Speaker 1: You're going to go to sleep tonight and you're gonna
Speaker 1: have dreams. But what if you could influence what you
Speaker 1: dream about? And as far as remembering what you dreamt about,
Speaker 1: what if you're spending years of your life in a
Speaker 1: world that you never recall. Can nightmares be manipulated as
Speaker 1: a therapy? And our dreams sometimes predictive of changes in
Speaker 1: your health before you become aware of those changes. Today
Speaker 1: we talk with Adam harr Horowitz, a neuroscientist and dream
Speaker 1: engineer who is spending his working days trying to help
Speaker 1: people during their nighttime. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me,
Speaker 1: David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,
Speaker 1: and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three
Speaker 1: pound universe to understand some of the most surprising aspects
Speaker 1: of our lives. So last night I had another dream,
Speaker 1: not uncommon for me, that I was about to give
Speaker 1: a big talk and none of my slides made any sense.
Speaker 1: There was an audience of about four thousand people, they
Speaker 1: were already seated, but I couldn't actually remember what I
Speaker 1: had agreed to talk about at this conference, and my
Speaker 1: computer was acting very strangely, nothing made sense, and I
Speaker 1: couldn't move stuff around on the slides the way that
Speaker 1: I needed to. So the clock was ticking down to
Speaker 1: my entry on stage, and there was a building tightness
Speaker 1: in my chest. And then bang, I woke up and
Speaker 1: here's my normal life and all my responsibilities. And I
Speaker 1: got up and within minutes all of those details dissolved.
Speaker 1: The conference, the lecture hall, the computer, that pit in
Speaker 1: my stomach, all of it slipped away like I was
Speaker 1: trying to hold on to smoke. Now, this kind of
Speaker 1: thing where we are fully and emotionally immersed in some
Speaker 1: bizarre reality, only to come to realize a moment later
Speaker 1: that this was all false. This happens to us every
Speaker 1: night of our lives. And that's what we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about today. What exactly are dreams about. So let's
Speaker 1: start at the beginning. When you close your eyes at night,
Speaker 1: the world in front of you disappears. As you fall
Speaker 1: into sleep, your incoming senses drift away from you, and
Speaker 1: you might think that your brain goes quiet, but that's
Speaker 1: not what happens. Instead, your brain becomes a generator and
Speaker 1: you find yourself somewhere else. You're running through a building,
Speaker 1: or you're talking to someone you know but they have
Speaker 1: a different body, or you're in a bad situation that
Speaker 1: you need to get out of, or whatever. The key
Speaker 1: is that you are inhabiting a reality that feels completely
Speaker 1: real until you suddenly discover that it isn't. So what
Speaker 1: is going on here? Why does our brain construct dreams?
Speaker 1: There are several ideas in the literature, and like many
Speaker 1: things in neuroscience, the answer depends on the level of
Speaker 1: explanation you are asking about. So some years ago I
Speaker 1: proposed a theory about why we dream, called the defensive
Speaker 1: activation theory, and the idea, in a nutshell, is that
Speaker 1: during sleep, when the planet has rotated into darkness, your
Speaker 1: visual cortex needs to stay active, Otherwise, given the brain's plasticity,
Speaker 1: your other senses will begin to invade that territory. So
Speaker 1: dreaming serves as a kind of internal defense mechanism, keeping
Speaker 1: the visual system active in the absence of external input.
Speaker 1: And in our published research we find this allows us
Speaker 1: to make accurate predictions across different species of animals in
Speaker 1: terms of how much of their time they spend in
Speaker 1: rapid eye movement sleep. If you're interested in this, please
Speaker 1: check out episodes eleven and fifty one. Now, that's a
Speaker 1: mechanistic explanation about why the brain shoots activity into the
Speaker 1: visual cortex. In other words, it's about why the brain
Speaker 1: needs to make sure that the lights stay on at night.
Speaker 1: But I've always emphasized that the brain is a storyteller.
Speaker 1: So when your mid brain blasts random activity into your
Speaker 1: visual cortex, you don't see that as random pixels. Your
Speaker 1: brain weaves all of this into a sensory narrative, and
Speaker 1: the content of that narrative depends on what is in
Speaker 1: your brain, from what happened during the day to what's
Speaker 1: been burned deep down into your wiring based on all
Speaker 1: your experience in the world. And this is why you
Speaker 1: dream about your childhood home, or some conversation you had,
Speaker 1: or some fear that you have. And because the connections
Speaker 1: are much looser during dreaming, these stories can take off
Speaker 1: in bizarre directions. And this is the level that we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about today. And this matters because the
Speaker 1: content of dreams shapes how we feel the next day.
Speaker 1: It reflects what we are processing. Your dream content can
Speaker 1: rehearse threats or revisit memories, and sometimes when things go wrong,
Speaker 1: it can trap you in loops of trauma, which means
Speaker 1: dream content is more than just background noise. We're talking
Speaker 1: about experiences that you are having. You've got emotional landscapes
Speaker 1: that you're walking through, And given that you spend about
Speaker 1: a third of your life in this weird Doppelganger state
Speaker 1: of sleep, it's sort of strange that you're having all
Speaker 1: this experience but you remember almost none of it. So
Speaker 1: what if we could access more of that, and what
Speaker 1: if we could at least part shape it. What if
Speaker 1: we could engineer our dreams. Now, for essentially all of
Speaker 1: human history, dreams have felt like something that happens to us.
Speaker 1: They are mysterious and slippery and uncontrollable. But there's a
Speaker 1: growing field at the intersection of neuroscience and psychology and
Speaker 1: technology that's focused on what is called dream engineering. The
Speaker 1: idea is that we might be able to influence what
Speaker 1: we dream about and how we experience those dreams and
Speaker 1: what we recall. So just imagine being able to nudge
Speaker 1: your dreams towards the things that you want to dream about,
Speaker 1: like problem solving or emotional healing. Imagine being able to
Speaker 1: reduce nightmares by reshaping them. These ideas are being tested
Speaker 1: in laboratories and translated into apps, and today we're going
Speaker 1: to explore that frontier. My guest is Adam harr Horowitz,
Speaker 1: a researcher who has been at the center of this movement.
Speaker 1: His work expands from dream inception, in other words, methods
Speaker 1: for influencing your dream content, to interacting with your dreams
Speaker 1: in real time, to technologies for better recall of your
Speaker 1: dream content. Given that so much of your life is
Speaker 1: spent in this internal world, what would it mean to
Speaker 1: take it seriously? Here's my conversation with Adam horror Horowitz. So, Adam,
Speaker 1: tell us about dreams. What is happening when you fall
Speaker 1: asleep at night and you have these crazy cinematic experiences.
Speaker 2: I think dreams at night are basically thinking while you're asleep,
Speaker 2: And so for folks out there, I think thinking about
Speaker 2: your day dreams can be very, very helpful. What's that
Speaker 2: thing that happens when you stop paying attention in a lecture?
Speaker 2: Why is it you start imagining being on a beach
Speaker 2: in Hawaii? Why is it that you leave the place
Speaker 2: you are and you go to a whole different world.
Speaker 2: What is your brain doing? And so I think day
Speaker 2: dreams are the same thing as night dreams. The reason
Speaker 2: the night dreams are way, way weirder is because you're
Speaker 2: not also processing the world. There isn't all this input
Speaker 2: on top of that imagination.
Speaker 1: Totally unanchored from the external.
Speaker 2: Totally unanchored. So a dream is what happens when you're
Speaker 2: completely untethered.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And what is happening in the brain when you
Speaker 1: make a transition into dreaming.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there is this wild thing happening when you're
Speaker 2: transitioning into dreaming.
Speaker 3: It is a global process.
Speaker 2: So sleep happens, of course in your brain, but your
Speaker 2: breath is changing, the way your eyes are moving is changing,
Speaker 2: your muscle tone is changing, your whole body is changing.
Speaker 2: Sleep is a global, dynamic, complicated process. People sometimes think
Speaker 2: about falling asleep as your brain turning off. It is
Speaker 2: absolutely not turning off. It is so complex, it is
Speaker 2: metabolically super active. Also, there's a lot happening. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of calories being consumed, and so when you start
Speaker 2: falling asleep and you don't have to process the outside world,
Speaker 2: you can start processing internal information instead.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's like these giant chip making factories,
Speaker 1: computer chips, They switch over the whole factory to manufacture
Speaker 1: something else. And it's this enormous process where they're switching
Speaker 1: everything over. And I think about the transition into dreams
Speaker 1: and into sleep more generally as being this giant turnover.
Speaker 3: WHOA.
Speaker 2: Let me give you an example, which is so fun.
Speaker 2: When you fall asleep, one of the things your brain
Speaker 2: has to do is clear out waste products from during
Speaker 2: the day.
Speaker 3: Because all this.
Speaker 2: Thinking, using all this atp, all this identity and triphosphate,
Speaker 2: the energy that your cells use, it leaves behind waste
Speaker 2: products and you have to clear them out, just like
Speaker 2: you have to clear out waste products from your gut.
Speaker 2: The distance between your neurons will increase by sixty percent
Speaker 2: every night that you fall asleep, so that you can
Speaker 2: wash away that metabolic waste. So literally falling asleep is
Speaker 2: it's that weird. It's like your brain is expanding to
Speaker 2: have these waves of fluid come through and wash you
Speaker 2: clean from the thinking of the day.
Speaker 3: It is a crazy, beautiful process.
