13 Dreams Freud Never Had: The New Mind Science

by J. Allan Hobson

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.

Genres: Science, Psychology

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

John Allan Hobson is an American psychiatrist and dream researcher. He is known for his research on rapid eye movement sleep. He is Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School, and Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hobson is quite the interesting figure in the realm of dream science. While his neurobiology-based descriptions of the brain during sleep were relatively useful, I found his wholesale denial of Freud's theories of the unconscious to be pretty laughable -- especially when his descriptions and preoccupations were so thoroughly imbued with latent content that he would not acknowledge. Ultimately, such blindness was more than a little creepy. But in terms of walking through the various brain structures that people believe are involved with dreaming, Hobson presents a fairly entertaining overview of the best theories he has to offer on how dreaming works and what it's purpose is. The problem is how superficially the science actually sits -- scratch beneath the surface of his many confident assertions (and his nearly fetishistic descriptions of the brain structures), and even Hobson admits it's all just a likely theory...