Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams: A Guide to Awakening Consciousness During Dream Sleep - Hardcover

McPhee, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805025006 ISBN 13: 9780805025002

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1995

Synopsis

An introduction to the art of lucid dreaming offers step-by-step directions on how to master the techniques of becoming a conscious participant in one's dreams, discussing the mechanics of sleep, a history of the study of dreams, and the techniques of dream analysis and interpretation.

About this title

About the Author

Charles McPhee is a co-founder of Home Sleep Diagnostics, Inc.

Reviews

The notion of dreaming one's way to greater mental health may seem irresistible; the catch here is that hard work is involved. McPhee, a former staffer at the Cedars-Sinai Sleep Disorders Center in Los Angeles, asserts that lucid dreams, i.e., ones in which the dreamer is actually conscious of dreaming, provide access to the unconscious mind and thus to fuller knowledge of the whole self, which can lead to happiness and self-esteem. Achieving lucid dreaming, however, is no simple feat. Techniques for remembering one's dreams and for using their incongruities and distortions as cues to conscious observation are detailed. The task then becomes to integrate the conscious and the unconscious, again no simple, short-term task. Beginning with a review of sleep research (e.g., everyone dreams about 100 minutes a night and, yes, in color), McPhee blends science (psychoanalytic and neurological) and somewhat academic self-help to yield pop psychology on a challenging level.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Although a good deal of our sleeping time is spent dreaming, McPhee, an expert in sleep and sleep disorders, argues that "our memory for dreams is elusive at best." And that is problematic, in McPhee's view, because remembering and understanding our dreams can lead to a fuller understanding of ourselves. McPhee discusses the Freudian notion of dreams as an emotional "release valve" and then builds upon that discussion for a more complete explanation of how our unconscious thoughts reveal our conscious selves. He presents straightforward steps to help us "develop [a] memory for dreams." The author also provides a short history of sleep research plus a thorough description of the mechanics of sleeping and dreaming. A pragmatic rendering of a subject too often taken for granted. Brian McCombie

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805025006
• ISBN 13: 9780805025002
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256