Mystery of Dreams: A Bedtime Story About Why We Dream | SleepWise

1
00:00:00,080 --> 00:00:03,080
Good evening and welcome back to
Sleep.

2
00:00:03,080 --> 00:00:07,880
Wise to night.
We drift into one of the oldest

3
00:00:07,880 --> 00:00:13,360
and most intimate mysteries of
human experience, a country we

4
00:00:13,360 --> 00:00:18,120
visit nearly every night yet
rarely understand.

5
00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:24,480
A place we step into without
packing, without planning, and

6
00:00:24,480 --> 00:00:29,920
almost without noticing the
strange and tender country of

7
00:00:29,920 --> 00:00:32,920
dreams.
There is something quietly

8
00:00:32,920 --> 00:00:37,360
remarkable about dreams.
They belong to everyone.

9
00:00:37,800 --> 00:00:42,040
They are not the property of
scholars, nor the privilege of

10
00:00:42,040 --> 00:00:47,080
anyone culture, nor the
inheritance of any single age.

11
00:00:47,880 --> 00:00:52,000
The farmer who falls asleep at
the edge of a field.

12
00:00:52,600 --> 00:00:57,680
The child curled beneath a thin
blanket, the traveller resting

13
00:00:57,680 --> 00:01:03,280
in an unfamiliar room, the elder
dozing in an afternoon chair.

14
00:01:04,080 --> 00:01:08,160
All of them sooner or later,
slip into worlds that no one

15
00:01:08,160 --> 00:01:12,520
else can see.
And in the morning they wake

16
00:01:12,520 --> 00:01:18,440
again into the shared daylight,
often carrying only a soft

17
00:01:18,440 --> 00:01:21,440
fragment of where they have been
to night.

18
00:01:21,960 --> 00:01:27,400
We will not try to solve dreams.
We will not approach them as a

19
00:01:27,400 --> 00:01:32,400
problem to be answered.
Instead, we will follow the

20
00:01:32,400 --> 00:01:38,040
long, gentle path of how people
across centuries have tried to

21
00:01:38,040 --> 00:01:42,520
understand them.
We will visit ancient temples

22
00:01:42,680 --> 00:01:47,720
where dreamers once left beside
the sick, hoping for guidance.

23
00:01:48,520 --> 00:01:52,760
We will pause beside
philosophers who first asked

24
00:01:53,040 --> 00:01:58,400
with care whether dreams might
come from the body itself rather

25
00:01:58,400 --> 00:02:03,200
than from the gods.
We will sit briefly with the

26
00:02:03,240 --> 00:02:08,560
early psychologists who imagined
the dreaming mind as a hidden

27
00:02:08,560 --> 00:02:14,080
landscape full of meaning.
And we will look in on the quiet

28
00:02:14,080 --> 00:02:18,520
laboratories of the 20th
century, where researchers first

29
00:02:18,520 --> 00:02:24,920
watched a sleeper's eyes moved
beneath closed lids and realized

30
00:02:25,240 --> 00:02:29,200
something extraordinary was
happening within.

31
00:02:29,600 --> 00:02:34,040
Along the way, we will listen to
what science has come to know,

32
00:02:34,400 --> 00:02:38,480
and we will be honest about what
it still does not.

33
00:02:39,360 --> 00:02:43,720
The dreaming brain has been
studied for decades now with

34
00:02:43,760 --> 00:02:48,480
instruments far more delicate
than anything our ancestors

35
00:02:48,480 --> 00:02:53,080
imagined.
And yet much remains uncertain.

36
00:02:54,120 --> 00:02:59,600
Why we dream at all is still, in
some ways, an open question.

37
00:03:00,600 --> 00:03:05,680
The mystery has not been
removed, it has only been

38
00:03:05,680 --> 00:03:08,720
deepened.
If these quiet journeys help you

39
00:03:08,720 --> 00:03:14,080
rest, you can follow Sleep Wise
and share it with someone who

40
00:03:14,080 --> 00:03:18,760
might enjoy falling asleep while
learning something new.

41
00:03:19,160 --> 00:03:23,360
So let your shoulders soften and
let your breathing find its

42
00:03:23,360 --> 00:03:27,080
slower pace.
Let the day's last small

43
00:03:27,080 --> 00:03:30,880
thoughts drift toward the edges
of the room.

44
00:03:31,240 --> 00:03:36,360
There is no need to remember
every name, every century, or

45
00:03:36,480 --> 00:03:40,800
every theory.
The story will move slowly, the

46
00:03:40,800 --> 00:03:45,680
way sleep itself moves in soft
and unhurried steps.

47
00:03:46,760 --> 00:03:51,760
Tonight we are not chasing
dreams, we are walking gently

48
00:03:52,000 --> 00:03:54,840
around the long human effort to
understand them.

49
00:03:55,640 --> 00:04:00,160
And as we begin, the night
itself becomes part of the

50
00:04:00,160 --> 00:04:06,360
story, because somewhere ahead
of us, sleep is waiting, And

51
00:04:06,360 --> 00:04:10,880
beyond sleep, perhaps a quiet
dream of your own.

52
00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:19,519
Before we step into temples and
laboratories, it helps to pause

53
00:04:19,519 --> 00:04:24,240
for a moment on something
simple, something we tend to

54
00:04:24,240 --> 00:04:27,920
overlook because it happened so
quietly.

55
00:04:28,680 --> 00:04:33,360
Almost every human being who has
ever lived has dreamed.

56
00:04:33,680 --> 00:04:39,240
Not occasionally, not as a rare
event, but night after night,

57
00:04:39,840 --> 00:04:44,760
generation after generation,
across every continent and

58
00:04:44,760 --> 00:04:48,520
century.
Think of how unusual that is.

59
00:04:49,200 --> 00:04:53,200
Languages have shifted, empires
have risen and fallen.

60
00:04:53,840 --> 00:04:58,320
Calendars have been rewritten.
Religions have argued with one

61
00:04:58,320 --> 00:05:02,000
another.
Technologies have transformed

62
00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:08,160
daily life beyond recognition.
And yet, through all of it, in

63
00:05:08,160 --> 00:05:14,320
every village and every city, in
tents and palaces and modern

64
00:05:14,320 --> 00:05:19,760
apartments, sleeping minds have
continued to spin their soft,

65
00:05:20,240 --> 00:05:26,080
unrepeatable worlds.
The act of dreaming has outlived

66
00:05:26,080 --> 00:05:30,600
almost everything else.
There is something tender in

67
00:05:30,600 --> 00:05:35,960
that continuity.
A child today asleep in a quiet

68
00:05:35,960 --> 00:05:42,640
bedroom may dream of a winding
staircase, or a kind animal, or

69
00:05:42,640 --> 00:05:49,200
a place that does not exist.
3000 years ago, a child in a

70
00:05:49,200 --> 00:05:53,440
stone house in another part of
the world likely dreamed of

71
00:05:53,440 --> 00:05:57,560
something equally strange and
equally vivid.

72
00:05:58,400 --> 00:06:03,520
We will never know what those
long ago dreams contained, but

73
00:06:03,520 --> 00:06:07,400
we know almost certainly that
they happened.

74
00:06:07,720 --> 00:06:13,360
Modern researchers believe that
nearly all healthy adults dream

75
00:06:13,360 --> 00:06:18,160
multiple times each night, even
when they remember nothing in

76
00:06:18,160 --> 00:06:22,480
the morning.
Most dreams are forgotten within

77
00:06:22,480 --> 00:06:28,360
minutes of waking, a quiet fact
that has frustrated dreamers for

78
00:06:28,360 --> 00:06:32,040
centuries.
Some people are confident they

79
00:06:32,040 --> 00:06:37,280
never dream at all, yet sleep
studies repeatedly show

80
00:06:37,280 --> 00:06:42,040
otherwise.
The forgetting seems to be part

81
00:06:42,040 --> 00:06:45,600
of the design, not a personal
failing.

82
00:06:45,920 --> 00:06:49,600
Dreams also seem to begin early
in life.

83
00:06:50,320 --> 00:06:54,320
Infants spend a remarkable
amount of their sleep in the

84
00:06:54,320 --> 00:06:59,680
active stage, marked by quick
eye movement, the period most

85
00:06:59,680 --> 00:07:04,200
associated with vivid dreaming
in adults.

86
00:07:05,080 --> 00:07:09,280
What an infant experiences
during that time is, of course,

87
00:07:09,280 --> 00:07:12,960
beyond our reach.
We cannot interview a sleeping

88
00:07:12,960 --> 00:07:19,680
baby, but the patterns of brain
activity suggest that something

89
00:07:19,680 --> 00:07:23,960
resembling inner experience may
be unfolding.

90
00:07:24,280 --> 00:07:26,960
And dreaming may not be only
human.

91
00:07:27,560 --> 00:07:32,440
Cats twitch in their sleep.
Dogs paddle their paws as if

92
00:07:32,440 --> 00:07:37,240
running.
Birds, rats, even some reptiles

93
00:07:37,400 --> 00:07:41,920
show patterns during rest that
resemble the dreaming states of

94
00:07:41,920 --> 00:07:45,640
mammals.
We will return to this gentle

95
00:07:45,640 --> 00:07:50,000
thought later.
For now, it is enough to notice

96
00:07:50,000 --> 00:07:56,400
that dreaming, whatever it is,
may be far older than our

97
00:07:56,400 --> 00:08:01,320
species and far more widely
shared than our written

98
00:08:01,320 --> 00:08:07,600
histories alone would suggest.
So tonight, as you settled into

99
00:08:07,600 --> 00:08:12,760
the warmth of your blankets, you
join a quiet line that stretches

100
00:08:12,760 --> 00:08:19,240
back through every grandparent,
every ancestor, every sleeper of

101
00:08:19,280 --> 00:08:23,320
every age.
You are part of an unbroken

102
00:08:23,320 --> 00:08:28,640
thread of dreaming that began
long before history was written,

103
00:08:28,760 --> 00:08:32,919
long before the first stories
were carved into stone, and

104
00:08:32,919 --> 00:08:38,039
continue softly and without
instruction into this very

105
00:08:38,039 --> 00:08:42,360
night.
The earliest written records of

106
00:08:42,360 --> 00:08:46,960
dreams come to us from the soft
clay of Mesopotamia.

107
00:08:47,640 --> 00:08:52,400
Long before paper, before
parchment, before the alphabets

108
00:08:52,400 --> 00:08:57,520
we know today, people pressed
wedge shaped marks into damp

109
00:08:57,520 --> 00:09:01,840
tablets and let the sun bake
them into permanence.

110
00:09:02,680 --> 00:09:06,680
Among the many things they
recorded alongside harvests,

111
00:09:06,880 --> 00:09:12,440
laws and prayers, were dreams.
In the ancient cities between

112
00:09:12,440 --> 00:09:16,400
the Tigris and the Euphrates,
dreams were not considered

113
00:09:16,400 --> 00:09:20,120
private noise.
They were taken seriously,

114
00:09:20,680 --> 00:09:25,920
sometimes anxiously, as messages
worth examining.

115
00:09:26,880 --> 00:09:32,320
Scribes compiled long lists of
dream images and what each might

116
00:09:32,320 --> 00:09:36,160
foretell.
To dream of a certain animal, a

117
00:09:36,160 --> 00:09:41,040
certain river, a certain action
in the night was to receive a

118
00:09:41,040 --> 00:09:44,240
kind of clue about the days
ahead.

119
00:09:45,280 --> 00:09:48,120
These were not casual
curiosities.

120
00:09:48,920 --> 00:09:53,560
They were treated as a quiet
correspondence between the

121
00:09:53,560 --> 00:09:57,720
sleeping mind and the wider
order of things.

122
00:09:58,240 --> 00:10:02,600
The most famous of these
collections is sometimes called

123
00:10:02,760 --> 00:10:08,200
Syrian Dream Book, preserved in
fragments from the great library

124
00:10:08,560 --> 00:10:12,800
of King Ashabanipal in the 7th
century.

125
00:10:13,280 --> 00:10:19,920
Before our era, that library,
buried for thousands of years

126
00:10:19,920 --> 00:10:25,080
beneath the ruins of Nineveh,
held 10s of thousands of tablets

127
00:10:25,560 --> 00:10:29,280
when archaeologists eventually
uncovered it.

128
00:10:30,160 --> 00:10:35,800
Among them were these careful
dream catalogues, evidence that

129
00:10:35,800 --> 00:10:40,520
even at the dawn of writing,
human beings were already trying

130
00:10:40,520 --> 00:10:44,600
to organize the wandering
material of the night.

131
00:10:45,040 --> 00:10:49,160
The famous Epic of Gilgamesh,
one of the oldest stories in

132
00:10:49,160 --> 00:10:55,440
human literature, also returns
again and again to dreams.

