Dreams have always held a special fascination long before psychoanalysis conceived of them as products of the unconscious. Dreams are enticing. They seem to tell us something special about ourselves, about our future or our past. At the same time, they are enigmatic, seem to reveal and say nothing, to be as mere discharges, distorted images of mundane events in our lives.

Christopher Evans in Landscapes of the Night: How and Why We Dream, a book completed posthumously by his son, Peter Evans, begins a circuitous path through this wide-ranging study with observations of biological phenomena, followed by a swift, deft and informative history of man's study of sleep and dreaming.

Starting from the first Assyrian clay tablet “dream books,” he allows us to glimpse the Egyptian, Graeco-Roman and Chinese views of the nature and function of dreams. For early historical man, dreams are a bridge between the natural and the supernatural