The World of Dreams

This is early psychology at its most intrepid and most charmingly dated. Written in 1911, before EEGs existed, before anyone understood sleep cycles, Havelock Ellis set out to map the territory of dreaming with nothing but his own nighttime reports and the testimony of willing friends. The result is a window into how turn-of-the-century thinkers made sense of the unconscious mind - some of it eerily prescient, much of it quaint by today's standards. Ellis catalogs dreams of the 'highly strung,' experiments with drugs like hashish and mescalin, and builds theories about the sleeping mind with the confidence of a man who has never heard of REM cycles. It's a period piece that rewards patience: occasionally condescending, sometimes brilliant, and always a reminder that the human hunger to understand dreams is far older than the scientific tools to study them.