Speaker 1: Oh hey, so up top. This episode is exclusively sponsored
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Speaker 1: What a dream? Oh hey, it's your friend's fiance who
Speaker 1: commits everything to spreadsheets aliboard. We are back. It's the
Speaker 1: top of twenty twenty three. We're going to talk about
Speaker 1: hopes and dreams, but not hopes at all, just dreams,
Speaker 1: just dreams, all dreams. So this episode is a dream.
Speaker 1: It was years in the making. This expert has been
Speaker 1: at the top of the dream research game for decades.
Speaker 1: I have waited through the pandemic until everyone was quadruple
Speaker 1: vaxed and rapid tested. And also his new book just
Speaker 1: came out this fall. The timing was right. I went
Speaker 1: to Santa Cruz, a college town in this crunchy enclave
Speaker 1: on the California coast, where he has been a professor
Speaker 1: since nineteen sixty five. And I walked around the misty,
Speaker 1: rainy you see Santa Cruz campus until we spotted each other.
Speaker 1: Are you in the white coat? Ah? Okay, cool, I see,
Speaker 1: I'll walk through, And then ducked into the offices. We
Speaker 1: said hello to his colleague.
Speaker 2: All Lords and is in Barbara Laurs.
Speaker 1: She's my very lifelong residence fare And we posted up
Speaker 1: at his desk, and he has an affable smile, contagious warmth,
Speaker 1: and surprising humility for someone who is so celebrated in
Speaker 1: this field. He is a distinguished Professor emeritus and a
Speaker 1: research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and
Speaker 1: has written several books on dreaming, including the Scientific Study
Speaker 1: of Dreams and the Emergence of Dreaming, and his latest
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two release, The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming, The Where, How, when,
Speaker 1: what and Why of Dreams. This dude knows dreams, wrote
Speaker 1: the actual book on them, and also really quick before
Speaker 1: we ask him one million not smart questions. Thank you
Speaker 1: to everyone supporting for a dollar or more a month
Speaker 1: at patreon dot com, slash ologies and submitting the questions
Speaker 1: for the show. Thanks to everyone for leaving reviews. I
Speaker 1: read them all every week, and this week Cam left
Speaker 1: one that said do yourself a favor and listen to
Speaker 1: as many episodes as possible, even if they sound odd,
Speaker 1: like the one about flags. Cam and everyone else, Thank
Speaker 1: you and welcome to Owneurology. Owneurology. It's not easy to say,
Speaker 1: but it's an established field, stemming from the Greek word
Speaker 1: for dreams. And this man runs the research site dreambank
Speaker 1: dot net and has been privy to thousands of dream
Speaker 1: records over decades of research. And he lets me ask
Speaker 1: him things like what even is a dream? Why do
Speaker 1: we do it? Our dreams? A wish that your heart
Speaker 1: makes our dreams ghosts? Are we smarter when we dream more?
Speaker 1: Why is sleep important? And what does it all mean?
Speaker 1: So this week we'll arm you with the fundamental facts
Speaker 1: of dreaming, some brain basics, and sleep trivia, and then
Speaker 1: we'll be back with him next week to answer so
Speaker 1: many Patreon questions explaining all the weird stuff that happens
Speaker 1: to us when we dream, from nudity to flying to
Speaker 1: teeth dropping from their sockets. It's all good stuff. So
Speaker 1: pull up the covers and open your ears for author,
Speaker 1: researcher psychology and sociology, professor, dream expert and onnirologist, doctor g.
Speaker 1: William Domhoff Bill Domhoff pronouns he him and title your
Speaker 1: doctor Domhoff.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, Professor. I prefer might tell my students Professor Donoff,
Speaker 2: you can call me Billy. You can call me professor
Speaker 2: donmalf Doc.
Speaker 1: You don't good people ever, just call you doc.
Speaker 2: No, No, okay, Willie Wild, Willie Billy George.
Speaker 1: Now I got to ask, first off, how much sleep
Speaker 1: do you get a night? Because I feel like you're
Speaker 1: more productive and you look more well rested than I do.
Speaker 2: I'd probably get eight to nine hours sleep a night.
Speaker 1: Have you always been that way?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I've always been a night owl that sleeps in.
Speaker 2: Which was so it was when I went to college
Speaker 2: the first year, the nine your courses and I had
Speaker 2: an eight am class it was on botany, and they'd
Speaker 2: get in there and he'd start to show slides and
Speaker 2: the fall asleep, fall asleep. So I never again took
Speaker 2: a class before ten in the morning. And then when
Speaker 2: I became a professor, I never taught a class before
Speaker 2: ten or eleven. I m's preferred late morning or afternoon,
Speaker 2: so I really get rolling later at night. And that
Speaker 2: was reinforced when I had young children, and so we'd
Speaker 2: get the kids to bed and then maybe nine nine
Speaker 2: thirty I'd start in and go to two or three.
Speaker 2: So for some reason, that's when I think the best.
Speaker 2: And we do know from research that there are you know,
Speaker 2: night owls and larks, and people do their circadian rhythm
Speaker 2: does differ. One of the things that I want to
Speaker 2: emphasize is that on every generalization I make, there's huge
Speaker 2: individual differences people huge individual differences. The processes are the same,
Speaker 2: but we still.
Speaker 1: Vary for more on those broad chronotypes like being an
Speaker 1: up and out a morning person versus a midnight cyber goblin.
Speaker 1: You can listen to the circadian rhythms episode which is
Speaker 1: called chronobiology that's in the show notes. But wait, what
Speaker 1: is this one? Is it onrology? I had to check. Also,
Speaker 1: have you heard of the term ourology? Neurology, own neurology. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that would that's apparently that would be you're you would
Speaker 1: be an on neurologist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a Greek word, yes, for dreaming. Yeah, we
Speaker 2: don't use it much, I know, I know we used
Speaker 2: we once used psychopompologists. No carrier of souls to the underworld.
Speaker 1: That's an even better ology. Use that.
Speaker 2: You know, you call me a psychopompologist. They kind of
Speaker 2: took you over the river sks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh I love that. Okay, So Professor Domhoff and
Speaker 1: his men, we're really the only ones to use the
Speaker 1: term psychopompologist, and I love it. But onerrology is the
Speaker 1: one that you're going to hear more often in the literature.
Speaker 1: But if you become an oneerrologist, though, and you want
Speaker 1: to spearhead an industry wide change to psychopompology, hey, follow
Speaker 1: your dreams. At any point during your dream research, have
Speaker 1: you had to watch people in the lab sleeping and dreaming?
Speaker 1: Has that ever been part of the research?
Speaker 2: I just once one or two nights, and I've watched
Speaker 2: videos of it, and certainly in the very early days.
Speaker 1: And we're talking to other people's studies from the late
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties early nineteen sixties, there.
Speaker 2: Were people that watched people's sleep, and there was one
Speaker 2: especially great one looking at the influence of external stimuli
Speaker 2: on dreams, which is very minor in dreams because dreams
Speaker 2: are an act of imagination and we're basically screening everything
Speaker 2: else out. Hey, they taped these people's off, eyes open,
Speaker 2: and they're in the bed and they fell asleep so
Speaker 2: they could watch their eye movements, and they not only
Speaker 2: watch their eye movements, they wig a little light around. No,
Speaker 2: I didn't phase them at all, because all that kind
Speaker 2: of incoming input goes into a kind of a terminal
Speaker 2: lower part of our brain where it's no the gates
Speaker 2: are down. In other words, when that is we say included.
Speaker 2: But when it's excluded, like do not enter, you're going
Speaker 2: no further. So those stimuli don't have any impact.
Speaker 1: What about when it's waking you up, Like if you
Speaker 1: hear cat meowing and meowing and in your dream there's
Speaker 1: a tiger after you or something. You wake up and
Speaker 1: your cat's just hungry.
Speaker 2: Well, it's possible, but way more rare than people want
Speaker 2: to believe. Because we have this enormous need to think
Speaker 2: that we're somehow processing external stimuli that our dreams are
Speaker 2: influenced by recent events, but when it happens, as one
Speaker 2: of my colleagues one says, the dream has a greater
Speaker 2: influence on the stimuli than the stimula I have on
Speaker 2: the dream. So if you ring a bell, they're hearing
Speaker 2: a symphony, or you ring a bell and they hear
Speaker 2: something entirely different. So there's no real connection with the
Speaker 2: external world in dreams, and when to the degree there is,
Speaker 2: what happens is in one of the ways people get
Speaker 2: confused about what's in a dream is that as we awaken,
Speaker 2: we're also having imagery, and in that transition kind of
Speaker 2: period you may still have imagery or thoughts, but in
Speaker 2: terms of what is a dream, those aren't really dreams.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of experiences, mental experiences we have during
Speaker 2: the night that are not dreams.
