Mapping the uncharted territory at the edges of psychological knowledge, these fascinating essays explore compelling aspects of dreams and dreaming. They discuss topics as diverse as memorable dreams, lucid dreaming, the role of dreams in the evolution of human consciousness, and the relationship between dreams and the waking state.
In ‘The Dream and Its Embedding’, psychoanalyst Patrick Mahony demonstrates, with absorbing case-studies, how dreams can become effective therapeutic tools, while dream scholar Kelly Bulkely concludes in ‘Big Dreams’ that, ultimately, the function of dreams is to make the brain grow. Luigi Zoja, dream analyst, explores the profusion of nightmares among soldiers, prisoners and other victims of war in ‘Nightmares’. And Madhu Tandan, who lived for seven years at an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas, explains how dreams can access a level of consciousness beyond the psychological.
This volume is the first in the ‘Boundaries of Consciousness’ series, which, under the leadership of Sudhir Kakar, seeks to bring together psychoanalysts, philosophers, religious-studies scholars and neuroscientists in order to expand the frontiers of current psychological understanding. Subsequent volumes will spring from symposia held at Wasan Island, Canada, on the supernatural, death and dying, and creativity and imagination.
Edited and introduced by Sudhir Kakar, On Dreams and Dreaming will be of interest to scholars and to all who dream and seek to understand why.
Despite being sullied by frauds and dismissed by sceptics, the paranormal has exerted a strange fascination over humankind for centuries. In Seriously Strange, a group of nine intellectuals come together to shed light on some of the most baffling experiences on record—psychical experiences.
Through these illuminating essays, they tell us how such extraordinary events can be decoded and interpreted to become the object of rigorous scientific study. The range is wide: from essays that reveal how Freud and Jung engaged with the notion of the paranormal to a provocative and humorous memoir of a physicist who spent over a decade running a secret psychic spying programme for the US government during the Cold War; from heartfelt accounts by practising psychiatrists of the anomalies in their healing practice to a learned call for the renewal of professional parapsychology in the light of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
By telling their own stories and exploring some of the implications of their work, these men and women map the mind-bending geography of the human psyche and the spectrum of experiences—love and death, desire and sex, hurt and healing, myth and magic—that influence it.