The Dream Expert: What Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You (The Ultimate Dream Interpretation Guide)

onethird of Our Lives is potentially spent dreaming your Waking Life is feeding your dream life that's a solar flare from your brain in a unique state that you can't get to during the day dual trained brain surgeon and neuroscientist Dr Raul John the measurements of emotion in our dreaming brain can reach a top speed our waking brain can never reach how are you processing how are you metabolizing the most difficult thing in your day hey everyone I've got some huge news to share with you in the last 90 days 79.4% of our audience came from

viewers and listeners that are not subscribed to this channel there's research that shows that if you want to create a habit make it easy to access by hitting the Subscribe button you're creating a habit of learning how to be happier healthier and more healed this would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better bigger brighter content for you in the world subscribe right now the number one Health and Wellness podcast J sh J shett the one the only J shett 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'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 rul jandal is a dual trained brain surgeon and neuroscientist at City of Hope in Los Angeles Dr John dial leads the John deal lab which explor 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 rul johnel Raul it's great to see you pleasure 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 going to 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 and so you're going to 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 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 there here's how I 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 and we remember more when we're younger we remember less as we get older and then in certain

diseases dreams come to the rescue and it seems now that at the end of life like with my cancer patients uh dreams return and they're they're filled with reconciliation you were thinking they're 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 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 are so why do we dream and why is it important to try to understand why we dream the it's not a big deal it's completely off for those people who think it if they understand onethird of Our Lives is potentially spent dreaming and the brain shuts us down right it's just onethird like can't be passive and it puts you down

right like you get sleep pressure like you I got to sleep well when I was in training and 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 by like that thing that's not happening on accident right that's not a glitch that didn't last through uh 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 it's 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 giv respect to people whove tried to come up with some ideas like it's a threat

rehearsal if we're running from a a woolly mammoth in our dreams we're better prepared for during the day what I would say is maybe and when I say maybe you're 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 veilance 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 the atrophy but our day if you look at the

brain activation electricity is so narrow nrow the brain wants to be efficient right cuz it's an energy hog it's only like four or five lbs 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 one1 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 then have some way to high-intensity train them those would go deric 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 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 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 your nocturnal therapist this feeling of like okay I'm 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 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 you know not yes and not no when it come my dream your dream infinitely wild okay 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 b together about this I think we were vibing about

this before we uh uh 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 gap apps are say maybe say likely and say

I 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 iotic 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 uh 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 uh falling teeth that seems to be common and then there was a dream that was very rarely reported doing math now I don't like math so I was like that's all good for me but but you start when you look at lots of thousands of dreams you're like why is that one so low then now now walk with me over here

then you start looking at brain scans and brain electricity and what happens what's the difference between the waking brain and the dreaming brain right in a 24-hour cycle we're about 2/3 waking brain and onethird dreaming brain and there are some transition zones that I love like I call them Lial States or blurry zones that we can get into but that when you see that and you say well what's the difference I started off like they're both burning hot they're both sparkling 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 that you know you'd have a stroke so it dampens the imagination Network and the emotional systems called the limic 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 a measurement if the dreaming brain has dampened logic and reason and math liberated

emotion hyper visual it kind of makes sense why we don't see a lot of math because that part of the brain that does that isn't 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 in clusive and bringing in more people that patterns of how we dream you know and what we dream can be explained by the brain I that 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 B 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 against 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 a certain song or certain interaction can kind of liberate you and so

the way I I would explain this is uh 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 moving on those as a group tended to recover from divorce better and so when you when you just look and you say okay that's in 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's 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 emotional trauma and for p 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 expansive positive filled with reconciliation as they're asking for surgery and all that

you would think they're all going to be horrific because it's dark time stress right you think day stress is is is turned into dreaming stress but but the connection is not clear and that's where I think there's power in in in our dream life I think in general when I look at all the surveys dreaming is Our Shepherd uh 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 uh during our life for example pregnancy dreams women

