#1 Brain Surgeon: What Your Dreams Are Trying To Tell You About Yourself | Rahul Jandial

in your new book this is why you dream you make the Bold assertion that perhaps the reason we sleep is so that the brain can dream I do yeah and I think um what's helped me with this book is to really think about it in a way where it could be a conversation in any form so Pub over here Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles because dreams are for everyone they are inside everyone they pop up in everyone even if people say they don't dream I don't have to tell you what a nightmare is we all know what that is um so I wanted to do it in a way where I could make statements that were uh profound and then go into the science that backs them up or also elaborate on the gaps in the science but why it's likely to be true if it ever can be fully understood and many things will not be so that statement I believe we sleep in order to dream I believe we sleep um because the brain must dream and we can get into that in the next little while but the easiest way for me to say where I come to that conclusion is from the glimpses of transplant surgery Neuroscience what happens when we go a day or two without sleeping as a medic or as a surgeon you know what that is so the first thing is um there's something that builds up it's called Sleep pressure we don't ask to sleep we don't request to sleep and if we try not to sleep after a day or two sleep has to happen uh the second thing is dreaming is a robust electrical and metabolic activity that happens in the dreaming brain which is liberated during sleep so when we think of our brains they're not on off and they're definitely not off while we're sleeping the metabolic activity the usage of glucose the measurements of electricity are robust while we sleep our bodies are sleeping but our brains are not resting our brains are not sleeping the dreaming brain and the waking brain at times the electrical activity can be so similar that it was called paradoxical sleep so the first first thing we all have to accept as a measurement not my opinion is that the brain is not quiet while we sleep the brain is not resting while we sleep the brain is doing something very fundamental because it forces us to sleep and the and what happens when we sleep is that the electrical activity in the brain is something distinct uh from the electrical activity during Waking Life because different regions uh are dominant while we sleep the dreaming brain fires up the imagination network if you will and logic is dampened that's a measurement on fmri the waking brain has more executive Network function and we can get into that and less uh imagination Network function so even though the electrical activity can be similar if not identical it's generated by very different ensembles of neurons in in the dreaming brain and the waking brain so when you start to look at all of this process that sleep puts us down sleep we'll take risk to sleep what happens when we sleep our brains are on fire right I've put livers into other people we don't reconnect the nerves sleep isn't really for the liver in some fundamental way yes there are some metabolic changes that happen during sleep and and those benefit people but the massive thing happening in the sleeping body is the brain is throbbing with glucose usage and metabolic activity and electrical activity so when I look at that it makes me think that the process of sleep is for the benefit of dreaming yeah it's so powerful if we think about what happens in our body through an evolutionary lens the fact that certain parts of our brain are more metabolically active when we sleep and in particular when we are dreaming it's hard not to make the case that dreaming therefore must serve a very powerful function for us right right if you go without sleep a day or two then what the dreaming brain and throughout this conversation you know some of the fundament the foundations of conversation I want to have with you and your listeners and I thank you for this opportunity is to walk away with things that are like that's measurement that's a that's a fact that's not a study show or an interpretation it's a fact that in a 24-hour cycle your brain is active throughout there's blood flow throughout okay it's just a question of there are two very different brain States the waking brain and the dreaming brain and if we go a day or two without sleep when we are forced to sleep something builds up inside us dream pressure sleep pressure the dreaming starts to happen earlier in that sleep so it's almost like it's waiting to get out the vivid dreams and REM stages change when you go a day or two without sleep and then end up falling asleep so it almost feels like there's something building up that must occur because when the brain goes without it a day or two it jumps off earlier so those kind of conceptual things are my interpretations but it's a measurement that the activity is robust while we sleep in our dreaming brains is there any Merit to the Viewpoint that if certain parts of our brain are more active when we are asleep and in particular When We're Dreaming are those the same are that might be I guess less active and then you could argue resting during the day because can we have an organ that's going hot all the time yeah good question yeah perfect question I had this conversation with my son um and he says it's a great question because wait a second you're saying waking brain and dreaming brain are both active both hot but you just you're also saying that certain parts are dampened certain parts are dampened certain regions are dampened so then how can they be even so just bear with me there the waking brain um and this these are established Neuroscience Concepts this what I'm about to say is welln in Neuroscience the waking brain is executive Network dominant the executive network is a collection of structures throughout the brain from evolutionary old parts of the brain like The Reptilian Brain to the modern parts of the brain like the prefrontal cortex that pushed our foreheads forward they're all connected and they but they provide a certain function uh much like if we talked about uh Finance there would be different parts of London and UK but they would all function as a finance industry well the executive network is the dominant Network while we're awake it's focused on what's called task on it's looking for things to do outside it's using reason it's using logic that makes sense when we go from waking brain to Dreaming brain this is a measurement the executive network is dampened okay so then if things are robust equally then something must be heightened in the dreaming brain and that's the point you're getting to and that's really where the magic in my mind and beauty of dreaming is that it's a what what compensates for the dampened executive network is the lyic system which is emotional networks as well as the imagination Network which other people call default mode network but I call it the imagination Network so you have a hyper emotional hyperv visual dreaming brain and and you have dampened logic in the dreaming brain now the massive Point here another measurement is the degree to which emotions not in every dream not in your dream or not in my dream but in some dreams the top speed of emotions in the dreaming brain is higher than what we could ever feel uh emotionally in our waking brains and that's an fmri measurement of metabolic usage so just explain fmri for people who don't what that is so when we talk uh and while we're here is because For the First Time in the last 20 years we have exotic brain Imaging that's giving us a glimpse into dreaming that we we never had before Aristotle's talking about it 2,000 years ago everybody's curious about it but so when I when I say measurements there are three essential measurements of brain function we have now fmri is there's no radiation with it so you know uh when my wife was pregnant and she needed some Imaging she had an MRI so neuroscientists can recruit people to study them without injuring them so that's why you're hearing that word quite a bit uh an MRI is a it's a functional MRI and when you perform a task the slight changes in in blood flow uh the connection being that if these regions are more actively engaged in that task they'll have a little bit more trickle of blood flow so fmri looks at uh metabolic usage in some sense through blood flow then the other thing we should know is you can measure electricity with scalp electrodes called an EEG what I try to tell people is think of it we put an electrode on the heart and that's an EKG we all get that right that little classic squiggle what if we put 96 on our scalp you'll record something else so those two I think are the essential essential studies we're using uh to understand dreaming and to understand uh waking brain because there's no conversation without having an understanding of both and then the last thing is patient stories things you understand too like you can't you can't not include the fact that on some rare exotic surgeries that where we remove half the brain in a child uh for seizures they still dream you know like that's an important part we don't have to only rely on fmri and EG right we don't have to only rely on fancy pictures and measurements of electricity uh we can we can also rely on some of the stories from from patients so those three things are what I'm using to uh put this love letter together to Dreaming yeah that's that's a beautiful way of looking at it The Love Letter you put together for dreaming you you just use the word magic and I love the term magic it's not a term you would necessarily associate with a neurosurgeon or a neuroscientist right and I think that speaks to something really powerful about dreaming there is a mystery to dreaming that we all know you know what do our dreams mean right what was it that I dreamt about last night what does that actually mean does it mean anything can dreams help us predict the future all these kind of things that people will say cultures have written about and reported for years but I love the fact that as a neurosurgeon you using the word magic when you're talking about the this mystery of dreaming yeah I think um you know first of all thank you um because um this is just giving me space to to move around with thoughts and also qualify and also say say things like magic and and I think it I think it works for me because we just we just opened with a few minutes of look we're going to take this apart in a really scientific way right we've got tools now we're measuring with fmis and pretty brain Imaging we're measuring electricity I'm talking about measurements and interpretation and executive Network and Imagination Network we did some some introduction to the foundations of the science right dream sleep pressure um but then I just need everybody to know I hope that when you see or learn a little bit about the science of dreaming you'll be left in more awe of dreams you know that that learning just a glimpse of how they may be working and the patterns uh that have had have been there since Antiquity that are now partially explicable you leave with a sense of you leave more impressed it does feel like magic when you take actually a scientific Glimpse at it because there will always be gaps I'm not that guy who's here saying ah I got dreaming figured out no I'm just offering you you a perspective that hasn't been offered in a long time and I look forward to more dream information not just the the measurements the the hardcore Neuroscience I'm talking about but as more people contribute based on different sexuality based on different gender into what they're dreaming as we get more surveys and questionnaires and see more patterns there'll be more interesting linkages with the patterns of dreaming and the patterns of brain activation while dreaming yeah it's fascinating you mentioned surveys there and you you refer to surveys quite a lot in the book about what people are saying when we ask them about their dreams and it made me think that are we always going to be missing something with surveys because presumably the people who fill them in and are able to articulate what they dreamt about that's an inherent bias there isn't there because the people who can't remember their dreams are probably not filling in those surveys yeah I mean it's a tricky one to get around isn't it well and that's that's sort of an Insight people who um who look at science fairly want to present they want to present how it's done so the listener can understand what are the limitations I don't want to conceal the limitations we are working with something that's it's elusive it's like trying to grab you know like a cloud or something and you're exactly right that when we talk about surveys and questionnaires I I use that rather than studies because a lot of the patterns of what we dream okay and how we dream is the brain stuff what we dream is what have people been saying for thousands years what what did Aristotle say about lucid dreaming um why did people start reporting more color dream color-filled dreams once TV went from black and white to color is that really what happened yeah that so that's out there as a survey now we now you and I can explore is there brain science that links to that and what it means but so when I say surveys or measurements now we're now we have a good platform so that's one thing why do people in these surveys across the last they're called dream reports so people have been waking people up while they're asleep what are you dreaming about writing it down so they're they're trying to not just do it on the on the back end of somebody saying last night I think I dreamt of this they're they're trying to be a bit more rigorous and having people in sleep labs and different stages of sleep waking them up and saying what are you dreaming about they're they're trying it'll always be an incomplete picture of course but let's work with what we have because we have something more than we've had in a long time and so another thing that I noticed there the color TV thing threw me off like imagine me reading this like a I had like I was pulling from so many different I was pulling from everything like there's no you don't type in dream science I mean I was looking at cognitive Neuroscience looking at how