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J. Allan Hobson

Dream Life: An Experimental Memoir (The MIT Press) Hardcover – March 11, 2011

by J. Allan Hobson (Author)

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A pioneer in sleep and dream science surveys his life and work through the lens of dreaming and consciousness.

J. Allan Hobson's scientific experimentation began in childhood, with a soot-filled investigation into the capacity of a chimney to admit Santa Claus. (He discovered that even with the damper open the chimney was far too narrow.) Hobson's life as an experimentalist has continued through a pioneering career devoted to aligning psychology and biology and to investigating the relationship of dreaming and consciousness. In Dream Life, Hobson conducts an experimental investigation into his life and work.

Hobson charts his developing consciousness through a vividly imagined conception (in October of 1932), birth, and babyhood, offering a theory about "protoconsciousness" in fetuses and infants. He recounts his youthful zeal for scientific discovery, his early sexual experimentation, and his education. He describes taking on the entrenched Freudians at Harvard Medical School in the 1950s, as a maverick psychiatrist who wanted to replace psychoanalysis with biological science. He describes his further studies, his marriages and love affairs, his travels, and what he learned about the brain from his whiplash-induced amnesia after a 1963 automobile accident and from his "brain death" after a stroke in 2001. Through it all, Hobson uses his life as the ultimate case study for his theory that REM sleep provides a test pattern that allows the brain to develop "offline." Dreams―most intense in REM sleep, when the brain is active―need no Freudian-style decoding, he says. Dreaming is a glorious mental state, to be enjoyed and studied for what it tells us about consciousness.

Print length

312 pages
Language

English
Publisher

The MIT Press
Publication date

March 11, 2011
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0262015323
ISBN-13

978-0262015325
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Aiming squarely at Freud, Hobson and a succession of collaborators documented people's sleep cycles, monitored their brain waves, and tracked chemical changes in the brain. In a series of books driven by five decades of research, Hobson argued that what's really happening when we dream is that our forebrains―the center of thinking and memory―are offline, while our visual, auditory, and emotional centers are not only online, but lit up. Bizarre and powerful dreams aren't caused by repressed desire, he argued, but by biology. Dreams may be fun to think about, but they're really just a side effect of sleep.

―Boston Globe

Many scientists write lay expositions of their research. Others do memoirs. Hobson, one of the world's most eminent sleep researchers, provides a unique amalgam. He recounts his life history, employing diverse episodes to convey insights into brain function. Hobson is frank to a fault, baring painful personal traumas―including his stroke, heart failure, and marital infidelities―all as learning moments for the reader. The resulting volume is as engrossing as a detective story, emotionally moving, and teaches far better than any textbook. Every scientist, physician, and curious lay reader will wish to devour this succulent brain food.

―Solomon H. Snyder, M.D.

Review

This remarkably candid and unconventional memoir provides a fascinating account of the life of the mind, as lived and boldly explored by one of the foremost brain scientists of our time. The details of Hobson's youthful escape from the Siren call of psychoanalysis, and the fruits of his subsequent and revolutionary research on sleep and dreaming, bear witness to a challenging and passionate quest. Along the way, we learn just how the study of sleep and dreaming have supplied a 'royal road' to the understanding of consciousness.

―Frank J. Sulloway, University of California, Berkeley, author of Freud, Biologist of the Mind and Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press; 1st edition (March 11, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262015323
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262015325
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Customer Reviews:
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Alan V

A Life of the Brain-Mind

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2011

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Every other memoir I have read focuses almost exclusively on the waking life of its author -- the life of the mind. By selecting out memorable and important events from their waking states, their authors ignore the third of their lives they spend asleep. What could possibly happen during that sleeping time of any interest to anyone? It turns out, quite a lot.

