Resumo de The Dreaming Universe

This book is 351 pages of exploration extra-ordinary and if one is interested in consciousness and its mysteries, here is the book that shall make you feel the awe of the mystery of consciousness through dreaming.

The author, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, is a quantum physicist, world traveler and a very credible popular science writer. In this book he goes through a variety of explanations starting with the use of dreams in ancient legends like Bible to Freudian interpretations to the deeper Jungian ideas like 'individuation' and 'synchronicity'. He differentiates Jungian idea of energy from that of Freudian thus: while Freudian energy is psychological (sexual drive) Jungian is the same as that of the physicist. He also dwells on how Jung was influenced by the developments in Physics. After all Jung had been studying for quite some time the dreams of the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

Dr. Wolf gives an epic sweep of dream research including Aserinsky stumbling upon the now-famous REM movement and William Dement confirming it. Dr. Wolf then moves on to the work of Benjamin Libet. Work of Libet has aroused serious interest as well as controversy. What Libet calls the temporal backward referral (also called 'delay-and-antedating paradox'), refers to the lag in time of noticed electrical potential rising in the brain and the actual experience by the subject. There is a missing 300-500 ms. Libet sees in this a 'subjective antedating of the experience'. Dr. Wolf uses quantum mechanical processes to explain this paradox. To him this backward temporal referral is indicative of the fact that 'the brain-mind was operating in accordance with the rules of quantum physics'.

Australian aborigines whose spiritual tradition involves dreamtime are discussed next. To aborigines Dreamtime is essentially sacred time. It consists of spiritual cycles and considered more real than reality. Mythological events of creation happen in this time. Aborigines feel the sensory world through the perspective of this mythological world. In aboriginal spiritual tradition the Mythological Sacred Dream Time is both past and it renews itself in every individual and generation. Everything is united by Dreamtime. Interestingly Hindu term for mythology, ?Purana? also conveys the same meaning. ?Purana? (puran (old) + nava (new)) means old yet new. In the succeeding chapters the author also presents varied dreams like lucid dreams, holographic dreams etc. This reviewer personally feels that the chapter on telepathic nature of these dreams is perhaps the weakest area in the book.

Dr. Wolf also explores the dreams in art, literature etc. He explores the dark dreams that lurk in the house of writer Maxim Gorky and in the famous poetry of 'Bronze horseman' by Pushkin and in the dreams of fantasy that inhabit the Russian art and folk traditions. Even social systems dream and the architectural monuments are the visible forms of these dreams take up. Close Encounters, Out of Body experiences UFOs are according to Alan Wolf yet another expression of such collective dreams.

If we are parts of a big cosmic dream then what does that make of our dreams - collective and individual? Is our notion of divided individual self, asks Dr. Wolf, nothing more than conditioned responses, a natural historical development of the Hindu concept of Maya? (p.243) The author attempts to answers this through his own lucid transcendental experience in the last two pages where the physicist almost becomes a mystical poet. In that near-poetic discourse he leaves the question open-ended. Is dreaming then the basic deep Mystery that has sprouted dimensions of space and time? The Process that is this Universe ? is it in reality dreaming?

Do not miss this book.

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