0:00

Oh, hey. So up top, this

0:02

episode is exclusively sponsored by

0:04

Satva, and this is the first inology's history

0:07

the first one we've ever had sponsored

0:09

by Just One Company and it's Satva luxury

0:11

mattresses, which is perfect

0:13

because I love Sat us. If you're

0:15

looking for a new mattress, trust me

0:18

just go straight to santa dot com slash Ologies.

0:20

They have mattresses with inner springs, they

0:22

have memory foam, they have adjustable firmness,

0:25

They have white glove delivery. They have

0:27

so many good reviews. People love their

0:29

sapros as do I. It's so luxurious.

0:31

It's so plush. Who knew sleeping can

0:34

get better? Suffered it. That's

0:36

s double ATVA dot

0:38

com slash

0:39

allergies.

0:40

What a dream?

0:41

Oh, hi. It's still your friend's

0:43

fiancee who commits everything to spreadsheets.

0:46

It's Alie Ward. This is part two

0:48

of Oneirology. We cover so

0:50

many burning questions in the field of

0:52

dreams with one of the world's top researchers.

0:55

Go back to part one and start there. What

0:57

are you doing? This is part two. Go back.

1:00

Start with that. Come back here. Okay.

1:02

Let's skip the good stuff. But really quick,

1:04

thank you to everyone at patreon dot com slash

1:06

Ologies who submitted questions for this.

1:08

It costs a dollar a month or more to join.

1:11

Thanks to everyone rating and subscribing

1:13

and leaving reviews. Also,

1:16

I read every single one. There were

1:18

so many lovely ones this week, but I have

1:20

to shout out Tremendous who

1:23

shared the show with their husband who

1:25

looked it up and said that I'm

1:28

their mom's cousin. Here's

1:30

the deal. My dad was one of eleven and my

1:32

mom was one of six. I have

1:34

so many cousins were related

1:36

to most of Montana, so I'll be honest,

1:39

I have no idea who tremendous is.

1:41

I don't know which cousin's child spouse

1:43

wrote that, but shoot me a text. People

1:46

were family. Okay. Oneirology,

1:48

dreams. Tuck yourself in for answers

1:50

about where creativity comes,

1:53

neuroimaging the imagination, creepy

1:56

2 dreams, foods and

1:58

dreams, mental health and dreaming,

2:01

relaxed, fish, medications,

2:04

and your sleep, lucid dreaming,

2:06

a newly discovered part of the brain,

2:09

what sleep stages are important for

2:11

cleaning out your brain, your dogs,

2:13

naps, and more with author,

2:16

researcher, Oneirology, and

2:18

sociology professor, dream

2:20

expert and A

2:22

neurologist, doctor Qi William

2:24

Domhoff.

2:43

Can

2:44

I ask a few questions from listeners?

2:46

From

2:46

who who listens Are they listening now?

2:48

No. Not right now, but they know that you're coming

2:50

on. Oh. I told

2:52

them Jesus Christ. I'm sitting here.

2:57

No. You're Oh, out there. Blah. Blah. Blah.

2:59

Mike, as they say the No. Not a

3:01

hot mic at all. This

3:04

inquiry was burning a hole in

3:06

the minds of Hana news, Dantouin, Mazilopez,

3:09

Corey Jesswan, and first time question askers,

3:12

Andy Cornaccia, Trevor Girding,

3:14

Marvet Fudge, Jess, Nann,

3:16

and Traviskip who all needed info

3:18

on whether our dreams have

3:20

any meaning. What's the point? So

3:22

yes, everyone needed to know that straight out of the

3:24

gate. Okay. A ton of

3:26

people want to know.

3:29

Essentially, Alie Mueller wants to

3:31

know. Do things really have meaning and dreams

3:33

like seeing certain objects or the

3:36

recurring dream of teeth

3:38

falling

3:38

out. Like so many people have the

3:40

dream that their teeth are falling out, which seems

3:42

weird. Do they

3:44

have any meaning? First

3:46

of all, people do

3:48

have certain common dreams like

3:51

flying, you know, under

3:53

their own power or teeth

3:55

falling out. Mhmm. But they're

3:57

very rare. In other words,

3:59

in your whole dream life and we've we've studied

4:01

this by, like, we have two

4:03

week dream journals from students. And

4:07

one percent of them, four

4:09

dreams out of hundreds will have

4:12

teeth falling out. Mhmm. And certain individuals

4:14

will have it. But if if we all talk about it,

4:16

this is where a whole not

4:19

being rigorous and in the lab and Alie, you

4:22

know, not projecting things on your

4:24

participants. We call it creating

4:26

demand characteristics. Creating

4:28

expectations. And also,

4:30

if you've heard a lot that trick people

4:32

have dreams that their teeth fall

4:34

out pretty soon you think you have one or

4:36

you have. But they're they're

4:38

very rare, but they are

4:40

the kind of dreams that we Alie studied a

4:43

lot to try to get to this

4:45

symbolic meaning, but

4:48

I honestly don't know what the symbolic

4:50

meaning of that is. In

4:52

dreams,

4:52

if there is any symbolism, there

4:54

could be symbolism you

4:56

know, for Freudian, it's castration, I

4:58

think. You know, he's he's falling out.

5:01

Patrons, Mallory, skinner, cat, and

5:03

first time question asks Kristen Robb, Justin

5:05

Goodheart, and Alie Murray, as well

5:07

as me, your father, have

5:09

all had nightmares of teeth rotting

5:11

out of our skull and just

5:13

falling out, like, overwrite

5:15

peaches from a tree. What does Domhoff

5:18

say about this? But for your

5:20

teeth listeners. Yes. Your teeth

5:22

feed listeners. Go on

5:24

dreambank dot net. Pick

5:27

we've got it limited so that the thing doesn't

5:29

crash. Pick two dream series at

5:31

a

5:31

time. And put in the word

5:33

teeth. Teeth.

5:36

Mhmm. Put it in ore mode

5:38

or so it'll be tooth or teeth.

5:41

And in Three

5:44

seconds. It will

5:46

tell you how many dreams

5:49

have a tooth in it. And

5:51

it'll give you a tooth column and a teeth column.

5:54

Nice. So if you put in tooth, teeth,

5:56

gums, no. No.

5:59

You get a column for each one

6:01

and you'd get what's called Alie contingency.

6:04

Let's take a little jaunt down the teeth

6:06

dream timeline of life to get to

6:08

the bottom of it. Shall we? I need

6:10

to. Okay. So in his nineteen

6:12

hundred publication, the interpretation

6:14

of dreams, One, Dr. Sigman

6:16

Frode, said that dental

6:19

dreams are mental dreams.

6:21

And they represent issues with things

6:23

like castration, and

6:25

repressed sexual urges and

6:28

the compulsive desire to pleasure oneself.

6:30

So I went to make a withdrawal from

6:32

doctor Dom dot net. And

6:35

I looked into his archive to find

6:37

that, yes, the percentage of

6:39

the twenty thousand collected dreams

6:42

that even mentioned tooth or teeth is

6:44

very low. It's less than a percent.

6:46

And some of those are just mentioning a

6:48

toothbrush and not even tooth trauma.

6:50

I read one dream account from

6:53

a participant identifying as

6:55

Barb who dreamt on March

6:57

second, nineteen eighty one, quote, We

6:59

go to the party. I'm wearing a

7:01

long formal gown and I have one high

7:03

heeled shoe on and one

7:05

off. I walk on tip toes with the right

7:07

foot. And hope no one notices my missing

7:09

shoe. There's a buffet table, lots

7:11

of high class, snotty women,

7:14

a tooth with a feather on it, falls

7:17

out of my mouth onto the table.

7:19

I'm embarrassed. I say

7:21

nonchalantly, O'Purnell, very

7:23

French and classy. I picked

7:25

up. It reminds me of an engagement

7:27

ring. I feel the empty place

7:29

with my tongue. I realized there

7:31

had been another one that fell out. Sometime

7:33

earlier. Why did Barb

7:35

dreamtness? Also, Barb,

7:38

I would party with you. You sound fun as hell

7:40

to be a mess with. Now, I've

7:42

heard that these dreams, these kind of oral

7:44

embarrassment and horror dreams

7:46

mean some fear of a loss of control,

7:48

but I looked up a twenty twelve study

7:50

to get some stats. It's called Dream Motif

7:52

Scale. It was published in a journal dreaming,

7:55

and it provided some numbers on

7:57

our fucked up teeth dreams. And

7:59

Despite my assumption that one

8:01

hundred percent of everyone has

8:04

these dreams, the researchers report

8:06

that only thirty nine percent of

8:08

those studied had what they called

8:10

a TD, which stands for

8:12

2 at least once. Sixteen

8:15

percent of people reported that their TD

8:17

were recurrent and eight

8:19

percent were like, I have these

8:21

all the damn time doctor,

8:23

why, why, why, why.

8:25

And thankfully, for us, there is a twenty

8:28

eighteen study that answers that. And

8:30

it's called dreams of teeth falling out, an

8:32

empirical investigation of physiological

8:34

and psychological correlates. Thank

8:36

god. Okay. So the authors of this

8:38

preface by saying, teeth dreams

8:40

are enigmatic. Because they

8:42

don't fall under the rubric of

8:44

the continuity hypothesis, which

8:46

just means dreaming about normal shape

8:48

that happens every day. But again, why?

8:50

Okay. This is huge. Hold on to your molars.

8:53

Their findings supported the

8:55

dental irritation hypothesis,

8:57

which means you dream

8:59

of teeth falling out when you

9:01

have a dental problem. That's

9:04

it. Sometimes months before it

9:06

actually gives you any problems. So

9:08

maybe you're due for a crown

9:10

replacement or you should slow

9:12

down on the white

9:13

strips. But let's get to the cooler

9:15

dreams. But there's a better one

9:17

that's tantalizing, and that is flying.

9:20

Because up is good in

9:22

our thinking, when we when we look at all the

9:24

work that's been done meaning in waking

9:27

Alie up as good, down as bad,

9:30

left as bad, right as good, this kind

9:32

of stuff. But flying

9:34

Think of all the metaphors. I'm walking on

9:36

air. I'm high as a kite. I

9:38

hope they don't prick my balloon and I fall.

9:40

Mhmm. And so we

9:42

express elation through height,

9:45

through

9:45

flying. I'm on walking on

9:48

air.

9:48

Over the moon. Over

9:49

the moon, the whole planet. Right. Cloud nine.

9:52

There's so high right now. And that's the

9:54

kind of temptation. It

9:56

just makes sense to think those

9:59

dreams must be symbolic

10:01

too. In other words, we have what

10:03

one researcher calls a waking state

10:06

bias. So it

10:08

lures us into putting more into the

10:10

dream that's there. Going back to that

10:11

hypothetical. If I have a hundred and fifty veered

10:14

dreams,

10:14

I think

10:15

I could know a lot

10:17

about you,

10:18

the whole lot. Would

10:21

I know something you don't know? I

10:24

don't think so. What I'd know

10:26

is what I would learn

10:28

from

10:28

you, if I could sit down with you, and

10:30

say,

10:30

I would like to have an anonymous

10:33

interview with you. For

10:35

research purposes, I wish, you know, answers

10:37

honestly as you can. And I ask you

10:39

what what your feelings are towards your mother,

10:41

what your feelings are towards your two

10:43

2. What are

10:45

some of your regrets? What are

10:47

some of the things you worry about. I

10:50

think that I would then learn

10:52

from that interview what I've already

10:54

learned from your

10:54

dream.

10:54

Yeah. If

10:55

I wanted to know what I can learn from your

10:57

dreams.

10:57

I think I'd just interview

11:00

you for an hour, an anonymous

11:02

honest interview. And so That

11:05

means that dreams have meaning. Dreams

11:07

have personal meaning.

