Really interesting read and have recommended to many friends, specifically non-readers as the subject matter is so universally interesting.

I received the EARC from Netgally in exchange for an honest review.

First book I read on the subject of dreams but not the first I read on sleep, and I thought information is fascinating and science based It wasn’t ground breaking for me. The answer to Why we dream doesn’t get answered but that’s not necessarily a problem (according to me) But if you are hoping to find that one answer you won’t find it here.

The book is well written and with enough tangents to get a little annoying but they also work as “natural” pauses so you can easily pick the book back up and still be able to comeback into it.

I’d recommend this book for people who, like me, are curious on the subject and have not much previous knowledge.

This is an excellent examination of everything connected with dreaming. It is a fairly academic book but an easy read. There’s a lot of science and research but it’s clearly melded into a well written narrative that anyone could follow.

We learn about the purpose of dreams ~ and of nightmares. I found the information around small children’s dreams fascinating but wondered how they’d researched that… The book is deep but written in a friendly way that doesn’t condescend. As someone who has kicked my partner several times while asleep, I found the information about how parts of your brain are responsible for switching off muscle movement, very interesting. There’s a lot going on here but it’s a book anyone with an interest in the brain and sleep/dreams could read easily.

I was given a copy of this book by NetGalley

Written by neurosurgeon Rahul Jundial, this book explores what happens when we dream on a neurobiological, psychological and cognitive level. A lot is covered in this book, with extensive research, it discusses childhood dreaming, nightmares, lucid dreaming and how dreaming can help creativity and problem solving.

Overall, this was an interesting read and there’s a lot to learn from this book. Certain sections had a lot of detail and repetition, such as the chapter on lucid dreams (where I found myself losing interest a little). There remains many unknown aspects of dreaming and this book attempts the exploration of many theories in an easy to understand manner. There’s a small section on what our dreams mean and the future of dreams which discusses AI being able to record our dreams and play them out as a video by observing neuron patterns, how companies use our dreams for marketing and what dream trackers mean for our dreams going forward.

I found myself having vivid dreams whilst reading this before bed, which is funny because the book often mentions the link between our cognition and waking mind before we sleep and the dreams we have.

If you have an interest in this area of psychology and neuroscience, this will be an enjoyable and insightful read for you.

A few interesting facts:

Until the 60s, many people reported dreaming in black and white because newspapers, TV and film were in black and white.

‘Cheese gives you nightmares’ is a myth but the belief kept the myth alive. This is the nocebo effect, if you think something will give you side effects, it is more likely to.

We are not born able to dream; our ability to dream develops during childhood. When children reach the age of five, they start appearing as figures in their dreams and characters in the dream plot, this is when nightmares begin.

This is a book that demands your attention. Its interesting, compulsive but makes you really stoop to think and digest what the author is telling us.

As a fequent dreamer, with recurring dreams that are nearly identical I found this book really insightful.

The download date was unfortunately missed, I would be happy to re-review it if it became available again. I have awarded stars for the book cover and description as they both appeal to me. I would be more than happy to re-read and review if a download becomes available. If you would like me to re-review please feel free to contact me at thesecretbookreview@gmail.com or via social media The_secret_bookreview (Instagram) or Secret_bookblog (Twitter). Thank you.

It has taken me some time to complete this book, not because it is boring but because it provides much food for thought and to, literally, dream about.

Normally, I almost never remember a dream but This Is Why You Dream seems to have changed that for me. I have always been aware of dreaming but not of the details and convenient as it may seem for me to use the section on nightmares as "a hook", that is the part of the book which seems to have had the most effect.

Rather than me saying anything more personal about the effects This Is Why You Dream has had on me, may I suggest you read it for yourself as I do believe you too will discover things about your subconscious.

As I work as a hypnotherapist most of my work is with the subconscious mind. Our dreams are our subconscious so this was a very insightful and informative read for me. It may be a little deep for the layman. Very well written.

Dreams in general fascinate me. Not so much the typical "meaning of dreams" approach, where if you dream about X then supposedly it means Y, but the whole subject: we all dream, dreams are as old as humanity, and yet, like with sleep in general, they're something so trivial but at the same time so elusive, not fully understood yet. (My own dreams are also pretty much of the WTF kind most of the time, and it is fascinating in its own way.)

The author explores some theories about why we dream here, also from an approach as a neurosurgeon. I enjoyed especially the part about nightmares, how it seems that very young children don't have them, but they actually start when children really get deep into building their own sense of self: nightmares as "the Other/the Threat vs. the Self", in a way for our brains to establish who we are? I can sense so many possibilities for stories here, too.

Another part I enjoyed was the different roles of the Executive Network and the Imagination Network. Most of my past, older traditional reading about dreams tended to put them in the "information processing" category, with their being some jumble of whatever we experienced during the day, and in a way I think this is also part of it anyway (at least, I do regularly find elements of my current work or personal life projects in my dreams!); but this other approach was more novel to me, and made a lot more sense when explained.

I think I may have liked seeing a few more case studies, but overall I really enjoyed this.

Very interesting read, There are many theories why we dream and is it to do with our lives when we are awake doing day to day things.
Total rating 3 1/2 stars.

Dreams - our imaginations at play

As if being a brain surgeon isn’t enough Rahul Jandial is also a trained neurobiologist, making him a great guide to the mysteries of why we dream.

