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s, double ATVA dot

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com slash allergies. What a

0:40

dream? Oh, hey. It's

0:42

your friends fiance who commits everything

0:45

to spreadsheets. Alie we

0:47

are back. It's the top of twenty twenty

0:49

three. We're gonna talk about

0:51

hopes and dreams, but not hopes at

0:53

Alie. Just dreams, just dreams, all dreams.

0:56

So this episode is a dream. It was years

0:58

in the making. This expert has been

1:00

at the top of the Dream Research game

1:02

for decades. I have waited through the pandemic

1:05

until everyone was Quadruple

1:07

Vaxd and Rapid Tested, and

1:10

also his new book just came out this fall.

1:12

The timing was right. I went to Santa Cruz.

1:14

A college town in this crunchy enclave

1:17

on the California coast where he has

1:19

been a professor since nineteen

1:21

sixty five. And I walked around the misty

1:24

rainy UC Santa Cruz campus until

1:26

we spotted each other. Are you in the white

1:28

coat? Okay.

1:31

Cool. I see you. I'll walk through

1:32

it. And

1:35

then tucked into the offices. We said hello

1:37

to his colleague. Holly Ward.

1:39

This is Barbara Ward. She's my lifelong

1:42

present behavior. And we posted up

1:44

at his desk and he has an

1:47

affable smile contagious warmth

1:50

and surprising humility for someone who

1:52

is so celebrated in this field. He

1:54

is a distinguished professor emeritus and

1:56

a research professor at the University of California

1:58

Santa Cruz and has written several books

2:00

on dreaming, including the scientific

2:03

study of dreams and the emergence

2:05

of dreaming, and his latest twenty

2:07

twenty two release, the neurocognitive theory

2:10

of dreaming. Thewhere, how,

2:13

when, what, and why of dreams.

2:16

This dude knows dreams, wrote

2:18

the actual book on them. And

2:20

also really quick before we ask him one million,

2:22

not smart questions. Thank you to everyone

2:24

supporting for a dollar or more a month

2:27

at patreon dot com slash Ologies submitting

2:29

the questions for the show. Thanks to

2:32

everyone for leaving reviews. I read them

2:34

all every week. And this week, Cam

2:36

left one that said, do yourself a favor

2:38

and listen to as many episodes as

2:40

possible, even if they sound odd,

2:42

like the one about flags. Cam

2:45

and everyone Alie. Thank you. And

2:47

welcome to on neurology. On neurology?

2:49

Sure. It's not easy to say, but it's an

2:51

established field stemming from

2:53

the Greek word for dreams

2:56

and this man runs the research

2:58

site dreambank dot net and has

3:00

been privy to thousands of

3:02

dream records over decades of

3:04

research, and he lets me ask him things like,

3:07

what even is a dream? Why do we

3:09

do it? Our dreams a wish that

3:11

your heart makes, our dreams ghosts,

3:13

Are we smarter when we dream more?

3:15

Why is sleep important? And what

3:18

does it all mean? So this week we'll

3:20

arm you with the fundamental facts

3:22

of dreaming, some brain basics

3:24

and sleep trivia, and then we'll

3:26

be back with him next week to answer

3:29

so many Patreon questions explaining all

3:31

the weird stuff that happens to us. When we dream

3:34

nudity to flying to

3:36

teeth dropping from their sockets, it's

3:38

all good stuff. So pull up the covers

3:40

and open your ears. For author,

3:43

researcher, Oneirology, and

3:45

sociology professor, dream

3:47

expert and Oneirology,

3:50

doctor Qi Domhoff. Domhoff.

4:13

Mhmm. Pronounce, hehim, and

4:15

title. You're doctor Right?

4:18

Yeah. Professor, I prefer Mitel.

4:21

My students, Professor Donaldoff,

4:23

you can call me Bill, you can call me Professor

4:25

Donaldoff. Howard Bauchner: Doc, you don't do

4:27

people ever just call you doc? No.

4:29

No? Okay. Alie. Wild

4:31

Willie teach Alie George.

4:35

No. I gotta ask first off

4:37

How much sleep do you get a night?

4:40

Because I feel like you're more productive

4:43

and you look more rested than I do.

4:46

I probably get eight to nine hours sleep

4:48

a night. Have you always been that way? Yeah. I've

4:50

always been a night owl

4:53

that sleeps in. Really?

4:55

Which was so it was when

4:57

I went to college the first year, they

5:00

signed your courses and I had an eight AM class.

5:02

It was un botany and they'd get in there and he'd

5:04

start to show slides and they'd fall

5:06

asleep and fall asleep. So

5:09

I never again took a class before

5:12

ten in the

5:12

morning. And then when I became

5:15

a professor, I never taught a class

5:17

before ten or eleven. the

5:18

that's preferred late morning

5:20

or afternoon. So I really

5:22

get rolling later at

5:24

night and that was reinforced when

5:27

I had young children. Mhmm.

5:29

And so we'd get the kids to bed. And

5:32

then maybe nine, nine

5:34

thirty, I'd start in and go

5:36

to two or three. So for

5:38

some reason, that's when I think

5:41

the best. And and we do know

5:43

from research that there are, you

5:45

know, night owls and larks and

5:47

and that people do their circadian

5:50

rhythm does differ. One

5:52

of the things that I wanna emphasize is

5:54

that on every generalization I

5:56

make, there's huge individual differences

5:59

-- Mhmm. -- in people, huge individual

6:01

differences. The processes are

6:03

the same, but we still vary.

6:06

For more on those broad chronotypes,

6:09

like being a up and out of morning

6:11

person versus a midnight

6:13

cyber goblin you can listen to the

6:15

circadian rhythms episode, which is called

6:17

Oneirology, that's in the show notes. But

6:19

wait, what is this one? Is it on neurology?

6:21

I had to check. Alie, have you

6:23

heard of the term Onurology.

6:27

Onurology? Yes. Yes. Yeah.

6:29

That would act that's apparently, that would

6:31

be. Your you would be an on

6:33

urologist. Yeah. But that's a Greek word.

6:35

Yes. For dreaming. Yeah. That we don't use

6:37

it

6:37

much. I know. I know. But

6:39

we used We want to use psychopompologist.

6:42

No. We got rid of souls

6:44

to the underworld. That's

6:47

an even betterology. Am I allowed to use

6:49

that? You're me a Ologies. You know,

6:51

you called me a cyclone Ologies. They

6:53

kinda took you over the river steaks.

6:55

Yeah. Oh, love that. Okay.

6:57

So, professor Domhoff and his

6:59

mentor were really the only ones to use

7:02

the term psychopompologist. And

7:04

I love it. But on urology is the

7:06

one that you're gonna hear more often in

7:08

the literature. But if you become

7:11

an on urologist, though,

7:13

and you want to spearhead an industry

7:15

wide change to psychopompology. Hey,

7:18

follow your dreams. At any

7:20

point during your dream research, have you had

7:22

to watch people in the lab

7:24

sleeping and dreaming? Has that ever been part of

7:26

the research? I just want one

7:28

or two nights, and I've watched

7:30

videos of it. And

7:32

certainly, in the very early days,

7:34

and we're talking to other people's studies from

7:36

the late nineteen fifties, early nineteen

7:38

sixties. There were people that

7:40

watched people Alie. And

7:43

there is one especially great one

7:45

looking at the influence

7:48

of external stimuli on dreams.

7:50

Which is very minor in dreams because

7:52

dreams are an act of imagination and

7:54

we're basically screening everything

7:56

else out. But, hey, right. They

7:58

taped these people's eyes open,

8:01

and they're in the

8:01

bed. No. And they

8:03

fell asleep. Uh-huh. So they could

8:05

watch their eye movements, and they not only watch

8:07

their eye movements, they they

8:09

wiggled the light around. No.

8:12

It didn't phase them at all because

8:14

all that kind of incoming input goes

8:16

into a kind of terminal,

8:18

a lower part of our brain

8:21

where it says, no. We're we're

8:23

the gates are

8:23

down. Mhmm.

8:24

In other words, when that is, we say,

8:26

occluded, but when it's excluded,

8:28

Alie, do not enter. You're you're going

8:31

no further. So those

8:34

stimuli don't have any impact. What about

8:36

when it's waking you up? Like, if you hear cat

8:38

mowing and mowing and in your dream, there's a

8:40

tiger after you or something you wake up and your cat's

8:42

just hungry. Well, it it's

8:44

possible that way more

8:46

rare than than people wanna

8:48

Alie. Mhmm. Because we have this enormous

8:51

need to think that

8:53

we're somehow processing external

8:55

stimuli that

8:57

our dreams are influenced by

8:59

recent events. But when

9:02

it happens as one of my

9:04

colleagues, one says, the dream

9:06

has a greater influence on the stimuli

9:08

than the stimuli I am on the

9:10

dream. So if you

9:12

ring a bell, they're hearing a

9:14

symphony and or you

9:16

ring a bell and and they they

9:18

hear something entirely different. So

9:20

it's there's no real connection with

9:23

the external world in

9:25

dreams. Mhmm. And when to the

9:27

degree there is, what happens is

9:29

in in one of the ways people

9:31

get confused about what's in a

9:33

dream is that as

9:35

we awaken, We're also

9:37

having imagery. In that

9:39

in that transition kind of

9:41

period, you may still

9:43

have imagery or thoughts. But

9:46

In terms of what is a dream, those aren't

9:48

really dreams. There's a lot of experiences,

9:51

mental experiences we have

9:53

during the

9:54

night. Than are not dreams.

