Dreaming and Other Involuntary Mentation

the long version

Dreaming and involuntary waking mentation are discrete phenomena reflecting principles of automatic activity at both mental and neuronal levels. Such principles include the obligatory connectivity of the associative process and the more recent concepts of neuronal networks, their formation, excitability and hierarchical organization. Principles of (1) associative activity forming networks and of (2) neuronal excitability underlying network dominance, can be applied to dreaming and forced waking ideation. Such an application permits congruence between mental and neural levels, helping explain such phenomena as recurrent dreams, enduring memories secondary to catastrophic trauma and life-long fixations as encountered in fetishism, phobias and obsessive-compulsive states. Dreaming and Other Involuntary Mentation is a very readable book whose value lies in its offering acceptable explanations of mental function, providing psychiatrist, neurologist and psychotherapist with the glimmerings of a basic science of the mind. The clinical examples provide new vistas for the cognitive scientist; clinical data and their analysis can only enlarge the comprehensiveness of cognitive science.