penguins have 5,000 episodes of sleep or whatever High number they have I was really trying to survey a lot of science uh to understand this and the the fact that the dream reports rarely I mean somebody's dream may have math but when you look at 10,000 dreams not your dream not my dream but when you look at a lot of Dreams math is rarely reported M okay so I said okay that's interesting and then you look at the brain picture of somebody who's asleep or in rem stage of sleep with Vivid dreaming and when they're startled awake and they report they were dreaming the region of the brain specifically the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex people don't need to worry about that but they're like it's the area like where horns would be it's the part of that most you know new part of your brain if you will that is the part that's dampened in dreaming remember I said dreams are hyper emotional hyper Visual and dampened logic so that makes sense because when patients have injury in that area they struggle with math so you start to see the connection okay the areas that are less robustly engaged in the dreaming brain the things that part of the dreaming brain would kind of do don't really show open dream reports right so imagine me seeing that like a year and a half ago and I was like oh wow that's that's pretty profound isn't it just that that by itself is profound people don't tend to dream about maths that's and there's a brain scan that we can use to explain why yeah M Dr yeah it really is you know the prefrontal course at soral leral parts of it is where we do our maths that is shut down at night so of course we dance see now somebody should write and say no I do math I get that we're not saying it can't happen but the patterns start to take some shape right I that I felt that when I first I saw this about a year and a half ago I was looking at that I said huh even if that's the only thing I can contribute to the world like Raul's like he kind of explain why a lot of people don't talk about math in their dreams cuz it fits with the lower metabolic usage in the dorsal L prefrontal cortex in the sleeping dreaming brain like uh rul johnelle I'm cool with that cuz it just shows that it's possible it is possible and then everybody else that follows me can say hey we have more surveys we have more Neuroscience 20 30 years from now but maybe you know somebody listening now is going to be like hey the just the fact that even anything about dreaming could be explained I mean just one single thinging mive to me you know one thing I learned yesterday when I was researching for our conversation reading your book I was looking up all kinds of papers just trying to build up this picture of dreaming and sleep and I I came across some research which suggested that during RM sleep REM sleep the part of the Sleep Cycle where these Vivid typically but yes typically yeah we'll get to that the where these dreams happen apparent it's the only part of the day or night where we have no noradrenaline in the brain which I found fascinating because nor adrenaline is a is a stress hormone it's helps us focus it sort of Narrows things down for us we're focusing on the task at hand detects the signal out of the noise yeah as you would want if you're the day dealing with a task or a threat yeah whereas if if it's true which I think it is that it's the only time where the brain doesn't have any nor adrenaline bathing around it that it kind of makes sense well that would then allow us to be Broad and imaginative because the nor adrenaline is not there to focus us so instead of more signal uh to noise maybe maybe it's the flip side more noise and less signal Divergent thinking let me just let me just get into that it's the fact that our brains have lower adrenaline or noradrenaline during sleep and dreaming that's a measurement the interpretation or the opinion the conversation we're having now and I welcome everybody to I mean if somebody's got a better idea of that to me that's consistent with the way our dreaming brain thinks feels um connects dots not so closely looks for wider associations because it's now permitting the noise to have a bit of space that's Divergent thinking right so when you talk about convergent thinking and Divergent thinking convergent thinking is a type of thinking like where you're trying to design an engine Divergent thinking is more C these are neuroscientific uh terms used in cognitive Neuroscience that's the creative ideation is Divergent thinking not looking for the imedia connection not looking for the shortest route but looser associations sometimes that are required for creative thinking so the fact that thousands of dreaming brains and thousands of dream reports in general show very little math kind of fits with brain scan that shows that region of the brain that does a lot of math and calculation is dampened not off just less than it usually is during the day and the imagination is liberated the fact that we have a lot of wild thoughts and we don't do math that at the chemical level the brain is 100 billion neurons little molecular jellyfish like things floating in a bath the chemical story right not just the flesh story of activation deactivation or blood flow but anatomically that makes sense also at the electrochemical level it makes sense that the neurotransmitters responsible for this are dampened so that's how this book is built where I'm trying to connect what I can I take measurements and I'm very forthright about I believe or wouldn't it be interesting so we just had a conversation about it the point you made or the point that I've written that's not out there somewhere that I extracted with a reference and that's why this book has been such a like a wonderful thing for me because uh you know after 10,000 over 10,000 patient over thousands of operations and all the humanity you learn through it you start to feel like I think I know a lot about neuros surgery and Neuroscience and then you explore this topic and you're almost reborn again because it's it's a fresh look at everything here's a question for you that just came to me if we use the dreaming brain and dreaming as an analogy right we're saying that when we're awake there are certain parts of our brain that are more active and are getting more blood flow and whatever it might [Music] be which enables us to do certain things in the day Focus you know task whatever it might be but at nighttime in some ways it's flipped where those bits go to sleep and Other Things become more awake might you argue that you writing this book is a beautiful analogy for that so as someone who's a neuroscientist right A Neurosurgeon yeah looking at all the facts and the data and what does this operation mean if I remove this part of the brain what happens a lot of fact and rational thinking I think please correct me if I'm wrong but it almost feels like this book is your exploration into the dream world and great to what might be that's great man I mean nobody's you know I've had some proper conversations nobody's uh put it out there like that and connected that but uh thank you uh just to take the conversation to a new place in my mind right is uh is welcome um and I think that's why I love this book and topic because um I was feeling like I was getting to the point humbly and respectfully that I was mastering the craft of things that are like daytime more executive Network like performing surgery what this means avoid this what this results was becoming I was starting to see uh even though I feel um that I was at the at the Leading Edge of taking a fresh look at the brain and mind I was starting to become constrained in my thinking about this this heavenly flesh if you will right this this white flesh that gets all this blood flow but is white there's so many things about it that don't make sense from a from a literal or from a convergent thinking point of view to to do a fair job of this topic I had to approach it with Divergent thinking and thoughts and try to connect like you know later when we get into it like Aristotle side my lucid dreaming but um that sounds I'm skeptical about that I ended up having two chapters out of nine on that so I went through that like there's things I thought there was there's no way there's any science on this there's tremendous science on lucid dreaming and other things like oh that makes sense and I was like wait that's maybe that hasn't been fairly presented like symbols and Dream Dictionary so we don't have to get into all of that now but but yes this book is me um and uh my publisher and friend said that I I said there's going to be a lot of holes when you there is no dream science I mean we've got stuff that you've never had before so I can I'm going to you know and they're like but that's why we want you to do it is we want you to tell us what it is there do it in your way where it's storytelling where it's accessible to everybody cuz we don't want to make this academic because dreams are for for everyone dreams happen in everyone and then where you're not sure try to come up with the an idea or hypothesis which is what you do in science like when you apply for a grant at the National Institute of Health the the first part of the grant is not like hey show us some clever experiment and some fancy details and charts they significance and Innovation innovation in scientific grant writing is I think Mother Nature works this way so I was already learning to do that and given permission do that in my in my laboratory so then it was in this book it's you know I think I I think this area is dampened not off and maybe that explains why very few people talk about math that the the measurements and then the hypothesis and that's where in this book you'll see I wonder could it be it's an invitation to the reader if you if you got a better approach or an Insight I welcome it yeah because I'm as curious as you are about this I don't have it figured out I'm just giving you a new look do you think dreams can help us deal with things like trauma and negative thoughts and chronic stress I would ask that people not ask dreams to be something we wouldn't want our waking thoughts to be right our waking thoughts are wild and all over the place and sometimes they help us and sometimes we ruminate and not every waking thought is worth holding on to the what is happening in dreaming that there first some people have said that maybe the dreaming brain functions partly I I don't think you can cap with one thing but sort of as a nocturnal therapist okay and where do they get that statement I think that as you get seven 6 seven 89 you know roughly I I I I always pause it giving hard numbers because it doesn't mean that you're not coping well if you get by with six hours of sleep I just want to leave freedom for people like I got a bunch of people only work night shifts they're you know they're doing fine they're not popping up new cancers all the time I just want to leave room that people have very different sleep habits and if we describe something it's not like you're suboptimal to what you could be everybody's got their own patterns that said that as you get into the later parts of sleep you tend to have more of these vivid dreams and REM sleep and people tend to have more positive emotional veilance which is like just affect as they engage um longer sleep that maybe Clarity that comes with good sleep is because you've had vivid dreams at the tail end of it see that's a hypothesis but that's where they come up with the maybe it serves as a nocturnal therapist but what I would say is yet some of my patients they have PTSD nightmares so dreams are a d they're a double-edged sword for some they can help people cope for some they can actually um worsen their emotional meu emotional environment because uh a bad memory is trapped on Loop and it pops up in nightmares So my answer is can they help people with trauma is they can um I think there's nocturnal processing going on if you pay attention to your dreams and the context of your dreams and if you try to remember your dreams you're more likely to remember your dreams but there is something happening there where I think that hyper emotional state leans therapeutic not for everybody but in general it leans therapeutic yeah I think so too a lot of sleep researchers call REM sleep the part of the Sleep Cycle which we can consider emotional first aid where we are processing the emotions of the day and I've heard some researchers say that it's when we take off the emotional um like Something's Happened let's say something negative we take off the emotional edges off it and lay it down in a much more rational less emotional state during REM sleep I've heard that being said I think Matt Walker once told me that on this podcast actually a few years ago and it's always been fascinating that to me the fact that and I think this fits with that initial statement that I put to you where you feel that or you you at least assert that perhaps the reason we sleep is so that the brain can dream I thought one of the most important things for us as humans is to process what happens to us right we have to deal with negativity all the time you know how do we do that if REM sleep is where we take off those negative emotional edges and REM sleep is also where a lot of these vivid dreams take place then to me it kind of makes sense yeah well perhaps dreaming is a way for some of us very good I appreciate what you're saying some people it makes things worse for them maybe I don't know maybe something like pcsd maybe you're repeatedly dreaming about something which is making you wake up and making you feel even worse but I think for many people it stands to reason at least in my brain that the process of dreaming may be your attempt to process some of the events of your life sorry to interrupt to make sure you are taking action after watching this video I have created a free special guides to help you improve your sleep and reduce fatigue in my clinical experience most people who are struggling to sleep are doing something unconsciously in their day-to-day life that is negative ly impacting their ability to sleep at night so in this free guide I share with you five of my very top tips tips that I have seen transform the lives of many of my patients so if you want to get hold of this guide