Ologies with Alie Ward - Oneirology Part 1 (DREAMS) with G. William Domhoff

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

WHY do we dream? What do dreams mean? What parts of our brain are working after-hours? We sought out UC Santa Cruz researcher and professor Dr. G. William Domhoff, a world expert on the topic, for this dream-come-true episode. Learn about historical dream research, dream researchers collect dream reports, how neurodivergence affects dreaming, why you should set an alarm to go to bed, how remembering dreams can help solve problems, and more about REM myths! We’ll be back next week to answer all your questions and dig even deeper. Also teeth dreams: WHY. Dr. G. William Domhoff’s book: The Neurocognitive Theory of DreamingHis website: Dreamresearch.netThis episode is wonderfully sponsored by Saatva.com/ologiesA donation will be made toward dream research at UC Santa Cruz More episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Somnology (SLEEP), Chronobiology (CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS), Personality Psychology (PERSONALITY), Molecular Neurobiology (BRAIN CHEMICALS), Attention-Deficit Neuropsychology (ADHD) Part 1 and Part 2, Eudemonology (HAPPINESS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn 

Okay, so up top, this episode is exclusively sponsored by Saatva, and this is the first inology's history, the first one we've ever had sponsored by just one company, and it's Saatva Luxury Mattresses, which is perfect because I love Saatvas. If you were looking for a new mattress, trust me, just go straight to saatva.com. They have mattresses with inner springs, they have memory foam, they have adjustable firmness, they have white glove delivery, they have so many good reviews. People love their saatvas, as do I. It's so luxurious, it's so plush. Who knew sleeping can get better? Saatva did. That's S-A-T-V-A.com slash oligies. What a dream. Oh, hey, it's your friend's fiance who commits everything to spreadsheets.

Alleyboard, we are back. It's the top of 2023. We're going to talk about hopes and dreams, but not hopes at all. Just dreams, just dreams, all dreams. This episode is a dream. It was years in the making. This expert has been at the top of the dream research game for decades. I have waited through the pandemic until everyone was quadruple-vaxxed and rapid-tested, and also his new book just came out this fall. The timing was right. I went to Santa Cruz, a college town in this crunchy enclave on the California coast, where he has been a professor since 1965, and I walked around the misty, rainy UC Santa Cruz campus until we spotted each other. Are you in the white coat? Okay, cool. I see you. I'll walk towards you. And then ducked into the offices. We said hello to

his colleagues. Alleyboard, this is Barbara Lawrence. She's my lifelong friend and savior. And we posted up at his desk, and he has an affable smile, contagious warmth, and surprising humility for someone who is so celebrated in this field. He is a distinguished professor emeritus and a research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has written several books on dreaming, including the Scientific Study of Dreams and the Emergence of Dreaming, and his latest 2022 release, The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming, The Where, How, When, What, and Why of Dreams. This Dude Knows Dreams wrote the actual book on them. And also, really quick before we ask him 1 million not-smart questions, thank you to everyone supporting for

a dollar or more a month at patreon.com slash oligies and submitting the questions for the show. Thanks to everyone for leaving reviews. I read them all every week. And this week, Cam left one that said, do yourself a favor and listen to as many episodes as possible, even if they sound odd, like the one about flags. Cam and everyone else, thank you. And welcome to Oneurology. Oneurology? It's not easy to say, but it's an established field stemming from the Greek word for dreams. And this man runs the research site dreambank.net and has been privy to thousands of dream records over decades of research. And he lets me ask him things like, what even is a dream? Why do we do it? Are dreams a wish that your heart makes? Are dreams ghosts?

Are we smarter when we dream more? Why is sleep important? And what does it all mean? So this week, we'll arm you with the fundamental facts of dreaming, some brain basics and sleep trivia. And then we'll be back with him next week to answer so many Patreon questions explaining all the weird stuff that happens to us when we dream from nudity to flying to teeth dropping from their sockets. It's all good stuff. So pull up the covers and open your ears for author, researcher, psychology and sociology professor, dream expert and onarologist, Dr. G. William Domhoff. Bill Domhoff. Pronouns, he, him and title. You're Dr. Domhoff, right?

Yeah, professor. I prefer, I tell my students, Professor Domhoff, you can call me Bill or you can call me Professor Domhoff. Doc, you don't, do people ever just call you Doc? No. No, okay. Willie, Wild Willie, Billy George. Now I got to ask first off, how much sleep do you get a night? Because I feel like you're more productive and you look more well rested than I do. I probably get eight to nine hours sleep a night. Have you always been that way? Yeah, I've always been a night owl that sleeps in. Really? So it was when I went to college, the first year, they sign your courses and I had an eight a.m. class. It was on botany and they'd get in there and he'd start to show slides and

I'd fall asleep, fall asleep. So I never again took a class before 10 in the morning. And then when I became a professor, I never taught a class before 10 or 11. I much preferred late morning or afternoon. So I really get rolling later at night and that was reinforced when I had young children. And so we'd get the kids to bed and then maybe 9, 9.30 I'd start in and go to two or three. So for some reason that's when I think the best. And we do know from research that there are, you know, night owls and larks and people do, their circadian rhythm does differ. One of the things that I want to emphasize is that on every generalization I make, there's huge individual differences in people, huge individual differences. The processes are the

same, but we still vary. For more on those broad chronotypes, like being a up and at a morning person versus a midnight cyber goblin, you can listen to the circadian rhythms episode, which is called chronobiology. That's in the show notes. But wait, what is this one? Is it onorology? I had to check. Also, have you heard of the term onorology? Onorology? Onorology? Yes. Yeah, that would, that's apparently that would be your, you would be an onorologist. Yeah, from that's a Greek word. Yes, for dreaming. Yeah, we don't use it much. I know, I know. But we used, we once used psychopompologist. No, really? Carrier of souls to the underworld. That's an even better ology. I'll have to use that.

Now you can be an ology. You call me a psychopompologist. They kind of took you over the river sticks. Yeah. Oh, love that. Okay, so Professor Domhoff and his mentor were really the only ones to use the term psychopompologist. And I love it, but onorology is the one that you're going to hear more often in the literature. But if you become an onorologist, though, and you want to spearhead an industry-wide change to psychopompology, hey, follow your dreams. At any point during your dream research, have you had to watch people in the lab sleeping and dreaming? Has that ever been part of the research? I just once or one or two nights, and I've watched videos of it and, and certainly in the very early days.

