History of the Self: Dreams

Summary

Throughline
Episode: History of the Self: Dreams
Release Date: January 9, 2025
Hosts: Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei
Host Affiliations: Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, NPR
Narrator Contributions: Various
Guest Expert: Siddhartha Ribeiro, Neuroscientist
Special Appearances: Samantha Alexander

---

Introduction: The Personal and the Universal

In the episode titled History of the Self: Dreams, hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei delve deep into the enigmatic world of dreams, exploring their significance from ancient civilizations to modern neuroscience. The episode intertwines personal anecdotes, scientific insights, and historical narratives to unravel the complex role dreams play in shaping human consciousness and culture.

Personal Narratives: Dreams as Coping Mechanisms

The episode opens with Siddhartha Ribeiro sharing a poignant childhood experience that underscores the therapeutic potential of dreams. At [00:57], Ribeiro recounts:

"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."

These recurring nightmares, filled with fear and hopelessness, led Ribeiro to psychotherapy, where subtle therapeutic techniques enabled him to gain autonomy over his dreams. This personal story sets the stage for understanding dreams not just as random nocturnal activity but as meaningful psychological processes.

Similarly, Rund Abdelfatah shares her own experiences with dreams following her father's passing. At [08:05], she reflects:

"When I see my dad in a dream and he tells me he's proud of me, that I'm doing okay... Is it God? Is it my mind trying to heal itself? Is it just a bad night's sleep? Is it all three?"

These narratives highlight how dreams serve as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious, offering solace, processing grief, and maintaining connections with lost loved ones.

Scientific Insights: The Neuroscience of Dreams

Siddhartha Ribeiro, a neuroscientist from the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte and author of The Oracle of Night, provides a scientific framework for understanding dreams. At [06:19], Ribeiro emphasizes:

"Dreams are not random at all. Their genesis, their motor, is entirely not random."

He explains that dreams are a process of adaptation, preparing the dreamer for the next day by reactivating memories and emotions in a free-associative manner. The discussion delves into the stages of sleep, particularly REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, where dreams are most vivid and biologically active.

At [12:21], Ribeiro outlines the sleep phases:

"Phase one, the brain slows down. The body relaxes, muscles twitch... about 90 minutes after you fall asleep, rapid eye movements start. You enter your first cycle of REM sleep."

During REM sleep, the brain exhibits strong activation of the cerebral cortex, yet lacks certain neurotransmitters like norepinephrine and serotonin, leading to the uninhibited, often bizarre nature of dreams. Ribeiro asserts that this state allows for the reactivation and association of memories without the constraints of conscious logic.

Historical Perspectives: Dreams Across Civilizations

The episode traverses through time, examining how different cultures have interpreted and valued dreams. From ancient Babylonian dream tablets to Paleolithic cave paintings, dreams have been a source of insight, inspiration, and decision-making.

At [21:36], Rund Abdelfatah introduces the Chauvet Cave paintings:

"They would come to be known as the Chauvet Cave paintings. These works of art were made by people who would have been recognizable to us."

Siddhartha Ribeiro suggests that these early artworks, which depict fantastical creatures and dynamic scenes, might be expressions of the dream experiences of our ancestors. He posits that dreams played a crucial role in their lives, possibly serving as communication with higher powers or guiding communal decisions.

Freud and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

One of the pivotal moments in the episode is the exploration of Sigmund Freud's contributions to dream interpretation. At [37:04], Freud reflects on his father's death:

"There is still very little happening to me externally, but internally, something very interesting... my self-analysis has continued in dreams and has presented me with the most valuable elucidations and clues."

Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams marked a significant shift in how dreams were perceived, reclaiming them from superstition and assigning them a meaningful place in psychological analysis. Ribeiro explains:

"What Freud did that was so important is that he reclaimed dreams as something meaningful."

Despite initial resistance and skepticism from the scientific community, Freud's theories laid the groundwork for understanding dreams as reflections of the unconscious mind, influenced by personal desires and unresolved conflicts.

