Speaker 1: Oh hey, so up top. This episode is exclusively sponsored
Speaker 1: by Satfa and this is the first in ologies history,
Speaker 1: the first one we've ever had sponsored by just one company,
Speaker 1: and it's Sotfa Luxury Mattresses, which is perfect because I
Speaker 1: love sofas. If you are looking for a new mattress,
Speaker 1: trust me, just go straight to Sofa dot com slash ologies.
Speaker 1: They have mattresses with inner springs, they have memory phone,
Speaker 1: they have adjustable firmness, they have white glove delivery, they
Speaker 1: have so many good reviews. People love their safas, as
Speaker 1: do I. It's so luxurious, it's so plush. Who knew
Speaker 1: sleeping can get better? Satfa did? That's s doubleatva dot
Speaker 1: com slash ologies.
Speaker 2: What a dream?
Speaker 3: Oh why it's still your friend's fiance who commits everything
Speaker 3: to spreadsheets? It's Ali Ward. This is part two of Onerology.
Speaker 3: We cover so many burning questions in the field of
Speaker 3: dreams with one of the world's top researchers. Go back
Speaker 3: to part one and start there. What are you doing?
Speaker 3: This is part two? Go back start with that. Come
Speaker 3: back here. Okay, let's get the good stuff, but really quick.
Speaker 1: Thank you to everyone at Patreon dot com, slash Ologies
Speaker 1: who've submitted questions for this It costs a dollar a
Speaker 1: month or more to join. Thanks to everyone rating and
Speaker 1: subscribing and leaving reviews. Also, I read every single one.
Speaker 1: There were so many lovely ones this week. But I
Speaker 1: have to shout out Tremendous who shared the show with
Speaker 1: their husband, who looked it up and said that I'm
Speaker 1: their mom's cousin.
Speaker 3: Here's the deal. My dad was one of eleven and
Speaker 3: my mom was one of six. I have so many
Speaker 3: cousins were related to most of Montana, so I'll be honest.
Speaker 3: I have no idea who Tremendous is. I don't know
Speaker 3: which cousins child spouse wrote that, but shoot me a text.
Speaker 3: People were family, Okay. On neurology dreams, chuck yourself in
Speaker 3: for answers about where creativity comes, neuroimaging, the imagination, creepy
Speaker 3: tooth dreams, foods and dreams, mental health and dreaming, relaxed
Speaker 3: fish medications, and your sleep Lucid dreaming a newly discovered
Speaker 3: part of the brain. What sleep stages are important for
Speaker 3: cleaning out your brain, your dog's naps, and more with
Speaker 3: author researcher, psychology and sociology professor dream expert and owneurologist,
Speaker 3: doctor g William Domhoff.
Speaker 1: Can I ask a few questions from listeners, from people
Speaker 1: who listening now, No, not right now, but they know
Speaker 1: that you're coming on.
Speaker 2: Oh I told them, and now you're a say that.
Speaker 1: No, not a hot mic at all. Okay, this inquiry
Speaker 1: was burning a hole in the minds of Hannah News, Dantuin,
Speaker 1: Mazie Lopez, Corey Jesswan, and first time question askers Andy Cornaccia,
Speaker 1: Trevor Derning, Marvette Fudge, Jess Nan, and Travis Gibson, who
Speaker 1: all needed info on whether our dreams have any meaning?
Speaker 1: What's the point? So yes, everyone needed to know that
Speaker 1: straight out of the gate. Okay, a ton of people
Speaker 1: want to know. Essentially, Joe Mueller wants to do things
Speaker 1: really have meaning and dreams like seeing certain objects or
Speaker 1: the recurring dream of teeth falling out like so many
Speaker 1: people have the dream of their teeth are falling out,
Speaker 1: which seems weird.
Speaker 2: Do they have any meaning? First of all, people do
Speaker 2: have certain common dreams like flying they under their own power,
Speaker 2: or teeth falling out, but they're very rare, in other words,
Speaker 2: in your whole dream life. And we've we've studied this
Speaker 2: by like, we have two week dream journals from students
Speaker 2: and one percent of them, you know, four dreams out
Speaker 2: of hundreds will have teeth falling out, and certain individuals
Speaker 2: will have it. But if we all talk about it,
Speaker 2: this is where a whole not being rigorous and in
Speaker 2: the lab and really you know, not projecting things on
Speaker 2: your participants. We call it creating demand characteristics and creating expectations.
Speaker 2: And also if you've heard a lot that people have
Speaker 2: dreams that their teeth fall out pretty soon you think
Speaker 2: you have one or you have, but they're very rare.
Speaker 2: But they are the kind of dreams that we really
Speaker 2: studied a lot to try to get to this symbolic meaning.
Speaker 2: But I honestly don't know what the symbolic meaning of
Speaker 2: that is in dreams. If there is any symbolism, there
Speaker 2: could be symbolism. You know, for Freudians it's castration. I think,
Speaker 2: you know, teeth falling.
Speaker 1: Out Patron's Mallory Skinner, Kat and first time question askers
Speaker 1: Christian rob Justin Goodheart and Leanne Murray as well as
Speaker 1: me your father, have all had nightmares of teeth rotting
Speaker 1: out of our skull and just falling out like overripe
Speaker 1: peaches from a tree. What does Domhoff say about this?
Speaker 2: But for your teeth listeners, Yes, your teethe listeners. Go
Speaker 2: on dreambank dot net. Pick we've got it limited, so
Speaker 2: the thing doesn't crash. Pick two dreams series at a time,
Speaker 2: and put in the word teeth, teeth, put teeth and tooth.
Speaker 2: Put it in or mode or so it'll be tooth
Speaker 2: or teeth, And in three seconds it will tell you
Speaker 2: how many dreams have a tooth in it? Huh? And
Speaker 2: it'll give you a tooth column and a teeth scull.
Speaker 2: So if you put in tooth, teeth, gums, tongue, mouths,
Speaker 2: you'd get I call him for each one, and you'd
Speaker 2: get what's call a contingency.
Speaker 1: Let's take a little down the teeth dreams timeline of
Speaker 1: life to get to the bottom of it. Shall we
Speaker 1: I need to? Okay? So, in his nineteen hundred publication
Speaker 1: The Interpretation of Dreams, one doctor Sigmund Freud said that
Speaker 1: dental dreams are mental dreams, and they represent issues with
Speaker 1: things like castration and repressed sexual urges and the compulsive
Speaker 1: desire to pleasure ones self. So I went to make
Speaker 1: a withdrawal from doctor dom Hoff's dreambank dot net, and
Speaker 1: I looked into his archive to find that, yes, the
Speaker 1: percentage of the twenty thousand collected dreams that even mentioned
Speaker 1: tooth or teeth is very low. It's less than a percent,
Speaker 1: and some of those are just mentioning a toothbrush and
Speaker 1: not even tooth trauma. I read one dream account from
Speaker 1: a participant identifying as Barb, who dreamt on March second,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one. Quote, we go to the park par
Speaker 1: I'm wearing a long formal gown and I have one
Speaker 1: high heeled shoe on and one off. I walk on
Speaker 1: tiptoes with the right foot and hope no one notices
Speaker 1: my missing shoe. There is a buffet table, lots of
Speaker 1: high class snotty women. A tooth with a feather on
Speaker 1: it falls out of my mouth onto the table. I'm embarrassed,
Speaker 1: I say, nonchalantly, Oh pardon, very french.
Speaker 2: Like and classy.
Speaker 1: I pick it up. It reminds me of an engagement ring.
Speaker 1: I feel the empty place with my tongue. I realized
Speaker 1: there had been another one that fell out sometime earlier.
Speaker 1: Why did Barb dream this?
Speaker 4: Also?
Speaker 2: Barb?
Speaker 1: I would party with you. You sound fun as hell
Speaker 1: to be a mess with. Now I've heard that these dreams,
Speaker 1: these kind of oral embarrassment and horror dreams, mean some
Speaker 1: fear of a loss of control. But I looked up
Speaker 1: a twenty twelve study to get some stats. It's called
Speaker 1: Dream Motif Scale. It was published in the journal Dreaming,
Speaker 1: and it provided some numbers on our fucked up teeth dreams.
Speaker 1: And despite my assumption that one hundred percent of everyone
Speaker 1: has these dreams, the researchers report that only thirty nine
Speaker 1: percent of those studied had what they called a TD,
Speaker 1: which stands for tooth dream at least once. Sixteen percent
Speaker 1: of people reported that their TD were recurrent, and eight
Speaker 1: percent were like, I have these all the damn time, doctor,
Speaker 1: Why why? Why? And thankfully for us, there is a
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen study that answer set and it's called Dreams
Speaker 1: of Teeth Falling Out An Empirical Investigation of physiological and
Speaker 1: psychological correlates. Thank God. Okay, so the authors of this
Speaker 1: preface by saying teeth dreams are enigmatic because they don't
Speaker 1: fall under the rubric of the continuity hypothesis, which just
Speaker 1: means dreaming about normal shit that happens every day. But again,
Speaker 1: why okay, this is huge, Hold on to your molars.
Speaker 1: Their findings supported the dental irritation hypothesis, which means you
Speaker 1: dream of teeth falling out when you have a dental problem.
Speaker 1: That's it, sometimes months before it actually gives you any problems.
Speaker 1: So maybe you're due for a crown replacement, or you
Speaker 1: should slow down on the white strips. But let's get
Speaker 1: to the cooler dreams.
Speaker 2: But there's a better one that's tantalizing, and that is flying.
Speaker 2: Because up is good in our thinking when we look
Speaker 2: at all the work that's been done on meaning in
Speaker 2: waking life, up is good, down is bad, left is bad,
Speaker 2: right is good this kind of stuff. But flying, think
Speaker 2: of all the metaphors. I'm walking on air, I'm high
Speaker 2: as a kite. I hope they don't prick my balloon
Speaker 2: and I fall, And so we express elation through height,
Speaker 2: through flying. I'm walking on air, over the moon, over
Speaker 2: the moon, the whole ring, cloud nine high right now,
Speaker 2: And that's the kind of temptation. It just makes sense
Speaker 2: to think those dreams must be symbolic. Two. In other words,
Speaker 2: we have what one researcher calls a waking state bias,
Speaker 2: so it lures us into putting more into the dream
Speaker 2: that's there. Going back to that hypothetical, if I have
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty of your dreams, I think I
Speaker 2: could know a lot about you, A whole lot. What
Speaker 2: I know something you don't know. I don't think. So
Speaker 2: what i'd know is what I would learn from you.
Speaker 2: If I could sit down with you and say I
Speaker 2: would like to have an anonymous interview with you for
Speaker 2: research purposes, I wish you know answer as honestly as
Speaker 2: you can, and I ask you what your feelings are
Speaker 2: towards your mother, what your feelings are towards your two sisters,
Speaker 2: What are some of your regrets, what are some of
Speaker 2: the things you worry about? I think that I would
Speaker 2: then learn from that interview what I've already learned from
Speaker 2: your dream If I wanted to know what I can
Speaker 2: learn from your dreams, I think I've just view for
Speaker 2: an hour in an anonymous, honest interview. And so that
Speaker 2: means that dreams have meaning. Dreams have personal meaning. Occasionally
Speaker 2: they'll have cultural meaning. For example, in societies they're hunting.
