Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Neurosurgeon Breaks Down the Science of Dreaming, The One Dream That Predicts The Future, How to Lucid Dream, and The Incredible Things Your Brain Does As You Die

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

What if your dreams could predict disease, unlock creativity, reveal hidden trauma—and even be controlled?   Dr. Rahul Jandial, MD, PhD (dual-trained neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, founder of the Jandial Lab at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles, and bestselling author of This is Why You Dream) takes you inside the wild, cutting-edge world of dream neuroscience and the sleeping brain.   Discover how this top brain surgeon can create a memory of a nightmare during awake brain surgery, what the brain does just before death, and how dream patterns may predict neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease. Learn why erotic dreams occur, how lucid dreaming can enhance your waking life, what happens during sleep paralysis, and why some people don’t remember their dreams—plus expert sleep tips to improve dream recall.   Dr. Jandial also explores the deep links between trauma and nightmares, depression, and the eerie science of precognitive dreams and near-death experiences (NDEs). From the universal themes of falling and flying dreams to the latest on how AI might already be hacking your dreams, this is everything your brain’s doing while you sleep—and why it matters more than ever.   Dr. Rahul Jandial's book, THIS IS WHY YOU DREAM: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735627/this-is-why-you-dream-by-rahul-jandial-md-phd/   Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/   BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do we dream? Dreaming is high-intensity training for creativity and imagination and emotion. There's mystery and magic to it, and it's a sacred space. If dreams are good for us, why are we have nightmares? We are inheriting our thinking and dream processes from our ancestors. When children dream of animals, they tend to dream of beasts, not puppies. Nightmares could be a warning sign for mental health issues. They're linked to depression. They're linked to suicide.

We may have gotten it wrong thinking death is when I'm like. the heart stops beating. Your brain dies a few minutes after your heart dies. Death is electrical silencing of brain activity. The heart is stopped, but for three minutes after, there's an explosion of brain activity. It doesn't go out in a whimper. The last thing that the brain does is just launch all the neurotransmitters, all the electricity. Some people who are resuscitated and see, I saw my whole life story. It's consistent. Or near-death experiences. Those electrical patterns are like wild dreams. So maybe death is one last dream. There is one dream or dream pattern that predicts the future. And that's... Before we dive into today's episode, I'm going to ask you to do something

very quick, very easy, but super helpful. I'm going to ask you to hit the subscribe button. You see it? Go get it. Hit the subscribe button. It just takes a second, but it means a lot to us. You have probably noticed from all of the comments that we get, many people find that listening to MBB regularly is helping them feel happier, healthier, more inspired. And you know what? That actually is why we are doing this. It makes my heart swell to hear that so many of you are feeling inspired. So subscribing to this show, whether you're listening on YouTube or whether you're listening to it through a podcast app, it's the easiest way to ensure that you will never miss an episode. So we don't want you to miss a single one and you don't want to miss a single one. So you'll get notified

as soon as a new episode drops. All you have to do is subscribe. And share this episode with someone if you enjoy it. We're trying to spread the word. Help us do that. The best way to support our show is by subscribing. So do it now. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you. Let's get back to the good stuff. Hi, I'm Biolik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. Welcome to our breakdown. Jumped on my line there. We're so excited. We're very excited. Because we're going to find out what the heck is happening when our eyes close and it's night, night time. It turns out a lot more than we expected. We used to think we understood what was going on in sleep and in dreams.

But the science has changed so much and so rapidly. We're going to be talking to Rahul Jandial. He's an MD PhD. He's a neurosurgeon and a neuroscientist. And he wrote, this is why you dream. and it's all about the fascinating science behind what we're dreaming, the cultural similarities of people's dreams, people's nightmares, what's the function of a nightmare, what's up with erotic dreams,

everybody wants to know, and what are the things that we can do to help us harness the power of lucid dreaming? And how can it impact our waking life? We're going to talk about the imagination network and the executive functioning network and how those interplay between our waking life and our sleep life. Dr. Jandiel has a fascinating perspective as someone who literally operates on brains, holds people's lives in his hand,

and is going to describe for us how he can literally create a memory of a nightmare during open brain surgery. I mean, it's absolutely fascinating. We also get a little esoteric. We bring him into the MBB spiritual world. we talk about what the brain does right before it dies, and I was just like my jaw was on the floor for that. You may have seen him other places before,

but you've actually never seen him like you're about to. Dr. Janiel oversees the Jandial Lab at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles. He also has an unbelievable nonprofit, the International Neurosurgical Children's Association, where he performs and teaches brain surgery in underserved hospitals in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. He's the author of several books,

including life lessons from a brain surgeon and life on a knife's edge. But today we're going to be talking about this is why you dream. Let's welcome to the breakdown, Rahul Jandiel. Break it down. We talk a lot about dreams. It's something we talk a ton about,

and this is why you dream was very helpful. And we wanted you to sort of give us the primer, first of all. why do we dream? Massive question, right? I mean, who should be given the opportunity to even answer that question? But my hypothesis,

my understanding is based on neuroscience that's only been available for the last 20, 30 years. So, of course, you've trained in it. I'm 52. That was my training. And so the prior, you know, the prior, like, theories were just shots in the dark,

like, oh, it's threat training. Oh, it's, nocturnal therapist. But what I found is that modern neuroscience shows that in a 24-hour cycle, our brain is never off. So when we sleep, you're not resting. Your brain is not resting. It's not like a computer screen that turns off. You click the keyboard and pops back on.

