Sometimes life can seem hard and tough to navigate, but what may seem like the smallest task such as getting out of bed or even brushing your teeth should be celebrated as a win.
And State Farm is here to help you celebrate all your wins.
The State Farm personal price plan helps you create an affordable price just for you.
Talk to the State Farm agent today to learn how you can bundle and save with the personal price plan.
Like a good neighbour, State Farm is there.
Businesses are based on rating plans that vary by state.
Covered options are selected by the customer.
Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
There's a lot of talk about mindfulness these days, which is fantastic.
I mean, we all want to be more present and self-aware.
More patient, less judgmental.
We discuss all these themes on the podcast, but it's hard to actually be mindful in your day-to-day life.
That's where calm comes in.
I've been working with calm for a few years now with the goal of making mindfulness fun and easy.
Calm as all sorts of content to help you build positive habits, shift yourself to work, reframe your negative thoughts and generally feel better in your daily life.
So many incredible options from the most knowledgeable experts in the world, along with renowned meditation teachers.
You can also check out my 7-minute daily series to help you live more mindfully each and every day.
Right now, listeners of on-purpose get 40% off a subscription to Calm Premium at calm.com forward slash J.
That's c-a-l-m.com forward slash J-a-y.
For 40% off, calm your mind, change your life.
I'm a scientist. Dr. Raul Jandiyal.
The measurements of emotion in our dreaming brain can reach a top speed or waking brain can never reach.
How are you processing?
Are you metabolizing the most difficult thing in your day?
Hey, everyone. I've got some huge news to share with you.
In the last 90 days, 79.4% of our audience came from viewers and listeners that are not subscribed to this channel.
These resets that shows that if you want to create a habit, make it easy to access.
By hitting the subscribe button, you're creating a habit of learning how to be happier, healthier, and more healed.
This would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better, bigger, brighter content for you in the world.
Live right now. Everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, to Number One Health Podcast in the world, thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow.
I'm so excited because we've really been tapping here on purpose into things you're fascinated about.
Questions that you're thinking about.
Thanks for exploring themes that you're wondering about.
This was one of those that I can't wait to share with you.
This has been a theme I've been fascinated about.
We're talking to the expert, the person who's thinking about it differently, who's open to the idea of this truly being discovery all based on curiosity.
Dr. Raul Jandial is a dual-trained brain surgeon and neuroscientist at City of Hope in Los Angeles.
Dr. Jandial leads the Jandial lab, which explores the intersection of neurobiology and cancer.
As part of his nonprofit that he founded, he teaches and performs pediatric neurosurgery in charity hospitals in South America and Eastern Europe.
Today we're talking about his newest book, Out Now This Is Why You Dream.
Welcome to the show, Raul Jandial.
Raul, it's great to see you.
Pleasure to mind. Thank you for being here.
Yeah, I'm excited to do this.
Yeah, I'm really grateful.
Like I said to you, honestly, this is usually when we're doing an interview.
I'm like, all right, I'm going to, you know, I've got certain questions.
I'm going to go with the flow and the amount of questions we've had from our team, our audience, our community.
It's never happened before.
I'm just telling you that.
And so you're going to see me reading out questions from real people who've sent them in for you to understand more about dreaming, which I think is probably one of the most undiscovered, untapped, misunderstood or completely un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un
We're burning hot and we're sparking electricity.
So people who remember their dreams and people who don't remember their dreams, that brain is still sparking hot and generating a lot of electricity.
So I think it's more of memory recall in the morning.
At the same time, we all know about a nightmare.
So we've all had one dream.
The question is, why do some people dream more, dream less, or remember their dreams more, remember their dreams less?
And that's something I think is related to the variety of human experience.
We don't hold our waking thoughts to the same rigid contours, right?
So our dreamscape, our dream life is individual between us.
And we remember more, when we're younger, we remember less as we get older, and then certain diseases, dreams come to the rescue.
And it seems now that at the end of life, like with my cancer patients, dreams return.
And they're filled with reconciliation.
You would think in their struggle, like, you know, there would be dark, but they're actually positive.
So those patterns of dreams are there, the brain electricity is firing while we sleep.
And that's the sort of foundation from which I try to find meaning in dreaming.
Absolutely. I mean, the book is called, this is why you dream.
Why do we dream? And why is it important for us to understand why we dream?
Because I think a lot of people say, yeah, I dream sometimes, sometimes I don't, who cares, what's the big deal?
But I'm fascinated by it.
I know a lot of people are.
So why do we dream? And why is it important to try to understand why we dream?
It's not a big deal. It's completely off for those people who think it if they understand one third of our lives is potentially spent dreaming.
And the brain shuts us down.
Right? It's just one third.
Like, that can't be passive.
And it puts you down, right?
Like, you get sleep pressure.
Like, I got a sleep. Well, when I was in training and surgical training, we skipped a night of sleep.
What happens when somebody skips a night of sleep the next night?
They dream harder and earlier.
If I can be so bold, I think sleep is for the brain.
It's not for our thigh muscle.
