J. Allan Hobson’s scientific experimentation began in childhod, 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.

A cento anni dalla nascita della psicoanalisi e alla luce delle nuove scoperte delle neuro-scienze, ecco un'occasione per fare il punto della situazione. Perché sogniamo? Che senso hanno le immagini oniriche? Quale sarà il futuro della mente nell'era del cervello? Dal sogno come 'via regia' dell'inconscio alla chimica dei sogni, ripercorriamo un cammino di non facile intesa, tra psicoanalisti e scienza.

Il volume, riccamente illustrato, affianca la storia dell'arte occidentale alle nuove sorprendenti visioni che la scienza ha prodotto per interpretare lo straordinario mondo interiore del cervello. Il sogno è visto come un processo autocreativo che rivela il nostro profondo talento naturale nel visualizzare emozioni: siamo tutti pittori e registi quando i nostri cervelli sognano.

In this book, J. Allan Hobson offers a new understanding of altered states of consciousness based on knowledge of how our brain chemistry is balanced when we are awake and how that balance shifts when we fall asleep and dream. He draws on recent research that enables us to explain how psychedelic drugs work to disturb that balance and how similar imbalances may cause depression and schizophrenia. He also draws on work that expands our understanding of how certain drugs can correct imbalances and restore the brain's natural equilibrium.Hobson explains the chemical balance concept in terms of what we know about the regulation of normal states of consciousness over the course of the day by brain chemicals called neuromodulators. He presents striking confirmation of the principle that every drug that has transformative effects on consciousness interacts with the brain's own consciousness-altering chemicals. In the section called 'The Medical Drugstore,' Hobson describes drugs used to counteract anxiety and insomnia, to raise and lower mood, and to eliminate or diminish the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia. He discusses the risks involved in their administration, including the possibility of new disorders caused by indiscriminate long-term use. In 'The Recreational Drugstore,' Hobson discusses psychedelic drugs, narcotic analgesia, and natural drugs. He also considers the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate drug use. In the concluding 'Psychological Drugstore,' he discusses the mind as an agent, not just the mediator, of change, and corrects many erroneous assumptions and practices that hinder the progress of psychoanalysis.