133
00:10:55,960 --> 00:11:01,720
The hero dreams his companion
dreams, and the dreams shape

134
00:11:01,760 --> 00:11:07,280
what they do next.
To early story tellers, a dream

135
00:11:07,280 --> 00:11:11,600
was not a side note, it was a
turning point.

136
00:11:11,920 --> 00:11:16,440
Far to the South, along the
Nile, the Egyptians developed

137
00:11:16,440 --> 00:11:21,880
their own careful traditions.
A papyrus from the era of

138
00:11:21,880 --> 00:11:26,680
Remeses, the second now known as
the Chester Beatty Papyrus,

139
00:11:27,240 --> 00:11:31,280
preserves a long Egyptian dream.
Interpretation Guide.

140
00:11:32,120 --> 00:11:35,760
Each entry follows a quiet
pattern.

141
00:11:36,680 --> 00:11:42,840
If a man sees himself doing
this, the meaning is good.

142
00:11:43,680 --> 00:11:49,360
If he sees himself doing that,
the meaning is troubling.

143
00:11:50,520 --> 00:11:56,560
Dreams were sorted, weighed, and
held against expectation.

144
00:11:56,960 --> 00:12:02,240
Later still in the Ptolemaic
period, an Egyptian temple

145
00:12:02,240 --> 00:12:08,440
dreamer named Horre of Sabenetos
kept his own personal records,

146
00:12:08,960 --> 00:12:13,000
writing down the dreams he
received while sleeping within

147
00:12:13,000 --> 00:12:17,840
sacred precincts.
His archive, recovered in modern

148
00:12:17,840 --> 00:12:22,960
times, gives us a rare and
intimate glimpse of one ancient

149
00:12:22,960 --> 00:12:27,400
person's nightly inner life.
What unites these scattered

150
00:12:27,400 --> 00:12:32,720
records is something quietly
moving from the very beginning

151
00:12:32,720 --> 00:12:36,160
of writing.
Human beings did not want to

152
00:12:36,160 --> 00:12:40,680
lose their dreams.
They wanted to keep them, study

153
00:12:40,680 --> 00:12:44,400
them, share them.
They wanted to set the night

154
00:12:44,400 --> 00:12:48,760
down beside the day, where it
could be considered with the

155
00:12:48,760 --> 00:12:53,880
same patience as a harvest
report or a King's edict.

156
00:12:54,920 --> 00:13:00,000
Even before science, even before
philosophy in the formal sense,

157
00:13:00,360 --> 00:13:04,480
the dream was already considered
worth remembering, worth

158
00:13:04,480 --> 00:13:09,360
recording, and worth passing on
to readers of a future no one

159
00:13:09,360 --> 00:13:12,320
yet knew.
From the river valleys of the

160
00:13:12,320 --> 00:13:17,840
ancient world, the story of
dreams flows next into the soft

161
00:13:17,840 --> 00:13:22,840
hills and whitestone sanctuaries
of Greece.

162
00:13:23,920 --> 00:13:28,640
Here dreams entered not only
literature and philosophy, but

163
00:13:28,640 --> 00:13:34,520
also medicine.
In a way that may sound unusual

164
00:13:34,520 --> 00:13:40,280
to modern ears, the Greeks
honored a God named Asclepius,

165
00:13:40,760 --> 00:13:46,080
who was associated with healing.
Across the Greek world,

166
00:13:46,400 --> 00:13:51,280
Sanctuaries were built in his
name, set apart from ordinary

167
00:13:51,280 --> 00:13:56,400
towns, often nestled in places
where the air was clean and the

168
00:13:56,400 --> 00:14:01,160
views were quiet.
The most famous of these stood

169
00:14:01,160 --> 00:14:06,200
at Epidaurus in the eastern part
of the Peloponnese, but others

170
00:14:06,200 --> 00:14:12,840
rose at Cos Pergamum and many
other locations across the Greek

171
00:14:12,840 --> 00:14:17,640
and later Roman world.
People came to these sanctuaries

172
00:14:18,000 --> 00:14:22,560
when they were I'll.
They came with chronic pain,

173
00:14:22,840 --> 00:14:27,360
with troubled hearts, with
conditions their local healers

174
00:14:27,360 --> 00:14:31,600
could not soothe.
After a series of cleansing

175
00:14:31,600 --> 00:14:37,080
rituals, prayers, and offerings,
the patient would be invited to

176
00:14:37,080 --> 00:14:42,160
sleep within the sacred grounds
in a covered hall built for that

177
00:14:42,160 --> 00:14:46,600
purpose.
This practice was called dream

178
00:14:46,760 --> 00:14:50,720
incubation.
The hope was that during the

179
00:14:50,720 --> 00:14:56,920
night the God himself or one of
his sacred animals, often

180
00:14:56,920 --> 00:15:02,640
imagined as a gentle snake,
might appear in the dream and

181
00:15:02,720 --> 00:15:07,560
offer a sign of healing.
When morning came, the dreamer

182
00:15:07,560 --> 00:15:11,560
would describe the night to a
temple priest who helped

183
00:15:11,560 --> 00:15:17,600
interpret what had been seen.
Sometimes the dream offered a

184
00:15:17,600 --> 00:15:21,560
direct instruction.
Bathe in this stream.

185
00:15:22,040 --> 00:15:25,840
Eat this herb.
Avoid this kind of food.

186
00:15:26,640 --> 00:15:30,160
Sometimes the dream itself was
considered the cure.

187
00:15:30,920 --> 00:15:36,480
The walls of these sanctuaries,
especially at Epidaurus, were

188
00:15:36,480 --> 00:15:41,360
once lined with stone tablets
recording the recoveries that

189
00:15:41,360 --> 00:15:46,440
grateful visitors attributed to
their nights of sacred sleep.

190
00:15:46,960 --> 00:15:52,400
Centuries later, in the 2nd
century of the Common Era, a man

191
00:15:52,400 --> 00:15:58,000
named Artemidorus of Daldus
travelled widely across the

192
00:15:58,000 --> 00:16:01,680
Mediterranean world listening to
dreams.

193
00:16:02,440 --> 00:16:06,840
He gathered them from sailors
and farmers, merchants and

194
00:16:06,840 --> 00:16:11,240
physicians, ordinary people in
marketplaces and Inns.

195
00:16:11,680 --> 00:16:18,120
He then wrote a five book work
known as the Onerocritica, which

196
00:16:18,120 --> 00:16:22,560
can be translated as the
interpretation of dreams.

197
00:16:22,880 --> 00:16:27,880
Artemidoris believed that dreams
could carry meaning, but he was

198
00:16:27,880 --> 00:16:34,040
careful and methodical about it.
He insisted that one had to know

199
00:16:34,040 --> 00:16:37,480
the dreamer in order to
interpret a dream.

200
00:16:38,600 --> 00:16:43,680
The same image, he said, would
mean different things depending

201
00:16:43,680 --> 00:16:48,960
on the person's age, profession,
health, and circumstances.

202
00:16:49,880 --> 00:16:54,160
A dream of climbing a tree might
mean one thing for a young

203
00:16:54,160 --> 00:16:58,360
athlete and quite another for an
aging merchant.

204
00:16:59,360 --> 00:17:04,480
A dream of water near a sailor
was not the same as a dream of

205
00:17:04,480 --> 00:17:09,200
water near a farmer who had
never seen the open sea.

206
00:17:09,480 --> 00:17:14,240
That insistence on context, on
the individual life that

207
00:17:14,240 --> 00:17:19,880
surrounded the dream, would echo
across centuries, long after the

208
00:17:19,880 --> 00:17:25,599
temples of Asclepius had fallen
quiet and the priests who once

209
00:17:25,599 --> 00:17:29,400
received the dreamers had
vanished into history.

210
00:17:30,200 --> 00:17:35,760
The idea that a dream might be
deeply personal, woven from the

211
00:17:35,760 --> 00:17:39,600
texture of a single life, would
return again.

212
00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:44,400
While temples and travellers
continued to take dreams as

213
00:17:44,400 --> 00:17:49,520
messages from gods, a quieter
turn was already underway.

214
00:17:49,520 --> 00:17:54,520
Elsewhere in the Greek world,
the philosopher Aristotle,

215
00:17:54,920 --> 00:17:59,480
writing in the 4th century
before our era, approached the

216
00:17:59,480 --> 00:18:04,880
subject in a way that would feel
surprisingly familiar to a

217
00:18:04,880 --> 00:18:08,440
modern reader.
Aristotle was a careful

218
00:18:08,440 --> 00:18:12,600
observer.
He studied animals, plants,

219
00:18:13,120 --> 00:18:18,320
weather and the movements of the
stars with the patience of a man

220
00:18:18,320 --> 00:18:23,400
who believed nature could be
understood if one was willing to

221
00:18:23,400 --> 00:18:28,080
look closely enough.
When he turned his attention to

222
00:18:28,080 --> 00:18:32,760
sleep and dreams, he applied
that same gentle method.

223
00:18:33,560 --> 00:18:38,560
He wrote 3 short treatises that
have survived to us, often known

224
00:18:38,560 --> 00:18:43,920
by their Latin titles.
One concerned sleep and waking,

225
00:18:44,840 --> 00:18:50,600
one concerned dreams themselves,
and one concerned the question

226
00:18:50,600 --> 00:18:54,240
of whether dreams could foretell
the future.

227
00:18:54,600 --> 00:18:59,240
In these works, Aristotle
proposed something quietly

228
00:18:59,240 --> 00:19:03,480
revolutionary.
He suggested that dreams might

229
00:19:03,480 --> 00:19:08,760
not be visitations from the gods
at all, but a natural product of

230
00:19:08,760 --> 00:19:13,800
the body and mind.
During the day, he reasoned, the

231
00:19:13,800 --> 00:19:19,360
senses are constantly active.
The eyes gather light, the ears

232
00:19:19,360 --> 00:19:22,840
gather sound, the skin gathers
touch.

233
00:19:23,720 --> 00:19:27,800
The mind moves through these
impressions without rest.

234
00:19:28,440 --> 00:19:32,800
But at night, when the body lies
still and the senses grow quiet,

235
00:19:33,360 --> 00:19:39,480
those impressions do not vanish.
They linger like the soft after

236
00:19:39,480 --> 00:19:43,480
image left when a candle is
moved across the dark.

237
00:19:43,840 --> 00:19:48,560
For Aristotle, the dream was
something like the play of these

238
00:19:48,560 --> 00:19:52,760
sensory residues.
Free of the day's interruptions,

239
00:19:53,680 --> 00:19:59,160
the mind, no longer fully
steering, allowed images to

240
00:19:59,400 --> 00:20:04,960
drift, recombine and form into
the strange shapes we encounter

241
00:20:05,360 --> 00:20:09,440
while asleep.
He noted that people who had

242
00:20:09,440 --> 00:20:13,760
eaten heavily or who had a fever
or who were anxious.

243
00:20:14,360 --> 00:20:18,560
Often had especially vivid or
unsettled dreams.

244
00:20:19,560 --> 00:20:24,880
To him, this suggested that the
body itself influenced the

245
00:20:24,880 --> 00:20:30,120
dreaming mind, much as wind
shapes the surface of a still

246
00:20:30,120 --> 00:20:32,800
pond.
He also wrote with

247
00:20:32,800 --> 00:20:38,400
characteristic care about the
question of dream prophecy.

248
00:20:39,080 --> 00:20:43,360
He did not entirely dismiss it,
but he was cautious.

249
00:20:43,920 --> 00:20:47,760
He thought that some dreams
might appear to foretell events

250
00:20:48,000 --> 00:20:53,280
simply by coincidence.
Others might pick up on faint

251
00:20:53,280 --> 00:20:57,000
signals the dreamer had noticed
during the day without

252
00:20:57,000 --> 00:21:03,000
consciously registering them.
Either way, he resisted the idea

253
00:21:03,000 --> 00:21:07,360
that dreams were sent from above
for the sake of the sleeper.

254
00:21:07,760 --> 00:21:10,600
This was a remarkable shift in
tone.

255
00:21:11,200 --> 00:21:16,040
Aristotle did not mock the older
view, nor did he forbid it to

256
00:21:16,040 --> 00:21:19,840
others.
He simply asked whether nature

257
00:21:19,840 --> 00:21:24,400
itself could account for what
people experienced when they

258
00:21:24,400 --> 00:21:29,880
slept.
In doing so, he placed a small

259
00:21:29,880 --> 00:21:34,800
but enduring stone on the path
that would eventually lead, many

260
00:21:34,800 --> 00:21:40,160
centuries later, to
laboratories, brain scans, and

261
00:21:40,160 --> 00:21:46,200
the modern study of sleep.
The dream had begun very softly,

262
00:21:46,760 --> 00:21:51,240
to come down from the heavens
and settle within the human

263
00:21:51,240 --> 00:21:55,040
being.
As the ancient world gave way to

264
00:21:55,040 --> 00:21:59,960
the medieval one, dreams entered
the great religious traditions

265
00:22:00,280 --> 00:22:04,880
and took on a new gravity.
They were no longer only

266
00:22:04,880 --> 00:22:08,120
material for philosophers or
temple priests.

