Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stup
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff with blow your Mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. In
Speaker 1: the last episode in the series this week, we started
Speaker 1: off by talking about a couple of different dream worlds.
Speaker 1: We talked about love Craft with Cadath and author and
Speaker 1: the Plateau of Lange. We talked about Boheas and his
Speaker 1: circular ruins. The one I immediately turned to is a
Speaker 1: comic book one. Uh it is Little Nemo in Slumberland.
Speaker 1: Have you ever read these book? I've never read them.
Speaker 1: There By A windsor Mackay, there were these great turn
Speaker 1: of the century comic strips that appeared in newspapers, and
Speaker 1: they were these huge comic strips to not like the
Speaker 1: ones that were used to nowadays. But every one of
Speaker 1: them began with this kid named Nemo falling asleep, falling
Speaker 1: into a dream world, having an adventure, and then waking
Speaker 1: up in the very last panel. So I always think
Speaker 1: of Little Nemo in Slumberland. But then, uh we, I
Speaker 1: guess should acknowledge that that Doctor Strange movies coming out
Speaker 1: in the next month or two, and Marvel has their
Speaker 1: own like dream universe, and there's like, like a major
Speaker 1: Doctor Strange villain is Nightmare. He's like personification of nightmares.
Speaker 1: Be interesting to what exceed to what extent they incorporate
Speaker 1: dreams and they're going a whole like the whole quantum
Speaker 1: science sort of angle. Yeah, I don't know, I'm curious too.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of the interviews about that movie
Speaker 1: have have talked about, you know, how they're going to
Speaker 1: explore alternate realities and things like that. So we'll see,
Speaker 1: we'll see. Maybe maybe Nightmare in the Dream Rails will
Speaker 1: be in Doctor Strange two or something like that if
Speaker 1: it does well enough. But then of course there's wonder Land,
Speaker 1: there's Odds, there's even the Matrix is kind of like
Speaker 1: a dream world, right. That is something something to that
Speaker 1: keep coming kept coming up for me, is that to
Speaker 1: a large extent, virtual reality is the new dream world.
Speaker 1: And a lot of these shows they kind of kind
Speaker 1: of you can you can sort of trade in and
Speaker 1: out in their treatment of dreams or virtuality. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: with the virtual reality thing, like it kind of makes
Speaker 1: me think of, um, the very popular nineties comic The Sandman,
Speaker 1: the Neil Game Sandman book. There's there's also sort of
Speaker 1: like a major aspect of like confronting reality. We talked
Speaker 1: about this in the last episode. Wh's real, What's not?
Speaker 1: How do you know when you're in a dream? That's
Speaker 1: a very common trope and dream fiction. Yeah. One that
Speaker 1: instantly comes to mind too, Dreamscape. Did you ever see this? No?
Speaker 1: I haven't seen that. It's pretty great, has some some
Speaker 1: wonderful effects. There's a guy that turns into a serpent
Speaker 1: in the dream. It's okay, it's pretty cool. Um, there's
Speaker 1: night Marion Elm Street. I don't think he's ever been
Speaker 1: given the really a neuroscientific treatment um, which I think
Speaker 1: would be interesting. Like after I saw Inception the first time,
Speaker 1: I was like, this is pretty good, but I would
Speaker 1: like to see an inception Nightmarre Nemes Street cross over.
Speaker 1: There's your reboot for Nightmare in Elm Streets. And they
Speaker 1: tried that a couple of years ago and it didn't
Speaker 1: quite work out. I love the reboot, but me, most
Speaker 1: people did not like it. Um. Another piece of fiction
Speaker 1: that comes to mind my My, the fantasy series I'm
Speaker 1: obsessed with by our Scott Baker. There's a there there
Speaker 1: are these groups there's a group of sorcerers in it
Speaker 1: uh and they are known as the Mandate, and they
Speaker 1: are carrying on this tradition of warning the world about
Speaker 1: this uh, this threat that that is in the Far North,
Speaker 1: that was was fought and defeated in a huge, nearly
Speaker 1: catastrophic war centuries and centuries ago, and they they're warning
Speaker 1: everyone that could come back. And every is part of
Speaker 1: your initiation. Each one of these Mandate sorcerers uh uh
Speaker 1: absorbs the dreams of the schools founder Sessawatha. So every
Speaker 1: night they're plagued with nightmares of this first Great War,
Speaker 1: the first Apocalypse. So that then then in the Waking War,
Speaker 1: they have this this fresh and intense um reminder of
Speaker 1: why they need to warn everyone. That reminds me of
Speaker 1: two things of No, I'm gonna try not to spoil
Speaker 1: it too much, but Game of Thrones there's a lot
Speaker 1: of that going on in there with a brand he's
Speaker 1: having these like prophetic dreams. Yeah, they give a very
Speaker 1: weird space that I'm I think it's still they're still developing,
Speaker 1: they're still unrolling exactly how dreams work in that world.
Speaker 1: And then uh, we're gonna talk about in this episode,
Speaker 1: but various tribes around the world that that have dreams
Speaker 1: is like a major important part of their culture and
Speaker 1: how they decide to do things as a community. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, before we move on, we need to get
Speaker 1: a little bit of house cleaning out of the way. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this week's episodes, if you haven't listened to the
Speaker 1: previous one, are sponsored by Falling Water, which is a
Speaker 1: new TV show coming out on octobert on USA Network.
Speaker 1: They approached us about working together. Yeah, they said, hey,
Speaker 1: we like to sponsor a couple of episodes on dreams,
Speaker 1: and we said, well, that's great because we would love
Speaker 1: to do a couple of episodes on dreams. Uh. And
Speaker 1: we've covered the topic in the past, we'll cover it
Speaker 1: again in the future. So it's a perfect match. We'll
Speaker 1: talk more about it in the sponsor breaks but and
Speaker 1: I don't want to spoil it too much. Falling Water
Speaker 1: is the science fiction mystery about entering other people's dreams.
Speaker 1: This episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind Though, is
Speaker 1: gonna be about Carl Young, the collective unconscious, and the
Speaker 1: current science of linked dreaming. And like last episode, we
Speaker 1: were put in touch with Dr Moran Surf, who's a neuroscientist,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna touch base with him at the end
Speaker 1: of this episode and talk to him about some of
Speaker 1: the ideas and research that we're throwing around. Uh in
Speaker 1: these in the in the pair of these episodes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna talk about the collective unconscious and young,
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about conjoined and shared dreaming. Should be
Speaker 1: quite inexperience. But let's let's start with Carl Young and
Speaker 1: the collective unconscious. And I'm going to defer to you
Speaker 1: a lot in this section because I know this is
Speaker 1: this is more your area of expertise. Oh, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say that, but yeah, when I was in grad school,
Speaker 1: Young came up a lot. One of my UM, one
Speaker 1: of the professors that was on my thesis committee is
Speaker 1: very much in the young In school of thought. He
Speaker 1: was constantly trying to invoke young and collective unconscious and
Speaker 1: archetypes into my work. UM and the other professors, like
Speaker 1: many in academia, didn't think that there was a legitimate
Speaker 1: foundation for yous work, and so they sort of pushed
Speaker 1: against that. But yeah, I have some familiarity with him,
Speaker 1: so let's touch base with him. Uh. Young was a
Speaker 1: Swiss psychiatrist who founded what's known as analytic psychology. He's
Speaker 1: known mainly for the descriptions of extroverted and introverted personalities
Speaker 1: and his theory that there is an underlying universal understanding
Speaker 1: of symbolic representations. Most of this work that we're going
Speaker 1: to refer to was in the early part of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. Now you're probably thinking of Sigmund Freud. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: he and Sigmund Freud met in seven. They began as collaborators,
Speaker 1: but they eventually had intellectual disagreements and disliked one another's
Speaker 1: approaches to psychoanalysis. Young himself felt he was more about
Speaker 1: putting humans in a historical context and finding the meaning
Speaker 1: and dignity of their lives in the universe. So he
Speaker 1: was a pretty metaphysical guy. Yeah. I you know, I
Speaker 1: haven't seen this film, but Cronenberg's David Kronenberg's two thousand
Speaker 1: and eleven film A Dangerous Mind has Michael Fastbender as
Speaker 1: Young and Vigo Mortison as Freud. It looked like I
Speaker 1: was totally on board, and that movie just kind of
Speaker 1: came and went, and I haven't remembered to watch it.
Speaker 1: I think I I distinctly remember when it came out
Speaker 1: and saying, oh, that looks good, but maybe a little serious.
Speaker 1: I'll come back to that when I'm in the mood
Speaker 1: for a serious movie. And I'm so rarely in the
Speaker 1: mood for a serious good movie. I just tend to
Speaker 1: go for goofy uh or bad movies instead. But I'll
Speaker 1: come back to this one at some point. Uh. And
Speaker 1: you know another popular cultural tie in that for me anyway,
Speaker 1: is I'm quite fond of the Peter Gabriel song from
Speaker 1: two Rhythm of the Heat, which has an excellent, like
Speaker 1: accelerating drumbeat, but when lyrics that say, like the rhythm
Speaker 1: is around me, the rhythm has control, the rhythms inside me,
Speaker 1: the rhythm has my soul. And apparently this is he
Speaker 1: based the lyrics here, and that the songs structure itself
Speaker 1: on Carl Young's experiences while observing a group uh of
Speaker 1: nocturnal ritual dancers in the in the Sudan. So this
Speaker 1: is one of the things about Young that I didn't
Speaker 1: really know until doing the research for this episode. I mean,
Speaker 1: he was pretty well traveled. It wasn't like he was
Speaker 1: just sitting at home spitting these theories out and not
Speaker 1: like applying them to the real world. He was observing
Speaker 1: a lot of I guess, anthropological ways that the collective
Speaker 1: unconscious may manifest. Yeah, I mean a lot of academics
Speaker 1: so certainly of his time even would have been perfectly
Speaker 1: happy to just remain in the in their study and
Speaker 1: write all this. But he went out in the field.