So what's happening in that 24-hour cycle is you have like the waking brain and the sleep dreaming brain. and the metabolic activity, the glucose being used, the electricity that's being churned out by those neurons, is burning hot when you sleep and dream. And so that speaks to something important must be happening. Like, you're not going to hold on to that capacity through evolution if it's not important. So then the idea comes, how is that dreaming brain different in the waking brain? And what you find in the waking brain is the executive networks tend to rain and don't. dominate things in this fancy words, but dorsalateral prefrontal cortex controls the executive networks and it keeps us, you know, able to drive on traffic, get on the subway. And that's

important. That area is dampened. Nothing's ever off in the dreaming brain. And other areas like the imagination network or the limbic system are liberated. So if the dreaming brain is a hypervisual, hyper imaginative state, my idea is the brain needs to let that loose to maintain that capacity. So use it or lose it. So the brain is saying, we need a safe space to let this imagination, to let this desire,

to let this visual sort of adventures and awkward social situations happen in a safe space. Otherwise, we'll lose that complexity. So my idea is, to put it briefly, is dreaming is high intensity training for creativity and imagination and emotion based on the way the brain is different

in those two states. Why are their nightmare? Meaning if that's the place for me to play and have imagination and creativity, why are so many people plagued by a high level of negative intensity with dreams? Come on. If dreams are good for us, why are we have nightmares? That's a straight up question. I think it's an important one.

The way I've, and I made that chapter two because I wanted to get in front of it. What we find with nightmares, so now you can go back like 50 years or 100 years. years and now some of the stories start even with like Aristotle writing about lucid dreaming. So those are surveys, questionnaires, people are logging things for centuries. And then there are measurements. We were going to talk about the dreaming brain and that was more of things we can measure. And I try to link the ideas. Nightmares arrive for children no matter how healthy the upbringing.

These are called longitudinal studies. They had families say, here's our four-year-old and ask them about dreaming until they're like 24 years old. And so you get an idea of how dream patterns arrive at which age. And every kid has a nightmare. And they tend to arrive at age four, five, six, seven, something like that. So as far as pediatric nightmares, they arrive and almost overwhelmingly, they go away. Kids don't really have nightmare disorders. So the best way I've come to understand nightmares is to break them into two categories.

pediatric nightmares that arrive for healthy kids, and then late in life nightmares that sometimes pop up once in a while or more concerningly, like after trauma or PTSD, they become recurrent. And those are some of the, those nightmares, I think, have to be understood to be a little bit different.

This guy. I mean, she's pointing to you. How many fingers are pointing back? That's funny. But those are two separate themes for nightmares. And adults, I think, Nightmares could be a warning sign if you look at the pattern of nightmares, not the occasional nightmare, but what we call progressive.

Like a headache, not a big deal. A headache the next day, worse, worse, stronger. Progressive nightmares could be a warning sign for mental health issues. They're linked to, that doesn't mean they're causing suicide, but they're linked to depression. They're linked to suicide. So I see them as adults, maybe a vital sign rather than blood pressure and pain and temperature. and then I see them in children. And children, it's all hypothetical,

but they happen to come at the same time as the cultivation of theory of mind. So just like we learned a walk and talk, we also are, the mind is being cultivated, right? It starts to get a sense of self versus other. And then it becomes, you know, then it develops sexual features.

And then there's adolescence. The flesh looks the same, but the mind is going through a lot of changes. There has to be something, a universal cognitive feature like nightmares arriving at age four, five, six, and every kid, it's got to be cultivating or fine-tuning the mind aspect more so than the brain. So that's the sort of the two ways I think about it. Have there been links between children who are under some sort of increased stress with frequency of nightmare?

I don't have a specific answer for that. And so the surveys on children are linked. limited. But I think that's a question that I asked originally, like, there was a terrible thing like in, I don't know if it's Bell-Ruse where the kids weren't picked up in orphanages and then they scanned their brains and it was like they were smoother. There was a lack of those folds that allow surface area to develop. The same way, I was like, well, kids who've had a harder life must maybe they have more nightmares. And I didn't find that as an obvious link. But you talk about trauma and the connection between trauma and sleep, which I thought was really interesting.

Because to me, it's a little bit of an opening. You talk so much about how what happens at night is in many cases a reflection of also what your brain is working on in the day. So if you're working on a lot of trauma or you're talking about neglect, right, like constitutional neglect, it wouldn't surprise me that that sort of makes its way into the nightmare world as well or the sleep world. Absolutely. Yeah. So just to reverse, like you can't see. the waking mind experiences and memory are of course feeding the dreaming mind. That goes way to the concept of like, can you interpret dreams?

It's like does a basket mean the same thing for all of us? It's hard given that we're always adding our own imagination, our own memory into it. But yes, it seems reasonable that people who are struggling that that would be reflected in some way in their dreams. I just didn't find a lot of, you can't actually search like some of these things. things. It's all like tangential, like imagination and trauma on kids. And so it was really like hunting for links because there is no, I don't think so, but there isn't like a professor of dream science. It's not really a science. It had to pull from trauma, imagination, perception,

but your point is well taken. I'm just thinking like I've been to a lot of doctors. I've been to a lot of therapists, right? No one ever says, how are you, like, what are you dreaming about or what is your dream life like? Like, but usually would be like, how many hours are you sleeping a night? right, the psychiatrist love to ask that. And I'm like, well, what kind of five hours do you want me to describe to you, you know? Exactly. My Ambialx breakdown is supported by Superpower.

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about them. Make sure to mention My Ambiotics Breakdown to help support the show. We're going to get into dream interpretation later because I think there's a fascinating exploration about how we assign personal meaning that you explain. But let's step back a little bit and get some of the overview in terms of, can you talk a little bit about this idea of smoothness that you just mentioned in brain structure? Because I think a lot of people don't quite understand that, myself included. And then talk about, you know, the evidence that you saw of dreams being in the brain

through awake surgeries. Ooh, okay. So first of all, thank you. I try to be clear about measurements, surveys. I'm not disparaging anybody or any approach, but sometimes it's too easy to say, the brain does this or this is good for your brain. It may be true.

I just need that one step further explanation where at what scale. Is it at the flesh? Is it at the electrochemistry? Like where we might take antidepressant. Just one step deeper gives me a sense that it's been explored a little bit. So that said, the, when you look at the brain, much like in like the Grand Canyon,

you can see like the different types of dinosaurs, like there's sedimentary layers, you can, you know, you can date how old the neurons are based on evolution. And so what happened most recently was the, it's not really modular, but it's connected, the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain with emotions instinct. which is its own kind of genius. And then the prefrontal cortex, which is the part that over time pushed our foreheads forward.