Speaker 1: So that gait that goes down metaphorically is part of
Speaker 1: the thalmus, which is a nugget right in the center
Speaker 1: of the brain that acts as your information station, and
Speaker 1: it gathers intel from your body's senses and processes it
Speaker 1: so your cerebral cortex can figure out exactly what the
Speaker 1: hell's going on. Thanks to pathways called the thalamo cortico
Speaker 1: thalamic circuits, which is a term I dare you to
Speaker 1: try to work into casual conversation. You simply can't. But yes,
Speaker 1: the thalamus noodles around with learning and memory as well
Speaker 1: as sleep and waking, and some research suggests that external
Speaker 1: stimuli makes it into our dreams somewhere between nine to
Speaker 1: eighty seven percent, which is how has that ranged even possible?
Speaker 1: Because it's tough to study how much of the waking
Speaker 1: world makes it into your dreams because part of the
Speaker 1: research involves watching people sleep and then tickling them with
Speaker 1: a feather or squeezing parts of their limbs, and then
Speaker 1: waking them up and being like, what were you dreaming about?
Speaker 1: Were you dreaming about the feather? And results have really
Speaker 1: varied and sleep subjects maybe they're just waking up pissed.
Speaker 1: I don't know. But in doctor Domo's new book, The
Speaker 1: Neurocognitive Theory of Dreamings, he lists several factors that need
Speaker 1: to happen to allow spontaneous and undirected thinking aka dreaming.
Speaker 1: So those things are an adequate level of cortical activation
Speaker 1: in the brain. There's also the blocking of external stimuli
Speaker 1: via those gating mechanisms in the thalmus, and also a
Speaker 1: loss of conscious self control through deactivating three networks in
Speaker 1: your brain, the frontoparidle control network, the dorsal attention network,
Speaker 1: and the salience ventral network. There will not be a quiz,
Speaker 1: and it is okay if you remember none of that.
Speaker 1: But the point is it's not just about which areas
Speaker 1: of the brain are active, but also which ones are
Speaker 1: told to chill out for now so that we can sleep.
Speaker 1: And not all dreaming happens in REM and not all
Speaker 1: imagery is dreaming because we're not fully asleep the whole
Speaker 1: night what.
Speaker 2: And some of them were actually awake well at other times.
Speaker 2: There's one particular experience where where our mind is awake
Speaker 2: but our body is still in this state of paralysis
Speaker 2: called atonia. And so you're awake and you're thinking it
Speaker 2: and you can't move, but that's not dreaming. The EG record,
Speaker 2: the electro on cephalogram says you're awake, but your body
Speaker 2: has not the usual change that happens from when you're
Speaker 2: awaking from this particular stage of sleep called rapid eye
Speaker 2: movement sleep, which we'll call REM sleep, and that stage
Speaker 2: of sleep is unusual and it has this sleep paralysis
Speaker 2: kind of aspect. So and then we have many awakenings
Speaker 2: during night. All that gets confused in and mumbled into
Speaker 2: thinking it's a dream, but most of them aren't.
Speaker 1: And my biggest giant question is what is a dream?
Speaker 1: But before I ask that, I want to ask a
Speaker 1: little a little bit about you, because you were so
Speaker 1: prolific and you are so well recognized in this field.
Speaker 1: When it came to for me researching who knows the
Speaker 1: most about dreams, it was like all signs pointed to you.
Speaker 1: But you also have this other full career where you're
Speaker 1: a sociologist who's written textbooks. At what point in your
Speaker 1: long career did you say I want to go do
Speaker 1: dream research.
Speaker 2: I started out in dream research. I was a psychology
Speaker 2: undergraduate major. I did that in my junior year, but
Speaker 2: I wasn't really sure because I didn't know for sure
Speaker 2: what I wanted to do. I graduated in psychology. I'd
Speaker 2: had two or three social courses, but I still I
Speaker 2: wasn't sure I wanted to do grad school. My advisor said, oh,
Speaker 2: you got to go to grad school, and he wanted
Speaker 2: to send me to the University of Iowa, which was
Speaker 2: famous for this behavioristic stuff and conditioning learning with pigeons
Speaker 2: and rats, and I didn't like it at all, and
Speaker 2: so I wasn't sure what I was going to do.
Speaker 2: And then, oh my goodness, so I quickly went down
Speaker 2: enrolled in Kent State University, which was near my home
Speaker 2: raised in the suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. And I went
Speaker 2: to Kent State and they were glad to have me
Speaker 2: because I'd been a good student at Duke where I
Speaker 2: went undergraduate, and there I really got into it. And
Speaker 2: even though I had these professors that my interests weren't
Speaker 2: the same as theirs, they really were exciting in terms
Speaker 2: of rigorous thought and how to do experiments and so on.
Speaker 2: But it then went to the University of Miami had
Speaker 2: a brand new program and it was called humanistic and personality.
Speaker 2: In other words, they weren't doing what traditionally psychology had done,
Speaker 2: and that's why I said, Wow, I'm going there. And
Speaker 2: when I arrived, by coincidence, there was a visiting professor
Speaker 2: named Calvin S. Hall, and he was it turns out
Speaker 2: he was the finest expert in psychology about dreams, and
Speaker 2: he was very rigorous psychologist. He'd been trained as a
Speaker 2: behavior geneticist in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Speaker 1: And Calvin S. Hall was the mentor that we mentioned
Speaker 1: who co coined the term psychopropology. But yes, he was
Speaker 1: a well respected psychologist and studied how fast smart little
Speaker 1: rats could make it through mazes as well as pioneered
Speaker 1: this method still known as the open field test, and
Speaker 1: that is where they put a little mouse on a
Speaker 1: checkerboard table and observed it venturing around to determine heritable
Speaker 1: traits of emotionality. Akaa, how freaked out they get being
Speaker 1: in an open space, based on how scared their parents were.
Speaker 1: And for more on your own heritable emotionality now that
Speaker 1: we're all right, from visits with our family, you can
Speaker 1: see the personality psychology episode which we'll link in the
Speaker 1: show notes. But yes, doctor Calvin Hall.
Speaker 2: He bred the brave with the brave, and the scared
Speaker 2: with the scared, and so he bred for temperament and
Speaker 2: mice within four or five generations. So he's very rigorous.
Speaker 2: But then he got interested in dreams and he brought
Speaker 2: that rigor to dreams and he developed a what's called
Speaker 2: a coding system, which I best can describe as you
Speaker 2: put things in boxes. You put elements in a dream
Speaker 2: in boxes. So if I have a dream that I
Speaker 2: was sitting in my house and a friend walked in
Speaker 2: and he had his dog and the dog bit me, Well,
Speaker 2: the setting is my house, the character is my friend,
Speaker 2: and there's an animal character, this dog, and there was
Speaker 2: an aggression.
Speaker 1: The dog bit me, and Bill says that a bite
Speaker 1: would be an example of physical aggression, of course, so
Speaker 1: that goes in the physical aggression box. Wait, the what box? Okay?
Speaker 1: So his mentor, Calvin Hall and then this other guy,
Speaker 1: Robert Vandcastle, developed a quantitative system. It is known as
Speaker 1: the Hall, vand Castle dream coding system. This was back
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties. What the hell is a dream
Speaker 1: coding system, We're all asking. So it's a way of
Speaker 1: taking dream reports from subjects and then indexing them to
Speaker 1: measure who is dreaming about what, how often? And some
Speaker 1: of the tags they assigned to these dream reports are characters,
Speaker 1: the people who appear, settings, objects, activities, success and failure,
Speaker 1: misfortune and good fortune, emotions, and then social interactions. And
Speaker 1: social interaction has subcategories for friendliness, sexuality, and aggressions. So
Speaker 1: this coding system forever changed psychopapology and also showed that
Speaker 1: humans tended to dream about pretty similar things. Based on
Speaker 1: this now quantitative research and dream scientists were kind of
Speaker 1: able to forge this new world of research just by saying,
Speaker 1: give me, you're tired, you're friendly, your horny masses yearning
Speaker 1: to dream free.
Speaker 2: So we have all these boxes for minor misfortunes, major misfortunes,
Speaker 2: types of aggression, physical and on physical, whether you befriended
Speaker 2: me or I befriended you, it's very detailed. And what
Speaker 2: happened was taking his course, I also learned an amazing
Speaker 2: thing for that time period, and it's still always always
Speaker 2: surprising to us, and that was it had just been
Speaker 2: discovered in nineteen fifty three that our sleep, contrary to
Speaker 2: being just a simple sort of one undifferentiated state, in
Speaker 2: fact has these various stages we call them. And one
Speaker 2: of these stages this rim sleep stage, which we go
Speaker 2: into four or five times a night, about every ninety minutes.
