Where Dreams Come From Sanjeev Chatterjee

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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