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What, if anything, do dreams tell us about ourselves? What is the relationship between types of sleep and types of dreams? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Or are dreams simply meaningless mental noise--"unmusical fingers wandering over the piano keys"?
With expertise in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Owen Flanagan is uniquely qualified to answer these questions. And in Dreaming Souls he provides both an accessible survey of the latest research on sleep and dreams and a compelling new theory about the nature and function of dreaming. Flanagan argues that while sleep has a clear biological function and adaptive value, dreams are merely side effects, "free riders," irrelevant from an evolutionary point of view. But dreams are hardly unimportant. Indeed, Flanagan argues that dreams are self-expressive, the result of our need to find or to create meaning, even when we're sleeping. Rejecting Freud's theory of manifest and latent content--of repressed wishes appearing in disguised form--Flanagan shows how brainstem activity during sleep generates a jumbled profusion of memories, images, thoughts, emotions, and desires, which the cerebral cortex then attempts to shape into a more or less coherent story. Such dream-narratives range from the relatively mundane worries of non REM sleep to the fantastic confabulations of deep REM that resemble psychotic episodes in their strangeness. But however bizarre these narratives may be, they can shed light on our mental life, our well being, and our sense of self.
Written with clarity, lively wit, and remarkable insight, Dreaming Souls offers a fascinating new way of apprehending one of the oldest mysteries of mental life.
- Sales Rank: #1926914 in eBooks
- Published on: 2001-05-17
- Released on: 1999-11-18
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
It is a long-held notion of evolutionary theory that every aspect of behavior has an adaptive purpose, making the organism that exhibits it more fit for survival. That view hits a wall when it is brought to bear on dreaming, an act that seems to have no discernible adaptive advantage.
What good does it do us to dream? Cognitive scientist Owen Flanagan addresses this and related questions in Dreaming Souls, an endlessly interesting excursion into the philosophy of mind. He proposes, first, that dreaming is simply a by-product of the ordinary awareness that allows us to live as conscious beings, an unintended rejoinder to our waking states. Nature selected mammals to have rigid skeletons in a calcium-rich environment, Flanagan notes, but "cared not one bit about their color"; in the same way, he suggests, dreaming may simply be "an expectable side effect of selection for creatures designed to have and utilize experiences while they are awake, and which continue to have experiences after the lights go off." All this is not to say that dreams are unimportant, Flanagan adds, even though they may not be especially trustworthy; dreams may be a useful means of mind reading, something we constantly do while we are awake, interrogating ourselves constantly in order to gauge our thoughts and responses to the world around us. Dreams enable us, too, to mine below the narrative self of daily life, the person we present to others, a mask that may be quite different from who we really are. ("The self," Flanagan observes, "trades in fiction rather than fact.")
Flanagan proposes no definitive answers to the question of why we dream, but his ideas are stimulating and well-argued, and they open the door to further investigation. --Gregory McNamee
From Kirkus Reviews
An informative review of current research on sleep and dreams and a new theory about the nature and function of dreaming, presented with clarity, wit, and finesse. Flanagan (philosophy, experimental psychology, and neurobiology/Duke Univ.), editor of the Philosophy of Mind Series, to which the present work belongs, brings insights from philosophy, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, psychology and psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience to his theory of dreams. What's more, he does so in an unpedantic way that utterly engages the reader. Dreaming, he asserts, is not an evolutionary adaption but a side effect of an adaptation that human beings have learned to use in creative and helpful ways. While Flanagan's theory sees dreaming''a free rider on a system designed to think and to sleep''as serving no direct biological function, he finds that dreams do matter, for they sometimes possess meaningful structure, are sometimes self-expressive, and sometimes provide insights into one's own mind and one's relations with others. Unlike Freud, he finds that most dreams do not conceal their content or have deep meaning. He uses Freud's famous ``wolf man'' dream interpretation to illustrate the implausibility of the Freudian approach and argues that his own alternative is both plausible and testable. He also takes issue with the notion that dreams are wellsprings of creativity, effectively destroying the commonly accepted belief that the lengthy ``Kubla Khan'' came to the poet Coleridge in a dream and that Mary Shelley dreamed the entire plot of the novel Frankenstein before writing it down. What is important to remember, in Flanagan's view, is that while dreams, hatched in the chaotic activity of the brainstem, sometimes don't mean much of anything, the images and memories activated in our sleep are our own, and it is we ourselves who give them narrative shape. Diagrams, cartoons, quotations, and of course dreamsmostly but not always the author's ownilluminate and enliven the presentation. Science writing at its best. (16 line illus., 3 halftones) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Flanagan's Dreaming Souls is, quite simply, a masterpiece: learned, lively, and surpassingly smart. Owen's voice in this book is so honest, direct, lovable and funny, it kept reminding me of Frank McCourt. And yet it IS neurophilosophy. It is about the whys and wherefores of our dreaming brains."--Patricia S. Churchland, Presidential Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, author of Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain
"Owen Flanagan does it again. He takes one of the most fascinating and elusive topics in mind/brain research, the 'why' of dreams, and ropes it into a coherent notion that one and all can understand. I won't spoil it for you and tell you his intriguing idea. But I will tell you, I think he is on to something big."--Michael S. Gazzaniga, Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College, author of Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind and The Mind's Past
"Are dreams just the noise that the brain makes during sleep? Flanagan makes us take this question seriously as he builds dream consciousness into his new brain-based philosophy of mind."--J. Allan, Director of Laboratory of Neurophysiology, Harvard Medical School and author of Sleep, The Dreaming Brain, and most recently Consciousness
"How important to have a philosopher dedicate himself to the basic questions of human psychology. Owen Flanagan challenges and synthesizes contemporary theories of mind to arrive at a provocative understanding of the relationship of dream and dreamer."--Peter D. Kramer, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Brown University, author of Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave?
"An informative review of current research on sleep and dreams and a new theory about the nature and function of dreaming, presented with clarity, wit, and finesse.... Science writing at its best."--Kirkus Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Focus on the physiological
By Leslie Halpern
"Dreaming Souls" clearly lays out an anti-Freudian way of viewing dream content. Flanagan's focus on dreams as "free-riders" that coincidentally join us each night when we sleep is a fascinating way to interpret the latest in sleep science.
He offers his Laws of Dream Science to help explain the bizarre nature of our dreams without giving them undeserved (in his opinion) importance to our everyday lives. His IUD scale measures the incongruity, uncertainty, and discontinuity found in most dreams. The descriptions of our physiological processes during sleep are presented in easy-to-understand language, with diagrams and an occasional photograph to help discuss these complex ideas.
A Duke University professor, Flanagan adroitly explains difficult concepts in simple terms that even a C-student freshman could understand (which may or may not be a good thing for you). Despite this small complaint about style, the substance of this book is so overwhelmingly important that anyone the least bit interested in sleeping, dreaming, Freud, or consciousness should read it.
Leslie Halpern, author of Dreams on Film: The Cinematic Struggle Between Art and Science and Reel Romance: The Lovers' Guide to the 100 Best Date Movies.
45 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
An important book on the 100 year mark of Freud's theory.
By Daniel A. Oldis
On the 100th anniversary of Freud's THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, the philosopher/scientist Owen Flanagan has given readers a facinating synthesis of natural selection and depth psychology in the form of an original theory regarding the purpose and function of dreams. Written in a lively and conversational style, the book dissects such disparate dream-work hypotheses as Freud's, Hobson's and Crick's on its way to a realistic yet human understanding of Hamlet's rub. Dreams are not evolutionary adaptations and do not contribute to the species' survival; they are simply by-products of the neuro-chemical goings-on of sleep, but they do reveal ouselves to ourselves and contribute to personality and identity. This book is a worthwhile companion to Antonio Damasio's THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS from a neurological perspective and Gordon Globus' DREAM LIFE, WAKE LIFE from a philosopical one. Flanagan elaborates on the epistomological musings of Descartes (how can we know if we are ever truly awake and not dreaming?), the moral dilemma of St. Augustine (can we truly sin in deams?) and the objectivity challenge of Daniel Dennet (do we actually dream at all or just invent the dream story upon awakening?) While there are interesting examples of dream interpretation here, readers should not look for deep symbolism, creativity wonder stories, Jungian archetypes or a how-to book on decoding one's own dreams. Neither does this book really have much to say about the general evolution of consciousness outside of dreams--Damasio's is the place to go for that. But this is good reading on the cognitive structure of dreams and it is science straight up--an important book as our dreams, along with our lives, move into the next millenium.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A Better Way To Consider Dreams
By Thomas H. Lynch
Flanagan delivers a theory of dreams that could largely supplant the psychodynamic dream theories of Freud, Jung and others of this ilk. Freud, as is well known, thought dreams release socially unacceptable desires that got repressed in our waking lines. Dreams are a royal road to the dynamic, meaningful unconscious. Is an intimidating theory that makes it prudent either to forget dreams or keep them to oneself, or save to disclose in the confidentiality of therapy. Jung's theories were not so narrowly based, but nonetheless he touts dream material as personally laden messages cast up from the deep coils of our personal and collective unconscious minds.
