Speaker 1: There's a lot of talk about mindfulness these days, which
Speaker 1: is fantastic. I mean, we all want to be more
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Speaker 1: your mind, Change life.
Speaker 2: One third of our lives is potentially spent dreaming. Your
Speaker 2: waking life is feeding your dream life. That's a solar
Speaker 2: flare from your brain in a unique state that you
Speaker 2: can't get to during the day. Dual trained brain surgeon
Speaker 2: and neuroscientists Doctor Raoul Jandyall the measurements of emotion in
Speaker 2: our dreaming brain can reach a top speed our waking
Speaker 2: brain can never reach. How are you processing? How are
Speaker 2: you metabolizing the most difficult thing in your day?
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, I've got some huge news to share with you.
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Speaker 2: The number one health and wellness podcast Jay Sheety Jay
Speaker 2: Shetty see Zy Sheet.
Speaker 1: Everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, to number one health
Speaker 1: podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one
Speaker 1: of you that come back every week to listen, learn
Speaker 1: and grow. I'm so excited because we've really been tapping
Speaker 1: here On Purpose into things you're fascinated about questions that
Speaker 1: you're thinking about, topics, you're exploring themes that you're wondering about,
Speaker 1: and this was one of those that I can't wait
Speaker 1: to share with you. This has been a theme I've
Speaker 1: been fascinated about. We're talking to the expert, the person
Speaker 1: who's thinking about it differently, who's open to the idea
Speaker 1: of this truly being discovery, all based on curiosity. Doctor
Speaker 1: Raoul Johndel is a dual trained brain surgeon and neuroscientist
Speaker 1: at City of Hope in Los Angeles. Doctor John Deale
Speaker 1: leads the John Deale Lab, which explores the intersection of
Speaker 1: neurobiology and cancer. As part of his nonprofit that he founded,
Speaker 1: he teaches and performs pediatric neurosurgery in charity hospitals in
Speaker 1: South America and Eastern Europe. Today, we're talking about his
Speaker 1: newest book out now, This is Why You Dream. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show, Roul John Dale Roll, It's great to
Speaker 1: see you.
Speaker 2: Pleasure of mind.
Speaker 1: Thank you for being here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited to do this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm really grateful. And like I said to you, honestly,
Speaker 1: this is usually when we're doing an interview, I'm like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm gonna you know, I've got certain questions.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go with the flow and the amount
Speaker 1: of questions we've had from our team, our audience, our community.
Speaker 1: It's never happened before. I'm just telling you that. And
Speaker 1: so you're going to see me reading out questions from
Speaker 1: real people who've sent them in for you to understand
Speaker 1: more about dreaming, which I think is probably one of
Speaker 1: the most undiscovered, untapped, misunderstood, or completely on on thestudy
Speaker 1: areas of our lives. So let's dive straight into it.
Speaker 1: And the first question I have for you is does
Speaker 1: everyone dream?
Speaker 2: I think so. So here's how I describe it. I
Speaker 2: would first say, let's bust a major myth that dreaming
Speaker 2: and sleep is a time of rest for our brains.
Speaker 2: Our brains are not resting while we sleep. Just imagine
Speaker 2: somebody lying down and when they're sleeping, the heart is
Speaker 2: flickering a little bit of electricity from the EKG that
Speaker 2: we put on the surface of their heart. We put
Speaker 2: a bunch of stickers on the surface of the scalp,
Speaker 2: and there's vibrant electricity while we're sleeping. The electricity our
Speaker 2: brain generates while we sleep is as hot as the
Speaker 2: electricity our brains are generating now, so that's the first thing.
Speaker 2: The second thing is the heart when it's pushing up
Speaker 2: the blood, the brain is mopping up glucose. It's burning
Speaker 2: hot metabolically, so inside our skull while we're lying down,
Speaker 2: even though we don't remember a lot of it, we're
Speaker 2: burning hot and we're spark electricity. So people who remember
Speaker 2: their dreams and people who don't remember their dreams, that
Speaker 2: brain is still sparking hot and generating a lot of electricity.
Speaker 2: So I think it's more of memory recall in the morning.
Speaker 2: At the same time, we all know about a nightmare,
Speaker 2: so we've all had one dream. The question is why
Speaker 2: do some people dream more, dream less, or remember their
Speaker 2: dreams more remember their dreams less. And that's something I
Speaker 2: think is related to the variety of human experience. We
Speaker 2: don't hold our waking thoughts to the same rigid contours, right,
Speaker 2: so our dreamscape, our dream life is individual between us,
Speaker 2: and we remember more when we're younger, we remember less as
Speaker 2: we get older, and then in certain diseases, dreams come
Speaker 2: to the rescue. And it seems now that at the
Speaker 2: end of life, like with my cancer patients, dreams return
Speaker 2: and they're filled with reconciliation. You would think in their struggle,
Speaker 2: like you know, there would be dark, but they're actually positive.
Speaker 2: So those patterns of dreams are there. The brain electricity
Speaker 2: is firing while we sleep, and that's the sort of
Speaker 2: foundation from which I try to find meaning.
Speaker 1: And dreaming absolutely, I mean, the book is called This
Speaker 1: Is Why You Dream? Why do we dream? And why
Speaker 1: is it important for us to understand why we dream?
Speaker 1: Because I think a lot of people say, yeah, I
Speaker 1: dream sometimes sometimes I don't. Who cares? What's the big deal?
Speaker 1: But I'm fascinated by it. I know a lot of
Speaker 1: people are. So why do we dream? And why is
Speaker 1: it important to try to understand why we dream?
Speaker 2: The it's not a big deal. It's completely off for
Speaker 2: those people who think it. If they understand one third
Speaker 2: of our lives is potentially spent dreaming and the brain
Speaker 2: shuts down right, it's just one third, like that can't
Speaker 2: be passive and it puts you down right, Like you
Speaker 2: get sleep pressure, like I got to sleep well when
Speaker 2: I was in training in surgical training. We skip a
Speaker 2: night of sleep. What happens when somebody skips a night
Speaker 2: of sleep. The next night, they dream harder and earlier.
Speaker 2: If I can be so bold, I think sleep is
Speaker 2: for the brain. It's not for our thigh muscle, it's
Speaker 2: not for our liver. There are some metabolic changes. I'm
Speaker 2: not discounting all of it, but the real thing driving
Speaker 2: us to sleep is our brain. What does our brain
Speaker 2: do just vibrantly when we sleep, it's dream. So that's
Speaker 2: like my straight up answer about like that thing that's
Speaker 2: not happening on accident, right, that's not a glitch that
Speaker 2: didn't last through thirty thousand generations accidentally. And so then
Speaker 2: the question becomes if we have this vibrant one third
Speaker 2: of our lives that we partially remember sometimes remember sometimes
Speaker 2: it's an exciting journey, sometimes an erotic journey. Sometimes it's
Speaker 2: a nightmare, like what's that all about? You know? And
Speaker 2: the way I've come to understand it is, first, you know,
Speaker 2: given respect to people who've tried to come up with
Speaker 2: some ideas like it's a threat rehearsal if we're running
Speaker 2: from a wooly mammoth and our dreams were better prepared
Speaker 2: for during the day, what I would say is maybe,
Speaker 2: And when I say maybe, you're likely it's not a
Speaker 2: respect for you and your listeners. I don't want to
Speaker 2: be that guy that comes in here says yes no
Speaker 2: about something as big and magical as dreaming, so threat rehearsal.
Speaker 2: Maybe some people think it's a nocturnal therapist because towards
Speaker 2: the morning, when we have more of our vivid dreams,
Speaker 2: the emotional balance, the valence they call it, tends to
Speaker 2: be more positive. Maybe I like to think of it
Speaker 2: as something that sparks creativity because of what happens with
Speaker 2: the dreaming brain. The dreaming brain looks for looser dots
Speaker 2: to connect. It's imaginative by design, logic is dampened down.
Speaker 2: So I think it's our creativity engine. And then the
Speaker 2: way I put it all together is with something straight
Speaker 2: up called use it or lose it that people know
Speaker 2: about when we talk about the brain, right, they say, hey,
Speaker 2: use it or lose it. We know if we don't
Speaker 2: use our biceps, the atrophy, but our day. If you
Speaker 2: look at the brain, activation electricity is so narrow. The
Speaker 2: brain wants to be efficient, right, because it's an energy hog.
Speaker 2: It's only like four or five pounds, but it uses
Speaker 2: twenty percent of our blood. So the brain during the
Speaker 2: day to navigate the world task on outward. Executive network
Speaker 2: logic wants to be efficient driving down the one to
Speaker 2: one easily, going on the tube easily, not have to
Speaker 2: activate everything to get that done. If we only use
Speaker 2: those limited parts of our brain during the day and
Speaker 2: didn't have some way to high intensity train them, those
Speaker 2: would go derelic we wouldn't use them, and we may
Speaker 2: lose them. So I think in the biggest way possible
Speaker 2: is that dreaming process. Dreams and dreaming is high intensity
Speaker 2: training for our brain. It keeps those corners engaged, It
Speaker 2: keeps those neurons firing that might not during the day,
Speaker 2: and those are available to us the next day for
Speaker 2: a creative process for the next day, or the next year,
Speaker 2: or the next generation for an adaptive process. That's my biggest,
Speaker 2: most romantic way of thinking about about why we dream
Speaker 2: so hard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like them, maybe because I think we've all
Speaker 1: had different dreams that you feel you had for different reasons,
Speaker 1: And there are some dreams that you did feel well,
Speaker 1: Like you said, like you're a nocturnal therapist, this feeling
Speaker 1: of like Okay.
Speaker 2: I'm healing them there, you're working something out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're working something out. I've definitely had dreams where
Speaker 1: I feel like, oh my gosh, like this feels like
Speaker 1: it's mirroring my reality and I'm either preparing or I'm
Speaker 1: dealing with it internally. And I think you're so right
Speaker 1: that there's so many different processes and it's hard to
Speaker 1: it down to one. Is there a way to start
Speaker 1: to label and define or do you think that's unhealthy
Speaker 1: when it comes to dreaming?
Speaker 2: Perfect question. So to the maybe, I'll add likely, you know,
Speaker 2: not yes and not no when it comes to my dream,
Speaker 2: your dream infinitely wild. Okay, but what happens when you
Speaker 2: start looking at ten thousand dreams? What happens when you
Speaker 2: start So I'm over here, so there is no like
Speaker 2: professor of dream science. Right, So now I was like
Speaker 2: when they asked me, the publisher asked me, like, can
Speaker 2: you put a book together about this? I think we're
Speaker 2: vibing about this before we uh, before we went live
Speaker 2: with this or recording with this. And it was like
Speaker 2: they're like, you wrote this thing about the brain, like
Speaker 2: you know, smart drugs, Alzheimer's creativity. Then you wrote this
Speaker 2: thing about the mind, like resilience and trauma and belief
Speaker 2: and about your own struggles, why don't you put together
Speaker 2: something about dreams from a scientific perspective that everybody can read.
Speaker 2: And I was like, there's going to be so many gaps,
Speaker 2: and they said, then let us know where the gaps are,
Speaker 2: say maybe, say likely, and say I wonder, I believe,
Speaker 2: And that's what I've tried to do in the book.
Speaker 2: But to your question about when I started this process,
Speaker 2: when I looked at not your dream, my dream, but
Speaker 2: ten thousand dreams, Aristotle was writing about lucid dreaming a
Speaker 2: couple hundred years ago, they're still writing about being chased
Speaker 2: or falling, and I was like, wait a second, there
Speaker 2: are patterns to dream reports, like now they have dream banks.
Speaker 2: So the first thing I noticed was nightmares and erotic
Speaker 2: dreams are essentially universal. And I say essentially because it's
Speaker 2: ninety plus in this world is considered a hundred, right,
Speaker 2: because that's just how science works when you look at
Speaker 2: questionnaires and surveys, So everybody's at a nightmare, erotic dreams
Speaker 2: are almost all the way up there. And then chasing falling,
Speaker 2: falling teeth, that seems to be common. And then there
Speaker 2: was a dream that was very rarely reported doing math.
Speaker 2: I don't like math, so I was like, that's all
Speaker 2: good for me. But but you start when you look
Speaker 2: at lots of thousands of dreams, like why is that
Speaker 2: one so low? Now walk with me over here. Then
Speaker 2: you start looking at brain scans and brain electricity and
Speaker 2: what happens. What's the difference between the waking brain and
Speaker 2: the dreaming brain. Right in a twenty four hour cycle,
Speaker 2: we're about two thirds waking brain and one third dreaming brain.
Speaker 2: And there are some transition zones that I love, like
Speaker 2: I call them liminal states or blurry zones that we
Speaker 2: can get into. But that when you see that and
Speaker 2: you say, well, what's the difference I started off with like,
Speaker 2: they're both burning hot, they're both sparkling electricity, So what's
Speaker 2: the difference. So when you go from waking brain to
Speaker 2: dreaming brain, what happens is the need to look outward changes, right,
Speaker 2: And so the executive network, a collection of structures, not
Speaker 2: just one thing, dampens logic and math ability damping. They
Speaker 2: don't turn off. Nothing turns off on the brain, otherwise
Speaker 2: you know you'd have a stroke. So it dampens the
Speaker 2: imagination network and the emotional systems called the limbic structures
Speaker 2: are liberated. So if we know now that the dreaming
Speaker 2: brain as a measurement, not my opinion, right, we can
Speaker 2: talk about opinions, but this is a measurement. If the
Speaker 2: dreaming brain has dampened logic and reason and math, liberated emotion,
Speaker 2: hyper visual, it kind of makes sense why we don't
Speaker 2: see a lot of math, because that part of the
Speaker 2: brain that does that is to take in a back
Speaker 2: seat while we dream. So I said, okay, even if
Speaker 2: that's the only thing I can say in this book,
Speaker 2: and some youngster, you know, ten twenty thirty years from now,
Speaker 2: it takes more data from dream banks that are more
Speaker 2: inclusive and bringing in more people that patterns of how
Speaker 2: we dream, you know, and what we dream can be
Speaker 2: explained by the brain. Thought to me, that was fascinating.