The frontal bossing we have is from that growth. And so to accommodate that growth, the forehead was pushed forward, but also like a pizza, it had to be like smushed together like an accordion to fit inside the skull. So those ridges are a way to have a greater surface area

of what they call the cortical canopy and the neurons are all on top. So when you see the brain, the other things, the brain's not a homogenous structure. You know that. Like when you look at the side, there's different anatomical regions. There's different fibers. Under microscope, there are different cell types. It's not like the liver where you cut it.

Wherever you cut it, it just looks like tiles. And so what happens is the neurons, if you think of them as like molecular jellyfish, the bodies are all on the surface. And then the tentacles are coming down sort of like a mushroom to the, to the brain send that controls your body. So to fit in all of those neurons on the cortical canopy, and there's a lot of like, you know, sort of ecology terms that I love, like to understand the brain, you kind of have to think of it as an ecosystem and as a garden.

And cortex means bark. Like it's the top, you know, a centimeter that's where the neurons are situated. So once in a while, when there's a deep-seated tumor, we have to get to a deeper brain structure. That means you're going to have to go through the cortical canopy. And to do that safely, patients choose, particularly with language, something called awake brain surgery. I know it's, but it's going, it's for 60, 70 years. It's what's done at all the elite centers. Yeah, it's possible because the brain doesn't feel touched directly. In the exposed brain, with the person awake, if you touch just gently the surface of the brain, there's no feeling

that somebody touched me. Perception is all through the nerves that come out of our skull and our body. So when we, whereas movement, like a Lombard Street right here, we know this is motor, does hand, this is motor, this does hand. But language is usually left temporal lobe and it's a, it's a neighborhood, but it's not a specific address. That address has to be determined in each person when they're awake. So the scalp is numb. They're under anesthesia. How big a hole are we talking about being? About a cookie size.

He likes big cookies. Yeah. I mean. Mrs. Fields. nibblers, yeah. 12 for a... It's an interesting question, you know, in the past... Like, it could be an Oreo size.

Not for this. It depends. Right. It depends on... We try to do the smallest hole possible, but it has to provide sufficient exposure. So the incision is in the sideburn. And, you know, it's a medium cookie-sized hole in the skull. It's done behind the hairline with an absorbable stitch.

You don't see the scar. Because you're taking a flat. out of the skull in order to access. Like ice fishing. You make one hole, you lift that piece of skull out. Yeah. And you put on the back table, like a cookie. And then the brain isn't just there.

It's covered with a sheath, a little bit like a nylon parachute called a Dermotter. And then you lift that up and you incise that. And then it's something beautiful. I mean, it's opalescent. It's not gray. It's shimmering. I mean, it's not. The whole thing about the brain is like nothing you've seen before.

And the fact that it's that way when it's getting so. so much blood flow, like, shouldn't it be red? But so there's mystery and magic to it immediately when you look at it and it's a sacred space. So now with like a faint pen, it looks like a fountain pen, the tiniest bit of electricity, you're looking for disruption of function. So that means the patient has got a drape and somebody's sitting there talking to them. They've been, you know, they've woken up.

They're still a little groggy, but the scalp is numb, so they're not in pain. And you march, you tickle a little spot and you see if it disrupts. or speech. So they're asked to count or sing or speak in different languages. A language that they know, obviously. You can't be like, you speak Mandarin now. Just by touching that. Yeah, that's, well, the, the reason is that if you, if you injure their primary tongue, they lose all languages that they may have learned. But if you grew up with English and you learned Spanish, like I did, if you go, if you injure Spanish, I'll still be able to have English. So there's, wait a second. Yeah, there's some new language there. English and Spanish.

The primary tongue and secondary languages are stored in slightly different areas. Storage may not be the right word, but if you injure the primary tongue, you lose all languages subsequently learned. So basically the structure for language is established in whatever your primary tongue is. God doesn't know what people are going to be

and where they're going to grow up. So you have a template in your brain, I mean, depending on how Chomsky and you want to be, like there is language that is built upon that language you build other languages. He loves this. No, no, I understand that, but to think that as you're poking around, it could be the difference between how, like, confetti-sized pieces.

Confetti-sized parts of the brain that would cause someone to lose one versus the other is amazing. And the way to think of that is it's not necessarily that little piece, but that piece could be the hub of something bigger, right? Like, he'd throw L-A-X, you disrupt that, you're changing the world. That's an excellent question. The language thing, and so the natural questions are like, well, well, what if you learn both? Or what if, what if Braille sign language? So there's a lot of interesting questions that others, when they do these operations will bring to you.

And so it's a feel that's always interesting to read. But back to the, so they'll, you'll, it's one, two, three, four, five, six, and you tickle. And they don't, they say one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And they don't pause. what you're looking for is something called speech arrest. And if you hit the next confetti piece that you're mapping out, they'll go one, two, three, three, three, three, three. And it sounds like, and then you put a red piece of confetti.

So that means to get to the deeper part of the brain, you cannot go through there dissect through that little piece. So in the end, it looks like Swiss cheese that you've made little portals in to get to the deeper brain to dissect out. And you're finding the least destructive pathway to get deeper. Yeah. I think that's a fair way to put it, that you don't want to lose any part of your brain,

but you're going through areas that don't have functional significance for language and communication. When that happens, back to dreams, and it's been reported from the Montreal experience for a while, and it's not some sort of like magical recent thing. It's just that people are, in my field, they don't take these things and think about

how that could be broadly relevant. But sometimes when you tickle, you can activate people's nightmares, recurrent nightmares they've had since they were a kid. What does that look like when you're... They're freaked out. It's a nightmare I had when I was young. Oh.

They're re-experiencing in that moment. They're not falling asleep. So it's the only thing I can, yeah, it's the only thing I can say about dreams is that they come from the brain because I've activated one. Everything else is a conversation. Wow.

