Dreaming As Delirium ― How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind

with a new foreword by the author In this book J. Allan Hobson sets out acompelling--and controversial--theory of consciousness. Our brain-mind, as he calls it, is not afixed identity but a dynamic balancing act between the chemical systems that regulate waking anddreaming. Drawing on his work both as a sleep researcher and as a psychiatrist, Hobson looks inparticular at the strikingly similar chemical characteristics of the states of dreaming andpsychosis. His underlying theme is that the form of our thoughts, emotions, dreams, and memoriesderive from specific nerve cells and electrochemical impulses described by neuroscientists. Amongthe questions Hobson explores are: What are dreams? Do they have any hidden meaning, or are theysimply emotionally salient images whose peculiar narrative structure refects the uniqueneurophysiology of sleep? And what is the relationship between the delirium of our dream life andpsychosis?Originally published by Little, Brown under the title The Chemistry of ConsciousStates.

J. Allan Hobson is Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of The Dreaming Brain: How the Brain Creates Both the Sense and The Nonsense of Dreams, Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind (MIT Press,1999), The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness (MIT Press, 1999, 2001), and other books.