Speaker 2: In gathering societies, they dream more of animals, lo and behold,
Speaker 2: that's a cultural kind of difference, and of.
Speaker 1: Course, for every member of every indigenous society all over
Speaker 1: the world, there is a different relationship with dreaming. But
Speaker 1: Professor Tomhoff also notes in his most recent book, The
Speaker 1: Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming, that his research has found, unsurprisingly
Speaker 1: that the dreams of people in indigenous societies more often
Speaker 1: feature them as the victims of aggression, which just mirrors
Speaker 1: the very tragic reality both historically and presently. And a
Speaker 1: paper on the Plane's Vision quest paradigm in the journal
Speaker 1: American Indian noted that in Native in indigenous context, there's
Speaker 1: typically quote no separation between the world as dreamed and
Speaker 1: the world as lived. It continues that in non indigenous culture,
Speaker 1: the distinction between waking and dreaming is largely a consequence
Speaker 1: of culturally reinforced theories of mind that have resulted in
Speaker 1: a bifurcated worldview for most Euro Americans, so modern Western
Speaker 1: culture separates them a bunch now. The nonprofit organization Worldwide
Speaker 1: Indigenous Science Network has also started doing what they call
Speaker 1: dream work, which is collecting dream journals and providing a
Speaker 1: network to share the role of dreams in their lives.
Speaker 1: But what about in our futures? So patrons Amy Naramatsu, R. J. Deutsche,
Speaker 1: Emily Staffer, krab Brynn Mpeva, Victoria Edding, Zoe first time
Speaker 1: question askers Ifana Chamatsko, Taylor, Clinton Nan fl Rabbit, Ariana O'Connor,
Speaker 1: and Kaylin Bennett all wanted to know about that dreamy
Speaker 1: nostalgia feeling and deja vu, and about nocturnal premonitions. What
Speaker 1: has Professor Dohmhoff seen in his decades of research?
Speaker 2: So, dreams have meaning, but I don't think they have
Speaker 2: the profound or symbolic, prophetic, any of those kind of
Speaker 2: meanings which have been attributed to them in almost every culture,
Speaker 2: because there are some cultures actually really don't give it
Speaker 2: damn about dreams, but most there's a whole lot that do.
Speaker 2: And they are ones that then we can learn from
Speaker 2: because they have dreams are prophetic. They use dream to
Speaker 2: decide where to go on the hunt and so on.
Speaker 2: You have to have certain dreams to enter certain professions
Speaker 2: like warrior. You have to have certain dreams before you
Speaker 2: be initiated in the manhood. And then of course, just
Speaker 2: like our society, then they may have ways to induce
Speaker 2: that dream.
Speaker 1: And the role of consciousness altering plant medicine goes deep, deep,
Speaker 1: deep into history, and for more on that, I will
Speaker 1: link a twenty twenty paper from the Journal of Psychedelic
Speaker 1: Studies called the Role of Indigenous Knowledges in Psychedelic Science,
Speaker 1: and that comes hot out of the gates, acknowledging how
Speaker 1: much colonialism and past scientific research have excluded indigenous knowledge
Speaker 1: and not given credit where it's due. And essentially it
Speaker 1: says that in some cultural frameworks, psychedelics aren't just for
Speaker 1: trip and balls. They're a tool used in concert with
Speaker 1: our brain's own mechanisms to use these altered states of
Speaker 1: consciousness to our benefit and our growth. So mushrooms, they
Speaker 1: are not just for enjoying the lights at the next
Speaker 1: meeting of the Juggalos, but our dreams hallucination adjacent. First
Speaker 1: time question askers Kevin Parachan, Sophie Fournier, and Wendy Lockhart wanted.
Speaker 2: To know what happens is that all gets blurred and
Speaker 2: people talk about altered states of consciousness, and so suddenly
Speaker 2: they're saying dreams are like hypnotic states, or like drug states,
Speaker 2: and so on. What the neuroimaging research reveals is that
Speaker 2: hypnosis is not like psychedelics or hallucinations or like dreaming.
Speaker 2: In other words, every one of those states has a
Speaker 2: different network supporting it, and the dreaming network is different
Speaker 2: from all of those altered states of consciousness networks. And
Speaker 2: so one of my strong claims, of course, gets me
Speaker 2: a lot of trouble is to say you can't learn
Speaker 2: anything about dreams by studying hallucinations or hypnotizing people, or
Speaker 2: studying psychedelic drug states. That doesn't teach you about dreaming.
Speaker 2: Dreaming is a normal, every day occurrence in virtually everyone
Speaker 2: that we know of. There may be a few people
Speaker 2: that don't dream, and it'd be great if neuroimaging would
Speaker 2: study them, because I do think there might be a few.
Speaker 2: But at any rate, I think that we have to
Speaker 2: understand a dream, we first of all have to be
Speaker 2: sure that the mental activity is not sleep talking, or
Speaker 2: from a brief arousal or from sleep paralysis, and then
Speaker 2: study those dreams. Then we could make comparisons, but to
Speaker 2: try to understand dreams on the basis of psychosis, which
Speaker 2: is what famous neurologist of the mid nineteenth century said,
Speaker 2: Give me the secret of dreams and I will tell
Speaker 2: you the secret of psychosis. Of course, then Freud quoted
Speaker 2: that with great approval, and famous philosophers have said that.
Speaker 2: Important people have said that, Yeah, we believe it right.
Speaker 1: What about Professor Domhoff.
Speaker 2: I don't anymore if I ever did.
Speaker 1: What about dreams and sleep quality? Victoria Edding wants to
Speaker 1: know if I remember a lot of my dreams one night,
Speaker 1: or if they're vivid, does that mean I got good
Speaker 1: or bad sleep? And Jenna Knalana wanted to know how
Speaker 1: do stressful dreams or nightmares affect the quality of the
Speaker 1: sleep you're getting? Do you have a good, cozy sleep?
Speaker 3: Do you have better dreams?
Speaker 2: I think I can say with confidence that people that
Speaker 2: are in really anxiety, that are really highly roused in
Speaker 2: some way, whether through drug states or tensions or whatever
Speaker 2: it may be, that's going to affect sleep quality, and
Speaker 2: it then may affect dreams. It's not the dreams that
Speaker 2: are it's not bad dreams that are causing it. It's
Speaker 2: vice versas.
Speaker 1: So. Patron Dominique McDermott asked why they feel more tired
Speaker 1: after a night of intense dreams, But according to doctor Domhoff,
Speaker 1: it's not your nightmares messing up sleep. It's the tension
Speaker 1: and discomfort you already have that are giving you the
Speaker 1: bad dreams again. Sleep hygiene, coziness, temperature control, stress mitigation
Speaker 1: can all give you better sleep, which will help you
Speaker 1: have a better tomorrow. But some types of stress go
Speaker 1: way deeper than others.
Speaker 2: Here's where PTSD victims, God love them. That's just a
Speaker 2: tough thing. But when they're studied with neuroimaging or EEGs,
Speaker 2: their brains day and night are just really activated. They
Speaker 2: are on fire. So the brain of a person sleeping,
Speaker 2: they're not sleeping like a non PTSD person. Their brain
Speaker 2: is fired up. Their vigilant. One of the attention networks
Speaker 2: also has a vigilance aspect to it, and that's the
Speaker 2: vigilance network. You know. Right now, we're paying attention. We're
Speaker 2: in this particular room. We can hear sound. But if
Speaker 2: we suddenly heard a loud noise, or if I noticed
Speaker 2: out the window that the building was falling, we would
Speaker 2: totally change everything in our body. Our digestion would stop,
Speaker 2: this would stop. Every bit of energy would be mobilized
Speaker 2: just on that particular focus, and I'd be no more
Speaker 2: imagining or thinking. I'd be totally a kind of focus,
Speaker 2: that salience part of the attention network is still on
Speaker 2: in these PTSD victims, and so it really he really
Speaker 2: does distort their sleep, and the brain is then much
Speaker 2: more activated, and they're going to have more dreams because
Speaker 2: they're more activated, and because they're got incredibly deep and
Speaker 2: burned in personal concerns, they're going to dream about those
Speaker 2: things now. Contrary to the view that people just keep
Speaker 2: dreaming the same nightmare, they don't. Really. We have the
Speaker 2: dreams on dream Bank. We have the dreams of Vietnam Vet.
Speaker 2: And he's quite a guy that was a medic in
Speaker 2: Cambodian Highlands in nineteen seventy or seventy one. He saw horrific,
Speaker 2: unbelievable human slaughter death. His dreams are full of fright,
Speaker 2: and he's one of the few people that could write
Speaker 2: them all down, and he kept them all his life.
Speaker 2: He's probably seventy now, and his dreams are just constantly vigilant,
Speaker 2: constantly agitated, constantly. You know, somebody comes in there and
Speaker 2: he's talking to an old friend and all of a
Speaker 2: sudden he sees somebody other corner right turn and just
Speaker 2: gets fiercely angry, and you know, goes at him or
Speaker 2: they get in the conflict. So the vigilance, it's in
Speaker 2: his dreams. But I would know that if I talked
Speaker 2: to him, because he tells me and he writes stories,
Speaker 2: and he has a website and he puts his poems
Speaker 2: and thoughts up there. And I once saw a lecture
Speaker 2: he gave to high school. I'd laugh, but it was
Speaker 2: so sad because he went in and told him what
Speaker 2: it was like. Yeah, they I mean, it's just scared
Speaker 2: the but Jesus out of him. Yeah, I mean it
Speaker 2: was overwhelming. And so even the accounts we often give
Speaker 2: of these things, we soften them for people. If we're
Speaker 2: really say what the horrors were like, it's so overwhelming
Speaker 2: for other people, so you don't you don't say them,
Speaker 2: but he said them. And I think PTSD then is
Speaker 2: the example on this because it's so different from normative dreaming,
Speaker 2: and it's more like than the answers to these questions
Speaker 2: that where these people are temporarily in that kind of
Speaker 2: agitated state, maybe.
Speaker 1: Your buddy's depression or anxiety have shown up. And if so,
Speaker 1: you're not alone, even though mental health struggles can make
Speaker 1: you feel like it. And his research supports.
Speaker 2: That well, the interesting thing that we found with people
Speaker 2: with any kind of diagnosis, and it's not totally certain,
Speaker 2: but the interesting finding which shows how important it is
Speaker 2: to use a scientific coding system. The main way their
Speaker 2: dreams differ is there are no friends in their dreams.
Speaker 2: No friends, no people that they call friends. In one
Speaker 2: case or two that we studied as well as the
Speaker 2: individual dream series, it was only their parents and their sister,
Speaker 2: they had no friends. In another study where you had
Speaker 2: dreams from might think I think one hundred and six
Speaker 2: dreams from schizophrenics and it's on dreamresearch dot Net under
Speaker 2: interesting findings in their dreams, there's just all strangers in
Speaker 2: O theres no family and no friend. So if I
Speaker 2: was reading through a dream series and I got about
Speaker 2: five ten dreams into it and nobody has been mentioned
Speaker 2: as a friend, I immediately and I antenna go up.