267
00:22:08,680 --> 00:22:13,600
They became part of Scripture,
theology, and the inner life of

268
00:22:13,600 --> 00:22:16,800
faith.
In the Hebrew Bible, dreams

269
00:22:16,800 --> 00:22:23,160
appear at moments of decision.
The patriarch Jacob dreams of a

270
00:22:23,160 --> 00:22:28,880
ladder rising into the heavens
with messengers moving upon it.

271
00:22:29,760 --> 00:22:35,880
His son Joseph, sold into Egypt,
becomes famous as an interpreter

272
00:22:35,880 --> 00:22:40,400
of dreams, eventually reading
the dreams of Pharaoh and

273
00:22:40,400 --> 00:22:43,640
helping a Kingdom prepare for
famine.

274
00:22:44,600 --> 00:22:48,880
In the New Testament, another
Joseph, the husband of Mary,

275
00:22:49,360 --> 00:22:54,280
receives guidance through dreams
that shape the early life of the

276
00:22:54,280 --> 00:22:58,520
family at the heart of the
Christian story.

277
00:22:58,960 --> 00:23:04,920
Across these passages, the dream
is not a curiosity, it is a

278
00:23:04,920 --> 00:23:09,720
channel through which something
important is delivered.

279
00:23:10,120 --> 00:23:14,920
Within early Christianity,
however, the topic also became

280
00:23:14,920 --> 00:23:17,800
delicate.
The North African thinker

281
00:23:18,160 --> 00:23:23,840
Augustine, writing at the end of
the 4th century, devoted careful

282
00:23:23,840 --> 00:23:27,560
attention to the strangeness of
dreams.

283
00:23:28,560 --> 00:23:32,600
He was troubled by the question
of moral responsibility.

284
00:23:33,440 --> 00:23:37,880
If a person behaves in a dream
in ways they would never choose

285
00:23:37,880 --> 00:23:42,440
while awake, can they be held
accountable for that inner

286
00:23:42,440 --> 00:23:46,280
conduct?
Augustine concluded with some

287
00:23:46,280 --> 00:23:51,560
relief that the dreaming self
was not the same as the waking

288
00:23:51,560 --> 00:23:55,920
self, and that one should not be
condemned for what 1 merely

289
00:23:55,920 --> 00:23:59,960
dreamed.
Yet the question itself reveals

290
00:23:59,960 --> 00:24:03,680
how seriously dreams were taken
at the time.

291
00:24:04,120 --> 00:24:07,720
The Christian world also
inherited an older Roman

292
00:24:07,720 --> 00:24:13,680
tradition of classifying dreams.
A late Roman writer named

293
00:24:13,680 --> 00:24:18,640
Macrobius, commenting on a
famous text by Cicero,

294
00:24:19,440 --> 00:24:22,640
distinguished several kinds of
dream.

295
00:24:23,520 --> 00:24:27,400
Some were thought to be
meaningful, sent through divine

296
00:24:27,400 --> 00:24:31,360
or rational channels.
Others were considered merely

297
00:24:31,360 --> 00:24:37,760
the noise of digestion and worry
That careful sorting was a quiet

298
00:24:37,760 --> 00:24:41,480
attempt to keep nuance alive
within faith.

299
00:24:41,840 --> 00:24:47,920
Meanwhile, in the Islamic world,
dream interpretation flourished

300
00:24:48,280 --> 00:24:51,200
as a serious intellectual
tradition.

301
00:24:52,200 --> 00:24:58,040
The 8th century scholar Muhammad
Ibn Sirin became renowned for

302
00:24:58,040 --> 00:25:03,920
his work in this area, and dream
books in his name circulated

303
00:25:03,920 --> 00:25:09,800
across centuries and cultures.
In many Islamic traditions, the

304
00:25:09,800 --> 00:25:15,040
truthful dream was held in high
regard, though scholars also

305
00:25:15,040 --> 00:25:20,160
distinguished it carefully from
confused or troubling dreams.

306
00:25:20,480 --> 00:25:25,360
And throughout medieval Europe,
Mystics and visionaries

307
00:25:25,760 --> 00:25:31,400
described inner experiences that
often blurred the line between

308
00:25:31,400 --> 00:25:37,600
dream and waking vision.
Hildegarde of Bingen in the 12th

309
00:25:37,600 --> 00:25:41,880
century wrote of luminous
visions that arrived while she

310
00:25:41,880 --> 00:25:47,040
was awake, though her accounts
share much of the texture of

311
00:25:47,040 --> 00:25:53,000
dreams across these centuries.
The dream sat at the threshold

312
00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:58,200
between heaven and the human
heart, treated with both

313
00:25:58,200 --> 00:26:03,400
reverence and caution.
It could be a message, a

314
00:26:03,400 --> 00:26:08,760
warning, a comfort, or a
confusion, and the careful work

315
00:26:08,760 --> 00:26:13,560
of telling them apart was
considered a kind of inner

316
00:26:13,560 --> 00:26:17,440
labor.
While European thought wrestled

317
00:26:17,440 --> 00:26:22,920
with dreams in its own way,
other traditions, far older in

318
00:26:22,920 --> 00:26:28,080
some respects, had developed
their own deep understandings.

319
00:26:29,040 --> 00:26:34,480
Tonight we touch on a few of
these gently, knowing that each

320
00:26:34,480 --> 00:26:39,440
one deserves more time than a
single evening can offer.

321
00:26:39,800 --> 00:26:45,120
In Tibetan Buddhism there exists
A contemplative practice, often

322
00:26:45,120 --> 00:26:50,240
called dream yoga.
It belongs to a wider set of

323
00:26:50,240 --> 00:26:55,320
teachings, sometimes associated
with the Indian master Naropa

324
00:26:55,520 --> 00:27:00,200
and his lineage.
In dream yoga, the practitioner

325
00:27:00,200 --> 00:27:06,360
trains gradually and with
patience to recognize the dream

326
00:27:06,360 --> 00:27:09,280
as a dream while still inside
it.

327
00:27:09,680 --> 00:27:15,120
The aim is not entertainment, no
mere curiosity, but spiritual

328
00:27:15,120 --> 00:27:19,680
cultivation.
By becoming aware within dreams,

329
00:27:19,880 --> 00:27:25,120
the practitioner is said to gain
insight into the constructed

330
00:27:25,120 --> 00:27:30,360
nature of all experience.
The dream becomes a kind of

331
00:27:30,640 --> 00:27:35,720
teacher, a soft school in which
the boundary between appearance

332
00:27:35,720 --> 00:27:41,680
and reality can be examined.
This idea would later resonate

333
00:27:41,680 --> 00:27:45,640
with Western researchers
studying what they would come to

334
00:27:45,640 --> 00:27:52,200
call lucid dreaming.
But long before the laboratories

335
00:27:52,200 --> 00:27:58,120
arrived, contemplatives in
Tibetan monasteries had been

336
00:27:58,120 --> 00:28:03,280
working quietly with the same
inner territory for many

337
00:28:03,280 --> 00:28:06,920
centuries.
Far away on the continent of

338
00:28:06,920 --> 00:28:11,600
Australia, Aboriginal peoples
developed something altogether

339
00:28:11,600 --> 00:28:17,440
different and deeply sacred.
The English word dreamtime,

340
00:28:18,000 --> 00:28:23,000
sometimes also translated as the
Dreaming, attempts to point

341
00:28:23,000 --> 00:28:28,120
toward a complex set of ideas
that varies among Aboriginal

342
00:28:28,120 --> 00:28:32,520
nations and languages.
It is not simply the realm of

343
00:28:32,520 --> 00:28:37,600
nightly dreams.
It refers more profoundly to an

344
00:28:37,600 --> 00:28:42,520
ancestral time and presence in
which great beings shape the

345
00:28:42,520 --> 00:28:48,760
land, the laws, and the rhythms
of life, and which remains in

346
00:28:48,760 --> 00:28:53,520
some sense ever present beneath
the surface of the world.

347
00:28:54,360 --> 00:28:59,320
Dreams, in this tradition, can
be one way among many of

348
00:28:59,320 --> 00:29:05,080
touching that ancestral reality.
But the dreaming itself is far

349
00:29:05,080 --> 00:29:11,160
larger than any single dream.
We approach this idea with

350
00:29:11,160 --> 00:29:16,600
respect, knowing it belongs
first to the peoples who have

351
00:29:16,600 --> 00:29:19,880
carried it for thousands of
generations.

352
00:29:20,280 --> 00:29:25,440
In ancient China, dreams entered
philosophy through one of the

353
00:29:25,440 --> 00:29:30,360
most beloved short passages in
the world's literature.

354
00:29:31,200 --> 00:29:36,400
The Taoist thinker Zhuangzi,
writing in the 4th century

355
00:29:36,400 --> 00:29:42,040
before our era, described
falling asleep and dreaming.

356
00:29:42,400 --> 00:29:46,920
He was a butterfly, fluttering
happily through the air.

357
00:29:47,360 --> 00:29:52,440
When he awoke, he wondered, was
he a man who had dreamed of

358
00:29:52,440 --> 00:29:57,960
being a butterfly, or was he now
a butterfly dreaming of being a

359
00:29:57,960 --> 00:30:02,440
man?
He did not solve the puzzle, he

360
00:30:02,440 --> 00:30:06,680
simply offered it.
Across these traditions, the

361
00:30:06,680 --> 00:30:11,400
dream is taken seriously, but
not always in the same way.

362
00:30:12,160 --> 00:30:17,040
In some it is a path of
contemplative practice, in

363
00:30:17,040 --> 00:30:22,120
others a doorway to ancestors
and to the sacred shape of the

364
00:30:22,120 --> 00:30:27,840
land, in others still a quiet
Riddle about identity itself,

365
00:30:28,440 --> 00:30:31,520
asked without insisting on an
answer.

366
00:30:32,520 --> 00:30:38,480
Together, they remind us that no
single culture has owned the

367
00:30:38,480 --> 00:30:44,600
dream and that the night has
been read in many different

368
00:30:44,600 --> 00:30:47,600
lights.
As Europe entered the Age of

369
00:30:47,600 --> 00:30:52,440
Reason, dreams encountered a new
kind of skepticism.

370
00:30:53,360 --> 00:30:57,760
The thinkers of the 17th and
18th centuries were drawn to

371
00:30:57,920 --> 00:31:01,880
clarity, evidence, and orderly
thought.

372
00:31:02,880 --> 00:31:07,440
Many of them grew cautious about
treating the wandering night as

373
00:31:07,440 --> 00:31:11,720
a source of truth.
The French philosopher Rene

374
00:31:11,720 --> 00:31:16,880
Descartes raised a piercing
question in his Meditations of

375
00:31:16,880 --> 00:31:21,840
1641.
How, he asked, could anyone be

376
00:31:21,840 --> 00:31:25,160
certain they were awake at this
very moment?

377
00:31:26,120 --> 00:31:30,760
Dreams sometimes feel entirely
real while they are unfolding.

378
00:31:31,520 --> 00:31:35,840
Only on waking does their dream
nature become clear.

379
00:31:36,800 --> 00:31:41,280
He used this thought to test the
foundations of knowledge itself,

380
00:31:41,920 --> 00:31:45,040
asking what could be known
beyond doubt.

381
00:31:45,880 --> 00:31:51,760
The dream in his hands became a
tool of philosophy rather than a

382
00:31:51,760 --> 00:31:56,240
message from above.
It revealed how easily the mind

383
00:31:56,640 --> 00:32:00,640
could be deceived by its own
vivid productions.

384
00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:05,640
Other thinkers of the era,
including Thomas Hobbes and John

385
00:32:05,640 --> 00:32:10,760
Locke, also tended to treat
dreams as the noise of a resting

386
00:32:10,760 --> 00:32:16,560
mind, scattered impressions
stitched together without much

387
00:32:16,560 --> 00:32:21,320
reliable meaning.
The dream was no longer a

388
00:32:21,320 --> 00:32:27,560
doorway to gods or ancestors.
For many, it was an interesting

389
00:32:27,560 --> 00:32:31,200
puzzle, but not a place to seek
wisdom.

390
00:32:31,520 --> 00:32:36,280
Yet just as one current was
cooling toward dreams, another

391
00:32:36,280 --> 00:32:39,680
was warming.
The Romantic movement of the

392
00:32:39,680 --> 00:32:44,200
late 18th and early 19th
centuries embraced the

393
00:32:44,200 --> 00:32:48,560
imagination as a deep and
serious power.