all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below um what I would say is and I mean this with the the utmost respect when I use words like likely or maybe it's to leave room it's not the I haven't if there was a factor measurement that I had I trust me I would be bringing it but but when you say that my my mind goes likely yeah and so then I say um but I like I like stories from patients and I like measurements and then I like to connect the dots in a Divergent way if you will yeah so we're having a we we're yeah I'm Dreaming dreaming while awake um well what is on that what's a Daydream compared to a dream at night so the the the two terms so there are a lot of misnomers and stuff like that so I try to simplify language um Daydream and mind if if there's anything during the day that's more like dreaming it's mind wandering so Daydream is still directed thought the executive network is saying if I go to London I'll take the train I'll go meet him it's I'm doing something but I have a directed thought about something else so therefore you would say that technically it's not really a dream correct okay mind wandering is is a it follows a similar pattern although at a very micro scale as dreaming it's jumping of thoughts Without You leading them yeah you also mentioned the default mode Network before the dmn and how you have um aka the imagination yeah you've been very clear inly but to call it the imagination Network so let's just again connect waking a nighttime perfect cuz then let see everybody gets oriented with that and then we explore and we come back to that cuz that's the 24-hour that's what your brain's doing in 24 hours if you like it or not waking and and sleeping waking brain dreaming brain yeah so we've spoken about the default mode Network on this show before I've written about it but in the context of let's say you're struggling with a problem on your emails and your work whatever your job is you can't you can't find this the solution and instead of continuing to try or continuing to you know send emails or whatever you put everything down you down tools you go for a walk for 30 minutes without your phone let's say and during those 30 minutes because you're not focused on a task the dmn the default Mo Network fires up and starts to solve these problems for you without you actually or takes a fresh look at it a fresh look at it yeah so you may come back after 30 minutes and go oh I was trying to do that for 5 hours I couldn't solve it now I know how I might move this forwards right that's the part of the brain which you're calling the imagination Network that's super active at night correct but I guess the difference might be that in the day we can remember what has just happened but we can't always at night yeah because during the day you still have you still have executive Network at play yeah so you can then apply that straight away but it's yeah I don't know but but dreaming something similar is happening right yeah yeah let's so let's just give me some time on that one that's a fundamental thing you brought up so right away we've we can all accept that there's a awaking brain and dreaming brain and that the dreaming brain the sleeping brain is is wild it's off the charts it's doing a lot of stuff let just that's a measurement we've so now we have that then uh the way to think of our brain is not a certain spot or region or on or off that's the other thing I would love for people to walk away with is the there a collection of structures and the brain is in like a liver where it's like the same tile all the way through I mean it's exotic and nodules and nodes and hubs and and so we call them networks to uh to perform a task you have the executive Network so there would be something in the frontal lobe of course it would receive things from the occipital lobe because you're taking Invision it would bring an instinct from your lyic structures a bit too right so think of it as a giant Ensemble and certain instruments play Da Da Da right that's the executive Network um what the other players um when the executive network is not playing not engaged with something outward not in a t when your brain is not in a quote task on mode the this is how these they were this was discovered so people thought um the executive Network now is now dampened and what nobody was looking see all of Neuroscience for a long time cognitive Neuroscience behavioral Neuroscience was provoked and see what happens in the brain and then somebody looked at to who identifi the default mode Network oh I got a lot of stories in this one the uh that when you're not task on it's not like you're a computer in hibernation waiting for somebody to click the keyboard something else fills up the space and that's the imagination Network you're always toggling between executive Network and Imagination Network that's when you're under threat it might be 50 2% let's give it percentages executive Network and 48% imagination Network those are the subtle shifts and modulation that happen in the brain you can't have a you can't have a brain part turned off it'll die there's always blood flow going there's just a St isn't it right exactly so it's just a partial so during the day you're mostly executive Network 51 52% and at night at and and you're 48% imagination network but in mind wandering uh you might be 51% executive Network and 49% Imagination Network so still enough memory to sometimes direct thoughts or in mind wandering grab a good thought both are at play what happens in dreaming is you're maybe 53 these are just rough approximations for the concept this is not a measurement but in the dreaming brain it's like 54% imagination Network and 46% executive Network it's the ex ative network is still there it would die otherwise right the those structures are pulled in different directions so when you talk about uh executive Network and Imagination Network when it comes to mind wandering you're as you don't since you don't have anything in front of you you're driving a car you still need an executive Network you're walking around without your phone as you mentioned you still need Executive Network to not bump into a wall but it's not it allows some of that mental workspace created by the imagination Network to weigh in and that's why people I think when they're shaving or they're doing some task but not a demanding one uh that allows imagination Network to come back into play a little bit more and so they get what do they get they don't get solutions they get the contributions of Divergent thinking which may lead to Solutions we're not all going to be Geniuses creative Geniuses but understanding that and here comes a measurement they put people with poetry writing poetry they put them in these scans to look at the measurements of brain brain activity specifically you know anatomically writing poetry brought up the imagination Network a bit you could see those structures light up a little more but evaluating The Poetry require the executive Network to come back yeah you kind of you you kind of need both you need that Divergent thinking to come up with the fresh ideas and then you need to know the dots right like is this is this a good idea or not and that comes back to to what you were saying about what happened with my book and it comes back to this toggling which happens naturally in a 24-hour period you got two-thirds of the day executive Network dominant you know and Imagination Network can come up a little bit and then onethird of the day is actually sleep and dreaming where the imagination network is dominant this this back and forth leading to different contributions in our brain in 24 hours or in the production of poetry is a to me is a very invigorating thing that that the different states of Mind have different Brilliance to contribute yeah what's the difference between what's going on in our brain When We're Dreaming compared to when we are hallucinating or something that's becoming more and more common is the use of psychedelics yeah so you know a lot of people when they're under the influence of psychedelics might say that they felt as if they were in a dreamlike state yeah so I'd love to tackle this one because Let's Do It um the only thing I can I found on hallucination versus dreaming is when you hallucinate you see something on a real background like it's the you're awake hallucination means you're awake my patients do it after surgery ICU psychosis you people can look that up or ICU delirium they still see the the hospital walls they just hallucinate or imagine somebody in that landscape when you dream you you actually create the landscape so the the imagination uh you the the imagination product of a dream you actually create the whole landscape plus the content whereas hallucinations the landscape is created by the real world you're just inserting things in front of it that was the only way I could find a difference between hallucination and dreaming if there was more I would bring it to you but that's the okay that's interesting that's that that was something I said I could take away with that um um psychedelics very interesting so again as a cancer surgeon in the United States psilocybin is being uh you know clinical trials for patients with cancer who have existential crisis that something inside them is is is eating them up alive right there's a there's a field called psychooncology that it's uh specifically the Psychiatry or the psychological management of people with cancer uh and in that field psychedelics have relevance so I'm not coming at this with some unfamiliarity let's just say that uh our approaches to mental health are imperfect because mental health is comp complex and if there is something that can help some people and it can be safely done I'm all for it so that said psychedelics um the science that's out there um it suggests that's very important they actually have less default mode network uh SL imagination Network activation on psychedelics really yeah you would expect it to be more you're still imaginative but it's not the source is not the imagination Network wow you still have Divergent thinking but it's not coming from that and that might feeds more into the mystery of the brain right it's like well where the hell is it coming from exactly know I felt the same way and look for example psychedelics modulate serotonin serotonin is also used for Selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors we use it for anti-depressants it's also related to psychedelic experiences we have dreamlike States when the imagination network is liberated in dreaming uh and then psychedelics have actually dampened dream uh imagination Network so let me let me just explain what the relevance there is so when you dream it's you fully inhabit the experience you are Central you are in the driver's seat of a car you can't control you're going on this joy ride that you've made but you're fully you're in the middle you are you you are in the nucleus you're the central person Central Central feature of it and that their default Network imagination network is is robust in psychedelics it seems to be that the imagination network default mode Network really is dampened and it allows for something called ego dissolution it's closer to a dissociative state that you're floating above the car and seeing yourself being driven around in it you're not fully inhabiting the experience you're seeing it from a step removed which therefore may allow you to see the things in your life In a Different Light leading to the potential uh mental health benefits it's it's a stepping away from your cancer diagnosis that allows you to maybe have the therapeutic value so psychedelics have a dream like state but they're closer in my opinion to dissociated states where you it's ego dissolution and stepping away from the experience in a dreamy way yeah in a wild way whereas dreams you're being thrashed around as a central feature of the dream so uh there in life why I use the term magic early on you know just to have that Glimpse it actually adds more questions but that is the current science that I have been able to find Yeah the more you delve into this topic the more mysterious it gets I I can't imagine what it was like writing this book actually because you know you said it's trying to catch a clouds or you know I think about it as trying to almost catch a ghost you know but it keeps moving and there's new things coming up and about and we and we keep learning more about Neuroscience in ourselves as we explore it's not it's not I want the listener to know it's not confusing in a negative way it's it's unpacking more doors uh that allow us guidance to to understanding other things like mental health I I love the fact that we can't fully explain these things actually I remember about a year ago uh Professor from Berkeley Dr Daka Kelner was here in the studio he just written a book on the science of a and Incredibly enough he he he was saying that it's really hard to define or and I remember saying to him I love that I love the fact that we as humans can't give a robust and clear definition for everything there are some things out there that are still that mysterious I think I think that speaks to the magic of life and and actually and that it speaks to the the conversations you're going to have with somebody in a pub because if somebody walks into a pub and says hey I got all the dreaming figured out they're going to look at you like come on yeah and so there's something that also is uh intuitive for people that does not not rely on science and explanations that uh nobody's ever going to figure out dreaming we we're just and people have been commenting about it for thousands of years in 2024 we're just commenting about it with uh the per the from the perspective of Neuroscience uh realizing is quite limited realizing will learn more and then have more questions for it and I will say to people isn't that how you want your life to be where you know where you learn learn something you think you're at the Mountaintop or you think you've arrived at a moment you realize there's so much more past that well that's what this book has done for me yeah no I mean there's so many wonderful passages in your book I love the way you you've edit you've marked it up like an editor I love that you do that I've been deep into this uh and it it it's been truly fascinating but there's so many bits I think which have captivated me I mean the word Captivate you right here dreams Captivate scare arouse and Inspire us because they are both so real and so surreal we are simultaneously creators of our dreams and heless participants in our Strange Creations they emerge from us but seem somehow apart from us home movies we have conjured that do not follow the laws of time or nature both intimate and out of our control Rahul that is beautiful thank you that's the Love Letter part that's the Love Letter part right and the other way is you're you're in a car you're the driver seat of a car you can't control it's it's both I and I think it the topic deserves that sometimes a little finesse and flare and sometimes just regular conversation about it it's also fascinating to me that some of the things that happen when we are dreaming are acceptable Only When We're Dreaming like hallucinations being delusional being disorientated having a wild fluctuation in our emotions the Amnesia of forgetting what just happened if if jumping from event to event without any connection if if that happened in the daytime yeah right there would be illness yeah even that is fascinating isn't it if you were displaying those things in the daytime it would be disturbing and difficult yeah someone might say Hey you probably need to see a psychiatrist right but these are things that we are perfectly okay with when we're in our bedrooms at night and they happen because the executive network is dampened so logic does not get in the way of being at the top of a building and then next being you know being naked in front of a Podium a second later like those jumps of scene and story and emotion are possible because the executive network is dampened and they're so vivid and they're so emotional many times and so story driven because uh the emot imagination Network and the limpic systems are liberated so when you see what's you see what's going on with the dreaming brain then the wildness of Dreams feels consistent not explicable but consistent yesterday I put out a little video on my Instagram page saying that I was about to talk to you about the topic of dreaming what did people want to know I think we've had almost maybe just over a thousand comments now already from people saying oh can you ask him this can you ask him this can you ask him this now I can't ask a thousand questions but there were some patters right um most of them actually were to do with interpretation of Dreams which is presumably High the individual so we'll get to that shortly because I think that's really really fascinating and people want to know about that I guess before we start interpreting them though let's go through what do people tend to dream of about right are there categories that you found you know are there particular things that broadly speaking this these are the topics that humans tend to dream about at least the ones who fill in reports and surveys yeah um the first of all they are Universal dreams and the early chapters are nightmares and erotic dreams over 90% of people report them I don't have to tell you what a nightmare is you don't have to tell me what a nightmare is but we've had to tell our children it was was only a nightmare right well let's just pause there a second I've heard you say that nightmares are proportionately more common in children than adults much more okay so when the nightmares start do all children get them to our knowledge and there's something you just said there we have to teach them that these are not real I mean maybe just explore that a little bit for me yeah it's chapter 2 because again uh when I had conversations with people and they you know things would pop up because I I want this is a book for everyone the one of the common things I heard and things I thought myself were well wait a second you're saying dreaming must happen we sleep in order DREAM come on nightmares must be a glitch there can't be any use for nightmares it just feels like a mistake right something that we don't necessarily share and don't want experience um so nightmares again some some surveys and measurements so people say what what kind of uh data is this some famili family signed up for their kids being woken up and asked about their dreams for a long time I I listen this it's this doesn't hurt them whatever but that I had that information to work with Okay but you know so they're they're you're not commenting on the morality or the ethics you're just saying the data is there you went in and had a look exactly because this is from the last 30 4050 years um not to be light about it but it I that's not something I would do but I'm you know I'm glad somebody did it because it gave me a look that I wouldn't have had they're called longitudinal studies okay you know he not just asking like a thousand people at this moment it's you know asking Johnny and Suzie uh at age two at age five at age seven Johnny and Susie as they grow up participate in uh reporting on their dreams yeah so you can start to see the patterns of dreams as a developmental feature okay and so um they tend to nightmares in general tend to arrive you know 678 56789 interestingly they arrive at the same time the imagination network is being cultivated in the child's mind no isn't that interesting right that's a measurement now we can talk about like what we think about it but that's a measurement and the first thing you noticed is I noticed also is you know I've part of what I do is pediatric nerve surgery so you get you know you see children you see injured children you see children with cancer children you've operate on so you get a lens into dreaming from um from quite a few uh quite the breadth of of the human brain and human mind right but almost all parents just I'm just qualifying it just as a as a way to be respectful to The Listener so but essentially kids have to be told it's only a dream what because they believe it to be real or they don't my my idea is that waking thought and dreaming thought is inseparable for a while for kids so when when you when you ask the younger children about their dreams as soon as they can communicate they're not very Dynamic it's like a table or a a you know or a piece of furniture or something a scene that's not moving so it could be that dreaming thought and waking thought for children Age 2 34 is kind of a Continuum and then when nightmares arrive we have to teach them it was only a nightmare so a big broad hypothesis would be that the arrival of nightmares for every child around the age of four or five serves to cultivate to mature the Mind much like that's my idea much like we learn to walk and talk right that's a process it has to be developed it has to be stimulated yeah the arrival of nightmares at the same time as the Rival of the imagination Network and something else called theory of mind we'll get into I think it serves a function it's hard for me to look at the brain and mind and see things that happen like essentially 100% of the time yeah they happen for everybody they serve a purpose and they change the person you'll say okay wait that's really highflying but isn't that what adolescence is our brains don't look different as we go from teenager to adult but something dramatically changes in that brain I think nightmares um cultivate the mind I think erotic dreams prepare the mind and body for for the erotic act and procreation and just like later on they will be adolescent there are uh psychological and cognitive developments happening um that that dreams play a role in that that's that's the big the big thesis in my mind I've heard some researchers suggest that dreaming is almost a mistake that actually when Evolution was you know creating sleep for one of a better term the goal was sleep and the side effect was oh you get dreams as well and and for research compare it to let's say the formation of the light bulb right the goal of the light bulb is to give light yeah is to give light but you also get heat generated heat wasn't the goal light was the goal heat just came along for the rides it's very hard for me to believe that that's the case particularly because there is such a high metabolic cost exactly to Dreaming right exactly yeah you know Mother Nature doesn't really mess it up like this where you actually have so much let's take that AP energy going to these parts of the brain when you see I costly exactly metabolically and and just risk but that also plays into what you just said about you think nightmares serve a role you think that erotic dreams serve a role and I guess one of the things I've been thinking over the last 24 hours r as I've been deeply immersed in in the in the topic of dreaming is perhaps dreaming is our safe space to explore everything and anything maybe in the day because of social norms because of our job and how we're meant to behave our prefrontal CeX our executive network has to keep a lid on things right so we can function and be to get things done to get things done but at nighttime perhaps in the safety of our bedrooms actually all bets are off we can go anywhere we want to I know we're not directing it necessarily but it makes me think is it our way of you know liberating us so we we act a certain way in the day but we can explore everything the subconscious has its time in the sun yeah let me take both of those there very a lot that no no no no but that gets to why we dream right we've been talking about what we dream all these patterns and we'll get back into it nightmares and erotic Dems being Universal is a type of is a pattern of dreaming we've been talking about the dreaming brain how we dream we talked about what we dream you've pulled us into why we dream but before we get there um thinking of dreaming as a glitch it's just something I just can't wrap my head around cuz again back to the story is when the human body is asleep just imagine just zoom away for a little bit and the body is mostly paralyzed not completely it's a chemical temporary paralysis of course we can breathe we can move our eyes right that's where you get the rapid eye movement uh we can have some reflexive movements and stuff like that just imagine the the human body asleep and then put a heat map on it and the and inside the skull is red hot yeah okay now put some electrical measuring put it on a put it on a mat like a iPhone charger and see where the electricity is being generated you get you get a little flicker from the heart from the heart still beating right from the three nerves on top of the surface of the heart that's where you the EKG is a measurement of the Electrical uh electricity generated by the nerves on the surface of the heart it's not from the pump or the muscle or the valves so you get a little bit from there you some faint electricity from the skin and you have this like explosive electricity again from within the skull right like if we just took a real Common Sense look at it so what's happening in the sleeping body it has to do with the brain like that I don't think anybody will contest that then the question is um whatever the brain is doing if if dreaming is the glitch or the the roar outside the stadium but not something fundamental then what is fundamentally happening in that throbbing hot electrically active brain you what I would say to those people who consider it that is um if you don't sleep for a day or two then more dreaming happens so it's as if your brain is oh we're missing out on that we need to ramp it up now to make sure you get your dream quer dream hunger dream hunger sleep pressure just just you know hey I'm not not going to be able to prove it but I think the way I'm thinking about it makes in it it makes common sense that dreaming isn't the glitch because the brain wants to do more of it when it can't get sleep sleep is for the brain it's not for your body I've moved I've transplanted Hearts kidney pancreas part of transplant surgery we're not connecting the nerves you know the body is interchangeable it's the Dream It's the brain that's saying sleep and when the brain sleeps it it's robustly having dream activity so you say that's hey that's a glitch but to me that doesn't make intuitive sense and I have something on that thing is it a glitch or not I have something at the end of this conversation new information coming The Last 5 Years about brain electricity at the time of death that I'd like to come back to this point to uh for the listener that I've uh explained to not only is it a glitch I think is fundamental uh and I'll I have some you know something that might persuade you even further in that direction um that said why we dream okay so let you know it's let's say it's not a glitch all right and you you like the concepts there um the the most romantic and and the biggest theme Here is um that if we start with the fact that the brain is flesh it's white flesh right it's flesh it there are still some governing principles that apply for your thigh muscle and they as they do for your brain flesh it's not a muscle the use it or lose it thing right if you don't use your arms it atrophies if we don't if we cover up one eye for patient for medical purposes the part of the brain that's responsible for that can wither or be repurposed right so the brain is the ultimate us it or lose it organ and if we only use the parts needed to get on the tube or drive the 101 in La by Design the waking brain wants to be efficient because it steals 20% of the blood flow of the body and it's only 5 six 5 kg so it's an energy hog it wants to be efficient it evolved in a resource depleted environment and so it wants to form habits it wants to get things done with just 12% of the brain limited of executive Network usage taking a stroll without having to pay attention that is actually smart just taking a quick break to give a shout out to Vivo barefoot shoes now I've been a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot for over 10 years now well before they started supporting my podcast they are the only shoes that I wear and they really have had a huge impact on my own life and the lives of many of my patients you see when people start wearing Minimalist Shoes like Vios you can see improvements in things like back pain hip pain knee pain foot pain even things like plop fasciitis can often get better and scientific research show shows us that just wearing Vios for about 4 