9:56

So that gate that goes down

9:59

metaphorically is part of the

10:01

thalamus. Which is a nugget right in the

10:03

center of the brain that acts as your

10:05

information station. And it gathers

10:07

intel from your body senses

10:09

and processes it so

10:11

your cerebral cortex can figure out

10:13

exactly what the hell is going on. Thanks to

10:15

pathways called the thalamo corticothalamus circuit.

10:18

Which is a term I dare you to try to work in a casual

10:20

conversation. You simply can't. But

10:22

yes, the thalamus noodles

10:24

around with learning and memory as

10:26

well as sleep and

10:28

waking. And some research suggests

10:30

that external stimuli makes

10:32

it into our dreams somewhere

10:34

between nine to eighty seven

10:36

percent, which is how is that

10:38

range even possible? Because

10:40

it's tough to study how much of the waking

10:42

world makes it into your dreams, because part of

10:44

the research involves watching people

10:47

sleep and then tickling them with a feather

10:49

or squeezing parts of their limbs and then waking

10:51

them up and being like, what were you dreaming about? Were

10:53

you dreaming about the feather? And

10:55

results have really varied. And sleep

10:57

subjects, maybe they're just waking up pissed. I don't

10:59

know. But in Domhoff new book,

11:01

the neurocognitive theory of

11:03

dreaming. He lists several factors that

11:05

need to happen to allow

11:07

spontaneous and undirected thinking,

11:09

AKA dreaming. So

11:11

those things are an adequate level

11:13

of cortical activation in the brain. There's

11:16

also the blocking of external

11:18

stimuli via those gating mechanisms

11:20

in the thalamus and also a

11:22

loss of conscious self control

11:25

through deactivating three networks in your

11:27

brain, the frontoparietal control

11:29

network, the dorsal attention network, and

11:31

the Salient's ventral network, there

11:33

will not be a quiz and it is

11:35

okay if you remember none of that. But the

11:37

point is, It's not just about which areas

11:39

of the brain are active, but also which

11:41

ones are told to chill out for

11:43

now so that we can sleep. And

11:45

not all dreaming happens in REM,

11:48

and not all imagery as dreaming

11:50

because we're not fully asleep the whole

11:52

night.

11:52

What? And some of them

11:54

were actually awake. Oh. At other

11:56

times, there's one particular

11:58

experience where our

12:00

mind is awake, but our our

12:03

body is still in the

12:05

state of paralysis called erroneous.

12:07

Mhmm. And so you're awake

12:10

and you're thinking and you can't move.

12:12

Uh-huh. But that's not dreaming. EG

12:15

record, the electroencephalogram

12:16

says, you're

12:17

awake, but your body is

12:20

not the the usual change that happens.

12:22

From when you're waking from this

12:24

particular stage of sleep called rapid eye

12:26

movement sleep, which we'll call

12:28

REM Alie. And that stage of

12:30

sleep is unusual. And it

12:32

has this sleep paralysis kind

12:34

of aspect. So and then we have

12:36

many awakenings during night. All of

12:38

that gets confused in and mumbled into

12:41

thinking it's a dream, but most

12:43

of them aren't. And my biggest

12:45

giant question is, what is a

12:47

dream? But before I ask that, I

12:49

wanna ask a little a little bit about you

12:51

because you were so

12:53

prolific and you were

12:55

so well recognized in this field.

12:57

When it came to, for me, researching

13:00

Who knows the most bad dreams? It was Alie, all

13:02

sides pointed to you. But you also

13:04

have this other full career

13:07

where you're a sociologist who's

13:09

written textbooks At what point

13:11

in your long career did you say I

13:13

wanna go do dream research?

13:15

I started out in dream research.

13:17

I was a psychology undergraduate

13:19

major. I did that in my

13:21

junior year, but I wasn't really sure because

13:23

I didn't know for sure what I wanted

13:25

to do. I

13:27

graduated in psychology that I'd had

13:29

two or three social courses.

13:32

But I still was I wasn't sure I went

13:34

to grad school. My advisors

13:36

said, no, you gotta go to grad

13:38

school, and he wanted to send me

13:40

to the University of Iowa, which

13:42

was famous for this

13:44

behavioristic stuff and

13:46

conditioning learning with pigeons

13:48

and rats, and I I didn't

13:50

like it at all. And So

13:52

I wasn't sure what I was gonna do. And then

13:54

I oh my goodness. So I

13:56

quickly went down and enrolled in

13:58

Ken State University, which was near

14:01

my home race in the suburb of

14:02

Cleveland, Ohio. And I went to

14:05

Kent State, and they were they were glad to have me

14:07

because I'd been a good student at

14:08

Duke. Where

14:09

I went undergraduate. And

14:11

there, I really got into it. And even I

14:13

had these professors that my interests

14:15

weren't the same as theirs, they really

14:18

were exciting in terms of rigorous

14:20

thought and how to do

14:22

experiments and so on. About

14:24

And it went to the University of Miami Alie a

14:26

brand new program, and it

14:29

was called Humanistic and personality.

14:31

In other words, they weren't doing

14:33

what traditionally psychology had done, and

14:35

that's why I said, wow, I'm going

14:37

there. And when I arrived by

14:39

coincidence, there was a

14:41

visiting professor named Kelvin

14:43

Hall. And he was, turns

14:45

out, he was the finest expert

14:47

in psychology about

14:50

dreams. And he was a

14:52

very rigorous psychologist.

14:54

He'd been trained as

14:56

a behavior geneticist in

14:58

psychology. At the University

15:00

of California, Berkeley. And

15:02

Alie s Hall was the mentor that we

15:05

mentioned who co coined the term

15:07

psychopathology. But yes, he was a well respected

15:09

psychologist and studied

15:11

how fast smart little

15:13

rats could make it through mazes, as

15:15

well as pioneered this method,

15:17

still known as the open field

15:19

test. And that is where they

15:21

put a little mouse on a

15:23

checkerboard table and observed

15:25

it venturing around to

15:27

determine heritable traits

15:29

of emotionality. AKA how

15:31

freaked out they get being in an open

15:33

space based on how scared their parents

15:35

were. And for more on your own

15:37

heritable emotionality, Alie that we're

15:39

all ripe from visits with our

15:41

Alie, you can see the personality psychology

15:44

episode, which will link in the show notes. But

15:46

yes, Dr. Calvin Hall. He

15:48

bred the brave with the brave and

15:51

scared with the scared. And so he bred

15:53

for temperament and mice within four or

15:55

five generations. So he's very rigorous.

15:57

But got interested in dreams, and he brought

15:59

that rigor to dreams. And

16:02

he developed a what's called a

16:04

coding

16:04

system. Which I best can

16:06

describe as

16:07

you put things in

16:09

boxes, you put elements in a dream

16:11

in boxes. So if

16:13

I have a dream that I was sitting in my

16:16

house and a friend walked

16:18

in and he had his dog and

16:20

the dog bit me

16:21

Well, the setting is my house.

16:24

The character is my friend.

16:26

And

16:26

there's an animal character. This

16:29

dog and there was an

16:31

aggression. The dog bit me.

16:33

And Bill says that a bite would be an

16:35

example of physical aggression,

16:37

of course. So that goes in the

16:39

physical aggression box. Wait.

16:41

The what box? Okay. So his

16:43

mentor, Calvin Hall, and then this other

16:45

guy, Robert Fan to Castle, developed

16:47

a quantitative system. It is known

16:49

as the Hall Vanda Castle Dream

16:51

Coating System. This was back in nineteen

16:53

sixties. What the hell is a dream

16:55

coding system? We're all asking.

16:57

So it's a way of taking

16:59

dream reports from subjects and

17:01

then indexing them to

17:03

measure who is dreaming about what,

17:05

how often. And some

17:07

of the tags they assigned to these

17:09

dream reports are characters. The

17:12

people who appear, settings,

17:15

objects, activities, success

17:17

and failure, misfortune, and

17:19

good fortune, emotions, and

17:21

then social interactions. And social interaction

17:24

has subcategories for

17:26

friendliness, sexuality, and

17:29

aggression. So this coding

17:31

system forever changed psychopathology

17:34

and also showed that

17:36

humans tended to dream about pretty

17:38

similar things based on this

17:40

now quantitative research. And

17:42

dream scientists were kind of able to

17:44

forge this new world of research

17:46

just by saying, give me your

17:48

friendly, your horny masses,

17:50

yearning to dream free. So

17:52

we have all these boxes for

17:55

minor, miss fortunes, major

17:57

misfortunes, types of

17:59

aggression, physical and non physical,

18:01

whether you befriended me

18:03

or I befriended you, It's

18:06

very detailed. And

18:09

what happened was

18:11

taking his course, I also learned an amazing thing

18:14

for that time period. And it's still

18:16

always always surprising to us. And

18:18

that was, it had just been discovered in

18:21

nineteen fifty three that are sleep,

18:23

contrary to being just a simple

18:25

sort of one undifferentiated

18:28

state, in fact, has

18:30

these various stages, we

18:32

call them. And one of these stages,

18:34

this REM sleep stage, which

18:36

we go into four or five

18:38

times a night, about every ninety

18:41

minutes. This stage of sleep is what

18:43

we call really activated. That is

18:45

your breathing rate changes. And

18:48

your heart rate changes,

18:50

your little twinges that

18:52

that you'll see it in your dog. It's

18:54

the reference. Yeah. Pause or

18:57

moving, and then it's called

18:59

rapid eye movement sleep because

19:01

your eyes are

19:03

moving. And it's even the name of it's

19:05

funny because the person who originally

19:07

studied it, the eye

19:08

movements, sir, they jump all around it. And

19:10

he was gonna call them jerky eye

19:13

movements.

