Book: The Secret History of Dreaming

From

The Wisdom of Your Dreams
Using dreams to tap into your unconscious and transform your life.
Dr. Jeremy Taylor
February 10, 2010

Robert Moss has done it again – he has written another most engaging, informative, and eye-opening book. Like many of his earlier books, the The Secret History of Dreaming challenges many of the most deeply held and unconsciously reactive prejudices of main stream scientific dream researchers – most particularly, the unquestioned assumption that dreams are essentially an epiphenomenon of autonomic processes of individual body/minds, whose meaning, (if any), is limited to symbolic reflections of the individual dreamer’s own less-then-fully-conscious personal experience and “threat rehearsal.”…

The Secret History of Dreaming,
(New World Library, 2009, ISBN 978-1-57731-638-1), adopts a much broader and more dramatic view. It offers the reader a series of compelling and vividly rendered historical anecdotes that Robert weaves together to create a picture of the process of dreaming as an “unseen hand”, shaping the history of the world much more specifically and directly than the currently fashionable, scientific view would allow.

Robert begins his book by quoting a basic premise of the medievalist historian, Jacques Le Goff, “The imaginal life is central to the human story, and should be central to the writing and teaching of history.”…

Having made it clear that he is taking this “middle path”, Robert goes on to share some truly compelling stories, drawn from all over the world, involving particularly talented and brave dreamers, both men and women, whose dreams have influenced the course of history in very specific and dramatic ways.

Robert also explores levels of dreaming that regularly reveal the health of dysfunction of the dreamer’s physical body, both in the moment of the dream, and in the future. Chapters address the life shaping dreams of famous American artists like Mark Twain, and political leaders like John Adams and Benjamin Rush, as well as the great American heroine of the anti-slavery movement, Harriet Tubman. Robert draws our attention to the dreaming exploits and insights of many other fascinating characters throughout history, ranging from Winston Churchill to Joan of Arc, to the aboriginal inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. (Full Article)

Comments

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *