In exile from the dreamscape

Have we lost touch with our own dreams? Rubin Naiman — a psychologist specialising in sleep and dream medicine, and a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Arizona’s Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine — explores in Aeon magazine how we live in a wake-centric world that devalues dreaming, any experiencing dreams is fundamental for us to be our most authentic selves. "From a hard-nosed neuroscientific perspective, the subjective dream is merely an incidental, meaningless side-effect of REM sleep. It’s just a dream. The phenomenological study of dreams, however, which dates back millennia, has yielded a vast and intriguing literature of psychological, cultural and mythological observations. What might an integration of the science and subjectivity of REM sleep and dreaming reveal?"