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A ground-breaking 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.
What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use dreams? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented, astonishing study of the role and significance of dreams, from the beginning of human history. It is an investigation on the grand scale, encompassing literature, anthropology, religion, and science, one that articulates 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 the author finds a key to humankind's first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future, and to conceive the existence of "souls" and "spirits"--to cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at startling and 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 confirmed by contemporary research.
Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating from first to last, The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to understand this most basic of human experiences.
The Oracle of Night The History and Science of Dreams
by Ribeiro, Sidarta; Hahn, DanielFormat: Hardcover
Pub. Date: 2021-08-17
Publisher(s): Pantheon
List Price: $35.11
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Summary
Author Biography
SIDARTA RIBEIRO is the founder and first director of the Brain Institute of Federal University or Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, where he currently is Professor of Neuroscience. He received a Ph.D in Animal Behavior from Rockefeller University. His research topics encompass memory, sleep and dreams, neuroplasticity, symbolic competence in in non-human animals, computational psychiatry, and psychedelics.
Table of Contents
1. Why Do We Dream? 3
2. The Ancestral Dream 30
3. From Living Gods to Psychoanalysis 59
4. Unique Dreams and Typical Dreams 77
5. First Images 99
6. The Evolution of Dreaming 114
7. The Biochemistry of Dreams 129
8. Madness Is a Dream One Dreams Alone 145
9. Sleeping and Remembering 159
10. The Reverberation of Memories 174
11. Genes and Memes 198
12. Sleeping to Create 216
13. REM Sleep Isn’t Dreaming 247
14. Desires, Emotions, and Nightmares 267
15. The Probabilistic Oracle 289
16. Missing the Dead, and the Inner World of Culture 320
17. Does Dreaming Have a Future? 332
18. Dreaming and Destiny 348
Epilogue 379
2. The Ancestral Dream 30
3. From Living Gods to Psychoanalysis 59
4. Unique Dreams and Typical Dreams 77
5. First Images 99
6. The Evolution of Dreaming 114
7. The Biochemistry of Dreams 129
8. Madness Is a Dream One Dreams Alone 145
9. Sleeping and Remembering 159
10. The Reverberation of Memories 174
11. Genes and Memes 198
12. Sleeping to Create 216
13. REM Sleep Isn’t Dreaming 247
14. Desires, Emotions, and Nightmares 267
15. The Probabilistic Oracle 289
16. Missing the Dead, and the Inner World of Culture 320
17. Does Dreaming Have a Future? 332
18. Dreaming and Destiny 348
Epilogue 379
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