Description
At first glance, dreams are strange, even bizarre. In them, kings can turn into
cabbages and horses can sing! It's easy to dismiss them-as they routinely
are-as meaningless hallucinations that arise when the rational intellect has
been disarmed by sleep. And yet, human beings have forever puzzled over
their meaning, and continue to do so, arguing that their strangeness is pointing
to something other than what is depicted in them.
Even a cursory analysis of our own dreams can reveal the truth of such a
claim, that dreams aren't random images conjured by the erratic firing of the
synapses in our brain. They seem to know our thoughts, often when we don't
know them ourselves, and have answers to questions that vex us in our waking
lives. Analysed carefully, they can show us our deepest desires and confront
us with concerns that we've been trying our best to avoid. They may even
know our bodies better than we think we do. And then of course there are
the paranormal dreams, which, as the author shows, are not beyond rational
interpretation; and lucid dreams, which prove that sleep isn't even a necessary
condition for dreaming.
Condensing four decades of experience in collecting and interpreting dreams,
Madhu Tandan's The Logic of Dreams is the perfect primer for those confounded
by the multiplicity of our chaotic dream world, and simultaneously a ready
handbook for those who wish to learn to interpret their own dreams.
