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This book is a goldmine, full of many deep veins although it also has a few shallow ones. The author provides an extremely rich view and review of the role of the cerebral cortex in dreams. He does this in three parts: (1) a comprehensive review of neurologic literature from the nineteenth century to the present; (2) his own study of 361 cases with cerebral lesions and a group of symptomatic controls without CNS pathology; and (3) a series of hypotheses he develops which weave through the clinical material and help keep a focus on the meaning of the findings. The major impact of this book is how clearly the author demonstrates the crucial role played by a number of telencephalic structures in the generation of dreams. This convincingly contradicts the long accepted notion that REM sleep and therefore dreaming is mainly the result of pontine activity. The pontine theory has contributed to the belief that dreams are inherently meaningless. For psychoanalysts such an idea should not make sense. Indeed, this reviewer's sense, as an analyst, that dreams could not be purely based on pontine activity led to a study (Greenberg, 1966) showing the important role of the visual association cortex in the parietal area in the generation of the eye movements in REM sleep. At the same time animal studies also showed the cortical contributions (Jeannerod, Mouret, and Jouvet, 1965). Nonetheless, the belief in the central role of the pons persisted. Solms' book should put an end to such thoughts as he shows, both in his review of the literature and from his own cases, the essential role of the cerebral cortex in the generation of and quality of dreams.
Solms begins his presentation by describing the Charcot–Wilbrand syndrome based on case reports by Charcot and Wilbrand. These turn out to be two different disorders although they have been lumped together as one. In the Charcot form the patient loses visual dreaming although dreams continue in other modalities. Such patients also suffer