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The Brain Never Sleeps: Why We Dream and What It Means for Our Health - Hardcover

Van Kampen, Karen

 
9781668077979: The Brain Never Sleeps: Why We Dream and What It Means for Our Health
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668077973 ISBN 13: 9781668077979
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

We all dream, but do we know why we dream? Discover what goes on behind our eyelids and what it means for our health.

Do you have common recurring dreams of missing an exam, even though it has been years since you were in college? Do certain people keep showing up in your dreams? How can you stop your dreaming brain from fixating on the same preoccupations and concerns? We spend every night of our lives dreaming, yet we remain unaware of the power and possibilities of accessing the inner sanctum of our minds.

In The Brain Never Sleeps, Karen van Kampen guides us on a journey through dreamland, sharing how we can reclaim this other realm of thought and experience to improve our well-being. Our dreams are as real to us as our waking experiences. They have the power to influence what we think, feel and do. With our dreaming brain operating in a different mode, disconnected from the demands and distractions of daily life, we brainstorm new ideas, face our fears and uncover insights into ourselves. Van Kampen, whose father opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in North America, acts as a unique and informed guide, combining first-person narrative with highly accessible science journalism.

Van Kampen investigates neuroscience and psychology to reveal the connection between our waking and dreaming lives while also exploring what happens when people get stuck in between—the mixed brain state of parasomnias including sleepwalking and night terrors. Through the fascinating stories of dream scientists, we learn how dreams boost learning, spark creativity and process emotions. Van Kampen conducts her own dream experiments with expert researchers as her guides. The Brain Never Sleeps propels us into the next frontier of dream engineering where we can guide our dreams with the hope of improving our well-being. Her toolkit at the end of the book offers simple ways to use dreams to improve our waking and dreaming lives.

The Brain Never Sleeps is a personal and enlightening journey that will change how we understand and value our nocturnal wanderings.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen van Kampen is an author and award-winning journalist who specializes in health and science. Her fascination with dreams began at the age of nine when she became her father’s first sleep lab “assistant,” helping him practice electrode hook-up and testing. She is the author of The Golden Cell: The Quest for the Next Great Medical Breakthrough, and her writing has appeared in many publications including The Globe and Mail, National Post, Calgary Herald, and Reader’s Digest. She enjoys teaching creative nonfiction writing at the University of Toronto. The Brain Never Sleeps is also available in Arabic, French, Romanian, and Spanish.

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Chapter One: The Freud Effect Chapter One THE FREUD EFFECT
WHEN I LIVED IN LONDON some years ago, I used to pass a blackened bronze statue on my daily walk to Finchley Road, a busy, dismal, yet useful thoroughfare teeming with shops and amenities in northwest London. On overcast days, the statue was dull and mute. When it poured, rained, or drizzled, in typical London fashion, heavy raindrops accumulated on the tip of the figure’s nose, plopping into a puddle in his lap. On those magical sunny days when the ceiling of clouds was lifted from the city, revealing a big blue sky, the statue shone. But I was oblivious to all of this. I’d just had a baby, and I bumped my stroller along the cobblestone streets of my new neighbourhood, navigating my way through the dense and disorienting fog of sleeplessness.

One day my husband joined me on my trek to the shops. We took the shortcut to Waitrose, meandering along narrow backstreets, past the local wine store, pharmacy, and café. Rounding the corner toward Finchley Road, Dimitri stopped and looked up. Staring down at us was the statue of a balding, bearded man with raised, inquisitive eyebrows, clad in a distinguished three-piece suit. He sat with his hands perched on his hips, leaning forward toward the road, casting a watchful gaze on the passing crowd.

“Hey, it’s Freud,” said Dimitri.

Staring down at me was the father of psychoanalysis, the Austrian neurologist who popularized dream interpretation and the man forever known to proclaim that dreams are the attempted fulfillment of our repressed wishes. I stood there, wide-eyed, as if waking up to this new sight. With my line of vision raised from the stroller, I noticed a sign pointing to the Freud Museum around the next corner. For almost half a year, I’d been living only a few blocks away from the house where Freud had spent his last days.

