Allan Hobson
Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School
and Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Profile – Allan Hobson (b. 1933)
Known for his AIM model of dreaming states and his extensive work on sleep, Allan Hobson is both an experimental researcher and a psychiatrist, and is Professor Emeritus at Harvard Medical School. He began having lucid dreams after reading about them in 1962, and for decades he kept a dream journal. His dreams stopped after a stroke in 2001 but began again thirty-six days later, just as he began to walk again. He has long tried to understand the function of sleep, recently proposing that the brain optimises itself during sleep by minimising free energy and reducing the complexity of its model of the world. Hobson is a fervent critic of psychiatry’s long reliance on psychoanalysis; he describes Freud’s ideas as facile and erroneous, saying we have to wait for psychoanalysts to die since they will never recant. He has a dairy farm in Vermont where he has restored old buildings to house exhibitions and an art gallery. He is the author of many books on dreaming, including The Dream Drugstore (2001) and Psychodynamic Neurology: Dreams, Consciousness, and Virtual Reality (2015).
More biographical information
Profile at Harvard Medical School
Interview for the New York Times, August 2002
Interview on his own sleep, Van Winkles, September 2015
Overview of his dream theory on Dream Studies Portal
Personal website
Publications
Complete list of books on Wikipedia
List of books on his website
Citations on Google Scholar
Selected publications relevant to consciousness
Hobson, J. A. (1999). Dreaming as delirium: How the brain goes out of its mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Books preview here.
Hobson, J. A. (2002). Dreaming: An introduction to the science of sleep. New York: Oxford University Press. Amazon preview here.
Hobson, J. A. (2007). Normal and abnormal states of consciousness. In M. Velmans and S. Schneider (Eds), The Blackwell companion to consciousness (pp. 101–113). Oxford: Blackwell. Google Books preview here.
Hobson, J. A. (2009). REM sleep and dreaming: Towards a theory of protoconsciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 803–813. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Hobson, J. A. (2014). Introduction. In N. Tranquillo (Ed.), Dream consciousness: Allan Hobson’s new approach to the brain and its mind (pp. 3–8). Cham: Springer International. Google Books preview here.
Hobson, J. A., and Friston, K. J. (2012). Waking and dreaming consciousness: neurobiological and functional considerations. Progress in Neurobiology, 98(1), 82–98. Open-access full text here.
Hobson, J. A., and Friston, K. J. (2014). Consciousness, dreams, and inference: The Cartesian theatre revisited. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 21(1–2), 6–32. Paywall-protected journal record here.
Hobson, J., Pace-Schott, E. F., and Stickgold, R. (2000). Dreaming and the brain: Toward a cognitive neuroscience of conscious states. BBS, 23(6), 793–1035 (incl. peer commentaries and authors’ response). Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (target article only) here.
Pace-Schott, E. F., and Hobson, J. A. (2007). Altered states of consciousness: Drug-induced states. In M. Velmans and S. Schneider (Eds), The Blackwell companion to consciousness (pp. 141–153). Oxford: Blackwell. Google Books preview here.
Tranquillo, N. (Ed.), Dream consciousness: Allan Hobson’s new approach to the brain and its mind. Cham: Springer. Google Books preview here.
Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin, I., and Hobson, J. A. (2009). Lucid dreaming: A state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming. Sleep, 32, 1191–1200. Open-access full text here.
Video
Dream consciousness. Lecture, BIAL Foundation symposium, November 2013
Dreaming as virtual reality. Lecture, ISPA, Lisbon, October 2012