Our Dreaming Mind

The early part of the book seemed almost like an extended literature review for a dissertation or an encyclopedia. The thoughts of dozens, perhaps even hundreds of philosophers, researchers, and other dreamers are briefly summarized in chronological order, from Plato to Artemidorus, from Erik Erikson to Calvin Hall. I found the sections on Freud and Jung particularly illuminating. As someone who has heard a lot about Freud, but never read his works, I found the overview of Freud's work on dreams and his school of psychoanalysis quite informative, especially when it was directly contrasted with Jung's work. The contributions of each of these men to the topic of dream research were presented in great depth, and supplemented with example analyses in their corresponding schools.

I also found the section of the book covering contemporary dream research to be quite fascinating. It would have been better, however, if this section were expanded and brought up to date with the latest laboratory findings. One annoying habit that Van de Castle has is using this book to defend criticisms of his research methodology. In several places in the text, he reports that other researchers disagreed with his findings, and then he launches into in-depth justification of his conclusions. While he is certainly within his rights to defend his views, it makes no sense to do so in a popular work such as this one- -all he needed to do in this text was mention the disagreements (perhaps in an endnote) and briefly explain that he had answered the questions in print elsewhere. By discussing the points in detail here, it makes it appear as if he is defending his research by appealing not to his scientific peers, but to the general public. In contrast, it might have been good to explain the experimental design of his research in a little more detail in this book. From his descriptions here, he makes it sound as if he does dream research by positing that certain elements of dreams are common or absent in a particular group of people, and then checking their dreams to see if this is indeed the case. He never mentions whether this research is conducted using double-blind methods or control populations. If he had mentioned here that he consistently used such methods, his research would sound a lot more credible. (If he actually didn't use such methods, then his research would be dreamy, indeed.)

In any case, I found much of what Van de Castle reports to be consistent with my own experiences. After reading this book, I am even more certain that following one's nightly dreams can be a very illuminating and worthwhile practice. I plan to use the book's extensive bibliography to follow up on the ideas presented here.


Interesting read   May 14, 2003
ostawookiee (Winston-Salem, NC USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

VdC gives a pretty good gloss-over history of dreaming and what certain people thought of them; how certain philosophers and psychologists thought of them. He also recounts several studies and the statistics that were drawn from them - which are quite interesting.
One of the studies on lucid dreaming describes the participants methods for inducing lucid dreams, and the method happens to be almost identical to a method I've successfully used before, which I originally got from a book called "Control Your Dreams".