And we're talking other people's studies from the late 1950s, early 1960s. There were people that watched people sleep. And there was one especially great one looking at the influence of external stimuli on dreams, which is very minor in dreams, because dreams are an act of imagination. And we're basically screening everything else out. But anyway, they taped these people's eyes open, and they're in the bed, and they fell asleep. So they could watch their eye movements, and they not only watched their eye movements, they, they wiggled a light around. No, didn't phase them at all, because all that kind of incoming input goes into a kind of a terminal, lower part of our brain, where it says no, the gates are down. In other words, when

that is, we say occluded, but when it's excluded, like, do not enter, you know, you're going no further. So those stimuli don't have any impact. What about when it's waking you up? Like, if you hear a cat meowing, meowing, and in your dream, there's a tiger after you or something, you wake up and your cat's just hungry? Well, it's possible, but way more rare than, than people want to believe. Because we have this enormous need to think that we're somehow processing external stimuli, that our dreams are influenced by recent events. But when it happens, as one of my colleagues once says, the dream has a greater influence on the stimuli than the stimuli I have on the dream. So if you ring a bell, they're hearing a symphony, or you ring a bell and they hear

something entirely different. So it's, there's no real connection with the external world in dreams. And when to the degree there is, what happens is, and one of the ways people get confused about what's in a dream is that as we awaken, we're also having imagery. And in that transition kind of period, you may still have imagery or thoughts. But in terms of what is a dream, those aren't really dreams. There's a lot of experiences, mental experiences we have during the night that are not dreams. So that gate that goes down metaphorically is part of the thalamus, which is a nugget right in the center of the brain that acts as your information station. And it gathers intel from your body's senses and processes it so your cerebral cortex can figure

out exactly what the hell is going on, thanks to pathways called the thalamocortico thalamic circuits, which is a term I dare you to try to work in a casual conversation. You simply can't. But yes, the thalamus noodles around with learning and memory as well as sleep and waking. And some research suggests that external stimuli makes it into our dreams somewhere between nine to 87%, which is how is that range even possible? Because it's tough to study how much of the waking world makes it into your dreams, because part of the research involves watching people sleep and then tickling them with a feather or squeezing parts of their limbs and then waking them up and being like, what were you dreaming about? Were you dreaming about the feather? And results have

really varied and sleep subjects, maybe they're just waking up pissed. I don't know. But in Dr. Domhoff's new book, The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreamings, he lists several factors that need to happen to allow spontaneous and undirected thinking, aka dreaming. So those things are an adequate level of cortical activation in the brain. There's also the blocking of external stimuli via those gating mechanisms in the thalamus and also a loss of conscious self-control through deactivating three networks in your brain, the frontal parietal control network, the dorsal attention network, and the salience ventral network. There will not be a quiz and it is okay if you remember none of that. But the point is, it's not just about which areas of the

brain are active, but also which ones are told to chill out for now so that we can sleep. And not all dreaming happens in REM and not all imagery is dreaming because we're not fully asleep the whole night. What? And some of them were actually awake. Oh. At other times, there's one particular experience where our mind is awake, but our body is still in this state of paralysis called atonia. And so you're awake and you're thinking and you can't move. But that's not dreaming. EG record, the electroencephalogram says you're awake. But your body is not the usual change that happens from when you're waking from this particular stage of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep, which we'll call REM sleep. That stage of sleep is unusual and it has this sleep paralysis

kind of aspect. And then we have many awakenings during night. All that gets confused in and mumbled into thinking it's a dream, but most of them aren't. And my biggest giant question is, what is a dream? But before I ask that, I want to ask a little, a little bit about you because you were so prolific and you are so well recognized in this field when it came to, for me, researching who knows the most about dreams. It was like all science pointed to you. But you also have this other full career where you're a sociologist who's written textbooks at what point in your long career did you say I want to go do dream research? I started out in dream research. I was a psychology undergraduate major. I did that in my junior year,

but I wasn't really sure because I didn't know for sure what I wanted to do. I graduated in psychology. I'd had two or three social courses, but I still was. I wasn't sure I wanted to grad school. My advisor said, oh, you got to go to grad school. And he wanted to send me to the University of Iowa, which was famous for this behavioristic stuff and conditioning, learning with pigeons and rats. And I didn't like it at all. And so I wasn't sure what I was going to do. And then I thought, oh my goodness. So I quickly went down and enrolled in Kent State University, which was near my home raised in the suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. And I went to Kent State and they were they were glad to have me because I'd been a good student at Duke where I went undergraduate. And there I really

got into it. And even though I had these professors that my interests weren't the same as theirs, they really were exciting in terms of rigorous thought and how to do experiments and so on. But it then went to the University of Miami, had a brand new program, and it was called humanistic and personality. In other words, they weren't doing what traditionally psychology had done. And that's why I said, wow, I'm going there. And when I arrived, by coincidence, there was a visiting professor named Calvin S. Hall. And he was, it turns out, he was the finest expert in psychology about dreams. And he was a very rigorous psychologist. He'd been trained as a behavior geneticist in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

And Calvin S. Hall was the mentor that we mentioned who co coined the term psychopompology. But yes, he was a well respected psychologist and studied how fast smart little rats could make it through mazes, as well as pioneered this method still known as the open field test. And that is where they put a little mouse on a checkerboard table and observed it venturing around to determine heritable traits of emotionality, aka how freaked out they get being in an open space based on how scared their parents were. And for more on your own heritable emotionality, now that we're all ripe from visits with our family, you can see the personality psychology episode, which we'll link in the show notes. But yes, Dr. Calvin Hall, he bred the brave with the

brave and the scared with the scared. And so he bred for temperament mice within four or five generations. So he's very rigorous. But then he got interested in dreams and he brought that rigor to dreams. And he developed a what's called a coding system, which I best can describe as you put things in boxes, you put elements in a dream in boxes. So if I have a dream that I was sitting in my house, and a friend walked in, and he had his dog and the dog bit me, well, the setting is my house, the character is my friend. And there's an animal character, this dog. And there was an aggression, the dog bit me. And Bill says that a bite would be an example of physical aggression, of course. So that goes in the physical aggression box.

