Pod Insights Throughline History of the Self: Dreams About this episode Our dreams can haunt us. But what are we to make of them? From omens and art to modern science, we tell the story of dreams and the surprising role they may play in our lives. (Originally ran as The Way We Dream)
To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline http://plus.npr.org/throughline.
See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from NPR sponsor Viori with the Halo Essential Wide-Like Pant. Receive 20% off your first purchase at viori.com/NPR on any US orders over $75 and free returns. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
0:59 Speaker 01 I was five when my father died.
1:04 Speaker 01 And for some months, I didn't show any major symptoms of trauma.
1:16 Speaker 01 But then I developed this nightmare.
1:21 Speaker 01 Which was horrible, and it was repetitive.
1:43 Speaker 01 In this nightmare, I was completely hopeless.
1:51 Speaker 01 I couldn't see either mother or father around.
2:00 Speaker 01 And the whole thing was quite scary, so much so that I told my mother that I didn't want to sleep at all.
2:09 Speaker 01 And this is when she realized I needed help.
2:22 Speaker 01 And then she took me to a psychotherapist.
2:29 Speaker 01 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.
2:50 Speaker 01 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.
3:30 Speaker 01 And I was a detective looking for a mad criminal. I was hunting a tiger in the jungle.
3:51 Speaker 01 And I also had a male friend, an adult friend.
3:56 Speaker 01 And at some point, he says, "I cannot go on with you. You need to go by yourself now."
4:18 Speaker 01 And then I accepted that and I moved alone towards fighting that tiger. Then the tiger finds me.
4:28 Speaker 01 And I had to flee
4:33 Speaker 01 and jump in the water and swim.
4:40 Speaker 01 And there was a big shark there.
4:51 Speaker 01 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.
5:03 Speaker 01 And then after that third dream, these dreams ceased. They stopped.
5:22 Speaker 01 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.
5:31 Rund Abdelfatah? You know,
5:34 Rund Abdelfatah? sometimes I struggle with that idea of that the dreams are actually telling us something real because
5:45 Rund Abdelfatah? my dad passed away. And hearing you describe that, like I had dreams. They were the most vivid dreams I've had in my life. And part of me wants to like dissociate them from my reality, like sort of have them be in their own space. But what you're describing feels like
6:07 Rund Abdelfatah? almost like dreams are a window into into our minds, into some deeper consciousness,
6:15 Rund Abdelfatah? rather than a random assortment of things that just like happen in our mind.
6:21 Speaker 01 So there is a level of noise, of a level of unpredictability in dreams.
6:26 Speaker 03 They're not random at all.
6:27 Speaker 01 But their genesis, their motor, is entirely not random. This is very clear when you lose somebody you love.
6:36 Speaker 03 They're not random at all.
6:37 Speaker 01 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.
6:55 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Sedarta Ribeiro.
6:57 Speaker 01 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.
7:08 Rund Abdelfatah? Sedarta also wrote the book, "The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams."
7:14 Speaker 01 Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day.
7:22 Speaker 03 They're not random at all.
7:35 Rund Abdelfatah? 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," he would say.
8:21 Rund Abdelfatah? But there was no convincing my mom. She reminded him that she knew she'd have two daughters years before me and my sister came along because two cats with green eyes had come to her in a dream. We both have green eyes. For a long time, I wasn't sure who was right. I made the mistake of thinking it was an either-or. Dreams either meant nothing or they were the key to unlocking everything. But now, when I see my dad in a dream, and he tells me he's proud of me, that I'm doing OK, well, I don't know what to make of that exactly. Is it God? Is it my mind trying to heal itself? Is it just a bad night's sleep? Is it all three?
9:03 Speaker 04 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.
9:31 Speaker 01 They're not random at all.
9:33 Rund Abdelfatah? History can seem big and imposing, but it's always intensely personal. It's all of our individual experiences that add up to historical events.
9:44 Speaker 04 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.