Speaker 2: I'm wondering what why are they no friends? And then
Speaker 2: as I'm reading and now I'm coding too, I'm counting friends, animals, characters, mother,
Speaker 2: father or you know this guy only dreams about his father,
Speaker 2: never his mother. What's going on? And then we study
Speaker 2: it more seriously, either with our coding system or we
Speaker 2: create a word string. And that's why I know people
Speaker 2: basically dream about things that they're familiar with seventy five
Speaker 2: seventy seventy five percent of the time. But here I
Speaker 2: should say that I am no clinician of any kind,
Speaker 2: whether psychological or medical. And if people do right to
Speaker 2: me at my website and ask about these things, some
Speaker 2: of these things, and I say, look, you've got to
Speaker 2: go to the sleep disorder clinic, and you've got to
Speaker 2: have expert medical attention ask them. But you shouldn't ask me.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't get your advice I don't think from anybody
Speaker 2: on the web. But I could be wrong on that,
Speaker 2: but you shouldn't get any advice from me.
Speaker 1: Planic clinician can can help reduce the waking anxiety, which
Speaker 1: can help reduce the nmers and.
Speaker 2: Some you know, some kinds of drugs sometimes and certainly
Speaker 2: psychotherapies of various kinds can help people. So we all
Speaker 2: need someone to lean on.
Speaker 1: I love him well. I wanted to ask about that
Speaker 1: because we did have a lot of folks who wanted
Speaker 1: to know about different substances SSRIs or melatonin or spicy foods,
Speaker 1: any brain medication, especially things that are sleep aids Do
Speaker 1: they change how we dream?
Speaker 2: My statement is on this is at any time, if
Speaker 2: we go on a drug, or if we go off
Speaker 2: a drug, in other words, we change our neurochemical our biochemistry,
Speaker 2: then those things may happen and there may then be
Speaker 2: an adjustment. But again I'm no medical expert, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's one of those things that I look at as
Speaker 2: a possible window for me into understanding dreams.
Speaker 1: So if you're getting some help from medication, you are
Speaker 1: also not alone. High Let me introduce you to my
Speaker 1: own brain buddy Effects or but patrons Mariah McGregor, Kitlyn Schmidt's,
Speaker 1: Kitlyn Ramirez, and Becky pot Roff and first time question
Speaker 1: asker Olympia Silv wanted to know what is up with
Speaker 1: antidepressants and vivid dreams. And the deal is they're not
Speaker 1: necessarily causing the dreams, but they're suppressing rem sleep and
Speaker 1: in the case of lexapro zolofs and balta on a
Speaker 1: few others, it can mean that you might be having
Speaker 1: these micro awakenings and remembering the dreams more. Also, stress
Speaker 1: and sadness in your waking hours can mean it's on
Speaker 1: your mind more in your sleep so addressing fears or
Speaker 1: concerns in therapy or with lifestyle changes that might benefit
Speaker 1: your mental health may improve things while you're sleeping. Also,
Speaker 1: those side effects of really vivid dreaming on antidepressants are
Speaker 1: apparently the worst in the first few weeks, but you
Speaker 1: can definitely ask a doctor about timing the medication differently,
Speaker 1: which could help. I just started taking Mind at night
Speaker 1: and it's helping me function better in the morning, so
Speaker 1: there's that. Also, melatonin may give you Bonker's dreams if
Speaker 1: the dose is too high, so experiment with that, Timothy
Speaker 1: Wang who asked, and melatonin is also connected to a
Speaker 1: neurochemical called vasotocin, which kind of helps erase your memory
Speaker 1: of dreams so that you don't get confused between them
Speaker 1: and reality. So if you're on a medication that's blurring
Speaker 1: those lines. Earl of grahamble Cain asked about chantex that
Speaker 1: might be why it's your bong boguarding your dreams maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit. And I'm sorry to report that TC
Speaker 1: has been shown to repress rem sleep. Evan Davis, Ashley Adar,
Speaker 1: and Ellie Wheeler. So if you have a medication that's
Speaker 1: affecting your sleep, first time question askers Laura Rayfield and
Speaker 1: Katie Giassovitch. Talk to your doc about changing your timing.
Speaker 1: Maybe try to cultivate the best sleep hygiene you can
Speaker 1: manage and treat your brain well. But enough about pills.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about cheese. So Scott Sheldon, Paul Smith, Luke Lafemina,
Speaker 1: Stephanie Leski, and Francesca Parelli wanted to know, in Francesca's words,
Speaker 1: is it true that eating cheese before bed makes dreams
Speaker 1: more intense? And I had to look into this for us.
Speaker 1: I knew you needed to know. Here's the deal. So
Speaker 1: a two thousand and five study showed the blue cheese
Speaker 1: gave people vivid dreams and cheddar made them dream about celebrities.
Speaker 1: And it's not important that this was a tiny study
Speaker 1: or that it was funded by the British Cheese Board,
Speaker 1: which is a great name for a charcuterie related propaganda machine,
Speaker 1: the Cheese Board. I love that, but yes, so further
Speaker 1: studies have disproven that as just delicious flim flam. Now,
Speaker 1: the reason that you may actually be swept away to
Speaker 1: dreamland in a tide of fondo is because one cheese
Speaker 1: in Europe is usually the last meal of the evening,
Speaker 1: so it's a scapegoat cheese. And two eating late at
Speaker 1: night can cause your temperature to rise and mess up
Speaker 1: your sleep, making you wake up more to remember your
Speaker 1: weird dreams. And then also three lactose baby, not all
Speaker 1: of us can digest that shit. And guess what, Having
Speaker 1: a three am bubbling colon is a nightmare in every fashion.
Speaker 1: And also Julia Fisher, the chocolate you're eating before bed
Speaker 1: isn't necessarily a dream inducer, but the caffeine may be
Speaker 1: interrupting your sleep and making you remember your dreams. Sidney Tubes,
Speaker 1: Rachel Kendrick, Scott Sheldon, Christina Johnson, and Crystal Simon's try
Speaker 1: eating earlier if your evening meal or fourth meal is
Speaker 1: causing you some knockedal stress. Just consider what a three
Speaker 1: am l scorcho gordida does to your butthole. Now imagine
Speaker 1: that's your brain trying to sleep.
Speaker 3: You know what I mean.
Speaker 2: I give a couple lectures back when I taught on nightmares,
Speaker 2: and for instance, people have nightmares when they have high fevers.
Speaker 2: That was going to be my next question.
Speaker 1: It was your question, actually, Pascal Peran, Miranda Harder and
Speaker 1: Ellie's Wabele who asked about cooking up wild brain activity.
Speaker 1: Let's say, with fever dreams. Does a different part of
Speaker 1: your brain activate when the temperature is high?
Speaker 3: Or is that a hallucination?
Speaker 2: More questions around brain temperature. I'm still not fully understood,
Speaker 2: and so it's in the realm of not guesswork, but
Speaker 2: of still work in progress. And I happen to be
Speaker 2: very interested in it academically because brain temperature is related
Speaker 2: to level of activation. When we're highly activated, we're metabolizing better,
Speaker 2: cells are working more efficiently, So that really then relates
Speaker 2: to a lot of energy use. When we're really highly
Speaker 2: activated and we're metabolizing all our cellars, metabolizing really fast,
Speaker 2: we're using up a lot of energy and that gets
Speaker 2: to then sleep.
Speaker 1: A few folks wanted to know why physiologically we dream.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at you, Lauren Cooper, Hannah Johnson, Bethany Barlow,
Speaker 1: and Sidney Are we defragmenting our drives? Is it like
Speaker 1: cleaning up after a party. In Sleepy John's words, dreaming
Speaker 1: is how the brain cleans out the lint filter.
Speaker 2: True or false. Here's the strange thing about sleep. For decades,
Speaker 2: centuries people have looked for. Sleep is somehow resting something,
Speaker 2: or it's getting rid of poisons and toxins, or it's
Speaker 2: time to lay in stores of kind of energy. Those
Speaker 2: age old concerns are still being studied, but nobody has
Speaker 2: done studies that, and this is among a community of
Speaker 2: serious sleep researcher where they all come to agree.
Speaker 1: So folks are working on it, but it takes a
Speaker 1: lot of research for a scientific community to stand behind something.
Speaker 1: So we don't know if dreams specifically clean your brain,
Speaker 1: but we do know that sleep itself does. There have
Speaker 1: been plenty of studies that during sleep, your body's cerebral
Speaker 1: spinal fluid gets into your brains nooks and crannies and
Speaker 1: washes away beta, amyloid and tau proteins that act as plaques,
Speaker 1: which can lead to the development of Alzheimer's and dementia.
Speaker 1: So sleepy time can save your mind. But check this out,
Speaker 1: kados so literally. This week, a study titled a mesothelium
Speaker 1: divides the subarachnoid space into functional compartments, published in the
Speaker 1: journal Science, reported that there's a new part of the
Speaker 1: brain we didn't know about until this week. This is
Speaker 1: like finding a hidden room in your basement. I guess
Speaker 1: the attic. We didn't know there's a membrane in your brain.
Speaker 1: They are now calling the subarachnoidal lymphatic like membrane or slym.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's pronounced slym or slim or slime.
Speaker 1: I hope it's slime because the neuroscientists who discovered it
Speaker 1: think it might help separate the clean cerebral spinal fluid
Speaker 1: from the dirty stuff and once again helped to clean
Speaker 1: your brain. What else did they say?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 1: They said that deep non rem sleep is the most
Speaker 1: important stage for brain cleaning, and that sleep is critical
Speaker 1: to the function of the brain's waste removal system. And
Speaker 1: this study shows that the deeper the sleep, the better.
Speaker 1: Hout bonkers that this is fresh information. We literally did
Speaker 1: not know last week. What an exciting time to be
Speaker 1: alive and.
Speaker 2: Asleep, and so it's a genuine puzzle for them. But
Speaker 2: there's one thing that I think we do know about sleep,
Speaker 2: and sleep is a state of adaptive inactivity. Adaptive inactivity,
Speaker 2: what does that mean? Well, seeds think of the seeds
Speaker 2: for a tree, or they can be dormant for hundreds
Speaker 2: or even thousands of years, trees lose their leaves, insects
Speaker 2: go underground seventeen year locust torpor, which is a kind
Speaker 2: of really beyond sleep where body temperature goes much lower.
Speaker 1: Now, for more on nature's ability to go offline, you
Speaker 1: can see the dentdrology episodes on trees, the somnology episode
Speaker 1: on sleep, we've got a molecular neurobiology episode on brain chemicals,
Speaker 1: and the thermophysiology episode on body heat, or also the
Speaker 1: ersenology episodes on hibernating bears.
Speaker 2: Anyway, what sleep does is allows us to use less
Speaker 2: energy and at the same time not expend energy. So
Speaker 2: every animal sleeps differently for differing amounts of time relating
Speaker 2: to its ecological niche. Let me give you any two examples.
