The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving-- and How You Can Too [Hardcover]

Deirdre Barrett Ph.D. (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 27, 2001

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." -- John Steinbeck

Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples showing how some of the world's most creative people have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. From these, she draws lessons on lucid dreaming and its application to our problems great and small.

In the visual arts, for example, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built surrealism out of dreams. Today, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, dreams her extraordinary designs into life. In film, "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman; so have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, many dream of winning a Nobel Prize, but physiologist Otto Loewi worked with the Committee on the medical experiment that earned him the real prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi dreamed of resistance.

Since Freud, we have taken it for granted that our dreams tell us something about where we are and where we have been. Now, in The Committee of Sleep, Barrett vividly reveals how dreams can also tell us where we could possibly go -- and how to get there.

Read this book, sleep on it, and see what transpires!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Taking her title from John Steinbeck, who once wrote that "a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it," Barrett gathers supporting evidence for the idea that dreams can enhance creativity and solve problems, not only for Nobel Prize winners and other overachievers like Coleridge, Gandhi and Dal¡, but for everyone. Drawing on personal narratives, anecdotal evidence and clinical studies, Barrett (The Pregnant Man and Other Cases from a Hypnotherapist's Couch), a faculty member at Harvard Medical School's department of psychiatry, shows how "the Committee" works across all disciplines and media--including poetry, film, engineering, music, sports and politics. She also crosses cultural boundaries to show that dreams in non-Western societies serve a similar creative function. Intriguingly, Barrett explores dreams that foreshadow "illnesses that did not yet show physical symptoms": one man dreamt of a panther piercing him "just to the left of his spine between his shoulder blades," in exactly the spot where, two months, later a malignant melanoma was found. Barrett provides readers with dream exercises and specific techniques for making the most of their sleeping hours. In addressing the "accuracy of dream recall," she reinforces her credibility by acknowledging a greater "potential for distortion when people other than the dreamer repeat the story." However, her use of the catchall term "Committee" begins to lose its irony through repetition, yielding the occasional impression that Barrett actually believes that some independent body governs dream content. But that's one small stylistic quibble with an otherwise graceful and fascinating work.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"This fascinating and balanced compendium is the first critical examination of the tricky subject of the role of dreams and dreaming in creative life -- a question which has been pondered since antiquity. Dr. Barrett draws vividly and eloquently on the world's literature as well as her own clinical experience; one leaves this book with much more respect for sleep and dreaming."
-- Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist from Mars

"An Engaging yet scholarly adventure filled with absorbing anecdotes from the history books and from Dr. Barrett's own interviews with some of the world's great scientists and artists. As she explores the sometimes whimsical, often profound creative energy of the dream, her perceptive commentary illuminates why and how nocturnal inspirations occur and provides practical guidance for readers wishing to call upon the Committee as a resource. Facinating reading!"
-- D.M. Thomas, author of The White Hotel

"Barrett provides a delightful update on the creative use of dreams by contemporary artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, scientists, inventors, and others, along with a reminder of classical dream discoveries. She has gathered many unique examples from eastern cultures, as well, including India, Islam, and Africa. Her personal interviews with living artists in various fields inspire readers to recognize their own dream discoveries and use them to enrich their daily lives. Good bedtime reading!"-- Patricia Garfield, Ph.D., author of Creative Dreaming and The Universal Dream Key

"A fascinating account of the fantastic creativity of the dreaming mind. The most extensive collection of creative dreams yet, The Committee of Sleep is well written, thoughtful, and inspiring."-- Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D., author of the bestseller Lucid Dreaming

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (February 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812932412
• ISBN-13: 978-0812932416
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #783,260 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D. is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School's Behavioral Medicine Program. She Past President of both the International Association for the Study of Dreams and the American Psychological Association's Div. 30, The Society for Psychological Hypnosis. Dr. Barrett has written four books: The Committee of Sleep (Random House, 2001) and The Pregnant Man and Other Cases from a Hypnotherapist's Couch (Random House, 1998), Waistland (Norton, 2007) and Supernormal Stimuli (Norton, 2010). She is the editor of four additional books: Trauma and Dreams (Harvard University Press, 1996), The New Science of Dreaming (Praeger/Greenwood, 2007), Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy (Praeger/Greenwood, 2010), and The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams (Greenwood, 2012). Dr. Barrett has published dozens of academic articles and chapters on health, hypnosis, and dreams. She is Editor-in-Chief of DREAMING: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams.
Dr. Barrett's commentary on psychological issues has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN, Fox, and The Discovery Channel. She has been interviewed for dream articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Life, Time, and Newsweek. Her own articles have appeared in Psychology Today and Invention and Technology. Dr. Barrett has lectured at Esalen, the Smithsonian, and at universities around the world.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Heavy Writing Style but Fascinating Information September 20, 2010

By bronx book nerd VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Dreams can be valuable sources of ideas, creativity and solutions, as clearly demonstrated by Deirdre Barrett's book. Barrett covers how dreams have assisted writers, painters, architects, biologists and chemists, for example, in finding solutions to problems or by presenting new creative ideas. All the accounts and evidence presented in this book should convince any skeptic that dreams can be a rich vein to mine. I myself often come up with creative ideas when I am in the so-called hypnagogic state, that state on the border of sleeping and waking, when I awaken in the morning. My problem is that I am usually not prepared to capture my thoughts on pen and paper, and I later find myself remembering that I had a good idea but not remembering what it was. Barrett also explores the impact that dreamers' professions and cultures have in the types of dreams they have. For example, in cultures where dreams are accepted as sources of ideas or inspiration, they are more readily shared and acted on.

On the down side, although I can't quite put my finger on it, there is something about Barrett's writing style that made it somewhat difficult to get through the text, and I found that I was forcing myself to push through the text, feeling at times that I was more reading a menu of dream selections and their details rather than a story about the dreams and their dreamers.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Creativity and dreams! July 1, 2010

By Richard Aru

Format:Hardcover

This book brings together all the best accounts of dreams which have solved important waking life problems or inspired great art. It summarizes research on how often and what kinds of problems dreams are most helpful with. There are directions for incubating creative problem solving dreams which give the reader all clear information to get started making practical use of their own dreams. Well-written and entertaining reading. Recommended to anyone who's interested in dreams or in the creative process.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars EXCELLENT FOR WORKING WITH YOUR DREAMS August 21, 2010

By Curt Howard

Format:Paperback

This book isn't a self-help book per se. It devotes most of the space to describing problem solving and creative dreams of historic and modern writers and scientist. But it has enough pages which outline how to incubate proberm-solving dreams yourself to make this easy and the famous examples are more inspiring than a whole book of the 'how-to' would be. Best book if you want to start getting practical help from your dream life.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating October 28, 2012

By New Mexico reader

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Committee of Sleep is a fascinating book combining excellent examples of dreams with lots of examples of how they can be used to enrich your life. It is well researched and very helpful.

0 of 9 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Book February 18, 2013

By Barbara Lawson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Didn't remember ordering this book. Don't know if I would like it or not. If I should run across it would look thru it then.