9:57 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Rande Abdelfattah.
9:59 Speaker 04 I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And on this episode of Throughline from NPR, we're taking a journey through the history of dreams.
10:13 Speaker 05 My name is Samantha Alexander. I'm from Rosemont, Arkansas, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
10:21 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from the Carter Center. Since 1982, the Carter Center has gone where the need is greatest, waging peace, fighting disease, and building hope. Far Away, Up Close: Global Stories from the Carter Center is a new documentary-style podcast about the people who do this difficult, often dangerous, work and what drew them to it, told in their own words. Follow Far Away, Up Close: Global Stories from the Carter Center wherever you listen.
10:52 Speaker 00 This message comes from ProLon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? ProLon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/NPR. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab.
11:38 Speaker 00 Part One: The Science of Sleep.
12:07 Speaker 01 Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day, for the following day.
12:19 Speaker 01 When we go to sleep, our brain will enter a sequence of different phases.
12:30 Speaker 04 Phase one: The brain slows down. The body relaxes. Muscles twitch.
12:35 Speaker 01 Which will be characterized by very different brainwaves and very different chemicals released in the brain.
12:42 Speaker 04 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.
13:03 Speaker 01 Dreaming occurs during most of the time, but it's not very vivid until about halfway through the sleep.
13:17 Speaker 04 The first one is short, but the cycles get longer and longer as you move in and out of deep sleep and dreaming sleep.
13:25 Speaker 01 Rapid eye movement sleep, REM sleep.
13:52 Speaker 01 REM sleep is characterized by very, very strong activation of neurons in the cerebral cortex.
14:01 Speaker 01 So much so that some scientists called it paradoxical sleep, because it feels like the brain is awake even though it's asleep.
14:17 Speaker 01 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,
14:40 Speaker 01 memories tend to associate in quite unpredictable manners.
14:48 Speaker 01 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 odd during the dream and wake up.
15:06 Speaker 01 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 thread.
15:23 Speaker 01 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.
15:46 Speaker 01 If I had to draw a dream, this would be patches of memories with an overall tone that is given by desire.
15:56 Speaker 04 They're in black and white.
15:57 Speaker 05 And every time I turned around, all of them had their masks on.
16:00 Speaker 04 And we were having races down, like flights of stairs.
16:03 Speaker 01 You'd see memories being reactivated, guided by desires, fears. We were just being wobbles. And I had to swim over to their room and hold my breath. 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.
16:27 Speaker 01 I just vividly remember trying to grasp all of the speeches. There's no censorship. There's no mind telling you, "You shouldn't be dreaming that. You shouldn't be visualizing this."
16:41 Speaker 01 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.
17:01 Speaker 01 They can give us a lot of insights into what's going on, and we may not be aware of what's going on.
17:29 Speaker 01 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. If you look into the brain areas that are involved in daydream, they're the same as those involved in nightdream. When we plan something in the future, when we travel in the past, when we tell a story about our own life, when we make a story up, all those situations involve activation of those brain regions that we need to have empathy, to be able to put ourselves in other shoes. So, very likely, what allowed our ancestors to develop technology,
18:14 Speaker 01 to develop new ideas, to develop culture, and enter this process of accumulation of culture is something that was propelled by dreams.
18:31 Speaker 04 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 Riberro, "For thousands of years, we humans have made art, technology, and imagined new futures inspired by the dreams we experience almost every night."
19:16 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, we meet our ancestors in a cave of forgotten dreams.
19:37 Speaker 06 My name is Fonz Howard. I'm from Jacksonville, North Carolina, and I'm listening to Throughline from NPR.
19:43 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from the Carter Center. Since 1982, the Carter Center has gone where the need is greatest: waging peace, fighting disease, and building hope. Far Away Up Close: Global Stories from the Carter Center is a new documentary-style podcast about the people who do this difficult, often dangerous, work and what drew them to it, told in their own words. Follow Far Away Up Close: Global Stories from the Carter Center wherever you listen. This message comes from ProLon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? ProLon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass.