It's not for our liver. There are some metabolic changes.
I'm not discounting all of it.
But the real thing driving us to sleep is our brain.
What does our brain do just vibrantly when we sleep?
It's dream. So that's like my straight up answer about like that thing, that's not happening on accident, right?
That's not a glitch. That in last through 30,000 generations accidentally.
And so then the question becomes if we have this vibrant one-third of our lives that we partially remember, sometimes remember, sometimes as an exciting journey, sometimes an erotic journey, sometimes as a nightmare, like, what's that all about?
And the way I've come to understand it is, first, given respect to people who've tried to come up with some ideas, like it's a threat rehearsal.
If we're running from a woolly mammoth and our dreams were better prepared for during the day, what I would say is maybe.
And when I say maybe you're likely, it's not a respect for you and your listeners.
I don't want to be that guy that comes in here and says, yes, no, about something as big and magical as dreaming.
So threat rehearsal, maybe.
Some people think it's a nocturnal therapist because towards the morning when we have more of our vivid dreams, the emotional balance, the valence they call it tends to be more positive, maybe.
I like to think of it as something that sparks creativity because of what happens with the dreaming brain.
The dreaming brain looks for looser dots to connect.
It's imaginative by design.
Logic is dampened down.
So I think it's our creativity engine.
And then the way I put it all together is with something straight up called user-loser that people know about when we talk about the brain, right?
They say, hey, use it or lose it.
We know if we don't use our biceps, they atrophy.
But our day, if you look at the brain activation electricity, is so narrow, the brain wants to be efficient, right?
Because it's an energy hog.
It's only like four or five pounds, but it uses 20% of our blood.
So the brain during the day to navigate the world, task on outward, executive network logic wants to be efficient, driving down the 101 easily, going on the tube easily, not have to activate everything to get that done.
If we only use those limited parts of our brain during the day and didn't have some way to high intensity train them, those would go derelict.
We wouldn't use them and we may lose them.
So I think in the biggest way possible is that dreaming process, dreams and dreaming is high intensity training for our brain.
It keeps those corners engaged.
It keeps those neurons firing that might not during the day.
And those are available to us the next day for a creative process, for the next day, or the next year, or the next generation for an adaptive process.
That's my biggest, most romantic way of thinking about why we dream so hard.
Yeah, I like the maybe because I think we've all had different dreams that you feel you had for different reasons.
And there are some dreams that you did feel were like you said, like your nocturnal therapist, this feeling of like, okay, I'm healing, I'm learning.
You're working something out.
Yeah, you're working something out.
I've definitely had dreams where I feel like, oh my gosh, like this feels like it's mirroring my reality and I'm either preparing or I'm dealing with it internally.
And I think you're so right that there's so many different processes and it's hard to nail it down to one.
Is there a way to start to label and define or do you think that's unhealthy when it comes to dreaming?
Perfect question. So to the maybe I'll add likely, you know, not yes and not no when it come my dream, your dream infinitely while, okay.
But what happens when you start looking at 10,000 dreams?
What happens when you start?
So I'm over here. So there is no like professor of dream science, right?
So now it was like, when they asked me, the publisher asked me like, can you put a book, book together about this?
I think we were vibing about this before we, uh, before we went live with this or recording with this.
And it was like, they're like, you wrote this thing about the brain, like, you know, smart drugs, Alzheimer's, creativity.
Then you wrote this thing about the mind, like resilience and trauma and belief and about your own struggles.
Why don't you put together something about dreams from a scientific perspective that everybody can read?
And I was like, there are going to be so many gaps.
And they said, then let us know where the gaps are, say maybe, say likely and say I wonder I believe.
And that's what I've tried to do in the book.
But to your question about when I started this process, when I looked at not your dream, my dream, but 10,000 dreams, Aristotle's writing about lucid dream.
Couple hundred years ago, they're still writing about being chased or falling.
And I was like, wait a second, there are patterns to dream reports.
Like now they have dream banks.
Well the first thing I noticed was nightmares and erotic dreams are essentially universal.
And I say essentially because it's 90 plus in this world is considered a hundred, right?
Because that's just how science works when you look at questionnaires and surveys.
So everybody's had a nightmare.
Erotic dreams are almost all the way up there.
And then chasing, falling teeth.
That seems to be common.
And then there was a dream that was very rarely reported doing math.
I don't like math. So I was like, that's all good for me.
But you start when you look at lots of thousands of dreams, you're like, why is that one so low?
Then now walk with me over here, then you start looking at brain scans and brain electricity.
And what happened? What's the difference between the waking brain and the dreaming brain, right?
In a 24 hour cycle, we're about two thirds waking brain and one third a dreaming brain.
And there are some transition zones that I love.
Like I call them liminal states or blurry zones that we can get into.
But when you see that and you say, well, what's the difference?
I started off with like, they're both burning hot.
They're both sparkling electricity.
So what's the difference?
So when you go from waking brain to dreaming brain, what happens is the need to look outward changes, right?
And so the executive network, a collection of structures, not just one thing, dampens logic and math ability, dampen.