Speaker 1: So apparently he found something dark, primal and irresistible, and
Speaker 1: the accelerating rhythm that these individuals were creating, and he
Speaker 1: feared was going to possess him, that he might be
Speaker 1: sucked into their collective psychoical experience. Huh. Here's here's a
Speaker 1: quote from what he said. The natives easily fall into
Speaker 1: a virtual state of possession. That was the case. Now
Speaker 1: is eleven o'clock approached, their excitement began to get out
Speaker 1: of bounds. The dancers were being transformed into a wild horde,
Speaker 1: and I became worried about how it would end. Well,
Speaker 1: So let's we're gonna try to keep it brief because honestly,
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't be surprised if this already exists out there.
Speaker 1: But you could have an entire podcast dedicated to young um.
Speaker 1: But we've only got so much time here. Here's a
Speaker 1: brief look at his psychological theories. He began working with
Speaker 1: word association to uncovered groups of emotionally charged ideas that
Speaker 1: were stored in people. Uh. He coined these terms. This
Speaker 1: is the term complex that we use nowadays. And he
Speaker 1: connected this to a psycho somatic theory about schizophrenia, in
Speaker 1: which he thought complexes influenced our biochemistry, which then subsequently
Speaker 1: lead to mental illness. He also brought about the term
Speaker 1: which you've probably heard about, individual ation. Uh. He thought
Speaker 1: that despite a normal life, all people undergo a developmental
Speaker 1: journey that is signposted for them by archetypal images. Now,
Speaker 1: if you listen to our episode on myth that we
Speaker 1: did a couple of months ago, we we delved into
Speaker 1: that quite a bit. We we talked about more about
Speaker 1: Young's archetypal work and symbolic work than the collective unconscious,
Speaker 1: but it's there too. And at the end of his life,
Speaker 1: he theorized that the more uncertain we are about ourselves,
Speaker 1: the more we have kinship with all things, because everyone
Speaker 1: is uncertain, from I don't know, uh, squirrel out in
Speaker 1: the yard to me and this podcast studio. Uh. And
Speaker 1: he said the alienation that he received from the science community,
Speaker 1: which I referred to earlier, that manifested as what he
Speaker 1: called an unexpected unfamiliarity within himself. So this kind of
Speaker 1: brought that about for him. Now, archy types and myth
Speaker 1: big one, right, And I said we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: If you, if you weren't there for that episode, here's
Speaker 1: a quick breakdown. He became increasingly interested in the connection
Speaker 1: between human psychology and our myths, folklore, and fairy tales,
Speaker 1: and he began to interpret thought processes as a result
Speaker 1: of mythological symbolism. The collective unconscious, which we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about a lot today, was how these archetypal images
Speaker 1: manifested despite cultural differences around the world, right, Like people
Speaker 1: in a tribe in the Amazon are having very similar
Speaker 1: archetypal images to somebody in London, for instance. His evidence
Speaker 1: was that there are strong parallels in dream imagery across
Speaker 1: all these different cultures, and collective unconscious represented a form
Speaker 1: of the unconscious mind, memories and impulses that were not
Speaker 1: aware of That's what he's referring to when he says unconscious.
Speaker 1: He thought that that was common to all of mankind
Speaker 1: as a whole. And originated with our inherited structure of
Speaker 1: the brain. So he thought of it as being like
Speaker 1: a biological structure of the brain that all humans shared. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, it's the aspect of your psyche that
Speaker 1: stems not from personal experience and conditioning that's personal unconsciousness,
Speaker 1: but from everything that came before in the conscious experience
Speaker 1: of humanity. It's not a personal acquisition, but a psychic heritage.
Speaker 1: It's not the realm of complexes, but of archetypes. It's
Speaker 1: the deep dark waters, and the personal consciousness is the
Speaker 1: sunlit shallows. Yeah, and I wanna touch on this briefly.
Speaker 1: To Young wasn't entirely consistent with how he regarded collective
Speaker 1: unconscious uh. So, for instance, sometimes he thought of it
Speaker 1: as being connected to genetics, more biological and saying earlier.
Speaker 1: The other times he would talk about it as being
Speaker 1: a demonstration of communion with something divine, a space outside
Speaker 1: of ourselves that we all access. Uh, similar to the
Speaker 1: when we were just talking about Frederick van Eden in
Speaker 1: our last episode. It's kind of something outside of ourselves
Speaker 1: that's influencing our dreams. So it's not quite easy to
Speaker 1: pin down Young on like what you know what he's
Speaker 1: talking about here. Is he just talking about collective unconscious
Speaker 1: as like being a biological phenomenon we all share, or
Speaker 1: is it like he really believes in some kind of
Speaker 1: astral space that we all access together, or you know,
Speaker 1: just in reading some of this stuff about the encountering
Speaker 1: the drummers, um and and the rhythm and then looking
Speaker 1: at this, it seems like he was a guy that
Speaker 1: was was very open about not only his his own uncertainties,
Speaker 1: but but open to how everything might actually connect. So
Speaker 1: he had this idea of the unconscious, the collective unconscious, uh,
Speaker 1: that that he very much believed in, and he but
Speaker 1: we have, had validity to it, but was perhaps open
Speaker 1: to exactly how it connected with the universe. I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think he was primarily concerned with the not just
Speaker 1: the human project, but sort of like the universal project, right,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to know what maybe the ultimate question
Speaker 1: what am I doing here? What? It is very existential
Speaker 1: right now, speaking of that question what am I doing here?
Speaker 1: One might very well ask that question about the collective unconscious?
Speaker 1: What what's the possible application for all of this aside
Speaker 1: from just uh, you know, staring into your nown navel. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true, and a lot of academics, including some of
Speaker 1: my thesis committee, would have asked that question. Well, Young's
Speaker 1: theories are more prevalent than any application of his actual ideas,
Speaker 1: especially when we're talking about therapeutic practice of psychology. But
Speaker 1: his word association tests that I mentioned, that's become a
Speaker 1: standard for clinical psychology with rating scales that have been
Speaker 1: designed to test personality. I think a lot of us
Speaker 1: have taken so, so this would be like the therapist
Speaker 1: is saying like father, king, mother in these words, and
Speaker 1: you tell them what them, what they mean to you?
Speaker 1: I think so. Yeah, But I think it's I think
Speaker 1: maybe that's closer to what he was doing, and that's
Speaker 1: evolved into sort of a more complex version of the test,
Speaker 1: more like the BuzzFeed type quiz of like what Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones character? Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: really been his influences on BuzzFeed quizzes, Uh individuation which
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, that's been incorporated into many theories on
Speaker 1: personality development and the myth archetype theories have been partially
Speaker 1: embraced by those who are looking to understand humans as
Speaker 1: symbol using beings and this isn't a lot of different
Speaker 1: disciplines communication, art, philosophy, and definitely in linguistics. It led
Speaker 1: to Joseph Campbell, who we also talked about in that
Speaker 1: Myth episode, and his whole hero's journey theory, which has
Speaker 1: been very popularized. A lot of people have heard probably
Speaker 1: more about the hero's journey than they've heard about Young. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was popularized mainly by Star Wars and George Lucas
Speaker 1: talking about having used it while he was writing the
Speaker 1: scripts for those. There's countless books on storytelling that also
Speaker 1: talk about the hero's journey being like the inherent narrative
Speaker 1: that we all turned to. You know, speaking of narratives,
Speaker 1: I know that we have some Dune fans listening to
Speaker 1: the episode, fans of Frank Herbert's Done and and uh
Speaker 1: and many of them up to also fans of Brian
Speaker 1: Herbert's work Um continuing on with that universe. But in
Speaker 1: the Done novels, the Bennie Jessers Sisterhood, they possessed a
Speaker 1: collective memory that was heavily based on Young's collective unconscious.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that, Yeah, yeah, I knew there was
Speaker 1: some connection, but I had not researched it to just
Speaker 1: the other day to see like there was definite connect
Speaker 1: continue there did that come up when you and Joe
Speaker 1: did the Doune episode. We didn't get into a lot
Speaker 1: of the heavier like psychological philosophical stuff as much. I mean,
Speaker 1: we certainly could. There's there's actually a whole book out
Speaker 1: there called the Philosophy of doone. But but certainly an
Speaker 1: area we could explore. Yeah. So in the book, this
Speaker 1: gives the Bennie jestered inborn abilities, memories and modes of behavior,
Speaker 1: and it key points in the novels. It also opens
Speaker 1: up the individual too harmful past lives essentially, And according
Speaker 1: to Frank Herbert's son Brian, and he had studied the
Speaker 1: work of Young and as well, and also had studied
Speaker 1: the work of Young's associate, Dr Joseph b. Rhyan. So
Speaker 1: you might be listening to this and saying, Okay, this
Speaker 1: young character, I've heard of him before, This all sounds interesting.
Speaker 1: Did he have any evidence for all this? Well, his
Speaker 1: main evidence was what I mentioned earlier, the strong parallels
Speaker 1: and dream imagery across different cultures. That's mainly what he's
Speaker 1: stuck to um And and that's why there's a lot
Speaker 1: of criticism leveled against him. Yeah. I mean, if your
Speaker 1: if your main evidence is essentially based in the world
Speaker 1: of dream um, it's it's hard. You can see where
Speaker 1: that would be a problem. Especially you know, as we
Speaker 1: talked about in the last episode, you can't always rely
Speaker 1: on human beings talking about their memories of their dreams,
Speaker 1: because memories are inherently unreliable. Yeah, because we were engaging
Speaker 1: in that process where we take the nonsense of memories. Potentially,
Speaker 1: this is one of view of it. If you take
Speaker 1: the nonsense of dreams and then you're recoding it into
Speaker 1: some new form that's more narrative or more symbolic. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a several step process. It's not all
Speaker 1: housed in the dream world. And you could also you
Speaker 1: could say that the parallels between one, uh one people's
Speaker 1: archetypes and another. You could say that these parallels could
Speaker 1: just easily represent universal aspects of the human experience or
Speaker 1: or even the evolution of human consciousness. Um and and
Speaker 1: and for that you wouldn't necessarily need this collective unconscious.
