HealthyGamerGG - My Partner Cheated in their Dream! What do I do?

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Dr. K dives into the world of dreams and if what you do in them means something! He talks about what they are, the subconscious, different perspectives, and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And all the negativity that I experience in dreams is like feels 100% real. Like I'm so terrified. You'll wake up in a cold sweat and just terrified, terrified, terrified, terrified. Girlfriend keeps giving me crap for cheating on her in her dreams. My girlfriend has been dreaming a lot about me cheating on her or treating her badly in her dreams. This has happened around seven times already and I keep on waking up to her angry messages about how I treat her in her dreams. I always apologized for it even though I did nothing wrong. and have made sure to assure her that I would never do those things in real life.

But today was the last straw. I woke up to her being very pissed at me, and I decided that I would not apologize this time, because it's honestly not my fault. And I've done all I can to assure her. Now she wants to break up because I was being too aggressive towards her and her insecurities. This sounds kind of frustrating. So this is where, you know, we can go a couple different routes.

So let's kind of start with the relationship route. You know, if you're having an argument with someone who has a belief that you think is unreasonable, like, you cheated on me in my dreams, therefore you need to apologize. I think a good way to have that conversation is to ask open-ended questions about, help me understand what I need to apologize for. Well, you cheated on me in my dream. You'd ask questions. Like, am I responsible for the behavior that you're,

that your mind, is that me? Like, is that actually me? And like, can I control what I do in your dreams? It just ask simple questions like that. Like, you know, I really start with just open-ended questions. Like, help me understand what I did that was wrong. You know, and that's where sometimes you can, you know, sort of disagree that, like, I don't know how to control my behavior in your dreams. Like, I don't know how to do that. Right? And this is the kind of thing where you've got to be careful because when you first started apologizing for it, you sort of took responsibility for it. Right.

Does that make sense? It's kind of weird. But like when you say like, oh yeah, I'm sorry for things that are outside of my control, you set up a expectation for the future. So this is where we've got to be really careful in relationships about what kinds of behaviors we reinforce. course. Because if you apologize for it five times, then it's sort of like understandable why someone may get upset because you've set an expectation. Both of you all have agreed that this is your fault and you've said, okay, a few times. Right. So there's like that whole angle of the relationship stuff. But what I really want to focus on today is the dreaming part. Right. So then like

this sort of question of like, why does the girlfriend keep dreaming about this person cheating on them. And so like what's going on with dreams? Like what do we know about dreams? So I'd love to talk to you all today a little bit about dreams and what we know about dreams and also what we don't know about dreams. So what we're going to do today is talk a little bit about I'm just going to share my experience in learning about dreams and sort of different perspectives that I have. We're going to touch a little bit on sort of like hard science. We're going to touch a little bit more on like soft science and different theories. We're going to touch a little bit on psychotherapy and a little bit on spirituality. So the first thing to understand about dreams, we're going to start with science. The first

thing to understand about dreams is that we don't really know what they are and we don't really have great ways of studying them. So what do I mean by that? So if we think about neuroscience, a lot of what we know about neuroscience is originally developed through animal models. Okay? So what we'll sort of do is if we want to figure out like how a neuron works, for example, the earliest studies on neurons used, I believe, squid neurons. So squid neurons are like super, super long. And so they're quite large as well. So like we will study like the brain through animals, right? So if we want to understand how the occipital lobe, how the eyes work, how the visual cortex works, we'll sort like study animals because in the case of an animal you can actually like dissect the animal you can look at

the brain you can do kinds of invasive research on animals that we can learn things about scientifically the challenge with dreams is that we don't have a clear way of like inferring what the animal animals dreams are right so we can't we can sort of measure visual stimuli in animals we can measure things like, you know, fear responses. We can measure rudimentary functions of the brain. But when it comes to something as nuanced as a dream, we can't really ask animals like what they're dreaming about. So that's like there's kind of a disconnect there because some of the major tools that we use to learn about stuff neuroscientifically, we can't really use animals very well to study dreams. So what we're left with is humans. And the problem with humans is we can ask them, okay, what did you

dream about. So we can actually get that kind of data. We can get the subjective data from humans. The problem is that we can't get the objective data from humans. So studies like fMRI, which study blood flow to different parts of the brain, EEG, electroencephalogram, which study electrical activity across the brain, these tend to be imprecise neuroscientific tools. So we can't open up someone's brain and sort of like operate on that minute level, right? Where we can sort of do that with animals. So the first thing to understand about research into dreams is that we're sort of fundamentally handicapped in a way that we're not with many other parts of studying the brain or other phenomenon that are neurological in nature.