They don't turn off. Nothing turns off in the brain.
Otherwise, you know, you'd have a stroke.
So it dampens the imagination network and the emotional systems called the limbic structures are liberated.
So if we know now that the dreaming brain as a measurement, not my opinion, right, we can talk about opinions, but this is a measurement.
If the dreaming brain has dampened logic and reason and math, liberated emotion, hyper-visual, it kind of makes sense why we don't see a lot of math.
Because that part of the brain that does that is it taking a back seat while we dream.
So I said, OK, even if that's the only thing I can say in this book, and some youngster, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now, it takes more data from dream banks that are more inclusive and bringing in more people that patterns of how we dream, you know, and what we dream can be explained by the brain.
And that, to me, that was fascinating.
So dreams are not limitless.
Yours is, mine is. When you look at a lot of them, nightmares happen universally.
And then we find very emotional, visual movement-based dreams.
That's fascinating. I mean, you don't even think about it that way.
And I think so often it's kind of, it's interesting because it's a microcosm of how we live our lives.
Like we live our lives thinking, no one understands me, no one knows what I'm going through.
Only I have this experience.
And then all of a sudden when you zoom out and you look at the patterns, you're like, wait a minute, we're all struggling with the same thing.
I was just talking to someone earlier and we were talking about how the brain is going on earlier and we were talking about how like we seem to be the problem solvers in our families.
And then you start realizing how, wait a minute, we're all trying to solve the same problems we're dealing with the same emotions.
And those patterns are so useful in finding, so have they basically looked at dream patterns and then looked at stress patterns and lifestyle patterns?
Like is that what you're measuring them against or what are the patterns being measured against?
So if out of the 10,000 people, 9,000 people dreamt about their teeth falling out, what then are we measuring in their life to make sense of that dream?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And also we tend to fall into the same traps, right?
I think that looking at brain science shows that yes, we're individuals, but what's driving us and what's holding us back is also something we share.
That's why these conversations, that's why a certain book or certain song or certain interaction can kind of liberate you.
And so the way I would explain this is the dream patterns that they're looking at.
When I say they, I mean 20, 40 years of different studies, I'm trying to stitch it together.
Let me give you a specific one.
There was one survey questionnaire where women going through divorce, when their dreams, they were reconciling in their dreams that things were breaking up and people were moving on, those as a group tended to recover from divorce better.
And so when you just look into, you just say, okay, that's very interesting.
Things that were struggling in their dreams were also ones more likely to have depression longer.
And so what that does to me is that invites a conversation.
So does the dream or the dreaming brain kind of give a clue to how well you're coping with your real waking life stress?
That by itself is powerful.
That one, it knows about it.
It's in it some other brain.
It's your brain, it's just in this dreaming mode.
So it knows about it, your waking life is feeding your dream life.
I mean, six, seven, eight hours, how are you processing, how are you digesting, how are you metabolizing the most difficult thing in your day?
And I think that's where I love it is that it's not distinct and that the dreaming brain can be your shepherd.
It can be the thing that helps you process the emotional trauma.
And for people with PTSD, it can actually actually play back flashbacks.
So it's a wild space that leans emotional, leans visual.
Let me give you a second example.
With my patients, end of life cancer patients, dreams are expensive, positive, filtered reconciliation as they're asking for surgery and all that.
You would think they're all going to be horrific because it's dark stress.
It's dark stress, right?
You would think day stress is turned into dreaming stress, but the connection is not clear.
And that's where I think there's power in our dream life.
I think in general, when I look at all the surveys, dreaming is our shepherd at the end of life.
I think nightmares and erotic dreams cultivate the young mind, much like our minds are cultivating adolescence, dreams mirror and reflect what's going on during our life.
For example, pregnancy dreams, women who are pregnant, their dreams are very different, rolling over bed with the babies are going to be called.
So sometimes waking anxiety and dream anxiety clearly linked.
I got to give a talk tomorrow.
I got a dream. I'm showing off naked.
I got to, I got to exam alarms.
Sometimes they're clear.
Sometimes they're your companion pregnancy dreams, end of life dreams.
Sometimes they're just junk.
Not everything's going to make sense, right?
Our waking life doesn't make sense.
So I think when you start to look at those categories, the fourth category being universal dreams, nightmares and erotic dreams in children, then the one we're left with, that the one that now I spend even more time with is that hyper emotional, hyper visual that lingers into the next day.
What I would say is don't let that one go.
That's a solar flare from your brain in a unique state that you can't get to during the day, hyper emotional, hyper liberated.
The measurements of emotion in our dreaming brain can reach a top speed.
Our waking brain can never reach.
So for me, when I look at the whole thing, the hyper emotional, hyper visual with the central image is a dream that has broken out from your dream life that is about you that a therapist can't get to.
I mean, it's your brain conjured it.
And that's one to reflect on.
What I would say is like not every time, not everyone, but in our search for wellness and healing, that's a free and accessible portal.
And when I was working on this book with the UK publishers, there were like seven or eight people who were like, we're dreaming more.