Speaker 1: We talked about this in the Myth episode two, that
Speaker 1: there's like a couple of other people have proposed similar theories,
Speaker 1: one of which is Alan Moore. UH. Comics and no
Speaker 1: novelists have his new novel Jerusalem just came out. Um,
Speaker 1: But he has this theory of what he calls idea space,
Speaker 1: which is very similar to the Young in idea. But
Speaker 1: again a lot of people say Allan Wore's crack pot.
Speaker 1: So who knows, now, why would they say Young's a
Speaker 1: crack pot? Why would they say Alan Moore's a crack pot? Well,
Speaker 1: here are some criticisms that are leveled against Young because
Speaker 1: of his interest in connecting his theories to religion and
Speaker 1: cultural myth. He's considered an embarrassment by many people in
Speaker 1: the psychology discipline. I mentioned here my own experience with
Speaker 1: this UH in my thesis Freudians. Even in the psychology
Speaker 1: psychology discipline, they say his archetypes are only metaphysical ideas
Speaker 1: in their existence can't be proven, so why bother. He's
Speaker 1: also criticized for failing to offer any kind of coherent
Speaker 1: model for personality development, and then others just blatantly dismiss
Speaker 1: him as being a mystic crackpot because he doesn't offer
Speaker 1: any experimental evidence for his observations al right. Well, on
Speaker 1: that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're going to go beyond Young and
Speaker 1: and to be collected unconscious, and then we will enter
Speaker 1: into the world of dreams again. All Right, we're back.
Speaker 1: So morphic resonance. This sounds uh, here's a new term
Speaker 1: for this episode. How does this tie into the collective unconscious? Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna go this is a This is like,
Speaker 1: you know how there's Star Trek beyond. This is Young beyond.
Speaker 1: So these are um ideas that tie in to Young's
Speaker 1: collective unconscious, but are a little different. Morphic resonance was
Speaker 1: primarily advocated for by a guy named Rupert Shell Drake,
Speaker 1: and he was formally a recognized scholar in biochemistry. He
Speaker 1: was a winner of his university's Botany Prize, a Harvard scholar,
Speaker 1: he was basically a well renowned academic. Now he's shunned
Speaker 1: by the scientific community, and he writes about the limitations
Speaker 1: of contemporary scientific thought as being dogma ces. It reminded
Speaker 1: me of our episode on Cargo cult science. His example
Speaker 1: of this, and I talked about this briefly in the
Speaker 1: last episode. His nemesis, his Richard Dawkins, the guy who
Speaker 1: came up with the well a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of things, but mainly mimetic theory, uh. And he's interested
Speaker 1: in the influence of cosmology on evolution. In this he
Speaker 1: also thinks that the laws of nature themselves are prone
Speaker 1: to evolutions, so we can't necessarily trust the laws of
Speaker 1: nature because they're they're malleable, they're changing. That does sound problematic, yeah,
Speaker 1: And he points to dark matter as being an example
Speaker 1: of this because nothing in our science can begin to
Speaker 1: explain it. And I'm just gonna give a little stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind, uh insight into that. How many
Speaker 1: times have we sat around and said we should do
Speaker 1: an episode on dark matter and then we start looking
Speaker 1: into it and we're like, oh boy, this is tough.
Speaker 1: It's uh. It's definitely often refer to these as the
Speaker 1: wing pool topics because it's like a swimming pool where
Speaker 1: there's there's a deep drop off between the shallow and
Speaker 1: the deep end. It's not a gradual zero entry scenario,
Speaker 1: so that those those topics can be a little intimidating
Speaker 1: to go after, but they can be fulfilling. So we'll
Speaker 1: maybe we'll get around a dark matter at some point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one day. Sheldrake himself, as a child was fascinated with pigeons,
Speaker 1: and this is important. I'm not just bringing up you
Speaker 1: know something he liked. Uh. He especially liked that you
Speaker 1: could release them far away from home, and yet they
Speaker 1: would always make their way back, right, kind of like
Speaker 1: the ravens and Game of Thrones. They always find their
Speaker 1: way back. That's why we call him homing pigeons. In school,
Speaker 1: he realized science couldn't yet explain homing pigeons, and they
Speaker 1: just talked about it as being kind of an unobservable mystery.
Speaker 1: So he became interested in the idea that biology and
Speaker 1: heredity were similar to Young's collective unconscious, and that there
Speaker 1: is a shared memory within species. This was influenced by
Speaker 1: Hunt Henri Bergson's idea that memory isn't stored in our brain,
Speaker 1: as it's instead a part of time and space. Memory
Speaker 1: isn't in us again, it's like it's external to us.
Speaker 1: So these ideas grew for shell Drake when he tried
Speaker 1: what do you think psychedelics? Another psychedelic Avenger here, uh,
Speaker 1: and transcendental meditation. Shell Drake now believes memory is a
Speaker 1: function of time and not matter matter, meaning our brains,
Speaker 1: and that it's shared by all living things. He calls
Speaker 1: this sharing morpho genetics. And now he researches phenomena that
Speaker 1: science dismisses. So for example, how dogs know when their
Speaker 1: owners are coming home. You know that, like when a
Speaker 1: dog will know before you get to the front door.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's because they're hearing is a lot better than ours. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be my first guy. But he's investigating that
Speaker 1: it might have some kind of morphic resonance. Another one
Speaker 1: is our human ability to predict when we're being stared
Speaker 1: at from a distance. Oh, now, there's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of interesting science to this. We actually have an older
Speaker 1: episode on the science staring, and I know it's one
Speaker 1: that Joe has wanted to revisit. What this reminds me again,
Speaker 1: I go back to these comic book examples. Have you
Speaker 1: ever read Animal Man, the DC comic character I haven't
Speaker 1: got I haven't got around of that one. That one's
Speaker 1: on the list yet another. Grant Morrison didn't create him,
Speaker 1: but Grant Morrison had a great run on Animal Man,
Speaker 1: and Animal Man as a character is able to tap
Speaker 1: into what are called more shik fields that allow him
Speaker 1: to sort of access these species memories. Now that I've
Speaker 1: read this, I have to think that the people working
Speaker 1: on Animal Man, especially Morrison, were influenced by Sheldrake, but
Speaker 1: hit So. Sheldrake's hope is that all of this will
Speaker 1: lead to a moment of what he calls coming out
Speaker 1: in science, where people will be able to discuss these
Speaker 1: topics without any fear of repercussion. So in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight he was actually attacked at a conference by
Speaker 1: paranoid schizophrenic with a knife. So yeah, that's how far
Speaker 1: this like weird division goes between like people who deem
Speaker 1: themselves scientific and people who uh and what they see
Speaker 1: as a pseudoscience. Right, that like it went so far
Speaker 1: as it clearly provoked this this mentally ill men into
Speaker 1: physically attacking him, but luckily he lived through it. Now
Speaker 1: to to return to the collective unconscious in the dream world. Um,
Speaker 1: of course, the idea of their being a realm of dreams,
Speaker 1: or even a shared realm of dreams. Uh, it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not something that that young um or anyone else
Speaker 1: necessarily invented. I mean, this has been something that has
Speaker 1: been explored in older modes of belief for a time.
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly, there are plenty of examples where you
Speaker 1: have prophetic dreams and dream communication. It is occurring between
Speaker 1: especially between a divine entity and a human. But we
Speaker 1: also have these ideas of a shared space. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: we most often see those now in tribal dream world.
Speaker 1: So Young himself actually that I was mentioning how he
Speaker 1: kind of traveled around the world. He visited the East
Speaker 1: African Alghani tribe in Kenya in and this is where
Speaker 1: he came up with a term he used called big dreams,
Speaker 1: because the al Ghani called their collective dreams big dreams,
Speaker 1: and this was where the dreamer was dreaming for their
Speaker 1: whole community and perhaps the whole world. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a shamanic style that matched Young's theories very well. So
Speaker 1: later on he would come to see this it's kind
Speaker 1: of like a collective memory or bodily expression that all
Speaker 1: humans shared due to biology. So again there this time
Speaker 1: he's leaning on the biology thing. Uh. In the late
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, Catholic missionaries also discovered the Akure tribe in
Speaker 1: the deep Amazon Uh and this is a tribe that
Speaker 1: are semi nomadic. They number around eleven thousand people. When
Speaker 1: asked how they had survived in the harsh Amazon for
Speaker 1: so long, they said it was because of the guidance
Speaker 1: that they had received in the spirit world while they
Speaker 1: were dreaming. So now they're referred to as the dream
Speaker 1: people of the Amazon because they have this unique daily
Speaker 1: ritual they call wausa or it translates into dream sharing.
Speaker 1: So here's how it works. Every day, they get up early,
Speaker 1: like three four am early, and they gather in family
Speaker 1: units around their communal fire, and they consume a special
Speaker 1: tea and drink it so much that they end up vomiting.
Speaker 1: So it's a sort of cleansing, purging part of the ritual.
Speaker 1: So minus the t this is this is kind of
Speaker 1: a ritual that a lot of people in America take
Speaker 1: part in, especially around Marty Gras. Yeah. Yeah, except for
Speaker 1: where it's going next. I don't know if people at
Speaker 1: Marty Gras sit around and do this next. So you've
Speaker 1: got order that negative energy from vomiting up your tea.
Speaker 1: Then everybody takes turns telling each other what they remember
Speaker 1: from their dreams, because they believe the dreams each contain
Speaker 1: fragments of important messages from their spirit elders or a
Speaker 1: powerful rainforest spirit known as Eru tom uh, and this
Speaker 1: spirit is sometimes seen as being manifested as sort of
Speaker 1: like an avatar, as a panther or boa constrictor. So
Speaker 1: the idea here is the interpreting of these dreams is
Speaker 1: really important since no person is getting all the information individually.
