The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional lives

Leading sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright here brings together decades of work on sleep and sleep disorders to put forth a new theory of how the human brain works. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in such areas as human learning, memory, and emotion, Cartwright's theory integrates conscious and unconscious processes as they move forward across time - from waking, to sleeping and dreaming, to the next waking day. The author contends that one of the main purposes of sleep is to aid in regulating emotions and in processing experiences that occur during waking hours, describing how conscious thoughts and feelings are replayed and related in memory throughout sleep and dreams, and how this process effects changes in thinking and feeling the next day - and in our very identities.