Creatures of the Mind

If dreams fuel creativity, what happens when they fall silent? As science searches for the unconscious through brain scans and complex data, this film asks whether the answers might instead lie in the Creatures of the Mind.

Isolated during the global pandemic, filmmaker Marcelo Gomes realises that he has not only lost the ability to make films – he has also stopped dreaming. In search of understanding, he turns to Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro, whose research into ‘creatures of the mind’ explores beings born from imagination, dreams and folklore, opening pathways to the unconscious. Narrated from the director’s autobiographical perspective, the film follows Ribeiro as he forges connections between Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian ancestral knowledge, contemporary neuroscience and psychedelic research. Eclectic, visionary and surreal, Creatures of the Mind examines how non-Western traditions can expand science’s understanding of unconsciousness, symbolism and trance – and why some questions ultimately resist rational explanation.

– Saulė Savanevičiūtė