Speaker 1: Excellent. So let's go into dreaming, in particular, the cinematic
Speaker 1: emotional kind of thing. Now, traditionally that's been thought to
Speaker 1: happen during rapid eye movement sleep when you can see
Speaker 1: when you're watching somebody sleep that their eyes are moving
Speaker 1: back and forth beneath their eyelids. But tell us the
Speaker 1: modern view about when we're having those cinematic emotional dreams.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so.
Speaker 2: The consensus in the field now is that we're dreaming
Speaker 2: all night, We're not just dreaming in REM. And it
Speaker 2: is true that if you want those biggest, emotional, most
Speaker 2: cinematic dreams, you're most likely to get them in REM,
Speaker 2: but you're most likely to get them in REM at
Speaker 2: the end of the night. So like the most fun
Speaker 2: thing if I tell folks all you want to have
Speaker 2: big dreams, snooze that alarm, Why because you're most likely
Speaker 2: to have super dense REM right there in the morning.
Speaker 2: But also it looks like in those last two hours
Speaker 2: of sleep, your non REM dreams look very cinematic, look
Speaker 2: very emotional, look very vivid, have first person narratives. They're
Speaker 2: hard to distinguish. So I think the big takeaway is
Speaker 2: you're dreaming all night, and sleep staging needs to get
Speaker 2: a little smarter to tract those dreams. But if you
Speaker 2: want to make a good bet and you're watching a
Speaker 2: partner a kid sleep and you want to get a
Speaker 2: big dream report, and you see those eyes moving, it's
Speaker 2: a good time to wake them up.
Speaker 1: Cool, So why are dreams so bizarre?
Speaker 3: Great?
Speaker 2: So I think you can't answer this question without asking
Speaker 2: about what dreaming is doing in general. And so I
Speaker 2: like a theory called the next up theory, which is
Speaker 2: that network exploration to understand possibilities. And this bobstickled and
Speaker 2: Tony's odra, I'm too wonderful scientists. And the basic idea
Speaker 2: is that, Okay, we go around all day collecting all
Speaker 2: this information into short term memory, but somehow that information
Speaker 2: has to leave short term memory and get integrated into
Speaker 2: the story of our lives. And you can't do that
Speaker 2: integration while you're processing the world around you. So you're
Speaker 2: too busy taking information in into short term memory, things
Speaker 2: that are happening to you right now, prossing the world,
Speaker 2: the physics, the possibilities, the dangers. At night, your eyes
Speaker 2: are closed at night, you're still you don't need to
Speaker 2: be doing any of that work. So what you're doing
Speaker 2: at night is taking that information you learn today and
Speaker 2: fitting them into the memory networks of your whole story
Speaker 2: of your life in particular, so you can predict all
Speaker 2: the possibilities of what's going to happen tomorrow and next
Speaker 2: week and a month later. So we're having this conversation.
Speaker 2: I'll store it in short term memory, but it kind
Speaker 2: of reminds me of that time that I got interviewed
Speaker 2: to get into high school to have this exam, and
Speaker 2: it was kind of intense and emotional. But it's like
Speaker 2: a little bit like this in my stomach. It kind
Speaker 2: of feels stressful, but it's like not that stressful. It's
Speaker 2: like kind of different. I have to understand the similarities
Speaker 2: and the difference is, So maybe tonight I have a dream,
Speaker 2: and that dream is you and me sitting here, but
Speaker 2: you're my high school counselor, and so at night I'm
Speaker 2: associating these things largely based on So dreams are largely
Speaker 2: emotion driven, and I'm trying to fit these memories together
Speaker 2: so I can make sense of the story of my life.
Speaker 2: Because our job isn't and you know this as an neuroscientist,
Speaker 2: our job isn't to store all the information we've ever
Speaker 2: gotten from the world. Our job is to extract patterns.
Speaker 2: Extracting patterns relies on making associations those associations are driven
Speaker 2: by feelings. This is something that Antonio Dimasio writes about
Speaker 2: so beautifully in the feeling of what happens, Dreaming is
Speaker 2: the same thing. Dreaming is a feelings driven association to
Speaker 2: make sense of your day. And you can do it
Speaker 2: because you're not processing all the potholes and hot coffees
Speaker 2: and things that are in front of your face while
Speaker 2: you're awake.
Speaker 1: Great, and so this is what the field calls consolidation,
Speaker 1: where you take all this stuff and you burn it
Speaker 1: into the rest of the system. Okay, so the reason
Speaker 1: that dreams are so bizarre is because of these weird
Speaker 1: associations that are happening while you're stitching this stuff into
Speaker 1: what you already know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the reason I think dreams are so bizarre you
Speaker 2: can think about as a kind of network or node association,
Speaker 2: a kind of tree of exploration. The first thing you
Speaker 2: want to do with this interaction us sitting here together
Speaker 2: is think of the most similar memories. Oh, okay, sitting
Speaker 2: here is sort of like how I sat in the
Speaker 2: chair this morning, and they feel a little bit similar. Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna associate those two memories. But the longer you
Speaker 2: spend to sleep. The more times you have an altradean cycle,
Speaker 2: the more times you wake up and go back to sleep,
Speaker 2: the more bizarre those things are going to get. So
Speaker 2: that you can understand the most wild and wild and
Speaker 2: wild possibilities of what might happen the next day. And
Speaker 2: the idea here is kind of simple. It's that you
Speaker 2: want to have the widest net of possibilities so that
Speaker 2: you're not surprised when you wake up the next day
Speaker 2: by what happens. You want to be able to predict
Speaker 2: everything that happens tomorrow, and so tonight I rehearse all
Speaker 2: the possible scenarios that are similar to this. And the
Speaker 2: idea is simply that being surprised costs you a lot
Speaker 2: of calories you have to learn. But if you've already
Speaker 2: predicted tomorrow how something's going to feel, what it reminds
Speaker 2: you of, so that you're not surprised the next time
Speaker 2: you sit down in an interview, it basically isn't as
Speaker 2: surprising and doesn't cost you as many calories to understand it.
Speaker 2: So dreaming is a way to explore short term, long term,
Speaker 2: less bizarre and more bizarre associations between a memory and
Speaker 2: experience and all the possible experience that it could be like,
Speaker 2: so that I can predict them happening.
Speaker 1: What about nightmares? What's the story with nightmares?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the idea is that dreams, when they're working well,
Speaker 2: are a way to integrate today into the story of
Speaker 2: my life and make it make sense. And memory consolidation
Speaker 2: keeping memories, memory evolution, extracting patterns from those memories, and
Speaker 2: just from those memories. Nightmares are when that memory consolidation
Speaker 2: evolution breaks. And so the kind of canonical nightmare that
Speaker 2: folks in my field worry about are these trauma related nightmares,
Speaker 2: and they're often treatment resistant, and so what they look
Speaker 2: like is somebody has an experience and that's a traumatic experience.
Speaker 2: And these dreams are weird because they're not a metaphor,
Speaker 2: they're not a narrative, and they don't change. People have
Speaker 2: the same experience at night that they had during the day,
Speaker 2: and it's like that memory is not evolving.
Speaker 3: It's like you're going back.
Speaker 2: He was chasing me down the hall with the knife,
Speaker 2: just like he did in real life. And every night
Speaker 2: I go to sleep and I know that he's going
Speaker 2: to chase me down the hall with the knife. So
Speaker 2: I actually got into this field because I had a
Speaker 2: traumatic experienced little kid, a violent mugging experience, and I
Speaker 2: had these traumatic nightmares, and a therapist and my mom
Speaker 2: really helped me with it, and helped me by basically
Speaker 2: telling me bedtime stories. We can get into how that
Speaker 2: works in a second, but I had personal experience these nightmares.
Speaker 3: They happen every night, and so.
Speaker 2: That memory can't evolve, that memory can't lose its emotional power,
Speaker 2: that memory can't be integrated into the networks of your
Speaker 2: whole life's story. It just returns every night, and it's
Speaker 2: like an exposure every night. And those nightmares are really stressful.
Speaker 2: You can see that they're stressful all the way from
Speaker 2: cortisol levels to them predicting levels of suicidality and depression
Speaker 2: and dementia and Alzheimer's. Nightmares are really really, really bad
Speaker 2: for you, and so their treatment target. But I think
Speaker 2: of nightmares basically as that memory integration system not quite
Speaker 2: working and instead getting stuck on the memory because it's
Speaker 2: so emotionally charged.
Speaker 1: And let's zoom in on that for a second. About
Speaker 1: predicting dementia, tell us this quite surprising result.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting. So This is a research mostly from
Speaker 2: a person named Obademi O tai Ku. That takeaway is
Speaker 2: that across dementia, across Alzheimer's, across even early death before
Speaker 2: seventy five. If you ask people on a set of
Speaker 2: questionnaires called a PSQI, which you ask everyone about their
Speaker 2: sleep quality, there's this one question, do bad dream make
Speaker 2: your sleep worse at night or keep you up at night?
Speaker 3: If they endorse that.
Speaker 2: If they say yes, bad dreams keep me up at night,
Speaker 2: people seven years later are more likely to have cognitive decline.
Speaker 2: Fifteen years later are more likely to have Parkinsons. They're
Speaker 2: more likely to die early. The reason is kind of obvious,
Speaker 2: which is that during the day, if you spend a
Speaker 2: lot of your time stressed out, we already know it
Speaker 2: has all these consequences in terms of inflammation, in terms
Speaker 2: of physical health during the day.
Speaker 3: It's not weird.
Speaker 2: We think, oh, my psychological health affects my physical health.
