This book was an excellent find with the very helpful combination of scientific research, related art works and famous quotes....all about sleeping and dreaming!
Here are some parts that I found to be most interesting and thought provoking:
"Sleep is better than medicine" - English proverb
"...enigmatically the dark side of human existence" - pg.19
"Dead to the world"
"Sleep and death both give us a sense of helplessness, a lack of control"
"People sleep and dream whether they want to or not" - Diderot
"...the arbitrary power of the dream, it's foreign logic and it's specific mechanisms"
"Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, and yet a third of life is passed in sleep" - Lord Byron
"...Freud: dream interpretation, the road "to the knowledge of the unconscious in mental life"
(Dream research combined with trauma research)..."severe lesions suffered by the mind that permanently hinder therapeutic intervention."(Traumatic experiences can produce nightmares and damage behavior by leaving traces on the brain)
"(In dreams)...our braiin turns itself inside out, switches of logical and "civilised" parts" - Mark Solms
"...sleep is a highly active state accompanied by different physiological reactions"
(The previous theory of dreams only occurring during R.E.M cycles has been disproved)..."redeemed the reputation of sleep, finding that learning while sleeping is possible"
"Dreams are my psychological digestive system" - Igor Stravinsky
"...underlying biological rhythms" (sleep and the whole human psyche is based around time and our internal clocks
(1980's studies: daylight identified as the most important internal timer, brightness brings circadian (sleep) rhythms into alignment with the rhythm of day and night.
"...how modern society is coping in a "world without sleep"
"...sleep plays a fundamental role in the process of memory formation...the stabilisation of already-existing memory content...consolidation"
"It is common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it" - John Steinbeck
"Chief nurisher in life's feast" - Shakespeare, from "Macbeth", Act II, Scene ii
"If dreaming is the activity of inner psychic reality, the reflection of our conscious and unconscious experiences, then sleep is an escape that protects us from the insistent demands of our everyday life. It offers us the possibility to curl up in a fetal position under the protective shield of sleep, pull the blanket up over our heads and abandon ourselves to the illusion of primary experience." - pg, 90
"Dreams contradict what is real and true, but at the same time, they are the duplicate of this logical realm." - pg. 122
"That every night in Max's room a forest grew and grew-
and grew until his ceiling hung with vines
and the walls became the world all around
and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max
and he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are" - Maurice Sendak, from "Where the Wild Things Are"
No comments:
Post a Comment