19:15

then he decided that wouldn't be right.

19:17

They would be known as gyms, and

19:20

they would be jerky eye

19:22

movements. So he called

19:24

them rapid eye movements. Who

19:26

was this guy? Okay, doctor

19:28

Nathaniel Kleitman, a renowned

19:30

sleep researcher, and his student Eugene

19:32

Azarinsky, and they hooked up willing volunteers

19:34

to electrodes in nineteen fifty

19:36

three and discovered the REM

19:38

phase of sleep, which is called a

19:41

paradoxical form of sleep because It

19:43

has a lot of similarities to being awake. Your cerebral

19:46

neurons are firing with the

19:48

same intensity as your waking hours.

19:50

And you're only in REM sleep about twenty

19:52

to twenty five percent of the night

19:54

if you're an adult. But babies, they're

19:56

in that zone roughly eighty percent

19:59

of their sleepy time, although dream scientists know that

20:01

their brains aren't having the same level

20:03

of dream activity that fully

20:05

developed adult brains have.

20:07

But what is happening when our eyes are

20:09

are darting around shiftily under our

20:12

lids? It gave people more of

20:14

a sense that these eye movements

20:16

maybe were tracking dreams, which was one of our early

20:18

beliefs. Alie in fact,

20:20

I think the studies show

20:22

that our eye movements are just jerking

20:25

around randomly. Alie people have

20:27

desperately tried to find patterns in

20:29

them that would relate to dreams, but

20:32

that didn't happen. But the point is very

20:34

simple and that is that if

20:36

you combine the seeming

20:39

finding that we only dream

20:41

during these rapid eye

20:44

movement periods when our brain

20:46

is basically activated

20:48

again, certain parts of our brain that

20:50

later turned out will get to that probably

20:53

later. Then if you

20:55

then collect a dream during that

20:57

period and which we call

20:59

a verbal report because we're

21:01

very rigorous

21:01

psychologists, all we

21:03

have, if you wanna ask me what a dream

21:06

is, as you know it or I know

21:08

it, a dream is a verbal report

21:10

of memory of a subjective experience that

21:12

you had during the night.

21:15

From a scientist

21:17

perspective, their data hounds and they can't

21:19

work with what they don't know. So

21:21

you have this particular report,

21:23

like the one I just gave,

21:26

and then we sit down and we have it on

21:28

a piece of paper typed out and then we

21:30

say, oh, there's a character, there's

21:32

an animal, there's a social interaction,

21:36

there's a setting. So you combine

21:38

those two -- Mhmm. --

21:40

and and we could be

21:42

scientific. Now you have to understand

21:45

that psychologists used to have in those days what

21:47

we called physics envy. And

21:49

that is that we

21:52

wanna be scientists just like you. We want you to recognize

21:55

that we're scientists just like

21:57

you. So we have to be

21:59

serious. And suddenly,

22:02

we have a situation

22:04

where we have people on a sleep

22:07

lab with this big

22:09

clunky in those days that EEG

22:11

was enormous. It was this big clunky clunky

22:14

machine and that

22:16

made us look pretty scientific and

22:18

we've collected a dream during

22:20

a REM period, which is supposedly only

22:22

when we dream. And

22:25

then we get the verbal

22:27

report and we quantify it.

22:29

So the title of my dissertation

22:32

was. This this is sort

22:34

of like Please notice we are scientists, but

22:36

it said in a pretty assertive

22:38

manner. So the title of my dissertation

22:41

was, a quantitative

22:43

study of dream content

22:45

using an objective indicator

22:48

of dreaming. Oh, Stene.

22:50

Yeah. Like, Wow. How could you get

22:52

more scientific than that? Very lab

22:54

coat. Yeah. You tell you're

22:56

wearing a wear a wear a wear a black.

22:57

And furthermore, we would say This

22:59

is the only known one to one

23:02

relationship between a physiological

23:04

event and a psychological

23:06

event. In

23:07

other words, REM sleep equals dreaming.

23:10

That

23:10

was called the REM Dream equation. So

23:15

how could I not go into dream

23:17

research as a person that was

23:19

interested in human motivation,

23:22

why we do the

23:24

silly things we do. The things we know we

23:26

shouldn't do. We

23:28

watch absurdities unfold

23:30

every day, you know, in

23:32

the culture, in what we're doing,

23:34

in whatever realm of life that

23:36

we're in. The other hooker was,

23:39

You gotta understand in the fifties, in the

23:41

early sixties, Freudian

23:43

Young and the neo Freudians

23:46

were the sort of they were

23:48

in the atmosphere. And even though

23:50

psychologists shied away from

23:52

all three and there were very few

23:54

Freudians, no young ends,

23:56

still their metaphors, their images

23:59

prevailed and their ideas. And

24:01

we had the expectations that,

24:03

you know, they that we're

24:05

testing some of their ideas, no

24:07

question. But the point is,

24:09

Freud had that right

24:11

metaphor, the kind of metaphor that

24:13

works. And, Troy's phrase

24:15

was dreams are the

24:17

royal road to the

24:18

unconscious. The royal

24:22

road. Today, we know they're a bumpy, little

24:25

unpaid road to

24:28

the mundane, I would say,

24:30

except for a few very interesting kind of dreams that

24:32

we can talk about. And just a

24:34

quick context. So Sigman, Freud,

24:36

was a pioneer in psycho and

24:39

analysis and Karl Young thought that the symbols

24:41

and the meanings of things that

24:43

happen in dreams really depend on the

24:45

context of those events or objects to

24:48

the dreamer. And that dreaming can be

24:50

used as kind of a creative tool to

24:52

solve problems. For it, it was like,

24:54

no. If you dream of

24:56

corn dogs, you're a secret little curve and

24:58

dreaming is just a way to keep you

25:00

asleep as you plumb the depths

25:02

of your repressed subconscious.

25:04

So we know dreaming happens in longer

25:06

and longer cycles through the night,

25:08

but what is your brain doing

25:10

while you're snoozing?

25:12

And so sure enough, what happens

25:15

is we we dream

25:17

when our brain

25:18

is at a certain level of activation

25:21

If there's no incoming stimuli,

25:23

we dream during

25:26

some parts of our non REM

25:28

sleep too particularly a

25:30

stage that you might hear me

25:31

mention later non REM II.

25:34

Mhmm. And non REM

25:36

II is very similar in its

25:38

blood flow and if you're trying

25:40

to awaken people, they'll

25:42

awaken as readily to

25:44

a lighter tone just the same

25:47

as REM sleep. So there's

25:49

just slight differences in certain

25:51

ways between REM sleep and non REM

25:53

sleep. And that's on the level of

25:55

activation. And so my claim is

25:57

that once there's adequate level

25:59

of activation and there's no

26:02

incoming stimuli, you're gonna dream if you have

26:04

a mature and intact neural

26:07

substrate that supports streaming.

26:08

Mhmm. I've always wondered

26:11

what does a brain in normal daily life

26:13

look like in an MRI versus

26:15

a dreaming

26:16

one? They are different.

26:19

And that was the mindblower of the nineteen

26:22

nineties. Parts of our

26:24

brain remain deactivated

26:27

even while parts of the brain

26:29

do activate during REM

26:32

sleep and non

26:34

REM2 sleep, what does that mean?

26:36

More specifically, it means

26:39

that the parts of

26:41

our brain that are

26:43

related to the external world

26:45

which means sensory systems,

26:47

visual systems, sensory motor

26:49

system, but also what's called

26:51

the executive network, which you could think of

26:53

as the conduct of an

26:56

orchestra. That whole executive

26:58

network that lets us know what time it is, how

27:00

much more time before we have to

27:02

get on the bus when our

27:04

child's gonna arrive home, that

27:06

network's deactivated the whole

27:08

night. And we also have networks

27:10

in our brain that are called

27:12

attention

27:12

networks.

27:12

And they're sort of watching. And

27:15

they interact a lot with the

27:17

executive network. But the net executive

27:20

network is kind of slacking off, so to speak. The

27:22

attention networks slack off a little

27:24

bit. And what happens

27:26

is when the attention and

27:28

executive networks are

27:30

relatively deactivated, we call it.

27:32

Then what happens is

27:34

the neural substrate, the

27:36

set of brain areas that

27:39

support a network for imagination,

27:42

for selfhood, for

27:44

memory, for internal thinking,

27:46

that network becomes more

27:48

salient like when you start to

27:51

daydream. Mhmm. When you drift

27:53

off, when your

27:55

mind wanders. Parts of that

27:57

network are what we dream

27:59

with. And that was the

28:01

key that dreaming

28:03

is an intensified form

28:07

of mind wandering. Mhmm.

28:10

Dreaming is based

28:13

on our imaginations,

28:15

the same network that

28:18

supports imaginative thought

28:20

like a really good day dream is

28:23

basically the network that supports

28:25

dreaming. And that to me

28:27

was huge because

28:29

it connected dreaming

28:32

and waking thought. So the part

28:34

of your brain that daydreams

28:37

and imagines is on the night shift

28:39

as a dreammaker. What?