Wait, the what box? Okay, so his mentor, Calvin Hall, and then this other guy, Robert van de Kassel, developed a quantitative system. It is known as the Hall van de Kassel dream coding system. This was back in the 1960s. What the hell is a dream coding system? We're all asking. So it's a way of taking dream reports from subjects and then indexing them to measure who is dreaming about what, how often. And some of the tags they assigned to these dream reports are characters, the people who appear, settings, objects, activities, success and failure, misfortune and good fortune, emotions, and then social interactions. And social interaction has subcategories for friendliness, sexuality, and aggressions. So this coding system forever changed

psychopropology and also showed that humans tended to dream about pretty similar things based on this now quantitative research. And dream scientists were kind of able to forge this new world of research just by saying, give me your tired, your friendly, your horny masses, yearning to dream free. So we have all these boxes for minor misfortunes, major misfortunes, types of aggression, physical and non-physical. Whether you befriended me or I befriended you, it's very detailed. And what happened was, taking his course, I also learned an amazing thing for that time period. And it's still always, always surprising to us. And that was, it had just been discovered in 1953 that our sleep, contrary to being just a simple sort of one undifferentiated

state, in fact, has these various stages we call them. And one of these stages, this REM sleep stage, which we go into four or five times a night, about every 90 minutes, this stage of sleep is what we call really activated. That is your breathing rate changes and your heart rate changes, your little twinges, that you'll see it in your dog, it's a pause or moving. And then it's called rapid eye movement sleep, because your eyes are moving. And it's even the name of it's funny, because the person who originally studied it, the eye movements, they jump all around, and he was going to call them jerky eye movements. And he decided that wouldn't be right, they would be known as gyms. And they would be jerky eye movements. So he called them rapid eye movements.

Who was this guy? Okay, Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman, a renowned sleep researcher and his student Eugene Azarinsky. And they hooked up willing volunteers to electrodes in 1953, and discovered the REM phase of sleep, which is called a paradoxical form of sleep, because it has a lot of similarities to being awake. Your cerebral neurons are firing with the same intensity as your waking hours, and you're only in REM sleep about 20 to 25% of the night if you're an adult. But babies, they're in that zone roughly 80% of their sleepy time, although dream scientists know that their brains aren't having the same level of dream activity that fully developed adult brains have. But what is happening when our eyes are darting around shiftily under our lids?

It gave people more of a sense that these eye movements maybe were tracking dreams, which was one of our early beliefs. But in fact, I think studies show that our eye movements are just jerking around randomly. And then people have desperately tried to find patterns in them that would relate to dreams, but that didn't happen. But the point is very simple. And that is that if you combine the seeming finding that we only dream during these rapid eye movement periods when our brain is basically activated again, certain parts of our brain that later turned out, but I'll get to that probably later. Then if you then collect a dream during that period, and which we call a verbal report because we're very rigorous psychologists, all we have,

if you want to ask me what a dream is, as you know it or I know it, a dream is a verbal report of a memory of a subjective experience that you had during the night. From a scientist perspective, they're data hounds and they can't work with what they don't know. So you have this particular report like the one I just gave, and then we sit down and we have it on a piece of paper typed out and then we say, oh, there's a character, there's an animal, there's a social interaction, there's a setting. So you combine those two and we could be scientific. Now you have to understand that psychologists used to have in those days what we called physics envy. And that is that we want to be scientists just like you, we want you to recognize that we're scientists just like

you. So we have to be serious. And suddenly we have a situation where we have people in a sleep lab with this big clunky in those days of EEG was enormous. It was this big clunky clunky machine and that made us look pretty scientific. And we've collected a dream during a REM period, which is supposedly only when we dream. And then we get the verbal report and we quantify it. So the title of my dissertation was this is sort of like, please notice we are scientists, but it's set in a pretty assertive manner. So the title of my dissertation was a quantitative study of dream content using an objective indicator of dreaming. Oh, stunning. Yeah. Like, wow, how could you get more scientific in that? Very lab code. And furthermore, we would say this is the only known

one-to-one relationship between a physiological event and a psychological event. In other words, REM sleep equals dreaming. That was called the REM dream equation. So how could I not go into dream research as a person that was interested in human motivation, why we do the silly things we do, the things we know we shouldn't do, that we watch absurdities unfold every day, you know, in the culture, in what we're doing, in whatever realm of life that we're in. The other hooker was, you gotta understand in the 50s and the early 60s, Freud and Jung and the neo-Froidians were the sort of, they were in the atmosphere. And even though psychologists shied away from all three, and there were very few Freudians, no Jungians, still their metaphors, their images prevailed and their

ideas. And we had the expectations that, you know, that we were testing some of their ideas, no question. But the point is Freud had that right metaphor, the kind of metaphor that works. And Freud's phrase was, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, the royal road. Today we know they're a bumpy, little unpaved road to the mundane, I would say, except for a few very interesting kind of dreams that we can talk about. And just a quick context. So Sigmund Freud was a pioneer in psychoanalysis, and Carl Jung thought that the symbols and the meanings of things that happen in dreams really depend on the context of those events or objects to the dreamer, and that dreaming can be used as kind of a creative tool to solve problems. Freud was like,

no, if you dream of corn dogs, you're a secret little perv. And dreaming is just a way to keep you asleep as you plumb the depths of your repressed subconscious. So we know dreaming happens in longer and longer cycles through the night, but what is your brain doing while you're snoozing? And so sure enough, what happens is we dream when our brain is at a certain level of activation, if there's no incoming stimuli, we dream during some parts of our non-rem sleep too, particularly a stage that might hear me mention later, non-rem two. And non-rem two is very similar in its blood flow. And if you're trying to awaken people, they'll awaken as readily to a lighter tone, just the same as REM sleep. So there's just slight differences in certain ways