Speaker 1: It's going out to everybody in fragments, So a village
Speaker 1: elder tries to piece all this together. And the primary
Speaker 1: instruction that these tribes have gained from all of this
Speaker 1: is basically live in harmony with nature. Uh So, to
Speaker 1: give you some examples of this. The more tangible actions
Speaker 1: that they've taken from their collective dreams include finding plants
Speaker 1: that they need in the forest for medicine and then
Speaker 1: figuring out how to prepare those plants as medicine and
Speaker 1: administering certain dosages. So that seems very interesting. As children,
Speaker 1: they're actually taught that nightmares result in personal growth, So
Speaker 1: when you're having a nightmare, you should move toward the
Speaker 1: threat in your nightmare so that you can conquer your
Speaker 1: fear and realize the dreams true message. Wow, that ties
Speaker 1: in rather nicely with the demon dream that Fred and
Speaker 1: van Eden defined the idea that you're you're fighting the
Speaker 1: demon and overcoming it. And then of course that ties
Speaker 1: in with some of the theories about dream that we
Speaker 1: have today, in which they are their simulations or they
Speaker 1: are a problem solving scenario. Yeah. So, and again because
Speaker 1: of these similarities that it begs the question, you know,
Speaker 1: let's think, like young, like, is this because human beings
Speaker 1: are biologically all having these same experiences or is it
Speaker 1: because we're accessing something outside of ourselves. It also seems
Speaker 1: like this is such a far more modern approach to
Speaker 1: dreaming than anything we have in like a Western certainly
Speaker 1: a Christian tradition, where like if you're having a demonic dream,
Speaker 1: then it's it's something you know it's at I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's either an actual demon or something about your personal
Speaker 1: sin that you should feel bad about. But there's we
Speaker 1: don't have like a robust system of dealing with nightmares
Speaker 1: in our culture. So you remember in the last episode
Speaker 1: we were talking about lucid dreaming and I was saying, like,
Speaker 1: I just like it's just not for me, you know,
Speaker 1: mainly because like I'm just not interested in that. I
Speaker 1: just want the process to play out well. And maybe
Speaker 1: like I'm unimaginative in this way. But uh. Similarly, like
Speaker 1: in modern society, who likes listening to somebody else's dream? Right?
Speaker 1: Like I so I was just listening to um uh
Speaker 1: this podcast called nerdet and they did an episode where
Speaker 1: they talked to a dream interpreter. And the funny bit
Speaker 1: like at the beginning, the two hosts were talking to
Speaker 1: each other and one host was like, I'm gonna tell
Speaker 1: you about my dream, and the other host was like, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want to hear about your dream, and she said,
Speaker 1: go talk to this dream interpreter. And then they did
Speaker 1: that on the same way, like people go, hey, I
Speaker 1: had this crazy dream last night, let's try to unpack
Speaker 1: it right, And I go, okay, See, I I feel
Speaker 1: that the opposite on this, and I and I also
Speaker 1: I often encounter that that that argument that that people
Speaker 1: don't like hearing about other people's dreams, like the most
Speaker 1: the most startling or the most noteworthy example of this
Speaker 1: for me was when I read I don't know it
Speaker 1: was in the movie too, but it was certainly when
Speaker 1: I read Corman McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. There's
Speaker 1: a part where the sheriff character played by Tommy Lee
Speaker 1: Jones in the movie He's he mentioned to his wife
Speaker 1: the guy this dream. He says, nobody wants to hear
Speaker 1: about anybody's dream, but then goes on to share this
Speaker 1: really potent dream that ties into the whole thematic structure
Speaker 1: of the book because so clearly, like Corman, McCarthy can't
Speaker 1: actually believe that, because he's a dream all the time.
Speaker 1: To add additional insight, and as a culture, we love
Speaker 1: TV shows about dreams, we do. We you know, we
Speaker 1: mentioned all these bit different fictional properties that that have
Speaker 1: existed or will exist very soon. And in the case
Speaker 1: of the TV show, uh, and we clearly like to
Speaker 1: hear about those dreams. And I find my own experience,
Speaker 1: I like to hear about other people's dreams because it
Speaker 1: gives me a little insight into how their mind works. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so all of this is making me think, like my
Speaker 1: reaction to this is very much like a sort of
Speaker 1: modern contemporary one, which is like, let's stay closed off
Speaker 1: from our dreams, like especially other people's dreams. Let's exists
Speaker 1: in the waking world, right, whereas bring it back to
Speaker 1: the aquar I mean, it seems like this, like you said,
Speaker 1: it seems like such a mature way to experiences and
Speaker 1: such a like like man like, I don't think I've
Speaker 1: ever had a communal experience like that. We're like, oh,
Speaker 1: my family, we all just sit around the living room
Speaker 1: and we have have tea. I mean, other than the
Speaker 1: vomiting part, but like have tea and sit around and
Speaker 1: talk about what we thought about last night. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: there's something kind of beautiful about it. Now. I do
Speaker 1: have to say, if if we if like a workplace
Speaker 1: made everybody coming on a Monday morning and instead of
Speaker 1: brainstorming ideas, everyone shared their dreams. Okay, I could see
Speaker 1: dreams getting a little but like on a on a personal,
Speaker 1: like interpersonal level, I tend to like hearing about people's dreams. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, what we're getting into here is basically like
Speaker 1: this isn't unique to that one specific tribe, right. But
Speaker 1: they go a step further. They equate reality with dreaming
Speaker 1: rather than with being awake. They also believe that all
Speaker 1: inner qualities that make an individual unique exist separate from
Speaker 1: the physical brain. Instead, when they dream, their soul enters
Speaker 1: a multiverse where they learn all the things that are
Speaker 1: going on in the world. This allows them theoretically to
Speaker 1: move through time, though their focus is mainly on improving
Speaker 1: the future, so they mainly in their dreams try to
Speaker 1: look at the future rather than the past. You know,
Speaker 1: this sounds like a dream world scenario that would fit
Speaker 1: in with what we're seeing on Game of Thrones. Totally, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So they're basically they try to alter their dreams, and
Speaker 1: if an elder interprets something bad is coming, they're going
Speaker 1: to try to as a community sort of alter that
Speaker 1: dream wise, but also by their behaviors in Waking Life.
Speaker 1: And yes, they, like many of the other people we've
Speaker 1: spoken about in this series, used hallucinogens to provoke these
Speaker 1: vision quests. Here's a major example of a way that
Speaker 1: this has affected their society. They had a dream, a
Speaker 1: dream interpretation that they would seek conflict with the people's
Speaker 1: of the north in Waking Life. All of their clans
Speaker 1: united and called upon their Catholic missionary friends to assist
Speaker 1: them because they were worried about this. And it turned
Speaker 1: out a couple of years later, Ecuador and Peru were
Speaker 1: about to allow oil companies to come in and slash
Speaker 1: and burn the part of the Amazon that this tribe
Speaker 1: lived in, so They see this as part of their
Speaker 1: long building prophecy, and the prophecy basically goes like this,
Speaker 1: our people, us the Northerners, were called the people of
Speaker 1: the Eagle, and their people are called the people of
Speaker 1: the Condor. And rather of than fighting over the Amazon,
Speaker 1: they want their prophecies that we're all going to unite
Speaker 1: and fly together, which immediately made me think of lucid dream.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, how else are you going to fly? Now?
Speaker 1: Of course, in Australian Aboriginal mythology, there is also this
Speaker 1: concept of the dream time, which is a bit more
Speaker 1: complex than a mirror's dream world. But and it has
Speaker 1: to do has to do with an ancient time of
Speaker 1: the gods in the way that that time sort of
Speaker 1: echoes through the current life of ritual. But but there
Speaker 1: is a component of dream to it. So, hey, we
Speaker 1: we've we've discussed Young and his take on everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's get into a little bit of Freud. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the other, the flip side of the coin. So
Speaker 1: Freud and Young famously didn't get along so much so
Speaker 1: they made a movie about it. Freud, however, wrote about
Speaker 1: dream telepathy in a piece called Dreams and Telepathy. Uh
Speaker 1: and he says, there, Yeah, maybe there's a theoretical connection
Speaker 1: between dreams and telepathy in this, but he says he
Speaker 1: doesn't actually believe they're connected. He sees dreams as being
Speaker 1: of course he does something that's in our unconscious telepathy
Speaker 1: to him, though, wouldn't alter a dream since it would
Speaker 1: come from an external source. Right, Yeah, Now it's interesting
Speaker 1: the whole, Like how how Freud looked at dreams. I
Speaker 1: was reading that, Like he believed that we had trouble
Speaker 1: remembering content from our dreams in large part because our
Speaker 1: dreams we're pulling out things we were uncomfortable with. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Well then he went on to write in another piece
Speaker 1: called The Occult Significance of Dreams, this is the Freud
Speaker 1: we don't hear often about um. In this book he
Speaker 1: discusses telepathic or prophetic dreams, and he doesn't dismiss the
Speaker 1: idea entirely, and he seems to indicate that, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe these could be true. Maybe it's a real thing.
Speaker 1: Since this, many experiments have been conducted to see if
Speaker 1: there's a connection, if there is something actually going on
Speaker 1: with what Freud coined is dream telepathy. Sometimes this kind
Speaker 1: of parapsychology is referred to though as the third rail
Speaker 1: of psychology. So remember how I was referring to Young
Speaker 1: and how he's often dismissed in academia. Of course this
Speaker 1: stuff gets the same treatment. Uh, many people treated as pseudoscience.
