The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1060: Dreams | Skeptical Sunday

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

What's really happening when we sleep? Michael Regilio tucks us in and takes us to the alluring world of dreams and their purpose on this Skeptical Sunday! Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by skeptic, comedian, and podcaster Michael Regilio! On This Week's Skeptical Sunday: Dreams serve important biological functions, including problem-solving, emotional processing, and memory consolidation. Scientists have observed that dreaming can improve task performance and help solve complex problems. Sleep cycles consist of four phases: NREM 1, NREM 2, NREM 3, and REM sleep. REM sleep is when most vivid dreaming occurs, and certain areas of the brain are even more active during this phase than when awake. Common dream themes exist across cultures, such as being chased, being late for an exam, or being naked in public. These may serve evolutionary purposes like threat simulation or primitive instinct rehearsal. Sleep disorders like REM Behavior Disorder (RBD) can be dangerous, as people may physically act out their dreams. Conversely, sleep paralysis prevents most people from acting out dreams but can lead to frightening experiences. Anyone can increase their chances of having lucid dreams — where you're aware you're dreaming and can sometimes control the dream – through simple techniques like regularly asking yourself if you're awake or asleep throughout the day, or setting an intention to have a lucid dream before going to sleep. Practicing these techniques can lead to fascinating dream experiences and potential benefits for problem-solving and creativity. Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know! Connect with Michael Regilio at Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, and make sure to check out the Michael Regilio Plagues Well With Others podcast here or wherever you enjoy listening to fine podcasts! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1060 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host Michael Regulio. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers. On Sundays, though, we do Skeptical Sunday where a rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic that you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions. Topics such as circumcision, diet supplements, the lottery,

GMOs, energy drinks, internet porn, and more. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime and cults and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on Skeptical Sunday, in the last line of the movie The Maltese Falcon,

Humphrey Bogart describes the small statue and namesake of the film as being the stuffed dreams are made of. That line in the movie was most likely borrowed from Shakespeare, who may have taken the notion from Aristotle. Poetic license aside, man has been inspired, baffled, even scared by our dreams since the beginning. Many have tried to interpret them for their meaning. Others have dismissed them as meaningless. And some scientists have wondered why we even have them at all. Today on Skeptical Sunday, skeptic and comedian Michael Regilio is here to help lift the fog of dreams. I mean, of dreams, dreams, dreams. I like that. Hey, Jordan. If you're like me, you can't really

tell that you're dreaming when you're in a dream. Okay, so I've definitely noticed that, of course. up incredibly grateful to realize it was all just a dream and I didn't actually, I don't know, try to smuggle a brick of cocaine into Egypt. I do lucid dream though, which is kind of a different thing, right? It's like you know you're dreaming when you're dreaming and then stuff, all kinds of crazy stuff happens. Maybe we'll get into that. No, you know, we're going to get a lot into lucid dreaming. That is so great that you're a lucid dreamer because you guys are a very small percentage of the population. Yes, we will definitely get into that. But you've also had the dreams where you don't know that you're dreaming. Of course. It's completely weird and you don't know.

So let me ask you this. How do you know that this isn't a dream? Well, yeah, since I'm not panicking for an 11th grade social studies test that I didn't study for, and I appear to be fully clothed, I'm going to go with I'm pretty damn sure that this is not a dream. Yeah. So near as I can tell, I agree. It's not a dream. But it's actually interesting. You went with the old anxiety about a test and arriving somewhere naked dream. Those are actually really common dreams. Most people have. It's interesting to think that people's dreams have commonalities. And of course, it's common. My mom will say, I still have exam dreams and my mom's like 82. So that makes sense, but it's also a little

weird because you'd think that dreams would be as unique as our own personal life experiences. And I guess if we commonly have an experience of taking a test, fine, but why do we all have the dream that we're in school naked? That's weird. That's never happened to pretty much anybody on planet Earth. Yeah, I mean, did cavemen have these dreams? Clearly not. But some scientists point to these commonalities as evidence that dreams are like for something. They serve a purpose. And most of the evidence emerging from the field actually really supports that notion. I wonder if nudists ever have anxiety dreams that they're naked at school or is it just like, nope, totally different flavor. Like they're stuck in an ugly outfit at school. All right. So people have

always believed dreams served a purpose that they actually meant something. Is that like dreams are predicting the future or is it more like horoscopy? Well, no, they're definitely not predicting the future horoscopy. All the evidence says they don't portend the future and they don't mean things in that way, but they do serve a purpose. In fact, when scientists talk about the purpose of dreams, they mean the evolutionary purpose, the biological function, and how the brain itself benefits. But you're right.

People have always believed dreams have a deeper meaning, going like all the way back to the third millennium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted. their dreams on wax tablets. Why wax tablets? I thought the trend was to carve things in stone back then. Yeah, that's because stone is heavy and really, really difficult to carve in. Stone was only carved in when people really, really meant it. Wax was cheap and easy to carve.

The ancient Egyptians carved in wax, and they also wrote on papyrus, which is exactly what they wrote the ancient book of dreams on. My 10th grade girlfriend had a book of dreams or a dream book or something too. And of course, she also had a dream catcher naturally. Different book, same nonsense. I'm pretty sure. But as far as the dream catcher goes, yeah, everyone's 10th grade girlfriend had one of those. But both the book and the dream catcher do illustrate how there's an innate desire to understand

what the hell these insane B movies that play in our heads each night are all about. But let me be clear, we now know that dreams. dream reading and these dream books, they're like palm reading at best. That is to say, they're complete nonsense. In ancient Egypt, dreams were a really big deal. Back then, people with vivid dreams were believed to be blessed. Ancient Egyptians thought dreams were like transmissions from the gods. Of course, we know better today, but this is exactly why they would induce or incubate dreams in special dream temples. Dream temple sounds like something my 10th grade girlfriend would have had also.

She sounds like a very interesting person. Anyway, in the ancient world, lots of cultures built temples and altars to their healer gods. We had Imotep in Egypt and Asclepius in Greece, just to name a few. These gods had the power to cure people and they would use sleep and sacred dreams. Look, I'll be honest, getting a good night's sleep works wonders for me as well, possibly just because of the kids, but I get it. Right, right. And you know what, as we'll see, dreams are actually a part of that.