have who are pregnant their dreams are very different rolling over in bed what the babies are going to be Rec called so sometimes waking anxiety and dream anxiety clearly linked I got to give a talk tomorrow I got a dream I'm showing up naked I got to uh you know I got an exam alarms sometimes they're clear sometimes they're your companion pregnancy dreams uh end of life dreams sometimes they're just junk not everything's going to 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 and 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 has 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 an 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 are 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 let's talk about that a little so I was going to ask you if you don't remember your dream I if you don't make the subconscious conscious does that mean that it doesn't have an effect and that 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 Dolly 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 person expence on into that I mean there's so

many things I want to talk about but 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 you jumped in the car you went asleep for a bit you got to the other

side maybe you remember a tree you saw the way or your mom and dad did something when you were a kid but you don't remember most of and 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 into the science I believe they're relevant let's take this first stage you 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 on our on our scalp the electricity Blends it's it's like a Lial State like I was I used to be a scuba diver when when you go from a freshwater 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 Dolly and some current tech companies in San Francisco They believe that during that period you kind of sort of have access to

that divers ENT 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 startle himself awake he'd write down what he was thinking that that was a scene in Inception right so I'm just bring I'll bring the science in but that's there Christopher Nolan's talking about that salor Dolly wrote a book about that you know his stuff is real like the and so what that that period is the first entry

into dream life that that you can still hold on to and what we're finding is that people have more interesting ideas they have more Divergent thinking and creative ideas at that window is that but to be clear your trouble at work you got to create a project is that going to guarantee it no but it's a habit of respecting that transition Lial 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 that's one thing that people can do to cultivate in that

same area some people feel and Report questionnaires and surveys not measurements that what you think about at that time uh 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 of blood vessels and tissue in different ways on challenging cases I'll flip the P 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 Forest wow and so what I what I concluded is my opinion is that that it's a three-dimensional space and I know I'm working on a three-dimensional creative project and that my dream life is somehow um rehearsing that practicing that providing me with that maneuver in a complex surgy and I say man that that that was uh 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 the dreaming brain builds that so sleep entry uh for waking up uh 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 has taken off so much in culture but and I'm trying to bring some science to it I 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 yeah 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 or so that's a great question the thing you said about waking up I 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 opened up with like we need more dream Banks we need people who have a greater exposure to social media uh to start talking about their dreams at this point it doesn't look like they populate dreams Ro for 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 100 papers on that but those are the spr that's the sprinkling of information that I saw like so what becomes familiar to us 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 that's a big category erotic dreams but is there any reasoning to that specifically because of being uh erotic dreams

about people you're not attracted to like where does that come from I don't know I think now we're getting into opinion I think 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 um 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 it's almost like an instruction if

you will um an inherit of thinking not just risk- taking or mental health but we inherit those dreams even if people who' never go on to have sex they still have erotic dreams almost like a Playbook that's meant for our 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% in these reports infidelity cheating is common and 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 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 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 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 uh what brings someone to climax the thoughts they have during that process with their love or without their level it's the internal thinking of Desire during the day that tends to find itself uh in erotic dreams and to me that's consistent if you think about the dreaming brain uh as something that has the liberated imagination Network 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 though if someone's in a happy relationship but you're saying it's still common for them to cheat in their dreams no 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 okay fantasizing I can't answer that because it would 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 you're bisexual you just haven't figured that out 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 more diverse sort of perspectives on sexuality will 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 open with like you 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 to still think if you're hung up on them during the day and you dream 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 some of the take a dream or not because I feel like a lot of people exactly like you just said you have a dream about something you're thinking oh God maybe I need that maybe I don't and and 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 dilemas 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 uh one dreams should not be neglected okay uh nightmares if they pop up and they arrive out of the blue they shouldn't be neglected I think uh dreams that are flashbacks after PTSD obviously should

not be neglected so there's some dreams that have a uh 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 myself should I discuss this with a therapist should I discuss this with my lover and I think the way I've um 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 all right I'm 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 like but if you start having nightmares or if you have emotional dreams dreams that are filled with fright or regret I'm not saying that that there's never an automatic link right other than the 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 uh 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 the 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 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 is going to be the same meaning for me at this at this moment my 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 hyper it's a emotion to a hyper emotional state it could mean nothing it could mean something but what I'm I'm here to say is take a look at it yeah I it's not just static no I I 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 met got a lot on that man 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 G to ask you and I was 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 sorry when you look at dream interpretation the interpretation of that was Bears represent strength and they represent courage and they have the symbol in now I go so it's a right it depends yeah it depends depends on which brain conjured up which image yeah you work in the circus bear means one thing you know you're a hunter bear means one thing you know in culture bear means something else so I like that but just to go

