We spend about five or six years of our lives dreaming. Yet most of us remember only a couple of dreams a week, allowing valuable ideas to vanish into the night. Artists and innovators including Beethoven, Salvador Dalí, Paul McCartney, Dmitri Mendeleev and Larry Page considered dreams a crucial part of the creative process, and new research shows that dreams are a breeding ground for new ideas--a time for the brain to experiment in a wider network of associations. Drawing on cutting-edge science as well as real-world stories, Alice will reveal the simple steps to improving dream recall and harnessing the power of dreams for problem-solving and creativity.

Growing up, Alice Robb dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer. But by age fifteen, she had to face the reality that she would never meet the standards of the hypercompetitive ballet world. After she quit, she tried to avoid ballet—only to realize, years later, that she was still haunted by the lessons she had absorbed in the mirror-lined studios of Lincoln Center: discipline, stoicism, silence, submission.

Profound, nuanced, and passionately researched, Robb presents an excavation of her adolescent years as a dancer, and an exploration of how those days informed her life for years to come (based on her book). As she grapples with the pressure she faced as a student at the School of American Ballet, she investigates the fates of her former classmates as well. From sweet and innocent Emily, whose body was deemed thin enough only when she was too ill to eat, to precocious and talented Meiying, who was thrilled to be cast as the young star of the Nutcracker but dismayed to see Asians stereotyped onstage, and Lily, who won the carrot they had all been chasing—an apprenticeship with the New York City Ballet—only to spend her first season dancing eight shows a week on a broken foot.

Theirs are stories of heartbreak and resilience, of reinvention and regret. Along the way, Robb weaves in the myths of famous ballet personalities past and present, from the groundbreaking Misty Copeland, who rose from poverty to become an icon of American ballet, to the blind diva Alicia Alonso, who used the heat of the spotlights and the vibrations of the music to navigate space onstage.

Much more than a talk for dance-lovers and bunheads, by examining the psyche of a dancer, Alice Robb grapples with the contradictions and challenges of being a woman today.