Customer Reviews

The Complete Book Of Dreams (DK Living)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Have you ever solved a problem in your life through a dream or woken up and had the desire to go back to sleep to finish a dream. If you have a vivid dream world you will enjoy this unique approach to unraveling your dreams and learning from them.

Symbols will often appear in our dreams. In this book, a comprehensive thesaurus provides thousands of symbols and their meanings. Dreams will often have a major theme and unique illustrations show how selected dreams progress.

Julia and Derek Parker are best-selling authors and are recognized experts in the field of dream interpretation. In this book, they explain the mechanics of sleep and dreaming and explain how to deal with the problem of nightmares. There is advice on how to create your own personal dream notebook.

The nonsensical plots and characters in our dreams often can become more rational and sensible and comment on our problems and difficulties in life. The history of dreams is an interesting chapter and is well illustrated. The Mechanics of sleep tells of how we fall into a cycle of sleep. During sleep, we experience NREM an REM sleep and people need each type of sleep for various reasons.

So, if you have had a dream in which you saw mammals, reptiles, winged creatures, fish, fire, water, earth, air, weather, trees, flowers or plants this book seeks to tell you why. There are a variety of dreams which are interpreted throughout the book.

There is so much in this book, it is hard to even list all the dreams or symbols. What I was the most interested in was dreams of flying. Apparently they are extremely common. One time in a dream, I thought I had flown into the night sky. So, I went to page 147 to see why. They say that in life if you are trying to "rise above" something or trying to achieve a position or have high ambitions, that could be the reason.

What I loved even more than the actual interpretation was the Thesaurus in which you can look up the images you see in your dreams. I can't wait to go dream something so I can look up my dreams again. I think this should be by everyone's bedside so when they wake, they can look up the meaning of their dreams. If you have dreamed it, I bet it is in this complete compilation of dream meanings.

A fascinating subject and a look into the private world of dreams.

~The Rebecca Review

A truely good book on dream interpetation. It provides common symbol references along with sample interpetations. The references are not absolutes but guides and the book talks primarily about the importance of interpeting the dream in the context of your own life.

I found the opening 40 pages of this book to be a very interesting introduction to dreams and how to analyze them. The rest of the book concerns dream themes such as "water" which, for example, the authors attribute to the dreamer's emotional life. The book gives many examples of dreams and suggested interpretations. It is obvious that great care and thought went into the writing, and the comprehensive, detailed, coverage of dream elements is impressive. Further, there are numerous worthwhile illustrations to accompany the text.

From the title one would hope that this book would give a comprehensive assessment of what dream experts (i.e. psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers and neuroscientists) have discovered about the meaning and interpretation of dreams. The implication is that the dream elements and themes are universal archetypes of the human mind and that these are the ones that would apply to anybody.

There is no background, however, as to why the authors believe that the dream elements mean what they claim them to mean. I first thought that maybe the authors are such well known experts that they didn't need to give references, like what one would see in a basic textbook. But, the book tells us nothing of the authors' credentials: one can discover, however, from the authors' website that they are known mainly as astrologers. [But, there is little connection to astrology in this book].

Maybe the book's suggestions of dream meanings will lend insight into understanding your own dreams. I wasn't looking for a scholarly treatise, but I was hoping for something more authoritative.

I really like this book. It serves as a great tool for a thorough analysis of dreams. It also has a great reference index in the back to look up certain themes. It has recommendations for putting together a dream journal. In addition, it discusses how psychiatrists like Freud view dreams.

This is my favortie dream book. I am amazing by the accurate interpretation of my dreams. Almost 90% or above accuracy. Unlike many dream topic books I have read, Parkers explain the dream symbol with logical meaning and explanation.

I found that there are many bad written dream topic books in the market. They intrepret dreaming of a cat meaning omen or bad luck! I think readers need a new age dream analysis book, not a middle age one!

For something I've done every night of my life, I'm coming late to the study of dreams & dreaming. I can still remember fragments of nightmares; those demented, violent dramas that seemed to fill my sleeping time, tear my bed apart & awaken me in a panic. Nowadays my dreams are quite different, although elements of my childhood dreams will occasionally make brief appearances, especially flying. In clear & beautifully illustrated details the images of our dreams are interpreted along with a section on dream themes & a thesaurus listing thousands of symbols. Makes a sound beginner's reference book. ()

This book is great for helping one interpret and recall their dreams, but if you're looking for detailed info on dreams, this book wouldn't have that. Information on dreams in general is too brief for me. But who knows? Maybe, other people who read this book will have a different opinion.

The problem with books that have titles like this is that the title implies a bargain basement approach, a kind of, "all you ever wanted to know but where afraid to ask...".
Here the title bruises the content badly as this book is an easy to follow and intelligent text into the world of dreams and dream analysis. The book is doubtless helpful both personally and collectively and I feel it is worthy of being a clinical reference text, it really is that well reseached and that interesting. You will learn something of your internal world buy reading it, gauranteed.