We're remembering our dreams more.
Some had lucid dreams. So that's the second thing I would say is that this can be induced and cultivated.
You're not a passenger with your dream life.
And what you remember from your dream life, you can also cultivate that.
You're not a passenger at that stage either.
Hey, everyone. This is Jay here, my wife and I have had so much fun creating our own sparkling tea Juni.
And I've got big news for you.
It's our target. And we'd love your support.
If you can go out, grab a Juni, you'll be adding adaptogens and new tropics into your life with mood boosting properties aimed at promoting a balanced and happy mind.
Draw a commitment to our wellness journey and striving to fuel our bodies with the health and the experience.
It's been our purpose to make healthy choices accessible for all, which is why Juni is now on shelves at target.
So head to our store locator at drinkjuni.com and find Juni at a target near you.
Let's talk about that a little.
What's the effect and are you encouraging us to take time to actually make the subconscious conscious and reflect on our dreams?
I would say the first question is, I can't answer that fully.
The second question is absolutely try to engage your dream life.
Sleep entry when you go from waking to dreaming like Salvador Dolly did or Christopher Nolan's talking about inception.
Sleep exit, which we can get into, lose the dreaming.
The answer to the question, should we engage our dream life?
Yes, yes, yes. I got a lot of science on that.
Let's do it. Let's dive into that.
I mean, there's so many things I wanted to talk about, but let's see as we've gone there now.
Let's dive into it now. So let's talk about the process of being more of a proactive leader in our dreams and not a passenger in our dreams.
What does that look like?
Absolutely. Because I would argue that anyone I talk to, we're all passengers in our dreams.
We simply go to bed. We may remember.
We may not remember. We show up.
It's like the car journey.
We jumped in the car. You're going to sleep for a bit.
You're going to decide, maybe you remember a tree you saw along the way or your mom and dad did something when you were a kid, but you don't remember most of it.
It doesn't really matter.
You're in the driver's seat of a car you can't control.
It seems that way. That one will get to with lucid dreaming.
But how you can affect your dreams, because we've gotten to the science, I believe they're relevant.
Let's take this first stage.
You go from waking to dreaming, right?
Whatever time that is, not every time, not for everyone, but just the fact that it's possible, that's something called sleep entry.
With those surface electrodes on our scalp, the electricity blends.
It's like a liminal state.
I used to be a scuba diver when you go from a freshwater river to an ocean.
It's not like there's a crisp line.
There's a blurry zone. Similarly, when we go from waking to dreaming, there's about a 10-15 minute period called sleep entry.
Salvador Dali and some current tech companies in San Francisco, they believe that during that period, you kind of have access to that divergent creative ideation of dreaming, and that they can extract ideas from there.
So much so Thomas Edison with the light bulb would fall asleep in a chair, and when he'd fall asleep, and he'd start on himself awake, he'd write down what he was thinking, that that was a scene in inception, right?
So I'll bring the science in, but that's there.
Christopher Nolan is talking about that.
Salvador Dali wrote a book about that.
His stuff is real like that.
And so that period is the first entry into dream life that you can still hold on to.
And what we're finding is that people have more interesting ideas.
They have more divergent thinking and creative ideas at that window.
Is that, but to be clear, your trouble at work, you got to create a project, is that going to guarantee it?
No, but it's a habit of respecting that transition, liminal zone, as a portal to estate, your brain is not in when you're awake or not in when you're dreaming, right?
So that's one thing that people can do to cultivate.
In that same area, some people feel and report questionnaires and surveys, not measurements, that what you think about at that time will be more likely to populate your dream life, whether you remember or not, and may lead to the aha moment the next day.
Let me give you a specific example.
I'm a cancer surgeon, cancer eats a blood vessels and tissue in different ways.
On challenging cases, I'll flip the images through, that's the last thing I go to bed thinking about.
And somebody asked me this in London, they said, well, did you dream of surgery?
I said, no, I've never dreamt.
I'll never dream to surgery, but I have a lot of dreams of scuba diving, navigating mazes, going through forests.
And so what I concluded, it's my opinion, is that it's a three dimensional space.
I know I'm working on a three dimensional creative project, and that my dream life is somehow rehearsing that, practicing that, providing me with that maneuver in a complex surgery.
And I say, man, that was, where did that come from?
Sometimes I think it wasn't like, in this scenario six, I will come up with solution four.
No, like things arise during our waking life.
And I think that dreaming brain builds that.
So sleep entry for waking up intentionally and writing down your thoughts and journaling at that moment, journaling in general about what you want to dream about.
For me, looking at pictures about a surgery, those are specific things as you fall asleep that somebody can try.
Wow, that's fascinating.
I think journaling's taken off so much in culture.
And I'm trying to bring some science to it.
I think the act of journaling straight after waking up, like immediately.
I know for a fact that if I pick up my phone first thing in the morning, which I try to avoid to do, but when it does happen, I forget my dream immediately.
And I know I wake up kind of in a dream state, and then I completely shut it off.