394
00:32:49,440 --> 00:32:54,800
Poets, novelists and artists
turned again toward the night,

395
00:32:55,360 --> 00:33:00,800
hoping to find in it a kind of
creative spring that pure reason

396
00:33:00,800 --> 00:33:05,280
could not supply.
The English poet Samuel Taylor

397
00:33:05,280 --> 00:33:10,000
Coleridge claimed that his
haunting poem about Kubla Khan

398
00:33:10,560 --> 00:33:15,720
came to him in a state of
reverie, possibly induced by an

399
00:33:15,760 --> 00:33:20,520
opiate, and that the verses
arrived almost fully formed.

400
00:33:21,360 --> 00:33:24,920
Famously.
He was interrupted, he said, by

401
00:33:24,920 --> 00:33:29,000
a visitor from the village of
Porlock, and the rest of the

402
00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:35,440
dream slipped away.
The poem we have is, by his

403
00:33:35,440 --> 00:33:39,720
account, only a fragment of what
the knight had offered.

404
00:33:40,040 --> 00:33:44,560
Mary Shelley, travelling with
friends near Lake Geneva in the

405
00:33:44,560 --> 00:33:50,400
summer of 1816, later recalled
that the seed of her novel

406
00:33:50,400 --> 00:33:57,760
Frankenstein arrived in a kind
of waking dream, a vivid inner

407
00:33:57,760 --> 00:34:03,640
image of a pale figure stirring
into life beside its maker.

408
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:08,280
Even within the sciences,
certain remarkable stories took

409
00:34:08,280 --> 00:34:12,920
hold.
The chemist Auguste Kekule wrote

410
00:34:12,920 --> 00:34:16,800
that the ring shape of the
benzene molecule occurred to him

411
00:34:17,120 --> 00:34:21,120
after a dream of a snake seizing
its own tail.

412
00:34:22,040 --> 00:34:26,719
Dmitri Mendeleev, who organized
the periodic table of the

413
00:34:26,719 --> 00:34:32,639
elements, later told friends
that the arrangement had come to

414
00:34:32,639 --> 00:34:37,040
him during sleep.
Whether one trusts every detail

415
00:34:37,040 --> 00:34:41,080
of these accounts, the message
of the age is clear.

416
00:34:42,040 --> 00:34:46,199
The dream had returned to the
imagination of educated people,

417
00:34:46,560 --> 00:34:50,880
no longer simply divine but
still strangely generous.

418
00:34:51,840 --> 00:34:56,400
Reason had grown careful about
it, and yet the knight refused

419
00:34:56,400 --> 00:35:00,920
to leave the human mind alone,
slipping back into poems,

420
00:35:00,920 --> 00:35:05,160
novels, and even the quiet
notebooks of scientists.

421
00:35:05,560 --> 00:35:10,960
As the 19th century turned into
the 20th, the study of dreams

422
00:35:10,960 --> 00:35:17,040
entered a new chapter, this time
within a developing field called

423
00:35:17,440 --> 00:35:22,240
psychology.
Among its early figures was a

424
00:35:22,240 --> 00:35:27,920
Viennese neurologist named
Sigmund Freud, who had changed

425
00:35:27,920 --> 00:35:32,280
the way Western culture spoke
about dreams for generations to

426
00:35:32,280 --> 00:35:37,080
come.
In 1899, Freud published a long

427
00:35:37,080 --> 00:35:41,280
and ambitious book called The
Interpretation of Dreams.

428
00:35:42,000 --> 00:35:46,320
He believed that the mind held
layers far below the surface of

429
00:35:46,320 --> 00:35:51,080
awareness, and that dreams
offered, as he memorably put it,

430
00:35:51,600 --> 00:35:55,840
a kind of royal Rd. into those
hidden depths.

431
00:35:56,640 --> 00:36:01,600
To Freud, a dream was rarely a
simple replay of the day.

432
00:36:02,400 --> 00:36:08,640
It was something quietly
disguised, a story whose surface

433
00:36:08,640 --> 00:36:13,280
concealed deeper currents.
He proposed a careful

434
00:36:13,280 --> 00:36:16,800
distinction between two aspects
of any dream.

435
00:36:17,640 --> 00:36:22,720
The first he called the manifest
content, meaning the events and

436
00:36:22,720 --> 00:36:26,680
images the dreamer actually
remembers on waking.

437
00:36:27,680 --> 00:36:33,080
The second he called the latent
content, meaning the underlying

438
00:36:33,080 --> 00:36:39,280
wishes, fears and tensions that
in his view, gave rise to the

439
00:36:39,280 --> 00:36:43,560
dream in the 1st place between
the two.

440
00:36:43,560 --> 00:36:48,320
He believed, said a process he
called the dream work, which

441
00:36:48,320 --> 00:36:52,000
transformed the latent material
through condensation,

442
00:36:52,480 --> 00:36:56,360
displacement, and symbolic
substitution.

443
00:36:57,280 --> 00:37:02,760
A worry might appear as a
strange building, A wish might

444
00:37:02,760 --> 00:37:06,680
appear as a small detail in the
corner of the scene.

445
00:37:07,040 --> 00:37:11,440
Freud also argued that many
dreams were, at their core,

446
00:37:11,720 --> 00:37:17,080
expressions of wish.
Even unsettling dreams, he

447
00:37:17,080 --> 00:37:21,200
suggested, often hid an attempt
by the mind to give shape to

448
00:37:21,200 --> 00:37:26,360
something it longed for, feared,
or could not say openly during

449
00:37:26,360 --> 00:37:30,800
the day.
This idea was provocative and,

450
00:37:30,800 --> 00:37:36,400
to many, shocking.
It treated the mind as far more

451
00:37:36,400 --> 00:37:41,640
layered than older thinkers had
imagined, and it suggested that

452
00:37:41,640 --> 00:37:46,200
the inner life carried on a
quiet conversation with itself

453
00:37:46,880 --> 00:37:52,040
even while the body slept.
The cultural effect of Freud's

454
00:37:52,040 --> 00:37:56,400
work was enormous.
Words like unconscious

455
00:37:56,520 --> 00:38:01,680
repression and dream symbol
entered everyday speech across

456
00:38:01,680 --> 00:38:06,360
many languages.
Artists, writers and film makers

457
00:38:06,800 --> 00:38:12,800
absorbed his ideas for decades.
Much of the educated world spoke

458
00:38:12,800 --> 00:38:17,520
of dreams in his vocabulary,
even when they did not realize

459
00:38:17,520 --> 00:38:20,760
it.
Yet the specific scientific

460
00:38:20,760 --> 00:38:24,960
claims of his theory have not
aged easily.

461
00:38:25,800 --> 00:38:30,160
Later researchers have struggled
to confirm his particular method

462
00:38:30,160 --> 00:38:35,760
of interpretation, and many of
his confident readings now seem

463
00:38:35,760 --> 00:38:41,920
more imaginative than tested.
Modern sleep science holds his

464
00:38:41,920 --> 00:38:47,600
work at a respectful distance,
valuing his attention to inner

465
00:38:47,600 --> 00:38:51,640
life while questioning many of
his conclusions.

466
00:38:52,000 --> 00:38:57,040
Still, Freud reopened a door
that had been closing.

467
00:38:57,960 --> 00:39:02,720
He insisted that the dream
mattered, that it was worth

468
00:39:02,720 --> 00:39:08,000
listening to, and that something
in the human mind was speaking

469
00:39:08,000 --> 00:39:13,600
quietly to itself in the night.
Whether or not one accepts his

470
00:39:13,600 --> 00:39:19,480
particular interpretations, that
simple insistence has continued

471
00:39:19,480 --> 00:39:24,320
to shape how dreams are
approached in clinics, in books

472
00:39:24,880 --> 00:39:29,200
and in late conversations
between curious friends.

473
00:39:29,680 --> 00:39:35,360
For a time, the young Swiss
psychiatrist Carl Jung was one

474
00:39:35,360 --> 00:39:40,840
of Freud's closest companions in
this new science of the mind.

475
00:39:41,680 --> 00:39:46,280
The two corresponded
extensively, travelled together

476
00:39:46,680 --> 00:39:51,760
and for several years seemed
bound by a shared mission.

477
00:39:52,440 --> 00:39:57,960
But Jung gradually came to feel
that Freud's view of dreams,

478
00:39:58,280 --> 00:40:05,600
while powerful, was too narrow.
Around 1912, he began to publish

479
00:40:05,640 --> 00:40:11,360
ideas that would lead painfully
to a parting of ways.

480
00:40:11,840 --> 00:40:15,200
Jung agreed that dreams were not
random.

481
00:40:15,960 --> 00:40:19,960
He agreed that they reached
towards something deeper than

482
00:40:19,960 --> 00:40:24,640
waking awareness.
But he disagreed with the idea

483
00:40:24,640 --> 00:40:28,760
that dreams were largely
disguises for hidden wishes.

484
00:40:29,640 --> 00:40:35,240
To Jung, a dream was less like a
cipher to be cracked and more

485
00:40:35,240 --> 00:40:39,960
like a quiet letter from a part
of the self that the daytime

486
00:40:39,960 --> 00:40:46,200
mind did not always know well.
Its purpose was not always to

487
00:40:46,200 --> 00:40:51,360
conceal.
Sometimes he believed a dream

488
00:40:51,360 --> 00:40:55,360
was simply trying to say
something the dreamer had not

489
00:40:55,360 --> 00:40:59,840
yet learned how to hear.
Jung introduced ideas that have

490
00:40:59,840 --> 00:41:04,360
since become widely known, even
outside psychology.

491
00:41:05,120 --> 00:41:09,200
He spoke of archetypes,
recurring inner figures and

492
00:41:09,200 --> 00:41:14,200
patterns that he believed showed
up across cultures and across

493
00:41:14,200 --> 00:41:18,520
centuries.
The wise elder, the shadow self,

494
00:41:18,880 --> 00:41:22,480
the inner companion, the
threshold guide.

495
00:41:23,320 --> 00:41:28,000
He noticed that dream images of
his patients seemed to echo

496
00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:33,400
images from myths, fairy tales
and religious traditions far

497
00:41:33,400 --> 00:41:36,760
removed from anything they had
personally studied.

498
00:41:37,800 --> 00:41:42,920
To him this hinted at a deeper
layer of the mind which he

499
00:41:42,920 --> 00:41:45,800
called the collective
unconscious.

500
00:41:46,600 --> 00:41:52,320
It was, in his view, a shared
inheritance of imagery and

501
00:41:52,320 --> 00:41:58,640
pattern that all humans carried
with them beneath the personal

502
00:41:58,640 --> 00:42:01,680
layer formed by an individual
life.

503
00:42:02,080 --> 00:42:06,040
This was a poetic and ambitious
idea.

504
00:42:06,720 --> 00:42:10,840
It connected dreaming to the
great story telling traditions

505
00:42:10,840 --> 00:42:14,760
of the world.
It suggested that when one

506
00:42:14,760 --> 00:42:19,720
dreamed of crossing a dark river
or meeting a stranger at a

507
00:42:19,720 --> 00:42:24,680
crossroads, one was not entirely
alone in the symbol.

508
00:42:25,440 --> 00:42:28,960
Many other dreamers had stood at
similar inner places.

509
00:42:29,320 --> 00:42:34,560
Modern science has been cautious
with Jung's framework, much as

510
00:42:34,560 --> 00:42:36,720
it has been cautious with
Freud's.

511
00:42:37,640 --> 00:42:42,960
The Collective Unconscious in
its strict form is difficult to

512
00:42:42,960 --> 00:42:48,800
test, and contemporary cognitive
research takes a different

513
00:42:48,800 --> 00:42:54,920
approach to dream symbolism.
Yet Jung's emphasis on the

514
00:42:54,920 --> 00:42:59,480
meaningful texture of dreams and
on the dreamer's own role in

515
00:42:59,480 --> 00:43:04,040
making sense of inner images has
remained influential in

516
00:43:04,040 --> 00:43:09,720
literature, in art therapy, and
in many quiet rooms where people

517
00:43:09,720 --> 00:43:12,160
work with their own night
memories.

518
00:43:12,560 --> 00:43:17,200
Whether one follows him fully or
not, Jung helped keep alive the

519
00:43:17,200 --> 00:43:22,400
idea that the dream was not only
a problem to be solved, it could

520
00:43:22,400 --> 00:43:28,600
also be a quiet companion to the
inner life, a soft form of self

521
00:43:28,600 --> 00:43:33,960
encounter, and a doorway into
the long imaginative inheritance

522
00:43:33,960 --> 00:43:37,720
of the human family.
By the time Jung's later

523
00:43:37,720 --> 00:43:42,440
writings appeared, the tools of
science were already shifting.

524
00:43:43,240 --> 00:43:48,520
Soon dreams would be approached
not only through conversation,

525
00:43:49,160 --> 00:43:52,000
but through the gentle hum of
instruments.