28:41

Okay. But what are we dreaming

28:43

about? Writing on

28:45

unicorns? Eating, chowder, redecorating the dining

28:47

room, peeing our pants, what's happening?

28:49

Get to the core

28:52

of it. Dreams are

28:55

most revealing for

28:57

somebody that's researching the meaning of

29:00

dreams. In terms of fact, they're about our

29:02

personal concerns seventy, seventy

29:04

five percent of the

29:05

time. And, of course, that's

29:08

what

29:08

we daydreamed. Oh my god. I

29:11

hope my kids do an okay school.

29:13

Why did I say that to the boss yesterday?

29:16

What am I gonna wear next week to

29:18

that wedding? I mean, all of these

29:20

personal concerns are what we

29:22

drift

29:22

to. Penelope

29:23

Dodge. I have to laugh because

29:26

in the sixties, There

29:28

was a study done or a

29:30

professor who was in a classroom,

29:33

introductory psychology class, And

29:35

he had a little starter gun that the gun issued

29:37

off when for a race in the in the

29:39

track meet. And he said periodically Alie

29:42

the quarter, I'm going to

29:44

I'm a tell you how that guy, I'm gonna

29:46

go bang. And I want you to

29:48

immediately write down. What you

29:50

were thinking. Oh

29:50

my god. So let

29:53

me

29:54

the overall results were that only twenty five

29:56

percent of the people any

29:58

classroom, we're listening fully to the lecture

30:02

and at the time this starter gun

30:04

was shot. I mean, our minds are all over

30:06

the place. I know the students aren't

30:08

paying attention. I know they're

30:10

struggling to get back to pay attention.

30:12

Mhmm. We all do that.

30:14

Especially, you know, in certain parts of a lecture,

30:16

if we've heard that part before, then we drift

30:18

off. You know, why did that guy talk

30:20

about that again? Mhmm. Will he

30:22

get to any thing new. Wonder

30:25

why they ever made him a full professor,

30:27

you know, all of these things

30:29

are going through. Your

30:32

mind as you listen to this

30:34

talk, and we're all the same

30:36

way. We know that from research. I'm not

30:38

speaking personally. It's just an example

30:40

of course based on solid

30:42

research. Well, what about

30:44

people who self identify as

30:47

artists are really creative or people

30:49

who have deficiencies in

30:51

attention, like or executive function

30:53

issues like ADHD. Do they dream

30:56

differently? Well, there's

30:58

some there first of all, there's these

31:00

huge individual differences in all of

31:02

us. And best example I can give you

31:04

is about music. And that is

31:07

that I know from

31:10

different studies but from the

31:12

studies my students do did

31:14

in my courses. And

31:16

that is, that if you are a

31:19

person that's really interested in

31:20

music, you will dream about

31:23

music. You will hear music.

31:25

In your dreams more frequently

31:27

than the rest of us. So if I

31:29

see a lot of music in dreams,

31:31

a lot of playing

31:34

music, talking about music, then

31:36

I can make the rather obvious

31:39

inferences. What's your strongest interest? And they

31:41

said, oh, music. So

31:43

if you are creative, chances are you are

31:45

creative in the dream world. But what if

31:47

your attention networks and

31:51

executive networks kinda go

31:53

offline in your waking hours.

31:55

Well, a July two thousand and

31:57

twenty two study called Dream

31:59

Recall and Dream Content

32:01

in children with ADHD noted that

32:03

sleep and dream studies for

32:06

neurodivergent folks are a

32:08

bit

32:08

lacking. But this found that after

32:10

studying the dreams of a hundred and

32:12

three ADHD kids and one

32:14

hundred kids in a control group, quote,

32:16

dream recall frequency and general

32:19

dream characteristics like

32:21

dream length and bizarreness

32:24

didn't differ from children without

32:26

ADHD. But the dreams

32:28

of the children with ADHD

32:31

were more negatively toneed

32:33

and included more misfortunes

32:35

and threats, more negative

32:38

endings, and physical aggression

32:40

toward the dreamer. The dreams seemed

32:42

to reflect the inner world of the

32:44

child with ADHD. And the

32:46

researchers noted that from a

32:48

clinical point of view, it would be very

32:50

interesting to study whether the negatively toned

32:52

dreams change during treatment

32:54

pharmacological and or psychotherapeutic

32:56

in a way similar to how

32:59

sleep quality improves. So if you

33:01

are neurodivergent and you have

33:03

bad dreams about fitting

33:05

in, science backs it up. But what

33:07

if you've been medicated? And

33:09

you're not dreaming as much? Well, I

33:11

looked it up. And in a twenty twenty

33:13

frontierson psychology paper titled,

33:16

dreams, sleep, and psychotropic drugs.

33:18

Researchers noted that you might not be

33:20

dreaming less, but you might be sleeping

33:23

more soundly getting up fewer times in

33:25

middle of the night, which is

33:27

coherent with the arousal retrieval

33:29

model that states that nighttime

33:32

awakenings help you remember your dreams. They're

33:34

encoded into long term memory,

33:36

and therefore, you have more dream

33:38

recall. So sometimes remembering

33:40

fewer dreams is a sign that

33:43

your saw and logs pretty

33:45

hard. Either way, get

33:47

that sleep Alie so good for your

33:49

brain. Oh, and for both part one and two, we'll

33:51

be donating to a charity of Professor

33:53

Dom Hof's Choice, and we'll tell you more about that

33:55

charity next week. But

33:57

both episodes are sponsored by

33:59

Sapha. Today's episode

34:01

is exclusively sponsored by

34:03

Sapha because rule number one of dreaming

34:05

you gotta sleep to dream. Safa has a sleep

34:08

blog on their site and it

34:10

recommended this tip that I love which is set

34:12

an alarm not to wake up,

34:14

but to go to bed, set an

34:16

alarm, at night, wind

34:18

down, floss your teeth, getting

34:20

jammies, and get stoked to

34:22

get into a comfortable bed,

34:24

nice sheets, a clean

34:26

pillowcase, and a mattress that

34:28

you're excited to sleep on. I used

34:30

to have a very different relationship with sleep

34:32

or I didn't fully appreciate how good

34:35

sleep really is. What's something

34:37

that is free but

34:40

also makes you happier, it helps your

34:42

body heal, and you look

34:44

better when you're well rested. So if you

34:46

have a bad relationship with your

34:48

mattress, please get a salsa. Do it for both of us. One thing I love about

34:50

salsa is that they have a lot of different options.

34:52

They have mattresses with coils. They

34:54

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34:56

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35:00

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35:10

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35:12

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com slash Ologies.

35:20

Okay. Back

35:22

into it. So speaking of studies, Professor Dom Hof just

35:24

published one with his research

35:26

assistant. This is a twenty twenty

35:28

paper titled from to

35:30

young adulthood in two dream series.

35:32

The consistency and continuity of

35:34

characters and major personal interests and

35:37

it was published by the American Educational

35:39

Association. And this study analyzed

35:42

five thousand Dream reports

35:44

from two subjects. And you can find

35:46

them at dreambank dot net.

35:48

But here's what they were about because I know

35:50

you want to

35:51

know. Where we had a dream

35:53

journals from two different young women who had kept

35:55

their dreams for their own reasons

35:57

with no interest

36:00

in science or anything else. One of them was

36:02

blind, in fact, twelve or thirteen

36:04

years

36:05

old, and she

36:08

wake up and tell her dreams to her mom and her mom said, you know,

36:10

you like your dream

36:11

so much. Why don't you tape them?

36:13

And so now she's thirty

36:15

years old and She

36:17

looks on the web about dreams and on

36:20

behold, she finds my two

36:22

research sites that were created

36:24

by this research assistant, Adam Schneider, who's a great graphic

36:26

designer, and I'll match him against

36:28

anybody as far as spreadsheets and so on.

36:30

And so we have two

36:32

research sites Dream Research

36:34

dot net and Dreambank dot

36:36

net. So they come across these

36:38

and they they look at them and then

36:40

they say, hey, I I got these

36:42

dreams from when I was twelve to

36:44

twenty five. Wow. So two

36:46

different people do that over the space of five

36:48

years, and now we have a

36:50

dream series we can study. So the one

36:52

woman that we name Disney, because

36:54

we have everybody at anonymity, and we

36:56

change all the names, all the

36:58

places, and we put the the dreams are

37:00

all on it. On

37:01

the Dream Bank for you to look

37:03

at. But there's no real names up there.

37:05

It's all pseudonyms. But any

37:08

rate, Izzy she would

37:10

have all these dreams

37:13

about TV characters

37:15

and movie characters and zombies and so

37:18

on. So when you ask

37:20

her about these things in her

37:22

dream, she said, I

37:24

love horror. She's and has she

37:26

been to horror, you know, conferences,

37:28

you know, where they they all the people who like horror

37:30

films go. She goes to

37:32

those things. Well, you know, they

37:34

say, well, that's hardly Alie. But it does tell us

37:36

that she dreams about

37:40

her concerns. her

37:42

dreams are also excellent for another

37:44

thing to understand about dreams that relate

37:46

to your point, Ali. And that is

37:50

that she had these dreams of

37:52

people she had crushes on. The first

37:54

time she she had a couple dreams

37:57

since she was twelve. She

37:59

had a crush on some TV or movie

38:01

man. And then then she got a crush on

38:03

another TV or movie star. And she

38:05

wrote him down, And

38:08

then she started to write her dreams down. That's actually how

38:10

she started to write her dreams down. Well, we can figure out

38:13

the percentage of her dreams where

38:16

she's dreaming about these celebrities as we call them or

38:18

they're known people, but they're celebrities.