11:10

Occasionally, they'll have cultural

11:12

meaning. For example, in

11:14

societies, they're hunting and gathering societies,

11:16

they dream more of animal

11:18

flow and behold. Mhmm. That

11:20

that's a cultural kind of

11:22

differs. And of course, for every member of

11:24

every indigenous society all over the

11:26

world, there is a different

11:28

relationship with dreaming. Professor

11:30

Dom also notes in his most recent book,

11:32

the neurocognitive theory of dreaming, that

11:34

his research has found unsurprisingly

11:36

that The dreams of people in

11:38

indigenous societies more often

11:40

feature them as the victims of

11:42

aggression, which just mirrors

11:44

the very tragic reality

11:46

both historically and presently. And

11:48

a paper on the plane's 2 quest paradigm

11:51

in the Journal American Indian noted

11:53

that in native and indigenous

11:55

context, there's typically Alie separation

11:57

between the world as dreamed and

11:59

the world as lived. And

12:02

continues that in non indigenous

12:04

culture, the distinction between

12:06

waking and dreaming is largely a

12:08

consequence of culturally reinforced

12:10

theories of mind that have resulted in

12:12

a bifurcated worldview for most

12:14

euro Americans. So modern

12:16

western culture separates them a bunch. Now,

12:18

the nonprofit organization worldwide

12:21

indigenous science network has also

12:23

started doing what they call dream work, which is

12:25

collecting dream journals and providing

12:27

a network to share the role of

12:29

dreams in their lives. But what about in

12:31

our futures? So patrons, Amy

12:33

2, RJ Doidge, we stopped her

12:36

caribbean, brin, and peeva, Victoria

12:38

Edding. Zoe, first time question

12:40

esters. Yifana Chymotzko, Taylor

12:42

Clinton, Nann, FL Rapid, Ariana

12:44

O'Connor, and Alie Bennett all wanted to

12:46

know about that dreamy

12:48

nostalgia feeling and deja

12:50

vu and about nocturnal

12:52

premonitions. What has professor

12:54

Domhoff seen in his decades of research?

12:58

So dreams have meaning but

13:01

I don't think they have

13:03

the profound or

13:05

symbolic prophetic any of

13:07

those kind of meanings which have been

13:09

attributed to them. In

13:11

almost every culture because there's some cultures

13:13

actually really don't give it to him about me.

13:15

Mhmm. But most there's a whole lot

13:17

to do. And they are ones

13:19

that then we can learn from because they

13:21

have dreams of prophetic. They

13:23

use dreams to decide where to go on a

13:25

hunt and and so on.

13:27

You have to have certain dreams to enter

13:29

certain professions like Warrior. You

13:32

have to have certain dreams before

13:34

you be initiated in the manhood.

13:36

And then,

13:37

of course, just like our society, then they

13:39

they may have ways to induce

13:41

that dream. Mhmm. And

13:43

the role of consciousness altering plant

13:45

medicine goes deep, deep, deep into 2. And

13:47

for more on that, I will link a twenty

13:49

twenty paper from the Journal of

13:51

Psychedelic Studies called the role of

13:53

indigenous acknowledges in a psychedelic

13:56

science. And that comes hot

13:58

out of the gates acknowledging how much

14:00

colonialism and past scientific

14:02

research have excluded indigenous knowledge and

14:04

not giving credit words do. And essentially, it

14:06

says that in some cultural frameworks,

14:08

psychedelics aren't just for trip

14:10

and falls. They're a tool

14:12

used in concert with our

14:14

brain's own mechanisms to use

14:16

these altered states of consciousness to our

14:18

benefit and our growth. So mushrooms. They are

14:20

not just for enjoying the

14:22

lights at the next meeting at the Juggalos.

14:24

But our dreams, hallucination,

14:27

adjacent, first time question eschar is

14:29

Kevin. Parachen, Sophie Fornier, and Wendy

14:31

Lockhart wanted to

14:31

know. What happens is that all gets

14:34

blurred and people talk about

14:36

altered states of consciousness. And

14:38

so suddenly, they're saying

14:40

dreams are like hypnotic states

14:42

or like drug states and

14:44

so on. What the neuroimaging research

14:47

reveals is that

14:49

hypnosis is not like psychedelics

14:52

or hallucinations or like

14:55

dreaming. In other words, every one of those

14:57

states has a different

14:59

network supporting it. And The

15:02

dreaming network is different from

15:04

all of those altered state of

15:06

consciousness networks. And so one

15:08

of my strong claims, of course,

15:10

gets me a lot of trouble is to

15:12

say, you can't learn anything

15:14

about dreams. By studying

15:17

hallucinations or hypnotizing

15:19

people or studying

15:21

psychedelic drug

15:23

states. That doesn't teach you

15:25

about dreaming. Dreaming is a

15:27

normal everyday occurrence

15:32

in virtually everyone that

15:34

we know of, there may be a few people

15:36

that don't dream, and it

15:38

be great if neuroimaging would study them because

15:41

I do think there might be a few. But at

15:43

any rate, I

15:45

think that we have to 2 understand

15:47

a dream.

15:47

Alie, first

15:48

of all, have to be sure that the

15:50

mental activity is not

15:52

sleep talking or from a brief

15:54

arousal or from sleep

15:56

paralysis and then

15:59

study those dreams, then

16:01

we could make comparisons. But

16:03

to try to understand dreams on the

16:05

basis of psychosis, which

16:07

is what famous

16:09

neurologist of the mid nineteenth

16:12

century said,

16:14

give me the secret of dreams, and

16:16

I will tell you the secret of

16:18

psychosis. Of course, then Freud

16:20

quoted that with great approval.

16:23

And famous philosophers have

16:25

said

16:25

that. But important people have said that. And so

16:27

Mhmm. Yeah. We believe it. Right? What about

16:29

Professor Domhoff? I don't

16:31

I don't I don't anymore, if

16:33

I ever did. What about

16:36

dreams and sleep quality? Victoria

16:39

Edding wants to know, if I remember

16:41

my dreams one night or if they're

16:42

vivid, does that mean I got good or bad

16:45

Alie? And Jenna Kanalana wanted to

16:47

know how do stressful dreams or nightmares

16:49

affect the quality of the sleep you're

16:50

getting. Do you have a good cozy sleep? Do you have

16:53

better dreams? I I

16:55

think I can say with confidence

16:56

that people that are in really

16:59

anxiety states that

17:01

are really highly rouse

17:03

in some way, whether through

17:05

drug states or tensions or

17:08

whatever it may be, that's

17:10

gonna 2 sleep

17:11

quality. And it then

17:14

may affect dreams. It's

17:16

not the

17:16

dreams that are it's not

17:17

bad dreams

17:18

that are causing it vice versa.

17:20

So patron Dominique McDermott

17:23

asked why they feel more tired after a night

17:25

of intense dreams. But according to

17:27

doctor 2, it's not your

17:29

nightmares messing up

17:31

sleep. It's the tension and

17:33

discomfort you already have that are giving you

17:35

the bad dreams. Again, sleep

17:37

hygiene, coziness, temperature

17:40

control, stress mitigation

17:42

can all give you better sleep, which will

17:44

help you have a better tomorrow. But

17:46

some types of stress go way deeper

17:49

than others.

17:49

Here is where PTSD victims.

17:53

God love them. It's just a tough

17:55

thing. But when they're

17:57

studied with neuroimaging or EEGs,

17:59

their brains day and night

18:01

are are just really activated.

18:04

Mhmm. They're on fire. Mhmm. So

18:07

the brain of a person sleeping,

18:09

but

18:09

they're not sleeping like Alie a non

18:12

PTSD person. Their brain

18:14

is fired up. They're vigilant. One

18:16

of the attention networks also has

18:18

a vigilance aspect to

18:21

it. And that's the

18:23

vigilance network right now we're paying

18:25

attention. We're in this particular room. We

18:27

can hear sound. But if we suddenly

18:29

heard a loud noise or if I noticed

18:31

out the window that building was falling.

18:33

We would totally change everything

18:35

in our body. Our digestion would stop.

18:37

This would stop. Every bit of

18:39

energy would be mobilized.

18:42

Just on that particular focus, and

18:44

I'd be no more imagining

18:46

or thinking, I'd be totally a

18:48

kind of focus. That Alie

18:51

part of of the attention network

18:54

is still on in these

18:56

PTSD -- Mhmm. -- victims. And

18:59

so it really does distort their

19:01

sleep Alie the brain

19:03

is then much more activated

19:05

and they're gonna have more dreams

19:07

because they're more activated. And

19:10

because they're got incredibly

19:12

deep and burned in

19:14

personal concerns, they're gonna dream about

19:17

those things. Now contrary to the

19:19

view that though people

19:21

just keep dreaming the same

19:22

nightmare, they

19:23

don't really

19:25

Alie have the

19:26

dreams On Dream Bank, we have the dreams

19:28

of Vietnam vet. And

19:30

he's quite a guy that was a

19:32

a medic in Cambodia in

19:34

Highlands in nineteen seventy seventy

19:36

one. He saw horrific, unbelievable human

19:41

slaughter, death,

19:44

his dreams are full

19:46

of of fright. And he's one of the few people that

19:48

could write them all down, and they kept them all

19:50

his life. He's probably seventy

19:52

now. And his dreams are

19:54

just constantly vigilant, constantly agitated,

19:57

constantly, you know, somebody

19:59

comes in there and he's talking

20:01

to an old friend and all of a sudden he sees somebody out

20:03

of the corner right turn, didn't

20:05

just get fiercely angry and, you know,

20:07

goes at him or are they getting

20:09

a conflict? So the vigilance that's in

20:11

his dreams. But

20:13

I would know that if I talk to him because

20:15

he tells me and he writes stories and

20:17

he has a

20:19

website and he puts his poems

20:21

and thoughts up there. And

20:23

and once all, luxury gave a

20:26

high school I I'd laugh at us

20:28

so sad because he went in and told him what

20:30

it was

20:30

like. Yeah. They I mean, it's just

20:32

scared to put Jesus out of them. Yeah. I mean,

20:34

it was overwhelming. And

20:37

so even the accounts we often

20:40

give of these

20:41

things, we soften them for people.

20:43

If we're Alie, say what

20:45

the horrors were like,

20:46

It's so overwhelming for other

20:49

people, so you you don't you don't say

20:51

them, but

20:53

he said them. Mhmm. And

20:56

I I think PTSD

20:58

then is is the is the example

21:00

on this. Because it's so different from normative

21:03

dreaming. And it's more

21:05

like then the answers to these questions

21:07

that where these people are temporarily

21:09

in that kind of edge

21:11

2. Maybe your buddy's depression or

21:13

anxiety have shown up. And if so,

21:15

you're not alone. Even though

21:17

mental health struggles can make you feel

21:20

like

21:20

it. And his research supports that. Well,

21:22

the interesting thing that we found

21:24

with people with any kind

21:27

of diagnosis And it's not

21:29

totally certain, but the interesting

21:32

finding, which shows how important

21:34

it is to use a scientific

21:36

coding system, The main way

21:38

their dreams differ is there

21:40

are no friends in their

21:42

dreams, no friends, no people

21:44

that they call friends. In

21:46

one cases or two that we studied as well

21:48

as the individual dream

21:49

series, it was only

21:52

their parents. And their

21:54

sister. They had no

21:55

friends. In another study where he had

21:58

dreams from, I think, I think, made one hundred and

22:00

six dreams from schizophrenics,

22:02

and it's on dream research dot net

22:04

under interesting findings.

22:06

In their dreams, there's just

22:08

all strangers. In other words, there's no no

22:11

family and no friend. So if I

22:13

was reading through a dream

22:15

series and I got about five

22:17

ten dreams into

22:18

it, and nobody

22:21

has been mentioned as a

22:22

friend. I immediately and

22:25

I intend to go up. I'm wondering what?

