On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Dr. Rahul Jandial: What Your Nightmares Are Trying to Tell You & How to Know Which Dreams You Need to Pay Attention to

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Do you often remember your dreams?   What was the last dream you can remember?   Today, let's welcome Dr. Rahul Jandial. Rahul is a dual-trained brain surgeon and neuroscientist based at City of Hope in Los Angeles. He leads the Jandial Lab, which explores the intersection of neurobiology and cancer. Beyond his research, Dr. Jandial is dedicated to global health, performing pediatric neurosurgery in charity hospitals across South America and Eastern Europe. He is also the author of the book "This Is Why You Dream," which delves into the science and significance of dreaming.   Jay and Rahul explore the significance of dreams and their impact on our lives, and that the brain is highly active during sleep, generating as much electricity as when awake. This activity suggests that dreaming is not a passive process but an essential function for the brain, helping it process and rehearse experiences, emotions, and creativity.   There are common themes in dreams, such as nightmares, erotic dreams, and motifs like falling or being chased. Rahul highlights that these themes are linked to the brain's imaginative and emotional networks, which are more active during dreaming. Nightmares, for instance, play a crucial role in developing a sense of self and other in children, while in adults, they can indicate unresolved emotional issues or trauma. He also discusses the concept of lucid dreaming, where one becomes aware of dreaming and can exert some control over the dream narrative.    In this interview, you'll learn: How to enhance dream recall How to induce lucid dreaming How to utilize dreams for creative problem solving How to reduce nightmare in children How to cultivate positive morning thoughts  How to improve sleep quality for better dreams   Embrace the power of your dreams to boost creativity and emotional well-being. Take the first step tonight for a healthier, more vibrant tomorrow!   With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty   What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 03:05 Does Everyone Dream? 05:01 Why Do We Dream? 09:01 Dreams in a Scientific Perspective 13:30 Making Sense of a Dream 19:05 Sleep Entry 23:20 Erotic Dreams 29:02 Dreams Should Not be Neglected 32:09 Are We Meaning Makers? 37:02 Recurrent Dreams 38:36 Unwanted Recurrent Dream 42:11 Thoughts, Emotions, and Activities in the Brain Level 48:48 How Do You Explain Nightmares? 54:01 Task On 56:52 Sleep Exit 01:01:39 Cross Section of AI and Dreams 01:04:08 Can Dreams Predict the Future? 01:08:02 Mental Workspace in Uncertainty 01:12:58 Flashbacks vs PTSD 01:17:33 Lucid Dreaming 01:23:33 Can You Practice Lucid Dreaming? 01:25:15 The Right Approach to Understanding Dreams 01:47 The Dreaming Brain 01:33:34 When to Take a Nap 01:35:29 The Feeling of Falling While Asleep 01:37:35 Rahul on Final Five   Episode Resources: Dr. Rahul Jandial | Instagram Dr. Rahul Jandial | Facebook This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better, bigger, brighter content for you and the world. Subscribe right now. The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose,

the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow. I'm so excited because we've really been tapping here at On Purpose into things you're fascinated about, questions that you're thinking about, topics you fascinated about, questions that you're thinking about, topics you're exploring, themes that you're wondering about. And this was one of those that I can't wait to share with you.

This has been a theme I've been fascinated about. We're talking to the expert, the person who's thinking about it differently, who's open to the idea of this truly being discovery, all based on curiosity. Dr. Rawool Jandial is a dual-trained brain surgeon and neuroscientist at City of Hope in Los Angeles. Dr. Jandial leads the Jandial Lab, which explores the intersection of neurobiology and cancer.

As part of his nonprofit that he founded, he teaches and performs pediatric neurosurgery in charity hospitals in South America and Eastern Europe. Today we're talking about his newest book out now, This Is Why You Dream. Welcome to the show, Raoul Jandiel. Raoul, it's great to see you. Pleasure's mine. Thank you for being here. Yeah, I'm excited to do this.

Yeah, I'm really grateful. Like I said to you, honestly, this is usually when we're doing an interview, I'm like, all right, I'm going to, you know, I've got certain questions, I'm really grateful. Like I said to you, honestly, this is usually when we're doing an interview, I'm like, all right, I'm gonna, you know, I've got certain questions, I'm gonna go with the flow. And the amount of questions we've had from our team, our audience, our community, it's never happened before. I'm just telling you that. see me reading out questions from real people who've sent them in for you to understand more about dreaming, which I think is probably one of the most undiscovered, untapped, misunderstood or completely un-understood areas of our life. So let's dive straight into it. And the first question I have for you is, does everyone dream? I think so.

So here's how I would describe it. I would first say, let's bust a major myth that dreaming and sleep is a time of rest for our brains. Our brains are not resting while we sleep. Just imagine somebody lying down and when they're sleeping the heart is flickering a little bit of electricity from the EKG that we put on the surface of the heart. We put a bunch of stickers on the surface of the scalp and there's vibrant electricity while we're sleeping. The electricity our brain generates while we sleep is as hot as the electricity our brains are generating now.

So that's the first thing. The second thing is the heart when it's pushing up the blood, the brain is mopping up glucose. It's burning hot metabolically. So inside our skull, while we're lying down, even though we don't remember a lot of it, we're burning hot and we're sparking electricity. So people who remember their dreams

and people who don't remember their dreams, that brain is still sparking hot and generating a lot of electricity. So I think it's more of memory recall in the morning. At the same time, we all know about a nightmare. So we've all had one dream. The question is, why do some people dream more, dream less, or remember their dreams more, remember their dreams less? And that's something I think is related to the variety of human experience.

We don't hold our waking thoughts to the same rigid contours, right? So our dreamscape, our dream life is individual between us. And we remember more when we're younger, we remember less as we get older. And then certain diseases, dreams come to the rescue. And it seems now that at the end of life, like with my cancer patients, dreams return. And they're filled with reconciliation. You would think in their struggle like, you know, there would be dark, but they're actually positive. So those patterns of dreams are there. The brain electricity is firing while we sleep.

And that's the sort of foundation from which I try to find meaning in dreaming. Absolutely. I mean, the book is called This is Why You Dream. Why do we dream and why is it important for us to understand why we dream? Because I think a lot of people say, yeah, I dream sometimes, sometimes I don't, who cares? What's the big deal? But I'm fascinated by it. I know a lot of people say yeah I dream sometimes, sometimes I don't, who cares, what's the big deal? But I'm fascinated by it, I know a lot of people are. So why do we dream and why is it important to try to understand why we dream? It's not a big deal, it's completely off for those people who think it. If they understand one third of our lives is potentially spent dreaming and the brain shuts us down, right? It's just one third like that can't be passive

and it puts you down right? Like you get sleep pressure like you I gotta sleep. Well when I was in training in surgical training we skip a night of sleep. What happens when somebody skips a night of sleep? The next night they dream harder and earlier. If I can be so bold I think sleep is for the brain. It's not for our thigh muscle, it's not for our liver. There are some metabolic changes, I'm not discounting all of it. But the real thing driving us to sleep is our brain. What does our brain do just vibrantly

when we sleep, it's dream. So that's like my straight up answer about like that thing, that's not happening on accident, right? That's not a glitch. That didn't last through 30,000 generations accidentally And so then the question becomes if we have this vibrant one-third of our lives that we partially remember sometimes remember Sometimes as an exciting journey sometimes an erotic journey. Sometimes it's a nightmare

Like what's that all about? You know and the way I've come to understand it is first, you know given respect to people who've tried to come up with some ideas, like it's a threat rehearsal for running from a wooly mammoth in our dreams were better prepared for during the day. What I would say is maybe. And when I say maybe or likely, it's out of respect for you and your listeners. I don't want to be that guy that comes in here says, yes, no, about something as big and magical as dreaming.

So threat rehearsal, maybe some people think it's a nocturnal therapist because towards the morning when we have more of our vivid dreams, the emotional balance, the valence they call it tends to be more positive. Maybe. I like to think of it as something that sparks creativity because of what happens with the dreaming brain. The dreaming brain looks for looser dots to connect. It's imaginative by design. Logic is dampened down. So I think it's our creativity engine. And then the way I put it all together is with something straight up called use it or lose it that people know about when we talk about the brain, right? They say, hey, use it or lose it. We know if we don't use our biceps, they atrophy. But our day, if you look at the brain activation, electricity is so narrow. The brain wants to be efficient, right? Because it's an energy hog. It's only like four or five pounds, but it uses 20% of our blood.

So the brain during the day to navigate the world, task on outward, executive network logic, wants to be efficient. Driving down the 101 easily, going on the tube easily, not have to activate everything to get that done If we only use those limited parts of our brain during the day and didn't have some way to high-intensity train them Those would go derelict. We wouldn't use them and we may lose them So I think in the biggest way possible is that dreaming process?

dreams and dreaming is Dreams and dreaming is high intensity training for our brain. It keeps those corners engaged. It keeps those neurons firing that might not during the day. And those are available to us the next day for a creative process, for the next day or the next year or the next generation for an adaptive process. That's my biggest most romantic way of thinking about why we dream so hard. Yeah, I like the maybe because I think we've all had different dreams that you feel you had

for different reasons. And there are some dreams that you did feel were like you said, like you're nocturnal therapist, this feeling of like, okay, I'm healing, I'm learning. You're working something out. Yeah, you're working something out. I've definitely had dreams where I feel like, oh my gosh, like this feels like it's mirroring my reality

and I'm either preparing or I'm dealing with it internally. And I think you're so right that there's so many different processes and it's hard to nail it down to one. Is there a way to start to label and define or do you think that's unhealthy when it comes to dreaming? Perfect question. So to the maybe, I'll add likely.

Not yes and not no. When it comes, my dream, your dream, infinitely wild. But what happens when you start looking at 10,000 dreams? What happens when you start, so I'm over here. So there is no like professor of dream science, right? So when I was like, when they asked me, the publisher asked me like, can you put a book together about this?

I think we were vibing about this before we went live with this or recording with this. And it was like, they're like, you wrote this thing about the brain, like, you know, smart drugs, Alzheimer's, creativity. Then you wrote this thing about the mind, like resilience and trauma and belief and about your own struggles.

Why don't you put together something about dreams from a scientific perspective that everybody can read? And I was like, there are going to be so many gaps. And they said, then let us know where the gaps are, say maybe, say likely and say, I wonder, I believe. And that's what I've tried to do in the book. But to your question about when I started this process, when I looked at not your dream, my dream, but 10,000 dreams, Aristotle was writing about lucid dreaming. A couple hundred years ago, they're still writing about being chased or falling. And I was like, wait a second, there are patterns to dream reports. Like now they have dream banks. So the first thing I noticed was nightmares and erotic dreams are essentially universal.

