The Oracle of Night
by Pantheon
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$32.50
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Original price
$32.50
Original price
$32.50
$32.50
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$32.50
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$32.50
Description
A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and their essential role in the formation of who we are and the world we have made.
"A resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams." —The New York Times
What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use them? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented study of the role and significance of this phenomenon. An investigation on a grand scale, it encompasses literature, anthropology, religion, and science, articulating 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 Sidarta Ribeiro locates a key to humankind’s first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future and our ability to conceive of the existence of souls and spirits—to today’s cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at 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 elucidated by contemporary research.
Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating, The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to understand this most basic of human experiences.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 379A Jabuti Award Finalist for Best “Brazilian Book Published Abroad”
“A sweeping account as tangled and chaotic—and fascinating—as the dreams themselves . . . It reinfuses the dreamscape with beauty, mystery and significance . . . The Oracle of Night takes a breakneck journey through history, from cave paintings and the ancient Greeks to Celtic myths, Egyptian pharaohs, Gilgamesh and Julius Caesar. The text, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, moves fluidly from systemic historiography to guesswork and lighthearted extrapolation . . . The result is a curiously hybridized book, at times playful, at times intensely scientific . . . Poetic and visceral.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The Oracle of Night makes a resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams . . . This book is the culmination of decades of thought and collaborative work. It’s also the expression of remarkable, if sometimes all-over-the-map, scholarship, drawing on history, literature, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, sociology and psychology, among other disciplines . . . [Ribeiro's] lyrical account is aided by Daniel Hahn’s beautiful translation from the Portuguese . . . You can’t help being awed and enchanted by the wonder with which Ribeiro approaches his subject, by the depth of his knowledge and passion.”
—The New York Times
“[Ribeiro] explores hypotheses about the evolutionary value of sleep to humans, presenting a fascinating analysis of the debate about the relationship between sleep and cognitive ability . . . concluding, among other things, that nap rooms would be a valuable addition to school environments.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A comprehensive consideration of the sleeping mind . . . [Ribeiro] offers a capacious examination of the phenomenon of dreaming. The author draws on biology, chemistry, neurophysiology, anthropology, mythology, history, literature, biography, and art—along with myriad examples of dream narratives—to create a rich history of the human mind . . . A stimulating and informative overview.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A groundbreaking 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.”
—Next Big Idea ClubSIDARTA RIBEIRO is a founder of the Brain Institute at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, where he is also a professor of neuroscience. He received a PhD in animal behavior from The Rockefeller University.1
Why Do We Dream?
When he was five years old, the little boy went through a disturbing phase in which he had the same nightmare every night. In this dream, he was living without any relatives near him, alone in a sad city beneath a rainy sky. A good part of the dream took place in a maze of muddy alleys that circled gloomy buildings. The city, which was surrounded by barbed wire and illuminated by insistent flashes of lightning, looked more like a concentration camp. The boy and the city’s other children would invariably end up at a scary house where cannibal witches lived. One of the children—never the boy—would go into the three-story building and everybody would watch the many dark windows, waiting for one of them to be suddenly lit up, revealing the silhouette of the child and the witches. There would be a horrifying scream, and that was how the dream ended, only to be repeated, in detail, every night.
The boy developed a terror of sleeping, and informed his mother that he had decided never to fall asleep again, so as to avoid the nightmare. He would lie still in bed, alone in his room, fighting desperately against sleep, determined to remain alert. But ultimately he would always succumb, and a few hours later everything would start over again. The fear of being the child chosen to go into the house was so great that he was unable to prevent the repeating of the narrative, unable to avoid falling into the same oneiric trap. His earnest mother taught him to think about flower- filled gardens as he was drifting off, so as to calm the beginning of his sleep. But after the dark curtain of midnight, the nightmare would return, relentlessly, as if the dawn would never be allowed to return.
Soon afterward, the boy started to have sessions of psychotherapy with an excellent specialist. The memories he retains of this period are of board games kept in an appealing wooden box in the consulting room. At a certain point the psychologist suggested, cleverly, that the dream might somehow be under control. And then the nightmare of the witches was replaced by another dream.
This one also had a disagreeable narrative, though it wasn’t a horror story so much as a piece of Hitchcockian suspense with surprising image editing. The gray thriller was experienced in the third person: the boy didn’t see the dream through his own eyes, but from outside, as if watching a movie about himself. The dream, which took place in an airport and always ended the same way, was again repeated every night. There was an adult companion with dark hair who was helping the boy to look for a deranged criminal. The boy couldn’t find the criminal and ended up leaving the place with his friend. But then, to his great anxiety, the “camera” moved to reveal his quarry, upside- down, hanging from the ceiling of the terminal hall like a huge spider in the gap between the walls . . . The most disturbing thing was not having spotted the criminal earlier, despite his having been there the whole time.
