Dreams, Creatures, and Visions

[0] We are in the season of chaos.

[1] Is the final boarding call?

[2] It can feel like everything is happening at once.

[3] It might be sprinting across an airport.

[4] Or around your kitchen with a few too many dishes cooking at once.

[5] Your phone keep pinging, a text from your mom, a weather alert, more and more breaking news.

[6] Online conspiracy.

[7] Reeling from the devastating floods.

[8] From targeting the electric grid.

[9] You might feel trapped.

[10] Political violence.

[11] Devastaking effect.

[12] A violent clash.

[13] Whatever it is, we're going to take you out of it.

[14] Here at ThruLine, we're always going to different places in time and space.

[15] In this episode, we've picked a few of our most popular destinations.

[16] Six stories pulled from some of our most sound -rich episodes, from the immensity of dreams to the enormous power.

[17] of a very tiny creature.

[18] So immerse yourself.

[19] Think of us as your travel guides on a sonic journey to other worlds.

[20] Today's show, dreams, creatures, and visions.

[21] Hi, this is George from Benicia, California, and you're listening to ThruLine.

[22] Thanks for the history lessons.

[23] Part 1.

[24] The World of Dreams.

[25] Your head hits the pillow, and the journey begins.

[26] much of human history, dreams were considered messages from the deep.

[27] They were a source of inspiration, of ideas, and even guided the way many people lived their lives.

[28] But beginning in the 16th century in Europe, dreams lost much of their power.

[29] The Christian church saw dreams as a possible source of sin.

[30] Some philosophers regarded dream interpretation as nonsense.

[31] One writer thought they were merely the result of indigestion.

[32] But then in the late 1800s, in all a man came along who questioned that approach.

[33] I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients.

[34] Sigmund Freud was one of the first scientists who thought deeply about dreams and attempted to better understand the science behind them, and the emotions and behaviors they conjured.

[35] When Freud was a young doctor, he was a scientist.

[36] He saw himself as a scientist.

[37] This is Sidarta Ribeiro.

[38] He's a neuroscientist.

[39] and author of the book, The Oracle of Night, the History and Science of Dreams.

[40] And he was trying himself in different fields of science, of neuroscience.

[41] At this time, scientists were trying to understand the connection between the brain and the mind, the body and consciousness.

[42] One of the most common diagnoses of the time was hysteria.

[43] It was often a kind of catch -all diagnosis for people, especially women, who might have been suffering from symptoms like depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, insomnia, and even something called sexual forwardness.

[44] When Sigmund Freud was a medical student studying hysteria, he came to believe that it was a psychiatric disorder.

[45] And after graduating, he opened his own private practice to treat patients and further study the condition.

[46] And until the very end of the 19th century, he was pursuing a clinical work that was very strongly rooted in the neuroscience and psychiatry.

[47] psychiatry of his time.

[48] But then...

[49] His father died.

[50] He entered the crisis and had these major dreams.

[51] And this is when he undergoes the big change.

[52] When he produces his seminal book interpretation of dreams and creates a new field of knowledge that we call psychoanalysis.

[53] Psychoanalysis is the idea that investigating the unconscious, often through dreams, can possibly treat the psychological symptoms patients are suffering, conditions that people still experience today, like depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, and so on.

[54] Using his own dreams and his patience as evidence, Freud put forth an idea in a book called The Interpretation of Dreams that would become his lasting legacy.

[55] What Freud did that was so important is that he reclaims dreams as something meaningful.

[56] But even after Freud published his book, it's not like everything instantly changed.

[57] changed.

[58] Dreams were still mostly dismissed in the scientific community.

[59] Why?

[60] Because in the 19th century, science was completely sure that dreams were nonsense, that nobody should pay attention to dreams, that they reflected at most bad digestion.

[61] What is common in all these dreams is obvious.

[62] They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day, which remain unrealized.

[63] They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.

[64] He would say, dreams have a meaning.

[65] They are related to people's lives.

[66] They are not something that can be dismissed, but they also cannot be predetermined.

[67] If you want to make sense of somebody's dream, you need to understand that person.

[68] You need to listen to that person.

[69] You need to share the context of that person.

[70] And this is what is done in psychoanalysis and in psychotherapy in general.

[71] So Freud was able to say, yes, dreams have a meaning, but this meaning is centered in the dreamer.

[72] This idea that people dream for a reason, that it's a way to cope with problems the conscious mind can't do while it's awake, was radical.

[73] That by reflecting on your dreams, you were confronting something deep inside of you that followed like a shadow you didn't know was there.

[74] Dreams are meaningful if we pay attention.

[75] attention to them.

[76] So it's a relationship that we build, not just with ourselves, but with those mental creatures that inhabit ourselves.

