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Philosophy of Dreams

Online ISBN:
9780300199123
Print ISBN:
9780300188400
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Philosophy of Dreams

Published:
22 October 2013
Online ISBN:
9780300199123
Print ISBN:
9780300188400
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

Why has humankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion, and the arts come into being? This book offers a new answer to these time-worn questions by scrutinizing the phenomenon of the dream, using it as a psychic fossil connecting us with our Stone Age ancestors. It argues that both civilization and mental processes are the results of a compulsion to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination, imagination, mind, spirit, and God all developed in response. Until the beginning of the modern era, repetition was synonymous with de-escalation and calming down. Then, automatic machinery gave rise to a new type of repetition, whose effects are permanent alarm and distraction. The new global forces of distraction, the book argues, are producing a specific kind of stress that breaks down the barriers between dreams and waking consciousness. The book ends with a sobering indictment of this psychic deregulation and the social and economic deregulations that have accompanied it.

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