I'm currently reading "Communing with the Gods" by Charles D. Laughlin and wanted to know if anybody else have picked it up and maybe wanted to discuss it. It was published just recently.

It's an anthropological study of dreams in different cultures written by a man who is himself a lucid dreamer and Tibetan dream yoga practitioner. I'm not used to reading academic literature and I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm finding it quite tough to get through, but at the same time very interesting.

He talks about the differences between the way we dream here in the west and the way other societies do, and how it's difficult for western anthropologists to really understand what they are told about dreams when they visit other societies but are not themselves familiar with lucidity. It's a study in how different societies dream, how they talk about dreaming and how they interpret their dreams. He also gets around a lot of other states of consciousnesses. I think that it's going to end out in a critique of how ignorant of dreams we are here in the west.

There's also a whole chapter on the neuroscience of dreaming which is very good. Plus I'm looking forward to reading the chapter on dream yoga, from the authors own studies in Tibet.

Anyway, I've only read about one third, cause as I said it's quite difficult for me to read, but I hope some of you would like to read it, or already have, so that we can talk about it. And maybe it will even help me understand it better.

-Strit