months or so improves the strength in your feet by over 60% which is absolutely incredible one thing people don't realize about these shoes is just how flexible they are which allows your feet to do what your feet naturally want to do rather than the shoe dictating your foot's movement Vivo Barefoot are giving my audience a 15% off onetime code when you make your first order and they make it really easy for you to give them a try they give a 100 day trial for new customers so if you don't like them you just send them back for a full refund I'm a huge fan I really hope you take advantage of this offer to get your 15% off codes all you need to do is go to viob barfoot.co.nz engagement of all the neurons and all the emotions and these dramatic scenes I believe those capacities would wither if we don't use those mental capacities we would lose them and they won't be there for our Creative Solutions the next day or for the next challenge our species or individuals we eat my face I think Dreaming by having that experience every night uh Keeps Us adaptive keeps us uh creative for challenges that have yet to come so in some ways it's like going to the gym for our creativity muscle well it's high-intensity training for the mind there you go yeah high intensity training for the mind it's letting everybody in the orchestra have warm up the instruments even though the next day for the performance there will be select instruments used by the waking brain well there are examples on there if artists or songwriters or poets having come up with ideas in their dreams which has then informed what they've created in the day the dreaming mind informed in the waking mind the waking mind and forming the dreaming mind that's should come as no surprise to us now that we realize that it's the same brain in a 24-hour rotation and it's burning hot and electrically sparking through both waking and dreaming and the they're just two different brain states in the same person okay so so back to the things that we dream about you mentioned nightmares are pretty much Universal in children in children and then they fade away and then they fade okay come and they go away in a wave and then people will say maybe they come back at stressful times in their lives which I guess feeds that idea that maybe it's our way of processing something or our subconscious potentially processing something that we haven't managed to in our waking lives so on a very grounded level like first half the first part of this conversation has been fantastic because I like the um the it's conceptual and lets people know how we're approaching it now at the at the ground level that nightmares in adults are uncommon if they show up I think they can serve as a psychological thermometer if you will the pattern of nightmares is what matters the occasional nightmare is not an issue but if you start to have more and more nightmares much like if you had more and more headaches then I think it can be a clue to your well-being or your lack of well-being or your mental health during the day at its boldest um nightmar in adults they could be a warning sign of issues that people are having that they haven't even noticed or grappled with during the waking brain they could be a warning sign if you will and I have some stories about that but that's the way to think of nightmares and adult adults are a psychological thermometer not the occasional but uh the consist nuan it they call it nuan it nightmares meaning you haven't had them they show up and they persist and they're getting worse and then PTSD nightmares are flashbacks it's a bit of a different biological basis that's a memory on Loop that's stamped with a motion whereas adult nightmares of a monster or falling and you wake up not always but if there is a clue it's coming from a hyper emotional brain State and maybe that is the warning sign for some issues you haven't actually looked at or grappled with that are affecting you but not at the front of your mind you mentioned that erotic dreams may be Universal yeah again again do we have to accept that there's a bias there in the sense that we can only know that from people who have reported them so if you are surveying 100 people or a thousand people and they all say it then we know that those thousand people who remembered their dreams are all having some form of herotic dream but we can't necessarily say that everyone has them fair is that fair to say I think it's fair to say and I think we have to have that Nuance here when we say when I say Universal um when 90s something per of people not 100 say they've had erotic dreams I and Nightmares even higher I'm putting that in a a universal category and that's fair for you to say and as you know in medicine that you know things when they get in the 90s because of issues with Statistics and sampling they start that starts to feel like 100% so in our world and in this in this context nightmares and erotic dreams are in the 90 plus range uh teeth falling out are in the 2030 range math is in the not zero but like very very low range so we have to have that flexibility it's interesting when I put out that Instagram post yesterday lots of lots of public comments but I've had loads of private DMS direct messages with people saying I can't with you share this in public but I'd love you to put this to Rahul if you can and quite a lot of women sent me messages saying I'm happily married but I often have dreams about being intimate with other people or becoming pregnant with other people right sometimes people I know sometimes people I don't know what does this mean you know I'm really happily married I love being a mom what does that mean and first of all it's interesting that people don't feel that they can share that which I totally understand public that's an interesting point in itself yeah yeah but you know maybe explain that to us how common is that I think I mean you've written a whole chapter on this right so it's my favorite chapter because I think leaves room for everybody um again I don't I'm not the guy who comes in here and explains erotic dreams to everybody but I do have some interesting things to say the uh the erotic dreams of an ex or or infidelity in erotic dreams is also very very common and that was a survey and report that I found very interesting healthy relationships healthy marriages infidelity dreams are very common 70 80% and I thought that's interesting and that took me down the down the path of erotic dreams are sort of an embodiment of Desire meaning it's the it's the feature of a healthy brain it just happens to be that erotic dreams tend to be narrow it tends to be with some repellent bosses people at work but the characters you know family even when people are younger the characters are narrow sort of within the tribe and then the acts are wild is my my assessment of of the dream reports about erotic dreams the other thing that I found interesting is um they reported across cultures so that's an interesting thing and also erotic fantasies during the day tend to link with more erotic dreams than actually having a robust sex life or looking at a lot of porn it was your fantasies your daytime imaginations of Sex and the act that are more likely to have erotic dreams or those ideas show up in erotic dream okay so for those women and I'm sure this happens to men as well so for those people who are in a stable relationship yet are having these erotic dreams with other people you say healthy brain healthy brain nothing for them to be worried about nothing for them to be worried about okay and then for those who are in an unhealthy relationship dreaming Fidelity is maybe just reflective of it and how they deal with it afterwards but that then speaks to the whole subjective nature of how we inter seate dreams doesn't it because within the context of your own life yeah has to be yeah but also we can't even give these hor ofast rules can we in the sense that let's say someone is having a dream of infidelity if they've got a stable marriage and they really like their partner I think things are going great they could choose to interpret that as I've got a healthy brain I'm just exploring all things in my mind but I'm happy in my real daytime life not a lat and desire yeah whereas you can also interpret that very same dream completely differently if you don't feel your relationship is going well you could say to yourself This is a sign that I need to get out of this relationship and move on which is very hard to study scientifically isn't it because this is purely subjective but it it also and so that's why are surveys so the analysis is is mine that it's a healthy brain the the fact or the survey that I'm giving people is healthy relationships are reporting infidelity dreams happily married people report infidelity dreams at at the same amount as unhappily married people as well as single people it seems to be a process of the human mind that said ju a bridge in your dream and a bridge in my dream could mean very different things also so the when we get to it dream interpretation is really about the hyper emotional dream as as something that's reminding you to reflect upon what's going on in your own life it can't mean the same thing for the same per for different people a bridge or infidelity or different acts and I think the the hyper emotional brain State whatever emotions experiences it creates as part of the dreaming process is our portal to self-examination that's the biggest way way to think of it it's your it's your own brain's creation so it has to be understood in the context of your own life uh Beyond erotic dreams that's the way to think of why dream dream symbols like a leaf can't be the same thing for many different people a bridge can't be the same thing for many different people it has to be understood in the context of your own life what are some other things that are common in terms of what people dream about other ones are um showing them naked in front of a Podium alarm not going off for an exam so that I I try to conceptualize dreams those are the types of dreams that require no interpretation they're obvious your waking intense waking light waking brain anxiety and your dreaming brain anxiety are highly intertwined the other ones are these interesting ones called um genre dreams um where your Waking Life Experiences are so profound that you're also having them in some ways uh in your dreams so end of life for some of my patients that are at the end of their Journey they have dreams of reconciliation or these expansive dreams about their whole life almost as if the dreams are their their partner or Shepherd in this complex process that's interesting so you do a lot of cancer surgery so a lot of your patients at the end of their lives so uh with terminal conditions are having dreams and are those dreams in your experience comforting for them or not always but surprisingly so okay that's interesting very interesting so it see it seems to have back to your original point where others have made about it's a therapeutic you know dreams are therapist or they're they're helping us process emotion maybe but if there was any stage where it suggests that it's uh end of life um for people I've seen with cancer and they're reported on that genre dreams all of them no are they all coping well no but a surprising number the dreams uh are a source of comfort for them a way to reflect back on their life and especially it seems to happen when they' when they they're starting to make that decision to I've had enough treatments I'm moving towards pation which is you know more Comfort not necessarily extending life but the quality of life it so it's it's their partner another example would be uh pregnant women they tend to have dreams of maybe a baby in the bed or naming dreams of children so massive life events dreams whether in end of life or in pregnancy tend to have a comforting tend right we're just we're giving a we're giving an impression here um they tend to have a positive emotional therapeutic role yeah and and I and I think that's the dynamic nature of dreams like that's beautiful right back to erotic dreams some very interesting facts erotic dreams arrive before the erotic act like and people who've never had sex have erotic dreams but the fact that erotic dreams arrive before the erotic act it's an interesting orientation of events usually it's use it or lose it we have this ability and then we have to cultivate it or it Withers erotic dreams they arrive before we have the capacity to feel erotic touch so I just want people to know when you know when when you have the capacity or you learn as in your teenage years that this feels like a caress not just a touch it's the same nerves in your hands and arms there you didn't grow new nerves there where they land in the brain how the brain perceives it changes M and that those brain changes happen after erotic dreams arrive wouldn't it be magical and wild to think that in some ways again erotic dreams are a cognitive maturation that leads to a leads to a cerebral maturation and leads to a bodily maturation ultimately for procreation right like so nightmares arrive and the kids are different erotic dreams arrive and then the body is different right there's something about that there has to be a thesis for why n greater than 90% of people have uh nightmares and erotic dreams and they arrive in certain waves in our development so those two I leave as very sort of theoretical wonderful things to explore falling is also common isn't common what do you think falling symbolizes I'm not sure I think it's uh falling being chased some people have said oh this is the threat rehearsal feature of the brain I welcome all ideas if you're falling in your dreams that scares you maybe you're less likely to walk next to an edge and fall off who knows maybe that's a cognitive inheritance from our ancestors yeah um but what they those are common dreams so people's being chased people feeling the anxiety of being naked people falling are convergent like an evolution convergent features of the human mind when there's waking anxiety and to me that suggests that the dreaming process is not a glitch that it uh that it goes through certain experiences that we have in common that have been reported from when people were on a horse and carriage all the way to an electric car right and they happen