526
00:43:52,360 --> 00:43:59,360
Measuring the body in sleep.
In 1953, in a small sleep

527
00:43:59,360 --> 00:44:05,080
laboratory at the University of
Chicago, something quietly

528
00:44:05,080 --> 00:44:09,960
extraordinary happened.
A graduate student named Eugene

529
00:44:09,960 --> 00:44:15,000
Asarinski, working under the
older physiologist Nathaniel

530
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:19,280
Kleitman, had been observing
sleeping subjects through the

531
00:44:19,280 --> 00:44:23,800
night.
Among his tasks was to track the

532
00:44:23,800 --> 00:44:29,960
slow movements of the eyes
beneath closed lids, which had

533
00:44:29,960 --> 00:44:34,560
long been thought to drift
gently downward as sleep

534
00:44:34,560 --> 00:44:37,960
deepened.
Osserinski had a young son,

535
00:44:38,280 --> 00:44:43,680
Armand, and during early
experiments he sometimes used

536
00:44:43,680 --> 00:44:48,320
him as a subject, watching long
hours of paper recordings

537
00:44:48,320 --> 00:44:50,760
unspool from a polygraph
machine.

538
00:44:51,720 --> 00:44:55,440
The pen traced the soft
electrical patterns of the

539
00:44:55,440 --> 00:45:01,640
brain, the muscles, and the
eyes, giving a kind of written

540
00:45:01,640 --> 00:45:06,920
portrait of the night.
What Azarinski noticed was

541
00:45:06,920 --> 00:45:11,160
unexpected.
Every so often the eyes of his

542
00:45:11,160 --> 00:45:15,040
sleeping subjects did not drift
quietly.

543
00:45:15,720 --> 00:45:19,280
They jerked rapidly back and
forth, almost as though the

544
00:45:19,280 --> 00:45:24,480
sleeper were watching something.
The brain wave patterns at those

545
00:45:24,480 --> 00:45:29,160
moments looked surprisingly
active, in some ways closer to

546
00:45:29,160 --> 00:45:35,840
waking than to deep sleep.
Yet the body lay still, the

547
00:45:35,840 --> 00:45:42,040
muscles deeply relaxed.
At first, Asarinski and Kleitman

548
00:45:42,280 --> 00:45:45,520
thought their equipment might be
misbehaving.

549
00:45:46,200 --> 00:45:50,320
They checked it carefully.
The signals were real.

550
00:45:51,000 --> 00:45:54,800
They began to wake their
subjects during these strange

551
00:45:54,800 --> 00:45:58,360
episodes and asked what had been
happening.

552
00:45:59,280 --> 00:46:03,080
Again and again.
The answer was the same.

553
00:46:03,440 --> 00:46:07,480
The sleeper had been dreaming,
often vividly.

554
00:46:07,840 --> 00:46:13,360
In the early 1950s, Osorinski
and Kleitman published a short

555
00:46:13,360 --> 00:46:19,120
paper in the journal Science.
It was modestly titled and

556
00:46:19,120 --> 00:46:23,200
quietly worded, but it changed
the field forever.

557
00:46:24,080 --> 00:46:29,040
They had identified A recurring
stage of sleep marked by quick

558
00:46:29,040 --> 00:46:34,360
eye movement, low muscle tone
and active brain patterns.

559
00:46:35,240 --> 00:46:39,800
Dreaming, it seemed, was not
scattered randomly through the

560
00:46:39,800 --> 00:46:43,120
night.
It was concentrated in

561
00:46:43,120 --> 00:46:48,200
significant part within these
particular passages of sleep.

562
00:46:48,520 --> 00:46:53,400
Soon afterward, another graduate
student in the same laboratory,

563
00:46:53,760 --> 00:46:57,000
William Dement, took the work
further.

564
00:46:57,760 --> 00:47:03,160
He spent years studying sleep
stages, sometimes living for

565
00:47:03,160 --> 00:47:08,440
days alongside his subjects in
the lab, and helped map the

566
00:47:08,440 --> 00:47:15,280
broader cycle of a night's rest.
Dement would later become one of

567
00:47:15,280 --> 00:47:20,840
the great public voices of sleep
science, founding sleep clinics

568
00:47:21,200 --> 00:47:26,120
and helping to establish Sleep
Medicine as a serious field.

569
00:47:26,800 --> 00:47:30,680
What had begun as a careful
observation of a child's

570
00:47:30,680 --> 00:47:36,480
twitching eyelids had opened a
new continent of inquiry for the

571
00:47:36,480 --> 00:47:41,440
first time in human history.
The dreaming brain could be

572
00:47:41,440 --> 00:47:47,640
reliably found, timed, and
studied while it was at work.

573
00:47:48,680 --> 00:47:52,640
Across the decades that
followed, laboratories around

574
00:47:52,640 --> 00:47:58,040
the world would refine this work
and add new instruments to it.

575
00:47:59,040 --> 00:48:02,520
The night was no longer a closed
door.

576
00:48:03,200 --> 00:48:08,200
It had a structure, a rhythm,
and a hidden architecture that

577
00:48:08,200 --> 00:48:13,680
could very gently be measured by
patient observers.

578
00:48:14,040 --> 00:48:18,360
Once researchers could see
sleep, they began to map its

579
00:48:18,360 --> 00:48:22,000
shape.
What they found was not a single

580
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:28,360
uniform state, but a quiet
sequence of stages that the body

581
00:48:28,360 --> 00:48:35,360
and brain pass through gently,
again and again across the

582
00:48:35,360 --> 00:48:39,200
night.
A typical adult night begins

583
00:48:39,200 --> 00:48:43,600
with a soft drift downward.
The first stage of sleep is

584
00:48:43,600 --> 00:48:50,000
light and easily disturbed.
Muscles loosen, the heart slows,

585
00:48:50,560 --> 00:48:54,840
and the brain produces patterns
that begin to look different

586
00:48:55,280 --> 00:49:00,720
from the alert daytime mind.
From there, the sleeper moves

587
00:49:00,720 --> 00:49:05,880
into a slightly deeper stage
marked by short bursts of brain

588
00:49:05,880 --> 00:49:12,000
activity that researchers came
to call sleep spindles, along

589
00:49:12,000 --> 00:49:14,920
with other quiet electrical
signatures.

590
00:49:15,960 --> 00:49:20,760
These have been associated in
many studies with the work of

591
00:49:21,080 --> 00:49:26,160
laying down memories and
protecting sleep from being

592
00:49:26,160 --> 00:49:29,800
interrupted.
After this, the body sinks into

593
00:49:29,800 --> 00:49:33,080
the deepest stage of slow wave
sleep.

594
00:49:33,800 --> 00:49:39,120
Here the brain produces large,
unhurried waves and the body

595
00:49:39,120 --> 00:49:44,520
becomes still and heavy.
This is the stage from which it

596
00:49:44,520 --> 00:49:49,560
is hardest to be awakened.
Children especially can spend

597
00:49:49,560 --> 00:49:54,480
long stretches in this deep
territory, which is part of why

598
00:49:54,480 --> 00:49:59,520
they sometimes seem almost
impossible to rouse in the early

599
00:49:59,520 --> 00:50:04,600
part of a night.
Slow wave sleep is widely

600
00:50:04,600 --> 00:50:10,480
thought to be a time of physical
restoration, immune support, and

601
00:50:10,480 --> 00:50:13,200
a particular kind of memory
work.

602
00:50:13,480 --> 00:50:18,240
After a period of deep sleep,
the body does not simply rise

603
00:50:18,240 --> 00:50:23,160
straight back to waking.
Instead, it climbs part way up

604
00:50:23,480 --> 00:50:28,320
and enters the active dreaming
stage, the one Osirinski and

605
00:50:28,320 --> 00:50:34,520
Kleitman had first identified,
marked by quick eye movement and

606
00:50:34,520 --> 00:50:38,960
rich brain activity.
Most of the body's larger

607
00:50:38,960 --> 00:50:43,880
muscles are quietly held still
during this time, a kind of

608
00:50:44,080 --> 00:50:49,080
natural protection that prevents
us from acting out the contents

609
00:50:49,080 --> 00:50:53,320
of our dreams.
Heart rate and breathing become

610
00:50:53,600 --> 00:50:58,320
irregular, almost as though the
body were responding to

611
00:50:58,320 --> 00:51:04,120
something unseen.
And for many sleepers, this is

612
00:51:04,120 --> 00:51:09,040
where the most vivid narrative
dreams unfold.

613
00:51:09,480 --> 00:51:14,520
These stages do not occur only
once over the course of a

614
00:51:14,520 --> 00:51:18,600
typical night.
The sleeper cycles through this

615
00:51:18,600 --> 00:51:24,360
pattern several times, with each
full cycle lasting roughly 90

616
00:51:24,360 --> 00:51:28,320
minutes.
Early in the night, slow wave

617
00:51:28,320 --> 00:51:33,760
sleep is more abundant.
Later in the night, the dreaming

618
00:51:33,760 --> 00:51:40,800
stages grow longer and richer.
By the hours before dawn, much

619
00:51:40,800 --> 00:51:44,440
of 1's dreaming life has
actually been lived.

620
00:51:44,840 --> 00:51:49,240
This shape of the night was
almost entirely invisible to

621
00:51:49,240 --> 00:51:53,440
earlier generations.
The ancient world could only

622
00:51:53,440 --> 00:51:57,640
watch a sleeper from the
outside, noting the slow breath

623
00:51:58,000 --> 00:52:02,320
and the closed eyes.
The inner sequence remained a

624
00:52:02,320 --> 00:52:06,080
mystery.
Now we know that sleep is not a

625
00:52:06,080 --> 00:52:11,080
single dark room.
It is a series of soft chambers,

626
00:52:11,640 --> 00:52:16,800
each with its own quality,
gently passed through, and

627
00:52:16,800 --> 00:52:21,840
dreams we have come to see have
their preferred chambers

628
00:52:22,360 --> 00:52:28,280
returning to them again and
again, as faithfully as a tide

629
00:52:28,360 --> 00:52:33,840
returning to a familiar shore.
For most of human history, no

630
00:52:33,840 --> 00:52:38,280
one could see what was happening
inside the head of a sleeping

631
00:52:38,280 --> 00:52:42,880
person.
The dream was, in every literal

632
00:52:42,880 --> 00:52:48,160
sense, a private event.
But over the second-half of the

633
00:52:48,160 --> 00:52:54,360
20th century, and especially in
recent decades, gentler imaging

634
00:52:54,360 --> 00:52:59,280
tools allowed researchers to
peer at the dreaming brain in a

635
00:52:59,280 --> 00:53:02,480
new way.
What they have found is a

636
00:53:02,480 --> 00:53:07,640
strange and beautiful pattern.
During the active dreaming stage

637
00:53:07,640 --> 00:53:11,120
of sleep, the brain is not at
rest.

638
00:53:11,880 --> 00:53:17,120
Many regions are vividly
engaged, almost as engaged as

639
00:53:17,120 --> 00:53:21,720
during waking life.
But which regions and which fall

640
00:53:21,720 --> 00:53:27,080
quiet helps explain why dreams
feel the way they do.

641
00:53:27,440 --> 00:53:31,560
The visual areas of the brain
are highly active during

642
00:53:31,560 --> 00:53:36,040
dreaming, even though the eyes
are closed and there is no light

643
00:53:36,040 --> 00:53:40,200
to gather.
This may be part of why dreams

644
00:53:40,200 --> 00:53:46,160
are so often experienced as
vivid, almost cinematic images.

645
00:53:47,280 --> 00:53:51,960
The mind is generating a world
from within using the same

646
00:53:51,960 --> 00:53:56,040
equipment it uses to perceive a
world from without.

647
00:53:56,440 --> 00:54:01,160
Areas associated with emotion,
especially the limbic regions

648
00:54:01,160 --> 00:54:05,920
deep within the brain, are also
unusually active.

649
00:54:06,720 --> 00:54:11,040
This may help explain why dreams
so often carry a strong

650
00:54:11,040 --> 00:54:16,120
emotional charge, sometimes more
intense than the events of an

651
00:54:16,120 --> 00:54:20,640
ordinary wakened day.
Fear, longing, joy,

652
00:54:20,840 --> 00:54:25,440
embarrassment, tenderness, all
can sweep through a dream with

653
00:54:25,440 --> 00:54:29,360
surprising force.
At the same time, certain

654
00:54:29,360 --> 00:54:33,720
regions of the front part of the
brain, particularly parts of the

655
00:54:33,720 --> 00:54:38,760
prefrontal cortex, become
noticeably quieter than during

656
00:54:38,760 --> 00:54:42,640
waking.
These are areas associated with

657
00:54:42,640 --> 00:54:47,880
logical reasoning, self
monitoring, planning, and the

658
00:54:47,880 --> 00:54:51,320
steady evaluation of whether
something makes sense.

