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Articles by Dr. Naiman

Dream Deprived: A Modern Epidemic?

A recent review paper authored by Rubin Naiman of the Center for Integrative Medicine, University of Arizona, and published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (August 2017), claims that “we are at least as dream-deprived as we are sleep-deprived” and suggests that a “silent epidemic of REM sleep deprivation” is contributing to our…

How Dream Therapy Can Change Your Life

The following story is excerpted from TIME’s special edition, The Science of Sleep, which is available at Amazon.
The first time I dialed up my dream therapist, I didn’t realize how personal it would get. It’s just dreaming, I told myself. What could I learn that a dream dictionary couldn’t decode? Underestimating my own dreams was my first mistake. Underestimating Rubin Naiman was my second. I’d found him by asking Google a throw-away question: Can dreams improve emotional health? The query led to Rubin Naiman, Ph.D., his face framed in a cloud of white hair.

Falling For Sleep

In Evelyn De Morgan’s numinous painting, Night and Sleep (1878), Nyx, the mighty Greek goddess of night, hovers across a dusky sky with her beloved son Hypnos, the sweet-natured god of sleep. The painting and the Greek gods it captures depict a radically different way of understanding and relating to sleep. In…

Sleep and Recovery

Recovering Night: Alcohol, Substances and Sleep A few years ago I found myself at an AA meeting in a small community in Southern California. It had been some time since I had accompanied a friend in recovery to a meeting. Having periodically attended various 12-step meetings around the country over…

Another View of Narcolepsy

Narcolepsy is a complex condition with biomedical, psychological, social and, I believe, important spiritual dimensions. An integrative approach invites us to reconsider narcolepsy from a broader perspective. It encourages us incorporate key biomedical knowledge into a larger psychosocial and even mythic framework. Since narcolepsy is a lifelong condition, it also…

Hypnotized by Hypnotics

Picture a serene, dimly lit bedroom. Curtains flap in a gentle breeze as an angelic night moth glides gracefully across the room, bestowing sweet slumber upon some lucky soul. Leave the rest to Lunesta says the tagline. Anyone who has flipped through a popular magazine or turned on a television…