*THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER* What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and
minds use dreams? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented astonishing
study of the role and significance of dreams from the beginning of human history. An
investigation on the grand scale encompassing literature anthropology religion and science
it articulates the essential place dreams occupy in human culture and how they functioned as
the catalyst that compelled us to transform our earthly habitat into a human world. From the
earliest cave paintings - where the author finds a key to humankind's first dreams which
contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future - to cutting-edge scientific research
Ribeiro arrives at startling and revolutionary conclusions about the role of dreams in human
existence and evolution. He explores the advances that contemporary neuroscience
biochemistry and psychology have made into the connections between sleep dreams and learning
before revealing what dreams have taught us about the neural basis of memory and the
transformation of memory in recall. And he makes clear that the earliest insight into dreams as
oracular has been confirmed by contemporary research. Accessible authoritative and
fascinating from first to last The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to understand
this most basic of human experiences.