So these people were definitely onto something, whether Imotep had anything to do with it or not. In fact, back at Imotep's heyday, people would travel hundreds of miles to reach his temple. Once they'd get there, they would get some shut-eye and incubate their dreams. Once a person incubated these dreams, there was the Egyptian dream book to tell them what they meant. And I'm guessing it probably wasn't too different from the book of dreams your 10th grade girlfriend had. and again, equally full of crap. You know, I don't know. She told me that because she dreamt she saw me on a horse,

that meant I was going to grow up to be a movie star. You know, I was kind of hoping that she was onto something with that. Yeah, I'm sure we'd all hope that these dreams mean something like that. But it's funny that she said that because horses do show up in a lot of dream books. The Egyptian dream book interpreted like 108 different dreams, including horses, as well as the meaning of dreaming about different foods, and the meaning of that ever so common dream, the dream of doing it.

Yeah, doing it. Oh, yeah, it. I get it, right. The classic recurring dream of teenage boys everywhere. Actually, more like the dream of everyone. And no one was more interested in that particular dream than Sigmund Freud. Right.

Now, Freud, he also believed that dreams were deeply meaningful, but not because they, again, predicted your fate, but because he thought they were a window into your subconscious. Freud was the first person to really try and understand dreams from a more scientific point, even if, quite frankly, he was mostly wrong. Mostly wrong, about a lot of... So is it like a Freudian slip, not a real thing? No.

Really? Definitely, sadly, not. In fact, most of what Freud believed has been discredited. But it doesn't diminish his role in starting science down the path of understanding our minds. Freud believed dreams revealed our genuine desires, and because those desires were sometimes embarrassing, our brains would deliberately confuse the dreams to hide their true meaning. What? So Freud believed that our brains were trying to hide stuff from our brains? Yeah. Okay.

He thought that's why dreams were weird, because we couldn't just come out and acknowledge our genuine desires so our mind would mask them in weird interpretive French Nouveau-style dreams. Right. And so let me guess the desire everybody was hiding was an Oedipus complex or something. Yeah, you know Freud. He believed that it was always one thing or your mother. Nice. In 1900, Freud published the book Interpretations of Dreams. So basically a dream book in a lab code. Freud was inspired to write the book because of a dream he himself had called Irma's Injection. Okay. What would Freud say about somebody who had a dream called Irma's injection? Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Freud definitely wanted to do it

with Irma. Yeah. Anyway, the dream itself was about a former patient of Freud's who could not completely heal because she refused treatment from Freud. In the dream, Freud runs into her at a party and examines her. His friends and colleagues were there, and some stuff was a little weird. Like one guy who normally had a beard was now clean-shaven. Another dude was walking with a limp. This is such a weird dream. I'm imagining him running through this party being like, she needs my injection. She needs my injection. I mean, it's just so like Freud's just straight up. One thing he got was projection, right, I guess, eventually. So that's it.

The father of modern psychology insisted dreams or secret desires because he examined a patient in a dream at a party and his friends looked weird. Well, that and his mother was naked on a bed having an orgy. What? What? Okay. Just kidding. Just kidding.

I was like, oh, you left that part out. Yeah. I think probably in Freud's case, all of his dreams included something like that. but Freud's dream as he revealed it to us was kind of boring, which is strange, since Freud had a definite belief that sex was the root of all neuroses. In fact, this dogma on Freud's part was a point of contention between him and his friend and the other father of modern psychology, Carl Jung. Ah, yeah, Carl Jung. So this guy's got a bunch of devotees running around all over the place. So you see him quoted on Reddit and stuff all the time or mentioned in books. Yeah, in fact, a next girlfriend once

dragged me to a lecture at the Hammer Museum here in L.A., and by the way, what would Freud say about a place called the Hammer Museum? Yeah, exactly. I'm guessing I'm something of a troglodyte, because in truth, I couldn't really follow a single word. Yeah, it sounds like a law school lecture. Freud would probably tell you that you didn't follow a single word because you were fantasizing about sex the whole time. And he would be right. Okay, fine. Back to Young. Young believed dreams could be interpreted as well. He also saw universal characters in dreams. like the sage and the trickster. Again, the concept comes up of the brain trying to trick

or be tricky with the brain. And that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What's the point? Why would the brain need to trick the brain? It's one brain. Well, I mean, it's because these gentlemen, for all their good intent, didn't fully understand the brain at that time.

But according to Young, dreams had two functions. They compensated for things as in repressed memories, and they look forward to things. That's to say they contained harbingers, if you know what I'm saying here, Jordan. Yeah, I see what you did there. Did he have anything to say about what it means if you see a harbinger riding a horse?

Yeah, I'm sure he did. But again, both these men's theories have been completely debunked by modern science. But as with everything, humans don't give a rat's ass about what science has to say. We just go with our beliefs. In fact, lots of people still see dreams as harbingers. And still seeing what you're doing there, I guess.

In fact, interestingly enough, one study, and this is a relatively recent study, a reveal that people would be more likely to cancel a plane trip if they dreamt of a plane crash the night before they went on that trip over if the government had a warning about a likelihood of terrorism. In truth, though, I think I would also be tempted to cancel a flight if I dreamt of a plane crash the night before I was supposed to get on a plane. And I am, you know me, I am not superstitious or anything.

I just feel like that's a little... Yeah, I think in truth that, yeah, okay, fine, so would I... Damn you, Carl Jung, you've won this round. Yeah, yeah, I think he won this round, all right. Okay, so people thousands of years ago, and people 100 years ago, new dreams were important but didn't quite understand how. What do we know now, given, I don't know, MRI technology or whatever it is, that they didn't know then?

You really nailed it. I want to reinforce dreams are important. And since we spend about one third of our lives sleeping, which on average means six years of our lives is spent dreaming, it's a really good idea that we understand them. Yeah. Well, sadly, with two small kids at home, I'm now spending maybe a quarter or a fifth of my life asleep now, at best, if that. I would like to get back to one-third, though, ideally. Really? Well, I mean, the fact of the matter is lack of sleep has really negative effects on mood, attention span, the immune system, energy levels, personal appearance, memory, and weight.

I can vouch for, unfortunately all of those, I can completely vouch for that. But here's an interesting fact I came across that lack of sleep is a factor in about 20% of car accidents. So, Jordan, dude, I am definitely advising you to get a little extra shut eye. Luckily, I let my wife drive who gets even less sleep than I do. And also, yeah, oh, get some more shut eye, says the stand-up comedian who doesn't have kids. Got it. Noted. Thank you.

Very helpful, Regulio. Look, it's super important. In fact, from an evolutionary standpoint, sleep like must be crazy important. What makes you say that? Because in survival, it's not a great idea to lie unconscious for long periods of time while there are things out there, you know, trying to eat you. So evolutionarily speaking, sleep must have some really significant benefits. Oh, right.