Modern Implications: Dreams in Contemporary Society

The discussion transitions to the relevance of dreams in today's fast-paced, technology-driven world. Ribeiro highlights the decline in dream recall due to disrupted sleep patterns:

"People are increasingly sleeping later and later... This creates a situation in which people will go to sleep after midnight and they need to wake up early anyway. So that means they will cut short the second half of the night. It will cut short the REM phase, and therefore they will have less dreaming."

This reduction in dreaming activity is linked to various societal issues, including emotional instability and cognitive deficits. Ribeiro argues that reconnecting with our dream life is essential for maintaining a moral compass and fostering empathy:

"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."

The Evolution of Dream Science: From Freud to Today

Ribeiro traces the evolution of dream study, acknowledging the resurgence of interest in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. With advances in neuroscience, empirical studies have begun to validate Freud's and Jung's theories, demonstrating tangible benefits of dream analysis in enhancing cognitive performance and emotional health.

At [47:13], Ribeiro cites a study linking dreams to improved task performance:

"They showed that when people navigate a virtual maze and they dream about it, they become much better at navigating."

This modern research supports the long-held belief that dreams are integral to learning, creativity, and psychological resilience.

Conclusion: Reintegrating Dreams into Modern Life

The episode concludes with a call to action, urging listeners to pay more attention to their dreams. Samantha Alexander emphasizes the importance of dream recall:

"Oh, absolutely. Write them down immediately. If you wake up during the night with a dream, write it down."

Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei reiterate the profound impact dreams have on individual well-being and societal health. By fostering a deeper relationship with our inner worlds through dreams, we can navigate modern challenges with greater empathy, creativity, and ethical grounding.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Siddhartha Ribeiro [00:57]:

  "I told my mother that I didn't want to sleep at all... And then he took me to a psychotherapist."

• Samantha Alexander [04:08]:

  "You must move forward."

• Ramtin Arablouei [04:14]:

  "Conquer your fear."

• Rund Abdelfatah [06:19]:

  "Sometimes I struggle with that idea that the dreams are actually telling us something real."

• Siddhartha Ribeiro [07:07]:

  "Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day."

• Rund Abdelfatah [24:42]:

  "They were paying attention... They concluded that those dreams were a proof of the existence of those entities."

• Siddhartha Ribeiro [29:42]:

  "This has to do with our lack of sleep and lack of dreaming."

• Siddhartha Ribeiro [34:11]:

  "Capitalism and science have been developing hand to hand together, intertwined, one feeding the other."

• Siddhartha Ribeiro [42:47]:

  "Dreams are meaningful if we pay attention to them."

• Rundet Abdelfatah [44:37]:

  "Write them down immediately. If you wake up during the night with a dream, write it down."

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Key Takeaways

1. Dreams as Psychological Tools: Dreams serve as mechanisms for processing emotions, coping with trauma, and maintaining connections with lost loved ones.

2. Scientific Validation: Modern neuroscience supports the ancient and psychoanalytic views of dreams, linking them to memory consolidation, creativity, and emotional regulation.

3. Historical Significance: Across cultures and epochs, dreams have been pivotal in shaping art, decision-making, and societal structures.

4. Modern Challenges: Contemporary lifestyles, marked by reduced sleep quality and quantity, are diminishing the role of dreams, potentially contributing to societal and individual disconnection.

5. Reintegration of Dreams: Encouraging dream recall and reflection can enhance personal well-being, creativity, and ethical grounding in an increasingly fragmented world.

Final Thoughts

History of the Self: Dreams masterfully weaves personal experiences with scientific discourse and historical analysis to present a comprehensive exploration of dreams. By highlighting the enduring significance of dreams and advocating for their reintegration into modern life, the episode underscores the vital role dreams play in defining our humanity and shaping our collective history.

Transcript

[Narrator]

This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics with the Room Next Door, the new film by Pedro Almodovar, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. After years go by, two friends meet again in an extreme but sweet situation, now playing in select theaters.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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. 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. But then he very, very subtly, 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 change. And I was a detective looking for a mad criminal. I was hunting a tiger, the. In the jungle. And I also had a male friend, an adult friend. And at some point, he says, I cannot go on with you. You need to go by yourself.