later in life people who've never actually been stressed out with a School exam might have it later on in life when they're stressed out about something else yeah and it's interesting to to think about this that I would have thought that you can only dream about things maybe that you can somehow address have well maybe have experienced but then you're saying with a Ros Dre that's not the case you can in advance of the event so it gets even more complex but I guess the wider Point as we delve into the interpretation of dreams and I was thinking about this when I was reading all the the comments from people saying what does this mean what does this mean what does this mean and there were some patterns of course it's great to look at the science of what's happening in the brain what's happening with electrical activity but so much of dreaming is internal that maybe science will never fully understand or at least to me and given that we know from science how important our mind is how we think how we perceive things then maybe one of the powerful lessons is look dreams serve a role they're there for a reason right pay attention to them particularly the big Vivid ones I agree and if you can then start to assign meaning in a way that it helps you perhaps the onus is on us to spend time with ourselves journaling thinking writing down whatever it might be to come up with the meaning that works best for us right what I'm telling you is nobody else can tell you what this means it has to come from you your brain conjured it it has to be interpreted by you you can't go to a dream dictionary and say that this means the same thing there are patterns and we're exploring the science to to really get you to the point that this is a built-in process this is is not a glitch it's a built-in personalized process that your brain goes through every night if you have the opportunity to dream more through Auto suggestion if you have the opportunity to remember more of your dreams in the morning by not quickly waking up and trying to remember your dreams which people report they can you have given yourself access to uh your your own mind during a state of hyper emotion that you don't have during the day that's a rare window to yourself that you can't get by turning outward and that dreaming should be a priority in our lives particularly when we fall asleep and when we wake up sleep entry and sleep exit and that this is afforded to us and it's free and it's possible not every time not for everyone but it shouldn't be neglected it's quite the opposite of the glitch it's it's the rarest glimp into your into yourself do you think everyone dreams the electricity and the metabolic activity suggest something wild is happening some people will say that I don't remember corre my dreams so even even if I take myself and my wife for example I do dream I would say quite rarely because I remember them rarely and and I'm saying rare compared to my wife who seems to have lots of viid dreams and will share what they are and can remember them in seemingly quite a lot of detail now I don't think relative to her experience I remember them in the same detail as she seems to so that's all I can compare it with so you think that the brain science is suggesting that everybody dreams whether they can remember those dreams or not I think so yeah um I think so the brain science doesn't suggest the brain science shows that your brain is burning hot and the people who remember vivid dreams and the people who don't remember the dreams much at all still burning hot it's still burning hot and is still sparking people can make from that what they want what I'm saying is um even for people who don't remember their dreams in the morning the dreaming process is still serving you at night serving your brain at night to have those Divergent thoughts to have those experiences those awkward emotional situations that social Dynamic interplay and part of the reason we don't remember them I believe is to avoid dreaming life and Waking Life confusion which some people can develop in rare cases so our autobiographical memory by Design kicks in in the morning and Stitches the waking brain memory throughout our life to keep it distinct from our Dream Life memory but just because we don't remember it trying to remember you can remember more it's a portal to self-examination right that's what dream interpretation really is about but it's still serving some housekeeping role whether you remember it or not and the example I would give to you is if you run in your dreams whether you remember it or not those same motor neurons are firing it's just your body's not reacting if you feel hurt in your dreams it's still the same experiences being heartbroken during the day it's just that your body is or isn't reacting so those neurons are still flaring up well some people can actually wake up and this is some of the questions they can wake up feeling exhausted after a really Vivid dream yeah which kind of makes sense if we look at brain metabolic activity well it experience it at the level of the brain it happened the the question I've written down from Instagram was can you wake up exhausted from a dream yep and you would say the people report Vivid dreaming so much something called epic dreams that they actually are fatigued by it so so when we I'm you know what I'm thinking about here is as doctors one of the most common things that come into us maybe not as a neurosurgeon but certainly in more general medicine would be fatigue and of course there are a number of things on the differential diagnosis is when a patient presents with fatigue some more serious some you know not so serious but I don't think of my differential in the past epic dreaming should be yeah I ever put you know excessive Dreaming or you know Vivid dreaming that's what it's called it's called epic SL excessive dream epic even EP epic dreaming it's it's a misnomer but it what these are what I call unicorns just to know that that exists opens our mind yeah that dreaming also in a certain way can leave people exhausted Ed dreaming um some people wake up in the middle of their dreams yet they're still dreaming some people say they don't remember their dreams and other people have vivid dreams that variety I think is important it's the dreaming process it's a liberated state of mind that's hyper emotional and Hyper Visual and what it creates uh is very personal but the process is going the neurons are that's how you get that electricity those that's how you get all that glucose us cuz the neurons are using it as you're being chased the neurons in your brain versus being chased in real life it's having the same experience what do you think alcohol does to our ability to drain I'm not sure so this is a this is a good question so one thing notably absent from the book is uh the effect of drugs on dreaming it was just so broad so from my patients waking up from anesthesia um from anti-depressants um from other drugs I just couldn't find a pattern that said uh you know maybe I found that you know marijuana led to even less dream recall but I couldn't find um you know of course drugs changed REM sleep but there wasn't I there was a lot of information but I couldn't find a uh a story that I could use to sort of explain the role of drugs on dreaming the point though is they absolutely have effect on on dreaming it's biological so drugs affected alcohol reduces REM sleep right so and REM sleep is where we have all these vivid dreams well let hold on let's just clarify that for a minute it's been said that dreaming only occurs during REM sleep what's your take on that the best way to think of it is uh when you go from waking brain to sleep/ Dreaming brain there's a period called Sleep entry and then on the other end there's a period called Sleep exit when you're waking people up you can have different times during the night where people have report more more dreaming more Vivid dreaming but now dreams are being reported from the seconds you are falling asleep throughout the night different types of dream all the way to even when you're not in REM sleep correct correct and I was pleasantly surprised by that so that's where the Bold statement comes in that theoretically we could be dreaming one-third of Our Lives because we sleep onethird of Our Lives roughly yeah so th being woken up in different stages people are reporting dreams I've often wondered why alcohol is such a depressant for people it can you know people can feel depressed the day after and regular alcohol drinkers can often yeah and and I think there's many potential biological explanations for that but but one of them I think or at least a contributing disrupted dreams disrupted dreams disruptive REM sleep again the part of sleep which is our emotional first aid as it were it kind of makes sense if you're missing that key part during your sleep cycle there's going to be a consequence the following day and interestingly and I patients who are depressed they go a day their first night of skipping sleep their mood improves to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I have created a free breathing guide that's going to help you reduce stress calm your mind and boost your energy in this guide I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work immediately even just one minute a day will start to make a big difference to receive your free guides all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below so there so then the thought is maybe the emotional therapist or the REM sleep or the nocturnal therapist is is altered maybe depression is a failure of dreams to to have their therapeutic benefit these are all theoretical statements I think Matt Walker mentioned that so but again though I would welcome people to bring their opinions in but the measurement is people with depression they skip sleep they feel better just that first day that's not a treatment but that's an interesting measurement people with uh people who are alcoholic or they ingest too much alcohol and they don't sleep well or sleep long enough uh they don't feel well what could it be from I think it could be from a lot of different things what is this idea that you talk about that dreams are stimulus Independence what does that mean stimulus Independence so um the big thing the big the big thought is on planet Earth things self-organize um what do you mean by that meaning uh termite Mounds form crystals form um cells coales they come together in my laboratory if I put one neuron dissected out in a Petri dish uh floating in some fluid it's it's nothing but if I start putting a few in there they come together without you doing anything without me nudging them they they coales and then they start sparking electricity towards each other stimulus independent neuronal activity now now take those two or three neurons and make them 100 billion in our skulls right dreams kick in without us asking dreams are s stimulus independent brain activity and that's what I try to do in the book is explain why we don't have to ask to dream we must dream we don't ask to sleep sleep demands itself and that these are not things we have to kick up they're things that must occur but you can see that at the level of individual neurons in a Petri dish to help people understand uh what it means to be stimul independent meaning without poking and prodding uh this will happen without poking or prodding uh brain electricity will spark yeah wow powerful isn't it yeah and that's and I thank you for indulging that because that's where I'm trying to take it from erotic dreams and surveys to portal to yourself which is a more philosophical point to neurons in a Petri dish I've tried to give it that broad look to come up with with insights here humans have always tries to explain dreams and there are you've probably come across thousands of different explanations I I once heard I can't remember which culture this was talking about dreaming as the language of the spirit which I found fascinating there are I think from is it Native American tribes talk about dream catchers that you put above your children's bed we did that for our child I think we were given it by my wife's parents they'd come back I think from America it was a gift and I think the goal was that you it it matches the negative dreams so they don't go into the child again which I find it's interesting isn't it how we try and explain these things as a scientist what I say is I see clearly why those ideas arose because the point that we're making over and over again how could you have such a wild night wild Journey when you're lying there asleep and things look like they're cooling off yeah sleeping body sleeping brain nothing's going on it the thought was the brain was inactive flesh yeah uh while you're sleeping yet you went to the wildest places so surely that had to come from something external Gods Spirits Omens it may it made sense till about 100 years ago when somebody Dr Burger put stickers on somebody scalp and said oh wait there's electricity during the day and then somebody looked when that person was asleep um and it was missed for a short while but there was still electricity at night yeah and so um until recently just the question where do dreams come from that's that's only 50 80 100 years that we've become confident uh through those measurements and through something called awake brain surgery where you tickle the surface of the brain and a recurrent nightmare can happen in the patient it only now with confidence do we say dreams come from the brain but until we understood that at night while we sleep your brain is burning hot and sparking a lot of electricity it didn't make sense that inactive sleeping brain hibernating uh cooled off brain would be the source or the origin of these wild experiences so they had to be attributed to something else I don't think it have to be mutually exclusive you know if we cover some more of the questions that came in um quite a few people have asked about whether you can train yourself to start remembering your dreams and a couple of times in this conversation you mentioned the term Autos suggestion what is autosuggestion Autos suggestion is people are reporting consistently when they before they go to bed that they say that I will dream I will try to dream I will try to remember my dream they coach themselves before they