22:27

Why are there no friends? Mhmm. And then

22:29

as I'm reading and now I'm coding too, I'm

22:31

counting friends, animals, characters,

22:34

mother, father, or, you know,

22:36

just just guy only dreams about his

22:37

father, never his mother, what's going

22:40

on.

22:40

And then

22:40

we study it more seriously. Alie either

22:43

with our coding system or

22:45

we create a word string.

22:47

And that's why I know people

22:49

basically dream about things are familiar

22:51

with seventy five, seventy seventy five percent of

22:54

the time. But here I should say that I am

22:56

no clinician of any kind

22:58

whether psychological or medical.

23:02

And if people do write to

23:04

me at my website and ask about

23:06

these

23:06

things, some of these things. And I say, look,

23:08

you've got to go to the

23:10

sleep disorder

23:11

clinic, and you've got to have

23:14

expert medical attention

23:16

asked them, but you shouldn't ask

23:18

me. You shouldn't get your advice,

23:20

I don't think. From anybody on

23:22

the web, but I could be wrong

23:25

on

23:25

that. But but

23:27

it sure

23:27

shouldn't get any advice from me.

23:29

But

23:29

a clinician can can

23:32

help reduce the waking

23:34

anxiety, which can help reduce the night

23:36

nurse. And and some, you know, some

23:38

kinds of drugs sometimes. And

23:40

and certainly, psychotherapies of

23:42

various kinds can help

23:43

people. So we we all need

23:46

someone to lean on. I

23:48

love him.

23:48

I wanted to ask about that we did have a lot of folks

23:50

who wanted to know about different substances,

23:54

SSRIs or melatonin or

23:57

spicy foods, any brain medications,

23:59

especially things that are sleep aids, do they change

24:01

how we dream? My

24:04

statement is on

24:06

this is that anytime if we

24:08

go on a drug or if we

24:10

go off a drug. In other words, we we

24:12

change our neurochemical

24:15

biochemistry, then those

24:17

things, you know, may happen, and there may

24:19

then be an adjustment. But again,

24:21

I'm no medical expert and

24:25

you know, it's one of those things that I look at as

24:27

a possible window for

24:29

me into understanding

24:31

dreams. So if you're getting some

24:34

help from medication, you're also

24:36

not alone. Hi. Let me introduce you

24:38

to my own brain buddy effects

24:40

or but patrons, Mariah McGregor,

24:43

Caitlin Schmitz, Caitlin Ramirez,

24:45

Anne Becky Potroft, and first time Quest

24:47

Oscar, Olympias Silk, wanted to know what

24:49

is up with antidepressants and vivid dreams. And the

24:51

deal is they're not necessarily

24:53

causing the dreams, but they're

24:55

suppressing REM sleep and in the

24:57

case of Lexi Pro, Zoloft, and

24:59

Balta, Pacil 2 a few others, it can

25:01

mean that you might be having these

25:03

microawakening and remembering

25:05

the dreams more. Also, stress

25:07

and sadness in your waking hours can mean

25:09

it's on your mind more in your sleep.

25:11

So addressing fears or

25:13

concerns in therapy or with

25:16

lifestyle changes might benefit your mental health may

25:18

improve things while you're sleeping.

25:20

Also, those side effects of really

25:22

vivid dreaming on antidepressants are

25:24

apparently the worst in the first few weeks.

25:26

But you can definitely ask a doctor about

25:29

timing the medication differently, which could help.

25:31

I just started taking mine at night and it's

25:33

helping me function better in the morning. So

25:35

there's that. Also, melatonin may give you bonkers dreams

25:37

if the dose is too high, so experiment with

25:39

that. Timothy Wang, who asked? And

25:41

melatonin is also connected to a

25:43

neurochemical called vasotocin,

25:45

which kind of helps

25:47

erase your memory of dreams so

25:49

that you don't get confused between

25:52

them in reality. So if you're on medication

25:54

that's blurring those lines, Earl of

25:56

Gramaliken asked about Chantix, that

25:58

might be why. But is your bong boguarding

26:00

your dreams? Maybe a little bit.

26:02

And sorry to report that THC has been

26:05

shown to repress rem sleep, Evan

26:07

Davis, Ashley Aidar, and Alie

26:09

So if you have a medication that's affecting

26:12

your sleep, first time class rescuers, Laura Rayfield, and

26:14

Katie Jarasovitch. Talk to your

26:16

doc about changing your timing. Maybe try

26:18

to cultivate the best sleep

26:20

hygiene you can manage and treat your brain well.

26:22

But enough about pills, let's talk

26:24

about cheese. So Scott Sheldon Paul

26:26

Smith, Luca Feminin. Stephanie Luskey and

26:29

Francesca Parelli to know in

26:31

Francesca's words, is it true that

26:33

eating cheese before bed makes

26:35

dreams more intense and I had

26:37

to look into this for us. I knew you

26:39

needed to know. Here's the deal. So a two

26:41

thousand and five study showed that

26:43

cheese gave people vivid dreams

26:46

and Cheddar made them dream about

26:48

celebrities. And it's not

26:50

important that this was a tiny

26:52

study or that it was funded by the British

26:54

Cheese Board. Which is a great name for a

26:56

charcuterie related propaganda machine,

26:58

the cheese board. I love that. But

27:00

yes, so further studies have

27:03

disproven that as just delicious

27:05

flim flam. Now the reason that

27:07

you may actually be

27:09

swept away to 2 in a tide of

27:12

fondue is because one,

27:14

cheese in Europe is usually the

27:16

last meal of the evening so

27:18

it's a scapegoat, cheese. And two, eating

27:21

late at night can cause your

27:23

temperature to rise and mess up

27:25

your sleep, making you wake

27:27

up more to remember your weird

27:29

dreams, and then also three

27:31

lactose baby. Not all of us can

27:33

digest that shit and guess what? Having a

27:35

three AM bubbling colon is

27:37

a nightmare in every

27:39

fashion. And also, Julie Fisher, the

27:41

chocolate you're eating before bed isn't

27:43

necessarily a dream Alie user but

27:45

the caffeine may be interrupting your sleep and making you

27:48

remember your dreams. Sydney tubes, Rachel

27:50

Kendrick, Scott Sheldon, Christina Johnson,

27:52

and Crystal Simons, eating

27:55

earlier if your evening meal or

27:57

fourth meal is causing you some

28:00

nocturnal stress. Just consider

28:02

what a three AM Elsporto

28:04

Gordita does to your

28:05

butthole. Now imagine that's your brain

28:08

trying to sleep. You know what

28:10

I mean? I give a couple lectures back when

28:12

I taught on nightmares.

28:14

And for instance, people have nightmares

28:16

when they have high

28:18

fevers. That was gonna be my next question.

28:20

It was your question actually, Pascal

28:22

Perron Miranda Harter and Eli Zweepel,

28:24

who asked about cooking up wild

28:27

brain activity. Let's say with fever

28:29

dreams, does does a different part of your

28:31

brain activate when the temperature is

28:33

high or is that a hallucination

28:34

more? Questions around brain

28:38

temperature are still not

28:41

fully understood. And

28:43

So it's in the realm of not guess work

28:46

but of still work in

28:48

progress. And I happen to be very

28:50

interested in it academically. Because

28:52

brain temperature is

28:55

related to level of activation.

28:58

When we're highly activated, we're

29:00

metabolizing better. Cells

29:02

are working more efficiently.

29:05

So that really then

29:07

relates to a lot of

29:09

energy use when we're really highly

29:11

activated and we're metabolizing our

29:13

sellers metabolizing really

29:14

fast, we're using up a lot of

29:17

energy. And that gets to then sleep. A

29:20

few folks wanted to know

29:22

why physiologically dream

29:24

I'm looking at you Lauren Cooper, Hannah Johnson, Bethany

29:27

Barlow, and Sydney. Are we

29:29

de fragmenting our drives?

29:31

Is it Alie cleaning up after a

29:33

party? In sleepy John's words,

29:35

dreaming is how the brain cleans

29:37

out the lint

29:38

filter, Turfoise. Here's the

29:39

strange thing about sleep. For

29:43

decades, centuries, people have

29:45

looked for

29:46

sleep as somehow resting

29:50

something or it's

29:52

getting rid of poisons and toxins,

29:54

or it's time to lay

29:56

in stores of kind of energy. Those

30:00

concerns are still being studied,

30:02

but nobody has done studies

30:04

that and this is among

30:06

a community of of serious

30:09

sleep researcher WHERE THEY ALL COME TO

30:11

2. SO FOLKS ARE WORKING ON

30:13

IT BUT IT TAKES A LOT OF RESEARCH FOR

30:15

A SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY TO

30:17

STAND BEHIND SOMETHING. So we don't

30:19

know if dreams specifically clean your brain,

30:22

but we do know that sleep

30:24

itself does. There have been plenty of studies

30:26

that during sleep, your

30:28

body's cerebral spinal fluid

30:30

gets into your brain's nooks

30:32

and crannies and washes away

30:34

beta amyloid and tau proteins that

30:36

act as plaques can lead to the

30:38

development of Alzheimer's and

30:40

dementia. So sleepy time can

30:42

save your mind, but check

30:45

this alkylose. So literally Alie a

30:47

study titled, a mesothelium divides

30:49

the subarachnoid space into functional

30:52

compartments. Published in the Journal

30:54

Science reported that there's a new

30:56

part of the brain we didn't

30:58

know about until

31:00

this week This is like

31:02

finding a hidden room in your basement

31:04

or I guess the attic. We didn't know.

31:06

There's a membrane in your brain They are

31:08

now calling the subarachnoidal lymphatic

31:10

like membrane or SLYM.

31:12

I don't know if

31:14

that's pronounced SLYM or

31:17

slim or Alie. I

31:19

hope it's slime because the

31:21

neuroscientists who discovered it think

31:23

it might help separate the clean

31:25

cerebral spinal fluid from the dirty

31:27

stuff. And once again, help to clean your brain. What

31:29

else did they say? So they said

31:31

that deep non REM sleep is

31:33

the most important stage

31:35

for brain cleaning and that sleep

31:38

is critical to the function of the

31:40

brain's waste removal system. And

31:42

this study shows that the deeper

31:44

the sleep better. How

31:46

bonkers, that this is

31:48

fresh information we

31:50

literally did not know last week. What

31:52

what an

31:52

exciting time to be

31:55

alive and asleep? And

31:57

so it's a genuine puzzle

31:59

for them. But there's one thing that

32:01

I think we do know about sleep. Alie

32:04

sleep is a state of

32:06

adaptive inactivity.

32:09

Adaptive inactivity. What does

32:11

that mean? Well, seeds think

32:13

of the seeds for a tree

32:16

or they can be dormant. For

32:19

hundreds, even thousands of

32:21

years. Trees lose their

32:23

leaves. The insects go

32:25

underground. Seventeen year

32:27

local. Torpor. Which is

32:29

a kind of really beyond

32:31

sleep where body temperature

32:33

goes much

32:33

lower. Now for more on

32:36

nature's ability, to go offline. You can see

32:38

the Oneirology episodes on trees,

32:40

the Oneirology episode on sleep. We've

32:42

got a molecular neurobiology episode on

32:44

brain chemicals. And the episode

32:46

on body

32:46

heat, or also the Ersonology episodes on

32:49

hibernating pairs. Anyway. What

32:51

sleep does is

32:54

allows us to use

32:56

less energy and at

32:58

the same time not expend

33:01

energy. So every animal

33:03

sleeps differently for

33:06

differing amounts of time relating

33:08

to its ecological niche.

33:10

Let me give you unique two examples. On the

33:12

one hand, bush elephants in

33:15

in Africa, they sleep as little

33:17

as two hours whoa.