[Samantha Alexander]

You must move forward.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Conquer your fear.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

And then I accepted that, and I moved alone towards, you know, fighting 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. 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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

You know, sometimes I struggle with that idea that the dreams are actually telling us something real. Because my dad passed away, and hearing you describe that, like, I had dreams, they were the most vivid dreams I've had in my life. And part of me wants to, like, dissociate them from my reality, like, sort of have them be in their own space. But what you're describing feels like almost like dreams are a window into our minds, into some deeper consciousness, rather than a random assortment of things that just, like, happen in our mind.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

So there's a Level of noise, 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. 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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

This is Siddhartha Ribeiro.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Siddhartha also wrote the book the Oracle of Night. The History and Science of Dreams.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day. They're not random at all.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

After my dad passed and he began showing up in my dreams, I found myself thinking back to a conversation we'd had a few years earlier. It's the only time I can remember my dad explicitly talking about dreams. It all started when my mom mentioned that a mysterious thing had happened to a friend of hers. She dreamed about a loved one right at the moment that loved one died. My mom believed God was sending her friend a message in that dream. But my dad kind of chuckled and said, dreams don't work like that. He was a doctor who specialized in helping people with sleep issues, after all. If I'm being honest, he probably would have trolled me for making this episode. Eh, bad dreams. It's probably sleep apnea, he would say. But there was no convincing my mom. She reminded him that she knew she'd have two daughters. Years before me and my sister came along because two cats with green eyes had come to her in a dream. We both have green eyes. For a long time, I wasn't sure who was right. I made the mistake of thinking it was an either or. Dreams either meant nothing, or they were the key to unlocking everything. But now, when I see my dad in a dream and he tells me he's proud of me, that I'm doing okay. Well, I don't know what to make of that exactly. Is it God? Is it my mind trying to heal itself? Is it just a bad night's sleep? Is it all three?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

These questions are probably not that much different than the ones you're asking. Fears about the chaos of the world make it into our dreams. We mourn those we've lost. We escape the confines of our waking minds. We find joy in absurdity. We escape into ourselves in our dreams. And for thousands of years, dreams have helped humans find meaning. They've inspired creativity, pushed people towards innovation, and even sparked conflict.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

They're not random at all.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

History can seem big and imposing, but it's always intensely personal. It's all of our individual experiences that add up to historical events.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And we've been exploring the personal and how it's changed history, from the politics of smell to the history of love, one man's quest to end aging. And now the content of our dreams.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

I'm Rund Abdelfattah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And on this episode of Throughline from npr, we're taking a journey through the history of dreams.

[Samantha Alexander]

My name is Samantha Alexander. I'm from Romance, Arkansas. And you're listening to throughline from NPR.

[Narrator]

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[Rund Abdelfatah]

The science of Sleep.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day, for the following day. When we go to sleep, our brain will enter a sequence of different phases.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Phase one, the brain slows down. The body relaxes, muscles twitch, which will.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Be characterized by very different brain waves and very different chemicals released in the brain.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Phase two, Body temperature drops. Bursts of brain activity happen in waves. Your eyes stop moving, your muscles relax. Everything slows down. And then about 90 minutes after you fall asleep, rapid eye movements start. You enter your first cycle of REM sleep.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Dreaming occurs during most of the time, but it's not very vivid until about halfway through the sleep.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The first one is short, but the cycles get longer and longer as you move in and out of deep sleep and dreaming sleep.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Rapid eye movement sleep. REM sleep. Hi, we're done back. REM sleep is characterized by very, very strong activation of neurons in the cerebral cortex, so much so that some scientists call it paradoxical sleep because it feels like the brain is awake even though it's asleep. 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. 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 odd 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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Every single thing that I believe in.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Again, because I love you.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

And this is quite different. 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.

[Samantha Alexander]

They're in black and white, and every time I turned around, all of them.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Had their masks on.

[Samantha Alexander]

And we were having races down, like.

