Stuff You Should Know - How Fever Dreams Work

Episode Date: July 13, 2017

Fever dreams can be unsettling experiences. These ramped up nightmares are vivid, detailed and only happen when the human body experiences a fever. What is it about the combination of fevers and dreams that make these night terrors so hellish? Learn all that and more in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, stuff you should know is going on tour. Do-do-do-do. What are the deets, my friend? Okay, so starting August 8th in Toronto, that's in Canada. We're gonna be at Danforth Music Hall in then Chicago.

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Go Jayhawks. Yeah. On October 11th. And hey, if you're in Kansas City or anywhere in that area, this is your chance. Get in your car. Yeah. If you are anywhere near Brooklyn,

well then you should go to the Bell House October 22nd, 23rd, and 24th. We'll be there all three nights. And finally, we're gonna wrap it up here in Atlanta at the Buckhead Theater on November 4th, for a benefit show where we are donating all of the monies to Lifeline Animal Project of Atlanta and the National Down Syndrome Society.

Yep, so for all this information again, visually, and for links to tickets, just go to S-Y-S-K-Live.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. Jerry's got a salad. Everything's normal, which means it's time for Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Jerry's got this shawarma special, she's saying. Oh, really?

Yeah, she loves it. How you doing? I'm good, man. Feeling, despite myself, kind of relaxed. Okay. I'm not feeling feverish, if that's what you're driving at. No, that's not what I was driving at.

Yeah, no, I'm not. You get fevers a lot? No, not anymore. Although, I haven't for a long time. I've never been a fever person. I've probably had a handful, maybe. How many fevers have you had? Not a ton since I was a kid.

Not a lot of adult fevers. I mean, I've had hip hop fever. I've had rock and roll fever. Yeah, yellow fever. I've had the fever for a flavor of a Pringle. Oh, man, me too. What are those? Those aren't even potato chips, are they?

They're potato crisps. Man, those are good. They're mashed together potato parts. I don't think I want to know how those are made. No, it's like chicken McNuggets. I think a unicorn just poops them out. Have you seen unicorn pizza? It's a little much.

Oh, what is it? There's a restaurant in New York. I'm not quite sure where. Maybe Lower East Side. They have unicorn pizza. It's like dough. Okay, good start. Like a nice pastel-colored frosting instead of sauce.

A mound of cotton candy. Nerds or pop rocks, maybe. Oh, good lord. And then some other stuff. Supposedly, it tastes kind of good. I'll eat anything that has enough frosting on it. I like frosting, but I'm not into sugary candies, really. Oh, like nerds and pop rocks and stuff?

Nah. You know, I did brain stuff once on pop rocks, and that was interesting. Yeah? Yeah, your tongue actually warms the pop rocks to the point where they melt, and since they have CO2 trapped inside during the manufacturing process,

that CO2 suddenly is released in a pop. So it's just a little bubble of CO2? Yeah. That's gotta be good for ya. I'm sure. It's funny, my, I had a roommate in college. Like, not many adults eat candy. Like, people eat chocolate and stuff like that,

candy bars, but candy candy. I don't know. For an adult, it's just a little strange. I guess, yeah. You eat candy? Sure. Like what? Mentos, not mint Mentos, like candy Mentos.

I know. I like those. Well, I had a roommate that would go to the convenience store next, and this was college granted. Right. And he would eat the stuff, I think. Okay.

And he would go with like $15, and buy, you know, like giant sweet tarts, you know, those big truable ones. Sure. And like fun dip, and nerds, and just all kinds of candy. Fun dip, or liquor made? There's the same thing, I think, yeah.

It was just a sugar stick. Like a lick of stick. Yeah, dip in sugar. Right. Like I don't have a foot, but I've got my liquor made. Oh, man. Can you, can you guys out there

and podcast Lantel we're stalling? Because we are big time, because we happen upon a topic that no one really knows what's what. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about fever dreams. We know about fevers. Yep.

