Dream Life: An Experimental Memoir

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J. Allan Hobson's scientific experimentation began inchildhod, with a soot-filled investigation into the capacity of a chimney toadmit Santa Claus. (He discovered that even with the damper open the chimneywas far too narrow.) Hobson's life as an experimentalist has continuedthrough a pioneering career devoted to aligning psychology and biology and toinvestigating the relationship of dreaming and consciousness. In Dream Life,Hobson conducts an experimental investigation into his life and work. Hobsoncharts his developing consciousness through a vividly imagined conception (inOctober 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 theentrenched Freudians at Harvard Medical School in the 1950s, as a maverickpsychiatrist who wanted to replace psychoanalysis with biological science. Hedescribes his further studies, his marriages and love affairs, his travels, andwhat he learned about the brain from his whiplash-induced amnesia after a 1963automobile accident andfrom his "brain death" after a stroke in2001. Through it all, Hobson uses his life as the ultimate case study for histheory that REM sleep provides a test pattern that allows the brain to develop "offline."Dreams -- most intense in REM sleep, when thebrain is active -- ;need no Freudian-style decoding, he says. Dreaming isa glorious mental state, to be enjoyed and studied for what it tells us aboutconsciousness.