[77] That was Sidata Ribeiro, neuroscientist and author of the book, The Oracle of Night.

[78] And in the years since Freud published the interpretation of dreams, there's been research suggesting that what we dream about actually does impact our waking life.

[79] Dreams are like that stale taste of sleep in your mouth.

[80] When you wake up in the morning, they linger with you, replaying in your head long after you've gotten out of bed.

[81] Sometimes you're returning to a remnant of the past.

[82] Sometimes there are a glimpse of the future you wished you lived in.

[83] One you might fight to make real.

[84] So let's greet our next dreamer.

[85] Marcus Garvey, the radical visionary, orator, and champion of black empowerment and Pan -Africanism.

[86] Garvey was born in Jamaica and later moved to New York.

[87] Decades before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Garvey attracted millions with a simple, uncompromising message.

[88] Black people deserve nothing less than everything.

[89] And if that couldn't happen in the United States, they should return to Africa.

[90] It came to Harlem in 1916, and it was rather fortuitous that it came at a time when there was this burgeoning of the street orators, the Ebony Sages, as they called them.

[91] This is Colin Grant.

[92] I'm the author of Negro with a hat, The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey.

[93] Colin is also the son of Jamaican immigrants to the UK, and he's our next guide.

[94] And it has been said that of the population of Harlem ran about that time, 1916, one -fifth of the people in Harlem were from the Caribbean.

[95] And so, in a way, Garvey had a ready -made audience the people who already were drawn to his sound to the Caribbean lilt of his standard Caribbean voice.

[96] Played here by a voice actor.

[97] We are men, human beings, capable of the same acts as any other race, possessing the same circumstances, the same intelligence as any other race.

[98] People were just amazed by the great silver -tonged orator in their midst.

[99] I mean, Garvey had a voice like thunder.

[100] Now Africa's been sleeping, not dead, only sleeping.

[101] Today Africa's walking about not only on our feet, but on our brains.

[102] Without amplification, Garvey could be heard 10 blocks away from the 135th Street to 125th Street.

[103] You can enslave for 300 years the bodies of men.

[104] You can shackle the hands of men.

[105] You can shackle the feet of men.

[106] You can imprison the bodies of men.

[107] But you cannot shackle our emperseller.

[108] imprison the minds of men.

[109] But it wasn't just the power of his voice.

[110] It was what he was saying that really drew people in.

[111] Because he was speaking their thoughts.

[112] He was a great romancer and dreamer, and he articulated in a way that people thought they were hearing themselves.

[113] Within a few months, he became the person that anybody with any kind of feeling about wanting to tap into the zeitguise that person had to hear Marcus Garvey.

[114] He was proud and full of bravado, and his message was equally fierce.

[115] Black people should be brash about their pride for their culture, their skin color, their history, and that the only path to liberation was for all African people of the world to unite.

[116] The idea was bold and seductive, and he came up with another idea that would embody the entire movement, a shipping company that would allow allow anyone to invest in black empowerment.

[117] He called it the Black Star Line.

[118] And that idea really caught on.

[119] It was an idea that excited, enthralled black people, no matter their station, from the poorest to the wealthiest, actually.

[120] And the Black Star Line was going to be a shipping line that would trade between America, Europe and Africa.

[121] but it also would be the shipping line that would lead to the repatriation of African Americans to Africa.

[122] Any black person who could muster the $5 to buy a share in the Black Star Line could become a shareholder.

[123] And pretty soon thousands of them did.

[124] Investment in the Black Star Line was historic.

[125] So much so that at every meeting that Garvey spoke, there would be these huge drums, beer barrel -sized drums, and they would be packed full of dollar notes.

[126] Even if people didn't want necessary to go to Africa, they wanted to show their support for this exciting idea.

[127] The Black Star Line embodied everything Garvey had preached in Harlem about self -defense, self -confidence, and self -sufficiency.

[128] These are poor people.

[129] and they brought into the idea, they brought into the romance and the dream of it, and it made them feel important.

[130] It made them feel part of something larger than themselves, and it also felt possible.

[131] The thing with such epic, radical dreams is that sometimes they're so big they collapse in on themselves.

[132] By the 1920s, the authorities, including a young Justice Department staffer named J. Edgar Hoover, were investigating Garvey.

[133] The ships he purchased were in disrepair and his allies began turning against him.

[134] Eventually, he was convicted for mail fraud, jailed, and then deported back to Jamaica.

[135] With the Black Starline bankrupted, Marcus Garvey's career was more or less over.

[136] What he left behind was a promise, one of the most ambitious visions of emancipation, self -worth, and self -determination that Black Americans had ever seen.

[137] This is the great conundrum of Marcus Garvey.

[138] He was a great promoter.

