I love just about any content involving dreams. I even have an “Inception” tattoo! I requested this one pretty quickly when I saw it, because it looked really cool.

While the actual subject matter was very interesting, something about the way this was written was lacking for me. It felt sort of dry and academic. I had to go back and re-read many paragraphs to make sure I was retaining information. The author also repeated himself a little bit.

I did learn some new things about how dreams and nightmares affect us on a physical and psychological level, and how various factors can influence dream content. This author has done a lot of work in the field of dream research, which sounds like an awesome career. It goes way beyond symbolism and analysis and has a lot to do with trauma, repair and mental stimulation.

I particularly enjoyed reading about Microdreams, which are those little moments that occur when you’re dozing off and your mind shows you brief images and sounds but they aren’t full on dreams. Your brain can actually delay a sound that you hear in the real world to make it match up with the imagery in your mind. (Example: a loud noise in real life becomes a slamming door in a dream.) Artists such as Dali actually used Microdreams to inspire their work.

There were cool factoids like that to be found throughout the book. Another one is that the sleep paralysis demons are different in every country due to the influence of cultural lore on subconscious fears.

I’m absolutely sold on the idea that dreams and nightmares would be a useful tool to be studied in conjunction with the state of a person’s mental and even physical health, as all of the arguments and evidence presented here is very compelling. A large portion of the book covers this. There are long section about how therapy is used to treat nightmares, especially amongst sufferers of PTSD. Plus, dreaming about actual life experiences or memories helps us process our emotional response and even lessen how emotional we are about those particular memories. It is our mind’s nightly ritual for repairing itself.

Reading about the author’s work in sleep experiments was my favorite part. The fact that she was able to communicate with dreaming people through light cues and eye movements was fascinating to me. She was essentially speaking back and forth with people while those people were asleep!

Technology is getting closer to one day being able to “see” what someone is dreaming about. This of course brings up questions of privacy. But I think it’s very cool that such strides have already been made in dream research, especially with scientific funding currently being gutted left and right.

3.5 stars.

Thank you to Netgalley and to the Publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review! All opinions are my own.

This was a really interesting dive into dream science. There is a decent amount of information provided about common dream themes, why we might dream, and what our body experiences while dreaming. The most engaging part of the book for me, though, was the coverage of nightmares. As someone who still experiences night terrors as an adult, I found it quite helpful to learn about nightmares. It was also reassuring to know not all aspects of nightmares are “bad” (like how those who experience frequent nightmares tend to be more empathetic & sensitive). The concept of dream engineering was also intriguing to me. Although I have experienced lucid dreaming, it never occurred to me that dreams could be engineered otherwise.

Excellent primer on dream science and nightmares. Thank you so much for providing the eARC via NetGalley. This will be a book I look forward to adding to my physical library upon publishing.

A scientific guide to dreaming and sleeping, explaining how the mind interprets different sensory inputs and memory processing and relays them into dreams. Dream researcher, scientist, and author, Michelle Carr, does an excellent job of explaining the foundational elements of sleep, weaving in examples from her research at a sleep lab.

For me, the most valuable part of this book is learning more about the science of nightmares and understanding what makes people more predisposed to them. I also appreciated the concept that nightmares can also be associated with more positive traits, like having a higher sensitivity to emotional and sensory stimuli or being more open to perceptual experiences, which can make life more vivid as well. Much has been studied about sleep, sleep cycles, and dreams, but this is one of the few books I’ve found about nightmares.

Special thanks to Henry Holt & Company and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest, independent review.

Nightmare Obscura is a non fiction book that explores the science of dreaming. This book is based on factual evidence, which is what caught my attention. We all have dreams, but why do we have them? Why do we have nightmares and how does this affect our lives? Michelle Carr does research on these topics. While this book made me feel anxious at times, I found it to be very informative and thought provoking. It gave me a deeper understanding on how dreams work and why they matter!

While doing her research, she figures out the tools on how we can treat our nightmares. She does this by doing dream engineering! I learned a lot from this book and will try to have better, more restful sleep. This book is well written, data driven and was well researched. I give this book a 4 out of 5 stars!

Thank you to NetGalley, author and researcher Michelle Carr and Henry Holt & Company for this digital advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This book is set to be published on November 18, 2025!