After some more play psychotherapy and more conversations about controlling one’s dreams, the boy developed a third dream narrative, this one no longer a nightmare but an adventure dream— still filled with peril but accompanied by much less fear and anxiety. It was about a tiger hunt in the Indian jungle, and the boy featured clearly as the hero, a Mowgli in British colonial clothing, watching from the outside, in the third person. The same dark-haired adult friend was with him at the beginning of the dream as they passed through the thick forest, until they sighted cliffs and a rough sea. On the right-hand side of the field of vision there was a tall island, small and surrounded by sheer cliffs, and in the background the sun was setting, brightly colored against a gray sky. Evening was closing in, and it was barely possible to make out his friend’s face. The boy spotted a causeway connecting the mainland to the island, and assuming that the tiger was hiding there, he suggested cornering it. The friend agreed, but explained that from that point onward, the boy would have to make his way alone. The boy advanced, rifle in hand, and started his crossing of the causeway, keeping his balance several yards above a tempestuous, foamy, lead-green sea. The clouds parted, the setting sun appeared, and the horizon was tinged in orange, red, and purple. The boy stepped onto the ground of the island and found himself face-to-face with the deep green bushland, his rifle raised, imagining he was pointing it at the tiger behind the leaves. And then, all of a sudden, he realized that the tiger was behind him, on the causeway. He was the one who was cornered.
Even before the fear came, the boy made a split-second decision to throw himself into the sea. Down he fell, and when he struck the water the dream suddenly switched to the first person, with a vividness that was heightened by the abrupt contact of his warm body with the cold water. He understood that he was dreaming, and with his own eyes he saw the dark sea surrounding him. For a moment, everything was like lead, and then he started to swim around the island. He was afraid, and the fear made him notice a huge shark swimming alongside him. The shock and the tension made time slow down—and then everything was calm. Between the sea and the sky, which were getting ever darker, the boy went on swimming calmly alongside the gigantic shark, and he swam and swam through the night, and nothing bad happened till the following day . . . Not long after he’d started to have the dream about the tiger and the shark, these oneiric narratives left the boy for good, never to return. The nightmares disappeared, the fear of sleeping passed, and nighttime peace was restored to the house.
"A resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams." —The New York Times
What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use them? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented study of the role and significance of this phenomenon. An investigation on a grand scale, it encompasses literature, anthropology, religion, and science, articulating 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 Sidarta Ribeiro locates a key to humankind’s first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future and our ability to conceive of the existence of souls and spirits—to today’s cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at 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 elucidated by contemporary research.
Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating, The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to understand this most basic of human experiences.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 379A Jabuti Award Finalist for Best “Brazilian Book Published Abroad”
“A sweeping account as tangled and chaotic—and fascinating—as the dreams themselves . . . It reinfuses the dreamscape with beauty, mystery and significance . . . The Oracle of Night takes a breakneck journey through history, from cave paintings and the ancient Greeks to Celtic myths, Egyptian pharaohs, Gilgamesh and Julius Caesar. The text, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, moves fluidly from systemic historiography to guesswork and lighthearted extrapolation . . . The result is a curiously hybridized book, at times playful, at times intensely scientific . . . Poetic and visceral.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The Oracle of Night makes a resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams . . . This book is the culmination of decades of thought and collaborative work. It’s also the expression of remarkable, if sometimes all-over-the-map, scholarship, drawing on history, literature, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, sociology and psychology, among other disciplines . . . [Ribeiro's] lyrical account is aided by Daniel Hahn’s beautiful translation from the Portuguese . . . You can’t help being awed and enchanted by the wonder with which Ribeiro approaches his subject, by the depth of his knowledge and passion.”
—The New York Times
“[Ribeiro] explores hypotheses about the evolutionary value of sleep to humans, presenting a fascinating analysis of the debate about the relationship between sleep and cognitive ability . . . concluding, among other things, that nap rooms would be a valuable addition to school environments.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A comprehensive consideration of the sleeping mind . . . [Ribeiro] offers a capacious examination of the phenomenon of dreaming. The author draws on biology, chemistry, neurophysiology, anthropology, mythology, history, literature, biography, and art—along with myriad examples of dream narratives—to create a rich history of the human mind . . . A stimulating and informative overview.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A groundbreaking 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.”
—Next Big Idea ClubSIDARTA RIBEIRO is a founder of the Brain Institute at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, where he is also a professor of neuroscience. He received a PhD in animal behavior from The Rockefeller University.1
Why Do We Dream?