Speaker 2: This stage of sleep is what we call really activated.
Speaker 2: That is, your breathing rate changes, and your heart rate changes,
Speaker 2: your little twinges that you'll see it in your dog.
Speaker 2: It's the work pause or moving, and then it's called
Speaker 2: rapidie move and sleep because your eye eyes are moving.
Speaker 2: And it's even the name of It's funny because the
Speaker 2: person who originally studied it the high movements. They jump
Speaker 2: all around, and he was going to call him jerky
Speaker 2: eye movements, and he decided that wouldn't be right. They
Speaker 2: would be known as gems and they would be jerky
Speaker 2: eye movements, so he called them rapid eye movements.
Speaker 1: Who was this guy? Okay? Doctor Nathaniel Kleitman, a renowned
Speaker 1: sleep researcher, in his student Eugene Azarinsky, and they hooked
Speaker 1: up willing volunteers to electrodes in nineteen fifty three and
Speaker 1: discovered the REM phase of sleep, which is called a
Speaker 1: paradoxical form of sleep because it has a lot of
Speaker 1: similarities to being awake. Your cerebral neurons are firing with
Speaker 1: the same intensity as you're waking hours, and you're only
Speaker 1: in REM sleep about twenty to twenty five percent of
Speaker 1: the night if you're an adult. But babies they're in
Speaker 1: that zone roughly eighty percent of their sleep time. Although
Speaker 1: dream scientists know that their brains aren't having the same
Speaker 1: level of dream activity that fully developed adult brains have,
Speaker 1: but what is happening when our eyes are darting around
Speaker 1: shiftily under our lids.
Speaker 2: It gave people more of a sense that these eye
Speaker 2: movements maybe we're tracking dreams, which was one of our
Speaker 2: early beliefs. But in fact, I think the studies show
Speaker 2: that our eye movements are just jerking around randomly, and
Speaker 2: people have desperately tried to find patterns in them that
Speaker 2: would relate to dreams, but that didn't happen. But the
Speaker 2: point is very simple, and that is that if you
Speaker 2: combine the seeming finding that we only dream during these
Speaker 2: rapid eye movement periods when our brain is basically activated
Speaker 2: again certain parts of our brain that later turned out
Speaker 2: but we'll get to that probably later, then if you
Speaker 2: then collect a dream during that period, and which we
Speaker 2: call a verbal reins because we're very psychologists, all we
Speaker 2: have if you want to ask me what a dream is,
Speaker 2: as you know it or I know it, a dream
Speaker 2: is a verbal report of a memory of a subjective
Speaker 2: experience that you had during the night.
Speaker 1: From a scientist perspective, they are data hounds and they
Speaker 1: can't work with what they don't know.
Speaker 2: So you have this particular report, like the one I
Speaker 2: just gave, and then we sit down and we have
Speaker 2: it on a piece of paper typed out, and then
Speaker 2: we say, oh, there's a character, there's an animal, there's
Speaker 2: a social interaction, there's a setting. So you combine those
Speaker 2: two and we could be scientific. Now you have to
Speaker 2: understand that psychologists used to have in those days what
Speaker 2: we called physics envy, and that is that we want
Speaker 2: to be scientists just like you. We want you to
Speaker 2: recognize that we're scientists just like you, So we have
Speaker 2: to be serios. And suddenly we have a situation where
Speaker 2: we have people in a sleep lab with this big
Speaker 2: clunky In those days of EEG was enormous. It was
Speaker 2: this big, clunky, clunky machine, and that made us look
Speaker 2: pretty scientific. And we've collected a dream during a rem period,
Speaker 2: which is supposedly only when we dreamt, and then we
Speaker 2: get the verbal report and we quantify it. So the
Speaker 2: title of my dissertation was this is sort of like,
Speaker 2: please notice we are scientists, but it's set in a
Speaker 2: pretty assertive manner. So the title of my dissertation was
Speaker 2: a quantitative study of dream content using an objective indicator
Speaker 2: of dreaming, like, wow, how could you get more scientific
Speaker 2: than that?
Speaker 1: Very lab coat?
Speaker 2: And furthermore, we would say this is the only known
Speaker 2: one to one relationship between a physiological event and a
Speaker 2: psychological event. In other words, remsleep equals dreaming. That it
Speaker 2: was called the rem dream equation. So how could I
Speaker 2: not go into dream research as a person that was
Speaker 2: interested in human motivation? Why we do the silly things
Speaker 2: we do, the things we know we shouldn't do. That
Speaker 2: we watch absurdities unfold every day, you know, in the culture,
Speaker 2: in what we're doing, in whatever realm of life that
Speaker 2: we're in. The other hooker was you got to understand
Speaker 2: in the fifties, in the early sixties, Freud and jung
Speaker 2: and the neo Freudians were the sort of they were
Speaker 2: in the atmosphere. And even though psychologists shied away from
Speaker 2: all three, and there were very few Freudians, no Jungens,
Speaker 2: still their metaphors, their images prevailed their ideas, and we
Speaker 2: had the expectations that you know, they we were testing
Speaker 2: there some of their ideas, no question. But the point
Speaker 2: is Freud had that right metaphor, the kind of metaphor
Speaker 2: that works. And Freud's phrase was dreams are the royal
Speaker 2: road to the unconscious, a royal road. Today we know
Speaker 2: they're a bumpy, little, unpaved road to the mundane, I
Speaker 2: would say, except for a few very interesting kind of
Speaker 2: dreams that we can talk about.
Speaker 1: And just a quick context. So Sigmund Freud was a
Speaker 1: pioneer in psychoanalysis, and Carl Jung thought that the symbols
Speaker 1: and the meanings of things that happen in dreams really
Speaker 1: depend on the context of those events or objects to
Speaker 1: the dreamer, and that dreaming can be used as kind
Speaker 1: of a creative tool to solve problems. For it was like, no,
Speaker 1: if you dream of corn dogs, you're a secret little
Speaker 1: perv and dreaming is just a way to keep you
Speaker 1: sleep as you plumb the depths of your repressed subconscious.
Speaker 1: So we know dreaming happens in longer and longer cycles
Speaker 1: through the night, But what is your brain doing while
Speaker 1: you're snoozing?
Speaker 2: And so sure enough, what happens is we dream when
Speaker 2: our brain is at a certain level of activation if
Speaker 2: there's no incoming stimuli. We dream during some parts of
Speaker 2: our non rem sleep too, particularly at stage that might
Speaker 2: hear me mention later non rem two and non REM
Speaker 2: two is very similar and it's a blood flow, and
Speaker 2: if you are trying to awaken people, they'll awaken as
Speaker 2: readily to a lighter tone, just the same as REM sleep.
Speaker 2: So there's just slight differences in certain ways between REM
Speaker 2: sleep and non ramsleep, and that's on the level of activation.
Speaker 2: And so my claim is that once there's adequate level
Speaker 2: of activation and there's no incoming stimuli, you're going to
Speaker 2: dream if you have a mature and intact neural substrate
Speaker 2: that supports dreaming.
Speaker 1: I've always wondered what does a brain in normal daily
Speaker 1: life look like in an MRI versus a dreaming one.
Speaker 2: They are different, And that was the mind blower of
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties. Parts of our brain remain deactivated even
Speaker 2: while parts of the brain do activate during REM sleep
Speaker 2: and non rem too sleep. What does that mean? More specifically,
Speaker 2: it means that the parts of our brain that are
Speaker 2: related to the external world, which means sensory systems, visual systems,
Speaker 2: sensory motor system but also what's called the executive network,
Speaker 2: which you could think of as the conductor of an orchestra,
Speaker 2: that whole executive network that lets us know what time
Speaker 2: it is how much more time before we have to
Speaker 2: get on the bus when our child's going to arrive home.
Speaker 2: That network's deactivated the whole night. And we also have
Speaker 2: networks in our brain. They're called attention networks, and they're
Speaker 2: sort of watching and they interact a lot with the
Speaker 2: executive network. But the executive network is kind of slacking off,
Speaker 2: so to speak. The attention networks slack off a little bit.
Speaker 2: And what happens is when the attention and executive networks
Speaker 2: are relatively deactivated, we call it. Then, what happens is
Speaker 2: the neural substrate, the set of brain areas that support
Speaker 2: a network for imagination, for selfhood, for memory, for internal thinking,
Speaker 2: that network becomes more salient, just like when you start
Speaker 2: to daydream, when you drift off, when your mind wanders,
Speaker 2: parts of that network are what we dream with. And
Speaker 2: that was the key that dreaming is an intensified form
Speaker 2: of mind wandering. Dreaming is based on our imaginations. The
Speaker 2: same network that supports imaginative thought like a really good
Speaker 2: daydream is basically the network that supports dreaming. And that
Speaker 2: to me was huge because it connected dreaming and waking thought.