And I say essentially because it's 90 plus in this world is considered 100, right? Because that's just how science works when you look at questionnaires and surveys. So everybody's had a nightmare. Erotic dreams are almost all the way up there. And then chasing, falling, falling teeth, that seems to be common and then there

was a dream that was very rarely reported doing math I don't like math sounds like that's all good for me but but you start when you look at lots of thousands of dreams like why is that one so low then now when I walk with me over here then you start looking at brain scans and brain electricity and what happened what's the difference between the waking brain and the dreaming brain, right? In a 24 hour cycle, we're about two thirds waking brain and one third dreaming brain.

And there's some transition zones that I love, like I call them liminal states or blurry zones that we can get into. But when you see that and you say, well, what's the difference? I started off with like, they're both burning hot. They're both sparkling like electricity. So what's the difference?

So when you go from waking brain to dreaming brain, what happens is the need to look outward changes. Right. And so the executive network, a collection of structures, not just one thing dampens logic and math ability dampen. They don't turn off. Nothing turns off in the brain. Otherwise, you know, you'd have a stroke. So it dampens the imagination network and the emotional systems called the limbic structures are liberated. So if we know now that the dreaming brain as a measurement, not my opinion, right? We can talk about opinions, but this is a measurement. If the

dreaming brain has dampened logic and reason in math, liberated emotion, hypervisual, it kind of makes sense why we don't see a lot of math. Because that part of the brain that does that is it taking a backseat while we dream. So I said, okay, even if that's the only thing I can say in this book and some youngster, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now takes more data from dream banks that are more inclusive and bringing in more people, that patterns of how we dream and what we dream can be explained by the brain.

I thought to me, that was fascinating. So dreams are not limitless, yours is, mine is, but when you look at a lot of them, nightmares happen universally, erotic dreams happen essentially universally, and then we find very emotional, visual, movement-based dreams. That's fascinating. I mean, you don't even think about it that way, and I think so often it's kind of...

It's interesting because it's a microcosm of how we live our lives. Like, we live our lives thinking, no one understands me, no one knows what I'm going through, only I have this experience. And then all of a sudden when you zoom out and you look at the patterns, you're like, wait a minute, we're all struggling with the same thing. I was just talking to someone earlier

and we were talking about how like, we seem to be the problem solvers in our families. And then you start realizing how, wait a minute, we're all trying to solve the same problems. We're dealing with the same emotions. And those patterns are so useful in finding. So have they basically looked at dream patterns and then looked at stress patterns and lifestyle patterns? Like is that what you're measuring them against or what are

the patterns being measured again? So if out of the 10,000 people, 9,000 people dreamt about their teeth falling out, what then are we measuring in their life to make sense of that dream? Yeah, that's a great question. And also we tend to fall into the same traps, right? I think that looking at brain science shows that, yes, we're individuals, but what's driving us and what's holding us back is also something we share. That's why these conversations, that's why a certain book or certain song or certain interaction can kind of liberate you.

And so the way I would explain this is the dream patterns that they're looking at and when I say they I mean 20-40 years of different studies I'm trying to stitch it together. Let me give you a specific one. There was one survey questionnaire where women going through divorce when their dreams they were reconciling in their dreams that things were breaking up and people were moving on those as a group tended to recover from divorce better. And so when you just look and you just say, okay that's very interesting. Those that were struggling in their dreams were also ones more likely to have depression longer. And so what that does to me is that invites a

conversation. So does the dream or the dreaming brain kind of give a clue to how well you're coping with your real waking life stress? That by itself is powerful. That one, it knows about it. It ain't some other brain. It's your brain. It's just in this dreaming mode. So it knows about it. Your waking life is feeding your dream life. I mean, six, seven, eight hours, how are you processing? How are you digesting? How are you metabolizing the most difficult thing in your day? And I think that's where I love it is that it's not distinct and that the dreaming brain can be your shepherd. It can be the thing that helps you process its emotional trauma. and for people with PTSD

It can actually actually play back flashbacks. So it's it's a wild space that leans emotional leans visual Let me give you a second example with my patients end of life cancer patients Dreams are expensive positive filled with reconciliation as they're Asking for surgery and all that with reconciliation as they're asking for surgery and all that you would think they're all gonna be horrific because it's dark times. Stress, right? You think day stress is turned into dreaming

stress but the connection is not clear and that's where I think there's power in our dream life. I think in general when I look at all the surveys dreaming is our shepherd at the end of life. I think nightmares general, when I look at all the surveys, dreaming is our shepherd at the end of life. I think nightmares and erotic dreams cultivate the young mind, much like our minds are cultivating adolescence. Dreams mirror and reflect what's going on during our life. For example, pregnancy dreams, women who are pregnant, their dreams are very different, rolling over in bed with the babies are going to be called. So sometimes waking anxiety and dreaming anxiety clearly linked.

I gotta give a talk tomorrow, I got a dream, I'm showing up naked. I gotta, you know, I gotta exam alarms. Sometimes they're clear. Sometimes they're your companion pregnancy dreams, end of life dreams. Sometimes they're just junk, not everything's gonna make sense, right?

Our waking life doesn't make sense. So I think when you start to look at those categories, the fourth category being universal dreams, nightmares and erotic dreams in children, then the one we're left with, that the one that now I spend even more time with is that hyper emotional, hyper visual that lingers into the next day.

What I would say is, don't let that one go. That's a solar flare from your brain in a unique state that you can't get to during the day. Hyper emotional, hyper liberated. The measurements of emotion in our dreaming brain can reach a top speed our waking brain can never reach. So for me when I look at when I look at the whole thing, the hyper emotional, hyper visual with a central image is a dream that is broken out from your dream life that is about you, that a therapist can't get to. I mean, it's your brain conjured it and that's one to reflect on. What I would say is like, not every time, not everyone, but in our search for wellness and healing,

that's a free and accessible portal. Not every time, not everyone, but in our search for wellness and healing, that's a free and accessible portal. And when I was working on this book with the UK publishers, there were like seven or eight people who were like, we're dreaming more, we're remembering our dreams more. Some lucid, you know, had lucid dreams. So that's the second thing I would say is that this can be induced and cultivated. You're not a passenger with your dream life

and what you remember from your dream life you can also cultivate that. You're not a passenger at that stage either. Hey everyone it's Jay here. My wife and I have had so much fun creating our own sparkling tea Juni and I've got big news for you. It's at Target and we'd love your support. If you can go out, grab a Juni, you'll be adding adaptogens and nootropics into your life with mood boosting properties aimed at promoting a balanced and happy mind. Through our commitment to our wellness journey and striving to fuel our bodies with the healthiest ingredients, it's been our purpose to make healthy choices accessible for all.

Which is why Juni is now on shelves at Target. So head to our store locator at drinkjuni.com and find Juni at a Target near you. Let's talk about that a little. So I was going to ask you, if you don't remember your dream, if you don't make the subconscious conscious, does that mean that it doesn't have an effect? And are you encouraging us to take time to actually make the subconscious conscious and reflect on our dreams? I would say the first question is,

I can't answer that fully. The second question is absolutely try to engage your dream life. Sleep entry, when you go from waking to dreaming like Salvador Dali did, or Christopher Nolan's talking about inception Sleep exit which we can get into lucid dreaming the answer to the question should we engage our dream life? Yes. Yes Yes, I got a lot of science on that I got a lot of experience on that. Let's dive into that. I mean, there's so many things I want to talk about Let's seeing as we've gone there now. Let's let's dive into it now

So let's talk about the process of being more of a proactive leader in our dreams and not a passenger in our dreams. What does that look like? Because I would argue that anyone I talk to, we're all passengers in our dreams. We simply go to bed. We may remember, we may not remember. We show up. It's like a car journey.

We jumped in the car, you're going to sleep for a bit. You got to the other side. Maybe you remember a tree you saw along the way, or your mom and dad did something when you were a kid But you don't remember most of it. It doesn't really matter. You're in the driver's seat of a car You can't control it seems that way that one will get to with lucid dreaming But how you can affect your dreams because we've gotten to the science. I believe they're relevant. Let's take this first stage You go from waking to dreaming, right? Whatever time that is, not every time, not for everyone, but just the fact that

it's possible. That's something called sleep entry, okay? With those surface electrodes on our scalp, the electricity blends. It's like a liminal state. Like I was, I used to be a scuba diver when you go from a fresh water river to an ocean. It's not like there's a crisp line there's a blurry zone similarly when we go from waking to dreaming there's about a 10 15 minute period called sleep entry Salvador Dali and some current tech companies in San Francisco they believe that during that period you're kind of sort of have access

to that divergent creative ideation of dreaming and that they can extract ideas from there. So much so Thomas Edison with the light bulb would like have, would fall asleep in a chair. And when he'd fall asleep and he'd startle himself awake, he'd write down what he was thinking. That that was a scene in Inception, right? So I'm just bringing, I'll bring the science in,

but that's there. Christopher Nolan's talking about that. Salvador Dali wrote a book about that. You know, his stuff is surreal. And so that period is the first entry into dream life that you can still hold onto. And what we're finding is that people have more interesting ideas.

They have more divergent thinking and creative ideas at that window. But to be clear, you're trouble at work, you gotta create a project, is that gonna guarantee it? No, but it's a habit of respecting that transition liminal zone. As a portal to a state, your brain is not in when you're awake or not in when you're dreaming, right?

So that's one thing that people can do to cultivate. In that same area, some people appeal and report, questionnaires and surveys, not measurements, that what you think about at that time will be more likely to populate your dream life, whether you remember or not, and may lead to the aha moment the next day. Let me give you a specific example. I'm a cancer surgeon. Cancer eats up blood vessels and tissue in different ways. On challenging cases, I'll flip the images through as the last thing I go to bed thinking about. And somebody asked me this in London. They said, well, did you dream of surgery? I said, no, I've never dreamt. I've never dreamt of surgery, but I have a lot of dreams of

scuba diving, navigating mazes, going through forests. And so what I concluded is my opinion is that that it's a three dimensional space. I know I'm working on a three dimensional creative project and that my dream life is somehow rehearsing that, practicing that, providing me with that maneuver in a complex surgery. And I say, man, that was a, where did that come from sometimes I think.

It wasn't like in this scenario six, I will come up with solution four. No, like things arise during our waking life. And I think that dreaming brain builds that. So sleep entry for waking up intentionally and writing down your thoughts and journaling at that moment, journaling in general about what you want to dream about. For me, looking at pictures about a surgery,

those are specific things as you fall asleep that somebody can try. Wow, that's fascinating because I think journaling is taking off so much in culture. And I'm trying to bring some science to it. I think the act of journaling straight after waking up, like immediately. I know for a fact that if I pick up my phone first thing in the morning, which I try to avoid to do, but when it does happen, I forget my dream immediately. Like I, and I know I wake up kind of in a dream state,

and then I completely shut it off. Have you found links between going to sleep with your phone or without your phone and how that affects our dreams? Or if you watch a particular show and TV, and how does that affect your dream and what you do in the morning does that have any correlation so that's a great question the thing you said about waking up i'll get to that as sleep exit because there's some interesting science there but when you're looking at all these surveys that's why i open up with like we need more dream banks we need

people who have a greater exposure to social media to start talking about their dreams. At this point, it doesn't look like they populate. Dreams, for example, let's take a specific example. Erotic dreams tend to be about a narrow group of people in your life, family even when you're younger, repellent bosses and celebrities. So I'm curious to see like, right, like so now that doesn't mean there's a hundred papers on that. But those are the sprinkling of information that I saw like, so what becomes familiar to us? Wait, you said bosses? Well, you know, people can have like awkward dreams about bosses, right? They have sexual dreams about people they actually are not attracted to.

