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41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An important book on the 100 year mark of Freud's theory., November 15, 1999
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.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Better Way To Consider Dreams, December 22, 2000
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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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
LIKE AN NREM DREAM -- NOT GOOD, November 19, 2007
This review is from: Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind (Philosophy of Mind) (Paperback)
Reading this book, you want to like Owen Flanagan. He starts out proving he's conversational. He brings his own personal experience or that of his friends to the table when discussing dreams and thought. He transitions from one topic to another in a manner that initially hints that some surprise or awesome entertainment is just around the corner of your reading, titillating you, -- but then he doesn't deliver. He overintellectualizes his subject; he stretches a topic as if it is important and central to the entire original conception he's propounding about the nature of dreams, only to let you discover that it isn't that important, it isn't that central, in the very end. There had been plenty of "talk" (or writing) one could have done well without, one discovers.
The book lacks scientific and philosophical clout. Not that the whole thing is a complete wash, no. There is some useful information. You learn that dolphins sleep with only half of their brain; you learn dreams are generally unpleasant and that adult dreams rarely contain sex. Finally, we learn there are no dreams where whole works of art come to the dreamer completely intact, though they can inspire one artistically. But the philosophizing on difference, on how we can cognitively know we're dreaming from how we know we're awake, was jejeune and illogical. I found one common fallacy in his argument -- begging the question -- which astounded me since in that very same context he had pointed out to his readers another common fallacy that people often use when thinking about dreams and awakeness. To find (even) one common fallacy in his work was a huge disappointment. It confirmed my perspective that Owen Flanagan's on-the-surface personable, conversational writing style was more important to him than the logical flow of his own ideas as a philosopher.
One undergraduate of psychology reviewing this book on Amazon stated he thought Flanagan's 195-page book could be reduced to a 10-page pamphlet. I agree. The style of writing for this work is an odd admixture of conversation and highly technical jargon where words like "pleiotropic" and "PGO waves" are tossed into the discussion without definition, context, or purpose. Reading this book felt like the NREM dreams Flanagan vividly describes in his text: longer-than-the-actual spent time, repetitive, and compulsively nattering on small or insignificant details or events. I think the book could be improved by having more signal and less noise.
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