Speaker 1: So the part of your brain that daydreams and imagines
Speaker 1: is on the night shift as a dream maker? What okay?
Speaker 1: But what are we dreaming about? Writing on unicorns, eating chowder,
Speaker 1: redecorating the dining room, peeing our pants? What's happening?
Speaker 2: To get to the core of it, dreams are most
Speaker 2: revealing for somebody that's researching the meaning of dreams. In
Speaker 2: terms of fact, they're about our personal concerns seventies seventy
Speaker 2: five percent of the time, and of course that's what
Speaker 2: we daydream about. Oh my god, I hope my kids
Speaker 2: do an okay school? Why did I say that to
Speaker 2: the boss yesterday? What am I gonna wear next week?
Speaker 2: To that wedding? I mean, all of these personal concerns
Speaker 2: are what we drift to. I have to laugh because
Speaker 2: in the sixties there was a study done where a
Speaker 2: professor was in a classroom introductory psychology class and he
Speaker 2: had a little starter gun that did the gun you
Speaker 2: shoot off when for a race in a track meet?
Speaker 2: And he said, periodically in the quarter I'm going to
Speaker 2: I tell you how that gun I'm gonna go bang,
Speaker 2: and I want you to immediately write down what you
Speaker 2: were thinking.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: So only the overall results were there's only twenty five
Speaker 2: percent of the people in the classroom we're listening fully
Speaker 2: to the lecture at the time that the starter gun
Speaker 2: was shot. I mean, our minds are all over the place.
Speaker 2: I know the students aren't paying attention. I know they're
Speaker 2: struggling to get back to pay attention. We all do that,
Speaker 2: especially we're you know, in certain parts of a lecture,
Speaker 2: if we've heard that part before, then we drift off.
Speaker 2: Why did that guy talk about that again? Will he
Speaker 2: get to anything new? Wonder why they ever made him
Speaker 2: a full professor? You know, all of these things are
Speaker 2: going through your mind as you listen to this talk,
Speaker 2: and we're all the same way. We know that from research.
Speaker 2: I'm not speaking personally. It's just an example, of course,
Speaker 2: based on solid research.
Speaker 1: Well, what about people who self identify as artists, are
Speaker 1: really creative, or people who have deficiencies in attention like
Speaker 1: or executive function issues like ADHD. Do they dream differently?
Speaker 2: Well, there's some there. First of these huge individual differences
Speaker 2: in all of us. The best example I can give
Speaker 2: you is about music, and that is that I know
Speaker 2: from different studies, but all from the studies my students
Speaker 2: do did in my courses, and that is that if
Speaker 2: you are a person that's really interested in music, you
Speaker 2: will dream about music. You will hear music in your
Speaker 2: dreams more frequently than the rest of us. So if
Speaker 2: I see a lot of music in dreams, a lot
Speaker 2: of playing music talking about music, then I can make
Speaker 2: the rather obvious inferences what's your strongest interest? And they say, oh, music.
Speaker 1: So if you are creative, chances are you are creative
Speaker 1: in the dream world. But what if your attention networks
Speaker 1: and executive networks kind of go offline in your waking hours.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: July twenty twenty two study called Dream Recall and Dream
Speaker 1: Content in Children with ADHD noted that sleep and dream
Speaker 1: studies for neurodivergent folks are a bit lacking, But this
Speaker 1: found that after studying the dreams of one hundred and
Speaker 1: three ADHD kids and one hundred kids in a control group,
Speaker 1: quote dream recall frequency and general dream characteristics like dream
Speaker 1: length and bizarreness didn't differ from children without ADHD, but
Speaker 1: the dreams of the children with ADHD were more negatively
Speaker 1: toned and included more misfortunes and threats, more negative endings,
Speaker 1: and physical aggression toward the dreamer. The dreams seemed to
Speaker 1: reflect the inner world of the child with ADHD, and
Speaker 1: the researchers noted that quote from a clinical point of view,
Speaker 1: it would be very interesting to study whether the negatively
Speaker 1: toned dreams change during treatment pharmacological and or psychotherapeutic in
Speaker 1: a way similar to how sleep quality improves. So, if
Speaker 1: you are neurodivergent and you have bad dreams about fitting in,
Speaker 1: science backs it up. But what if you've been medicated
Speaker 1: and you're not dreaming as much? Well, I looked it
Speaker 1: up and in a twenty twenty Frontiers in Psychology paper
Speaker 1: titled Dreams, Sleep and Psychotropic Drugs, researchers noted that you
Speaker 1: might not be dreaming less, but you might be sleeping
Speaker 1: more soundly and getting up fewer times in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night, which is coherent with the arousal retrieval
Speaker 1: model that states that nighttime awakenings help you remember your
Speaker 1: dreams that are encoded into long term memory, and therefore
Speaker 1: you have more dream recall. So sometimes remembering fewer dreams
Speaker 1: is a sign that you're saw on logs pretty hard.
Speaker 1: Either way, get that sleep, it's so good for your brain. Oh,
Speaker 1: and from both Part one and two will be donating
Speaker 1: to a charity of Professor Domhoff's choice, and we'll tell
Speaker 1: you more about that charity next week. But both episodes
Speaker 1: are sponsored by SAPA. Today's episode is exclusively sponsored by
Speaker 1: SOTFA because rule number one of dreaming, you got to
Speaker 1: sleep to dream. SAFA has a sleep loog on their
Speaker 1: site and it recommended this tip that I love, which
Speaker 1: is set an alarm, not to wake up, but to
Speaker 1: go to bed. Set an alarm at night, wind down,
Speaker 1: floss your teeth, get and jammies, and get stoked to
Speaker 1: get into a comfortable bed, nice sheets, a clean pillowcase,
Speaker 1: and a mattress that you're excited to sleep on. I
Speaker 1: used to have a very different relationship with sleep where
Speaker 1: I didn't fully appreciate how good sleep really is. What's
Speaker 1: something that is free but also makes you happier. It
Speaker 1: helps your body heel and you'll look better when you're
Speaker 1: well rested. So if you have a bad relationship with
Speaker 1: your mattress, please get a sofa. Do it for both
Speaker 1: of us. One thing I love about SOAFA is that
Speaker 1: they have a lot of different options. They have mattresses
Speaker 1: with coils, they have memory foam they have adjustable firmness.
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Speaker 1: not stuffed at a box. They delivered to you by hand.
Speaker 1: So if you have been looking for a mattress that
Speaker 1: makes you excited to go to sleep and get the
Speaker 1: sleep and the dreaming that you deserve, check out Sofa.
Speaker 1: You can learn more at SAFA dot com slash ologies.
Speaker 1: That's subleatva dot com slash ologies. Okay, back into it. So,
Speaker 1: speaking of studies, Professor Domhoff just published one with his
Speaker 1: research assistant. This is a twenty twenty paper titled from
Speaker 1: Adolescence to Young Adulthood in two dream Series the Consistency
Speaker 1: and Continuity of characters and Major personal Interests. And it
Speaker 1: was published by the American Psychological Association. And this study
Speaker 1: analyzed five thousand dream reports from two subjects and you
Speaker 1: can find them at dreambank dot net. But here's what
Speaker 1: they were about, because I know you want to know where.
Speaker 2: We had dream journals from two different young women who
Speaker 2: had kept their dreams for their own reasons, with no
Speaker 2: interest in science or anything else. One of them was blind,
Speaker 2: in fact, twelve or thirteen years old, and she'd wake
Speaker 2: up and tell her dreams to her mom, and her
Speaker 2: mom had said, you know, you like your dreams so much,
Speaker 2: why don't you tape them? And so now she's thirty
Speaker 2: years old and she looks on the web about dreams,
Speaker 2: and lo and behold, she finds my two research sites
Speaker 2: that were created by this research assistant, Adam Schneider, who's
Speaker 2: a great graphic designer. And I'll match him against anybody
Speaker 2: as far as spreadsheets and so on. And so we
Speaker 2: have two research sites, dreamresearch dot net and dream bank
Speaker 2: dot net. So they come across these and they look
Speaker 2: at them and then they say, hey, I got these
Speaker 2: dreams from when I was twelve to twenty five.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So had two different people do that over the space
Speaker 2: of five years, and now we have parent dream series
Speaker 2: we can study. So the one woman that we named Dizzy,
Speaker 2: because we have everybody at anonymity and we change all
Speaker 2: the names, all the places, and we put the the
Speaker 2: dreams are all on the dream bank for you to
Speaker 2: look at. But there's no real names up there. It's
Speaker 2: all pseudonyms. But at any rate, Izzy she would have
Speaker 2: all these dreams about TV characters and movie characters and
Speaker 2: zombies and so on. So when you ask her about
Speaker 2: these things in her dream, she said, I love horror.
