Throughout the ages, humankind has displayed a ceaseless fascination with dreams. Yet, as we know, most of us forget our dreams by the time we wake up in the morning. Those fragmentary recollections that remain often vanish before we've even had a cup of coffee or a shower. What a waste it is when we consider that the average adult spends a quarter to a third of his or her entire life - twenty years - asleep, and that of those, fully five of them have been spent continuously dreaming! It is a loss of that extraordinarily personal and revelatory dialogue between the conscious and unconscious mind, for, like Dorothy in her dream of a place called Oz, each of us constructs from the raw materials of our lives - the people, places, memories, joys, and sorrows - a magical, intricate, sometimes outrageous, but always telling account of who we are. Must we squander night after night this sure chance at self-knowledge and understanding? Must we always forget out dreams?In his enlightening and highly entertaining new book, Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams, Charles McPhee answers these questions by offering a step-by-step guide to mastering the techniques of lucid dreaming, the learned ability to become a conscious participant in our dreams. Beginning with a discussion of the physical mechanics and architecture of human sleep. McPhee next offers a brief history of the study of dreams and human psychology. He then introduces his proven techniques whereby anyone can become a lucid dreamer: how we can familiarize ourselves with our own sleep cycles; how we must discipline ourselves to write down our dreams upon waking; how, with practice, we can learn to introduce a state of consciousness into our dream life, thereby retaining vastly greater memories of our dreams without startling ourselves awake in the process. He concludes with an insightful series of chapters on how to analyze and decode our dreams for our own benefit and understanding.Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams will appeal both to the pop psych crowd and admirers of Freud as well as to anyone seeking greater self-knowledge and happiness. And it delivers on its promise: Lucidity is a learned progression; consciousness is compatible with the dreamscape; and that these mechanisms for inner illumination really work. Read Less