That being said, we can do some kinds of research, and so we'll share with you kind of what we know about dreams. The first thing is that no one has been able to figure out why we dream from a scientific basis. So we don't really know exactly what purpose they serve. There are case reports of people, for example, who have injuries, who are. stop being able to dream, and they seem to be doing okay for the most part. Once again, they had brain damage, so it's hard to tell exactly what's caused by what. But no one really knows

exactly why we dream. Second thing that we sort of know is, this is really interesting, is that you dream in, your dreams are based in your experiences in real life in some way. So, for example, if you take a blind person, when they dream, they're not able to see. So they're, they're dreams, they can still dream, but their dreams are composed of smells, touches, tastes, sounds. So if you lack a particular sense and your brain has never sort of experienced a particular sense, you can't dream in that sense. That's kind of interesting, right? Next thing that we know about dream is that the most common subjective experience in dreams is that most dreams tend to be filled with some kind of emotional content. So the most common emotion that people experience

in dreams is anxiety. society. Negative emotions tend to be more common than positive emotions, but people can feel a full range of emotions. And then we also know from like phenomenologic studies that dreams tend to be kind of bizarre and exaggerated. So they tend to be like pieces of reality that get stitched together in nonsensical ways and amplified. So it's like, you know, I'm at the circus and the president of the United States is there. And the president transformed in. an airplane, and then everyone in the circus formed a big, tall tower of people, and we stood on top of the airplane, and the airplane flew into the ocean.

Like, that's like, it's like nonsensical. It's all pieces of something that could be plausible that are kind of stitched together. But there does appear to be kind of emotional content, which is very central to dreams. A couple of other things which people tend to wonder about. So about 8 to 10% of dreams tend to have sexual content. So most dreams are not sexual in nature. Sometimes you can get vivid sexual experiences within dreams. That tends to happen more rarely.

But it's not like dreams are all sexual in nature. So we have some data on that kind of stuff. The short answer is we don't really know what dreams are. We know that they tend to be filled with emotional content. We know that they tend to be restricted to senses which you're capable of experiencing and they tend to get stitched together in different ways. So the next thing that people are kind of curious about is like, do dreams mean something?

Okay? I don't know if that makes sense, but these are like basically like, if I have a dream, does it mean something? Right? Is this my brain trying to tell me that something is going on? So let's kind of take a look at that for a second.

So there are a couple of different theories. And what I'm going to do is kind of run through them. So the first is that dreams, and then we'll get to like Freud and all that good stuff, which I'm sure you guys are curious about. So the first, so let's think through the possibilities. The first is that dreams are RNG. Okay?

So there's no meaning to anything in the dream. It's just kind of random. So one way to kind of think about this is, you know, there are different forms of divination, like looking at chicken entrails or like reading tea leaves and things like that. And if you kind of like look at the tea leaves at the bottom of your cup, it can look like something, right? It can look like a dog or it can look like a dog,

or it can look like a wolf or it can look like a butterfly or whatever. The human mind, it's just a random assortment of stuff, and it doesn't actually have some kind of meaning. And the meaning that we see in dreams is assigned by our mind as opposed to having some kind of intrinsic meaning. So in this kind of hypothesis, what we sort of say is that, okay, your brain just does different kind of stuff. Cleans out adenosine, remakes ATP, you know, neurons kind of like,

go through some kind of maintenance process, and as a side effect of maintenance, we get these kinds of different stimuli. And that's what a dream is. And it has no significance whatsoever. So second option is that they do have some kind of meaning. So this is where people like Freud come in. So what Freud basically said is he's like, we've got this subconscious mind. Right? That was Freud's biggest contribution. And I know that. that Freud tends to get, you know, people talk about things like his stages of development, like oral phase, anal phase, phallic phase, all this kind of stuff, edible complex. Like all the sexual stuff tends to get memed on the most.