Flanagan has a much friendlier, sensible view based on modern findings about how our brains actually work, as well as an extensive survey of actual dream content, information not available in the early 20th Century when Freud and Jung cranked out their dream theories. Flanagan's book is well worth the effort to understand. I will attempt a few highlights so as to whet your appetite to learn more directly from his book.
One key concept is that our brains evolved within social groups of our early ancestors. We need to make sense of things while awake, especially what's what in our own social group. We are tuned to take gossip and make the best story we can of it. We're storytellers one and all, making up a story and calling it what actually happened. We hear and see whatever fits in with the stories we have constructed over time.
The brain never turns off. Flanagan credits as dreams any mentation we have while not awake. Let me attempt report to you Flanagan's idea of dreaming in the rapid eye movement part of sleep. If you observe a sleeping person whose eyeballs are moving back and forth under their lids, and then wake the person suddenly, usually the person will report mentation that has a storyline. Flanagan points out that the rapid eye movements are controlled by neurons in the pontine brainstem (rather than a result of a dreamer looking at images of the dream), so rapid eye movements are indicative of PGO waves originating in the pons (P) from neurons that move the eyes. These neurons also signal the lateral geniculate (G) body in the thalamus and the occipital cortex (O), which is the main visual processing area of the brain. The PGO waves are also involved in the neurochemical stockpiling of neurotransmitters secreted by neurons. The puzzle of sleep is far from being completely solved, but most likely restoring the stockpiles is a major function. Prolonged lack of sleep does lead to fuzzy brain functioning. The PGO waves stimulate neurons all over the brain to get on with producing neurotransmitters, and all sorts of mentation bubbles up. However, Flanagan reasons: "but there is no reason...to think that the content of the mentation of the PGO waves is causally related to these processes. The mentation that occurs is mostly noise-at least as measured against what one is trying to learn and remember." (page 118) Flanagan cites research that shows people don't typically dream about what is recently learned, although the so-called "today's residue" does occasionally appear in dreams. The content of dreams and the content of memories we'd like to consolidate do not make a good match.
Now, the part of the cortex we use to make up stories during the day is not completely shutdown in sleep. Once the mental contents stirred up by the PGO waves interact with this part of the brain, a cohesive story may result. Flanagan feels most of the time the story is very weak. After all, we have four or five rapid eye movement episodes a night, making up to 35 a week. Once in a while we get a dilly, but Flanagan feels mostly we get noise. Not that this noise is to be disregarded. After all, he points out, the noise of a heart can reveal much about the quality of the heart's functioning. However, it would be ludicrous to believe that noise of the heart evolved so cardiologist could make a living. So Flanagan concludes that dreams did not evolve as releasers of repressed wishes, even though dreams can be used to help ferret out all sorts of things that may be characteristic of the person. As he says, "According to the neurophilosophical view I recommend, most dreams do not express wishes. Most dreams do not conceal their content. Most dreams do not involve sex or aggression, neither on the surface nor deep down inside, neither manifestly nor latently. Most dreams do not have deep meanings -- not sexual or aggressive deep meanings, nor even deep spiritual meaning. Dreams sometimes don't mean much of anything, and they certainly don't, as a matter of policy, mean any one kind of thing. It is predictable from the fact that dreams originate in chaotic activity in the brainstem that most are bungled, as Nietzsche puts it, or that things fall apart because the center cannot hold, as Yeats puts it, and sometimes a thematic center can not even be found or, if found, cannot be maintained in the internal chaos in which dreams are hatched." (page 192) This is not to say dreams are not worth paying attention to. After all, the stories put together from the fragments triggered by PGO waves are put together by your very own "story maker." And remember, your story maker is not fully functioning in sleep. Nonetheless, it is operating, perhaps less critically and more creatively than in your waking state. Your dreams are bound to have your characteristic slant which you may not be aware of unless you study your own dreams. Dreams may be noise, biologically speaking, but just as heart noises are worth attending to, so are dreams. Just don't go ape, oops, don't go Freud!
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