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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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.
He entered the crisis and had these major dreams. And this is when he undergoes the big change.
This is when he produces his seminal book, The Interpretation of Dreams, and creates a new field of knowledge that we call psychoanalysis.
What Freud did that was so important is that he reclaimed dreams as something meaningful.
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.
And the people that believed that dreams had a meaning were the superstitious people that were not educated, that were buying those manuals, 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. And Freud was able to say that they were both wrong.
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.
Dreams work. 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.
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.
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're 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.
We had to wait until 2010 for the first paper that showed dreams. 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 maze.
So to 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 recently.
We did not evolve to have this lack of relationship to dreams. We evolved instinctively. 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, will cut short the REM phase, and therefore 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. 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...
Showing 41–60 of 62 · page 3 of 4
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