Speaker 2: So dreams are not limitless. Yours is mine is when
Speaker 2: you look at a lot of them, nightmares happen universally,
Speaker 2: erotic dreams happen essentially universally, and then we find very emotional,
Speaker 2: visual movement based dreams.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. I mean, you don't even think about it
Speaker 1: that way, and I think so often it's kind of
Speaker 1: it's interesting because it's a microcosm of how we live
Speaker 1: our lives, Like we live our lives thinking no one
Speaker 1: understands me, no one knows what I'm going through, only
Speaker 1: I have this experience. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: when you zoom out and you look at the patterns,
Speaker 1: you're like, wait a minute, we're all struggling with the
Speaker 1: same thing. I was just talking to someone earlier and
Speaker 1: we were talking about how we seem to be the
Speaker 1: problem solvers in our families, and then you start realizing, how,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, we're all trying to solve the same problems.
Speaker 1: We're dealing with the same emotions, and those patterns are
Speaker 1: so useful in finding so have they basically looked at
Speaker 1: dream patterns and then looked at stress patterns and lifestyle patterns?
Speaker 1: Like is that what you're measuring them against? Or what
Speaker 1: are the patterns being measured against? So if out of
Speaker 1: the ten thousand people, nine thousand people dreamt about their
Speaker 1: teeth falling out, what then are we measuring in their
Speaker 1: life to make sense of that dream?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. And also we tend to
Speaker 2: fall into the same traps, right, I think that looking
Speaker 2: at brain sigence shows that yes, we're individuals, but what's
Speaker 2: driving us and what's holding us is also something we share.
Speaker 2: That's why these conversations, that's why a certain book or
Speaker 2: a certain song, or certain interaction can kind of liberate you.
Speaker 2: And so the way I would explain this is the
Speaker 2: dream patterns that they're looking at. And when I say they,
Speaker 2: I mean twenty forty years of different studies, I'm trying
Speaker 2: to stitch it together. Let me give you a specific one.
Speaker 2: There was one survey questionnaire where women going through divorce
Speaker 2: when their dreams they were reconciling in their dreams, that
Speaker 2: things were breaking up and people were moving on. Those
Speaker 2: as a group tended to recover from divorce better. And
Speaker 2: so when you just look into you just say, okay,
Speaker 2: that's very interesting. Those that were struggling in their dreams
Speaker 2: were also ones more likely to have depression longer. And
Speaker 2: so what that does to me is that invites a conversation.
Speaker 2: So does the dream or the dreaming brain kind of
Speaker 2: give a clue to how well you're coping with your
Speaker 2: real waking life. Stress, That by itself is powerful one
Speaker 2: it knows about it. It ain't some other brain. It's
Speaker 2: your brain, it's just in this dreaming mode, so it
Speaker 2: knows about it. Your waking life is feeding your dream life.
Speaker 2: I mean, six seven, eight hours, how are you processing,
Speaker 2: how are you digesting? How are you metabolizing the most
Speaker 2: difficult thing in your day? And I think that's where
Speaker 2: I love it, is that it's not distinct and that
Speaker 2: the dreaming brain can be your shepherd. It can be
Speaker 2: the thing that helps you process emotional trauma. And for
Speaker 2: people with PTSD, it can actually actually play back flashbacks.
Speaker 2: So it's a wild space that leans emotional, leans visual.
Speaker 2: Let me give you a second example with my patients
Speaker 2: end of life cancer patients dreams are expansive, positive, filled
Speaker 2: with reconciliation. As they're asking for surgery and all that.
Speaker 2: You would think they're all going to be horrific because
Speaker 2: it's dark time stress, right, You would think day stress
Speaker 2: is turned into dreaming stress. But the connection is not clear.
Speaker 2: And that's where I think there's power in our dream life.
Speaker 2: I think, in general, when I look at all the surveys,
Speaker 2: dreaming is our shepherd at the end of life. I
Speaker 2: think nightmares and erotic dreams cultivate the young mind much
Speaker 2: like our minds are cultivating adolescents. Dreams mirror and reflect
Speaker 2: what's going on during our life. For example, pregnancy dreams
Speaker 2: women who are pregnant, their dreams are very different rolling
Speaker 2: over in bed what the babies are gonna be called.
Speaker 2: So sometimes waking anxiety and dream anxiety clearly linked. I
Speaker 2: gotta give a talk tomorrow. I got a dream showing
Speaker 2: up naked. I gotta I gotta exam alarms. Sometimes they're clear,
Speaker 2: Sometimes they're your companion. Pregnancy dreams, end of life dreams
Speaker 2: sometimes are just jumped. Not everything's gonna make sense right,
Speaker 2: Our waking life doesn't make sense. So I think when
Speaker 2: you start to look at those categories, the fourth category
Speaker 2: being universal dreams, nightmares and erotic dreams and children, then
Speaker 2: the one we're left with that the one that now
Speaker 2: I spend even more time with, is that hyper emotional,
Speaker 2: hyper visual that lingers into the next day. What I
Speaker 2: would say is, don't let that one go. That's a
Speaker 2: solar flare from your brain in a unique state that
Speaker 2: you can't get to during the day. Hyper emotional, hyper liberated.
Speaker 2: The measurements of emotion in our dreaming brain can reach
Speaker 2: a top speed. Our waking brain can never reach So
Speaker 2: for me, when I look at the whole thing, the
Speaker 2: hyper emotional, hyper visual with a central image is a
Speaker 2: dream that has broken out from your dream life. That
Speaker 2: is about you that a therapist can't get to. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's your brain conjured it and that's one to reflect on.
Speaker 2: What I would say is like, not every time, not everyone,
Speaker 2: but in our search for wellness and healing, that's a
Speaker 2: free and accessible portal. And when I was working on
Speaker 2: this book with the UK publishers, there were like seven
Speaker 2: or eight people who are like, we're dreaming more, We're
Speaker 2: remembering our dreams more. Some lucid you know, had lucid dreams.
Speaker 2: So that's the second thing I would say is that
Speaker 2: this can be induced and cultivated. You're not a passenger
Speaker 2: with your dream life and what you remember from your
Speaker 2: dream life. You can also cultivate that you're not a
Speaker 2: passenger at that stage either.
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Jay here. My wife and I have
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Speaker 1: Let's talk about that a little. So I was gonna
Speaker 1: ask you, if you don't remember your dream, if you
Speaker 1: don't make the subconscious conscious, does that mean that it
Speaker 1: doesn't have an effect? And are you encouraging us to
Speaker 1: take time to actually make the subconscious conscious and reflect
Speaker 1: on our dreams.
Speaker 2: I would say the first question is I can't answer
Speaker 2: that fully. The second question is absolutely try to engage
Speaker 2: your dream life sleep entry when you go from waking
Speaker 2: to dreaming like Salvador Dali did or Christopher Nolan's talking
Speaker 2: about inception sleep exit, which we can get into lucid dreaming.
Speaker 2: The answer to the question should we engage our dream life? Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: I got a lot of science on that. I got
Speaker 2: to do it.
Speaker 1: Let's dive. Let's let's dive into that. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: so many things I want to talk about, but let's
Speaker 1: seeing as we've gone there now, let's let's dive into
Speaker 1: it now. So let's talk about the process of being
Speaker 1: more of a proactive leader in our dreams and not
Speaker 1: a passenger in our dreams. What absolutely look right? Because
Speaker 1: I would argue that anyone I talked to we're all
Speaker 1: passengers in our dreams. We simply go to bed. We
Speaker 1: may remember, we may not remember. We show up. It's
Speaker 1: like the car Jenny, right, we jumped in the car,
Speaker 1: you got to stap for a bit, you got to
Speaker 1: the other side. Maybe you remember a tree you sore
Speaker 1: along the way, or your mom and dad did something
Speaker 1: when you were a kid, but you don't remember most
Speaker 1: of it. It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2: You're in the driver's seat of a car you can't control.
Speaker 2: It seems that way that one will get to with
Speaker 2: lucid dreaming. But how you can affect your dreams, because
Speaker 2: we've gotten to the science I believe the irrelevant. Let's
Speaker 2: take this first stage. You go from waking to dreaming
Speaker 2: right whatever time. That is not every time, not for everyone,
Speaker 2: but just the fact that it's possible. That's something called
Speaker 2: sleep entry. Okay, with those surface electros on our scalp,
Speaker 2: the electricity blends. It's like a liminal state. Like I
Speaker 2: used to be a scuba diver, when when you go
Speaker 2: from a freshwater river to an ocean, it's not like
Speaker 2: there's a crisp line, there's a blurry zone. Similarly, when
Speaker 2: we go from waking to dreaming, there's about a ten
Speaker 2: to fifteen minute period called sleep entry. Salvador Dali and
Speaker 2: some current tech companies in San Francisco, they believe that
Speaker 2: during that period you kind of sort of have access
Speaker 2: to that divergent creative ideation of dreaming and that they
Speaker 2: can extract ideas from there. So much so Thomas Edison
Speaker 2: with the light bulb, would like would fall asleep in
Speaker 2: a chair and when he'd fall asleep and he'd start
Speaker 2: himself awake, he'd write down what he was thinking. That
Speaker 2: that was a scene and inception. Right. So I'm just
Speaker 2: up bringing the science in, But that's there. Christopher Nolan's
Speaker 2: talking about that. Salvador Dolly wrote a book about that.
Speaker 2: You know, his stuff is real, like the and so
Speaker 2: what that period is the first entry into dream life
Speaker 2: that you can still hold on to. And what we're
Speaker 2: finding is that people have more interesting ideas, they have
Speaker 2: more divergent thinking and creative ideas at that window. Is
Speaker 2: that But to be clear your trouble at work, you
Speaker 2: got to create a project. Is that going to guarantee it? No,
Speaker 2: But it's a habit of respecting that transition liminal zone
Speaker 2: as a portal to a state your brain is not
Speaker 2: in when you're awake or not in when you're dreaming. Right,
Speaker 2: So that's one thing that people can do to cultivate
Speaker 2: in that same area. Some people peel and report questionnaires
Speaker 2: and surveys, not measurements that what you think about at
Speaker 2: that time will be more likely to populate your dream life,
Speaker 2: whether you remember or not, and may lead to the
Speaker 2: aha moment the next day. Let me give you a
Speaker 2: specific example. I'm a cancer surgeon. Cancer eats some blood
Speaker 2: vessels and tissues in different ways on challenging cases. I'll
Speaker 2: flip the images through. That's the last thing I go
Speaker 2: to bed thinking about. And somebody asked me this in London.
Speaker 2: They said, well, your dream of surgery. I said, no,
Speaker 2: I've never dreamt. I've never dreamt a surgery, but I
Speaker 2: have a lot of dreams of scuba diving, navigating mazes,
Speaker 2: going through forests, and so what I concluded is my
Speaker 2: opinion is that it's a three dimensional space. And I
Speaker 2: know I'm working on a three dimensional creative project and
Speaker 2: that my dream life is somehow rehearsing that, practicing that
Speaker 2: providing me with that maneuver in a complex surgery. And
Speaker 2: I say, manah, that was where did that come from?
Speaker 2: Sometimes I think it wasn't like in this scenario six,
Speaker 2: I will come up with solution four. No, Like things
Speaker 2: arise during our waking life, and I think that dreaming
Speaker 2: brain builds that. So sleep entry for waking up intentionally
Speaker 2: and writing down your thoughts and journaling at that moment,
Speaker 2: journaling in general about what you want to dream about.
Speaker 2: For me, looking at pictures about a surgery. Those are
Speaker 2: specific things as you fall asleep that somebody can try.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's fascinating because I think journaling has taken off
Speaker 1: so much in culture, and.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to bring some science to it.
Speaker 1: I think the act of journaling straight after waking up,
Speaker 1: like immediately. I know for a fact that if I
Speaker 1: pick up my phone first thing in the morning, which
Speaker 1: I try to avoid to do. But when it does happen,
Speaker 1: I forget my dream immediately. Yeah, And I know I
Speaker 1: wake up kind of of in a dream state and
Speaker 1: then I completely shut it off. Have you found links
Speaker 1: between going to sleep with your phone or without your
Speaker 1: phone and how that affects our dreams? Or if you
Speaker 1: watch a particular show and TV and how does that
Speaker 1: affect your dream and what you do in the morning.
Speaker 1: Does that have any correlation?
Speaker 2: So that's a great question. The thing you said about
Speaker 2: waking up, I'll get to that at sleep Exit because
Speaker 2: there's some interesting science there. But when you look at
Speaker 2: all these surveys, that's why I open up with, like,
Speaker 2: we need more dream banks. We need people who have
Speaker 2: a great exposure to social media to start talking about
Speaker 2: their dreams. At this point, it doesn't look like they
Speaker 2: populate dreams. Let's take a specific example. Erotic dreams tend
Speaker 2: to be about a narrow group of people in your
Speaker 2: life family, even when you're younger, repellent bosses and celebrities.
Speaker 2: So I'm curious to see like right, like So, now
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean there's one hundred papers on that, but
Speaker 2: those are the spring, that's the sprinkling of information that
Speaker 2: I saw, Like, so what becomes familiar to the bosses. Well,
Speaker 2: you know people can have like awkward dreams about bosses,
Speaker 2: is right, they have sexual dreams about people they actually
Speaker 2: are not attracted to. That's a big category in erotic dreams.
Speaker 1: But is there any reasoning to that specifically because being
Speaker 1: erotic dreams about people you are not attracted to, Like,
Speaker 1: where does that come from?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I think it's now we're getting into opinion.
Speaker 2: I think it's a power dynamic play and I think
Speaker 2: intimacy can be both collaborative and also a power dynamic
Speaker 2: in some mix of it. All right, but that's just
Speaker 2: that's an expiration. But erotic dreams, since we're there and
Speaker 2: we'll get back to sleep exit is they're interesting. We
Speaker 2: all get them. They come before we've done the erotic act,
Speaker 2: even if we haven't seen it. So it's it's almost
Speaker 2: like an instruction, if you will, an inheritance of thinking,
Speaker 2: not just risk taking or mental health, but we inherit
Speaker 2: those dreams. Even to people who never go on to
Speaker 2: have sex, they still have erotic dreams, almost like a
Speaker 2: playbook that's meant for a mind to activate our brain
Speaker 2: and bodies for the act to pro create. That's the
Speaker 2: big topic. The specific thing is across cultures, different over generations,
Speaker 2: the percentages are surprisingly similar ninety plus. The other surprising
Speaker 2: thing is that eighty to ninety percent in these reports,
Speaker 2: infidelity cheating is common erotic dreams, whether you're in a
Speaker 2: healthy relationship, whether you're lying about in a healthy relationship
Speaker 2: and covening somebody else, or whether you're in a bad relationship.
Speaker 2: It's almost like almost like a semi built in thing.
Speaker 2: And I think that's how I've learned to think about
Speaker 2: erotic dreams is that's just desire. It's like a flare
Speaker 2: of desire. It interestingly tends to be toward a narrow group,
Speaker 2: but the acts tend to be wild.
Speaker 1: There's a few points that you made in the book
Speaker 1: that fascinated me. Seeing as we're on the topic of
Speaker 1: erotic dreams. I was sharing it with the team earlier.
Speaker 1: So there's three things here, but let's go one by one.
Speaker 1: So erotic dreams are not fueled by masturbation or pornography.
Speaker 1: Walk me through that.
Speaker 2: That's what some reports a decade ago mentioned that might
Speaker 2: be changing. But what's interesting to me there is it's
Speaker 2: not what we do during the day that shows up
Speaker 2: in our erotic dreams. It's actually what we fantasize about
Speaker 2: secretly during our day that's more likely to show up
Speaker 2: in erotic dreams. And scientifically, to me, I think that
Speaker 2: makes a lot of sense because the dreaming process is
Speaker 2: the imagination network liberated, So it makes sense that what
Speaker 2: you imagine in your dream life is more connected to
Speaker 2: the fantasy you're having while you're awake. It doesn't matter
Speaker 2: the sexual act the sexual person. That what brings someone
Speaker 2: to climax, the thoughts they have during that process with
Speaker 2: their lover, without their level. It's the internal thinking of
Speaker 2: desire during the day that tends to find itself in
Speaker 2: erotic dreams. And to me, that's consistent if you think
Speaker 2: about the dreaming brain as something that has the liberated
Speaker 2: imagination network. It's an imaginative process. Right your eyes are closed,
Speaker 2: that movie you're making for yourself, So whatever you're thinking
Speaker 2: about during the day, you know that's the movie you're
Speaker 2: making at night.
Speaker 1: So then getting back to what you're saying earlier, if
Speaker 1: someone's in a happy relationship, but you're saying it's still
Speaker 1: common for them to cheat in their dreams.
Speaker 2: That's a separate pattern.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a pattern that you've seen. So is
Speaker 1: that an argument then that that doesn't may be happy
Speaker 1: in the relationship, but then they're okay fantasizing.
Speaker 2: I can't answer that. No, No, I love the question.
Speaker 2: That's a deep question. What I would say to you
Speaker 2: is from there what people ask us if you have dreams,
Speaker 2: tend to have more bisexuality. So does that mean you
Speaker 2: have your bisexual you just haven't figured that out or
Speaker 2: you're not sharing that with somebody during the day. I
Speaker 2: can't answer that, But I think as we bring in
Speaker 2: more reports from dream banks and bring in more cultures,
Speaker 2: more backgrounds, more genders, and more diverse sort of perspectives
Speaker 2: on sexuality, we'll get insights into that. But that's a
Speaker 2: very individual thing. So as a a whole, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of cheating in erotic dreams. As a whole, what
Speaker 2: shows up in our erotic dreams is what we imagine
Speaker 2: and then it leaves it to the person. That's why
Speaker 2: I open with like, you know, people have asked me like,
Speaker 2: if you dream of your ex, does that mean you
Speaker 2: really want them? I was like, well, if you're just
Speaker 2: seriously thinking to still thinking if you're hung up on
Speaker 2: them during the day, you're dream about your ex, that
Speaker 2: means one thing. But if you're like, no, I've really
Speaker 2: moved on and the lover pops up in your dream,
Speaker 2: I think that's just a solar flare of desire. I
Speaker 2: wouldn't make much of that.
Speaker 1: I think that's the hard part, right. I think what
Speaker 1: we don't know is how seriously to take some of these,
Speaker 1: to take a dream or not, because I feel like
Speaker 1: a lot of people exactly like you just said, you
Speaker 1: have a dream about something, you're thinking, oh God, maybe
Speaker 1: I need that, maybe I don't. And is that a
Speaker 1: lack of self awareness? Is it because the dream is
Speaker 1: not clear? Like? How do we how have you thought
Speaker 1: about that as you've reflected on dreaming, How do we
Speaker 1: get better at knowing whether to take a dream seriously
Speaker 1: or not? Because I feel like that would help solve
Speaker 1: so much a conundrum or dilemmas that's created by dreams.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a big question. It's a big question. It's
Speaker 2: a big question.
Speaker 1: I'd thought.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my opinion about it is that one, dreams should
Speaker 2: not be neglected. Okay, nightmares if they pop up and
Speaker 2: they arrive out of the blue, they shouldn't be neglected.
Speaker 2: I think dreams that are flashbacks after PTSD obviously should
Speaker 2: not be neglected. So there's some dreams that have an
Speaker 2: easier rule to follow if you will. But then what
Speaker 2: about those other dreams that you're bringing up right, like
Speaker 2: intensely emotional to linger with you during the day, and
Speaker 2: you're wondering like, wait a second, is that an insight
Speaker 2: to myself that I don't even have yet about myself?
Speaker 2: Should I discuss this with a therapist? Should I discuss
Speaker 2: this with my lover? And I think the way I've
Speaker 2: started to reflect on my dreams a bit more is
Speaker 2: that when they are hyper emotional, it's an invitation to
Speaker 2: look at your life differently. I feel like I'm doing well,
Speaker 2: I'm high achieving, I'm doing this. I'm not. You know,
Speaker 2: you feel like, no, it's fine, I'm dealing with a
Speaker 2: broken relationship. But if you start having nightmares, or if
Speaker 2: you have emotional dreams that are filled with fright or regret,
Speaker 2: I'm not saying that that there's never an automatic link,
Speaker 2: right other than showing up naked at a podium or
Speaker 2: I'm not going off, But the one that's powerful haunts
Speaker 2: you doesn't make sense. That's an invitation to think about
Speaker 2: something and back to our original conversation. To me, that's
Speaker 2: a life well examined is paying attention to the emotional,
Speaker 2: powerful dreams that you have that linger with you. The
Speaker 2: dream is symbolic to get to your answer in the
Speaker 2: most specific way. The dream is a metaphor. The dream
Speaker 2: is symbolism because from the dreaming brain and you've hyper visual,
Speaker 2: hyper emotional. It's not going to spell it out for you.
Speaker 2: It's going to be metaphorical. It's going to be symbolic.
Speaker 2: Specific example, Vietnam veterans who had PTSD got better, they
Speaker 2: start going through divorce, they're not and they're struggling. They're
Speaker 2: not dreaming of divorce, they're dreaming of war again. So
Speaker 2: the experiences you're having, they're an invitation to reflect. The
Speaker 2: meaning is metaphorical and symbolic, all based on how the
Speaker 2: dreaming brain is built, and it's personal. It's hard to
Speaker 2: say a bridge or a light bulb in your life
Speaker 2: at this moment is going to be the same meaning
Speaker 2: for me at this at this moment in life, or
Speaker 2: my life ten years from now, not just former versions
Speaker 2: of myself. So I'm not here to refute anything, but
Speaker 2: it's a very personal process. Your brain made it. It's
Speaker 2: hyper it's an emotion to a hyper emotional state. It
Speaker 2: could mean nothing, it could mean something. But what I'm
Speaker 2: here to say is take a look at it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not just static.
Speaker 1: No, I think that's I completely agree with you. I
Speaker 1: think it's a great point, and I feel like it's
Speaker 1: really interesting because it then goes back to the idea
Speaker 1: that humans are meaning makers and that way story and
Speaker 1: if you're looking at a me a lot on that man,
Speaker 1: then you're trying to figure out and if you have
Speaker 1: a if you have a negativity bias in your conscious mind,
Speaker 1: I wonder how much like I'll give an example. I
Speaker 1: was talking to someone the other day and they were
Speaker 1: saying that they'd been dreaming about bears, and so I
Speaker 1: started googling what that means, and I was gonna ask you,
Speaker 1: and I was googling about it. It was really interesting
Speaker 1: because in a conscious state, a big bear feels scary
Speaker 1: and it feels like death, and it feels like run away.
Speaker 1: And that's how they saw a bear in their dream.
Speaker 1: But then when you look at the dream, spiritual version,
Speaker 1: whatever you call it, the interpret Sorry, when you look
Speaker 1: at dream interpretation, the interpretation of that was bears represent
Speaker 1: strength and they represent courage, and they have the symbol
Speaker 1: and the now goo. So it's it depends.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it depends on which brain conjured up which image. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you work in the circus, bear means one thing, you know,
Speaker 2: your hunter, bear means one thing you know. In culture,
Speaker 2: bear means something else. So I like that. But just
Speaker 2: to go back to something that you know, I've been
Speaker 2: I've been moving around and people have asked me stuff.
Speaker 2: The question you just asked is something special about are
Speaker 2: we meaning makers? And now this is gonna take me
Speaker 2: a little time to open up on this. But but
Speaker 2: what's what's interesting, and again I don't have all the
Speaker 2: answer this conversation, is that in the dreaming brain, even
Speaker 2: though the logic and reason areas are dampened, specifically the
Speaker 2: dorsal ladder prefrontal cortex, it's right behind our sort of
Speaker 2: horns in the prefrontal cortex that pushed our brains forward,
Speaker 2: there's another area called the medial prefrontal cortext that's preserved.
Speaker 2: It stays throbbing, it's actually liberated a little bit. And
Speaker 2: you know what that one does. It does something we
Speaker 2: only figured out when we accidentally injure it or somebody
Speaker 2: has a stroke in that area. It stitches the story
Speaker 2: of our life together. Right, And so what's happening this
Speaker 2: is this is this is cool. What's happening is your
Speaker 2: emotions and your vision centers and your movement centers are
Speaker 2: just firing up stuff linked directly and directly to the
Speaker 2: stuff you feted during the day, the stuff your life feted, right,
Speaker 2: your life, your memory plus the imagination and then the
Speaker 2: media prefrontal cortex is they're putting a story to it. Dreams,
Speaker 2: often not always are stories. They have a narrative component.
Speaker 2: They're emotional, they're visual, they have a narrative component. Our
Speaker 2: brains want to make a cohesive story. I know that
Speaker 2: for a lot of reasons, and the dreaming brain is
Speaker 2: something that also preserves that. And some have even extended
Speaker 2: that say like, well maybe that's why we can you know,
Speaker 2: we get movies that have jumps of ideas, people go
Speaker 2: from one place to the other, like our dreaming. The
Speaker 2: way we dream prepares us for the way we appreciate art. Right,
Speaker 2: so we can let that go this way on this
Speaker 2: on this side some of my patients with certain complications
Speaker 2: and certain tumors and different things, they'll wake up and
Speaker 2: they won't feel certain parts of their body and they'll
Speaker 2: develop something called neglect, or they'll develop something what it's
Speaker 2: called confabulation. It's a fancy word for lying. When the
Speaker 2: body signals are disconjugate, they don't make sense. The brain,
Speaker 2: the mind will make up a story to make it
Speaker 2: all fit. And some patients have actually tried to throw
Speaker 2: a leg they don't feel off the bed and they say, oh,
Speaker 2: that was a stranger. And so you see things with
Speaker 2: the injured brain and the healing brain that there's a
Speaker 2: drive within us sometimes will even lie to ourselves and
Speaker 2: others to create a consistent or a story that makes
Speaker 2: sense to ourselves meaning. And I think if you look
Speaker 2: at that at the brain level, and you look at
Speaker 2: that at the dreaming level, what I try to tell
Speaker 2: people my first book is look at that at the
Speaker 2: life level. Like our maturation isn't done just with adolescens.
Speaker 2: R work has to continue to cultivate your brain and
Speaker 2: your mind and your life. So when you get through
Speaker 2: a struggle and you get through it, that prepares you
Speaker 2: for the next one. If you're in a struggle. Now,
Speaker 2: that's just overwhelming, like something difficult, so hard. Don't worry
Speaker 2: because you're cultivating that stress, stress for the next one.
Speaker 2: And I think all of those pieces not measurements, but
Speaker 2: my opinion that we are meeting makers. We are storytellers
Speaker 2: in the moments of our lives, in our dreaming brain,
Speaker 2: in our life in general, and the area where stories
Speaker 2: and emotions are the wildest with our dreams. And that's
Speaker 2: where I think why we dream is something bigger than
Speaker 2: just threat rehearsal. I think it's something powerful when we
Speaker 2: wake up. And that clarity is because are some consciousness
Speaker 2: had its run?
Speaker 1: Are people having when you look at the data, are
Speaker 1: people having the same dream again and again and again
Speaker 1: or are they having different dreams every night?
Speaker 2: Well that's a good question. So there are recurrent dreams.
Speaker 2: It's a specific example. The only thing I can say
Speaker 2: with certainty is dreams come our brain. We do these
Speaker 2: exotics brain surgeries where we wake people up to map
Speaker 2: the surface of their brain. You don't feel. You wouldn't
Speaker 2: know if I touched your brain if the situation ever rose,
Speaker 2: which it won't. But like the brain doesn't feel, the
Speaker 2: brain feels through its nerves, so we can dissect the
Speaker 2: brain in somebody while they're talking. The point there is
Speaker 2: is not to scare anybody. That's a therapeutic process. But
Speaker 2: when we tickle and map the brain, they'll say, oh,
Speaker 2: I remember this nightmare from when I was a kid.