Speaker 2: On the one hand, bush elephants in Africa they sleep
Speaker 2: as little as two hours in twenty four and they
Speaker 2: can be moving for two three days without sleeping, and
Speaker 2: when they stop, they don't immediately quotes make up any sleep,
Speaker 2: so they're really adapted to that little that niche. On
Speaker 2: the other hand, a possums sleep nineteen hours and a
Speaker 2: kind of bat sleeps twenty hours. Now that bath that
Speaker 2: sleeps twenty hours is really interesting. When does it come
Speaker 2: out at dusk and what's going on at dusk? The
Speaker 2: moths they're flying around, it's food supplies flying around. So
Speaker 2: it does everything in four hours, whereas the elephant is
Speaker 2: awake twenty two hours, which.
Speaker 1: Means that some animals have to fuel themselves for longer
Speaker 1: stretches just to maintain homeostasis and keep their brain and
Speaker 1: their body type ofture up.
Speaker 2: But think of it this way. If you had to
Speaker 2: be awake twenty four hours a day, that's a lot
Speaker 2: of foraging. That's a lot of hunting. That's a lot
Speaker 2: of farming that uses up a lot of food. It's
Speaker 2: far more evolutionarily adaptive if we take one third of
Speaker 2: the roughly one third, but it's really less off. There
Speaker 2: can be more of us, the more food supply and
Speaker 2: so on. Soa each creature is adapted. We are actually
Speaker 2: probably adapted. And this will surprise you. Just seven hours
Speaker 2: a night, really, how do I know? My friend knows?
Speaker 2: My UCLA sleep expert friend, he studied three different honting
Speaker 2: and gathering societies with the whole crew of anthropologists and
Speaker 2: others that he helped organize.
Speaker 1: Now for more details, you can see at twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: study titled sleep variability and night time activity among Tremani
Speaker 1: forger horticulturists by lead author doct Gandhi Yetish, who is
Speaker 1: doing a postdoc at UCLA's Center for Sleep Research. But
Speaker 1: researchers over the years studying the sleep habits of hunter
Speaker 1: gatherer cultures and agro pastoralists observed.
Speaker 2: That they every seven hours a night. But it's actually
Speaker 2: they sleep seven hours a night roughly in the winter,
Speaker 2: but in the summer they sleep six hours. So and
Speaker 2: that's true. Reindeer, now, jump reindeer. They're way up there
Speaker 2: in the cold, cold Arctic. Hey, they're sleeping a lot
Speaker 2: less in the summer and they sleep a lot more
Speaker 2: in the winter. So this is enormous complexity to sleep
Speaker 2: that has to do with ecology and with us. What's
Speaker 2: striking about us and where dreams can come in again,
Speaker 2: is that all the basically all other primates go to
Speaker 2: sleep when it gets dark and they wake up when
Speaker 2: it gets light.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why don't we do that?
Speaker 2: Why don't I do that? To chimpanzees sleep eleven or
Speaker 2: twelve hours whatever it is, we sleep basically seven or
Speaker 2: eight because we are not tied to the light dark cycle.
Speaker 2: We are tied more to a temperatures are internal temperature
Speaker 2: cycles are not tied to the light cycles. So when
Speaker 2: it gets dark everywhere in the world, the human beings
Speaker 2: huddle together and make a fire and they shoot the ball,
Speaker 2: and they talk about dreams and they talk about their myths,
Speaker 2: and they hang out. They have a little fun and
Speaker 2: dance around, and we wake up and then our body
Speaker 2: temperature goes way down during the night. And here's the
Speaker 2: other part. The brain temperature can't go down, and that's
Speaker 2: REM sleep. The REM sleep is a thermometer. It's most
Speaker 2: likely my bet is on sleep researchers who say REM
Speaker 2: sleep is a way to reheat the brain periodically during sleep.
Speaker 2: That's its function, and it makes it so sleep can
Speaker 2: go on. We cycle between REM and non REM. We
Speaker 2: go nonrim, then REM heat up a little, nonrim heat
Speaker 2: up a little, and then towards morning, the circadian rhythm
Speaker 2: we're build into us, our brain temperature starts to go
Speaker 2: up independent of REM very likely as we approach morning.
Speaker 2: So now we have a dual system going on that's
Speaker 2: heating our brain. How does all this relate to dreams?
Speaker 2: If dreams are tied to the level of brain activation.
Speaker 2: Then the point is that when you're an hour or
Speaker 2: two into sleep, the default network, the parts of the
Speaker 2: fault network that are active during sleep, there's not enough
Speaker 2: activation to stay together. The network breaks apart. Front part
Speaker 2: breaks off from the back part. You know, it's the
Speaker 2: simplest language. We could talk about posterior and anterior and
Speaker 2: so on. Let's not. And at that point, if we
Speaker 2: awaken people, they might have an image or they oh
Speaker 2: I thought exert or say no, I don't remember a thing.
Speaker 2: But during the RIM period you awaken them, they'll get
Speaker 2: a dream. Here's what we know. Probably from six let's
Speaker 2: say you're an eight o'clock waker upper, so from six
Speaker 2: o'clock on your brain is doing quite a bit of dreaming.
Speaker 2: What's important about that is that from our studies in
Speaker 2: the lab way in the past, we know that the
Speaker 2: dreams from the first REM period do not differ from
Speaker 2: the dreams from the second RAM period or the third
Speaker 2: REM period. My dissertation was one small step in that
Speaker 2: two or three better studies came along. They confirmed a
Speaker 2: lot of what I wrote, luckily, but there were other
Speaker 2: things where I was wrong on and better data, bigger
Speaker 2: sample sizes, so we can collect a good sample of
Speaker 2: your dreams between I say, six and eight in the morning.
Speaker 2: And furthermore, we can get a lot of your dreams
Speaker 2: on spontaneous morning awakening. And when we do studies where
Speaker 2: we have people. I did a study in nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 2: just as there came to be answering machines on telephone.
Speaker 2: I bought a couple of those, and I had the
Speaker 2: students phone in anytime they remembered a dream nice and
Speaker 2: most of them were morning awakenings seventy five or so percent,
Speaker 2: And that's what's predicted in other studies too. But sometimes
Speaker 2: you're just sitting there. Like one woman in the study,
Speaker 2: she was sitting in the backyard. She was studying in
Speaker 2: the sun, and the sun started to shift and she
Speaker 2: started to feel a little cold in her mind drifted
Speaker 2: off and she remembered a dream about skiing. So you know,
Speaker 2: we have those kinds of things, and it happened. But
Speaker 2: the point is that we can get a good sample
Speaker 2: of dreams in a variety of ways, and for any
Speaker 2: future dream researchers out there. The last three pages of
Speaker 2: my new book explain exactly what we need to do,
Speaker 2: but that nobody is doing, and it has to start
Speaker 2: with your cell phone. We got to have every We
Speaker 2: got to have samples of people well from about age
Speaker 2: nine or ten, and we didn't get into this. But
Speaker 2: we don't dream oftener well until we're nine to eleven
Speaker 2: years old, which will rite a lot of cages too.
Speaker 1: If you have smologites more on kids sleep in a bit.
Speaker 2: But at any rate, if we had people phone in
Speaker 2: their dreams anytime day or night, we have the voice
Speaker 2: to text, and then we have the text in a
Speaker 2: central place and we put them on the dream bank
Speaker 2: and we can search them with word strings. We can
Speaker 2: go to town. We can automate this thing and churn
Speaker 2: out so much. All we need is about a million
Speaker 2: or two million a year for about four years, and
Speaker 2: we could figure out which series we're right in which
Speaker 2: we're wrong.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's all you need to get more. What
Speaker 1: is it psychopompologists.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll escort you to the world of dreams.
Speaker 1: Now, we will escort you through more of your questions
Speaker 1: in a moment, But first let's donate again to some
Speaker 1: relevant causes. And this week we're going to send it
Speaker 1: to two One is the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network that
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, which creates spaces for ethical collaboration between
Speaker 1: Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. And we're also going
Speaker 1: to donate to the research that doctor Bill Domhoff has
Speaker 1: dedicated his whole career too in efforts to further understand
Speaker 1: who dreams, what and why. And also the day after
Speaker 1: part one aired, I got the sweetest text from Bill
Speaker 1: just saying that he had a great time chatting and
Speaker 1: that I did my homework well. Oh, and then he
Speaker 1: included an emoji of a bed and said the emoji
Speaker 1: above is an honor of STFA as a perfect sponsor,
Speaker 1: so it's Domhoff approved. And on that note, those nations
Speaker 1: were made possible by the one and only sponsor of
Speaker 1: these episodes, SATFA, and today's episode is exclusively sponsored by
Speaker 1: SATVA because one's got a sleep to dream and STFA
Speaker 1: luxury mattresses are just like a first class ticket to Snoozetown.
Speaker 2: Love them.
Speaker 1: And usually I saved my secrets for the end of
Speaker 1: the episode. But as long as we're on the topic,
Speaker 1: this one time I had a dream. Once I arrived
Speaker 1: to this party and I was wearing like one of
Speaker 1: those high necked Victorian dresses that like sad ladies step
Speaker 1: off of a train in a dusty mining town. And
Speaker 1: I arrived at this saloon and like all of my
Speaker 1: relatives were there and they were drinking warm beer, and
Speaker 1: I leaned over to my mom, Fancy Nancy, and I
Speaker 1: was like, wow, what a party. What's the occasion, and
Speaker 1: she was like, it's your wedding. And I looked up
Speaker 1: and my boyfriend at the time was waiting for me
Speaker 1: at the top of the aisle, and I was like, shit,
Speaker 1: I don't even drink beer or like him like that.
Speaker 1: And I was trying to figure out if there was
Speaker 1: a way I could like dip out the back. And
Speaker 1: then when I woke up in real life, I was
Speaker 1: on vacation with this boyfriend and I unfortunately knew that
Speaker 1: he was not the one. So thanks, dreams, you saved
Speaker 1: this man from dating me any longer. And also you
Speaker 1: saved us a wedding and a divorce. Years later, I'm
Speaker 1: now hitched to someone I absolutely adore, but I still
Speaker 1: don't like beer.
Speaker 4: Anyway.
Speaker 1: Dreams, you gotta love them, but before you can dream,
Speaker 1: you gotta fall asleep, and the best way to do
Speaker 1: that is on a Satfa luxury mattress. Every SAFA is
Speaker 1: designed for better sleep with features only found on the
Speaker 1: world's nicest, most expensive mattresses. They are high, high quality,
Speaker 1: and what's more, Satfa will set up your mattress in
Speaker 1: the room of your choice and take your old one
Speaker 1: for no extra charge. And if you think you're gonna
Speaker 1: get that from one of those mattress in a box companies,
Speaker 1: you're dreaming. Also, just a side note, I love the
Speaker 1: people behind Satfa. Shout out to all the folks handcrafting
Speaker 1: your mattresses to order in Queens, New York, in Austin, Hello.
Speaker 1: So treat yourself to a mattress worthy of your rest
Speaker 1: and get a good deal thanks to ologies. Right now
Speaker 1: save two hundred dollars when you purchase one thousand dollars
Speaker 1: more at stfa dot com slash ologies. That's s double
Speaker 1: atva dot com slash Ologies. Thank you, Sotfa. You truly
Speaker 1: make me sleep easy. Okay, let's get back to explaining
Speaker 1: the imaging advancements that help us understand the dream world.
