Siddhartha Ribeiro
Appearances
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History of the Self: Dreams
they can give us a lot of insight into what's going on, and we may not be aware of what's going on. Dreams are the source of new ideas. And they have been the source of new ideas from the very beginning. Our ability to daydream is very likely a reflection of our ability to nightdream.
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History of the Self: Dreams
If you look into the brain areas that are involved in daydream, they're the same as those involved in nightdream. When we plan something in the future, when we travel in the past, when we tell a story about our own life, when we make a story up, all those situations involve activation of those brain regions that that we need to have empathy to be able to put ourselves in other shoes.
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History of the Self: Dreams
So very likely what allowed our ancestors to develop technology, to develop new ideas, to develop culture and enter this process of accumulation of culture is something that was propelled by dreams.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And this is when she realized I needed help. And then she took me to a psychotherapist. I don't exactly know what he did because I don't have a lot of memories of this process. What I remember is going to those sessions and playing with toys and talking, but not directly about the events of my father's death.
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History of the Self: Dreams
This art is not produced at the entrance, at the very entrance of the caves, but very deep in the caves. They had to go for hundreds of meters. And then they needed to use fire to be able to draw or paint.
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History of the Self: Dreams
For example, when you have like a bison, the bison has many legs. It doesn't have four legs. It has more legs. And this seems to be an attempt to produce the impression of motion.
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History of the Self: Dreams
They're those paintings that are not just beautiful and impressive, but they are also suggestive of magic, of mental imagery that had some purpose, that was the mixture of people and other animals. A human torso with a bison head, for example.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And this is probably a function that was facilitated by dreaming by REM sleep that conduces a reactivation of memories that is not very strict, that is quite lax. Now, if we transport ourselves 30,000 years in the past and we imagine these situations
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History of the Self: Dreams
The only logical thing to conclude is that people would come out of those dreams absolutely sure that they had encountered godly entities in search of guidance.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And if you don't have any other theory about... what dreaming is like. Why would you doubt that, right? Why would you wake up in the morning saying, I had this dream about this lord of the beasts with big antlers that came and helped me plan my hunt. But no, this is probably illusion. No, this is not the conclusion that our ancestors took.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Quite contrary, they concluded that those dreams were a proof of the existence of those entities and they should be paid attention. So all those things point to a very rich mental life. These ancestors of ours were dreaming. All non-aquatic mammals have REM sleep. So it's safe to say that our ancestors in the Paleolithic were dreaming a lot.
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History of the Self: Dreams
But then he very, very simply, he led me to believe that I could change the course of the dream, that I could have some degree of autonomy, some degree of consciousness, and that I could change that dream script. And after that, the dream changed. And I was a detective looking for a mad criminal. I was hunting a tiger in the jungle. And I also had a male friend, an adult friend.
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History of the Self: Dreams
As far as we look back, our ancestors were dreaming. And as soon as they had language, they were sharing those dreams.
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History of the Self: Dreams
If you're disconnected from that, if you just live from waking life to waking life and you never remember your dreams and you never share your dreams with anybody, and you never take your dreams into consideration for any decision, you're living a life that is entirely different from the lives of our ancestors. We did not evolve to have this lack of relationship to dreams. We evolved with dreams.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Dreams were important to define what we are. And I think that a lot of what people are feeling nowadays, this sense that we are going nowhere, this sense that we are going alone, this sense that we have no roots, that we have no connection to the past. This, I think, has to do with our lack of sleep and lack of dreaming.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Well, Rand, I think you're touching a very good point here, which is that dreams are simulations of possible futures, which means that they are often wrong. And that's why in all those ancient cultures, there is the need for dream interpretation.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Dreams should not be taken at face value. Dreams, and people knew this across cultures. People knew it in the ancient world. Now, dreams have been, of course, appropriated for political reasons many, many times. In the Roman Empire, it happened all the time. For example, Julius Caesar had a dream, well, reported a dream, when he was less than 30, in which he would have sex with his mother.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And this dream was used politically many, many years later. when he crossed the Rubicon and invaded Rome and caused a civil war, this dream was used at this moment politically to say that the dream was actually a good premonition because he was having intercourse with his mother, so he was taking control of the motherland. In all different cultures, a dream could decide a war.