But the biggest contribution he made to Western psychology was he was basically the first person in the West who was like, hey, our mind is not all conscious. There's this thing called the subconscious mind. And the thing is, that belief has become so prevalent in our society that we sort of take it as granted, we don't even credit it to Freud anymore. People are just like, oh, it's the subconscious. So what Freud sort of said is we have the conscious mind, but then we also have, we have the subconscious mind.

And basically what happens is the conscious mind suppresses the subconscious mind. So Anna Freud later explored this concept as defense mechanisms, right? So these kinds of things like denial, intellectualization. we have all these defense mechanisms where there's this stuff floating around in our subconscious that our conscious keeps in check. And so the key thing about the dream

is that during the, I mean, during sleep, the conscious mind becomes inactive and therefore none of the defense mechanisms are active. So what dreams actually are, our subconscious, it's like unfiltered subconscious thought. So it absolutely has meaning. Okay, it's basically our subconscious

without the restraints of our conscious mind. Subconscious gone wild. And then Jung also sort of agreed with this. So Jung kind of said, yeah, it's like the subconscious, but then there were a couple of different important distinctions. One is that Freud thought that our subconscious thoughts are symbolic. So what this sort of means, and other people will sort of say that they're thematic. So what's the difference between these? So a symbolic representation is something that means something else. Whereas a thematic representation is it's not like precisely correct, but the theme is actually the same. It's more direct.

So even if in a dream I'm afraid of being, you know, hunted down by a bear, what Freud may say is that a bear is a symbol for my father. Whereas what I may be afraid, a thematic person may say that I'm afraid of being prey, but it's not like the bear is a symbol for something. It's the fear that's important. Like, I'm afraid that someone is going to take advantage of me. Versus Freud will say like, oh, like the bear means something else. Does that make sense? So a good example of this is like, you know, so some people will say that losing your teeth in a dream is a symbol for a fear of death.

So losing teeth equals fear of death. So there's symbolic representations. Whereas in a thematic representation, losing teeth may be like, oh crap, I forgot to floss and I'm worried about dental hygiene. So it's not really a one-to-one representation like the real world, but it's basically like in the same ballpark. Whereas in the symbolic representation of dreams, there's sort of like this idea that it actually means something else. Now, I tend to be more of the mind of the thematic representation. I don't really consider, you know, there's some value to this sort of symbolic representation stuff. But there are a couple of like problems with the symbolic representations.

One is, as some critics have kind of pointed out, like symbols are not the same for all people. So some people will believe that symbolism is like universally human. so there's some symbols that are universally human. I don't know, for example, that like someone who grows up in Papua New Guinea, that losing teeth has the fear of death. I don't know that that's the case. I just haven't seen evidence that has made me convinced that symbolic representations are universally human, which then sort of begs the question, okay, so like if they're not universally human,

then even if individuals can have symbolic representation, you can't read a book about symbols and then have this mean the same thing for every person. So then like understanding the objective nature of symbols within dreams, I don't think really translates them much personally. Some people do believe that. So they believe that I can read a book about symbolic representations and this is what this means for all human beings, that all human beings think that losing teeth is a fear of mortality. And they believe that and that's fine. Like, they're allowed to do that, right? So this is kind of where, um, You know, second kind of perspective is that it's actually subconscious thought.

