Books Mentioned in This Episode

Podcast: No Stupid Questions

Episode: Do Dreams Actually Mean Anything? | No Stupid Questions | Episode 59

Here’s a list of all the books mentioned in this episode, complete with an Amazon buy link and quotes from the episode.

The Interpretation of Dreams Cover

The Interpretation of Dreams

by Sigmund Freud

Buy on Amazon
"Of course, in his classic work, The Interpretation of Dreams, which he wrote just at the dawn of the 20th century. For Freud, dreams were a matter of wish fulfillment. This is a way that we play out our unconscious impulses."
Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper Cover

Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper

by Stephen J. Dubner

Buy on Amazon
"And I ended up writing a book about him; it was called Confessions of a Hero Worshiper, and it was about the notion of heroes. So I got to hang out with him, talk about this notion; well, what do you make of all this, Stephen? Did we answer this question about dreams and what they're good for?"
Thinking, Fast and Slow Cover

Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

Buy on Amazon
"And as you've taught us all here via Danny Kahneman, I guess we do have this appetite for coherence, right? This is one of my major take-homes from Danny Kahneman. I know everyone thinks about thinking fast and slow and judgment decision-making and biases and heuristics, but I think one of his core insights is that human beings have certain fundamental limited patience and inclinations; one of them is this need to create causal narratives and for there to be coherence, and we hate having the opposite of that, which is a sense of dissonance, things not adding up."