The Secret Life of the Psyche. Dreams, Hallucinations, Visions, and Voices. The World of Dreams

Before you is a fundamental work, decades ahead of its time. French psychiatrist Paul-Max Simon, like Sigmund Freud but twenty years earlier, makes a bold attempt to map the terra incognita of the human mind.

In this book, first published in 1890, dreams and hallucinations cease to be mere folkloric "monsters" or mystical visions. Simon, with cold scientific logic, investigates them as the key to understanding the workings of the brain. He meticulously analyzes how bodily ailments, repressed desires, external stimuli, and daily experiences transform into whimsical images of dreams and intrusive voices.

On the pages of this book, you will find astonishing stories: from prophetic dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations in healthy individuals to complex cases of demonomania, lycanthropy, and vampirism, which the author explains from the standpoint of emerging psychiatry. This journey to the border of science and madness, reality and illusion, compels one to reconsider the nature of one's own "self".