So that's a big category in erotic dreams. But is there any reasoning to that specifically because of being erotic dreams about people you're not attracted to? Like, where does that come from? I don't know. I think it's now we're getting into opinion. Yeah. I think it's a power dynamic play and I think intimacy can be both collaborative and also a power dynamic and some mix of it all. Right. But that's just that's an exploration. But erotic dreams, since we're there and we'll get back to sleep exit is,

they're interesting. We all get them. They come before we've done the erotic act, even if we haven't seen it. So it's almost like an instruction, if you will, an inheritance of thinking, not just risk taking or mental health, but we inherit those dreams, even to people who'd never go on to have sex,

they still have erotic dreams dreams almost like a playbook That's meant for a mind to activate our brain and bodies for the act to procreate. That's the big topic The specific thing is across cultures different over generations. The percentages are surprisingly similar 90 plus The other surprising thing is that 80 to 90 percent in these reports, infidelity, cheating is common in erotic dreams. Whether you're in a healthy relationship, whether you're lying about in a healthy relationship and coveting somebody else, or whether you're in a bad relationship, it's almost like a

semi-built-in thing. And I think that's how I've learned to think about erotic dreams is that's just desire it's like a flare of desire it interestingly tends to be toward a narrow group but the acts tend to be wild there's a few points that you made in the book that fascinated me seeing as we're on the topic of erotic dreams I was sharing with the team earlier so there's three things here but let's go one by one so erotic dreams are not fueled by masturbation or pornography walk Walk me through that. That's what some reports a decade ago mentioned. Now that might be changing but what's

interesting to me there is it's not what we do during the day that shows up in our erotic dreams. It's actually what we fantasize about secretly during our day that's more likely to show up in our erotic dreams. And scientifically to me, I think that makes a lot of sense because the dreaming process is the imagination network liberated. So it makes sense that what you imagine in your dream life

is more connected to the fantasy you're having while you're awake It doesn't matter the sexual act the sexual person that what you What brings someone to? Climax the thoughts they have during that process with their lover without their level. It's the internal thinking of desire During the day that tends to find itself in erotic dreams. And to me, that's consistent if you think about the dreaming brain as something that has the liberated imagination. It's an imaginative process, right? Your eyes are closed. That movie you're making for yourself, so whatever you're thinking about during the day, you know, that's the movie you're making at night.

So then going back to what you were saying earlier, that if someone's in a happy relationship, but you're saying it's still common for them to cheat in their dreams. That's a separate pattern, yeah. Yeah, that's a pattern that you've seen. So is that an argument then that that person may be happy in their relationship, but then they're fantasizing?

I can't answer that. No, no, no. No, I love the question. That's a deep question. What I't answer that. No, no, no. No, I love the question. That's a deep question. What I would say to you is from there, what people ask is if you have dreams tend to have more bisexuality. So does that mean you have your bisexual?

You just haven't figured that out or you're not sharing that with somebody during the day? I can't answer that. But I think as we bring in more reports from dream banks and bring in more cultures, more backgrounds, more genders, and more diverse sort of perspectives on sexuality, we'll get insights into that. But that's a very individual thing. So as a whole, there's a lot of cheating in erotic dreams. As a whole, what shows up in our erotic dreams is what we imagine. And then it leaves it to the person. That's why I opened with like, you know, people

have asked me like, if you dream of your ex, does that mean you really want them? I was like, well, if you're seriously thinking, if you're hung up on them during the day, you're dreaming about your ex, that means one thing. But if you're like, no, I've really moved on, and a lover pops up in your dream, I think that's just a solar flare of desire. I wouldn't

make much of that. I think that's the hard part, right? I think what we don't know is how seriously to take a dream or not. Because I feel like a lot of people exactly like you just said, you ever dream about something you're thinking, oh God, maybe I need that. Maybe I don't. And is that a lack of self-awareness? Is it because the dream is not clear? Like how do we, how have you thought about that as you've reflected on dreaming? How do we get better at knowing whether to take a dream seriously or not? Because I feel like that would help solve so much of our

conundrum or dilemmas that's created by dreams. Yeah, it's a big question. It's a big question. It's a big question. I would love to know your thoughts. Yeah, my opinion about it is that one dreams should not be neglected. Okay, nightmares if they pop up and they arrive out of the blue they shouldn't be neglected. I think dreams that are flashbacks after PTSD obviously should not be neglected. So

there's some dreams that have a an easier rule to follow if you will. But then what about those other dreams that you're bringing up right like Intensely emotional that linger with you during the day and you're wondering like wait a second Is that an insight to myself that I don't even have yet about myself? Should I discuss this with a therapist should I discuss this with my lover and I think the way I've Started to reflect on my dreams a bit more is that when they are hyper emotional, it's an invitation to look at your life differently. I feel like I'm doing well, I'm high achieving,

I'm doing this, I'm not, you know, you feel like, no, it's fine, I'm dealing with a broken relationship. But if you start having nightmares, or if you have emotional dreams that are filled with fright broken relationship, but if you start having nightmares, or if you have emotional dreams that are filled with fright or regret, I'm not saying that that, there's never an automatic link, right?

Other than showing up naked at a podium or alarm not going off. But the one that's powerful, haunts you, doesn't make sense. That's an invitation to think about something. And back to our original conversation, to me, that's a life well examined is paying attention to the emotional, powerful dreams that you have that linger with you. The dream is symbolic, to get to your answer in the most specific way. The dream is a metaphor. The dream is symbolism. Because from the dreaming

brain and you've hyper visual, hyper emotional, it's not going to spell it out for you. It's going to be metaphorical. It's going to be symbolic. Specific example, Vietnam veterans who had PTSD got better. They start going through divorce. They're not, and they're struggling. They're not dreaming of divorce. They're dreaming of war again. So the experiences you're having, they're an invitation to divorce. They're dreaming of war again. So the experiences you're having, they're an invitation to reflect. The meaning is metaphorical and symbolic, all based on how the dreaming brain is built.

And it's personal. It's hard to say a bridge or a light bulb in your life at this moment, it's gonna be the same meaning for me at this moment in life. Or my life 10 years from now, not just former versions of myself. So I'm not here to refute anything, but it's a very personal process. Your brain made it. It's a motion to a hyper emotional state. It could mean nothing. It could mean something.

But what I'm here to say is take a look at it. Yeah. It's not just static. No, I think that's I completely agree with you. Yeah. It's not just static. No, I think that's, I completely agree with you. I think it's a great point. And I feel like it's really interesting because it then goes back to the idea that humans are meaning makers and that we're storytellers. And if you're looking at a metaphor, then you're trying to figure out, and if

you have a, if you have a negativity bias in your conscious mind, I wonder how much, like, I'll give an example. I was talking to someone the other day and they were saying that they'd been dreaming about bears. And so I started Googling what that means and I was, you know, going to ask you. And I was Googling about it. It was really interesting because in a conscious state, a big bear feels scary and it feels like death and it feels like run away.

And that's how they saw a bear in their dream. But then when you looked at the dream spiritual version, whatever you call it, the inter sorry, when you look at dream interpretation, the interpretation of that was bears represent strength and they represent courage and they have this symbol in the Nago. So it's a store, right? Yeah, it depends. Yeah, it depends on which brain conjured up which image. Yeah. Bears represent strength and they represent courage and they have this symbol in the Nago. Depends. Yeah, it depends. Depends on which brain conjured up which image.

You work in the circus, bear means one thing. You're a hunter, bear means one thing. In culture, bear means something else. So I like that, but just to go back to something that... I've been moving around and people have asked me stuff. The question you just asked is, is, is something special about are we meaning makers? And now this is gonna take me a little time to open up on this. But, but what's what's interesting, and again, I don't have all the

answers conversation is that in the dreaming brain, even though the logic and reason areas are dampened, specifically the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it's right behind our sort of horns in the prefrontal cortex that pushed our brains forward, there's another area called the medial prefrontal cortex that's preserved. It stays throbbing, it's actually liberated a little bit.

And you know what that one does? It does something we only figured out when we accidentally injure it or somebody has a stroke in that area. It stitches the story of our life together. Something that makes me crazy is when people say, well, I had this career before, but it was a waste. And that's where the perspective shift comes, that it's not a waste that everything you've done has built you to where you are now.

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And so what's happening, this is cool. What's happening is your emotions and your vision centers and your movement centers are just firing up stuff linked directly and directly to the stuff you fed it during the day, the stuff your life fed it, right? Your life, your memory, plus the imagination. And then the medial prefrontal cortex is there putting a story to it.

Dreams often, not always, are stories. They have a narrative component. They're emotional, they're visual, they have a narrative component. Our brains want to make a cohesive story. I know that for a lot of reasons. And the dreaming brain is something that also preserves that. And some have even extended that,

say like, well, maybe that's why we can, we get movies that have preserves that. And some have even extended that, say like, well maybe that's why we can, you know, we get movies that have jumps of ideas. People go from one place to the other, like our dreaming, the way we dream, prepares us for the way we appreciate art, right? So we can let that go this way. On this side, some of my patients, with certain complications and certain tumors

and different things, they'll wake up and they won't feel certain parts of their body. And they'll develop something called neglect or they'll develop something what is called confabulation. It's a fancy word for lying. When the body signals are disconjugated, they don't make sense.

The brain, the mind will make up a story to make it all fit. And some patients have actually tried to throw a leg they don't feel off the bed and they say, oh that was a stranger. And so you see things with the injured brain and the healing brain that there's a drive within us. Sometimes we'll even lie to ourselves and others to create a consistent or a story that makes sense to ourselves. Meaning. And I think if you look at that at the brain level and you look at that at the dreaming level, what I try to tell people my first book is look at that at

the life level. Like our maturation isn't done just with adolescence, right? The work has to continue to cultivate your brain and your mind and your life. So when you get through a struggle and you get through it, that prepares you for the next one. If you're in a struggle now that's just overwhelming, like something difficult, so hard, don't worry because you're cultivating that stress for the next one. And I think all of those pieces, not measurements, but my opinion, that we are meaning makers. We are storytellers in the moments of our lives, in our dreaming brain, in our life in general, and the area where stories and emotions are the wildest

with our dreams. And that's why I think why we dream is something bigger than just threat rehearsal. I think it's something powerful. When we wake up and that clarity is because our subconscious has had its run. Are people having, when you look at the data, are people having the same dream again and again and again? Or are they having different dreams every night? Well, that's a good question. So there are recurrent dreams. So specific example, the only thing I can say with certainty is dreams come from our brain.