back to something that you know I've been 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 this going to take me a little time to open up on this but what's what's interesting and again I don't have all the ansers this conversation uh is that in the dreaming brain even though the logic and reason areas are dampened specifically the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is 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 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 powerful right and so what's happening this is this is this is cool what's happening is your motions and your vision centers and your movement centers are just firing up stuff linked directly indirectly 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 you know we get movies that have jumps of ideas people go from

one place to the other like art dreaming the way we dream prepares us for the way we appreciate art right so we can let that go this way on this 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 uh neglect or they'll develop something what it's called confabulation it's a fancy word for lying when the body signals are disconjugate 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 other 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 in 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 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 cuz you're cultivating that Str 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 uh in

the moments of our lives in our dreaming brain uh 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 is because our subconscious has had its run do 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 Mo well that's a that's a good

question so there are recurrent dreams it's a 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 Rose which it won't but like the brain doesn't feel the brain feels through its nerves so we can dissect the brain and somebody while they're talking the point there is is is not 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 their 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 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 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 are 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 anymore big question um okay so let's look at that um so now we got the foundation waking brain dreaming brain hyper imaginative hyper emotional um you're cooking up you're creating the events of your Dreamscape and I found this to be very powerful that nightmares since we imagined them the treatment for nightmares is something called imagery rehearsal therapy now I'm not a therapist I mean I take care a lot of cancer patients more than 10,000 in my life so there's a um there's a cultivation uh that

I have benefited from from them trusting me uh so I think I have some sense of understanding of human nature but 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 H 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 you're saying that we can actually feed our dreams if you practice a new script for the ending of your nightmares you can rescript 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 rescripted is powerful that 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 and that therapy can guide you to a better conclusion of your dream I love that as a scientist because it's the imagin Nation 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 uh uh 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 so you don't wake up and say Ah that's 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 the meaning about it yeah for sure I mean I I can relate to that I feel like there have been parts of my life where I've been able to code the emotion and feeling and script that I wake up with by what I put into the code before I go to bed and so at one point in my life when I was trying to wake up early and I didn't enjoy it and my reaction to waking up early in the

morning would be I'm so tired I just just want to stay in bed I just you know and I wanted to wake up early I 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 rescripting 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 I waking up so early and so I 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 yeah 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 would I say something in the middle if that through studying the the 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 you know I'm feeling it more I'm thinking about it more in the right way like that's just out there right that feels like there's like a kite flying flying above our head what I'm trying to get people to understand is the dream 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 rescripting your dreams right uh journaling like people are like okay so so there's brain activity that's leading to this mind that I want to

get my mind to lean a certain way and the brain activity is driving that and so what's the people say well how that happen I would give you the example of placebo and so when you believe a medicine is going to help you even if I tell you look that's there's nothing active in it that's just like sugar um 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 how 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 the chemicals that are floating around think of the brain as like a 100 billion microscopic jellyfish and there's like electric storms and waves of a of neurotransmitters flying around in there when you believe the pharmacy of your mind is actually releasing chemicals and things that generates different electricity that alleviates pain pain that prepares your brain and mind for rescripting the nightmare that makes positive gives you the scientific basis possibly for positive reinforcement positive relationships like these are actually uh not just emotions

but they're working at the level of the brain that's powerful yeah know I love that I love that description and as you were saying that I was thinking about this it it's all coming back to an intentionality a programming a 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 played video games for like 10 years like consistently at all and I think the pandemic kind

of you know had 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 with which I really enjoyed watching was ozar and I can I remember watching ozar every day for 30 days in a row and it's not even the scaryest show and while I was watching I probably didn't feel anything and somehow I felt that I had to dream every night that my house was being broken into like that 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 if we get back to that it's symbolic maybe it's the stress of the pandemic I mean so it's never going to be pinned down uh exactly but you're right the 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 will tell you is when color television arrived and magazines the dream reports show a bump in people having uh color 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's so many things we don't understand the the take-home is

