Books like Stop sleeping through your dreams by Charles Lambert McPhee

David Foulkes is one of the international leaders in the empirical study of children's dreaming, and a pioneer of the use of sleep labs research with children. In this book, which distills a lifetime of study, Foulkes shows that dreaming as we normally understand it - active stories in which the dreamer is an actor - appears relatively late in childhood. This true dreaming begins between the ages of 7 and 9. Although younger children do report dreams (often at the prompting of their eager parents), careful empirical study suggests that what the child calls dreams are almost certainly waking fantasies and confabulations. Laboratory studies show that preschoolers' REM sleep dreams usually consist of isolated static images - often of animals. Foulkes argues that the late development of narrative dreaming suggests an equally late development of waking reflective self-awareness.

"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 derives 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 reflects the unique neurophysiology of sleep? And what is the relationship between the delirium of our dream life and psychosis?"--BOOK JACKET.