We do these exotics brain surgeries where we wake people up to map the surface of their brain. You don't feel, you wouldn't know if I touched your brain if the situation ever arose, which you won't. we do these exotics brain surgeries where we wake people up to map the surface of their brain. You don't feel, you wouldn't know if I touched your brain if the situation ever arose, which it won't, but like the brain doesn't feel, the brain feels through its nerves. So we can dissect the brain in somebody while they're talking. The point there is not to scare anybody,

that's a therapeutic process, but when we tickle and map the brain, they'll say, oh, I remember this nightmare from when I was a kid. You can activate a recurrent nightmare in a patient by tickling the surface of the brain. So dreams come from the brain. There are recurrent dreams.

There are, that's individual. There are common dreams across people, falling, being chased, teeth falling out. There are universal dreams. So you start to see all these patterns. A recurrent dream is a loop of electricity in that part of your brain that pops up again and again. It must be because if we take a little faint pen and tickle it and you have that

that dream again, that's that's built into the electrical flows of your brain. So we have to step back a little bit when you ask those questions, because there are so many different dream types and dream experiences I don't want to give a single answer but recurrent dreams are our loops of electricity that happen over and over again we can actually activate that and then universal dreams common dreams and rare dreams is how I conceptualize it. What does someone do if they have a recurrent dream that they don't want to have any? Big question. Okay so let's look at that.

So now we've got the foundation, waking brain, dreaming brain, hyper imaginative, hyper emotional. You're cooking up, you're creating the events of your dreamscape. And I found this to be very powerful, that nightmares, since we imagine them, the treatment for nightmares is something called imagery rehearsal therapy. Now, I'm not a therapist. I mean, I take care of a lot of cancer patients. I'm more than 10,000 in my life.

So there's a there's a cultivation that I have benefited from from them trusting me. So I think I have some sense of understanding of human nature, but therapy, when you try to help somebody through conversation, talk therapy, right? That's great. It seems to be effective. That's out there. What they're finding is imagery rehearsal therapy is a new thing where imagine what you want to be.

Imagine something you don't want to have. And when I read that, I was like, I don't know if I can sink my teeth in that until I started reading about nightmares and learning about nightmares and across all different sciences that if you practice before you go to bed, going back a bit to your saying, we can actually feed our dreams. If you practice a new script for the ending of your nightmares, you can re-script your nightmares through something called imagery rehearsal therapy. People can look it up and not every time, not for everyone, but just the fact that nightmares can be re-scripted is powerful. You think you're out of control, but you can feed your dreams. You

can steer your dreams and lucid dreaming is the prime example of that and that therapy can guide you to a better conclusion of your dream. I love that as a scientist because it's the imagination network. You've imagined this nightmare. And it's powerful to think now you can actually imagine a different kind of ending for this nightmare. To me, that's all scientifically consistent. And to me, that's why I think it's powerful to look at dreaming as more magical, more fascinating that it is being driven by certain brain processes, right? Yeah. So you don't wake up and say, ah, that's a glitch.

Ah, that's static. No, there's something drove that. Learn about the engine behind it and then reflect about the meaning about it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can relate to that. I feel like there have been parts of my life where I've been trying to wake up early and I didn't enjoy it. And my reaction to waking up early in the morning would be, Oh, I'm so tired. I just want to stay in bed. I just, you know, and I wanted to wake up early. I believe that was a worthy pursuit and a habit to invest in. And so I would, before I went to bed, I would say to myself,

I am waking up energized, happy and healthy. And so even that re-scripting in the evening, I found I would wake up and I would be saying that to myself when I woke up. And there was this direct link between a script that I didn't have it written in the morning. I didn't have it there, but that repetition would carry over in the morning. And I found whenever I used it, it worked. And whenever I don't use it, I can still wake up and feel, Oh God, why am I waking up so early? And so I've sensed moments of that, or I've had experiences of that

and that coding or that imagery rehearsal therapy that you mentioned. That would be, I would love for our audience to practice it, community to try it out and see how it shows up in your life. Because I think what we don't realize is you're subconsciously rehearsing anyway. Oh yeah. Right? Whatever you do. The work is going on. You're doing it.

Work with it. Yeah, whatever you're watching, reading, seeing, that is imagery rehearsal. It's just not therapy and it's not conscious. But we're doing imagery rehearsal throughout the day and before we go to bed. And it adds a big question here. So when you when you say something like that, it ties into positive thinking, wish fulfillment, all these seem these nebulous terms that I think some people really embrace, other people poo poo and they say that can't be true. When I say something in the middle, that through studying that about dreams and dreaming,

I've learned about like, what's the biology of how what you just described about, I think about something before I go to bed and it helps me wake up and I'm feeling it more, I'm thinking about it more in the right way. That's just out there, right? That feels like there's like a kite flying above our head. What I'm trying to get people to understand is,

the dreams, if they can be defined, are thoughts, emotions, and activities that are actually happening at the brain level. That's what's sparking all that electricity. If I'm running in a dream, the motor strip that moves my legs, the neurons there are firing, the signals just aren't getting through. So then what that does is it opens up a whole new world of athletes practicing the shot in their mind,

positive reinforcement, going to bed and re-scripting your dreams, right? Journaling, like people are like, okay, so there's brain activity that's leading to this mind that I wanna get my mind to lean a certain way and the brain activity is driving that so what's the people say? Well, how that happened? I would give you the example of placebo And so when you believe a medicine is gonna help you even if I tell you look that's there's nothing active in it

That's just like sugar That's just something that has no capacity to change By the pill itself, the physiology of your body. But belief is enough to make people feel less pain. And I can give you a scientific explanation about how that happens. Belief, you're armed with neurotransmitters.

That electricity that we're measuring, the chemicals that are floating around, think of the brain as like 100 billion microscopic jellyfish and as there's like electric storms and waves of neurotransmitters flying around there. When you believe the pharmacy of your mind is actually releasing chemicals and things that generates different electricity,

that alleviates pain, that prepares your brain and mind for re-scripting the nightmare, that gives you the scientific basis possibly for positive reinforcement, positive relationships. Like these are actually not just emotions, but they're working at the level of the brain. That's powerful. I love that description. And as you were saying that I was thinking about this, it's all coming back to an intentionality, a programming, like what I'm hearing from you is just this idea of get active, get involved, be conscious, be aware. I was thinking about, I remember during the pandemic, I probably hadn't, up until the pandemic,

I probably hadn't watched TV or the pandemic, I probably hadn't watched TV or played video games for like 10 years, like consistently at all. And I think the pandemic kind of, you know, had time and we were indoors and all the rest of it. And so I started watching TV. I remember one of the shows I was watching, which I really enjoyed watching was Ozark. And I can, I remember watching Ozark every day for 30 days in a row. And it's not even the scariest show. And while I was watching, I probably didn't feel anything. And somehow I felt that I'd dream every night that my house was being broken into. Like that was an experience that I was having. And I connected the two because as someone who didn't have nightmares

as an adult, and as someone who didn't watch that much TV, those were the only two changes that I had at least noticed. Or if we get back to that it's symbolic, maybe it's the stress of the pandemic. So it's never going to be pinned down exactly, but you're right, paying attention to the patterns of your dreams, more than just a dream, unless it's hyper emotional, but the pattern of dreams, I think is an important thing to do. Like, and how does

our waking life feed our, our dream life? What I would tell you is, when color television arrived in magazines, the dream reports show a bump in people having colored color dreams. Like there were more black and white dreams when TV was black and white. And I was like, wait, but the world is in color. And what I'm saying to you is, that's why this topic is so fresh because it doesn't all make sense.

The science gives some insight and the exploration reveals there are so many things we don't understand. The take home is, it's not a passive process. It's not something that is coming from the gods or omens. It's your brain giving you thoughts, emotions, dreams, and potentially insights that you can't have access to with your waking brain.

And to me, that's a special portal. And how people cultivate that, I think it's up to them. I'm here to let people know that there's a rigorous science behind the brain biology, brain chemistry, brain electricity that drives dreaming. Yeah, I mean that bump in color television, I can't imagine when we have enough data to look at the social media bump. Because to me, it's bizarre to feel that exposure to social media pornography, being on the online world doesn't lead to specific or certain dreams. Especially with the hours that people are putting in.

Yeah, exactly. So that would be the next wave. And my hope is that somebody listening to this, you know, as I mentioned, I'm 51. I've got three sons, 18, 19, 22 in college. Like my hope is somebody walks away and says, Oh wait, some of the stuff about dreams can be explained by the brain. Because imagine in 20, 30 years, how much more data we'll have through people with online dream banks and how much more we'll know about neuroscience. Imagine the connections that somebody sitting here playing different roles than us can make. And so it's more of a, it's an inception. It's I want people to be ignited

that dreams can, some parts of dreams can be made sense of. Yeah. I want to dive back into nightmares because as a child, I grew up having a lot of nightmares. I don't, I remember one of them very vividly, even till today, I don't dream about it anymore. But I remember waking up in the middle of the night feeling horrified. And you talk about in the book, how children in the middle of the night feeling horrified. And you talk about in the book how children have the most nightmares. Like it's common.

Children have five times as many nightmares as adults, you say. Even the gentlest childhood is no protection against nightmares. And I think that's really unnerving for parents when their kids are having nightmares. I have friends who have kids who will tell me like, oh, God, she just doesn't sleep.

She has nightmares. And it's like, you're trying to figure it out. And I mean, you're a father. So it's interesting to hear how you may have felt about that. I'm sure a lot of us listening right now are thinking, God, I definitely had nightmares as a kid. When you're having that as a kid, it can be so unnerving. It can be so difficult, even more than as an adult,

because you really feel powerless. What have been some, have there been any therapies or remedies that have helped but then you go on to say that nightmares are needed right so walk me through that. Alright so so when I was thinking about this book I was rolling around LA going to different spots and sort of just bouncing around people you know regular people at Dodger Stadium and often I got the question like all right you're gonna talk about dreams and dreaming, you know, to have a new take on it. But clearly nightmares can't be good for you, right? There's no use for nightmares. I thought I got to take this one head on to chapter two.

And so when I look at that, I would ask people to think of nightmares based on age. And we do that in the hospital and medicine and surgery and science where they're sort of age related, pediatric and adult is what I would say. We've talked about adults, flashbacks, nightmares if they arrive, pay attention to them. They could be a warning flare for some mental health issues. You get them more in depression. You know, we've left that. How to explain nightmares in kids is an exploration. It's a conversation. I think it's fresh. And I looked at a bunch of pieces that I think it's fresh and I looked at a bunch of pieces that

That helped me sort of come up with an idea a story if you will so if you look at the first thing about nightmares that struck me is You have to say hey Johnny that was only a nightmare It's only with nightmares that we tell our kids That's only a nightmare. So as a conversation, does that mean Johnny was blurring dreaming brain thoughts and waking brain thoughts until that moment? So that's a power. I'm not saying I have the answer.

