Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, over a hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud declared confidently, quote, the

interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of

the mind, unquote.

He was writing in the interpretation of dreams and his ideas made a

huge impact on the century that was to follow. However, despite the cultural influence of

his work, there's still no agreement in neuroscience as to the function or mechanism of dreaming.

This is partly because for much of the century, despite Freud, the prevailing neuroscientific

wisdom was that there was no meaning to dreams at all.

What is the mental circuitry that creates our dreams, if they have no meaning, why do we dream

them?

And is the tight turning with neuroscientists starting to find reasons to take dreams seriously

again? With me to discuss the to take dreams seriously again.

With me to discuss the neuroscience of dreams is Mark Solms, professor of neuropsychology at the

University of Cape Town, Martin Conway, professor of psychology at Durham University,

and last year's brief lecturer, Professor V.S. Ramachandran from the

University of California, San Diego, who is here to launch the Winchester Festival of Art

and the Mind tomorrow.

In the 20th century to

rather amplify what I said in that introduction

that the Ramachandran, what did neurologists in the last century think about

...