Speaker 2: But the nineteen nineties changed everything because of neuroimaging, and
Speaker 2: these neuroimaging studies showed for the first time the parts
Speaker 2: of the brain that were active during dreaming, and it
Speaker 2: wasn't really expected that parts of the brain would not
Speaker 2: be active. For example, there was one very famous theory
Speaker 2: that said dreams were just a reaction to these random
Speaker 2: electrical charges called spikes that came from the brain stem,
Speaker 2: and these electrical charges ended up in the visual cortex,
Speaker 2: and then a visual cortex saw them, saw these spikes
Speaker 2: and said what the hell does that mean, and so
Speaker 2: tried to make sense out of him. That was his
Speaker 2: theory of dream called activation synthesis. Well, now we know
Speaker 2: that part of the brain isn't even active. The whole
Speaker 2: theory was turned out to be wrong anyhow, But the
Speaker 2: point is that kind of neuroimaging study just said goodbye
Speaker 2: to that theory, which happens a lot of times in science.
Speaker 2: New technologies come along and things are solved.
Speaker 1: Professor Domhoff recounts the work of doctor Ralph Wrighton, who,
Speaker 1: along with Word Halsteed, used neuroimaging in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: on people with brain injuries to develop what is known
Speaker 1: as the Halsteed writing neuropsychological battery, which is just another
Speaker 1: word for a lot of tests.
Speaker 2: He had a questionnaire and the questionnaire said, has your
Speaker 2: injury influenced your dreaming? That's all it said. And if
Speaker 2: they said yes, and said how's it influenced, and then
Speaker 2: he would interview him and some of them say, well,
Speaker 2: I don't see the pictures anymore, and some would say
Speaker 2: I don't dream anymore. He then matched that up with
Speaker 2: the kind of X rays we had at that time,
Speaker 2: and he was able to show there are certain places
Speaker 2: that if you have a lesion in the brain, you
Speaker 2: will lose dreaming. And there's two different places like that
Speaker 2: and other places. This relates back to mental imagery. If
Speaker 2: you have injuries in these secondary visual cortices, you won't
Speaker 2: see in dreams. You lose your mental imagery.
Speaker 1: I lost it.
Speaker 2: Now that becomes exciting because we're saying, wow, that's a
Speaker 2: connection then with and you also don't see images. You
Speaker 2: don't have good mental imagery in waking either. And that
Speaker 2: was done in a lab study by the same great
Speaker 2: cognitive psychologist, David Fowkes who did the developmental studies.
Speaker 1: And then around the turn of this century a huge
Speaker 1: development occurred and it wasn't just having your thong underwear
Speaker 1: show over your low rise genes.
Speaker 2: In two thousand, two thousand and one, the world changed,
Speaker 2: I think in terms of understanding the human mind, and
Speaker 2: that is the neuroimaging studies accidentally in a way discovered
Speaker 2: the imagination network, which is was called a default network.
Speaker 2: So you've got the person all hooked up, their participant,
Speaker 2: they're all ready to go into the NeuroImage machine. You say, okay,
Speaker 2: we're just fine tuning things. Just relax. Then they notice,
Speaker 2: what's the record look like when we just told them
Speaker 2: to relax, And it looked the same and everybody and
Speaker 2: it was different from what you usually see. First, there's
Speaker 2: a task network. That's where we're getting you all hooked
Speaker 2: up so you can see whether you see a yellow
Speaker 2: lemon or a green pig or whatever it may be,
Speaker 2: or you have to pick this brown thing out of
Speaker 2: seven different colors. Where our executive network is really common
Speaker 2: and visual, and you know, we're always really focused. But
Speaker 2: when we relaxed, we go into a different network, and
Speaker 2: so they call it, well, that's the default network, the
Speaker 2: non task network. Well, it's a crummy name because it
Speaker 2: trivializes that. It's the it's the inner you, it's the imagination,
Speaker 2: it's the semantic memory bank. It's the self network, it's
Speaker 2: the imagination network.
Speaker 1: What these neuroimaging studies found on patients whose dreams had
Speaker 1: changed was.
Speaker 2: If you get a lesion in your primary visual cortex,
Speaker 2: it doesn't affect your dreaming, nor in anywhere in your
Speaker 2: executive network. Doesn't affect your dreaming at all. And so
Speaker 2: when I realized that both the neuroimaging and the lesion
Speaker 2: network showed the same parts of brain were necessary for dreaming,
Speaker 2: so there goes you got dreams coming from the same network.
Speaker 2: It creates imagination.
Speaker 1: How exciting is this? So the part of the brain
Speaker 1: making all this magic happen, dreams and imagination, it's called
Speaker 1: the default network, and Bill describes it in the twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen paper Dreaming and the Default Network, a review, synthesis
Speaker 1: and counterintuitive research proposal. And the default network doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like a lot's going on. It sounds like your printer
Speaker 1: on standby. But do not let the name fool you.
Speaker 1: So so many patrons asked something along the lines of
Speaker 1: creativity and absurdity in dreams? Where is this coming from?
Speaker 1: I'm looking at you, Gaelic Pearl Mofo, Sean Thomas Kane,
Speaker 1: Mary C. Mcaharn, Heather de van Volkenberg, Emily Staufer in
Speaker 1: first time question askers Samantha Jackson, Jon Ohlandau, Katie Pikes,
Speaker 1: Kylie Chapman, Eliza Miller, Archie de Delhi, Kelsey Quarterback, Heidi
Speaker 1: m Shelby, and Bryce Stewart and Maxine Lewis, who, in
Speaker 1: their words, wants to know why their mind invented a
Speaker 1: scenario of trying to put wheels on a kangaroo using
Speaker 1: pipe cleaners and empty thread rolls.
Speaker 4: I have a question with that default network.
Speaker 1: Is that why when we are working, working, working, We're
Speaker 1: sitting in a laptop, we're trying to come up with something,
Speaker 1: and then we say, fuck this, I'm gonna go for
Speaker 1: a walk, I'm gonna go take a shower, and then
Speaker 1: we have like our best idea ever is that this
Speaker 1: switch to the default network.
Speaker 2: Yes, but that's your example is perfect. One of the
Speaker 2: people that studies is saying studies creativity and studies insights,
Speaker 2: we get insights. And he used the shower in there.
Speaker 2: I heard him is when you're in a shower, your
Speaker 2: executive network is attentive, but it doesn't have to be
Speaker 2: fully attentive. And your attention network is saying, I get
Speaker 2: fall down. This water could get too hot, but it's cool.
Speaker 2: I mean it's it's relaxed. Yeah, and all of a
Speaker 2: sudden you're thinking, God, damn, that's where that paragraph goes.
Speaker 2: Speaking for me, Wow, how about this for a paper?
Speaker 2: People are studying creativity. It's a back and forth between
Speaker 2: the imagination network and this is executive network. When they
Speaker 2: get really good at it, I think, you know, and
Speaker 2: really refined. And it's hard work that they're doing getting
Speaker 2: the image but then doing all accounting of all the
Speaker 2: little pixels. I mean, you know, this is detail work.
Speaker 2: But they're going to see this back and forth, but
Speaker 2: they're going to see you're mostly his fault networks up.
Speaker 1: So neuroscientists are looking in painstaking detail at what areas
Speaker 1: of your brain light up, which probably makes their own
Speaker 1: brains light up as they do it. But Professor Domhoff
Speaker 1: delivered a great metaphor.
Speaker 2: I think of the human brain, including the sleeping as
Speaker 2: a symphony orchestra. And we think of the symphony orchestra
Speaker 2: with all the different kinds of musical instruments out there
Speaker 2: that all have different roles, and we have a conductor
Speaker 2: and the conductor is doing certain things and telling this
Speaker 2: group to sing, do you know, go down, this group
Speaker 2: to go up. This comes strong, and so you listen
Speaker 2: to it and all of a sudden there's just very
Speaker 2: no virtually no sound. Other times boom boom, boom boom,
Speaker 2: but it's in harmony and it's coming, it's moving around
Speaker 2: in such a way that it's that it's very smooth.
Speaker 2: And always think of that because of a number of
Speaker 2: reasons from the past in research the harmonious mind, but
Speaker 2: all also in some detailed work that a great sleep
Speaker 2: researcher did where she looked at our brainstem falling asleep.
Speaker 2: When we fall asleep, it's not just like abrupt or boom,
Speaker 2: it's just this. It is kind of this dance almost
Speaker 2: or there's harmonious toning down and going silent. When we
Speaker 2: go to sleep, we have a whole stage called a
Speaker 2: sleep onset stage, and so when we close our eyes,
Speaker 2: then certain networks go down. At the same time, there's
Speaker 2: neurochemical things that are happening that I likened to that
Speaker 2: the conductor has looked at the clock, and it is
Speaker 2: a clock that's in us. The orchestra has looked up
Speaker 2: on the wall and seen or subjectively thought, Yes, it's
Speaker 2: about over. And so the conductor starts to tamp everything down.
Speaker 2: And as the conductor sort of turns away, then say,
Speaker 2: the horns go down, we're just left with just you know,
Speaker 2: the softest part of it. What happens then the executive
Speaker 2: network starts to fall away, the attention networks go down
Speaker 2: a little bit, and there are studies of this of
Speaker 2: how they kind of disconnect from each other and different
Speaker 2: brain waves come up. So we're usually in a very
Speaker 2: fast brain wave state, let's call it beta. But as
Speaker 2: we drift into sleep, more alpha, and then theta veta
Speaker 2: is a little less than alpha. They start to come
Speaker 2: into the picture and they move from the back of
Speaker 2: the brain to the front of the brain. So there's
Speaker 2: this gradual transition. And then this one researcher on sleep
Speaker 2: on Stday is a great phrase where he calls the
Speaker 2: default network the gateway to sleep. They's just the gateway
Speaker 2: to sleep. And we do if we awaken you in
Speaker 2: sleep on set you're having little mini dreams, oh for sure.
Speaker 1: And that's so great when you start to realize that
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, I'm pulling a sleep and my
Speaker 1: mom has this trick she taught me where if you
Speaker 1: need to fall asleep, but your brain is thinking about
Speaker 1: what you got to do, and stress out the way
Speaker 1: to help her fall sleep, she comes up with a
Speaker 1: category like let's say it's cars or fruit or boys'
Speaker 1: names or whatever, and she'll go, okay, apple, a B banana,
Speaker 1: see cherry, and she'll go to the alphabet. And her
Speaker 1: name's Nancy. We call it the fancy Nancy.
Speaker 2: That's great because it's putting you into that more imaginative mode. Yes,
Speaker 2: and back and forth, and vigilance is going down. Tension
Speaker 2: networks are now saying she's messing around, We don't need
Speaker 2: to watch anymore. Yeah, and you shift into that and
Speaker 2: as you go to sleep. If you waken people in
Speaker 2: the first hour, sometimes you'll get a dream from them.
