Where Dreams Come From

So far in this podcast, most of my guests have told us about their aspirations in life and their quest to achieve their dream.  My guest today, Deirdre Barrett, is different. She studies dreams. She writes books about the dreams people have in their sleep and she teaches classes at Harvard about those dreams. Deirdre has been interested in dreams from a very young age and her search is, in part, about the dreams we have while asleep and their bearing on our waking lives.

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Jeremy Sherman set out, fairly early in life – to be a hippie. He now asserts that science is his spiritual path. Possessing a naturally questioning mind, Jeremy abandoned the quest for undefined enlightenment to seek out answers to higher truths by applying scientific methods. Working closely with Harvard and Berkley neuroscientist and biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon he seeks to explain the basis on which biological organisms aspire or try. He told me that this aspect of life – trying or aspiring or dreaming, so to speak – distinguishes living organisms from machines. It has names but little in way of explanation. 

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Michael Smolens has been a serial entrepreneur all his life. He says he went with his gut at every stage. The motivation was never money, it was to do things that were never done before. Even when he fell down, he just continued. Now, approaching the fourth quarter of life, he has labeled himself Collector of Puzzle Pieces. Give it a listen.

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Ruby Hembrom is the founder of Adivaani – a platform for indigenous people’s expression in India. She, has been awarded the Asia Foundation Development Fellowship and an Atlantic Fellowship – among other honors. However, Ruby did not set out in life imagining she would become a publisher and archivist of indigenous literature and culture in India. Born into a Santal tribal family, her formative years were spent with experiences of colorism that affected her deeply. Ultimately, her dream formed as a response to the exclusion that she felt at every step. 

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Ruth Jeannoel’s mother fled the oppressive Duvalier regime in Haiti and settled in Boston, Massachusetts where Ruth was born. From all accounts, it was hard to be a single mother, without knowing any English and never having had faced the brutal New England winters. Ruth, who learnt Haitian Creole at home and English at School became her mother’s interpreter, as she tried to make her way in the United States. In the absence of money – the church was their sole source of solace and inspiration. In this conversation, Ruth explains her early influences, the discovery of words for the inequalities that surrounded her and, ultimately, as a woman of African ancestry – the deep desire to help others like her.

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Bijayini Satpathy, came of age as a classical Odissi dancer at Nrityagram – a dance village in South India, founded in 1990 by the socialite and danseuse Protima Gauri Bedi.

When Bijayini decided to leave Nrityagram and strike out on her own in 2018, she told Marina Harss of the New York Times that she had a (I quote) “strong urge to push into an untouched and unexplored dimension, before it was too late.” And, even though she felt a “shocking sense of loss” of her hold on dance at the self-imposed severance, she has rebuilt herself. It has been as if she was compelled to undertake a painful path to fully realize her dream. Bijayini Satpathy spoke to me from her home, outside Bangalore and not very far from the Nrityagram campus. 

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Imagine you are walking along a road in rural Central India, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. A place where infrastructure is sparse and people continue to live in poverty, many excluded by circumstance to fully participate in India’s heady economic development. It’s quiet, and then you hear the unmistakable low rumble of a Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike’s 4-stroke engine. Then you see it. It’s blue in color and astride it is a venerable European woman.

My guest, Ulrike Reinhard, grew up in Germany and discovered her gift as a basketball player early. Although her middle-class parents were not really happy about whom she chose to date, they did give her the freedom with sports and education. It seems that this freedom allowed her to live life on her own terms. In 2013, while on a trip to India, Ulrike was inspired to build a skatepark for children in a village in Central India. The thought was, that a skatepark could be instrumental in breaking down barriers of caste, class and gender. Be a positive disruptor in an otherwise stagnant setting. Seven years on, it seems the experiment is thriving to the benefit of the children of Janwaar, Madhya Pradesh and their families. Ulrike Reinhard spoke to me recently from Portugal.

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Almost four decades ago, while still in college in India, I played bass in a rock band. My guest today, Rahul Ram, was the bassist in a rival band. Then we lost touch, until one day, in the early 2000s, the song Bandé by the band Indian Ocean for the Bollywood film Black Friday came bursting into the scene. Rahul Ram was ostensibly the band’s front man. In our conversation, he outlines his various interests and how they got channeled, and defined his music and life. Rahul spoke to me from his home near Naggar, Himachal Pradesh.

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In November 1969, when Sesame Street premiered on Public Television, my guest Dr. Loretta Long was there. As we will hear, based on her fortitude and thinking on her feet, she had landed the role of Susan Robinson - a housewife. Later, her character developed into a working nurse and mother to an adopted son. Sesame Street was pathbreaking in that it aimed to be an influential educational program for American children by combining rigorous research, educational content and entertainment; to engage kids in learning while having fun. Despite the fact that Sesame Street has gone on to be one of the most successful edutainment programs in the anywhere, in this conversation, Dr. Loretta reveals she never felt successful – even through all the fanfare. 

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Steven Lavine spent 29 years of his working life as the president of California Institute of the Arts –  CALARTS. Having grown up in a small Wisconsin town, Steven could not wait to go out into the world. As he puts it, invoking his distant cousin Bob Dylan, he wanted to explore where the wind was blowing. After attending Ivy League institutions and becoming a professor for a while, he landed a job at the Rockefeller Foundation to discover the possibility that elite institutions could be instrumental in bringing about social change. His next job, as the president of Calarts, afforded him the dream of trying this idea out for himself. 

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