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The Oracle Of Night: The History And Science Of Dreams by Sidarta Ribeiro (book review).

Considering we all have dreams, you would have thought analysis would have started before Freud but he was making connections to how the brain worked and started asking what it all meant.

With his book, ‘The Oracle Of Night: The History And Science Of Dreams’, Sidarta Ribeiro examines the history of dreams and although I never put the dots together before, its hardly that surprising that dreams were seen as the means to predicting the future. When he points out the number of times biblical characters got their insights from dreams, no doubt attributed to God, its even more amazing they made good decisions. Incidentally, the reverence to the dead and their mummification happened a lot earlier than Egypt, even if their ideas on anatomy was always suspect.

It was interesting to read that we all tend to have similar dreams, although I would have thought we creative types might have exhibited some differences, if only for Technicolor’s sake. Oh, you might want to look at www.dreamboard.com from his recommendation. Humans tend to exhibit more REM than most animals although I am still baffled how that can be determined with fish who don’t have eyelids.

One of the most telling aspects of sleep is it improves your learning subjects although Ribeiro doesn’t point out whether it’s the dreaming or the brain cataloguing new information. When you consider you can only carry about 10 new things in your short term memory, your long term memory needs time to store its information.

I should point out that over the course of this advance copy of the book sans extra information that Riberio is a Brazilian scientists and heavily involved in dream research.

One thing that has struck me and a good reminder why its important to read books such as this is the revelation that we are actually dreaming all the time. Not that we remember it, just the action of the part of the brain that is responsible for dreaming. It is only sleep that brings the dreams to the fore.

That gave me a heavy moment of heavy thinking and how much it might be connected to our ability to imagine things and why some of us are better than others at it. We might well be seeing how different brain functions are working together. Riberio’s example of Mozart creating music from day dreaming would certainly support that. In fact, he goes on with many creative examples across history.

I can’t help but think covering historic dreams as padding though, mostly because it doesn’t explore whether they were dreaming or was it precognition, which also follows a similar pattern of flashes of insight and acting on it. If the hippocampus is involved in both of them then these brain activities are drawing more connections.

His closing chapter covering the Australian aboriginal people’s ‘dreamtime’ and progresses to lucid dreaming amongst other subjects, bringing everything together.

If you want a book to make you think for the new year, then this might be the one. Although its not said in the book, Riberio’s reveal that our dreaming function is on all the time hit me the most because it hits on other aspects like precog and creativity in the broader picture. For us creative folk, it means we draw on it all the time because we remember and turn imagination into creativity. I suspect with the less creative, its like not remembering dreams as much as lack of ability.

GF Willmetts

December 2021

(pub: Bantam Press/Transworld. 466 page occasional illustrated indexed hardback. Price: £20.00. ISBN: 978-0-593-06395-5)

check out websites: www.penguin.co.uk

 

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

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