So, like, we would have evolved not to sleep because we would have been getting eaten except for we couldn't evolve not to sleep because sleep is so important, basically. Okay. Exactly. Yes. That makes sense. I never thought about that. From what I remember back in the day, I did feel good after a full night's sleep, you know, felt good to just kind of shut down, I guess. Ah, no, that's the thing. You're not shutting down. The brain doesn't shut down. In fact, certain areas of the brain during certain phases of sleep are even more active than in waking life. That's, well, okay. Well, I suppose that makes sense, right? So I'm aware there are phases we go through while sleeping, but what are they Exactly. Do you know? Yes, there are four phases of sleep. NREM 1, NREM 2, NREM 3, and REM sleep.

REM sleep, of course, refers to rapid eye movement. And REM sleep is when all the really vivid, crazy dreams happen. And when we're in that dream state, our eyes are darting around under our closed eyes. Researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathan Clytman discovered REM sleep in 1953, because apparently nobody noticed our eyes moving crazily under our eyelids while we slept before 1953. But I say that and then I realize, in truth, I've never noticed it. Well, yeah, I'm not surprised. You have to have somebody to sleep with you for you to notice it.

But you know, it's funny. I can tell you're really into music. I mean, I knew that. You were really into music because you said REM sleep. Did I? Which is not what we say. Yeah, but that's funny because. I was waiting for you to make that mistake, and you didn't.

And I was like, oh, okay. And then you did right then. And I was like, ah, yes. I can't resist a band reference in every episode. As a big fan of the band, when I see that word in print, it comes out Riem. Okay, I will try to correct that. It's not the end of the world as we know it or anything. That was a very good one.

Okay. Yeah. Thank you. You know what's dreamy, Regulio, the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators every week, it is because of the circle of people that I know like and trust, otherwise known as a network.

And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at six-minute networking.com. This is a course that's about improving your relationship-building skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. And the course does all of that in a non-cringy, down-to-earthway. It's not going to make you look bad or feel bad. It's not going to make the people you connect with look bad or feel bad. And it takes just a few minutes a day. many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course.

So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. NREM sleep refers to non-Rapid eye movement. This phase of sleep, N-REM sleep, researchers also call this slow-wave sleep, which refers to the brain waves that the scientists see in sleep labs when they hook up people's heads to that bunch of wires.

Right. Yeah, I've actually done that during a sleep study, and it's cool until you have to go pee, and then they're like, oh, yeah, we'll send someone in there to disconnect all those wires. And then you do it again, and they're like, really, dude? There's like 40 wires. You're going to make us unplug those things again. So, yeah, I should have maybe thought of that. I'm surprised that they haven't better planned for that.

They should just put people, I don't know, in a diaper or give you a jar or something. Anyway, that's called an EEG or an electroencephalogram. Scientists use this machine to monitor the brainwaves, as we said. In a full night's sleep, you'll go through slow wave sleep and REM phases about four to six times a night, with each cycle lasting around an hour and a half. Some nights I go through like one phase. I look through my sleep app for my aura ring, and it's like, oh, you didn't get any REM sleep, or you didn't get any deep sleep or anything like that.

Also, I think it's kind of ridiculous that the phases of sleep are called, not REM 1, not REM 2, not REM 3, and REM. That's like, you couldn't think of three other names for the fake, just not this, not this, not this three, and then, oh, this one. Well, scientists, yeah, I mean, they love the very simple, as Neil deGrasse Tyson points out. What do we call it when there's just nothing, you know, this black holes, we just call them a black hole, you know? Right. Sleep experts say it takes an hour and a half before you start dreaming.

Okay, but I know that I've had dreams during quick naps. In fact, I did a blood draw once and I was really, really hungry and really, really fasted, and I was sitting up, and I passed out. And the first time it's ever happened to me in my life. And I had like a full dream between him realizing I was falling asleep with a needle in my arm and him catching me in a chair. When I woke up, I was like, what happened? And my wife's like, you passed out for a second. And I was like a second, I had a full-on dream about going somewhere and doing something and leaving and coming. Like I felt like I just woke up from almost like a full nap. And I was out for seconds.

Okay. I mean, that is really interesting. And I'm not sure if there's a difference between passing out from blood loss. Yeah, from blood loss and getting a quick nap. But people do say all the time, like, yeah, oh, I know I've had dreams and naps. But those are not the powerful dreams that you get in Remsley. I see. Right.

Low-wave sleep dreams are far more sedate. So that's when you dream about you got to fix a broken faucet in the bathroom or run an errand or something? I mean, maybe, but probably not. I mean, you're in between sleeping and awake. You experience what are called hypnagogic hallucinations. Okay, definitely going to need you to define, was a hypnagogic hallucinations, for sure. Hypnagogic hallucinations are also sometimes called waking dreams.

They're a kind of hallucination that happens as a person is drifting off. They involve seeing, hearing, feeling, or smelling something that's not there. In fact, Salvador Dali famously tried to capitalize on hypnagogic hallucinations. He would intentionally fall asleep in a chair while holding a heavy skeleton key over a plate. And then when he would doze off, he dropped the key on the plate immediately waking him up. And in this sleepy waking dream stupor, that's when he would go and paint. Ah, okay, yeah. And I guess it worked, right?

because his work looks like something from a dream or, yeah, like an acid trip or something. And I feel like the skeleton key thing is funny because I'm imagining him doing this. And then I'm imagining all the people that look at their phone in bed at night and drop it on their face because they have the exact same thing happen and then they wake up and they do it all over again. Or am I just, is that just me who does that? You drop the damn thing right in your noggin. Oh, many times. In fact, I actually had this realization recently.

I was in a restaurant and somebody dropped their phone. everybody looked. I was like, oh my God, we've all been conditioned to recognize the sound of a dropping phone. And it like freaks us out. We're like, oh my God, that $1,200 computer that I carry around. It goes my paycheck. That's right. And it's also funny that it was a skeleton key that is so Dolly. He could have held anything, but it had to be like a 15th century skeleton key. Right. Not a coin, just to get like a weird antique with a skull on it or something. Exactly. In fact, Dolly himself famously dreamt about those melting clocks. NREM-1 is also the sleep phase where you get the hypnic jerk. Okay. The hypnot jerk, since I'm 12 years old today, I'm going to just leave that one

right there. Okay, well, the hypnotic jerk is actually really interesting. It's not a dream. Again, it's in this falling asleep phase. Many people, your legs will kick sometimes. That's the jerk itself. But another really interesting thing is you get this feeling of falling and you catch yourself and you wake up. You're like, holy shit, I felt like I was falling. This is not perfectly understood. I looked into it, though. And my favorite theory about it is that it dates back to when we were primates sleeping in trees. And when you're sleeping in a tree, you have to be super, uber aware of if you're falling or not. So that this internal falling detector we have in our brains is so sensitive that it gets, you know, a false detection easily. And so we think we're falling and we have to