it's not a p 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 right because to me it's bizarre to feel that exposure to social media pornography uh being on the online world doesn't lead to specific or certain dreams like especially with the hours that people are putting in right 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 yeah 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 I don't I remember one of them very vividly uh 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 have the most nightmares like it's common children have five times as many nightmares as adults you say even the gentless 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 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 all right 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 going to talk about dreams and dreaming uh you going have a new take on it but clearly nightmares can't be good for you right there's no use for nightmares and I thought I got to take this one head on in 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 in 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 um uh that helped me sort of come up

with an idea uh a story if you will so if you look at uh the first thing about nightmares that struck me is um 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 that's a power I don't I'm not saying I have the answer I'm just I'm leaving that with your audience that's one nightmares do that by definition nightmares wake

you up and they sear your memory okay um just like our kids learn to walk and talk our mind is being cultivated so they had these families that signed all their 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 uh you know a sweater then they get more imaginative and what happens is 567 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 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 in children you may have had them a lot but they arrive and then very few of them lead to nightmare disorder like it doesn't ruin their the next day so it's almost sort of like whereas an adults nightmare disorder means the residue is lingering with you so when you look at the patterns children learn to work walk and talk nightmares arrive around 4 56 and most of them go away erotic dreams around

like 11 12 13 and persist in some way adolescence arrives around 15 16 but these are cognitive changes the the brain looks about the same it's not like the a new lob 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 it's the dream we've always the all of us have had is a nightmare yeah that's super fascinating to me super fascinating it's exporation it's an exploration it's an exploration yeah and and

it's 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 there a rigidity to it right do this don't do this this will save you this won't save like no but the dreaming process leaves it open like yeah we're just beginning to understand it's personal keep digging keep exploring fail better I think that's what that all shows us why why I feel like what 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 yeah 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 some ideas about that like when we fall asleep in 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 woolly 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 well I would tell people is when we're not task on the brain doesn't rev down like your like your computer like goes and then you have to hit the keyboard to pop it up no it creates a mental life of its own 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 um they 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 it to me to me the uncertainty that the dreaming brain goes through that's our genius built in we don't we actually

don't want to become too rigid in our habits it might be okay today uh going on the freeway 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 yeah and it's I'm going to flipflop because we talked about uncertainty and uh creativity but I want to go into lucid dreaming and this idea of wanting some control in the uncertainty um but I before we get there I wanted to go back to sleep exit cuz I don't think we we talked about sleep entry but we didn't didn't finish sleep exit and that works because sleep exit uh 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 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 the residue or the lingering feelings of your dream life will necessarily be put in the

back seat and so if you do want to 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 um 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 my life for the last 5 10 5 10 years

I get out what exactly yeah what so what I do is if I have the luxury because I I do now it I didn't for a long time I mean the phone calls and Pages were 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 there 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

that I'm I'm trying to not have my executive Network kick in I'll keep my eyes closed I'll run through some thoughts oh that's interesting hold on that what should I do that like I I I have my sleep exit uh thinking or moments if you will and then I'll I'll reach over I'll go to my notes app it's right on the home screen and I'll write a few things down when I have ideas I mean i' say great majority have 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 the time it's rarely it's rarely like at 2:00 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 Lial 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 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 called hypnogogic and hypnopompic so the first thing I'm out there is like stop using these words that suck right like words are terrible yeah I'm so glad you didn't I but even hearing you say I've I've I've never heard the word sleep entry and sleep exit before yeah 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 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're 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 uh a pattern they overlap in a way that never happens while you're awake or while you're dreaming right so like that's 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 yeah no 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

well it's different for different people and people seem to cultivate it but Salvador Dolly he's written about it said you know anywhere from 2 to 12 minutes that's how long you have yeah but it's it's personal but it's real it's for everybody to figure out for themselves you know but I like the two to 12 minutes it gives us a gaug 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 uh you know your iPhone or Apple