Speaker 2: You can activate a recurrent nightmare in a patient by
Speaker 2: tickling the surface of the brain. So dreams come from
Speaker 2: the brain. There are recurrent dreams. There are that's individual.
Speaker 2: There are common dreams across people falling, being chased, teeth
Speaker 2: falling out. There are universal dreams, so you start to
Speaker 2: see all these patterns. A recurrent dream is a loop
Speaker 2: of electricity in that part of your brain that pops
Speaker 2: up again and again. It must be because if we
Speaker 2: take a little faint pen and tickle it and you
Speaker 2: have that dream again, that's that's built into the electrical
Speaker 2: flows of your brain. So we have to step back
Speaker 2: a little bit when you ask those questions because there
Speaker 2: are so many different dream types and dream experiences. I
Speaker 2: don't want to give a single answer. But recurrent dreams
Speaker 2: are loops of electricity that happen over and over again.
Speaker 2: We can actually activate that and then universal dreams common
Speaker 2: dreams and rare dreams. Is how I conceptualize it.
Speaker 1: What does someone do if they have a recurrent dream
Speaker 1: that they don't want to have?
Speaker 2: Any big question? Okay, so let's look at that. So
Speaker 2: now we got the foundation waking brain, dreaming brain, hyper imaginative,
Speaker 2: hyper emotional. You're cooking up, you're creating the events of
Speaker 2: your dreamscape. And I found this to be very powerful
Speaker 2: that nightmares since we imagined them. The treatment for nightmares
Speaker 2: is something called imagery rehearsal therapy. Now I'm not a therapist.
Speaker 2: I mean I take care of a lot of cancer patients.
Speaker 2: I'm more than ten thousand in my life, So there's
Speaker 2: there's a cultivation that I have benefited from from them
Speaker 2: trusting me. So I think I have some sense of
Speaker 2: understanding of human nature. But therapy, when you try to
Speaker 2: help somebody through conversation talk therapy, right, that's great. It
Speaker 2: seems to be effective. That's out there. What they're finding
Speaker 2: is imagery rehearsal therapy. It's a new thing where imagine
Speaker 2: what you want to be, imagine something you don't want
Speaker 2: to have. And when I read that, I was like,
Speaker 2: I don't know if I can sink my teeth in
Speaker 2: that until I started reading about nightmares and learning about
Speaker 2: nightmares and across all different sciences that if you practice
Speaker 2: before you go to bed, going back a bit to
Speaker 2: your saying that we can actually feed our dreams. If
Speaker 2: you practice a new script for the ending of your nightmares,
Speaker 2: you can rescript your nightmares through something called imagery rehearsal therapy.
Speaker 2: People can look it up and not every time, not
Speaker 2: for everyone, but just the fact that nightmares can be
Speaker 2: rescripted is powerful. That you think you're out of control,
Speaker 2: but you can feed your dreams, you can steer your dreams,
Speaker 2: and lucid dreaming as the prime example of that, and
Speaker 2: that therapy can guide you to a better conclusion in
Speaker 2: your dream. I love that as a scientist because it's
Speaker 2: the imagination network. You've imagined this nightmare, and it's powerful
Speaker 2: to think now you can actually imagine a different kind
Speaker 2: of ending for this nightmare. To me, that's all scientifically consistent,
Speaker 2: and to me, that's why I think it's powerful to
Speaker 2: look at dreaming as more magical, more fascinating, that it
Speaker 2: is being driven by certain brain processes. Right, so you
Speaker 2: don't wake up and say, ah, that's a glitch that's static. No,
Speaker 2: there's something drove that. Learn about the engine behind it,
Speaker 2: and then reflect about the meaning about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, I mean I can relate to that.
Speaker 1: I feel like there have been parts of my life
Speaker 1: where I've been able to code the emotion and feeling
Speaker 1: and script that I wake up with by what I
Speaker 1: put into the code before I go to bed. And
Speaker 1: so at one point in my life when I was
Speaker 1: trying to wake up early and I didn't enjoy it,
Speaker 1: and my reaction to waking up early in the morning
Speaker 1: would be, Oh, I'm so tired. I just want to
Speaker 1: stay in bed. I just you know, And I wanted
Speaker 1: to wake up early. I believed that was a worthy
Speaker 1: pursuit and a habit to invest in, and so I
Speaker 1: would before I went to bed, I would say to myself,
Speaker 1: I am waking up energized, happy and healthy. And so
Speaker 1: even that rescripting in the evening, I found I would
Speaker 1: wake up and I would be saying that to myself
Speaker 1: when I woke up, and there was this direct link
Speaker 1: between a script that I didn't have it written in
Speaker 1: the morning. I didn't have it there, but that repetition
Speaker 1: would carry over in the morning and I found whenever
Speaker 1: I used it, it worked, and whenever I don't use it,
Speaker 1: I can still wake up and feel, oh God, why
Speaker 1: am I waking up so early? And so I've sensed
Speaker 1: moments of that, or I've had experiences of that and
Speaker 1: that coding or that imagery rehearsal therapy that you mentioned.
Speaker 1: I would love for our audience to practice a community
Speaker 1: to try it out and see how it shows up
Speaker 1: in your life, because I think what we don't realize
Speaker 1: is you're subconsciously rehearsing anyway.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, right, whatever you do, the work is going on,
Speaker 2: you're doing it, work with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, whatever you're watching, reading seeing that is imagery rehearsal.
Speaker 1: It's just not therapy and it's not conscious. But we're
Speaker 1: doing imagery rehearsal throughout the day and before we go
Speaker 1: to bed.
Speaker 2: And it adds a big question here. So when you
Speaker 2: when you say something like that, it ties into positive thinking,
Speaker 2: wish fulfillment, all these these nebulous terms that I think
Speaker 2: some people really embrace. Other people poo poo, and they
Speaker 2: say that can't be true. Or I say something in
Speaker 2: the middle that through studying about dreams and dreaming, I've
Speaker 2: learned about, Like, what's the biology of how what you
Speaker 2: just described about. I think about something before I go
Speaker 2: to bed, and it helps me wake up, and I'm
Speaker 2: you know, I'm feeling it more. I'm thinking about it
Speaker 2: more in the right way, Like that's just out there right.
Speaker 2: That feels like there's like a kite flight and flying
Speaker 2: above our head. What I'm trying to get people to
Speaker 2: understand is the dreams, if they can be defined, are thoughts, emotions,
Speaker 2: and activities that are actually happening at the brain level.
Speaker 2: That's what's sparkling all that electricity. If I'm running in
Speaker 2: a dream, the motor strip that moves my legs, the
Speaker 2: neurons they are firing, the signals just aren't getting through.
Speaker 2: So then what that does is it opens up a
Speaker 2: whole new world of athletes practicing the shot in their mind,
Speaker 2: positive reinforcement, going to bed, and rescripting your dreams right journaling.
Speaker 2: Like people are like, okay, so there's brain activity that's
Speaker 2: leading to this mind that I want to get my
Speaker 2: mind to lean a certain way, and the brain activities
Speaker 2: driving that. And so the people say, well, how that happened.
Speaker 2: I would give you the example of placebo and So
Speaker 2: when you believe a medicine is going to help you,
Speaker 2: even if I tell you, look, that's there's nothing active
Speaker 2: in it. That's just like sugar. That's just something that
Speaker 2: has no capacity to change by the pill itself the
Speaker 2: physiology of your body. But belief is enough to make
Speaker 2: people feel less pain. And I can give you a
Speaker 2: scientific explanation about how that happens. Belief you're armed with neurotransmitters,
Speaker 2: that electricity that we're measuring, the chemicals that are floating around.
Speaker 2: Think of the brain as like one hundred billion microscopic jellyfish,
Speaker 2: and is there's like electric storms and waves of neurotransmitters
Speaker 2: flying around in there. When you believe, the pharmacy of
Speaker 2: your mind is actually releasing chemicals and things that generates
Speaker 2: different electricity, that alleviates pain, that prepares your brain and
Speaker 2: mind for rescripting the nightmare, that makes positive, gives you
Speaker 2: the scientific basis possibly for positive reinforcement. Positive relationships like
Speaker 2: these are actually not just emotions, but they're working at
Speaker 2: the level of the brain. That's powerful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. I loved that description. And as
Speaker 1: you were saying that, I was thinking about this. It's
Speaker 1: all coming back to an intentionality of programming, a like
Speaker 1: what I'm hearing from you is just this idea of
Speaker 1: get active, get involved, be conscious, be aware. I was
Speaker 1: thinking about. I remember during the pandemic, I probably hadn't
Speaker 1: up until the pandemic, I probably hadn't watched TV or
Speaker 1: played video games for like ten years, like consistently at all.
Speaker 1: And I think the pandemic kind of you know, had
Speaker 1: had time and we were indoors and all the rest
Speaker 1: of it. And so I started watching TV. I remember
Speaker 1: one of the shows I was watching, which I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed watching, was Ozark, and I can I remember watching
Speaker 1: Ozark every day for thirty days in a row, and
Speaker 1: it's not even the scariest show. And while I was watching,
Speaker 1: I probably didn't feel anything. And somehow I felt that
Speaker 1: I had dreamed every night that my house was being
Speaker 1: broken into like that that was an experience that I
Speaker 1: was having and I connected to because it's someone who
Speaker 1: didn't have nightmares as an adult and as someone who
Speaker 1: didn't watch that much TV. Those are the only two
Speaker 1: changes that I'd at least not is.
Speaker 2: Or if we get back to that, it's symbolic. Maybe
Speaker 2: is the stress of the pandemic. I mean, so it's
Speaker 2: never going to be pinned down exactly. But you're right.
Speaker 2: The paying attention to the patterns of your dreams more
Speaker 2: than just a dream unless it's higher emotional. But the
Speaker 2: pattern of dreams, I think is an important thing to do.
Speaker 2: And how does our waking life feed our dream life?
Speaker 2: What I would tell you is when color television arrived,
Speaker 2: the magazines the dream reports show a bump in people
Speaker 2: having color color dreams, like there were more black and
Speaker 2: white dreams when TV was black white, And I was like, wait,
Speaker 2: but the world is in color. And what I'm saying
Speaker 2: to you is that's why this topic is so fresh
Speaker 2: because it doesn't all make sense. The science gives some insight,
Speaker 2: and the exploration reveals there's so many things we don't understand.
Speaker 2: The take home is it's not a it's not a
Speaker 2: passive process. It's not something that is coming from the
Speaker 2: gods or omens. It's your brain giving you thoughts, emotions, dreams,
Speaker 2: and potentially insights that you can't have access to with
Speaker 2: your waking brain. And to me, that's a special portal.
Speaker 2: And how people cultivate that, I think it's up to them.
Speaker 2: I'm here to let people know that there's a rigorous
Speaker 2: science behind the brain biology, brain chemistry, brain electricity that
Speaker 2: drives dreaming.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that bump in color television. I can't
Speaker 1: imagine when we have enoughdates to look at the social
Speaker 1: media bump, right, because to me, it's bizarre to feel
Speaker 1: that I'm exposed you to show social media pornography. Being
Speaker 1: on the online world doesn't lead to specific or certain.
Speaker 2: Dreams, especially with the hours that people putting in, right, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: So that would be the next wave. And my hope
Speaker 2: is that somebody listening to this, you know, as I mentioned,
Speaker 2: I'm fifty one, I've got three sons eighteen ninety teen,
Speaker 2: twenty two in college. Like, my hope is somebody walks
Speaker 2: away and says, oh wait, some of the stuff about
Speaker 2: dreams can be explained by the brain. Because imagine in
Speaker 2: twenty thirty years how much more data will have through
Speaker 2: people with online dream banks, and how much more will
Speaker 2: know about neuroscience. Imagine the connections that somebody's sitting here
Speaker 2: playing different roles than us can make. And so it's
Speaker 2: more of a it's an inception. I want people to
Speaker 2: be ignited that dreams can some parts of dreams can
Speaker 2: be made sense of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to dive back into nightmares because as
Speaker 1: a child, I grew up having a lot of nightmares.
Speaker 1: I don't I remember one of them very vividly, even
Speaker 1: till today. I don't dream about it anymore, but I
Speaker 1: remember waking up in the middle of the night feeling horrified.
Speaker 1: And you talk about in the book how children have
Speaker 1: the most nightmares, like it's common children have five times
Speaker 1: as many nightmares as adults. You say, even the gentlest
Speaker 1: childhood is no protection against nightmares. And I think that's
Speaker 1: really unnerving for parents when their kids having nightmares. I
Speaker 1: have friends who have kids who tell me like, oh God,
Speaker 1: she just doesn't sleep, she has nightmares, And it's like
Speaker 1: you're trying to figure it out. And I mean, you're
Speaker 1: a father, so it's interesting to hear how you may
Speaker 1: have felt about that. I'm sure a lot of us
Speaker 1: listening right now are thinking, God, I definitely had nightmares
Speaker 1: as a kid. When you're having that as a kid,
Speaker 1: it can be so unnerving. It can be so difficult,
Speaker 1: even more than as an adult, because you really feel powerless.
Speaker 1: What have been some Have there been any therapies or
Speaker 1: remedies that have helped, But then you go on to
Speaker 1: say that nightmares are needed. So walk me through there.
Speaker 2: All right. So when I was thinking about this book,
Speaker 2: I was rolling around in La going to different spots
Speaker 2: and sort of just bouncing around people, you know, regular
Speaker 2: people at Dodger Stadium, and often I got the question, like,
Speaker 2: all right, you're going to talk about dreams and dreaming.
Speaker 2: You need to have a new take on it. But
Speaker 2: clearly nightmares can't be good for you, right, There's no
Speaker 2: use for nightmares. And I thought I got to take
Speaker 2: this one head on in chapter two. And so when
Speaker 2: I look at that, I would ask people to think
Speaker 2: of nightmares based on age, and we do that in
Speaker 2: the hospital and medicine and surgery and science where they're
Speaker 2: sort of age related. Pediatric and adult is what I
Speaker 2: would say. We've talked about adults, flashbacks, nightmares. If they
Speaker 2: y paid attention to them, they could be a warning
Speaker 2: flair for some mental health issues. You get them more
Speaker 2: in depression. You know, we've left that how to explain
Speaker 2: nightmares and kids is an exploration, it's a conversation. I
Speaker 2: think it's fresh. And I looked at a bunch of
Speaker 2: pieces that helped me sort of come up with an idea,
Speaker 2: a story, if you will. So if you look at
Speaker 2: the first thing about nightmares that struck me is you
Speaker 2: have to say, hey, Johnny, that was only a nightmare.
Speaker 2: It's only with nightmares that we tell our kids that's
Speaker 2: only a nightmare. So as a conversation, does that mean
Speaker 2: Johnny was blurring dreaming brain thoughts and waking brain thoughts
Speaker 2: until that moment. So that's a power. I'm not saying
Speaker 2: I have the answer. I'm just I'm leaving that with
Speaker 2: your audience. There's one nightmares do that. By definition, nightmares
Speaker 2: wake you up and they see your memory. Okay, just
Speaker 2: like our kids learn to walk and talk, our mind
Speaker 2: is being cultivated. So they have these families that signed
Speaker 2: all the kids up to be woken up and talk
Speaker 2: about their dreams for like twenty years in a row.
Speaker 2: They're called longitudinal kids. When they start talking, their dreams
Speaker 2: are like a table, you know, a sweater. Then they
Speaker 2: get more imaginative, and what happens is five ' sixt'
Speaker 2: seven nightmares arrive. What else is arriving? They're developing visuospatial skills,
Speaker 2: and they're also developing this thing called theory of mind.
Speaker 2: People can look up these terms that children at some
Speaker 2: point developed the ability to look at somebody and say
Speaker 2: that smile. I don't think they mean well, mind reading,
Speaker 2: reading the other person's intention, right. That arrives theory of
Speaker 2: mind at the same time as nightmares. So my biggest
Speaker 2: way to conceptualize that is nightmares arrive in children to
Speaker 2: help them develop a sense of self versus other help them,
Speaker 2: not a sense of identity, but that my thoughts and
Speaker 2: my experiences are mine, My waking life and dream life
Speaker 2: are separate, and that I need to think of myself
Speaker 2: as different from my uncles and aunts and other people
Speaker 2: around me. And I think that's the function of nightmares
Speaker 2: and children. You may have had them a lot, but
Speaker 2: they arrive and then very few of them lead to
Speaker 2: nightmare disorder, like it doesn't ruin there the next day.
Speaker 2: So it's almost sort of like whereas an adults, nightmare
Speaker 2: disorder means the residue is lingering with you. So when
Speaker 2: you look at the patterns children learn to work, we'll
Speaker 2: walk and talk. Nightmares arrive around four or five, six, and
Speaker 2: most of them go away. Erotic dreams around like eleven, twelve, thirteen,
Speaker 2: and persist in some way. Adolescences arise around fifteen sixteen.
Speaker 2: But these are cognitive changes. The brain looks about the same.
Speaker 2: It's not like a new low pops up. These are
Speaker 2: cognitive changes that are happening. So I think nightmares cultivate
Speaker 2: them mind, mind and children. They arrive and fade things
Speaker 2: that happen that universally and science aren't accidental. And it's
Speaker 2: the it's the dream we've always had that all of
Speaker 2: us have had as a nightmare.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's super fascinating to me, super fascinating.
Speaker 2: It's an exploration.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it is such a it's so interesting
Speaker 1: how we're so addicted to certainty and conclusiveness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of stifling. Yeah, it's very rigidity to it, right,
Speaker 2: do this, don't do this, this will save you, this
Speaker 2: won't say no. But the dreaming process leaves it open, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we're just beginning to understand it's personal. Keep digging, keep exploring,
Speaker 2: fail better. I think that's what that all shows us.
Speaker 1: What why? I feel like what the conversation we're having
Speaker 1: exposes a weakness that we have across so many areas
Speaker 1: of our life, which is that we're uncomfortable with uncertainty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we constantly feel discomfort when we can't control. And
Speaker 1: I think dreams are like the ultimate version of that.
Speaker 2: Dreams are like, hey, just to remind you you need uncertainty. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Let me dig into that a little bit. I have
Speaker 2: some ideas about that, like when we fall asleep and dream.
Speaker 2: The executive networks dampen. Let me reverse a bit. Most
Speaker 2: of the day is something we call task on. It's
Speaker 2: outward and the brain the executive network. Reason logic is
Speaker 2: paying attention. Of course, food scarcity, right, Willie mammitz. It
Speaker 2: makes sense those who are best at paying attention outward,
Speaker 2: navigating the world and using as little amount of calories
Speaker 2: and brain energy. That seems like that would be a
Speaker 2: natural adaptation. Well, what I would tell people is when
Speaker 2: we're not tasked on, the brain doesn't rev down like
Speaker 2: your computer like goes and then you have to hit
Speaker 2: the keyboard to pop it up. No, it creates a
Speaker 2: mental life of its own, right, that's the imagination network.
Speaker 2: So during the day we're mostly executive network outward. But
Speaker 2: if there's nothing to do with mind wandering or things
Speaker 2: are safe, we turn back into our own head. Dreaming
Speaker 2: is the example of that, but just suffused with like uncertainty,
Speaker 2: and so the question becomes the day is so focused
Speaker 2: on thinking, calculating. Adrenaline is up. Adrenaline finds the signal
Speaker 2: in the noise. They've done studies where they change that,
Speaker 2: and then the dreaming brain is kind of the opposite.
Speaker 2: Adrenaline comes down. You're looking for looser patterns, divergent thinking,
Speaker 2: designing a car, not fixing an engine. To me, to me,
Speaker 2: the uncertainty that the dreaming brain goes through. That's our
Speaker 2: genius built in. We don't We actually don't want to
Speaker 2: become too rigid in our habits. It might be okay
Speaker 2: today going on the freeware, going on the tube, as
Speaker 2: we mentioned, but that's not the process your brain needs
Speaker 2: to be in to be the most adaptive for heartache,
Speaker 2: for falling in love, for a kid, getting sick, for
Speaker 2: the uncertainty the environment will give us, and the uncertainty
Speaker 2: we almost want to engage in love affairs and adventures.
Speaker 2: I think that's the balance. Get things done, Try not
Speaker 2: to be too rigid, try to be open minded and
Speaker 2: appreciate that your dreaming brain is gonna take you there,
Speaker 2: whether you want it or not. That's the love story
Speaker 2: of uncertainty and creativity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's I'm gonna flip flop because we talked
Speaker 1: about uncertainty and creativity, but I want to go into
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming and this idea of wanting some control in
Speaker 1: the uncertainty. But before we get there, I wanted to
Speaker 1: go back to sleep exit because I don't think we
Speaker 1: talked about sleep entry, but we didn't finish sleep exit.
Speaker 2: And that works because sleep exit that dampened executive network,
Speaker 2: that damp and adrenaline that looks for the signal and noise.
Speaker 2: It seems to come back on. And if an alarm
Speaker 2: goes off, we know it comes back on. Like you
Speaker 2: could be dreaming and sleeping you smell smoke. The executive
Speaker 2: network is the boss. It will pop back on and dominate.
Speaker 2: And so if you do grab your phone in the morning,
Speaker 2: I check emails too quickly or jump on Instagram, like,
Speaker 2: your brain will go to that forward task on feature
Speaker 2: and the residue or the lingering feelings of your dream
Speaker 2: life will necessarily be put in the backseat. And so
Speaker 2: if you do want to remember your dreams more as
Speaker 2: you wake up, if you have the luxury of a
Speaker 2: bed and time and not an alarm. That's a critical
Speaker 2: windows sleep exit to sort of hold onto your dream
Speaker 2: thoughts and your dream experiences. It's an imperfect process, but
Speaker 2: I can tell you people who have tried, they get
Speaker 2: better at it. And again, it's free, it's accessible, it's
Speaker 2: from your own brain. I think it's one of those
Speaker 2: habits that I've incorporated my life for the last five
Speaker 2: ten five ten years.
Speaker 1: I get what exactly.
Speaker 2: So what I do is if I have the luxury,
Speaker 2: because I do now I didn't for a long time.
Speaker 2: I mean, the phone calls and pages are going off
Speaker 2: in the middle of the night, and now it's more
Speaker 2: like if I wake up in the morning, I try
Speaker 2: to linger, I try not to move. And there's different
Speaker 2: types of yoga. The people have been talking about a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff like this for centuries and millennia, and
Speaker 2: I'm just adding some scientific pieces that support it. But
Speaker 2: that I'm trying to not have my executive network kick in.
Speaker 2: I'll keep my eyes closed. I'll run through some thoughts.
Speaker 2: So that's interesting, hold none that Whishould I do that?
Speaker 2: Like I have my sleep exit thinking or moments if
Speaker 2: you will, and then I'll reach over and I'll go
Speaker 2: to my notes app. It's write on the home screen,
Speaker 2: and I'll write a few things down. When I have ideas,
Speaker 2: I mean i'd say a great majority have come from them.
Speaker 2: They're almost all bad ideas, but that is the idea generator.
Speaker 2: If I've had a good idea, it's been during that time.
Speaker 2: It's rarely. It's rarely, like at two o'clock on a
Speaker 2: triple espresso. Right. That's important because we have to get
Speaker 2: things done. But the dreaming process, sleep entries we talked about,
Speaker 2: and sleep exit I think are interesting portals where there
Speaker 2: are sort of blurry liminal states that we have a
Speaker 2: different type of thinking without it being just like wildly psychedelic.
Speaker 2: You know, it's measured, but it's a fresh perspective. It's
Speaker 2: a different take on the things that are important in
Speaker 2: your life at that moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, even the language of sleep entry and
Speaker 1: sleep exit is so powerful.
Speaker 2: Well, I got to you know, but this calls hypnogogic
Speaker 2: and hypnopopic. So the first thing I'm out there is like,
Speaker 2: stop using these words that suck, right, like a terrible Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad. Yeah, even hearing you say I've I've
Speaker 1: never heard the word sleep entry and sleep exit before. Yes,
Speaker 1: and personally really like that language because I think we
Speaker 1: don't think about it like that. And it's so funny
Speaker 1: how we we enter buildings, we leave buildings, we enter spaces,
Speaker 1: we leave spaces, and sleep is kind of like that.
Speaker 1: And we are talking about evening routines and morning routines,
Speaker 1: but this was almost a bit more intimate to both
Speaker 1: sides of that.
Speaker 2: It's the essential routine. I'll just sleep entry and sleep exit.
Speaker 2: What I love about it is that I can put
Speaker 2: stickers on your scalp our scalps and record the electricity
Speaker 2: and be like, look the waves you are measurably, not
Speaker 2: just by report like, hey, I'm feeling different. I get that.
Speaker 2: I trust that that's individual. But the brain waves during
Speaker 2: sleep entry and sleep exit have a pattern. They overlap
Speaker 2: in a way that never happens while you're awake or
Speaker 2: while you're dreaming. All right, So that's why I want
Speaker 2: people to walk away like it's not just his thing.
Speaker 2: He's looking at the fact that he can measure that
Speaker 2: this is a different space right now. Yeah, yeah, No,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean it's powerful or not. That's for you
Speaker 2: to figure out. But we can measure sleep entry and
Speaker 2: sleep exit, and it looks different on a twenty four
Speaker 2: cycle of brain waves. And how long does it lost
Speaker 2: was different for different people, and people seem to cultivate it.
Speaker 2: But Salvador Dali's written about it said, you know, anywhere
Speaker 2: from two to twelve minutes.
Speaker 1: That's how long you have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's it's personal, but it's real as for
Speaker 2: everybody to figure out for themselves.
Speaker 1: You know, by like the two to twelve minutes, it
Speaker 1: gives us a gauge sure as to how long do
Speaker 1: you not let you executive brain turn on in the morning.
Speaker 2: And because there's science, there's tech companies coming up with
Speaker 2: a little you know, your iPhone or Apple watch is
Speaker 2: tracking your stages of sleep and when people are in
Speaker 2: that sleep entry, it'll buzz them to wake up, like
Speaker 2: Dolly tried, and they'll and that that's their way of
Speaker 2: write down what you're thinking now as sort of the
Speaker 2: tech approach to creativity. It's interesting, right, how does.
Speaker 1: I mean talking about the tech approach again? Another tangent
Speaker 1: because aspect I'm like completely obliterated any form of structure,
Speaker 1: but it's it's great. Where do you see the cross
Speaker 1: section of AI and dreams, like where can it be useful?
Speaker 1: Where will it be helpful with this? Where will it not?
Speaker 1: Will it help us ask better questions? Is it going
Speaker 1: to help us take better notes? Is it going to
Speaker 1: help us?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm not a computer scientist, but I'll
Speaker 2: tell you two things. They're making programs that add noise
Speaker 2: because sometimes the patterns and algorithms of computers become so
Speaker 2: rigid like our daily thinking, that they can't handle the
Speaker 2: insertion of new data. And that's sort of mirrors what's
Speaker 2: going on like that's it's called overfitted. The computer process
Speaker 2: and algorithm design is too tight, too efficient, and that
Speaker 2: learning from dreaming, they find that the computer system is
Speaker 2: more adaptive when they add in noise. Where artificial intelligence
Speaker 2: fits in, I'm not sure, but tech is all over it.
Speaker 2: They're tracking the data from smartphones and certain people you're volunteering.