Speaker 2: She'd been to horror you know conferences, you know where
Speaker 2: they all the people like horror films go. She goes
Speaker 2: to those things. Well, you know, they say, well, that's
Speaker 2: hardly news, but it does tell us that she dreams
Speaker 2: about her concerns. And her dreams are also excellent for
Speaker 2: another thing to understand about dreams that relate to your
Speaker 2: point ally, and that is that she had these dreams
Speaker 2: of people she had crushes on the first time she
Speaker 2: had a couple dreams since she was twelve. She had
Speaker 2: a crush on TV or movie man, and then she
Speaker 2: got a crush on another TV or movie star, and
Speaker 2: she wrote them down, and then she started to write
Speaker 2: her dreams down. That's actually how she started to write
Speaker 2: her dreams down. Well, we can figure out the percentage
Speaker 2: of her dreams where she's dreaming about these celebrities as
Speaker 2: we call them, or they're known people, but their celebrities
Speaker 2: she doesn't know them personally anyway, She has dreams about
Speaker 2: these crushes, and then it turns out she pretty soon
Speaker 2: having dreams about high school crushes. And there this one
Speaker 2: guy that appears throughout most of her high school years.
Speaker 2: So if you ask her, do have romantic interest towards
Speaker 2: certain guys, she would say, oh, yes, yeah, I get
Speaker 2: crushes and they really last a long time. Here's the
Speaker 2: interesting thing, it's all imagination. If we finally asked her,
Speaker 2: well you ever get involved with these people? You know
Speaker 2: this is via email and all, and she knows it's anonymous,
Speaker 2: she said, I never even touched anyone. She was the
Speaker 2: most shy person, but her fantasy life was very rich.
Speaker 2: There's always to that. So whether you do the things
Speaker 2: you dream, that's another story. And that's why I call
Speaker 2: it imagination. Now the other woman, the blind young woman
Speaker 2: we a code named Jasmine. Jasmine has a kind of
Speaker 2: blindness where she can see vague outlines. If you magnify
Speaker 2: things enough, she can read on a screen at any rate.
Speaker 2: She's always messing with her equipment, always with her computers,
Speaker 2: always with the sound equipment. And she was very, very interested,
Speaker 2: also in music. But when she dreamt about famous characters
Speaker 2: we'll call them, it was like snow White or you know,
Speaker 2: something like that, a nice, harmless little video cartoon kind
Speaker 2: of character, or nice characters like Mary Poppins, not some
Speaker 2: horror movie or some crush or something that involves sexuality.
Speaker 2: So she had a very different set of interests and
Speaker 2: I could know all those through her dreams. So dreams
Speaker 2: present a portrait of your personal concerns and they portray
Speaker 2: how you view the world.
Speaker 1: I'm curious too, in Jasmine's case, are you using the
Speaker 1: part of your brain that can see things visually? If
Speaker 1: you don't have sight, would you have sighted dreams?
Speaker 2: It depends. It's an ideal question, thank you. And that
Speaker 2: is First of all, visual imagery is something we gradually
Speaker 2: develop out of seeing, but it is located in what
Speaker 2: are called secondary visual cortices.
Speaker 1: Where in the brain is this, Well, the primary visual
Speaker 1: cortex is located in the occipital lobe, which is the
Speaker 1: very back of the brain. It's like your brain's but
Speaker 1: it's just above the nape of your neck, and the
Speaker 1: secondary visual courtesies are just above that, just a we
Speaker 1: smage closer to the top of your head.
Speaker 2: What that means is that one of the parts of
Speaker 2: the brain that never activates in the whole sleep period
Speaker 2: is what's called your primary visual cortex, which is a
Speaker 2: significant part of your brain. So what you're seeing is
Speaker 2: the mental imagery that you can see. If I ask
Speaker 2: all of you right now, imagine you're sitting in your
Speaker 2: living room. What's your living room look like? How many
Speaker 2: windows are in there? What's the furniture look like? Now,
Speaker 2: have your mom walk into that room. You can call
Speaker 2: up that visual imagery And.
Speaker 1: Just a quick aside. There's a slim fraction of folks
Speaker 1: who don't have visual imaginations, and they have what's called
Speaker 1: aphantasia or imagery weakness, and a twenty twenty study found
Speaker 1: that about zero point eight percent of cited folks are
Speaker 1: unable to form visual mental images. But a twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two Consciousness and Cognition paper revealed that the majority of
Speaker 1: a fantasics, though they can't conjure mental imagery while awake,
Speaker 1: nevertheless retain the capacity to experience rich visual dreams. So
Speaker 1: not so much when awake, but then it's a visual
Speaker 1: bonanza in their sleep. So people's ability to imagine can vary.
Speaker 2: Now that visual imagery is not automatic, and it's not
Speaker 2: there at the start, how do we know? We know?
Speaker 2: Two ways? One is developmental psychology studies. People who are
Speaker 2: awake by you can are ways of doing studies that
Speaker 2: I don't dare get into detail on how we can
Speaker 2: see how good you are at visualizing, say, in your mind.
Speaker 2: But the other way is precisely blind people. If you
Speaker 2: are born blind or become blind before about age four,
Speaker 2: you do not have visual mental imagery. But if you
Speaker 2: become blind after age seven, you will have visual imagery
Speaker 2: in your dreams, at least for many years. In one case,
Speaker 2: a woman gradually had less and less she was older,
Speaker 2: but she lost her sight at seven and so she
Speaker 2: didn't have much visual imagery. In other words, we've done
Speaker 2: studies of visual imagery in the dreams of the blind
Speaker 2: and other imagery. And this was done with a person
Speaker 2: who was doing a doctorate degree in which he brilliantly
Speaker 2: gave people cassettes. This was older, gave them cassettes. He
Speaker 2: didn't know quite how to study him well. And that's
Speaker 2: where we come in. Because of this crazy little content
Speaker 2: system I've told you about. It's obsessively detailed, one might say.
Speaker 2: And we were able to create a taste, touch, smell percent,
Speaker 2: hearing percent, the visual percent, so we could go through.
Speaker 2: We now have it all fancy on the computer and
Speaker 2: so we can create word strings for taste, touch, smell
Speaker 2: for various words, all the words for taste, smell, and
Speaker 2: so on, and then find all the dreams that have
Speaker 2: from these blind people to have those in them. Then
Speaker 2: we check them for false positives, things like oh, I
Speaker 2: see what you mean. Well, there, that's just a metaphor.
Speaker 2: In any case, we can determine that the people that
Speaker 2: did not have any visual mental imagery because they were
Speaker 2: blind at birth or before, they dream of one guy,
Speaker 2: I really remember he could smell the cof he's holding
Speaker 2: onto his coffee cup and he can feel how warm
Speaker 2: it is, and he smells the coffee. We do that
Speaker 2: a little bit, we do or cited, but it's two
Speaker 2: three percent of the sensory images in our dream. But
Speaker 2: hearing occurs fair amount of dreams too, so we have
Speaker 2: this mental imagery. It doesn't depend on the primary visual cortec.
Speaker 1: I'm so confused about dreams because I could sit in
Speaker 1: front of a laptop and say, okay, write a movie,
Speaker 1: and I'd be like, I don't know what to write about.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to describe it. And then I
Speaker 1: fall asleep in my pants on the couch and I
Speaker 1: have this like fantastic odyssey with whatever, like pirates and
Speaker 1: hot air balloons. How does our imagination do that?
Speaker 2: I call it imagination roaming freely. You see, when we're awake,
Speaker 2: you're constrained by these other networks, these these networks that
Speaker 2: are oriented towards the waking world, these executive and attention networks.
Speaker 2: So you're constrained at night, you're roaming freely and instantly.
Speaker 2: The same thing in the morning when you wake up
Speaker 2: in the morning, whether you wake up from a dream
Speaker 2: or not. And if it's a relaxed wakening, which it
Speaker 2: is for most human beings, even in honting and gathering societies,
Speaker 2: people are all around fire. They feel safe. Say you
Speaker 2: wake up gradually and the parts of the brain that
Speaker 2: are activating the most are not immediately the executive network
Speaker 2: or the attention network foggy, and you'll have a lot
Speaker 2: of drifting waking thoughts. And in my case, I'll wake
Speaker 2: up in the morning not from a dream, and I'll say,
Speaker 2: that's where that paragraph should go. I got to move
Speaker 2: that paragraph. That's what that didn't sit right. Then I'll
Speaker 2: quickly note something down. You'll make changes in the manuscript,
Speaker 2: revealing what I do with most of my time.