watch is tracking your stages of sleep and when people people are in that sleep entry it'll Buzz them to wake up like Dolly tried and they'll and that that's their way of uh 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 because there's so fascinating I'm like completely obliterated any form of uh 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 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 the computer process and algorithm design is too tight too efficient and

that learning from dreaming they 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 uh 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 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 drink dream

we wake up to alarms and smoke and that we should be careful about in that vulnerable precious uh remarkable and 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 Riff on this a little bit like a hundred years ago they were like people were sleeping they put their hand in like a bucket of water see if they had more dreams about water in the modern version they're going to be taking your data and trying

to find 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 because I don't want you know I'm I'm private especially in my dream life yeah 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 um Vanilla Sky yeah with um Tom Cruz and Cameron deers 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 r 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 go I manifested this like I made this happen or like I have a disease and oh my God I saw this coming or 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 now constantly replaying it 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 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 I can't grip the data on that um 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 um there are plenty of reports and surveys where breast cancer patients have said like I had a dream and I felt the 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 can predict the future I need to unpack this one for

a little bit because this was mind-blowing when I when I learned about it there's something called REM behavior disorder which I'm relabeling dream and acma Behavior Uh yeah my world thank you thank you so much my world the words are are they confuse you know um dream and acma Behavior Uh middle-aged men 50s acting out their dream usually protecting their bed partner um 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 flare of the brain's deterioration with Parkinson's is a change in dreams 15 years ago I'll just leave it at that for for all the rigorous people out there saying hey they're talking about stuff like I'm questioning whether what you know the science can really show this look up REM behavior disorder Cap all caps RM behavior disorder which I call Dream an Acy 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 that an opportunity for us to start with medicine earlier I mean it just says so much but outside of that one and 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 you lottery numbers and stuff like that but at a more grounded level

they don't they don't necess predict what's going to happen to you um but what happens to you maybe 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 you're like I knew it you go I knew you replay it all yeah yeah you rep playing like and then you now you see all the red flags and 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 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 yeah and I think we we connect if I may yeah please 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 than that I can play scenarios out and you know what does that the imagination Network

the same thing that's liberated 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 you know pull back from a hot frying pan or you know pull back from a scorching Rock if you're a lizard right that's 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 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 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 we do look back and say hey um you know 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 I think I think people should look at that as like that's that's what makes life exciting you know yeah yeah have you seen any connection between alcohol and dreams well this a big question so this is a notable thing that I left out of the book I I have patients waking up from anesthesia I'm floating above disassociative States like psychodel experiences ambient dreams fentel dreams alcohol suppresses dreams people smoke weed marijuana users in the morning they don't remember their dreams I couldn't find an

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 anti-depressants make this change to 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 cuz I was like that's going to be one of the chapters and I just uh I um 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 um is uh galantamine and so those people that take it and they're like oh my gosh I'm I'm becoming aware I'm Dreaming while I'm Dreaming that's lucid dreaming you double that dose they have more lucid dreaming and in the world of science that dose dependent escalation is as close you get to you know cause

and effect so uh drugs definitely affect the brain uh I just couldn't put them into NE categories because people are anti-depressants had this type of dream people are on did Coke the next day they had a different type of dream so that is a mixed bag uh in alcohol 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 grow uh dream Banks gr I hope so I hope so and I think that's an interesting question yeah the the things that

I'm looking at are what were available to me everywhere from Aristotle few th000 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 to to fill the dream Bank in with this stuff somebody after me is going to take that and say ooh I think alcohol does this and anti-depressants do this I think it's I think it's quite possible but just as like 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 you know 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 you know look at yeah 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 their dream about the war that's like a real event that happened in their life they 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 yeah representing something what's kind of breakdown of dreams of flashbacks versus fantasy uh I think PTS SD flashbacks are clearly replay of of a bad experience in your Dreamscape the imaginative component of dreams when you look at these surveys um 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 what I would say is um in flashbacks it's a replay um if your if your dream is falling that's not a replay but indicative something and then there's most stuff is in between it's highly visual highly creative jumping from social situations to visual situations uh you know you're on the top of a building you're in an awkward situation you're finding with something there are these jumps a little bit movie like but it's not a hallucination and this this is the best I I because I wanted to be able to