wake ourselves up because, let's face it, it's better to think you're falling and wake yourself up and not be falling than it is to be actually falling while you're snoring away and REM sleep. That makes sense. You know what's funny is I never thought about this until you mentioned it just now, but when I go to bed, I always have to cover my arms with the blanket and sort of pin them in place as I'm falling asleep because otherwise I do that hypnot jerk thing and I often will just bend my elbows really suddenly, which has caused me to hit myself in the face and eyes really, really hard. Wow. To the point where I have like eye bruises or my eye really hurts the next day because I probably like

damaged it somehow. I basically punch myself in the face and I feel when I have my arms pin down, I feel them moving under the blanket sometimes and I'm like, wow, good thing that that wasn't allowed to swing upwards because that was a hard one. I've definitely noticed this. I just never really thought about what it is or why it's happening or anything like that. It's crazy. Yeah, that's crazy, man. I mean, on a side note, it has nothing to do with the sleep phases, but I've slept on my arm to the point where it fell asleep so thoroughly that when I woke up and rolled over, I mean, I clocked myself to the point where I thought I was about to pass out. No one has punched me

in the face harder than me to date. And that is not a challenge to anyone to outdo that. Right. Yeah. So then next we slip into NREM 2 sleep, which is an even deeper sleep. There's not much dreaming in NREM 2. And then we drop into NREM 3. This is the deepest phase of sleep. Our heart rate actually drops, as does our breathing slows down.

Our body temperature drops. This is when somebody's out like a light or sleeping like a log or whatever it is, this is probably NREM 3. I see. This is probably the deep sleep that shows up in sleep apps and that you're, where your body recovers, and I suspect slash no from looking at the time tracker on the Oro Ring app that I don't get a ton of this. You want to, it's really interesting about Enram 3 because I just said we're like out,

we're solidly out, but it's actually, it's in Enram 3 when people sleepwalk, sleep talk, sleep eat, which is a big one and wet the bed. Sleep eating is something I hadn't thought about because I don't know anybody who does it, but I bet you were going to get some emails from people who do crazy stuff. If you do crazy stuff in your sleep, I'm very curious about it. So when a person is in the deepest sleep, I think it's so weird that that's when they get up and walk around. I would have thought it was during REM and they're having a dream and they're acting the dream out, not in a totally dreamless, deep sleep, air quotes, dreamless deep sleep phase. When I went camping once as a kid, we had a sleepwalker and he ended up peeing on someone and he soaked their entire sleeping bag at about 3 a.m.

Nobody noticed or saw it. It was just, we just sort of put it together because the kid woke up covered and pee. Everyone thought he wet it, but it didn't quite check out because his clothes weren't as wet as the bag was. And he was like, as his pee, did it rain? What is it? And then the next days we saw this kid's sleepwalking and we're like, wait a minute. Did he sleep piss on this guy? And also in a sort of scary version of this, when I went to North Korea on one of my trips there, one of the guys we brought, he was like, oh, I sleepwalking. And he told his roommate or whatever. And he's like, oh, whatever. And he's like, do I wake you up? And he's like, yeah, you can just wake me up, no problem. which is weird because I always thought like, oh, you're not supposed to do that. Well, one day we were in this rural hotel, and there's a fence around the hotel because they don't want locals and tourists mixing in North Korea generally at all.

And they closed the fence and they closed the barricade in front of the door and all this stuff so you couldn't get in or out of the hotel. Well, around two, three, four, whatever time it was that this guy was in sleepwalk phase, he gets up, leaves the room, leaves the little cabins that we're sleeping in, and starts walking around the hotel grounds and is just like aimlessly walking around. And finally, some security guy who I guess was just patrolling saw him. And the next day, they're like, we need to talk to you. What were you doing awake? Why were you trying to get out of the hotel? And he's like, honestly, I don't remember this. I sleepwalk. And apparently they had never heard of this. So we're

convincing them that he has a disorder that they've never heard of. And they're like, you mean to tell me that at the middle of the night, you wake up and walk around. He was pretty close to getting in trouble for this. That is incredible. Yes. And by the way, I remember when I was younger, they said don't wake a sleepwalker for some reason. But yes, now they say definitely do wake a sleepwalker, mostly because they could hurt themselves falling down the stairs or walking into something. And you could end up in a North Korean prison camp. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they didn't tell us not to wake up. I thought it was like, oh, they might have a heart attack if you wake them up. Not like, oh, if you don't wake them up, they might end up in a gulag. Yeah, exactly. So NREM three is also the sleep phase when people will have

night terrors. And I, again, was surprised to find out that night terrors are not nightmares. So that is surprising. So night terrors, this is where people wake up, I don't know if they wake up, but they're just screaming. They're screaming and flailing around. And I thought that that was just really bad nightmares. We, back in my old training company, we used to have dormitory situation and our clients would come stay with us. And we had a couple guys with night terrors. And it was really scary because they would scream like somebody was stabbing them with a, kitchen knife. And then in the morning, they would be like, oh, how'd everybody sleep? And we're like, wow, you had some nightmares. And they're like, no, no, I didn't. I don't have any nightmares.

And we're like, well, you screamed so loud. Everybody woke up. We turned the lights on. We almost called the cops. And he's like, oh, yeah, right, you know, I should have told you. It was terrifying for everyone else, mostly. It sounds like he was scared, but it also sounds like he wasn't even dreaming. Yeah. And it's because he wasn't, or at least that's what the experts say. They say that these activities are not tied to dreaming. Huh. So go figure. Night Terror's. as it turns out, are terrifying for the people you sleep with, way more than you, because you don't even remember. Exactly.

So after NREM 3, which is that deep sleep, we actually go back into M-REM-2 for a little while, and then we enter the show, baby, the show of shows, REM sleep. And that's when all the wild dreaming occurs, right? Exactly. The brain looks awake in this phase. In fact, certain areas of the brain have higher levels of blood,

than during waking hours. And the heart rate and the breathing, they kick right back up. So that's interesting that some parts of the brain are even more active during this phase than they are while we're awake. I would not have thought that. I just always assume when we're sleeping our brain is sort of on two out of ten. Yeah, no. Some parts of the brain are. In fact, this is interesting. It makes a lot of sense. One area of the brain that is not active is the prefrontal cortex. And that is the part of the brain involved in logic, reason, and self-awareness. Ah, okay. So is that why maybe the dreams we have in REM sleep are so not logical and seem melting clock-ish? Yeah, exactly. In addition, the fact that the logical part of the brain

is shut down, this is why we don't notice the dreams that we're having are so weird. I see. So not only is it responsible for us maybe having the weird dreams. It's also responsible for us not noticing that the dream is weird. Everyone can relate to this, right? It's nuts that you can find yourself hanging out with like, oh, it's my best friend from second grade. And his arms are Tonka trucks. You don't go, huh, that doesn't make any sense. You're just like, yep, that's the reality right now. He's got Tonka truck arms and his face is made out of bubble gum. Right. It's like totally fine in the dream. Exactly. We've all had those crazy dreams where you wake up and you're like, how the hell did I not know that was a dream?