I'm leaving that with your audience. That's one. Nightmares do that. By definition, nightmares wake you up and they sear your memory. Just like our kids learn to walk and talk, our mind is being cultivated. So they have these families that signed all the kids up to be woken up and talk about their dreams for like 20 years in a row. They're called longitudinal. Kids when they start talking

their dreams are like a table, you know, a sweater. Then they get more imaginative. And what happens is five, six, seven nightmares arrive. What else is arriving? They're developing visual spatial skills. And they're also developing this thing called theory of mind. People can look up these terms. That children at some point develop the ability to look at somebody and say, that smile, I don't think they mean well. Mind reading.

Reading the other person's intention, right? That arrives, theory of mind, at the same time as nightmares. So my biggest way to conceptualize that is nightmares arrive in children to help them develop a sense of self versus other help them not a sense of identity But that my thoughts and my experiences are mine my waking life and dream life are separate and That I need to think of myself as different from my uncles and aunts and other people around me And I think I think that's the function of nightmares and children

You may have had of them a lot, but they arrive and then very few of them lead to nightmare disorder. Like it doesn't ruin the next day. So it's almost sort of like, whereas in adults, nightmare disorder means the residue is lingering with you. So when you look at the patterns, children learn to walk and talk. Nightmares arrive around four or five, six,

and most of them go away. Erotic dreams around like 11, 12, 13, and persist in some way. Adolescents arrives around 15, 16. But these are cognitive changes. The brain looks about the same. It's not like a new lobe pops up. These are cognitive changes that are happening.

So I think nightmares cultivate the mind in children. They arrive and fade. Things that happen that universally in science aren't accidental. And it's the dream we've always had, that all of us have had as a nightmare. Yeah, that's super fascinating to me. Super fascinating. It's an exploration. It's an exploration, yeah.

It is such a, it's so interesting how we're so addicted to certainty and conclusiveness. Yeah. It's kind of stifling. Yeah, it's very stifling. There's a rigidity to it, right? Yeah. Do this, don't do this, this will save you, this won't save you. Like, no, but the dreaming process leaves it open. Like, we're just beginning to understand it's personal.

Keep digging, keep exploring, fail better. I think that's what that all shows us. What, why I feel like the conversation we're having exposes a weakness that we have across so many areas of our life, which is that we're uncomfortable with uncertainty. And we constantly feel discomfort when we can't control. And I think dreams are like the ultimate version of that. Dreams are like, hey, just to remind you, you need uncertainty. Yeah.

Let me dig into that a little bit. I have some ideas about that. Like when we fall asleep and dream, the executive networks dampen. Let me reverse a bit. Most of the day is something we call task on. It's outward. And the brain, the executive network reason logic is paying attention. Of course, food scarcity, right? Wooly mammoths, it makes sense. Those who are best at paying

attention outward, navigating the world and using as little amount of calories and brain energy, that seems like that would be a natural adaptation. What I would tell people is, when we're not task on, the brain doesn't rev down like your computer that goes, and then you have to hit the keyboard to pop it up. No, it creates a mental life of its own. All right, that's the imagination network. So during the day, we're mostly executive network outward, but if there's nothing to do,

like with mind wandering or things are safe, we turn back into our own head. Dreaming is the example of that, but just suffused with like uncertainty. And so the question becomes, the day is so focused on thinking, calculating, adrenaline is up, adrenaline finds the signal in the noise. They've done studies where they changed that.

And then the dreaming brain is kind of the opposite. Adrenaline comes down, you're looking for looser patterns, divergent thinking, designing a car, not fixing an engine. To me, the uncertainty that the dreaming brain goes through, that's our genius built in. We actually don't want to become too rigid in our habits. It might be okay today, uh, going on the freeware, going on the tube, as we mentioned, but that's not the, that's not the process your brain needs to be in,

to be the most adaptive for heartache, for falling in love, for a kid getting sick, for the uncertainty, the environment will give us and the uncertainty we almost want to engage in love affairs and adventures I think that's the balance Get things done Try not to be too rigid try to be open-minded and appreciate that your dreaming brain is going to take you there whether you want it or not That's the that's the love story of uncertainty and creativity Imagine you ask two people the same exact set of seven questions.

I'm Minnie Driver and this was the idea I set out to explore in my podcast, Minnie Questions. This year we bring a whole new group of guests to answer the same seven questions, including actress and star of the mega hit sitcom Friends, Courtney Cox. You can't go around it, so you just go through it. This is a roadblock. It's going to catch you down the road. Go through it. Deal with it. Comedian, writer, and star of the series Catastrophe,

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Hi! I'm Mika, and this is our brand new podcast! Blippi and Mika's Road Trip! The Blippi-mobile will take us to amazing places! Quick, quick, put your seatbelts on! Get ready for a ride, we're gonna have some fun! We'll explore and listen to the sounds of awesome places like farms, racetracks, and even construction sites! Follow your ears, what do you hear? And we'll meet new friends along the way. They'll teach us awesome new things about the places and things we see and hear.

What did we learn today? It's so cool! Listen to Blippi and Mika's Road Trip Podcasts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Elliot Coney and this is family therapy. In my best hopes, I guess identify the life that I want and work towards it. I never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of. I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true? That's true. And I'm not offended by that.

Thank you for going through those things and thank you for overcoming them. Wow. Thank God for deliverance. Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive. It just keeps me going. I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now. So how did we do today? We did good. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. whenever you get your podcast. Yeah, and it's, I'm going to flip-flop because we talked about uncertainty and creativity,

but I want to go into lucid dreaming and this idea of wanting some control in the uncertainty. But before we get there, I wanted to go back to sleep exit because I don't think we talked about sleep entry, but we didn't finish sleep exit. And that works because sleep exit, that dampened executive network, that dampened adrenaline that looks for the signal and noise, it seems to come back on. And if an alarm goes off, we know it comes back on.

Like you could be dreaming and sleeping, you smell smoke. The executive network is the boss. It will pop back on and dominate. And so if you do grab your phone in the morning and check emails too quickly or jump on Instagram, like your brain will go to that forward task on feature. And the residue or the lingering feelings of your dream life will necessarily be put in the backseat.

And so if you do wanna remember your dreams more as you wake up, if you have the luxury of a bed and time and not an alarm, that's a critical window sleep exit to sort of hold on to your dream thoughts and your dream experiences. It's an imperfect process, but I can tell you, people who have tried, they get better at it. And again, it's free, it's accessible,

it's from your own brain. I think it's one of those habits that I've incorporated in my life for the last five, ten, five, ten years. I get out exactly. Yeah. So what I do is if I have the luxury, because I do now, I didn't for a long time. I mean, the phone calls and pagers are going off in the middle of the night. And now it's more like if I wake up in the morning, I try to linger and I try not to move. and there's different types of yoga. People have been talking about a lot of stuff like this for centuries and millennia,

and I'm just adding some scientific pieces that support it, but I'm trying to not have my executive network kick in. I'll keep my eyes closed, I'll run through some thoughts, so that's interesting, hold on to that, what should I do there? Like I have my sleep exit thinking or moments, if you will. And then I'll reach over, I'll go to my notes app.

It's right on the phone screen. And I'll write a few things down when I have ideas. I mean, I'd say a great majority of come from them. They're almost all bad ideas. But that is the idea generator. If I've had a good idea, it's been during that time. It's rarely it's rarely like at two o'clock on a triple espresso, right? That's important because we have to get things done. But the dreaming process, sleep entries we talked

about and sleep exit, I think are interesting portals where there are sort of blurry liminal states that we have a different type of thinking without it being just like wildly psychedelic. You know, it's measured but it's a fresh perspective. It's a fresh perspective. It's a different take on the things that are important in your life at that moment. Yeah, I mean, even the language of sleep entry and sleep exit is so powerful. Well, I got to, you know, but this calls hypnagogic and hypnopompic. So the first thing I'm out there is like, stop using these words that suck, right?

Like, those words are terrible. Yeah, I'm so glad you didn't use it. Even hearing you say I've never heard the word sleep entry and sleep exit before. Yeah, some three minute difference. And I personally really like that language because I think we don't think about it like that. And it's so funny how we enter buildings, we leave buildings, we enter spaces, we leave spaces. And sleep is kind of like that. And we are talking about evening routines and morning routines,

but this is almost a bit more intimate to both sides of that. It's the essential routine. Now, just sleep entry and sleep exit. What I love about it is that I can put stickers on your scalp, our scalps, and record the electricity and be like, look, the waves change.

You are measurably, not just by report, like, hey, I'm feeling different. I get that. I trust that. That's individual. But the brain waves during sleep entry and sleep exit have a pattern. They overlap in a way that never happens

while you're awake or while you're dreaming. Right? So, like that's what I want people to walk away with. Like, it's not just his thing. He's looking at the fact that he can measure that this is a different space right now. Yeah. That doesn't mean it's powerful or not. That's for you to figure out. But we can measure sleep entry and sleep exit. And it looks different on a 24-hour cycle of brain waves.

And how long does it last? Well, it's different for different people and people seem to cultivate it. But Salvador Dali, he's written about it, said, you know, anywhere from 2 to 12 minutes. That's how long you have. Yeah, but it's personal, but it's real. And it's for everybody to figure out for themselves, you know. But I like the 2 to 12 minutes. It gives us a gauge as to how long do you not let your executive brain turn on in the morning.

And because there's science, there's tech companies coming up with a little, you know, Sure. As to how long do you not let your executive brain turn on in the morning? And because there's science, there's tech companies coming up with a little, you know, iPhone or Apple Watch is tracking your stages of sleep. And when people are in that sleep entry, it'll buzz them to wake up like Dolly tried. And that's their way of, write down what you're thinking now as sort of the tech approach to creativity.

It's interesting, right? How does, I mean, talking about the tech approach again, another tangent, cause it's so fascinating. I'm like completely obliterated any form of a structure, but it's, it's great. Where do you see the cross-section of AI and dreams? Like where can it be useful? Where will it be helpful with this? Where will it not?