between REM sleep and non-rem sleep. And that's on the level of activation. And so my claim is that once there's adequate level of activation, and there's no incoming stimuli, you're going to dream if you have a mature and intact neural substrate that supports dreaming. I've always wondered, what does a brain in normal daily life look like in an MRI versus a dreaming one? They are different. And that was the mindblower of the 1990s. Parts of our brain remain deactivated even while parts of the brain do activate during REM sleep and non-rem two sleep. What does that mean? More specifically, it means that the parts of our brain that are related to the external world, which means sensory systems, visual systems, sensory motor system, but also

what's called the executive network, which you could think of as the conductor of an orchestra. That whole executive network that lets us know what time it is, how much more time before we have to get on the bus, when our child's going to arrive home, that network's deactivated the whole night. And we also have networks in our brain that are called attention networks. And they're sort of watching, and they interact a lot with the executive network. But if the executive network is kind of slacking off, so to speak, the attention networks slack off a little bit. And what happens is when the attention and executive networks are relatively deactivated, we call it, then what happens is the neural substrate, the set of brain areas that support

a network for imagination, for selfhood, for memory, for internal thinking, that network becomes more salient, just like when you start to daydream, when you drift off, when your mind wanders. Parts of that network are what we dream with. And that was the key, that dreaming is an intensified form of mind wandering. Dreaming is based on our imaginations. The same network that supports imaginative thought, like a really good daydream, is basically the network that supports dreaming. And that, to me, was huge because it connected dreaming and waking thought. So the part of your brain that daydreams and imagines is on the night shift as a dreammaker. What? Okay, but what are we dreaming about? Writing on unicorns, eating chowder, redecorating the

dining room, peeing our pants. What's happening? To get to the core of it. Dreams are most revealing for somebody that's researching the meaning of dreams. In terms of fact, they're about our personal concerns, 70, 75 percent of the time. And of course, that's what we daydream about. Oh my god, I hope my kids do an okay school. Why did I say that to the boss yesterday? What am I going to wear next week to that wedding? I mean, all of these personal concerns are what we drift to. Penny feet thoughts. I have to laugh because in the 60s, there was a study done, or a professor was in a classroom, introductory psychology class, and he had a little starter gun that did the gun you shoot off for a race in a track meet. And he said, periodically in the

quarter, I'm going to, I'm going to take out that gun, I'm going to go bang. And I want you to immediately write down what you were thinking. Oh my god. So only the overall results were that only 25 percent people in the classroom were listening fully to the lecture at the time the starter gun was shot. I mean, our minds are all over the place. I know the students aren't paying attention. I know they're struggling to get back to pay attention. We all do that, especially in certain parts of a lecture. If we've heard that part before, then we drift off. Why did that guy talk about that again? Will he get to anything new? I wonder why they ever made him a full professor. You know, all of these things are going through your mind as you listen to this talk. And we're

all the same way. And we know that from research. I'm not speaking personally. It's just an example, of course, based on solid research. Well, what about people who self-identify as artists or really creative or people who have deficiencies in attention like or executive function issues like ADHD? Do they dream differently? Well, there's some there. First of all, there's these huge individual differences in all of us. The best example I can give you is about music. And that is that I know from different studies, but also from the studies my students do did in my courses. And that is that if you are a person that's really interested in music, you will dream about music. You will hear music in your dreams more frequently than the rest of us.

So if I see a lot of music in dreams, a lot of playing music, talking about music, then I can make the rather obvious inferences. What's your strongest interest? And they say, oh, music. So if you are creative, chances are you are creative in the dream world. But what if your attention networks and executive networks kind of go offline in your waking hours? Well, a July 2022 study called Dream Recall and Dream Content in Children with ADHD noted that sleep and dream studies for neurodivergent folks are a bit lacking. But this found that after studying the dreams of 103 ADHD kids and 100 kids in a control group, quote, dream recall frequency and general dream characteristics like dream length and bizarreness didn't differ from children

without ADHD. But the dreams of the children with ADHD were more negatively toned and included more misfortunes and threats, more negative endings and physical aggression toward the dreamer. The dreams seem to reflect the inner world of the child with ADHD. And the researchers noted that, quote, from a clinical point of view, it would be very interesting to study whether the negatively toned dreams change during treatment, pharmacological and or psychotherapeutic in a way similar to how sleep quality improves. So if you are neurodivergent and you have bad dreams about fitting in, science backs it up. But what if you've been medicated and you're not dreaming as much? Well, I looked it up. And in a 2020 Frontiers in Psychology paper titled Dreams,

Sleep and Psychotropic Drugs, researchers noted that you might not be dreaming less, but you might be sleeping more soundly and getting up fewer times in the middle of the night, which is coherent with the arousal retrieval model that states that nighttime awakenings help you remember your dreams that are encoded into long-term memory and, therefore, you have more dream recall. So sometimes remembering fewer dreams is a sign that you're sawing logs pretty hard. Either way, get that sleep. It's so good for your brain. Oh, and for both part one and two, we'll be donating to a charity of Professor Damhoff's choice and we'll tell you more about that charity next week. But both episodes are

sponsored by SAFA. Today's episode is exclusively sponsored by SAFA because rule number one of dreaming, you got to sleep to dream. SAFA has a sleep log on their site and it recommended this tip that I love, which is set an alarm not to wake up but to go to bed, set an alarm at night, wind down, floss your teeth, get in jammies and get stoked to get into a comfortable bed, nice sheets, a clean pillowcase, and a mattress that you're excited to sleep on. I used to have a very different relationship with sleep where I didn't fully appreciate how good sleep really is. What's something that is free but also makes you happier, it helps your body heal, and you look better when you're well rested. So if you have a bad

relationship with your mattress, please get a SAFA. Do it for both of us. One thing I love about SAFA is that they have a lot of different options, they have mattresses with coils, they have memory foam, they have adjustable firmness, they have crib mattresses and they're made to order, they're not stuffed in a box, they deliver to you by hand. So if you have been looking for a mattress that makes you excited to go to sleep and get the sleep and the dreaming that you deserve, check out SAFA. You can learn more at SAFA.com slash allergies, that's S double A TVA.com slash allergies. Okay, back into it. So speaking of studies, Professor Domhoff just published one with his research assistant. This is a 2020 paper titled