659
00:54:51,960 --> 00:54:56,600
When this area dims, the mind
grows wonderfully tolerant of

660
00:54:56,600 --> 00:55:00,840
strangeness.
A familiar street can lead to an

661
00:55:00,840 --> 00:55:04,600
unknown city.
A loved one can become a

662
00:55:04,600 --> 00:55:07,120
stranger and then a friend
again.

663
00:55:07,960 --> 00:55:13,360
Time can fold.
Settings can shift without

664
00:55:13,360 --> 00:55:17,600
protest.
The dreamer rarely thinks to ask

665
00:55:17,600 --> 00:55:22,000
whether any of this is
reasonable, because the part of

666
00:55:22,000 --> 00:55:27,080
the mind that usually asks such
questions is, for the moment,

667
00:55:27,640 --> 00:55:32,720
drifting in its own quiet.
The body, meanwhile, remains

668
00:55:32,720 --> 00:55:37,160
gently held in place.
Most large muscles are kept

669
00:55:37,160 --> 00:55:42,040
still by signals descending from
the brain stem, a state

670
00:55:42,040 --> 00:55:45,000
sometimes called sleep
paralysis.

671
00:55:45,520 --> 00:55:51,640
When noticed at the edges of
dreaming, this soft restraint is

672
00:55:51,640 --> 00:55:56,720
a kind of protection, allowing
the inner story to unfold

673
00:55:57,000 --> 00:55:59,280
without spilling into the
bedroom.

674
00:55:59,680 --> 00:56:05,480
So a dreaming brain is, in a
sense, an active brain, with the

675
00:56:05,480 --> 00:56:11,280
inner critic temporarily off
duty, the senses turned inward,

676
00:56:11,800 --> 00:56:18,040
the emotion stirring, and the
body lying quietly behind the

677
00:56:18,040 --> 00:56:21,280
curtain.
From this very particular

678
00:56:21,280 --> 00:56:26,240
arrangement, the dream emerges
vivid and strange.

679
00:56:26,640 --> 00:56:31,480
It is not difficult to see why
earlier ages felt the dream came

680
00:56:31,480 --> 00:56:36,680
from somewhere else, from gods
or messengers or hidden

681
00:56:36,680 --> 00:56:41,400
ancestors.
The experience itself is so

682
00:56:41,400 --> 00:56:45,800
different from ordinary thought
that it seems to belong to

683
00:56:45,800 --> 00:56:50,520
another country.
We now know that the country is

684
00:56:50,560 --> 00:56:56,760
in some sense the same one we
live in, only differently lit.

685
00:56:57,160 --> 00:57:01,920
If we ask what dreams might be,
for one of the most carefully

686
00:57:01,920 --> 00:57:05,560
studied possibilities concerns
memory.

687
00:57:06,560 --> 00:57:11,840
Across the night, while the body
lies still, the brain appears to

688
00:57:11,840 --> 00:57:17,760
do a kind of quiet sorting.
It is not the loud filing of a

689
00:57:17,760 --> 00:57:21,120
busy office.
It is something gentler, more

690
00:57:21,120 --> 00:57:25,520
like a lamp lit librarian moving
slowly through the day's

691
00:57:25,520 --> 00:57:32,320
accumulated pages, deciding what
to keep, what to set aside, and

692
00:57:32,320 --> 00:57:36,480
what to thread together with
older volumes, memory

693
00:57:36,480 --> 00:57:40,560
researchers have long noticed
that what we learn during a day

694
00:57:40,560 --> 00:57:44,720
is more durable if we sleep
before being tested.

695
00:57:45,560 --> 00:57:50,280
A new vocabulary list.
A piece of music, a tricky route

696
00:57:50,280 --> 00:57:56,280
across an unfamiliar city, all
tend to settle more firmly after

697
00:57:56,280 --> 00:58:00,600
a good night's rest.
This is true not only for the

698
00:58:00,600 --> 00:58:06,000
kind of memory we can describe
in words, but also for the

699
00:58:06,000 --> 00:58:11,840
quieter memory of skills, of how
the hand knows where to fall on

700
00:58:11,840 --> 00:58:17,120
a keyboard or a string.
In recent decades, researchers

701
00:58:17,120 --> 00:58:21,680
have come to believe that
different stages of sleep may

702
00:58:21,680 --> 00:58:24,440
serve different aspects of this
work.

703
00:58:25,480 --> 00:58:31,360
Slow wave sleep, with its deep,
unhurried rhythms, has been

704
00:58:31,360 --> 00:58:36,160
linked to the consolidation of
factual memory and the

705
00:58:36,160 --> 00:58:40,000
strengthening of recently
learned material.

706
00:58:40,920 --> 00:58:46,280
The active dreaming stage, with
its vivid imagery and emotional

707
00:58:46,280 --> 00:58:52,840
weight, has been associated with
the integration of memories into

708
00:58:52,840 --> 00:58:58,040
wider patterns and with the
gentle processing of feeling.

709
00:58:58,360 --> 00:59:02,640
Studies in animals have shown
remarkable things.

710
00:59:03,280 --> 00:59:07,920
After a rat has spent the day
learning to navigate a maze,

711
00:59:08,480 --> 00:59:12,840
certain cells in its brain
replay parts of that journey

712
00:59:12,840 --> 00:59:18,400
while it sleeps in patterns that
closely mirror the original

713
00:59:18,400 --> 00:59:25,160
experience, though often faster.
It is as though the brain were

714
00:59:25,160 --> 00:59:30,640
quietly walking back through the
corridors of the day, marking

715
00:59:30,640 --> 00:59:35,160
what was important, smoothing
what was rough.

716
00:59:35,600 --> 00:59:39,960
Whether human dreams are exactly
such replays is more difficult

717
00:59:39,960 --> 00:59:44,080
to say.
Our dreams rarely repeat the day

718
00:59:44,080 --> 00:59:48,720
in literal form.
They borrow fragments, blend

719
00:59:48,720 --> 00:59:52,760
them with older memories and
weave them with concerns and

720
00:59:52,760 --> 00:59:56,760
wishes.
But many researchers now suspect

721
00:59:57,120 --> 01:00:03,240
that this very weaving is part
of how memory is made stable.

722
01:00:04,280 --> 01:00:07,360
The dream.
May not be a recording of the

723
01:00:07,360 --> 01:00:13,520
day, it may be a workshop in
which the day is being fitted

724
01:00:13,880 --> 01:00:18,280
into a longer life.
If this view is right, then a

725
01:00:18,280 --> 01:00:22,520
great deal of what we treasure
as personal memory has been

726
01:00:22,520 --> 01:00:27,080
quietly shaped in sleep.
The names of friends, the

727
01:00:27,080 --> 01:00:31,960
lessons of mistakes, the
contours of places we've loved

728
01:00:32,440 --> 01:00:38,200
may all be set more deeply in US
by nights we will never remember

729
01:00:38,520 --> 01:00:43,160
in detail.
The dream becomes in part a

730
01:00:43,160 --> 01:00:48,760
hidden Craftsman working in the
dark to keep us recognizably

731
01:00:49,120 --> 01:00:53,160
ourselves.
It is a softer picture than the

732
01:00:53,160 --> 01:00:59,520
older idea of dreams as raw
nonsense or as coded messages.

733
01:01:00,400 --> 01:01:05,720
In this view, the dream is part
of the long patient labor of

734
01:01:05,720 --> 01:01:12,200
becoming a continuous person.
Each night the day is folded

735
01:01:12,200 --> 01:01:17,160
gently into the larger story of
a life.

736
01:01:17,600 --> 01:01:23,400
If memory is 1 possible purpose
of dreams, another concerns the

737
01:01:23,400 --> 01:01:29,920
careful management of feeling.
For decades, researchers have

738
01:01:29,920 --> 01:01:34,600
noticed that dreams rarely
concern themselves with the calm

739
01:01:34,720 --> 01:01:38,680
middle of life.
They tend to gather around what

740
01:01:38,680 --> 01:01:43,320
is unsettled.
Fears, hopes, embarrassments,

741
01:01:43,520 --> 01:01:49,400
longings, conflicts all seem to
find their way into the night

742
01:01:49,760 --> 01:01:54,640
more readily than the small,
ordinary moments that fill most

743
01:01:54,640 --> 01:01:57,480
of a day.
In the early years of this

744
01:01:57,480 --> 01:02:04,240
century, the Finnish researcher
Anti Revan Sul proposed an idea

745
01:02:04,240 --> 01:02:08,000
sometimes called the threat
simulation theory.

746
01:02:08,720 --> 01:02:12,720
He suggested that dreams might
have served across long

747
01:02:12,720 --> 01:02:18,200
stretches of human evolution as
a kind of inner rehearsal hall.

748
01:02:19,000 --> 01:02:23,960
In sleep, the mind could
practice responding to dangers,

749
01:02:24,080 --> 01:02:28,680
threats and difficult social
situations without any of the

750
01:02:28,680 --> 01:02:33,720
real world consequences.
A person could feel chaste and

751
01:02:33,720 --> 01:02:37,920
find themselves running.
A person could face a sudden

752
01:02:37,920 --> 01:02:43,160
loss and feel its weight.
The body remained safe, the

753
01:02:43,160 --> 01:02:48,440
muscles still, while the inner
self moved through scenarios

754
01:02:48,440 --> 01:02:52,960
that might one day matter.
Revantz Houle pointed out that

755
01:02:52,960 --> 01:02:58,360
across cultures and ages, dreams
of being pursued, of falling, of

756
01:02:58,360 --> 01:03:02,960
arriving unprepared, of facing
strangers in unfamiliar places,

757
01:03:03,600 --> 01:03:08,960
are remarkably common.
If this is so, then nightmares,

758
01:03:09,160 --> 01:03:13,920
far from being only failures of
rest, may sometimes be the

759
01:03:13,920 --> 01:03:16,600
system doing what it was shaped
to do.

760
01:03:17,440 --> 01:03:22,320
They are not pleasant, but they
may be part of how the mind

761
01:03:22,320 --> 01:03:26,440
keeps itself ready.
Other researchers have suggested

762
01:03:26,440 --> 01:03:32,200
a broader idea, sometimes called
the emotional regulation view.

763
01:03:33,080 --> 01:03:37,680
In this view, the dreaming brain
does not only rehearse threats,

764
01:03:38,400 --> 01:03:43,520
it also processes the emotional
residue of waking life.

765
01:03:44,320 --> 01:03:49,160
A difficult conversation, a
small humiliation, a tender

766
01:03:49,160 --> 01:03:55,120
goodbye, all may be revisited,
reshaped and softened during the

767
01:03:55,120 --> 01:03:58,440
night.
Studies have suggested that

768
01:03:58,680 --> 01:04:03,760
after a good night that includes
the active dreaming stage, the

769
01:04:03,760 --> 01:04:09,080
emotional intensity of difficult
memories can become a little

770
01:04:09,160 --> 01:04:14,320
easier to carry, while the
memory of the event itself

771
01:04:14,880 --> 01:04:19,800
remains intact.
This idea fits with something

772
01:04:19,800 --> 01:04:22,640
many people have noticed in
their own lives.

773
01:04:23,200 --> 01:04:27,080
Sleeping on a problem often
makes it feel different in the

774
01:04:27,080 --> 01:04:33,000
morning, not necessarily solved,
but somehow slightly more

775
01:04:33,000 --> 01:04:37,560
bearable, as though the night
had taken a little of the

776
01:04:37,560 --> 01:04:41,840
sharpness of it.
Of course, none of this is fully

777
01:04:41,840 --> 01:04:45,200
settled.
Researchers continue to debate

778
01:04:45,200 --> 01:04:49,680
which of these functions, if
any, is the primary one.

779
01:04:50,120 --> 01:04:54,760
It is also possible that dreams
do several things at once, the

780
01:04:54,760 --> 01:04:59,880
way a long walk can clear the
head, exercise the body, and

781
01:04:59,880 --> 01:05:05,360
allow time to think, all in a
single quiet hour.

782
01:05:05,680 --> 01:05:11,040
What does seem clear is that
dreams are not simply waste.

783
01:05:12,080 --> 01:05:15,400
They are not the cluttered
shavings of a working mind.

784
01:05:16,000 --> 01:05:20,040
They appear to be doing
something, even if we are not

785
01:05:20,040 --> 01:05:24,920
yet sure exactly what.
And they have been doing it

786
01:05:25,080 --> 01:05:29,680
faithfully for as long as our
species can remember.

787
01:05:30,120 --> 01:05:34,120
Not every theory of dreams looks
for hidden meaning.

788
01:05:34,840 --> 01:05:42,120
In 1977, 2 Harvard researchers
Allen Hobson and Robert Mccarley

789
01:05:42,600 --> 01:05:47,200
offered a quieter and more
mechanical account that startled

790
01:05:47,200 --> 01:05:50,960
many in the field.
They called their idea the

791
01:05:50,960 --> 01:05:56,240
activation synthesis hypothesis,
and it grew out of careful

792
01:05:56,240 --> 01:05:58,520
observation of the dreaming
brain.

