Book Weaver of dreams is one of the more recent attempts of science to explain the unfathomable secret of why we dream, why we dream exactly what we dream, and the like in connection with dreaming and dreams. Namely, during the past six decades, many details have been discovered about when and how our brain creates dreams, but it is still not known when and how the brain creates dreams, nor what is the role and nature of those dreams, and in particular, it remains unknown what their meaning. The author Dreamweaver Dauve Draisma is a professor of the history of psychiatry at the University of Groningen and, among other things, the author of the book Why life speeds up as we age, which has been translated into 19 languages, including Serbian. Weaver of dreams is his latest book. It has been available to us recently, thanks to the translation by Bojana Budimir and the publishing house "Clio".
Books about dreams - I always bypassed them in a wide arc, Dauve Draisma wrote in the first sentence of the book, explaining that most of them are dream dictionaries or explanations of neurologists and physiologists about the stages of sleep. And then a friend, an artist, asked him to investigate the dreams of blind people - she was interested in whether they contained visual images, or sounds, smells, the sense of touch? And, says Draisma, the topic began to spread itself.
Dauve Draisma based his research on the previous knowledge about dreams, and certainly on the discoveries of Freud, Jung, Adler and others (among these others there is no Leopold Sondi and his teaching on the familiar unconscious, which forms a whole with Freud's personal unconscious and Jung's collective unconscious) and on the laboratory researches of dreams that have been carried out in recent times. The topics of his book are dreams about flying and floating, about nudity, about an exam, prophetic dreams, lucid dreams, colors in dreams, dreams of blind people, about time in dreams, about nightmares, and about erotic dreams. The book's title is a metaphor from a quote by Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington that "the brain becomes a magic loom on which millions of shimmering chunks weave interlocking patterns; every pattern always has a meaning, though never constantly; it is a changing harmony of smaller patterns".
Žarko Trebješanin, writer of the afterword Dreamweaver, assesses that Draisma's book "does not offer simple and easy answers to the difficult questions posed by dream research. On the contrary, it doubts much more and critically examines existing interpretations and answers that are taken as irrefutable knowledge and commonly known truths. In this book, there are more well-posed, productive and lucid questions than apodictic claims and definitive answers to the riddles posed by the dream."
As a special quality and feature of Draisma's book, he points out numerous illustrative examples - dreams of important people, telepathic, erotic, terrible, beautiful and prophetic dreams, with which Draisma substantiated his views and discoveries. Almost every chapter, writes Trebješanin, the author begins with an "interesting anecdote, an intriguing experiment, the results of a survey, some of the revolutionary discoveries in the study of dreams, the life story of a great dream researcher, a mysterious dream or a criminal case in order to interest us and introduce us to some of the important research, methodological and theoretical problems in the study of the type, nature and function of dreams".
Duave Draisma is a great skeptic and rationalist in his approach to mysterious nocturnal events, assesses Trebješanin, and dispels many misconceptions about dreams in a sobering way. For example, regarding Lincoln's famous dream in which four days before he was to be assassinated he dreamed that he was lying in a box in the East Room of the White House and a soldier told him that they had killed the president, Draisma soberly concluded that it was not particularly strange and inexplicable for someone who is constantly threatened with assassination to put his dead body on display, where else but in the East Room, where the murdered and deceased presidents have already been displayed. Or, this is how Draisma explained the dream of a fisherman who was fascinated by his "prophetic dream" about a scarecrow because he found the corpse of a drowned man in the very place in the lake where the scarecrow was in his dream. "Probably, the day before he fell asleep, he was passing by the place where the corpse was located and glancing over it, he didn't notice anything." However, he unconsciously registered something and that traumatic scene appeared again in his dream, as is the case in the nightmares of soldiers who suffered from war neurosis during the war." According to Draisma, sleep is the guardian of sleep, and that is why there are traumatic and all other terrible dreams, that's why that fisherman dreamed of a scarecrow: the dream told him that "it's nothing terrible, it's not really a corpse, it's just a scarecrow, keep sleeping."
The book has over 250 pages, it is not a small format ("Clio's" library "Imago"), but due to the mixture of scientific and hypothetical approach to the subject in a proportion that suits even the ordinary fan of dream stories, it is extremely easy to read.