Speaker 1: They think it's going to ruin your career, so they
Speaker 1: try to stay away from it. Hence, it's very difficult
Speaker 1: to find quote unquote legitimate sources on this topic, right,
Speaker 1: Like usually we're looking for peer reviewed research papers for
Speaker 1: the episodes that we do, and it was a little
Speaker 1: more difficult on stuff like this because no peer review
Speaker 1: journal is going to publish something about dream telepathy and
Speaker 1: there's unless there's like super concrete evidence. Yeah, so you're
Speaker 1: the sources that you you end up going to in
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of cases, there's a steep
Speaker 1: drop off in believability and uh and even like the
Speaker 1: rigors of research. Well, there's two fairly recent studies that
Speaker 1: I think are worth siting here. There's Stanley Krippner and
Speaker 1: Montague Ullman in the nineteen seventies and eighties, they were
Speaker 1: at the I think it's May Minoties Medical Center in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: Sorry if I'm getting that wrong. Uh. They were testing
Speaker 1: for dream telepathy there and they were verifying it with
Speaker 1: an e g. Everything I read about these guys immediately
Speaker 1: made me think that they were the inspiration for Ghostbusters.
Speaker 1: So with this dream to telepathy though, but we're talking
Speaker 1: about the supposed ability of one individual to speak to
Speaker 1: another through dream exactly, yet that they could speak through
Speaker 1: dreams and share dreams without technological hookup like we talked
Speaker 1: about with Dr Seraf Uh. And then there was a
Speaker 1: study by Carlyle Smith at Trent University in Ontario, and
Speaker 1: he showed students photos of an individual and he asked
Speaker 1: them to dream about the problems of that particular person.
Speaker 1: Wasn't necessarily a person that they'd ever met before. Now,
Speaker 1: the senders and the receiver's identities were totally unknown even
Speaker 1: to the experimenters. The first experiment was about their health,
Speaker 1: the second was about their life problems. In post analysis,
Speaker 1: Carlyle Smith found that there were more what he referred
Speaker 1: to as hits than controls, where an image or concept
Speaker 1: from the person's dream correlated to the real problems of
Speaker 1: the individual sender. Now you can take this with a
Speaker 1: grain assault too, I suppose, right, like in the same
Speaker 1: way as like fortune cookies, right, like, like there's a
Speaker 1: certain percentage that like a fortune cookie is vague enough
Speaker 1: that almost all of us will I guess, like see
Speaker 1: a little bit of ourselves and it identify. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that this gets into the Foyer effect that Joe and
Speaker 1: I did an episode on a while back. If you have,
Speaker 1: like certainly with like personality tests, like if enough stuff
Speaker 1: clicks off for somebody, they'll buy into the whole package. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And that's similar to what we're dealing with with mutual
Speaker 1: dreaming here too. Yeah, this is the notion that two
Speaker 1: lucid dreamers can share and experience the same dream. So
Speaker 1: you find this within loose to dreaming communities, which that
Speaker 1: can sometimes be like a message board or read it
Speaker 1: for him in some cases. Uh, But you'll find individuals
Speaker 1: who claimed to have experienced this together sometimes who even
Speaker 1: find at times dubious claims of it taking place in
Speaker 1: a laboratory setting. Essentially, two or more lucid dreamers say
Speaker 1: that they encounter each other and then afterwards confirmed that
Speaker 1: all three shared the same details of the encounter or
Speaker 1: the setting. So it kind of matches up with some
Speaker 1: of these experiments that you were just talking about. So
Speaker 1: it's the idea that it's an idea that feeds on
Speaker 1: notions of dream, telepathy, and collective unconscious to a certain extent.
Speaker 1: And it reminds me a bit of a sci fi
Speaker 1: novel that came out titled Vert v u r T
Speaker 1: by Jeff Noon. It's it's really good. It's um It
Speaker 1: involves a like a kind of a cyberpunky kind of future,
Speaker 1: except there's instead of technology, there's a there's a hallucinogenic
Speaker 1: drug called vert and it comes in feather form, so
Speaker 1: essentially you get these multicolored feathers and you suck on them,
Speaker 1: and then it allows everyone to enter into a shared
Speaker 1: alternate reality that is essentially a dream world, and you
Speaker 1: can then interact with other people who are taking VERD
Speaker 1: at the same time. Isn't it funny how much of
Speaker 1: our fiction is based around us being able to share
Speaker 1: a reality together when we already share a reality together
Speaker 1: that is and it it maybe it's just that, like
Speaker 1: people inherently feel alienated from one another, like we have
Speaker 1: to enter some other kind of states so that we're connected. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly when people are when there is a
Speaker 1: physical disconnect I think you know, it certainly makes sense.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you have plenty of times where you're you're
Speaker 1: entering into this virtual experience with people that you you
Speaker 1: share the the actual experience with. Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay,
Speaker 1: So we've spent most of this episode talking about theories, right,
Speaker 1: collective unconsciousness, young Freud, dream, telepathy, mind to mind communication
Speaker 1: without wires, right, but what about the wires. We're using wires, right,
Speaker 1: there's a technology in science to this whole thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this brings us to Traveloge. Uh you might not
Speaker 1: think it, but yeah, travel Edge plays an important role here. Um,
Speaker 1: so the Traveloge hotel chain. You might not think of
Speaker 1: travel Lodge as a major player in futurist predictions, but
Speaker 1: you do see this from large future concerned companies. From
Speaker 1: time to time, they all commission some sort of a
Speaker 1: study on where what what's the future of their business
Speaker 1: with the future of of life is it intersects with
Speaker 1: their business? And indeed you see more and more companies
Speaker 1: that are devoting people and resources to future readiness. And
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eleven, travel Edge commissioned noted futurist
Speaker 1: dr Ian Pearson to weigh in on where hotel technology
Speaker 1: is going, and indeed what the experience of checking into
Speaker 1: a hotel might consist of in the year twenty thirty five.
Speaker 1: I'm absolutely on board with this. I always sleep better
Speaker 1: in a hotel. I don't really even the first night.
Speaker 1: Yeah mean I some of the best experiences of sleep
Speaker 1: I've ever had have been in a hotel. I mean,
Speaker 1: I certainly love trip to New York. When we stayed
Speaker 1: at the Yotel in Hell's Kitchen, Man, I slept great there. Ok, well,
Speaker 1: maybe you'll sleep even better in So basically what happened
Speaker 1: here is Pearson did a six month study and then
Speaker 1: he laid out his vision of a future in which
Speaker 1: nearly any surface or fabric in a hotel room maybe
Speaker 1: electronically enhanced to make your stay better. So maybe they
Speaker 1: made a particularly nostalgic cent or it's a virtual display. Uh,
Speaker 1: maybe it's UM. It's turning your walls of the room
Speaker 1: into a scenic vista or even a room in your
Speaker 1: own home so you feel like you're actually at home.
Speaker 1: This is kind of like what we end up talking
Speaker 1: to Dr Surf about UM. The idea of linked dreams,
Speaker 1: or influencing your dreams by using sensory applications outside and
Speaker 1: that's exactly where Pearson goes because of course you check
Speaker 1: into a hotel room. A few notable examples aside, you're
Speaker 1: probably checking in that hotel room for one key purpose,
Speaker 1: and that is to go to sleep. And when we're sleeping,
Speaker 1: we dream. So Pierson's predictions deal with this a lot
Speaker 1: of not only using virtual reality and even virtual sex,
Speaker 1: which goes into but technologically augmented dream states. So some
Speaker 1: of the dream enhancement notions are are fairly physical and
Speaker 1: they're involving some of these things we've already discussed, so
Speaker 1: surfaces that they can be turned into displays in a
Speaker 1: mid light um devices that in it a fragrance, that's
Speaker 1: that even in a sleeping state, you're going to process
Speaker 1: and could have bed sometimes at night with that. My
Speaker 1: wife and I have this little device actually maybe that's
Speaker 1: where the idea for this device came from. You put
Speaker 1: like a various scented oils into it and it puts
Speaker 1: a spray out under your room, and then the device itself,
Speaker 1: another setting on it can make it glow so the
Speaker 1: room has like a particular hue to the color. It's nice.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, some of the the technolo ology here
Speaker 1: is along about those lines, but also special pjs. They
Speaker 1: use yarns that contract under our electric fields. I don't
Speaker 1: I hope those are disposable electronic pjas. I don't know
Speaker 1: that I would want to wear somebody else's pjs. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing the fumigatum, but probably. And then on top
Speaker 1: of that you can add in some heating and cooling elements.
Speaker 1: So essentially you have a garment that can you know,
Speaker 1: hug you, massage you and and and in doing so,
Speaker 1: it's like a thundershirt. Yeah, like a thundershirt that is
Speaker 1: going to influence your dreams, linking imagery and sound and
Speaker 1: even physicality to create a fully tactile dreamscape. So how
Speaker 1: is this going to play out? Well, he predicts the
Speaker 1: active management of our dreams through dream management systems. This
Speaker 1: will allow us to manipulate the course of our dreams,
Speaker 1: you know, basically just sort of primus like, well, I
Speaker 1: want to I want to have a dream that I'm
Speaker 1: at the ocean, so ocean sounds, ocean smell piped in.
Speaker 1: Maybe somehow you program the garment or the bed itself
Speaker 1: to create that sensation of waves rolling across you and
Speaker 1: then falling away. So it's not so much as I'm
Speaker 1: gonna physically accept your dream, but I'm going to do
Speaker 1: everything with the environment of the hotel room to accept
Speaker 1: it for you. A lot of this makes me think
Speaker 1: of something that we've both covered. I think you and
Speaker 1: Julie did a previous stuff to blow your mind about this,
Speaker 1: and I've covered it elsewhere, a s MR. I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if these people who are investigating this are looking into
Speaker 1: the effect of a s MR. There are whole SMR
Speaker 1: video series that are all designed to make you go
Speaker 1: to sleep and wake you up. There's even a podcast.
