Siddhartha Ribeiro
speaker
62 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Siddhartha Ribeiro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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 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.
And at some point he says, I cannot go on with you. You need to go by yourself now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day. They're not random at all.
They're not random at all.
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.
Which will be characterized by very different brain waves and very different chemicals released in the brain.
Dreaming occurs during most of the time, but it's not very vivid until about halfway through the sleep.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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