From the Iliad to Aristophanes, from the gospel of Matthew to Augustine, Greek and Latin texts are constellated with descriptive images of dreams. Some are formulaic, others intensely vivid. The best ancient minds Plato, Aristotle, the physician Galen, and others struggled to understand the meaning of dreams.

With "Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity" the renowned ancient historian William Harris turns his attention to oneiric matters. This cultural history of dreams in antiquity draws on both contemporary post-Freudian science and careful critiques of the ancient texts. Harris traces the history of characteristic forms of dream-description and relates them both to the ancient experience of dreaming and to literary and religious imperatives. He analyzes the nuances of Greek and Roman belief in the truth-telling potential of dreams, and in a final chapter offers an assessment of ancient attempts to understand dreams naturalistically.

How did dreaming culture evolve from Homer s time to late antiquity? What did these dreams signify? And how do we read and understand ancient dreams through modern eyes? Harris takes an elusive subject and writes about it with rigor and precision, reminding us of specificities, contexts, and changing attitudes through history.

We've nearly all been there at least once - awakened with a pounding heart and the memory of frightening scenes that seemed so real, but were conjured up and existed only in the sleeping mind. Nightmares affect people across countries and cultures, with some 10 percent of the world's population reporting recurrent nightmares. Parents have reported, and science has recorded, nightmares in children as young as 18 months old. Up to 40 percent of children aged 2 to 12 experience nightmares, as do some 35 percent of veterans and 50 percent of adults with chronic illness. With this book, a psychologist widely known in his field shows how nightmares evolved and were useful to ancestral populations, and why nightmares may carry beneficial functional effects even today for people who suffer from the pulse-pumping dreams. McNamara brings us up to date on the biology of nightmares and what, specifically, happens in the brain during the event. He also explains the history and development of nightmares and likely causes, including traumatic events, psychological and physical disorders, and commonly consumed medications.

Why do we sleep? Are we sleeping enough? Do we suffer stress from "sleep debt"? Why do some of us struggle with sleep disorders? And how can we tackle sleep problems? These are the kinds of questions that make many of us toss and turn all night.
Jim Horne finds answers to these questions and many more in Sleepfaring, a journey through the science and the secrets of sleep. He reveals what goes on in our brains behind the veil of sleep, looks at body clocks, the values of napping, and the controversial question of "sleep debt," and also gives some hints from the latest sleep research that may just help you get a better night's rest. In recent years, the nature of sleep, our sleeping patterns, how much sleep we need, and the dangers of lack of sleep have become increasingly important, as people work longer hours, styles of working have altered, and the separation between workplace and home has been eroded by cell phones and the internet. From drowsiness at the wheel, to stress and insomnia, this is a subject that truly matters to people. Horne draws on the latest research in brain physiology, psychology, medicine, and the many social factors that contribute to sleep problems to reveal what science has discovered about sleep, and problems related to sleep-from snoring to sleep apnea. Nor does Horne shy away from controversy, challenging, for example, the conventional wisdom on the amount of sleep we actually need.
For anyone wishing to know more about the many mysterious processes that begin when we close our eyes each night, Sleepfaring offers a wealth of insight and information.

Smashing the myths Michael demonstrates the simplicity of Dream Interpretation. In this well structured book he starts with the basics and gently introduces how dreams give direct guidance on your health. That alone is worth the sticker price but it doesn't stop there With each chapter the arsenal for cracking the code in dreams is advanced until from your dreams you can answer the deeply philosophical questions, ""Why am I here?" and "What is my life purpose?" "

Michael writes from an unashamed spiritual perspective but with his feet firmly on the ground. With this book you can take steps to restore your power and regain control of all aspects of your life.

Your dreams want you to be in loving relationships, healthy, happy and successful. They are an illusion created to help you wake up from other illusions. You would be wise to listen to them.

Michael Sheridan

Reviews
Practical, easy to read and very enlightening. Dreams have never been more cogently presented than in this great book. A welcome and essential addition to the library of human knowledge. Neal Keyes A.W.E.A.C., Former Head Counselor, The Hanly Centre for Alcohol and Drug Addiction, Dublin

All dreams have multiple meanings. Michael's gift is to help us to interpret dreams in a meaningful way - messages from the subconscious regarding our health or our purpose in life. This is a great book, easy to read, and one you will want to refer to again and again. Denis Prone, Ph.D, Transpersonal Psychologist and Researcher.