Speaker 2: They'll play certain songs and you'll have people watch commercials
Speaker 2: and see if they dream about it more and then
Speaker 2: buy that product more. Like that space is here, so
Speaker 2: if somebody's listening, like, that's a massive space, and I
Speaker 2: just think I would remind people that we're not completely
Speaker 2: shut off when we dream, we wake up to alarms
Speaker 2: and smoke, and that we should be careful about in
Speaker 2: that vulnerable, precious, remarkable, a unique state that somebody's not
Speaker 2: just taking marketing advantage of it. And I think that's
Speaker 2: where AI will extract data, figure out what's the right buzz,
Speaker 2: the right sound, and just to riff on this a
Speaker 2: little bit, like one hundred years ago, they were like,
Speaker 2: people are sleep and they put their hand in like
Speaker 2: a bucket of water, see if they had more dreams
Speaker 2: about water. In the modern version, they're going to be
Speaker 2: taking your data and trying to fine tune like the song,
Speaker 2: the scent and the picture to put, you know, to
Speaker 2: throw at you to try to get you to buy stuff.
Speaker 2: So I'm a bit like dystopian about that because I
Speaker 2: don't want you know I'm private, especially in my dream life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely no, it's I mean, I feel like some
Speaker 1: of my favorite movies have been about dreams. You mentioned
Speaker 1: Inception even I mean this isn't about dreams, but still
Speaker 1: in that in that space of Vanilla Sky, Yeah, with
Speaker 1: Tom Cruise and Cameron DearS. That movie, if you're not
Speaker 1: seeing it, it's probably one of my favorites. And just
Speaker 1: how that memory bank or some sort of like subconscious
Speaker 1: bank is created and held. And it's fascinating thinking about that.
Speaker 1: There's a few more things roll that I want to
Speaker 1: go over with you from the book, which I think
Speaker 1: are so interesting for people. I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about. Before we get into lucid dreaming. I want
Speaker 1: to talk to you a bit about how dreams can
Speaker 1: predict the future. And I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: worry that their dreams, their thoughts can create reality subconsciously.
Speaker 1: Somewhere we feel that like I know people who have illnesses,
Speaker 1: or like, oh I manifested this, like I made this happen,
Speaker 1: or like I have a disease and oh my god,
Speaker 1: I saw this coming, or you know that kind of
Speaker 1: feeling warning dream Yeah, warning dreams. And that almost feels
Speaker 1: a bit worrying as well, because often when you have
Speaker 1: that warning, you know, constantly replaying and thinking about it
Speaker 1: while you're awake and while you're asleep. Can dreams predict
Speaker 1: the future, especially when it comes to health.
Speaker 2: In one specific way, dreams can absolutely predict the future
Speaker 2: of your health, and we'll get into that that's Parkinson's,
Speaker 2: but in general for cancer, for other diseases. It's hard
Speaker 2: to tease out whether my patients had the diagnosis and
Speaker 2: then sort of reverse thought like I think I had
Speaker 2: a dream about that. I'm not judging them. I'm just
Speaker 2: totally open minded. But I can't grip the data on that.
Speaker 2: But if you do have a dream about disease, statistically
Speaker 2: you're not more likely to have that disease. They've been
Speaker 2: looking at these surveys, so it might just reveal a
Speaker 2: certain anxiety you're having again symbolic. You might be struggling
Speaker 2: with something and then have a disease based dream. So
Speaker 2: as long as we remember that most of the time
Speaker 2: they're symbolic and not literal, I think that's important. There
Speaker 2: are plenty of reports and surveys where breast cancer patents
Speaker 2: are said like I had a dream, I felt the
Speaker 2: lump in these sort of things, I respect that, I
Speaker 2: respect their whole journey, So I want to put that
Speaker 2: out there. The one specific way that dreams can predict
Speaker 2: the future. I need to unpack this one for a
Speaker 2: little bit, because this was mind blowing when I when
Speaker 2: I learned about it. There's something called rem behavior disorder,
Speaker 2: which I'm relabeling dream and act. My behavior. Uh yeah,
Speaker 2: my world, my world. The words are they confuse, you know,
Speaker 2: dream and act my behavior. Middle aged men fifties acting
Speaker 2: out their dream, usually protecting their bed partner. They come
Speaker 2: in the bed partners maybe has an injury. Those men
Speaker 2: ninety four percent of the time. And that's essentially in medicine,
Speaker 2: it's universal. Fifteen years later will develop Parkinson's. I think
Speaker 2: you know. So that is the one example, and it's
Speaker 2: if it's the only example for every neuroscientists out there,
Speaker 2: Every scientist out there hear me with this that the
Speaker 2: first warning flare of the brain's deterioration with Parkinson's is
Speaker 2: a change in dreams fifteen years ago. I'll just leave
Speaker 2: it at that. For all the rigorous people out there saying, hey,
Speaker 2: they're talking about stuff like I'm questioning whether you know
Speaker 2: the science can really show this. Look up REM behavior
Speaker 2: disorder cap all caps RAM behavior disorder, which I call
Speaker 2: dream and acting behavior. It's in scientific American. This isn't
Speaker 2: like one paper I'm digging up, like this is thing.
Speaker 2: This is stuff that that's coming out. REM behavior disorder
Speaker 2: predicts Parkinson's fifteen years later. And what I would say
Speaker 2: to the researchers out there, is that an opportunity for
Speaker 2: us to start with medicine earlier. I mean, it just
Speaker 2: says so much. But outside of that one and all
Speaker 2: you need is one unicorn for unicorns to be real.
Speaker 2: I haven't found any evidence that dreams predict the future.
Speaker 2: I mean, they definitely don't give you lottery numbers and
Speaker 2: stuff like that, but at a more grounded level, they
Speaker 2: don't actually predict what's going to happen to you, but
Speaker 2: what happens to you maybe because of what the dream
Speaker 2: is symbolically mentioning you're going through a difficult time, or
Speaker 2: you lose your job. You have a dream about losing
Speaker 2: your job, So I can see where those connections would form.
Speaker 2: I just don't have any, so I'll leave it as
Speaker 2: a maybe.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting how again, it goes back to this
Speaker 1: idea of when you get a diagnosis or something happens,
Speaker 1: you then go back to finding that point Like it's
Speaker 1: almost like you've been dating someone and you knew they
Speaker 1: were wrong, and then when they break up with you,
Speaker 1: I knew it.
Speaker 2: You go and you replay it all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you replaying it, like and then you now
Speaker 1: you see all the red flags do and again, there's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with it, but it's that feeling of I
Speaker 1: remember and I know, but we're not always good at
Speaker 1: trusting our gut in that moment, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: Like there's there's not a feeling of it's almost like again,
Speaker 1: and I'm not discounting anyone's experience, but I find even
Speaker 1: I do it where you're living your life and then
Speaker 1: something happens and you go, I knew it. I knew it.
Speaker 1: There was a part of you that sensed it.
Speaker 2: I call that hunch and instinct. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 2: we we connect if I may, yeah, please in the
Speaker 2: moment as we navigate uncertainty, and because we're not just
Speaker 2: reflexive creatures, right, there's this thing called counterfactual thinking, like
Speaker 2: I can run out if this happens, then that I
Speaker 2: can play scenarios out and you know what does that
Speaker 2: The imagination network, the same thing that's liberating and dreaming.
Speaker 2: We create a mental workspace what if this happens, What
Speaker 2: if this happens? What if this doesn't happen? As we
Speaker 2: navigate the uncertainty, So it's not just you know, pull
Speaker 2: back from a hot frying pan or you know, pull
Speaker 2: back from a scorching rock if you're a lizard, right,
Speaker 2: those are reflexes. We have the ability to choose. And
Speaker 2: I think when you look at what you're saying about
Speaker 2: hunch and instinct and how we kind of nuse something
Speaker 2: and we should have maybe paid more attention to it,
Speaker 2: I think that for me, that's in the rear view.
Speaker 2: When you're in the moment and things are imperfect, as
Speaker 2: they often are, I believe that you are trying to
Speaker 2: create the outcome out of that imperfect situation, and when
Speaker 2: it doesn't arise or it doesn't arrive for you, so
Speaker 2: we do look back and say, hey, you know, maybe
Speaker 2: we should have done things differently. That is the cost
Speaker 2: of the freedom of choice that we have right now
Speaker 2: what to do, whether to grab this glass or not.
Speaker 2: And just like heartache is the cost of exposing yourself
Speaker 2: to falling in love, you know, And I'm familiar with that,
Speaker 2: So I think I think people should look at that
Speaker 2: as like, that's that's what makes life exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you see any connection between alcohol and dreams.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a big question. So this is a notable
Speaker 2: thing that I left out of the book. I have
Speaker 2: patients waking up from anesthesia. I'm floating above disassociative states
Speaker 2: like psychedelic experiences, ambient dreams, fent no dreams, alcohol suppresses dreams.
Speaker 2: People who smoke weed, marijuana users in the morning, they
Speaker 2: don't remember their dreams. Well, I couldn't find it. It
Speaker 2: definitely affects dreaming. To me, that says two things. Dreams
Speaker 2: are coming from the brain. You take drugs and your
Speaker 2: dreams change. They're biological. And the second thing is I
Speaker 2: couldn't find a way to say antidepressants make this change
Speaker 2: your dreams. You know, coke and meth makes this change.
Speaker 2: And alcohol and alcohol if I just couldn't find something
Speaker 2: to wrap it aroun. Yeah, And I tried because I
Speaker 2: was like, that's going to be one of the chapters,
Speaker 2: and I just I didn't find a clear link except
Speaker 2: for one. Galantamine is this drug we give patients with dementia.
Speaker 2: It works on a seat of colin. It's one of
Speaker 2: the less famous neurotransferers. We have a lot, they do
Speaker 2: a lot. It's not dopamine does this. It's not that
Speaker 2: linear as we're seeing now and liberating people now. Is
Speaker 2: galantamine and so those people they take it and they're like,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, I'm becoming aware. I'm dreaming while I'm dreaming.
Speaker 2: That's lucid dreaming. You double that dose. They have more
Speaker 2: lucid dreaming. And the world of science that dose dependent
Speaker 2: escalation is as close as you get to you know,
Speaker 2: cause and effect. So drugs definitely affect the brain. I
Speaker 2: just couldn't put them into Knie categories because people are
Speaker 2: anti depressants at this type of dream. People are on
Speaker 2: to cope the next day they had a different type
Speaker 2: of dream. So that is a mixed bag, and alcohol
Speaker 2: is part of that. It's you know, it's a chemical.
Speaker 1: Do you think we'll ever get closer to understanding the
Speaker 1: links more deeply as the memory banks dream branks?
Speaker 2: I hope so. I hope so. And I think that's
Speaker 2: an interesting question. The things that I'm looking at are
Speaker 2: what we're available to me everywhere, from Aristotle a few
Speaker 2: thousand years ago to stuff happening now to questionnaires from
Speaker 2: twenty years ago. It's, of course necessarily it's imperfect, but
Speaker 2: I think as people are more honest, and that's the
Speaker 2: liberated to fill the dream banks in with this stuff,
Speaker 2: somebody after me is going to take that and say ooh,
Speaker 2: I think alcohol does this and antidepressants do this. I
Speaker 2: think it's I think it's quite possible. But just as like,
Speaker 2: just to let everybody know, I'm working with what's out
Speaker 2: there and trying to connect the dots between the gaps
Speaker 2: of like from you know, philosophy to brain science to YouTube,
Speaker 2: you know, ambient dreams. Like I'm really trying to bring
Speaker 2: it together from every corner that I could.
Speaker 1: You know, look at how much do we dream in
Speaker 1: events in reality versus completely fantasy based events, Like how
Speaker 1: much of our dreams are replaying like you were saying
Speaker 1: that the veterans, for example, they dream about the war
Speaker 1: it's like a real event that happened in their life there,
Speaker 1: So that's a flashback. Yeah it's a flashback.
Speaker 2: Yeah so but when they dream about it when they're
Speaker 2: getting divorced, that's a symbolic dream representing something.
Speaker 1: What's going to breakdown of dreams of flashbacks versus fantasy.
Speaker 2: I think PTSD flashbacks are clearly replay of a bad
Speaker 2: experience in your dreamscape, the imaginative component of dreams. When
Speaker 2: you look at these surveys, it's a complete mixed bag.
Speaker 2: But what I will tell you is that I'm trying
Speaker 2: to just add the information here to your question, which
Speaker 2: is a good one. But how much of our dream
Speaker 2: life is a replay versus just completely cooked up by
Speaker 2: the imagination network? I get that that's a good question.
Speaker 2: And what I would say is, in flashbacks, it's a replay.
Speaker 2: If your dream is falling, that's not a replay, but
Speaker 2: indicative something. And then there's most stuff is in between.
Speaker 2: It's highly visual, highly creative, jumping from social situations to
Speaker 2: visual situations. You know, you're on the top of a building,
Speaker 2: you're an awkward situation, you're finding with something. There are
Speaker 2: these jumps, a little bit movie like, but it's not
Speaker 2: a hallucination. And this is the best I because I
Speaker 2: wanted to be able to answer this question like two
Speaker 2: years ago when I was thinking of this, and this
Speaker 2: is with a gem that I found. When you hallucinate,
Speaker 2: just bear with me. It's a purple elephant in this room.
Speaker 2: The landscape is reality, the element is inserted in it.
Speaker 2: In dreaming, the whole thing is imagined. And so I
Speaker 2: would say the entire process of dreaming leans heavily imaginative.
Speaker 2: That's the best to answer I can.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's good answer. Yeah, No, it's interesting to me
Speaker 1: because I yeah, I always wonder, like I'm like, we
Speaker 1: always do we have a dream in a space we've
Speaker 1: been in and seen.
Speaker 2: In and even all of it, you think all of it.
