Legado Onírico: Criatividade e Neurociência em Diálogo — A Scholarly Appraisal

Abstract

Legado Onírico: Criatividade e Neurociência em Diálogo — A Scholarly Appraisal AbstractLegado Onírico: Criatividade e Neurociência em Diálogo (2026) offers an interdisciplinaryexamination of dreams at the intersection of brain, mind, culture, creativity, and AI. Publishedby Pod Editora, authored by Marleide da Mota Gomes, the volume proposes that dreamsfunction as biological, emotional, and creative processes—a synthesis of empiricalneuroscience and humanistic interpretation. The book’s central organizing principle is theproposal that dreams serve multiple functions, including memory consolidation, emotionalregulation, threat simulation, and creative incubation. da Mota Gomes achieves this synthesisby engaging with classical theories from Freud and Jung alongside contemporary frameworks,including Activation-Synthesis Theory from Hobson and McCarley, Threat Simulation Theoryfrom Revonsuo, Predictive Processing, and Neuropsychoanalysis from Solms. The work alsoincorporates emerging computational models such as the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis, theAdversarial Dream Process, and the Dream Denoising Model, though these remain speculativeanalogies rather than established findings.One of the book’s notable features is its use of a fictional protagonist, Lara, aneuropsychologist and artist whose narrative thread weaves through the theoretical material.Lara’s dream journal and art series, Traduções Oníricas, provide an experiential anchor forabstract concepts. The book is further distinguished by AI-generated illustrations createdusing DALL·E, inspired by surrealism and magical realism, visual elements that reinforce theargument about the fundamentally symbolic nature of dream content. Structured into twelvechapters with five appendices covering theoretical frameworks, epigraphs, artist references, aglossary, and author biographies, the work positions itself as accessible to both specialistsand general readers.This critical self-assessment examines the book’s content, structure, and theoreticalframeworks, noting both its ambitious integrative project and the limitations inherent in suchbreadth. While Legado Onírico offers a valuable interdisciplinary map of dream research,several aspects merit careful consideration: the varying empirical support across frameworks,the book’s reliance on speculative computational analogies, the narrative device’s implicationsfor scholarly rigor, and the absence of non-Western perspectives on dreaming.Keywords: Dreams; Sleep, REM; Neurosciences; Medicine in the Arts.