Have you found links between going asleep with your phone or without your phone and how that affects our dreams or if you watch a particular show and TV and how does that affect your dream and what you do in the morning?
Does that have any correlation?
So that's a great question.
The thing you said about waking up, I'll get to that at sleep exit because there's some interesting science there.
But when you're looking at all these surveys, that's why I open it up with like, we need more dream banks.
We need people who have a great exposure to social media to start talking about their dreams.
At this point, it doesn't look like they populate.
Dreams, let's take a specific example.
Rodic dreams tend to be about a narrow group of people in your life, family even when you're younger, repellent bosses and celebrities.
So I'm curious to see, that doesn't mean there's 100 papers on that, but those are the sprinkling of information that I saw.
So what becomes familiar to us?
You said bosses? Well, you know, people can have like awkward dreams about bosses, right?
They have sexual dreams about people they actually are not attracted to.
That's a big category in erotic dreams.
But is there any reasoning to that specifically because of being erotic dreams about people you're not attracted to?
Like, where does that come from?
I don't know, I think it's now we're getting into opinion.
I think it's a power dynamic play and I think intimacy can be both collaborative and also a power dynamic and some mix of it all, right?
But that's just, that's an exploration.
But erotic dreams, since we're there and we'll get back to sleep exit, is they're interesting.
We all get them. They come before we've done the erotic act, even if we haven't seen it.
So it's almost like an instruction, if you will, an inheritance of thinking, not just risk taking or mental health.
But we inherit those dreams even to people who never go on to have sex.
They still have erotic dreams, almost like a playbook that's meant for a mind to activate our brain and bodies for the act to procreate.
That's the big topic. The specific thing is across cultures, different over generations, the percentages are surprisingly similar, 90 plus.
The other surprising thing is that 80 to 90% in these reports, infidelity, cheating is common erotic dreams.
Whether you're in a healthy relationship, whether you're lying about in a healthy relationship and coveting somebody else, or whether you're in a bad relationship, it's almost like a semi built in thing.
And I think that's how I've learned to think about erotic dreams is, that's just desire.
It's like a flair of desire.
It interestingly tends to be toward a narrow group, but the acts tend to be wild.
There's a few points that you made in the book that fascinated me seeing as we're on the topic of erotic dreams.
I was sharing with the team earlier.
So there's three things here, but let's go one by one.
So erotic dreams are not fueled by masturbation or pornography.
What can we do with that?
That's what some reports a decade ago mentioned.
That might be changing.
But what's interesting to me there is it's not what we do during the day that shows up in erotic dreams.
It's actually what we fantasize about secretly during our day that's more likely to show up in erotic dreams.
And scientifically to me, I think that makes a lot of sense because the dreaming process is the imagination network liberated.
So it makes sense that what you imagine in your dream life is more connected to the fantasy you're having while you're awake.
It doesn't matter the sexual act, the sexual person, that what brings someone to climax the thoughts they have during that process with their lover, without their level, it's the internal thinking of desire during the day that tends to find itself in erotic dreams.
And to me, that's consistent if you think about the dreaming brain as something that has the liberated imagination network.
It's an imaginative process, right?
Your eyes are closed. That movie you're making for yourself.
So whatever you're thinking about during the day, that's the movie you're making at night.
So thinking back to what you were saying earlier, if someone's in a happy relationship, but you're saying it's still common for them to cheat in their dreams.
That's a separate pattern, yeah.
Yeah, that's a pattern that you've seen.
So is that an argument then that that person may be happy in their relationship, but then they're fantasizing.
I can't answer it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, what I would say to you is from there, what people ask is if you have dreams tend to have more bisexuality, so does that mean you
have your bisexual, you just haven't figured that out or you're not sharing that with somebody during the day, I can't answer that.
But I think as we bring in more reports from dream banks and bringing more cultures, more backgrounds, more genders, and more diverse sort of perspectives on sexuality, we'll get insights into that.
But that's a very individual thing.
So as a whole, there's a lot of cheating in erotic dreams.
As a whole, what shows up in our erotic dreams is what we imagine.
And then it leaves it to the person.
That's why I opened with like, you know, people who asked me like, if you dream of your ex, does that mean you really want them?
I was like, well, if you're seriously thinking to still think if you're hung up on them during the day, you dream about your ex, that means one thing.
But if you're like, no, I've really moved on.
And the lover pops up in your dream.
I think that's just a solar flare of desire.
I wouldn't make much of that.
I think that's the hard part, right?
I think what we don't know is how seriously to take a dream or not, because I feel like a lot of people, exactly like you just said, you have a dream about something you're thinking, oh, God, maybe I need that.
Maybe I don't. And is that a lack of self awareness?
Is it because the dream is not clear?
Like, how do we, how have you thought about that as you've reflected on dreaming?
How do we get better at knowing whether to take a dream seriously or not?
Because I feel like that would help solve so much of our conundrum or dilemmas that's created by dreams.
Yeah, it's a big question.
It's a big question. I don't love to know your thoughts.
My opinion about it is that one, dreams should not be neglected.
