The Oracle of Night: The history and science of dreams - Softcover

Ribeiro, Sidarta

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552177598 ISBN 13: 9780552177597

Publisher: Penguin, 2022

Synopsis

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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. An investigation on the grand scale, encompassing literature, anthropology, religion, and science, it 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, which contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future - 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, before revealing 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.

About this title

About the Author

Sidarta Ribeiro (Author)
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.

Daniel Hahn (Translator)
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and literary translator. He translates from Portuguese, Spanish and French and has translated literature from Europe, Africa and the Americas, including the work of José Eduardo Agualusa, Philippe Claudel, María Dueñas, Eduardo Halfon, José Luís Peixoto, José Saramago and Gonçalo M. Tavares. His translations have won literary awards including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and the LA Times Book Award. He is also the author of several works of non-fiction, including The Tower Menagerie and the forthcoming If This Be Magic, and the award-winning children’s picture-book Happiness is a Watermelon on Your Head, and is co-editor of ‘The Ultimate Book Guide’ series. He reviews for publications including the Guardian, Spectator and Prospect, and is former Chair of the Translators Association and the Society of Authors and former National Programme Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.

From the Back Cover

These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented, astonishing study of the role and significance of dreams, from the beginning of human history. An investigation on the grand scale, encompassing literature, anthropology, religion, and science, it 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, which contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future - 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, before revealing 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0552177598
• ISBN 13: 9780552177597
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 488