Speaker 1: Did you know there's a whole podcast that's designed to
Speaker 1: help you go to sleep? Uh, some people use they do,
Speaker 1: but a s MR. We should define this. This is
Speaker 1: of course when and you have to listen to the
Speaker 1: past episode to get the full breakdown. But essentially, certain
Speaker 1: people here certain types of sounds and has an exceedingly soothing,
Speaker 1: even you four effect on them. And this might be
Speaker 1: the sound of someone whispering. My wife experienced, this is
Speaker 1: the experiences this actually specifically with the sound of somebody
Speaker 1: drawing her. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's very
Speaker 1: popular with the YouTube community. There's a number of YouTubers
Speaker 1: who make a living doing it where they like kind
Speaker 1: of perform roles whispering into a three D microphone. And
Speaker 1: I'm very susceptible to it. It totally works. It it
Speaker 1: Uh people call it brain orgasms. It like makes your
Speaker 1: brain tingle in your spine kind of tangle down your
Speaker 1: back and stuff. Yeah, yeah, way, it totally works for me. Well, well,
Speaker 1: that and all these additional dream priming techniques, they make
Speaker 1: a lot of sense that they're very much grounded within
Speaker 1: like either current or very near technologies. But then Pearson
Speaker 1: takes it one step farther. He says dream linking to
Speaker 1: other people will be possible, So if a friend is
Speaker 1: dreaming at the same time, it may be possible to
Speaker 1: communicate with him via your dream. Sleepers will also be
Speaker 1: able to play games in their sleep using feedback from
Speaker 1: image recognition and emotion detection. So he says that with
Speaker 1: the aid of brain monitoring, will be able to record
Speaker 1: the dreams that we're having, uh, play them back later,
Speaker 1: even continue on with them where we left off, or
Speaker 1: experience the dream completely again. He says. It says that
Speaker 1: we we may use active contact lenses that'll that'll that
Speaker 1: will work along with skin connectivity monitors with the dream
Speaker 1: management software to detect a nightmare and then either change
Speaker 1: the course of your dream or wake you up. He
Speaker 1: says that dream management systems could even be used for
Speaker 1: edgecuricational or study purposes, so instead of just dreaming about whatever,
Speaker 1: you can actively do your homework in your dream. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So these are very similar to devices we talked about
Speaker 1: in the last episode. But let's just cover them again
Speaker 1: very quickly in case, uh, somebody listening to this one
Speaker 1: hasn't heard about. Yeah, because it's as as far out
Speaker 1: there as that last example from Pearson may seem, and
Speaker 1: it seems very sci fi. Uh. We see the groundwork
Speaker 1: already coming together in in current technology. So as we
Speaker 1: as we discussed in our last episode, you have psychophysiologist
Speaker 1: Stephen Lebert with the Lucidity Institute, and he uses e
Speaker 1: g s to look into and at the electra electrical
Speaker 1: brain activity that takes place during sleep, monitoring dream activity.
Speaker 1: And this has allowed the development of a number of
Speaker 1: different devices such as the Nova dreamer Um, which it
Speaker 1: looks like a cross between a sleep mask and like goggles, uh,
Speaker 1: and it detects the rapid eye movement of r M
Speaker 1: sleep and the dreams that are likely taking place underneath it,
Speaker 1: and deliver splashing light queues to let the user know that, hey,
Speaker 1: you're you're having a dream right now, Wake up, go lucid,
Speaker 1: fly around, do whatever you want. And as I mentioned
Speaker 1: in the last episode, there's there's another device that's been
Speaker 1: advocated as doing something similar by a guy named Keith Hearn.
Speaker 1: He called it the dream Machine, uh, and it was
Speaker 1: never made commercially available, but it's a similar principle basically
Speaker 1: that it can detect when you're dreaming uh and then
Speaker 1: uses either like a visual or auditory cues to wake
Speaker 1: you up or let you know that you're dreaming so
Speaker 1: that you can control the dream. Yeah. Now, it's also
Speaker 1: worth knowing the U. S Military has explored the use
Speaker 1: of VR goggles. They help trauma stricken individuals who wake
Speaker 1: up from a nightmare and then calm them, distract them,
Speaker 1: and then conceivably allow them to enter re enter the
Speaker 1: dream world in a calm or state. This would be
Speaker 1: I guess this would this would be more of a
Speaker 1: priming system as opposed to an active dream manipulation. I
Speaker 1: wonder how well that would work together with the m
Speaker 1: d m A therapy that we talked about for PTSD individuals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, you know, I don't remember
Speaker 1: reading anything in our research about m d m a's
Speaker 1: effect on dreams, like and in fact, I don't think
Speaker 1: I've heard anything clinical or just interpersonal about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I can't remember. It's been a while since we
Speaker 1: did those But so and when it comes to observing dreams,
Speaker 1: because certain and when we start talking about sharing dreams,
Speaker 1: there are a few different scenarios. Like one is one
Speaker 1: person dreams and the other one observes. Another is that
Speaker 1: both are engaged in the dream sharing together as a
Speaker 1: collaborative effort. So in two thousand eleven, scientists that you
Speaker 1: see Berkeley demonstrated the use of fm or I to
Speaker 1: measure the brain activity of volunteers as they watched short
Speaker 1: video clips. Then a computational model crunched the fm ri
Speaker 1: I data and reproduce the images. So on. Essentially, they
Speaker 1: would be thinking of one thing and then this this
Speaker 1: they're getting an on screen interpretation of what they are thinking.
Speaker 1: And the results are imperfect at this stage, we're talking
Speaker 1: colorful blurs uh basic shape or sense of size or movement.
Speaker 1: But they match up, I mean surprisingly well, considering that
Speaker 1: the technology is doing what seemed the domain of magic
Speaker 1: in previous ages, looking into a person's mind and seeing
Speaker 1: what they're thinking about, breaking through that last barrier of privacy,
Speaker 1: which we think that we all have. We talked to
Speaker 1: drs sor If about this a little bit about another
Speaker 1: study that does something similar, and the way he describes it,
Speaker 1: it makes me think of like that right now, we're
Speaker 1: at low resolution and we're working our way up to
Speaker 1: get to like a regular type resolution. We're not quite
Speaker 1: at an HD level yet with our dreams, but they're
Speaker 1: just so they're just these blurry, grainy things that you
Speaker 1: could interpret as being you know, visuals. Yeah, at the
Speaker 1: time of this initial study, the researchers predicted that we
Speaker 1: were just a few decades away from enabling people to
Speaker 1: read or view another individual's thoughts and intentions and ultimately
Speaker 1: even their dreams, allowing us to to to play back
Speaker 1: a dream and edge a little closer to some of
Speaker 1: Ian Pearson's predictions. Alright, but what about so I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of something we talked about on a lot of how
Speaker 1: stuff work shows brain computer interfaces. You and Joe did
Speaker 1: a whole episode on techno telepathy. Now, what about when
Speaker 1: you're like literally hooking up wires to somebody's brain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is one of those areas where the
Speaker 1: current technology is not it's not quite up to sci
Speaker 1: fi levels by any means, but it's certainly it's it's
Speaker 1: certainly close enough to where it's just it's really astounding
Speaker 1: to think that we're actually pulling some of this off.
Speaker 1: So for years now, scientists have been developing lots of
Speaker 1: different technologies for brain computer interfaces, and in physical terms,
Speaker 1: it makes sense because the brain is an electrochemical machine
Speaker 1: and its activities are expressed in ways that are detectable
Speaker 1: to machines that are sensitive to electromagnetism and all. You
Speaker 1: can divide the whole process up into three basic technological
Speaker 1: elements neuroimaging, transmission, and neurostimulation. And we've already touched on
Speaker 1: the neuroimaging a bit. We use fm R I, we
Speaker 1: use U electro and cephalography UM or magneto cephalography to
Speaker 1: observe the activity. For input, you've got a few different options,
Speaker 1: certainly implanted electrodes which would be very invasive obviously, but
Speaker 1: then also focused ultrasound or transcranial magnetics stimulation. You put
Speaker 1: a nice friendly electro magnet against your head carefully a
Speaker 1: line a lined over your scalp to target a particular
Speaker 1: part of the brain, and it pulses inward to stimulate
Speaker 1: electrical activity in the targeted region of the brain. So
Speaker 1: one of the studies that I read about, and uh,
Speaker 1: it's from a Gizmodo article in two thousand eight, it
Speaker 1: said a research team at the a t R Computational
Speaker 1: Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan were successfully able to display simple
Speaker 1: images produced in the human brain on a computer screen
Speaker 1: using these technologies. Now, this is similar to what you
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier. We bring it up again with
Speaker 1: Dr Serif in the interview and he says he thinks
Speaker 1: that they repeated or maybe did like a better version
Speaker 1: of it in But this is a colleague of his,
Speaker 1: so he was very familiar with this and explains it
Speaker 1: far better. But the essential gist as it converts electrical
Speaker 1: signals sent to the visual cortex into images that are
Speaker 1: then translated onto the computer screen the way that did
Speaker 1: they tested this when they showed the test subjects six
Speaker 1: letters in the word neuron, and the subjects succeeded in
Speaker 1: reconstructing that word on screen with their brain. So basically,
Speaker 1: it comes down to a scenario where if we can
Speaker 1: observe the what's physically going on to cause a particular
Speaker 1: dream image, if we can observe it, translate that into data,
Speaker 1: and then retranslate that back and and and make that
Speaker 1: same physical process appear in another individual's brain, we can
Speaker 1: conceivably allow two brains to communicate with each other. We
Speaker 1: can allow brains to maybe even share a share our
Speaker 1: mind state, and the more far fetched a versions of it,
Speaker 1: the one that I really like this is obviously a
Speaker 1: science fiction scenario. Although I mean, if we've got the
Speaker 1: technology to do this, I don't see why we wouldn't
Speaker 1: hook up a human brain to an animal brain and
Speaker 1: and see what kind of interface you get there. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you mentioned that, because just to give you
Speaker 1: an example out there for everyone where we are with
Speaker 1: this technology experimentally, we have linked to rats, We've enabled
Speaker 1: a human to move a living rats tail with their mind,
Speaker 1: and we've even managed to allow limited brain to brain
Speaker 1: communication with humans, taking brain activity from one person and
Speaker 1: injecting brain activity into the second person. In a multinational
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen study, we had a team. The team
Speaker 1: of researchers involved use e e g. Caps and uh
Speaker 1: TMS equipment. So we're talking about trans magnetic stimulation transcranial magnets, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And they used this to allow them to communicate, to
Speaker 1: eat with each other using signals of numbers, lights, and colors.