793
01:05:58,880 --> 01:06:04,000
Hobson and Mccarley pointed out
that during the active dreaming

794
01:06:04,000 --> 01:06:09,880
stage of sleep, certain regions
deep in the brain stem fire in

795
01:06:09,880 --> 01:06:14,200
irregular bursts.
These signals do not arrive in

796
01:06:14,240 --> 01:06:19,560
any particular order, and they
do not on their own mean

797
01:06:19,560 --> 01:06:23,280
anything.
They are simply pulses of neural

798
01:06:23,280 --> 01:06:28,400
activity rising from below.
When these pulses reach the

799
01:06:28,480 --> 01:06:32,680
upper regions of the brain,
however, something interesting

800
01:06:32,680 --> 01:06:36,840
happens.
The cortex, the great folded

801
01:06:36,840 --> 01:06:41,520
sheet of tissue most associated
with thought and perception,

802
01:06:42,080 --> 01:06:46,800
does what it always does.
It tries to make sense of what

803
01:06:46,800 --> 01:06:52,800
it receives during waking life.
That sense making is constrained

804
01:06:52,800 --> 01:06:57,320
by the steady arrival of
information from the eyes, ears

805
01:06:57,440 --> 01:07:01,880
and skin.
The cortex weaves this stream

806
01:07:01,880 --> 01:07:04,280
into a coherent picture of the
world.

807
01:07:04,920 --> 01:07:10,200
But during dreaming, those outer
signals are largely shut out.

808
01:07:11,120 --> 01:07:17,680
Only the inner pulses remain,
and the cortex, faithful to its

809
01:07:17,680 --> 01:07:21,880
nature, continues to weave in
this view.

810
01:07:22,280 --> 01:07:27,400
The strange landscapes of dreams
are not coded messages.

811
01:07:28,000 --> 01:07:32,800
They are the cortex's best
effort to construct a story out

812
01:07:32,800 --> 01:07:36,760
of what is essentially internal
noise.

813
01:07:37,640 --> 01:07:41,600
A burst of activity in the
regions that govern balance

814
01:07:41,600 --> 01:07:44,360
might become a sensation of
falling.

815
01:07:44,960 --> 01:07:49,480
A burst near the regions
associated with faces might

816
01:07:49,480 --> 01:07:54,560
summon a familiar visitor.
A wave through the emotional

817
01:07:54,560 --> 01:08:00,320
centres might color the whole
scene with dread or warmth.

818
01:08:01,240 --> 01:08:06,640
The dream in this account is a
meaning making process running

819
01:08:07,000 --> 01:08:10,800
on randomness.
This was a striking and somewhat

820
01:08:10,920 --> 01:08:14,960
humbling idea.
It suggested that the rich

821
01:08:14,960 --> 01:08:19,439
interpretive traditions of
Freud, Jung and many others

822
01:08:20,040 --> 01:08:25,000
might have been reading deep
meaning into what was at bottom

823
01:08:25,439 --> 01:08:32,319
the brains improvisation.
For some this was a relief, for

824
01:08:32,319 --> 01:08:38,240
others it felt like a loss.
Hobson himself later softened

825
01:08:38,240 --> 01:08:43,200
parts of his early framework.
He came to acknowledge that even

826
01:08:43,200 --> 01:08:48,600
if dreams begin in noise, the
way the brain shapes that noise

827
01:08:48,880 --> 01:08:52,200
is deeply revealing of who the
dreamer is.

828
01:08:53,040 --> 01:08:58,560
The same pulses in two different
lives would not produce the same

829
01:08:58,560 --> 01:09:02,040
dream.
The cortex always weaves with

830
01:09:02,040 --> 01:09:06,399
the threads it already has.
So even within this more

831
01:09:06,399 --> 01:09:10,479
mechanical view there is room
for the personal.

832
01:09:11,240 --> 01:09:15,960
The dream may not arrive
carrying a hidden message, but

833
01:09:15,960 --> 01:09:19,880
it still bears the fingerprint
of the dreamer.

834
01:09:20,840 --> 01:09:25,600
In the choice of images, the
texture of feeling and the shape

835
01:09:25,600 --> 01:09:30,319
of the inner story, something
quietly individual still

836
01:09:30,319 --> 01:09:34,200
appears.
The activation synthesis idea

837
01:09:34,479 --> 01:09:39,880
remains influential, though few
researchers now hold it in its

838
01:09:39,880 --> 01:09:44,600
strictest form.
It joined a wider conversation

839
01:09:44,600 --> 01:09:49,960
in which dreams are studied not
from anyone angle, but from

840
01:09:49,960 --> 01:09:55,280
many, as a meeting place of
biology, memory and the

841
01:09:55,280 --> 01:10:00,680
imaginative life of the dreamer.
There is one particular kind of

842
01:10:00,680 --> 01:10:05,200
dream that has fascinated
thinkers for centuries, in part

843
01:10:05,440 --> 01:10:10,960
because it sits so strangely
between sleep and waking.

844
01:10:11,960 --> 01:10:16,320
It is the dream in which the
dreamer becomes aware that they

845
01:10:16,400 --> 01:10:20,560
are dreaming while still inside
the dream itself.

846
01:10:21,440 --> 01:10:27,560
In modern terms, this is often
called lucid dreaming.

847
01:10:27,960 --> 01:10:30,960
The experience can take many
forms.

848
01:10:31,720 --> 01:10:36,760
Sometimes it begins quietly,
with a small detail that does

849
01:10:36,760 --> 01:10:41,600
not match the world.
A clock face that will not stay

850
01:10:41,600 --> 01:10:47,680
still, a familiar room with an
extra door, a conversation with

851
01:10:47,680 --> 01:10:51,920
someone long absent.
Something flickers in the

852
01:10:51,920 --> 01:10:56,800
dreamer's awareness, and instead
of the ordinary acceptance of

853
01:10:56,800 --> 01:11:00,960
the dream, a soft recognition
arrives.

854
01:11:01,440 --> 01:11:07,040
This is a dream the dreamer is
dreaming.

855
01:11:07,360 --> 01:11:11,680
What follows varies from person
to person.

856
01:11:12,560 --> 01:11:18,600
Some lucid dreamers describe a
calm sense of presence, simply

857
01:11:18,600 --> 01:11:22,840
observing the dream from within
while remaining aware of its

858
01:11:22,880 --> 01:11:26,320
nature.
Others find that they can shape

859
01:11:26,320 --> 01:11:31,560
the dream itself, walking
through walls, flying gently

860
01:11:31,560 --> 01:11:36,200
above familiar landscapes, or
speaking with the figures who

861
01:11:36,200 --> 01:11:40,920
appear to them.
The body, all the while, remains

862
01:11:40,920 --> 01:11:44,280
still in bed.
As we touched on earlier,

863
01:11:44,800 --> 01:11:49,720
contemplative traditions in
Tibetan Buddhism developed

864
01:11:49,720 --> 01:11:54,080
careful practices around this
state long before any laboratory

865
01:11:54,080 --> 01:11:58,480
considered it.
For centuries, dream yoga taught

866
01:11:58,480 --> 01:12:04,200
practitioners to recognize the
dream as a dream, partly as a

867
01:12:04,200 --> 01:12:07,840
path toward understanding the
nature of mind itself.

868
01:12:08,320 --> 01:12:12,960
In the late 20th century, the
American psychophysiologist

869
01:12:12,960 --> 01:12:18,320
Steven Laberge, working at
Stanford University, helped

870
01:12:18,320 --> 01:12:21,760
bring lucid dreaming into
mainstream science.

871
01:12:22,440 --> 01:12:27,760
He developed clever experimental
designs in which trained lucid

872
01:12:27,760 --> 01:12:32,680
dreamers were asked to give
prearranged eye movement signals

873
01:12:32,680 --> 01:12:37,720
from within their dreams.
Because the muscles of the eyes

874
01:12:37,720 --> 01:12:42,000
are not paralyzed during the
active dreaming stage, those

875
01:12:42,000 --> 01:12:46,080
small movements could be
detected on recording

876
01:12:46,080 --> 01:12:51,720
instruments while the rest of
the body remained still when the

877
01:12:51,720 --> 01:12:54,920
agreed signals appeared at the
agreed moments.

878
01:12:55,440 --> 01:13:01,760
Science had, in a sense,
received a message from inside a

879
01:13:01,760 --> 01:13:06,440
dream.
This research gradually helped

880
01:13:06,440 --> 01:13:11,080
establish lucid dreaming as a
real and studyable phenomenon,

881
01:13:11,400 --> 01:13:18,480
not merely A literary curiosity.
It also raised intriguing

882
01:13:18,480 --> 01:13:22,280
questions.
What does it mean for awareness

883
01:13:22,280 --> 01:13:25,000
to flicker on inside an inner
story?

884
01:13:25,560 --> 01:13:30,120
What does it tell us about the
layers of consciousness that the

885
01:13:30,120 --> 01:13:33,240
mind can hold?
A small lamp of self

886
01:13:33,240 --> 01:13:36,560
recognition, even while
dreaming.

887
01:13:36,920 --> 01:13:41,720
For most people, lucid dreams
happen rarely, if at all.

888
01:13:42,440 --> 01:13:46,840
They are not necessary for
restful sleep, nor are they a

889
01:13:46,840 --> 01:13:51,240
goal worth straining for.
But they remind us that the

890
01:13:51,240 --> 01:13:56,680
dreaming mind is more layered
than it first appears, and that

891
01:13:57,000 --> 01:14:02,240
even within the night, a quiet
awareness can sometimes turn and

892
01:14:02,600 --> 01:14:08,360
look at itself, almost like a
candle that briefly notices its

893
01:14:08,360 --> 01:14:11,920
own soft flame.
If you have ever lived with a

894
01:14:11,920 --> 01:14:15,600
dog or a cat, you have probably
seen something curious.

895
01:14:16,440 --> 01:14:21,520
A sleeping animal, deep into
rest, begins to twitch.

896
01:14:22,440 --> 01:14:27,440
Paws move as if running.
Ears flicker, Whiskers tremble.

897
01:14:28,280 --> 01:14:33,600
Sometimes there is a soft sound,
a muffled bark, or a quiet

898
01:14:33,600 --> 01:14:38,200
chirp.
The body is otherwise still, but

899
01:14:38,200 --> 01:14:41,600
something is clearly happening
within.

900
01:14:41,960 --> 01:14:47,200
For a long time, people noticed
these signs and quietly wondered

901
01:14:47,200 --> 01:14:52,160
if animals dreamed.
The question seemed almost

902
01:14:52,160 --> 01:14:57,200
impossible to answer.
Animals could not describe their

903
01:14:57,200 --> 01:15:03,080
inner experience, and dreams had
long been thought of as a deeply

904
01:15:03,080 --> 01:15:06,920
human gift.
But when researchers began

905
01:15:06,920 --> 01:15:12,600
studying sleep across species,
they found something remarkable.

906
01:15:13,280 --> 01:15:18,720
Many animals show during their
rest the very same patterns that

907
01:15:18,720 --> 01:15:22,240
mark the active dreaming stage
in humans.

908
01:15:22,560 --> 01:15:28,040
Mammals in particular, share
this stage almost universally.

909
01:15:28,880 --> 01:15:33,480
Dogs, cats, horses, mice,
dolphins, elephants, monkeys,

910
01:15:34,040 --> 01:15:38,160
and many others all enter
periods of sleep marked by quick

911
01:15:38,160 --> 01:15:42,520
eye movement, irregular
breathing, and active brain

912
01:15:42,520 --> 01:15:45,680
patterns.
Birds, too, show similar

913
01:15:45,680 --> 01:15:50,440
episodes, though shorter and
arranged differently across the

914
01:15:50,440 --> 01:15:54,000
night.
Even some reptiles, in studies

915
01:15:54,000 --> 01:15:58,880
of recent years, appear to have
a primitive version of these

916
01:15:58,880 --> 01:16:03,360
states.
The roots of dreaming sleep may

917
01:16:03,360 --> 01:16:06,800
stretch deep into the long
history of life.

918
01:16:07,240 --> 01:16:11,560
Direct evidence that animals
experience something like a

919
01:16:11,560 --> 01:16:16,440
dream came from a striking
experiment by the French

920
01:16:16,440 --> 01:16:20,800
researcher Michel Jouvais in the
1960s.

921
01:16:21,720 --> 01:16:26,680
Jouvais found that a small
region in the brain stem helps

922
01:16:26,680 --> 01:16:31,360
keep the body still during the
active dreaming stage.

923
01:16:32,120 --> 01:16:37,160
When this region was carefully
altered in cats, the animals

924
01:16:37,160 --> 01:16:42,560
continued to enter dreaming
sleep, but their bodies were no

925
01:16:42,560 --> 01:16:46,920
longer held quiet.
They began to act out what

926
01:16:46,920 --> 01:16:51,400
seemed to be hunts and
explorations, stalking,

927
01:16:51,480 --> 01:16:56,040
pouncing, and crouching, all
while their eyes remained closed

928
01:16:56,040 --> 01:16:58,400
and the rest of the world was
absent.