And then the third thing to kind of consider is that there's some amount of housekeeping. So that dreams serve the function of basically some kind of like mental housekeeping. So if there are, you know, fears or thoughts that I didn't take care of while conscious, that I can take care of these in the dream, sometimes there are different kinds of like, so we know that like memory consolidation happens while we sleep. And so the process of consolidating our memories may result in some kind of dream like stimulus. Right. So if I spent the day at the theme park and was riding, you know, if I was riding roller coasters,

and I had a really great day and I enjoyed it a lot. And like my brain at night is like, okay, let's like save that to long term storage. And in the process of saving that to long-term storage, as I'm like, you know, rewriting that kind of stuff, like I experience some kind of roller coaster-ish sort of dream where it's some sort of like reinterpretation of that stimuli. So as part of kind of the natural process of what we do when we sleep, like how our mind handles thoughts, emotions, experiences, some of that process involves or manifests as dreaming. So whether it's memory consolidation or, you know, experiences throughout the day that weren't processed appropriately, they sort of get their time to kind of go on in our head. Now, you may say, like, does that mean it's part of the subconscious mind? There's some overlap here. There's not necessarily like these are all exclusive. But I think the big difference is that, you know, this is a kind of a short term thing where it's like if I did something on day one, I will dream about it on night one.

maybe night two. Whereas if you look at Freud and Jung and stuff, they sort of think that, okay, we've got this subconscious, which maybe changes over time, but is generally static. And on, you know, night 263, we can have a dream about this on night 864. We can have a dream about this. On night 22, we can have a dream about this. Does that kind of make sense? I guess you all can't see that.

So that's like kind of how those are different. So this is sort of like a daily housekeeping sort of thing. Okay. So these are a couple of perspectives about what dreams are. Next thing to consider is kind of like spiritual perspectives. Actually, let's talk about psychotherapy for a second. So when it comes to dreams, oftentimes we'll use these as tools in psychotherapy. So in some disciplines of psychotherapy, dreams are way more.

important than others. So number one is psychoanalysis. So psychoanalysis, you can easily argue is actually a precursor to psychotherapy and doesn't fall under the umbrella of psychotherapy. You can say that it's actually completely different. And that psychotherapy is an offshoot of psychoanalysis, fair enough to say. But in psychoanalysis, so people like Freud and Jungian, so people who become Freudian psychoanalysts and Jungian psychoanalysts will do a lot of work around dreams. Okay? So that's very common. At the same time, we don't really have great evidence that this is particularly useful. I'm not saying that it isn't useful.

I'm just saying we don't have great studies on it. We may have some studies on it, but... Hey. Hi. What's up? Yeah. Nope. I'm going to finish my lecture, even if it seems dry.

No. Just take no chat. Nope. I'm finishing my lecture on psychoanalysis of dreams. So, boring. Okay. If it's boring, too bad. We're almost done.

What? No, we're talking about dreams today. Look, if you guys want to know about dreams, we're going to learn about dreams. And it doesn't, I don't know. Like, this is, you know, it is what it is. Okay. So I guess she's bored with it. So in psychoanalysis, people will do all these, like, complex dream interpretations,

stuff like that. Freud wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams. The interesting thing is that the more that we kind of evolve psychotherapy, like the less symbolic and weird stuff kind of gets. So there's even like CBT versions of dream interpretation. And I think this is where the kind of stuff that like I like about dreams. So when I talk about dreams and psychotherapy, what I tend to focus on is if someone has a dream. So here's how I deal with dreams, okay? So let's say you've got a dream. So the first thing that I'll do is I'll ask someone.

Okay, so like tell me about the dream. And so they'll say, okay, this happened first, this happened first, this happened first, this happened first, this happened first, this happened first. Sorry, next, next, next, okay? So there are like six events that happen in the dream that they can remember. And then like, so what an analyst may do is they may look at this and they'll say like, okay, so, and I'm probably not doing this justice. If you're an analyst out there and you can explain this better, please post it on our subreddit. We'd really appreciate that. But they'll say, oh, this means like fear of death.

You know, this, by the way, is like this kind of internal conflict. And they'll kind of translate your dream for you. I personally don't put much stock in that. And what I tend to ask people is for each of these events, what was the emotion that you felt? What was the emotion? What was the emotion? What was the emotion? So as we go through the emotions, then I'll basically ask them, like, is this relevant to real

life in some way? Is this relevant to real life in some way? Is this relevant to real life in some way? Basically, this is what I'll do. And I'll try to see, like, if I'm done psychotherapy with them, I may know stuff about them, right? So I'll know, like, oh, like, you know, I know that you've had a lot of conflict with your brother over this particular thing.