20:26 Speaker 00 Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/NPR. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab.
21:03 Speaker 00 Part Two: Messages from the Deep.
21:17 Speaker 04 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...
21:45 Speaker 04 Through the light of their flashlights, they saw something shocking.
21:51 Rund Abdelfatah? There were mysterious paintings on the walls depicting life in an ancient world. Human handprints in various sizes, geometric shapes, human figures and animals. Lions, bison, horses, bears, species that lived in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic era, around 30,000 years ago. They would come to be known as the Chauvet cave paintings. These works of art were made by people who would have been recognizable to us, people who on some level must have valued art, because they had to go to some great lengths just to make them.
22:33 Speaker 01 This art is not produced at the entrance, at the very entrance of the caves, but very deep in the caves. They had to go for hundreds of meters. And then they needed to use fire to be able to draw or paint.
22:57 Rund Abdelfatah? The paintings come in two colors, black and red. They run across the cave wall like some ancient message left behind for future people to discover. And here's what makes them even trippier. If you use a torch fire to illuminate the caves in just the right way, the paintings appear to be animated.
23:18 Speaker 01 For example, when you have like a bison, the bison has many legs. It doesn't have four legs, it has more legs. And this seems to be an attempt to produce the impression of motion.
23:38 Rund Abdelfatah? As the filmmaker Werner Herzog said, "These paintings could be considered the first works of cinema."
24:09 Speaker 01 There are those paintings that are not just beautiful and impressive, but they are also suggestive of magic, of mental imagery that had some purpose. There was the mixture of people and other animals. A human torso with a python head, for example.
24:38 Rund Abdelfatah? Where did these wild images come from? How did our ancient ancestors pull ideas from the recesses of their minds and place them onto a rock canvas? Siddhartha believes that the key to answering these questions comes from dreams.
24:57 Speaker 01 And this is probably a function that was facilitated by dreaming, by REM sleep, that conduces a reactivation of memories that is not very strict, that is quite lax.
25:14 Speaker 01 Now, if we transport ourselves 30,000 years in the past and we imagine these situations, the only logical thing to conclude is that people would come out of those dreams absolutely sure that they had encountered godly entities in search of guidance.
25:50 Speaker 04 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.
26:35 Speaker 01 And if you don't have any other theory about what dreaming is like, why would you doubt that, right? Why would you wake up in the morning saying, "Mm, I had this dream about this, this Lord of the Beasts with big antlers that came and helped me plan my hunt, but no, this is probably illusion." No, this is not the conclusion that our ancestors took. Quite, quite, quite in contrary, they concluded that those dreams were a proof of the existence of those entities, and they should be paid attention. So, all those things point to a very rich mental life. These ancestors of ours were dreaming.
27:16 Speaker 01 All non-aquatic mammals have REM sleep, so it's safe to say that our ancestors in the Paleolithic were dreaming a lot.
27:46 Speaker 07 My recent dream was that I was hanging out with Mr. Rogers. I'm currently 30 weeks pregnant and had a recent dream that the skin on my belly was translucent. And I thanked him for being a stable part of my life growing up. And I could look in.
28:07 Speaker 05 And see that my baby was screaming, "Help, help," over and over again. Forty-eight now, so I've been writing my dreams down a very long time. And it was very disturbing. I was very pleased to wake up from that one.
28:22 Speaker 01 As far as we look back, our ancestors were dreaming, and as soon as they had language, they were sharing those dreams.
28:29 Speaker 06 If he gazes toward the right, his adversary will die. If he gazes toward the left, his adversary will overcome him.
28:38 Speaker 04 This is from a dream tablet written over 3,000 years ago in Babylon. If you look backward, he will not attain his desire. 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.
