Book Review for "Are You Dreaming?"

Here's my review of the book "Are You Dreaming?" by Daniel Love.

Unfortunately the book has been a disappointment to me for the greater part, which is a shame because it would have had the potential to be great.

On the positive side, the book has very solid footing on scientific grounds, explaining all about sleep cycles and the different phases of sleep. It starts out with a history of lucid dreaming, including recommendations of books by other authors who have written about lucid dreaming in the past.
Various techniques for the induction of lucid dreams, many of them rather novel and previously unheard of, are outlined in meticulous detail. It may be doubtful whether most of them could ever be practical in the context of a very active waking life. For instance I'm pretty sure that, should I interrupt my sleep for 30 to 90 minutes as suggested in one method, I certainly would be unable to fall asleep again at all thereafter, especially since this interruption is to take place only after 5 hours of sleep. But this concern aside - there are certainly very different people and very different methods may work for them and my own sleep simply seems to be very fragile, even despite the fact that I'm a semi-professional athlete and athletes are said to usually have very sound sleep.
Many of the methods outlined certainly require an extraordinary amount of dedication, but this is not something that I mean to criticize, in the contrary, it reassures me that the fact that I have had only some sporadic lucid dreams, like just some few per year, doesn't mean there's something wrong with me or that I haven't been trying hard enough but that it simply is harder than many other sources might have made believe.

All this is good and well, however... on a personal, spiritual side the book sadly fails completely. To avoid misunderstandings, of course I don't mean spiritual in some stupid religious sense but in regard to simply your spirit, the human soul. Because I'm not a robot but a living being with a soul - no, I don't mean a "soul" but an actual soul! The only time the author uses the word soul, toward the end of the book, he actually puts it in quotation marks which I find pretty much offensive - to be a living creature means to have a soul, and to deny the soul degrades us all to senseless automatons! It appears as if he does indeed see us in just that way, as he repeatedly compares the human mind to a computer. I wouldn't have minded his comparing of lucid dreaming to the perfectly realistic virtual reality worlds of the holodeck in Star Trek, I've been a Star Trek fan myself and the comparison is suitable up to some degree. But to go so far and say that your mind is like the starship's computer that creates just an illusion is simply going too far. "It's all just in your mind" is something that is usually said to people who are deemed mentally ill, and the notion that "all this is really taking place on the inside of your skull" is a hideously claustrophobic and utterly depressing idea.

Ironically he goes on to mention that many lucid dreamers will carefully select what they allow into their minds while waking and suggests it be best to avoid watching horror movies in order to not have such scenery coming up in vividly realistic and potentially gory detail in one's lucid dreams, which strikes me as an oddly new-agey, wimpy attitude you would expect from some deeply religious person, and in stark contrast to the cold and barren materialist view displayed over and over elsewhere in the book. I have always enjoyed my horror movies and always will. I've even encountered Freddy Krueger (the undead murderer from "A Nightmare on Elm Street) at numerous occasions in my dreams and I consider myself good friends with him - and that's the point: If you don't consider your dreams as another living world, just as alive as your waking world and peopled with creatures and persons to encounter, to engage and possibly befriend with... then why would you first care about your dreams at all? If you see it as all just an irrelevant illusion generated by your lifeless robot brain... that's the very sad impression I got from this book. It fails to inspire and engage due to this bleak and depressing point of view.
It may have been meant in order to avoid a new-agey feel and to try and align the subject of lucid dreaming more with the mainstream views of the scientific community which is so tragically afflicted with the materialist dogma. But I would preferably try to keep my dreams free of both dogmatism and materialism - as much as the rest of my life!
Bottom line: As much as I'm in favor of the scientific study of just about every aspect of life and of learning as much as possible about everything, the world of dreams should never be stripped of life and soul lest it become a barren and lifeless world.