Dreams And Delusions

This collection of essays by historian Fritz Stern ponders the promise and catastrophe of twentieth-century German history. It is now reissued with a new introduction by the author.

A distinctively human aspect of the mind is its ability to handle both factual and counterfactual scenarios. This brings enormous advantages, but we are far from infallible in monitoring the boundaries between the real, the imaginary and the pathological. In the early modern period, particularly, explorations of the mind's ability to roam beyond the factual became mainstream. It was an age of perspective art, anamorphism and optical illusions; of prophecy, apocalyptic dreams, and visions; and of fascination with the supernatural. This volume takes a fresh look at early modern understandings of how to distinguish reality from dream, or delusion from belief. Opening with cognitivist and philosophical perspectives, Cognitive Confusions then examines test cases from across European literature, providing an original documentation of the mind in its most creative and pathological states.

In the era of television, computers and more sophisticated techniques, to grasp the knowledge of any subject is quite easy and interesting which make a long-lasting impact on the mind. This book has pictorial illustrations concerning Dreams. Delusions and Dreads to create a long-lasting impression on the minds of neophytes for easy understanding of the Materia Media. The book is in three parts: the first part covers the Dreams, second the Delusions and third the Dreads (fears).

A distinctively human aspect of the mind is its ability to handle both factual and counterfactual scenarios. This brings enormous advantages, but we are far from infallible in monitoring the boundaries between the real, the imaginary and the pathological. In the early modern period, particularly, explorations of the mind's ability to roam beyond the factual became mainstream. It was an age of perspective art, anamorphism and optical illusions; of prophecy, apocalyptic dreams, and visions; and of fascination with the supernatural. This volume takes a fresh look at early modern understandings of how to distinguish reality from dream, or delusion from belief. Opening with cognitivist and philosophical perspectives, Cognitive Confusions then examines test cases from across European literature, providing an original documentation of the mind in its most creative and pathological states.

In a circle of men who take it for granted that the basic riddle of the dream has been solved by the efforts of the present writer's curiosity was aroused one day concerning those dreams which have never been dreamed, those created by authors, and attributed to fictitious characters in their productions. The proposal to submit this kind of dream to investigation might appear idle and strange; but from one view-point it could be considered justifiable. It is, to be sure, not at all generally believed that the dreamer dreams something senseful and significant. Science and the majority of educated people smile when one offers them the task of interpreting dreams. Only people still clinging to superstition, who give continuity, thereby, to the convictions of the ancients, will not refrain from interpreting dreams, and the writer of Traumdeutung has dared, against the protests of orthodox science, to take sides with the ancients and superstitious. He is, of course, far from accepting in dreams a prevision of the future, for the disclosure of which man has, from time immemorial, striven vainly. He could not, however, completely reject the connections of dreams with the future, for, after completing some arduous analysis, the dreams seemed to him to represent the fulfilment of a wish of the dreamer; and who could dispute that wishes are preponderantly concerned with the future? I have just said that the dream is a fulfilled wish. Whoever is not afraid to toil through a difficult book, whoever does not demand that a complicated problem be insincerely and untruthfully presented to him as easy and simple, to save his own effort, may seek in the above-mentioned Traumdeutung ample proof of this statement, and may, until then, cast aside the objection that will surely be expressed against the equivalence of dreams and wish-fulfilment.

In this book J. Allan Hobson sets out a compelling—and controversial—theory of consciousness. Our brain-mind, as he calls it, is not a fixed identity but a dynamic balancing act between the chemical systems that regulate waking and dreaming. With a new foreword by the author. In this book, J. Allan Hobson sets out a compelling—and controversial—theory of consciousness. Our brain-mind, as he calls it, is not a fixed identity but a dynamic balancing act between the chemical systems that regulate waking and dreaming. Drawing on his work both as a sleep researcher and as a psychiatrist, Hobson looks in particular at the strikingly similar chemical characteristics of the states of dreaming and psychosis. His underlying theme is that the form of our thoughts, emotions, dreams, and memories derive from specific nerve cells and electrochemical impulses described by neuroscientists. Among the questions Hobson explores are: What are dreams? Do they have any hidden meaning, or are they simply emotionally salient images whose peculiar narrative structure refects the unique neurophysiology of sleep? And what is the relationship between the delirium of our dream life and psychosis? Originally published by Little, Brown under the title The Chemistry of Conscious States.

The true story of a US Navy service member