ISBN: 9781855756267    Publisher: Karnac Books Year of publishing: 2010     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 246        Language: English

The subject of this book is the study of dreaming from a specific point of view one that provides useful and enlightening results: the analysis of the complex patterns of links among the memory sources of dreams. The significance of these patterns is logical and emotional at the same time. This approach is interdisciplinary: it directly involves the fields of psychology psychotherapy linguistics computer science mathematics (graph theory) history of psychology literature and motion pictures. However no specific advanced expertise in any of these fields is required for understanding the various contents.The book is divided into three parts. Part I is dedicated to theories and methodologies regarding dream functions and dream interpretations: these theories and methodologies are considered in the perspective of their implications for the study of links among dream sources. Some meaningful examples of dreams or metaphors or dreams that can be found in poetry or motion pictures are also considered. Part II describes a method for the identification of link patterns that is based on a linguistic and partially automatic analysis of verbal data consisting of dream reports and associations provided by the dreamer. This method is rigorously defined efficacious and not difficult to apply. It allows obtaining through the introduction of heuristic rules plausible explanations for significant aspects of a dream. Finally part III shows how this method can be concretely applied to a number of important dreams reported in the literature.
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Umberto Barcaro is an associate professor at the Computer Science Department of Pisa University and a research associate at the National Research Council of Pisa. He is a Board member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams a member of the Italian Society of Physics and a member of the Italian Society of EEG and Clinical Neurophysiology. He is involved in the European Projects "Heartfaid" and "Biopattern". He has published papers on scientific journals including 'Clinical Neurophysiology Journal of Physiology' and 'Sleep Medicine WSEAS Transactions on Systems and Dreaming'.
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