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History of the Self: Dreams
A dream could decide the end of a war. A dream could decide whether kings would marry or make peace with their neighbors. In a way, until the end of the Middle Ages, dreams were the only possible light into the future. It was noisy, it was metaphorical, it was imprecise, but was nevertheless some sort of insight into the future.
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History of the Self: Dreams
However, in the past 500 years, two things started to develop very strongly, which opposed the importance of dreams. And those are capitalism, on one hand, and science, on the other hand. Capitalism and science have been developing hand to hand, together, intertwined, one feeding the other.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And then after the development of proper science, and that, I think, is related to capitalism, the insight into the future became technical, scientific.
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History of the Self: Dreams
However, I think it was a mistake, and it is a mistake for us, to replace one with the other. Because the kind of insight we can get from dreams is very different from the insight we get from science.
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History of the Self: Dreams
When Freud was a young doctor, he was a scientist. He saw himself as a scientist. And he was trying himself in different fields of science, of neuroscience.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And until the very end of the 19th century, he was pursuing a clinical work that was very strongly rooted in the neuroscience and psychiatry of his time.
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History of the Self: Dreams
He entered the crisis and had these major dreams. And this is when he undergoes the big change.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And at some point he says, I cannot go on with you. You need to go by yourself now.
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History of the Self: Dreams
This is when he produces his seminal book, The Interpretation of Dreams, and creates a new field of knowledge that we call psychoanalysis.
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History of the Self: Dreams
What Freud did that was so important is that he reclaimed dreams as something meaningful.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Why? Because in the 19th century, science was completely sure that dreams were nonsense, that nobody should pay attention to dreams, that they reflected, at most, bad digestion.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And the people that believed that dreams had a meaning were the superstitious people that were not educated, that were buying those manuals, those Pulp Fiction manuals that give you a fixed relationship between dream symbols and specific meanings. Something that is very old that still exists today. And Freud was able to say that they were both wrong.
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History of the Self: Dreams
He would say, dreams have a meaning. They are related to people's lives. They are not something that can be dismissed, but they also cannot be predetermined. If you want to make sense of somebody's dream, you need to understand that person. You need to listen to that person. You need to share the context of that person. And this is what is done in psychoanalysis and in psychotherapy in general.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And then I accepted that and I moved alone towards, you know, finding that tiger. Then the tiger finds me. And I had to flee. And jump in the water and swim. And there was a big shark there. In the end, I felt like I was going through an adventure and I was overcoming the fear. It was about overcoming the fear of going alone. And then after that third dream, these dreams ceased. They stopped.
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History of the Self: Dreams
So Freud was able to say, yes, dreams have a meaning, but this meaning is centered in the dreamer.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Dreams work. are meaningful if we pay attention to them. So it's a relationship that we build, not just with ourselves, but with those mental creatures that inhabit ourselves. Our minds are filled with creatures that we, people, people that we met, people that are fictional, people that we met a long time ago and we imagine how they are now.
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History of the Self: Dreams
So those creatures are, they evolve in our minds throughout our lives. that has been proposed 120 years ago by Sigmund Freud, and then Carl Jung said similar things, and science dismissed that for a long period of time.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And one thing I do in my book, The Oracle of Night, is to defend the legacy of psychoanalysis and to show that, in fact, many of the things that were proposed about dreams at the turn of the 20th century ended up being corroborated, verified by science.
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History of the Self: Dreams
The science of dreaming has evolved. Many things that were dismissed in the 50s and 60s are the hottest science nowadays, including lucid dreaming. In the 80s and 90s, to study dreams was bad for people's career, like studying psychedelics. And nowadays it's hot and now it's something that is trendy.
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History of the Self: Dreams
We are not isolated, right? We are not living an experience, each of us, that is disconnected from everybody else. Rather, the contrary. We go through things in our lives, even though our lives are quite different, but we go through things that are quite similar. We're all born. We need to be fed. We need to be taken care of. We grow up. We go through puberty. So all those things, right?
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History of the Self: Dreams
If you have a long life, you will go through all those phases which are shared with other people.
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History of the Self: Dreams
We had to wait until 2010 for the first paper that showed dreams. that when you dream about a task, you become better at completing that task. They showed that when people navigate a virtual maze and they dream about it, they become much better at navigating. And that does not happen if they stay awake thinking about the maze, or if they sleep without dreaming about the maze.