38:20

She doesn't know them personally. Anyway,

38:24

she has dreams about these crushes.

38:26

And then it turns out she

38:28

pretty soon having dreams about high

38:30

school crushes. And

38:32

there's this one guy that appears throughout most of her high school

38:34

years. So if you ask her,

38:36

do you have romantic interest towards

38:40

certain guys, she would say, oh, yes.

38:42

Yeah. I get crushes and they

38:44

really last a long time. Here's

38:47

the interesting

38:48

thing. It's all imagination. If we finally asked

38:50

her, will you

38:50

ever get involved with these people? You know,

38:53

this is via email

38:56

and all. And she knows it's anonymous. She

38:58

said, I never even

39:00

touched anyone.

39:02

She was

39:04

most shy person, but her fantasy

39:07

life was very rich. Mhmm.

39:09

So we should so

39:12

Whether you do the things you dream, that's another

39:15

story. And that's why I

39:17

call it imagination. Now

39:20

the other woman, a deaf blind gentleman, that we a

39:23

code named Jasmine, Jasmine

39:26

has a kind

39:28

of blindness where she can see vague outlines. If you

39:30

magnify things enough, she

39:32

can read on a screen.

39:36

At any rate, she's always messing with her equipment, always

39:38

with her computers, always with

39:41

this sound equipment, and she

39:43

was very very interested also in

39:46

music. But when she dreamt

39:47

about famous characters we'll call,

39:50

it was like Snow

39:52

White or,

39:52

you know, something like that.

39:56

A nice you know, harmless little video cartoon

39:58

kind of characters or or nice

40:00

characters, you know, like Mary Poppins, you

40:02

know, not some horror movie

40:04

or some crusher,

40:06

something that involves sexuality. So

40:08

she had a very different set of

40:10

interests, and I could know all those through

40:13

her dreams. So dreams present a portrait of

40:15

your personal concerns, and they

40:18

they portray how you view

40:20

the world. I'm curious too, in Jasmine's case,

40:22

are you using the part of your

40:24

brain that can see things

40:26

visually? If you don't

40:28

have sight, Would you

40:30

have cited dreams?

40:32

It

40:32

depends. It's an ideal question. Thank you.

40:34

And that is, first of all, Visual

40:37

imagery is something we

40:40

gradually develop out of

40:42

seeing, but it

40:44

is located in what are called

40:46

secondary visual cortices. Where in

40:48

the brain is this? Well, the

40:51

primary visual cortex is

40:54

located in the occipital lobe, which is the very

40:56

back of the brain. It's like your

40:58

brain's butt. It's just above the nape

41:01

of your neck. And the secondary visual cortices

41:03

are just above that, just a

41:05

weiss image closer to the top of your

41:07

head. What that means is that one of the

41:09

parts of the brain that

41:12

never activates

41:14

in the whole sleep period

41:16

is what's called your primary visual

41:19

cortex, which is a significant part of

41:21

your brain. So what

41:23

you're seeing is the

41:26

mental imagery can

41:28

see, if I asked all of you right

41:30

now, imagine you're sitting

41:33

in your living room. What's

41:35

your living room look like? How many windows

41:38

are in there? What's the

41:40

furniture look like? Now have your

41:42

mom walk into

41:45

that room. You can call up that visual

41:47

imagery. And just a quick aside, there's

41:49

a slim fraction of folks who

41:51

don't have visual imaginations and they

41:53

have what's called avantasia

41:56

or imagery weakness. And a

41:58

twenty twenty study found that about

42:01

point eight percent of sighted folks are

42:03

unable to form visual mental images. But a

42:06

twenty twenty two consciousness and

42:08

cognition paper

42:10

revealed that the majority

42:12

of a fanatics, though they

42:14

can't conjure mental imagery while

42:16

awake, nevertheless retain the

42:19

capacity to experience rich visual dreams.

42:21

So not so much when awake, but then it's a visual

42:23

bonanza in their sleep. So people's

42:25

ability to imagine can

42:28

vary. Now that visual imagery is not automatic

42:30

and it's not there at the start.

42:32

How do we know? We

42:35

know two ways. One is

42:38

developmental psychology Ologies,

42:40

people who

42:42

are away. You can there

42:44

are ways of doing studies that I don't

42:46

dare get into detail on on

42:48

how we can see how good you

42:50

are at

42:51

visualizing, say, in your mind. But

42:54

the other way is precisely

42:56

blind

42:56

people. If

42:57

you are born

42:59

blind, or become blind before about

43:02

age

43:03

four. You do not have

43:06

visual mental

43:08

imagery. But if you become

43:10

blind after age seven,

43:13

you will have

43:16

visual imagery in your dreams at

43:18

least for many years. In

43:20

one case of woman, gradually, she had

43:23

less and less. She was older but

43:26

she lost her sight at seven. And so she didn't have

43:28

much visual imagery. In other words, we've

43:31

done studies of

43:34

visual imagery in the dreams of the

43:36

blind and other imagery. And this was done with a person who was

43:38

doing a a doctorate degree

43:41

in which he brilliantly gave people cassettes.

43:43

This was told her in the night

43:46

that gave

43:46

them cassettes. You didn't

43:49

know quite how to study

43:51

him well, and that's where we come in because there's this crazy

43:53

little content system I've told you about. This obsessively

43:55

detailed one might

43:58

say. And we were able

44:00

to create a taste, touch, smell, percent, hearing

44:02

percent, the visual percent. So

44:06

we could go through. We now have it all fancy on the

44:08

computer. And so we can create word

44:10

strings for taste, touch, smell,

44:12

for various words, all words for taste,

44:15

touch, smell and so on. And then

44:18

find all the dreams that have from these

44:20

blind people that have those

44:22

in them then we check things

44:24

like, oh, I see what you mean.

44:26

Well, there, that's just a metaphor.

44:29

In any case, we

44:31

can determine that the

44:34

people that did not have

44:36

any visual mental imagery because

44:38

they were blind at birth

44:40

or before they dream of one guy really

44:42

remember he would he would smell the coffee. He's

44:44

holding on to his coffee cup and he can

44:46

feel how warm it is and he

44:48

smells

44:49

the coffee.

44:50

We do that a little bit. We do are cited. But

44:52

it's two, three percent of

44:54

the sensory images in our

44:58

dream. But hearing occurs in a fair amount of dreams too.

45:00

So we have this

45:02

mental imagery. It doesn't

45:04

depend on the primary. Visual

45:08

cortex. I'm so confused

45:10

about dreams because I could

45:12

sit in front of a laptop and say, okay, write

45:14

a movie. And I'd be like, I don't know what write

45:17

about. I don't know how to describe it. And then

45:19

I fall asleep in my pants

45:21

on the couch and I have

45:23

this Alie odyssey

45:25

with pirates and hot air

45:27

balloons. How does our imagination do that?

45:30

I call it imagination

45:34

roaming freely. Alie see,

45:36

when we're awake, you're constrained

45:38

by these other networks. These

45:40

networks that are oriented towards waking

45:44

world, these negative and attention

45:46

networks. So, gee, you're

45:48

constrained. At night, you're roaming freely. And,

45:50

essentially, the same thing in the morning, when you wake up

45:52

in the morning, whether you wake up for

45:54

from a dream or not. And if

45:56

it's a relaxed awakening, which it is

45:58

for most human beings, even in hunting

46:00

and gathering, societies that people are all

46:02

around fire. They feel safe. Say, you

46:05

wake up gradually Alie and the parts

46:07

of the brain that are activating the

46:09

most are not immediately the network or the attention

46:12

network in foggy. And you'll

46:14

have a lot of drifting waking

46:16

thoughts. And In my

46:17

case, I'll wake up in the morning, not from a

46:20

dream, and I'll say,

46:22

that's where that paragraph should go.

46:24

I've got to move that paragraph.

46:27

That's what that didn't fit right. And

46:29

then I'll quickly note something down,

46:31

you know, make changes

46:33

in the

46:34

manuscript. Revealing what I do with most of my time and book.