29:02 Speaker 01 If you're disconnected from that, if you just live from waking life to waking life, and you never remember your dreams, and you never share your dreams with anybody, and you never take your dreams into consideration for any decision, you're living a life that is entirely different from the lives of our ancestors.
29:21 Speaker 01 We did not evolve to have this lack of relationship to dreams. We evolved 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.
29:58 Rund Abdelfatah? You know, it's interesting because you mentioned that dreams are a way to, you know, on the one hand, from a positive perspective, they're a way to imagine our way out of a problem. But on the other hand, they're also potentially misleading.
30:15 Speaker 01 Well, Rand, I think you're touching a very good point here, which is that dreams are simulations of possible futures, which means that they are often wrong. And that's why, in all those ancient cultures, there is the need for dream interpretation.
30:34 Speaker 04 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.
31:07 Speaker 01 Dreams should not be taken at face value, dreams. And people knew this across cultures. People knew it in the ancient world.
31:26 Speaker 01 Now, dreams have been, of course, appropriated for political reasons many, many times. In the Roman Empire, it happened all the time.
31:38 Speaker 01 For example, Julius Caesar had a dream, well, reported a dream, when he was less than 30, in which he would have sex with his mother.
31:50 Speaker 01 And this dream was used politically many, many years later, when he crossed the Rubicon and invaded Rome and caused a civil war. This dream was used at this moment politically to say that he was, that the dream was actually a good premonition because he was having intercourse with his mother, so he was taking control of the motherland.
32:39 Speaker 01 En todas las culturas diferentes, un sueño puede decidir una guerra. Un sueño puede decidir el fin de una guerra. Un sueño puede decidir si los reyes se casarán o hacer paz con sus vecinos.
33:00 Speaker 01 De alguna manera, hasta el final de los Años Medievos, los sueños eran la única luz posible en el futuro. Era raro, era metáforico, era impreciso, pero fue sin embargo algún tipo de visión en el futuro.
33:19 Speaker 01 Sin embargo, en los últimos 500 años, dos cosas comenzaron a desarrollarse muy fuertemente que opusieron la importancia de los sueños. Y son el capitalismo por un lado y la ciencia por el otro. El capitalismo y la ciencia han estado desarrollándose mano a mano, juntos, entrelazados, uno alimentando al otro. Y luego, después del desarrollo de la ciencia adecuada, y eso creo que está relacionado con el capitalismo, la visión del futuro se volvió técnica, científica.
33:56 Speaker 04 Con la llegada de la ciencia y la razón, la necesidad del misticismo y encontrar sentido a través de los sueños se volvió menos relevante. Durante el Enlightenment en Europa, la interpretación de los sueños comenzó a verse como mera superstición. Los filósofos como René Descartes trivializaron los sueños. Esta tendencia continuó con el surgimiento de la ciencia moderna. Porque, ¿por qué necesitarías un sueño para ayudarte a predecir eventos futuros cuando tienes un método científico para probar ideas y algoritmos que pueden basar predicciones en datos?
34:27 Speaker 01 Sin embargo, creo que fue un error, y es un error para nosotros, reemplazar uno con el otro. Porque el tipo de visión que podemos obtener de los sueños es muy diferente de la visión que obtenemos de la ciencia.
34:50 Rund Abdelfatah? In the 19th and early 20th century, some philosophers and psychologists began to recognize and study dreams.
34:59 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, the story of a scientist from Austria who sparked a movement with a radical idea about how dreams can help us understand mental illness.
35:29 Speaker 00 Hi, this is Belisha Manley from Chicago, Illinois, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from the Carter Center. Since 1982, the Carter Center has gone where the need is greatest, waging peace, fighting disease, and building hope. Far Away Up Close: Global Stories from the Carter Center is a new documentary-style podcast about the people who do this difficult, often dangerous, work and what drew them to it, told in their own words. Follow Far Away Up Close: Global Stories from the Carter Center wherever you listen. This message comes from ProLon. Want to look and feel your best this fall?
