Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 201: Sleep On It

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Dr. Theodore Hendersen ~ https://healmybrain.info/

The dream you're going to share with this relates to something you mentioned earlier. That sounds like a good segue. So my dreams are kind of funny. When I was a kid, I did this as well. So if I have a problem, I sleep on it. You know, sleep on the problem. It's a phrase, right? But for me, I'll dream the solution.

I recommend it literally. I do for my study. it's that is exactly right. Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of dreamscapes. Today our guest dreamer is Dr. Theodore Henderson. He specializes in neuroplasticity-based treatments for the brain. He's the author of Brighter Days Ahead. We're going to talk about all that and more.

Of course, you can find him at heal my brain.info. Link will be in the description below. For my part, would you kindly like, share and subscribe? Tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. I do video games. Blah. typical episode cannot speak i do video game streams monday through friday 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific most days of the week uh this episode is brought to you in part by uh this book right over here

finally after years of waiting uh abccccconellirochronology volume four uh prima relicorum meaning uh the first of what remains uh all the rest of the stuff i couldn't pack into the original trivium. Of course, you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable MP3s of this very podcast, so you may take the Wizard with you wherever you wander with or without Wi-Fi. I love alliteration, of course. And last but not least, if you would head on over to Benjamin the Dream Wizard. Dot locals.com. It's free to join attached to my Rumble account, and that is more than enough out of me. Dr. Henderson or Theodore, as you as you prefer. Thanks for being here. I appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. All right. Yeah, good deal. Well, we got so many places to go. So, so much stuff to cover just from that brief introduction. What is, you know, what kind of doctor are you? There are many kinds. What is neuroplasticity? What treatments can affect that? What's the reference to brighter days in the book?

I mean, where would you like to begin? I'm a terrible interviewer, by the way. We're just going to talk. All right. Sounds like a plan. Yeah. Well, so let's kind of start from the idea of who I am. I'm a board-certified psychiatrist.

I'm also an MD PhD. So my original PhD work was in neurobiology. I was studying how the brain developed and how growth factors played into the organization of the brain. I then went into radiology. A natural transition, of course. Well, you know, it made sense to me at the time. You know, you read a stack of films, you get done, you go back to the research lab and do what you really love to do.

Oh, yeah. But unfortunately, I got really bored in radiology. I learned a ton, but I also got bored, and I said, I can't see myself doing this for the rest of my life. And so I switched over to psychiatry. And psychiatry has been a bit of a love for me. You know, I had a, you know, I talk about this a little bit in the book. I had a rough childhood.

We'll leave it at that. Sure. And in medical school and graduate school, I started a nonprofit organization in St. Louis that went into the schools and taught kids about child abuse and how to keep themselves safe. And we did that for seven years, and it was an award-winning program. And it was also an opportunity for me to get medical students taught about a topic that's not covered in most medical school curriculum. So psychiatry was kind of a natural transition for me.

And I saw myself as being kind of an academic psychiatrist, you know, with research at a university. and I ended up at University of Colorado. I went, let's just say that it became clear that that university was not a good fit for me. I should have gone with the Harvard offer. And so I went into private practice. But, you know, I was drawn back to radiology. I was drawn back to neuroimaging.

And so I ended up working in functional neuroimaging, specifically using brain spec scans. And spec scans are a way of looking at how the brain functions, what's working well, what's not working well in the brain. So that led to an introduction to another doctor who was looking at how to use infrared light as a treatment modality. And his initial introduction to me was, yeah, I want to use infrared light to treat the brain. and my first thought was, that is like the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life. I mean, we got to get through the scalp and skull. That's not going to happen without, you know, a whole lot of power.

And being a radiologist, I understood light. You know, think about MRI. MRI is radio waves and magnetic fields. And radio waves are what? They're light. So it sort of made sense that I would question that. Which is where the dream comes in, by the way. We'll wrap back around to that.

Sure. Nice. A little guarantees there. Yep. So I started working with him, and I said, we've got to figure out how to get through the scalp and skull of the human being and deliver to the brain, infrared light with sufficient energy to do what Harvard is showing it was doing in mice.

And that led us on a path, and eventually we reached a point where we had a treatment. Now, what does infrared light do? Well, it turns on neuroplasticity, the question you're asking me first. And there are other things that turn on neuroplasticity, which we'll hopefully talk about. So what is neuroplasticity? So the brain has the ability to degenerate and regenerate to repair itself. And that ability to repair itself is driven in large part by a growth factor called brain

derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF for short. And BDNF happened to be one of the topics of my postdoctoral research grants when I, you know, finished my PhD and was a resident and a medical student, I was doing research and had NIH-funded grants. So I knew BDNF well, and BDNF comes up as a key factor in the reverse. of psychiatric disorders. For example, depression is, doesn't get better because serotonin levels go up. It gets better because neuroplasticity gets turned on by Agenda BDM. So, you know, we can, we can explore that in more detail, but just to kind of give a brief introduction, neuroplasticity means brain repair. And brain repair is key to undoing, you know, any number of brain disorders.