enter this nightly dreaming process and on when they wake up over time they start to remember their dreams more and more so you're priming the brain in the 15 minutes or so before beds you're directing it as to what you want you're the you're the architect right you're you're the driver of the car you're you're well you're not at night the car's moving you ain't driving it well you are driving it but you're not in control that's your an analogy yeah I think that's that's a good that's a fair one but maybe you're setting the landscape a little bit to where you're going to run wild with what you're doing the 15 minutes before you while you're falling asleep that you're incubating and feeding things that may pop up in your dream life a bit more that that extends Beyond dreams I think that many people have spoken about this idea that what you want to process and think about you know intentionally put that into your mind before you go to sleep whether it's related to Dreaming or not it's quite a powerful idea isn't it so let's hold on to that one um and and just like visualizing Sports can improve Sports Performance because you're rehearsing those neurons and I think that whether you remember it or not if you're dreaming of sports then those neurons go off there is some benefit there and there's people who suggest that athletes have more of those type of Dreams similarly down here um the power of belief which was a chapter in my last book is fundamental now I I don't know about your other authors and how people have approached it but um Placebo is the power of belief but it has a scientific measurable basis Placebo is not going to fix a broken leg but when it comes to matters of the Mind um and feeling pain feeling Wellness these things placebos work because belief releases uh the neur belief releases a lot of things from the pharmacy of your own mind right that there are uh belief can activate electricity in your mind belief can release neurotransmitters in your mind I think the S the science of placebo is overlaps with the science of Auto suggestion and and positive thinking that there you know that belief releases something it's not just some ether in your mind it's not just some figment of your imagination that you're actually create a process of neurotransmitter release by believing this pill will help me even though you know it's there's nothing in it it's a sugar pill thought can release and neurotransmitters thought can release chemicals in your brain thought can release neurotrophic factors like bdnf thought can actually generate more electricity and stay with me thought can actually change the actual structure of the brain that it comes from yeah and that this called activity dependent marination using simpler terms that habits and thought whether good thoughts or bad thoughts when the brain tries to be more efficient and it's sending those electrical charges down the axons when your brain starts to use the same same neuronal flows to tie your shoelaces or ride your bike or go on that walk the neurons at that area they wrap more than milin it's a fatty sheath around the tentacles which are called axons to improve the speed of conduction electricity as well as let use few fewer resources so thought is powerful yeah thought changes the brain thought can release chemicals that are housed ready to deploy in the brain but a big butt from from this for certain things it's not thoughts not going to fix a broken leg it only works for things related to the mind and here it is is the biggest adventure the Mind goes on is dreaming so I do believe there is some science to support conceptually that Autos suggestion before you fall asleep can incubate feed the dreaming process not reliably even but you have a you got a shot at it and then on the other end waking up slowly not grabbing your phone and going letting the executive Network kick in too rapidly that the residue of your dreams people report remembering their dreams more and in a in a specific example I was talking to the publishing team they're like everybody working on this project is coming into the office saying man I'm Dreaming more man I'm remembering my dreams more and these are some these are rigorous publishing types who read a lot of books right and think about the effect it had on the office yeah and so I love that as a as a ground example of yes I do believe this is possible so in terms of something practical for people to help them perhaps start remembering more of their dreams I guess you could call this feeding your dreams the time before bad what what we saying 15 20 minutes I know there's no trial on this but what what are you what are you recommending for people um so what salador DOI used to do for Creative processes he felt like it was last 10 15 minutes before he there's before he goes to sleep the final 10 15 minutes yeah the transition the hybrid state from waking brain to Dreaming brain Christopher Nolan talks about inception Edison mentioned it that just right when he's about to fall asleep the thoughts that he's having at that time are interesting and the thoughts he wants to dream about he would try to have them at that moment so that's sort of your portal to extract and introduce but you can't know the exact moment that's going to happen so perhaps so it's a ritual you create to if for those who have the luxury of a bed and the time to do that right cuz it's not access that you can't always have that calm Qui moment but it's a ritual in my life for a complex operation to run through the images you know I flip through the images and I really think about like the branching arteries of the brain I try to so you do that the night before an operation a visualization type technique and I've done this for a long time wrote about it in the first book that and whether and this was interesting I had somebody interviewed me he's like do you ever dream of the operation I was like never but I do dream of like scuba diving or walking through forest and stuff like that and then he somebody else this was somebody from the times he he picked up on that he's like so again that fits it's a metaphorical symbolic visual spatial navigation because you're working on a visual spatial project the next day and and I like that that's not science but there's some connection there that I think is real I love that I I I cced before about this whole idea about creativity because you you make the very powerful case that dreaming helps us be more creative which kind of makes sense you know we are going on these wild Journeys and exercising our creativity muscle when we're asleep but there's another component as well isn't there which really speaks to this idea of the mind and percep and interpretation so number one I can see why dreaming helps creativity in a direct fashion but secondly if we start to pay attention to our dreams and we get creative with how we interpret them using these metaphors that's also kind of feeding creativity isn't it so I think it works on both of those levels I agree with you the I just think first of all it's great because we'll talking about my science we're Tau my surveys we're setting some we're leaving a lot of room for people to to to get what they can from this and what I would say is um just at a common sense level for me when I have a good idea during the day it's not cuz I'm like on my fifth espresso and just trying to push through the problem it almost arrives to me MH when I'm slightly distracted yeah right and exactly and it's hard for me to think that the that the extremely imaginative and liberated six seven hours I'm spending every night are in some ways not contributing to my aha moments during the day they're not arriving from the heavens I think the dreaming process is is feeding my Solutions and creativity during the day that's my hunch that um that that just like you for poetry you have to have Divergent creative thinking and then executive function to evaluate what you've thought of is it a good idea or is it just an idea right I feel like the 24 hours in my brain does the same thing as you were mentioning or this book you know like there's all this task on thinking about the world during the day and these are conceptual conversations these are my these are my opin opinions but task on during the day and then at night you know it's Divergent thinking and they're both feeding each other the problems of my day the complex operations with the creative the idea generation now that I'm that I is a part of my career I'm thinking about it during the day then I go to bed and then my dreaming brain has a chance at it it's playing with it in whichever way whichever degree and then the next day starts and my dream my waking brain is again on those problems but there has been some contribution from the seven hours of sparking electricity and metabolic activity I can't prove to you through a test but doesn't that make intuitive sense that that that the seven hours of dreaming or are not uh separate right it's it's my life being played out with the waking brain and dreaming brain and my Waking Life is feeding my dreaming brain and my dreaming life is feeding my waking brain it's 24 hours in my head so is there something you've changed since doing this research and writing the book what you do before bed to try and auto suggest the dreams that you're going to have is that something you've changed because you've also spoken about the first 5 10 minutes of the morning as well right the kind of as you're going into sleep and as you're coming out of it in the morning if we want to train ourselves to remember more of our dreams we need to pay attention to the morning as well right so the uh the habit of thinking about things when I uh during sleep entry waking brain to Dreaming brain let's give it a title sleep entry 5 10 15 minutes the electrical activity shows both sort of a hybrid state of of waking and dreaming a little bit that's um that's there but on that though if if you are in your bed on Instagram consuming other people's content in this um that's the right question are you feeding that into your head yeah it's like what are you feeding just before you go to bed the only comment I can make that is a very good point also by being always on a task you're not letting your imagination Network have chance to play yeah or warm up the these are conceptual things but what I will say is the uh erotic dreams that tend to be about the narrow characters in your life and and celebrities fit into that so maybe we see them as family or within our tribe for now social media celebrities have not there's one study that said social media celebrities are not popping up in erotic dreams so I don't have a specific example or answer for the role of social media and dreaming but oh that's going to be great to look at over the next 10 20 30 years right as we get a lot more track record in it sleep entry I've been doing for a while then I found the science that showed it was interesting people should look that up solver dly Edis so that's what we're talking about 10 15 minutes for bad okay and then and auto suggestion it and incubating and feeding creativity all fit together so that could could that even be writing things down saying I want to dream about this topic that's what that's what people suggest so you're literally feeding that intention okay so that's really you practice imp perfectly but but but you can influence your dream that makes sense when you understand the power of the mind that completely makes sense and then so when you wake up and that's very inter interesting so that's a new thing that I've been doing um and lucid dreaming fits into that a little bit but um the Sleep exit is also not a p you know crisp process it doesn't happen a millisecond it's it's also sort of a hybrid State and what's happening is your your adrenaline is coming back in serotonin is coming back in your brain is switching to waking brain right it's gone from dreaming brain and now it's coming to waking brain and during that time the switch isn't crisp so if you have the luxury of bed and a time and not setting alarm trying to linger slowly wake up and people report not opening their eyes immediately not reaching for something immediately I as a habit don't check my email or social media first I go to my notes app I jot down a few thoughts I've had and then I leave it and then I look at it the next day I have a whole notes uh notes sheet on one of my apps was just sort of like morning thoughts and I've I've created this process of coming to rise slowly or sometimes waking up a little bit earlier than I plan on and trying to drift back into sleep trying to ride those sort of hybrid Lial States and I've when I have good ideas they tend to be at that time because you're again it's trying to remember your dreams um works if you give yourself that time in the morning during sleep exit yeah you can't say I want to remember my dreams and then I mean we all have to set alarms but if alarm goes off you're on your F phone the baby's crying that's not necessarily a time that you can um fully use that process it kind of speaks to this idea though that that that time when we've just woken up is quite a powerful time there are possibly insights there about our dreams or about other things in our life that can happen there if you again have the luxury of doing so and you give yourself time and space there which of course not everyone can do and I know myself when I can be quite disciplined on what I do first thing in the morning and when it's not receiving inputs from the outside news social media when it's when I'm just left with myself things come up you know sometimes great ideas I'm writing you know I'm writing my next book at the moment almost finished it and a lot of the insights come then if you allow that space But you almost to me at least by going on Instagram or the news at that time you almost close that window absolutely do because to go on that means you've brought the executive Network back on even faster so you've lost that little magical window and you may not get it back till later and the science's executive network is going to is going to come up right it's going to take a dominant role right once that's on it will take a dominant role because it's the waking brain yeah and you want the waking brain to come on as slow as possible so you have the the longest