[139] He managed to excite people, but he was a poor businessman.

[140] Fundamentally, he was a great starter, but not such a great finisher.

[141] He was a dreamer and a romancer, and the great thing about Marcus Garvey is that he encouraged people to believe in themselves.

[142] I mean, it sounds quite small, but it's a quite big thing.

[143] When you're at the footstall of society, you are despised, you are the wretched of the earth.

[144] Garvey was saying, fundamentally, you are at the footstallel of society.

[145] You are worthy.

[146] His greatest sale was to sell the black person to themselves.

[147] No matter how you choose to look at his legacy, Marcus Garvey's impact on future generations is undeniable.

[148] His ideas have remained a powerful part of our culture.

[149] Black empowerment and Pan -Africanism were a part of his vision for the future.

[150] And Colin Grant says that Garvey remains alive because his ideas live on through the people who still aspire to live the future he dreamed.

[151] When I was researching Marcus Garvey, I came across a speech that he gave in Nova Scotia in the 1930s.

[152] I was reading this long speech, and towards the end of the speech, I came across this line, this phrase which looked very familiar.

[153] And the line was, emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but our self can free our mind.

[154] We must emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.

[155] So when you sway to Bob Marlin and the Wailers, you're really dancing to Marcus Garvey.

[156] That was historian Colin Grant, talking to us about the life and mind of Marcus Garvey.

[157] Coming up, we leave the world of dreams, for a world hidden right in front of us.

[158] Hi, this is Suzanne in Minneapolis, and you're listening to ThruLine.

[159] We wanted to take a moment to talk about ThruLine Plus.

[160] Subscribers to ThruLine Plus help make shows like this one possible, and they get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor -free.

[161] To find out more, head over to plus .npr .org slash ThruLine.

[162] And to everyone who's already signed up, thank you so much.

[163] Part 2.

[164] The world of nuisance.

[165] Pess, they're the little things that plague us.

[166] They burrow into the hidey holes, nooks, and crannies of our world and make themselves at home.

[167] It's easy to write them off as the vermin we live with, an inconsequential or tiny annoyance at most.

[168] But as history tells us, sometimes the smallest foes have the largest impact.

[169] For example, we all think we know the story of the American Revolution.

[170] People were mad about taxes, the Boston Tea Party broke out, George Washington and his crew took up arms and defeated the Imperial British Army with unconventional tactics.

[171] And while some of that is sort of true, there's a big, or should we say, small part of the story that's rarely mentioned.

[172] Mosquitoes.

[173] It's 1778, three years into the American Revolutionary War.

[174] The first half of the war was fought.

[175] almost entirely in the north.

[176] George Washington and the Continental Army were having mixed success and spent a lot of energy running from the British Army, trying to buy more time.

[177] The British are very upset that General Washington won't essentially commit to a decisive battle to end the war.

[178] And Washington knows he can't do this because he doesn't have anything.

[179] If he commits to a decisive battle and loses, the revolution's over.

[180] That's Dr. Tim Weingard.

[181] He's a history professor at Colorado Mesa University, an author of the book, The Mosquito, A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.

[182] But as long as he can keep an army, however ill -supplied and under -equipped in the field, the British have to defeat and chase this army.

[183] All the while, he's desperately waiting for help to come.

[184] He waits for his political lords, essentially, in the Continental Congress to get some supplies, get some allies, get some weapons, and hopefully get France on board.

[185] This is essentially playing cat and mouse, and it frustrates the British.

[186] So, they changed their strategy.

[187] The British concentrated their forces in the southern colonies of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

[188] Second in command of this campaign was General Charles Cornwallis, who landed in Charleston with 9 ,000 British soldiers.

[189] And these soldiers come primarily from Northern England and Scotland, these British soldiers.

[190] So the American soldiers have been seasoned to their colonial malaria.

[191] They've had malaria.

[192] They've been seasoned to it.

[193] Where these British soldiers come over, they haven't been seasoned to their own English malaria, let alone colonial stew of malaria.

[194] And this new set of circumstances in the South forced Cornwallis to adopt some unusual tactics.

[195] If you look at his campaign in the South in 1780, 1781, he is zigzagging all over the place.

[196] It is one of the strangest marches you've ever seen on a map.

[197] And so why is Cornwall doing this?

[198] Is he running away from the Americans?

[199] Is he chasing the Americans?

[200] No, he's trying to find a healthy spot for his troops.

[201] With a third of my army sick and wounded, which I was obliged to carry in wagons or on horseback, the remainder without shoes and worn down with fatigue, I thought it was time to look for some place of rest and river.

[202] And he says this repeatedly in his correspondences.

[203] He says that malaria is ruining my army.

[204] And he's asking British loyalists in the southern colonies where there's a healthy spot.