36:13 Speaker 00 ProLon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/NPR. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab. Part Three. What dreams...
36:58 Speaker 07 Dreams may come.
37:13 Rund Abdelfatah? For much of human history, dreams were considered messages from the deep. They were a source of inspiration, of ideas, and even guided the way many people lived their lives. But beginning in the 16th century in Europe, dreams lost much of their power. The Christian church saw dreams as a possible source of sin. Some philosophers regarded dream interpretation as nonsense. One writer thought they were merely the result of indigestion.
37:41 Speaker 04 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. I started my professional activity as a neurologist, trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. 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.
38:19 Speaker 01 When Freud was a young doctor, he was a scientist. He saw himself as a scientist, and he was trying himself in different fields of science, of neuroscience.
38:30 Speaker 04 At this time, scientists were trying to understand the connection between the brain and the mind, the body and consciousness. One of the most common diagnoses of the time was hysteria. It was often a kind of catch-all diagnosis for people, especially women, who might have been suffering from symptoms like depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, insomnia, and even something called sexual forwardness.
38:56 Speaker 04 When Sigmund Freud was a medical student studying hysteria, he came to believe that it was a psychiatric disorder. And after graduating, he opened his own private practice to treat patients and further study the condition.
39:08 Speaker 01 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.
39:21 Speaker 04 But then...
39:22 Speaker 01 His father died.
39:26 Speaker 03 I find it difficult to write just now. The old man's death has affected me profoundly. With his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic lightheartedness, he had a significant effect on my life.
39:40 Speaker 03 I now feel quite uprooted.
39:44 Speaker 01 He entered the crisis and had these major dreams.
40:17 Speaker 01 And this is when he undergoes the big change.
40:22 Speaker 03 There is still very little happening to me externally, but internally, something very interesting.
40:29 Speaker 03 For the last four days, my self-analysis has continued in dreams and has presented me with the most valuable elucidations and clues.
40:39 Speaker 01 This is when he produces his seminal book, The Interpretation of Dreams, and creates a new field of knowledge that we call psychoanalysis.
40:50 Speaker 03 Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology and a new method of treatment of the neuroses.
40:58 Rund Abdelfatah? Psychoanalysis is the idea that investigating the unconscious, often through dreams, can possibly treat the psychological symptoms patients are suffering, conditions or neuroses that people still experience today, like depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, and so on. Using his own dreams and his patients as evidence, Freud put forth an idea in a book called The Interpretation of Dreams that would become his lasting legacy.
41:26 Speaker 01 What Freud did that was so important is that he reclaimed dreams as something meaningful.
41:35 Rund Abdelfatah? But even after Freud published his book, it's not like everything instantly changed. Dreams were still mostly dismissed in the scientific community.
41:43 Speaker 01 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.
41:57 Rund Abdelfatah? It would take eight years to sell the first 600 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams. And for the first year and a half, no scientific journal reviewed it, besides some psychological ones, where Freud's book received negative reviews. One prominent psychologist warned that, quote, "Uncritical minds would be delighted to join in this play with ideas and would end up in complete mysticism and chaotic arbitrariness."
42:23 Speaker 03 People did not believe in my facts and thought my theory is unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting.
42:32 Speaker 01 And the people that believed that dreams had a meaning were the superstitious people that were not educated, that were buying those manuals, you know, 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, right? And Freud was able to say that they were both wrong.
42:58 Speaker 03 What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.
43:10 Speaker 01 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."
43:44 Rund Abdelfatah? This idea that people dream for a reason, that it's a way to cope with problems the conscious mind can't do while it's awake, was radical. That by reflecting on your dreams, you were confronting something deep inside of you that followed like a shadow you didn't know was there.
44:01 Speaker 01 Dreams 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. There 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.
44:45 Speaker 01 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.
45:19 Speaker 06 What should people do about dreams? I mean, generally, one forgets them almost as soon as one wakes up. Should one take notes and remember them?
