In Your Dreams: New Book Goes Inside 'The Transformative Power Of Our Nightly
   "Why We Dream -- The Transformative Power Of Our Nightly Journey," by
   "Why We Dream -- The Transformative Power Of Our Nightly Journey," by
   Why do we dream? To defrag the brain? Unbound our unconscious? There's
   Alice Robb, science journalist. Author of "Why We Dream: The
   Editor-in-chief of the journal Dreaming: The Journal of the Association
   for the Study of Dreams. Past president of the International
   Association for the Study of Dreams. Author of "The Committee of
   Excerpt from "Why We Dream" by Alice Robb
   I spent the summer of 2011 digging holes and talking about my dreams.
   eyes at chapter titles like "Life Is a Dream" and "Rehearsal for
   bodies technique," the ludicrous "dream lotus and flame technique," the
   Lucid Dreaming had all the trappings of a New Age self-help screed, but
   our dreams. We sleep, mindlessly, through many thousands of
   "lucid dreams," a sleeping person could become aware that she was
   dreaming and -- with a little practice -- control the plot of the
   dream. I was hooked.
   Most people experience a lucid dream at some point in their lives, but
   minority, lucid dreaming is so pleasurable that it becomes a hobby or a
   kind of self-help. Lucid dreams can seem more vivid than reality; they
   of her lucid dreams, and measures of vaginal pulse amplitude have shown
   that women's dream orgasms correspond to real physiological changes.)
   Others use lucid dreaming to take control of nightmares or rehearse
   one that stands out most is the memory of my first lucid dream.
   The memory had none of the haziness that usually clouds dreams, and the
   recounted our previous night's dreams while we scratched the grime off
   have a lucid dream." We made up mantras of our own: "Tonight, I will
   dreaming, like finding ourselves flying or meeting dead people. Every
   thinking about dreams. They were so much fuller, so much more
   I began keeping a dream diary, carefully logging whatever I could
   remember of my dreams in a spiral-bound leather notebook each morning;
   stunned: I understood that I had been having dreams like this all my
   incremental, often imperceptible. But improving your dream life can be
   as simple as increasing the time you devote to thinking about dreams
   for your intention to remember your dreams or taking a moment to write
   life-changing. Becoming aware of your dreams is like dipping into a
   Excerpted from Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly
   New York Times: "Opinion: Why Do You Keep Dreaming You Forgot Your
   "It was only after a painfully on-the-nose dream a few weeks later that
   I stopped doubting my intuition. In the dream, I had agreed to a second
   Time: "People Say It's Boring to Talk About a Dream You Had. Here's Why
   descriptions of dreams: witnesses and victims seemed to make a point of
   in their dreams. Telling dreams, he said, was a way to create "a social
   that dream reports started dropping out of inquests and news stories in
   dream world,' he said. 'There's increasing embarrassment around
   dreams.' Suddenly, they might be interpreted as signs of some latent
   "A century later, conventional wisdom dictates that dreams are not a
   in 2018, Dan Piepenbring began a review of Insomniac Dreams -- a book
   about Nabokov's relationship with his dreams -- by apologizing for the
   topic: 'Dreams are boring. On the list of tedious conversation topics,
   should never talk about. Dreams came in at number four, right behind
   that listening to other people's dreams made him dream 'of a future in
   Review of Books that discussion of dreams is all but banned from his
   tell you their dreams,' they say with an I-feel-your-pain nod. 'Those