His fascination with the brain, its workings and how and why we dream is infectious. For a short book the scope is immense and Rahul works through the history of thinking on dreams, the part dreams play in our lives from childhood through to adulthooda, lucid dreaming and the ways we can learn to do this ourselves and how it could be used to help people cope with conditions such as nightmares and PTSD.

His views on some of the new neurotechnologies gave me food for thought. Most importantly they highlighted the need for us to approach this new tech, whether we allow it to intrude into our lives and how our neural information is used with caution.

All in all I found the book very interesting and learned a lot from it.

I was given this book from the author via netgalley only for the pleasure of reading and leaving an honest review should I choose to.

I am a precognitive reader so maybe this isn't for me, but dreaming and understanding them and how they flow from sleeping to waking life is still so unexplained, any insight is of value, thank you for this book.

This was a very well-written, easy-to-understand book. The subject matter is very fascinating to me and the author explained such a detailed topic in an excellent way. I'll definitely recommend this book to friends & family!

This was a really insightful and educational book about dreams. I don’t normally like non-fiction books but I was drawn to this one as someone who is constantly plagued by nightmares. I found some of the information really helpful and helped me to understand my nightmares and dreams better, in turn helping me to understand myself a bit better too.

Really struggled with this! I found that a lot of the writing went over my head. The book was very dense - and made me zone out at times.
I just couldn't get to grips with this writing. I wish I could connect, but it just made me overwhelmed!

Fascinating, dreams have always fascinated me and with the advances in neuroscience they still elude us.
Better understanding of lucid dreams and how to remember dreams now to try the technique.

This is such an interesting book. I have recurring dreams and anxiety dreams and whilst this does not necessarily interpret them, it goes a way to explaining why I have them. I did not understand all of the terminology but I was able to get most of the gist. It' snot one to read from cover to cover, but one to refer to and come back to when required. Really interesting.

In this book Rahul gives very thorough explanation of how, when and most importantly why we dream. He quotes from a multitude of independent studies and together with his deep knowledge of the physical brain attempts to explain, in plain English, just where modern science is at when looking at dreams.
I found the latter chapters about the recent advances in fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) and how it is used in dream research to be particularly interesting. Rahul has an easy writing style and kept me engaged throughout the book.

I’ve long been interested in why I dream what I dream and why we actually dream at all. This book isn’t a book about interpreting your dreams it’s more about explaining why you dream so it didn’t really help me with that but nonetheless, I found it very interesting and learned a lot from it. I have a grandson who suffers from nightmares and the explanation about why children suffer nightmares I think might just help him cope with them. He’s a bright boy and I hope he will benefit from the explanation.
As yet, I haven’t got to the end of the book, but I have definitely read enough to recommend it to anyone who’s interested in dreaming!

My thanks go to the author, the publishers and to NetGalley for an advanced e.copy of this book.

From the author of “Life On A Knife’s Edge – Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon” comes this very readable, yet very thorough (judging by the extensive bibliography at the back) study on dreams. The author states that before starting this work he thought dreams represented very much a niche area of medicine with their interpretation, especially, having the distinct aroma of pop psychology, akin to horoscopes, but recent discoveries he has made on the operating table and the research carried out for this book has convinced him otherwise. A specialist in paediatric brain surgery he certainly knows what he’s talking about and even though the complexities of brain functions will inevitably stump the general reader he makes everything as clear as he possibly can in explaining dreams and their purpose, significance, importance and meanings.
There are sections on nightmares, erotic dreams, inspirations for creativity and impact on health and well-being. There’s quite a chunk on lucid dreaming (where the sleeper is aware they are dreaming and can potentially exercise some control over their dreams) and what all this might mean for us in the future as some bewildering technology is under development.
If you, like me, are interested in dreams then you are going to want to read this book. To get you going here are some little snippets I found myself highlighting.
• We spend about two hours a night dreaming and not just during REM sleep as was once thought.
• When dreaming the brain’s Executive Network shuts down (which controls logic, reason and reality testing) and another part, termed here the Imagination Network becomes dominant leading to those scenarios the waking brain would never fathom.
• What we dream about is far more universal than you would expect. Surveys carried out fifty years about in four different countries show people’s dreams to be remarkably similar (predominantly school/exam dreams and being chased).
• Dreams do actually follow rules: When objects transform into other objects it is generally something similar. It’s hard to read in a dream (that is why I can never finish calling the school register in my recurring teacher dream). Use of TVs, computers and social media turn up rarely. Hands generally look strange as do watch and clock faces.
• Up to the age of 7 or 8 children are rarely active participants in their own dreams, it's mainly animals from stories and cartoons. When nightmares kick in (and they need to for developmental reasons) children will experience them 5 times more than adults.
• Exam Dreams? In tests students did 20% better than those who didn’t dream about them, even though the dreamer may have had the humiliating experience of turning up late, or naked, or forgetting to revise.
Towards the end the author concludes that the understanding of dreams can only enrich our lives and help us to cope with events and emotions. And, as a bonus, you never know you might discover something along the lines of the Periodic Table, DNA, or the sewing machine all of which benefitted from dreamers.
I think I’m going for a lie down now……
This Is Why You Dream is published by Cornerstone Press, part of the Penguin Random House Group in the UK on 18th April 2024. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.