When he was five years old, the little boy went through a disturbing phase in which he had the same nightmare every night. In this dream, he was living without any relatives near him, alone in a sad city beneath a rainy sky. A good part of the dream took place in a maze of muddy alleys that circled gloomy buildings. The city, which was surrounded by barbed wire and illuminated by insistent flashes of lightning, looked more like a concentration camp. The boy and the city’s other children would invariably end up at a scary house where cannibal witches lived. One of the children—never the boy—would go into the three-story building and everybody would watch the many dark windows, waiting for one of them to be suddenly lit up, revealing the silhouette of the child and the witches. There would be a horrifying scream, and that was how the dream ended, only to be repeated, in detail, every night.
The boy developed a terror of sleeping, and informed his mother that he had decided never to fall asleep again, so as to avoid the nightmare. He would lie still in bed, alone in his room, fighting desperately against sleep, determined to remain alert. But ultimately he would always succumb, and a few hours later everything would start over again. The fear of being the child chosen to go into the house was so great that he was unable to prevent the repeating of the narrative, unable to avoid falling into the same oneiric trap. His earnest mother taught him to think about flower- filled gardens as he was drifting off, so as to calm the beginning of his sleep. But after the dark curtain of midnight, the nightmare would return, relentlessly, as if the dawn would never be allowed to return.
Soon afterward, the boy started to have sessions of psychotherapy with an excellent specialist. The memories he retains of this period are of board games kept in an appealing wooden box in the consulting room. At a certain point the psychologist suggested, cleverly, that the dream might somehow be under control. And then the nightmare of the witches was replaced by another dream.
This one also had a disagreeable narrative, though it wasn’t a horror story so much as a piece of Hitchcockian suspense with surprising image editing. The gray thriller was experienced in the third person: the boy didn’t see the dream through his own eyes, but from outside, as if watching a movie about himself. The dream, which took place in an airport and always ended the same way, was again repeated every night. There was an adult companion with dark hair who was helping the boy to look for a deranged criminal. The boy couldn’t find the criminal and ended up leaving the place with his friend. But then, to his great anxiety, the “camera” moved to reveal his quarry, upside- down, hanging from the ceiling of the terminal hall like a huge spider in the gap between the walls . . . The most disturbing thing was not having spotted the criminal earlier, despite his having been there the whole time.
After some more play psychotherapy and more conversations about controlling one’s dreams, the boy developed a third dream narrative, this one no longer a nightmare but an adventure dream— still filled with peril but accompanied by much less fear and anxiety. It was about a tiger hunt in the Indian jungle, and the boy featured clearly as the hero, a Mowgli in British colonial clothing, watching from the outside, in the third person. The same dark-haired adult friend was with him at the beginning of the dream as they passed through the thick forest, until they sighted cliffs and a rough sea. On the right-hand side of the field of vision there was a tall island, small and surrounded by sheer cliffs, and in the background the sun was setting, brightly colored against a gray sky. Evening was closing in, and it was barely possible to make out his friend’s face. The boy spotted a causeway connecting the mainland to the island, and assuming that the tiger was hiding there, he suggested cornering it. The friend agreed, but explained that from that point onward, the boy would have to make his way alone. The boy advanced, rifle in hand, and started his crossing of the causeway, keeping his balance several yards above a tempestuous, foamy, lead-green sea. The clouds parted, the setting sun appeared, and the horizon was tinged in orange, red, and purple. The boy stepped onto the ground of the island and found himself face-to-face with the deep green bushland, his rifle raised, imagining he was pointing it at the tiger behind the leaves. And then, all of a sudden, he realized that the tiger was behind him, on the causeway. He was the one who was cornered.
Even before the fear came, the boy made a split-second decision to throw himself into the sea. Down he fell, and when he struck the water the dream suddenly switched to the first person, with a vividness that was heightened by the abrupt contact of his warm body with the cold water. He understood that he was dreaming, and with his own eyes he saw the dark sea surrounding him. For a moment, everything was like lead, and then he started to swim around the island. He was afraid, and the fear made him notice a huge shark swimming alongside him. The shock and the tension made time slow down—and then everything was calm. Between the sea and the sky, which were getting ever darker, the boy went on swimming calmly alongside the gigantic shark, and he swam and swam through the night, and nothing bad happened till the following day . . . Not long after he’d started to have the dream about the tiger and the shark, these oneiric narratives left the boy for good, never to return. The nightmares disappeared, the fear of sleeping passed, and nighttime peace was restored to the house.
PUBLISHER:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN-10:
1524746908
ISBN-13:
9780807512099
BINDING:
Hardback
BISAC:
Psychology
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
6.3000(W) x 9.5500(H) x 1.2500(D)
AUDIENCE TYPE:
General/Adult
LANGUAGE:
English