In writing his own memoir, sleep and dream researcher Dr. J. Allan Hobson sets out to correct the impression that our lives consist only of our waking experiences. He addresses his own life story as not only the product of a mind, but as the product of a brain as well. So for instance, he uses his own protoconsciousness theory of dreaming to describe how he likely developed from a nonconscious fetus to a fully conscious child. He gives examples of his dream experiences and not only relates them to his waking preoccupations but treats them as novel experiences in themselves. He addresses how a car accident gave him temporary amnesia, how a brain stem stroke killed a part of his total self, and how the medications he has taken in his old age altered his perceptions -- and how such experiences affected his sleep and dream life as well.

So one meaning of Hobson's subtitle An Experimental Memoir is that the form of his account is novel in including such detail. Another is that his lifelong preoccupation was with replacing the inaccuracies of Freudian psychoanalytic assumptions with perspectives derived from careful brain science. The experiments Hobson and his associates performed were successful in doing exactly that, yet the world has largely not yet caught up with the facts they learned. This memoir can therefore be read as an introduction to the whole range of such contributions to sleep and dreaming science, to Hobson's many other books and to the scientific articles he and his associates produced. Although few people may agree with or even understand the full range of his professional opinions (including me) Hobson is always thought-provoking.

A third meaning of his subtitle is that as a skeptic from an early age, Hobson treated much of his life as experimental. Not only did he become a scientist who challenged the ideas in his field, but he treated himself and the other people and things in his life as experimental subjects as well, as fit objects of careful observation. It is this stance which reminds me of a quote from Walden, Henry Thoreau's own experimental memoir: "Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me... If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about."

With its distinctive voice and striking perspectives, Allan Hobson's latest book has earned a place among my favorite memoirs.

15 people found this helpful

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Anthony K Shin

An engaging, personalized discussion that connects consciousness, dreams, and brain physiology

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2013

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Written with humor and genuineness as a personalized memoir, this book presents a thoroughly interesting and engaging account of how the brain functions in what is commonly thought to be "unconscious" or "subconscious," but may just as usefully be considered a robust but different type of human consciousness. One issue that seems to be curiously absent from the discussion, however, is the differing functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

2 people found this helpful

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Patk Moon

As described

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2022

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Fast and accurate!

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Kathy

Sorry, couldn't get past the admitted infidelities

Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2020

I started this book with some interest, but the self-centeredness of the author really put me off. THEN he got to the part where he was cheating on his wife (with students??) and justifying it with the tired "younger women are more fertile" blather. Whatever, dude. You made a promise, which you then repeatedly broke, all the while exposing your wife to STDs. That isn't sexual freedom, that is ABUSE. Then not wanting to divorce her because of the damage it would do to his social network is such a sad tale of, you know, consequences.

And people wonder why I'm not a fan of academia.

I'm glad this was a gift, though sorry my ill-advised friend spent money on it.

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Dr. Leopold FALTIN, meincoach.at '

Live your dream life

Reviewed in Germany on June 4, 2011

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If somebody ever lived the life of his dreams, J. Allan Hobson did it. Persuaded that there is more to it than Freud postulated but never proved, he was among the first who studied sleep and dream based on science, applied scientifically sound methods and thereby explained step by step in ever increasing detail and depth his view that REM sleep plays an indispensable role in development of consciousness - both human and, more general, mammalian. And that's what he shows in this book.

Since he devoted (and still devotes) his entire life to this subject he choses the form of an autobiography not only to illustrate, but to make it obvious and understandable how pervasive his thoughts and conclusions are to everybody's life and personal development. In doing so, he once more applies, persuasively, his concept for successful demonstrations to bring science to the masses: he sells a process instead of a product.

So enthusiastic is he in reporting his conjectures, experiments, observations and insights that sometimes he seems to forget his certainly interested, but not necessarily equally qualified readership. There are passages in this book which simply exceed the educational standards of non-psychologists and non-biologists required to follow him.

Being one of this bunch I like this book nevertheless. It touches, moves and finally persuades by its openness, its straightness and because Hobson is an excellent storyteller. It is as simple as that. He tells the story which is, in the double sense of the book's title, his own.

3 people found this helpful

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Dream Life: An Experimental Memoir (The MIT Press) Hardcover – March 11, 2011

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J. Allan Hobson

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