Okay. Nightmares, if they pop up and they arrive out of the blue, they shouldn't be neglected.
I think dreams that are flashbacks after PTSD obviously should not be neglected.
There's some dreams that have an easier rule to follow, if you will.
But then what about those other dreams that you're bringing up, right?
Like intensely emotional, the linger with you during the day.
And you're wondering, like, wait a second, is that an insight to myself that I don't even have yet about myself?
Should I discuss this with a therapist?
Should I discuss this with my lover?
And I think the way I've started to reflect on my dreams a bit more is that when they are hyper-emotional, it's an invitation to look at your life differently.
All right? I feel like I'm doing well.
I'm high achieving. I'm doing this.
You feel like, no, it's fine.
I'm dealing with a broken relationship.
But if you start having nightmares or if you have emotional dreams that are filled with fright or regret, I'm not saying that that there's never an automatic link, right?
I'm not showing up naked at a podium or alarm not going off.
But the one that's powerful haunts you doesn't make sense.
That's an invitation to think about something.
And back to our original conversation.
To me, that's a life well examined is paying attention to the emotional powerful dreams that you have that linger with you.
The dream is symbolic to get to your answer in the most specific way.
The dream is a metaphor.
The dream is symbolism.
From the dreaming brain and you have hyper-visual, hyper-emotional, it's not going to spell it out for you.
It's going to be metaphorical.
It's going to be symbolic.
A specific example, Vietnam veterans who had PTSD got better, they start going through divorce.
They're not, and they're struggling.
They're not dreaming of divorce.
They're dreaming of war again.
So the experience that you're having, they're an invitation to reflect.
The meaning is metaphorical and symbolic all based on how the dreaming brain is built.
And it's personal. It's hard to say a bridge or a light bulb in your life at this moment is going to be the same meaning for me at this moment.
Or my life, 10 years from now, not just former versions of myself.
So I'm not here to refute anything, but it's a very personal process.
Your brain made it. It's a motion to a hyper-emotional state.
It could mean nothing. It could mean something.
But what I'm here to say is take a look at it.
It's not just static. No, I think that's, I completely agree with you.
I think it's a great point.
And I feel like it's really interesting because it then goes back to the idea that humans are meaning-makers.
And that with storytellers.
And if you're looking at a mega-sort of that, man.
I've got a lot of that, man.
Then you're trying to figure out, and if you have a negativity bias in your conscious mind, I wonder how much, like, I'll give an example.
I was talking to someone the other day and they were saying that they'd been dreaming about bears.
And so I started googling what that means.
And I was, you know, going to ask you and I was googling about it.
It was really interesting because in a conscious state, a big bear feels scary, and it feels like death, and it feels like run away.
And that's how they saw a bear in their dream.
But then when you look to the dream spiritual version, whatever you call it, the interpretation, the interpretation of that was bears represent strength and they represent courage and they have this symbol in the Nago.
So it's a story. Yeah, it depends.
It depends on which brain conjured up, which image.
Yeah. You work in the circus.
Bear means one thing. You know, your hunter bear means one thing.
You know, in culture bear means something else.
So I like that, but just to go back to something that, you know, I've been, I've been moving around and people have asked me stuff.
The question you just asked is, is, is something special about, are we meaning makers?
And now this is going to take me a little time to open up on this.
Please. But what's, what's interesting, and again, I don't have all the answer.
This conversation is that in the dreaming brain, even though the logic and reason areas are dampened, specifically the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, it's right behind our sort of horns in the prefrontal cortex that pushed our brains forward.
There's another area called the medial prefrontal cortex that's preserved.
It stays throbbing. It's actually liberate a little bit.
And you know what that one does?
It does something we only figured out when we accidentally injure it, or somebody has a stroke in that area.
It stitches the story of our life together.
Shopify's already taken the cash register online, helping millions sell billions around the world.
But did you know that Shopify can do the same thing at your retail store?
Give your point of sell system a serious upgrade with Shopify.
Shopify POS is the command center for your retail store, making everything from taking payments to managing inventory simple and efficient.
It's a powerhouse partner that seamlessly unites your in-person and online sales, letting you track every sale and know exactly what's in stock.
Plus Shopify helps you connect with customers both in-line and online, driving store traffic with easy to use marketing tools for platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
And with hardware that fits your business perfectly, you can take payments by smartphone, transform your tablet into a POS system, or use Shopify's POS Go Mobile device.
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com forward slash J, or lowercase.
Go to Shopify.com forward slash J to take your retail business to the next level today.
Shopify.com forward slash J.
Sometimes life can seem challenging and overcoming problems can seem impossible, but when you focus on your problems, it can keep you from seeing the good in your life.
One thing that helps me when I need a change in perspective is acknowledging the small wins in life.
I encourage my team to pay attention to small wins, because it helps them see positive outcomes and the steps that they're achieving on the road to a bigger goal.
Use the power of small wins to shift your outlook and you will start to see positive changes.
State Farm is also there to help you find personal wins and celebrate the small things in life.
The State Farm Personal Price Plan helps you create an affordable price just for you.
Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can bundle and save with the personal price plan.
Like a good neighbour, State Farm is there.
Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state.
Coverage options are selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.
Powerful, right? And so what's happening, this is cool.
What's happening is your motions and your vision centers and your movement centers are just firing up stuff, linked directly and directly to the stuff you've fed it during the day, the stuff you've life fed it, right, your life, your memory, plus the imagination.
And then the media prefrontal cortex is there putting a story to it.
Dreams often, not always, are stories.
They have a narrative component.
They're emotional, they're visual, they have a narrative component.
Our brains want to make a cohesive story.
I know that for a lot of reasons.
And the dreaming brain is something that also preserves that.
And some have even extended that to like, well, maybe that's why we can, you know, we get movies that have jumps of ideas.
People go from one place to the other like, our dreaming, the way we dream prepares us for the way we appreciate art, right?
So we can let that go this way.
On this, on this side, some of my patients with certain complications and certain tumors and different things, they'll wake up and they won't feel certain parts of their body.
And they'll develop something called neglect, or they'll develop something with this called confabulation.
It's a fancy word for lying.
When the body's signals are discontrigated, they don't make sense.
The brain, the mind will make up a story to make it all fit.
And some patients have actually tried to throw a leg, they don't feel off the bed, and they say, oh, that was a stranger.
And so you see things with the injured brain and the healing brain that there's a drive within us.
Sometimes we'll even lie to ourselves and others to create a consistent or a story that makes sense to ourselves, meaning.
And I think if you look at that at the brain level, and you look at that at the dreaming level, what I try to tell people my first book is, look at that at the life level.
Like our maturation isn't done just with adolescence, right?
The work has to continue to cultivate your brain and your mind and your life.
So when you get through a struggle and you get through it, that prepares you for the next one.
If you're in a struggle now that's just overwhelming, like something difficult, so hard, don't worry, because you're cultivating that stress for the next one.
And I think all of those pieces, not measurements, but my opinion, that we are meaning makers.
We are storytellers in the moments of our lives, in our dreaming brain, in our life in general.
And the area where stories and emotions are the wildest with our dreams.
And that's why I think why we dream is something bigger than just threat rehearsal.
I think it's something powerful when we wake up and that clarity is because our subconscious has had its run.
Are people having, when you look at the data, are people having the same dream again and again and again?
Or are they having different dreams every night?
Well, that's a good question.
So there are recurrent dreams, so specific example.
The only thing I can say with certainty is dreams come from our brain.
We do these exotics, brain surgeries where we wake people up to map their surface of their brain.
You don't feel, you wouldn't know if I touched your brain if the situation ever rose, which it won't.
But like the brain doesn't feel, the brain feels through its nerves.
So we can dissect the brain in somebody while they're talking.
The point there is not, it's not to scare anybody.
That's a therapeutic process.
But when we tickle and map the brain, they'll say, oh, I remember this nightmare from when I was a kid.
But you can activate a recurrent nightmare in a patient by tickling the surface of the brain.
So dreams come from the brain.
There are recurrent dreams.
There are, that's individual.
There are common dreams across people falling, being chased, teeth falling out.
You know, there are different types of dreams.
So you start to see all these patterns.
A recurrent dream is a loop of electricity in that part of your brain that pops up again and again.
It must be. Because if we take a little faint pen and tickle it and you have that dream again, that's built into the electrical flows of your brain.
And the experience is, I don't want to give a single answer.
But recurrent dreams are our loops of electricity that happen over and over again.
We can actually activate that.
And then universal dreams, common dreams and rare dreams is how I conceptualize it.
What does someone do if they have a recurrent dream that they don't want to have any big question?
Okay. So let's look at that.
So now we got the foundation, waking brain, dreaming brain, hyper imaginative, hyper emotional.
You're cooking up, you're creating the events of your dreamscape.
And I found this to be very powerful that nightmares, since we imagined them, the treatment for nightmares is something called imagery rehearsal therapy.
Now, I'm not a therapist.
I mean, I take care of a lot of cancer patients.
I'm more than 10,000 in my life.
So there's a. There's a cultivation that I have benefited from, from them trusting me.
So I think I have some sense of understanding of human nature.
But. But therapy, and when you try to help somebody through conversation, talk therapy, right?
That's great. It seems to be effective.
That's out there. What they're finding is imagery rehearsal therapy is a new thing where imagine what you want to be.
Imagine something you don't want to have.
And when I read that, I was like, I don't know if I can sink my teeth in that until I started reading a mud nightmares and learning about nightmares and across all different sciences.
But if you practice before you go to bed, going back a bit to your saying that we can actually feed our dreams, if you practice a new script for the ending of your nightmares, you can re-script your nightmares through something called imagery rehearsal therapy.
People can look it up and not every time, not for everyone.
But just the fact that nightmares can be re-scripted is powerful.
You think you're out of control, but you can feed your dreams.
You can steer your dreams and lose a dreaming as the prime example of that.
And that therapy can guide you to a better conclusion of your dream.