Wow, that seems like it's a very similar emotion to like what you were experiencing then. Right? And what we basically do is, is I think about dreams as almost a projective test. So this is like an inkblot test where we can, it's really in the interpretation of it that you do with a patient that you really figure out, like what has value and what doesn't. Because I do think, I personally think that dreams are not completely random. So I don't, I don't really subscribe to this.

I don't think that generally speaking, if you look at the body, our body. doesn't do anything randomly. So I find it hard to believe that there's just one part of our body that functions completely randomly, whereas the rest of our body, like everything that happens, it happens for a reason. So there's all kinds of fascinating stuff in the body. Like, for example, our muscles, the muscles in our leg, when they contract, they actually push blood in our veins back up to our heart. Right? So if you kind of think about how does, so arteries have a lot of of, you know, elasticity to them. Vains have less elasticity to them. Our legs are beneath our heart. I know this is kind of a random non-sequitur, but it's like super cool in physiology. So like if we

kind of think about it, how do we like pump blood from the bottom of our feet back up to our heart, right? Because it's easy to get blood from our brain to our heart because it just has to go with gravity. Easy to get blood from our arms to our heart because that also sort of has to go with gravity. Easier to get blood from our stomach to our heart because it doesn't have to travel very far. But when you're talking about the blood in your fingers and you're talking about the blood in your toes, that has to go against gravity across a much longer distance. And so our body was like, oh, I have a neat idea. Every time we contract muscles, what we're going to actually do is squeeze the veins and push the blood back to the heart, right? So our body basically does everything for

reason. You know? And so I don't think that dreams are just completely random. I think there's something going on in our mind. And so when I do kind of dream work with patients, we'll sort of use it this way. But we'll sort of say like, okay, like what about the dream resonates with you? What do you think in this dream is actually applicable to your real life? And there is evidence that shows that people who do kind of dream work in psychotherapies, there's actually a really interesting studies about people who are stuck in psychotherapy. So if you feel stuck in psychotherapy, oftentimes one way to kind of like randomly like get some sort of emotional grip and have some kind of like thing to work on or make some

kind of breakthrough can often be done through dreams. Because it's kind of random, right? So you're trying to figure out, okay, what's going on here? What's going on here? You hit a dead end. You hit a dead end. Then you start doing some dream work and it can really help in terms of like opening things up for people.

So I tend to think about dreams almost as projective tests, where it's sort of like it gives us material to go through in a psychotherapeutic session. Okay? So that's kind of like dreams and psychotherapy. There's a lot that's written about this kind of stuff. I found a really good summary, actually. Let me see if I can just post this for y'all. I found a 30 page. Oh, yeah.

So this is just, I just Googled this. and there's a, I can't post in chat, but maybe you guys can, the use of dreams of modern psychotherapy. This is a great 30-page summary. It's in the public domain. Not the published version. This is the author's final peer-reviewed manuscript. I think it's in the public domain. I just Googled it.

Oh, it looks like, okay, that's interesting. So I just Googled psychotherapy and dreams, and this came up. I assumed it was in, yeah, it looks like it's just. posted on Marquette.edu. So it looks like it's posted for public consumption. It's just a great. If you all are interested in this, I would highly recommend this because it's 36 pages, so it's not like a textbook or something.

But she does a really good job of going through a lot of the common, sort of like summarizes like what Adler said about dreams, what Jung said about dreams in one pair. paragraph. And so it's really good. It's an introductory thing about like, you know, dreams and psychotherapy. It's actually excellent. Probably the best thing I've read, to be honest. You know, I've tried to study this stuff a lot. It's just a lot of it is very like obtuse and dense. So that's, so dreams, dream analysis can be useful in psychotherapy. Some psychotherapists will work a lot with dreams and other psychotherapists will won't work so much.