[205] And because they're seasoned, they say, oh, just go that way.

[206] And then he gets there and his troops are cut to pieces by malaria again.

[207] I am now employed in disposing of the sick and wounded.

[208] And in procuring supplies of all kinds to put the troops into a proper state to take the field.

[209] I am, likewise, impatiently looking out for the expected reinforcement from Europe.

[210] To enable me either to act offensively or even to maintain myself in the upper parts of the country, where alone I can hope to reserve the troops from the fatal sickness which so nearly ruined the army last autumn.

[211] April 10th, 1781.

[212] As Cornwallis was running around looking for a safe, mosquito -free spot for his troops, he got an order from his superiors to retreat and fortify at the port of Yorktown in Virginia.

[213] Yorktown is a little hamlet situated in the tidewater estuaries between the James and York rivers.

[214] Essentially, it's rice patties, it's marshland.

[215] So he holds up in Yorktown and the French Navy comes or eventually joined by General Washington, and the Americans, and they ensnare the British in Yorktown.

[216] This is in August, which is prime mosquito time, and prime mosquito country in these marshlands surrounding New Yorktown.

[217] His army was decimated, and in October, General Cornwallis surrendered.

[218] I have the mortification to inform your excellency that I have been forced to give up the post and to surrender the time.

[219] troops under my command.

[220] The troops being much weakened by sickness, as well as by the fire of the besiegers.

[221] In his correspondences, Cornwallis lay some of the blame for his surrender on malaria.

[222] He's like, I don't have anybody who can even stand up to fight.

[223] He only has 35 % of his troops, roughly, who are able to even stand up.

[224] Our force diminished daily by sickness, to little more More than 3 ,200 rank and file fit for duty.

[225] The rest are either sick, dead, or dying of malaria.

[226] The siege of Yorktown was the final battle in the war between the colonies and Great Britain, opening the path for the formation of the United States.

[227] So in a way, Dionnophle's mosquito defounding mother of the United States, and she deserves to have her nice proboscis face tucked in between Washington and Jefferson on Mount That was Dr. Tim Weingard, a professor of history at Colorado Mesa University.

[228] Okay, so now mosquitoes are supposed to be the good guys, the underdogs that help the U .S. ensure its independence.

[229] Yeah, like, what's next?

[230] Rats are supposed to be our friends?

[231] They're very intelligent, they're very adaptable, just like humans, you know, they moved around with us because they can live in lots of different places and figure out how to survive.

[232] Yep, we're taking a closer look.

[233] at rats.

[234] During the pandemic, rats reminded us that in the large scheme of things, we're just one more animal in the city.

[235] One of our producers, Lawrence Wu, watched it happen in New York City, where he and I live.

[236] I mean, what's New York City without rats?

[237] He picks up the story.

[238] You know, you kind of see the landscape and you're looking for signs of rats everywhere.

[239] Are there burrows there?

[240] Is there a rat feeding in that corner?

[241] So, yeah, they're just, to me, like, part of the city.

[242] This is Dr. Jason Munci South.

[243] He's a professor of biology at Fordham University in the Bronx, where he leads his own research lab.

[244] And since about 2008, when I moved to New York City, I've been studying the effects of urbanization on wild animals and also pest species like rats.

[245] Jason's lab focuses on understanding how humans and cities affect wild animal populations in those places.

[246] So I call them up to get a little more insight into what is up with New York City's rats.

[247] They're primarily nocturnal.

[248] They live in burrows, so they'll burrow into soil and spend, you know, most of the day down there.

[249] And they build these colonies, almost like villages of related rats.

[250] They're highly social.

[251] They spend a lot of time with other rats.

[252] They'd have to be somewhere near water sources.

[253] And they are, you know, territorial to some degree.

[254] Over time, they'll add more tunnels and they'll start to connect, they'll sort of overlap with neighboring boroughs.

[255] And so it becomes this big tangle.

[256] Like a subway, but for rats.

[257] So I've seen them, you know, in like New York City parks where there wasn't a lot of control going on.

[258] Where you could count like 300 holes and you could just watch them coming in and out all day.

[259] Seeing all those rats coming in and out of those rat holes sparked the question.

[260] What's going on with rats in New York City?

[261] How did these animals get here?

[262] And Jason decided to build a whole study around it.

[263] The first thing he discovered was that New York City is actually overrun by just one kind of rat, the brown rat.

[264] Their Latin name is Rattis Norvegicus, which would translate to the Norway rat.

[265] But that's a misnomer.

[266] They did not originate in Norway.

[267] We don't exactly know why they have that name.

[268] Jason and his team.

[269] decided that in order to find the actual origin of the New York City rat, they had to compare its DNA to other rats in the world to find a match, kind of like an Ancestry .com or 23M