Kind of know about dreams. Yeah. But apparently no one's really gotten to work on figuring out what fever dreams themselves are. So it's largely anecdotal. Yeah. So you're gonna have to bear with us on this. We'll leave that there for now.

Yeah. But I guess a good place to start is by talking about both those things separately. And starting with fevers, you've always heard 98.6 Fahrenheit is the normal internal body temperature of a human. That in 92, there was a big study that said it's really 98.2.

What? Depending on like how old you are, what time of day it is, what you're doing where you, if you put it in your butt or under your armpit or in your mouth or in your ear. Or all of them at once. That'd be something else.

It can vary a little bit. So I think there's a bit of a slight sliding scale to that number. Yeah, for sure. But I think the key is, is it's gonna be roughly around there. And even if you have an average body temperature that's not exactly 98.6,

let's say you typically tend toward 97.5. You run cooler. Yeah, yeah. Your body temperature still during the average day gonna fluctuate plus or minus about a degree Fahrenheit either way. Yeah, so it looked a little bit into the 98.6. And the original dude that came up with that

was a German physician named Karl Reinhold August Wunderlich. That was good. That's a good one. When? 1868, he wrote a book. Well, he did a studies where he had this temperature rod. He would stick under the armpits of all these people. He's like, where do you want it?

Yeah, exactly. And everyone once said. Everyone always says armpit. Do you know the comedian Rory Scovel? No. You should just check him out. Okay. He does these weird things.

Like he'll just do his whole routine with a German accent. Okay. Like for no reason whatsoever. I like the sound of that. And he did one about stealing old people, like kidnapping old people for the German accent. He's from South Carolina, I think, but he's done shows with like a severe Southern accent

and then one just normal accent and then he'll do a German thing. He just likes to mess with people? I guess so. He's great. I will check him out. Thanks man. So anyway, 1868, he wrote a book called,

after these experiments called Dos Verharten der Erkenfarmer in Kronkenheiten. That is good. And I looked at, it's funny, the real translation, I think of that as on the temperature in diseases, but if you type it in the Google translate, it comes out as the behavior of the intrinsically warm and sick units.

That's the subtitle. Yeah, they like correct me up. Yeah. So anyway, he's the guy that came up in 98.6 and that stood for a long time. But that's just so, that was just based on his observations, his study. And it's stuck.

It was an average. It wasn't like this is what you should be. It was just the average of all these people. Right, and then 130 years later, we finally got around to verifying whether that was actually true or not. Well, I mean, it says in 92 that they said it was 98.2 from another study,

but then everything I still read says 98.6. All right, I know what you're talking about though. I had heard in the last few years that they're like that 98.6 jazz is kinda made up. So the point is, is that your body's going to be roughly somewhere around there, right? That's your normal body temperature. And then depending on the time of day,

it's either gonna be a little cooler than that or a little warmer than that. And our body temperatures are regulated by something called the hypothalamus. And like I said, depending on the time of day, your body temperature is gonna fluctuate and that's tied to sleep apparently. So as your body temperature is rising,

usually in the late afternoon is about where it peaks during the day. That's associated with wakefulness, alertness. Not necessarily just having a high body temperature, but an incline in the temperature in your body. Means you're awake, you're alert, you're ready to go. Right? What's your reaction?

It, once it starts to decline, that's associated with drowsiness. And it hits, it's trough. Your body temperature is at its lowest right about before you wake up. Right. And that's actually associated with REM sleep. Yeah.

So there are some stuff starting to come out. Just bear with us, everybody. We're laying the groundwork. So your body temperature changes. The hypothalamus is directing the whole thing and sleep and wakefulness has something to do. It's related to your body temperature changes. All right.

Good night, you take it from here. Well, you know what? Let's take a break because I'm not sure where I should go. We'll be right back. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

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Okay, I was being coy. You set the stage very nicely. So if your body gets, let's say some bad bacteria gets in it, and your body is alerted, warning intruder is coming, your immune system kicks into gear, and starts producing this biochemical material called a pyrogen. Okay, this is my new favorite thing the body does. Oh yeah? Yeah.