From Adolescents to Young Adulthood in Two Dream Series, The Consistency and Continuity of Characters and Major Personal Interests. And it was published by the American Psychological Association and this study analyzed 5,000 dream reports from two subjects and you can find them at dreambank.net. But here's what they were about because I know you want to know. Where we had dream journals from two different young women who had kept their dreams for their own reasons with no interest in science or anything else. One of them was blind in fact, 12 or 13 years old. And she'd wake up and tell her dreams to her mom and her mom had said, you know, you like your dreams so much, why don't you tape them? And so now she's 30 years old and

she looks on the web about dreams. And lo and behold, she finds my two research sites that were created by this research assistant, Adam Schneider, who's a great graphic designer and I'll match him against anybody as far as spreadsheets and so on. And so we have two research sites, dreamresearch.net and dreambank.net. So they come across these and they look at them and then they say, hey, I got these dreams from when I was 12 to 25. So had two different people do that over the space of five years and now we have a dream series we can study. So the one woman that we named Dizzy because we have everybody at anonymity and we change all the names, all the places and we put the dreams are all on the dream bank for you to look at. But there's no real names up there,

it's all pseudonyms. But at any rate, Dizzy, she would have all these dreams about TV characters and movie characters and zombies and so on. So when you ask her about these things in her dream, she said, I love horror. She's been to horror conferences where all the people like horror films go. She goes to those things. Well, they say, well, that's hardly news, but it does tell us that she dreams about her concerns. And her dreams are also excellent for another thing to understand about dreams that relate to your point, Ali, and that is that she had these dreams of people she had crushes on. The first time she had a couple of dreams when she was 12, she had a crush on some TV or movie man and then she got a crush on another TV or movie star

and she wrote them down and then she started to write her dreams down. That's actually how she started to write her dreams. Well, we can figure out the percentage of her dreams where she's dreaming about these celebrities as we call them or they're known people but they're celebrities, she doesn't know them personally. Anyway, she has dreams about these crushes and then it turns out she pretty soon having dreams about high school crushes and there's one guy that appears throughout most of her high school years. So if you ask her, do you have romantic interest towards certain guys, she would say, oh, yes, yeah, I get crushes and they really last a long time. Here's the interesting thing, it's all imagination. If we finally ask her, will you ever get

involved with these people? You know, this is via email and all and she knows it's anonymous. She said, I never even touched anyone. She was a most shy person but her fantasy life was very rich. So whether you do the things you dream, that's another story and that's why I call it imagination. Now, the other woman, the blind young woman that we code named Jasmine, Jasmine has a kind of blindness where she can see vague outlines. If you magnify things enough, she can read on a screen. At any rate, she's always messing with her equipment, always with her computers, always with the sound equipment and she was very, very interested also in music. But when she dreamt about famous characters, we'll call them, it was like snow white or

you know, something like that, a nice harmless little video cartoon kind of characters or nice characters like Mary Poppins, not some horror movie or some crush or something that involves sexuality. So she had a very different set of interests and I could know all those through her dreams. So dreams present a portrait of your personal concerns and they portray how you view the world. I'm curious too, in Jasmine's case, are you using the part of your brain that can see things visually? If you don't have sight, would you have sighted dreams? It depends. It's an ideal question. Thank you. And that is, first of all, visual imagery is something we gradually develop out of seeing, but it is located in what are called secondary visual courtesies.

Where in the brain is this? Well, the primary visual cortex is located in the occipital lobe, which is the very back of the brain. It's like your brain's butt. It's just above the nape of your neck. And the secondary visual courtesies are just above that, just a wee smidge closer to the top of your head. What that means is that one of the parts of the brain that never activates in the whole sleep period is what's called your primary visual cortex, which is a significant part of your brain. So what you're seeing is the mental imagery that you can see. If I asked all of you right now, imagine you're sitting in your living room. What's your living room look like? How many windows are in there? What's the furniture look like? Now have your mom walk

into that room. You can call up that visual imagery. And just to quick aside, there's a slim fraction of folks who don't have visual imaginations, and they have what's called aphantasia or imagery weakness. And a 2020 study found that about 0.8% of sighted folks are unable to form visual mental images. But a 2022 consciousness and cognition paper revealed that the majority of aphantasiics, though they can't conjure mental imagery while awake, nevertheless retain the capacity to experience rich visual dreams. So not so much when awake, but then it's a visual bonanza in their sleep. So people's ability to imagine can vary. Now, that visual imagery is not automatic, and it's not there at the start. How do we know?

We know two ways. One is developmental psychology studies, people who are awake. You can use our ways of doing studies that I don't dare get into detail on, on how we can see how good you are at visualizing, say, in your mind. But the other way is precisely blind people. If you are born blind or become blind before about age four, you do not have visual mental imagery. But if you become blind after age seven, you will have visual imagery in your dreams at least for many years. In one case, a woman gradually had less and less. She was older, but she lost her sight at seven. And so she didn't have much visual imagery. In other words, we've done studies of visual imagery in the dreams of

the blind and other imagery. And this was done with a person who was doing a doctorate degree in which he brilliantly gave people cassettes. This was, it's older. He gave them cassettes. He didn't know quite how to study them well. And that's where we come in because of this crazy little content system I've told you about. It's obsessively detailed, one might say. And we were able to create a taste, touch, smell percent, hearing percent and the visual percent. So we could go through, we now have it all fancy on the computer. And so we can create word strings for taste, touch, smell for various words, all the words for taste, touch, smell and so on. And then find all the dreams that have from these blind people to have those in them.