That's how I opened the book. So when you think about in terms of how information is coded, in the brain, like this is intricate and fascinating because we're talking about a localization, right, that is producing an experience. Because the electricity is reverberating like Aurora Borealis all across the brain,

it's not like that spot does that only and the next spot does creativity. Totally. It's just that spot is in a certain hub that if you trip it up, it throws off all kinds of synchrony throughout the brain rather than like, this does this, and this is where creativity lives,

and this is where love lives. It's just really not like that. The best example I can come up with is the way like financial markets work or airports work through hubs and flights and different things. You could, you know, technically he throws a very small place on the planet, but you're going to have larger scale disruptions with it. I think that's how you think about spots in the brain. Not that that spot does that and then the next spot does the next thing. I'm going to ask something that might make you uncomfortable because I greatly appreciate your desire and need for clarity and evidence. so this is a little bit more metaphysical.

Sure. The idea that the nightmare is in the brain, if we think about, we talk a lot to physicists and think about the hard problem of consciousness, it could also be that they're wired in the brain because you've had the experience, so they're recreated by those mechanisms,

but they didn't necessarily start initially in the brain. Do you know what I mean? Like where they were experienced first, it could be that you've had those repeated grooves and therefore now it's mapped. That doesn't make me uncomfortable at all. I think that's fascinating. I don't know if some energy is crossing the skull to initiate or seed cognitive experiences. I haven't seen that. I'm not opposed to that.

I'm open to that. what I would add is of the dreams, the nightmares as a species of dreams, it follows, it's the only dream that follows sort of a hereditary pattern. So adding to that, what I would say is we are inheriting our thinking and dream processes from our ancestors. And so that might sound woo-woo to some, but I want to provide the evidence for that is that when children dream of animals, it's not puppies, it's not phyto. They tend to dream of beasts.

Yeah. And so you see certain patterns of thought. And you say, well, of course that makes sense because you can get depression from family. You get bipolar. You can get schizophrenia. And nightmare disorder clusters in family. But teeth falling out doesn't cluster in family. You know, flying doesn't cluster in families.

And then nightmares and erotic dreams are almost universal. They always arrive at approximately the same time, no matter the country and no matter the era. And so you start to see. that, much like we, in my opinion, much like, you know, when you're born, you're not walking and talking. It's cultivated in you. And if you, if you don't encourage that person to walk and talk, or if we cover an eye for medical purposes where those neurons would receive that signal, they wither, I think same thing with the cultivation of the mind is what we engage with children, but also there are some patterns of five or six. They all get nightmares because I, I'm a pediatric

neurosurgeon by passion also in other countries. And you see like, oh, five or six, they all have nightmares. I've had three sons. I've had to tell them, it's only a nightmare. And then it makes you think, like, can they not discern dream thoughts from day thoughts until nightmares? So I can never prove that. But those are the metaphysical adjacent questions that I also like to ask.

And then, oh, they get erotic dreams, but they've never seen or have the erotic act. It arrives before, almost like a guidebook. And then they go through adolescence, not perfectly. A lot of mental health issues happen there. But those three things, nightmares, erotic dreams, and adolescents are mental changes, mind changes that happen. I feel like that's built in. That's built in from the neurons and unlikely to, not impossible, but unlikely to come from outside the skull. There's a few things you touch on here.

One of them is the universality of sense. symbols in the dream and I never considered that I, for example, have dreamt a lot about tigers or lions chasing me. I've never had an experience with a tiger or lion. I wonder if that is inherited through ancestral connection. And I also wonder, are there universal animals that are dreamt across cultures more commonly than others? So I was really looking for that. And I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of things. And they, There were some mentions of like taradactyls. I was like, let's go on.

This is just, but that's just a mention. I can't, we need more. Yeah. So what you're saying is imagine if the next 30 years, if we took away all the judgment and made it anonymous and let everybody sort of log their dream thoughts, patterns, content, somebody other than me, 20, 30 years from now will have more brain surface recordings, plus more of that like granularity of surveys and all things they can like they can connect.

Yeah. And so yes, the beasts more than pets was something I noticed in a paper or two. It was just surveys. I thought that stuck out to me. Nightmares being inherited. I said maybe that, you know, that's linked. But yeah, dreams and children are interesting

because you have to rely on their kids. communication. So they have to develop it first. And one interesting pattern that I found was their complexity, their dreams was linked more to the complexity of their visual motor maturation than it was like math and memory. I was like, that's interesting. You know, like the, they're, you know, which one's feeding which? Is it because you're getting good at your physical environment and then your dreams are that way? Or is the, is a dream becoming colorful? And then you can navigate your physical environment better. I'm not sure, but I like those kind of questions.

There's an example in the book where you talk about attempts to predict personalities based on reports of dreams. And there was this one study you talked about where the dreams were almost the opposite of the personality predictors, meaning the question was, can we decide who is the most mature, who's the most sophisticated, who's the most, you know, analytical of a thing? are based on their dreams. And it turned out the people with like the craziest most like creative dreams were actually the people who were not necessarily the most creative or imaginative people in

their day life. Can you talk a little bit about some of those discrepancies? I was fascinated with that. In Parkinson's and other things, there are these thoughts. So this is going to take a little bit, but it's a very beautiful concept here. So now this is measurements. Like it's going to feel wild. But there is one dream or dream pattern that predicts the future.

And that's in Parkinson's patients. When they get something called REM behavior disorder, people can look it up. It's almost invariably men in their 50s. They start having what I like to call it dream enactment behavior because REM behavior just always going to get that. But they end up acting out their dreams, their temporary paralysis of, of dream life is not there and they attack their bed partners. And so those people that have that 94 to 96% in the future, 13, 14, 14, 15 years later will develop Parkinson's.