46:36

Seriously, this dude has written over

46:38

twenty books, and they're not

46:41

zombie fan sick. He's written twenty legit sociology

46:43

and neurobiology textbooks in his waking

46:46

hours, and then he dreams about

46:48

paragraphs when

46:50

he rests. But what about a relaxed awakening? Let's

46:52

talk about that for a second. So according to the twenty

46:54

nineteen book, Dreams, Biology,

46:56

Psychology, and

46:58

Culture, the circumstances

47:00

around an awakening also play

47:02

a really big role in how

47:04

often you can remember your dreams. So

47:06

for example, like, if a person in a dream study has to

47:09

complete a task as soon as they

47:11

wake up, that distraction interferes

47:15

and messes up dream recall compared

47:17

to participants who are allowed

47:19

to enjoy the langer of bed and

47:21

fart around and think about their dreams

47:23

the night before. There's a ton of

47:25

individual factors that influence that wildly. And

47:28

remembering the details of

47:30

your

47:30

dreams, may or may not be helpful

47:32

to you. It depends on who you ask. In

47:34

other words, you're waking reflections

47:36

and thoughts that are triggered

47:39

by your dreams are used by a few writers, not

47:41

a lot, and and not a lot by

47:43

poets. And there's books and articles on

47:45

that where you ask a lot of

47:47

poets, artists, is that do

47:50

they use their dreams? And and a few

47:52

do and most don't. So in your

47:54

case, I would suggest then that

47:56

you tape record your dreams and see if

47:58

you see. And then your reflections

48:01

on your dreams become

48:04

useful there's some people who believe, oh,

48:06

we solve problems and dream. But if you're talking about cognition

48:08

and complex thinking, the

48:11

fact is that sometimes

48:14

people do solve problems reflecting

48:16

on their dreams. There was

48:18

one study done for instance where

48:20

the professor asked the students to

48:23

try to dream about something that's been

48:26

bothering them. So they collected these

48:28

dreams. And the students said,

48:30

well, you know, two of

48:32

the fifty say related to anything at all to a

48:34

problem in the students minds

48:36

and judges, independent judges,

48:38

that means some other psychologists that

48:40

you're working

48:42

with they go through and they say, yeah, that dream seems to relate to particular

48:45

problem. But here, the one I

48:47

like best in that study was,

48:50

This woman had a a dream when she woke up and she was wolfing

48:52

down pills. If I forgot to make my

48:54

pills, go was open, go down

48:58

pills. And she woke

49:00

up and she said, I think I better

49:02

write down a a schedule to

49:04

remind me to write to take my

49:05

pills. Right?

49:06

Mhmm. But but the dream she didn't solve

49:08

a problem in that dream. But

49:11

reflecting on that dream, it

49:13

it changed. And then another woman

49:15

had a dream where she'd been having trouble

49:17

with her menstrual cycle

49:20

and she'd been to the doctor about it

49:23

and so on. And she has a dream

49:25

about running. Anyway, when she wakes up and she

49:28

reflects on the dream,

49:30

she said, think I forgot

49:32

to tell the doctor that I have been doing a lot

49:34

of running. And of course, we know women that run

49:36

miles and miles and miles that can

49:38

affect your

49:40

menstrual cycle. So it's a reflection on the

49:42

dreams, but I don't

49:44

believe contrary to many, that

49:46

dreams solve problems and they

49:48

and Dreaming is not

49:50

a problem solving mechanism.

49:52

I disagree with that

49:54

kind of view because first,

49:57

we forget ninety eight percent of our dreams,

49:59

ninety five to ninety nine

50:02

will say. That's gonna kill you as

50:04

a researcher. To think of how

50:06

much data is just not recollected. It's unwavering. Does that kill you?

50:08

Yeah. Well, it's fascinating

50:10

and the trouble is. We

50:13

can't figure out why. In other words, it's

50:15

the easiest kind of study there is

50:18

to take people that are what we

50:20

call high recallers and

50:22

low recallers. And they've been compared on every personality

50:24

test and every cognitive test,

50:26

and we don't get

50:28

high correlations. So I can't say,

50:30

oh, you dream because of this, you

50:32

dream be you don't dream because of

50:34

that. Now people are

50:36

trying that with neuroimaging

50:38

studies of people

50:40

that say they dream frequently and

50:42

and people that say they rarely

50:44

dream it. And there are differences in

50:47

the activation levels of some parts of

50:49

that neural network. So that's just in

50:51

its infancy, but it could then turn out to

50:53

be

50:53

useful. And so we end up

50:56

with things like this.

50:57

One of

50:58

the best predictors of whether

51:00

you recall dreams is whether you're

51:03

interested in

51:04

dream. Now why

51:04

might you be interested in dreams and becomes a question? She

51:07

wants to know about your

51:08

dreams. Well, one of my

51:11

students did a study of of

51:14

that. And she asked people how interested they were in their

51:17

dream. And she got the highs

51:19

and the lows. And with the

51:22

highs, The interesting thing was several of them thought they'd had

51:24

a dream that was psychic. And

51:26

so they had a dream that

51:29

their sister was ill. Or

51:31

their grandfather was very sick.

51:34

And those dreams were very

51:36

upsetting to them, and they called

51:38

the people. To check

51:40

then which people often

51:41

do. Yeah. So what happens

51:44

is if if a thousand people,

51:46

million people tonight

51:47

dream that their grandfather has become

51:49

gravely ill. One of those

51:52

grandfathers is gonna die that night

51:54

by chance. So that

51:56

person is gonna think they're psychic.

51:58

The other people, they often

52:00

do call their their home

52:02

I know that because we've done studies where we ask people

52:04

about types of dreams and then

52:07

but we ask basically, you ever

52:09

had a dream that led

52:11

you to take any action.

52:14

And they'll say, well, I dream my grandfather

52:16

died and I called home

52:18

and he

52:19

hadn't. I was

52:20

really But the other the other was in that study. This

52:22

is where dreams are fun. I mean, a lot of

52:24

times, even though we have more negative,

52:28

Dreams are have more misfortune than good fortune. They have more

52:30

aggression and

52:31

friendliness. And so

52:32

on, they have a negativity bias as

52:34

does much of our waking thought.

52:38

For more on this, startling and bummer

52:40

info. See the paper, a wandering

52:42

mind is an unhappy mind

52:44

by two Harvard professors who

52:47

used a mood tracking app

52:49

to learn that about forty

52:51

seven percent of the time or thinking

52:53

about things that make us anxious. Or

52:55

sad rather than just enjoying being alive on

52:58

the planet. And the researchers

53:00

wrote, a human mind is a wandering mind

53:02

and a wandering mind is an

53:04

unhappy mind. The ability to think

53:06

about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that

53:08

comes at an emotional cost.

53:12

And that's partly why some experts

53:14

say that mindfulness can help shift

53:16

your mental habits away from

53:19

the dark recesses of why did I do that? Why did I do

53:21

that? Why did I do that? Or what if a disaster

53:24

happens? Thoughts that are all too familiar

53:26

for some

53:28

of us? But any rate, in

53:30

this particular study where we ask if

53:32

it led the action, there were

53:34

two women in about about

53:36

forty five who had had a

53:38

dream that their boyfriend was cheating on them. Mhmm.

53:40

Now and it's on a questionnaire

53:43

and it's anonymous.

53:45

This one woman who dreamed of her boyfriend,

53:47

cheated on her,

53:48

they were

53:48

actually sleeping in the same bed. She said,

53:51

I was so angry. I sucked him

53:53

in the arm. The other

53:55

woman was not in

53:58

the same

53:59

bad with her boyfriend when this dream happened.

54:02

But she said, I didn't speak to

54:04

him for

54:06

two days. Can you imagine? Yeah. So it feels so

54:08

real. You feel so hurt by

54:10

it. And no matter how real

54:12

it feels,

54:14

you're not allowed to physically or emotionally abuse anyone

54:16

when you wake up. We got that. We're good

54:18

there. Go have a nap. And in it,

54:20

you can take a Louisville slugger to

54:24

both headlights you can slash a hole in all four

54:25

tires, and then you can wake up and be

54:28

nice. Well, that

54:28

gets to the other thing that's about

54:30

dreams. One of the reasons so

54:34

fascinating to

54:34

us. I use

54:36

we have a term, fancy term.

54:38

It's called embodied simulation.

54:42

Now, that's what a dream is. It's an embodied

54:44

simulation. What does that mean?

54:46

First of

54:47

all, simulation is

54:50

when

54:50

you're putting yourself in some hypothetical scenario.

54:53

You're driving along

54:55

and you're thinking, what if

54:57

I pulled over here and went in

55:00

that gas station? And

55:02

what if I then played

55:04

the jukebox and I listen to

55:06

music. And and what if I really started

55:08

to really

55:09

do what

55:09

I wanna do, which is just sing and show

55:11

people I can

55:14

really sing. So I've just simulated a

55:16

scenario. I'm driving along. I'm

55:18

gonna pull into this

55:20

gas station

55:22

and into its little store, and I'm gonna go in there

55:24

and sing. Mhmm. That's a simulation.

55:26

But an embodied simulation What

55:29

that means is that when we

55:31

really get intensely into

55:34

dreaming, part of the brain areas

55:36

that activated are not

55:39

only our imagination, but

55:42

also the

55:44

secondary visual auditory and motor

55:46

cortices. And you can sometimes call

55:48

this up in your mind and imagine

55:50

yourself running. You're

55:52

really running and you're really afraid. You can

55:54

work yourself up and get a sense

55:57

of that. And you're being imagine

55:59

you're being chased by that

56:02

dog that you're scared of down the street. I have a feeling

56:04

that doctor Domhoff had a bad experience with

56:06

a dog, which saddens me, and I didn't

56:08

ask about it. But anyway, So

56:11

at that point, it becomes not just sort

56:13

of abstract thought, but

56:16

we are maybe shaking a little bit or

56:20

really feeling a sense of running. All of that

56:22

is what I mean by

56:24

intensified form of mind wandering.

56:26

Because we

56:28

know that the secondary

56:30

visual cortices and motor

56:32

cortices are activated during

56:36

dreaming. And what that means is it does feel real.

56:39

We experience dreams

56:41

as real while

56:43

they are happening. And we wake up.

56:45

And it's usually gone

56:46

in a flash where Alie say, my

56:48

God, I can't believe that. I

56:52

was actually Arguing was that

56:54

guy that I'd never would argue

56:56

with in my

56:56

life. I was actually talking to

56:59

that person I've never talked

57:01

to

57:01

or I was giving Jimmy Carter advice,

57:03

you know. And so

57:06

that feels so real. And

57:08

so for most of us that

57:10

we shake that feeling, but some dreams can feel

57:13

more than real. Bill says that

57:15

one type of embodied simulation is

57:17

a little more profound.