Speaker 2: I mean that's so you have memory of places you've
Speaker 2: been and then you can imagine, and dreaming has access
Speaker 2: to both that and if I may the dreaming memory,
Speaker 2: like when you go up, you get up to go
Speaker 2: to the bathroom, sometimes you can slip back into a dream,
Speaker 2: so it's not random. And so I always wonder, is
Speaker 2: there's like access to memory our dreaming mind can have
Speaker 2: that are waking mind does not have access to Like
Speaker 2: people with this is fascinating, like this a little bit
Speaker 2: heavier on the size part, Like people who have memory issues,
Speaker 2: like they've had a trauma and they can't remember if
Speaker 2: they played Tetris or a video game. They'll see pictures
Speaker 2: of it in their dreams but can't tell you about
Speaker 2: it when you ask them during the day, I said, no,
Speaker 2: I never played a Tetris game, but I had one
Speaker 2: in my dream. And they're basically playing Tetris is being
Speaker 2: played in front of them, So there's something going on
Speaker 2: where the dreaming mind has a memory system. I think
Speaker 2: I don't have evidence for this, but there are little
Speaker 2: dots like that, like slipping back into a dream, getting
Speaker 2: up to go to the bathroom. People with amnesia being
Speaker 2: able to feed their dreams. Can't identify like on a
Speaker 2: map or you know, a dissection. But there's something unique
Speaker 2: going on with a dreaming memory and dreaming mind. And
Speaker 2: that's why it's so inspiring for me. Like you know, I,
Speaker 2: you know, I use drills and take off pieces of
Speaker 2: skull and I dissect with him. I'm like, I'm not
Speaker 2: that guy, right. Most people would think, I think that's
Speaker 2: why it's powerful, like brain surgeons talking about the dreaming mind,
Speaker 2: and but that's what it's done for me. My man
Speaker 2: is like fifty one years in ten thousand patients operate
Speaker 2: in like ten countries, suns, you know, wild love, affair, heartbreak,
Speaker 2: all of it, intense emotions, relationship with my partner for
Speaker 2: thirty years, like all of it. And you start to
Speaker 2: think like I think I'm getting a sense, and then
Speaker 2: you then putting this book together, it's it's almost like
Speaker 2: a rebirth. There's too much of a statement, but like,
Speaker 2: oh wait a second, there's a dreaming mind memory system.
Speaker 2: Wait a second, Parkinson's The first flare is a change
Speaker 2: in dreaming pattern. So just when I thought, like, you know,
Speaker 2: I think I'm figuring this out, you know, I'm excited
Speaker 2: to have the lens with which I approached the world reset.
Speaker 2: And that's what dreaming has done for me.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about lucid dreaming. We've been talking about. We've
Speaker 1: been kind of like peppering it in the whole time.
Speaker 1: First of all, let's just define and a lot of
Speaker 1: the questions I ask are very simplified. And the reason
Speaker 1: for that is because I think a lot of these
Speaker 1: terms ideas are out there and most people don't even know.
Speaker 1: And I think, as you're simplifying language from a very
Speaker 1: scientific point of view, my goal is to try and
Speaker 1: simplify topics that we all hear about, and you might
Speaker 1: even hear around a conversation and you're sitting there going,
Speaker 1: I don't even know what that means. I don't know
Speaker 1: if anyone knows what that means, but we're all pretending
Speaker 1: to know. So it's like, what is lucid dreaming? How
Speaker 1: common is it? And then how do we do it?
Speaker 2: So let's go do lucid dreaming. Here's the way I
Speaker 2: explained it to you first, a little bit of a
Speaker 2: story about it. When I was constructing this book, it's
Speaker 2: lucid dreaming. Oh no, I don't want to cover there
Speaker 2: can't be any science for it. Two out of nine
Speaker 2: chapters aren't lucid. And so again that's it's refreshing for me.
Speaker 2: And the most rigorous science on dreaming is about lucid dreaming.
Speaker 2: So we talked earlier about the waking brain and the
Speaker 2: dreaming brain. Now we know that there's a sleep entry
Speaker 2: and there's a sleep exit in the middle of dreaming.
Speaker 2: In the middle of the night, some people become aware, Hey,
Speaker 2: I'm actually dreaming, and they become aware of the dream.
Speaker 2: And somebody might say, well, why is that unusual? Well,
Speaker 2: most dreams are in the rear view. You wake up
Speaker 2: and you say, oh, whoa, that was a dream, because
Speaker 2: but like I had a visual at a vibrant one
Speaker 2: last night, but I was and only when I woke
Speaker 2: up I was like, Okay, that was only a dream.
Speaker 2: But when the dream was happening, I was fully inhabiting
Speaker 2: the dream. That was the dream was happening in my
Speaker 2: mind right and at the neuronal electrochemical level. So sleep entry,
Speaker 2: sleep exit. Lucid dreaming is the return of awareness allowing
Speaker 2: people to know that they are actually in a dream
Speaker 2: while dreaming, Okay, not in the rear view like I
Speaker 2: had this morning. And so that's a big statement. And
Speaker 2: what I would say is there's proof for it. Lucid
Speaker 2: dreaming can be proven by this experiment that they did
Speaker 2: and have been doing. That's the thing about studies and
Speaker 2: experiments for your listeners. If somebody breaks into something new
Speaker 2: and it's real, you'll see an explosion of data in
Speaker 2: the scientific literature for that. And in the seventies somebody said,
Speaker 2: wait a second, you're a lucid dreamer. You're telling me
Speaker 2: you can become aware while you're in a dream while
Speaker 2: the dream is happening. And so they did a couple
Speaker 2: of things. They trained the person that rapid eye movement,
Speaker 2: which is like skittish eye movements when we sleep and dream.
Speaker 2: They said, if you're in a lucid dream and consciousness
Speaker 2: has returned, can can you communicate with me, like with
Speaker 2: your eyeballs through like a Morse code? And people should
Speaker 2: look this up. They left, right, left, right. They train
Speaker 2: these eye pattern movements. At the same time, they put
Speaker 2: the electrodes on the surf of the scalp because a
Speaker 2: guy like me will be like, he's just woke up, right, Well,
Speaker 2: I need to know more than that. And they prove
Speaker 2: by the electricity that the person is truly asleep, so
Speaker 2: you can't fake being asleep across a glass. This person
Speaker 2: at a certain time in the middle of the night,
Speaker 2: proving they're asleep, starts to communicate with their eyeballs, and
Speaker 2: it still shows you're asleep, communicating with the outside world
Speaker 2: when you're asleep. That's powerful. That's lucid dreaming. Am I
Speaker 2: a lucid dreamer?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Have I had one or two? Yes? Did people working
Speaker 2: on this book start two? Yes? Can it be induced? Yes?
Speaker 2: And so lucid dreaming is powerful because again it's a
Speaker 2: liminal state, right, It's a bit of awareness, it's a
Speaker 2: bit of waking consciousness that has bubbled up during dreaming consciousness.
Speaker 2: And so nothing is rigid sleep entry. You don't go
Speaker 2: from wake to sleep in a second. It's not a
Speaker 2: hard line. So there are all these overlapping, blurry states
Speaker 2: and lucid dreaming is that Two more points about that,
Speaker 2: when you put those patients, not patients, participants into brain scanners.
Speaker 2: That executive network I've been talking about logic and stuff
Speaker 2: is dampened. They show more blood flow that area, not
Speaker 2: as much as when you're awake, but the blood flow
Speaker 2: to the frontal cortext that does reason and logic and
Speaker 2: awareness is halfway. So you know exactly right. And so
Speaker 2: if everybody's been a lucid dreamer and telling people of
Speaker 2: work and people are shaking you off like you're out
Speaker 2: of your head, tell them no, there's there's the left
Speaker 2: right eye movement proof. There's brain scan proof. Galantamine, that
Speaker 2: drug that makes lucid dreamers have more or have people
Speaker 2: start to lose ad dream There's a lot of scientific
Speaker 2: evidence for that. And the last thing is, so can
Speaker 2: we learn to lucid dream? And that dream I had
Speaker 2: was a trippy one. I was in the pandemic and
Speaker 2: I was teaching the boys to say, we got this boat,
Speaker 2: I just like we had. I had to get them outdoors.
Speaker 2: You can't have three dogs and puppies in the house
Speaker 2: and in a pandemic. And I thought, this is luxury
Speaker 2: I have. We're by the water here in California. It
Speaker 2: was like I'm turning the helm hard, but I'm going
Speaker 2: horizontal like on a giant like river pouring off in
Speaker 2: a waterfall. And it was just like I'm trying so
Speaker 2: hard just to stand still, and you know, I just
Speaker 2: remember the whole thing like this my right arm. And
Speaker 2: this was during the construction of this book, and I
Speaker 2: thought to myself, that's interesting. It's very visual. I know
Speaker 2: I'm in a dream. I mean, those are unique experiences
Speaker 2: for me. Again, as a brain surgeon, they usually would
Speaker 2: not even explore these areas. But when I see the
Speaker 2: brain scan showing you're halfway between sleep and wake, when
Speaker 2: I see that drugs bringing loose to dreaming, I love
Speaker 2: pulling those two worlds together for people, you know. So
Speaker 2: I'm fascinating now with fascinating now with lucid dreaming. And
Speaker 2: I think people who about a third of people do it,
Speaker 2: like when you, thirty to forty percent report it sometimes
Speaker 2: more sometimes less athletes tend to have it, more gamers
Speaker 2: tend to have more visuospatial creative people tend to have
Speaker 2: more lucid dreams. And there are some techniques that are
Speaker 2: out there.
Speaker 1: I was gonna ask you if someone's a beginner, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they want to try it. After watching this, they're
Speaker 1: going to get the book and they're like, all right,
Speaker 1: I want to play with it. What are the first
Speaker 1: three things someone should do?
Speaker 2: First thing they should do is look up mild lucid
Speaker 2: dreaming mild techniques. So there's a lot of techniques written
Speaker 2: about since antiquity, people cultivated spirituality with that this massive
Speaker 2: topic faith. Yeah, so mild technique and what it is
Speaker 2: is waking up a bit earlier than you should you
Speaker 2: plan to or should, and then trying to hold onto
Speaker 2: consciousness and waking life as you drift into sort of
Speaker 2: back into sleep. The technique is described in the book
Speaker 2: and you can look it up online. But I want
Speaker 2: people to know why I mentioned that technique after four
Speaker 2: or five is because there is a study when they
Speaker 2: took a bunch of people and they said, okay, we're
Speaker 2: going to teach you the left right left right morse code.
Speaker 2: You practice this technique, then we're going to get you
Speaker 2: in the sleep lab. It's not my experiment or it's
Speaker 2: not my investigation. We're going to get you in the
Speaker 2: sleep lab. Okay, now, prove to us with your eyeball
Speaker 2: movements that you're actually lucid dreaming. Everything before that was
Speaker 2: a survey like, yeah, I did it, and I'm locid
Speaker 2: dreaming more. I believe people, but you know, I like
Speaker 2: that extra bit of proof. So the mild technique is
Speaker 2: proven with the left right left right Morse code technique
Speaker 2: that clearly shows you are asleep based on your brain
Speaker 2: electricity and you are using eye patterns so much so
Speaker 2: this is a banger. They started doing a little bit
Speaker 2: of math two plus two and they have code, and
Speaker 2: somebody says to me, I think I was in Paris,
Speaker 2: and I said, wait a second. You said the dreaming
Speaker 2: brain doesn't do bath. I said, yeah, but I also
Speaker 2: showed you the brain scans that show a bit of
Speaker 2: awareness and has come back, as does the bit of
Speaker 2: ability to do math. So I love seeing those pieces
Speaker 2: come in consistently.
Speaker 1: That's brilliant. Brother. From audio, You've done, you know, tons
Speaker 1: of research, tons of reading, looking at studies. I feel
Speaker 1: one of the biggest things that I'm taking away from
Speaker 1: this is often the questions we're asking about our dreams
Speaker 1: are the wrong questions. We're asking, like what does this mean?
Speaker 1: Is this? You know? Is this real? Like? You know,
Speaker 1: what should I do with this? What would you say
Speaker 1: are the best questions we should ask when we've woken
Speaker 1: up after dreaming? What should we be looking for? Point
Speaker 1: us in the right direction, because I feel maybe we're
Speaker 1: wasting time and energy and effort in a different direction.
Speaker 2: So I would say, when I'll tell you my approach again.
Speaker 2: That's that's a massive topic you've you've just asked of me.
Speaker 2: Is one. There are dreams that clearly reflect your waking anxiety,
Speaker 2: showing up late, longoing lone doesn't go off showing up
Speaker 2: naked at a podium because you're worried about public speaking.
Speaker 2: So some don't require you to spend much time on them.
Speaker 2: Number two, there are universal dreams, nightmares, and erotic dreams.
Speaker 2: We've talked about that a little bit. Number three, their
Speaker 2: dreams are just static. You know, let's not hold dreaming
Speaker 2: thought and emotions to what we wouldn't waking thought. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff we do with them today we
Speaker 2: don't even hold on to right. Similarly, the fourth our
Speaker 2: genre dreams, pregnancy dreams. Massive lifetime events are happening, Massive
Speaker 2: lifetime events are happening, and you're dreaming. That's consistent the
Speaker 2: ones that I would say to people are to focus
Speaker 2: on are the ones that are hyper hyper emotional and
Speaker 2: they linger into the next day. You can try to
Speaker 2: cultivate it with the morning technique. We talked about a
Speaker 2: slower rise, not switching to email and Instagram too quickly.
Speaker 2: But the hyper emotional dream is one to reflect upon.
Speaker 2: Here's why. The emotional systems of your brain called limbic structures.
Speaker 2: The brain has the reptilian brain inside our throat sort
Speaker 2: of back there. That's instinct. It makes you take a
Speaker 2: breath when you're underwater. Above it developed the emotional brain
Speaker 2: much like what my dog has. You know, they have intuition,
Speaker 2: they have instinct. That's called the limbic system. And people
Speaker 2: can look this up and there's there's circuits in there
Speaker 2: like the Pepe circuit, and it's a fascinating it's a
Speaker 2: fascinating part of the brain. And then on top of
Speaker 2: it is a giant frontal cortex. The frontal cortex has
Speaker 2: is integrated with all those they're all intertwined. There is
Speaker 2: no dopamine. There's a reward pathway that jumps from the
Speaker 2: reptilian to the emotional to but to get things done,
Speaker 2: our advantage and the thing that blossomed our foreheads forward
Speaker 2: was logic and reason, the executive and the CEO. So
Speaker 2: I believe that limbic system, those emotional systems are dampened
Speaker 2: during the day for productivity, a conventional productivity, not creativity.