From Alzheimer's to ADHD. I think the common understanding for most people who've heard the term, and this is what stands out of my mind too, is the idea of we think of, or it's often referenced that children have the highest neuroplasticity. That is, you know, the concept behind the plasticity is it can be shaped or molded or grown in a way. And that's why you want to say introduce children to concepts, languages, different things as young as possible.

not everything, but academic material, certainly, of an age-appropriate type so that they can maximize their potential. Is that understanding broadly correct in terms of it's the highest when you're a kid, lowest when you're an adult, and it always declines, but it can be, we can minimize the decline or can we actually reverse the decline? What are we finding these days? Well, that's where it gets exciting. We are able to reverse the decline.

with these types of treatments, infrared light, ketamine, we'll talk about ketamine a little bit, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, but not the TMS that most people think of. This is next generation TMS. So those types of treatments turn on neuroplasticity, and the adult brain actually has a surprising degree of neuroplasticity. plasticity. And, you know, we have patients with Alzheimer's disease whose, you know, scores on their cognitive tests improve dramatically.

That was going to be my one of my questions. Like, do we know if it has any effects on like dementia type? Because dementia is basically the brains falling apart as, as we get older and to a greater or lesser degree in some people. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So you mentioned TMS and I don't know if you said the full thing.

It's transcranial magnetic. stimulation? That is correct. That is correct. So essentially transcranial magnetic stimulation is if you, in basic physics, if you create a magnetic field and you put it near a conductive material like, I don't know, copper or human tissue, it creates an electrical current within the tissue. So transcranial magnetic stimulation, which started out as a radiological tool that was used

in radiology to map the physical. the brain functionally. But if you put a magnet up near the head and you turn on the magnetic field, you create an electrical current at right angles within the brain material. That is amazing. I mean, and it's great that we went from like x-rays being like the huge. We can see bones on the inside without cutting open the skin. This is amazing.

And then we got to MRI type scans, which are even more fine. they can actually see the tissue and they can tell you if tissue's broken in a certain place where you know because it's not in the shape it's supposed to be or there's an obvious tear or something that's amazing stuff this reminds me of um studies they did where so so for the longest time they thought it was a natural conclusion oh we see people's eyes moving rapid eye movement and we think that's when dreamy happens because we observe say animals like a dog's laying by the fireplace and he's twitching and yelping and oh he must be chasing a rabbit and we can't wake a dog up and ask him but we could wake up people and they would say, oh, yes, I was dreaming. And so the longest time we thought

dreams only happened during REM sleep. And then we found out, no, actually, if you wake up a person anytime during the night, something was happening. There was some imagery or thought process occurring. And that brings me around to the functional MRI thing. So one of the great things I love to tell folks, too, is that, you know, for the longest time, we thought, what do we think? How do I characterize it properly. We thought that schizophrenic folks who heard voices were experiencing

a purely imaginary phenomenon. And then we actually did the functional MRI scans of people and said, okay, let me know when you're hearing a voice. And then they looked at the function, and the areas of the brain lit up that process sound. They're literally hearing something

that is not there. That was revolutionary in terms of understanding what's actually going on. You know, it isn't there, they're not, Lundering this up. They're having a physical experience that we can actually see. And then they started doing the same thing on dreams.

And so, you know, we could actually watch dreams happen on, on FMRI stuff. So I don't know if you want to go into any of that. That's just where my area of fascination lies. Yeah. And, you know, so I could talk to you about the sleep centers and I can talk to you about a little bit about what we know in schizophrenia. Certainly not my area of expertise. So, you know, I'm doing the broad strokes too.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. no, that's that that's just fascinating information for people that maybe don't don't know those things that don't understand kind of how this all works or I think one of the big problems has been a poor communication in terms of getting the best most correct information out there and also the latest. I mean a lot of things have changed. I've been out of school since got like 2000, you know, way way back when and I may have spent 20. 20 plus years in inpatient psychiatric seeing when people say they've seen it all. No, really. Give it 20 years.

You'll go through the gamut in every degree. One of the biggest things that I found helped folks, the client too, but very often their family who had to be their support system, was that patient education in a way of saying, well, here's what we think is going on. Here's how it works. Here's what it looks like. And here's what you can do to work with it. Because, you know, you can't, I think a long time ago, they used to think you

confront delusions until you break through the client's resistance and it's all this mental process that you can cure through and then we realize no it's really it's physical and so we've got these new as you were saying these new treatments are coming along how so people think and i think you would touch on this a little bit then i'm confused i'm sure the audience is too in in terms of how it works but the idea of getting light red light specifically into the brain but you're doing it using transcranial magnetic stimulation rather than, say, shining an actual photon beam of light?

No, it says we're co-mingling things. So I was speaking about different modalities that worked on this. So with the infrared light therapy, what we worked out in the lab was how much

power, how much energy needs to be delivered to the scalp in order to get through the skull and into the brain three centimeters and so that's using infrared laser so laser what is laser it's it's coherent light that's produced by a by a diode and the coherent light you know certain wavelengths are important in infrared light of treatment of the brain one of those is 810 another is 980 and you know it's like plus or minus 50 um and why

Why are those wavelengths important? Well, because they turn on the mitochondria. And if you recall the mitochondria, the little organelles and the side of the cell that make energy, the energy. What are they called the powerhouse of the cell? Powerhouse of the cell is a great... That stuck with me from the great science. Well, the enzyme chain that drives that is called the electron train. And one of those enzymes contains copper.

Now, you know, just like iron is in hemoglobin to make iron, you know, the iron allows hemoglobin to pick up oxygen and let it go. The copper is essential to allow the electron movement down the electron transport chain to produce at the end ATP, the energy currency of the cell. Well, so the copper also allows infrared light photons to ping off a, electron. So the light, the photon gets converted into an electron essentially. And the wavelengths, at which that happens, depends on, you know, the orientation arrangement of the copper within the molecule. So 810 and 980 are important wavelengths for activating the mitochondria.

Now, there's another wavelength that we use that I'll talk about it a little bit, but it enhances cognitive function. But just staying with the electrical, transformal that work on the mitochondria, which again, A10, 980 are the wavelengths that we studied and we use. The mitochondria just don't produce ATP. They have their own genes, and those genes code for things like early response proteins that signal the chromosomes in the nucleus to do things, like turn on this gene or that gene. And so as a result, when you activate the mitochondria, you activate a number of growth factors. And, you know, in the brain, the main growth factor that gets activated is brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BTNF.

So we're back to something that turns on neuroplasticity very powerful, very powerful. And we are literally able to demonstrate using brain scans, functional brain scans, that patients would try. traumatic brain injury, their injuries get smaller. Their injuries get less. You know, our response rate with depression is 92%. Wow. You know, Prozac's like 18. Yeah, yeah.

92% response rate. So it's a very powerful activator of neural plasticity and, you know, that, and it also makes the mitochondrial healthier. So just stand back for a second. We get stuck in this thinking about diseases. Oh, well, what's the treatment for Alzheimer's? Well, the treatment for Alzheimer's, of course, can't be the same as the treatment for Parkinson's disease, because the Parkinson's is different from Alzheimer's, is different from ADHD, is different from autism.

But if you make the mitochondrial healthier in any neuron, it doesn't matter what the disorder is. The disorder will improve. Yeah. Yeah, then this is, I was thinking along these lines. too as well is that a lot of our interventions are looking for target and and it makes sense in a way. This is not exactly the wrong way to look at it, but they're targeted to what is what is broken about this thing and how to say put it back together in a very specific manner. But there's a different approach also, which is, you know, if you could just make the

encourage the conditions under which a certain organ has greater capacity to heal itself naturally to just do what it does naturally, but better, stronger. And that's what we're finding with. And then the light, in general, in general terms of safety, and people hear, oh, you're going to shoot a laser at my brain and they're thinking like G.I. Joe or something from, or, or, uh, light sabers where like lasers are dangerous. But, you know, you can put your hand at the infrared laser at a, uh, at the

supermarket when you go, they scan the barcodes. It's the same thing. You put it right on your hand. There's no, there's no heat. There's no pain. It's not that kind of laser. You actually have to, it takes a tremendous amount of energy. and you have to craft the laser very specifically to get it to burn something.

And that's not. So, but what you have found that you can kick up the intensity to a sufficient degree that it will, you know, not just go through paper, which casts a shadow. I mean, paper blocks light. It's very thin. But it'll go through the skin and through the skull, which are both designed to keep things out. They can't keep out everything. And they certainly don't keep out.

What we think of is less tangible things like. radio waves or whatnot, but light we think of as, uh, at, well, they say, you're classically a particle and a wave, that, that kind of a thing, which is confusing to most people, me too, but, uh, but still the idea is that you can get it. And you only got to get it. You said about three centimeters in and just hitting even the surface area of the brain tends to have even greater, uh, or, um, also influence healing of deeper, deeper parts of the brain or does it mostly function on the areas that are actually stimulated directly? How does that, how does that work? That's a great question.

So thanks for asking that question. Because there's a lot of confusion in the field, and there's a lot of commingling of things. So, you know, people are talking about red light therapy now, and you use that term yourself. Well, red light therapy technically is much lower wavelengths around 650, 670. And that's generally just coming in through the eyes, right? Well, I mean, it can get through the skin. But the important thing is that red light therapy won't activate the mitochondria. It's too low.

It's outside that window of that copper. Gotcha. And so, you know, there's confusion about that in the field. The second confusion is that power matters. So there's a lot. You can go on Amazon and, you know, buy some helmet that goes under your head. or you can pay $6,000 for a 1067 nanometer helmet that's supposed to make you smarter. And, you know, and there's another device that's $4,000, which has these little pads that stick on your head.

And the problem with them is there a half a watt. Now, half a watt goes 0.8 millimeters through human skin, and that's it. So it's not going to get through the scalp. it's not going to get through the skull and it's not going to get into the brain no matter how much you try. I mean, a photon or two might, but not enough energy to turn on those mitochondria. So there's this confusion in the field about low power infrared light device, and people are buying these things and sticking them on their head and say, oh, gosh, I'm getting smarter. And what we do, and what we do, you know, we're working with like 13 watts.

And 13 watts gets through the scalp and skull with sufficient energy remaining because you lose energy at the scalp. You lose energy at the skull. You lose energy in the brain. You lose energy just going to the air. And that gets into the skull, into the brain. And why three centimeters, which was kind of your original question? Well, three centimeters allows me, depending on where I angle, to reach the midline of the brain. And therefore, you know, things like the substantial nitrogen, which is important in Parkinson's disease, we can get there.

But we can easily, we easily get to the cortex. And so, you know, the other thing to keep in mind, and somebody finally did the study that I sort of dreamed about at one point. And the study was that you take an infrared light device and you get a brain and you put it on and a, You put it on a plastic or plexiglass sheet. And then you shy the laser up through the plexiglass sheet. And basically what happens, the brain lights up like a light bulb because the infrared light just bounces around inside the brain. It bounces off the sulsine, the gyrite.

So it goes everywhere within the brain. Now, does that mean that everywhere gets that sufficient window of light to turn on the mitochondria? That question has not been answered. So when we're treating a brain injury, for example, someone that has an ATV accident and they hit the back of their head against, you know, the ground, then we're treating the back of the head because we want to get as much power to the area where the damage is. That is very cool.

So so far we've, okay, one more question on this, on this tack. Where is the technology today? we still in university lab experimental or are we getting it to the point of a consumer technology that might be something you could do at home or is that still kind of a little bit on the horizon yeah well that's a complicated question let me break it down into two parts the at home part and the in the clinic part so in the clinic we've been we've been treating patients since 2013 we've published our first series in 2015 and then we published a series and depression in 2017.

And so we're actively treating patients here in our clinic in Denver. We're working on opening a clinic in Florida, hint, but we're not quite there yet. And, you know, my goal is to have clinics in every major city in the U.S. The clinical treatment, it's not something you can do at home. 13 watts of infrared light is powerful. And, you know, you can burn something. Okay. So it, you know, my technologists are carefully trained.

They had to treat me several times before I let them treat any patients. So I know, you know, I can guide them in their treatment protocols and their techniques so that they're doing it in a way that is safe. This is hand applied. We're literally, you know, going over the scalp directly. Another thing to keep in mind with infrared light is hair. It's an additional blockage layer. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. And in fact, infrared light bounces around the hair follicle like a hall of mirrors. So hair is actually, you know, an impediment. It blocks 98% of the light. So you don't tend to get a sunburn on your scalp,

right? No, no. If you have hair. Exactly. Yeah. Or in my case on my neck either. Yeah. There you go.

Well, okay, the other thing. So let me answer to the second. part. Let me answer the second. I apologize. Let me answer the second part. So the second part is, what do you do at home? And so where you're going to be able to get at home are these half-watt LED devices. Now, here's the funny thing. The research studies with these half-watt LED devices show that they do something. People's depression gets a little bit better. People's cognitive function gets a little bit better. People's traumatic brain injury symptoms get a little bit better. Not a lot better, a little bit better. Now, that's great. At home, you can put it on for 30 minutes

while you watch TV or whatever, and wow, you get a little bit of benefit. But the moment you stop doing that every day, the benefit goes away. With contrast, it's, with what we do. Like I said, we started treating traumatic brain injury back in 2013. The patients, to this day, continue to do fantastic. They've had zero updates. They've had zero come back and get a refresher, a booster, nothing. I talked to one of those patients two weeks ago, and all of her neurological function got better. And she was a geophysicist who did four-dimensional mapping of oil deposits. It's high level math.

She could not accurately do simple arithmetic, single digit arithmetic, two plus two. I think it's three. She couldn't do it. I think that area of my brain was always broken, but so not going to be able to heal that. Go ahead. Well, in her case, it used to work great. After treatment, she got it back. She got her four-dimensional math back, and she's back at her job.

and the only thing she had was fluorescent light-induced headaches. Now, fast forward, 12 years, she no longer gets headaches in fluorescent light. So she not only got everything back, but she got even some improvement as, you know, neuroplasticity is slowly tapered off. So, yeah, you know, that's a huge difference. And it's an important distinction. That is very cool. Well, I hope we can all look forward to the day when it does become an easy technology we can use at home.

Or at the very least, you're maybe you're able to develop a device and training protocol that can be deployed in almost any general practitioner's office of like, you know, come on in or at least a specialty, you know, a specialist office for brain or whatever so that people can just get a referral from their doctor. Go to this guy. He knows how to use it. They do the thing. You get some benefit from it. But before we move along, I did want to loop back to the idea of, so we've been discussing the physical intervention of a specific intensity of red light therapy that is significantly greater than the little machines you can buy on Amazon, that kind of thing. But you also mentioned ketamine. And that made me think of Elon Musk because apparently he's on a ketamine regimen, and that you've noticed has a specific benefit to neuroplasticity as well, specifically.

All right. Well, and so brighter days ahead was really about neuroplasticity, but I used ketamine as sort of the example through much of the book. I started a ketamine clinic 11 years ago. It was the first clinic in Colorado on the 13th in the country. And the reason I started a ketamine clinic is I really was about two patients. I had two patients who I could not break their depression. And I was ready to fly them out to New York to go to a ketamine clinic. I said, well, okay, maybe I better learn about this stuff before I send somebody out to New York. Well, when I started reading up on ketamine, you know, and I kind of skipped over all the, you know, I looked briefly at the clinical studies.

but I went to, what's the mechanism? And I got my socks blown off. The mechanism of ketamine is that it turns on BDNF by a very powerful mechanism, independent of the mitochondria, so a different mechanism. And so since I understood that depression is actually degenerative change in the body, the hippocampus gets smaller,

the frontal cortex gets thinner and smaller, during depression. And when you get on an antidepressant regimen that works for you, then it turns on neuroplasticity, weekly, poorly, Prozac. You know, if you're lucky and, you know, the moon is full and Mars is in retrograde in Capricorn, then you stand a chance of maybe getting some antidepressant benefit from Prozac. And the reason is that very weakly, very poorly turns on PDNF and neuroplasticism.

but not reliably. Ketamine does it very reliably. But what has happened to the ketamine field is, number one, they got stuck on the early multi-infusion studies. The early multi-infusion studies were six infusions over two weeks. Now, I was curious why that was true. So I called up the guy who had done with study. He said, you know, and said, okay, so what's the molecular mechanism?

What were you targeting when you pick six infusions in two weeks? Yeah, and why that specific protocol would in that that dose is? Why not something else? Why not microdosing every day or something? Right, right. You want to know the answer? Yeah. Okay.

His answer was, I don't know. It sounded good. We picked it out of a hat. You got to start somewhere. Exactly. What are you going to do? But then you've got to look at it as well and see what's, what? what is working here. And bizarre too that I think a lot of people out there will hear the word

ketamine and they'll go, oh, is that one of those controlled drugs, controlled substance? So necessarily it's not therapeutically benefit or isn't that a horse tranquilizer? A lot of things start out that way. A lot of things do. And then you start looking at what are the other applications. And the difference between a prescribed medication and a, and a, you know, illegal drug is it doesn't have any utility. Can it be safe? Can it be safely prescribed? Maybe it needs to be regulated, but but also it doesn't matter where it started. You know, what you're not going to do is give a human a horse size dose. You're not dosing a human like you would tranquilize a horse. I assume, right? You know, it's all about that. That's a great assumption in my clinic. It's not such a

good assumption in other clinics. Because here's what's happening. Most ketamine clinics in the U.S. go with that six infusions in two weeks model. Now, neuroplasticity takes time. ketamine works by turning on neuroplasticity. An axon grows a millimeter a day. And, So when you give ketamine that frequently, you are basically wasting time, money, and ketamine. You're not getting any more benefit. So in my clinic, for years, I dose people once a week at most. I never dose them more than once a week, and I found over time that I was dosing them once every two weeks. So, in fact, my clinic operates one day every two weeks.

Now, there's no benefit to having patients come in for multiple infusions within a week because neuroplasticity takes time. And I found that I got exactly the same result if I dose them weekly than if I dose them every two weeks. And the number of infusions that my patients need to reach depression resolution is for 4.3. Not six, not six plus booster is 4.3. One other piece to this puzzle, the dose. So there's a urban myth out there that, oh, in order for ketamine to help depression, the person must hallucinate. Hoppycock. 11 years I've been running and clicking. I've treated

hundreds and hundreds of patients. Do you know how many patients have elucid in my clinic? one in 11 years one and they were kind of hypersensitive I'd imagine because you're using such a low dose yeah yeah I don't think it's like um it's not the same type of a drug or or intended experience as say ayahuasca where actually what you're doing is going on a psychedelic spirit journey into your mind with with ayahuasca most drugs aren't intended to work that way you don't you don't you don't cure depression with uh with you know or treat it with uh prozac as you were saying LSD, but you don't treat it with with Prozac with the intent of saying, well, the Prozac only works if it makes you hallucinate. People look at you like, what are you stupid?

Like, well, you assume that about something else. Because, yeah, the, that intensity is not, would not necessary, not recommend it, apparently. So, well, that's, I wanted to, yeah, I wanted to come back around to that. So it is actually, now what we've got is converging lines of, of inquiry that bring us to the same conclusion about the, the mechanism in the cells that is functioning to generate. I mean, when you say, you know, the, the axon in the neuron grows only a tiny, well, when people realize how small they really are, like, that's actually a lot of growth. They're, they're minuscule. And that's another thing that blows my mind to you.

Look at pictures of the galaxies where there's these what looks like webs of strands. And it's like, as above so below, that's like looking into the microscopic level of, you know, the neural net in our brain. And that's where we get that term. neural net that's been popularized since Star Trek days. But anyway, we are running you out of time. I think we got about, you know, 15, 20 minutes most,

and I don't want to cheat you in the audience out of the dream experience thing. So any, do you want to wrap up anything on this subject or we just move on? Yeah. I don't know if you had final thoughts. Let's close a loop. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So, so one of the really important things to think about, and, you know, because I emphasize that I do neuroplasticity-based. Now we got ketamine turning on BT and F by one mechanism. We've got infrared light turning on by another mechanism. And over here, we've got transcranial magnetic stimulation. If it's powerful enough, and now a machine was just invented a few years ago,

it's now available in the US, it's called the Exomind. It's powerful enough to turn on neuroplastity by yet a third mechanism. Now what happens if you put one of the, or two of these three mechanisms together? mechanisms together. We're all three. You get synergy. You get synergy. Nice. Yeah, you put all three and you can, I mean, the sign, I've not collected and updated to say I get an additional synergistic boost, but I have definitely shown and patented that if you put two mechanisms together, you get a synergistic boost.

Nice. And you can't always assume that. And sometimes things, uh, things work against each other. Um, and then there's also limits on the human, like, uh, If you, let's say, I was vitamin D deficient. I still am. I said it's a problem with absorption. So that's different individual to individual. But they will give you, say, like a 50,000 IU pill once a week or something to try and boost that level. And your body can only absorb so much of it.

That's why they say, you know, if you take too many supplements or vitamins, you have very expensive P. Because your body maxes out on what it can absorb in a given dose. Because we're actually, I mean, we've evolved for thousands of. years to absorb microscopic amounts through food. And so taking into a concentrated pill, we're going to hit that limit too. So it's good. I mean, this is all part of the research process. You have the hypothesis and you test it and whatnot.

And sometimes you find out that that didn't work. It didn't do any harm, but it didn't make it better. So we're not going to do that. But I'm looking forward to hearing more about that someday about like, you know, the age of, say, perhaps most medications is over. And we just have a visit to the doctor and you get a little, you get a little ketamine and a red light you get your brain

you know rung up like a like a bottle of OJ at the store and you're good and it moves you out of that so where you can then begin doing other behavioral stuff once you're out of that funk

that hopelessness and you know no no wonder that people are trying what sound like extreme remedies because depression is fatal major depression that goes on long enough kills almost 100% of people that don't get it treated.

So at this point, you're looking at a right to try type of situation, even if some things might be dangerous, which none of this sounds like it is. Because we're dealing with a fatal disease that will eventually take people out. So you're going to go to some pretty far flummy people flight of Tibet and try to meditate for seven years. They do all kinds of stuff trying to treat depression. So it's fascinating learning new things. But as I was saying, we better move out. You did mention that the dream you're going to share with us relates. to something you mentioned earlier.

That sounds like a good segue. Benjamin the Dream Wizard wants to help you hears the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his Dreamscape's program features real dreamers, gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions.

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of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the DreamWizard.com. So my dreams are kind of funny. When I was a kid, I did this as well. So if I have a problem, I sleep on it. You know, sleep on the problem. It's a phrase, right? But for me, I'll dream the solution.

I recommend it literally. I do. For my study, that is exactly right. So, you know, this doc presented to me this idea of, okay, let's use infrared light to treat traumatic brain injury, and I want you to do a brain scan before and after and show how they get better. And my initial reaction, again, was this is nonsense. There's no way that infrared light can get through to the brain. And so I was like stumped, but I was fascinated by what Harvard had shown about what it was doing in mice.

So, you know, I had this, it was actually two dreams. So one was that, okay, for me to figure this out, I need to get inside the brain. So I sort of had this dream along the lines of fantastic voyage from, you know, the movie from the 60s with, you know, Raquel Welch. And then the 80s, inner space. They metertize a submarine and they go inside. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a great movie.

I love that. But that didn't really yield an answer for me. But the second was that, you know, I literally, you know, imagined that I could quarter a brain and put a light meter inside of it and then be able to shine the laser on the outside of that quarter and be able to determine how much energy was getting through. And when I woke up, I said, well, that's how we got to do it. So, you know, I started out, we started out with sheep heads, and then we eventually got cadaver heads. And we literally worked out the physics of infrared light penetration through tissue. And the paper we wrote on this, it's actually been cited over a thousand times because, you know, nobody had sat down and gone through the physics of infrared light penetrating tissues in its comprehensive ways. is what Larry Maurice and I did, literally in a makeshift lab.

That is amazing. So the dream process or what occurred during the dream was seeing yourself implement that measurement modality, I guess we'd say, where you took a brain and cut it into quarters? I mean, that's the visual experience. The funny thing was my brain. Oh. You know, I was literally opening up my mind. my own brain into quarters and like, you know, being able to do all that. So again, you know, dreams are, are, uh, have a fantastical quality to them.

Absolutely. And the most, uh, one of the most fantastical things about dreams is that they do not feel fantastical when we're in them. Dream logic takes over and it's, of course I quartered my own brain. Why wouldn't I? It doesn't feel like something weird. Now, the caveat to that is sometimes it does. And if it does, that means something else.

So it's like, this is, this is wrong or bad. Okay. well, that's connected to something else. But the idea that you would be physically capable of doing that without harming yourself, that just feels completely natural. That is fascinating to. And the idea that it was your own brain. So if we went through the dream, like the course of the dream, did it start with you?

I mean, where did it, if you were to tell it like a story, I was in my lab. I was in my home. I was. And then where did it go from there? Oh, well, I mean, that's, we're talking 12 years ago. Long time. Yeah, you probably didn't write it down. actually more like 15 years ago now that I think about it.

I didn't write it down, but, you know, I got the concept. And so I can't say exactly where it started, where I was when it started. But it was really like, okay, I need to be able to document. I need to be able to quantify this. How do I get at that? It's like, oh, well, it's easy. It just. And how did you actually end up opening your head?

I mean, did you? I just reached up and grabbed. Reach up so your brain was already exposed or you pulled the skull open to. I reached that. I pulled the skull open. Because, I mean, the skull is important. The scalp and the skull. I mean,

I needed all the pieces, right? Because you've got to go through the scalp and the skull and reach the brain. So. And it was an easy thing to do. You didn't struggle with it. There wasn't any pain or sensation of, uh, that's very interesting. So we're not, we're not getting a narrative. Now, I told you this was fine.

And I said I've made an episode. I have with one lady who's the entire dream was the sensation of falling through a void. That was it no visuals, not just that sensation. And one thing you said when we were talking earlier is you make your, you know, red light application practitioners practice on you first. So very interesting that in your dream there's a reflection of how you approach things to. It's like, I wouldn't do this to someone else unless I was willing to do it to me. So I'm going to, how am I going to solve this problem?

I'm going to experiment on myself in a way. That's, I think there's a grand tradition of, you know, mad scientists going, well, if I can't get the permission, I'll just do it on me and I'll figure it out. Now, that's how you get the green goblin and some other supervillains. They're like, well, this all went wrong, the lizard, et cetera. Couldn't get permission for human experimentation, that kind of thing. But I think it is a fantastic approach to, or demonstrative of how you look at things like that. It's like, you know, I want to know this, so I need to be willing to do it myself. I need to do it myself, not just do it myself, but do it to myself in that way.

So that's fascinating as well. And also, there is a long tradition of dream answers coming to people. And this is what happens to me too. So I remember virtually none of my dreams. It is rare. I remember I even had a dream and that it stays with me, that I have a narrative I can tell. This happened. Then that happened.

And I was in this place. and I talked to that person. None of that ever. So very often I will go to bed confused about something, undecided about how I want to approach a particular problem. And I can only assume, and I believe it is true, that some thought process has taken place in the night because I wake up the next morning and I have an answer.

I have a solution. Or at least my mind is somehow made up on the subject. the day before, really torn between two things. The next day clears a bell. How did I not know that yesterday? That's exactly what I want. That's what I think is the right solution, the best option, that kind of thing. But also then to have the gift in your case of saying the visuals present the solution in a way that is then able to be carried out into the real world.

So the idea is you have to, you know, the problem you were considering is get, getting through the density of layers. And well, one thing to do was, was, okay, well, let's get directly to the material, but also I need to be able to put a sensor in there. And that's kind of like what I'm envisioning is, and most people understand this, how do you produce an x-ray? And it's usually on a film, on a sheet of paper, a physical object when it's not on computers who do a lot with computers these days.

But what you do is you put that film behind the leg and you shoot the x-rays through that. So you had that kind of background of like, well, this is a, what am I trying to say? This is a known solution to this type of problem. So what I've got to be able to do is measure how much is actually getting through. Oh, well, I'm not going to cut open. And you wake up the next day. I'm not going to cut open my own head.

But this points me in the right direction. This provides the conceptually right idea of how to approach measurement. And then, yeah, and then you took off from there. And so this may not need Some dreams need explanation Some dreams are very straightforward This one is like oh yeah We just got to find a way to make sure it works

And this is the answer Some dreams are that direct And there's no interpretation needed to You can just kind of explore how did it work Why did it appear that way? And as I said earlier You know you didn't do this experiment to someone else You didn't bring a monkey into the lab

You know you're like this is This is important to me, important enough to do it right. And I'm going to use myself as a guinea pig in a way. That's fantastic. Any other elements of the dream standout? Now that you're kind of thinking back on it, any other process or occurrence, happenstance, situation setting related to the dream come to mind? I wish I could be more specific about that particular dream.

But I do this all the time. I mean, yeah. My PhD thesis came about out of a dream. It came. Nice. And the dream was an argument with my, with my professor. And, you know, it's like, well, the only way we can prove that is we had to do, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as soon as I said it, it's like, that's it.

And, you know, I woke up and it's like, that's it. That is the PhD thesis. That is the study to do. Nice. And up until that time, you'd been thinking about it without an answer. And then it all kind of coheres. I think it's very similar to the idea of, you know, we're driving in the car, stereos bumping and we're just singing along and whatnot.

But we see a traffic incident ahead of us. One of the first things we do, turn down the music so we can see better. And that's, I think that's part of what that's an analogy I use for what's happening when we go to sleep at night. We turn off the external stimuli of the world and we're able to concentrate better on whatever is really important to us. So I mean, one of the taglines for the show I tried a while ago and I forgot and then I remembered and I forget is follow your dreams.

They know the way. Now, a lot of people say that in terms of follow, it's like follow your bliss, follow your passions, follow your aspirations. But I think literally, again, sleep on it, follow your dreams. You will work out the solution to problems that you just can't in the waking state, in some ways. and sometimes it'll just be intuitive and you don't even know why and then but that'll open the door to then figuring out why okay why did i think this would work you don't you don't sometimes you don't have to understand it to just kind of go with it and say okay let me follow that line of thought and see where it leads me a lot of that inspiration can come in dreams as well um well i think we're running up on uh your time limit i want to respect that and get you out of here so we did a little dream discussion not exactly an interpretation but i'll talk about dreams in any capacity so this is still still fascinating to me and a fascinating story about you know where medical technical technical technology is going and people don't know these things until somebody tells them it's like how was I

supposed to know it I would have not woken up this morning and going I wonder what's going on with red light and brains lately why would those two things ever come into my head until I talk to someone who knows so if you didn't have any additional questions about the dream experience some people do some people don't I don't nothing no that's fine I just want to get what I think I could give you one more example if you're if you wanted to I mean we we we don't have to I Like I said, it's running up against your clock, so I'll let you lead on that. I've got a few minutes, yeah. Okay.

So let me give this. The one other example is sort of, because one of the things that bugs me is, you know, I talked about how low power infrared light devices that you can buy on Amazon, they do something, right? They do a little bit, but it's transient. It's not the big benefit that we see, and it's transient. It goes away. And I've been trying to figure out how can that mechanistically work. So I mentioned earlier right at the beginning that there's a third wavelength that we're using,

and that's 1064 nanometer light, that increases cognitive function. And it's been shown to increase alpha wave activity in the brain. That is the wavelengths that your cortex makes when you're thinking. So 1064 has been shown to enhance cognitive function in college students and people with mild cognitive impairment and people with early dementia. So a number of studies have been done with it. So what we did is we applied 1064 nanometer light to our forearm while we were recording the alpha waves in our brain using quantitative EEG.

And, you know, red light on, alpha waves go up. Red light off, alpha waves go down. Red light on, alpha waves go up. And so we showed that by indirectly treating the skin, we were turning on alpha wave activity in the brain. So it's proved that it's a skin-mediated connection. Okay, now we were doing this on ourselves, you know, back to kind of the dream and your analysis of the dream.

And, you know, I dreamed that scenario. I dreamed how could I, you know, I was wrestling with, how can I prove this? So the last part of the study, and I only did this to myself because it hurts. is I put a blood pressure cuff on my arm, and I inflated it to the point that I had no pulse. So no blood in, no blood out. And then we did the same study,

QEG device on my head, infrared light applied to the forearm. You know what happened up here? Absolutely nothing. I was going to be my guess, too, just the way you were phrasing it. I don't know why. And then, just intuitive.

Guess what? So when I release the blood pressure cuff, alpha wave in my brain, shot up. The infrared light was off. So are we thinking, so we stopped the infrared light. We released the blood pressure cuff. The blood in my arm got out and immediately the alpha wave activity went up. So a bloodborne agent of some sort. Gotcha. That's what I was going to say. So it was either closing the conduits through which light might travel indirectly bouncing off of things, but also directly affecting blood cells and then those cells depositing part of that

effect and that's that's the direction you're leaning is it seemed like it seemed like that very interesting now i presented this at a grand rounds at harvard and uh folks were you know throwing out the idea okay well maybe it's uh energy traveling through the meridians and you trapped it with the blood pressure cuff and then you released it okay maybe i can't i can't disprove that at this point uh but you know it's i would love to redo that study and and we will eventually i mean We weren't able to publish it because we did it on ourselves, but it's the proof of concept. Absolutely. Yeah.

That, you know, and, you know, I will eventually redo that study. That is fascinating as well. Now, if we correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we have technology today where they do the equivalent of a, what's it call it when you get? My words fail me. Your kidney doesn't work. So, dialysis, dialysis machine. They do something like that, but they run the blood through light. And it treats blood infections by killing, killing it in the blood that runs through.

And then if you cycle the blood through enough, is it, am I remembering that correctly? Yeah, you're absolutely remembering correctly. And generally, that's UV light. The other thing that they're doing is they're ozoneing the blood. They run it through a filter with ozone. And then they run it back in. This is, you know, these are sort of off label or off, of the general beaten track treatments for things like Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses.

So, yeah, it's definitely, there's definitely some role out there for, you know, treating the blood. You know, and there's, in fact, a test being developed for Alzheimer's using a blood-borne protein. So, you know, the idea that that some blood-borne agent or protein from your forearm that's been, you know, hit with infrared light, could, you know, do something to the brain. That's called indirect photobiomodulation. And there's several studies in animals showing that that's a real thing, that it works. Yeah. And that's probably broadly, broadly everything in your field of study that we've just, discussed today is also an endorsement of, you know, get out and get some healthy sunshine.

A lot of this stuff is, it's just good for us to do that on many levels, including vitamin D, which we need, you know, for good health and, and mood, lifts mood and whatnot. But also, in some ways, you're not getting nearly the concentrated dose, but you're getting some of that benefit that comes from exposure to these different wavelengths of light. So, I mean, just another drop in the bucket of things that are like, you know ancient wisdom we've always known if you want to clear your head go for a walk because you got to do something physical sometimes to knock the gears loose and getting out in the sunshine just for general health and uh no proven benefit yet to sunning the um

um fundament as as we might say but uh you know that's the study for another day i suppose um okay well let's do this let's wrap it up get you out of here uh once again this has been our guest dreamer dr theodore henderson out of denver colorado he is a uh he specializes in neuroplastic based treatments for the brain, author of Brighter Days Ahead. You can find him at heal my brain.info. Link in the description below. For my part, would you kindly like, share and subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers.

I do video game streams Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. 2, 8 p.m. Pacific. Brand new book, finally, after about two years of being just, honestly, I was just lazy. I have no excuse. Right there on the screen, it is O'Neuro Chronology, Volume 4, Prima Relaquorum. of what remains. Of course, you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com. And if you'd head on over to Benjamin the dreamwizard.orgals.com and join the community, we'd love to have you. That is enough out of me. Dr. Henderson, thank you for being here.

I appreciate your time. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's been a great chat. I learned a lot and I hope you did too out there. So the last thing to say is thank you for watching. Hope we see you next time.