57:20

And that is, Kaisley, this is a rare

57:22

dream now. But people

57:26

sometimes have

57:28

dreams of deceased loved ones.

57:30

Mhmm. Not just that you're walking around

57:32

with your dad and

57:33

mom, but you recognize

57:35

who are deceased but

57:37

you recognize

57:38

that they're

57:40

alive. Yeah. And you can't believe it.

57:42

Yeah. This happened

57:44

to me like literally Alie two nights ago.

57:46

Yeah. Yeah. I was like, dad, you're back. You know? Yes. And

57:49

back to life

57:49

dreams. Those dreams

57:52

are so powerful for people.

57:56

And here's a striking thing.

57:58

One of the founders

58:00

of Anthropologie of Ologies

58:04

Anthropologie an English guy named Edmund Tyler. He

58:06

said dreams in the

58:09

spiritual world. Dreams in

58:11

religion are very closely

58:16

tied because

58:18

these occasional dreams of Somebody

58:23

being alive are

58:26

really so real to

58:28

people. They tell

58:30

other people. You'll never

58:31

guess who I read it

58:32

to. And in that sense, some myths, this is another

58:34

phrase I really like. Alie

58:38

myths are dreams that have

58:40

been told and retold. Mhmm.

58:42

If I tell you

58:45

a

58:46

dream in

58:46

which this amazing thing happened where so

58:48

and so was back to life. And

58:50

that dream kinda grabs you

58:53

or resonates like it

58:55

did for

58:55

you. Yeah. You might

58:58

tell my dream, but it would

59:00

be just slightly Alie

59:02

by you with every time story is

59:04

told -- Mhmm. -- it gets older slightly. We call it leveled

59:06

and sharpened. The minor stuff

59:08

falls out and the stuff

59:11

that's interesting gets sharpened and embroidered. Mhmm. You know,

59:13

the big guy in the dream becomes a giant.

59:16

Right? Uh-huh. So

59:18

so that kind of embroidering

59:21

of dreams that have been told and

59:24

retool may well relate to some of

59:26

our mythology. Now Ologies

59:28

to tell a little little story related to

59:30

that about when you ask people for

59:32

dreams. When I first read research

59:35

on these back to life

59:37

dreams, I was very interested, and I wanted to

59:39

see if very many students had

59:41

that kind of dream. And I used to teach these

59:43

very large classes. Whether

59:45

it was introductory psych or personality

59:48

or of course on dreams.

59:50

And I

59:50

I would give them these anonymous questionnaires.

59:53

This particular questionnaire, I just

59:56

asked this very general

59:57

question. Have you ever had a

1:00:00

dream of a deceased

1:00:02

loved one? In

1:00:03

which

1:00:03

they seem to be

1:00:06

alive. And

1:00:08

to

1:00:09

my surprise, these are all

1:00:11

eighteen to twenty year old,

1:00:13

And they probably

1:00:15

hadn't experienced even the deaths of their

1:00:17

grandparents yet in a lot of

1:00:19

the cases. But four

1:00:21

or five students had dreams in which their

1:00:24

dog was alive.

1:00:25

Oh. Their cat was Alie.

1:00:28

And they

1:00:30

loved it. And I was so

1:00:31

taken aback. And one

1:00:34

of my daughters really had a

1:00:36

dog she really Alie. And I

1:00:38

told

1:00:39

her about you know, these dreams I'd collected. And she

1:00:41

said, dad, I dream about

1:00:44

him being about her dog being

1:00:46

I just so joyful when I see

1:00:50

him And he's like, dude alive. Mhmm. So

1:00:52

so if you've had that experience

1:00:54

now, now I'll turn to one of

1:00:56

our studies.

1:00:58

And he's up on the web on the Dream Bank. He's we

1:01:00

his name's Ed, student name is Ed, student

1:01:03

ed, whatever the right word is. This

1:01:05

twenty fifteen paper titled

1:01:08

dreaming as embodied Simulation

1:01:10

was published via the American

1:01:12

Educational Association and it

1:01:14

deals with Dream journals

1:01:16

that this anonymous subject

1:01:18

Ed recorded on his own for

1:01:20

decades, never intending them to

1:01:22

be public but later pass them on

1:01:24

to researchers in case they could help

1:01:26

other people going through difficult

1:01:30

emotional times. And

1:01:30

we call him the widower. This is

1:01:32

a man that never had an interest in dreams

1:01:34

in his life, and then his wife

1:01:37

got seriously ill, Third time

1:01:40

of cancer return, third time

1:01:42

when when the first two

1:01:44

times they thought it was a beat. So it was really,

1:01:46

you know, she was gonna

1:01:48

live on. So it was a a disastrous

1:01:50

year or so, and she went through a horrifying gradual death

1:01:52

through stomach cancer. So you can

1:01:56

imagine how dramatic it was. But any rate,

1:01:58

shortly after she died within a month, he

1:02:00

had a dream. In

1:02:02

which she

1:02:04

was there, and she was alive, and she looked Alie. And

1:02:06

he

1:02:06

couldn't believe it. And he was kind of

1:02:09

frightened that we and she assured

1:02:11

him. She reassured him, She

1:02:13

was

1:02:13

okay. We call these reassurance dreams.

1:02:16

I'm okay. It's

1:02:17

okay. And then

1:02:19

he was really discombobulated guy

1:02:21

after this and several months later, he met

1:02:23

another woman, and he was thinking

1:02:25

about getting married to her. And he had

1:02:27

a dream in which his you

1:02:30

know, we'll say this one

1:02:31

might be highly motivated, but she had a dream of which is

1:02:34

deceased wife said, you

1:02:35

should get married again.

1:02:38

Oh. So He had moving

1:02:40

dreams. But anyway, in his in his

1:02:42

diaries, which may be the dream so

1:02:44

valuable, he wrote he said, you

1:02:46

know, I'm I'm not a religious guy.

1:02:49

I'm scientifically rational Alie he was

1:02:51

a scientist, but he said, I

1:02:53

swear she visited me a couple

1:02:55

of those times. I swear

1:02:57

she visited me a couple of time. That is

1:03:00

the connection dreams have

1:03:02

with the spirit

1:03:04

worlds. And here's

1:03:06

another thing about this.

1:03:08

We have people that interpret

1:03:10

our dreams. Mhmm. The

1:03:12

people that interpret our dreams. Are

1:03:15

the first professionals in human

1:03:17

history. They Alie called

1:03:20

shaman. You are sick. You

1:03:22

are confused. You

1:03:24

go to the shaman who I call a

1:03:27

the first psychoanalyst. And

1:03:29

you go to the shaman and you say,

1:03:31

hey, I'm Phil O'Neil.

1:03:34

And the shaman dives into the world of spirits often through a

1:03:36

dream and finds out which

1:03:38

evil spirit, which malevolent

1:03:41

thing you know, which spirit is mad at you for whatever reason

1:03:44

and often it's random. You just

1:03:46

had bad luck at this spirit was

1:03:48

anointing pick to

1:03:50

you. Mhmm. He tells me it's okay or

1:03:52

what the spirit said, and then I can go

1:03:54

work that day. And I think

1:03:56

that's what you

1:03:58

know, a lot of people in our society they have the

1:04:01

function of making it. So

1:04:03

the rest of us are

1:04:05

able to outwork. Their job is to keep

1:04:07

us working in terms of

1:04:10

we don't collapse into all

1:04:12

our neuroses and

1:04:14

anxieties and angers and fears and resentments and all

1:04:16

of the rest that go

1:04:18

with human beings being

1:04:20

injustice collectors.

1:04:22

They're mood mechanics. Yes. That would be a good word

1:04:24

for. Yeah. They gotta do it or you

1:04:26

can't work. I mean, and if they

1:04:29

do it right, then spire

1:04:31

us as some attend to

1:04:34

do, then we really feel good about

1:04:36

ourselves. What about when you see a

1:04:38

big book on the shelf at a bookstore

1:04:40

and it's like the dream

1:04:42

encyclopedia and it's like you had a dream about

1:04:44

owls, it means you might be pregnant

1:04:46

or whatever. When do you

1:04:48

find any correlation between the

1:04:50

symbolism of dreams and any of your

1:04:51

research? No. Okay. That's

1:04:54

what I thought the answer

1:04:54

was maybe I mean, that's a long that's

1:04:57

an short answer based on a long

1:04:59

painful set of a long journey.

1:05:01

I'm sure. And first of all, when, you

1:05:03

know, I I said in

1:05:06

the clinical lore is all around you in the dreams of a railroad to

1:05:08

the unconscious, and Freudian

1:05:10

symbols, hats, hats are

1:05:12

phallic symbols.

1:05:13

Right. But we

1:05:13

did other studies, and I've studied

1:05:16

dreams of like, I have four

1:05:18

thousand dreams and this one woman,

1:05:20

and we looked through and we did word searches found unusual

1:05:22

dreams. Big sample went through.

1:05:24

Try to make sense out of them.

1:05:28

And the one example, she's had

1:05:30

ten dreams about bananas. But

1:05:32

in the one dream, the banana was

1:05:35

clearly a phallic symbol.

1:05:37

In other words, the

1:05:40

banana turned into a penis.