Speaker 1: Seriously, this dude has written over twenty books, and they're
Speaker 1: not zombie fanfic. He's written twenty legit sociology and neurobiology
Speaker 1: textbooks in his waking hours, and then he dreams about
Speaker 1: paragraphs when he rests. But what about a relaxed awakening.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that for a second. So, according to
Speaker 1: the twenty nineteen book Dreams, Biology, Psychology, and Culture, the circums,
Speaker 1: dances around, and awakening also play a really big role
Speaker 1: in how often you can remember your dreams. So, for example,
Speaker 1: like if a person in a dream study has to
Speaker 1: complete a task as soon as they wake up, that
Speaker 1: distraction interferes and messes up dream recall compared to participants
Speaker 1: who are allowed to enjoy the languor of bed and
Speaker 1: fart around and think about their dreams the night before.
Speaker 1: But there's a ton of individual factors that influence that wildly,
Speaker 1: and remembering the details of your dreams may or may
Speaker 1: not be helpful to you. It depends on who you ask.
Speaker 2: In other words, you're waking. Reflections and thoughts that are
Speaker 2: triggered by your dreams are used by a few writers,
Speaker 2: not a lot, and not a lot by poets, And
Speaker 2: there's books and articles on that where you ask a
Speaker 2: lot of poets artists to set and do they use
Speaker 2: their dreams, and a few do and most don't. So
Speaker 2: in your case, I would suggest then that you tape
Speaker 2: record your dreams and see if you see, and then
Speaker 2: your reflections on your dreams become useful. There's some people
Speaker 2: who believe, oh, we solve problems in dreams if you
Speaker 2: talk about cognition and complex thinking. The fact is that
Speaker 2: sometimes people do solve problems reflecting on their dreams. There
Speaker 2: was one study done, for instance, where the professor asked
Speaker 2: the students to try to dream about something that's been
Speaker 2: bothering them. So they collected these dreams and the students said, well,
Speaker 2: you know, like two of the fifty say related anything
Speaker 2: at all to a problem in the student's minds, and
Speaker 2: judges independent judges. That means some other psychologists that you're
Speaker 2: working with they go through and they say, yeah, that
Speaker 2: dream seems to relate to that particular problem. But the
Speaker 2: one I like best in that study was this woman
Speaker 2: had a dream when she woke up and she was
Speaker 2: wolfing down pills if I forgot to make my pills,
Speaker 2: gulp and gulp down pills, And she woke up and
Speaker 2: I said, I think I better write down a schedule
Speaker 2: to remind me to write to take my pills. But
Speaker 2: the dream she didn't solve a problem in that dream,
Speaker 2: but reflecting on that dream, it changes. And then another
Speaker 2: woman had a dream where she'd been having trouble with
Speaker 2: her menstrual cycle and she'd been to the doctor about
Speaker 2: it and so on, and she has a dream about
Speaker 2: running any When she wakes up and she reflects on
Speaker 2: the dream, she said, I think I forgot to tell
Speaker 2: the doctor that I have been doing a lot of running.
Speaker 2: And of course we know women that run miles and
Speaker 2: miles and miles. It can affect your menstrual cycle. So
Speaker 2: it's a reflection on the dreams. But I don't believe,
Speaker 2: contrary to many, that dreams solve problems and dreaming is
Speaker 2: not a problem solving mechanism. I disagree with that kind
Speaker 2: of view because first, we forget ninety eight percent of
Speaker 2: our dream ninety five to ninety nine.
Speaker 1: Will say, now, that's going to kill you as a
Speaker 1: researcher to think of how much data is just not
Speaker 1: recollected if I'm waking. Does that kill you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, it's fascinating. And the trouble is we can't
Speaker 2: figure out why. It's the easiest kind of study there
Speaker 2: is to take people that are what we call high
Speaker 2: recallers and low recallers, and they've been compared on every
Speaker 2: personality test and every cognitive test, and we don't get
Speaker 2: high correlations. So I can't say, oh, you dream because
Speaker 2: of this, you you don't dream because of that. Now
Speaker 2: people are trying that with neuroimaging studies of people that
Speaker 2: say they dream frequently and people that say they rarely dream,
Speaker 2: and there are differences in the activation levels of some
Speaker 2: parts of that neural network. So that's just an infancy,
Speaker 2: but it could then turn out to be useful, and
Speaker 2: so we end up with things like this. If one
Speaker 2: of the best predictors of whether you recall dreams is
Speaker 2: whether you're interested in dream now, why might you be
Speaker 2: interested in dreams? Then becomes a question she wants to
Speaker 2: know about your dreams? Well, one of my students did
Speaker 2: a study of that, and she asked people how interested
Speaker 2: it were in their dream and she got the highs
Speaker 2: and the lows, And with the highs, the interesting thing
Speaker 2: was several of them thought they'd had a dream that
Speaker 2: was psychic and so they had a dream that their
Speaker 2: sister was ill or their grandfather was very sick, and
Speaker 2: those dreams were very upsetting to them, and they called
Speaker 2: the people to check, which people often do. So what
Speaker 2: happens is if a thousand people, million people tonight dream
Speaker 2: that their grandfather has become gravely ill, one of those
Speaker 2: grandfathers is going to die that night by chance, So
Speaker 2: that person is going to think they're psychic. The other people,
Speaker 2: they often do call their home. I know that because
Speaker 2: we've done studies where we ask people about types of dreams,
Speaker 2: and then we asked, basically, you ever had a dream
Speaker 2: that led you to take any action? And they'll say,
Speaker 2: while I dream my grandfather died and I called home
Speaker 2: and he hadn't as relieve, but the other ones in
Speaker 2: that study. This is where dreams are fun. I mean
Speaker 2: a lot of times, even though we have more negative
Speaker 2: dreams have more misfortune than good fortune. They have more
Speaker 2: aggression and friendliness and so on. They have a negativity bias,
Speaker 2: as does much of our making thought.
Speaker 1: For more on this startling and bumber info, see the
Speaker 1: paper A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind by two
Speaker 1: Harvard professors who used a mood tracking app to learn
Speaker 1: that about forty seven percent of the time are thinking
Speaker 1: about things that make us anxious or sad, rather than
Speaker 1: just enjoying being alive on the planet. And the research wrote,
Speaker 1: a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering
Speaker 1: mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about
Speaker 1: what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes
Speaker 1: at an emotional cost, and that's partly why some experts
Speaker 1: say that mindfulness can help shift your mental habits away
Speaker 1: from the dark recesses of why did I do that,
Speaker 1: Why did I do that? Why did I do that?
Speaker 1: Or what if a disaster happens? Thoughts that are all
Speaker 1: too familiar for some of.
Speaker 2: Us, but any rate. In this particular study where we
Speaker 2: ask if it led the action, there were two women
Speaker 2: about forty five who had had a dream that their
Speaker 2: boyfriend was cheating on them. Now and it's on a
Speaker 2: questionnaire and it's anonymous. This one woman who dreamed of
Speaker 2: her boyfriend cheated on her. They were actually sleeping in
Speaker 2: the same bed. She said, I was so angry I
Speaker 2: socked him in the arm. The other woman was not
Speaker 2: in the same with her boyfriend when this dream happened.
Speaker 2: But she said, I didn't speak to him for two days.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel so real. You feels so hurt by it,
Speaker 1: and no matter how real it feels, you're not allowed
Speaker 1: to physically or emotionally abuse anyone. When you wake up.
Speaker 1: We got that. We're good. There, go have a nap,
Speaker 1: and in it you can take a Louisville slugger to
Speaker 1: both headlights, you can slash a hole in all four tires,
Speaker 1: and then you can wake up and be nice.
Speaker 2: Well, that gets to the other thing that's about dreams.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons they're so fascinating to us, I
Speaker 2: use that. We have a term, fancy term. It's called
Speaker 2: embodied simulation. Now, that's what a dream is. It's an
Speaker 2: embodied simulation. And what does that mean? First of all,
Speaker 2: simulation is when you're putting yourself in some hypothetical scenario.
Speaker 2: You're driving along and you're thinking, what if I pulled
Speaker 2: over here and when in that gas station? And what
Speaker 2: if I then played the jute box and I started
Speaker 2: to listen to music, And what if I really started
Speaker 2: to really do what I want to do, which just
Speaker 2: to sing and show people I can really sing. So
Speaker 2: I've just simulated a scenario. I'm driving along, I'm going
Speaker 2: to pull into this gas station and into its little store,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to go in there and sing. That's
Speaker 2: a simulation, but an embodied simulation. What that means is
Speaker 2: that when we really get intensely into a dreaming part
Speaker 2: of the brain, areas that are activated are not only
Speaker 2: our imagination, but also these secondary visual, auditory, and motor corteses.