45:25 Speaker 07 Oh, absolutely. Write them down immediately. If you wake up during the night with a dream, write it down. Don't do this, don't go back to sleep. Flying in the air. I felt like I was a wave. But I went up to them and I was like, please take me with you, please take me with you. And they were like, you have blood on your head. I was a part of the Soviet Army and I accidentally blew up this huge effigy of Stalin. I was hell-bent on proving to people that I had hung out with Elliot Page, the actor
46:00 Speaker 01 in Brooklyn. And then it becomes a full-blown hurricane. I just remember my car being tossed around, basically.
46:08 Speaker 06 And then I went downstairs and I found people were rolling refrigerators around. And I've lost my script and the producer is drunk and everything goes to pieces and the microphone catches on fire.
46:28 Speaker 04 After Freud's death in 1939, it still took some time for his work on dreams to be taken as serious science.
46:36 Speaker 01 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.
46:59 Speaker 04 After Freud, there were others who continued to pursue the study of dreams and the unconscious mind, specifically another well-known psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. He believed that human beings are connected to each other and their ancestors through a shared set of experiences that are embedded in our DNA, an idea he called the collective unconscious.
47:20 Speaker 01 We are not isolated, right? We are not living in an experience, each of us, that is disconnected from everybody else. Rather the contrary, we have, 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, if you have a long life, you will go through all those phases which are shared with other people.
47:51 Speaker 04 As time went on, more and more studies on dreams and the unconscious continue to build on one another. And almost 125 years after Freud first published The Interpretation of Dreams, there's now research that supports the idea that dreams can have a significant impact on our waking life.
48:10 Speaker 01 We had to wait until 2010 for the first paper that showed 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.
49:02 Rund Abdelfatah? As all of this was playing out in the scientific world, the human experience was changing.
49:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Freud grew up during a time before electricity was widely available, when the sun and moon dictated sleeping patterns, when daily life revolved around the seasons. In today's world, where sleep is being cut short, caffeinated drinks are keeping us awake and screens vie for our attention, it's become harder and harder to dream.
49:31 Speaker 01 We did not evolve to have this lack of relationship to dreams. We evolved. We have 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.
50:02 Speaker 01 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, it will cut short the REM phase, and therefore they will have less dreaming.
50:34 Speaker 01 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 many of the problems they were facing nowadays
51:17 Speaker 01 of intolerance, people being angry all the time, this has to do with, among other things, sleep and dreaming.
51:32 Speaker 01 I really feel that we need to focus on what is important. And the way to do that is to go inwards, is to go towards our inner world, is to find meaning between the representation of ourselves and those mental creatures that we carry with us. If we have no relationship to those, it's very hard to have ethics. It's very hard to have a moral compass. Moral compass will not come from capitalism. It will not come from science only. It has to come from a richer relationship with the inner world. And this is what dreams are all about.
52:25 Speaker 04 That's it for this week's episode. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
52:29 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
52:33 Speaker 04 This episode was produced by me.
52:35 Rund Abdelfatah? And me and? Lawrence Wu.
52:37 Speaker 05 Lain Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Ibevez.
52:41 Speaker 04 Yolanda Sangwe. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
52:46 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks also to Adriana Tapia for her production on this episode, Deb George for editing help, Tamar Charney and Anya Grunman.
52:54 Speaker 04 Thank you to Casey Herman for his voiceover work. This episode was mixed by Andy Huther.
53:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes?
53:06 Speaker 03 Navid Marvi.
53:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.
53:10 Speaker 04 Also, we want your voice on our show. Send us a voicemail at 872-588-8805 with your name, where you're from, and the line. You're listening to Throughline from NPR, and we'll get you on the show. That's 872-588-8805.
53:30 Rund Abdelfatah? And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] .
53:37 Speaker 04 Thanks for listening.
53:46 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
Previous History of the Self: Aging Next Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback) Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated