Dreams and Nightmares: A Guide to Interpreting What Your Mind is Trying to Tell You While Your Body Sleeps

Dreams & Nightmares provides an opportunity to explore in a new way the illusory world created by our minds every night. 'Ordinary dreaming' and 'nightmares' are usually treated separately, but the approach in this book is to treat dream life as a holistic psychological event; this is reflected in the two-sided structure, putting together the yin and yang of dream life, reinforcing the idea that they are two sides of the same phenomena. Based on current, scientifically based yet accessible information, each half of the book mirrors the other, and each is divided into four sections. The first explores what dreams/nightmares are and why we have them; then we learn how to deal with our experience; the third section covers 100 dream/nightmare symbols, gathered under themed headings with explanations from Freud, Jung and new dream theorists. Finally, there is a review of the work of established dream writers to interpret common symbols and dream/nightmare symbols. About the author Dr. Jennifer Parker is a lecturer in research methods and consciousness studies at the University of the West of England. She has researched dreams for 15 years and is a longstanding member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and founder of the Dream Research Group at UWE.