33:19

In twenty four. And they can

33:21

be moving for two, three days

33:23

without sleeping. And when they stop,

33:26

they don't immediately, quote, make up any

33:29

sleep. So they're really

33:31

adapted to that

33:33

little that niche. On the

33:35

other hand, apostums

33:38

sleep nineteen hours. And

33:41

a kind of bat sleeps

33:43

twenty hours. Now the

33:45

bat sleeps twenty hours is really

33:47

interesting. When does it come out at dusk.

33:50

And what's going on at

33:52

dusk? The moss are flying

33:54

around. Mhmm. It's it's food supply

33:56

is flying around. So it does everything

33:58

in four hours, whereas the

34:01

elephant is awake

34:03

twenty two

34:03

hours. Which means that some animals have

34:05

to fuel themselves for longer stretches just

34:07

to maintain homeostasis Alie keep

34:10

their brain and their body temperature

34:11

up. But think of it this way. If you had to

34:13

be awake twenty four hours

34:16

a day, That's a lot of foraging. That's a lot of

34:18

hunting. That's a lot of farming. That

34:20

uses up a lot of

34:22

food. It's

34:24

far more evolutionarily

34:27

adaptive. If we take one

34:29

third of the roughly one

34:31

third, but it's really less

34:33

off there can be more of us, there's more food

34:35

supply and and so on.

34:38

So each each creature

34:40

is adapted. We are

34:42

actually, probably adapted, and

34:44

this will surprise you, to seven

34:47

hours a night.

34:47

Really? How do

34:49

I know? Yeah. My friend knows.

34:52

My UCLA sleep expert

34:55

friend. He studied three different

34:57

hunting and gathering societies

34:59

with the whole crew of anthropologists and

35:01

others that he helped

35:04

organize. Now for more details, you can see a

35:06

twenty eighteen

35:08

study titled sleep variability and nighttime activity

35:10

among Ramani Forage or

35:12

horticulturists by lead author, Dr.

35:14

Gandhi Atish, who is

35:16

doing a post doc at UCLA's Center for

35:18

Sleep

35:18

Research. But researchers over the

35:20

years studying the sleep habits of hunter

35:23

gatherer cultures and agro pastoralists observed

35:25

that. They average seven hours

35:27

a night, but

35:30

it's actually They sleep seven hours a night roughly in

35:32

the winter, but in

35:34

the summer they sleep six

35:36

hours. So

35:39

And that's true of of, like, reindeer.

35:41

Now, I'll jump. Reindeer, their

35:42

way up there in a cold, cold

35:46

arctic. Hey, they're sleeping a lot less in the

35:48

summer, and they sleep a lot more in the

35:50

winter. So this

35:54

enormous complexity to sleep has

35:56

to do with ecology.

35:58

And with us, what's striking

36:00

about

36:01

us, and where dreams can

36:03

come in again is

36:04

that all he basically, all other primates go

36:07

to sleep when it

36:09

gets dark. Mhmm. And

36:11

they wake up

36:13

then

36:13

it gets

36:14

light. Yeah. Why don't we

36:15

do that? Why don't I do that 2?

36:17

Japan disease sleep eleven or twelve hours,

36:19

whatever it is. We sleep basically

36:21

seven or eight. Because we are

36:24

not tied to the light dark

36:26

cycle. We are

36:28

tied more to a

36:30

2, our internal temperature cycles

36:32

are not tied to the

36:34

light cycles. So when

36:37

it gets dark, everywhere in the world,

36:39

the human beings huddle together and make a

36:42

fire. Mhmm. And they shoot the

36:44

bowl, and they talk

36:46

about dreams

36:48

and they talk about their myths and they

36:50

hang out. They have a little fun

36:53

and dance around. Mhmm. And

36:55

we wake up And then our

36:58

body temperature goes way

37:00

down during the

37:00

night. And here's the the

37:02

other part. The

37:03

brain temperature can't go down. And that's

37:06

REM sleep.

37:08

REM sleep is Alie thermometer.

37:11

It's most

37:13

likely my bet

37:14

is on sleep researchers who say REM

37:17

sleep is a way to

37:19

reheat the brain periodically

37:23

during sleep. That's its function.

37:26

And it makes it so

37:28

sleep can go on. We cycle

37:30

between REM and non REM We

37:33

go non rim. If end

37:36

rim, heat up a little,

37:38

rim, non rim, heat up a

37:40

little. And then

37:42

towards

37:42

morning, circadian rhythm

37:44

were

37:44

built into us.

37:45

Our our brain temperature

37:48

starts to

37:50

go up

37:50

independent of REM, very likely,

37:53

as we approach Morny. So

37:55

now we

37:57

have a dual system going

38:00

on that's heating our

38:01

brain. How does all

38:04

this

38:05

relate

38:05

to dreams? If

38:06

dreams are tied to the level of

38:09

brain activation, then the

38:11

point is

38:13

that When

38:14

you're an hour or two into sleep, the

38:16

default network, the

38:17

parts of default 2 that are

38:19

active during

38:21

Alie, there's not enough activation for it

38:23

to stay together. The network breaks apart.

38:26

Front part breaks off from the

38:28

back part. You know,

38:30

it's a simplest language we could talk

38:32

about posterior and anterior and

38:34

so on. Less a lot. And

38:38

that point, if we awaken people, they

38:40

might have an image or they, oh, I thought

38:42

the x or or say, no. I don't

38:45

remember a thing. But during the rem

38:47

period, you wake and they'll get a dream. Here's what we

38:50

know. Probably from six,

38:52

let's say, you're you're an eight o'clock wake

38:54

or upper. So

38:56

from six o'clock

38:57

on, your brain is doing quite

38:59

a bit of

39:00

dreaming. What's important about that is

39:02

from our studies in the lab,

39:04

way in the past, know that the

39:06

dreams from the first REM period

39:09

do not differ from the dreams

39:11

from the second REM period or

39:13

the third REM period. My dissertation

39:15

was one small step in

39:17

that. Two or three better

39:19

studies came along. confirmed

39:22

a lot of what I wrote luckily,

39:24

but there were other things

39:26

where I was wrong on. And

39:29

better data, bigger sample

39:31

sizes. So we can

39:34

collect a good

39:36

sample of your dreams between,

39:40

I say, six and eight in the morning.

39:43

And

39:43

furthermore, we can get a lot of your

39:46

dreams on spontaneous

39:48

morning awakening. And when we do studies where we have

39:50

people, I did a study in nineteen

39:52

sixty three just as there

39:54

came to

39:56

be answering machines on telephone. I

39:58

I bought a couple of those and

40:00

I had the students phone in 2

40:02

they remembered a dream. Nice.

40:06

And most of them were morning awakenings

40:08

-- Mhmm. -- seventy five or so percent. And

40:10

that's what's predicted in other

40:14

studies too. But sometimes, you're you're just sitting there like one

40:16

woman in the study. She was sitting in

40:18

the backyard. She

40:20

was studying. And

40:22

in the sun and the sun started

40:24

to shift, and she started to feel a

40:26

little cold. She their mind drifted off,

40:28

and she remembered to dream about

40:31

skiing. So, you know, we have those kinds

40:33

of things that

40:33

happen. But the

40:36

point

40:36

is that we can get a good sample

40:40

of of dreams in a variety of ways. And any

40:42

future dream researchers out there,

40:44

the last three pages of

40:47

my new book explain exactly what we need to

40:49

do, but that nobody is doing.

40:52

And it has to start with your

40:54

cell phone.

40:56

We got to have every we got to have samples

40:58

of people from about age nine

41:00

or ten, and we didn't get into

41:02

this, but we 2 dream off to

41:05

her well until we're nine to eleven years

41:07

2, which will ride a lot of

41:10

cages too. If you

41:11

have smelagrites, more on kids sleep in a

41:13

bit. But any rate,

41:15

if we had people phone

41:17

in, their dreams anytime day

41:19

or night,

41:20

we have the voice to 2, and

41:23

then we have the text in the central

41:26

place, and we put them on the dream

41:28

bank, and we can search them with

41:30

word strings. We can

41:32

go to town. We can automate

41:34

this thing and churn out

41:36

so

41:36

much. All we need is about

41:38

million or two million a year. You

41:42

said? Or for about

41:44

four years and

41:46

we

41:47

could figure out which series were right and which That's

41:50

it. That's all you

41:51

need to get more, what does

41:53

it, psychopumpologists? Yeah. We'll

41:57

escort you to the world of

41:59

dreams. Now we will escort

42:02

you through more of your questions at a

42:04

moment. But first, let's donate again to

42:06

some relevant causes. And this week, we're gonna

42:08

send it to two. One is the

42:10

worldwide indigenous science network that we

42:12

mentioned Alie. Which creates spaces for our ethical collaboration

42:14

between indigenous and western ways of

42:16

knowing. And we're also going to donate to the

42:18

research that Dr.

42:20

Bill Domhoff has dedicated

42:22

his whole career too 2 efforts to further

42:24

understand who dreams, what,

42:27

and why, and also the day after

42:29

part one aired, I got the sweetest text from Bill just saying that he had

42:31

a great time chatting and that I

42:33

did my homework well. And

42:35

then he included an emoji of a bed and said the

42:37

emoji above is an honor of Satva as a

42:40

perfect sponsor. So it's Dom

42:42

Domhoff. And on that note, Those

42:44

donations were made possible by the one and only sponsor of these

42:47

episodes, Satva. And

42:49

today's episode is negatively

42:52

sponsored by Satva because

42:54

one's got to sleep to 2, and

42:56

Satva luxury mattresses are

42:58

just like a first class ticket

43:00

to snooze town. Love them. And usually, I saved my

43:03

secrets for the end of the episode, but as

43:05

long as we're on the topic, this one

43:07

time I had a dream I

43:10

arrived to this party and I was wearing

43:12

like one of those high necked

43:15

Victorian dresses that

43:17

sad ladies step off of a

43:20

train, a dusty, mining

43:22

town. And I arrived

43:24

at this saloon and like all of my relatives were

43:26

there and they were drinking warm

43:28

beer. And I leaned over to my

43:30

mom, Fancy Alie. And I was

43:32

like, wow. On

43:34

a party. What's the occasion? And she was like, it's

43:37

your wedding. And I looked up

43:39

and my boyfriend at the time was

43:41

waiting for me at the top of the aisle and I was

43:44

like, shit. I don't even drink

43:46

beer or like him

43:48

like that. And I was trying to figure

43:50

out if there was a way I could, like, dip out at the

43:52

back. And then when I woke

43:54

up, in real life, I

43:56

was on vacation with this

43:58

boyfriend, and I unfortunately knew that he

44:00

was not the one. So thanks

44:02

dreams. You saved this man from dating me

44:04

any longer, and also you

44:06

saved us a wedding and a divorce. Years

44:08

later, I'm now hitched to 2. I

44:10

absolutely adore, but I still don't like

44:12

beer. Anyway, dreams. You gotta

44:14

love them. But before you can dream, way

44:16

to do that is on a sofa luxury

44:18

mattress. Every sofa is

44:20

designed for

44:22

better sleep with features only found on the

44:24

world's Alie nicest most expensive

44:26

mattresses. They are high, high

44:28

quality, and

44:30

what's more Safa will set

44:32

up your mattress in the room of your

44:34

choice and take your old one

44:36

for no extra charge. And if you think you're gonna

44:38

get that from one of those mattress in a

44:40

box companies, your your dreaming. Also, just a side note, I

44:42

love the people behind Saffa, shout

44:44

out to all the folks and crafting your

44:46

mattresses to order in Queen's

44:48

New York. In Austin,

44:50

hello. So treat yourself to a

44:52

mattress worthy of your

44:54

rest and get a good deal. Thanks to

44:56

allergies. Right now, Save two hundred

44:58

dollars when you purchase a thousand dollar or more

45:00

at satva dot com

45:02

slash allergies. That's s

45:04

double ATVA

45:06

dot com slash allergies. Thank you, Sofia. You

45:08

truly make me sleep easy.