Speaker 2: But literally, when we're a couple hours into sleep now
Speaker 2: and a half to two hours into sleep, this network
Speaker 2: that's got a front and the back to it, those
Speaker 2: parts break apart. See, So back in the back, in
Speaker 2: the front of the brain, they're these important arts and
Speaker 2: then they're connected through these highways back and forth. But
Speaker 2: when those highways break apart, then they're isolated, and then
Speaker 2: you can't dream anymore. Oh, but that's also the way
Speaker 2: consciousness works. Consciousness is a property of a very big network.
Speaker 2: Dreaming is a property of portions of the default network,
Speaker 2: plus these secondary visual and sensory motor courtesies. That's why
Speaker 2: we can see and hear and smell and taste and
Speaker 2: run and feel exhausted after tracing back and forth, you know,
Speaker 2: I trace back and forth in a convention hall trying
Speaker 2: to you know, trying to get out of it just
Speaker 2: a week ago, you know, at some meeting and trying
Speaker 2: to figure out which entrance. There's people going everywhere, and
Speaker 2: I go back up the steps. When I woke up,
Speaker 2: I got it was exhausting, you know, a whole set. So,
Speaker 2: and of course that's the charm of dreams.
Speaker 1: Does that term wear off ever, or does it wear on?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 1: Patrons Aaron Sorens and Diane Dode, Christila Force, RJP seventeen
Speaker 1: Case Penix, Julie Debris, Bastion Peel and Debbie Potts and
Speaker 1: Darley and Scapura all had questions about dreaming at different ages,
Speaker 1: and Emily Stufferdes Swan and Julie Noble asked do babies dream?
Speaker 1: When do dreams start.
Speaker 2: One great psychologist, a cognitive psychologists, did longitudinal studies in
Speaker 2: a lab of children from three to fifteen, and their
Speaker 2: results were really exciting because they show that dreaming only
Speaker 2: develops gradually and it relates, we now know, to the
Speaker 2: maturation of the default network, as well as the cognitive
Speaker 2: development of imagination and ability to tell a story which
Speaker 2: we call narrative, to degenerate mental imagery, to have an
Speaker 2: autobiographical self. All of those things are gradual cognitive achievements.
Speaker 2: You can do things at five that you couldn't do
Speaker 2: it four, and you can do things at six you
Speaker 2: couldn't do at five, and so on. Only humans have a
Speaker 2: default network, and it is only functional by age five
Speaker 2: to seven and not fully mature till nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: What about when you see your dog going.
Speaker 4: And moving his.
Speaker 2: Little feet because his brain is activated.
Speaker 1: A lot of us wanted to know about critters in dreamland,
Speaker 1: including specs, Owl, Jesse Hurlbert, Aliameyer's, Corey Bridget b Sidney Taups,
Speaker 1: sou g Lori Fishman, First time askers Jules Crawford, Citieipend,
Speaker 1: Allison l and Kate Timms, who asked, I've heard a
Speaker 1: lot of people saying that animals don't dream, maybe their
Speaker 1: brains just do it differently. What do you think when
Speaker 1: my tiny little poodle, I'm going, oh the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. I never usually talk about animals and dreaming, Yeah,
Speaker 2: because that gets people. So No, I'm just curious. I'm
Speaker 2: just curious. Well, I think that his brain is activated.
Speaker 2: He's woofing and he's pause, are moving. We've all seen it.
Speaker 2: But that doesn't mean they're dreaming. It doesn't follow from
Speaker 2: that behavior.
Speaker 1: You're the expert.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you.
Speaker 1: And when your goblin is working and making flipper pause,
Speaker 1: that is called heaven and the best. But also myoklonos
Speaker 1: which is a type of muscle jerking, and that plus
Speaker 1: little fluttering eyelids and eyes are associated with remsleep, which
Speaker 1: accounts for about twelve percent of a dog's life. And
Speaker 1: if you're thinking, oh, okay, that's only about half as
Speaker 1: much as a human's twenty five percent of rem sleep. Right, No, No,
Speaker 1: that's twelve percent of the dog's life. They're not their sleep,
Speaker 1: they're life. They're only awake forty four percent of the time.
Speaker 1: According to a nineteen seventy seven study on dog sleeping,
Speaker 1: they're living the life and they're sleeping through it. But
Speaker 1: are they dreaming? This is where science gets divided. So
Speaker 1: even though some researchers found that lab rats learning a
Speaker 1: maze had the same, very specific brain activity during sleep,
Speaker 1: leading to the assumption that yes, the rats were dreaming
Speaker 1: about the maze, other scientists say that if you cannot
Speaker 1: take a report, you don't know who's dreaming. If only
Speaker 1: there are a book about animals when they Dream, I
Speaker 1: will actually. Philosopher David Penuguzman published the book When Animals
Speaker 1: Dream a few months back, so there you go, and
Speaker 1: in it there are accounts of cephalopods changing colors during
Speaker 1: sleep states, and fish who have brain activity during sleep
Speaker 1: that looks the same as when they're singing songs underwater.
Speaker 1: Which that made me learned that zebrafish sing, I guess,
Speaker 1: and they're not just performers. I went down a rabbit
Speaker 1: hole and it turns out zebrafish are connoisseurs as well.
Speaker 1: According to the twenty eighteen paper The Effects of Auditory
Speaker 1: Enrichment on zebra Fish Behavior and Physiology, researchers exposed a
Speaker 1: bunch of adult zebrafish to two hours of Vivaldi music
Speaker 1: twice a day for fifteen days, and overall, apparently zebrafish
Speaker 1: exposed to such auditory stimuli were less anxious and they
Speaker 1: had lower levels of inflammatory cytokines and cortisol. So if
Speaker 1: a fish can benefit from relaxing, please trust that you
Speaker 1: deserve peace and self care as well. If you're like
Speaker 1: in my dreams, let's discuss that. So, lucid dreaming is
Speaker 1: when you know you're dreaming and you can get some
Speaker 1: kind of control over the situations and the characters, kind
Speaker 1: of like the star trek Holidac but free and it's
Speaker 1: in your own brain. In tons of you such as
Speaker 1: Susan L. Tatum, Michelle Lee, Brenna Lynch, aaronhem Mia, MTB,
Speaker 1: Kaylee Evans, Toby Tobias, Shay Walker, and Johann E wanted
Speaker 1: to know is lucid dreaming legit and who can do it?
Speaker 1: What is lucid dreaming is at a different part of
Speaker 1: the brain. Is it even a real thing or is
Speaker 1: it just a kind of a euphemism for just daydreamingdam
Speaker 1: you're wincing.
Speaker 4: You're wincing like a poor.
Speaker 2: Lucid dreams are a very rare, maybe real thing that
Speaker 2: had been hyped, out of sight, warped, everything, hustled beyond belief.
Speaker 2: And it's a painful topic for me. You're right, I
Speaker 2: thought she canna ask me about lucid dream because I
Speaker 2: have foot in two worlds. I certainly get along with all,
Speaker 2: at least most of the dream researchers and whatever they're doing.
Speaker 2: And I'm curious. But I have my foot merely strongly
Speaker 2: in the scientific world. If I say there's no reason
Speaker 2: to believe it, we don't believe it. So most of
Speaker 2: the studies of lucid dreaming are quite bad, bumber, the
Speaker 2: first serious studies. I didn't tell you, we're done by
Speaker 2: a person. I'll go nameless. All people will go nameless.
Speaker 2: And in this particular dissertation done at the prestigious university
Speaker 2: where you could at that time in the seventies they
Speaker 2: could create their own program. And he had created his
Speaker 2: own program. He wasn't in a department, he wasn't trained
Speaker 2: in psych or anything else at any rate. He was
Speaker 2: both the participant in the experimenter. So fourteen of the
Speaker 2: seventeen instances of lucid dreaming were lo and behold the experimenters.
Speaker 2: It was also the subject and then he writes a
Speaker 2: popular book on it, and so on. So this is
Speaker 2: what is mostly going on. And in an article about
Speaker 2: later he got into the dreams turned out after he
Speaker 2: had been a hippie kind of person for a while
Speaker 2: and always hints at maybe it had used drugs and
Speaker 2: so on. Another guy was hilarious. He had insomnia, so
Speaker 2: he would go to bed and wake up, get up
Speaker 2: half coffee which had blew my mind, and he'd finally
Speaker 2: go to sleep five six am and eight half lucid dreams.
Speaker 2: This woman had had scary dreams as a young kid
Speaker 2: five to seven and feared witches. Now what that creates
Speaker 2: a state where you're afraid of sleep, you're scared to
Speaker 2: go to sleep, you don't want to go to sleep,
Speaker 2: and there are that kind of thing can happen to people.
Speaker 2: So that person is likely very vigilant during sleep. So
Speaker 2: once this dissertation based on the person's own dreams was published,
Speaker 2: then other people tried to do studies using EEG and
Speaker 2: other partition dissipants, and they would find that there was
Speaker 2: more of an EEG state, this alpha state I mentioned.
Speaker 2: It's different from our usual waking state, but it's not
Speaker 2: like what dream sleep looks like or other forms of sleep,
Speaker 2: so they were very iffy.
Speaker 1: So that was in the groovy nineteen seventies. But let's
Speaker 1: skip to the lit twenty tens, when neuroimaging was more
Speaker 1: widely available, and now this legend of lucid dreaming could
Speaker 1: be observed, and.
Speaker 2: The researcher had trained a number of participants to have
Speaker 2: lucid dreams. She used. Out of these thirty some people,
Speaker 2: there were five or six that said that they were
Speaker 2: having I think it was three or more lucid dreams
Speaker 2: a week at home. So she gets them in the
Speaker 2: lab and maybe two have one or two instances. It's
Speaker 2: very few, but the interesting thing is that there's a
Speaker 2: lot more activity in the executive network, a lot more activity.
Speaker 2: Then comes finally a neuroimaging study by a guy that
Speaker 2: was really into lucid dreaming, and he gets I think
Speaker 2: it was four guys from in their mid twenties to
Speaker 2: early thirties who have been really working out it on
Speaker 2: lucid dreaming for a long long time, very prolific lucid dreamers.
Speaker 2: But he's got fifteen nights of imaging on these guys.
Speaker 2: He gets two instances, one from each of two guys.
Speaker 2: That's that's not a lot same thing. He has got
Speaker 2: some of these areas that are active during waking and
Speaker 2: very important for consciousness, it's believed. Then we get to
Speaker 2: another interesting point in the literature. Now the people have
Speaker 2: tried to study consciousness that are really good. Thing is
Speaker 2: that there are parts of it's called the frontal poll
Speaker 2: or the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex. This particular area in the
Speaker 2: brain has been studied and it's really a key part
Speaker 2: of the executive network. But it has two parts, one
Speaker 2: that is sort of more active towards the external world
Speaker 2: and one that monitors our internal world. And so I
Speaker 2: just wrote a paper that's going to be published in
Speaker 2: March in which I humble dream researchers have the nerve
Speaker 2: to write about dreaming and consciousness, in which I say
Speaker 2: dreaming happens in a certain area in the hierarchical network
Speaker 2: that leads to consciousness, and what differs is in lucid dreaming.