Well, you knew that before, right? Or did you just not know the mechanism? I mean, I knew humans get fevers, and I knew the fever was to kind of like cook out everything. I didn't understand the mechanism, I just didn't answer your question. Well, take this part then. Oh yeah? Can I? Yeah.

So these pyrogens, right, they are these biochemical markers that are released by the immune system in the body, or, and this is why I love this, there's some bacteria, some pathogens that make humans sick that produce pyrogens naturally. So when they show up, they just start releasing them, and they just give themselves away. Yeah, they're big dummies in that way. Right. So where's the party? They kick open the door, they're carrying like a pony keg under one arm, their guts

sticking out, it's just, that's like that kind of bacteria, right? So the pyrogens enter the bloodstream and they travel to the hypothalamus, because remember the hypothalamus controls your body temperature. And this is what they do, Chuck, are you ready for what the pyrogens do? Yes. They go to your hypothalamus, and they dampen the heat-sensing neurons in the hypothalamus, and they excite the cold-sensing neurons in your hypothalamus, and they trick your hypothalamus into thinking your body's suddenly gotten very, very cold, so that your hypothalamus

turns the temperature up and says, don't let any of this heat out, we gotta warm back up. It tricks your body and your hypothalamus into creating a fever. That's right, and they do this because, well, they don't do this because, but what happens from there, they do this because they're dumb, but what happens from there is, like you said, the fever, what a fever is, and why you want that fever for at least a little while, is that it does, it's trying to cook and burn and bake that bacteria until it dies. Right.

It is your body's fighting, like when you hear, you know, like your fever broke, that's usually a good sign, that means that your fever did its job, and it's cooked all that bacteria up, and you're gonna be on the men soon. So basically, that's what's happening, and this is the great thing about a fever, but you know, a fever makes you feel like crap because it's a lot of hard work to kill all those things. Well, it is. There's a lot of, your sympathetic nervous system is kicked into high gear, which I found

out is one reason why they say you want to feed a cold starve of fever, because you don't want to introduce digestion because it requires the parasympathetic nervous system. Right. Right, fight or flight, and you don't want those two things going on while your body has a fever, it's just a lot of extra work for it, right? But one of the things that is going on when your body has a fever, when that temperature rises, it's hard enough on your organs, but it's also hard on the level just the fact that they're operating outside of their normal operating temperature, and that makes it very

hard on them, and can actually cook some of the ingredients inside yourselves. Yeah, I mean, it's like working in a too hot of an environment, it's just never fun for anyone. Right. Although I guess some people love that stuff. Yeah, but they're still, they might like it, but they still aren't working fast. Yeah, that's true. You know, they might be happy, but they're slow.

So if you have a fever, what's considered a fever now in 2017? If you're an adult and your oral temperature is above 100.4, or if your rectal or ear temperature is above 101, then that's considered a fever. If you're a kid, good luck getting anything besides the rectal temperature, because it's just tough. And you have basically no right. Which you have as wiggly kids who aren't like, sure, stick something in my ear for four seconds. But up the kazoo, there's not really anything you can do about that.

All they can do is say, glaven. Yeah, exactly. So the rectal temperature for a kid above 100.4, and with adults, you don't have to really worry about your fever too much. If it tops 105 for any period of time, you probably want to do something about that. That's what I saw was the 105 degree Fahrenheit mark was about where you should start to worry. Yeah, as an adult. And you're going to feel so awful if your temperature is 105.

You've probably already been to a doctor at that point. Let's hope so. For kids it's different, though. If you don't want to let your child get up to 105, that's bad, bad, bad. So what is it for kids that you really want to start worrying about, did you say? You know what? I'm not exactly sure. It probably depends on whether you're a first-time parent or this is your second or third kid.