45:10

Okay. Let's get back to explaining the

45:12

imaging

45:13

advancements and help us

45:16

understand the dream

45:17

world. But the nineteen

45:20

nineties changed everything because of neuro imaging.

45:23

And these neuroimaging studies showed for

45:25

the first time the parts of the brain that

45:27

were active during

45:30

dreaming. And It wasn't

45:32

really expected that

45:34

parts of the brain would not be active.

45:36

For example, there was one very famous

45:38

theory that said dreams were

45:41

just a reaction to these random

45:43

electrical charges called spikes that came

45:45

from the brainstem and

45:48

electrical charges ended up in

45:50

the visual cortex. Mhmm. And

45:52

then the visual cortex saw them,

45:54

saw these spikes said, What the hell

45:57

does that mean? And so he tried to make sense out

45:59

of 2. That was his theory of dream

46:01

called activation

46:03

synthesis. Well, now we know that part of the brain isn't even

46:06

active. The whole theory was

46:08

turned out

46:08

to be wrong anyhow, but the point is

46:11

that kind of neuroimaging studies just said

46:14

goodbye to that

46:14

theory, which happens a lot of

46:17

times in science, new technologies come along

46:19

and things are solved. Professor Domhoff recounts the

46:21

work of Domhoff Ralph Ritten,

46:23

who, along with

46:26

Ward Halsted, used

46:28

neural imaging in the nineteen nineties on

46:30

people with brain injuries to develop what

46:32

is known as the Halsted

46:34

Riton

46:35

neuropsychological battery. Which is just another

46:38

word for a lot of

46:38

tests. He had a questionnaire. And the questionnaire said, has

46:42

your injury

46:44

influenced your dreaming. That's all it said. Mhmm.

46:46

And if they said yes and said, how's it

46:48

how's it influenced? And then he

46:51

would interview him. And some of them say, well, I

46:53

don't see the pictures anymore. And some would say, I don't I don't dream

46:56

anymore. He then matched that up

46:58

with the kind of x rays we had

47:00

at that

47:02

time. And he was able to show there are certain places that

47:04

if you have a a lesion in the brain, you will

47:06

lose dreaming. Mhmm. And there's two different

47:08

places like that. And Other

47:11

places and this relates back to mental imagery,

47:14

if you have injuries in

47:16

these secondary

47:18

visual cortices, You won't

47:20

see in dreams. You lose your

47:22

mental

47:22

imagery. Come

47:23

last it. Now

47:24

that becomes exciting because

47:27

we're

47:27

saying, wow, That's a connection then with and and you also don't

47:30

see images. You don't have good mental imagery

47:32

and waking either, and that was done in a lab

47:34

study by

47:35

same great cognitive psychologist, David

47:38

Faukes, who did the

47:40

developmental studies. And then around

47:42

the turn of

47:44

this century, a huge development occurred, and it wasn't

47:46

just having your thong underwear show over

47:48

your low rise jeans. In two

47:50

thousand

47:51

two thousand one, the world changed

47:53

I think in terms of understanding the human mind.

47:56

And that is the

47:58

neuroimaging studies

48:00

Accidentally in a way discovered the imagination network,

48:03

which is was called

48:05

the default network. So

48:07

you've got the person all hooked up. They're a

48:10

participant. They're all ready to go into the

48:12

neural imaging machine. You say, okay. We're just

48:14

fine tuning things. Just relax. Then

48:16

they notice what's the record

48:18

look like when we just

48:20

told him to relax? And

48:22

it it looked the same in everybody, and it was,

48:24

you know, different from what you

48:26

usually see. First, there's

48:28

a task network. That's where we're getting

48:30

you all hooked up so you can see whether you

48:32

see a yellow lemon or a green pig

48:34

or whatever it may be. You have

48:36

to pick this brown thing out of seven different colors. We're

48:39

on we're on our executive

48:41

network is really common in

48:43

doing visual imaging. We're

48:46

always really focused. But when we're

48:48

relaxed, we go into a different

48:50

network. And so they call, well, that's

48:52

the default network, the non

48:54

task network. Well, it's a

48:56

crummy name -- Yeah. -- because it it

48:58

trivializes that. It's the

49:00

it's the inner

49:00

you. It's the imagination. It's

49:03

the semantic memory bank. It's the self

49:05

network. It's the imagination network. What these neuro

49:07

imaging studies

49:07

found on patients whose dreams had

49:10

changed was,

49:12

If you get a lesion in your primary visual cortex, it doesn't affect

49:14

your dreaming, nor in anywhere in your

49:16

executive network. It doesn't affect your

49:19

dreaming at all. And

49:21

so when I realized that both the

49:24

neuroimaging and the

49:26

lesion network showed

49:28

the same parts of the brain were necessary for dreaming. So there

49:31

goes. You got dreams coming

49:34

from

49:35

the same network. It creates imagination. How

49:37

exciting is this? So the part of the brain

49:40

making all this

49:42

magic happen dreams

49:44

and imagination. It's called the

49:46

default network. And Bill describes

49:48

it in the twenty fifteen paper,

49:50

dreaming and the default network. review

49:52

synthesis and counterintuitive research

49:54

proposal. And the default

49:56

network doesn't sound like a lot's going on. It

49:58

sounds like your printer

50:00

on standby but do not let

50:02

the name fool you.

50:04

So so many patrons asked

50:06

something along the lines of

50:08

creativity and absurdity

50:10

in dreams Where is this coming

50:12

from? I'm looking at you. Kayla Crowell,

50:14

MOFO, Sean Thomas, Kaye, Marysee,

50:16

Meg Ahern, Heather Deveen, Borkinberg, Emily Stauffer,

50:18

Alie first time Quest Oscars, Samantha Jackson, Joanna

50:20

Landau, Katie Pikes, Kylie Chapman,

50:22

Eliza Miller, Archie DeDElli, Kelsey

50:24

Kotabeck, Heidi m, Shelby, and

50:26

Alie Stewart, and Maxine

50:27

Lewis, who in their words wants to know

50:30

why their mind invented a

50:32

scenario of trying to put wheels on a

50:34

kangaroo using pipe cleaners

50:36

and empty thread

50:38

rolls. I have a question with that default network. Is that why we

50:40

are working, working, working, we're sitting in

50:42

a laptop, we're trying to come up with something, and then we

50:44

say, fuck 2. I'm gonna go for a walk. I'm gonna

50:46

go take a shower. And then

50:49

we have,

50:49

like, our best idea ever. Is that the switch to the default

50:51

network that's 2. No. But that's your

50:54

example is perfect. You got one of the

50:58

people who Studies this thing, studies creativity --

50:59

Mhmm. -- and studies insights.

51:02

We get insight and he uses a shower in

51:04

the in the life where I heard him, is

51:08

you're in a shower. Your executive network

51:10

is attentive, but it doesn't

51:12

have to be fully attentive. Mhmm. And

51:15

your attention network is saying, I could fall

51:18

down. This water could get too

51:19

2, but it's

51:20

cool. I mean, it's it's just relaxed. Yeah.

51:22

And all

51:23

of a sudden, he was thinking, God

51:25

damn. That's where that paragraph goes. Speaking

51:27

for me. Wow. How

51:30

about this for a

51:31

paper? People are studying

51:34

It's a back and forth between the imagination network

51:36

and this executive network. When

51:38

they get really good at it, I think,

51:41

you know, and really refined, and

51:43

it's hard work that they're doing getting the

51:46

image, but then doing all the counting

51:48

of all little pixels. I mean, you

51:50

know, this is

51:52

detailed

51:52

work. But they're going to see this back and forth, but they're going to see

51:54

you're mostly this Networks

51:56

up. Howard Bauchner: So neuroscientists

51:59

are looking in painstaking detail

52:01

at what areas of your brain

52:03

light up, which probably makes their own brains light up

52:05

as they do it. But Professor

52:08

Domhoff delivered a great

52:09

metaphor. I

52:10

think of the human brain, including

52:13

the sleeping as

52:15

a symphony orchestra. And we think of the symphony orchestra

52:17

with all the different kinds of musical

52:20

instruments out there that all

52:22

have different

52:24

roles. And we have a conductor. And the

52:26

conductor is doing certain

52:29

things and telling this group

52:31

to sing, 2 know, go

52:33

down, this group to go up, and this

52:35

comes strong. And so you listen to 2, and

52:37

all of a sudden, there's just barely no

52:40

virtually no sound Other time, boom boom boom boom,

52:43

but it's in harmony. And it's

52:45

coming it's moving around in

52:47

such a way that it's

52:49

that it's very smooth. And

52:51

always think of that

52:54

because of a number

52:56

of reasons from the past in research,

52:58

you know, the harmonious mind,

53:00

but also in some detailed work that a great sleep researcher

53:02

did, where she looked at our brainstem

53:04

falling asleep. When we fall asleep, it's

53:06

not just like a bronpter

53:08

boom boom. It's a just this

53:10

it is kind of a this dance almost

53:12

or this harmonious toning

53:14

down and going silent. When

53:17

we go to sleep, we have a whole stage called

53:19

the sleep onset stage. And so when we

53:21

close our eyes, then

53:24

certain networks go down. At the same time,

53:26

there's neurochemical things that are

53:28

happening that I liken to that

53:32

the conductor has looked at

53:34

the clock, and it isn't clocked. It's in

53:36

us. The orchestra has looked up

53:38

on the wall and seen

53:40

or subjectively thought, yes,

53:42

it's about over. And

53:44

so the conductor starts to tamp

53:48

everything down. And as the

53:50

conductor sort of turns

53:53

away, then say the horns go

53:55

down and we're just left with just you

53:57

know, the softest part of it. happens is then

53:59

the executive network starts

54:02

to

54:03

fall away the attention networks go down a little bit. And there are

54:06

studies of this, of how they kind of

54:08

disconnect from each other.

54:10

And different brain waves

54:12

come up. So we're

54:14

usually in a very

54:16

fast brain wave state, let's

54:18

call it beta. But as we drift

54:20

into sleep, more

54:22

alpha and then theta, say it is a

54:24

little less than alpha, they start

54:26

to 2 come into the picture

54:28

and they move from the back of

54:30

the brain to the front of

54:32

the brain. So there's this gradual transition and then this

54:34

one researcher on sleep on

54:36

Saturday Alie a

54:38

great phrase where he calls the default network

54:40

the gateway to sleep. Oh.

54:42

2 just the gateway to sleep. And we

54:44

do if we awaken

54:47

you, In sleep onset, you're having little mini dreams.

54:50

Oh, for sure. And that's so great

54:52

when you start to realize that and you're like,

54:54

oh, I'm

54:56

falling asleep. And my mom has this trick she taught me

54:58

where if you need to fall asleep, but your

55:00

brain is thinking about what you gotta do

55:02

and stress out the

55:04

way to help her fall

55:06

asleep. She comes up with a

55:08

category. Like, let's say it's cars

55:10

or fruit or boys

55:12

names or whatever. And she'll go, okay,

55:15

apple, a, b, banana, c,

55:17

cherry. And she'll go to the

55:19

alphabet, and her name's Nancy. We call it

55:21

a fancy Nancy. That's

55:22

great because it's put you into that more

55:24

imaginative mode -- Yes. --

55:26

and back and forth and

55:29

vigilance is going down. Tension

55:31

networks are now saying, oh, she's messing around. We don't need to watch

55:33

anymore. Yeah. 2 you shift into

55:35

that. And as you

55:37

go to

55:38

sleep, Alie you waken

55:42

people in the first hour,

55:44

sometimes you get a dream from them.

55:46

But literally,

55:47

when we're a couple hours into sleep, nine and

55:49

a half to two hours Alie sleep,

55:51

this network that's got a front and 2

55:53

to it, those parts break apart.