Speaker 1: And they did this across a across the across the continent,
Speaker 1: I believe it was like France to India. And in
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen, researchers at the University of Washington published
Speaker 1: a study showing that they were able to establish a
Speaker 1: technologically mediated, non invasive brain to brain interface which allowed
Speaker 1: one person to cause movement and another person's body without
Speaker 1: speech and across the internet. That is fascinating and terrifying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then something that well, I mean, you and Joe went
Speaker 1: into it pretty heavily in the technotal leaf of the episode.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure this is something we'll keep coming back
Speaker 1: to as more and more research is conducted in the area.
Speaker 1: It seems like you're basically talking about to two separate
Speaker 1: dreams that are correlated to a certain degree by the
Speaker 1: observation and manipulation of a dream management system. Again, two
Speaker 1: people are dreaming and you have a computer spitting out
Speaker 1: sea salt smells at you. Um Or, you are really
Speaker 1: experiencing the same dreams, the same reality. Two brains connected
Speaker 1: in a way that permits both dreamers to dream. Essentially
Speaker 1: is a single double decker brain, um Or, we work
Speaker 1: where one dreamer is, you know, essentially an observer mode perhaps,
Speaker 1: But that idea of like two brains as one, like computing,
Speaker 1: is one like that. I have a hard time imagine
Speaker 1: exactly what that would be like. I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: a level of personal connection that is beyond the human
Speaker 1: experience totally. I can't like, and we get into this
Speaker 1: with Dr Serf, I can't imagine the physical experience. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to understand what it's like other than just like
Speaker 1: feeling electrical stimulation in the brain. Um So we turned
Speaker 1: to him for this. He's the expert in this field.
Speaker 1: Uh we talked to him last episode, but if you know,
Speaker 1: I'll reintroduce him here. His name is Dr Moran Serf.
Speaker 1: He's a professor of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg
Speaker 1: School of management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern University,
Speaker 1: and he focuses on studying brain surgery patients their emotions,
Speaker 1: their dreams, their behaviors. Uh, he's He's recognized because he
Speaker 1: had a former career as a hacker, breaking into banks,
Speaker 1: stealing their money and proving to them that there is
Speaker 1: security flaws in their systems. So people look at that
Speaker 1: as a great metaphor of he is now hacking into
Speaker 1: brains and dreams. So let's turn to interview with him
Speaker 1: and get some more on what it would actually be
Speaker 1: like to share a dream state with someone else. Darker
Speaker 1: serve what is your view as a scientist of Young's
Speaker 1: collective unconscious? So the idea that things in the outside
Speaker 1: world penetrate our dreams and become symbols that have meaning
Speaker 1: in our dreams is very likely. We know from studies
Speaker 1: that were done not long ago, many years after Young
Speaker 1: theo is emerged that show that we can actually make
Speaker 1: you dream things by doing them when you're awake. So
Speaker 1: if you play tees a lot when you're awake, you're
Speaker 1: likely to actually dream about bricks falling from the sky
Speaker 1: on you to night after. So we know that things
Speaker 1: on the outside world penetrate our dreams. And what Young
Speaker 1: basically said is that things in that's a role that
Speaker 1: are really important go into our dreams, and because they're
Speaker 1: important for how many people together, they're gonna go into
Speaker 1: many people's dreams and all of them are going to
Speaker 1: somehow get to experience what happened in the world in
Speaker 1: the same way. Now now Young don't really have the
Speaker 1: mechanism for that, but now we know even about a mechanism. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, we know that in the months after nine eleven,
Speaker 1: many people in New York had shared dreams about a
Speaker 1: nightmare's event with planes crashing or with people going through
Speaker 1: horrific experiences. This is because there was a shared experience
Speaker 1: that happened to us when we're awake, and our dreams
Speaker 1: reflect the experience that are awake brain goes through, so
Speaker 1: it also went into many people's dreams. And the therapists
Speaker 1: that helps a lot of people work with things help
Speaker 1: them by looking also not just that they're awake selves,
Speaker 1: but also on their dreaming selves. In the same way,
Speaker 1: we know that if you just look at dream diaries,
Speaker 1: what people write about their dreams when they wake up,
Speaker 1: you see that there are teams that emerge, and those
Speaker 1: teams even make sense in the context of the geography,
Speaker 1: the location, the cultural experiences. So if you look at
Speaker 1: the western world and you ask people what the worst
Speaker 1: dreams you've had, you will hear a lot of dreams
Speaker 1: about being late for work and missing a meeting, or
Speaker 1: being embarrassed in public, or stuff like that. If you
Speaker 1: go to countries where the amount of meetings that people
Speaker 1: have to attend are smaller, about the amount of the
Speaker 1: famine and troubles with beasts are higher, you would hear
Speaker 1: a lot of small dreams about being attacked by animals
Speaker 1: or being in a grave circumstances where you have no food.
Speaker 1: And this has suggests that experiences in the outside world
Speaker 1: goes through your dream and be conseperency. The answer the
Speaker 1: world shove. But many people you can expect to have
Speaker 1: a lot of dreams happen to a lot of people
Speaker 1: in a very similar narrative. You took it one that
Speaker 1: further and suggested that they actually the dreams have a
Speaker 1: meaning that we can extract and go backwards. So we
Speaker 1: can ask people what you dreamed, and if we see
Speaker 1: that many people have a similar narrative or similar story
Speaker 1: or similar symbol in their dream we can kind of
Speaker 1: figure out what the community goes to. So if a
Speaker 1: people a lot of people in their dreams dream about
Speaker 1: being eaten by a beast, maybe there's a grave thing
Speaker 1: that happens right now to the our community that affects
Speaker 1: them and the priests the symbol of bad things happened.
Speaker 1: So he took that and tried to figure out in
Speaker 1: the biggest success as what happens to everyone. So in
Speaker 1: this particular episode, one of the things that we looked
Speaker 1: at was a Japanese study that seemed to indicate that
Speaker 1: we could uh using brain computer interfaces, look at imagery
Speaker 1: of what a person was dreaming. How close are we
Speaker 1: now to to actually being able to witness another person's dreams?
Speaker 1: I think the study is sort of I'm thirteen. So
Speaker 1: this is a study by a colleague of mind, professor
Speaker 1: Yukikamiani from Kyoto, Japan. And what they did is they
Speaker 1: did something remarkable, which is they used detected in our dreams,
Speaker 1: we actually see content that their visuals are like movie
Speaker 1: to actually extract the story by looking at the part
Speaker 1: of the brain that sees things. If you look at
Speaker 1: the brain of a human. There are many, many components
Speaker 1: to it. In the back of the brain has a
Speaker 1: big part of it that actually corresponds to the images
Speaker 1: that you see. So if you see a house, there's
Speaker 1: a part of the brain is like that. If you
Speaker 1: see a face, a different part light up. If you
Speaker 1: see colors or shapes, or objects or text, all of
Speaker 1: those things in the outide world have a call it
Speaker 1: in the brain. So what Camani and his colleagues did
Speaker 1: was first mapped those So they took you and they
Speaker 1: put you in the magnetic machine that kind of looked
Speaker 1: at your brain from the inside, called the f m ALI,
Speaker 1: and they mapped your brain and they found a part
Speaker 1: of the brain that corresponds to seeing faces and seeing objects,
Speaker 1: and seeing houses, and seeing familiar people and unfamiliar people,
Speaker 1: and many many things they could map have a clear
Speaker 1: collet in the brain. And then they had you go
Speaker 1: to sleep, and they waited for you to go to
Speaker 1: sleep and really get into deep sleep or dreamstays, and
Speaker 1: then they just looked at the same part of the
Speaker 1: brain and try to identify what images you may see.
Speaker 1: And they saw that maybe the part of the brainet
Speaker 1: his face is light up, and they said okay, right now,
Speaker 1: you see a face and then immediately after another part
Speaker 1: light up, and it's the part that says it's a
Speaker 1: familiar thing, and you say, okay, maybe it's the face
Speaker 1: of someone that you know. And then a third thing
Speaker 1: happens and it lights up and maybe it's a landmark
Speaker 1: that you're familiar with. It comes up, and just by
Speaker 1: that they could kind of create a suggestion to what
Speaker 1: your narrative is. You're going with someone that you know
Speaker 1: to a place that you're familiar with, maybe it's your house,
Speaker 1: and you see two individuals in talk and then they
Speaker 1: would wake you up, ask you to tell them what
Speaker 1: your dream is and compel how well they are. Decoders
Speaker 1: were able to predict what your dreams. And because we
Speaker 1: can extetend decoders where they were wrong and where they
Speaker 1: we're right, we can actually do better in the next iteration.
Speaker 1: So then you've got to sleep again. Then we wake
Speaker 1: you up after five minutes and ask you again. The
Speaker 1: computer learns again what you did correctly and what you
Speaker 1: did in corectly, and you've got to sleep again. And
Speaker 1: after a few trials, you can actually get to a
Speaker 1: level where we can predict with a very high accuracy.