Michael is an accomplished communicator, who succeeds in bringing simplicity to what are potentially complex and confusing areas of exploration. Paddy McMahon (Patrick Francis), Author, The Grand Design.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

Translation of an Urdu novel; includes critical appraisals of some of the author's works.

We all know what it is to dream, but we also know how difficult it is to describe or interpret dreams, or explain what they actually are. To attempt to articulate a dream is to realize how inadequate our words are to describe the experience. Dreams are beyond words, consisting of much more than what we can say about them.
In "Dreamtelling," Pierre Sorlin does not deal with our nocturnal visions "per se," but rather with what we say regarding them. He explores the influence of dreams on our imaginations, and the various - sometimes inconsistent, always imperfect - theories people have contrived to elucidate them. Sorlin shows how our accounts are built on recurrent patterns, but are also totally and entirely individual. He examines the urge to analyze night visions and why it is that some people have become experts in dream interpretation.
Many books have been published on the nature of dreams, on their psychological or biological origins and on their significance, but this book takes as its premise that all we can allege about nocturnal visions is based on dreamtelling. Sorlin shows how dreams arouse our creativity and how, in turn, our creativity influences our dream accounts. "Dreamtelling" is aimed at all those who not only dream, but are curious about the experience, and wonder why they feel compelled to analyze and recount their night visions.

This study shows how in the Bible dreams and visions were seen as powerful ways in which God communicated with his people, in contrast to today's sceptical culture. Looking at a series of Bible dreams and visions, the author draws on his years of pastoral experience to demonstrate how God can use them to bring fresh opportunities for healing and growth.

Advance Praise for Dream-Singers

"You will find a great storehouse of folk and literary treasures in this ambitious book that speaks to anyone who has ever thought about his or her dreams. It’s a wonderful adventure and I highly recommend it."–Clarence Major, author of Configurations and Juba to Jive

Acclaim for Dream Reader
also by Anthony Shafton

"A book so unique in its combination of scholarship, clarity, and down-to-earth feeling about dreams that I find it hard to fully express the excitement and satisfaction I felt on reading it."–Montague Ullman, M.D., Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Author of Working with Dreams and Dream Telepathy

"Breathtaking . . . the single most complete and thorough analysis of contemporary dream theories yet written . . . Shafton has a keen sense for what people most want to know about dreams, and an admirable ability to explain difficult concepts without oversimplifying them."–Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., Past President, The Association for the Study of Dreams, Author of The Wilderness of Dreams

Offering a unique blend of theory and practise, the 10 new titles in this series demystify popular approaches to natural healing and personal insight, revealing simple ways to balance body, mind and spirit.

• Offers an in-depth look into the nature of dreams and shows us the best way to use them to better our lives
• Jargon-free approach makes this subject easy to understand
• Perfect for the new enthusiast, this handy guide is simple to follow yet thorough and authoritative

Dreams are a constant source of self-knowledge, wisdom and understanding, but they cannot always be interpreted literally. This book aims to provide readers with a complete understanding of their dreams, explaining how they can work with their dreams in the pursuit of self-understanding.

With a new foreword by the author. 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. Drawing on his work both as a sleep researcher and as a psychiatrist, Hobson looks in particular at the strikingly similar chemical characteristics of the states of dreaming and psychosis. His underlying theme is that the form of our thoughts, emotions, dreams, and memories derive from specific nerve cells and electrochemical impulses described by neuroscientists. Among the questions Hobson explores are: What are dreams? Do they have any hidden meaning, or are they simply emotionally salient images whose peculiar narrative structure refects the unique neurophysiology of sleep? And what is the relationship between the delirium of our dream life and psychosis?

Originally published by Little, Brown under the title "The Chemistry of Conscious States."

This text is a one-stop resource on modern dream psychology, from the pioneering theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to the revolutionary findings of the sleep laboratory.

An introduction to the 20th century's major psychological theories about dreams and dreaming, this work offers a detailed historical overview of how these theories have developed from 1900 to the present. To help readers understand the many different approaches modern psychologists have taken, the book examines each approach in terms of three basic questions: How are dreams formed? What functions do dreams serve? How can dreams be interpreted?

