The Multiplicity of Dreams: Memory, Imagination, and Consciousness

by Harry T. Hunt

Dreams have been interpreted as divine revelations, previews of the future, relivings of the past, and expressions of unconscious conflicts. In this book, psychologist Harry T. Hunt provides a look at all aspects of dreaming, from the theories of Freud and Jung to the latest developments in sleep laboratories. Drawing on insights from anthropology and psychiatry as well as from cognitive psychology, Hunt argues that there are many types of dreams, and he classifies them systematically. This book should be useful to both scientists and the general public, for it explains what we know about dreams in accessible language.

283 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 1989

Reviews

[Tait · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hunt is a cognitive psychologist who examines the research on dreams, hallucinations, meditation, OBEs, and other liminal states to find the ways they intersect and extend out of the human imaginative function. He offers what may be one of the most important modern theories of dreaming, the Dream Diamond model, in which dreams exist on a spectrum extending from cloudy, subjective, and memory-based dreams to vivid, objective, and archetypal dreams, which allows us to consider new ways to enhance our dreaming. I believe Hunt’s theory is pivotal for understanding how to work with dreams magically as it offers a way to both see the connections between normal dreams and magical or objective dreams, as well as how to shift our everyday dreams in a more magical direction.