Sachgebiete

Beschreibung:

126 S.; zahlr. farb. Illustr.; 29 cm; fadengeh. Orig.-Pappband m. farb. illustr. OUmschl.

Bemerkung:

Gutes Ex.; Umschl. etwas berieben. - Englisch. - ... It was then dreams, in all likelihood, which gave birth to the concept of the soul, whose avatars have been identified in every tribe ever discovered by anthropologists in the heart of a jungle or desert. But if man didn't dream? If he had no memory of his dreams? Would he have invented the concept of the spirit or soul? Wouldn't he have believed instead that he was nothing but a body, or later a machine, or later still, a simple grouping of molecules? With no need of the soul, no metaphysical angst, would the marvelous artistic adventure which began with the first cave painters ever have come to pass? As Roger Caillois writes, "Without dreams, is it even conceivable that man as an individual could spring forth and subsist? This is why the Neurobiology of Dreams opened the way for the Neurobiology of the Holy (or one holy neurobiology, as some of our students prefer to say). I read with great pleasure and interest these enticing tales about bedtime rituals; about the petite men that accompanies falling asleep; about the exuberance of prophetic dreams; about the mechanics of dreams and desire, and, finally, the return to the waking world. Sophie de Sivry and my friend Philippe Meyer have combined their talents - and they are considerable - to track down and piece together the story of mans strange relationship with his internal arcadian clock. For every human being needs a daily ration of sleep. itself contingent upon reaching a state of thermal neutrality thanks to a bed, a sheet, or the body heat of communal slumber. I also learned that, for the sake of proprieties, young girls in boarding schools were forbidden to sleep on their stomachs. And yet that happy discovery did not, I'm sorry to say, help me resolve a long-running enigma: why was the erection which punctuates men's dream cycles four or five times every night discovered only in the middle of the 20th century - and by chance - by a urologist? How do men sleep when left naked and uncovered? I once tried to unravel the mystery by holidaying in a nudist colony. The women lay dozing on the beach, generously offering their breasts and bellies to the afternoon sun; the men, in contrast, slept on their stomachs. Perhaps out of an ancestral fear of being emasculated by a roaming animal? ? (Vorwort) ISBN 284321286