[Ad Voiceover]

Flights of stairs in the building.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Memories being reactivated, guided by desires and fears.

[Samantha Alexander]

We were just eating waffles, and I had to, like, swim over to the room and, like, hold my breath in.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Ways that are reminiscent of the waking life, but that mix things that happened yesterday with things that happened when you were a child.

[Samantha Alexander]

I just vividly remember trying to grab hold of this patient.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

There's no censorship. There's no mind telling you you shouldn't be dreaming, that you shouldn't be visualizing this. Quite the opposite. We tend to 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. 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 night dream. If you look into the brain areas that are involved in daydream, they're the same as those involved in night dream. 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 we need to have empathy to be able to put ourselves in other shoes. 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated early 20th century novelist, wrote a sentence that has always stuck with me, the dream is the truth. These five words express a grand idea that our dreams can reveal truths to us that we cannot access when we're awake. It's a place where we're completely free from the confines of our self awareness and when we try to make sense of our dreams, we can find meaning in our own thoughts and desires. According to Siddhartha Ribeiro, for thousands of years we humans have made art, technology and imagine new futures inspired by the dreams we experience almost every night.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Coming up, we meet our ancestors in a cave of forgotten dreams.

[Samantha Alexander]

My name is Fonz Howard.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

I'm from Jacksonville, North Carolina, and I'm.

[Samantha Alexander]

Listening to Throughline from npr.

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[Narrator]

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[Rund Abdelfatah]

Part 2 Messages from the deep In.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

December 1994, three explorers were making their way through a big complex set of caves in southern France. They walked through vast chambers, and as they got deeper into the caves, skulls and bones of bears littered the ground before them. Scratches surrounded them on the walls and the rocks. And then through the light of their flashlights, they saw something shocking.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

There were mysterious paintings on the walls depicting life in an ancient world. Human handprints in various sizes, geometric shapes. Human figures and animals. Lions, bison, horses, bears. Species that lived in Europe during the Upper paleolithic era, around 30,000 years ago. They would come to be known as the Chauvet Cave paintings. These works of art were made by people who would have been recognizable to us. People who on some level must have valued art because they had to go to some great lengths just to make them.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

This art is not produced at the entrance, at the very entrance of the cave 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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

The paintings come in two colors, black and red. They run across the cave wall like some ancient message left behind for future people to discover. And here's what makes them even trippier. If you use a torch fire to illuminate the caves in just the right way, the paintings appear to be animated.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

As the filmmaker Werner Herzog said, these paintings could be considered the first works of cinema.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

There are 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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Where did these wild images come from? How did our ancient ancestors pull ideas from the recesses of their minds and place them on onto a rock canvas? Siddhartha believes that the key to answering these questions comes from dreams.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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, 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Alright, so let's address the obvious question. How does Siddhartha know all this. How can anyone know anything about the intentions of people 30,000 years ago? Well, the reality is no one knows for sure. These are theories based on his reading of evidence. He and other scholars are decoding messages from human beings that lived in a completely different world. They're inferring intentions from outcomes. In this spirit, Siddhartha contends that because these cave paintings contain so many fantastical elements, particularly the melding of animal and human, the animation, etcetera, we can conclude on some level that prehistoric humans were engaging with their dreams, that they were taking them seriously.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

And if you don't have any other theory about what dreaming is like, why would you doubt that?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Right.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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. 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.

[Samantha Alexander]

In the dream. Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream. In the dream was my father. All that we see or sleep is but a dream within a dream. My recent dream was that I was hanging out with Mr. Rogers. I'm currently 30 weeks pregnant and had a recent dream that the skin on my belly was translucent. And I thanked him for being a stable part of my life growing up. And I could look in and see that my baby was screaming, help, Help. Over and over again. I'm 48 now, so I've been writing my dreams down a very long time, and it was very disturbing. I was very pleased to wake up from that one.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

As far as we look back, our ancestors were dreaming, and as soon as they had language, they were sharing those dreams.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

