Dream Reader is a uniquely comprehensive survey of contemporary approaches to understanding and working with dreams. The general reader interested in exploring the world of dreams could not obtain a better introduction and grounding than from this book. Academic psychologists, therapists, and professional dreamworkers alike will find it to be an incomparable survey and sampling of the growing literature on dreaming.

In Part I, Shafton summarizes sleep laboratory discoveries, then considers theories about dream generation and meaning that have arisen from these discoveries. Part II discusses major Euro-American schools of dream interpretation in the twentieth century: Freud, Jung, Existential, Cultural, and Gestalt. Also included are chapters dealing with various topics of interest: the dream styles of people of both genders, and of people with certain psychiatric diagnoses; non-interpretive approaches to dreamwork; dream incubation; lucid dreaming; dream re-entry; dreams of the blind; post-traumatic nightmares; and many more. Dream Reader provides an integrated review of the whole literature of dream psychology—the clinical, academic, and also the serious popular literature. It also presents sizeable extracts from the original sources for the reader's own critical evaluation.