Book Review: The Mind at Night

Actually Explains Why Mindfulness Meditation Works

Rodger Garrett "SighKoBlahGrr" (Loma Linda, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Mind at Night: The New Science of How and Why We Dream, by Andrea Rock; New York: Basic Books, 2004 at http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Night-New-Science-Dream/dp/0465070698/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326005667&sr=1-1.

The mere fact that someone has written a book in which Bill Domhoff up at UC Santa Cruz is liberally quoted will probably send the authoritarian, wealth-sucking, one-percenters up the wall. Bill, you see, may be one of our major dream researchers, but he's also the author of Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance, now in no less than its sixth edition since Noah's dog was a pup. That he showed up in a book about dreams struck me dumb (at first).

Listen: If you're the average guy or gal, stop reading right now; this is not going to shake your tree. This is not a book about dream interpretation and dramatic deciphering. (Look for Calvin Hall or Carl Jung or the grand old man from Vienna, himself.)

Because this is a book about the evolution of mid-20th century and millennial era neuropsychology as it relates to how important dreams appear to be to the maintenance of a healthy brain, not to mention growth towards greater effectiveness and creativity. There's no method here, but there's a lot of explanation of why the emerging rubric of mindfulness is changing the humna potential, as well as psychotherapeutic, map.

Figure this: If you do the mindfulness meditation / Power of Now / Radical Acceptance / Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life do, you can pretty much expect after reading The Mind at Night that the mindfulness meditations package our emotional and cognitive experiences in a way that works really well to make sense of it all during sleepytime.

Frankly, we used to think that MM did the job all by itself in some mysterious way we hadn't figured out yet. But this book went a long way toward blowing that theory out of the water. Research since the publication of the book has pretty conclusively demonstrated that MM wraps the dis-integrated bits and pieces of our sensory and emotional experience and evaluative efforts to make sense of them in neat little, pre-digested biscuits that are almost ideally organized for REM sleep processing.

I've been doing the do for some time now. Utterly life-changing. Wouldn't give it up if you put a gun to my head.

So for those of you who haven't gotten on the bandwagon yet, Rock's very sophisticated journalistic endeavor may be edifying. And it may even increase your motivation to start meditating Vipassana-style. (Everybody loves a good "explanation" now and again.)

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