I love that as a scientist because it's the imagination network.
Imagine this nightmare and it's powerful to think now you can actually imagine a different kind of ending for this nightmare.
To me, that's all scientifically consistent.
And to me, that's why I think it's powerful to look at dreaming as more magical, more fascinating, that it is being driven by certain brain processes.
So you don't wake up and say, that's a glitch, that's static.
No, there's something drove that.
Learn about the engine behind it and then reflect about the meaning about it.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can relate to that.
I feel like there have been parts of my life where I've been able to code the emotion and feeling and script that I wake up with by what I put into the code before I go to bed.
So at one point in my life, when I was trying to wake up early and I didn't enjoy it.
And my reaction to waking up early in the morning would be, I'm so tired.
I just want to stay in bed.
I just, you know, and I wanted to wake up early.
I believe that was a worthy pursuit and a habit to invest in.
And so I would, before I went to bed, I would say to myself, I am waking up, energized, happy and healthy.
Even that re-scripting in the evening, I found I would wake up and I would be saying that to myself when I woke up.
And there was this direct link between a script that I didn't have it written in the morning.
I didn't have it there, but that repetition would carry over in the morning.
And I found whenever I used it, it worked and whenever I don't use it, I can still wake up and feel like God, why am I waking up so early.
And so I've sensed moments of that, or I've had experiences of that, and that coding or that imagery rehearsal therapy that you mentioned, that would be, I would love for our audience to practice it, community to try it out and see how it shows up in your life.
And so I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's
why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that right because to me it's bizarre to feel that I suppose it shows social media pornography being on the online world doesn't lead to specific or certain dreams especially with the hours that people put in it right yeah exactly so that would be the next wave and my hope is that somebody
listening to this you know as I mentioned I'm 51 I've got three sons 18 19 22 in college like my hope is somebody walks away and says Oh wait some of the stuff about dreams can be explained by the brain because imagine in 20 30 years how much more data will have Yeah through people with online dream banks and how much more will know about neuroscience Imagine the connections
that somebody sitting here Yeah the playing different roles than us can make and so it's more of a it's an inception It's I want people to be ignited that dreams can some parts of dreams can be made sense of yeah I want to dive back into nightmares because as a child I grew up having a lot of nightmares I don't I remember one of them very vividly Even till today I don't dream
about it anymore But I remember waking up in the middle of the night feeling horrified and you talk about in the book how children have the most nightmares Like it's common children have five times as many nightmares as adults you say even the gentlest childhood is no protection against nightmares And I think that's really Unnerving for parents when their kids
having nightmares I have friends who have kids who tell me like oh, she just doesn't sleep.
She has nightmares And it's like you're trying to figure it out and I mean you're you're a father so it's interesting to hear how you may have felt about that I'm sure a lot of us listening right now thinking God I definitely had nightmares as a kid When you're having that as a kid it can be so unnerving it can be so difficult even more than as an adult because you really
feel powerless What have been some have them in any therapies or remedies that have helped but then you go on to say that nightmaser needed right so walk me through that all right So so when I was thinking about this book I was rolling around LA going to different spots and sort of just bouncing around people You know regular people at Dodger Stadium and often I got the question like
all right you're gonna talk about dreams and dreaming You have a new take on it, but clearly nightmares can't be good for you, right?
There's no use for nightmares and I thought I got to take this one head on in chapter two and so when I look at that I would ask people to think of nightmares based on age and we do that in the hospital and medicine and surgery and science where There's sort of age related pediatric and adult is what I would say we've talked about adults flashbacks Nightmares if they arrive
paid attention to them.
They could be a warning flare for some mental health issues You get them more in depression.
You know, we've left that How to explain nightmares in kids is in exploration.
It's a conversation. I think it's fresh and I looked at a bunch of pieces that That helped me sort of come up with an idea a story if you will so if you look at the first thing about nightmares that struck me is You have to say hey Johnny that was only a nightmare It's only with nightmares that we tell our kids That's only a nightmare.
So as a conversation. Does that mean Johnny was blurring dreaming brain thoughts and waking brain thoughts until that moment So that's that's a power.
I don't I'm not saying I have the answer.
I'm just I'm leaving that with your audience This one nightmares do that by definition nightmares wake you up and they see your memory.
Okay Just like our kids learn to walk and talk our mind is being cultivated So they had these families assigned all the kids up to be woken up and talk about their dreams for like 20 years in a row they're called longitudinal Kids when they start talking their dreams are like a table You know a sweater Then they get more imaginative and what happens is five six seven nightmares
arrive What else is arriving?
They're developing visual spatial skills and they're also developing this thing called theory of mine people can look up these terms that Children at some point develop the ability to look at somebody and say that smile.
I don't think they mean well Mind reading reading the other person's intention right that arrives theory of mind at the same time as nightmares So my biggest way to conceptualize that is nightmares arrive in children to help them develop a sense of self versus other Help them not a sense of identity But that my thoughts and my experiences are mine my waking life and dream
life are separate and And that I need to think of myself as different from my uncle