Well, and it varies with the age. It's like zero to 18 months. It's something. I guess, yeah. Like what you should do is go consult your doctor. Yeah, exactly. But any kind of temperature you should, for a child, you should kind of be a little more alert about.

Right. But we're not medical experts here. No, we're not. And everything we're saying assumes that you have healthcare coverage. That's right. All right, so that's fever in general. You got anything else on that? Yeah, one other thing.

The pyrogens... Pyro, by the way. That's no mistake. Man, I did have something. No coincidence. No, it's not. What is it? Latin for fire?

Greek word for fire. Yeah. Pyro. Eat. Def Leppard. Right? Great song. It really is.

It's an album, right? Yeah, they just mention it in Rock of Ages. Yeah. It comes up. They should have a song called Pyromania, I wonder. But that's pretty cool. It's like the antithesis of your band, your album, and your song all being the same name, like Big Country.

Oh, I love that song. Sure, but it's pretty uncreative. You're basically saying like, here's our basket, and we're going to put every egg we have into it. That's the one thing we came up with. Yeah. I saw a David Spade bit once, and he was talking about, he was complaining. It wasn't even comedy.

He was just complaining that he went and saw Big Country, and they didn't play the song Big Country. No. Yeah. Really? He's like, it's the name of your band. It's the one song everybody came to see, and they didn't play it. He's funny, too.

Well, the long and short of it is, I totally forgot what the other thing I had to say about Pirate Tens was, so I'll probably think of it. Oh, I know what it was. Pyrogens, as your immune system grows and ages and you become a grown-up, the pyrogens have a little less of an effect on you. So where if you're a kid and your immune system is young and inexperienced, your fever's going to shoot up quick, and it's going to get hotter faster. Right.

So you do want to stay on top of a kid's fever because their immune system is not used to pyrogens coming and messing with their hypothalamus, like an adult's it is. Yeah. That's a good point. That's what I was trying to think of. Yeah, that's true. You need to take that rectal temperature way more than you're comfortable with. I don't recall that ever having been done to me.

Well, because you don't remember being a baby. No, but my parents were pretty strict, pretty stern. No, by the time a kid is old enough to where you can say, hey, put this under your tongue or hold it still for a minute while I put this in your ear. But pre that when they're not sentient humans and they're just, you know, crying whiny little sacks of flesh. I got you. You got to stick it right off the butt.

Okay. Carrie's laughing. She almost spit out her shawarma salad. Carrie's done plenty of that, so she knows. Okay, so into dreams, I always think we've done a general show on dreams. I think we did, finally. I didn't find it. What, still?

No, I saw Lucid Dreamy. No. Can you control your dreams? That's the same thing, wasn't it? I think that was the same episode. Maybe, yeah. But no, we did run on dreams. I didn't see it.

Wow. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. Well. This contributes to the little by little. Someone will know. Okay. Jill Hurley, where are you when we need you?

Our statistician, the minister of stats. Right. All right. Well, we'll talk about dreams a bit here then, even though we've explained this in various episodes here and there, to some degree. But dreams, you know, if you're a psychologist, you really love to spend time talking and dissecting dreams, interpreting dreams. If you're more into the neurology side of science, you don't really care about that

kind of stuff. In fact, for many years, they thought it was called activation synthesis hypothesis, which was you go to sleep and all these synapses are just randomly firing and they don't really add up to even a story. You just do that when you wake up because you're human. Yeah. But that, I mean, that's complete BS. Well, you almost get the impression that they came up with this and the neurologists came

up with it to stake out their territory in response to years of psychoanalysts saying, this is what dreams are, they're like tapping into the collective unconscious or they're your repressed memories. Neuroscience said, no, nothing. Yeah. They're just your stupid wet brain going crazy while you sleep. Yeah, which we all know now is not true. I saw another one too.

