What Do Dreams Do?

Sue Llewellyn is a Professor in Humanities at the University of Manchester, UK. She has also held Chairs at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leicester, with visiting appointments in Canada, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Italy. Her background is in health services research. About 10 years ago she began to research and publish on dreams and memory processing across the sleep cycle. She is the author of 4 books and, approximately, 60 journal articles.

• Prologue: What do dreams do? 1: What is a dream? Dream patterns, basics and backstory 2: Dream to see patterns 3: Dream to associate 4: Dream to survive 5: Dream to remember Dream emotions, meanings and unconscious impact 6: Dream to emote 7: Dream to decide (and act) 8: Dream to predict 9: Dream to predict Dream creations and craziness 10: Dream to create 11: Dream to go crazy? Dream theorists and futures 12: Fit with Freud and other theorists Epilogue: What dreams may come?

In this interesting book, Llewellyn, a lecturer in humanities at the University of Massachusetts, presents a reader-friendly answer couched in evolutionary theory to the question at hand. In a dozen well-constructed, research-based chapters, Llewellyn makes the case that dreams help people not only remember but also decide, predict, and create. If a person could read only one book about dreams, Llewellyn's text would be this reviewer's choice.