Then we check them for false positives, things like, oh, I see what you mean. Well, there, that's just a metaphor. In any case, we can determine that the people that did not have any visual mental imagery because they were blind at birth or before, they dream of, one guy really remember he would, he would smell the car. He's holding onto his coffee cup and he can feel how warm it is and he smells the coffee. Well, we do that a little bit. We do her sighted, but it's two, three percent of the sensory images in our dream. But hearing occurs in a fair amount of dreams too. So we have this mental imagery. It doesn't depend on the primary visual cortex. I'm so confused about dreams because I could sit in front of a laptop and say, okay, write a movie

and I'd be like, I don't know what to write about. I don't know how to describe it. And then I fall asleep in my pants on the couch and I have this like fantastic odyssey with whatever like pirates and hot air balloons. How does our imagination do that? I call it imagination roaming freely. You see, when we're awake, you're constrained by these other networks, these networks that are oriented towards the waking world, these executive and attention networks. So you're constrained. At night, you're roaming freely and instantly the same thing in the morning. When you wake up in the morning, whether you wake up from a dream or not, and if it's a relaxed awakening, which it is for most human beings, even in hunting and gathering societies, people are all around fire, they feel

safe. So you wake up gradually and the parts of the brain that are activating the most are not immediately the executive network or the attention network, you're foggy, and you have a lot of drifting waking thoughts. And in my case, I'll wake up in the morning, not from a dream, and I'll say, that's where that paragraph should go. I've got to move that paragraph. That didn't fit right. And then I'll quickly note something down, make changes in a manuscript, revealing what I do with most of my time. Seriously, this dude has written over 20 books, and they're not zombie fanfic. He's written 20 legit sociology and neurobiology textbooks in his waking hours. And then he dreams about paragraphs when he rests. But what about a relaxed awakening? Let's talk about that for a

second. So according to the 2019 book Dreams, Biology, Psychology, and Culture, the circumstances around an awakening also play a really big role in how often you can remember your dreams. So for example, if a person in a dream study has to complete a task as soon as they wake up, that distraction interferes and messes up dream recall compared to participants who are allowed to enjoy the langer of bed and fart around and think about their dreams the night before. But there's a ton of individual factors that influence that wildly. And remembering the details of your dreams may or may not be helpful to you. It depends on who you ask. In other words, your waking reflections and thoughts that are triggered by your dreams are used by a few writers, not a lot,

and not a lot by poets. And there's books and articles on that where you ask a lot of poets, artists that do they use their dreams and then a few do and most don't. So in your case, I would suggest then that you tape record your dreams and see if you see. And then your reflections on your dreams become useful. There are some people who believe, oh, we solve problems in dreams. But if you talk about cognition and complex thinking, the fact is that sometimes people do solve problems reflecting on their dreams. There was one study done, for instance, where the professor asked the students to try to dream about something that's been bothering them. So they collected these dreams. And the students said, well, you know, like two of the 50 say related to anything at all to a

problem in the students' minds and judges, independent judges, that means some other psychologists that you're working with, they go through and they say, yeah, that dream seems to relate to that particular problem. But the one I liked best in that study was this woman had a dream which she woke up and she was wolfing down pills. Oh, I forgot to make my pills go up and go down pills. And she woke up and she said, I think I better write down a schedule to remind me to write to take my pills. But the dream, she didn't solve a problem in that dream. But reflecting on that dream, it changed. And then another woman had a dream where she'd been having trouble with her menstrual cycle. And she'd been to the doctor about it and so on. And she has a dream

about running. Anyway, when she wakes up and she reflects on the dream, she said, I think I forgot to tell a doctor that I have been doing a lot of running. And of course, we know women that run miles and miles and miles. It can affect your menstrual cycle. So it's a reflection on the dreams. But I don't believe, contrary to many, that dreams solve problems. And dreaming is not a problem-solving mechanism. I disagree with that kind of view because first, we forget 98% of our dreams, 95 to 99, we'll say. That's going to kill you as a researcher to think of how much data is just not recollected upon waking. Does that kill you? Yeah, well, it's fascinating and the trouble is we can't figure out why. In other words, it's the easiest kind of study there is to take

people that are what we call high recallers and low recallers. And they've been compared on every personality test and every cognitive test. And we don't get high correlations. So I can't say, oh, you dream because of this, you don't dream because of that. Now people are trying that with neuroimaging studies of people that say they dream frequently and people that say they rarely dream. And there are differences in the activation levels of some parts of that neural network. That's just an infancy, but it could then turn out to be useful. And so we end up with things like this. One of the best predictors of whether you recall dreams is whether you're interested in dream. Now, why might you be interested in dreams and becomes a question? She wants to know about

your dreams. Well, one of my students did a study of that and she asked people how interested they were in their dreams. And she got the highs and the lows. And with the highs, the interesting thing was several of them thought they'd had a dream that was psychic. And so they had a dream that their sister was ill or their grandfather was very sick. And those dreams were very upsetting to them. And they called the people to check, which people often do. So what happens is if a thousand people, million people tonight dream that their grandfather's become gravely ill, one of those grandfathers is going to die that night by chance. So that person is going to think they're psychic. The other people, they often do call their home. I know that because we've done studies where we

ask people about types of dreams. And then we ask basically, you ever had a dream that led you to take any action? And they'll say, well, I dreamed my grandfather died and I called home and he hadn't. And I was relieved. But the other, the other ones in that study, this is where dreams are fun. I mean, a lot of times, even though we have more negative dreams or have more misfortune than good fortune, they have more aggression and friendliness and so on. They have a negativity bias as does much of our making thought. For more on this startling and bummer info, see the paper, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind by two Harvard professors who used a mood tracking app to learn that about 47% of the time we're thinking about things that make us anxious or sad rather than just enjoying

being alive on the planet. And the researchers wrote, a human mind is a wandering mind and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost. And that's partly why some experts say that mindfulness can help shift your mental habits away from the dark recesses of why did I do that? Why did I do that? Why did I do that? Or what if a disaster happens? Thoughts that are all too familiar for some of us. But anyway, in this particular study where we asked if it led to action, there were two women about about 45 who had had a dream that their boyfriend was cheating on them. Now, and it's on a questionnaire and it's anonymous. This one woman who dreamed that her

boyfriend cheated on her, they were actually sleeping in the same bed. She said, I was so angry, I socked him in the arm. No, no. The other woman was not in the same bed with her boyfriend when this dream happened. But she said, I didn't speak to him for two days. Can you imagine? Yeah, I feel so real. You feel so hurt by it. And no matter how real it feels, you're not allowed to physically or emotionally abuse anyone when you wake up. We got that, we're good there. Go have a nap. And in it, you can take a Louisville slugger to both headlights. You can slash a hole in all four tires and then you can wake up and be nice. Well, that gets to the other thing that's about dreams. It's one of the reasons they're

so fascinating to us. We have a term, fancy term. It's called embodied simulation. Now, that's what a dream is. It's an embodied simulation. What does that mean? First of all, simulation is when you're putting yourself in some hypothetical scenario. You're driving along and you're thinking, what if I pulled over here and went in that gas station? And what if I then played the jukebox and I started to listen to music? And what if I really started to really do what I want to do, which is to sing and show people I can really sing? So I've just simulated a scenario. I'm driving along. I'm going to pull into this gas station and into its little store and I'm going to go in there and sing.