What's that? Threat simulation theory. Have you heard of that one? No, but that's a great band name. Basically it's your training to be a ninja while you sleep. Like your brain is running threat simulations constantly so that it's like working itself out like getting more and more agile and quick and like, so you can get better at running from a saber tooth tiger if you actually encounter it.

I could see that early on maybe. Sure. And there is an evolutionary advantage to it. So evolutionarily speaking, it would make sense. The point is that one came along and was like, no, there's obviously some reason for dreams. It's not just random. Yeah. Well, and then maybe I could have seen that early on, but then at some point someone around

the fire had a dream about Tuk Tuk's wife and woke up and went, whoa, there was no saber tooth tiger in that dream. I'm not sure what that meant, but I better not tell Tuk Tuk. And then they went, what's a rectal thermometer? It hasn't even been invented yet. So these days, they've done actual studies with EEG machines and MRI machines. And especially in Italy, these Italian researchers basically put people to sleep, not put them to sleep.

In a sleeper hole. They lay them down in a nice Italian bed, feed them some pasta fuzzul. Get out the rectal thermometer. Yep. And they hook them up to all these wires and machines. And then they will wake them up at different points in the night and say, hey, what were you dreaming of? We'd like to talk about it and study what was going on with these machines.

And they actually, what they found supports the current, the prevailing theory. I don't think it was their theory. I think it was around, but their research supports it called affect regulation theory, which is basically that we control our emotions or we process our emotions through our dreams. And these Italians found support for this and that when they woke people up and asked them what they were dreaming about, the ones who had the best recall were the ones who had the most theta waves in their frontal lobes. Right.

Which are slow moving waves, right? Yes. And when you look at an EEG machine, if you looked at those dreamers brainwaves, it looked like the brainwaves of somebody who was sitting there forming and recalling memories. So these people said, that's what they're doing. That's what all of us are doing. While we're dreaming, we're forming memories. We're taking emotions that we've experienced through the day and we're creating memories

out of them so we can file them away. So we're processing our emotions in our dreams. That's the point of dreams. That's the current understanding. Yeah. And then, I mean, other parts of the brain that have been active all sort of deal with emotion, whether it's the amygdala in the hippocampus or the lingual gyrus, which I think we just talked about in another episode.

I don't recall. I can't remember. But they're all areas of the brain that relate to emotion and memory and some with visual activity and, you know, that kind of makes sense. I like that theory. Yeah. And then under that current theory, so that's like the explanation for regular dreams and you can't just have a theory for dreams without including nightmares or else your theory is

broken, right? Right. And the direct regulation theory considers nightmares, basically, it's an emotion that's being put into the process of creating a memory, a false memory, right? A dream memory, I guess you put it, but it's a real emotion, right? And it's so big, it breaks the process and all of a sudden, this process of creating a fake memory, a fake experience goes haywire and all of a sudden, you're enduring some terrible, horrifying experience because the emotion that was being processed was too big

and got out of control and now you have a nightmare, TS for you. Yeah. I think we did one of the night terrors, right? We did, for sure. And sleep paralysis. We've covered it all, I think. I guess we really haven't done a dreams one. All right, so let's take another break.

And we're going to come back and finally talk about fever dreams. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. You robbed me of a Saturday night fever reference. I just want to go on record is saying that I was wrong.

So Chuck, here's where everything just kind of goes totally off the rail. We've talked about fevers. We've talked about nightmares. The problem is really understanding both doesn't necessarily amount to understanding them together. Right. So knowing what fevers are, knowing what dreams are doesn't mean you know what fever dreams are, but you can make stuff up if you want.

Yeah. And I'm, boy, I don't even think we even said if you've never had a fever dream, you might even know we're talking about. Oh, yeah. You'll kind of dumb at this point in the podcast, but the fever dream is basically a nightmare on steroids. Yeah. It's just so vivid and so real and scary that happens, you know, when you are sick with

a fever. Yes. Obviously. So they're fever dreams, right? So they are a thing. Yeah. But the scientific literature on them is super thin, basically non-existent. Kids seem to get them, if not more, at least they stand out more to children.

