Sidarta Ribeiro Brasilia, 1971. Neuroscientist, professor of Neuroscience and deputy director of the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.

In

The Oracle of the Night

(Debate) he analyzes the history and science of dreams

Do we all dream, even those who do not remember their dreams?


Yes, we all dream every night, many times a night. But those who are not used to thinking about dreams and trying to remember dreams do not remember them when they wake up and think they have not dreamed.

And is there any method for one to remember their dreams?

Yes, it is basically about thinking about dreams in three key moments. First of all, when going to sleep. At that moment you have to go to sleep with an intention, thinking that you want to dream as the ancient Greeks, Egyptians or Sumerians dreamed, as the Yanomami dream, as the Amerindian and Aboriginal peoples dream: wanting to dream to find answers. Secondly, when you wake up you don't have to move, you have to stay still in bed and try to find the most recent memory of the dream and use it as a thread to pull to search for more and more memories. And write those memories or record them in audio. And the third phase consists of

giving him ball

, in giving importance to the dream, in telling the dreams to relatives, to the wife, to the husband, to the children, to the grandparents, in the work environment, at school ... It is about giving relevance to the dream, to put it in context and to try to understand how it reflects or how it proposes solutions to everyday life problems.


Are dreams necessary for our mental and physical health?

Dreams are very important, they reveal a fundamental part of our mind that is the unconscious.

The unconscious is the majority part of the mind.

Conscious life occupies a very small part of the mind and dreams are the royal road, as Freud said, to the unconscious world.

And they are important for health.

There is a level where sleep is important for health from a purely biological point of view.

Sleep detoxifies the brain, consolidates memories, makes it possible to erase what must be forgotten, to transform what there is to generate new ideas ... But there is a higher level in which the dream is a narrative, a story;

It is not something that simply occurs at the level of neurons but at the level of an emergent property of neurons, which is consciousness.

What do dreams feed on?

What material are they made of?

Dreams are made of memories, of the electrical activation of memories, of their combinations, but guided by what we want to obtain or what we want to eliminate, by our desires and our fears. And that is put into action by a circuit that produces the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is the circuit we call reward and punishment. It is a circuit that is activated in the brain to motivate us to seek what is good and flee from what is bad. When this system is damaged by some type of brain injury, the person can have REM sleep, end up having a dream with a lot of cortical activation, with a lot of activation of neurons, but nevertheless they do not have the cinematic experience of sleep. Dreaming is not only activating neurons strongly, but activating them with a certain sense.The neurophysiology of the 21st century very strongly corroborates the intuitions that Freud and Jung had 120 years ago, the intuitions that the ancients had and that the indigenous people of today have that dreams are not fictions but the expression of mechanisms that we are now beginning to develop. know.

Can you control what you dream of?

Yes, in a certain state, it is what we call "lucid dreaming." It is a very strong type of REM sleep, with a lot of activation of the autonomic system and also of the prefrontal cortex, while in typical sleep there is not much prefrontal activation. That means that in the typical dream one does not control much what happens; the dream happens to the dreamer and is not generated by the dreamer, he cannot make many decisions or decide the course of things. But in "lucid dreaming" there is more prefrontal activation and that allows inhibiting certain behaviors and allowing others, allowing decision-making. The lucid is a dream in which one can choose not only what he does, the dreamer, but also the context: who he wants to meet, where he wants to be ...This is a dream that has been known for a long time and there is a discipline in Tibetan yoga and another in Hindu yoga to learn how to do it. It was later discovered by science and today it is a very fertile field of research.

If we didn't dream, would we die?

Maybe not, but we'd go crazy like that. Lack of REM sleep, during which we dream vividly, generates psychosis, generates a brain that dreams even though it is awake.


Not letting someone sleep, and therefore dreaming, has been used many times as a form of torture ...

It is a terrible torture. But now, with all the invasion of screens that we have in our lives, we are exposing ourselves to that same torture but voluntarily. We are choosing not to sleep or to sleep poorly, with a low depth level.


Why does hardly anyone experience their own death in dreams? Is death taboo in dreams too?

It is true that it is very difficult to dream of one's own death. It is not impossible, but it is very difficult and infrequent. And it is difficult because the biological function of sleep is to facilitate adaptation the next day. And, in that regard, it doesn't make much sense to simulate a future in which one has died, because no adaptation comes from here.

What are the most frequent dreams?

Dreams are extremely varied, as varied as we humans are. But there are themes, there are patterns. More than half of people's dreams have some type of anxious, negative content ... A very typical dream structure is to be in such a place with such a person, to want to go to another place to find another person or a certain object, trying to do it and not getting it. That is a very typical narrative, failing to complete the objective. But, of course, the dream in which the goal is achieved is also typical, a means of satisfying the desire of which Freud already spoke. About half of the dreams are negatively inclined and the other half positive. More or less like life, because dreams very much reflect the life that one leads. The children of the Gaza Strip, for example,they have many more nightmares than the children of Jordan or Galilee. There are very specific moments in our lives that have to do with our collective unconscious: birth, death, marriage, victory, defeat ... Those are archetypal patterns that appear in dreams quite frequently.

In ancient civilizations the dream was conceived as an oracle, as a way of predicting what was going to happen, what was going to happen. Do they have that power?