929
01:16:59,360 --> 01:17:04,760
It was, in its quiet way, a
glimpse of an inner life.

930
01:17:05,160 --> 01:17:08,960
Later research has only deepened
the impression.

931
01:17:09,840 --> 01:17:14,200
Rats appear to replay May's
experiences during sleep.

932
01:17:15,160 --> 01:17:19,600
Songbirds appear to rehearse
their songs while resting.

933
01:17:20,560 --> 01:17:25,720
The dreaming, whatever it is, is
not unique to us.

934
01:17:26,000 --> 01:17:29,200
This is a tender thought to
carry into the night.

935
01:17:29,920 --> 01:17:35,120
Somewhere a dog is twitching
beside its owner's bed, perhaps

936
01:17:35,120 --> 01:17:39,960
chasing a ball through a field
that exists only inside its

937
01:17:39,960 --> 01:17:43,880
head.
Somewhere, a cat is purring

938
01:17:43,880 --> 01:17:46,520
softly through a dream of her
own.

939
01:17:47,320 --> 01:17:52,320
A horse, asleep in a quiet barn
may be running through grass

940
01:17:52,320 --> 01:17:57,240
that only it can see.
The night belongs not only to

941
01:17:57,240 --> 01:18:03,400
humans, but to a great, quiet
community of dreamers.

942
01:18:04,200 --> 01:18:08,360
We share the dark with them, and
likely have, for as long as our

943
01:18:08,360 --> 01:18:12,200
family of creatures has known,
sleep at all.

944
01:18:12,560 --> 01:18:15,360
There is a kind of comfort in
that companionship.

945
01:18:16,000 --> 01:18:21,200
The act of dreaming, whatever it
is, is not a strange, isolated

946
01:18:21,200 --> 01:18:26,600
quirk of one species.
It is something older, gentler

947
01:18:27,000 --> 01:18:32,080
and more widely shared.
We dream among the dreaming.

948
01:18:32,400 --> 01:18:35,000
Not all of the dream country is
gentle.

949
01:18:35,400 --> 01:18:39,480
Tonight we look briefly at some
of its more difficult

950
01:18:39,480 --> 01:18:44,160
landscapes, with care and
without lingering.

951
01:18:44,480 --> 01:18:47,680
Nightmares are the most familiar
of these.

952
01:18:47,880 --> 01:18:52,360
They are dreams that carry
strong fear, threat, or

953
01:18:52,360 --> 01:18:56,520
distress, often vivid enough to
wake the sleeper.

954
01:18:57,600 --> 01:19:01,760
Most people experience them now
and then, especially in

955
01:19:01,760 --> 01:19:06,120
childhood, and an occasional
nightmare is generally

956
01:19:06,120 --> 01:19:09,120
considered a normal part of
life.

957
01:19:09,960 --> 01:19:14,800
Researchers have suggested that
nightmares may sometimes serve

958
01:19:14,800 --> 01:19:20,480
the same emotional and rehearsal
functions as ordinary dreams,

959
01:19:21,200 --> 01:19:24,200
only with the volume turned
higher.

960
01:19:25,200 --> 01:19:29,880
They become a concern mainly
when they grow frequent or

961
01:19:29,880 --> 01:19:33,960
distressing enough to disturb
sleep over time.

962
01:19:34,400 --> 01:19:38,800
Recurring dreams are another
curious feature of inner life.

963
01:19:39,720 --> 01:19:45,360
Many people return year after
year to the same dream landscape

964
01:19:46,000 --> 01:19:52,240
a particular house, a particular
school corridor, a particular

965
01:19:52,240 --> 01:19:55,560
sense of being unprepared for
something.

966
01:19:56,640 --> 01:20:01,200
These recurring dreams often
arrive during periods of stress

967
01:20:01,600 --> 01:20:04,600
and tend to fade when life
settles.

968
01:20:05,600 --> 01:20:10,160
Some dream researchers think
they may reflect concerns the

969
01:20:10,160 --> 01:20:17,280
mind has not yet fully resolved,
returning gently until they are.

970
01:20:17,600 --> 01:20:22,080
Then there is the experience,
sometimes called sleep

971
01:20:22,240 --> 01:20:26,480
paralysis.
As we have mentioned, the body

972
01:20:26,480 --> 01:20:30,920
is normally held still during
the active dreaming stage.

973
01:20:31,760 --> 01:20:36,400
Most of the time this happens
entirely outside our awareness,

974
01:20:37,160 --> 01:20:42,040
but occasionally, especially
when sleep is irregular, a

975
01:20:42,040 --> 01:20:46,720
person may briefly become aware
while the body's stillness has

976
01:20:46,720 --> 01:20:51,440
not yet lifted.
They feel awake but cannot move.

977
01:20:52,280 --> 01:20:57,560
Sometimes the experience is
accompanied by vivid, dreamlike

978
01:20:57,600 --> 01:21:02,360
imagery in the room.
Cultures across the world have

979
01:21:02,360 --> 01:21:08,000
stories about these visitations,
often interpreted as visits from

980
01:21:08,000 --> 01:21:14,080
spirits or unseen beings.
We now understand them as a

981
01:21:14,080 --> 01:21:19,840
small misalignment between two
systems that usually keep

982
01:21:19,840 --> 01:21:25,000
careful time with one another.
Night terrors are different from

983
01:21:25,040 --> 01:21:29,600
ordinary nightmares.
They tend to occur during deep,

984
01:21:29,840 --> 01:21:34,360
slow wave sleep rather than
during the active dreaming

985
01:21:34,360 --> 01:21:41,040
stage, often early in the night.
The person, frequently a child,

986
01:21:41,360 --> 01:21:47,160
may sit up, cry out, or appear
distressed while remaining

987
01:21:47,160 --> 01:21:51,400
largely unaware of their
surroundings and remembering

988
01:21:51,400 --> 01:21:54,440
little or nothing in the
morning.

989
01:21:55,520 --> 01:21:59,800
They are unsettling for those
who witness them, but generally

990
01:21:59,800 --> 01:22:04,200
not harmful, and most children
outgrow them.

991
01:22:04,560 --> 01:22:09,080
These darker corners of the
dream country are real and worth

992
01:22:09,080 --> 01:22:14,920
knowing about, especially for
those they touch, but they are a

993
01:22:14,920 --> 01:22:18,080
small portion of the wider
landscape.

994
01:22:18,920 --> 01:22:23,440
Most nights are quieter,
gentler, and more ordinary than

995
01:22:23,440 --> 01:22:26,400
the dramatic exceptions might
suggest.

996
01:22:27,280 --> 01:22:33,320
The mind, even in its
strangeness, mostly tends toward

997
01:22:33,320 --> 01:22:36,680
rest.
For people who do struggle with

998
01:22:36,680 --> 01:22:42,040
frequent or troubling dreams,
modern care offers thoughtful

999
01:22:42,040 --> 01:22:46,440
approaches.
Sleep specialists, therapists

1000
01:22:46,720 --> 01:22:51,480
and quiet practices of evening
calm have all been shown to

1001
01:22:51,480 --> 01:22:55,360
help.
The night is not a fixed

1002
01:22:55,360 --> 01:23:01,000
sentence.
It can often be gently improved.

1003
01:23:01,320 --> 01:23:07,080
So here we are, at the soft edge
of the night, with a long story

1004
01:23:07,080 --> 01:23:11,000
behind us and the quiet, dark
ahead.

1005
01:23:11,440 --> 01:23:16,800
We began in the clay tablets of
Mesopotamia, where dreamers

1006
01:23:16,800 --> 01:23:21,680
first wrote down their Knights.
We passed through Egyptian

1007
01:23:21,680 --> 01:23:26,560
temples and Greek sanctuaries
where the sleeping mind was

1008
01:23:26,560 --> 01:23:32,400
thought to whisper with gods.
We sat for a moment with

1009
01:23:32,440 --> 01:23:38,600
Aristotle, who first imagined
that the dream might come not

1010
01:23:38,600 --> 01:23:44,000
from above but from within.
We followed dreams into

1011
01:23:44,000 --> 01:23:48,080
scripture, into Islamic
scholarship, into Tibetan

1012
01:23:48,080 --> 01:23:53,800
monasteries, into aboriginal
dreamtime, and into a Taoist

1013
01:23:53,800 --> 01:23:57,600
garden where a man wondered if
he might be a butterfly.

1014
01:23:58,480 --> 01:24:04,000
We watched reason grow careful
and the romantic imagination

1015
01:24:04,000 --> 01:24:07,840
grow tender around the same
vivid material.

1016
01:24:08,440 --> 01:24:13,720
We met Freud and Jung, who in
different ways insisted that the

1017
01:24:13,720 --> 01:24:18,960
night was speaking to itself,
and we entered the laboratory,

1018
01:24:19,480 --> 01:24:23,320
where careful researchers
learned to find the dreaming

1019
01:24:23,320 --> 01:24:28,320
brain, time it, and study it
gently.

1020
01:24:28,680 --> 01:24:33,920
We learned that the night is not
a single dark room but a series

1021
01:24:33,920 --> 01:24:39,840
of soft chambers, that the brain
is wide awake during much of its

1022
01:24:39,840 --> 01:24:45,280
dreaming, that memories may be
quietly woven into the long

1023
01:24:45,280 --> 01:24:51,480
story of a life while we sleep,
that emotions may be softened by

1024
01:24:51,480 --> 01:24:55,880
morning, that even animals enter
their own inner worlds.

1025
01:24:56,640 --> 01:25:03,120
We touched briefly on lucid
dreams, on nightmares, on the

1026
01:25:03,120 --> 01:25:09,120
strange lull of sleep paralysis,
and throughout all of it we held

1027
01:25:09,120 --> 01:25:15,080
the same gentle truth.
The dream remains, in part, a

1028
01:25:15,080 --> 01:25:18,240
mystery.
That mystery has not been a

1029
01:25:18,240 --> 01:25:22,640
failure of inquiry.
It has been one of its quiet

1030
01:25:22,640 --> 01:25:26,600
gifts.
Each careful answer has revealed

1031
01:25:26,600 --> 01:25:31,760
new and softer questions.
Each instrument has shown us the

1032
01:25:31,760 --> 01:25:34,640
shape of something that's still
at its centre.

1033
01:25:35,120 --> 01:25:40,920
Eludes simple description.
We are not entirely sure why we

1034
01:25:40,920 --> 01:25:45,240
dream.
We know that we do, that we

1035
01:25:45,240 --> 01:25:50,040
always have, and that the
practice is far older and wider

1036
01:25:50,160 --> 01:25:55,160
than our species.
Alone to night, you will likely

1037
01:25:55,160 --> 01:25:59,160
dream again.
You will likely not remember

1038
01:25:59,160 --> 01:26:03,160
most of it.
You may carry into mourning only

1039
01:26:03,160 --> 01:26:07,840
a faint impression, a single
image, a softened mood.

1040
01:26:08,600 --> 01:26:13,320
That is the way the dream
usually arrives, like whether we

1041
01:26:13,320 --> 01:26:16,200
have walked through and almost
forgotten.

1042
01:26:16,800 --> 01:26:20,760
There is no need to chase it.
There is no need to capture it

1043
01:26:20,760 --> 01:26:23,840
in words.
It will do its quiet work

1044
01:26:23,840 --> 01:26:30,240
whether or not we attend to it.
And we will wake gently into

1045
01:26:30,280 --> 01:26:34,440
another day.
Outside, the world continues its

1046
01:26:34,440 --> 01:26:38,440
quiet turning.
Somewhere a child is settling

1047
01:26:38,440 --> 01:26:43,960
into a first dream of the night.
Somewhere a dog is twitching on

1048
01:26:43,960 --> 01:26:48,800
a worn rug.
Somewhere a stranger in a city

1049
01:26:48,800 --> 01:26:53,360
you will never see is closing
their eyes upon a day you will

1050
01:26:53,360 --> 01:26:57,680
never know.
And somewhere far away, perhaps,

1051
01:26:58,240 --> 01:27:03,720
a researcher is still watching a
soft pen trace the rhythms of a

1052
01:27:03,720 --> 01:27:09,880
sleeping brain, asking the same
patient question that ancient

1053
01:27:09,880 --> 01:27:14,200
temple priests once asked in
their own way.

1054
01:27:15,200 --> 01:27:21,640
What is happening in the night?
You are part of all of it.

1055
01:27:22,320 --> 01:27:27,120
The unbroken thread of dreamers
continues through you gently

1056
01:27:27,680 --> 01:27:32,560
into this night.
The world slows, and so do we.

1057
01:27:32,880 --> 01:27:33,600
Good night.