answer this question like two years ago and 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 the 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 got it that's the best answer I can get yeah no that's a good answer yeah no it's it's interesting to me because I yeah I always wonder like I'm like are we

always do we have a dream in a space we've been in and seen in and even I think all of it I think all of it I mean that's so you have memory yeah 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 get up to go to the bathroom and sometimes you can slip back into a dream so it's not random and so I I always wonder is there like access to memory our dreaming mind can

have that our waking mind does not have access to like people with uh this is fascinating like this little bit heavier on the size part like people who have memory issues like they've had a trauma and they can't remember uh if they 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 I say no I never played a Tetris game but I had one in my dream and they they're basically playing their 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 it like on a map or a you know a dissection but uh there's something unique going on with the dreaming memory and dreaming mind and that's why it's so inspiring for me like you know I you know I use drills and take off pieces

of skull and I dissect with 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 what it's done for me my man is like 51 years in 10,000 patients operating like 10 countries um Sons you know Wild Affair heartbreak all of it intense emotion relationship with my partner for 30 years like all of it um and he start to think like I think I'm getting a sense and then you then putting this book together it's it's almost like

a rebirth it's that's too much of a statement but like oh wait a second there's a a dreaming mind memory system wait a second Parkinson's the first flare is uh a change in dreaming pattern so just when I thought like you know I think I think I'm figuring this out you know um I'm excited to have uh 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 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 um 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 uh scientific point of view my goal is to try and simplify topics that we all hear about and you might even hear about in 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 three phases lucid dreaming here's the way I explain it to you first a little bit of a a story about it when I was constructing this book I locid Dreaming oh no I don't want to cover this there can't be any science for it two out of nine chapters are lucid and so again that's it's refreshing for me and the most rigorous science on dreaming is about lucid dreaming so we

talked earli 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 oh that was a dream mhm because but like I had a visual I had a vibrant one last night but and I was and only when

I woke up I was like wait okay that was only a dream but when the dream was happening I was fully inhabiting the dream I was the dream was happening in my mind right at the 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 um 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 you're a lucid Dreamer you're telling me you you can become aware um 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 an elusive dream and Consciousness has returned can you con can you communicate with me like with your eyeballs through like a morse code and people should look this up they left right left right they train these like eye pattern mov movements at the same time they put the electrodes on the surface scalp cuz a guy like me will be like he's just woke up right well 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 their 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 Lial state right it's a bit of awareness it's a a bit of waking consciousness that has 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 they're all these overlapping blurry States and Lum lucid dreaming is that two more points about that when you put those patients or not patients participants into brain scanners that executive Network I've been talking about logic and stuff is dampened the they show more blood flow of 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 wow so this you know exactly right and so for everybody who's been a lucid dreamer and telling people to work 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 scam 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 the lucid dream and the the lucid dream I had was a Trippy one I was in the

pandemic and I was teaching the boys to S we got this boat I just like we had I had to get them Outdoors do 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 into 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 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 looser dreaming I love pulling those two worlds together for people you know so I'm fascinating now with 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 uh sometimes more sometimes less athletes and have it more Gamers tend to have it more visual spatial creative people tend to have more lucid dreams and there are some techniques that are out there I was going to ask you if someone's a beginner yeah and they want to try it after watching this they're going to get the book and they're like all right I want to play with it what are the first three things someone should do first thing they should

do is look up m l d lucid dreaming mild techniques so there are a lot of techniques written about since Antiquity uh people cultivated spirituality with that this a massive topic Faith 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 wake 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 I mention that technique after four or five is because there is a study when they took a bunch of people and I said okay we're going to teach you the left right left right mors code you practice this technique then we're going to get you in the sleep lab it's not my experiment or it's not my investigation we're going to get you in the sleep lab okay now prove to us with your eyeball movements that you're actually loose to Dreaming everything before that was a survey like yeah I did it and I'm loose

to 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 that clearly shows you are asleep based on your BL brain electricity and you are using eye patterns so much so this this is a banger they started doing a little bit of math two plus two and they 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 R 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 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 that's a massive topic you've you've just um asked of me is one there are dreams that clearly reflect your waking anxiety showing up late alarm going alarm doesn't go off um showing up naked at a

