The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams

Product Description

A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and their essential role in the formation of who we are and the world we have made.
 
What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use them? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented study of the role and significance of this phenomenon. An inves­tigation on a grand scale, it encompasses literature, anthropology, religion, and science, articulating the essential place dreams occupy in human culture and how they functioned as the catalyst that compelled us to transform our earthly habitat into a human world.
 
From the earliest cave paintings—where Sidarta Ribeiro locates a key to humankind’s first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future and our ability to conceive of the existence of souls and spirits—to today’s cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at revolutionary conclusions about the role of dreams in human existence and evolution. He explores the advances that contempo­rary neuroscience, biochemistry, and psychology have made into the connections between sleep, dreams, and learning. He explains what dreams have taught us about the neural basis of memory and the transfor­mation of memory in recall. And he makes clear that the earliest insight into dreams as oracular has been elucidated by contemporary research.
 
Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating,
The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to under­stand this most basic of human experiences.

Review

“A portrait of the human mind as told through the role of dreams and how they’ve impacted the world.”

—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[Ribeiro] explores hypotheses about the evolutionary value of sleep to humans, presenting a fascinating analysis of the debate about the relationship between sleep and cognitive ability . . . concluding, among other things, that nap rooms would be a valuable addition to school environments.”

—Publishers Weekly
 
“A comprehensive consideration of the sleeping mind . . . [Ribeiro] offers a capacious examination of the phenomenon of dreaming. The author draws on biology, chemistry, neurophysiology, anthropology, mythology, history, literature, biography, and art—along with myriad examples of dream narratives—to create a rich history of the human mind . . . A stimulating and informative overview.”

—Kirkus Reviews
 
“A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and the essential role of dreams in the formation of who we are and the world we have made.”

—Next Big Idea Club

About the Author

SIDARTA RIBEIRO is a founder and vice director of the Brain Institute at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, where he is also a professor of neuroscience. He received a PhD in animal behavior from The Rockefeller University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Why Do We Dream?
 
When he was five years old, the little boy went through a disturbing phase in which he had the same nightmare every night. In this dream, he was living without any relatives near him, alone in a sad city beneath a rainy sky. A good part of the dream took place in a maze of muddy alleys that circled gloomy buildings. The city, which was surrounded by barbed wire and illuminated by insistent flashes of lightning, looked more like a concentration camp. The boy and the city’s other children would invariably end up at a scary house where cannibal witches lived. One of the children—never the boy—would go into the three-story building and everybody would watch the many dark windows, waiting for one of them to be suddenly lit up, revealing the silhouette of the child and the witches. There would be a horrifying scream, and that was how the dream ended, only to be repeated, in detai