Will it help us ask better questions? Is it going to help us take better notes? Is it going to help us? I don't know. I'm not a computer scientist, but I'll tell you two things. They're making programs that add noise because sometimes the patterns and algorithms of computers become so rigid, like our daily thinking, that they can't handle the insertion of new data. And that sort of mirrors what's going on. Like that's, it's called overfitted. The computer process and algorithm design is too tight, too efficient. And that learning from dreaming, they find that the computer system is more adaptive

when they add in noise. Where artificial intelligence fits in, I'm not sure, but tech is all over it. They're tracking the data from smartphones and certain people, you're volunteering, they'll play certain songs and you'll have people watch commercials and see if they dream about it more and then buy that product more. Like that space is here. So if somebody's listening, like that's a massive space. And I just think I would remind people that we're not completely shut off when we dream. We wake up to alarms and smoke and that we should be careful about in that vulnerable, precious, uh, you're remarkable,

a unique state that somebody's not just taking marketing advantage of it. And I think that's where AI will extract data, figure out what's the right buzz, the right sound. And just to riff on this a little bit, like a hundred years ago, they were like people were asleep and they put their hand in like a bucket of water to see if they had more dreams about water. In the modern version, they're gonna be taking your data and trying to fine tune like the song, the scent and the picture to put, you know, to throw at you

to try to get you to buy stuff. So I'm a bit like dystopian about that, but cause I don't want, you know, I'm private, especially in my dream life. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, it's, I mean, I feel like some of my favorite movies have been about dreams. You mentioned Inception. Even, I mean, this isn't about dreams, but still in that, in that space of vanilla sky with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. That movie, if you've not seen it, it's probably one of my favorites and just how that memory bank

or some sort of like subconscious bank is created and held and it's fascinating thinking about that. There's a few more things Raoul that I want to go over with you from the book which I think are so interesting for people. I want to talk to you about, before we get into lucid dreaming, I want to talk to you a bit about how dreams can predict the future and I think a lot of people worry that their dreams, their thoughts can create reality subconsciously somewhere. We feel that like I know people who have illnesses or like, I manifested this, like I made this happen or like I have a

disease and oh my God, I saw this coming or you know, that kind of feeling warning dreams. Yeah. Warning dreams and that almost feels a bit worrying as well because often when you have that warning you're now constantly replaying and thinking about it while you're awake and while you're asleep. Can dreams predict the future especially when it comes to health? In one specific way dreams can absolutely predict the future of your health and we'll get into that that's Parkinson's but in general for cancer, for other diseases, it's hard to tease out whether my patients had

the diagnosis and then sort of reverse thought, like I think I had a dream about that. I'm not judging them, I'm just totally open-minded, but I can't grip the data on that. But if you do have a dream about disease, statistically, you're not more likely to have that disease. They've been looking at these surveys. So it might just reveal a certain anxiety you're having,

again, symbolic. You might be struggling with something and then have a disease-based dream. So as long as we remember that most of the time they're symbolic and not literal, I think that's important there are Plenty of reports and surveys where breast cancer patients have said like I had a dream I felt a lump in these sort of things. I respect that I respect their whole journey

So I want to put that out there the one specific way that dreams can predict the future I need to unpack this one for a little bit because this was mind-blowing when I learned about it. There's something called REM behavior disorder, which I'm relabeling, dream enactment behavior. Yeah, my world, the words are, they confuse, you know, dream enactment behavior. Middle-aged men, 50s, acting out their dream, usually protecting their bed partner. They come in, the bed partner maybe has an injury. Those men, 94% of the time, and that's essentially in medicine, it's universal,

15 years later will develop Parkinson's. I think, you know, so that is the one example. And it's, if it's the only example for every neuroscientist out there, every scientist out there, hear me with this, that the first warning flair of the brain's deterioration with Parkinson's is a change in dreams 15 years ago. I'll just leave it at that. For all the rigorous people out there saying, hey, they're talking about stuff,

like I'm questioning whether the science can really show this. Look up REM behavior disorder, all caps REM behavior disorder, which I call it dream enactment behavior. It's in Scientific American. This isn't like one paper I'm digging up. Like this is thing, this is stuff that's coming out.

REM behavior disorder predicts Parkinson's 15 years later. And what I would say to the researchers out there is, is that an opportunity for us to start with medicine earlier? I mean, it just says so much. But outside of that one, and all you need is one unicorn for unicorns to be real, I haven't found any evidence that dreams predict the future. I mean, they definitely don't give any evidence that dreams predict the future.

I mean, they definitely don't give you lottery numbers and stuff like that. But at a more grounded level, they don't actually predict what's going to happen to you. But what happens to you may be because of what the dream is symbolically mentioning, you're going through a difficult time and you lose your job and you have a dream about losing your job. So I can see where those connections would form. I just, I just don't have any, so I'll leave it as a maybe. It's so interesting how again, it goes back to this idea of when you get a

diagnosis or something happens, you then go back to finding that point. Like it's almost like you've been dating someone and you knew they were wrong. And then when they break up with you, like, I knew it. You go, you replay it all. Yeah. You were playing like, and then you now you see all the red flags. And again when they break up with you, you're like, I knew it. You replay it all. Yeah, yeah, you replay it like, and then you now you see all the red flags. And again, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's that feeling of I remember and I know,

and, but we're not always good at trusting our gut in that moment. You know what I'm saying? Like there's not a feeling of, it's almost like, again, and I'm not discounting anyone's experience, but I find even I do it where you're living your life and then something happens and you go, I knew it.

I knew it. There was a part of you that sensed it. I would call that hunch and instinct. And I think we connect, if I may, in the moment as we navigate uncertainty and because we're not just reflexive creatures, right? There's this thing called counterfactual thinking, like I can run out, if this happens then that. I can play scenarios out.

And you know what does that? The imagination network. The same thing that's liberate and dreaming. We create a mental workspace. What if this happens? What if this happens? What if this doesn't happen? As we navigate the uncertainty,

so it's not just pull back from a hot frying pan or, you know, pull back from a scorching rock if you're a lizard, right? Those are reflexes. We have the ability to choose. And I think when you look at what you're saying about hunch and instinct and how we kind of knew something and we should have maybe paid more attention to it, I think that for me that's in the rear view. When you're in the moment and things are imperfect as they often are, I believe that you are trying to create the outcome out of that imperfect situation. And when it doesn't arise or it doesn't arrive for you,

so we do look back and say, hey, maybe we should have done things differently. That is the cost of the freedom of choice that we have right now, what to do, whether to grab this glass or not. And just like heartache is the cost of exposing yourself to falling in love, you know, and I'm familiar with that. So I think people should look at that as like, that's what makes life exciting.

Have you seen any connection between alcohol and dreams? Well, it's a big question. So this is a notable thing that I left out of the book. I have patients waking up from anesthesia. I'm floating above disassociative states like psychedelic experiences, ambient dreams, fentanyl dreams, alcohol suppresses dreams, people who smoke weed, marijuana users in the morning, they don't remember their dreams. I couldn't find it. It

definitely affects dreaming. To me that says two things. Dreams are coming from the brain. You take drugs and your dreams change. They're biological. And the second thing is I couldn't find a way to say antidepressants make this change your dreams. You know, Coke and meth makes this change. And alcohol as well. And alcohol. I just couldn't find something to wrap it around. Yeah, and I tried, because I was like, that's gonna be one of the chapters. And I just, I didn't find a clear link, except for one. Galantamine is this drug we give patients with dementia.

It works on acetylcholine, it's one of the less famous neurotransmitters. We have a lot, they do a lot. It's not dopamine does this, it's not that linear as we're seeing now, and liberating people now is galantamine. And so those people, they take it and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm becoming aware I'm dreaming while I'm dreaming. That's lucid dreaming. You double that dose. They have more lucid dreaming. the world of science that dose dependent escalation is as close you get to you know cause and effect so

Drugs definitely affect the brain. I just couldn't put them into new categories because people are antidepressants I had this type of dream people were on to coke the next day. They had a different type of dream So that is a mixed bag And alcohol is part of that. It's you know, it's a chemical Do you think we'll ever get closer to understanding the links more deeply as the memory banks dream banks? I hope so. I hope so.

And I think that's an interesting question. The things that I'm looking at are what were available to me. Everywhere from Aristotle a few thousand years ago, to stuff happening now, to questionnaires from 20 years ago. It's of course necessarily it's imperfect, but I think as people are more honest

and liberated to fill the dream banks in with this stuff, somebody after me is gonna take that and say, ooh, I think alcohol does this and antidepressants do this. I think it's quite possible, but just to let everybody know, I'm working with what's out there and trying to connect the dots between the gaps of, like from philosophy to brain science to YouTube, you know, ambient dreams.

Like I'm really trying to bring it together from every corner that I could look at. How much do we dream in events in reality versus completely fantasy-based events? Like how much of our dreams are replaying? Like you were saying that the veterans, for example, they dream about the war. That's like a real event that happened in their life. So that's a flashback. Yeah, it's a flashback. Yeah.

So, but when they dream about it, when they're getting divorced, that's a symbolic dream representing something. Representing something. What's the breakdown of dreams of flashbacks versus fantasy? I think PTSD flashbacks are clearly replay of a bad experience in your dreamscape. The imaginative component of dreams when you look at these surveys, it's a complete mixed bag. But what I will tell you is that I'm trying to just add the information here to your question, which is a good one, but how much of our dream life is a replay versus just completely cooked up by the imagination network? I get that. That's a

good question. And what I would say is, in flashbacks, it's a replay. If your dream is falling, that's not a replay, but indicative of something. And then there's most stuff is in between. It's highly visual, highly creative, jumping from social situations to visual situations. You know, you're on the top of a building, you're in an awkward situation, you're fighting with something. There are these jumps a little bit movie-like, but it's not a hallucination. Because I wanted to be able to answer this question,

like two years ago when I was thinking of this, and this is the gem that I found. When you hallucinate, just bear with me, it's a purple elephant in this room. The landscape is reality. The element is inserted in it. In dreaming, the whole thing is imagined. And so I would say the entire process of dreaming leans heavily imaginative. That's the best answer I can give.

Yeah, that's a good answer. No, it's interesting to me because I, yeah, I always wonder like, I'm like, are we always, do we ever dream in a space we've been in and seen in and even then? I think all of it. I think all of it. I mean, that's, so you have memory of places you've been and then you can imagine and dreaming has access to both of that. And if I may, the dreaming memory, like you go up, you has access to both of that and if I may the dreaming memory like you go up you get up to go to the bathroom sometimes you can slip back into a dream so it's not random and so I always wonder is there like access to memory our dreaming mind can have

that our waking mind does not have access to like Like people with, this is fascinating, like this little bit heavier on the science part, like people who have memory issues, like they've had a trauma and they can't remember if they've played Tetris or a video game, they'll see pictures of it in their dreams, but can't tell you about it. When you ask them during the day,

they'll say, no, I never played a Tetris game, but I had one in my dream. And they're basically playing Tetris is being played in front of them. So there's something going on where the dreaming mind has a memory system, I think. I don't have evidence for this, but there are little dots like that,

like slipping back into a dream, getting up to go to the bathroom, people with amnesia being able to feed their dreams. I can't identify like on a map or a dissection, but there's something unique going on with a dreaming memory and dreaming mind. And that's why it's so inspiring for me. Like, you know, I use drills and take off pieces of skull

and I dissect with them. I'm like, I'm not that guy, right? Most people would think. I think that's why it's powerful. Like brain surgeons talking about the dreaming mind. And, but that's why it's powerful. Brain surgeon's talking about the dreaming mind. But that's what it's done for me, my man, is like 51 years in, 10,000 patients, operating in like 10 countries, sons,

you know, wild love affair, heartbreak, all of it, intense relationship with my partner for 30 years, like all of it. And you start to think, like, I think I'm getting a sense. And then you then put this book together, it's almost like a rebirth. That's too much of a statement. But like, oh, wait a second, there's a dreaming mind memory system. Wait a second, Parkinson's, the first flare is a change in dreaming pattern. So just when I thought like, you know, I think I'm figuring this out, you know,

I'm excited to have, have the lens with which I approach the world reset. And that's what dreaming has done for me. Let's talk about lucid dreaming. We've been talking, but we've been kind of like peppering it in the whole time. First of all, let's just define, and a lot of the questions I ask are very simplified. And the reason for that is because I think a lot of these terms, ideas are out there and most people don't even know. And I think as you're simplifying language from a very scientific point of view, my goal is to try and simplify topics that we all hear about. And you might even hear around a conversation and you're sitting there going, I don't even know what that means.