I think what we've tended to see is over time, people have moved away from this, especially with the advent of the third wave of psychotherapies like dialectical behavioral therapy and all this mindfulness-oriented stuff. So, yeah, it's useful in psychotherapy. How useful depends on the therapist and depends on your interest as well. Last thing that we're going to talk about is spiritual perspectives. So these, I'm going to focus on. Eastern perspectives, I don't feel qualified. It's not like I'm, you know, I'm just not knowledgeable

enough on like, Baha'i Islamic perspectives on dreams. I have not studied those in any formal or informal way. So I'm sure that in the Judeo-Christian system and, you know, all these, like, I don't know what Shinto people believe about dreams. I just don't know. I haven't studied it. So I'm going to focus on the karmic religions, Eastern religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and a couple of different interpretations there. The first thing is that in the yogic system, it's not so much the content of the dream that's important, but an understanding that a dream is a state of consciousness. So a lot of the Eastern perspective is really interested in dreams in terms of like it's a fundamentally different state of consciousness.

Okay. So this is kind of interesting. So, you know, the general idea is that we have mind, okay? And then we have the self or true consciousness. consciousness. And these are actually separate. And then we have states of mind like waking, dreaming, and sleeping. Okay. And then if you all have watched Dr. Kay's guide to meditation, you'll see that we have a very long video about states of mind where we also know that there are other kinds of states of mind like flow, which is like Vienna. Okay. So this is a state of meditation.

So we know that there are other states of mind as well. And so it's, it's kind of of interesting. There's a, there's a great book that I have called the Panchadashi, and they explain this really well, where they're like, how do we know that sleeping is a state of mind? And they make a very interesting observation, which is that you're aware of sleep. Right? So when you wake up in the morning, you have an awareness that you've slept. You have an awareness that you've slept enough, you have an awareness that you've slept too much, you have an awareness that you've slept too little. And so what they sort of concluded is that awareness must be outside of the mind. In order for it to observe and make conclusions about sleep, it has to actually

exist outside of the mind. There are actually good physiologic counter arguments to this. So this is something that yogis developed, let's say, 3,000 years ago in ancient India. But since then, we have learned a lot about the body, the body and the brain for sure. I don't know if we've really learned a whole lot more about the mind, to be honest.

And so there may be other ways that we kind of know this stuff outside of awareness. So one example of this is that, like, you may have physiologic sensors, like sensors of hunger and thirst and solute concentration and glycogen concentration and hormonal imbalances and things like or hormonal balances that will indicate to you how long you've slept. So it may not be some kind of cosmic awareness, but simply your insulin to glucagon balance, which gives your body a sense of a clock. So you may have like a biological

clock where, oh, based on how hungry I am and what my solute concentration is and how much urine I produced and the balance between glucagon, insulin, and my current glycogen store level, some part of my brain interprets all of that information and says, I've slept for eight hours. Does that make sense? So I don't know that I personally agree with this. Once you study it, you can kind of make your own determination. So having kind of done all these different also meditations around sleep and awareness and stuff like that, I think this is correct. but it's important to point out that there may be simple physiologic reasons that don't have

anything to do with a true self or true consciousness or anything like that. Okay. So that's one perspective, which is that dreams are just a state of mind. A couple of other perspectives. One is that dreams are places that your past garmas can manifest or your somscars can manifest. So let's look at each of these in turn. Let's start. with sum scars. So if you all have been paying attention to us for a while, you'll know what a sumscar is. If the concept of a sumscar is new to you, you can check out our wiki. I'm sure that we've got YouTube videos about it, but the best explanation of somers is going to be in the Vedic psychology section of Dr. K's guide. Okay. So we have events that happen, and when we have events happen,

we have some kind of, so we have an event, okay? When we have an event, we produce a emotion. But the emotion of the event gets, there are two things that can happen to it. One is it gets processed and one is it gets stored. And oftentimes, depending on the size of the event, more of it will be processed and more of it will be stored. So for example, you know, if I have something super traumatic, if I plan a birthday party for myself and I invite 30 of my friends and I have a bunch of food there. What happens and no one shows up. So I feel super sad. So I feel sad on a level of 10 out of 10. And then what happens is I feel really sad about it. I think about it. I feel resentful for a while. And then eventually after two hours pass and no one shows up, I start playing