Speaker 2: Being stressed out up here changes my whole body. We
Speaker 2: know that it's a treatment target. We haven't really figured
Speaker 2: out the link between stress at night in dreams and
Speaker 2: stress in the body, but it looks like where your
Speaker 2: body should be repairing, whether it's your immune system at
Speaker 2: night or fighting inflammation at night. Instead you're rehearsing the
Speaker 2: worst moments you've ever had and going back to them.
Speaker 2: And so there are these consequences in terms of brain health,
Speaker 2: these consequences in terms of physical health.
Speaker 1: Is there a way for us to know the arrow
Speaker 1: of causality? There?
Speaker 3: Totally?
Speaker 2: So, I mean, the thing you can do is you
Speaker 2: can look at confounding factors. So these things that I mentioned, oh,
Speaker 2: nightmares and stress dreams predict cognitive decline dementia. Those are
Speaker 2: independent of depression, anxiety. Those are independent of sleep quality
Speaker 2: and sleep efficiency and sleep duration. You can be sleeping
Speaker 2: the right amount of hours, but these nightmares are the
Speaker 2: distinguishing factor in terms of whether you are or not
Speaker 2: gonna have cognitive decline later on. So one of the
Speaker 2: ways you look at is confounding factors. The better way
Speaker 2: to determine causality is help with the nightmares, see if
Speaker 2: it changes things. So the kind of amazing punchline is
Speaker 2: there's a behavioral therapy called imagery rehearsal therapy.
Speaker 3: You take the nightmare.
Speaker 2: Oh, he was chasing me down the hall with the
Speaker 2: knife and it was night time and I was running,
Speaker 2: and you stop and say, hey, what if it was daytime?
Speaker 1: You ask the patient this during the day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're sitting with them and they tell you about
Speaker 2: their nightmare that they're having every night. Okay, he's chasing
Speaker 2: me down the hall with the knife and it's nighttime
Speaker 2: and I'm running. Okay, what if it was daytime? They said, no,
Speaker 2: it wasn't daytime. No, no, no, okay, but we're we're going
Speaker 2: to try to change it. And you write down, okay,
Speaker 2: chasing me, but it's daytime, and then you rehearse it,
Speaker 2: and then you repeat it, and then you write it
Speaker 2: down again, and you rehearse it, and before bed, they
Speaker 2: rehearse it again, and you do it rehearsing.
Speaker 1: They think through that scenario.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's right.
Speaker 2: They really imagine it, really imagine it chasing, but it's daytime.
Speaker 2: Do it for three or four nights, and eventually the
Speaker 2: nightmare will change.
Speaker 3: They're still getting.
Speaker 2: Chased, but it's the day and they will wake up
Speaker 2: and they will say, oh my god, it's not happening
Speaker 2: to me. I'm making that dream, I'm making that nightmare.
Speaker 2: And so there's this sudden shift in agency what people
Speaker 2: call self efficacy or internal locus of control. I'm in control.
Speaker 2: I'm not a victim of my nightmare every night, and
Speaker 2: anyway it's not happening to me, I'm making it. And
Speaker 2: so then off what will happen is people will stop
Speaker 2: having the nightmares entirely. But also there's a difference between
Speaker 2: having nightmare and being distressed about the nightmare, and saying
Speaker 2: I'm in control changes everything about distress. So in terms
Speaker 2: of causality, it is very clear that, for instance, helping
Speaker 2: people with imagery rehearsal therapy, changing their nightmares, changing the
Speaker 2: level of joy and their dreams will predict, for instance,
Speaker 2: suicidality a day later, a week later, six months later,
Speaker 2: is really important for waking behavior.
Speaker 1: One more question before we move on to the next thing.
Speaker 1: I have nightmares occasionally, not very often, but when I do,
Speaker 1: they're not predicated on real memories. So how does that
Speaker 1: fit with the story that you mentioned about a memory
Speaker 1: that's embedded.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: So I think it's useful to think of these trauma
Speaker 2: related repetitive nightmares as pretty distinct from the nightmares that
Speaker 2: all of us have sometimes. And then also within that
Speaker 2: dream science says a bad dream happens all the time
Speaker 2: to everyone. The majority of dreams are negative, actually, like
Speaker 2: seventy percent of dreams are negative.
Speaker 3: It seems like we're rehearsing a lot of.
Speaker 2: Threats because we're like, oh, if you're going to rehearse
Speaker 2: something that might happen tomorrow, it makes sense to rehearse
Speaker 2: the bad thing, because that's the thing that's going to
Speaker 2: cost me a lot tomorrow if.
Speaker 3: I don't think about it.
Speaker 2: But these repetitive nightmares seem damaging in a way that
Speaker 2: normal nightmares aren't. And normal nightmares, we say a nightmare
Speaker 2: is the dream that wakes you up, a bad dream
Speaker 2: that you have and you sleep through the night even
Speaker 2: if it feels really bad. That's not called a nightmare.
Speaker 2: In terms of clinical nightmare disorder, nightmares disturb sleep. Nightmares
Speaker 2: disturb your life. They disturb your waking behavior. They make
Speaker 2: it so you can't work, they make it so you
Speaker 2: can't think, They affect rumination, they return during the day.
Speaker 2: A nightmare disorder is distinct from the bad dreams we're
Speaker 2: all having naturally.
Speaker 1: So what are the approaches of the therapeutic approaches that
Speaker 1: one can take it to nightmares?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm just gonna say my favorite recent one so
Speaker 2: beyond imagery rehearsal therapy, which is wonderful, and it's a
Speaker 2: behavioral therapy that works for many people, but not all.
Speaker 2: We need new innovative treatments. This repetitive nightmare complaint is
Speaker 2: something you can see in eighty percent of PTSD patients.
Speaker 3: It is huge.
Speaker 2: It is huge if you think only of for instance,
Speaker 2: folks were veterans and post combat nightmares, this is millions
Speaker 2: of people we're talking about every night nightmares, So big deal.
Speaker 2: My favorite recent one is Pillarinsika, Boris Heifitz and Harrison
Speaker 2: Chow folks out of Stanford Medical School here actually where
Speaker 2: you are, Yeah, who are just great doing this crazy
Speaker 2: innovative thing. And what happened was people were coming in
Speaker 2: for surgery, a normal surgery that had nothing to do
Speaker 2: with their PTSD. They happened to have PTSD, they happened
Speaker 2: to have these repetitive nightmares. They go under anesthesia, yeah,
Speaker 2: for the surgery propofaal anesthesia in particular, and these people
Speaker 2: wake up and they say, oh my god, I just
Speaker 2: had the best dream I've had in years.
Speaker 3: It was like my nightmare, but it didn't go bad.
Speaker 2: It was like, this thing that happens to me every night,
Speaker 2: except that there wasn't any of the negative emotion. And
Speaker 2: they wake up and they say, I haven't had a
Speaker 2: joyous dream in years. Thank you for giving that to me.
Speaker 2: And then three months later, six months later, two years later,
Speaker 2: they no longer endorse PTSD, They no longer have traumatic nightmares.
Speaker 2: Just from one session of propofol anesthesia, they are not
Speaker 2: having these trauma related nightmares anymore. And so Boris and
Speaker 2: the team were like, this is crazy. It keeps happening.
Speaker 2: I think that we're going to really investigate this and
Speaker 2: we're going to use propofol. And it turns out if
Speaker 2: you look at propofol dreams, everyone's having dreams under anesthesia,
Speaker 2: and if you look in p particular at the content,
Speaker 2: they're about ninety five percent positive and joyous. Doesn't matter
Speaker 2: if you come in endorsing PTSD netmores or not. They're
Speaker 2: super joyous dreams. And so over somebody who hasn't had
Speaker 2: a good time in their head for a long time,
Speaker 2: that's a big deal. And so they're exploring this kind
Speaker 2: of as a new psychedelic treatment mediated by anesthesia. The
Speaker 2: reason this is really cool is because millions of people
Speaker 2: are getting in anesthesia today. Yeah, and millions of people
Speaker 2: are not getting MDMA treatment today if you think that's
Speaker 2: useful for PTSD. But this is something that's already happening,
Speaker 2: and all you have to do is change a little
Speaker 2: bit of the outset of propofil extended a little bit
Speaker 2: and ask them what they're dreaming about. Quietly, don't interfere
Speaker 2: with it as they're coming out of surgery, so that
Speaker 2: they remember it, because otherwise they'll lose this pleasant experience
Speaker 2: if you don't ask them in the right way. Just
Speaker 2: like in the morning, if I wake you up with
Speaker 2: a loud alarm and I say you got to get
Speaker 2: to work, you'll forget your dream. So you have to
Speaker 2: help them recall that dream at the end of surgery
Speaker 2: if you want it to be beneficial.
Speaker 1: We're going to come back to this issue of dream
Speaker 1: recall in a few minutes, and you're also doing some
Speaker 1: nightmare work. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm really moved by the nightmare problem.
Speaker 2: So we got to do some work with doctor Wesley Jungren,
Speaker 2: who's wonderful. He's a marine himself, so he has an
Speaker 2: understanding of what it means to be in combat. He
Speaker 2: has an understanding from his community of what it means
Speaker 2: to take that combat home with you after service and
Speaker 2: the ramifications mental health wise, and so Wesley had this
Speaker 2: great idea which was basically, Okay, imagery rehearsal therapy beautiful treatment,
Speaker 2: but a lot of people don't believe it's gonna work, Like, yeah, right, doc,
Speaker 2: you can change my nightmares. Bs, I don't believe you
Speaker 2: for a second. So treatment credibility really matters in all
Speaker 2: kinds of behavioral therapy. So he said, Okay, okay, I'll
Speaker 2: leave you alone at night and you can go to sleep,
Speaker 2: but I'm not gonna do anything but just come in
Speaker 2: for a nap. And come in for a nap, and
Speaker 2: we're going to try to choose something for you to
Speaker 2: dream about. Maybe a tree, maybe a fork, maybe Beyonce,
Speaker 2: maybe chocolate.