55:55

See, so back in the back and the front of the brain,

55:58

there are these important

56:00

parts, and then

56:02

they're connected. Through these

56:04

highways back and forth. But when those

56:06

highways break apart,

56:08

then they're isolated. And then

56:10

you can't dream anymore. Oh,

56:13

But that's also the way consciousness

56:15

works. Mhmm. Consciousness

56:18

is a property of a very big network.

56:20

Dreaming is a property of

56:24

portions of the default

56:28

network plus the

56:30

secondary visual

56:32

and sensory motor cortices.

56:34

That's why we can see

56:38

and hear and smell and taste and

56:40

run and feel exhausted --

56:42

Mhmm. -- after tracing back

56:44

and forth.

56:46

You know, I

56:48

draped back and forth in a

56:50

convention hall, trying to,

56:52

you know, trying to get out of it just

56:54

a week ago, you know, trade

56:56

at some meeting. And trying to

56:58

figure out which entrance. There's people going

57:00

everywhere and and I go back up

57:02

the steps. When I woke up,

57:04

I go, I was exhausted. You know,

57:06

a whole set. So, and of

57:09

course, that's the charm of dreams.

57:11

Does that term wear off ever or

57:13

does it wear on?

57:16

So patrons, Erin Sorenson, Diane Doty, Kristy

57:18

La Force, our JIP seventeen, Case

57:20

Panics, Julie Dupree, 2, Filan,

57:24

Debbie Pottts, and Alie Skapura all had questions about

57:26

dreaming at different ages.

57:28

And Emily Stauffer, Jess Swann, and Julie

57:30

Noble asked, Alie babies

57:32

dream? When do dreams start?

57:34

One great psychologist,

57:35

a cognitive psychologist, did

57:38

longitudinal studies in

57:40

a lab of children

57:42

from three to fifteen. And their

57:44

results were really exciting because

57:46

they show that dreaming only

57:50

develops gradually. And it relates, we now know, to the

57:52

maturation of the default network,

57:54

as well as

57:56

the cognitive development of

58:00

imagination, ability to tell a story which we

58:02

call narrative 2 generate

58:04

mental imagery

58:05

to have an autobiographical self. All of

58:08

those things are gradual

58:10

cognitive

58:11

achievements. You can do things at five that you couldn't do at four

58:14

and you can do things at six, you couldn't do

58:16

at five, and so on.

58:18

Only humans have a

58:20

default network

58:21

and it is only functional by

58:24

age five to seven and not

58:26

fully mature till nine

58:29

to eleven. What about when you see

58:30

your dog

58:31

going? And moving

58:33

his little feet? Because

58:34

his brain is is activated, A

58:37

lot of us

58:37

wanted to know about critters in

58:40

Dreamland, including specs Alie, Jesse

58:42

Hurlberg, Alie Myers, Corey, Bridget

58:44

b, Sydney Tops, Sushi, Laurie

58:46

Fishman. First time Oscars, Jules

58:48

Crawford, Citigroup, and Alison L,

58:50

and Kate Timbs, who asked, I've heard a

58:52

lot of people saying that animals

58:54

don't dream Maybe their brains

58:56

just do it

58:56

differently. What do you think? When my

58:58

tiny little poodle I'm

59:01

going, oh,

59:01

the security suit in

59:04

the world. I know it. I never usually talk about

59:06

animals and dreaming -- Yeah. -- because that

59:08

gets people. So No. I'm

59:10

just curious. Well,

59:12

I I think that his brain is activated. He's whooping. Yeah.

59:15

And he's paused or moving. I you

59:17

we've all seen

59:17

it. But that doesn't mean

59:20

they're dreaming.

59:21

It doesn't follow

59:22

from that. Hey, there. You're

59:24

the expert. Well, thank you. And

59:28

when your goblin is more more

59:30

barking and making flipper

59:32

pause. That is called

59:34

heaven and the best, but also

59:36

my clonos. Which is a

59:38

type of muscle jerking. And

59:40

that plus little fluttering

59:42

eyelids and eyes are associated

59:45

with REM sleep. Which accounts for about twelve percent of a dog's

59:47

life. And if you're thinking, oh, okay, that's only about half

59:50

as much as a human's twenty five

59:52

percent of RAM sleep.

59:54

Right? No. No.

59:56

That's twelve percent of the

59:58

dog's life.

1:00:00

They're not their Alie. They're life.

1:00:02

They're only awake forty four percent of

1:00:04

the time according to a nineteen seventy

1:00:06

seven study on dog sleeping.

1:00:09

They're living the life and

1:00:11

they're sleeping through it. But are

1:00:13

they dreaming? This is where science gets divided. So even though

1:00:15

some researchers found that

1:00:18

lab rats learning

1:00:20

a maze had the same very specific

1:00:23

brain activity during sleep leading

1:00:25

to the assumption 2, the

1:00:27

rats were dreaming about the maze.

1:00:29

Other scientists say that if you cannot take

1:00:31

a report, you don't know who's

1:00:34

dreaming. If only there are a

1:00:36

book about animals when they dream. I will actually

1:00:38

philosopher David Peñu Guzman

1:00:40

published the book when animals dream

1:00:42

a few months back. So there

1:00:44

you go. And in it, there

1:00:46

are accounts of cephalopods changing colors during

1:00:48

sleep states and fish who

1:00:50

have brain activity during sleep

1:00:54

that looks the same as when they're singing songs

1:00:56

underwater, which that

1:00:58

made me learn that zebrafish sing, I

1:01:00

guess, and they're not just performers.

1:01:04

I went down a rabbit hole and it turns out

1:01:06

zebrafish are connoisseurs as well.

1:01:08

According to the twenty eighteen paper,

1:01:11

the effects of auditory enrichment on

1:01:14

zebrafish behavior and physiology.

1:01:16

Researchers exposed a bunch of

1:01:18

adult zebrafish to two hours of

1:01:20

vivaldi music. Twice a day

1:01:22

for fifteen days. And overall,

1:01:24

apparently, zebrafish exposed

1:01:26

to such auditory stimuli were less

1:01:28

anxious and they had lower levels

1:01:31

of inflammatory cytokines and

1:01:34

cortisol. So if a fish

1:01:36

can benefit from relaxing,

1:01:38

please trust that

1:01:40

you deserve peace and self care as well. If you're like, in my

1:01:42

dreams, let's discuss that.

1:01:44

So lucid dreaming is when you

1:01:46

know your

1:01:48

dreaming. And you can get some kind of control over the situations and

1:01:50

the characters. Kinda like the Star

1:01:52

Trek holiday, but free and

1:01:54

it's in your own brain.

1:01:56

In tons of you, such as Susan, Elle,

1:01:58

Tatum, Michelle Lee, Brenna Lynch, Aaronhem, Mia, MTB,

1:02:01

Kaylee Evans, Toby 2,

1:02:04

Shea Walker and Joanne e wanted to know is lucid dreaming legit

1:02:06

and who can do it?

1:02:09

What is lucid dreaming

1:02:11

that a part of the Is it even a real thing? Or is

1:02:13

it just a kind of a euphemism for

1:02:15

just daydreaming? You're

1:02:18

wincing. You're

1:02:19

wincing like it just poured I

1:02:21

haven't seen you from here on that

1:02:24

statement.

1:02:25

Lucid dreams are a

1:02:28

very rare maybe

1:02:30

real thing that

1:02:32

had been hyped out of sight,

1:02:35

warped everything, hustled beyond belief.

1:02:38

It's

1:02:38

painful topic for me. You're

1:02:41

right. Yeah. I thought she could ask

1:02:43

me, 2 lose it to me.

1:02:46

Because I

1:02:47

have foot in two worlds. I I

1:02:49

certainly get along with all at least most

1:02:51

of the dream researchers and and whatever

1:02:53

they're

1:02:53

doing. And

1:02:56

I'm curious, But I have my foot

1:02:57

really strongly in the scientific

1:03:00

world. If I say there's no reason to

1:03:02

believe Alie, we don't

1:03:04

believe

1:03:04

it. So

1:03:06

most of the studies

1:03:08

of lucid dreaming are

1:03:11

quite bad.

1:03:13

Bummer. The first serious studies. I can tell

1:03:15

you. We're done by a

1:03:18

person who'll go

1:03:19

nameless. All people will go

1:03:21

nameless. Okay. And In

1:03:23

this particular dissertation,

1:03:26

done at a depressed digit university,

1:03:28

where you could at that

1:03:31

time and seventies. They could create their

1:03:33

own program, and he had created his

1:03:35

own program. He wasn't in a department.

1:03:37

He wasn't trained in psych

1:03:39

or anything else. At any rate, he was both

1:03:41

the participant and the experimenter.

1:03:44

So fourteen of the seventeen

1:03:46

instances of lucid dreaming were

1:03:48

low and

1:03:50

behold, the experimenters, it was also the subject.

1:03:52

And then he writes a popular book

1:03:54

on it and so on. So

1:03:57

this is what is mostly going on in an

1:04:00

article about it.

1:04:01

Later, he got into the dreams, turned

1:04:03

out after he had been

1:04:06

a hippie kind of person for a while and always

1:04:08

hints at, you know,

1:04:08

maybe he had used drugs and

1:04:11

so on. Another

1:04:13

guy was hilarious. He

1:04:15

had insomnia. So he

1:04:18

would go to bed and wake up,

1:04:20

get up, have coffee, which it

1:04:22

blew my mind. And he finally go

1:04:24

to sleep five, six AM,

1:04:26

and he'd have lucid

1:04:28

dreams. This woman has had

1:04:30

scary dreams as a young kid.

1:04:31

Five to

1:04:32

seven 2 feared witches. Now,

1:04:35

what that creates is

1:04:37

a state where you're afraid of

1:04:39

You're scared to go to sleep. You don't want to go to sleep. And there are that kind 2

1:04:41

thing can happen to people. So

1:04:44

2 person is likely very vigilant

1:04:48

during sleep. So once this dissertation

1:04:50

based on the person's

1:04:52

own dreams was published, then

1:04:55

other people tried to do studies

1:04:58

using EEG and other

1:05:00

participants. And they would

1:05:02

find that there was more of

1:05:04

EEG state this alpha state, I mentioned, it's different from our

1:05:06

usual waking state, but it's not like

1:05:08

what Dream Sleep looks like

1:05:10

Alie other forms of

1:05:11

sleep. So

1:05:14

they were

1:05:15

they were very iffy. So that was in the

1:05:17

groovy nineteen seventies, but let's skip

1:05:19

to the lit twenty

1:05:22

tens. When neuroimaging was more widely available, and

1:05:24

now this legend of lucid dreaming

1:05:26

could be

1:05:27

observed. And the researcher

1:05:30

had trained number of

1:05:32

participants to have Luca

1:05:34

dreams. She used out of these thirty

1:05:36

some people. There were five or six

1:05:38

that said, that they

1:05:40

were having,

1:05:40

I think it was three or more

1:05:42

lucid dreams

1:05:43

a week at home. So

1:05:46

she gets them in the lab 2 maybe

1:05:48

two. You have one or two instances.

1:05:50

2 just very few. But the

1:05:53

interesting thing

1:05:55

is that there's a lot

1:05:57

more activity

1:05:58

in the executive network.

1:06:00

A lot more activity.

1:06:03

Then comes Finally, a

1:06:06

neuroimaging study by a guy that

1:06:08

was really into lucid

1:06:09

dreaming. And

1:06:13

he

1:06:13

gets I think it was four guys from in

1:06:16

their mid twenties and early

1:06:18

thirties who'd been really working at it

1:06:20

on lucid dreaming for a

1:06:21

long, long time. They were

1:06:24

prolific lucid

1:06:25

dreamers. And he's got fifteen

1:06:27

nights of imaging on

1:06:30

these guys. He gets two

1:06:32

instances, one from each of two

1:06:34

guys. Wait

1:06:34

a minute. That's not that's not that's

1:06:37

not

1:06:37

that's not a lot. Same thing.