I don't know if anyone knows what that means, but we're all pretending to know. So it's like, what is lucid dreaming? How common is it? And then how do we do it? So let's go through those two phases. Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, host of Womanica,

a daily podcast that introduces you to the fascinating lives of women history has forgotten. This month, we're bringing you the stories of disappearing acts. There's the 17th century fraudster who convinced men she was a German princess. The 1950s folk singer who literally drove off into the sunset and was never heard from again. The First Nations activist whose kidnapping and murder ignited decades of discourse about Indigenous women's disappearances. And the young daughter of a Russian czar whose legendary escape led to even more intrigue and speculation. These stories make us consider what it means to disappear and why a woman might even want

to make herself scarce. Listen to a manica on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For all the parents out there, picture that it's bedtime. You and the kids have been busy all day. You know they're tired, but with all that anxious energy, they just won't go to sleep. This was my kids every night. But I did find that stories calmed their mind and gave them something to focus on. So six years ago, I created the kids podcast Bedtime History to help solve that problem.

Bedtime History is a series of relaxing history stories that end with an inspirational message. We have episodes about Jackie Robinson, Neil Armstrong, Maya Angelou, and Sokka Jowaya. Episodes also include topics like space exploration, engineering, the rise and fall of civilizations, and major events like the Civil Rights Movement and the Transcontinental Railroad. With over 2,000 positive parent reviews, Bedtime History is one of the top education podcasts.

This week, join me and listen to Bedtime History every Monday and Thursday on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't understand what the big fat ones are. You don't put those inside of you, do you? I mean, you do? This is a show about women. Okay, so I just reapply my lip gloss after eating a delicious lunch.

We are headed back now to the European Political Systems class at Baruch College. Woo! Finally, a show about women that isn't just a thinly veiled aspirational nightmare. That's it, that's actually the name of the show. It's not hosted, not narrated, we're just dropping into a woman's world. It's like reality TV on the radio. I found out when my dad was gay when I was 10,

we were in a convertible on the 405 freeway listening to the B-52s. Looking back, I should have said, this is gay, this is already all gay. Listen to Finally a Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lucid dreaming, here's the way I would explain it to you. First, a little bit of a story about it.

When I was constructing this book, I was lucid dreaming. Oh no, I don't wanna cover this. There can't be any science for it. Two out of nine chapters aren't lucid dreaming. And so again, that's, it's refreshing for me. And the most rigorous science on dreaming is about lucid dreaming. So we talked earlier about the waking brain and the dreaming brain. Now we know that there's a sleep entry and there's a sleep exit. In the middle of dreaming, in the middle of the night, some people become aware, hey, I'm actually dreaming. And they become aware of the dream. And somebody might say, well, why is that unusual? Well, most dreams are in the rear view. You wake

up and you say, oh, whoa, that was a dream. But like I had a visual, I had a vibrant one last night, but and only when I woke up, I was like, wait a second, that was only a dream. But when the dream was happening, I was fully inhabiting the dream. The dream was happening in my mind, right? And at the neuronal electrochemical level.

So sleep entry, sleep exit, lucid dreaming is the return of awareness allowing people to know that they are actually in a dream while dreaming, okay? Not in the rear view like I had this morning. And so that's a big statement. And what I would say is there's proof for it. Lucid dreaming can be proven by this experiment that they did and have been doing that's the thing about studies and experiments for your listeners

If you if somebody breaks into something new and it's real you'll see an explosion of data in the scientific literature for that and in The 70s somebody said wait a second. You know, you're a lucid dreamer. You're telling me you can become aware While you're in a dream while the dream is happening and so they did a couple of things They trained the person that rapid eye movement, which is like skittish eye movements when we sleep and dream They said if you're in a lucid dream and consciousness has returned Can you can can you communicate with me like with your eyeballs, like a Morse code? And people should look this up.

They left, right, left, right. They train these like eye pattern movements. At the same time, they put the electrodes on the surface of the scalp because a guy like me will be like, he's just woke up, right? I need to know more than that. And they prove by the electricity that the person is truly asleep. So you can't fake being asleep. No. Across a glass, this person at a certain time in the middle of the night proving they're asleep, starts to communicate with their eyeballs and it still shows you're

asleep. Communicating with the outside world when you're asleep. That's powerful. That's lucid dreaming. Am I a lucid dreamer? No. Have I had one or two? Yes. Did people working on this book start to yes, can it be induced? Yes.

And so lucid dreaming is powerful because again, it's a liminal state, right? It's a bit of awareness. It's a bit of waking consciousness that is bubbled up during dreaming consciousness. And so nothing is rigid. Sleep entry, you don't go from wake to sleep in a second. It's not a hard line. So there are all these overlapping blurry states and lucid dreaming is that two more points about that.

When you put those patients, not patients, participants into brain scanners, that executive network I've been talking about logic and stuff is dampened. They show more blood flow that area, not as much as when you're awake, but the blood flow to the frontal cortex that does reason and logic and awareness is halfway. So this, you know, exactly right? And so if everybody's been a lucid dreamer and telling people to work and people are shaking you off like you're out of your head Tell them no there's uh, there's the left right eye movement proof. There's brain scan proof Galantamine that drug that makes lucid dreamers have more or have people start to lucid dream

There's a lot of scientific evidence for that. And the last thing is so can we learn to lucid dream? And the lucid dream I had was a trippy one. I was in the pandemic and I was teaching the boys to sail. We got this boat. I just like, we had to get them outdoors. You can't have three dogs and puppies in the house and in a pandemic. I thought this is a luxury I have. We're by the water here in California. It was like I'm turning the helm hard, but I'm going horizontal on like, on a giant like river pouring off in a waterfall.

And it was just like, I'm trying so hard just to stand still. And you know, I just remember the whole thing, like this, my right arm. And this was during the construction of this book. And I thought to myself, that's interesting. It's very visual. I know I'm in a dream. I mean, those are unique experiences for me.

Again, as a brain surgeon, they usually would not even explore these areas. But when I see the brain scan showing you're halfway between sleep and wake, when I see that drugs bring in lucid dreaming, I love pulling those two worlds together for people, you know? So I'm fascinated now with lucid dreaming. And I think people who

about a third of people do it, like when you 30 to 40% report it, sometimes more sometimes less athletes tend to have it more gamers tend to have more visual spatial creative people tend to have more lucid dreams. And there are some techniques that are out there. I was gonna ask you if someone's a beginner, yeah, and they want to try it. After watching this, they're gonna get the book, and they're like, all right, I wanna play with it.

What are the first three things someone should do? First thing they should do is look up M-I-L-D, lucid dreaming, mild technique. So there are a lot of techniques written about since antiquity, people have cultivated spirituality with that, this is a massive topic. Faiths use it a lot. Yeah, so mild technique.

And what it is is waking up a bit earlier than you should, you plan to or should. And then trying to hold on to consciousness and waking life as you drift into sort of back into sleep. The technique is described in the book and you can look it up online. But I want people to know why I mentioned that technique after four or five is because there is a study

when they took a bunch of people and they said, okay We're gonna teach you the left right left right Moore's code you practice this technique. Then we're gonna get you in the sleep lab It's not my experiment. It's not my investigation. We're gonna get you in the sleep lab Okay now prove to us with your eyeball movements that you're actually lucid dreaming everything before that was a survey like like, yeah, I did it and I'm lucid dreaming more. I believe people, but you know, I like that extra bit of proof. So the mild technique is proven with the left, right, left, right Morse code technique for that clearly shows you are asleep based on your brain, brain electricity, and you are using eye patterns. So much so this is a banger. They started doing a little bit of math.

Two plus two and they'd have code. And somebody says to me, I think I was in Paris and I said, wait a second, you said the dreaming brain doesn't do math. I said, yeah, but I also showed you the brain scans that show a bit of awareness and has come back as does the bit of ability to do math. So I love seeing those pieces come in consistently. That's brilliant. Raoul, from all your research you've done, you know, tons of research, tons of reading, looking at studies.

I feel one of the biggest things that I'm taking away from this is often the questions we're asking about our dreams are the wrong questions. We're asking like, what does this mean? Is this, you know, is this real? Like, you know, what should I do with this? What would you say are the best questions we should ask when we've woken up after dreaming? What should we be looking for? Point us in the right direction because I feel maybe we're wasting time and energy and effort in a different direction. So I would say when I, I'll tell you my approach, again, that's a massive topic you've just asked of me, is one, there are dreams that clearly reflect

your waking anxiety, showing up late, alarm doesn't go off, showing up naked at a podium because you're worried about public speaking. So some don't require you to spend too much time on them. Number two, there are universal dreams, nightmares and erotic dreams. We've talked about that a little bit. Number three, their dreams are just static, you know, let's not hold dreaming, thought and emotions to what we wouldn't waking thought. There's a lot of stuff we do them today. We don't even hold on to right? Similarly, the fourth are genre dreams, pregnancy dreams,

massive lifetime events are happening, massive lifetime events are happening in your dreaming. That's consistent. The ones that I would say to people are to focus on are the ones that are hyper hyper emotional, that you and they linger into the next day. You can try to cultivate it with the morning technique we talked about, a slower rise, not switching to email and Instagram too quickly. But the hyper emotional dream is one to reflect upon. Here's why. The emotional systems of your brain called limbic structures,

and the brain has the reptilian brain inside our throat sort of back there, that's instinct, makes you take a breath when you're underwater. Above it developed the emotional brain, much like what my dog has. You know, they have intuition. They have instinct. That's called the limbic system, and people can look this up. And there's there's circuits in there like the papay circuit. And it's a fascinating it's a fascinating part of the brain.