Speaker 3: I don't care.
Speaker 2: I'm lay down on the couch. You use a method
Speaker 2: called targeted dreaming gabation, which is something myself and some
Speaker 2: friends at MIT came up with. The Basic idea is
Speaker 2: you let people slip into the sleep onset period. They're
Speaker 2: half asleep, so they're losing a lot of their cognitive control,
Speaker 2: but they can still hear. When they're half asleep, you
Speaker 2: literally play the words to them from a speaker. Remember
Speaker 2: to think of a tree, Remember to think of chocolate.
Speaker 2: You then let them slip into the lightest sleep. It's
Speaker 2: called covert rem. It is at sleep onset, but it
Speaker 2: looks rem like in terms of the dreams. You then
Speaker 2: wake them up and say what were you dreaming about?
Speaker 2: And they say, oh, in a river, chocolate with umballumpas.
Speaker 2: And then you say, okay, you can go back to
Speaker 2: sleep now, and you repeat it, repeat it, repeat it,
Speaker 2: and you wake them about five times.
Speaker 3: They nap for about an hour.
Speaker 1: How do you wake them gently?
Speaker 2: You wake them gently with really really quiet audio. I've
Speaker 2: done vibration, I've done smell, I've done all this stuff.
Speaker 2: But simplest is sound, and you just say, hey, tell
Speaker 2: me what you are dreaming about.
Speaker 1: Oh, the sound of your voice saying what we're dreaming about?
Speaker 3: That's it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so this is via an app that we've made.
Speaker 2: This is recorded sounds. So people fall half asleep, remember
Speaker 2: to think of a tree. They fall into covert rem
Speaker 2: to have a dream. You wake them up what were
Speaker 2: you dreaming about? And then you snooze, rinse, and repeat,
Speaker 2: do it again, and so then take in one hundred
Speaker 2: people about ninety two percent and then will have a
Speaker 2: dream of that thing. And this is we've done these
Speaker 2: studies in my tea independently replicated a Duke Folks at
Speaker 2: Harvard using it Folks at Montre Medical Vancouver General Hospital
Speaker 2: is replicated.
Speaker 1: And this is called targeted dream incubation.
Speaker 2: Targeted dream incubation. The targeted Yeah, just because you can
Speaker 2: pick a target like tree. So the important thing in
Speaker 2: the context of the work that we did with Wesley
Speaker 2: Jungreen at the VA is people then wake up from
Speaker 2: that nap and they say, oh damn, maybe maybe you
Speaker 2: can change these dreams and so treatment credit abilities of interest.
Speaker 2: But what we really focused on is these feelings of agency.
Speaker 2: And we saw this twenty four percent increase in people's
Speaker 2: ratings in terms of feeling of self efficacy or agency,
Speaker 2: and then we saw that was related to lower suicidality
Speaker 2: the day of and lower suicidality a week later. So
Speaker 2: just making someone feel less helpless about their dreams and
Speaker 2: nightmares has this real clinical impact. Super cool, and so
Speaker 2: all these strategies, imagery, rehearsal, therapy and as she's a dreaming,
Speaker 2: targeted dream incubation. We're coming up with a whole menu
Speaker 2: for this really important thing.
Speaker 1: Oh incredible, Okay, So let's zoom in on the hypnagogic state,
Speaker 1: which is right when you're falling asleep. So some people
Speaker 1: like Thomas Edison and Solvador Dali would actually use this
Speaker 1: take advantage of this. So tell us how they did.
Speaker 2: That, totally, So pick your Edison's or your Dolli's. But
Speaker 2: also you can read Proost, and you can read Nabokov,
Speaker 2: and you can read all these poets and and scientists
Speaker 2: playing in this little area of sleep on set the Beatles,
Speaker 2: Einstein and whatever. So it's the moment when your brain
Speaker 2: is turning thoughts into images. It's the moment where your
Speaker 2: brain is turning the outside world into an internal world.
Speaker 2: You're awake, you're asleep, but it's not a switch. Sleep
Speaker 2: scientists think there are nine stages of the descent into sleep.
Speaker 2: They're called hory stages, and they're quick.
Speaker 1: How do you spell it?
Speaker 3: H ori I.
Speaker 2: It's named after Goud, named to dow Horri. There's a
Speaker 2: bunch of amazing Japanese dream researchers.
Speaker 3: Let's all about it.
Speaker 2: Man In those nine stages of sleep. You have these
Speaker 2: kind of different stereotype dreams, you have these very specific
Speaker 2: brain wave features EEG features, And Hypnagotya is the state
Speaker 2: of transition. The kind of cool thing about it is
Speaker 2: you're neither here nor there completely, So for people listening,
Speaker 2: this is the state when you're falling asleep and you're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I've got to go to the grossery store and I've
Speaker 2: gotta picked my kid up from school, and I've got
Speaker 2: to be in a bouncy castle with my grandma. There.
Speaker 3: Wait no, wait, wait, wait, it's where.
Speaker 2: You're It's where your thought takes a left turn all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, and it's quick, and it's very very
Speaker 2: very strange, And if you want to play with it,
Speaker 2: you can extend hypnagadja and it will only get weirder
Speaker 2: the longer you stay in it.
Speaker 3: It is a crazy state of mind.
Speaker 1: Hmmm, how do you extend it?
Speaker 2: So I extend hypnagadia with serial awakenings that sleep on
Speaker 2: set so very very simply, you can, for instance, without
Speaker 2: any sort of brain imaging, if you just snooze ten times,
Speaker 2: especially over a nap, because naps are going to be
Speaker 2: very very REM like during the day.
Speaker 1: As in hit your snooze button on your larm.
Speaker 2: You just keep hitting that snooze Those dreams will get
Speaker 2: weirder and weirder, but you will also get more control
Speaker 2: over those dreams. So we haven't gotten to talk about
Speaker 2: lucid dreaming yet. But lucid dreaming is this idea that
Speaker 2: you could in a dream, know that you're dreaming and
Speaker 2: then choose what to dream about. And so this is
Speaker 2: something that's been documented for hundreds of years but actually
Speaker 2: was researched again at Stanford, most seriously by a guy
Speaker 2: named Stephen Leberge about fifty years ago. And it's the
Speaker 2: idea that in this covert REM early sleep period or
Speaker 2: in REM, you realize you're dreaming, you take control of
Speaker 2: the dream, You make a choice. But even crazier, if
Speaker 2: you are awake inside a dream, you're totally paralyzed. Right
Speaker 2: of course, you can't move your body, or else you
Speaker 2: would wake up and start running around the bed and
Speaker 2: fighting ninjas. But your eyes are not paralyzed in REM
Speaker 2: sleep they can move around. So in that lucid dream
Speaker 2: the experiments work like this. Somebody realizes a dream and
Speaker 2: you've agreed before Hey, when you realize it's a dream,
Speaker 2: move your eyes left and right in the dream. Look
Speaker 2: at the draft, Look at the elephant. Look at the draft,
Speaker 2: look at the elephant. Your real eyes of the person
Speaker 2: lying there will actually move left, right, left, right four times.
Speaker 2: So you can signal from inside the dream, I know
Speaker 2: that I dream.
Speaker 1: Say four times. You mean that was the pre agreed
Speaker 1: upon the number to do. How crazy is that? So
Speaker 1: they are completely in a different world. They are asleep,
Speaker 1: we're on different planes of consciousness. But they're looking around
Speaker 1: in their dream one two, three, four. Their actual eyes
Speaker 1: are moving one to three four. We register that on
Speaker 1: what's called their eog Looking at their eye movements, it
Speaker 1: looks like that's right totally.
Speaker 2: And then you can go a little crazier. Okay, they
Speaker 2: know they're in a dream. I'm going to play a
Speaker 2: math problem on the loud speaker. What's three minus one?
Speaker 2: In their dream? They'll be walking down the street and
Speaker 2: then they'll look at a house and it'll be house
Speaker 2: number three minus one. And let's say, oh, it's the
Speaker 2: math problem I knew I would get. And then they'll
Speaker 2: move their eyes one two and they'll answer correctly. This
Speaker 2: is a literal this is this is this is a
Speaker 2: paper kind of Karen Conkling. A bunch of folks led
Speaker 2: this as a few years ago, replicated across four different labs.
Speaker 2: They are asleep. They are in a different plane of consciousness.
Speaker 2: You are playing math problems over the loud speaker. They're
Speaker 2: answering correctly with their eyes while they remain in rem
Speaker 2: and this is like, it's cool science, but it's also
Speaker 2: the first time humans have ever communicated across these planes
Speaker 2: of consciousness. So as someone who's really interested in consciousness
Speaker 2: and phenomenology, like for you this much, it's pretty weird.
Speaker 2: It's like we're we're talking across worlds. So I really
Speaker 2: love it.
Speaker 3: Via the eyes, I love that.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's loose dreaming but zooming back out now
Speaker 1: to this hypnogogic state right when you're falling asleep. So
Speaker 1: you're about to tell us what Edison Dalli and all
Speaker 1: the others actually do to take advantage of this. It's true.