That's a simulation. But an embodied simulation, what that means is that when we really get intensely into a dreaming, part of the brain areas that are activated are not only our imagination, but also the secondary visual auditory and motor cortices. And you can sometimes call this up in your mind and imagine yourself running. You're really running and you're really afraid. You can work yourself up and get a sense of that. And imagine you're being chased by that dog that you're scared of down the street. I have a feeling that Dr. Domhoff had a bad experience with a dog which saddens me and I didn't ask about it. But anyway. So at that point, it becomes not just sort of abstract thought, but we are maybe shaking a little bit or really feeling a sense of running.

All of that is what I mean by intensified form of mind wandering. Because we know that the secondary visual cortices and motor cortices are activated during dreaming. And what that means is it does feel real. We experience dreams as real while they are happening. And we wake up and it's usually gone in a flash where you say, my God, I can't believe that. I was actually arguing with that guy that I never would argue with in my life. I was actually talking to that person I've never talked to or I was giving Jimmy Carter advice. And so it feels so real. And so for most of us that we shake that feeling. But some dreams can feel more than real. Bill says that one type of embodied simulation is a little more profound.

And that is, occasionally, this is a rare dream now. But people sometimes have dreams of deceased loved ones. Not just that you're walking around with your dad and mom, but you recognize who are deceased. But you recognize that they're alive. And you can't believe it. Yeah. This happened to me like literally like two nights ago. Yeah. I was like, dad, you're back. Yeah. Yes. And back to life dreams. Those dreams are so powerful for people. And here's the striking thing. One of the founders of anthropology, of modern anthropology, an English guy named Edmund Tyler, he said, dreams in the spiritual world, dreams in religion, are very closely tied. Because these occasional dreams of somebody being alive

are really so real to people, they tell other people. You'll never guess who I read it to. And in that sense, some myths, this is another phrase I really like, many myths are dreams that have been told and retold. If I tell you a dream in which this amazing thing happened where so and so was back to life, and that dream kind of grabs you or resonates like it did for you, you might tell my dream, but it would be just slightly altered by you with every time a story is told, it gets altered slightly, we call it leveled and sharpened. The minor stuff falls out. And the stuff that's interesting gets sharpened and embroidered. You know, the big guy in the dream becomes a giant, right? So that kind of embroidering

of dreams that have been told and retold may well relate to some of our mythology. Now I want to tell a little little story related to that about when you ask people for dreams. When I first read research on these back to life dreams, I was very interested and I wanted to see if very many students had that kind of dream. And I used to teach these very large classes, whether it was introductory psych or personality or of course on dreams. And I would give them these anonymous questionnaires. This particular questionnaire, I just asked this very general question, have you ever had a dream of a deceased loved one in which they seemed to be alive? And to my surprise, and these are all 18 to 20 year olds,

and they probably hadn't experienced even the deaths of their grandparents yet in a lot of the cases. But four or five students had dreams in which their dog was alive, or their cat was alive. And they loved it. And I was so taken aback. And one of my daughters really had a dog she really loved. And I told her about, you know, these dreams I'd collected. And she said, Dad, I dream about him being about her dog being so joyful when I see him. And he's like, he's alive. So if you've had that experience now, now I'll turn to one of our studies. And he's up on the web, on the Dream Bank. His name's Ed, pseudonym is Ed, pseudonym, whatever the right word is. This 2015 paper titled Dreaming as Embodied Simulation was published via the American

Psychological Association. And it deals with dream journals that this anonymous subject, Ed, recorded on his own for decades, never intending them to be public, but later passed them on to researchers in case they could help other people going through difficult emotional times. And we call him the widower. This is a man that never had an interest in dreams in his life. And then his wife got seriously ill, a third time of a cancer return, third time when the first two times they thought it was a beat. So it was really, you know, she was going to live on. So it was a disastrous year or so. And she went through a horrifying, gradual death through stomach cancer. So you can imagine how dramatic it was. But anyway, shortly after she died,

within a month, he had a dream in which she was there and she was alive and she looked alive. And he couldn't believe it. And he was kind of frightened. And she assured him. She reassured him. She was okay. We call these reassurance dreams. I'm okay. It's okay. Then he was really discombobulated guy after this. And several months later, he met another woman and he was thinking about getting married to her. And he had a dream in which his, you know, we'll say this would might be highly motivated, but she had a dream in which his deceased wife said, you should get married again. So he had these moving dreams. But anyway, in his in his diaries, which made the dreams so valuable, he wrote, he said, you know, I'm not a religious guy. I'm scientifically

or anecdotal, he wasn't a scientist. But he said, I swear she visited me a couple of those times. I swear she visited me a couple of those times. That is the connection dreams have with the spirit worlds. And here's another thing about this. We have people that interpret our dreams. The people that interpret our dreams are the first professionals in human history. They are called shaman. You are sick. You are confused. You go to the shaman who I call a the first psychoanalyst. And you go to the shaman and you say, I'm feeling ill. And the shaman dives into the world of spirits often through a dream and finds out which evil spirit, which malevolent thing, you know, which spirit is mad at you for whatever reason. And often it's random.

You just had bad luck. The spirit was annoyed and picked you. He tells me it's okay or what the spirit said. And then I can go work that day. And I think that's what a lot of people in our society do. They have the function of making it so the rest of us are able to go out and work. Their job is to keep us working in terms of we don't collapse into all our neuroses and anxieties and fears and resentments and all the rest that go with human beings being injustice collectors. They're like mood mechanics. Yeah, they got to do it or you can't work. I mean, and if they do it right and they inspire us as some attend to do, then we really feel good about ourselves. What about when you see a big book on the shelf at a bookstore and it's like

the dream encyclopedia and it's like you had a dream about owls. It means you might be pregnant or whatever. Do you find any correlation between the symbolism of dreams and any of your research? No. Okay, that's what I thought the answer was going to be. I mean, that's a long, that's a short answer based on a long painful set of a long journey. I'm sure. I mean, first of all, when, you know, I said in the 50s, clinical lore is all around you and the dreams that are railroad to the unconscious and Freudian symbols hats, hats are phallic symbols. But we did other studies and I've studied the dreams of like, I have 4,000 dreams in this one woman and we looked through and we did different word searches and found the unusual dreams.

