Enough original content for a pretty good Scientific American: Mind article. Flanagan’s primary point is that dreams are the “spandrels of sleep;” in other words, non-adaptive from an evolutionary perspective. (This seems a little odd, though, since dreams are the intersection of consciousness and sleep, both of which Flanagan takes great pains to demonstrate definitely are adaptive.) This doesn’t mean that dreams have no value whatever, of course. For Flanagan, dreams are important for self-expression, which, while having no evolutionary significance, can certainly contribute to an individual sense of a more meaningful life. What galls is the relentless padding in this book. For the first third of the book, it’s kind of interesting to observe the various strategies, some quite sophisticated, that Flanagan employs to drag out his material. After a while, though, he abandons any artfulness along these lines and simply starts repeating himself ad nauseum: even to the point of duplicating the same graphics of domes and aqueducts to illustrate the architectural concept of spandrels. I tried to count the number of times that dreaming was compared to the gurgling of a stomach during digestion, but I lost my calculator. The latter third of the book is a rehash of material gleaned from the work of J. Allan Hobson, especially The Chemistry of Conscious States - Exploring the Relationship Between the Mind and the Brain ( )