Review of The Brain Never Sleeps: Why We Dream and What it Means for our Health by Karen van Kampen (publisher Simon and Schuster, March 2026)

Review due to be published in the Spring issue of Dream Time, magazine of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. 
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This is a wonderful, captivating, wide-ranging and very original book. It is a clear description of all aspects of research into dreaming and the experience of dreams. It ranges from what is happening in the brain when we dream, to dream content, types of dreams, dream analysis, nightmares, psychoanalysis, disorders of sleep and dreaming, and the technology now being used to alter our dreams. And the debates on whether dreaming has a function, and how we can even experiment to test these theories, are also explained well. As a journalist and science writer the author of course writes beautifully, all is clear, no redundancies, and even highly technical scientific methods are described so that the average reader will understand and appreciate how the science is done. 
Even people with a lifelong interest or work in this field will benefit from the breadth of the book. But for those experts, and for the general reader, one additional feature makes the book unique and extremely valuable. There are captivating and enlightening interviews with the major dream researchers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many of these people I have known or knew for years, but the interviews of how and why they became sleep and dream researchers, and details of what they were doing when growing up, was eye-opening for me. And some of the details, such as the family life of Eugene Aserinsky, the co-discoverer of REM sleep with Nathaniel Kleitman, are very poignant. 
Reading this bestselling book it is clear that Karen van Kampen has not just immersed herself in all areas of the research and practice in this field, but has engaged in long conversations across many years with those researchers and practitioners. The book is thus perfect in explaining where the field of dream research is now, it is completely up-to-date for 2026, and also how at theoretical, experimental and personal levels the field has developed over more than 100 years.   

​The full review can be read below. 

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