Speaker 2: I put forth the hypothesis that in loose dreaming, the
Speaker 2: internally oriented part of the executive network has been reactivated,
Speaker 2: because if our brain is constantly fluctuating in its activation levels,
Speaker 2: which I believe it is. Our networks right now are
Speaker 2: changing a million times. If I suddenly notice the sound,
Speaker 2: or if I notice out the window, I notice, my goodness,
Speaker 2: its stopped raining, it's sunny. You know. All of that
Speaker 2: changes our brain all the time, and so coming out
Speaker 2: of sleep like that, momentarily we could have that particular network.
Speaker 1: And when it comes to lucid dreaming, it's pretty rare.
Speaker 1: But some research, like the twenty eighteen paper titled Frequent
Speaker 1: lucid Dreaming associated with increased functional connectivity between frontopolar cortex
Speaker 1: and temporo parietal association areas, found that though we don't
Speaker 1: understand the neurobiological basis of lucid dreaming, evidence shows that
Speaker 1: there's involvement of these areas called the anterior prefrontal cortex
Speaker 1: and the parietal cortex, and people who were able to
Speaker 1: lucid dream frequently had significantly higher resting state functional connectivity
Speaker 1: between these areas. Mumbo jumbo, you're screaming at your windshield.
Speaker 1: You're like, I don't know what you're talking about. How
Speaker 1: do I make out with the weird, horny green eminem
Speaker 1: in my dreams? That's all I care about, and I
Speaker 1: understand you. So I scoured the internet to give you
Speaker 1: these unproven tips. But some people say good sleep hygiene,
Speaker 1: a comfortable room and sleeping setup, including temperature. Remember go cold,
Speaker 1: don't get too hot under there. Start dream journaling during
Speaker 1: waking hours. Check in with yourself to make sure you're
Speaker 1: in reality, like look at your hands, poke stuff to
Speaker 1: make sure it's real, so that you do it in
Speaker 1: your dream and say, holy shit, this is a dream. Also,
Speaker 1: before you go to sleep, set an intention and think
Speaker 1: to yourself tonight, when I dream, I'm going to remember
Speaker 1: i'm dreaming, I'm going to do it. And you can
Speaker 1: also try sleeping five or six hours and then getting
Speaker 1: up and reading or doing something active and then going
Speaker 1: back to bed for an hour and see if you
Speaker 1: get that sweet sweet in between worlds lucid dreaming reward.
Speaker 1: So I hope that helps. Tony Vessel specs owl art
Speaker 1: by d and Leah Morris. But don't get too desperate
Speaker 1: for it. You're better off just dreaming normally and then
Speaker 1: play in a video game when you're awake or something.
Speaker 2: Now you get what's the heavy part, and maybe say
Speaker 2: you got a sensor to the settle what I am
Speaker 2: comfortable with is people go around and say, I can
Speaker 2: teach you to lucid dream. I can give you techniques
Speaker 2: to lucid dream. I can there's technologies that can help
Speaker 2: you lucid dream. And I used to have a flyer
Speaker 2: that I passed around in my class from a guy
Speaker 2: that was a doctor I guess, down just a little
Speaker 2: town below Santa Cruz. You know, he had machine and
Speaker 2: he's standing there looking and he said he could, you know,
Speaker 2: come down and he'd have you a lucid dream with
Speaker 2: his machine. I mean this gets into hustles, this gets
Speaker 2: into maybe grift even I don't know, and so it
Speaker 2: gets uncomfortable for me. But what the problem is, what's
Speaker 2: difficult to say is look, if lucid dreaming is a
Speaker 2: typical and there's a study out there that says none
Speaker 2: of the technologies and methodologies have improved lucid dreaming for
Speaker 2: those who do not lucid dream, may I dare ask
Speaker 2: the question of can we possibly study the life histories
Speaker 2: of those people? I mean, it's too much pressure for people.
Speaker 1: People keep thinking, oh, I can lucid dream if I
Speaker 1: work hard enough, and that's just not true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can fly if you work hard enough,
Speaker 2: and you know, all the things were told to try harder.
Speaker 2: You can do it if you try. There was a
Speaker 2: great book on psychotherapy that talked about that we end
Speaker 2: up if we're not careful, and we do this in
Speaker 2: our society tremendously. It was a great book by this
Speaker 2: title called Blame the Victim, Blaming the victim. And so
Speaker 2: if you didn't prosper in my psychotherapy, what the.
Speaker 1: Hell's wrong with you?
Speaker 2: I mean, they're not my fault. You didn't try far.
Speaker 2: I told you the instructions, you know. I mean, things
Speaker 2: get turned around. Kid comes to school, they are not nourished,
Speaker 2: there's no books in their house because their family has
Speaker 2: been unfairly treated. And then you to say to the kid,
Speaker 2: you're not concentrating, you're not trying hard enough. Yeah, why
Speaker 2: don't you develop your vocabulary? I mean, I mean, so
Speaker 2: you're already blaming the victim, you know, and here we're
Speaker 2: talking about social class and race and gender and etc.
Speaker 2: But we blame the victims. Yeah, but what's the matter
Speaker 2: with you? I mean, because you can't lose a dream?
Speaker 2: I mean, so that happens in all of this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, that was going to be my very last question,
Speaker 1: my my just had to ask, because I've got you here,
Speaker 1: what would you do if you found out? Physicists cal
Speaker 1: Tech put out a paper next week saying, holy shit,
Speaker 1: we figured out multiverses are real, there are parallel universes,
Speaker 1: time travel is possible. We figured out that dreams are
Speaker 1: actually a parallel universe.
Speaker 4: What would you do.
Speaker 2: If I trusted the physicists, I'd believe it. I've shamed
Speaker 2: my mind before. I did give a lecture that actually
Speaker 2: got listened to on this, I want to plug it.
Speaker 2: Thirty nine thousand views. That's a big time for negative
Speaker 2: especially A dream researcher called the awesome Lawfulness of your
Speaker 2: nightly Dreams, and I was in dead serious mode. But
Speaker 2: at any rate, the interesting thing that I ended with
Speaker 2: it's similar to what you said is I said, we
Speaker 2: actually lead two lives. We lead a life that's waking,
Speaker 2: and we lead another life that's dreaming. And I said
Speaker 2: they differ because in the waking life, we pick up
Speaker 2: right where we left off, but in my dreaming life,
Speaker 2: it starts over each time. We have a different dream
Speaker 2: life each night. But if I have lots of dreams
Speaker 2: from you, and I have actually four thousand from Izzy
Speaker 2: the Young Woman or Iver her dreams from twelve to
Speaker 2: twenty five. You see that her life, it has all
Speaker 2: these episodes. She's, you know, see one of these crushes,
Speaker 2: or she's at a horror movie, or she and her
Speaker 2: brother arguing in some way, and it can be in
Speaker 2: a sense, a certain sense, very thematic. We have the
Speaker 2: dreams Dorotheis, she named herself. We often would let people
Speaker 2: give their own pseudonyms, but it got out of hand
Speaker 2: and I thought about putting that goofy stuff up there.
Speaker 2: So at any rate, but Dorothea was something very educated woman,
Speaker 2: born at probably the eighteen nineties. But we had six
Speaker 2: or seven hundred of her dreams. I forget what it is,
Speaker 2: but in seventy two percent of those dreams there's one
Speaker 2: of seven things happening. This is poignant. In her twenty
Speaker 2: percent of her dreams, she's either buying, preparing a meal,
Speaker 2: or eating a meal, you know, something doing with me.
Speaker 2: So that was her biggest theme. There was also I'll
Speaker 2: get to the point in part in a minute, which
Speaker 2: is her last dream that she mailed as before the
Speaker 2: home in Hawaii wrote and said she was dead. She
Speaker 2: also would often dream of missing the bus or the train.
Speaker 2: But she also had dreams about five ten percent of
Speaker 2: just which she's trying to go to the bathroom and
Speaker 2: her people people in the bathroom, and it's just you know, a.
Speaker 1: Problem, hey, who hasn't been there, right, Renee, you and
Speaker 1: oriel Vans can't have and you're probably just sleeping with
Speaker 1: a full bladder. And by you I mean we anyway,
Speaker 1: less toilet, more poignant.
Speaker 2: So towards the end of her life she retired to
Speaker 2: Hawaii and arrest and she lived in a real nice place.
Speaker 2: She swam every day. She seemed to be in fitting health.
Speaker 2: She would mail periodically these dreams too, in this case
Speaker 2: my mentor Calvin Hall. And then I you know, heirded
Speaker 2: all the files and put them on dream bank. The
Speaker 2: last dream before she died, which if you didn't know
Speaker 2: her that she twenty percent of her dreams were about food,
Speaker 2: you'd say, oh my god, it's a premonition of her death.
Speaker 1: But in her last dream.
Speaker 2: She's sitting around the table and with her siblings. She
Speaker 2: had several siblings, and she used a phrase, a very
Speaker 2: proper phrase. She said, mother had dished too liberally to
Speaker 2: know my brothers and sisters. And there was nothing really
Speaker 2: left for me to eat. And then I saw a
Speaker 2: hambone sitting at the end of the table or sitting
Speaker 2: on the floor. That was a dream. So now you said,
Speaker 2: my god, you know treminition, I mean death. I mean
Speaker 2: it's only a bone. She's not getting to eat. But no,
Speaker 2: this is always happening to her in her dreams, with
Speaker 2: these siblings and not getting you know, there's always this
Speaker 2: sort of I get kind of behind tip of all
Speaker 2: of this, you know. Yeah, yeah, I'm sort of the
Speaker 2: left out one in the litter. Yeah. So she has
Speaker 2: a separate life. M it's a second life.
Speaker 1: If there's any Rick and Morty fans out there, you
Speaker 1: might be haunted by the episode Night Family, in which
Speaker 1: Rick uses a machine to have his nocturnal self do
Speaker 1: the chores of his waking self, including getting like a
Speaker 1: ripped set of abs. But then the ultimate conclusion that
Speaker 1: they come to is that we as waking people, are
Speaker 1: just the servants of our sleeping selves.
Speaker 2: Creepy.
Speaker 1: I loved it. I think about it constantly. Well, last
Speaker 1: questions I always ask is what is hard about your work?
Speaker 1: What's the hardest thing about dreams?
Speaker 2: Well, there's a million things that are difficult for dreams
Speaker 2: because scientists like to observe. You can't observe dreams. You
Speaker 2: can't make them happen. In other words, you can't do
Speaker 2: experiments where you do this or that. It didn't work.
Speaker 2: I mean, we try to drop water on people whispering area.
Speaker 2: You tape their eyes open and flask and you tell
Speaker 2: them stuff during the day. It doesn't. It really works.
Speaker 2: It's the mind doing its own thing. I used to
Speaker 2: call it the spin of the cognitive rolodex, except nobody
Speaker 2: has a rolodex anymore.
Speaker 1: I remember what they are. It was a desktop address book.
Speaker 1: You can ask your grandma anyway.
Speaker 2: So semantic memory banks are being stirred up. But it's
Speaker 2: hard then, because we can't experiment and we can't observe,
Speaker 2: and we're at the mercy of you telling the dream.