Right. And it's because the prefrontal cortex is closed down. The other thing that is shut down in REM sleep is nor epinephrine, which is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in the regulation of stress, fear and anxiety. The part of your brain that records memory is also inactive during sleep. This is why we can't remember our dreams, except, you know, a few snippets. Like Tonka Truck Arms. Right. Like Tonka Truck Arms. About 90 to 95, of our dreams are forgotten within 10 minutes of waking up. Now, there are several theories about why this is, one that I found interesting, was the brain doesn't want us mixing up memories of things that happened in real life with stuff that happened in dreams. Yeah, that'd be

nuts if I was confused and I thought Tonka Truck Arms was a real person, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. Another thing that happens during REM sleep is muscle atonia or sleep paralysis. Yeah, I've heard of this. People wake up. well, they wake up paralyzed for maybe, is it a few seconds, I suppose? Yeah, more often than not. And let me tell you, it's a damn good thing they are. Why? Because we can't have the body.

You remember how you thought that people were having like really wild dreams and that's why they were walking around or acting out their dreams in NREM one. That's not what's happening there. But in REM sleep, we can't have that because of these wild, vivid dreams that come. So as a precaution, the brain shuts down. the body, shuts it down. We're completely paralyzed. Otherwise, we'd be whatever it is, fist fighting a frog in your dream while you're actually punching a wall or you're bob sledding with John Lennon while you're sliding off your roof. Yeah, okay, that does make sense. Maybe it's definitely

just better to stay in bed at that point. So with sleep paralysis, scientists have conjectured that many alien abduction stories might just be sleep paralysis. People often report waking up unable to move while surrounded by creatures, those are pretty much the exact symptoms of people experiencing sleep paralysis. So I, of course, never thought it was aliens, but I'm actually impressed, though, because I really thought most alien abduction stories were fabricated BS by bored people who wanted attention. Yeah, well, it turns out they're not BS.

They might just be SP, or, as I said, sleep paralysis, that, okay. Okay, we get it. By the way, before it was aliens, people were seeing demons. Oh, wow. Right. They would say that they would wake up, they would be sitting on their chest, making it hard to breathe. So it's really interesting that it all has to do with the human perspective in our environment. So a couple hundred years ago, somebody'd wake up, they would see creatures around them.

They couldn't move, and they would say it was demons. And then come sci-fi movies a couple hundred years later, and we think it's aliens. Who knows what it'll be in a hundred years? It's like, I woke up and there were AIs, Terminators, who knows. Sure. So your wake up, your paralysis is still in effect that you have naturally as a problem. of sleep, but your dream mind is still active, and you're also kind of awake, right? So you get this weird, surreal world where you can't move, but also feels real and feels awake, even though

part of your brain is just straight up hallucinating. That actually sounds pretty terrifying. That's a different kind of night terror right there. Absolutely. It's super scary. And I think I remember sleep paralysis happening to me once, but for whatever reason, be it the brain or the body or the connection between the two experts say that sleeping on your back makes sleep paralysis more likely. And I have definitely noticed that when I sleep on my back, I wake up with weirder dreams. I feel weirder. So there's something to that. About one-third of people have reported waking up to sleep paralysis, by the way. And sleep paralysis, again, for as weird and as crazy and as horrifying as some of the experiences might be, you're lucky you're experiencing it.

because the alternative is way worse, because some people actually do punch the walls and slide off roofs while they sleep. They have a disorder called RBD, which stands for REM behavior disorder. So when people with RBD have those crazy REM dreams, they physically act them out in real life? That sounds incredibly dangerous. I feel like people would die from this regularly. And they do. In fact, comedian Mike Berbiglia, people might be familiar with him. He talks about this a lot in one of his specials. You can go check it out. He's a really funny guy.

He's really cool. He famously has RBD, and he was diagnosed after he jumped out of a hotel window during a dream. Wow, that is really insane and scary. I mean, was he okay? He's alive.

Yeah. I mean, I've seen him. I mean, okay, it depends on how you put it. I mean, he received 33 stitches for these massive gashes in his legs. And again, as weird as to say, Barbiglia was one of the lucky ones because other people with the condition have died. In fact, some people with the condition, and this is almost more heartbreaking than die,

they've murdered people in their dreams. But they say if you die in a dream, you die in real life. Well, not true, but if you have RBD and you murder somebody in a dream, you might be murdering somebody in real life. And that has happened. Yeah. Wow, I've got to see that legal case, right? I was asleep when it happened.

Okay, but you still have to go to prison because you're incredibly dangerous. Oh, man, there's your legal mind. Because I read about that, and that never crossed my mind. But now I'm actually kind of super curious. Yeah, because there's no intent, right? You were asleep. But also good luck proving that you were asleep. You'd have to have a doctor's note that says you have RBD.

And even then it's like, okay, but we still kind of want to put somebody like that into an insane asylum or a care facility because you can't just have somebody who murders people in their sleep walking around even if they're not dangerous when they're awake. That's not safe. Yeah, clearly not. One more sad statistic about RBD is that 98% of people with it develop Parkinson's or dementia. So it's some sort of, it's related to those. That is sad. And I do not want RBD, and I guarantee you somebody listening to this has it, and I'm very curious about their experiences. It just makes having occasional crazy dreams seem incredibly tame. You know, it's a great gift for the hypnotic jerk in your life. Something from the fine product,

and services that support this show. We'll be right back. Don't forget about our newsletter. You can find it at Jordan Harbinger.com slash news every week. We go back and service a little something something from the back catalog, a little takeaway from the show. If you're a fan of the show, this is going to be great for you. Great feedback on the newsletter so far. Keep it coming in, folks. All right. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Why do humans dream at all? Do we know? I feel like I've talked about this on my show, but I can't remember the answer. Okay. Well, first off, you said humans, and the fact of the matter is most mammals have similar sleep cycles. Evidence suggests animals dream, and this is related to what we were just talking about.