The book begins with a brief historical review of the most important ideas about dreams proposed in Western antiquity. It then presents comprehensive descriptions of the dream theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other clinical psychologists. It further discusses the revolutionary discoveries of the modern sleep laboratory and the most important research findings of experimental psychologists. The book concludes with an examination of dreams in contemporary popular psychology, a multifaceted analysis of a sample dream, and an extensive bibliography on dream research.

The Mechanism-Physical, Etheric, and Astral; The Ego; The Condition of Sleep; Dream Visions; Symbolic, Prophetic, True, Vivid, and Confused Dreams; Experiments.

Every night we enter a mythic realm, a dark, primordial world of fear and desire. What this world offers, Anthony Stevens suggests, may well be the key to understanding our waking mysteries--ourselves, our society, and our history. A prominent psychiatrist and practicing Jungian analyst, Stevens views dreaming from both psychological and neurological perspectives to show how dreams owe their origins as much to our evolutionary history as a species as to our personal history as individuals. A work rich in symbolic and scientific insight, Private Myths traverses the course of dream interpretation from distant hunter-gatherer times to the present. This analysis is as authoritative as it is wide-ranging, including discussions of the biology of dreaming and the discovery of REM sleep, elaboration of the latest neuroscientific techniques in sleep research, and an assessment of the century-long legacy of analytic practice to dream interpretation. In a close look at the actual processes of dream formation, Stevens relates "dream work" to other creative capacities such as language, poetry, storytelling, memory, play, symptom-formation, magic, and ritual. He draws on his many years of experience to analyze key historical dreams, such as Freud's dream of Irma's injection and Hitler's dream of being buried alive, and enriches this discussion with analyses of his own and his patients' dreams. Remarkable in its breadth, Private Myths makes the principles of dream interpretation accessible to scientists, the findings of dream science accessible to analysts, and the discoveries of both available to anyone intrigued by the mysteries of dreams and dreaming.

This book is written for anyone who wants to know what dreams mean. It is straightforward, clear and unpretentious in style, and requires no previous knowledge of dream interpretation theories or of psychological jargon. It will enable readers to interpret their dreams on their own without having to rely on a therapist's supervision. It also explains how dreams reflect innermost thoughts, feelings, and behavioural inclinations, with an original, interesting, and easy-to-apply approach. This book provides a new approach to interpret dreams which explains how the reader can identify the psychodynamic meaning present in dreams. This new approach hypothesises that dreams follow an emotional pattern. An awareness of that pattern will help readers understand the emotional significance of dream content and the understanding of that emotional significance will lead to a realisation of cognitive messages present in 'mysterious' dream plots.

In this examination of the facts and folklore of sleep, Stanley Coren provides evidence that we are becoming an increasingly sleep-deprived society, and that this condition is seriously affecting our work, posing a danger to ourselves and to others. He argues that the "Exxon Valdez" oil spill and the space-shuttle "Challenger" disaster were associated with people suffering from sleep deprivation. He also looks at some of the more subtle and insidious effects of sleep loss on our physical and mental health. Coren asks questions such as: do fish sleep?; are there really "morning" and "night" people?; do some people really only need four hours' sleep a night? There are stories about sleep oddities, such as people who commit murder in their sleep, and descriptions of strange sleep disorders that affect a large number of people and might even be involved in unexplained infant deaths. Finally, the book describes specific techniques to improve the quality and efficiency of your own sleep.

In The Dream Seekers, Lee Irwin demonstrates the central importance of visionary dreams as sources of empowerment and innovation in Plains Indian religion. He examines 350 dreams from 150 years of published and unpublished sources to describe the shared features of cosmology for twenty-three groups of Plains Indians.

Irwin describes the different means of acquiring visions, including stress, illness, social conflict, and mourning and the spontaneous vision experience common among Plains Indian women. He also explores the stages of the structured male vision quest, unsuccessful or abandoned quests, and threshold experiences during a vision. His conclusion is that dreams not only strengthen the group's experience of a shared religious world view but also confer the right to enact new patterns of individual and collective behavior.

"The Dream Seekers offers new and genuine insights into the dream experience of the Plains Indians....(and) offers original comments on the dream experience itself -- the receiving of the dream and the transference of the dream's inherent power". -- American Indian Culture and Research Journal.

"No library -- private, professional, public, or academic, with any interest in Native American culture -- should be without this book". -- Western Historical Quarterly.

"Anyone with a particular interest in American Indian studies, anthropology, sociology, or religion will find this volume invaluable". -- Rapport.

This book is both a fascinating account of dream therapy and an exploration of the symbolism of the hare in myth and fable around the world. John Layard, a British Jungian analyst, first recounts his treatment of a devout Christian woman whose dream of the sacrifice of a hare marked a turning point in her spiritual and psychological healing. He then goes on to examine the meaning of the hare in the mythology of Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Among the many manifestations of this universal archetype are the hare as trickster-hero, as a goddess associated with the moon, as a Buddhist symbol of spiritual transformation, and as the Easter Rabbit of the Christian tradition.

Does your baby have trouble sleeping? You're not alone. Designed specifically for the very many parents encountering the same issues as you, this practical, no-nonsense book gives you the insights, tools and strategies to help your baby get the rest they need - however difficult the challenge. Featuring up-to-date safe sleeping guidance, and drawing on the latest clinical expertise, this book will help you to devise a gentle, sustainable sleep plan which will work for you and your baby. It is based on Andrea Grace's work with hundreds of families, and her decades of experience as the UK's longest-standing sleep consultant, to successfully formulate a gentle, sustainable approach without crying it out, or unnecessary distress for you or your child. It includes coverage of a variety of different needs, from colic to reflux and eczema, and provides welcome support for other carers and family members, from babysitters and childminders to grandparents and siblings. WHAT PARENTS SAY: 'We loved Andrea's method because it was gentle, kind and based around the needs of the baby.' 'Andrea has transformed our lives, she is amazing, a sleep guru!' 'I trusted Andrea and the results spoke for themselves from the very start.' 'I can't recommend Andrea Grace highly enough.'

All people dream regularly, regardless of their circumstances, whether they remember their dreams upon awakening or not. From the beginning of human history, dreams have been a source of creative inspiration and spiritual renewal, emotional and psychological insight, and scientific and cultural innovation.

Dreams of Awakening is a thorough and exciting exploration of lucid dreaming theory and practice within both Western and Tibetan Buddhist contexts. It not only explores lucid dreaming practices, but also the innovative new techniques of Mindfulness of Dream and Sleep, the holistic approach to lucidity training which the author co-created. The book is based on over 12 years of personal practice and the hundreds of lucid dreaming workshops which Charlie has taught around the world, in venues as diverse as Buddhist temples and dance-music festivals. Using a three-part structure of Ground, Path and Germination the reader is given a solid grounding in: * the history and benefits of lucid dreaming * cutting edge research from dream and sleep scientists. * entering the path of learning to do the practices * prophetic dreams, lucid living, out of body experiences and quantum dreaming. Although Dreams of Awakening presents many different angles on how to make the 30 years we spend asleep more worthwhile, the fundamental aim of the book is to teach people how to lucid dream their way to psychological and spiritual growth. This book is for all those who want to wake up, both in their dreams and waking lives.

Experts of every kind are queuing up to warn us that lack of sleep, or the wrong kind, will bring down a bewildering array of dire consequences. Heather Darwall-Smith's message in this book is simple: don't panic! Humans are biologically programmed to sleep, and by interrogating all the factors - sociological, physiological, neurological, and psychological - that might be impeding this innate instinct, each of us can work out the changes we can make in our own lifestyles to allow ourselves to sleep naturally again. This book demystifies the bewildering data around sleep by combining science with natural self-help techniques. Inside the pages of this illustrated guide to sleep, you'll discover: - A visual approach to understanding the science of why and how we sleep through info-graphics, graphs and diagrams that unpick the data and present the facts in an easy-to-follow format - Proven techniques and strategies for better sleep from the author - based on extensive clinical practice and drawing on the most up-to-date evidence from scientists around the world - The latest research and evidence to debunk the myths and misconceptions around sleep Heather Darwall-Smith has combined her research findings, clinical expertise, and curated techniques to create a uniquely visual approach to explaining the interrelated factors that make up our sleep habits. She also provides natural techniques to deal with these underlying causes. Humans are biologically programmed to sleep, Heather encourages each of us to work out the changes we can make to our lifestyles to nourish our body clocks for us to sleep naturally again. The Science of Sleep provides in-depth answers to questions about sleep challenges and exposes myths and fads using science that is accessible to all. Armed with facts, this book equips readers to take control of their choices, understand and transform their sleep habits one night at a time.