Hobson’s choice

Early this year, Allan Hobson, a recently retired Harvard psychiatry professor, was on his Vermont dairy farm preparing to open a dream museum. His barn, which until recently held more than forty cows, now contained a small, glass-enclosed bedroom at its center. Two dummies lay under the covers. Their faces were made of plaster—one molded from Hobson’s head and the other from his wife’s. Beside the bed was a preserved brain in a jar and X-rays of Hobson’s own skull.

Hobson has arguably been the dominant scientist in dream research for the past thirty years. He decided to open the museum when his Boston neurophysiology lab shut down (the whole hospital relocated) and he no longer had a place to showcase his favorite belongings. Several of the items come from his 1977 traveling science exhibit, Dreamstage, which attracted some thirty thousand visitors and popularized his theory that dreams are the result of random neural firings. In the original show, a volunteer slept in the glass bedroom while his brain waves and muscle twitches were projected onto a wall with laser lights.

For many years, there were often just two scientists represented in Intro to Psychology textbooks: Hobson and Freud. Hobson cultivates his reputation as the “Anti-Freud”—he’s even published an essay in which he pretends to be Freud congratulating Hobson on his work. Only recently have scientists begun challenging Hobson’s sweeping dismissal of psychoanalysis with actual neuroscience. His success (people called his lab the “Dream Team”) is due in part to his charisma and PR skills. He speaks with sanguine authority, announcing that he will save psychiatry, that we must objectify the subjective, that psychoanalytic theory makes us lazy babies: “It’s too comforting, like the Bible. It makes you brain-dead.”

Hobson has pale blue eyes, a few white tufts of hair, and an air of worn, preppy polish. One cheek droops slightly from a recent stroke. As he moves through the museum, he addresses the “fundamental problem” of whatever he’s discussing and tends to trail off into a series of knowing “blah blah blah blah”s when he feels he’s made his argument clear. On the walls is a narrative of the dreaming brain with large illustrations, designed to appeal to schoolchildren. He wants students to come here and know they have brains, “not minds floating up in the air like clouds.” He leans in close to an image of cilia magnified to the point where they appear edible. “It looks like a tidal pool,” he says. “Or maybe an ovary.”

Despite his distaste for Freud, Hobson is happy to divulge his own feelings, particularly sexual ones. He’s kept a dream journal for the past forty years, in which he freely analyzes...