CHAUTAUQUA — It is important that we get enough sleep, so that we stay healthy.

Sidarta Ribeiro said it is also important to dream during our sleep periods because dreams couple the past to the future. Ribeiro shared his expertise on dreaming with an Amphitheater audience Tuesday at Chautauqua Institution as part of the theme “The World of Nighttime.”

Ribeiro said if people don’t sleep every night, they will develop problems in their lives. “Most people nowadays in urban contemporary societies do not remember their dreams,” he said.

Ribeiro noted that researchers and scientists know more about sleep patterns than they do about dreams. Every human, unless he or she has a specific brain lesion will experience four to five full cycles of sleep every night. It means, he said, people are going to go through phase one which is very brief with short dreams, then phase two which is also quite brief, then phase three when people are without dreams.

During phase three, he added, people should be very rested, relaxed and actually doing a lot of protein synthesis, and a lot of processes that are important for good health.

“And then we go into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and this is when we dream the most. It’s not the only state when we dream, but it’s when we dream the most,” he said.

Most people, he added, wake up and they have the feeling that they had a dream. But the if they don’t stay quiet in bed and if they don’t make an effort to bring that dream back to the waking reality, the dream will be gone in a few seconds.

Research has shown that in the past 100 years, as electric lights first became prevalent, then radio, then TV, and then the internet computers, personal computers and cell phones, that people are losing about two hours of sleep per night.

“It depends on the age group,” Ribeiro said. “It depends on where you’re living, but overall, it basically means we are getting poorer and poorer sleep as we progress into the 21st century.”

If our sleep is cut short, he said, then people will not experience enough REM sleep and people won’t dream enough. Science has relinquished dreams to nonsense, but, he said, dreams are very important.

“Dreams are the gift that keeps on giving,” he said. “They keep coming and even if you don’t pay attention to them, they may force you to pay attention to them.”

He referred to Elias Howe and how he invented the sewing machine through dreaming. Within hours, he said, of waking up from his dream, Howe had a working prototype.

In the arts, of course, he added, this is very well known. There are many, many artists in all sorts of disciplines in the arts that that rely on dreams for creativity.

A famous example is Salvador Dali, Ribeiro noted. Dali used to have a method of sitting in a chair with a very heavy spoon in his hands, and then allowed himself to doze. When he lost the muscle tone, the spoon would fall on the ground. He would wake up and paint based on that image.

He said recent research shows that the time people spend in REM sleep is correlated with the creativity they have, so the ability to solve non-obvious problems has to do with the amount of time people spend in REM sleep. It is also known that when people sleep, they detoxify their brains.

“During the day we accumulate a lot of stuff that is detrimental to cognition. In particular, we accumulate the malformed proteins that will, down the road, cause Alzheimer’s disease. If you want to protect yourself from Alzheimer’s Disease, sleep well, because it’s during sleep that we remove those proteins from our brains,” he added.

According to assembly.chq.org, Ribeiro is Full Professor of Neuroscience and founder of the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, where his research focuses on memory, sleep, and dreams; neural plasticity; vocal communication; symbolic competence in non-human animals; computational psychiatry; neuroeducation; and psychedelics. He is the author of five books — his most recent is The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreaming, which will frame his presentation as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series. The author of more than 100 scientific articles, Ribeiro is a contributor for Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil¥s largest newspaper. A member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences since 2016, he is associate editor of the journals PLoS One, Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience and Frontiers In Psychology — Language Sciences. He is a member of the Council of the Sociedade brasileira para o Progresso da Cincia, the Steering Committee of the Latin American School for Educational, Cognitive and Neural Sciences and the Center for Research, Innovation and Education in Neuromathematics.

He served as secretary of the Brazilian Society of Neuroscience and Behavior in the triennium 2009-2011 and was a member of the Brazilian committee of the Pew Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences between 2011 and 2015. Most recently, his work has been honored with a Medical Innovation Award in the Diagnostic Medicine Category from Abril & Dasa in 2018, the Celso Furtado Award from the Ministry of National Integration in Brazil in 2017, and the 2017 Latin American Research Award from Google. Ribeiro holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of BrasÌlia, a master’s degree in biophysics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and a Ph.D. in animal behavior from the Rockefeller University, with post-doctoral studies in neurophysiology completed at Duke University.

“If we knew how to sleep and dream properly, and to use those dreams to share our desires and fears, could we be more empathetic?” he asked, “could we be more resourceful? Could we be more creative? Could we be more intelligent?”