And so anecdotally, people seem to recall having fever dreams more when they were kids, whether or not that's true or just a memory is, or, you know, what do you call it, like a memory bias or whatever. Yeah. There's no one really knows. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, we don't really know because I don't remember the last time I had a fever and if

I did, whether or not I had a fever dream, I don't think I've ever had a fever dream. I did when I was a kid. I don't remember having fever dreams. Yeah, I remember being sick as a kid and having like nightmares when I was sick. So like they're noticeably worse than your average nightmare? Yes. Really? Mm-hmm.

So would you keep waking up from them? That I don't remember. That's a big question to me. Well, let's talk about the anecdotal theory of what is behind fever dreams, right? Okay. So when your body's undergoing a fever, we said that your body's not functioning at its top performance. Yeah.

And that includes the brain. The brain itself is an extremely special organ if you didn't know already. It's like, I think 2% of the body's mass, but it requires 20% of the body's energy. Yeah. And the neurons compared to regular old dumb cells, they burn or they need about between 300 and 2500 times more energy than a regular old dumb cell in your body. Right. And so when all these chemical processes, when all of this energy is being exploited

to power cells, it produces the byproduct of heat. Yeah. So the brain is super sensitive to overheating, right? Yeah. Already, just under normal circumstances. Yeah. And it's generally taken care of by your body, like it's cooled down and regulated. Right.

So if you have a fever and your brain is not operating at optimal conditions, but you're asleep, so it's trying to go through its normal processes. If you have a nightmare, it's entirely possible that that nightmare is going to be far, far worse because the normal processes have broken down. Or it's even further possible, apparently the amygdala is frequently implicated with nightmares because it has to do with being terrified or angry or fearful. The amygdala might be functioning at an abnormal level and it's just basically going haywire while you have a fever.

Yeah. And then the fact that most dreams occur during REM sleep, and I think that's when your body is warmest during sleep anyway, right? That's when, see, this is where it all gets kind of hinky. During REM sleep, your hypothalamus says, I'm done, I'm not working right now. So it stops regulating temperature, which is usually why your body temperature is lowest right before you wake up. Oh, I thought it was highest right before you wake up.

No, it's highest in the afternoon while you're awake. It's lowest right before you wake up. I feel like I always wake up hot. You I mean, you may be like sleeping with too many blankets, your room might be a little too warm. I use no blankets. Or maybe it's my stupid, you know, schedule of my AC. I mean, it could be, you know, it might have cut off a couple hours before or something.

Right. It could be, right? So fires up after I get up. Because supposedly, when you are sleeping and you're in REM sleep, your hypothalamus is not regulating temperature during that period. So if you if you are already hot, and remember high body temperature is associated with wakefulness, then maybe you are waking up more frequently than you normally would. And when you wake up in the middle of a dream, you're more prone to remember it.

If you wake up in the middle of a nightmare, it's going to seem even worse than one that you had and woke up normally from. Yeah. I mean, I had a series of not nightmares last night, but just sort of anxiety dreams. And I don't have any anxiety about anything right now. I think it was just after reading all this stuff. Oh, yeah. I'm just suggestible.

You had anxiety dreams. Yeah. Yeah. But not about like Nothing specific? No. Like there's, you know, usually if I have anxiety dreams, I'm just like, because something's going on in my life.

I'm anxious. Sure. Yeah. But I'm There's just the research, huh? I think so. Man, you're a dedicated. But there are also celebrity dreams because, you know, I've talked about those before.

No. Yeah. Yeah. That I have just celebrity dreams all the time. But they're just very normal that I'm just like friends with celebrity people. But were they were the anxiety ridden last night? Yes. I was hanging out with the band Luna.

Okay. Dean Wareham of Luna. All right. And that was, but there was, I can't remember exactly what was going on, but, you know, there was anxiety involved. Like I was trying to get somewhere and couldn't get there. Like the typical stupid dream stuff, you know, but some Dean was in there somehow. Yeah.

