The Castle of Dreams

by Michel Jouvet, J. Allan Hobson (Foreword), Laurence Garey (Translator)

How discoveries about sleep and dreaming might have been a novel by a pioneering sleep researcher casts an eighteenth century aristocrat as its scientific and romantic hero. This enlightening, entertaining, and intriguing novel begins as a story within a story―or a story within a trunk. A Frenchman―our narrator, presumably the author Michel Jouvet, or a literary version of himself―buys an antique chest with brass fittings, labeled with the initials HLS and a partially worn away date, "178-." Happy to have such a handsome piece for his hallway, the narrator is surprised to find within it bundles of ancient papers tied with string. He has discovered the dream journals, experiments, and correspondence of eighteenth-century amateur scientist Hugues la Scève. With Jouvet, a recognized authority on sleep and dream research, as our guide, we follow la Scève's quest to unlock the mystery of dreams. In his chateau and elsewhere, la Scève undertakes a series of complex and often comic he records his own dreams and speculates on their relation to waking life; he studies sleeping cats, rabbits, and other animals (and observes rapid eye movement almost two centuries before modern science discovers it); he records the sleep and dream experiences of a Swiss soldier and a pair of Siamese twins. And, because sleep and dreams are often in close proximity to the erotic, he considers the relation of dreaming and sexual activity, heroically undertaking first-hand research with various women (with the notable exception of his wife). La Scève's fantastic experiments and discoveries have a solid scientific Jouvet has transposed some of his own cutting-edge research to the context of the eighteenth century―when scientific knowledge was more limited, but the joy of scientific study was more widespread. La Scève's experiments are a testament to the power of scientific observation. The tale that Jouvet discovered buried in the old chest could have been true.

313 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2008

About the author

Michel Valentin Marcel Jouvet was Emeritus Professor of Experimental Medicine at the University of Lyon. He spent one year in the laboratory of the Horace Magoun in Long Beach, California in 1955. Since this date, did research of Experimental Neurophysiology in the Faculty of Medicine of Lyon and of Clinical Neurophysiology in the Neurological Hospital of Lyon.

Experimental Medicine Professor at the University of LYON 1, he was the Director ot the Research Unit INSERM U 52 (Molecular Onirology) and of the Associated Unit UA 1195 of the CNRS (states of vigilance Neurobiology).

He described the electroencephalogram signs of cerebral death in 1959, and in 1961 categorized sleep into two different states: telencephalic (slow wave) sleep and rhombencephalic sleep (paradoxical sleep, known as REM sleep in English-language writings on the subject).

In The Paradox of Sleep (MIT Press, 1999) Jouvet proposed the speculative theory that the purpose of dreaming is a kind of iterative neurological programming that works to preserve an individual's psychological heredity, the basis of personality.

He was elected in 1977 to the French Academy of Sciences and has received the Intra-Sciences Prize in the United States in 1981 and the Prize of the Foundation for the Medical Research in 1983. In 1991 he was awarded the prestigious Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. His works, and those of his team, have brought about the discovery of paradoxical sleep and to its individualisation as the third state of functioning of the brain in 1959, to the discovery of its phylogenesis, of its ontogenesis and its main mechanisms.

Reviews

[Pierre Prisset · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un début un peu difficile mais les choses s’arrangent vers le milieu et la fin devient très intéressante

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a hard time getting into this book and therefore reading it. It was an interesting idea and the dreams and the analysis were okay. I wish I liked it more.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but wouldn't really recommend it. Was worth it just to hear how it is that dolphins sleep, though.

[Светлана · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enough sleep, but to much sex. Latter is disgusting.

[Carole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ploughed my way through two thirds of the book and finally gave up - sorry, but I just got bored.