The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness

From our regular book review column.

A little more than a century ago, Sigmund Freud struggled with his "project for a scientific psychology," an ambitious attempt to understand how the brain mediated normal and abnormal states of consciousness. It was and remains a noble goal, but Freud ultimately put the project aside when he realized that 1890s knowledge of the brain was insufficient to understand the mind. In the following years, he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, perhaps his most important theoretical model of mental processes. In that book, he had little to say about the neurologic basis of dreaming.