Ramteen Arablui
speaker
199 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Aug
Ramteen Arablui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
I'm Ramteen Arablui, and on this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're taking a journey through the history of dreams.
Phase one, the brain slows down, the body relaxes, muscles twitch.
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.
The first one is short, but the cycles get longer and longer as you move in and out of deep sleep and dreaming sleep.
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 imagined new futures inspired by the dreams we experience almost every night.
In 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.
All right, 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, etc., we can conclude on some level that prehistoric humans were engaging with their dreams, that they were taking them seriously.
This is from a dream tablet written over 3,000 years ago in Babylon.
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.
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.
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 base predictions on data?
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 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.
Showing 141–160 of 199 · page 8 of 10
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