So change in your dream pattern, and this, like, you can look this up on Scientific American, like this is not a, it's things we know, but I tried to really connect it all. But a change in dream pattern can predict the actual degeneration of the brain with Parkinson's. 14 years in advance, REM behavior disorder. Those people, the first question they asked were, are they just wild and out at night because they're just raging hard during the day? And it was like, no, there were, in general, as a survey,

there were sort of mellow, docile people and then they were just raging out through their dream changes. So it's not clear, like, a wild waking life equals a wild dream life. And what I like about that is we wouldn't expect the waking life to be, look, A lot of thoughts I have that I don't want. There are a lot of thoughts that I have that are interesting.

You know, the, let's leave dream cognition, dream experiences, because those neurons are going. Even if you're, neurons are going on fire when you're running, being chased by something by a tiger. It's just that your leg muscles aren't going. But the neurons in the motor strip are recording activity. Right. So it's happening at the brain. It's just not resonating through the body. It's fascinating.

I think it's fascinating. I'd like to touch back on what you were talking about in. children, the idea of understanding the waking life through nightmare, meaning the differentiation between those two worlds. Can you talk a little bit more about how they, the evolutionary process almost of... It's a conversation, right? So, but I'm just saying there's some really interesting things here that, well, first of all, when people say, oh, I don't dream. I've never met somebody who doesn't know what a nightmare is. It's a universal dream. I mean, I guess you could, somebody could say, I've never had one, but you know what I mean. It's,

It's a species of dream we've all had and we all know what it is. And part of a nightmare, which is very different in other dreams, is by definition, it's got to wake you up and it's got to sear your memory. Not just a bad dream. You make a distinction between people have shitty dreams all the time. Nightmare is a different class. It's like almost you don't want to go back to sleep. It's like it's that intense. And we know what nightmares are because they freak you out.

You wake up and the memory is, is why. wildly active and it's seared, imprinted. Whereas bad dream is you wake up and there's a residue and what happened? Oh, I don't want to feel that way anymore. You know, most dreams are looked at in the rear view. The nightmare is the only dream that wakes you up, slaps you around and says, you're going to remember this. So that's interesting in its own way.

And then when you think about in children, I have three grown sons, all of them, you know, and I've taken care of a lot of patience, thousands. the all of them at some point I had to tell them it was only a nightmare which when I started writing this putting this book together I was like does that mean they didn't know until then is the nightmare serving that purpose I don't have those answers but it's it is a very interesting thing that they have to be taught this this thing you just went through in bed it didn't really happen it's in your head and that's a whole different lifestyle and life and adventures you have And that's a very interesting training ground for the mind.

So there are children who, I mean, we just had Jim Tucker on, a psychiatrist, who studies children who claim to have lived other lives. He studied about 2,000 cases at UVA. And he was at the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies. And, you know, in many cases, these kids are explaining an experience that is more real than a dream, more real than even a memory. It's like a lived experience. What about people who have dreams that they say and report feel more real than a dream? Is that a thing? Because this universe over here might be like, it's an experience.

They're channeling it from another consciousness. Like, is there a categorical difference? I think it's fascinating as a training ground because physiologically we experience that fatigue sometimes after a crazy nightmare. Or when we go through something, if it's an erotic dream, we feel aroused or if it's terror. Blood pressures through the roof, yeah, I hear you. So it's interesting to think about those things as a training ground and how we differentiate what's real.

It could be if we're thinking about the evolutionary benefit, some of our awake mental daydreams or mental ruminations can also have that same experience, right? They can cause physiological change. And if we say, wait a second, that's not real either. are we having them as children? Again, this is just a hypothesis. Are we having them as children so that we can also say in our waking mind, wait a second, I can control some of where my mind goes and I don't have to follow it. That's an interesting concept. I'm just trying to draw the line between it's your imagination network. Okay, so I'm just going to back up a little bit. I can't say yes or no to

is that I'm alive and there's an energy entering me from outside my skull as an adult. I don't know. I don't have any evidence for that. I'm not saying other people are. If they're feeling it, they're feeling it. You know, they're not hurting anybody. I'm not against it. But I can't tell you that we're inheriting cognitive features from our ancestors.

That shouldn't be a surprise. I can't tell you that your dream patterns fit that. I can tell you that Aristotle was talking about lucid dreams. and there's hardcore evidence now that proves it. So that there are thousands of years of dream reports that fit some patterns that this is not accidental, that there's a dreaming process that's running. Universal dreams, common dreams, very infrequent dreams, math calculation.

Now, somebody might have it, but in general because that... I speak not my native tongue in my dreams. Yeah. It's not normal. And so your dream is infinitely wild. Yours is infinitely wild. But when you start looking at thousands of dreams, math is very rarely reported. And then going back to our original conversation, that dorsolateral prefrontis cortex is

dampened, which is what does calculation. Because we know when people get injured there, they get acalculia, which they can't do math. So I'm just putting a few of those patterns together. And then as far as imagination, so that's really fascinating because that's, I think that's what makes us, I don't know, that's the thing that I, that's the genius I love the most. So a couple of things about that, the newest neurons that are being formed in the MPFC, the medial prefrontal cortex, they're all related to like social cognition. Like if you have injury there, they can't change their political views or they don't get social fauxpaws. So I think it's really exciting.

It's not like we're getting stronger and like memorizing numbers to advance with each other and life. But it's a social interaction that happens. That said, I think dreaming cultivates that. let's just try out things in that area. And so what happens in the dreaming brain is the imagination network. They default mode. They have different names for it. I like to call it the imagination network.

It's the thing that when we daydream is our mental workspace. So there are, if you think of structurally as the brain is like continents, they take turns being dominant and not dominant, never off, because that's a stroke. It's never, no thing's ever off. is just the modulation. You wake up and you're focused on getting something done. Your mental workspace, your imagination network is dampened. Because right now you actually have to get some executive things done.

Things are under control. You don't have to search for food. You're able to now drift back into your own thoughts and have imagination. And to your point, imagination while we're awake or, you know, wild imagination in our dream life, I think is crucially important to pushing the complexity of our thoughts forward. Because that's where we're running the idea is a counterfactual thinking. If I go here, this happens. If I go here, this doesn't happen.