video games. So after two hours, I processed my emotion to an 8 out of 10. And then once I start playing video games, this gets stored. This goes dormant. And then the next time I I see my friends, right? Because I haven't fully processed the emotion. I see my friend the next day. And what happens? When I meet my friend, this eight out of ten stored emotion comes up and reactivates in my mind. And then I feel super, super sad and angry and resentful. And then my friend is like, wait, what's wrong? What happened? Like, why are you so upset with me? They're super confused. Because this emotion is not coming from our current interaction, right? It's projected from the past onto the present. So that's the idea of a sumscar. And so one way that a sumscar can be metabolized and

processed or brought back up is through our dreams. That's one Eastern perspective. The other thing to think about in terms of a karmic perspective is that when we commit an action, we get some kind of consequence. There's a principle of cause and effect. And so it's kind of like if I have a neutron and I create a positron, I have to create an electron as well, right? There's no way that I can just create a positron. That any kind of action I take has to have some kind of reaction to it. It's the principle of karma very similar to physics, basically. The only difference really is that the principle of karma assumes that this principle of

every action has an equal and opposite reaction. applies to more than just physics. So, like, on any level of stuff, like, this all applies. Or you could sort of say that, you know, physics begets chemistry, chemistry, begets biochemistry, biochemistry begets biology. Biology begets physiology. Physiology begets life. Life has a brain.

Brains create psychology. Psychology creates behavioral economics. Behavioral economics creates economic. creates economics, psychology, also on a mass scale, creates sociology. So at the end of everything, like the root of everything, is still physics and is still this principle of cause and effect, if that kind of makes sense. Okay? So what this sort of posits is that, you know, when you take an action, there's some kind of

karmic debt to be paid. And one of the interesting explorations that I made was I was sort of thinking about the suffering in dreams. So I did a particular meditation technique that allows you to be aware in dreams. Very hard technique to do. You guys want to learn it today. I can teach it to you today, but it's going to be really hard. So I had to practice this technique for months, and that's on top of being a regular meditator for like years.

So it's an advanced technique of meditation. And so what I did when I was doing this technique is I observed the suffering that I experienced. And what I made an interesting observation that in the dream and in real life, the quality of emotion is actually the same. If you really think about your dreams, the fear that you feel in your dreams is like 100% the same. And what I realize is like in my dreams, I'm actually like, so I sometimes will have negative dreams. And, you know, as we mentioned before, anxiety is the most common emotion that is represented. presented in dreams, negative emotions tend to be more common than positive emotions. And all the negativity that I experience in dreams is like feels 100% real.

Like I'm so terrified. You'll wake up in a cold sweat and just terrified, terrified, terrified, terrified. So I was kind of wondering, what does that mean carmically? So if I have some amount of like suffering or negative emotion that I've carmically signed up for in life, do I sort of get rid of it by paying these like phantom dollars from the dreams. Do I pay this karmic debt in a dream? It seems to me like that makes sense based on my personal experiences, but I'm not saying that that is objectively correct. So that's kind of a prevailing theory that I still kind of think about to this day. And so that's kind of a spiritual

perspective on dreams. Right? So what is a dream? We don't know. That is the best answer. That is the answer that I feel the most confident in. Okay? I don't know. I don't know what a dream is. Next thing to consider is, okay, so like if we don't know what a dream really is, what do we know? So we've tried to study dreams scientifically. It turns out that they're actually really hard to study because generally speaking dreams, we study the brain, right? And when it comes to the brain, we have two major things that we need. One is we need invasive methods because things like EEG and FMRI are not sufficient.

So it's not like one part of the brain dreams. So dreams are not necessarily neuroanatomically bound, right? So it's not like we have their dream center of the brain. So since the tools like FMRI and EEG aren't specific enough, what we would normally need to do is more invasive methods. And generally speaking, when we use invasive methods, we use them on animals because we don't do that kind of research on people. The problem with doing invasive research on animals is that animals can't tell us anything about their dreams.

