The Dreaming Brain

Rejecting the Freudian view of dreams as symbolic representations of a repressed subconcious, Hobson puts forward a neurologically-based explanation of dreams in what he calls his "activation-synthesis" model. Responding to randomly produced impulses from its sensory centres during REM sleep, the brain attempts to create coherent narratives from these impulses, creating the odd combination of logic and illogic that is typical of dreams. In this model dreaming is a healthy and creative process. Charting the history of neurology and psychology from Freud's disillusion with the limitations of Charcot's primitive neurological experiments, Hobson describes the two subjects taking separate paths until the present day.