Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams: A Guide to Awakening Consciousness During Dream Sleep

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. (Dec.)