A Conversation with Allan Hobson

Abstract

My wife Janice Brooks and I self-published our book The Conscious Exploration of Dreaming in 2000. As experienced lucid dreamers, we wanted to add our voices and detailed observations to the discussion about the implications of lucid experiences for dream theory, especially since so many others had failed to take naturalistic perspectives into account. Allan Hobson encouraged our efforts and wrote a foreword for our work, and even introduced some of our ideas to his contemporaries. That relationship with Allan grew into a friendship over time. While visiting Allan at his farm in East Burke, Vermont last summer, I took the opportunity to record his answers to some questions I had worked up beforehand, after reading his paper “EGO ERGO SUM” that will be published in the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis (In Press) and is a precis of Allan’s book on Dream Consciousness (Springer Verlag, In Preparation). The book will carry Allan’s three William James lectures given at Roehampton University in London and will be published along with 25 Commentaries by Springer Verlag in a volume sponsored by the Vienna Kreis, Friedrich Stadler, Director. This conversation was recorded on Monday morning July 16, 2012 as we sat at the breakfast table on his sun porch.