If he gazed toward the right, his adversary will die. If he gaze toward the left, his adversary will overcome him. This is from a dream tablet written over 3,000 years ago. Babylon. If you look backward, he will not attain his desire. This is some of the oldest evidence of dream interpretation ever recorded. And it shows us that in many parts of the world, for millennia, dreams played an important role in waking life.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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. 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, the 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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

You know, it's interesting because you mentioned that dreams are a way to, you know, on the one hand, from a positive perspective, they're a way to imagine our way out of a problem, but on the other hand, they're also potentially misleading.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

From ancient times all the way up to the Middle Ages, dreams were often used to try to predict future events. Special people in society were assigned the role of interpreting dreams. You can see this in many texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Quran. People were very serious about it. Even ancient rulers like Alexander the Great and Xerxes used dreams to predict victories in battle. And in many indigenous cultures around the world, dream interpretations were taken into consideration when making decisions, sometimes even for entire communities.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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, reported a dream when he was less than 30 in which he would have sex with his mother. 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 motherland. In all different cultures, a dream could decide a war. 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. He was noisy, it was metaphorical, he was imprecise, but was nevertheless some sort of insight into the future. 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. And then after the development of proper science, and that I think is related to capitalism, the insight into the future became technical, scientific.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

With the advent of science and reason, the need for mysticism and finding meaning through dreams became less relevant. During the Enlightenment in Europe, dream interpretation began to be seen as mere superstition. Philosophers like Rene Descartes trivialized dreams. This trend continued with the rise of modern science because why would you need a dream to help you predict future events when you have a scientific method to test ideas and algorithms that can be base predictions on data?

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

In the 19th and early 20th century, some philosophers and psychologists began to recognize and study dreams. Coming up, the story of a scientist from Austria who sparked a movement with a radical idea about how dreams can help us understand mental illness.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Foreign.

[Samantha Alexander]

Hi, this is Belicia manley from Chicago, Illinois, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

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[Rund Abdelfatah]

APY Part 3 what Dreams May come.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

B wow.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

For much of human history, dreams were considered messages from the deep. They were a source of inspiration of ideas and even guided the way many people lived their lives. But Beginning in the 16th century in Europe, dreams lost much of their power. The Christian church saw dreams as a possible source of sin. Some philosophers regarded dream interpretation as nonsense. One writer thought they were merely the result of indigestion.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And by the 19th century, most scientists saw dreams as just something our bodies do while we sleep, nothing more than the wiring hidden inside the walls of a house. As long as it functioned, that was all that mattered. But then, in the late 1800s in Austria, a man came along who questioned that approach.

[Sigmund Freud]

I started my professional Activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Sigmund Freud was one of the first scientists who thought deeply about dreams and attempted to better understand the science behind them and the emotions and behaviors they conjured.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

At this time, scientists were trying to understand the connection between the brain and the mind, the body and consciousness. One of the most common diagnoses of the time was hysteria. It was often a kind of catch all diagnosis for people, especially women, who might have been suffering from symptoms like depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, insomnia and even something called sexual forwardness. When Sigmund Freud was a medical student studying hysteria, he came to believe that it was a psychiatric disorder. And after graduating, he opened his own private practice to treat patients and further study the condition.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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. But then his father died.

[Sigmund Freud]

I find it difficult to write just now. The old man's death has affected me profoundly. With his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic light heartedness. He had a significant effect on my life. I now feel quite uprooted.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

He entered the crisis and had this major dreams. And this is when he undergoes the big change.

[Sigmund Freud]

There is still very little happening to me externally, but internally, something very interesting. For the last four days, my self analysis has continued in dreams and has presented me with the most valuable elucidations and clues.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

This is when he produces his seminal book, the Interpretation of Dreams and creates a new field of knowledge that we call psychoanalysis.

[Sigmund Freud]

Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology and a new method of treatment of the neuroses.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Psychoanalysis is the idea that investigating the unconscious, often through dreams, can possibly treat the psychological symptoms. People patients are suffering conditions or neuroses that people still experience today, like depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior and so on. Using his own dreams and his patients as evidence, Freud put forth an idea in a book called the Interpretation of Dreams that would become his lasting legacy.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

What Freud did that was so important is that he reclaimed dreams as something meaningful.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

But even after Freud published his book, it's not like everything instantly changed. Dreams were still mostly dismissed in the scientific community.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

It would take eight years to sell the first 600 copies of the Interpretation of Dreams. And for the first year and a half, no scientific journal reviewed it, besides some psychological ones. Where Freud's book received negative reviews, one prominent psychologist warned that, quote, uncritical minds would be delighted to join in this play with ideas and would end up in complete mysticism and chaotic arbitrariness.

[Sigmund Freud]

People did not believe in my facts and thought. My theory is unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

And the people that believed that dreams had a meaning were the superstitious people that were not educated, that were buying those manuals, you know, 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. Right. And Freud was able to say that they were both wrong.

[Sigmund Freud]

What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day, which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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. So Freud was able to say, yes, dreams have a meaning, but this meaning is centered in the dreamer.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

This idea that people dream for a reason, that it's a way to cope with problems the conscious mind can't do while it's awake, was radical. That by reflecting on your dreams, you were confronting something deep inside of you that followed like a shadow you didn't know was there.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Dreams 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. 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. 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, what.

[Samantha Alexander]

Should people do about dreams? I mean, generally one forgets them almost as soon as one wakes up. Should one take notes and remember them? Oh, absolutely. Write them down immediately. If you wake up during the night with a dream, write it down. Don't doze, don't go back to sleep.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Flying in the air, I felt like I was a wave.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

But I like went up to them and I was like, please take me with you, please take me with you. And they were like, you have blood on your head.

[Samantha Alexander]

I was a part of the Soviet army and I accidentally blew up this huge effigy of Stalin.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

I was hell bent on proving to people that I had hung out with Elliot Page, the actor in Brooklyn.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

And then it becomes a full blown hurricane. I just remember my car being tossed around, basically.

[Samantha Alexander]

And then I went downstairs and I found people were rolling refrigerators around and I've lost my script and the producer is drunk and everything goes to pieces and the microphone catches on fire.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

After Freud's death in 1939, it still took some time for his work on dreams to be taken as serious science.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

After Freud, there were others who continued to pursue the study of dreams and the unconscious mind. Specifically, another well known psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. He believed that human beings are connected to each other and their ancestors through a shared set of experiences that are embedded in our dn, an idea he called the collective unconscious.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

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 are 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? If you have a long life, you will go through all those phases which are shared with other people.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

As time went on, more and more studies on dreams and the unconscious continued to build on one another. And almost 125 years after Freud first published the Interpretation of Dreams, there's now research that supports the idea that dreams can have a significant impact on our waking life.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

We had to wait until 2010 for the first paper that showed 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 mess. So 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.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

As all of this was playing out in the scientific world, the human experience was changing. Freud grew up during a time before electricity was widely available, when the sun and moon dictated sleeping patterns, when daily life revolved around the seasons. In today's world, where sleep is being cut short, caffeinated drinks are keeping us awake, and screenshot vie for our attention, it's become harder and harder to dream.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

We did not evolve to have this lack of relationship to dreams. We evolved 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, 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. So that means they will cut short the second half of the night. It will cut short the REM phase, and therefore they will have less. 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. 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. Right? 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 many of the problems that we're facing nowadays of intolerance, people being, you know, 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. 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

That's it for this week's episode. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

I'm Rund Abdelfatah and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Laine Kaplan Levinson.

[Samantha Alexander]

Julie Kane, Victor Iz, Yolanda Sanguine.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Thanks also to Adriana Tapia for her production on this episode, Deb George for editing help, Tamar Charney and Anya Grundmann.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Thank you to Casey Herman for his voiceover work. This episode was mixed by Andy Huether.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.

[Siddhartha Ribeiro]

Includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Also, we want your voice on our show. Send us a voicemail at 872-588-8805 with your name, where you're from and the line you're listening to Throughline from NPR and we'll get you on the show. That's 872-588-8805.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write [e-mail] thanks for listening.

[Narrator]

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