Speaker 2: And you can sometimes call this up in your mind
Speaker 2: and imagine yourself running. You're really running and you're really afraid.
Speaker 2: You can work yourself up and get a sense of that,
Speaker 2: and you're being man and you're being chased by that
Speaker 2: dog that you're scared of down the street.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling that doctor Domhoff had a bad
Speaker 1: experience with a dog, which saddens me, and I didn't
Speaker 1: ask about it, but anyway.
Speaker 2: So at that point it becomes not just sort of
Speaker 2: abstract thought, but we are maybe shaking a little bit
Speaker 2: or really feeling a sense of running. All of that
Speaker 2: is what I mean by intensified form of mind wandering,
Speaker 2: because we know that the secondary visual courtesies and motor
Speaker 2: courtesies are activated during dreaming, and what that means is
Speaker 2: it does feel real. We experience dreams as real while
Speaker 2: they are happening, and we wake up and it's usually
Speaker 2: gone in a flash where we say, my god, I
Speaker 2: can't believe that I was actually arguing with that guy
Speaker 2: that I never would argue with in my life. I
Speaker 2: was actually talking to that person never talked to, or
Speaker 2: I was giving Jimmy Carter advice, you know. And so
Speaker 2: they feel so real, and so for most of us
Speaker 2: that we shake that feeling. But some dreams can feel
Speaker 2: more than real.
Speaker 1: Bill says that one type of embodied simulation is a
Speaker 1: little more profound.
Speaker 2: And that is occasionally this is a rare dream now,
Speaker 2: but people sometimes have dreams of deceased loved ones. Not
Speaker 2: just that you're walking around with your dad and mom,
Speaker 2: but you recognize who are deceased, but you recognize that
Speaker 2: they're alive. Yeah, and you can't believe it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this happened to me like literally like two nights ago. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was like, Dad, you're back, you know, yes, and
Speaker 2: back to life. Dreams. Those dreams are so powerful for people.
Speaker 2: And here's the striking thing. One of the founders of
Speaker 2: anthropology of modern anthropology, an English guy named Edmund Tyler.
Speaker 2: He said dreams in the spiritual world, dreams and religion
Speaker 2: are very closely tied, because these occasional dreams of somebody
Speaker 2: being alive are really so real to people they tell
Speaker 2: other people.
Speaker 1: You'll never guess who I read it to.
Speaker 2: And in that sense, some myths, this is another phrase
Speaker 2: I really like. Many myths are dreams that have been
Speaker 2: told and retold. If I tell you a dream in
Speaker 2: which this amazing thing happened where so and so was
Speaker 2: back to life, and that dream kind of grabs you
Speaker 2: or resonates like it did for you, you might tell
Speaker 2: my dream, but it would be just slightly altered by you.
Speaker 2: With every time a story is told, it gets oldered slightly.
Speaker 2: We call it leveled and sharpened. The minor stuff falls
Speaker 2: out and the stuff that's interesting gets sharpened and embroidered.
Speaker 2: You know, the big guy in the dream becomes a giant.
Speaker 2: So that kind of embroidering of dreams that have been
Speaker 2: told and retold may well relate to some of our mythologies. Now,
Speaker 2: I want to tell a little story related to that
Speaker 2: about when you ask people for dreams. When I first
Speaker 2: read research on these back to life dreams, I was
Speaker 2: very interested. I wanted to see if very many students
Speaker 2: had that kind of dream. And I used to teach
Speaker 2: these very large classes, whether it was introductory psych or
Speaker 2: personality or of course on dreams, and I would give
Speaker 2: them these anonymous questionnaires. This particular questionnaire, I just asked,
Speaker 2: this very general question, have you ever had a dream
Speaker 2: of a deceased loved one in which they seemed to
Speaker 2: be alive? And to my surprise, and these are all
Speaker 2: eighteen to twenty year old, and they probably hadn't experienced
Speaker 2: even the deaths of their grandparents. Shit in a lot
Speaker 2: of the cases, but four or five students had dreams
Speaker 2: in which their dog was alive, their cat was alive,
Speaker 2: and they loved it. And I was so taken aback.
Speaker 2: And one of my daughters really had a dog she
Speaker 2: really loved, and I told her about, you know, these
Speaker 2: dreams I'd collected, and she said, Dad, I dream about
Speaker 2: him being about her dog being shot. I'm just so
Speaker 2: joyful when I see him and he's, like you do alive.
Speaker 2: So if you've had that experience, now, now turned to
Speaker 2: one of our studies, and he's up on the web
Speaker 2: on the dream bank. His name Zed Sudan name is
Speaker 2: ed pseudonym, whatever the right word is.
Speaker 1: This twenty fifteen paper titled Dreaming as Embodied Simulation was
Speaker 1: published via the American Psychological Association, and it deals with
Speaker 1: dream journals that this anonymous subject ed recorded on his
Speaker 1: own for decades, never intending them to be public, but
Speaker 1: later passed them on to researchers in case they could
Speaker 1: help other people going through difficult emotional times.
Speaker 2: And we call him the widower. This is a man
Speaker 2: that never had an interest in dreams in his life,
Speaker 2: and then his wife got seriously ill a third time
Speaker 2: of tancer returned third time when when the first two
Speaker 2: times they thought it was a beat, so it was
Speaker 2: really you know, she was going to live on. So
Speaker 2: it was a disastrous year or so, and she went
Speaker 2: through a horrifying gradual death through stomach cancer. So you
Speaker 2: can imagine how dramatic it was. But at any rate,
Speaker 2: shortly after after she died, within a month, he had
Speaker 2: a dream in which she was there and she was alive,
Speaker 2: and she looked alive, and he couldn't believe it, and
Speaker 2: he was kind of frightened, but and she assured him,
Speaker 2: she reassured him she was okay. We call these reassurance dreams.
Speaker 2: I'm okay, it's okay. And then he was really discombobulated
Speaker 2: guy after this, And several months later he met another
Speaker 2: woman and he was thinking about getting married to her,
Speaker 2: and he had a dream in which his you know,
Speaker 2: we'll say this one might be highly motivated. But she
Speaker 2: had a dream in which his deceased wife said you
Speaker 2: should get married again. Oh so he had these moving dreams.
Speaker 2: But anyway, in his diaries, which made me the dreams
Speaker 2: so valuable, he wrote, he said, you know, I'm not
Speaker 2: a religious guy. I'm scientifically or annual, although he wasn't
Speaker 2: a scientist, but he said, I swear she visited me
Speaker 2: a couple of those times. I swear she visited me
Speaker 2: a couple of those times. That is the connection dreams
Speaker 2: have with the spirit worlds. And here's another saying about this.
Speaker 2: We have people that interpret our dreams. The people that
Speaker 2: interpret our dreams are the first professionals in human history.
Speaker 2: They are called shaman. You are sick, you are confused,
Speaker 2: You go to the shaman, who I call the first psychoanalyst.
Speaker 2: And you go to the shaman and you say, I'm
Speaker 2: feeling ill and the shaman dives into the world of spirits,
Speaker 2: often through a dream, and finds out which evil spirit,
Speaker 2: which malevolent thing. You know, which spirit is mad at
Speaker 2: you for whatever reason. And often it's random. You just
Speaker 2: had bad luck, this spirit was annoyed and picked you.
Speaker 2: He tells me it's okay, or what the spirit said,
Speaker 2: and then I can go work that day. And I
Speaker 2: think that's what you know, a lot of people in
Speaker 2: our societ do. They have the function making it so
Speaker 2: the rest of us are able to go out and work.
Speaker 2: Their job is to keep us working in terms of
Speaker 2: we don't collapse into all our all our neurosis and
Speaker 2: anxieties and angers and fears and resentments and all the
Speaker 2: rest that go with human beings. Being injustice collectors.
Speaker 1: They're like mood mechanics.
Speaker 2: Yes, that be a good word for Yeah, they got
Speaker 2: to do it or you can't work, I mean. And
Speaker 2: if they do it right, they inspire us, as some
Speaker 2: tend to do, then we really feel good about ourselves.
