Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams: A Guide to Awakening Consciousness During Dream Sleep Hardcover – December 1, 1995

The notion of dreaming one's way to greater mental health may seem irresistible; the catch here is that hard work is involved. McPhee, a former staffer at the Cedars-Sinai Sleep Disorders Center in Los Angeles, asserts that lucid dreams, i.e., ones in which the dreamer is actually conscious of dreaming, provide access to the unconscious mind and thus to fuller knowledge of the whole self, which can lead to happiness and self-esteem. Achieving lucid dreaming, however, is no simple feat. Techniques for remembering one's dreams and for using their incongruities and distortions as cues to conscious observation are detailed. The task then becomes to integrate the conscious and the unconscious, again no simple, short-term task. Beginning with a review of sleep research (e.g., everyone dreams about 100 minutes a night and, yes, in color), McPhee blends science (psychoanalytic and neurological) and somewhat academic self-help to yield pop psychology on a challenging level.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

These two books represent different ends of the spectrum of dream studies, a field that has grown rapidly in scholarly achievement and popular interest. The Quenks' book is narrowly focused on how to interpret dreams from a Jungian perspective. No time is spent on ancillary topics like remembering dreams, speculating on their nature, etc. They apply a set of questions to the dream, which, they reassure readers, will clarify most dreams. This limited approach may help some readers floundering with the notoriously difficult task of making sense of their own dreams. Unfortunately, the authors throw their entire system into some disarray on the final page when they report, "Prospective, religious, and very private dreams should be permitted to evolve naturally for the dreamer. An interpretation of these dreams may interrupt an important ongoing process by analyzing it." But just how does one know if a particular dream falls into one of those categories without some thought and analysis? McPhee's book, on the other hand, is basically Freudian in outlook and extremely diffuse. The title would seem to indicate it deals with how to achieve lucidity in dreams. Yet little space is devoted to that topic; instead, the author speculates on a variety of philosophical questions concerning consciousness and identity and resolves those questions with a long explanation of the Freudian mechanism of repression. There's nothing new here. The best book on dreams is Robert Van De Castle's Our Dreaming Mind (LJ 8/94) with Gayle Delaney's Breakthrough Dreaming (Bantam, 1991) and Stephen LaBerge's Lucid Dreaming (Tarcher, 1985) the best choices for the subtopics of interpretation and lucidity, respectively. Larger libraries with a readership hungry for new material on dreams may want to purchase the Quenk title; the McPhee title can be safely passed up.
Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, Wash.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.