Speaker 2: I got a little excited about dream research. I took
Speaker 2: a left turn, gotten to lose babe. So yeah, they
Speaker 2: were just something really simple, which they called the steel
Speaker 2: ball technique or sleeping with a key. But both involved
Speaker 2: sitting up right like you are letting yourself take anap
Speaker 2: during the day. Especially good is what's called the post
Speaker 2: prandial period, which is a fancy way of saying after
Speaker 2: you eat lunch, because you really get sleepy and you
Speaker 2: fall asleep sitting up, but you're holding something heavy when
Speaker 2: you start falling asleep. In hypnagodia, all these things are
Speaker 2: happening in your brain, but also you're losing muscle tone,
Speaker 2: so your grip will loosen, you'll drop that ball, it'll
Speaker 2: hit the ground and make a loud sound. It'll catch hypnagodia.
Speaker 2: Edison called it his genius gap because hypnagodia is super associative,
Speaker 2: super exploratory, super creative, super flexible cognition, and so Edison
Speaker 2: would pick a problem he was working on, think about
Speaker 2: it as he was falling asleep, and catch his hypnogogic
Speaker 2: thoughts around that topic to find his most creative thinking.
Speaker 2: And totally cool that Edison did it.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: It's been documented, but we just got real scientific evidence
Speaker 2: for it, led by Celia Lecrow a wonderful paper called
Speaker 2: sleep onset is a creative sweet Spot, And what she
Speaker 2: found is that have people try to solve math problems,
Speaker 2: specific kind of math problem that needs a Eureka moment,
Speaker 2: like solving puzzles. Have them do this exact technique and
Speaker 2: they enter into end one and they wake up, Or
Speaker 2: have them sleep a little deeper and let them go
Speaker 2: into end two a different stage of sleep. The people
Speaker 2: who just dipped into end one have a three x
Speaker 2: greater likelihood of solving that creative problem than the people
Speaker 2: who dipped into end two and went deeper in. There
Speaker 2: is something sweet happening in ND one. There is something
Speaker 2: strange and specific and flexible and creative, and I know
Speaker 2: you've written about creativity. There is something associative happening in
Speaker 2: that state of mind, but you got to catch it
Speaker 2: if you want it. So that's what the steel ball
Speaker 2: was for, and that's actually what our work at MIT
Speaker 2: around Dormea, which was basically a wearable device which would
Speaker 2: track the same thing you losing muscle tone, and then
Speaker 2: would talk to you. It's really similar to the steel
Speaker 2: ball technique, except instead of waking up entirely, it would
Speaker 2: help incubate that dream of your problem you wanted to
Speaker 2: work on right at that moment. It would wake you
Speaker 2: up automatically and record a verbal report, and then it
Speaker 2: would say, great, you can snooze again because the ball.
Speaker 2: It's kind of hard to snooze again with a steel ball.
Speaker 1: Okay, great, So now let's talk about dream recall. So
Speaker 1: what happens with almost all of us is wake up
Speaker 1: in the morning, we think, oh my gosh, I had
Speaker 1: this dream, but this happened, that happened, and then it's
Speaker 1: like gossamer and within fifteen minutes we can't remember it
Speaker 1: at all anymore. Yeah, So, first of all, why do
Speaker 1: we not recall our dreams? And then we'll get into
Speaker 1: how we might totally. So there's a few things that
Speaker 1: we do every morning.
Speaker 2: That make it pretty likely we're not going to recall
Speaker 2: our dreams, which is, we wake up to a really
Speaker 2: loud alarm, which doesn't let us leave sleep gradually, it
Speaker 2: makes us leave sleep suddenly we start thinking immediately about
Speaker 2: what's on the phone, that email the New York Times,
Speaker 2: Oh my god, what is he doing?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: All of that is going to invade our thoughts and
Speaker 2: overwrite these really gentle bits of dream recall. But there's
Speaker 2: another reason we don't recall our dreams, which is we
Speaker 2: don't care about our dreams.
Speaker 1: So in this evolutionarily yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So in the same way, if I decide, you know,
Speaker 2: birding is really important because knowing what birds are around
Speaker 2: my city will help me understand climate change, I will
Speaker 2: walk out of this recording studio today and suddenly I'll
Speaker 2: see birds all around me, and I'll remember those birds.
Speaker 2: I decided they were important, so I noticed them, so
Speaker 2: I remember them. You have to make things important if
Speaker 2: you want to encode them, consolidate them, and keep them.
Speaker 2: We don't care about dreams culturally, but I can tell
Speaker 2: you if somebody's in a dream study and we say, hey,
Speaker 2: we're investigating this thing, it turns out dreams.
Speaker 3: It's true.
Speaker 2: It turns out dreams and specific kind of dreams are
Speaker 2: pro dromal. So before a syndrome, they can predict, for instance,
Speaker 2: a manic episode or a depressive episode. So we really
Speaker 2: want to keep track of your dreams Suddenly, dream recall boom,
Speaker 2: it spikes because he made it important. And so if
Speaker 2: tonight you go to sleep and you say, the first
Speaker 2: thing I'm going to do in the morning is I'm
Speaker 2: going to record my dream, and then I'm going to
Speaker 2: share my dream with my wife and she expects me
Speaker 2: at the breakfast table to have this conversation with her.
Speaker 2: Because Mark Blackgrove's research shows that sharing dreams creates more
Speaker 2: marital intimacy than sharing waking thoughts.
Speaker 3: That's true. Because of that, I'm going to keep it.
Speaker 2: Or because there's research which shows how useful sharing your
Speaker 2: dreams with the therapist is in terms of introspection. Pick
Speaker 2: your reason your dream recall will spike. So these two things.
Speaker 2: How we wake up in the morning too stressful, too invasive,
Speaker 2: you move too much? How we go to bed at night.
Speaker 2: I don't care about dreams. Why would I remember them?
Speaker 2: You can set salience, you can set meaningfulness of dreams
Speaker 2: before sleep, and you will completely change your dream recall.
Speaker 1: Mm let me just return to this question about why
Speaker 1: under normal circumstances we don't remember our dreams. Because one idea,
Speaker 1: of of course, is that it's a bunch. You know,
Speaker 1: you're sticking your head in the night blender and you've
Speaker 1: got all these activities happening, But you don't want that
Speaker 1: to actually interfere with your memories of how the world works.
Speaker 1: You don't want that to actually build your internal model
Speaker 1: of the world. How do you think about why generally
Speaker 1: we don't remember unless we put a lot of effort
Speaker 1: into it.
Speaker 3: I think it's really hard.
Speaker 2: And I know you like to think of things both culturally,
Speaker 2: socially and evolutionarily. I think it's very, very hard to
Speaker 2: tease these two things apart. The reason being, you know,
Speaker 2: I've been super, super lucky to spend some time in
Speaker 2: indigenous context, for instance, where dreams are deeply important to people.
Speaker 2: Dream recall there, everyone's remembering dreams every day. I think
Speaker 2: there's a cultural question as much as there's an evolutionary question.
Speaker 2: And I think the big reason we don't remember dreams
Speaker 2: isn't because of oh, necessarily there's some way that our
Speaker 2: brain works. I think it's because we don't care. I'll
Speaker 2: give you another example. Canonically, there's no smell in dream reports.
Speaker 2: I expect this is the case with you. Oh, I've
Speaker 2: really primarily visual dreams. I have a lot of motor
Speaker 2: I run around, things happen, people attack me.
Speaker 3: But I'm not smelling stuff in my dreams. That's not
Speaker 3: why I wake up reporting.
Speaker 2: But again, if you go to a space where smell
Speaker 2: is incredibly important, specifically a tribe called the Aungies and
Speaker 2: the Andaman islands where smell is a way of interacting
Speaker 2: with your world and spirits and ancestors. The ajrees majority
Speaker 2: of them their dreams are smell. I think it's a
Speaker 2: dream is related to the thing you think is important
Speaker 2: about your world. And we live in a very visual world.
Speaker 2: Because of that, we have very visual dreams. Because of that,
Speaker 2: we have visual activity in dreams. Because of that, we
Speaker 2: can even read dreams out in the visual cortex, and
Speaker 2: we can predict what someone is dreaming about really well.
Speaker 2: But I think it's a cultural question there is You're
Speaker 2: totally right. Lots of people in the memory field think, oh,
Speaker 2: dreams are so bizarre and weird. They do their work
Speaker 2: and we don't need to remember them for them to
Speaker 2: do their associative work. But I don't think that totally
Speaker 2: explains it, because there are these other groups of people
Speaker 2: who are recalling their dreams every day, and they don't
Speaker 2: have different brains than us, they have a different culture.
Speaker 1: Hmm. I take that point about dream recall. I'm slightly
Speaker 1: more skeptical about the smell part only because when we
Speaker 1: look at what are called PGO waves, which are from
Speaker 1: ponting to geniculate to occipital cortex that's why it has
Speaker 1: this heavy name. But the point is it's the set
Speaker 1: of waves driven by a very evolutionarily ancient part in
Speaker 1: your midbrain that blasts activity into the visual cortex, and
Speaker 1: only the primary visual cortex. So that's why dreams are visual.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing they It splashes out from the visual cortex,
Speaker 1: and maybe if you're a culture that emphasizes the smell
Speaker 1: a lot, then certain things that are associated, so it
Speaker 1: follows some pathway and triggers a smell.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent.
Speaker 2: You're totally right, and I'm stoked that you know about
Speaker 2: PGO waves, so on the on the PGO wave thing, totally.
Speaker 2: But the thing you need to answer that question is
Speaker 2: a brain imaging study of the ages and the Niman
Speaker 2: islands to see actually what their sleeping brain looks like
Speaker 2: and if it's the same or if it's different.