Speaker 1: What about when you see a big book on the
Speaker 1: shelf at a bookstore and it's like the dream Encyclopedia,
Speaker 1: and it's like you had a dream about owls. It
Speaker 1: means you might be pregnant or whatever. Do you find
Speaker 1: any correlation between the symbolism of dreams and any of
Speaker 1: your research? No, okay, that's what I thought the answer
Speaker 1: was going to be.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a long that's a short answer based
Speaker 2: on a long, painful set of a long journey. And
Speaker 2: first of all, when you know, I said in the fifties,
Speaker 2: clinical lore is all around you, in the dreams of
Speaker 2: the railroad to the unconscious, and Freudian symbols hats, hats
Speaker 2: are phallic symbols. But we did other studies, and I've
Speaker 2: studied dreams of like I have four thousand dreams in
Speaker 2: this one woman. And we looked through and we did
Speaker 2: word searches and found the unusual dreams, big sample, went through,
Speaker 2: tried to make sense out of them. And one example,
Speaker 2: she's had ten dreams about bananas. But in the one
Speaker 2: dream the banana was clearly a phallic symbol. In other words,
Speaker 2: the banana turned into a penis hello. But in all
Speaker 2: the other dreams the bananas were just sitting there with
Speaker 2: other things and so on. So there was a famous
Speaker 2: statement that's made about Freudians that probably Freud didn't make.
Speaker 2: But the famous statement is there are some days when
Speaker 2: a cigar is just a cigar.
Speaker 1: PS. I tried to figure out if, like Liza Minelli
Speaker 1: or something said this, and all I found was that
Speaker 1: Freud dot Org says it wasn't Freud who said it,
Speaker 1: but if he did say it, he said it ironically,
Speaker 1: meaning that a cigar is never just a cigar. A
Speaker 1: cigar is also a dick, according to Sigmund.
Speaker 2: But here's the interesting thing about these neuroimaging studies that
Speaker 2: I emphasize so heavily in the last ten to fifteen years,
Speaker 2: and that is that when you study the network in
Speaker 2: the waking brain that is activated when you say something
Speaker 2: metaphoric to somebody. In other words, they're going to decode
Speaker 2: this metaphoric statement I made. Cross that river when you
Speaker 2: come to it. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
Speaker 2: Part of the brain that activates during an interpretation of
Speaker 2: a metaphor or generating a metaphor. Asked me to make
Speaker 2: up a metaphor that those particular areas are not active
Speaker 2: during dreaming, oh weird, or only partially active. I should
Speaker 2: say it's a more complex story. In other words, the
Speaker 2: networks that make it possible to experience emotions, to make
Speaker 2: symbolic statements, to understand symbolism, and the networks that allow
Speaker 2: you to recall specific memories. Those networks are not functional
Speaker 2: during dreaming. Dreaming has far less emotion in it than
Speaker 2: the stereotype say, it has far as I can tell,
Speaker 2: virtually no symbolism. And furthermore, if we study your dreams,
Speaker 2: there are no specific memories in them. There are no
Speaker 2: episotic memories we call them where oh, yes, I was
Speaker 2: with my sister at the zoo two weeks ago kind
Speaker 2: of memory. Instead, the memory bank we draw on in
Speaker 2: dreams is what are called semantic memories. That is sort
Speaker 2: of my general view, my general conception of my friend Joe,
Speaker 2: or your general conception of your younger sister that we
Speaker 2: draw on.
Speaker 1: So we tend to drum up general vibes from life,
Speaker 1: but not replay exact scenarios as we remember them. So
Speaker 1: dreams aren't a time machine made of your own jiggly memories.
Speaker 2: So we have cognitive insufficiencies during dreams, that there are
Speaker 2: certain things we can't do well during dream We don't
Speaker 2: have as much emotion as I've already said. I don't
Speaker 2: think there's much symbolism and dreams. There's not episotic memories.
Speaker 2: And of course the most obvious is we don't know
Speaker 2: where we are. In rare cases, for some people, they
Speaker 2: will think they are aware they are dreaming. In other words,
Speaker 2: it starts to use a little part of the executive network.
Speaker 2: They still even though they think they're dreaming, they don't
Speaker 2: say yeah, and I'm in bed, I'm in my house,
Speaker 2: and etcetera, etcetera. And they still don't really have what
Speaker 2: we have during waking life. So that network we're dreaming
Speaker 2: with is partial. It's a network that's very important in
Speaker 2: human beings, and it's only in human beings. It's a
Speaker 2: network that's probably seventy five thousand to two hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty thousand years old, and of course that's being studied
Speaker 2: like crazy by evolutionary anthropologists. Cognitively, modern human beings could
Speaker 2: be as recent as one hundred thousand years ago, and
Speaker 2: that's a lot more recent than we thought ten years
Speaker 2: ago or twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: For more on this, you can see papers like the
Speaker 1: Role of dreams in the Evolution of the Human Mind,
Speaker 1: which says that dreams aren't just a rehearsal for shit
Speaker 1: hitting the fan real bad. They're more of a general
Speaker 1: virtual practice for life, and they could have played a
Speaker 1: big part in human cognitive capabilities. So our ancestors twitched
Speaker 1: and dreamed so that we could walk around one day
Speaker 1: wearing underpants and eating cereal and building rockets, sometimes all
Speaker 1: at once.
Speaker 2: And so if you look at the you know, the
Speaker 2: brains of chimpanzees, monkeys and so on, they have some
Speaker 2: of the structures that are part of our imagination network. Incidentally,
Speaker 2: the technical term is which is just an accidental technical term,
Speaker 2: I have to name it first. It's called the default network.
Speaker 2: It means when we're not doing something, when we're not
Speaker 2: on a task, we just go into this state, which
Speaker 2: is the state of mind wandering and daydreaming. So we
Speaker 2: mind wander and daydream with the default network. But that
Speaker 2: default network has only one small part of things, and
Speaker 2: so therefore dreams are not as the same as waking,
Speaker 2: the same as consciousness. They're not a form of consciousness.
Speaker 2: They have parallels with consciousness.
Speaker 1: So much more on this in Part two. We get
Speaker 1: to the really juicy stuff via your questions, everything from
Speaker 1: sex dreams to teeth falling out and how to control
Speaker 1: your dreams and more of that will be out next week.
Speaker 1: Here's a tiny preview. Can I ask a few questions
Speaker 1: from listeners? Is that okay? Okay? That's all you get
Speaker 1: for a preview From next week? You need to come
Speaker 1: back because we will have a marathon Q and A
Speaker 1: with your dream questions and they are all so good,
Speaker 1: Like is there an intersection between dreaming and hallucinating? Does
Speaker 1: sleep quality affect your dreams? Why don't Baby's dream lucid dreaming,
Speaker 1: flying in dreams, the imagination and dreams reducing nightmares? And
Speaker 1: why rest is so critical? Meanwhile, ask specialists your sleepy questions,
Speaker 1: because why else would they study this for decades if
Speaker 1: they didn't want you to know? And links to dreambank
Speaker 1: dot net and his new book are in this show note,
Speaker 1: and so are our social handles. We're at Ologies on
Speaker 1: Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali word with one L
Speaker 1: on both. I'm on TikTok at Ali underscore Ologies. Please
Speaker 1: say hello and to submit questions for future episodes, you
Speaker 1: can join Patreon at Patreon dot com slash Ologies for
Speaker 1: about twenty five cents an episode, and Ologies Merch is
Speaker 1: available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Susan Hale for
Speaker 1: managing that and so much more. Thank you Noel Dilworth
Speaker 1: for all the scheduling. Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook
Speaker 1: group with assists from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Fealtis. Emily
Speaker 1: White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts and Caleb
Speaker 1: Patton bleeps them. Kelly ar Dwyer works on our website
Speaker 1: and can make you one. The incredible Mercedes Maitland of
Speaker 1: Maitland Audio is our new editor, with some assists from
Speaker 1: the ever helpful Dared Sleeper. The theme music is by
Speaker 1: Nick Thorburn of the Band's Islands. And if you stick
Speaker 1: around until the end of the show, I'm going to
Speaker 1: tell you a secret, and this week it's that I
Speaker 1: live on a steep hill and things roll down the
Speaker 1: hill and then I think they stay there for decades
Speaker 1: because I've had to go to the bottom of the
Speaker 1: hill after I've dropped things off of the hill, such
Speaker 1: as the rechargeable battery for a power drill, and at
Speaker 1: the very very bottom of the hill, aside from a
Speaker 1: bunch of old Pepsi bottles from the eighties, the coolest
Speaker 1: thing I found was a glass skull completely intact. I
Speaker 1: don't know how it fell hundreds of feet down this
Speaker 1: rock covered hill or what it was doing down there,
Speaker 1: but I'm pretty sure it's not cursed. It seems friendly.
Speaker 1: But now I got a glass skull on my bookshelf
Speaker 1: and it was free. Okay, we'll see you next week
Speaker 1: for more dreams. Byebye. Do you have any dream?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I'm all alone. I'm rolling a big doughnut in
Speaker 2: the snake where our death.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is exclusively sponsored by Sotfa. So a final
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