1:06:39

He has got some of these areas

1:06:42

that

1:06:42

are active during waking and very

1:06:45

important for consciousness. Believed,

1:06:48

then we get to another interesting

1:06:50

point. In the literature

1:06:54

now, people have tried to study consciousness

1:06:56

that are really good. The

1:06:58

thing is that there are parts

1:07:00

of it's called the frontal

1:07:03

poll or the rosrelateral prefrontal cortex,

1:07:06

this particular area in the

1:07:08

brain, has

1:07:10

been studied

1:07:12

And it's really a key part of the executive

1:07:14

network, but it has two

1:07:17

parts. One that is

1:07:20

sort of

1:07:20

more active towards the external world

1:07:22

and one that monitors our

1:07:25

internal world. And so,

1:07:27

I just wrote a paper

1:07:28

that's gonna be published in

1:07:30

March in which I

1:07:33

Humble Dream researcher. Have

1:07:36

a nerve to write

1:07:38

about dreaming and consciousness in

1:07:41

which I say dreaming

1:07:46

happens in a certain area

1:07:48

in the hierarchical network

1:07:50

that leads to consciousness. And

1:07:53

what differs is in lucid dreaming, I put forth

1:07:55

the hypothesis that in

1:07:58

lucid dreaming,

1:08:00

the internally oriented part of the executive network

1:08:03

has been reactivated

1:08:06

because If

1:08:08

our brain is constantly fluctuating in its activation levels -- Mhmm.

1:08:11

-- which I I believe it

1:08:12

is. Our our networks right

1:08:16

now are changing a million times.

1:08:17

Yeah. If I suddenly, you know, notice a sound or if I notice out the

1:08:20

window, I noticed my

1:08:22

goodness, it stopped raining. It's

1:08:24

sunny. Alie of

1:08:27

those that changes our brain

1:08:29

all the

1:08:30

time. And so coming out

1:08:32

of sleep like that,

1:08:35

momentarily, we could have

1:08:38

that particular network. And

1:08:40

when it comes to lucid

1:08:43

dreaming, it's pretty rare. But some

1:08:45

research, like the twenty eighteen paper titled, frequent lucid

1:08:47

dreaming associated with increased functional connectivity

1:08:50

between frontal polar cortex and

1:08:54

temporo parietal association areas found that though we don't understand

1:09:00

the neurobiological basis of lucid dreaming evidence shows

1:09:03

that there's involvement of these areas called

1:09:06

the anterior prefrontal cortex

1:09:09

and the parietal cortex and

1:09:11

people who were able to

1:09:13

lucid dream frequently had significantly

1:09:15

higher resting state functional

1:09:17

connectivity between these areas. Mambo jumbo. You're screaming at your windshield. You're like, I don't know

1:09:19

what you're talking about. How

1:09:22

do I make out with

1:09:25

the weird, horny, green, m and m in my dreams. That's all I care about. And I

1:09:27

understand you. So I

1:09:31

scoured the Internet. To give

1:09:33

you these unproven tips. But some people say, good sleep hygiene,

1:09:35

a comfortable room, and

1:09:38

sleeping setup, including temperature,

1:09:42

Remember, go cold. Don't

1:09:44

get too

1:09:44

hot out of there. Start

1:09:47

dream journaling. During waking hours, check-in

1:09:49

with yourself to make sure you're in reality. Like, look at your

1:09:51

hands, poke stuff, to make sure it's real so that

1:09:53

you do it in your dream and

1:09:55

say, holy shit. Alie

1:09:58

is a dream. Also, before you

1:10:00

go to sleep, set an intention and

1:10:02

think to yourself tonight, what I

1:10:05

dream? I'm gonna remember I'm dreaming. I'm gonna do it. And you

1:10:07

can also try sleeping five or six hours

1:10:10

Alie then getting up

1:10:13

and reading or doing something active and then going back to bed

1:10:15

for an hour and see if you get that sweet sweet between worlds lucid dreaming

1:10:18

reward. So I hope that

1:10:20

helps. Tony

1:10:22

Vessel Specsl, Art by Dee, and Liam Morris.

1:10:25

But don't get too desperate for it.

1:10:27

You're better off just dreaming normally

1:10:29

and then playing a video

1:10:31

game when you're

1:10:32

awake. Or something.

1:10:33

Now we

1:10:33

get dead. What's the heavy part? Mhmm. And we we we will say you got

1:10:35

a sensor to settle. What

1:10:38

I

1:10:39

am uncomfortable with is People

1:10:42

go

1:10:43

around and say,

1:10:44

I can they

1:10:45

teach you to lucid dream. I

1:10:47

can give

1:10:48

you techniques to lucid dream. I

1:10:50

can there's technologies that can help you lucid

1:10:53

dream. And I used

1:10:54

to have

1:10:55

a flyer that I

1:10:58

passed around

1:10:59

in my class from a guy a

1:11:01

guy, it was a doctor, I guess, down just the little town below set of crew.

1:11:03

You know, he had a machine and

1:11:06

he's standing there looking. And

1:11:08

he Hiddie

1:11:10

said he could, you know, come down and he'd have you lose a dream with his machine. this

1:11:12

gets into hustles.

1:11:15

This gets into 2

1:11:19

griffed even. I don't know. And so it

1:11:21

gets uncomfortable for me. But what

1:11:24

the problem is,

1:11:26

what's difficult to say

1:11:28

is Look, if

1:11:31

lucid dreaming is atypical

1:11:35

and there's A study out

1:11:38

there that says none of the

1:11:40

technologies and methodologies have improved lucid dreaming

1:11:42

for those who do not lucid dream

1:11:45

May I dare ask the question of, can we

1:11:47

possibly study the life history of those

1:11:51

people? I mean, It's

1:11:54

too much pressure for people. People keep thinking, oh, I can lose a dream if I work

1:11:55

hard enough and that's just not true. Yeah. And you can

1:11:58

fly if you work hard enough

1:12:00

and you

1:12:03

know, all the things we're told to try harder. You

1:12:05

can do it. If you

1:12:07

try, there was a

1:12:10

great book on psychotherapy

1:12:12

that talked about that we

1:12:14

end up, if we're not careful, and we do this in our society tremendously.

1:12:16

It was a great

1:12:18

book by this title called

1:12:21

blame the victim, blaming

1:12:23

the victim. And so

1:12:25

if you didn't prosper in

1:12:28

my psychotherapy, What

1:12:30

the hell's wrong with you? I mean, I mean, it's not my fault. You didn't drive our you

1:12:36

the instructions. You know, I

1:12:38

mean, if things get turned around, kid comes to school. They are not nourished. There's no in

1:12:40

their house because their

1:12:43

family's been unfairly treated. Alie then

1:12:47

you'd 2 to the kid, you're not

1:12:49

concentrating. Oh. You're not trying hard

1:12:51

enough. Yeah.

1:12:52

Why don't

1:12:53

you develop your vocabulary? I mean,

1:12:55

I mean, so you're already blaming the victim. Mhmm. You know,

1:12:58

and here we're talking

1:12:59

about social class and

1:13:01

race and gender

1:13:04

and etcetera. But we blame the

1:13:06

victims. Yeah. But it doesn't matter with you. I mean, because you can't lose a dream.

1:13:11

I mean, So that happens in

1:13:14

all of this kind of stuff. Well, that was gonna be my very last question. My my

1:13:17

just had

1:13:20

to ask because I've

1:13:22

got you here. What would you do if you found out physicists, caltech,

1:13:24

put out a

1:13:27

paper next week saying, Holy

1:13:30

Alie. We figured out multiverses are

1:13:33

real. There are parallel

1:13:36

universes. Time travel is

1:13:38

Possible, we figured out that dreams

1:13:40

are actually a parallel

1:13:42

universe.

1:13:43

What would you do? I

1:13:45

if I trusted the physicists, I believe it. I'm changing my mind in the

1:13:47

floor. I did give a lecture that it

1:13:50

actually got listened to

1:13:52

on 2 had

1:13:54

I wanna plug it thirty nine thousand

1:13:56

views. That's a big time for an accident.

1:13:58

I've been recently a dream researcher called

1:14:02

the awesome lawfulness of your nightly dreams. Mhmm. And I was in dead

1:14:04

serious mood. But at

1:14:06

a rate, the interesting thing

1:14:11

that I ended with that's similar to what you said 2 I

1:14:14

said, we actually lead two

1:14:16

lives. We lead

1:14:18

a life that's waking We

1:14:21

lead another life that's dreaming. And I

1:14:24

said, they

1:14:28

differ because In the waking

1:14:30

life, we pick up right where we left off.

1:14:33

But in my

1:14:36

dreaming life,

1:14:36

It starts

1:14:38

over each time. We have a

1:14:39

different dream life

1:14:43

each night, but if

1:14:47

I have lots of dreams from

1:14:48

you, and

1:14:49

I have actually four thousand

1:14:52

from Izzy, the young woman,

1:14:54

driver dreams from twelve to twenty

1:14:56

five, you see that her

1:14:58

life is has all these

1:14:59

episodes. She's, you know, see one

1:15:02

of these crushes or she's at

1:15:04

a horror

1:15:07

movie or she and her brother

1:15:09

arguing in some way, and it's

1:15:11

can be in a sense certain

1:15:14

sense very thematic. We have the dreams

1:15:16

Dorothea, she named herself. We often would

1:15:18

let people give their own pseudonyms, but they

1:15:20

got out of hand.

1:15:23

And I thought my not

1:15:26

goofy stuff up there. So

1:15:28

at any rate, but Dorothy it

1:15:31

was something very educated woman. More

1:15:33

than probably the eighteen nineties. But we had six or seven hundred

1:15:35

of her dreams. I

1:15:38

figured what it

1:15:40

is. But in seventy

1:15:42

two percent of those dreams, there's one of seven things happening.

1:15:47

This is poignant. In

1:15:50

in her. Twenty percent of

1:15:52

her dreams, she's either

1:15:53

buying preparing

1:15:54

a meal or eating a meal.

1:15:57

You know, something doing

1:15:58

doing with meal. So that was her biggest theme. There

1:16:00

was also

1:16:01

I'll get to the point in

1:16:03

part in a minute.

1:16:05

Which

1:16:06

is her last dream that she mailed

1:16:08

us before the the home in

1:16:10

Hawaii wrote and said she was dead.

1:16:13

She also would often dream

1:16:15

of missing the bus or the train, but she also had

1:16:19

dreams about five ten

1:16:21

percent if you get just wedged. She's trying to go to the bathroom and there's people,

1:16:23

people in the 2. And it's

1:16:26

Alie, you know, a

1:16:28

problem.

1:16:30

Hey, who hasn't been there? Right? Renee

1:16:32

Q and Ariel Fansat have and you're

1:16:35

probably just sleeping with a

1:16:37

full

1:16:37

bladder. And by you, I mean

1:16:39

we. Anyway, less toilet, more poignant. So towards the end of her life, she

1:16:41

retired to Hawaii in

1:16:43

in a rest 2 she'd

1:16:47

lived in a real nice place. She swam every day.

1:16:49

She seemed to be in

1:16:51

in fitting health. She

1:16:53

would mail periodically Alie dreams 2,

1:16:56

in this case, my mentor Calvin

1:16:58

Hall. And then

1:16:58

I, you know, inherited all the files

1:17:01

and put them on Dreambank. The

1:17:03

last dream before

1:17:04

she died, which if you didn't know her

1:17:06

that she twenty percent of

1:17:09

her dreams are about, Food, you'd

1:17:10

say, oh my God, it's a premonition of

1:17:13

her death.