Speaker 3: So totally, maybe all cool.
Speaker 2: We have PGO waves and we have visual cortex, then
Speaker 2: we have ol factory bulba activation, and we can see
Speaker 2: the kind of generation of their dreams. Totally, maybe they
Speaker 2: sleep really differently. I don't know, it could be pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: I see you don't buy it.
Speaker 1: I don't buy it only because we radiated out of
Speaker 1: Africa and moved to different places like yesterday. But the
Speaker 1: human brain hasn't changed in that time. So and in fact,
Speaker 1: these pgo waves are conserved all through the animal kingdom.
Speaker 1: Everybody's dreaming this way totally. But I do think I
Speaker 1: do take your point that if smell is really important
Speaker 1: to your culture, then you'll have more paved pathways between
Speaker 1: visual cortex and olfactory and so maybe that'll get triggered
Speaker 1: more and you.
Speaker 3: Can do fun things with that.
Speaker 2: You can say, oh, you know, I really want to
Speaker 2: make new musical album, and I know that the Beatles
Speaker 2: had their best songs come in dreams, and I want
Speaker 2: to use my dreams creatively, and so I'm gonna fall
Speaker 2: asleep listening to music from this album that I'm starting
Speaker 2: to create, so that it's more likely that I have
Speaker 2: a dream which is sound based, so that it's more
Speaker 2: likely that I have a creative breakthrough in my dreams.
Speaker 2: So you can do some kind of picking around this.
Speaker 2: You can pick, for instance, oh, I want smell as
Speaker 2: a signal that influences my dreams, So I'll give you
Speaker 2: a really crazy study.
Speaker 1: Guy.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll give you two smell studies. I'll see if
Speaker 2: you like them. They're very very different. One of them.
Speaker 2: You can pick smells. I smell them. I smell them,
Speaker 2: I spray them. I associated with lavender or something, lavender rose.
Speaker 2: I associate them with a place, and then I spray
Speaker 2: that smell on my pillow. I'm much more likely to
Speaker 2: dream of that place. You want a dream of Paris,
Speaker 2: spend the next week. I'm gonna watch a little Paris video.
Speaker 2: Wallacecent is in the room. I'm gonna spray that same
Speaker 2: scent my pillow. I feel very confident you will have
Speaker 2: a dream in Paris.
Speaker 1: I thought these studies were done a long time ago,
Speaker 1: so long ago, and okay, but I maybe I misremembered.
Speaker 1: I thought they hadn't yielded positive results.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the study that I'm referencing is two hundred
Speaker 2: years old. It's a guy named Saint Denise who would
Speaker 2: go with the piece and he spray sense, and then
Speaker 2: he would spray the one his pillow. He would go
Speaker 2: to the place, and then people have had some trouble.
Speaker 2: How does it work, this association? But we're getting better,
Speaker 2: and we're getting better, and we're getting better at it.
Speaker 2: And I'll give you a really, really specific example of
Speaker 2: this protocol, which is basically, I'm going to associate a signal,
Speaker 2: it doesn't really matter if it's smell or sound with something.
Speaker 2: Then I'm going to reintroduce that thing in sleep. Then
Speaker 2: I'm gonna hope that somebody dreams of that thing, and
Speaker 2: then i'm gonna see how it changes their next day.
Speaker 2: So there's a paper from this year again from Karen Conkly,
Speaker 2: whose work I love. You have people look at a
Speaker 2: set of puzzles while they're awake. You then, while they're
Speaker 2: looking at this puzzle versus that puzzle, play sound A
Speaker 2: versus sound B. You then wait until they're in remsleep.
Speaker 2: You then play sound A versus sound B. What you
Speaker 2: can see is that playing sound A, about seventy five
Speaker 2: percent of people will have a dream of the puzzle
Speaker 2: related to that sound. Not only will they have a
Speaker 2: dream related to it, but they'll then do better at
Speaker 2: solving that puzzle than folks who didn't have that reactivation
Speaker 2: related to it. So we're getting really good at not
Speaker 2: only making a claim, oh we can associate a sound
Speaker 2: with something in waking life and then make you dream
Speaker 2: about that thing, but making you dream about that thing
Speaker 2: will then make you better at tasks related to it.
Speaker 2: We did the same thing with creativity. Make someone dream
Speaker 2: about X, test them on X. Someone else dreams about
Speaker 2: why test them on X. The first person will do
Speaker 2: about forty three percent better on a set of creativity tasks.
Speaker 2: And it is hard to do causal work and consciousness.
Speaker 2: You have done this for a lot longer than me.
Speaker 2: But we're getting close. Dan Dennett wouldn't be satisfied, but
Speaker 2: we're getting close.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Why wouldn't he be satisfied?
Speaker 2: Because I think that some people think you can't solve
Speaker 2: the epiphenomenon problem. You can never make a claim about consciousness.
Speaker 2: Even if you say the experience seems to change waking behavior,
Speaker 2: somebody would say it's not the experience, it's the neural
Speaker 2: mechanisms that create the experience. I think there's basically no difference,
Speaker 2: And like, that's an argument for philosophers. What we're supposed
Speaker 2: to do is make useful stuff great. Okay, So that
Speaker 2: was back to dream incubation. But the other end of
Speaker 2: it that I wanted drill in with you is about
Speaker 2: dream recall. Okay, so you've developed an app called dust
Speaker 2: tell Us about that totally can I say one thing
Speaker 2: before and thank you for asking about it.
Speaker 3: So on dream recall.
Speaker 2: The best sci fi scenario is, actually, we don't have
Speaker 2: to wake people up and ask them about their dreams
Speaker 2: because self report is unreliable.
Speaker 3: The sci fi scenario is what.
Speaker 2: If we could just look at their brain activity and
Speaker 2: tell what they were dreaming about. Great in the same
Speaker 2: way that sci fi predicts science in so many fields. Horikawa,
Speaker 2: wonderful researcher, has this paper and encoding visual imagery during sleep,
Speaker 2: and he shows that what you can do is you
Speaker 2: can show people bunch of pictures, flash them really really
Speaker 2: really quickly while they're awake, and look at their visual cortex.
Speaker 2: This is an fMRI paper. It's a functional magnetic resonance
Speaker 2: imaging paper, so a kind of brain imaging where you
Speaker 2: look at brain blood flow and oxygenation, impress of the brain.
Speaker 2: But the very simple idea is flash a bunch of
Speaker 2: pictures of people while they're awake, let them go to sleep,
Speaker 2: look at their brain activity in the visual cortex, and
Speaker 2: look at similarity.
Speaker 3: Ah, when they looked at a.
Speaker 2: Giraffe while they were awake, this part lit up looks
Speaker 2: like that part is lighting up when they're asleep, and
Speaker 2: you can guess with really solid accuracy what they are
Speaker 2: dreaming about.
Speaker 1: And it's it's because you're looking across the whole visual
Speaker 1: cortex and you're seeing patterns, and so right, giraffe is
Speaker 1: represented by a particular pattern across all these vok which
Speaker 1: are three dimensional pixels in the brain. You know, some
Speaker 1: are very active summer lots in between and anyway, you
Speaker 1: can look at this and that's how you figure out
Speaker 1: these things, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can now do this. There's a paper
Speaker 2: from this year actually from Monica Schenhauer, which is doing
Speaker 2: this just with EEG. So epher Mariah. Is this big
Speaker 2: magnetic million dollar machine, scary, intense expensive EEG. Pop it
Speaker 2: on your head with a bunch of electrodes electron cephalogram.
Speaker 2: This is the classic brain waves. It looks like a
Speaker 2: heart rate based like Doom, Doom Doom. You can put
Speaker 2: people to bed, have them listen to one of four
Speaker 2: bedtime stories. You can then look at their brain activity
Speaker 2: while they're listening. When they go to sleep, look at
Speaker 2: their brain activity and you can guess which story they
Speaker 2: listen to. So it's getting reactivated just on EG and
Speaker 2: the stronger the similarity to the story, the more likely
Speaker 2: that they are dreaming of that thing with condition blind
Speaker 2: raiders saying, Oh, this person, just looking at their dream,
Speaker 2: can you guess what story they listen to? Just looking
Speaker 2: at their brain activity, can you guess which bedtime story
Speaker 2: they listen to?
Speaker 3: And so we're building up.
Speaker 2: To this stage where we can think, huh, not only
Speaker 2: can we control what someone dreams about with bedtime stories,
Speaker 2: we can then see them dreaming about it. With brain imaging.
Speaker 2: We can then tie that reinstantiation of the experience to waking, performance, encoding, consolidation, creativity.
Speaker 2: We're building the IO, the input output system for dreams,
Speaker 2: and it's totally, it's totally. It's crazy. It's like a
Speaker 2: crazy moment in the field.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, so now let's return to dream recall. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you wanted to help people get better at recalling
Speaker 1: their dreams because otherwise, unless you live on some island
Speaker 1: somewhere where that's important, it's very easy to not recall them.
Speaker 1: So what did you do? What is the dust app? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Thanks for asking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the dust app says at night, going to
Speaker 2: have classes on dreams and tell you why they're important.
Speaker 2: In particular that then turn into practices so you can
Speaker 2: try incubating a particular dream. So we have classes for
Speaker 2: flying dreams. You want to have a flying dream, give
Speaker 2: me fifteen minutes before your bedtime. For the rest of
Speaker 2: the week will give you a flying dream. We have
Speaker 2: classes on image rehearsal therapy. If you're struggling with nightmares.