Like, it's choices that have made us who we are, right? We're not just reflexive. Going back to children, you know, I think nightmares that when you have to tell a child that it was only a dream, maybe that liberates imagination during the day. Like you can let some things run wild. It's just my idea. Back to you. Like you can let some things run wild,

but you don't have to actually carry out the act. You can imagine, wait, my uncle is smiling at me, but do they really wish me well? That's called theory of mind, being able to put yourself in other people's shoes. So whether daytime imagination feeds nighttime or whether, I don't think he could be separated. But that's because of the brain for 20,

24 hours, it's on. It's just on in different ways. So in terms of, I want to get a little bit into lucid dreams because lucid dreaming is a state where the body in theory is asleep, but the mind is able to maintain access to this kind of imagination network, right? Explain for people who don't know, and I have such a funny lucid dreaming story. My kids were homeschooled until high school, and there's a lot of cool and quirky kids in the homeschool community. And there's this one kid, I won't name him, but if he's listening to this, hello. And he was really into lucid dreams.

And I remember thinking, like, what an unusual thing for, like, a 12-year-old kid to be, like, talking to all the other kids about? And I used to kind of, like, tease my kids about it. Like, oh, your friend and his lucid dreams. This is a thing. It's a thing. Explain what lucid dreaming is and why people are interested in accessing it. So this is massive. When I was asked by my publisher, this was in London, that they always wanted a book that was going to be bringing neuroscience, but don't smash people's dreams and magic, right?

I just crush it, just actually ignite it because some things can be understood. And I thought, and then, you know, there's going to be a chapter on lucid dreams. I was like, oh, lucid dreams. I ended up putting in two chapters in the book. Did you know about it ahead of time? I knew about a little bit, but it was the thing I wanted to. void. Yeah. It was out there. It was out there. It was the most voo. You go deep. I gave it two chapters. Nothing else got two chapters because that was refreshing for me too. So this is a little bit of a long windup on

this, but I think people should know. For me, lucid dreaming, the first thing I was like, they're just faking it. I'm asleep. And so, but we have a way. You know, so just like you put the three electrodes on the surface of the heart and you get a little electrical squiggle for an EKG, you know, and all those television shows. Well, that's really the three nerves that are on the surface of the heart. So they're generating a little bit electricity. You put 96 scalp electrodes and you record that, you get all these waveforms and beautiful patterns. Almost look like earthquakes. Well, there's something called a sleep spindle. You can't fake being asleep on that. You know, so that's the first thing. I was like, all right, prove to me they had sleep spindles.

Because in the epilepsy world, you know when they've fallen asleep because there's a sleep spindle, right? So it's not just going to be somebody like, I'm lucid dreaming, I'm in heaven, I'm flying over the moon. You might be. But I got to see that you're truly asleep when you're... So you're looking, just to clarify, you're looking for physiological evidence... Of sleep. Sorry. Electrophysiological evidence that this person, by all of our diagnostic criteria for sleep, is asleep.

But what is going on when they're lucid dreaming? So that's the basis, because I don't want to get duped, you know? Like, that's not... Because then there's not, you know, it's not rigorous. Outside of that, the way I think about is, like, when we talk to... about, I don't think we're ever fully awake or fully asleep, and you find these what I call liminal states, going from the waking brain to the sleep, dreaming brain, there's like a sleep entry period where the electricity overlaps that it's two different states. And then when you wake up,

sleep exit, there's a, there's a sort of an overlap period. And I think that makes sense. Like, it's not going to be a millisecond that you change, you know, frames of mind. Doesn't happen in nature. It doesn't happen in estuaries as rivers meet oceans, you know. But lucid dreaming is in the middle. It's not falling asleep. It's not waking up. You're in the middle of sleep a couple hours in. And you have a return of awareness that you are actually in a dream.

Usually it's in the rear view. Like, oh, I had a dream. Oh, I had a bad dream. But this is, oh, I'm dreaming while asleep. But how could you be asleep if you're thinking I'm dreaming? That's a thing. It's a thing. It's a thing.

I'm going to set this up for you. So the person is there. in a sleep lab, they've got the electrodes behind a glass is a sleep researcher. The electrodes are showing they're asleep. Part of the paralysis that happens in our body when we sleep temporarily, the parts that are spared are breathing and eye movements. So what they do is they'll communicate and set up codes to, hey, one plus one is two, true or false.

And they'll make eye movements as a way to communicate. worst code. Wait a second. The person's sleeping is communicating with a sleep researcher. With the sleep spindle, so it's an hour of sleep. So the way you test it is you say to the patient, there are certain ways that you're going to indicate to me when you're lucid dreaming because they're conscious. So they come up with little like ways so that when they're sleeping, they will know. Three eyeball movements to the left is yes. That's crazy to me because I just assumed that they were aware enough to be aware of their dream, but they're still

in the dream zone. Okay, that's an interesting point. Meaning they can hear from somebody outside of their dream. No, they are able to communicate to the researcher. I'm in it, we're in it, let's lock in. That's wild to me. I always assume that it's like, oh, I now am in the Matrix and I know I'm in the Matrix versus not knowing, but they're actually standing at the bridge of both of those worlds. And so

and that's, you know, I'm a cancer surgeon, I'm a neurosurgeon, I'm going to drive down this 101, you know, to City of Hope. There is, the science on that is just so rigorous and undeniable. And that I think that's why I love this book, is there's things you're going to think are no way and yes way and the things you're going to say, like, oh, I assume that to be, but no, it's not true. So just stay with the lucid dreaming thing. That's one.

Then number two, it can be cultivated. Physiologically, we put people on some Alzheimer's medicine. They come back and they say, we're having a lot more lucid dreams. So whenever a chemical increases a dream pattern, there's... Malaria pills as well. You know what? That's the chapter that I didn't write was effects of drugs on dreams because I couldn't find any patterns for it. And then so now what people can do is they can try to develop the ability to lucid dream.