window to hold on to the the residue and thoughts of your dreaming brain let's go through a few of these questions quick fire if we can uh I think we've covered most of the themes that people asked about uh here's one do recurrent dreams have more significance not more significance but they have a very um wellestablished neurobiological basis their neuronal Loops their electrical flows like dominoes that get taken over within almost almost like seizures and so during awake brain surgeries you if we tickle the surface of the brain some of my patients said oh this is a nightmare I've had since I was a kid so the meaning I think is uh uh is not there if I were if I were to be so bold to say I don't think it's about meaning but it's a an electrical activity that's stuck on Loop in your brain much like a flashback does stress decrease your ability to have dreams I don't know I mean I think um um I think stress shows up more in your dreams if I were to lean it more likely to dream with stress and different types of dreams as we discussed is it unusual to dream in color no it's common especially when and it was uh when color TV arose and color magazines the dream reports they called them technocolor dreams that more and more and a lot more people are saying I'm dreaming in color now even though life was in color exactly that's the crazy thing life was already in color that's that's that's that's a survey that I offer you with the references in the book and the interpretation is ours what does it mean to dream about my father who died six years ago that's interesting I was speaking with somebody about grief and at least in my own experiences and others that I know uh it tends to be that the the loved one who's passed away they arrive in parallel to the way you're mourning like in the beginning they tend to be um painful memories difficult memories and as people grieve and move on then uh memories arrive that are more routine or um even mundane really they just become features of their lives in their Dreamscape so again depends on which stage you are with the the loss of your father was it recent was it uh something you're struggling with or was it a long time ago and now they're just a memory that pops up and again the meaning is subjective really isn't it it's very hard more than subjective the meaning is personal but but we've got the agency to put the meaning that we want onto these dreams don't we and that is that that's the power of reflecting on your dreams yeah that the process itself is self- exploration right what is therapy but guided introspection well well dreams are your best therapist yeah I love that H can certain types of Dreams signal mental disorders or imbalanced brain chemistry um there is a unicorn uh that proves um dreams can predict the future there's one case it's a medical scenario it's called and people can look this up it's called REM behavior disorder which I prefer to call Dream and Acme Behavior greater than 90 something perc of men in their 50s if they act out their dreams 10 15 years later they'll develop Parkinson's so abnormal dreaming is the first warning sign of a brain degeneration that will happen 15 years later and that's called uh REM behavior disorder people can look that up so in that way dream do predict the future the future uh neurological deterioration of the human brain that's powerful so perhaps there may be some scope for early intervention at some point in the future sure but just as a concept in one example dreams are your warning flare for disease that's going to come 15 years later quite a bit later so whether that extends to anything else I just love the fact that there is one example I mean to continue that theme some people will say that they've had premonitions in their dreams they've dreamt about precognitive dreams yeah that has then come true what's your take on that I've have not seen any evidence that dreams can predict future events M even though that is the uh feeling that many people had when inactive flesh had brilliant nightly Adventures they thought well surely these are this is from the gods from the heavens and maybe there were messages that predicted the future I totally get that I would have thought that right now I don't see any evidence for that but there is one case where a certain type of dream predicts the future deterioration of the brain not the future lottery numbers or the future lover you may encounter does eating certain foods stimulate odd dreams and this particular person said when he has Chinese food he gets particularly bizarre dreams I'm sure you do and that's happening I just didn't find any evidence historically there's there's been mention of from cheese and different things people say they they steered dreams a certain way maybe I just I can't find a pattern or a science to support that you mentioned the term lucid dreaming a couple of times I don't think we've got time to go into it in detail there are two whole chapters on lucid dreaming in your book but could you just explain what it is and should we be worried if we experience it it seems like most people are delighted so lucid dreaming uh so we talked about sleep entry and we talked about sleep exit lucid dreaming is the return of awareness of being in the dream during the middle of sleep so most people the it's on the back end you look back and say oh that was just a dream lucid dreaming is I'm oh I'm in a dream and it's happening while being in the dream so there's a return of awareness of the dream um for the dreamer and I thought this was going to be something on The Fringe but there's a lot of robust evidence for lucid dreaming just briefly uh a third of people seemed roughly a third of people seem to lucid dream it is inducible there are techniques for it there's a way to prove your lucid dreaming in sleep Laboratories with controlled eye movements not random eye movements but the opposite controlled movements to prove that you've entered a lucid dream I was surprised the there's a drug galantamine that increases lucid dreaming and if you take a higher dose there's more lucid dreaming so it's a dose dependent escalation which is proof of causality in Pharmacology and lastly those brain scans show a little bit of that executive Network coming back online if you will casual phrase there um in people who have uh return of Lucidity uh while they're dreaming so robust science on lucid dream actually the most robust uh dream science if if there is such a thing is on lucid dreaming so it ended up being two chapters out of nine and can some people once they've got a little bit of awareness that they are in a dream can they take that next step and start to influ fluence what actually happens in that dream that's what they report they take control of that steering wheel of that car we were talking about they're in the driver's seat and now they can steer it bit they are reporting that so they become the director of the movie at that point a bit yeah and I I don't know how to prove that so I I but I trust them but I would leave it at that and then athletes tend to have more lucid dreaming people who do a lot of visual spatial tasks have naturally have more lucid dreaming but I think it points to the fact that we have hybrid States sleep s wa we started with waking brain and dreaming brain then we add a little sleep entry we add a little sleep exit right in the middle we're putting lucid dreaming which is a hybrid state of aware you know awake within a dream and then during our day we add a little mind wandering so we're not just so much and then you know what but that makes sense to me whether in a Petri dish or the way our bodies function or in nature things aren't onof they're not wired they're always strange flows and states and hybrid States States and understanding the Mind through dreaming has really opened my eyes to that well talking about strange flows let's close down this conversation with something that we opened it with this idea that the reason we sleep is so that our brain Can Dream It's really really powerful it's been a theme throughout this entire conversation and you hinted at something that happens at the end of life which makes you even more convinced that streaming is really really powerful so perhaps it' be a good one to close on yeah I um how how the brain dies is is powerful and um it it really has affected me because there's a measurement that shows something very dramatic so what I'm about to share with you is that um there are patients who are passing away and they have the sticker tying it all together right the stickers are on the heart you have an EK kg read typically we used to think of death as Flatline meaning that there's no signal coming from the heart no electrical signal and um some of these patients now as eegs those brain surface skull surface electrodes are a lot more common now that's giving a readout so you have electrical activity from the brain and you have electrical activity from the heart So the patient's alive the patient's alive and at that time you can get electrical acity from the heart and from the brain and then they have a heart attack then they have a heart attack and they've left instructions that they don't want to be paddled and Zapped and resuscitated DNR do not resuscitate when you look at the Monitor and the brain is uh the and the heart has now stopped and it's a flatline the brain electricity is still going so the first minute or two few minutes after cardiac death the brain electricity is not is going there's a massive explosion of activity similar to Dreaming brain waves similar to expansive memory W uh brain waves that the first few minutes after our heart stopped eating where historically we've thought this is the time of death the brain is having its final moment maybe its best moment a massive release of neurotransmitters the brain is not going out in a whimper it's going on an explosion of activity and that by itself shows us that we should be holding that loved ones hand hand longer than we have been and then for me starts to explain things like near-death experiences that in patients who have been brought back maybe this explains why they why they say they had memories of their whole life like a film strip play in their mind that the brain is um a salvo of electrical and chemical activity is the way it says goodbye and to me that those brain waves look a bit like dreaming brain waves that maybe death maybe brain death in itself is our is a one last massive dream points to me feeling like dreaming is not a glitch like I'm tingling all over my body that is and I'll send you the references for that and look up the guardian had an article about this this is a massive thing that's coming down the field um I mean some nurses say don't they that they will continue speaking to patients and they've been then they've been right all along after cardiac death so that they know they're not alone yeah and and that and that's interesting that I want people to know that when for when I did transplant surgery with them the heart it it it flutters it whimpers it's a decremental activity the liver is decremental but the brain um and this is how it really goes down is the heart squeezes one last time and then the the last ejection of blood goes preferentially to the cotage in the neck and not so much to the body CU it the artery shut down in a certain way much like in trauma and so that last squeeze of blood lands to the brain the heart is stopped but that blood is carrying glucose that keeps the neurons still uh sufficiently powered for a minute or two and what does the brain do at that moment um it fires everything in its Arsenal and gives you your biggest dream yet just making me think back to I'll send you the link to put on your website so people see like that's not that's a measurement that's a beautiful thing to say right there that's a measurement I'll let people interpret that interpret that the way they want well where my mind goes to is just over 11 years ago when my dad died I was with him at the time of death I was with him for hours beforehand I was with him along with my mom when dad died we were both holding his hands and I can't remember honestly what happened in the immediate moments after cardiac death but we were there I imagine I was crying I don't know but it's interesting to think now actually what was going on with Dad what was going on did he know was he experiencing like his whole live playing you know what was going on is you're all saying we know that there's electrical activity so something's going on just says we can't explain it yet doesn't mean that it's not powerful and I think the door that that opens as to the purpose of our brain the purpose of dreaming what this electrical activity being measured in the brain what it actually means is truly profound I think so thank you it's you've captured it well for me it's also comforting as a cancer surgeon um to occasionally start to share this story with my patients that there not only is there a genius built in every night for us with the dreaming brain that keeps us adaptive and creative and adventurous and open-minded that in your final moments a dreamlike robust activity uh will be there for you um to comfort you and to celebrate the life you've lived like to be able to have that interaction built off of a measurement um it's been a wonderful addition to my practice and my engagement with my patients as well as just once again a sort of rebirth that um I'm just starting to look at the brain the Mind Humanity Behavior art all through the lens of the dreaming brain I have so enjoyed our conversation a journey through Neuroscience neurochemistry magic mystery this is why you dream what your sleeping brain reveals about your Waking Life it's a fantastic book ra thanks for coming back on the show thank you brother if you enjoyed that conversation I think you are really going to enjoy this one about how the first thing you do each morning can set you up for the rest of your day there's two times the door to the subconscious mind opens up when we wake up in the morning and we go to bed at night and it's simple brain chemistry and simple physiology

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Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: G6yBbzz3u_U

Length: 123min 14sec (7394 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2024