How, you might wonder, could I have been so unaware? For starters, I was a new mother living thousands of miles away from family and friends. When Alexander was eight weeks old, Dimitri and I packed up our worldly belongings, which at the time consisted mostly of Ikea furniture and bright, loud baby toys, along with boxes of research for this book, which began many years ago. We moved from Toronto to north London’s Belsize Park, a leafy neighbourhood with a charming village vibe, teeming with buggies, dogs, and local shops along winding cobblestone streets. I soon found that I was living a cruel irony. My dad is a sleep doctor who opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in Canada when I was a kid. Let’s just say that we talked about the importance of sleep. A lot. My newborn son decided that he didn’t like to sleep at night. And then there was the kicker: I was writing a book on dreams. I’m sure Freud would’ve had something to say about this.

The world around me was dreamlike, seeming both unknown and familiar. I’d visited London over the years, so there was a familiarity to the city. I had memories of long walks through Hyde Park, going treasure hunting among the stalls of Camden Market, and cheering on street performers doing magic tricks, acrobatics, and singing opera from the cobblestones of Covent Garden. Yet I was so sleep-deprived that I was seeing things through a different lens. I was operating in another mode, much like a dream, which shaped how I experienced the world around me. I remembered only snippets of a day’s worth of memories. No wonder I’d gone months without noticing Freud staring down at me.

But I didn’t need a statue to feel Freud’s presence. He was one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers. He remains engrained in our culture and collective psyche. While Freud was not the first to study dreams, his work propelled dream research into the next century. To this day, the mere mention of his name can spark heated debate. Some would say that dream research is still weighed down by psychoanalytic baggage. And while some of Freud’s ideas are outdated and have been debunked by scientists, several of his theories laid the groundwork for research that continues to this day. It’s been more than 125 years since Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and this great, controversial figure continues to be quoted by students, scientists, and avid dreamers. Even grade-schoolers know who Freud is. He laid down the royal road to the enigmatic unconscious mind. So I decided that I’d better pay a visit to Freud’s last home and refuge, the epicenter of dream analysis.
The House of Dreams
TWENTY MARESFIELD GARDENS IS a stately, red brick house with three floors of white framed windows, impeccably trimmed hedges, and a blossoming almond tree that Freud used to admire. The gloriously sunny spring day I was there many years ago, Bobby, the museum’s elderly guard dog, dozed underneath its canopy of white flowers, ignoring me as I walked along the stone path and through the front door. Inside, the foyer was spacious and elegant, with a spiral staircase and polished wooden floors. To my right I found a narrow doorway leading to a dark, still room that smelled of old books, having lost the scent of Freud’s beloved cigars.

This was Freud’s study where he wrote and saw patients between 1938 and 1939 during the last year of his life. In the late thirties, as the Nazis overtook Austria, Freud knew he was in grave danger. He was among the Jewish writers whose books were burned by the Germans. So he took refuge in London, living his final year in exile. Comparing his family’s living conditions in Vienna to London, Freud wrote in his diary that they went from “poverty to white bread.”1

His study was spacious and grand, about five times the size of my own writing space. It spanned the length of the house and had tall windows on either end, overlooking the front and back yards. Dark bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes reached the high ceiling. A four-step wooden ladder stood in front of the shelves, its edges rounded and worn from Freud’s dress shoes climbing in search of hard-to-reach books.

If the burgundy velvet drapes were open, I could have peered into the lush back garden where Freud liked to relax on a swinging lounge, shaded by its canopy. He would take his papers into the backyard and read with his feet up, pausing to chat with visitors. Near the back window, I found his famous analyst’s couch, draped in a once-colourful rug, its royal blue, plum, and cream patterns now faded and worn. I imagined his patients with their heads propped against two now-flattened pillows, giving detailed accounts of their dreams during therapy sessions. Freud would listen from his forest-green velvet tub chair at the head of the couch, out of his patients’ sight, encouraging them to let their minds wander.

In the late 1800s, Freud unveiled psychoanalysis, a psychotherapy technique that explores the conscious and unconscious mind in order to uncover and analyze people’s fantasies and fears. To unveil what was tearing at people’s psyches, Freud devised the method of free association, asking them to relay whatever was on their minds, regardless of how silly or inconsequential these thoughts may have seemed. Yet he found that there were limits to what the conscious mind revealed. Freud believed that dreams harbour our fundamental instincts, including sexuality, aggression, and self-love. Some of our instincts are too painful, embarrassing, or damning for our fragile conscious to bear, so they are held captive by our unconscious. Freud used dream interpretation to analyze and free our instincts and wishes, including those we repress.

While Freud studied the dreams of patients, colleagues, and friends,...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668077973
ISBN 13 
9781668077979
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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