Anthony Shafton

Advance Praise for Dream-Singers ""You will find a great storehouse of folk and literary treasures in this ambitious book that speaks to anyone who has ever thought about his or her dreams. It's a wonderful adventure and I highly recommend it.""-Clarence Major, author of Configurations and Juba to Jive Acclaim for Dream Reader also by Anthony Shafton ""A book so unique in its combination of scholarship, clarity, and down-to-earth feeling about dreams that I find it hard to fully express the excitement and satisfaction I felt on reading it.""-Montague Ullman, M.D., Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Author of Working with Dreams and Dream Telepathy ""Breathtaking . . . the single most complete and thorough analysis of contemporary dream theories yet written . . . Shafton has a keen sense for what people most want to know about dreams, and an admirable ability to explain difficult concepts without oversimplifying them.""-Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., Past President, The Association for the Study of Dreams, Author of The Wilderness of Dreams

A comprehensive survey of contemporary approaches to understanding dreams. If you can have only one book on dreams, this is the one to have.Dream Reader is a uniquely comprehensive survey of contemporary approaches to understanding and working with dreams. The general reader interested in exploring the world of dreams could not obtain a better introduction and grounding than from this book. Academic psychologists, therapists, and professional dreamworkers alike will find it to be an incomparable survey and sampling of the growing literature on dreaming.In Part I, Shafton summarizes sleep laboratory discoveries, then considers theories about dream generation and meaning that have arisen from these discoveries. Part II discusses major Euro-American schools of dream interpretation in the twentieth century: Freud, Jung, Existential, Cultural, and Gestalt. Also included are chapters dealing with various topics of interest: the dream styles of people of both genders, and of people with certain psychiatric diagnoses; non-interpretive approaches to dreamwork; dream incubation; lucid dreaming; dream re-entry; dreams of the blind; post-traumatic nightmares; and many more. Dream Reader provides an integrated review of the whole literature of dream psychology-the clinical, academic, and also the serious popular literature. It also presents sizeable extracts from the original sources for the reader's own critical evaluation.