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History of the Self: Dreams
So to dream about something has a lot to do with succeeding in doing that. And this is something that many, many people believed for ages, but there was no empirical demonstration of that until quite recently.
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History of the Self: Dreams
We did not evolve to have this lack of relationship to dreams. We evolved instinctively. With dreams, dreams were important to define what we are. And I think that a lot of what people are feeling nowadays, this sense that we are going nowhere, this sense that we are going alone, this sense that we have no roots, that we have no connection to the past.
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History of the Self: Dreams
This, I think, has to do with our lack of sleep and lack of dreaming. People are increasingly sleeping later and later because there's a lot to draw our attention, a lot of stimulation going on, a lot of work going on. And this creates a situation in which people will go to sleep after midnight and they need to wake up early anyway.
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History of the Self: Dreams
So that means they will cut short the second half of the night, will cut short the REM phase, and therefore they will have less dreaming. But even when they have good dreaming, the fact that they wake up in the morning and move right away from bed will make the recall of dreams almost impossible. You can remember that you had a dream, but you cannot remember that dream.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And this is something that has to be discussed in society because it has a profound effect on people's emotions, on people's cognitive abilities. If you have a bad night of sleep, you will have cognitive deficits. And this is like a social snowball. Once you wake up like that, you will interact with other people and this will grow. And I think...
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History of the Self: Dreams
Many of the problems they were facing nowadays of intolerance, people being angry all the time, this has to do with, among other things, sleep and dreaming. I really feel that we need to focus on what is important. And the way to do that is to go inwards, is to go towards our inner world, is to find meaning. between the representation of ourselves and those mental creatures that we carry with us.
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History of the Self: Dreams
If we have no relationship to those, it's very hard to have ethics. It's very hard to have a moral compass. The moral compass will not come from capitalism. It will not come from science only. It has to come from a richer relationship with the inner world. And this is what dreams are all about.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Dreams are basically an expression of what's going on. But we may not be conscious of that at all. And that's why they're so precious.
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History of the Self: Dreams
So there's a level of noise, of a level of unpredictability in dreams. They're not random at all. But their genesis, their motor is entirely not random. This is very clear when you lose somebody you love. They're not random at all. If dreams were random, you would not have repetitive dreams about anything.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And especially at those moments when we are suffering and we go through grief and we have recurrent dreams, this cannot be produced by a random process. This has to be produced by a meaningful process.
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History of the Self: Dreams
I'm a neuroscientist from Brazil. I'm at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. My laboratory focuses on memory, sleep, and dreams.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day. They're not random at all.
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History of the Self: Dreams
I was five when my father died. And for some months, I didn't show any major symptoms of trauma. But then I developed this nightmare, which was horrible, and it was repetitive. In this nightmare, I was completely hopeless. I couldn't see either mother or father around. And the whole thing was quite scary, so much so that I told my mother that I didn't want to sleep at all.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day, the following day. When we go to sleep, our brain will enter a sequence of different phases.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Which will be characterized by very different brain waves and very different chemicals released in the brain.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Dreaming occurs during most of the time, but it's not very vivid until about halfway through the sleep.
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History of the Self: Dreams
But neurochemically, things are not the same as during waking. So some neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine and serotonin, are not released at all during REM sleep. And this will cause the reactivation of memories that occurs during REM sleep to be much more free. Memories tend to associate in quite unpredictable manners.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Also during REM sleep, the prefrontal regions of the brain are not activated. So this means that we lack the ability to inhibit behaviors, we lack the ability to feel odds during the dream and wake up. We tend to take the bizarreness of dreams as a very natural thing during dreaming, and we go along, we continue. We basically follow the threat. And this is quite different.
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History of the Self: Dreams
If things like that happen during waking, we would pause and say, oh, this is wrong. There's something here that doesn't fit. But we often don't get this feeling during dreaming. If I had to draw a dream, this would be patches of memories with an overall tone that is given by desire.
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History of the Self: Dreams
In ways that are reminiscent of the waking life, but that mix things that happened yesterday with things that happened when you were a child.
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History of the Self: Dreams
There's no mind telling you you shouldn't be dreaming that, you shouldn't be visualizing this. Quite the opposite. We tend to go into those repressed areas that we often cannot visit, but then during dreaming we can visit. And we will visit because, in fact, what the dreams are doing is to present us with images that synthesize, that express what we are going through.