1:05:42

Oh, hello?

1:05:42

Been all the other dreams the

1:05:46

bananas were just sitting there with other things

1:05:48

and so

1:05:49

on. So there was a famous statement

1:05:51

that's made

1:05:53

about Freudians that probably Freud didn't make, but the

1:05:56

famous statement is, there are some days

1:05:58

on a cigar. It's just a

1:05:59

cigar. PS, I tried to

1:06:02

figure out

1:06:04

if, like, Liza Monelli or something said this. And all I

1:06:06

found was that freud dot org says

1:06:08

it wasn't freud who said it.

1:06:10

But if he did

1:06:12

say it, he said it ironically, meaning that a

1:06:14

cigar is never just a

1:06:15

cigar. A cigar is also a

1:06:18

dick according

1:06:20

to Sigman. But

1:06:22

here's the interesting thing about

1:06:24

these neuroimaging studies that

1:06:26

I emphasize so heavily in

1:06:28

the last ten, fifteen years. And

1:06:32

that is that when

1:06:34

you study the network

1:06:36

in the waking brain that

1:06:39

is activated when you say something

1:06:41

metaphoric to somebody. In other words,

1:06:43

they're gonna decode this metaphoric

1:06:46

statement I made cross that

1:06:48

river when you come to it. Don't count

1:06:50

your chickens before they hatch.

1:06:52

Part of the brain that activates

1:06:54

during an interpretation of a metaphor or generating a

1:06:57

metaphor, if you ask me to

1:06:59

make up a metaphor. That

1:07:02

particular areas are not

1:07:04

active during dreaming. Oh,

1:07:07

weird. They're only

1:07:09

partially Should say, it's a more

1:07:12

words, the

1:07:12

networks that make it possible to

1:07:15

experience emotions, to

1:07:18

make symbolic statements

1:07:20

to understand symbolism and

1:07:22

the networks that allow you

1:07:25

to recall specific

1:07:27

memories. Those networks are not functional

1:07:29

during dreaming. Dreaming has far

1:07:32

less emotion in it than the

1:07:34

stereotypes say. It has far

1:07:39

as I can tell virtually no symbolism. And

1:07:41

furthermore, if we study your dreams, there

1:07:43

are no specific memories in them.

1:07:45

There are no

1:07:48

episodic memories we call them where, oh, yes, I

1:07:50

was with my sister at the zoo two

1:07:52

weeks ago -- Mhmm. -- kind of memory.

1:07:56

Instead, the memory bank we draw

1:07:58

on dreams is what are called

1:08:00

semantic memories. That is

1:08:02

sort of my general view, my

1:08:04

general concept of

1:08:06

of my friend Joe or

1:08:08

your general conception of

1:08:10

your younger

1:08:11

sister. That we draw

1:08:13

on to drum up general vibes from life,

1:08:16

but not replay exact

1:08:18

scenarios as we remember them.

1:08:22

So dreams aren't a time machine

1:08:24

made of your own jiggly

1:08:26

memories. So we have cognitive

1:08:29

insufficiencies during dreams. That is

1:08:32

there are certain things we can't

1:08:34

do well during dream. We don't

1:08:36

have as much emotion as I've

1:08:39

already said. I don't think there's much symbolism and dreams, there's

1:08:41

not episodic memories. And of course, the

1:08:43

most obvious is we don't

1:08:45

know where we are

1:08:47

in rare

1:08:48

cases. For some

1:08:50

people, they will think they are aware they are dreaming. In

1:08:52

other words, it starts to use a

1:08:54

little part of the executive network

1:08:59

they still even though they think

1:09:00

they're dreaming, they don't say, yeah. And I'm

1:09:02

in bed. I'm in my house and

1:09:04

etcetera,

1:09:04

etcetera. And in other words,

1:09:07

they still don't really have

1:09:09

what we have during waking life. So that network we're dreaming

1:09:11

with is partial. It's

1:09:15

a network that's very

1:09:17

important in human beings, and it's only in human

1:09:19

beings.

1:09:19

It's a network that's probably seventy

1:09:24

five thousand to two

1:09:26

hundred and fifty thousand years old. And of course that's being studied crazy by evolutionary

1:09:32

anthropologists cognitively modern

1:09:34

human beings could be as recent as a hundred thousand years ago.

1:09:39

And that that's You know,

1:09:41

one more recent than we thought ten years ago or twenty years ago. For more on this,

1:09:43

you can see papers like the role of

1:09:45

dreams in the evolution of the

1:09:48

human mind. Which

1:09:51

says the dreams aren't just a rehearsal for

1:09:53

shit hitting the fan real

1:09:56

bad. They're more of

1:09:58

a general virtual practice for

1:10:00

life. And they could

1:10:02

have played a big part in human cognitive ancestors twitched

1:10:08

and dreamed so that we

1:10:10

could walk around one day wearing underpants and eating cereal and building rockets.

1:10:14

Sometimes all at once.

1:10:17

And so if you look at the,

1:10:19

you

1:10:19

know, the brains of chimpanzees, monkeys and so on,

1:10:20

they they have some of the

1:10:22

structures that are part of our

1:10:26

imagination network. Recently, the technical

1:10:28

term is which is just an

1:10:30

accidental technical term. I have to name

1:10:32

it

1:10:33

first. It's called the default

1:10:35

network. It means

1:10:35

when we're not doing

1:10:36

something, when we're not on a

1:10:38

task, we just go into this

1:10:41

state, which is the state of

1:10:43

Mind wandering

1:10:43

daydreaming. Mhmm. So we mind

1:10:45

wandering and

1:10:46

daydream with the default network. But

1:10:50

that

1:10:50

that default network is only one small part of

1:10:53

things. And so therefore, dreams are

1:10:55

not as the same

1:10:57

as as waking. And they're not

1:11:00

as same as consciousness. They're not

1:11:02

a form of

1:11:02

consciousness. They have parallels with

1:11:05

consciousness. So much more on

1:11:08

this in part two. We get to

1:11:10

the really juicy stuff, via your questions,

1:11:13

everything from sex dreams, to teeth falling out,

1:11:15

and how to control your dreams, and more of that will be

1:11:17

out next week. Here's

1:11:19

a tiny premium. Can

1:11:22

I ask a few questions from listeners? Is

1:11:24

that okay? Okay. That's all you get for a preview

1:11:26

from next week. You need to come back

1:11:28

because we will have a marathon Q and A with

1:11:31

your dream questions, and they are all so good.

1:11:33

Like, is there an intersection between

1:11:35

dreaming and hallucinating? Does

1:11:37

sleep quality affect your dreams? Why don't baby

1:11:39

stream? Lucid dreaming, flying in dreams,

1:11:42

the imagination and dreams,

1:11:44

reducing nightmares, and why

1:11:46

rest is so critical. Meanwhile,

1:11:49

ask specialists your sleepy questions because why else would they study this for

1:11:51

decades if they didn't want you to know? And links

1:11:53

to dreambank dot net and

1:11:55

his new book are

1:11:59

in the show notes. And so our social

1:12:01

handles were at allergies on Twitter and Instagram.

1:12:03

I'm at Ali Alie with one

1:12:05

l on both. I'm on TikTok at ali

1:12:07

Alie allergies, please say hello. And to

1:12:09

submit questions for future episodes, you

1:12:11

can join patreon at patreon dot

1:12:13

com slash allergies for about twenty

1:12:15

five cents and sewed. And allergy's merch

1:12:17

is available at allergy's merch dot com. Thank you Susan Hale for managing that and

1:12:19

so much more. Thank you,

1:12:22

Noel. Still worth for all

1:12:24

this scheduling, Erin Talbert, Adman's Theology's

1:12:26

podcast Facebook Ologies from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis, Emily

1:12:28

White of the Wordry

1:12:31

makes our professional transcripts and

1:12:33

Caleb Patton bleeps them. Kelly Ardwyer works on our website and can make you

1:12:35

one the incredible Mercedes Maintenance of

1:12:37

Maintenance audio as our new

1:12:40

editor with assist

1:12:42

from the ever helpful of Jared Sleeper. The theme music

1:12:45

is by Nick Gorburne of The Banff Islands.

1:12:47

And if you stick around until the

1:12:49

end of the show, I am going to tell you

1:12:51

a secret in this week. It's that I live on

1:12:53

a steep hill and things roll down the hill

1:12:55

and then I think they stay there

1:12:57

for decades. Because I've had to go to the bottom

1:12:59

of the hill after I've dropped things

1:13:01

off of the hill such as

1:13:03

the rechargeable battery for a power drill. And

1:13:05

at the very very bottom of the hill,

1:13:07

aside from, like, a bunch of old Pepsi bottles from the eighties, the coolest

1:13:10

thing I found was a glass skull

1:13:15

completely intact. I don't know how it fell hundreds of feet down

1:13:17

this rock covered hill or what

1:13:19

it was doing down there, but

1:13:21

I'm pretty sure it's not cursed.

1:13:23

It seems friendly. But

1:13:26

now I got a glass skull

1:13:28

on my bookshelf and it was free. Okay. We'll

1:13:30

see you next week for more dreams. Bye bye.

1:13:51

Do you have any dreams?

1:13:56

Yeah. I'm all

1:13:58

alone. I'm rolling a big donut in the

1:14:01

snake wearing out there. Today's

1:14:03

episode is exclusively sponsored by

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Satva, so a final shout out

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to a Dream Sponsor Safa, we

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