Have you talked to him today? I don't know him, but I think I know why they were in there. That's all I'll say. Okay. Wink, wink. I guess so. So here's another thing that was in our own article I thought was interesting. Just a little tidbit was that some recreational drugs like meth and ecstasy can raise brain

temperatures. Right. That is one of the reasons they think that it like kills so many brain cells when you do those drugs. Yeah. Supposedly you're not supposed to take ecstasy in warm climates. Yeah. I've never, I've heard that.

Yeah. Just Norway. Well, there you have it. Supposedly it's fall barred. What else? Is there anything else in here? No, man. I can't believe we stretched this one out as far as we did.

Alrighty. We never have to talk about fever dreams again, Chuck. Good. If you want to know more about fever dreams, well, you might as well start at howstuffworks.com. There's nothing wrong with that. And you can also just go around and look at how sparse the research is on the internet for yourself. And if you are a researcher and you know more stuff about fever dreams that you can point

us to, let us know. Yeah. In the meantime, I think I said search bar somewhere in there, which means it's time for listener mail. You know what? I think another reason the anxiety dreams is because I'm barreling through the season of Fargo. Uh-huh.

And the third season. Yeah. And the two episodes I watched last night, which I believe were, if there are 10, I think it was eight and nine, were both just like ratcheted up with tension. I'm sure that's what it was. And I think that probably had something to do with it. That happens to me. Sometimes I'll be watching something and I won't realize how on top of me it's gotten.

And then all of a sudden like it goes to an ad and I'm like really uptight about like this scratch and dent washing machine sale that's going on somewhere and I don't understand why. And I'm like, oh, wow, that TV show really got to me. Yeah. I think Fargo had something to do with it. I think you may have nailed it. Um, all right, I'm going to call this one garden variety fan mail, which we don't read

a lot of these. So I'm going to dig in. Uh, hey guys, that's all this is fan mail. You guys are doing a great job. Always have. It's clear that with every episode you take great pains to provide the most accurate information you can in the most thoughtful way possible. How ironic that you would read this on the fever dream.

Uh, this has never been more evident to me than in the episodes you did on puberty. I know it's been a little while since he's came out, but, uh, just listened to them and it was touching to see how frequently you tried to reassure young listeners. What they're experiencing is normal and that there was nothing wrong about what was happening. Uh, to hear two grown men do their best to talk to young boys and girls about such sensitive material was a pleasure. Uh, yes, at times I could practically feel you nervously twitching while, uh, trying to discuss, um, menstruation in an informative yet reassuring way, but it was absolutely

charming. Uh, just reaffirm what we've always known that you two are just a pair of great dudes. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I like this guy. Uh, I've only been listening for a few years, but I'm a lifetime fan now. Uh, if you're keeping count, I'd like to put it in a vote for DC for live shows. Uh, Josh, uh, EDGE, uh, E, sorry. EDGE is edge.

And then add two L's. Edgel? Edgel. Sure, yeah. Josh, Edgel or Edgel? I like Edgel. Or Edgel. Edgel.

Or Edgel. Ooh. I think Edgel. Edgel sounds like a kid next door. Josh, Edgel. It's Josh. And Josh, you know what? We usually come to DC once a year.

Um, I don't think we're coming this year though. No, we probably will be there early-ish 2018. Yeah. DC's always great to us. So we'll definitely be back. Yeah. Soonish. Yeah.

Uh, and you can always fly somewhere in the continental United States or Canada. Josh. And then you can also get a solo express up to Brooklyn. Exactly. It's a pleasure train. There you go. Uh, there's rectal thermometers everywhere. Uh, if you want to see us on tour, go to S-Y-S-K-Live.com for tickets.

You can get in touch with us on Twitter at Josh M. Clark or S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join Chuck on Facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant or slash stuff you should know. You can send us both and Jerry an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.