Dreams and Consciousness: Response to Colace and Boag

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J. Allan Hobson

J. Allan Hobson, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 3, 1933, and obtained an AB degree from Wesleyan University in 1955, followed by his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1959. Between 1959 and 1960 he served his internship in medicine at Bellevue Hospital, New York, and from 1960 to 1961 and 1964 to 1966, he was a resident in Psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Boston. From 1962 to 1963, Hobson was a clinical scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health. During the academic year 1963−1964, Hobson was Special Fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health, Department of Physiology at the University of Lyon, France.

His successful career has brought Hobson many honors and awards including admission to the Boylston Medical Society and the Benjamin Rush Gold Medal for Best Scientific Exhibit, American Psychiatrist Association, 1978. He was the recipient of the 1998 Distinguished Scientist Award of the Sleep Research Society. In addition to several committee assignments at Harvard Medical School, Hobson has participated in numerous national and regional medical committees and served on the editorial boards of many medical journals. He has held many consulting appointments including Consultant in Psychiatry for the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission since 1965. In 2004, Hobson received the Peter Farrell Prize from the Division of Sleep Medicine, Harvard Medical School, for his lifetime dedication to sleep research at Harvard.

His major research interests are the neurophysiological basis of the mind and behavior, sleep and dreaming, and the history of neurology and psychiatry. He has contributed numerous articles to scientific journals and chapters to medical textbooks and is the author or co-author of many books and monographs, including The Dreaming Brain (Basic Books, 1988) and Sleep (Scientific American Library, 1989). Hobson's work has focused on the cognitive features and benefits of sleep. The results and concepts of this work are reported in The Chemistry of Conscious States (Little Brown, 1994), Consciousness (Scientific American Library, 1998), Dreaming as Delirium (MIT Press, 1999), The Dream Drugstore (MIT Press, 2001), Out of Its Mind: Psychiatry in Crisis (Perseus Books, 2001), Dreaming: An Introduction to Sleep Science (Oxford, 2002), 13 Dreams Freud Never Had (Pi Press, 2005), Angels to Neurones (Mattioli 1885, 2005), Dream Life: An Experimental Memoir (MIT Press, 2011), Psychodynamic Neurology: Dreams, Consciousness, and Virtual Reality (CRC Press, 2014), Ego Damage and Repair (Karnac, 2014), and Dream Consciousness: Allan Hobson's New Approach to the Brain and Its Mind (Springer, 2014).