Speaker 2: We have insomnia classes, lucid dreaming classes, yoga nidra classes.
Speaker 2: But the whole point of the classes is basically to
Speaker 2: make you think that your dreams are important, so overnight
Speaker 2: you're more likely to encode them.
Speaker 3: But then in the.
Speaker 2: Morning use our alarm instead of your native Apple iOS
Speaker 2: alarm Doom. It'll wake up really gently and it'll say,
Speaker 2: tell me what you're dreaming about. You don't have to move,
Speaker 2: you speak out loud, you stay still. It'll record your
Speaker 2: dream report, store it in a journal, and then ask, Hey,
Speaker 2: do you want a snooze or do you want to
Speaker 2: wake up? And you can snooze. After that snooze, you
Speaker 2: can choose a dream incubation. Hey, remember to dream of flying,
Speaker 2: so that when you're half awake, half conscious, not quite there,
Speaker 2: it'll guide your dreams towards a particular theme. So it
Speaker 2: takes both the targeted dream incubation protocol we talked about,
Speaker 2: takes the targeted memory reactivation protocol we talked about, and
Speaker 2: it squeezes it into an app so you can use
Speaker 2: it at home, use it for your nightmares, use it
Speaker 2: for your creativity. We're seeing big jumps in dream recall,
Speaker 2: which is really really fun because, like you said, if
Speaker 2: you don't remember these things, you can't work with them.
Speaker 1: And when you record your dream content, what happens with
Speaker 1: it then.
Speaker 2: Totally so it lives in a dream journal. And then
Speaker 2: you have choices. You can analyze your dream. You can
Speaker 2: look at what gestalt Freudian or Buddhist approach to it,
Speaker 2: or you can look at what a more contemporary cognitive
Speaker 2: neuroscience approach to understanding that dream with and that's AI.
Speaker 2: That's done by AI. You can also track over time, Hey,
Speaker 2: who am I dreaming of?
Speaker 3: Most? What places in my dreaming of?
Speaker 1: Most?
Speaker 2: What stress dreams am I having? You can also look
Speaker 2: at your dream readiness score, so in the same way
Speaker 2: you can be like, man, you didn't get much sleep
Speaker 2: last night, You're probably gonna be really sleepy tonight. You
Speaker 2: should be really careful about your bedtime. You can also
Speaker 2: look at, Oh, you had pretty disrupted rem in the
Speaker 2: night before. We think you're gonna have a super vivid
Speaker 2: dream tonight. I think that you should make sure not
Speaker 2: to drink a glass of wine and stay away from
Speaker 2: the blue light so you can have a big, beautiful
Speaker 2: experience tonight. So you can look at your dreams over time,
Speaker 2: you can look at your dream readiness, and the dreams
Speaker 2: over time matters because across all these different symptoms, pick
Speaker 2: your motor symptoms in Parkinson's, or your bipolar disorder, or
Speaker 2: your depressive episodes. A sudden change in dreams is a
Speaker 2: clinical signal that's super meaningful. And so if you see
Speaker 2: this sudden change in dreams, or you see this sudden change,
Speaker 2: for instance, in acting out your dreams, it's really something
Speaker 2: you should know. But you're not really gonna know that
Speaker 2: if you haven't been tracking your dreams over time and
Speaker 2: suddenly they're all really violent for ends, or suddenly they're
Speaker 2: all dreams of death, for instance, and so useful for
Speaker 2: a psychiatrist, for instance, if they're working with someone who
Speaker 2: might be struggling with suicidality. Oh, there's this sudden change
Speaker 2: dreams related to death. We're going to be really careful
Speaker 2: in the coming months, etc.
Speaker 1: Etc.
Speaker 2: So it's a way to understand your dreams over time,
Speaker 2: to understand yourself.
Speaker 1: Might it have something to do with biology. I don't
Speaker 1: know the answer to this, but if you get a
Speaker 1: viral infection, might your dreams change? Yeah?
Speaker 3: It's awesome question.
Speaker 2: So there's so much different work on this, but maybe
Speaker 2: the closest work to that kind of question is the
Speaker 2: work around lupus. So before you have a flare, before
Speaker 2: you have your first flare, often people will have this
Speaker 2: sudden change in dreams the kind of pain they're going
Speaker 2: to experience a few months later. They'll have it in
Speaker 2: their dreams before they have it in waking life. These
Speaker 2: are called pro drums. This is not that surprising. It
Speaker 2: sounds a little weird, but basically the idea is that
Speaker 2: you're having changes already in your body, but they're very
Speaker 2: subtle and they're overshadowed basically by all the things you're
Speaker 2: processing in wake. But at night you're much more in
Speaker 2: touch with your body because you're not overshadowed by input,
Speaker 2: and so that little little bit of pain or little
Speaker 2: little bit of change is going to manifest as a dream.
Speaker 2: So if you're having a lot of dreams of your
Speaker 2: teeth falling out, which is a classic, it predicts you
Speaker 2: having some dental problems six months later. This is not
Speaker 2: that surprising. If you want to have some really messed
Speaker 2: up dream tonight, just wait until eleven PM and eat
Speaker 2: really spicy food. Your stomach is going to mess your
Speaker 2: dreams up. Like we live in a brain that is
Speaker 2: connected to a body. It's just like those two things
Speaker 2: aren't disconnected. That's sort of surprising to people because dreams
Speaker 2: are like ethereal and untouchable.
Speaker 3: They're not.
Speaker 2: They're coming from your stomach. So in the prodrome space,
Speaker 2: that means my girlfriend has lupus. So I've thought a
Speaker 2: lot about this. That means that, huh, you have this
Speaker 2: sudden change, your doctor should know about it. I have
Speaker 2: some folks I'm related to a struggle with Parkinson's. That
Speaker 2: means that if you have a sudden change in your dreams,
Speaker 2: they're suddenly more violent. You're in your fifties, all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, you're having these dreams where you're getting attacked
Speaker 2: and you're kicking and you're fighting. It's likely that those
Speaker 2: dreams So those dreams predict onset of rem behavior disorder,
Speaker 2: which predicts on set of Parkinson's. If you know that
Speaker 2: Parkinson's is coming, this is decade, this is fifteen years out.
Speaker 2: Take that to your collinsion. That is so valuable. So yes,
Speaker 2: you asked me, oh, maybe if you have a viral
Speaker 2: infection or a fever, could those little changes in your
Speaker 2: body manifest as dream content? Definitely, all the way from
Speaker 2: tooth changes to a dopamine disorder.
Speaker 1: Amazing. So let me return to two things. One is
Speaker 1: the curiosity question. I often hear people say to me, oh,
Speaker 1: I have the exact same dream every night, and I've wondered,
Speaker 1: how would you actually know if that's true? Because often
Speaker 1: when I have a dream some bizarre thing, I think, oh,
Speaker 1: I've been here before, but it's presumably not true that
Speaker 1: I've had that same dream. So if you're looking at
Speaker 1: a dream journal, you could actually answer the question what
Speaker 1: do people find?
Speaker 2: I love this question because dreams mess with your feeling
Speaker 2: of familiarity. Beyond creating some strange visual world. I mean,
Speaker 2: as brains eientists, we have to think of how weird
Speaker 2: it is that my mother can be a chair in
Speaker 2: a dream. And I'm like, yeah, she's a chair. She's
Speaker 2: always been a chair. Something about familiarity is all messed
Speaker 2: up in a dream, And so the idea that you
Speaker 2: could step into a dream and be like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is familiar, I've been here before.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't.
Speaker 2: Really believe you totally like you said. So if you
Speaker 2: dream journal over the course of months, you might find,
Speaker 2: for instance, you're having a dream of your boss yelling
Speaker 2: at you a lot. That's probably something that you want
Speaker 2: to work through during the day. You're really returning to
Speaker 2: this place a lot. Let me give you a more
Speaker 2: concrete example. One of the dust users is in her
Speaker 2: seventies and she's bita tester and she's using the app
Speaker 2: and she has not been recalling her dreams before she
Speaker 2: starts using the app. She starts remembering her dreams, and
Speaker 2: she sends this report into the team and she says,
Speaker 2: you know, I've been waking up in the night with
Speaker 2: my heart pounding for so long, and I don't know
Speaker 2: why I'm remembering my dreams suddenly, and I'm having this
Speaker 2: dream almost every night. It's about my parents, and my
Speaker 2: parents are yelling at my brother and I'm a kid,
Speaker 2: and it's sixty years ago, and they're being cruel to him. Basically,
Speaker 2: she goes back to a difficult moment in her childhood.
Speaker 2: Every night she wakes up from it heart pounding, but
Speaker 2: she didn't remember the dreams until now. Suddenly she recalls
Speaker 2: the dreams and she writes in in her report, this
Speaker 2: is some anger that I think is actually with me
Speaker 2: during the day that I was pushing down that I'm
Speaker 2: going to take to my therapist and I'm going to
Speaker 2: work on it and I'm going to process. But I didn't
Speaker 2: remember the nightmare before, and so I didn't know that's
Speaker 2: why I was waking up at night. And so dreams,
Speaker 2: you know, whether you're a psychoanalyst or your Salvador dull
Speaker 2: Lee or your prooster, you're at the temple of a
Speaker 2: sclape beyond an ancient Greece. People are saying the same
Speaker 2: kind of thing, which is dreams are a place where
Speaker 2: more subtle signals can surface than our introspection during the day.
