History of the Self: Dreams
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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.
You must move forward 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.
You know, sometimes I struggle with that idea of that the dreams are actually telling us something real because... My dad passed away, and hearing you describe that, I had dreams. They were the most vivid dreams I've had in my life. And part of me wants to dissociate them from my reality, sort of have them be in their own space. But what you're describing feels like... almost like dreams are a window into our minds, into some deeper consciousness, rather than a random assortment of things that just like happen in our mind.
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.
This is Siddhartha Ribeiro.
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.
Siddhartha also wrote the book The Oracle of Night, The History and Science of 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.
After my dad passed and he began showing up in my dreams, I found myself thinking back to a conversation we'd had a few years earlier. It's the only time I can remember my dad explicitly talking about dreams. It all started when my mom mentioned that a mysterious thing had happened to a friend of hers. She dreamed about a loved one right at the moment that loved one died. My mom believed God was sending her friend a message in that dream. But my dad kind of chuckled and said, dreams don't work like that. He was a doctor who specialized in helping people with sleep issues, after all. If I'm being honest, he probably would have trolled me for making this episode. Eh, bad dreams. It's probably sleep apnea, you would say. But there was no convincing my mom.
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