In one study done with cats, scientists removed the part of their brain responsible for sleep paralysis, giving these cats RBD, and when asleep, these cats fought imaginary foes, hunted, and groomed. It sounds like, that one, it sounds cute, and two, it sounds like they were dreaming, so I get it. Oh, little kiddies, sleep grooming. As to why we humans dream, there's no one answer. Maybe there never will be a single answer. Maybe it's a bunch of things together.

But currently, scientists have several theories, like we dream to rehearse. The thing is, though, okay, fine, but rehearsing what? Fist fighting a frog or taking a multiple choice test completely naked? I mean, I get, you know, if you're thinking about something big, you have to do the next day, fine. But usually it's just nonsense. I mean, by the way, if you're taking a multiple choice test completely naked, when in doubt, choose C, by the way. All of the above. No, that's D.

I don't know. I did, again, went to music school. Not a lot of scan trial. Yeah. When we talk about the rehearsing, scientists call that primitive instinct rehearsal theory, and they state that anxiety dreams are so you can practice your fight or flight instincts, just to keep them sharp. Okay, so dreams are necessary for survival somehow, or at least surviving in the primitive world that we came from. Right. And another theory says we dream to heal from emotional damage. This is really interesting. Stress neurotransmitters in the brain

are much less active during REM sleep, so the brain can relive stressful events in our lives without getting stressed out. This helps us to heal and process. Rem sleep is when we actually decouple our emotions from our experiences. Oh, interesting. That's kind of what therapy is, right? Not to forget the bad things in life, but to remember them without that same intense emotional in the moment response. Right. It's almost like our dreams are our own personal psychologists. I never thought about our minds having a natural way to process traumatizing things. I guess it totally makes sense. It seems almost dumb that I didn't think of that before. The body really is amazing, man. I absolutely agree. I mean, we are the coolest supercomputer

robots to date. Good luck topping humans, AI creators or whatever. It might happen faster than we think, unfortunately, but so far we're top dog. Yeah. We're still top dog. Scientists also think we dream to solve problems. In your dreams, your mind can create limitless scenarios in order to work out problems. John Steinbeck called this the Committee of Sleep, and research shows the effectiveness of dreaming on problem solving. In studies, mice are put into mazes, and scientists can observe which parts of their brain are used as they try to solve it. Later, as the mice sleep, the scientists can see the same parts of the brain lighting up. Sure enough, when these little cute micey wake up, They are far better at solving the maze.

That's crazy. It's like visualization only you're doing it automatically while you sleep. That's also amazing. Your brain is really going to work while you're checked out. I love it. Absolutely. And this also applies to us human beings. Many studies show that people work out problems in their sleep and then are far better at whatever the problem it was that they were trying to work out. A 2010 study shows that people given a problem were up to 10 times. times better at it if they slept and dreamt about the problem between the first and second attempt as compared to those who stayed awake and merely thought about that problem or those who took a nap but did not dream about the problem. So I guess sleeping on it really works. I guess I'd always assume

when people say like, oh, I'm going to sleep on it, that they were going to sleep because they were tired or they needed a rest or they were kind of giving up and they needed a break from whatever they were doing, not because our brains were actually processing the problem while we sleep. I always thought that was kind of a cop-out. Now, I guess it's not. Oh, yeah. The history books are full of examples of of people who work stuff out in their dreams. August Keckle, famously dreamt about the structure of the benzene molecule. Famously might not be the right word here, because I've never heard of that person in my entire life. Oh, never heard of August Keckle. Okay, fine. I admit it. Never heard of the dude until I did this research. Not on my top list of super popular chemists. Yeah. Okay.

Other famous dreams that led to breakthroughs include the periodic table of elements, the structure of DNA, and the freaking theory of relativity. Really? Relativity. What was the dream? Well, it was a dream, so it was weird. And it was Einstein, so it was doubly weird. But it involved cows gathered by a fence. And he saw the cows jump away from the fence. But he realized that the farmer also watching saw them in a different, I don't know, it was. It was Einstein, but oh, Google also comes from a dream. Google is in Google, Google, like the web, the search engine. Yes, this is true. You can Google this. Larry Page had it, who's the guy, I'm sure everybody knows that that's the dude who came up with Google. He had an anxiety dream about getting into college.

In it, he imagined downloading the entire web onto some old computers, and then when he got up in the middle of the night, he realized that it was actually possible. Jeez, I wish any of my dreams created a multi-billion-dollar industry or whatever that's worth now. I mean, Larry Page has a really nice, yeah, it's funny to think of that guy being like, oh, I hope I get into college, because he's probably one of the most brilliant innovators of the 21st century, or even the 20th century, I guess, depending on which timestamp you want to put on Google. Yeah. And here he is freaking out about his SAT scores or whatever. Yeah, well, I mean, self-doubt and...

insecurity seemed to go hand in hand with a certain brand of genius. So I'm not that surprise. Oh, here's a really strange one. The sewing machine was invented as a result of a violent murder dream. Really? Okay. Go on. In 1845, Elias Howe dreamt that he had been captured by cannibals. And they stabbed him repeatedly with spears that had a hole in the tip. And when he woke up, He realized that that was the exact thing he needed for this thing he was working on the sewing machine, the hole in the tip of the needle. And he invented the sewing machine because he dreamed that a bunch of cannibals were stabbing him, no doubt, to eat him.

Wow, that's very weird. And who knew violent dreams could be so beneficial? I always felt like those are kind of a vice or like a way to burn off tension. Maybe they are. Google has definitely benefited the world to some degree. I'm sure relativity serves some purpose somewhere. But far, the dream. that has benefited the world the most has got to be the greatest of them all, because the Terminator

came to James Cameron in a dream. Well, that must have been a scary dream. And it depends. Like, are we talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator or the T-800 endoskeleton thing? Because that's scarier than just Arnold. I don't think it was either of them, to be honest with you, because the dream was like he saw an explosion and this robot came out of the explosion, like walked out of the explosion carrying knives, which just goes to show you how the creative mind works. He was able to take that

and spin it into Terminator, right? Which actually, speaking of scary dreams, gets us to the next theory of why we dream called threat simulation theory. Now, this theory says that the brain may be preparing for bad things and dreaming may have developed to prepare us for these unpleasant situations, like sparring to train in a fight. We dream of threats to prepare to take them on. Taking on the Terminator is generally useless, unless you're an 11-year-old and then he's completely toast. But yeah, it's a really interesting theory that we're training for something. I mean, it goes back to the rehearsal thing. It seems only useful if you're not fighting a frog that's also Bruce Lee or whatever. Right. I mean, I guess those are overlapping theories. When it comes to

this one and like nightmares, children, very often what they dream of is being attacked or chased by an animal. And you have to remember that for the first several million years of our brain's experiences on this planet, that was the greatest threat to us. It's only in the blink of an eye that getting hit by a car or whatever was a greater experience. And so, yes, the brain is training you or it's preparing you so that when it really happens, maybe you're a little calmer or maybe you know what to do better. In fact, one of the very few dreams I remember from having as a kid, and I came across nothing about this specifically was I was being chased by an animal. In this case, it was a bunny rabbit, go figure, for whatever reason. And it bit me in the ass. And when I woke up,