1:17:13

But in her last dream. She's

1:17:16

sitting around

1:17:18

the table and with her siblings, she had several

1:17:20

siblings. And she used a

1:17:22

phrase, a very proper phrase.

1:17:25

She said, mother

1:17:28

had dished too liberally, too, you know, my

1:17:30

brothers and sisters, and there was nothing really

1:17:32

left for me to

1:17:34

eat. And then I saw

1:17:37

a hand bone sitting at the end of the table or sitting on the floor. That was

1:17:39

a dream. So

1:17:45

Now, you say, my God. You know? Premmunition, I

1:17:47

mean, death. I mean, just only a

1:17:50

bone she's

1:17:51

not getting to 2

1:17:54

no, this is always happening to

1:17:56

her

1:17:56

-- Oh. -- in her dreams with

1:17:58

these siblings and not get you

1:18:01

know, there's always this sort of I

1:18:03

get kind

1:18:03

of hind tip of all of this. Yeah.

1:18:06

Yeah. I'm sort of the left out one

1:18:08

in the litter. Yeah. So

1:18:10

she has a separate

1:18:11

life. Mhmm. It's a second life. If there's any Rick and

1:18:13

Morty

1:18:13

fans out there, you might be haunted by

1:18:15

the episode night family

1:18:18

in which Rick uses a machine to have his nocturnal

1:18:20

self do the chores of his waking

1:18:22

self, including getting Alie a ripped set

1:18:25

of abs. But then the ultimate

1:18:27

conclusion that they come to is that

1:18:29

we, as waking people, are just the servants of

1:18:31

our sleeping selves, creepy, I

1:18:35

loved it. I think about it constantly. Well, the

1:18:37

last questions I always ask is

1:18:39

what is hard about your

1:18:41

work? What's the hardest thing

1:18:44

about dreams Well, there's a million things

1:18:46

that are difficult for dreams. Because scientists like to observe, you can't observe

1:18:48

dreams, you can't

1:18:51

make them happen. In other words, you can't

1:18:54

do experiments where you do this or that. They don't work. I mean, we try to drop water on people

1:18:59

with Premier here. You know, tape their eyes

1:19:01

open and flash them. You can and you tell them stuff during the day,

1:19:03

it doesn't it really works.

1:19:06

It's the mind doing its own

1:19:08

thing. I used

1:19:10

to call it the spin of

1:19:12

the cognitive Rolodex except nobody has a

1:19:14

Rolodex

1:19:14

anymore. I

1:19:15

remember what they are. It

1:19:17

was a desktop address book. You

1:19:19

can ask your grandma anyway. So being stirred

1:19:24

up but it's hard then because we can

1:19:26

experiment and we can observe and we're at the mercy of you telling

1:19:28

the dream. So we've done this elaborate study, we've

1:19:30

awakened you in the middle of the night,

1:19:34

2, would you report your dream? And you

1:19:36

say, I can't remember, which is maybe true,

1:19:38

but it it could not be

1:19:40

true. So you're at the

1:19:43

mercy of the participant. If you're like certainty,

1:19:45

any scientist wants to control all the variables. And if you can't

1:19:47

control the variables, you're gonna

1:19:50

say, that ain't my

1:19:52

field. So that's not

1:19:54

one of our problems. The other

1:19:56

problem is that because the work

1:19:58

on dreams did not lead to

1:20:00

as was early thought by some people in the

1:20:02

late fifties and early sixties might be a key to mental health.

1:20:05

There really was

1:20:08

that Alie. And some key cycle

1:20:10

analysts of that era who were MDs and very big deals, they helped some of the

1:20:12

early dream researchers

1:20:15

to get 2. So there

1:20:18

were grants for dreaming, but when dreaming turned out to be

1:20:20

not gonna be

1:20:23

useful in terms of medications

1:20:27

or studying psychosis or

1:20:29

so on, the money did

1:20:31

dry up. And I understand it,

1:20:33

and I appreciate it, and I

1:20:35

believe it, and In other words, I

1:20:38

I'm not out scolding anybody. Why aren't you studying dreams? There's Alzheimer's.

1:20:40

There's people's attention deficit

1:20:42

disorder, as you know. And

1:20:46

Alie of these these things of

1:20:48

waking command our attention

1:20:50

and there's PTSD. These

1:20:53

are things that command the tension of

1:20:55

federal government. As far as the foundations, they they course want to

1:20:57

make themselves look

1:21:00

good and So they find

1:21:02

topics that are relevant. It would make their name even more lustrous

1:21:04

than the millions

1:21:07

they made. And so Dreaming

1:21:10

does not fit into that category, but

1:21:12

the hardest thing of studying dreams

1:21:14

in the past was being

1:21:17

up all the time. I

1:21:19

mean, if you have a sleep dream lab, somebody's gonna Alie have

1:21:21

to wake up and wake up those

1:21:23

participants. Yeah. Right? So You

1:21:26

have to learn to be what it's like to be a 2, and

1:21:28

it ain't fun to be awakened at

1:21:31

one or two AM and

1:21:33

then jostled two hours later and so on.

1:21:35

Participants don't necessarily ask. I mean, that's enough

1:21:37

of that. That's

1:21:38

it. I'm out of here.

1:21:40

And if you just get them in

1:21:42

our first night, one dream in the

1:21:45

set of dreams. I studied. The guy dreamed that the

1:21:47

machine was electrocuteing you. Oh, yeah. It's me. Oh,

1:21:49

no. PEGI

1:21:52

mean, looking at

1:21:54

all these wires on it. It's

1:21:56

called electroencephalation. So he's the machine was zapping

1:21:58

him, you know. Then it has its little problems.

1:22:03

What about your favorite? Favorite thing about what

1:22:05

you do. You've been doing this for years

1:22:07

and years and years.

1:22:09

What's the

1:22:10

best? Some It's just I like to discover new

1:22:12

things. I didn't want to

1:22:14

just add to the details

1:22:17

on vision or learning I wanted to know

1:22:19

the royal road to the unconscious, the

1:22:21

meaning of Alie, why we are

1:22:24

crazy, why we

1:22:26

believe the things we believe. Why we have a fight with each other

1:22:28

so much? I mean, all those things

1:22:30

have been part of my research

1:22:33

life in one way or another. So I

1:22:36

was interested in using

1:22:38

the best methods, the

1:22:40

most serious

1:22:42

quantitative methods most objective methods to study the

1:22:45

toughest questions, just the

1:22:47

challenge of dreams. And

1:22:50

when you have a great mentor that done

1:22:52

so much and has

1:22:54

enthusiasm for it. And

1:22:58

I might say, we've replicated his work again and

1:23:00

his coding system has been used

1:23:02

all over the world carrying

1:23:05

that on. It

1:23:08

had some some meaning and he was

1:23:10

also a person that said, I think you're okay. We all need to have a mentor that says, you

1:23:12

know, you're right for this

1:23:14

field. When we go to college,

1:23:17

2 looking for something

1:23:19

that we like that likes us. Mhmm.

1:23:21

So if you

1:23:22

say, oh, I'm I love Oneirology.

1:23:25

you haven't

1:23:27

done so well in a statistics

1:23:29

or experimental site. And

1:23:32

then somebody has to

1:23:34

say, you know, Maybe you ought to go into some

1:23:36

more qualitative field. Mhmm. So they

1:23:38

like something that didn't like them.

1:23:41

It's like finding

1:23:43

any match. Right? So you find something

1:23:45

you really like where Alie likes

1:23:47

you. And so dream research was

1:23:49

that for me. You

1:23:52

asked me, What

1:23:54

keeps you going about all are

1:24:00

often negative. There's

1:24:01

some real fun in studying dreams and reading dreams. Patron

1:24:03

Scott Sheldon asked

1:24:06

thoughts on dream journals

1:24:09

And I think by now, we know

1:24:11

Professor Dom Hof is a fan, but would he read they sign up

1:24:14

and and fill up

1:24:16

your

1:24:17

dream coffers at the Dream Bank?

1:24:19

No. No. No. No. We we're very wary.

1:24:19

We use I mean,

1:24:22

the thing is I don't

1:24:26

You've heard of all the pranks that have been done

1:24:29

on researchers. The pilt

1:24:31

down man, fake bones,

1:24:33

and the British Museum

1:24:35

that fooled people So I I am

1:24:37

very very sensitive to that in terms of I know

1:24:39

people can make

1:24:43

up dreams. I know they can change them. You know, so I I

1:24:45

don't take any we don't collect any dreams over

1:24:47

the web. I'd never take a dream off

1:24:49

the web. Mhmm. These are people

1:24:51

that write me And then I

1:24:53

say, well, send me a photo copy, or when did you start writing them down? Or I

1:24:55

got a set of dreams that I got

1:24:57

a time stamp on them. Mhmm.

1:24:59

You know? So I

1:25:02

know that that person wrote those dreams down

1:25:04

in the

1:25:05

past. Just

1:25:05

write them down.

1:25:06

Don't look at them. Just write them

1:25:08

down every day for a month or to.

1:25:11

Mhmm.

1:25:11

And that gets you into it. If you stop

1:25:13

and you analyze and think and when then

1:25:15

you start to project

1:25:17

onto it, Just write them down. If

1:25:19

you can study your own dreams you want

1:25:21

to. Just write them down. Just keep them.

1:25:24

Just put them in the drawer. Don't even

1:25:26

look. Just keep them. But the more you do

1:25:27

it, you're more getting in the habit. Well, I'm gonna start writing my

1:25:29

down. I will. I'll let you know how it's

1:25:31

going too. You did start writing him

1:25:33

down? No. I'm gonna start.

1:25:35

Oh. I'm gonna start. This is

1:25:37

Voice them. I I'll I'll do voice to text on my phone. That way,

1:25:39

they're digitized. And I can later if

1:25:42

I need to analyze them, I

1:25:44

can.

1:25:45

The voice of text

1:25:47

works well. I've I've been

1:25:49

trying to tell dream researchers

1:25:51

for ten

1:25:52

years. Get

1:25:54

a voice to text. Well, this

1:25:56

is a call to the to the universe.

1:25:58

Get with it. Dream researchers. We got

1:26:01

a plan

1:26:01

here. Yeah,

1:26:02

we got a plan of how to get the brain

1:26:04

and and

1:26:04

we're gonna and I've got I

1:26:07

now know a person who can analyze

1:26:09

him. And if I do submit them

1:26:11

later to his research, Can I pick a cool name

1:26:13

like Jiminy Diamond or something? That'd be my student. And you can just

1:26:15

yeah. But don't go too

1:26:16

far. I won't do Jiminy

1:26:18

Diamond. I'll do, like, Lynette. Or

1:26:21

something. Something, Rhonda, something like that. Yeah. This has been an

1:26:23

absolute dream of mine. You've been

1:26:24

fulfilled. I have been wanting to

1:26:26

interview

1:26:26

you you

1:26:27

for years and this did

1:26:31

not disappoint. That was a good

1:26:31

time. It turns out. Thank you

1:26:33

so much

1:26:34

for doing this. My pleasure. You

1:26:37

bet. I hope it's I hope it's serious enough.

1:26:39

I mean, it's just I

1:26:41

hope

1:26:42

not. No. This is perfect.

1:26:45

So there you have it. Ask smart just

1:26:47

to anything. Bill and I had just such

1:26:50

a lovely time chatting. We talked for

1:26:52

over three

1:26:55

hours on rainy Tuesday in his office. I'm just

1:26:58

so glad I asked him if I

1:27:02

could ask him your questions. So his new book is called neurocognitive

1:27:04

theory of dreaming. It's linked in the show

1:27:06

notes. If you wanna know more, all

1:27:10

the details are in there. Alongside his research site, dreamresearch

1:27:12

dot net, I also have a

1:27:14

ton of links on my site

1:27:17

at alliboard dot com slashology slash on neurology, which is linked

1:27:19

in the show notes. We're at