent innovations in brain imaging. We have learned for instance that, in dreaming, some areas of the brain are very active--the visual and auditory centers, for instance--while others are completely shut down, including the centers for self-awareness, logic, and memory. Thus we can have visually vivid dreams, but be utterly unaware that the sequence of events or locales may be bizarre and, quite often, impossible. And because the memory center is inactive, we don't remember the dream at all, unless we wake up while it is in progress. Hobson also shows that modern research has disproved most of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (as one scientist put it, "Freud was 50% right and 100% wrong"), but we have gained new insight into the nature of mental illness. The book also discusses dream disorders (nightmares, night terrors, sleep walking), the possible link between dreaming and the regulation of body temperature, the effects of sleep deprivation, and much more. With special boxed features that highlight intriguing questions--Do we dream in color? (yes), Do animals dream? (probably), Do men and women dream differently? (no)--Dreaming offers a cutting-edge account of the most mysterious area of our mental life.

Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep

A pioneer in sleep and dream science surveys his life and work through the lens of dreaming and consciousness.
J. Allan Hobson's scientific experimentation began in childhood, with a soot-filled investigation into the capacity of a chimney to admit Santa Claus. (He discovered that even with the damper open the chimney was far too narrow.) Hobson's life as an experimentalist has continued through a pioneering career devoted to aligning psychology and biology and to investigating the relationship of dreaming and consciousness. In Dream Life, Hobson conducts an experimental investigation into his life and work. 
Hobson charts his developing consciousness through a vividly imagined conception (in October of 1932), birth, and babyhood, offering a theory about "protoconsciousness" in fetuses and infants. He recounts his youthful zeal for scientific discovery, his early sexual experimentation, and his education. He describes taking on the entrenched Freudians at Harvard Medical School in the 1950s, as a maverick psychiatrist who wanted to replace psychoanalysis with biological science. He describes his further studies, his marriages and love affairs, his travels, and what he learned about the brain from his whiplash-induced amnesia after a 1963 automobile accident and from his "brain death" after a stroke in 2001. Through it all, Hobson uses his life as the ultimate case study for his theory that REM sleep provides a test pattern that allows the brain to develop "offline." Dreams―most intense in REM sleep, when the brain is active―need no Freudian-style decoding, he says. Dreaming is a glorious mental state, to be enjoyed and studied for what it tells us about consciousness.

Dream Life: An Experimental Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Mit Pr

The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness

In this book, J. Allan Hobson offers a new understanding of altered states of consciousness based on knowledge of how our brain chemistry is balanced when we are awake and how that balance shifts when we fall asleep and dream. He draws on recent research that enables us to explain how psychedelic drugs work to disturb that balance and how similar imbalances may cause depression and schizophrenia. He also draws on work that expands our understanding of how certain drugs can correct imbalances and restore the brain's natural equilibrium. Hobson explains the chemical balance concept in terms of what we know about the regulation of normal states of consciousness over the course of the day by brain chemicals called neuromodulators. He presents striking confirmation of the principle that every drug that has transformative effects on consciousness interacts with the brain's own consciousness-altering chemicals. In the section called "The Medical Drugstore," Hobson describes drugs used to counteract anxiety and insomnia, to raise and lower mood, and to eliminate or diminish the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia. He discusses the risks involved in their administration, including the possibility of new disorders caused by indiscriminate long-term use. In "The Recreational Drugstore," Hobson discusses psychedelic drugs, narcotic analgesia, and natural drugs. He also considers the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate drug use. In the concluding "Psychological Drugstore," he discusses the mind as an agent, not just the mediator, of change, and corrects many erroneous assumptions and practices that hinder the progress of psychoanalysis.

Bradford Books

In this book J. Allan Hobson sets out a compelling-and controversial-theory of consciousness. Our brain-mind, as he calls it, is not a fixed identity but a dynamic balancing act between the chemical systems that regulate waking and dreaming.

Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind

Death & Grief

An investigation into the brain's chemistry and the mechanisms of chemically altered states of consciousness.
In this book, J. Allan Hobson offers a new understanding of altered states of consciousness based on knowledge of how our brain chemistry is balanced when we are awake and how that balance shifts when we fall asleep and dream. He draws on recent research that enables us to explain how psychedelic drugs work to disturb that balance and how similar imbalances may cause depression and schizophrenia. He also draws on work that expands our understanding of how certain drugs can correct imbalances and restore the brain's natural equilibrium.
Hobson explains the chemical balance concept in terms of what we know about the regulation of normal states of consciousness over the course of the day by brain chemicals called neuromodulators. He presents striking confirmation of the principle that every drug that has transformative effects on consciousness interacts with the brain's own consciousness-altering chemicals. In the section called "The Medical Drugstore," Hobson describes drugs used to counteract anxiety and insomnia, to raise and lower mood, and to eliminate or diminish the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia. He discusses the risks involved in their administration, including the possibility of new disorders caused by indiscriminate long-term use. In "The Recreational Drugstore," Hobson discusses psychedelic drugs, narcotic analgesia, and natural drugs. He also considers the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate drug use. In the concluding "Psychological Drugstore," he discusses the mind as an agent, not just the mediator, of change, and corrects many erroneous assumptions and practices that hinder the progress of psychoanalysis.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

A neurophysiologist provides familiar examples to illustrate his theories about the relationship between compex mental states and electrochemical events in the brain, linking human chemical systems to emotions, dreams, and memory

The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes Its Mind

Medical Books

Little,Brown & Co

Can complex mental states - feeling, thought, memory, fantasy, dreaming - be explained by electro-chemical events in the brain? If so, how? Hobson uses anecdote and example to illustrate his theory that the interplay of the brain's two chemical systems regulates our waking and dreaming lives.

The Chemistry of Conscious States: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain and the Mind

Science & Math

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hobson, J. Allan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hobson, J. Allan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hobson, J. Allan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

13 Dreams Freud Never Had: The New Mind Science

The Dreaming Brain

Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction

Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep

Dream Life: An Experimental Memoir

The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness

Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind

The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness

The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes Its Mind

The Chemistry of Conscious States: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain and the Mind