Speaker 2: And what's happening with your dreams is the roles are
Speaker 2: reversed and the emotional systems can achieve a top speed
Speaker 2: that you're waking life can't. So if you have emotions, thoughts,
Speaker 2: and experiences from a hyper emotional, hyper liberate brain, that's
Speaker 2: the one to reflect on within your life. And I've
Speaker 2: given a few specific examples and the process of reflecting
Speaker 2: what it means, it's individual to you. If you are
Speaker 2: having nightmares and you don't have them and you think
Speaker 2: your day, wait, my day's fine, I'm having a lot
Speaker 2: of nightmares when I don't, let that be a warning
Speaker 2: sign to reflect more upon yourself. If you're struggling with
Speaker 2: a relationship and you have dreams of falling or hyper
Speaker 2: emotional dreams of being chased, you know that's your relationship
Speaker 2: symbolically finding itself into your dreams. If you are at
Speaker 2: the end of life and you're having a lot of
Speaker 2: dreams about reconciliation. Those are that's the dreaming process coming
Speaker 2: to your rescue. The end of life dreams serve a
Speaker 2: different fundunction. I think they bring a solace And there's
Speaker 2: evidence coming out now that even when our heart is stopped,
Speaker 2: the last thing a brain does is haves one massive
Speaker 2: dream in the last minute or two, potentially experiencing the
Speaker 2: universal feature of near death experiences. So know that a
Speaker 2: hyper emotional dream comes from a hyper emotional state that's
Speaker 2: individual to your brain and that no one can give you,
Speaker 2: no one has access to. And maybe it's your responsibility
Speaker 2: to turn over that feeling in those thoughts and it
Speaker 2: just to pause for a minute and take all the
Speaker 2: information coming at you, take all the stuff you've gone through,
Speaker 2: and actually step aside for a little bit and say, hey,
Speaker 2: what was that solar flare from my mind? And if
Speaker 2: it's useful to you, great, If the process helps you
Speaker 2: remember those more, great, But if you just have that
Speaker 2: five to ten minutes during your morning where you just
Speaker 2: remember that you were not resting the night before, there
Speaker 2: was something wild and vibrant going on and you got
Speaker 2: a glimpse of it. What it means is up to you,
Speaker 2: but definitely don't neglect.
Speaker 1: It well, said doctor Raoul John Deel. The book is
Speaker 1: called This Is Why You Dream. If you don't have
Speaker 1: your copy already, make sure you grab it. We dove
Speaker 1: into some of the themes, some of the topics. There's
Speaker 1: so much more inside this book that I believe you're
Speaker 1: going to love and appreciate so that you can dream better,
Speaker 1: dream bigger, and dream more beautifully as well, which is
Speaker 1: what I wish for each and every one of you, rowld.
Speaker 1: Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you
Speaker 1: want to share that is on your heart and mind
Speaker 1: intuitively that you believe is important for our community.
Speaker 2: I think there's too much judgment going on in the
Speaker 2: ways that people approach life. And some people think they've
Speaker 2: got it all figured out, and some people on the
Speaker 2: other end saying I've got nothing figured out. And I
Speaker 2: got to tell you, listens, I've been into that entire range,
Speaker 2: and I would say a couple of things. I would say,
Speaker 2: I think the dreaming brain and mind is a genius
Speaker 2: built in that gives us resilience and resilience. I want
Speaker 2: to leave people with a brand new definition of it,
Speaker 2: a psychological definition that there's systemic resilience and processive resilience.
Speaker 2: Systemic resilience is is what you bring to the fight,
Speaker 2: and processive resilience is what the fight brings out in you.
Speaker 2: So wherever you're at, you're equipped with your dreaming brain
Speaker 2: as your ally. And I think to me, that gives
Speaker 2: me a source of strength, that there's this process cultivating me,
Speaker 2: protecting me, preparing me for the next day. That's not
Speaker 2: one side. That's that's rule speaking emotionally. Right on the
Speaker 2: other side, when you sit here and you say that's
Speaker 2: brain surgeon is trying to rock this stuff about the
Speaker 2: brain and mind and all that. I'll leave you with
Speaker 2: something I did not know in neuroscience. Right I got
Speaker 2: a lab, a PhD in neuroscience or a brain surgeon.
Speaker 2: You start to think you're like the expert at it.
Speaker 2: But there are things in exploring dreams and dreaming that
Speaker 2: I was surprised, like, how did I not know that?
Speaker 2: Because it would have changed all the ways I would
Speaker 2: have acted through my life. I would have been more open,
Speaker 2: more exploratory, more willing to accept other people's experiences because
Speaker 2: it doesn't all have to make sense even to the
Speaker 2: uber expert. So I leave people with something to search
Speaker 2: online called paradoxical kinesis p r A d o xicl canisis.
Speaker 2: It's called I can't explain why you move that way.
Speaker 2: That's my street translation for that medical term. But what
Speaker 2: it is is those same patients that have dream and
Speaker 2: act and behavior the care act out their dreams and
Speaker 2: later on their Parkinson's develops and their brains with her.
Speaker 2: The strangest thing is when the parkinson sets in and
Speaker 2: their voices are stifled and their movements are rigid. When
Speaker 2: they act out their dreams, their voices are big and
Speaker 2: their movements are fluid. The dreaming mind, somehow can access
Speaker 2: the body in a better way, in a more fluid way,
Speaker 2: in a more in tune way than the waking mind can.
Speaker 2: And that that's what I like to leave people with, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm excited about this. I hope you guys are too.
Speaker 1: So, Raoul, you talk about how naps lasting sixty to
Speaker 1: ninety minutes can boost learning and create a problem solving
Speaker 1: by forty percent. Why is this And when's the best
Speaker 1: time to take a nap?
Speaker 2: The napping thing is big these days, and people are
Speaker 2: finding it's not work harder, work longer, and all that,
Speaker 2: but try to work with the different states of mind
Speaker 2: and brain that you have and napping if you get
Speaker 2: to sixty or ninety minutes. People have done surveys and
Speaker 2: ask people to nap with puzzles and they find entering
Speaker 2: the dream state or the sleeping state, which again, as
Speaker 2: we've talked about, is imaginative, is divergent thinking that they
Speaker 2: solve problems better, they have more solutions to riddles. And
Speaker 2: the big point there for people is there's a utility
Speaker 2: to napping. You're not lazy because you app and if
Speaker 2: you can do it in a way that doesn't disrupt
Speaker 2: your sleep later on in the day, I think that's
Speaker 2: another you know, in the world of hacks, I think
Speaker 2: that's the hack that we've all got built in.
Speaker 1: Can you dream in that sixty to ninety minutes? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And have those dreams shown to be any different?
Speaker 2: I can't answer that. There isn't dat on. Have those
Speaker 2: shown dreams shown to be any different? But I would
Speaker 2: say one condition is narcolepsi, where people fall asleep suddenly
Speaker 2: and there's information coming out from them. They suddenly fall
Speaker 2: asleep and then they wake up and they enter a
Speaker 2: dream state. But that's a whole space. That's opening up
Speaker 2: the utility of naps, and it doesn't have to be
Speaker 2: every day, it doesn't have to be rigid, and if
Speaker 2: you have a big event or a big project coming up,
Speaker 2: I think personally, what I've tried is just shutting your
Speaker 2: eyes in a quiet space and allowing that mental work space,
Speaker 2: allowing yourself not to be tasked on and drift inwards
Speaker 2: in your thoughts. Whether you actually fall technically sleep or not,
Speaker 2: to me, that's been advantageous.
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely, I agree with that, and I know many
Speaker 1: athletes who do that as well before a big game,
Speaker 1: before a big performance. You're not necessarily falling asleep, but
Speaker 1: I like it. You're an off mode definitely. And also,
Speaker 1: last question I want to ask you was the question
Speaker 1: that Helena mentioned. So a lot of people when they're
Speaker 1: in sleep entry, they feel like they're falling. Why does
Speaker 1: that exist? Why do people have that experience?
Speaker 2: I don't know if I have an answer for that,
Speaker 2: and I've seen the reports, but I couldn't tie any
Speaker 2: signs to that. But sleep entry, falling asleep, it is
Speaker 2: a time where activation of the movement centers is pronounced
Speaker 2: and falling is actually a movement it's not you think, oh,
Speaker 2: running is a movement, falling something that happens to you know,
Speaker 2: But the activation of the brain when people fall it
Speaker 2: has to do with the motor strip as well motor sensory,
Speaker 2: so during that transition there may be a link there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's even interesting language like falling asleep, like I
Speaker 1: guess you're falling onto your bed, but the idea of
Speaker 1: falling is just I don't know.
Speaker 2: I find entering.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I find language really fascinating. And when I look
Speaker 1: at like falling to sleep, like that doesn't make any
Speaker 1: sense to me beyond falling onto a bed, which doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily create a RESTful, peaceful feeling.
Speaker 2: Take that back two thousand years and we memorize it
Speaker 2: by heart, and that's when we thought the heart was
Speaker 2: a center. So absolutely language shapes the direction of our mind.
Speaker 2: I mean the power of words and people finding handwriting
Speaker 2: is it activates more part of the brains than typing.
Speaker 2: And so definitely the communication and storytelling and building meaning,
Speaker 2: there's something there. I'll explore that hopefully in the years ahead.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think sleep entery and exits brilliant language though.
Speaker 1: That has really stayed with me, and it's making me
Speaker 1: think even more intentionally and insightfully around those intimate moments
Speaker 1: just before waking up, especially those two to twelve minutes
Speaker 1: that you said before you go to bed and after
Speaker 1: you wake up, because evening and morning routines make sense,
Speaker 1: but there's an even more special time there that could
Speaker 1: be managed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that morning time for me sleep exit is definitely
Speaker 2: something I put to you. So a lot of the
Speaker 2: ideas in this book. I'd read something, I'd be flipping
Speaker 2: through a bunch of papers, I'm like, what does this mean?
Speaker 2: What does this mean? And then it would be in
Speaker 2: the morning, I'd oh, maybe that, maybe that. Yeah, not
Speaker 2: a guarantee, but definitely a space to explore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, amazing roll. So we end every episode of On
Speaker 1: Purpose with a fast five final five. These are questions
Speaker 1: that have to be answered in one word to one
Speaker 1: sentence maximum, and these are your final five. So the
Speaker 1: first question is what is the best dreaming advice you've
Speaker 1: ever heard or received?
Speaker 2: Or try to remember them more?
Speaker 1: Okay, second question, what is the worst dreaming advice you've
Speaker 1: ever heard or received?
Speaker 2: Dreams are meaningless?
Speaker 1: Question Number three a dream you wish you'd have more often?
Speaker 2: Falling in love? The first time.
Speaker 1: Question number four, A dream that you wish people would
Speaker 1: have more often?
Speaker 2: Reconciliation dreams, dreams of forgiveness, dreams of letting go.
Speaker 1: And are those ones that we can train ourselves to have.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but those are the ones that some
Speaker 2: people report toward the end of life. And I just
Speaker 2: wonder if we had that more in the middle of
Speaker 2: our life, we'd be you know, we would have we
Speaker 2: would have less regrets, and we'd be less you know,
Speaker 2: encumbered by the fuss of the day.
Speaker 1: Why do you why is there any study to show
Speaker 1: why people having it later on in life? No?
Speaker 2: Wow, that's yeah, And I can tell you that from
Speaker 2: my own experience with cancer patients. Yeah, they're called genre dreams,
Speaker 2: end of life dreams. And again, our last act might
Speaker 2: be a massive dream, and it tends to be positive,
Speaker 2: not always for near death experiences. To me, I call
Speaker 2: that a dreaming coming to our rescue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, could you imagine that You're so right? If you
Speaker 1: could have that earlier on.
Speaker 2: Like all that beat, all that fuss. You know, it's
Speaker 2: a great answer, you know, I wish I could to
Speaker 2: let it go earlier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fifth and final question. We asked this to every
Speaker 1: guest who's ever been on the show. If you could
Speaker 1: create one law that everyone in the world had to follow,
Speaker 1: what would it be?
Speaker 2: Before you speak or act, do your best to imagine
Speaker 2: yourself in that person's shoes.
Speaker 1: Great answer, Doctor L. Johndale. The book is called This
Speaker 1: Is Why You Dream. Thank you so much for joining
Speaker 1: us today. If you don't already, make sure you follow
Speaker 1: doctor Raoul Johndale on Instagram across social media. Grab a
Speaker 1: copy of the book. We'll put the link in the
Speaker 1: comments and the caption section. And I'm so grateful for
Speaker 1: your time and energy today. I've learned so much. You've
Speaker 1: completely transformed my way of thinking about dreams. Honestly through
Speaker 1: your book in this interview, I think I knew nothing
Speaker 1: about dreams before we met. I had really poor ideas
Speaker 1: and maybe some limited beliefs, and speaking to you today
Speaker 1: has just opened up a whole new area of growth
Speaker 1: for me that I don't even think I was thinking about.
Speaker 1: So I love the idea that I'm walking away with
Speaker 1: some simple yet clear tools to actually start implementing from
Speaker 1: tonight and tomorrow. So I'm really excited about this dream journey,
Speaker 1: and I hope everyone who's listening and watching when you
Speaker 1: read the book. I hope you're going to go on
Speaker 1: a dream journey with me too. Love to see you
Speaker 1: tag me and doctor roll in some of the experiments,
Speaker 1: some of the tests that you're carrying out in your
Speaker 1: own life. Thank you so much, pleasure, Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it,
Speaker 1: you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort
Speaker 1: is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking
Speaker 1: your hidden potential. If you know you want to be
Speaker 1: more and achieve more this year, go check it out
Speaker 1: right now.
Speaker 2: You set a goal today, you achieve it in six months,
Speaker 2: and then by the time it happens, it's almost a relief.
Speaker 2: There's no sense of meaning and purpose. You sort of
Speaker 2: expected it, and you would have been disappointed if it
Speaker 2: didn't happen.