So it's very hard to correlate the invasive scientific information with anything subjective from a dream. So we're kind of handicapped in that way in our scientific exploration of dreams, which is actually a really fascinating subject that I could give an entire lecture about. Really cool. That being said, we've figured a couple things. right? So what we have done is we've done a lot of qualitative research. Well, we'll ask people, what are you dreaming about? What have we learned? Really interesting stuff. First, is that blind people can't see in their dreams. So if you don't have some kind of experience, you can't dream about it.

So it seems like dreams are composites of our own waking experiences. Okay? Next thing to consider is that oftentimes dreams are emotional. They tend to be the most common emotion in dreams is anxiety. Negative emotions tend to be more common than positive emotions. Eight to ten percent of dreams tend to be sexual in nature. Why don't we include that? Because people just wonder about that. Everyone wants to know about sexuality and dreams.

So that's just, that's what we know. Okay. And we're not really sure what purpose they serve. Okay? So one hypothesis is that dreams are just completely RNG, their byproducts or side effects of whatever restorative processes go on during sleep. I personally don't put a whole lot of stock into that hypothesis because, as I mentioned before, basically nothing in our body is random. Like everything, evolution has evolved a purpose for everything. We also do know that animals dream, and I don't know if you all have a pet, but like, you know, I used to have pet dogs and watching them dream is fascinating. You can tell that they're dreaming. And so we also know, for example, that children dream and children dream very, very vividly. So chances are it's doing something for them. So what are some of the things that it could be doing? What are some of the other purposes of dreams? So people like Freud and Jung sort of hypothesize that we've got a subconscious and we've got a conscious.

So our subconscious has all kinds of thoughts. And generally speaking, those are kept in check by our conscious mind. And so the dreaming state is the one state where the subconscious gets to throw a party without the conscious mind, you know, being around. So parents aren't home. Time to throw a rager, which is what a dream is. There's also a perspective that dreams are symbolic in nature, which is that, you know, the thing in the dream isn't actually what it means, but it's a symbol for something else.

or dreams are thematic in nature, where it's not so much that it's a symbol, it's not a representation of something else, but that generally is applicable. It's just some of the details are changed. So if I'm afraid of abandonment, that may manifest in a dream with me being left behind at a circus,

but the fear of abandonment is consistent. So there's a thematic connection between my actual fears and the fears in the dream versus a symbolic connection, which is like me being abandoned, at the circus is actually a symbol of, you know, I don't even, I don't know, like becoming, the process of becoming independent as an adult. Like, who knows?

Like, it's a symbol. So it's not actually connected. It's just one thing means something else, okay? I tend to put stock more into sort of the thematic experience. Another option is that dreams are just like housekeeping in some way in terms of memory consolidation, processing emotions, things like that. That's not mutually exclusive with sort of the Freudian Jungian subconscious perspective. Just another thing to consider.

Dreams are used in psychotherapy. Generally speaking, if you want like hardcore dream analysis with a lot of symbolic interpretation, go see a psychoanalyst. They're the ones who train in that the best. Although regular psychotherapists will also use dreams, I sometimes use dreams to draw out emotional themes that may be relevant to patients. There are some studies that show that working on dreams can be useful if you're stuck in psychotherapy.

Last thing to consider is sort of a spiritual perspective. So one is like in the Eastern perspective, we kind of look at dreams. We're not really interested. I don't know if this sort of makes sense, but in the yogic perspective, they're not really interested in the content of mind. What they're really interested in is transcending mind entirely. And so if that's the goal, they sort of, view dreams as a state of consciousness, and that's really the most important thing,

which is a different state of consciousness. The goal is still to move past all of that. So we don't want to tunnel down into what your anxiety is. We don't want to tunnel down into what your dream is. The goal is transcending mind entirely. Other perspectives from kind of the Eastern traditions is that dreams may have some connection to past lives, carmic manifestations, and then from a Vedic psychology perspective, this pent-up emotion can kind of manifest in dreams. So here's kind of a quick overview, right, of dreams. I'm not saying once again that this is necessarily correct, but it's something that I've been super curious about and something that, you know, I thought I'd shared today because people aren't commuted

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