Speaker 2: We are more in touch with ourselves and more in
Speaker 2: touch with the world, and we're more aware of quiet
Speaker 2: and small signals, and so we can really see what
Speaker 2: it is we're processing, really see what it is that's
Speaker 2: important to us, and so tracking of dreams over time,
Speaker 2: whether it's a nightmare like this user, whether it's a
Speaker 2: stress dream of your boss, or whether it's you know, man,
Speaker 2: I'm I'm having a lot of dream of Instagram ads.
Speaker 2: I should probably stop scrolling a bed and falling asleep.
Speaker 2: So this is crazy. Fifty This is a survey study
Speaker 2: across one thousand people. Fifty four percent of young Americans
Speaker 2: eighteen to thirty five regularly dream of advertisements. It's pretty
Speaker 2: crazy and dark, but the reason is they're falling asleep
Speaker 2: scrolling on their phones and they're getting hit with these things.
Speaker 2: And the CEO of Netflix says, my main competitor is sleep.
Speaker 2: They are trying to push further and further into the
Speaker 2: sleep onset period. So they're basically doing targeted dream incubation,
Speaker 2: but with the most sticky, million dollar or content you
Speaker 2: can think of. So people are dreaming of ads. If
Speaker 2: you dream journal and you're having like a bunch of
Speaker 2: Haley Baber dreams, you should probably be like, I probably
Speaker 2: shouldn't do this at night. I probably should be doing
Speaker 2: more of my own work than letting them get me.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I'm closing this part tell us why dream
Speaker 1: recall matters totally.
Speaker 2: It's sort of like asking why thinking matters. Thinking is
Speaker 2: where I figure out who I am. Thinking is where
Speaker 2: I figure out what's important to me. Thinking is how
Speaker 2: I make my choices about what to do tomorrow. Dreaming
Speaker 2: is your thinking at night. It is your most private
Speaker 2: and personal space. It is a world made entirely by you.
Speaker 2: So it's an important place to introspect. It's an important
Speaker 2: place to reflect and find yourself. But just the simpler
Speaker 2: reason is that you're dreaming in all stages of sleep.
Speaker 2: You're sleeping for twenty six years of your life. If
Speaker 2: you decide a dreams don't matter, I'm just gonna let
Speaker 2: them go, you're giving up years of lived experience where
Speaker 2: you could be flying, you could be sitting with a
Speaker 2: law loved one, you could be sitting with your grandma
Speaker 2: across the table. You could be returning to childhood memories,
Speaker 2: you could be choosing joy, and instead you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna lose that huge part of myself. And
Speaker 2: so one of our users wrote this really beautiful thing.
Speaker 2: We said, I feel like I've been sleep walking through
Speaker 2: sleep for my whole life until now. Suddenly getting dream
Speaker 2: recall means you find a new part of your mind.
Speaker 1: Is the unpredictability of dreams something that's useful. If we
Speaker 1: were to engineer our dreams one hundred percent, would we
Speaker 1: be losing something totally?
Speaker 2: I think it's an awesome question. It's an ethically important question.
Speaker 2: I think there's no chance of engineering your dreams one
Speaker 2: hundred percent. In the same way that, like, you know,
Speaker 2: what is education if not trying to engineer people's thoughts
Speaker 2: one hundred percent? It is really really hard to put
Speaker 2: a thought.
Speaker 3: In there the way you want.
Speaker 2: You know, you're planting a seed, but in the soil
Speaker 2: of their mind. I mean, you're you're raising two kids.
Speaker 2: It's like you're planting a seed, but that kid's a garden.
Speaker 2: They're gonna grow into something else.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: And so I think dreams are dreams are like that.
Speaker 2: I feel totally comfortable.
Speaker 3: You come to lab. I'd make you dream of a tree.
Speaker 2: But is it the tree from your childhood or is
Speaker 2: it the tree that you think of when you look
Speaker 2: at your calendar and oh gosh, I got a water
Speaker 2: the trees? I have no idea plant a seed is
Speaker 2: all I can do.
Speaker 1: What did you think of the movie Inception Love Inception.
Speaker 2: I think Inception totally rocks, And the biggest thing it
Speaker 2: did was make the world think about their dreams more
Speaker 2: and make them think dream incubation was possible. So when
Speaker 2: people come into lab, I just say, oh, it's kind
Speaker 2: of like that Inception thing. They say, oh, great, cool,
Speaker 2: I've seen the movie. I know exactly what's about to happen.
Speaker 1: Last question, what does dream engineering look like in ten years?
Speaker 2: So dream engineering is what we've named this whole field.
Speaker 2: So you know, doctor Harrison Chow, who's working on the
Speaker 2: anesthesia dreams, is calling himself a dream engineer. But also
Speaker 2: Michelle Carr, who's working on better versions of imagery rehearsal therapy,
Speaker 2: she's calling herself a dream engineer. It encompasses a lot
Speaker 2: of folks who are doing everything from chemistry to behavioral technice.
Speaker 2: So my hope is that in the same way you
Speaker 2: can go to a sleep clinic, you go to a
Speaker 2: dream clinic. For a really large portion of insomniacs who
Speaker 2: come into a sleep clinic, those people do not have
Speaker 2: a sleep problem, they have a dream problem. They are
Speaker 2: sleeping the right amount of hours, but the whole time
Speaker 2: they're in end too, which about fifty percent of the
Speaker 2: night they're having anxiety dreams. The dreams are I wish
Speaker 2: I could fall asleep, I wish I could fall asleep.
Speaker 2: I hope that I fall asleep. But they're literally asleep
Speaker 2: that whole time, for hours as they wake up, and
Speaker 2: it's called sleep state misperception. All the people coming into
Speaker 2: an insomnia clinic saying hey, please fix me, and the
Speaker 2: doctor says, you're actually sleeping seven hours, that's a dream problem.
Speaker 2: I want dream clinics for those people. All the people
Speaker 2: with PTSD who are coming in repetitive nightmare. What percentage
Speaker 2: of them actually go to a clinician less than ten percent?
Speaker 3: Great?
Speaker 2: I want these tools, these dream entering tools, on every
Speaker 2: phone in every bedroom of a person who's struggling. There's
Speaker 2: these other areas we didn't even talk about. In substance
Speaker 2: use disorder, for people who dream of a substance that
Speaker 2: predicts relapse onto that substance. All those people on their phone,
Speaker 2: they should have image rehearsal therapy to help them with
Speaker 2: those dreams. Across insomnia, across addiction, across depression, across PTSD,
Speaker 2: across pro drums for Alzheimer's and pro drums for Parkinston's
Speaker 2: I hope the dream entering is a way to make
Speaker 2: the world care and then to give them an easy tool,
Speaker 2: as easy as the tools we have for meditation. Hey,
Speaker 2: give me ten minutes of your time to do a
Speaker 2: few techniques before bed, and we'll change that internal world
Speaker 2: you have. Make it a little more joyous, make it
Speaker 2: a little more vivid, make you live a little more
Speaker 2: of those twenty six years.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Adam Harror Horowitz. In neuroscience,
Speaker 1: we often think about the work that dreams are doing
Speaker 1: in the background, like consolidating memories and exploring possibilities and
Speaker 1: stitching together the threads of our lives. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, there's the question of the experience that we're having.
Speaker 1: Because even when we take a mechanistic view, like the
Speaker 1: defensive activation theeriy where dreaming keeps the visual cortex active,
Speaker 1: that still leaves open the question of what the experiences
Speaker 1: mean for us, in other words, what they feel like
Speaker 1: and what they do to us. And that's where Adams
Speaker 1: work with lots of his colleagues and dream engineering, that's
Speaker 1: where that work comes in because it's pointing to the
Speaker 1: fact that dreams are part of our mental life, and
Speaker 1: a part that largely gets ignored. We can live our
Speaker 1: entire lives treating dreams as disposable things that evaporate in
Speaker 1: the morning. But what happens if we shift that stance.
Speaker 1: What happens if we decide that this internal world matters
Speaker 1: once we engage with it, other possibilities open up. We
Speaker 1: can begin to notice patterns that might not be obvious
Speaker 1: during the day, like recurring themes, and we can begin
Speaker 1: to reshape experiences like nightmares by introducing small changes. We
Speaker 1: can begin to use dreams as a space for exploration,
Speaker 1: for creativity, for problem solving, for reflection, and maybe we
Speaker 1: can start to see dreams as continuous with waking thought,
Speaker 1: part of the same process of the brain modeling itself
Speaker 1: and its past and its possible futures. And the larger
Speaker 1: horizon is that as dream engineering continues to develop, we're
Speaker 1: going to increasingly find ourselves in a world where people
Speaker 1: actively shape their inner experiences during sleep. We'll have dream
Speaker 1: clinics and dream interventions and dream based diagnostics. I think
Speaker 1: there will be a lot of questions here as we
Speaker 1: move forward, like if you could guide your dreams how
Speaker 1: much should you? Maybe unpredictability is part of what makes
Speaker 1: streaming useful for allowing unexpected associations, So there will be
Speaker 1: questions about what is gained and what is lost. But
Speaker 1: the big picture is this. You spend a huge chunk
Speaker 1: of your life in this state, years and years of experience,
Speaker 1: worlds built and dissolved every night, conversations, fears, flights, reunions,
Speaker 1: all of it unfolding in the dark. So given that
Speaker 1: that much of your life is happening in a place
Speaker 1: that you rarely remember, what might you discover when you
Speaker 1: start paying attention. Go to egleman dot com slash podcast
Speaker 1: for more information and to find further reading. Join the
Speaker 1: weekly discussions on my substack, and check out and subscribe
Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode
Speaker 1: and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman
Speaker 1: and this is Inner Cosmos.