And there's some techniques that are in the book that I'm not familiar with. And what I liked about it was they weren't just saying, hey, by the way, last night, I was lucid dreaming three times. They said, come back in the lab. prove it you're asleep with those sleep spindles and now communicate with our iMorse code so we know you can hear us at an increased rate while asleep that you've actually developed the ability to lucid dream

I like that kind of hate you prove it to us right so what is the benefit of lucid dreaming well I would like to speak to that because one of the methods in here is yoga nidra is one of the methods for getting into lucid have you ever done yoga nidra so that's what it is yoga nidra is putting your body to sleep while keeping your mind awake. And in the yoga nidra that I do,

she keeps saying, do not sleep, do not sleep. And she takes you through a hole, and he describes it in the book, you go through an entire body calming down, elaborate exercise. My yoga nidra, it takes like 40 minutes. Like, it's a thing. And you're trying to get to that state.

I never thought of it as I'm in the lucid dreaming phase, but you get into this very sleepy, strange. You almost feel like your body can't move. like it's asleep, but you're still able to listen to her words. I haven't had like dreaming experience. I've fallen asleep sometimes, but that's not lucid dreaming. My experience of this, which again, I never associate with lucid dreaming, but I think there's some overlap here is that I have, you know, when I started as a teenager doing somatic energy work, and people would lie on a massage table and they would often, through relaxation, quickly go into what I call it.

at a still point, which is that space in between awake and asleep, where they're way off experiencing vision and emotion and heightened emotion and often memory, but they're still somewhat aware. Now, I don't know, not completely unconscious. And they kind of shift in and out of that space,

sometimes going deeper into one, sometimes coming up, and you can have intense emotional processing happening in there. And what I would say is that, I don't know the exact details and the terminology, but for those who are listening, if you look at 24 hours and you start to see these things that are, if we get away from thinking about it, the brain as hardwired, but more as 100 billion-ish jellyfish that are creating these worlds of electricity

that we can measure, it's easier to understand that during the day, people with narcolepsy could just quickly fall asleep and have some unique experiences, emotions, thoughts, and feelings during that time. That shouldn't feel fringe. Or if you haven't slept for two days, you're going to have some different feelings in surgical and training. We went 36-hour shifts three times a week. So sleep deprivation does things. Sleep entry is not a millisecond phenomenon.

Salvador Dolly wrote about it as a place where he could extract clever ideas. lucid dreaming in the middle is the return of awareness. And what I like about it is, this is dope. Remember I mentioned the dreaming brain, the dorsalateral prefrontal cortex that does math is dampened and we see very few dream reports of math that all fits. People who lucid dream in fMRI machines, that area has more activity.

So it's consistent that awareness and the executive sense is returning in what they're describing and also in the brain activity. Like that's rigorous. And then people, when they wake up, like sleep paralysis, you know, a third of people have these like,

you know, like they're being violated and they're demons. It's so consistent that different cultures have set up the same story for it. And so, and then you wake up. And then you have different experiences.

You can do, you know, transcend. You know, you can meditate and have different thoughts and creativity during the day, you can have too many espressoes and have different so if you just realize that in a 24-hour cycle, it's not on off, it's not hardwired, and that cognition, whether it's the waking brain or the sleeping brain, it's fluid, you know, and I think that to me that's liberating that at any time I might find a clever idea, like I listen to a lot of rap music in my car, and when the beats get into a certain rhythm, I have different thinking. So I have my own rituals to try to find the nuggets that I can't sitting in front of a laptop or a triple espresso.

That's meant for a different type of thinking. That's my take on. I want to touch more on that in a second, but to wrap lucid dreaming, have people reported any physiological differences from lucid dreaming to regular sleep? More energy, more clarity, emotional processing? Not a measurement, but surveys and reporting that it tends to be an overall positive experience. some of the ways that people lose a dream and you have to disrupt sleep so you got to be a little careful about that

like wake up before you would and then try to, you know, the morning like an hour and a half earlier and then go back to bed but don't let yourself fall fully asleep. So there's a certain luxury you have to have. You're right? Yeah. If you're just trying to get the kids to school,

you may not have that luxury or you may do on a vacation. But sleep disruptions are concerned. It tends to be overall positive. It can be cultivated. It's rigorously proven. A third of people are reported on their own and I think it just speaks to the brain and mind

in a way that should excite people for what still undiscovered. I wonder if it's also touching on the cusp of, you know, when you're having a nightmare or a bad dream, and you wake yourself up, right? There's that in-between space, right? Where I'm able to say, right, where I'm able to say, like, oh, I don't want to see what's about to happen.

I'm going to wake myself up. So people who are lucid dreaming are possibly in that liminal space and able to kind of hold that. If I may, when you're asleep, you're not, I mean, if you smell smoke, you will wake up. The doors aren't completely shut to your mind. If you hear an alarm, you will wake up. So perception is dampened. And there's a central structure called the thalamus that lets things filter up and it controls movements heading down.

And if people have a little bit of injury to that area, for the first few months, they report more lucid dreaming. Interesting. So the- That filtration. Right. And that there's a there's a thermostat for arousal even when we're asleep because you won't sleep through a fire or a massive alarm going off. So you're not completely shut down. And the degree to that arousal, maybe you're modulating it on your own. Maybe a night where's waking you up like an alarm. Maybe lucid dreamers have cultivated that. But that's rigorous. This is not. I knew someone. I was having nightmares at the time and I would tell a friend that I was having it. And she was like, well, just tell yourself not to do that. Okay, so that's the thing. She was able to stop her nightmares like that and just say, I'm not doing that. So what I did find with that was people could search this is part of the therapy,

their cognitive therapeutic techniques for nightmare disorders is actually rescripting a nightmare by repeatedly thinking of having a more favorable ending. I think, come on, but that's out there and that is effective. So the waking mind can influence the dreaming mind even in the most wide. type of dream called a nightmare. So I just like leaving it not not completely on off. Talk a little bit more about the importance

of creative imagination and how we can increase problem solving and access to that creative imagination by utilizing our transition points in and out of sleep. For something to be creative, it has to be clever and useful. You can't be like, and I got a creative idea as an electric car. What's already out there?