Big sample went through, try to make sense out of them. And the one example, she had 10 dreams about bananas. But in the one dream, the banana was clearly a phallic symbol. In other words, the banana turned into a penis. But in all the other dreams, the bananas were just sitting there with other things and so on. So there was a famous statement that's made about Freudians that probably Freud didn't make. But the famous statement is there are some days when a cigar is just a cigar. P.S. I tried to figure out if like Liza Manelli or something said this and all I found was that Freud.org says it wasn't Freud who said it. But if he did say it, he said it ironically, meaning that a cigar is never just a cigar. A cigar is also a dick, according to Sigmund.

But here's the interesting thing about these neuroimaging studies that I emphasize so heavily in the last 10, 15 years. And that is that when you study the network in the waking brain that is activated when you say something metaphoric to somebody. In other words, they're going to decode this metaphoric statement I made across that river when you come to it. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. The part of the brain that activates during an interpretation of a metaphor or generating a metaphor, if you ask me to make up a metaphor, those particular areas are not active during dreaming. Oh, weird. They're only partially active, I should say. It's a more complex story. In other words, the networks that make it possible to experience emotions,

to make symbolic statements, to understand symbolism, and the networks that allow you to recall specific memories, those networks are not functional during dreaming. Dreaming has far less emotion in it than the stereotypes say. It has, as far as I can tell, virtually no symbolism. And furthermore, if we study your dreams, there are no specific memories in them. There are no episodic memories we call them. We're, oh yes, I was with my sister at the zoo two weeks ago, kind of memory. Instead, the memory bank we draw on in dreams is what are called semantic memories. That is sort of my general view, my general conception of my friend Joe or your general conception of your younger sister. That we draw on. So we tend to drum up general vibes from life,

but not replay exact scenarios as we remember them. So dreams aren't a time machine made of your own jiggly memories. So we have cognitive insufficiencies during dreams. That is, there are certain things we can't do well during dream. We don't have as much emotion as I've already said. I don't think there's much symbolism in dreams. There's not episodic memories. And of course, the most obvious is we don't know where we are. In rare cases, for some people, they will think they are aware they are dreaming. In other words, it starts to use a little part of the executive network. They still, even though they think they're dreaming, they don't say, yeah, and I'm in bed, and I'm in my house, and et cetera, et cetera. In other words, they still don't really have

what we have during waking life. So that network we're dreaming with is partial. It's a network that's very important in human beings, and it's only in human beings. It's a network that's probably 75,000 to 250,000 years old. And of course, that's being studied like crazy by evolutionary anthropologists. Cognitively modern human beings could be as recent as 100,000 years ago. And that's a lot more recent than we thought 10 years ago or 20 years ago. For more on this, you can see papers like the role of dreams in the evolution of the human mind, which says that dreams aren't just a rehearsal for shit hitting the fan real bad. They're more of a general virtual practice for life, and they could have played a big part in human cognitive

capabilities. So our ancestors twitched and dreamed so that we could walk around one day wearing underpants and eating cereal and building rockets, sometimes all at once. And so if you look at the, you know, the brains of chimpanzees, monkeys, and so on, they have some of the structures that are part of our imagination network. Instantly, the technical term is, which is just an accidental technical term. The guy happened to name it first. It's called the default network. It means when we're not doing something, when we're not on a task, we just go into this state, which is the state of mind wandering and daydreaming. So we mind wander and daydream with the default network, but that default network is only one

small part of things. And so therefore dreams are not as the same as waking. And they're not the same as consciousness. They're not a form of consciousness. They have parallels with consciousness. So much more on this in part two. We get to the really juicy stuff via your questions, everything from sex dreams to teeth falling out and how to control your dreams. And more of that will be out next week. Here's a tiny preview. Can I ask a few questions from listeners? Is that okay? Okay, that's all you get for a preview from next week. You need to come back because we will have a marathon Q&A with your dream questions and they are all so good. Like, is there an intersection between dreaming and hallucinating? Does sleep quality affect your

dreams? Why don't babies dream? Lucid dreaming, flying in dreams, the imagination in dreams, reducing nightmares, and why rest is so critical? Meanwhile, ask specialists your sleepy questions because why else would they study this for decades if they didn't want you to know? And links to dreambank.net and his new book are in the show notes. And so our social handles were at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with 1L on both. I'm on TikTok at Ali underscore oligies. Please say hello. And to submit questions for future episodes, you can join Patreon at patreon.com slash oligies for about 25 cents an episode. And oligies merch is available at oligiesmerge.com. Thank you, Susan Hale, for managing that and so

much more. Thank you, Noel Dillworth for all the scheduling. Aaron Talbert admins the oligies podcast Facebook group with assists from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts and Caleb Patton bleeps them. Kelly R. Dwyer works on our website and can make you one. The incredible Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio is our new editor with some assists from the ever helpful Jared Sleeper. The theme music is by Nick Thorburn of the Banth Islands. And if you stick around until the end of the show, I am going to tell you a secret. And this week it's that I live on a steep hill and things roll down the hill. And then I think they stay there for decades because I've had to go to the bottom of the hill after I've

dropped things off of the hill, such as the rechargeable battery for a power drill. And at the very, very bottom of the hill, aside from like a bunch of old Pepsi bottles from the 80s, the coolest thing I found was a glass skull completely intact. I don't know how it fell hundreds of feet down this rock covered hill or what it was doing down there, but I'm pretty sure it's not cursed. It seems friendly, but now I got a glass skull on my bookshelf and it was free. Okay, we'll see you next week for more dreams. Bye bye. Do you have any dreams? Yeah, I'm all alone. I'm rolling a big doughnut in the snake wearing a vest.

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