Philip M. Harvey
Cambridge, UK · Daedalus Press
This isn't really a book about dreams. It's about remembering who you are beneath everything life has layered on top of you.
I'm naturally a fairly shy person, believe it or not, even though a career in corporate life gave me an outward character that was confident, outgoing, and occasionally gregarious. If you met me in person, I think you'd find someone warmer and more considered than that, more interested in you than in talking about myself.
I went through some significant upheaval over the past few years. One of the things that has come out of it is a real interest in understanding change properly, embracing it rather than fighting it, and learning enough from the experience to help other people through similar situations. Ideally before they hit the wall at a hundred miles an hour the way I did.
If you had known me for a long time, my first book would probably surprise you. I actually have three in various stages of draft, but this is the one I finished first, and it is the one that looks least like anything you would expect from me.
During the hardest stretch of that change, I started dreaming far more than usual. It felt like I was working things out in my sleep, and the answers kept arriving at the wrong time of day, when I could not focus on them the way I would a business problem. That is the strange thing about a waking mind fixed on a problem: too much direct attention can amplify it, or make you fixate on the wrong part of it entirely. Dreaming works differently. The subconscious runs on its own timeframe, using memories and experience to play things out and reveal them to you sideways, rather than head-on.
I started trying to capture and interpret them, and there turned out to be a lot to capture. Hundreds of pages, first handwritten, later typed. I am a strategic, analytical person by nature, so I wanted an actual process for understanding what my own mind was showing me, not just a feeling about it.
I had already read widely in psychology, self-development, and the science of the mind. Most of my education and career sat firmly in the scientific world, so it made sense to come at this from as many angles as I could hold at once. I looked at the neuroscience of sleep and memory consolidation. I looked at how different traditions have interpreted dreaming across history, hoping to find the thread common to all of them, regardless of belief or upbringing.
What I found, again and again, was the same gap. Buy a dream dictionary and you get one fixed interpretation, usually built from someone else's statistics about what a symbol tends to mean in general. Buy a journal with a nice cover and you mostly get blank pages. Neither gives you what you actually need, which is a way to read your own dreams against your own life, with a real method behind it rather than a guess dressed up as certainty.
It was written with one intention: to help other people make sense of the confusion and mixed signals they get from their own mind, the way I once needed to make sense of mine.
The book isn't really about dreams. It's about remembering the person underneath all the layers life adds.
I write under the Daedalus Press imprint and live in Cambridge.