Jordan, I swear to God, in even fully awake, my ass really hurt. It felt like it had been bitten, yes. That's very odd. You didn't have a mark, though, right? You checked for a mark, no mark, just purely in your brain? Completely in the brain. Wow. No mark. No bunny or anything else. had bitten me while I slept. So yeah, very strange. Other theories focus on memory consolidation. The brain may be sorting through the memories of your day, remembering the important and forgetting the garbage. There's some really good evidence backing this one up. When new tasks are learned, people tend to spend more time in REM sleep. Plus, babies under six months spend about half their time sleeping in REM sleep. This could be a sign that, I almost said R.m. again,

this could be a sign that REM is important in learning and cognitive development. It's important to remember memories, they're not there. The brain doesn't want your memories so that you can reminisce and think about the good old days. They're there to help us with future events. That's clearly true. The film Memento comes to mind. I don't know if you've seen that, but the guy can't remember anything. He basically doesn't have anything but short-term memory.

So if you can't remember the past, it's really hard to move forward into the future. Right. Plus, when REM sleep is disrupted, people have memory problems. That's more evidence right there. There's another theory based on the importance of vision. This is super interesting that says dreams are meant to keep the visual cortex working at night. Before we get into that, that makes sense about the memory thing. Because if you drink and it screws up your sleep phases, this isn't true with everybody.

But for me, I can see that I've had no REM sleep, but I also can't remember stuff from the night before, even if I've only had a few drinks. and people are like, yeah, that was hilarious when Kevin fell. And I'm like, Kevin fell. And they're like, dude, you had two old fashions in three hours. And you don't remember when Kevin fell and we, like, died laughing? And I'm like, no. That's one reason I sort of stopped drinking because I'm thinking,

this is kind of brain damagey, this feeling. So dreams are just to keep our visual cortex working, you said. And that, I'm remembering now, David Eagleman talked about that on the podcast. And I can't remember. He's been on like four times, so I'm not sure which episode it was. but he was saying that our brain regions or functions in the brain, they fight to take over neurons or almost like real estate in the brain. So you know how blind people might have a better sense of smell or hearing as a result of not having sight? It's in part because their visual cortex

essentially gets taken over by another part of the brain. So since we sleep so much, you were saying it's like a third of our day. David was telling me that we dream so that other parts of our brain don't go, oh, the visual cortex isn't being used. I'm going to take over that processing power because it can happen quite quickly. I want to say this is episode 929. Again, he's been on like four times, so I might be mistaken. But I found that really interesting that your brain is like, I better activate the visual. It's almost like the visual cortex is defense mechanism. I better be active doing something so that the part the process is hearing or feelings or some other thing doesn't just like decide to squat on my land while I'm out. Yeah. And in fact, that was a really

excellent explanation of what's going on there. The only thing I can add to that is that you mentioned the blind people, you know, their brain rewires in order to enhance hearing and whatnot. If you blindfold a person, I believe it's within just a few hours that scientists can already see the brain refiguring things out. So it happens quick. So yes, so quickly so that perhaps in order to keep the visual cortex relevant and working, because God knows we need our eyes, we dream. Huh. And those are a few of the And the fact is most likely we dream because of a bunch of stuff. Maybe a couple of those or all of those might be the case. I wonder, and this is a little bit off topic here,

but I wonder if that's why people in prison, you ever read those accounts of somebody in prison and then it's like one week in or a month in or whatever, they can hear the water dripping, but they're like, is it a hallucination? But they're in the same area, the same room. Your brain is surely rewiring itself to accommodate this, right? if you've got nothing that you can see or nothing new that you can see, clearly your brain is

going to rewire and be like, oh, I need super hearing because that's the sense that's working. I can hear people talking really far away, and you start having these people write them like their auditory hallucinations or something, but I'm not sure that they are. Right. That's super interesting. That is really interesting. I actually hadn't heard that at all. This is slightly unrelated, but I always wonder, in like, prison, it's almost cruel that people don't get to see at various distances, that everything is only a certain amount of distance, because that's really bad for your eyes

and possibly bad for your brain. That should be part of prison life, that you get to go out and look out to the mountains a couple hours a day or something like that. So your brain and your eyes can use different distances. Damien Eccles, who was one of the West Memphis three, do you remember those guys? No, what was that again?

It was three kids accused of murder in West Memphis, Arkansas, back, I think, in the early 90s. And they were basically convicted for nothing more than they listened to heavy metal music and they wore black clothes and whatnot. And they were ultimately exonerated in a very, very strange case. There's a bunch of movies about it. Damien, who's an artist now, he complains that his eyes are so damaged because he never could see further than a few feet in front of him.

So that's a big side note there, but still interesting stuff. That stuff's interesting, though, man. It's interesting because if our brain refigures itself if we lose a sense, what happens if a sense is modified, right? Like you said, you can't see more than 10 feet in front of you because your world is 10 feet in front of you at most. Your brain surely adapts to that, too. Anyway, now we're talking about David Eagleman stuff from an armchair and it's probably

not helpful. One last thing about dream studies, though, is one thing that is immensely helpful and you could be a part of this. Maybe another dream study, bring your jar to pee in, is lucid dreamers. the study of lucid dreams. And why don't you tell people a little bit more about what it is since you are a lucid dreamer? Sure, yeah.

Of note, I now always remember to bring my jar to pee in. But yeah, I do this sometimes, the dreaming thing, not the peeing in the jar thing. I do this sometimes when I was a kid, I did it a lot. So lucid dreams are dreams in which the person dreaming is conscious and more or less fully aware that they are having a dream. I don't mean awake. I mean they're just conscious that they're having a dream.

You're still from, as I understand it, asleep, but something will happen, for example, that signals to me that I'm in a dream. So, for example, I'll be saying something in, like, German in my dream, and I'll realize I don't know the word for the thing that I'm saying. And I'll just suddenly go, oh, why would I have tried to use that word if I don't actually know that word? I must be in a dream.