Speaker 1: What is the visuals that you see in your mind? Now,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of limitations to death. One is that
Speaker 1: we don't really know if the visuals that you see
Speaker 1: correspond to the same visual that you interpret. So maybe
Speaker 1: you see a familiar person, but for you as your
Speaker 1: dad's and I think it's your mom. But just the
Speaker 1: fact that we can actually get something and predict something
Speaker 1: about the contact of your dream is already remarkable because
Speaker 1: we can actually give it to you and ask you
Speaker 1: to reflect on that. And that's something that most people
Speaker 1: don't have. Most of us just forget our dreams when
Speaker 1: we wake up. Now a computer can tell you what
Speaker 1: it thinks you dreamt of. And this might kind of
Speaker 1: like the the you know, the the the lightbulb in
Speaker 1: your brain and say, oh my god, yes, I definitely
Speaker 1: remember having seen this and death. So this is a
Speaker 1: way to give us access to something that our brain
Speaker 1: hides for us every night. So do you believe it
Speaker 1: will ever be possible for for two minds to share
Speaker 1: the same dream? Uh? In a sense similar to UH,
Speaker 1: I guess like mutual dreaming. That is the idea that
Speaker 1: sometimes stuffed around. So here are the challenges in having
Speaker 1: two brains share the same dream, but also we know
Speaker 1: how to solve those so it becomes a technical problem
Speaker 1: rather than a philosophical one. So the challenges are that
Speaker 1: in order for you and I have to share the
Speaker 1: same dream at the same time, we actually have to
Speaker 1: get to dreams state at the same time. So the
Speaker 1: fact that we're to sleep at the same time, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean mere dreaming at the same time. There are
Speaker 1: different things to be asleep and to drink. Then we
Speaker 1: know that each friend has its own kind of cycle.
Speaker 1: If you want it takes you five minutes to get
Speaker 1: your dream, it takes me twenty minutes. So in order
Speaker 1: to share the thing, we first have to just make
Speaker 1: sure that we're both do make at the same time.
Speaker 1: Already not easy, but that's something that we can actually hit.
Speaker 1: If we just let you sleep in and find next
Speaker 1: each other, we're gonna at some point hit this moment.
Speaker 1: That's that one. Now we want to actually not just
Speaker 1: have your dream happened to you in my veravor to me,
Speaker 1: but somehow we want to control the content unless we
Speaker 1: know we can do using a stimuli that actually penetrates
Speaker 1: the sleep and navigate the dreams. Some extent. So we know,
Speaker 1: for instance, that if I spray water on you when
Speaker 1: you're dreaming, it's likely if I can wake you up afterwards,
Speaker 1: you will tell me that you have dreamt on something
Speaker 1: that's to do with water. You might have You might
Speaker 1: say something like I was by the ocean, or I
Speaker 1: was seeing a waterfall, something like that. So here's one
Speaker 1: thing we can do. We also know that the smells
Speaker 1: manipulate dreams in certain directions. So we know that if
Speaker 1: you're asleep and I spread the smell of roses next
Speaker 1: to your nose, you will probably have a dream that
Speaker 1: has to do with something positive. It won't be roses
Speaker 1: that you dream of, but you will do something positive.
Speaker 1: I mean, if I spread the smell of boat and eggs,
Speaker 1: you will dream of something negative. So we can kind
Speaker 1: of nevigate the balance of your dream with smells. So
Speaker 1: the idea is that with touch and with sound and
Speaker 1: with the smells, we can actually shift your dreams in
Speaker 1: certain directions. Now, right now, it's not specific, like we
Speaker 1: kind of can move you to a positive or negative
Speaker 1: to something that you know. I means don't though, but
Speaker 1: this is just technical now, once we figure out if
Speaker 1: we can actually change your dream or make you think
Speaker 1: of something. When I'm controlling it from the outside, it's
Speaker 1: just a matter of mapping it's perfectly and finding what
Speaker 1: smells for you really make you think of your mom,
Speaker 1: what smells for me really make me thic of my mom.
Speaker 1: And then we basically could have the two of us
Speaker 1: slip out by side and spread the corresponding smells for
Speaker 1: the two of us, and now both of us go
Speaker 1: to the same idea of dreaming about our mothers. And
Speaker 1: if we really get to a level where we can
Speaker 1: control a lot of the negative mother's father's people, we know, people,
Speaker 1: we don't like, people, we like people, places we've been to,
Speaker 1: we can start imagining a world where we really have
Speaker 1: two people sleep there and each gets stimulus that makes
Speaker 1: them go to the same experience. So you and I
Speaker 1: go spend the evening together and then we go to sleep,
Speaker 1: and instead of the evening just being over when we
Speaker 1: both retired into our old world, we kind of continue
Speaker 1: the experience together in our dream world. That's the science
Speaker 1: fiction yet of this, But the reality is that we
Speaker 1: know that we're going in this direction because we know
Speaker 1: a lot of the components, and now it's just a
Speaker 1: matter of finding the perfection and making it really a reality. Now,
Speaker 1: if you want to go real science fiction, we can
Speaker 1: imagine that being one step above, which is instead of
Speaker 1: someone from the outside world just manipulating both of our
Speaker 1: prints at the same time and making a huge dream
Speaker 1: of a mid dream of a and just controlling for
Speaker 1: that being the same a, we can imagine that I'm
Speaker 1: looking at your brain and using the thing that camitality
Speaker 1: this guy that you mentioned in the previous study, by
Speaker 1: reading your brain and seeing that you right now see
Speaker 1: someone that you're familiar with and immediately spray the smell
Speaker 1: that makes you take someone familiar reading. And so I
Speaker 1: read one person's brain and write into the other person's
Speaker 1: plame and basically make the people share a dream by
Speaker 1: me just manipulating one after I read the other. That's
Speaker 1: quite science fiction right now. But the technology behind that
Speaker 1: is what we know right now. So it's just a
Speaker 1: matter of finding if we can actually do that, or
Speaker 1: it's gonna main uh the O with without any poof
Speaker 1: So let's stick to somewhere in between, like what the
Speaker 1: modern sciences and the and the science fiction theory that
Speaker 1: you just throw at us, what would a shared dream stay.
Speaker 1: If we were using brain to brain interfaces, be like,
Speaker 1: would it just be simply electrical signals going back and
Speaker 1: forth or would it be more sensory oriented like you
Speaker 1: were talking about touch, smell sound In the long In
Speaker 1: the long term, we might be able to actually really
Speaker 1: stimulate brains and activate them. Right now, we're not really
Speaker 1: good at that, and partially just because we don't have
Speaker 1: access to brains so in order to still that the
Speaker 1: bringing it to open one and stickulate those inside, and
Speaker 1: there aren't the many people who will happen to do that,
Speaker 1: So most of our work is coming with just looking
Speaker 1: at the brains and kind of imaging it, also looking
Speaker 1: at what's coming out without touching anything. If you talk
Speaker 1: about animals like mice and rats, are studies right now
Speaker 1: that actually do what I just mentioned. They read the
Speaker 1: brain of one rat and they and they stimulate the
Speaker 1: brain of another one. They actually share content from one
Speaker 1: rat to another. This was done last year by grouping
Speaker 1: the Duke University in Brazil, where they basically had one
Speaker 1: right think one thing, then it acculated the brain of
Speaker 1: another rat and they basically shared an experience across you know,
Speaker 1: Brazil and North Carolina but that's in the world of
Speaker 1: animals and the world of humans. We are as really
Speaker 1: as invasive as we are with animals, so we don't
Speaker 1: really get to change things in a very specific level
Speaker 1: in your brain. So the only thing that is those
Speaker 1: two is changing the environment and hoping that your dream
Speaker 1: is going to all. So that's where we are right now.
Speaker 1: We basically activate your senses from the outside and hope
Speaker 1: that your brain is gonna take you to the experience
Speaker 1: it by itself. So we can change the temperature in
Speaker 1: the room, and we can change the smell in the room,
Speaker 1: and we can speak to you, and we can even
Speaker 1: flesh light into your eyes that are closed and hope
Speaker 1: that this is gonna all make you dream of the
Speaker 1: right thing. So there are studies that show that you
Speaker 1: can actually navigate your dream using smells. Some smells make
Speaker 1: you dream of positive things, some of negative things, something
Speaker 1: to do more specific things that were actually in your
Speaker 1: experience before, or some memois in your wake self have
Speaker 1: a smell attached them, and if I spread that smells
Speaker 1: when you're asleep, it will take your brain to the
Speaker 1: same experience. So smells this one kind of big category
Speaker 1: of things that we play with right now sounds also works,
Speaker 1: so I can actually we'll spell in your ear some
Speaker 1: message and it will penetate your dream. We all know that,
Speaker 1: for instance, from your alarm clock. Oftentimes when you're asleep
Speaker 1: you allowm buzzes, and in terms of just waking up
Speaker 1: for the first few seconds, you can have incorporate the
Speaker 1: alarm sounds into your dream, and then at some point
Speaker 1: it's just too much and you wake up. But we
Speaker 1: know that there's a level by which content can actually
Speaker 1: get into your sleep, penetrate it and become part of
Speaker 1: your dream other than break you up. And the same
Speaker 1: as too for touch in order if we touch you
Speaker 1: in certain locations at certain times, you will have an experience.
Speaker 1: The classical story is that if I make your legs
Speaker 1: moved in your dream, you will kind of feel like
Speaker 1: you're falling. That's that's a classical experience that it will
Speaker 1: often report in their dreams. So all of those are
Speaker 1: just ways to change something that makes your brain hopefully
Speaker 1: take the content and change it accordingly. It's not specific enough.
Speaker 1: Now we don't really know you know, how to really
Speaker 1: make you go and imagine how it was when you
Speaker 1: and your mom went to the shopping more at age four.
Speaker 1: But we're getting there, so it becomes a technical problem
Speaker 1: rather than just a philosophical one. We actually starting to
Speaker 1: map the possibilities and slowly getting too more and more
Speaker 1: accurate abilities when it comes toneticating. All right, So there
Speaker 1: you have at the elective unconscious, uh, the conjoined dream,
Speaker 1: both in a sort of mystical terms, uh, psychological terms
Speaker 1: and even hard science of the nearer and distant future.
Speaker 1: If you want more on these related topics, if you
Speaker 1: want to look up some of the episodes we discussed here,
Speaker 1: head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the mother ship. That's what we find all the
Speaker 1: blog posts, the videos, as all the podcast episodes, and
Speaker 1: links out to our various social media accounts. Right we
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Speaker 1: the audience. Especially. We'll listen to whatever dreams you're having.
Speaker 1: And if you want to write us about your dreams
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