And Not Make Dreams Your Master

And Not Make Dreams Your Master is Stephen Goldin's 1971 near-future psychological-SF novel, in which a sleep researcher discovers that her dream-recording machine is producing dreams she did not have. The mystery is whether the recordings are real, whether someone is using her machine without her knowledge, or whether her own mind is producing the dreams in waking hours she is forgetting.

Goldin writes the speculative-neuroscience procedural with the care his catalog makes a trademark. The sleep-research detail is sourced from the actual early-1970s state of the field (REM mapping, EEG harmonics, the first dream-recall protocols). The paranoid mystery escalates patiently. The conclusion earns its strangeness rather than reaching for it.

Recommended for fans of 1970s psychological SF (Philip K. Dick's Ubik, Roger Zelazny's The Dream Master), and for readers looking for books like And Not Make Dreams Your Master in the unreliable-sleep-research subgenre. Three solid stars and one of the more inventive Goldin standalones.