Yes, certainly, but they are not a deterministic oracle. Dreams cannot predict the future as it will happen. They are a probabilistic oracle, a neuro-biological machine that integrates a lot of information from the past and tries to simulate a possible future. Mammals evolved with an ability to simulate possible futures, and that is REM sleep, the sleep that occupies the second half of the night. Later we learned to daydream, because the capacity for imagination would be like an invasion of REM sleep into wakefulness. Later our ancestors invented language. And from there, and although all mammals dream, we go on to do something that mammals cannot do: share dreams and thereby generate new social realities, new futures.

So do animals dream too?

Animals dream too. Possibly all mammals dream, and also birds and reptiles. And I recently published with my team an article on REM sleep, active sleep, in octopuses. So we have evidence that invertebrates may dream too.

Can a dream reveal a problem that we are not aware of?

Completely, and many times they do. It has in the history of science: the periodic table, for example, was discovered in dreams. And he has done it in the art world: Salvador Dalí used to paint as a technique to put himself to sleep with a heavy spoon in his hands, and when it fell and listening to the noise it made, he would get up and paint. There is a work of his called "Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before waking up" that he painted like this. There are many, many examples, another is that of Elias Howe, who invented the sewing machine in a dream. The dream generates new ideas. But we postmodern Westerners are in a world where there is no place for sleep. Sleep is not an issue, it is not an issue, it is like a super power that we have but do not know how to use.

Why did dreams, which throughout history have been so important, began to be considered as something insignificant?

In my book I make the conjecture that this has to do with the birth of two very powerful forces 500 years ago: science and capitalism. And these two forces began about 500 years ago to replace the dream as a lamppost for the future. From the beginning of time, from the beginning of the human lineage to about the year 1500, the dream was one of the main bluffs towards the future. So it was in all ancient civilizations that we are aware of, and it still is so in hunter-gatherer peoples, suggesting that it was also so in the Paleolithic and Neolithic. Until the year 1500, if you had a dream that said that this or that thing should be done, you would tell others so that they could do it. It was legitimate to say we are going to invade such a country why I have dreamed it,we are going to hunt this animal because I saw it in a dream ... The dream was itself an instance that validated the content. But the dream also needed interpretation, because they were not so naive as to think that everything that was in the dreams was true. They knew they had to be filtered, but dreams were gold to them.

And what happened to dreams from the 16th century?

From the year 1500, when capitalism and science began to develop incipiently, it was no longer reasonable to say that this or that thing should be done because one had dreamed it. Imagine someone showing up to the West Indies Company to convince investors to put money in a boat because you had dreamed of it ... That no longer worked. What the West India Company wanted to know was if you knew how to navigate, if you knew the currents, if you had good instruments ... Science thus takes over from the dream as a way of predicting the future in a much more exact way than the future. dream. It is true that the future that science can predict can put a man on the moon. But science cannot look where there is no light. It is very good where it sees, but it does not see anything where it cannot.The dream is much more diffuse, it has much more uncertainty, it is much more subliminal. But it can capture symptoms and signals that we are not aware of, that are not perceptible, and generate interpretable images.

An example?

The dream that Julio Cesar had and the dream that his wife, Calpurnia, had the night before Julius Caesar's murder. Julius Caesar dreamed that he was flying through the sky, that he met Jupiter and that he embraced him like a brother. Calpurnia had a dream in which the house falls, César goes to the Senate and is stabbed to death there. The two dreams are premonitory. Calpurnia's dream is what the ancients called a "theoretical dream", that is, a dream that predicts the future as it is. This is not magic: Julius Caesar's bad relationship with the Senate had lasted for years, so it was a very probable future prediction.


And what was the premonitory dream of Julius Caesar?

Julius Caesar dreamed the night before his murder that he was flying and meeting the god of the gods, who treated him as an equal. That is, in his dream Julius Caesar transformed himself into a god. And to become a god he had to die, and that is exactly what happened. In fact, after Julius Caesar was killed, the cult of Divus Iulius began. In my book I connect many of these legends, mythologies and stories of history with biology, I try to explain what happens in the brain that can explain this.

How is the pandemic affecting our dreams?

The pandemic has created two types of situations around the world. Most people who have neither the financial nor the emotional means to carry out severe social isolation find themselves in a situation of fear and anxiety. It is normal: think that in Brazil we have 3,500 deaths per day, per day. This generates a lot of anxiety, generates insomnia and over time generates fragmented sleep and also generates nightmares, often recurring. But there is another smaller group, with better financial means and also with the psychic and emotional capacity to isolate themselves or to stay with their family in peace and harmony, for whom the pandemic has been an opportunity to have more time to be with themselves, to to be in their own dreams, to have a better quality of sleep, to eat better ... All this has generated an increase in introspection,So there are also people who say that they are dreaming much more, that they have much more incredible, magnificent dreams, big dreams, epic dreams that can symbolize great life changes. The pandemic is also calling into question this world in which we do not even have time to dream.

What is the most important thing we lack to understand about dreams? What would you like to discover as a neuroscientist?

One very important thing about dreams is that they allow us to come into contact with other creatures of the mind, with the characters that inhabit our own brain. This dimension was very important to our ancestors. Our ancestors met with their parents and grandparents in dreams to obtain guidance from them regarding waking actions. And we lost this contact. I think it would be very interesting to reactivate that contact and understand it from the point of view of neuroscience. We have the illusion that our mind is inhabited by a single person, but the truth is that a multitude of people live in it, of people we have known, even characters like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Get to understand how that works during sleep,How can we connect with these people and dialogue with them, that from a neuronal point of view seems to me like a very, very interesting investigation.


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