And then on top of it is a giant frontal cortex. The frontal cortex is integrated with all those. They're all intertwined. There is no dopamine. There's a reward pathway that jumps from the reptilian to the emotional. But to get things done, our advantage and the thing that blossomed our foreheads forward was logic and reason, the executive and the CEO.

So I believe that limbic system, those emotional systems are dampened during the day for productivity, conventional productivity, not creativity. And what's happening with your dreams is the roles are reversed and the emotional systems can achieve a top speed that your waking life can't. So if you have emotions, thoughts and experiences from a hyper emotional hyper liberated brain, that's the one to reflect on within your life. And I've given a few specific examples. And the process of reflecting what it means it's individual to you. If you are having nightmares and you don't have them and

you think your day, wait my day is fine, I'm having a lot of nightmares when I don't, let that be a warning sign to reflect more upon yourself. If you're struggling with a relationship and you have dreams of falling or hyper emotional dreams of being chased, you know, that's your relationship symbolically finding itself into your dreams. If you are at the end of life and you're having a lot of dreams about reconciliation, those are that's the dreaming process coming to your rescue. At the end of life dreams serve a different function.

I think they bring a solace and there's evidence coming out now that even when our heart has stopped, the last thing a brain does is have one massive dream in the last minute or two, potentially experiencing the universal feature of near-death experiences. So know that a hyper emotional dream comes from a hyper emotional state that's individual to your brain and that

no one can give you, no one has access to, and maybe it's your responsibility to turn over that feeling and those thoughts and just to pause for a minute and take all the information coming at you, take all the stuff you've gone through and actually step aside for a little bit and say, hey, what was that solar flare from my mind? And if it's useful to you, great. If the process helps you remember those more, great. But if you just have that five, 10 minutes

during your morning where you just remember that you were not resting the night before, There was something wild and vibrant going on and you got a glimpse of it. What it means is up to you but definitely don't neglect it. Well said. Dr. Raul John-Diall, the book is called This Is Why You Dream. If you don't have your copy already make sure you grab it. We dove into some of the themes, some of the topics. There's so much more inside this book that I believe you're going to love and appreciate so that you can dream better, dream bigger and dream more beautifully as well, which is what I wish for each and every one of you.

Raul, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you want to share that is on your heart and mind intuitively that you believe is important for our community? I think there's too much judgment going on in the ways that people approach life. And some people think they've got it all figured out. And some people on the other end saying, I've got nothing figured out. And I got to tell you, listen, I've been in that entire range. And I would say a couple of things. I would say I think the dreaming brain and mind is a genius built in that gives us resilience and resilience. I want to leave people with a brand new definition

of it a psychological definition that there's systemic resilience and processive resilience. Systemic resilience is is is what you bring to the fight. And processive resilience is what the fight brings out in you. So wherever you're at, you're equipped with your dreaming brain as your ally. And I think to me, that gives me a source of strength that there's this process cultivating me, protecting me, preparing me for the next day. That's not one side. That's Rahul speaking emotionally, right? On the other side, when

you sit here, you say, that's brain surges, trying to rock this stuff about the brain and mind and all that. I'll leave you with something I did not know in neuroscience, right? I got a lab, a PhD in neuroscience, I'm a brain surgeon. You start to think you're like the expert at it, but there are things in exploring dreams and dreaming that I was surprised, like, how did I not know that? Because it would have changed all the ways I would have acted through my life.

I would have been more open, more exploratory, more willing to accept other people's experiences because it doesn't all have to make sense, even to the Uber expert. So I leave people with something to search online called paradoxical kinesis, P-A-R-A-D-O-X-I-C-A-L, kinesis. It's called, I can't explain why you move that way. That's my street translation for that medical term.

But what it is, is those same patients that have dream enactment behavior, they care act out their dreams, and later on their Parkinson's develops and their brains wither. The strangest thing is when the Parkinson's sets in and their voices are stifled and their movements are rigid, when they act out their dreams,

their voices are big and their movements are fluid. The dreaming mind somehow can access the body in a better way, in a more fluid way, in a more in tune way than the waking mind can. And that, that's what I like to leave people with. Like I'm excited about this. I hope you guys are too. So Raoul, you talk about how naps lasting 60 to 90 minutes can boost learning and create a problem solving by 40%.

Why is this and when's the best time to take a nap? The napping thing is big these days and people are finding it's not work harder, work longer and all that, but try to work with the different states of mind and brain that you have. And napping, if you get to 60 or 90 minutes, people have done surveys and asked people to nap

with puzzles and they find entering the dream state or the sleeping state, which again, as we've talked about is imaginative, is divergent thinking that they solve problems better. They have more solutions to riddles. And the big point there for people is there's a utility to napping. You're not lazy because you nap. And if if you can do in a way that doesn't disrupt your sleep later on in the day

I think that's another you know in the world of hacks I think that's the hack that we've got all got built in can you dream in that 60 to 90 minutes? Yeah, have and have those dreams shown to be any different. I can't answer that There isn't data on have those shown dreams shown to be any different? I can't answer that. There isn't data on have those dreams shown to be any different. But I would say one condition is narcolepsy where people fall asleep suddenly and there's information coming out from that. They suddenly fall asleep and then they wake up

and they enter a dream state. But that's a whole space that's opening up, the utility of naps. And it doesn't have to be every day. It doesn't have to be rigid. And if you have a big event or a big project coming up, I think personally what I've tried is just shutting your eyes in a quiet space and allowing that mental workspace, allowing yourself not to be tasked on and drift inwards in your thoughts.

Whether you actually fall technically asleep or not, to me that's been advantageous. Yes, absolutely. I agree with that. I know many athletes who do that as well before a big game or before a big performance, you're not necessarily falling asleep, but I like it. You're an off mode. Uh, definitely. And also last question I want to ask you was the question that Elena mentioned. So a lot of people, when they're in sleep entry, they feel like they're falling. Why does that exist?

Why does, why do people have that experience? I don't know if I have an answer for that. And I've seen the reports, but I couldn't tie any signs to that. But sleep entry, falling asleep, is a time where activation of the movement centers is pronounced. And falling is actually a movement.

It's not, you think, oh, running is a movement, falling is something that happens to you, no. But the activation of the brain when people fall, it has to do with the motor strip as well, motor sensory. So during that transition, there may be a link there. Yeah, it's even interesting language like falling asleep. Like, I guess you're falling onto your bed, but the idea of falling is just, I don't know.

I like entering. Yeah, I find language really fascinating. And when I look at like falling to sleep, I'm like, that doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah. Beyond falling onto a bed, which doesn't necessarily create a restful, peaceful feeling. Take that back 2,000 years and we memorize it by heart. And that's when we thought the heart was the center.

So absolutely language shapes the direction of our mind. I mean, the power of words and people finding handwriting is it activates more part of the brains than typing. And so definitely the communication and storytelling and building meaning, there's something there. I'll explore that hopefully in the years ahead.

Yeah, I think sleep entry and exit is brilliant language though. That has really stayed with me and it's making me think even more intentionally and insightfully around those intimate moments just before waking up, especially those two to twelve minutes that you said before you go to bed and after you wake up because evening and morning routines make sense but there's an even more special time there that could be managed. Yeah, that morning time for me, sleep exit is definitely something I put to use. A lot of the ideas in this book, I'd read something, I'd be flipping through a bunch

of papers. I'm like, what does this mean? What does this mean? And then it would be in the morning. I go, oh, maybe that, maybe that. Not a guarantee, but definitely a space to explore. Yeah, amazing. Raoul, so we end every episode of on purpose with a fast five final five

these are questions that have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum and These are your final five. So the first question is what is the best? Dreaming advice you've ever heard or received try to remember them more. Okay second question What is the worst dreaming advice you've ever heard or received? Dreams are meaningless question number three a dream you wish you'd have more often? Falling in love the first time. Question number four, a dream that you wish people would have more often? Reconciliation dreams. Dreams of forgiveness. dreams of letting go. And are those ones that we can train ourselves to have?

I don't know, but those are the ones that some people report toward the end of life. And I just wonder if we had that more in the middle of our life, we would be, you know, we would have, we would have less regrets and we'd be less, you know, encumbered by the fuss of the day. Why do you, why, is there any study to show why people are having it later on in life? No. Wow. That's, yeah. And I can tell you that from my own experience with cancer patients.

Yeah. They're called genre dreams, end of life dreams. And again, our last act might be a massive dream and it tends to be positive. Not always for near death experiences. To me, I call that a dreaming coming to our rescue. Yeah. Could you imagine? You're so right. If you could have that earlier on, like...

All that beef, all that fuss, you know. It's a great answer. You know, I just... I wish I could have let it go earlier. Yeah. Fifth and final question. We ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law

that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? Before you speak or act, do your best to imagine yourself in that person's shoes. Great answer. Dr. Raul John-Diall, the book is called This Is Why You Dream. Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you don't already, make sure you follow Dr. Raul John-Diall on Instagram, across social media, grab a copy of the book. We'll put the link in the comments and the caption section. And I'm so grateful for your time and energy today. I've learned so much, you've completely transformed my way of thinking about dreams. Honestly, through your book and this interview,

I think I knew nothing about dreams before we met. I had really poor ideas and maybe some limited beliefs and speaking to you today has just opened up a whole new area of growth for me that I don't even think I was thinking about. So I love the idea that I'm walking away with some simple yet clear tools to actually start implementing from tonight and tomorrow. So I'm really excited about this dream journey. And I hope everyone who's listening and watching, when you read the book,

I hope you're going to go on a dream journey and I hope everyone who's listening and watching when you read the book, I hope you're gonna go on a dream journey with me too and I'd love to see you tag me and Dr. Raoul in some of the experiments, some of the tests that you're carrying out in your own life. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant

on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential. If you know you want to be more and achieve more this year, go check it out right now. You set a goal today, you achieve it in six months, and then by the time it happens, it's almost a relief. There's no sense of meaning and purpose. You sort of expected it, and you would have been disappointed if it didn't happen. Parents, if you've ever experienced bedtime battles with the kids, I'm gonna let you into a little secret. The Koala Moon podcast has revolutionized over 20 million bedtimes with parents like you calling it life-changing and the perfect nighttime routine. With original kids bedtime stories and cozy sleep meditations, every episode has been

specially designed to make bedtimes a dream. Listen to Koala Moon on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, welcome to Across Generations where the voices of Black women unite. I'm your host, Tiffany Cross. Tiffany Cross. Join me and be a part of sisterhood, friendship, wisdom, and laughter. We gather a seasoned elder, myself as the middle generation, and a vibrant young soul for engaging intergenerational conversations prepared to engage or hear perspectives

that literally no one else has had. Listen to Across Generations Podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Mini Driver Imagine you ask two people the same seven questions. I'm Mini Driver, and this was the idea I set out to explore in my podcast, Mini Questions.

This year we bring a whole new group of guests to answer the same seven questions, including Courtney Cox, Rob Delaney, Liz Fair and many, many more. Join me on season three of Mini Questions on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers.