Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life with Brain Surgeon Dr Rahul Jandial #458

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Have you ever woken up from a vivid dream and wondered about its meaning? Or perhaps questioned the purpose of dreaming altogether? It’s certainly a fascinating topic and one which I have never covered before on my podcast.   This week, I’m delighted to welcome back Dr Rahul Jandial, a dual-trained neurosurgeon and neurobiologist. He is an expert in brain health, a world-renowned brain surgeon who routinely undertakes complex cancer operations and he’s also the author of the brand-new book, ‘This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life’.    During our conversation, Rahul explains his belief, that we sleep, in order to dream. When we are asleep, our brains are not resting but instead shift into a different state where areas linked to imagination and creativity become more active.   While dreams remain a largely unexplained phenomenon, Rahul shares his insights into common dream themes, the importance of dreams in childhood brain development, and the highly personal nature of dream interpretation. He also covers practical techniques for remembering dreams, the concept of lucid dreaming, the potential links between dreaming and future brain health, and also shares some profound insights about the brain at the time of death.    Throughout our conversation, Rahul emphasises that although dreams have captivated humans for centuries, they remain a mysterious and intensely personal aspect of our lives. However, if we approach our dreams with curiosity, they have the potential to gift us valuable insights about the contents of our minds and our emotions.   The topic of dreams clearly resonates with many of you - I received over 1,000 comments and questions about dreams when I announced this upcoming episode on my Instagram page.  And, I’m happy to say that Rahul answers some of these questions throughout our discussion, offering his unique perspective as both a neuroscientist and a neurosurgeon.   So whether you're a vivid dreamer or someone who rarely remembers their dreams, this episode offers a captivating glimpse into our sleeping minds. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://drinkag1.com/livemore https://calm.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/458 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

It's also comforting as a cancer surgeon to occasionally start to share this story with my patients that not only is there a genius built in every night for us with the dreaming brain that keeps us adaptive and creative and adventurous and open-minded, but in your final moments, a dream-like robust activity will be there for you to comfort you and to celebrate the life you've lived. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. Have you ever woken up from a vivid dream and wondered about its meaning? Or perhaps questioned the purpose of dreaming altogether? Well, it's certainly a fascinating topic, and one which I have never covered before on my podcast. So this week, I'm delighted to welcome back Dr. Rahul Jandil for his third conversation on my show. Rahul is a dual-trained neurosurgeon and neurobiologist. He's an expert in brain health, a world-renowned brain surgeon who

routinely undertakes complex cancer operations. And he's also the author of a brand new book, This Is Why You Dream, what your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. During our conversation, Rahul explains his belief that we sleep in order to dream. He explains that during sleep, our brains are not resting, but instead shift into a different state where areas linked to imagination and creativity become more active. While dreams remain a largely unexplained phenomenon, Rahal shares his insights into common dream themes, the importance of dreams in childhood brain development, and the highly personal nature of dream interpretation.

He also covers practical techniques for remembering dreams, the concepts of lucid dreaming, the potential links between dreaming and future brain health, and he also shares some profound insights about the brain at the time of death. Throughout our conversation, Rahul reminds us that while dreams have been a subject of fascination throughout human history, they remain a mysterious and deeply personal aspect of our lives. However, if we approach our dreams with curiosity, they have the potential to gift us valuable insights about the contents of our minds and our emotions. Now the topic of dreams clearly resonates with many of

you. I received over 1,000 comments and questions about dreams when I announced this upcoming episode on my Instagram page. And I'm happy to say that Rahul answers some of these questions throughout our discussion, offering his unique perspective as both a neuroscientist and a neurosurgeon. So whether you're a vivid dreamer or someone who rarely remembers their dreams, this episode offers a captivating glimpse into our sleeping minds. In your new book, This Is Why You Dream, you make the bold assertion that perhaps the reason we sleep is so that the brain can dream. I do, yeah. And I think what's helped me with this book is to really think about it in a way

where it could be a conversation in any form. So a pub over here, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, because dreams are for everyone. They are inside everyone. They pop up in everyone. Even if people say they don't dream, I don't have to tell you what a nightmare is. We all know what that is. profound and then go into the science that backs them up or also elaborate on the gaps in the science, but why it's likely to be true if it ever can be fully understood and many things will not be. So that statement, I believe we sleep in order to dream. I believe we sleep because the brain must dream and we can get into that in the next little while. But the easiest way for me to say where I come to that conclusion is from the glimpses of transplant surgery, neuroscience, what happens when we go a day or two without sleeping as a medic or as a surgeon,

you know what that is. So the first thing is there's something that builds up. It's called sleep pressure. We don't ask to sleep. We don't request to sleep. And if we try not to sleep after a day or two, sleep has to happen. The second thing is dreaming is a robust electrical and metabolic activity that happens in the dreaming brain, which is liberated during sleep. So when we think of our brains, they're not on off and they're definitely not off while we're sleeping. The metabolic activity, the usage of glucose, the measurements of electricity are robust while we sleep. Our bodies are sleeping, but our brains are not resting.

Our brains are not sleeping. The dreaming brain and the waking brain, at times, the electrical activity can be so similar that it was called paradoxical sleep. So the first thing we all have to accept as a measurement, in my opinion, is that the brain is not quiet while we sleep. The brain is not resting while we sleep. The brain is doing something very fundamental because it forces us to sleep. And what happens when we sleep is that the electrical activity in the brain is something distinct from the electrical activity during waking life because

different regions are dominant while we sleep. The dreaming brain fires up the imagination network, if you will, and logic is dampened. That's a measurement on fMRI. The waking brain has more executive network function and we can get into that and less imagination network function. So even though the electrical activity can be similar, if not identical, it's generated by very different ensembles of neurons in the dreaming brain and the waking brain. So when you start to look at all of this process that sleep puts us down, sleep will take risk to sleep. What happens when we sleep? Our brains are on fire, right?

I put livers into other people. We don't reconnect the nerves. Sleep isn't really for the liver in some fundamental way. Yes, there are some metabolic changes that happen during sleep and those benefit people. But the massive thing happening in the sleeping body is the brain is throbbing with glucose usage and metabolic activity and electrical activity. So when I look at that, it makes me think that the process of sleep

is for the benefit of dreaming. Yeah, it's so powerful. If we think about what happens in our body through an evolutionary lens, the fact that certain parts of our brain are more metabolically active when we sleep, and in particular when we are dreaming, it's hard not to make the case that dreaming therefore must serve a very powerful function for us, right? Right. If you go without sleep a day or two, then what the dreaming brain and throughout this conversation, some of the foundations of conversation I want to have with you and your listeners,

and I thank you for this opportunity, is to walk away with things that are, that's measurement. That's a fact. That's not a study show or an interpretation. It's a fact that in a 24-hour cycle, your brain is active throughout. There's blood flow throughout. Okay? It's just a question of there are two very different brain states,

the waking brain and the dreaming brain. And if we go a day or two without sleep, when we are forced to sleep, something builds up inside us, dream pressure, sleep pressure. The dreaming starts to happen earlier in that sleep. So it's almost like it's waiting to get out. The vivid dreams and REM stages change

when you go a day or two without sleep and then end up falling asleep. So it almost feels like there's something building up that must occur because when the brain goes without it a day or two, it jumps off earlier. So those kind of conceptual things are my interpretations, but it's a measurement that the activity is robust while we sleep in our dreaming brains. Is there any merit to the viewpoint that if certain parts of our brain are more active when we are asleep, and in particular when we're dreaming, are those the same areas that might be, I guess, less active? And then you could argue

resting during the day? Because can we have an organ that's going- Hot all the time. Yeah. Good question. Yeah. Perfect question. I had this conversation with my son and he says, it's a great question because, wait a second, you're saying waking brain and dreaming brain are both active, both hot, but you're also saying that certain parts are dampened, certain regions are dampened. So then how can they be even? So just bear with me there. The waking brain,

and these are established neuroscience concepts. This is what I'm about to say is well-known in neuroscience. The waking brain is executive network dominant. The executive network is a collection of structures throughout the brain from evolutionary old parts of the brain, like the reptilian brain to the modern parts of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex that pushed our foreheads forward. They're all connected and they, but they provide a certain function. Much like if we talked about finance, there would be different parts of London and UK, but they would all function as a finance industry. Well, the executive network is the dominant network while we're awake. It's focused

on what's called task on. It's looking for things to do outside. It's using reason. It's using logic. That makes sense. When we go from waking brain to dreaming brain, this is a measurement, the executive network is dampened. So then if things are robust equally, then something must be heightened in the dreaming brain. is that what compensates for the dampened executive network is the limbic system, which is emotional networks, as well as the imagination network, which other people call default mode network, but I call it the imagination network. So you have a hyper-emotional, hyper-visual dreaming brain, and you have dampened logic in the dreaming brain.

Now, the massive point here, another measurement is the degree to which emotions, not in every dream, not in your dream or not in my dream, but in some dreams, the top speed of emotions in the dreaming brain

is higher than what we could ever feel emotionally in our waking brain. And that's an fMRI measurement of metabolic usage. So... Just explain fMRI for people who don't know what that is.

So when we talk, and while we're here is because for the first time in the last 20 years, we have exotic brain imaging that's giving us a glimpse into dreaming that we never had before. Aristotle's talking about it 2,000 years ago. Everybody's curious about it. So when I say measurements, there are three essential measurements of brain function we have now. fMRI is, there's no radiation with it. So, you know, when my wife was pregnant and she needed some imaging, she had an MRI. So neuroscientists can recruit people to study them without injuring them. So that's why you're hearing that word quite a bit. An MRI is, it's a functional MRI. And when you perform a task, the slight changes in blood flow, the connection being that if these regions are more actively engaged in that task, they'll have a little bit more trickle of blood flow.

So, fMRI looks at metabolic usage in some sense through blood flow. Then the other thing we should know is you can measure electricity with scalp electrodes called an eeg what i try to tell people is think of it we put an electrode on the heart and that's an ekg we all get that right that little classic squiggle yeah what if we put 96 on our scalp you'll record something else so those two i think are the essential essential studies we're using uh to understand dreaming and to understand a waking brain. Cause there's no conversation without having an understanding of both. And then the last thing is patient stories, things you understand too. Like you can't, you can't not include the fact that on some rare exotic surgeries that where we remove half the brain in a child for seizures,

they still dream, you know, like that's an important part. We don't have to only rely on fMRI and EEG. We don't have to only rely on fancy pictures and measurements of electricity. We can also rely on some of the stories from patients. So those three things are what I'm using to put this love letter together to dreaming. Yeah, that's a beautiful way of looking at it. The love letter you put together for dreaming. Yeah, that's a beautiful way of looking at it. The love letter you put together for dreaming. You just use the word magic. And I love the term magic.

It's not a term you would necessarily associate with a neurosurgeon or a neuroscientist, right? And I think that speaks to something really powerful about dreaming. There is a mystery to dream that we all know. You know, what do our dreams mean? What was it that I dreamt about last night? What does that actually mean? Does it mean anything? Can dreams help us predict the future? All these kind of things that people will say cultures have written about and reported for years. But I love the fact that as a neurosurgeon you're using the word magic when you're talking about the

this mystery of dreaming yeah I think um you know first of all thank you um because um this is just giving me space to to move around with thoughts and also qualify and also say say things like magic. And I think it works for me because we just opened with a few minutes of, look, we're going to take this apart in a really scientific way, right? We've got tools now.

We're measuring with fMRIs and pretty brain imaging. We're measuring electricity. I'm talking about measurements and interpretation and executive network and imagination network. We did some introduction to the foundations of the science, right? Dream, sleep pressure. But then I just need everybody to know, I hope that when you see or learn a little bit about the science of dreaming,

you'll be left in more awe of dreams. You know, that learning just a glimpse of how they may be working and the patterns that have had been there since antiquity that are now partially explicable you leave with a sense of you leave more impressed it does feel like magic when you take actually a scientific glimpse at it because there will always be gaps i'm not that guy who's here saying, I got dreaming figured out. No, I'm just offering you a perspective that hasn't been offered in a long time. And I look forward to more dream information, not just the measurements, the hardcore neuroscience I'm talking about, but as more people contribute based on different sexuality, based on different gender into what they're dreaming. As we get more surveys and questionnaires and see more patterns, there'll be more interesting linkages with the patterns of dreaming and the patterns of brain activation while dreaming. Yeah. It's fascinating. You

mentioned surveys there and you refer to surveys quite a lot in the book about what people are saying when we ask them about their dreams. And it made me think that, are we always going to be missing something with surveys? Because presumably, the people who fill them in and are able to articulate what they dreamt about, there's an inherent bias there, isn't there? Because the people who can't remember their dreams are probably not filling in those surveys. I mean, it's a tricky one to get around, isn't it? Well, and that's sort of an insight people who look at science fairly want to present. They want to present how it's done so the listener can understand what are the limitations.

I don't want to conceal the limitations. We are working with something that's elusive. It's like trying to grab a cloud or something. And you're exactly right that when we talk about surveys and questionnaires, I use that rather than studies because a lot of the patterns of what we dream okay and how we dream is the brain stuff what we dream is what have people been saying for thousands of years what did aristotle say about lucid dreaming um why did people start reporting more color dream color-filled dreams once tv went from black and white to color. Is that really what happened? Yeah.

So that's out there as a survey. Now, you and I can explore, is there brain science that links to that and what it means? But so when I say surveys or measurements, now we have a good platform. So that's one thing. Why do people in these surveys across the last, they're called dream reports. So people have been waking people up while they're asleep. What are you dreaming about? Writing it down. So they're trying to not just do it on the back end of somebody saying, last night, I think I dreamt of this. They're trying to be a bit more rigorous and having people in sleep labs and different stages of sleep,

waking them up and saying, what are you dreaming about? They're trying. It'll always be an incomplete picture, of course, but let's work with what we have because we have something more than we've had in a long time. And so another thing that I noticed there, the color TV thing threw me off. Like, imagine me reading this, like I had, like, I was pulling from so many different, I was pulling from everything. Like there's no, you don't type in dream science. I mean, I was looking at cognitive neuroscience, looking at how penguins have 5,000 episodes of sleep or whatever high number they have. I was really trying to survey a lot of science to understand this. And the fact that the dream reports rarely, I mean, somebody's dream may have math, but when you look at 10,000 dreams,

not your dream, not my dream, but when you look at a lot of dreams, math is rarely reported. Okay, so I said, okay, that's interesting. And then you look at the brain picture of somebody who's asleep or in REM stage of sleep with vivid dreaming and when they're startled awake

and they report they were dreaming, the region of the brain, specifically the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, people don't need to worry about that, but they're like, it's the area like where horns would be. It's a part of that most new part of your brain, if you will. That is the part that's dampened in dreaming.

Remember I said dreams are hyper-emotional, hyper-visual and dampened logic. So that makes sense because when patients have injury in that area, they struggle with math. So you start to see the connection. Okay, the areas that are less robustly engaged in the dreaming brain,

the things that part of the dreaming brain would kind of do don't really show up in dream reports, right? So imagine me seeing that like a year and a half ago and I was like, oh, wow that's- That's pretty profound. That by itself is profound. People don't tend to dream about maths. And there's a brain scan that we could use to explain why. Mic drop. Yeah. It really is. The prefrontal cortex, the dorsolateral part of it

is where we do our maths. That is shut down at night. So of course we don't. is where we do our maths. That is shut down at night. So of course we don't. Now, somebody should write and say, no, I do math. I get that. We're not saying it can't happen,

but the patterns start to take some shape, right? I felt that when I first, I saw this about a year and a half ago. I was looking at it and I said, huh, even if that's the only thing I can contribute to the world. Well, that's massive. Rahul's like, he kind of explained why a lot of people don't talk about math in their dreams because it fits with the lower metabolic usage in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the

sleeping slash dreaming brain. Like, Rahul Jandiel, I'm cool with that because it just shows that it's possible. It is possible. And then everybody else that follows me can say, hey, we have more surveys. We have more neuroscience 20 20 30 years from now but maybe you know somebody listening now is going to be like hey the just the fact that even anything about dreaming could be explained i mean just one single thing it is amazing to me you know one thing i learned yesterday when i was researching for our conversations reading your book i was looking at all kinds of papers, just trying to build up this picture of dreaming and sleep. And I came across some research which suggested that during REM sleep, the part of the sleep cycle where these vivid...

Typically, but yes. Typically, yeah, we'll get to that, where these dreams happen. Apparently, it's the only part of the day or night where we have no noradrenaline in the brain, which I found fascinating because noradrenaline is a stress hormone. It helps us focus. It sort of narrows things down for us. We're focusing on the task at hand. Detects the signal out of the noise. Yeah.

As you would want if you're in a day dealing with a task or a threat. Yeah. Whereas if it's true, which I think it is, that it's the only time where the brain doesn't have any noradrenaline bathing around it, then it kind of makes sense. That would then allow us to be broad and imaginative because the noradrenaline is not there to focus us. So instead of more signal to noise, maybe it's the flip side, more noise and less signal. Divergent thinking. So let me just get into that. The fact that our brains have lower adrenaline or noradrenaline during sleep and dreaming, that's a measurement. The interpretation or the opinion, the conversation

we're having now, and I welcome everybody to, I mean, if somebody's got a better idea of that, to me, that's consistent with the way our dreaming brain thinks, feels, connects dots, not so closely, looks for wider associations because it's now permitting the noise to have a bit of space. That's divergent thinking, right? So when you talk about convergent thinking and divergent thinking, convergent thinking is a type of thinking like where you're trying to design an engine. Divergent thinking is more, these are neuroscientific terms used in cognitive neuroscience. That's creative ideation is divergent thinking, not looking for the media connection, not looking for the shortest route,

but looser associations sometimes that are required for creative thinking. So the fact that thousands of dreaming brains and thousands of dream reports in general show very little math kind of fits with a brain scan that shows that region of the brain that does a lot of math and calculation is dampened, not off, just less than it usually is during the day. And the imagination is liberated. The fact that we have a lot of wild thoughts and we don't do math, that at the chemical level, the brain is a hundred billion neurons, little molecular jellyfish-like things floating in a bath. The chemical story, right? Not just the flesh story of activation, deactivation, or blood flow, but anatomically that makes sense. Also at

the electrochemical level, it makes sense that the neurotransmitters responsible for this are dampened. So that's how this book is built, where I'm trying to connect what I can. I take measurements and I'm very forthright about, I believe, or wouldn't it be interesting? So we just had a conversation about it. The point you made or the point that I've written, that's not out there somewhere that I extracted with a reference. And that's why this book has been such a wonderful thing for me because after over 10,000 patients, over thousands of operations and all the humanity you learn through it, you start to feel like, I think I know a lot about neurosurgery and neuroscience. And then you explore this topic and you're almost reborn again because it's a fresh

look at everything. Here's a question for you that just came to me. If we use the dreaming brain and dreaming as an analogy, right, we're saying that when we're awake, there are certain parts of our brain that are more active and are getting more blood flow and whatever it might be, which enables us to do certain things in the day, focus, you know, task, whatever it might be. But at nighttime, in some ways it's flipped where those bits go to sleep and other things become more awake. Might you argue that you writing this book is a beautiful analogy for that? So as someone who's a neuroscientist, right, a neurosurgeon, yeah, looking at all the facts and the data

and what does this operation mean if I remove this part of the brain, what happens? A lot of facts and rational thinking, I think, please correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost feels like this book is your exploration into the dream world and what might be it's great man i mean nobody's you know i've had some proper conversations nobody's put it out there like

that and connected that but uh thank you uh just to take the conversation to a new place in my mind right is uh is welcome um and i think that's why I love this book and topic because I was feeling like I was getting to the point humbly and respectfully that I was mastering the craft of things that are like daytime, more executive network, like performing surgery, what this means, avoid this, what this results. I was starting to see, even though I feel that I was at the leading edge of taking a fresh look at the brain and mind, I was starting to become constrained in my thinking about this heavenly flesh, if you will, right? This white flesh that gets all this blood flow, but it's white. There's so many things about it that don't make sense from a literal or from a convergent thinking point of view

to do a fair job of this topic. I had to approach it with divergent thinking and thoughts and try to connect like, you know, later when we get into it, like Aristotle's taught my lucid dreaming, um that sounds I'm skeptical about that I ended up having two chapters out of nine on that so I went through that like there's things I thought there was there's no way there's any science on this there's tremendous science on lucid dreaming and other things like oh that makes sense and I was like wait that's maybe that hasn't been fairly presented like symbols and dream dictionaries so

we don't have to get into all of that now but but yes this book is me um and uh my publisher and friend said that i said there's gonna be a lot of holes when you there is no dream science i mean we've got stuff that you've never had before so i can i'm gonna you know and they're like but that's why we want you to do it is we want you to tell us what it is there. Do it in your way where it's storytelling, where it's accessible to everybody. Cause we don't want to make this academic because dreams are for everyone.

Dreams happen in everyone. And then where you're not sure, try to come up with an idea or a hypothesis, which is what you do in science. Like when you apply for a grant at the National Institute of Health, the first part of the grant is not like, hey, show us some clever experiment and some fancy details and charts. They're significance and innovation. Innovation in scientific grant writing is, I think mother nature works this way.

So I was already learning to do that and given permission to do that in my laboratory. So then it was in this book, it's, you know, I think this area is dampened, not off. And maybe that explains why very few people talk about math. The measurements and then the hypothesis, and that's where in this book, you'll see, I wonder, could it be? It's an invitation to the reader. If you've got a better approach or an insight, I welcome it. Yeah. Because I'm as curious as you are about this.

I don't have it figured out. I'm just giving you a new look. Do you think dreams can help us deal with things like trauma and negative thoughts and chronic stress? chronic stress. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to the mental wellness app, Calm. Now, do you ever feel like your brain is on overdrive and your mind is constantly racing? The plans, worries, and to-do lists can often feel never-ending. Well, Calm can help your mind take a break from the noise by softening anxiety symptoms in the moment and helping you cope with day-to-day stresses.

Calm is the number one app for sleep and meditation, giving you the power to calm your mind and change your life. Now, Calmises that everyone faces unique challenges in their daily lives, that mental health needs differ from person to person, and that time for meditation may also vary. And since self-care practices are so deeply personal, Calm strives to provide content that caters to your own individual preferences and needs. Their meditations range from focusing on anxiety and stress, relaxation and focus, to building habits, improving sleep and taking care of your physical well-being. Stress less, sleep more and live better with Calm. If you go to calm.com forward slash live more, you'll get a special offer of 40% off a Calm premium subscription and new content is added every week. For listeners of the show,

Calm is offering an exclusive offer of 40% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com forward slash live more. Go to calm.com forward slash live more for 40% off unlimited access to Calm's entire library. That's calm.com forward slash live more. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year.

It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. All of this goodness comes in one convenient daily serving that makes it really easy to fit into your life. No matter how busy you feel, it's also really, really tasty. The scientific team behind AG1 includes experts from a broad range of fields, including longevity, preventive medicine, genetics, and biochemistry. I talk to them regularly and I'm really impressed with their commitment to making a top quality product. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually, they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their

first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. I would ask that people not ask dreams to be something we wouldn't want our waking thoughts to be, right? Our waking thoughts are wild and all over the place, and sometimes they help us, and sometimes we ruminate, and not every waking thought is worth holding on to. What is happening in dreaming?

First, some people have said that maybe the dreaming brain functions partly. I don't think you can capture it with one thing, but sort of as a nocturnal therapist. Okay. And where do they get that statement? I think that as you get seven, six, seven, eight, nine, you know, roughly, I always pause at giving hard numbers because it doesn't mean that you're not coping well if you get by with six hours of sleep. I just want to leave freedom for people. Like I got a bunch of people only work night shifts. They're, you're not coping well if you get by with six hours of sleep. I just want to leave freedom for people. Like, I got a bunch of people who only work night shifts. They're doing fine. They're not popping up new cancers all the time.

I just want to leave room that people have very different sleep habits. And if we describe something, it's not like you're suboptimal to what you could be. Everybody's got their own patterns. That said, that as you get into the later parts of sleep, you tend to have more of these vivid dreams and REM sleep and people tend to have more positive emotional valence, which is like just affect as they engage longer sleep. That maybe clarity that comes with good sleep is because you've had vivid dreams at the tail end of it. So that's a hypothesis. But that's where they come up with the maybe it serves as a nocturnal therapist but what i would say is yet some of my patients they

have ptsd nightmares so dreams are a they're a double-edged sword for some they can help people cope for some they can actually uh worsen their emotional milieu, emotional environment, because a bad memory is trapped on loop and it pops up in nightmares. So my answer is, can they help people with trauma? Is they can. I think there's nocturnal processing going on. If you pay attention to your dreams and the context of your dreams, and if you try to remember your dreams, you're more likely to remember your dreams. But there is something happening there where I think that hyper-emotional state

leans therapeutic. Not for everybody, but in general, it leans therapeutic. Yeah. I think so too. A lot of sleep researchers call REM sleep the part of the sleep cycle, which we can consider emotional first aid, where we are processing the emotions of the day. And I've heard some researchers say that it's when we take off the emotional, like something's happened, let's say something negative negative we take off the emotional edges of it and lay it down in a much more rational less emotional state during REM sleep I've heard that being said I think Matt Walker once told me that on this podcast actually a few years ago and it's always been fascinating that to me the the fact that, and I think this fits with that initial statement that I put to you, where you feel that, or you at least assert that perhaps the reason we sleep is so that the brain can dream.

I thought one of the most important things for us as humans is to process what happens to us, right? We have to deal with negativity all the time. You know, how do we do that? with negativity all the time, you know, how do we do that? If REM sleep is where we take off those negative emotional edges, and REM sleep is also where a lot of these vivid dreams take place, then to me, it kind of makes sense. Yeah, well, perhaps dreaming is a way for some of us. Very good. I appreciate what you're saying. Some people, it makes things worse for them. Maybe, I don't know, maybe something like PTSD, maybe you're repeatedly dreaming about something which is making you wake up and

make you feel even worse. But I think for many people, it stands to reason, at least in my brain, that the process of dreaming may be your attempt to process some of the events of your life. What I would say is, and I mean this with the utmost respect when I use words like likely or maybe, it's to leave room. It's not that I haven't, if there was a factor measurement that I had,

I trust me, I would be bringing it. But when you say that, my mind goes likely. And so then I say, but I like stories from patients and I like measurements, and then I like to connect the dots in a divergent way, if you will. Yeah, so we're having a, yeah, I'm dreaming while awake. Well, what is on that? What's a daydream compared to a dream at night? So the two terms, so there are a lot of misnomers and stuff like that. So I try to simplify language.

Daydream and mind, if there's anything during the day that's more like dreaming, it's mind wandering. So daydream is still directed thought. The executive network is saying, if I go to London, I'll take the train. I'll go meet him. It's I'm doing something, but I have a directed thought about something else. So therefore you would say that technically it's not really a dream. Correct.

Okay. Mind wandering is, it follows a similar pattern, although at a very micro scale as dreaming. It's jumping of thoughts without you leading them. Yeah. You also mentioned the default mode network before the DMN and how you have... AKA the imagination.

Yeah, you've been very clear in the book to call it the imagination network. So let's just again connect waking and nighttime. Perfect. Because then everybody gets oriented with that. And then we explore and we come back to that. Because that's what your brain's doing in 24 hours, if you like it or not. Waking and sleeping.

Waking brain, dreaming brain. Yeah, so we've spoken about the default mode network on this show before. I've written about it. But in the context of, let's say you're struggling with a problem on your emails and your work, whatever your job is, you can't find the solution. And instead of continuing to try or continuing to send emails or whatever, you put everything down, you down tools, you go for a walk for 30 minutes without your phone, let's say. And during those 30 minutes, because you're not focused on a task, the DMN, the default mode network,

fires up and starts to solve these problems for you without you actually- Or takes a fresh look at it. It takes a fresh look at it, yeah. So you may come back after 30 minutes and go, oh, I was trying to do that for five hours. I couldn't solve it. Now I know how I might move this forwards.

That's the part of the brain, which you're calling the imagination network, that's super active at night. But I guess the difference might be that in the day we can remember what has just happened, but we can't always at night. Yeah. Because during the day you still have executive network at play. Yeah. So you can then apply that straight away, but's yeah i don't know but but dreaming something similar is happening right yeah yeah let's so let's look just give me some time on that one that's a fundamental thing you brought up so right away we've we can all accept that there's a waking brain and dreaming brain and that the dreaming brain the sleeping brain is wild. It's off the charts. It's doing a lot of stuff. Let's just, that's a measurement. So now we have that.

Then the way to think of our brain is not a certain spot or region or on or off. That's the other thing I would love for people to walk away with is a collection of're a collection of structures and the brain isn't like a liver where it's like the same tile all the way through. I mean, it's exotic and nodules and nodes and hubs. And, and so we call them networks to, uh, to perform a task. You have the executive network. So there will be something in the frontal lobe. Of course, it would receive things from the occipital lobe because you're taking in vision. It would bring an instinct from your limbic structures a bit too, right? So think of it as a giant ensemble and certain instruments play.

That's the executive network. What the other players, when the executive network is not playing, not engaged with something outward, when your brain is not in a, quote, task-on mode, this is how this was discovered. So people thought the executive network is now dampened. And nobody was looking. See, all of neuroscience for a long time, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience,

was provoke and see what happens in the brain. And then somebody looked at to identify the default mode network. cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience was provoke and see what happens in the brain. And then somebody looked at to identify the default mode network. I got a lot of stories in this one. That when you're not task on, it's not like you're a computer in hibernation waiting for somebody to click the keyboard. Something else fills up the space and that's the imagination network. You're always toggling between executive network and imagination network. That's when you're under threat, it might be 52%, let's give it percentages, executive network and 48% imagination network. Those are the subtle shifts in modulation that happen in the brain. You can't have a brain part turned off.

It'll die. There's always blood flow going. There's just a partial- That's a stroke, isn't it? Right. Exactly. So, it's just a partial- So, during the day, you're mostly executive network, 51%, 52%, and at night, and you're 48% imagination network. But in mind-wandering, network. But in mind wandering, you might be 51% executive network and 49% imagination network. So still enough memory to sometimes direct thoughts or in mind wandering, grab a good thought. Both are at play. What happens in dreaming is you're maybe 53. These are just rough approximations for the concept. This is not a measurement, but in the dreaming brain, it's like 54% imagination network and 46% executive network. The executive network is still there.

It would die otherwise, right? Those structures are pulled in different directions. So when you talk about executive network and imagination network when it comes to mind wandering, since you don't have anything in front of you, you're driving a car, you still need an executive network. You're walking around without your phone, as you mentioned, you still need executive network to not bump into a wall. But it's not, it allows some of that mental workspace created by the imagination network to weigh in. And that's why people, I think, when they're shaving or they're doing some task, but not a demanding one, that allows the

imagination network to come back into play a little bit more. And so they get, what do they get? They don't get solutions. They get the contributions of divergent thinking, which may lead to solutions. We're not all going to be geniuses, creative geniuses, but understanding that, and here comes a measurement, they put people with poetry, writing poetry, they put them in these scans to look at the measurements of brain activity, specifically, you know, anatomically. Writing poetry brought up the imagination network a bit. You could see those structures light up a little more. But evaluating the poetry required the executive network to come back. You kind of need both. You need that divergent thinking to come up with the fresh ideas.

And then you need to know the dots, right? Like, is this a good idea or not? And that comes back to what you were saying about what happened with my book. And it comes back to this toggling, which happens naturally in a 24-hour period. You've got two-thirds of the day is executive network dominant, you know, and imagination network can come up a little bit. And then one-third of the day is actually sleep and dreaming where the imagination network is dominant. This back and forth leading to different contributions in our brain in 24 hours or in the production of poetry, to me, is a very invigorating thing that the different states of mind have different brilliance to contribute. Yeah. What's the difference between what's going

on in our brain when we're dreaming compared to when we are hallucinating, or something that's becoming more and more common is the use of psychedelics. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people when they're under the influence of psychedelics might say that they felt as if they were in a dreamlike state. Yeah. So i'd love to tackle this one because let's do it um the only thing i can i found on hallucination versus dreaming is when you hallucinate you see something on a real background like it's the you're awake hallucination means you're awake my patients do it after surgery they put icu psychosis you people can look that up or ICU delirium. They still see the hospital walls. They just hallucinate or imagine somebody in that landscape.

When you dream, you actually create the landscape. So the imagination product of a dream, you actually create the whole landscape plus the content. Whereas hallucinations, the landscape is created by the real world. You're just inserting things in front of it. That was the only way I could find a difference between hallucination and dreaming. If there was more, I would bring it to you, but that's the- Okay. That's interesting. That was something I said I could take away with that. Psychedelics, very interesting. So again, as a cancer surgeon in the United States, psilocybin is being, you know, clinical trials for patients with cancer who have existential crisis, like something inside them is eating them up alive, right? There's a field called psycho-oncology that it's specifically the psychiatry or the psychological management

of people with cancer. And in that field, psychedelics have relevance. So I'm not coming at this with some unfamiliarity. Let's just say that. Our approaches to mental health are imperfect because mental health is complex. And if there is something that can help some people and it can be safely done. I'm all for it. So that said, psychedelics, the science that's out there, it suggests, and it's very important, they actually have less default mode network slash imagination network activation on psychedelics. Really? Yeah. You would expect it to be more. You're still imaginative, but the source is not the imagination network.

Wow. You still have divergent thinking, but it's not coming from that. And that might be related to serotonin. This just feeds more into the mystery of the brain, right? Right, right, right. Because it's like, well, where the hell is it coming from? Exactly. I felt the same way.

For example, psychedelics modulate serotonin. Serotonin is also used for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. We use it for antidepressants. It's also related to psychedelic experiences. We have dreamlike states when the imagination network is liberated in dreaming. And then psychedelics have actually dampened dream imagination network.

So let me just explain what the relevance there is. So when you dream, you fully inhabit the experience. You are central. You are in the driver's seat of a car you can't control. You're going on this joyride that you've made, but you're fully, you're in the middle. You are, you are in the nucleus, central person, central, central feature of it. And that their default mode network slash imagination network is robust. In psychedelics, it seems to be that the imagination network slash default mode network really is dampened and it allows for something called ego dissolution. It's closer to a dissociative state

that you're floating above the car and seeing yourself being driven around in it. You're not fully inhabiting the experience. You're seeing it from a step removed, which therefore may allow you to see the things in your life in a different light, leading to the potential mental health benefits. It's stepping away from your cancer diagnosis that allows you to maybe have the therapeutic value.

So psychedelics have a dreamlike state, but they're closer, in my opinion, to dissociative states where it's ego dissolution and stepping away from the experience in a dreamy way, in a wild way. Whereas dreams, you're being thrashed around as a central feature of the dream. So therein lies why I use the term magic early on. You know, just to have that glimpse, it actually adds more questions. But that is the current science that I have been able to find. Yeah. The more you delve into this topic,

the more mysterious it gets. I can't imagine what it was like writing this book actually, because, you know, you said it's trying to catch a cloud or, you know, I think about it as trying to almost catch a ghost, but it keeps moving

and there's new things coming up and about. And we keep learning more about neuroscience and ourselves as we explore. It's not, I want the listener to know, it's not confusing in a negative way. No. It's unpacking more doors that allow us guidance to understanding other things

like mental health. I love the fact that we can't fully explain these things, actually. I remember about a year ago, a professor from Berkeley, Dr. Daka Keltner, was here in the studio. He'd just written a book on the science of awe. And incredibly enough, he was saying that it's really hard to define awe. And I remember saying to him, I love that. I love the fact that we as humans can't give a robust and clear definition for everything. There are some things out there that are still that mysterious. I think that speaks to the magic of life.

And actually, and that it speaks to the conversations you're going to have with somebody in a pub, because if somebody walks into a pub and says, hey, I got all the dreaming figured out, they're going to look with somebody in a pub because if somebody walks into a pub and says hey i got all the dreaming figured out they're going to look at you like come on yeah and so there's something that also is uh intuitive for people that does not rely on science and explanations that uh nobody's ever going to figure out dreaming we're just and people have been commenting about it for thousands of years. In 2024, we're just commenting about it from the perspective of neuroscience. Realizing is quite limited. Realizing we'll learn more and then have more questions for it.

And I would say to people, isn't that how you want your life to be? Where you learn something, you think you're at the mountaintop or you think you've arrived at a moment, you realize there's so much more past that. Well, that's what this book has done for me. Yeah, no. I mean, there's so many wonderful passages in your book. And I love the way you've marked it up like an editor.

I love that you do that. Other people don't. I've been deep into this and it's been truly fascinating. But there's so many bits, I think, which have captivated me i mean the word captivate you right here dreams captivate scare arouse and inspire us because they are both so real and so surreal we are simultaneously creators of our dreams and helpless

participants in our strange creations they emerge us, but seem somehow apart from us. Home movies we have conjured that do not follow the laws of time or nature, both intimate and out of our control. Rahul, that is beautiful. Thank you. That's the love letter part. That's the love letter part, right?

And the other way is you're in a car, you're in the driver's seat of a car, you can't control. It's both. And I think the topic deserves that. Sometimes a little finesse and flair and sometimes just regular conversation about it. It's also fascinating to me

that some of the things that happen when we are dreaming are acceptable only when we're dreaming, like hallucinations, being delusional, being disorientated, having a wild fluctuation in our emotions, the amnesia of forgetting what just happened. Jumping from event to event without any connection.

If that happened in the daytime. Yeah. Right? It would be illness. Yeah. Even that is fascinating, isn't it? If you were displaying those things in the daytime. It would be disturbing and difficult.

Yeah. Someone might say, hey, you probably need to see a psychiatrist. Right. But these are things that we are perfectly okay with when we're in our bedrooms at night. And they happen because the executive network is dampened. So logic does not get in the way of being at the top of a building and then next being, you know, being naked in front of a podium a second later, like those jumps of scene and story and emotion are possible because the executive network is dampened and they're so vivid and they're so emotional

many times and so story driven because uh the emotion imagination network and the limbic systems are liberated so when you see what's you see what's going on with the dreaming brain then the wildness of dreams feels consistent not necessarily explicable, but consistent. Yesterday, I put out a little video on my Instagram page saying that I was about to talk to you about the topic of dreaming. What did people want to know? I think we've had almost maybe just over a thousand comments now already from people saying, oh, can you ask him this? Can you ask him this? Can you ask him this? Now I can't ask a thousand questions, but there were some patterns, right? Very good. Most of them actually were to do with interpretation of dreams,

which is presumably highly individual. So we'll get to that shortly because I think that's really, really fascinating and people want to know about that. I guess before we start interpreting them though, let's go through what do people tend to dream about? Are there categories that you've found? You know, are there particular things that, broadly speaking, these are the topics that humans tend to dream about,

at least the ones who fill in reports and surveys. Yeah. First of all, they're universal dreams. The early chapters are nightmares and erotic dreams. Over 90% of people report them. I don't have to tell you what a nightmare is. You don't have to tell me what a nightmare is, but we've had to tell our children

it was only a nightmare, right? Well, let's just pause there a second. I've heard you say that nightmares are proportionately more common in children than adults. Much more. Okay. So when do nightmares start? Do all children get them to our knowledge? And there's something you just said there, we have to teach them that these are not real. I mean, maybe just explore that a little bit for me. Yeah, it's chapter two, because again, when I had conversations with people and things would pop up, because I want, this is a book for everyone. One of the common things I heard

and things I thought myself were, well, wait a second, you're saying dreaming must happen. We sleep in order to dream. Come on, nightmares must be a glitch. There can't be any use for nightmares. It just feels like a mistake, right? Something that we don't necessarily share and don't want to experience.

So nightmares, again, some surveys and measurements. So people say, what kind of data is this? Some families signed up for their kids being woken up and asked about their dreams for a long time. Listen, it doesn't hurt them and whatever but that's i had that information to work with okay but you know so they're they're not commenting on the morality or the ethics you're just saying the data is there you went in and had a look exactly because this is from the last 30 40 50 years um not to be light about it but

it that's not something i would do but i'm you know i'm glad somebody did it because it gave me a look that I wouldn't have had. They're called longitudinal studies. It's not just asking like a thousand people at this moment. It's asking Johnny and Susie at age two, at age five, at age seven. Johnny and Susie, as they grow up, participate in reporting on their dreams. So you can start to see the patterns of dreams as a developmental feature, okay? And so they tend to,

nightmares in general tend to arrive, you know, six, seven, eight, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Interestingly, they arrive at the same time the imagination network is being cultivated in the child's mind. Now, isn't that interesting? Right. That's a measurement. Now we can talk about like what we think about it, but that's a measurement. And the first thing you noticed is, I noticed also is, you know,

part of what I do is pediatric neurosurgery. So you get, you know, you see children, you see injured children, you see children with cancer, children you've operated on. So you get a lens into dreaming from quite a few, quite the breadth of the human brain and human mind, right? But almost all parents, I'm just qualifying it just as a way to be respectful to the listener. But essentially, kids have to be told it's only a dream. What, because they believe it to be real?

Or my idea is that waking thought and dreaming thought is inseparable for a while for kids. So when you ask the younger children about their dreams, as soon as they can communicate, they're not very dynamic. It's like a table or a piece of furniture or something, a scene that's not moving. or something, a scene that's not moving. So it could be that dreaming thought and waking thought for children age two, three, four is kind of a continuum. And then when nightmares arrive, we have to teach them it was only a nightmare. So a big, broad hypothesis would be that the arrival of nightmares for every child around the age of four or five serves to cultivate,

to mature the mind. Much like, that's my idea, much like we learn to walk and talk, like that's a process. It has to be developed. It has to be stimulated. The arrival of nightmares at the same time as the arrival of the imagination network and something else called theory of mind we'll get into. I think it serves a function. It's hard for me to look at the brain and mind and see things that happen like essentially 100% of the time. They happen for everybody. They serve a purpose and they change the person.

You'll say, okay, wait, that's really high flying. But isn't that what adolescence is? Our brains don't look different as we go from teenager to adult, but something dramatically changes in that brain. I think nightmares cultivate the mind. I think erotic dreams prepare the mind and body for the erotic act and procreation. And just like later on, they'll be adolescent. There are psychological and cognitive developments happening that dreams play a role in. That's the big thesis in my mind. I've heard some researchers suggest that dreaming is almost a mistake.

That actually, when evolution was creating sleep, for want of a better term, the goal was sleep. And the side effect was, oh, you get dreams as well. And I've heard some research to compare it to, let's say the formation of the light bulb. Right, the goal of the light bulb is to give light. Yeah, it's to give light, but you also get heat generated. Heat wasn't the goal.

Light was the goal. Heat just came along for the ride. It's very hard for me to believe that that's the case, particularly because there is such a high metabolic cost to dreaming, right? Exactly. You know, Mother Nature doesn't really mess it up like this, where you actually have so much energy going to these parts of the brain when you receive it. It's costly. Exactly.

Metabolically and just risk. But that also plays into what you just said about you think nightmares serve a role. You think that erotic dreams serve a role. And I guess one of the things I've been thinking over the last 24 hours, Rahul, as I've been deeply immersed in the topic of dreaming is perhaps dreaming is our safe space to explore everything and anything. Maybe in the day, because of social norms, because of our job and how we're meant to behave, our prefrontal cortex, our executive network has to keep a lid on things, right? So we can function and be- To get things done. To get things done.

But at nighttime, perhaps in the safety of our bedrooms, actually all bets are off. We can go anywhere we want to. I know we're not directing it necessarily, but makes me think is it our way of you know liberating us so we we act a certain way in the day but we can explore everything the subconscious has its time in the sun yeah let me take both of those there's a lot there no no no But that gets to why we dream, right? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and

happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour, and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years.

It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision-making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every

evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal,

that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. We've been talking about what we dream, all these patterns. We'll get back into it. Nightmares and erotic dreams being universal is a pattern of dreaming. We've been talking about the dreaming brain, how we dream. We talked about what we dream. You've pulled us into why we dream. But before we get there, thinking of dreaming as a glitch, it's just something I just can't wrap my head around.

Because again, back to the story is, when the human body is asleep, just imagine, just zoom away for a little bit. And the body's mostly paralyzed, not completely. It's a chemical temporary paralysis. Of course, we can breathe. We can move our eyes, right? That's where you get the rapid eye movement.

We can have some reflexive movements and stuff like that. Just imagine the human body asleep and then put a heat map on it. And inside the skull is red hot. Yeah. Okay. Now, put some electrical measuring put it on put it on a mat like an iphone charger and see where the electricity is being generated and you get you get a little flicker from the heart from the heart still beating right from the three nerves on top of the surface of the heart that's where you the ekg is a measurement of the electrical electricity

generated by the nerves on the surface of the heart. It's not from the pump or the muscle or the valves. So you get a little bit from there, you get some faint electricity from the skin and you have this like explosive electricity again from within the skull, right? Like if we just took a real common sense, look at it. So what's happening in the sleeping body, it has to do with the brain. I don't think anybody will contest that. Then the question is, whatever the brain is doing, if dreaming is the glitch or the roar outside the stadium, but not something fundamental, then what is fundamentally happening in that

throbbing, hot, electrically active brain? You know, what I would say to those people who consider it that is, if you don't sleep for a day or two, then more dreaming happens. So it's as if your brain's like, oh, we're missing out on that. We need to ramp it up now to make sure you get your dream quota dream hunger dream hunger sleep pressure just just you know hey i'm not going to be able to prove it but i think the way i'm thinking about it makes it it makes common sense that dreaming isn't the glitch because the brain wants to do more of it when it can't get sleep sleep is for the brain it's not for your body. I've moved, I've transplanted hearts, kidney, pancreas, part of transplant surgery. We're not connecting the nerves. You know, the body is interchangeable. It's the brain that's saying sleep. And when the

brain sleeps, it's robustly having dream activity. So you can say that's a glitch, but to me, that doesn't make intuitive sense. And I have something on that thing. Is it a glitch or not? I have something at the end of this conversation, new information coming in the last five years about brain electricity at the time of death that I'd like to come back to this point to for the listener that I've explained to. Not only is it a glitch, I think it's fundamental. And I have something that might persuade you even further in that direction. That said, why do we dream? Okay, so let's say it's not a glitch.

All right. And you like the concepts there. The most romantic and the biggest theme here is that if we start with the fact that the brain is flesh, it's white flesh, right? It's flesh. There are still some governing principles that apply for your thigh muscle as they do for your brain flesh. It's not a muscle. The use it or lose it thing, right? If you don't use your arms, it atrophies. If we cover up one eye for a patient for medical purposes,

the part of the brain that's responsible for that can wither or be repurposed, right? So the brain is the ultimate use it or lose it organ. And if we only use the parts needed to get on the tube or drive the 101 in LA, by design, the waking brain wants to be efficient because it steals 20% of the blood flow of the body and it's only five, six to five kilograms. So it's an energy hog. It wants to be efficient. It evolved in a resource depleted environment. And so it wants to form habits. It wants to be efficient. It evolved in a resource depleted environment. And so it wants to form habits. It wants to get things done with just 12% of the brain, limited executive network usage, taking a stroll without having to pay attention. That is actually smart. But

if we did not have these nightly robust engagement of all the neurons and all the emotions in these dramatic scenes, I believe those capacities would wither. If we don't use those mental capacities, we would lose them, and they won't be there for our creative solutions the next day or for the next challenge our species or individuals we might face. I think dreaming by having that experience every night keeps us adaptive, keeps us creative for challenges that have yet to come. So in some ways, it's like going to the gym for our creativity muscle.

Well, it's high-intensity training for the mind. There you go. Yeah. High-intensity training for the mind. It's letting everybody in the orchestra warm up the instruments, even though the next day for the performance, there will be select instruments used by the waking brain. Well, there are examples, aren't there,

of artists or songwriters or poets having come up with ideas in their dreams, which has then informed what they've created in the day. The dreaming mind informing the waking mind, the waking mind informing the dreaming mind. That should come as no surprise to us now that we realize that it's the same brain in a 24-hour rotation

and it's burning hot and electrically sparking through both waking and dreaming. And they're just two different brain states in the same person. Okay, so back to the things that we dream about. You mentioned nightmares are pretty much universal. In children. In children. states in the same person. Okay. So back to the things that we dream about, you mentioned nightmares are pretty much universal. In children. In children. And then they fade away. And then they fade. Okay. They come and they go away in a wave. And then people will say maybe they come

back at stressful times in their lives, which I guess feeds that idea that maybe it's our way of processing something or our subconscious potentially processing something that we haven't managed to in our waking lives. So on a very grounded level, the first part of this conversation has been fantastic because I like that it's conceptual and lets people know how we're approaching it. Now at the ground level, nightmares in adults are uncommon. If they show up, I think they can serve as a psychological thermometer, if you will. The pattern of nightmares is what matters.

The occasional nightmare is not an issue, but if you start to have more and more nightmares, much like if you had more and more headaches, then I think it can be a clue to your wellbeing or your lack of wellbeing or your mental health during the day. At its boldest, nightmares in adults, they could be a warning sign of issues that people are having that they haven't even noticed or grappled with during the waking brain. They could be a warning sign, if you will.

And I have some stories about that. But that's the way to think of nightmares in adults are a psychological thermometer, not the occasional, but the consistent nuance that they call it, nuance at nightmares. Meaning you haven't had them, they show up and they persist and they're getting worse. And then PTSD nightmares are flashbacks. It's a bit of a different biological basis. That's a memory on loop that's stamped with emotion. Whereas adult nightmares of a monster are falling and you wake up. Not always, but if there is a clue, it's coming from a hyper-emotional brain state. And maybe that is the warning sign for some issues you haven't actually looked at or grappled with

that are affecting you, but not at the front of your mind. You mentioned that erotic dreams may be universal. Yeah. Again, do we have to accept that there's a bias there in the sense that we can only know that from people who have reported them? So if you are surveying a hundred people or a thousand people and they all say it, then we know that those thousand,000 people who remembered their dreams are all having some form of erotic dream. But we can't necessarily say that everyone has them. Fair.

Is that fair to say? I think it's fair to say. And I think we have to have that nuance here. When I say universal, when 90-something percent of people, not 100, say they've had erotic dreams, and nightmares even higher, I'm putting that in a universal category. And that's fair for you to say. And as you know, in medicine that,

you know, things, when they get in the nineties, because of issues with statistics and sampling, they start, that starts to feel like a hundred percent. So in our world and in this, in this context, nightmares and erotic dreams are in the 90 plus range. Teeth falling out are in the 20, 30 range. Math is in the not zero, but like very, very low range. So we have to have that flexibility. lots of public comments, but I've had loads of private DMs, direct messages with people saying, I can't really share this in public, but I'd love you to put this to Rahul if you can. And quite a lot of women sent me messages saying, I'm happily married, but I often have dreams about being intimate with other people or becoming pregnant with other people, right? Sometimes people I know, sometimes people I don't know. What does this mean? You know, I'm really happily married. I love being a mom. What does that mean? And first of all,

it's interesting that people don't feel that they can share that, which I totally understand publicly. That's an interesting point in itself. Yeah. But maybe explain that to us. How common is that? I mean, you've written a whole chapter on this, right? It's my favorite chapter because I think it leaves room for everybody. Again, I'm not the guy who comes in here and explains erotic dreams to everybody, but I do have some interesting things to say. the erotic dreams of an ex or infidelity in erotic dreams is also very, very common. And that was a survey and report that I found very interesting. Healthy relationships, healthy marriages, infidelity dreams are very common, 70, 80%. And I thought, that's interesting.

And that took me down the path of erotic dreams are sort of an embodiment of desire, meaning it's the feature of a healthy brain. It just happens to be that erotic dreams tend to be narrow. It tends to be with repellent bosses, people at work, but the characters, family, even when the people are younger, the characters are narrow sort of within the tribe. And then the acts are wild is my assessment of the dream reports about erotic dreams. The other thing that I found interesting is reported across cultures. So that's an interesting thing. And also erotic fantasies during the day tend to link with more erotic dreams than actually having a robust sex life or looking at a lot of porn. It was your fantasies, your daytime imaginations

of sex and the act that are more likely to have erotic dreams or those ideas show up in erotic dreams. Okay. So for those women, I'm sure this happens to men as well. So for those people who are in a stable relationship, yet are having these erotic dreams with other people, you say healthy brain. Healthy brain. Nothing for them to be worried about. Nothing for them to be worried about. And then for those who are in an unhealthy relationship,

dream infidelity is maybe just reflective of it and how they deal with it afterwards. But that then speaks to the whole subjective nature of how we interpret dreams, doesn't it? Within the context of your own life. Yeah. Has to be. Yeah, but also, we can't even give these Hanifas rules, can we in the sense that let's say someone is having a dream of infidelity if they've got a stable marriage and they really like their partner i think things are going great they could choose to interpret that as i've got a healthy brain i'm just exploring all things in

my mind but i'm happy in my real daytime life. Not a latent desire. Yeah. Whereas you can also interpret that very same dream completely differently if you don't feel your relationship is going well. You could say to yourself, this is a sign that I need to get out of this relationship and move on, which is very hard to study scientifically, isn't it? Because this is purely subjective. But it also, and so that's why those are surveys. So the analysis is mine, that it's a healthy brain. The fact or the survey that I'm giving people is healthy relationships are reporting infidelity dreams. Happily married people report infidelity dreams at the same amount as unhappily married people as well as single people. It seems to be a process of the human mind.

That said, a bridge in your dream and a bridge in my dream could mean very different things also. So when we get to it, dream interpretation is really about the hyper-emotional dream as something that's reminding you to reflect upon what's going on in your own life. It can't mean the same thing for different people, a bridge or infidelity or different acts. And I think the hyper-emotional brain state, whatever emotions, experiences it creates as part of the dreaming process is our portal to self-examination. That's the biggest way to think of it. It's your own brain's creation. So it has to be understood in the context of your own life. Beyond erotic dreams, that's the way to think of why dream symbols like a leaf can't be the same thing for many different people. A bridge can't be the same thing for many different people. It has to be understood

in the context of your own life. What are some other things that are common in terms of what people dream about? Other ones are showing them naked in front of a podium, alarm not going off for an exam. that i i try to conceptualize dreams those are the types of dreams that require no interpretation they're obvious you're waking intense waking light waking brain anxiety and your dreaming brain anxiety are highly intertwined the other ones are these interesting ones called um genre dreams, where your waking life experiences are so profound that you're also having them in some ways in your dreams. So end of life for some of my patients

that are at the end of their journey, they have dreams of reconciliation or these expansive dreams about their whole life, almost as if the dreams are their partner or shepherd in this complex process. That's interesting. So you do a lot of cancer surgery. So a lot of your patients at the end of their lives, so with terminal conditions, are having dreams. And are those dreams, in your experience, comforting for them? Not always, but surprisingly so.

Okay, that's interesting. interesting so it's it seems to have back to your original point where others have made about it's a therapeutic you know dreams are therapists or they're they're helping us process emotion maybe but if there was any stage where it suggests that it's uh end of life um for people've seen with cancer. And they're reported on that genre dreams. All of them? No. Are they all coping well? No. But a surprising number, the dreams are a source of comfort for them, a way to reflect back on their life. And especially it seems to happen when they're starting to make that decision to, I've had enough treatments. I'm moving towards

palliation, which is more comfort, not necessarily extending life, but the quality of life. So it's their partner. Another example would be pregnant women. They tend to have dreams of maybe a baby in the bed or naming dreams of children. So massive life events, dreams, whether in end of life or in pregnancy, tend to have a comforting, tend, right? We're just, we're giving a good, we're giving an impression here. They tend to have a positive emotional therapeutic role. And I think that's the dynamic nature of dreams. Like, that's beautiful, right? Back to erotic dreams, some very interesting facts. Erotic dreams arrive before the erotic act.

And people who've never had sex have erotic dreams. But the fact that erotic dreams arrive before the erotic act, it's an interesting orientation of events. Usually, it's use it or lose it we have this ability and then we have to cultivate it or it withers erotic dreams they arrive before we have the capacity to feel erotic touch so just want people to know when you know when when you have the capacity or you learn as in your teenage years that this feels like a caress, not just a touch. It's the same nerves in your hands and arms. You didn't grow new nerves there. Where they land in the brain, how the brain perceives it changes.

And those brain changes happen after erotic dreams arrive. happen after erotic dreams arrive? Wouldn't it be magical and wild to think that in some ways, again, erotic dreams are a cognitive maturation that leads to a cerebral maturation, leads to a bodily maturation, ultimately for procreation, right? So nightmares arrive and the kids are different. Erotic dreams arrive and then the body is different, right? There's something about that there has to be a thesis for why greater than 90% of people have nightmares and erotic dreams. And they arrive in certain waves in our development. So those two I leave as very sort of theoretical wonderful things to explore

falling is also common isn't it what do you think falling symbolizes i'm not sure i think it's falling being chased some people have said oh this is the threat rehearsal feature of the brain i welcome all ideas if you're falling in your dreams it scares you maybe you're less likely to walk next to an edge and fall off who knows maybe that's a cognitive inheritance from our ancestors um but what they those are common dreams so people's being chased people feeling the anxiety of being naked people falling are convergent like an evolution convergent features of the human mind when there's waking anxiety. And to me, that suggests that the dreaming process is not a glitch, that it goes through certain experiences that we have in common that have been reported from

when people were on a horse and carriage all the way to an electric car. Right? And they happen later in life. People who've never actually been stressed out with a school exam might have it later on in life when they're stressed out about something else. Yeah. And it's interesting to think about this, that I would have thought that you can only dream about things maybe that you can somehow... Address? Well, maybe have experienced but

then you're saying with erotic dreams that's not the case you can in advance of the event so it gets even more complex but i guess the wider point as we delve into the interpretation of dreams and i was thinking about this when i was reading all the comments for people saying what does this mean what does this mean what does this mean and there were some patterns of course it's great to look at the science of what's happening in the brain, what's happening with electrical activity. But so much of dreaming is internal that maybe science will never fully understand, or at least to me. And given that we know from science how important our mind is, how we think, how we perceive things,

then maybe one of the powerful lessons is, look, dreams serve a role. They're there for a reason, right? Pay attention to them, particularly the big vivid ones. I agree. And if you can then start to assign meaning in a way that it helps you, perhaps the onus is on us to spend time with ourselves, journaling, thinking, writing down, whatever it might be, to come up with the meaning that works best for us. Right. What I'm telling you is nobody else can tell you what this means. It has to come from you. Your brain conjured it.

It has to be interpreted by you. You can't go to a dream dictionary and say that this means the same thing. There are patterns and we're exploring the science to really get you to the point that this is a built-in process. This is not a glitch. It's a built-in personalized process that your brain goes through every night. If you have the opportunity to dream more through auto-suggestion, if you have the opportunity to remember more of your dreams in the morning by not quickly waking up and trying to remember your dreams, which people report they can, you have given yourself access to your own mind during a state of hyper emotion that you don't have during the day, that's a rare window to yourself that you can't get by turning outward. And that dreaming should be a priority in our lives, particularly when we fall asleep and when we wake up, sleep entry and sleep exit, and that this is afforded to us and it's free and it's possible. Not every time,

not for everyone, but it shouldn't be neglected neglected it's quite the opposite of the glitch it's it's the rarest glimp into your into yourself do you think everyone dreams the electricity and the metabolic activity suggests something wild is happening some people will say that i don't remember my dreams. So even if I take myself and my wife, for example, I do dream, I would say quite rarely because I remember them rarely. And I'm saying rare compared to my wife, who seems to have lots of vivid dreams and will share what they are

and can remember them in seemingly quite a lot of detail. Now, I don't think relative to her experience, I remember them in the same detail as she seems to. So that's all I can compare it with. So you think that the brain science is suggesting that everybody dreams whether they can remember those dreams or not? I think so. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think so. The brain science doesn't suggest. The brain science shows that your brain is burning hot.

And the people who remember vivid dreams and the people who don't remember the dreams much at all. Still burning hot. It's still burning hot and electricity still sparking. People can make from that what they want. What I'm saying is even for people who don't remember their dreams in the morning, the dreaming process is still serving you at night, serving your brain at night to have those divergent thoughts, to have those experiences, those awkward emotional situations, that social dynamic interplay. awkward emotional situations, that social dynamic interplay. And part of the reason we don't remember them, I believe, is to avoid dreaming life and waking life confusion, which some people can develop in rare cases. So our autobiographical memory by design kicks in in the morning and stitches the waking brain memory throughout our life

to keep it distinct from our dream life memory. But just because we don't remember it, trying to remember you can remember more and it's a portal to self-examination, right? That's what dream interpretation really is about. But it's still serving some housekeeping role whether you remember it or not. And the example I would give to you is

if you run in your dreams, whether you remember it or not, those same motor neurons are firing. It's just your body's not reacting. If you feel hurt in your dreams, it's still the same experience as being heartbroken during the day. It's just that your body is or isn't reacting. So those neurons are still flaring up.

Well, some people can actually wake up, and this is some of the questions, they can wake up feeling exhausted after a really vivid dream, which kind of makes sense if we look at brain metabolic activity. Well, the experience at the level of the brain, it happened. The question I've written down from Instagram was, can you wake up exhausted from a dream? And you would say, the people report vivid dreaming so much, something called epic dreams that they actually are fatigued by it. So when we're, you know, what I'm thinking about here is, as doctors, one of the most common things that come into us, maybe not as a neurosurgeon, but certainly in more general medicine would be

fatigue. And of course, there are a number of things on the differential diagnosis when a patient presents with fatigue, some more serious, some not so serious. But I don't think on my differential in the past, I ever put excessive dreaming or vivid dreaming. That's what it's called. It's called epic slash excessive dreaming. Even if EPI is epic dreaming. It's a misnomer, but these are what I call unicorns.

Just to know that that exists opens our mind. But these are what I call unicorns. Just to know that that exists opens our mind. That dreaming also in a certain way can leave people exhausted. Dreaming, some people wake up in the middle of their dreams, yet they're still dreaming. Some people say they don't remember their dreams and other people have vivid dreams. That variety I think is important. It's the dreaming process. It's a liberated state of mind

that's hyper emotional and hyper visual. And what it creates is very personal. But the process is going. The neurons are, that's how you get that electricity, those sparks. That's how you get all that glucose usage because the neurons are using it.

As you're being chased, the neurons in your brain versus being chased in real life, it's having the same experience. What do you think alcohol does to our ability to dream? I'm not sure. So this is a good question. So one thing notably absent from the book is the effect of drugs on dreaming. It was just so broad. So from my patients waking up from anesthesia, from antidepressants, from other drugs, I just couldn't find a pattern that said, you know, maybe I found that, you know, marijuana led to even less dream recall, but I couldn't find,

of course drugs change REM sleep, but there was a lot of information, but I couldn't find a story that I could use to sort of explain the role of drugs on dreaming. The point though is they absolutely have an effect on dreaming. It's biological, So drugs affect it. Alcohol reduces REM sleep, right? So, and REM sleep is where we have all these vivid dreams. Well, hold on.

Let's just clarify that for a minute. It's been said that dreaming only occurs during REM sleep. What's your take on that? The best way to think of it is when you go from waking brain to sleep slash dreaming brain, there's a period called sleep entry. And then on the other end, there's a period called sleep exit. When you're waking people up,

you can have different times during the night where people have report more dreaming, more vivid dreaming. But now dreams are being reported from the seconds you are falling asleep throughout the night, different types of dream all the way. Even when you're not in REM sleep. Correct. Correct. And I was pleasantly surprised by that. So that's where the bold statement comes in that theoretically we could be dreaming one third of our lives because we're sleep one third

of our lives roughly. So being woken up in different stages, people are reporting dreams. I've often wondered why alcohol is such a depressant for people. People can feel depressed the day after and regular alcohol drinkers can often- Disrupt their sleep. Yeah, and I think there's many potential

biological explanations for that. But one of them, I think, or at least a contributing factor- Disrupt disruptive rem sleep again the part of sleep which is our emotional first aid as it were it kind of makes sense if you're missing that key part during your sleep cycle there's going to be a consequence the following day. And interestingly, patients who are depressed, they go a day, the first night of skipping sleep, their mood improves. So then the thought is, maybe the emotional therapist or the REM sleep or the nocturnal therapist is altered. Maybe depression is a failure of dreams

to have their therapeutic benefit. These are all theoretical statements. I think Matt Walker mentioned that. But again, I would welcome people to bring their opinions in. But the measurement is people with depression, they skip sleep, they feel better just that first day.

That's not a treatment, but that's an interesting measurement. People who are alcoholic or they ingest too much alcohol and they don't sleep well or sleep long enough, they don't feel well. What could it be from? I think it could be from a lot of different things. What is this idea that you talk about that dreams are stimulus independent? What does that mean? stimulus independence. What does that mean? Stimulus independence. So the big thing, the big thought is on planet earth, things self-organize. What do you mean by that? Meaning termite mounds form, crystals form,

cells coalesce, they come together. In my laboratory, if I put one neuron dissected out in a Petri dish, floating in some fluid, it's nothing. But if I start putting a few in there, they come together. Without you doing anything. Without me nudging them. They coalesce and then they start sparking electricity towards each other. Stimulus independent neuronal activity. towards each other. Stimulus independent neuronal activity. Now take those two or three neurons and make them 100 billion in our skulls, right? Dreams kick in without us asking. Dreams are stimulus independent brain activity. And that's where I try to do in the book is

explain why we don't have to ask to dream. We must dream. We don't ask to sleep. Sleep demands itself. And that these are not things we have to kick up. They're things that must occur. But you can see that at the level of individual neurons in a Petri dish to help people understand what it means to be stimulus independent, meaning without poking and prodding, this will happen. Without poking or prodding, brain electricity will spark. Yeah. Wow. Powerful, isn't it? Yeah. And thank you for indulging that because that's where I'm trying to take it from erotic dreams and surveys to portal to yourself, which is a more philosophical point to neurons in a petri dish

i've tried to give it that broad look to come up with with insights here i mean humans have always tried to explain dreams and there are you've probably come across thousands of different explanations i i once heard i can't remember which culture this was talking about dreaming as the language of the spirit, which I found fascinating. There are, I think from, is it Native American tribes talk about dream catchers that you put above your children's bed?

We did that for our child. I think we were given it by my wife's parents. They'd come back, I think from America. It was a gift. And I think the goal was that you, it catches the negative dreams so they don't go into the child again which i find it's interesting isn't it how we try and explain these things as a scientist what i say

is i see clearly why those ideas arose because the point that we're making over and over again how could you have such a wild night wild journey when you're lying there asleep and things look like they're cooling off. Yeah. Sleeping body, sleeping brain, nothing's going on. The thought was the brain was inactive flesh. Yeah. While you're sleeping, yeah, you went to the wildest places. So surely that had to come from something external, gods, spirits, omens. It made sense till about a hundred years ago when somebody, Dr. Berger, put stickers on somebody's scalp and said, oh, wait, there's electricity during the day. And then somebody looked when that person was asleep and it was missed for a short while, but there was still electricity at night. And so until recently, just the question, where do dreams come from? That's only 50, 80, 100 years that we've become confident through those measurements and through something called awake brain surgery where you tickle the surface of the brain and a recurrent nightmare can happen to the patient. Only now with confidence do we say dreams come from the brain.

dreams come from the brain but until we understood that at night while we sleep your brain is burning hot and sparking a lot of electricity it didn't make sense that inactive sleeping brain hibernating uh cooled off brain would be the source or the origin of these wild experiences so they had to be attributed to something else i don't think it have to be mutually exclusive, you know. If we cover some more of the questions that came in, quite a few people have asked about whether you can train yourself to start remembering your dreams. And a couple of times in this conversation, you mentioned the term auto-suggestion. What is auto-suggestion?

Auto-suggestion is people are reporting consistently before they go to bed that they say that, I will dream, I will try to dream, I will try to remember my dream. They coach themselves before they enter this nightly dreaming process. And when they wake up over time, they start to remember their dreams more and more.

So you're priming the brain in the 15 minutes or so before bed. You're directing it as to what you want. You're the architect, right? You're the driver of the car. You're not at night. The car's moving. You ain't driving it. Well, you are driving it, but you're not in control. That's your analogy. Yeah, I think that's a fair one. But maybe you're setting the landscape a little bit to where you're going to run wild, but you're not in control. That's your analogy. Yeah, I think that's a fair one. But maybe you're setting the landscape a little bit to where you're going to run wild with what you're doing the 15 minutes

while you're falling asleep. That you're incubating and feeding things that may pop up in your dream life a bit more. That extends beyond dreams, I think. Many people have spoken about this idea that what you want to process and think about, you know, intentionally put that into your mind before you go to sleep, whether it's related to dreaming or not. It's quite a powerful idea, isn't it? visualizing sports can improve sports performance because you're rehearsing those neurons. And I think that whether you remember it or not, if you're dreaming of sports, then those neurons go off. There is some benefit there. And there's people who suggest that athletes have more of

those types of dreams. Similarly down here, the power of belief, which was a chapter of my last book, is fundamental. Now, I don't know about your other authors and how people have approached it, but placebo is the power of belief, but it has a scientific measurable basis. Placebo is not gonna fix a broken leg, but when it comes to matters of the mind

and feeling pain, feeling wellness, these things, placebos work because belief releases a lot of things from the pharmacy of your own mind. Belief can activate electricity in your mind. Belief can release neurotransmitters in your mind. Belief can release neurotransmitters in your mind. I think the science of placebo overlaps with the science of auto-suggestion and positive thinking. That belief releases something. It's not just some ether in your mind. It's not just some figment of your imagination. That you actually create a process of neurotransmitter release by believing this pill will help me, even though you know there's nothing in it. It's a sugar pill.

Thought can release neurotransmitters. Thought can release chemicals in your brain. Thought can release neurotrophic factors like BDNF. Thought can actually generate more electricity. And stay with me. Thought can actually change the actual structure of the brain that it comes from. And that this called activity dependent myelination

using simpler terms, habits and thought, whether good thoughts or bad thoughts, when the brain tries to be more efficient and it's sending those electrical charges down the axons, when your brain starts to use the same neuronal flows to tie your shoelaces or ride your bike or go on that walk, the neurons at that area, they wrap more of this myelin. It's a fatty sheath around the tentacles, which are called axons, to improve the speed of conduction electricity,

as well as use fewer resources. So thought is powerful. Thought changes the brain. Thought can release chemicals that are housed, ready to deploy in the brain. But a big but from this, for certain things, thought's not going to fix a broken leg. It only works for things related to the mind. And here it is, the biggest adventure the mind goes on is dreaming. So I do believe there is some science to support conceptually that auto-suggestion before you fall asleep can incubate, feed the dreaming process. Not reliably even, but you got a shot at it. And then on the other end, waking up slowly,

not grabbing your phone and letting the executive network kick in too rapidly, that the residue of your dreams, people report remembering their dreams more. And in a, in a specific example, I was talking to the publishing team. They're like, everybody working on this project just coming into the office saying, man, I'm dreaming more, man, I'm remembering my dreams more. And these, these are rigorous publishing types who read a lot of books. Right. And think about the effect it had on the office. Yeah. And these are rigorous publishing types who read a lot of books, right? And think about the effect it had on the office. And so I love that as a ground example of, yes, I do believe this is possible. So in terms of something practical for people to help them perhaps start

remembering more of their dreams, I guess you could call this feeding your dreams. The time before bed, what were you saying? 15, 20 minutes? I know there's no trial on this, but what are you recommending for people? So what Salvador Dali used to do for creative processes, he felt like it was last 10, 15 minutes before he- Before he goes to sleep, the final 10, 15 minutes.

Yeah, the transition, the hybrid state from waking brain to dreaming brain. Christopher Nolan talks about inception. Edison mentioned it. Just right when he's about to fall asleep, the thoughts that he's having at that time are interesting. And the thoughts he wants to dream about, he would try to have them at that moment. So that's sort of your portal to extract and introduce. But you can't know the exact moment that's going to happen.

So it's a ritual you create. Yeah. For those who have the luxury of a bed and the time to do that, right? Because it's not excess that you can't always have that calm quiet moment. But it's a ritual in my life for a complex operation to run through the images. You know, I flip through the images and I really think about like the branching arteries of the brain. So you do that the night before an operation, a visualization type technique. And I've done this for a long time. I wrote about it in the first book. And this was interesting. Somebody interviewed me.

He's like, do you ever dream of the operation? I was like, never. But I do dream of scuba diving or walking through forests and stuff like that. And then somebody else, this was somebody from the Times, he picked up on that. He's like, again, that fits. It's a metaphorical, symbolic, visual-spatial navigation because you're working on a visual-spatial project the next day. And I like that. That's not science, but there's some connection there that I think is real.

I love that. I circled before about this whole idea about creativity. Because you made a very powerful case that dreaming helps us be more creative, which kind of makes sense. We are going on these wild journeys and exercising our creativity muscle when we're asleep. But there's another component as well, isn't there, which really speaks to this idea of the mind and perception and interpretation. So number one, I can see why dreaming helps creativity in a direct fashion. But secondly, if we start to pay attention to our dreams and we get creative with how we interpret them

using these metaphors, that's also kind of feeding creativity, isn't it? So I think it works on both of those levels. I agree with you. creativity, isn't it? So I think it works on both of those levels. I agree with you. I just think, first of all, it's great because we're talking about science, we're talking about surveys, we're setting some, we're leaving a lot of room for people to get what they can from this. And what I would say is just at a common sense level for me,

when I have a good idea during the day, it's not because I'm on my fifth espresso and just trying to push through the problem. It almost arrives to me when I'm slightly distracted. Yeah. Right? Exactly. And it's hard for me to think

that the extremely imaginative and liberated six, seven hours I'm spending every night are in some ways not contributing to my aha moments during the day. They're not arriving from the heavens. I think the dreaming process is feeding my solutions and creativity during the day. And that's my hunch that just like you, for poetry, you have to have divergent creative thinking and then executive function to evaluate what you've thought of. Is it a good idea or is it just an idea, right? I feel like the 24 hours in my brain does the same thing, as you were mentioning, or this book, you know, like there's all this task on thinking about the world during the day. I mean, these are conceptual conversations. These are my,

these are my opinions, but task on during the day. And then at night, you know, it's divergent thinking and they're both feeding each other. The problems of my day, the complex operations or the creative, the idea generation.

Now that I'm, that is a part of my career. I'm thinking about it during the day. Then I go to bed and then my dreaming brain has a chance at it. It's playing with it in whichever way, whichever degree. And then the next day starts in my dream. My waking brain is again on those problems, but there has been some contribution from the seven hours of sparking electricity and metabolic activity.

I can't prove to you through a test, but doesn't that make intuitive sense that the seven hours of dreaming are not separate, right? It's my life being played out with the waking brain and dreaming brain. And my waking life is feeding my dreaming brain and my dreaming life is feeding my waking brain and my dreaming life is feeding my waking brain it's 24 hours in my head so is this something you've changed since doing this research and

writing the book what you do before bed to try and auto suggest the dreams that you're going to have is that something you've changed because you've also spoken about the first five ten minutes of the morning as well right the kind of as you're going into sleep and as you're coming out of it in the morning, if we want to train ourselves to remember more of our dreams, we need to pay attention to the morning as well. Right. So the habit of thinking about things when I, during sleep entry, waking brain to dreaming brain, let's give it a title, sleep entry, five, 10, 15 minutes. The electrical activity shows both sort of a hybrid state of waking and dreaming a little bit. That's there. But on that though, if you are in your bed on Instagram consuming other people's content in this... That's the right question. Are you feeding that into your head? Yeah. It's like,

what are you feeding just before you go to bed? The only comment I can make that it's a very good point. Also, by being always on a task, you're not letting your imagination network have a chance to play or warm up. These are conceptual things. But what I will say is the erotic dreams that tend to be about the narrow characters in your life and celebrities fit into that. So maybe we see them as family or within our tribe.

For now, social media celebrities have not, there's one study that said social media celebrities are not popping up in erotic dreams. So I don't have a specific example or answer for the role of social media and dreaming, but oh, that's gonna be great to look at over the next 10, 20, 30 years, right? As we get a lot more track record in it.

Sleep entry, I've been doing for a while. Then I found the science that showed it was interesting. People should look that up. Salva Derdali, Edison. So that's what we're talking about. That's what we're talking about. 10, 15 minutes before bed. Okay, and then?

And auto-suggestion and incubating and feeding creativity all fit together. So could that even be writing things down, saying I want to dream about this topic? That's what people suggest. and feeding creativity all fit together. So could that even be writing things down saying, I want to dream about this topic? That's what people suggest. So you're literally feeding that intention. Okay, so that's where the practical...

Imperfectly, but you can influence your dreams. That makes sense. When you understand the power of the mind, that completely makes sense. And then, so when you wake up... And that's very interesting. So that's a new thing that I've been doing. And lucid dreaming fits into that a little bit, but

the sleep exit is also not a crisp process. It doesn't happen a millisecond. It's also sort of a hybrid state. And what's happening is your adrenaline is coming back in. Serotonin is coming back in. Your brainin is coming back in, your brain is switching to waking brain, right? It's gone from dreaming brain and now it's coming to waking brain. And during that time, the switch isn't crisp. So if you have the luxury of bed in a time

and not setting alarm, trying to linger, slowly wake up and people report not opening their eyes immediately, not reaching for something immediately. I, as a habit, don't check my email or social media first. I go to my notes app. I jot down a few thoughts I've had and then I leave it. And then I look at it the next day. I have a whole notes sheet on one of my apps. It was just sort of like morning thoughts.

thoughts. And I've created this process of coming to rise slowly or sometimes waking up a little bit earlier than I plan on and trying to drift back into sleep, trying to ride those sort of hybrid liminal states. And when I have good ideas, they tend to be at that time because you're, again, it's trying to remember your dreams works if you give yourself that time in the morning during sleep exit. You can't say, I want to remember my dreams. And then, I mean, we all have to set alarms. But if alarm goes off and you're on your phone, the baby's crying, that's not necessarily a time that you can fully use that process. It kind of speaks to this idea though, that that time when we've just woken up is quite a powerful time. There are possibly insights there about our dreams or about other things in our life that can happen there if you, again, have the luxury of doing so and you give

yourself a bit of time and space there, which of course not everyone can do. And I know myself when I can be quite disciplined on what I do first thing in the morning and when it's not receiving inputs from the outside, news, social media, when I'm just left with myself, things come up. Sometimes great ideas I'm writing, I'm writing my next book at the moment, almost finished it. And a lot of the insights come then if you allow that space. But you almost, to me at least, by going on Instagram or the news at that time, you almost close that window. You absolutely do. Because to go on that means you've brought the executive network back on even faster.

So you've lost that little magical window and you may not get it back until later. And the science is executive network is going to come up, right? It's going to take a dominant role. Once that's on, it will take a dominant role. Because it's the waking brain. You want the waking brain to come on as slow as possible, so you have the longest window to hold on to the residue and thoughts of your dreaming brain. Let's go through a few of these questions.

Quick fire if we can. I think we've covered most of the themes that people asked about. Here's one. Do recurrent dreams have more significance? Not more significance, but they have a very well-established neurobiological basis. They're neuronal loops. They're electrical flows like dominoes that get taken over within almost like seizures.

And so during awake brain surgery, if we tickle the surface of the brain, some of my patients said, oh, this is a nightmare I've had since I was a kid. So the meaning I think is not there if I were to be so bold to say, I don't think it's about meaning, but it's an electrical

activity that's stuck on loop in your brain, much like a flashback. Does stress decrease your ability to have dreams? I don't know. I mean, I think stress shows up more in your dreams if I were to lean it more likely to dream with stress and different types of dreams as we've discussed. more likely to dream with stress and different types of dreams, as we've discussed. Is it unusual to dream in color? No, it's common, especially when, and it was when color TV arose and color magazines, the dream reports, they call them technicolor dreams

that more and more and a lot more people are saying, I'm dreaming in color now, even though life was in color. Exactly, that's the crazy thing. Life was already in color, right? That's a survey that I offer you with the references in the book and the interpretation is ours. What does it mean to dream about my father who died six years ago?

That's interesting, I was speaking with somebody about grief and at least in my own experiences and others that I know, it tends to be that the loved one who's passed away, they arrive in parallel to the way you're mourning. Like in the beginning, they tend to be painful memories, difficult memories. And as people grieve and move on, then memories arrive that are more routine or even mundane really they just become features of their lives and their dreamscape so again depends on which stage you are with the loss of your father was it recent was it something you're struggling with or was it a long time ago and now they're just a memory that pops up and again the meaning is subjective really isn't it

it's very hard more than subjective the meaning is. But we've got the agency to put the meaning that we want onto these dreams, don't we? And that's the power of reflecting on your dreams. Yeah. That the process itself is self-exploration, right? What is therapy but guided introspection? Well, dreams are your best therapist. Yeah. I love that. Can certain types of dreams signal mental disorders or imbalanced brain chemistry? There is a unicorn that proves dreams can predict the future. There's one case, it's a medical scenario. It's called, and people can look this up, it's called REM behavior disorder, which I prefer to call dream enactment behavior.

Greater than 90 something percent of men in their 50s, if they act out their dreams, 10, 15 years later, they'll develop Parkinson's. So abnormal dreaming is the first warning sign of a brain degeneration that will happen 15 years later. And that's called REM behavior disorder. People can look that up. So in that way, dreams do predict the future, the future neurological deterioration of the human brain. That's powerful.

So perhaps there may be some scope for early intervention at some point in the future. Sure. But just as a concept, in one example, dreams are your warning flare for disease that's going to come 15 years later, quite a bit later. So whether that extends to anything else, I just love the fact that there is one example. I mean, to continue that theme, some people will say that they've had premonitions

in their dreams, they've dreamt about something. Pre-cognitive dreams, yeah. That has then come true. What's your take on that? I've not seen any evidence that dreams can predict future events, even though that is the feeling that many people had when inactive flesh had brilliant nightly adventures. They thought, well, surely this is from the gods, from the heavens,

and maybe there were messages that predicted the future. I totally get that. I would have thought that. Right now, I don't see any evidence for that. But there is one case where a certain type of dream predicts the future deterioration of the brain, not the future lottery numbers or the future lover you may encounter. Does eating certain foods stimulate odd dreams? And this particular person said when he has Chinese food, he gets particularly bizarre dreams. I'm sure you do. And that's happening. I just didn't find any evidence. Historically, there's been mention of from cheese and different things. People say they steer dreams a certain way. Maybe. I just, I can't find

a pattern or a science to support that. You mentioned the term lucid dreaming a couple of times. I don't think we've got time to go into it in detail. There are two whole chapters on lucid dreaming in your book, but could you just explain what it is and should we be worried if we experience it? It seems like most people are delighted. So lucid dreaming, so we talked about sleep entry

and we talked about sleep exit. Lucid dreaming is the return of awareness of being in the dream during the middle of sleep. So most people, it's on the back end, you look back and say, oh, that was just a dream. Lucid dreaming is, oh, I'm in a dream and it's happening while being in the dream. So there's a return of awareness of the dream for the dreamer. And I thought this was going to be something on the fringe, but there's a lot of robust evidence

for lucid dreaming. Just briefly, a third of people seemed, roughly a third of people seemed to lucid dream. It is inducible. There are techniques for it. There's a way to prove you're lucid dreaming in sleep laboratories with controlled eye movements, not random eye movements, but the opposite, controlled movements to prove that you've entered a lucid dream.

I was surprised. There's a drug, galantamine, that increases lucid dreaming. And if you take a higher dose, there's more lucid dreaming. So it's a dose dependent escalation, which is proof of causality in pharmacology. And lastly, those brain scans show

a little bit of that executive network coming back online, if you will, casual phrase there, in people who have a return of lucidity while they're dreaming. So robust science on lucid dreaming. Actually, the most robust dream science, if there is such a thing, is on lucid dreaming. So it ended up being two chapters out of nine. And can some people, once they've got a little bit of awareness

that they are in a dream, can they take that next step and start to influence what actually happens in their dream? That's what they report. They take control of that steering wheel of that car we were talking about. They're in the driver's seat and now they can steer it. But they are reporting that. So they become the director of the movie at that point. A bit, yeah. And I don't know how to prove that.

So I trust them, but I will leave it at that. And then athletes tend to have more lucid dreaming. People who do a lot of visual spatial tasks have naturally have more lucid dreaming. But I think it points to the fact that we have hybrid states. We've started with waking brain and dreaming brain, then we add a little sleep entry,

we add a little sleep exit, right? In the middle, we're putting lucid dreaming, which is a hybrid state of awake within a dream. And then during our day, we add a little mind wandering. So we're not just so much. And then, you know what? But that makes sense to me. Whether in a Petri dish

or the way our bodies function or in nature, things aren't on off. They're not wired. They're always strange flows and states and hybrid states and liminal states. And understanding the mind through dreaming

has really opened my eyes to that. Well, talking about strange flows, let's close down this conversation with something that we opened it with. This idea that the reason we sleep is so that our brain can dream. It's really, really powerful. It's been a theme throughout this entire conversation and you hinted at something that happens at the end of life, which makes you even more convinced that dreaming is really, really powerful. So perhaps it'd be a good one to close on. Yeah. How the brain dies is powerful and it really has affected me because there's a measurement that shows something very dramatic. So what I'm about to share with you is that there are patients who are passing away and they have the sticker, tying it all together, right? The stickers are on the heart. You have an EKG read. Typically we used to think of death as flatline, meaning that there's no signal coming from the heart,

no electrical signal. And some of these patients now as EEGs, those brain surface, skull surface electrodes are a lot more common now. That's giving a readout. So you have electrical activity from the brain and you have electrical activity from the heart. So the patient's alive, the patient's alive. And at that time, and you have electrical activity from the heart so the patient's alive

the patient's alive and at that time you can get electrical activity from the heart and from the brain and then they have a heart attack then they have a heart attack and they've left instructions that they don't want to be paddled and zapped and resuscitated dnr do not resuscitate when you look at the monitor and the brain is uh at, and the heart has now stopped and it's a flat line, the brain electricity is still going. So the first minute or two, few minutes after cardiac death, the brain electricity is not just going, there's a massive explosion of activity, is not just going. There's a massive explosion of activity, similar to dreaming brainwaves, similar to expansive memory brainwaves, that the first few minutes after our hearts stop beating,

where historically we've thought this is the time of death, the brain is having its final moment, maybe its best moment, a massive release of neurotransmitters. The brain is not going out in a whimper. It's going out in an explosion of activity. And that by itself shows us that we should be holding that loved one's hand longer than we have been. And then for me, it starts to explain things like near death experiences that in patients who have been brought back, maybe this explains why they say they had memories of their whole life, like a film strip play in their mind, that the brain is a salvo of electrical and chemical activity is the way it says goodbye.

And to me that those brainwaves look a bit like dreaming brainwaves, that maybe death, maybe brain death in itself is our is the one last massive dream points to me feeling like dreaming is not a glitch like i'm tingling all over my body that is and i'll send you the references for that and look up the guardian had an article about this this is a massive thing that's coming down the field um some nurses say, don't they, that they will continue speaking to patients. Then they've been right all along. After cardiac death so that they know they're not alone.

Yeah. And that's interesting that I want people to know that when, for when I did transplant surgery with them, the heart, it flutters, it whimpers. It's a decremental activity. The liver is decremental but the brain and this is how it really goes down is the heart squeezes one last time and then the the last ejection of blood goes preferentially to the carotids in the neck and not so much to the body because the artery shut down in a certain way, much like in trauma. And so that last squeeze of blood lands to the brain.

The heart is stopped, but that blood is carrying glucose that keeps the neurons still sufficiently powered for a minute or two. And what does the brain do at that moment? It fires everything in its arsenal and gives you your biggest dream yet. It's just making me think back to- And I'll send you the link to put on your website so people see like, that's not, that's a measurement. That's a beautiful thing to say right there.

That's a measurement. I'll let people interpret that the way they want. Well, where my mind goes to is just over 11 years ago when my dad died, I was with him at the time of death. I was with him for hours beforehand. I was with him along with my mom. When dad died, we were both holding his hands. And I can't remember honestly what happened

in the immediate moments after cardiac death, but we were there. I imagine I was crying. I don't know. But it's interesting to think now, actually, what was going on with dad? What was going on? Did he know? Was he experiencing like his whole life playing? You know, what was going on is you're saying, we know that there's electrical activity. so something's going on. Just as we can't explain it yet doesn't mean that it's not powerful. And I think the door that that opens as to the purpose of our brain, the purpose of dreaming, what this electrical activity being measured in the brain, what it actually means is truly profound. I think so. Thank you. You've captured it well.

For me, it's also comforting as a cancer surgeon to occasionally start to share this story with my patients that not only is there a genius built in every night for us with the dreaming brain that keeps us adaptive and creative and adventurous and open-minded that in your final moments a dream-like robust activity will be there for you to comfort you and to celebrate the life you've lived like to be able to have that interaction built off of a measurement

it's been a wonderful addition to my practice and my engagement with my patients as well as just once again, a sort of rebirth that I'm just starting to look at the brain, the mind, humanity, behavior, art, all through the lens of the dreaming brain. I have so enjoyed our conversation, a journey through neuroscience,

neurochemistry, magic, mystery. This is why you dream, what your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. It's a fantastic book. Rahul, thanks for coming back on the show. Thank you, brother. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away

and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice,

how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday Five. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, eBooks, and as audio books, which I am narrating.

If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.