Speaker 2: So we've done this elaborate study. We awaken you in
Speaker 2: the middle of the night and say would you report
Speaker 2: your dream? And you say, I can't remember, which is
Speaker 2: maybe true, but it could not be true. So you're
Speaker 2: at the mercy of the participant. If you're like certainty,
Speaker 2: any scientist wants to control the variables, and if you
Speaker 2: can't control the variables, you're gonna say that ain't my
Speaker 2: feel So that's one of our problems. The other problem
Speaker 2: is that because the work on dreams did not leave
Speaker 2: to as was early thought by some people in the
Speaker 2: late fifties and early sixties, might be a key to
Speaker 2: mental health. There really was that belief, and some key
Speaker 2: psychoanalysts of that era who were mds and very big
Speaker 2: deals they helped some of the early dream researchers to
Speaker 2: get grants. So there were grants for dreaming. But when
Speaker 2: dreaming turned out to be not going to be useful
Speaker 2: in terms of medications or studying psychosis or so on,
Speaker 2: the money did dry up. And I understand it, and
Speaker 2: I appreciate it, and I believe it. And in other words,
Speaker 2: I'm not outscolding anybody. Why aren't you studying dreams? There's Alzheimer's,
Speaker 2: there's people's attention definite disorder, as you know, and all
Speaker 2: of these things of waking command our attention, and there's PTSD.
Speaker 2: These are things that command the tension of federal government.
Speaker 2: As far as the foundations, they of course want to
Speaker 2: make them say look good, and so they find topics
Speaker 2: that are relevant. It would make their name even more
Speaker 2: lustrous than the millions they made, and so dreaming does
Speaker 2: not fit into that category. But the hardest thing of
Speaker 2: studying dreams in the past was being up all. I mean,
Speaker 2: if you have a sleep dream, lamb, somebody's going to
Speaker 2: be have to wake up and wake up those participants. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: So you have to learn to be what it's like
Speaker 2: to be a participant. And it ain't fun to be
Speaker 2: awakened at one or two am and then jostled two
Speaker 2: hours later and so on. So participants don't necessarily last.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's enough of that. That's it. I'm out
Speaker 2: of here. And if you just get him. In our
Speaker 2: first night, one dream in the set of dreams I studied,
Speaker 2: the guy dreamed that the machine was electrocuting. Look you
Speaker 2: at all these wires on it. It's called electro and step.
Speaker 2: So he thought the machine was zapping. You know, it
Speaker 2: has its said a little problems.
Speaker 1: What about your favorite favorite thing about what you do?
Speaker 1: You've been doing this for years and years and years.
Speaker 2: Well, some it's just I like to discover new things.
Speaker 2: I didn't want to just add to the details on
Speaker 2: vision or learning. I wanted to know the Royal road
Speaker 2: to the unconscious, the meaning of life, why we are
Speaker 2: so crazy, why we believe the things we believe, why
Speaker 2: we fight with each other so much. I mean, all
Speaker 2: those things have been part of my research life in
Speaker 2: one way or another. So I was interested in using
Speaker 2: the best methods, the most serious quantitative methods, most objective methods,
Speaker 2: to study the toughest questions, just the challenge of dreams.
Speaker 2: And when you have a great mentor that done so
Speaker 2: much and has enthusiasm for it, and I might say,
Speaker 2: we've replicated his work again and again, and his coding
Speaker 2: system has been used all over the world. Carrying that
Speaker 2: on it had some meaning. And he was also a
Speaker 2: person that said I think you're okay. We all need
Speaker 2: to have a mentor that says, you know you're right
Speaker 2: for this field. When we go to college, we're looking
Speaker 2: for something that we like that likes us. So if
Speaker 2: you say, oh, I love psychology and you haven't done
Speaker 2: so well in the statistics or experimental side, and then
Speaker 2: somebody has to say, you know, maybe you ought to
Speaker 2: go into some more qualitative field. So they like something
Speaker 2: that didn't like them. It's like finding any match, right,
Speaker 2: So you find something you really like where it likes you,
Speaker 2: and so dream research was that for me. You ask
Speaker 2: me what keeps you going about dream For all of
Speaker 2: their negativity, and they are negative, there's some real fun
Speaker 2: in studying dreams and reading dreams.
Speaker 1: Patron Scott Sheldon asked thoughts on dream journals and I
Speaker 1: think by now we know Professor Domhoff is a fan.
Speaker 1: But would he read yours? Can they sign up and
Speaker 1: fill up your dream coffers at the dream Bank?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, we're very wary. We only use
Speaker 2: I mean, the thing is, I don't you've heard of
Speaker 2: all the pranks have been done on researchers, the pilt
Speaker 2: down man, the fake bones in the British Museum that
Speaker 2: fooled people. So I am very sensitive to that in
Speaker 2: terms of I know people can make up dreams. I
Speaker 2: know they can change them, you know. So I don't
Speaker 2: take any We don't collect any dreams over the web.
Speaker 2: I'd never take a dream off the web. These are
Speaker 2: people that write me and then I say, well send
Speaker 2: me a photo copy, or when did you start writing
Speaker 2: them down? Or I got a set of dreams that
Speaker 2: got timestamp on them, you know, so I know that
Speaker 2: that person wrote those dreams down in the past. Just
Speaker 2: write them down, don't look at them. Just write them
Speaker 2: down every day for a month or two, and that
Speaker 2: hits you into it if you stop and you analyze
Speaker 2: and think, and when then you start to project onto it.
Speaker 2: Just write them down. If you can study your own dreams,
Speaker 2: you want to, just write them down, just keep them,
Speaker 2: just put them in the drawer, don't even look. Just
Speaker 2: keep them. The more you do it, you more get
Speaker 2: in the halb.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm gonna start writing my down.
Speaker 2: I will.
Speaker 1: I'll let you know how it's going to.
Speaker 2: You did start writing them down?
Speaker 1: No, I'm going to start.
Speaker 4: I'm going to start.
Speaker 2: This is a voice them.
Speaker 1: I'll do voice to texts on my phone. That way
Speaker 1: they're digitized and I can later if I need to
Speaker 1: analyze them, I can.
Speaker 2: The voice of text work as well. I've I've been
Speaker 2: trying to tell dream researchers for ten years to get
Speaker 2: a voice to text.
Speaker 1: Well, this is a call to the to the universe.
Speaker 1: Get with that, dreams searchers.
Speaker 2: We got a plan here. Yeah, we got a plan
Speaker 2: of how to get the dream and we're gonna and
Speaker 2: I've got I now know a person who can analyze him.
Speaker 1: And if I do submit them later to his research.
Speaker 1: Can I pick a cool name like Jimminy Diamond or something.
Speaker 2: You can just yeah, but don't go too far.
Speaker 1: I won't do Jimmy Diamond. I'll do like Lynette or something,
Speaker 1: something Rhonda, something like that. This has been an absolute
Speaker 1: dream of mine, fulfilled. I have been wanting to interview
Speaker 1: you for years and this did not disappoint.
Speaker 2: It was a time.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing that my pleasure.
Speaker 2: I hope it's I hope it's serious enough. I mean,
Speaker 2: I hope not. No, this is perfect.
Speaker 4: So there you have it.
Speaker 1: Ask smart people sleepy questions and just know that that's
Speaker 1: the best way to learn anything. Bill and I had
Speaker 1: just such a lovely time chatting. We talked for over three
Speaker 1: hours on this rainy Tuesday in his office. Just so
Speaker 1: glad I asked him if I could ask him your questions.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: His new book is called The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming.
Speaker 3: It's linked in the show notes if you want to
Speaker 3: know more. All the details are in there. Alongside his
Speaker 3: research site dreamresearch dot net. I also have a ton
Speaker 3: of links on my site at Aliward dot com, slash ology,
Speaker 3: slash on, Neurology, which is linked in the show notes.
Speaker 3: We're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at
Speaker 3: ali Ward on both. I'm also at ali Underscore Ologies
Speaker 3: on TikTok. Now I'm giving it a shot, y'all. Thank
Speaker 3: you Aaron Talbert for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group
Speaker 3: with help from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis. Thank you
Speaker 3: Emily White of the Wordery for making professional transcripts, and
Speaker 3: Caleb Patton for bleeping episodes. Those are up for free
Speaker 3: at aliwar dot com, slash Ologies, dash Extras. Susan Hale
Speaker 3: handles merch and so much else, and Noelle Dilworth does
Speaker 3: our scheduling. Thank you to everyone supporting on Patreon dot
Speaker 3: com slash ologies. Thank you Zeekrodriguez Thomas and Mercedes Maitland
Speaker 3: for working on kid friendly shorter versions of classic episodes.
Speaker 3: Those are called smologies. They're up at Alleyward dot com
Speaker 3: slash Smologies. Kelly ar Dweyer makes our website and she
Speaker 3: can make yours. Nick Thorburn made the theme music, and
Speaker 3: lead editor for this episode was Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, you are wonderful. We heart you
Speaker 1: additional editing by Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media. Who
Speaker 1: I would marry in a saloon with warm bruskis And
Speaker 1: if you stick around, I tell you the secret. But
Speaker 1: I already told you one in the middle of the episode.
Speaker 1: So right now, I'm gonna just go over to Grammy.
Speaker 1: I'm literally recording this on my bed. I'm gonna see
Speaker 1: if Grammy's gonna make any barking noises in her sleep. Okay,
Speaker 1: she's awake, she's just breathing at me. That was uneventful.
Speaker 1: But when she does bargain, her sleep sounds like this.
Speaker 1: I'll do my best impression. She sounds kind of like
Speaker 1: a chicken. Okay, bybye, that wasn't a very good app secret.
Speaker 4: No, it wasn't. She was sleeping right before.
Speaker 1: Then.
Speaker 4: Can I do a different secret?
Speaker 3: That's really funny that it's still recording.
Speaker 1: My other secret is that it's raining really hard in
Speaker 1: California right now, and I had just gotten out of
Speaker 1: the shower and I was not wearing clothes and it
Speaker 1: was raining, and I dashed out onto the porch because
Speaker 1: I've never been nude in the rain, but now I have,
Speaker 1: so you're armed with that knowledge. Sorry everyone, Bye.
Speaker 4: Bye.
Speaker 2: Dreams. They feel real while we're in them, right it's the.
Speaker 1: Only when we wake up that we realize something was
Speaker 1: actually strange. Today's episode is exclusively sponsored by Satfa, so
Speaker 1: a final shout out to a dream sponsor, Sofa, we
Speaker 1: love you. I remember you can't dream if you can't
Speaker 1: fall asleep. And Satfa is the mattress company dedicated to
Speaker 1: helping you do just that well and comfortably. And maybe
Speaker 1: your bed just needs a linen upgrade. STFA has those
Speaker 1: two flannel sheets seten sheets percale sheets. But if you
Speaker 1: have been in the market for a new mattress, goes
Speaker 1: straight to Satfa. And right now you're in luck because
Speaker 1: you'll save two hundred dollars when you purchase one thousand
Speaker 1: dollars or more at sofa dot com slash ologies. That's
Speaker 1: s double atva dot com slash ologies sn