You got to like, you know what I mean? So you got to be, you've got to be a student. You've got to know to be creative. You've got to know all the dots before you can come up with new ways to connect the dots. So I think when we talk about creativity, which is really the thing I value most in my life now, is idea generation.

Okay, bad. I'm a specialist at bad idea generation. And they happen for me in the morning because I have the luxury now of bed and being able to set the time or not set the time to wake up. But before I go on Instagram, I go to my notes.

sap and whatever I'm thinking in the morning. I did that this morning too. I think I got up a four. I just stay in bed. Stay in bed. And then I five or six. And whatever I was thinking during that time, that was definitely different. Not necessarily psychedelic or way out there. They weren't any like, you know, purple elephants and stuff like that. But it's just a different way of thinking about the problems that I'm rolling around in my mind. And then I always write things down when I get up. I put down a few thoughts. And then like at the end of the week I look at it. I'm like,

bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. That's interesting. And that, in, And so idea generation toward creativity or toward anything, toward a relationship, toward employment of any sort, for me, the sleep exit window is very important for that. Dolly wrote, and so did Edison, like in that movie, Inception. Yeah, so that the falling chair thing, that's how the feeling of falling will pop you out of your dream state, falling asleep state. And that's what Dolly and Edison did. They put their notebooks, which is cool, right? Now you have the science to explain, like, Dolly, Edison, Airsoft. They put their notebook.

They're working on something. And they'd have, like, a key in their hand and a metal thing. And they'd drift off to sleep. And the key would hit the metal pan. They'd wake up and they'd quickly write down where they're thinking. Like, that's out there. Magic craftsmanship. You can get that on Amazon.

Talking about Edison and this idea of basically extending the window. So if you're not having your experience of dreams, it's potentially you're lowering your executive functioning side and so that you're able to harness a whole host of creative options. And in that state, you're able to really like you're just harvesting in there. Not for everyone and not every time, but it is possible. And it can be cultivated. I want to talk about people who don't remember dreams or don't have access to any of this because you're telling me all these things

nothing's in there except like the shit that I did wrong over the last 20 years nothing's in there I very very rarely remember my dreams I know that I'm having them I very very rarely very rarely remember them when I do have them

they're usually like horrible and bad like all these things even lucid dreaming I'm like there's nothing to go in there so I have cancer patients And a lot of them didn't have a lot of dream recall in their 30s, 40s and 50s. But when they face that, end-of-life dreams arrive or shepherd them. They tend to be favorable. You would think they're going to have nightmares.

Cancer surgery, cancer treatment equals nightmares. No. End of life. So then you have the nightmares that arrive for all children, even the ones that, you know, had the mildest upbringing. So the longitudinal pattern, like right now, Yeah, like there's no windows. I'm like, I'm just shut down, right?

But the pattern of dreaming and recall changes throughout life. And what I will say is that there are reports and people, there are surveys. I don't have measurements for it, but people do have, they have increased dream recall. They journal what they're thinking about going to bed. They slow down when they wake up. Does that mean every time? Does I mean every solution's there? But even if that's just a 5% capacity, isn't that great?

That it's free. It's personalized to you. And that's the ultimate biohack that we haven't never thought about. And I like leaving those windows open for people, if not now, but maybe at some point in your life, just to know, like, that's how that works. Dolly tried it. Oh, it didn't work for you? Okay. But, you know, that's there for those who are able to access it.

And even if you can't get to it now, that a different time in your life, dreams will serve different purposes. When I've had like the like wake up and like, oh, what am I thinking? It's always something like really insane. Like I'm falling off a cliff. You know, like, it doesn't seem creative or useful or like, what if this happened? Like I can't imagine. And I, again, there's different kinds of brains. I can't imagine that being like, oh, that's so useful.

I'm going to make a painting of it. I don't think it's metaphorical. I don't think it's linear. I think it's imagine the neurons that would be lost. that serve a greater function if you didn't wild out in your dreams. You know, I think it's sort of a preservation of capacity, not a, last night I had this dream and that equals this solution. Well, explain what's happening in problem solving.

So when I was a full-time writer, I used to say I would hit a wall in what I was doing, and the best thing I could possibly do was take a walk without any stimulation or a nap. And once I had a nap, I would wake up, I'd be like, oh, it's so I need to go this way, not the other way. And there are surveys of people, it tends to be visual spatial, like Tetris and video games, different things.

Again, visual spatial components that they'll nap or they'll use sleep as a way to those who nap did better on this. There's a lot of that out there. I'd encourage people to look into that. I can't prove it. I do believe it.

But back to your point about creativity, the people are like, oh, dream sharing, I was like, the last thing I want to share of my dreams, you know, That's not, that's a wild space. But I think it speaks to a preservation of capacity.

I've seen so much whether it's addiction, cancer treatment, chemo fog, brain injury, that brains are injured, minds are not working, but there is rehab for the injured. If the injured brain and the injured mind can recover through certain steps, why can't those be applied to all of us. And I think that's the big theme of my first book is that there is recovery of the injured brain. And it doesn't grow new neurons. The neurons you have repurpose.

It's not that like the liver re-sprouts and fills a space. So I like leaving all of that for people to know that it's possible. It's possible. I think that's the biggest message is that it's possible within some constraints. and I'm trying to share those with you. We're going to pause here. There is so much more to talk about with Dr. Rahul Jandiel. We hope you will tune in for our next episode

where we do a much deeper dive into some of the more esoteric aspects of dreams. So stay tuned for episode two. And don't forget to follow us on Miami-Bialk's breakdown on Substack. We've got a ton of fun bonus content, things you won't get anywhere else, our newsletter's from there.

So please join the community over there, join the conversation. And especially we want to talk about this episode. So please join us on substack. stack. It's my ambiolyx breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down.