Podium because you're worried about public speaking so some don't require uh 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 there dreams are just St 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 dur the day we don't even hold on to right similarly um fourth are genre dreams pregnancy dreams massive lifetime events are happening massive lifetime events are happening and you're dreaming that's consistent the

ones that I 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 morning Technique we talked about a slower rise not 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 lyic 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 underw

above it develop the emotional brain much like what my dog has you know they have intuition uh they have Instinct um that's called the the lyic system and people can look this up and there's there's circuits in there like the Pepe circuit and it's a fascinating it's a fascinating part of the the brain and then on top of it is a giant frontal cortex the frontal cortex has um is integrated with all those they're all they're all intertwined there is no dopamine there's a reward pathway that that jumps from The Reptilian to the emotional to

but to get things done our advantage and the thing that block our foreheads forward was logic and reason the executive and the CEO so I believe that lyic system those emotional systems are uh dampened during the day for productivity a 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 you're 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 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 you don't have them and you think your day wait my day is fine I'm having a lot nightmares when I don't let that be a 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 uh 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 the end of life dreams serve a different function uh I think they they bring a Solace and there's evidence coming out now that even when our heart is stopped the last thing a brain does is have one last one massive dream in the last minute or two potentially experiencing uh the universal feature of near 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 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 5 10 minutes during your morning where you just remember that you were not resting the night before that 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 R johnel 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 uh dream bigger and dream more beautifully as well which is what I wish for

each and every one of you R 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 your listeners I've been in that entire range and I would say a couple of things I would say um I

I think the dreaming brain and mind is a genius built in that gives us resilience and 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 uh is is what you bring to the fight and processive resilience is 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 on one side that's like that's Rahul speaking emotionally right on the other side when you sit here and you say this brain surch is 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 got 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 um through my life I would have been more open more exploratory more willing to accept other people's uh 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 Ox i c a l Kinesis it's called we can't explain why you move that way that's my that's my street translation for that medical term but what it is is those same patients PA s that have dream and

acma behavior they car act out their dreams and later on their Parkinson's develops and their brains wither the strangest thing is when the Parkinson 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 rul you talk about how naps lasting 60 to 90 minutes can boost learning and creative problem solving by 40% uh why is this and when's the best time to take a nap the 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 you can do it in a way that doesn't disrupt your sleep later on in the day I think that's another you know this in the world 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 I can't answer that there isn't date on have those shown 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 them 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 uh 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 Works Space uh allowing yourself not to be task on and drift inwards in your thoughts whether you actually fall technically as sleep or not to me that's been advantageous yes absolutely I agree with that and 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 you're in off mode uh definitely and also last question I wanted to ask you was the the question

that Helena 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 I 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 uh you think oh running is a movement falling something that happens to you no but the activation of the brain

when people fall uh is 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 is just I don't know 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 like 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 a center so absolutely language shapes uh the direction of our mind I mean The Power of Words and people are finding handwriting is it activates more part of the brains than typing and so definitely the uh communication and storytelling and building meaning there's something there yeah I'll explore that hopefully in the years ahead I think sleep entry and exit is brilliant language though that 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 2 to 12 minutes that you said before you go to bed and after you wake up because evening and morning routines make sense but there's a even more special time there that could be managed yeah that that morning time for me sleep exit is definitely something I put to use a lot of the ideas in this book i' 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 oh maybe that maybe that

not a guarantee but definitely a space to explore yeah amazing R so we end every episode of on purpose with a Fast Five final five uh these are questions that have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum and these are your final FES 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 uh 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 middle of our life we' be you know we would have uh we would have less regrets and we'd be less un 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 uh 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 yeah before you speak or act do your best to imagine yourself in that person's shoes great answer Dr R johnel 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 johol on Instagram across

social media grab a copy of the book we'll put the link in the comments and the caption section uh 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 with me too and I'd love to see you tag me and Dr Raul 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 6 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