Description

At first glance, dreams are strange, even bizarre. In them, kings can turn into

cabbages and horses can sing! It's easy to dismiss them-as they routinely

are-as meaningless hallucinations that arise when the rational intellect has

been disarmed by sleep. And yet, human beings have forever puzzled over

their meaning, and continue to do so, arguing that their strangeness is pointing

to something other than what is depicted in them.

Even a cursory analysis of our own dreams can reveal the truth of such a

claim, that dreams aren't random images conjured by the erratic firing of the

synapses in our brain. They seem to know our thoughts, often when we don't

know them ourselves, and have answers to questions that vex us in our waking

lives. Analysed carefully, they can show us our deepest desires and confront

us with concerns that we've been trying our best to avoid. They may even

know our bodies better than we think we do. And then of course there are

the paranormal dreams, which, as the author shows, are not beyond rational

interpretation; and lucid dreams, which prove that sleep isn't even a necessary

condition for dreaming.

Condensing four decades of experience in collecting and interpreting dreams,

Madhu Tandan's The Logic of Dreams is the perfect primer for those confounded

by the multiplicity of our chaotic dream world, and simultaneously a ready

handbook for those who wish to learn to interpret their own dreams.