Lucid dream expert Ryan Hurd has posted a wonderful review of Charles Laughlin’s Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK), a book that I’m proud to have released via Daily Grail Publishing in 2011. Ryan really nails my own feelings about the book:
Whenever I have had a spare moment for the past three months, I’ve been sneaking peaks at Charles Laughlin’s new book Communing with the gods: Consciousness, culture and the dreaming brain. It’s a tome, over 500 pages long, and because of its girth I have approached the volume each time with some hesitancy… and a little fear. But each time I’ve dived in, I’ve come away with big ideas, and also some unusual clarity.
This book may be heavy, but it’s really approachable for an academic text.
That’s an accomplishment for a book that essentially takes on the weighty task of summing up the topic of dreams in cross-culture perspective, including the evolutionary impact of the dreaming mind on our species, history, religion and art. Laughlin does this remarkably well, and he tells some great personal stories along the way.
There’s really only a few people in the world who have the personal experience and the scholarly prowess to single-handedly write an anthropology of dreams. In fact, no one has attempted this feat in a generation or longer.
Filled with the expert opinion of a life-long researcher of consciousness, dreams and shamanism, and wrapped in the perfect cover image courtesy of Adam Scott Miller, this is one book you need on your bookshelf. Grab a copy from Amazon US or Amazon UK.
Read the review in full here – thanks to Ryan for his thoughtful (and positive!) feedback.