Okay, well, instead of freaking sitting in chemistry class in Germany, during this dream, I'm going to go fly around and do something more exciting. And I'll just be able to start controlling things. And if the dream goes awry like, oh, no, I got hit by a truck in the dream, I'm just going to rewind and not do that. And sometimes I end up hitting the same wall or getting electrocuted by the same thing or falling from the sky because I can't get my flying working. And I can just back up and redo it.

Or I might even be like, you know what, I don't want to fly. I want to go to a place with his lots of girls or whatever. Like, I could just do kind of whatever I wanted, and it was really interesting. I figured everyone did this, but apparently not. I don't think I've ever done it to be, but that was an excellent description. Very good, mine afroind. Don Cushin. Yeah.

Stories about lucid dreams date back to Aristotle, actually. He may have been the first person to mention them in his famous work on dreams. And if Aristotle and Jordan Harbinger are having lucid dreams, they are definitely in the minority. About 50% of people have said that they've had one. but only 1% of people have them regularly. I have them, I won't say all the time these days because my sleep is all screwed up because of the kids. But like I said, when I was younger,

and I don't mean as a small child, I mean like even through my 30s, I had them all the time. Like I would say a third of the time or something like that, multiple times per week. Yeah, well, they're pretty rare. Interestingly enough, there was really no real proof

of them existing outside of people like your saying, claiming that it happened, but that is now not the case. There's actually now super solid evidence that lucid dreams are actually real. So you're not nuts. Yeah, no, I didn't, thanks. I never thought I was nuts. I just assumed everybody did that. And I remember talking with other people and you're right. Nobody really ever said like, oh yeah, I control my dreams. I just never, so I just stopped talking about it, I guess. So what's the evidence that I'm not nuts? Right. So in this case. Yes, in sleep labs, when hooked up to those EEGs, we talked about, scientists can tell if you're asleep or not. There's no faking. You cannot fake if you're asleep or not with scientists. They can tell

when your brain is in these steps. And lucid dreamers, like yourself, can signal to these researchers from inside the dream. Whoa, what kind of signal? Because to my knowledge, I'm not moving around while I'm doing this. Right. Well, one thing they can do is they can move their eyes like hard left and then hard right, which is not exactly what you see during Ari. There we go again, Michael Stipe, how dare you? This is not what we usually see in REM sleep. They can go hard left and then hard right and then hard left and they see that. And one other thing that lucid dreamers are not doing is sniffing. They sniffed a signal. And researchers are so into this because now, finally, these dream researchers can talk to people about their dreams while they're having them, while they're

in the dream. That is really interesting. If it's like sniff, if you're in, In a dream, sniff, if you're doing kung fu right now, because it is a little bit like Neo in the Matrix, at least for me. Things start off as a totally normal dream. I'm in a dream, Tonka truck arms, whatever, chemistry class in East Germany, speak in German, or I'm in a lecture, doing a show, whatever it is. But once I sort of take the red pill, it's never conscious, though. I usually, I bump into something where I'm like, wait, this is a dream.

So, like, I'll get flayed by Edward Cisorhands, and I'm like, wait, that's Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp's not a murderer. This is a character. Oh, I'm in a dream. So, like, my prefrontal cortex starts to wake up slightly and is like, this doesn't make any sense. That's kind of what it feels like is happening. And I start, like I said, I start to control things like the physics in the dream.

And usually other people disappear at that point. There might still be a monster or an animal chasing me, but I'm rarely interacting with other people at that point. Usually I'm like, oh, I'm going to fly from skyscraper to skyscraper using my magic wings, physics control flying thing. Right. You just said something so interesting and I didn't come across it when I was researching this episode at all, but now I'm dying to know, is lucid dreaming in any way related to the prefrontal cortex waking up? Is there some infusion of the logic part of the brain into the dream? Is that what's happening? I didn't come across that. I promised to do that

research and we can update people in the future on that because you really piqued my interest on that when you said that, because you do kind of have logic then. Now you have those faculties, super interesting. Because something has to trigger that it's a dream. Right. And if the prefrontal cortex is off and it says this doesn't make sense, because it's always something that just doesn't make sense that makes me think, I'm dreaming. I don't like wake up and go back to, or at least not consciously wake up and go back to sleep. And I'm like, oh, I'm kind of dream. That also, actually, I take it back. Sometimes that is what it is. I'll get up and I'll go to the bathroom and I'll come back and I'll go to REM sleep, but I'm like, oh, I'm dreaming right now. So maybe I wake up and I'm awake just

long enough for the prefrontal cortex to sort of kind of wake up a little bit, and then it doesn't fully go back to sleep at the same time as the rest of my brain starts dreaming. Like there's an overlap between the prefrontal cortex shutting down and my REM sleep kicking back up or the dream state kicking back up. I would love to know the answer to that because then you could, and I think a lot of people listening might too, because then you can trigger this. And I will tell you, lucid dreaming is fun as hell. There's nothing like it. Yeah, it seems fun. And by the way, I mean, there are ways to, I mean, people can't condition themselves to lucid dream. And one of them is to condition yourself to check whether or not you're dreaming throughout the day. Make it part of your

everyday habits. So if you say, once an hour, every hour, you're going to set your phone and you're going to say, am I dreaming or not? Am I dreaming or not? And you're going to look around, you're going to establish I am not dreaming. Well, if that habit can then make it into your dreams, as our habits tend to do, then in a dream you can say to yourself, am I dreaming or not, am I dreaming or not, in hopes of you going, aha, yes, I am dreaming. Right. It's like a habit that transfers to your sleep. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Some people just do nothing more than tell themselves. They're going to have a lucid dream, which is what this guy I came across who's an artist. This is what he does. He just meditates on having a lucid dream. And he is the only artist I know that actually works in the

medium of lucid dreaming. What he does is he has lucid dreams in which he then draws, does his artwork in the dreams, which come out dreamy, obviously, and strange. And then he wakes up and he tries to recreate those drawings. The second he wakes up, he runs to his materials and he tries to recreate it. Huh. That's fascinating. I don't know if I could do anything. anything like that. I mean, I can't draw anyway, but what about if somebody has a sleep disorder, or like PTSD, for example? I've heard that that has something to do with sleep and dreaming or it affects sleep and dreaming. People with PTSD and other certain mental disorders are often dream deprived. The scientists think that's part of the problem is that they're not

receiving what we already talked about, that restorative and those helpful effects of dreams, because they either don't sleep or they don't sleep properly. Yeah, through no fault of their own, by the way. I don't want to feel, I don't want people to think we're blaming PTSD sufferers from, you know, suffering more from bad sleep. So dreaming I'm late for an exam for a class I've never taken wild but naked, you're saying that that's essentially keeping me mentally stable? That's a tough argument to make. I mean, well, it does seem to be the case. And it's not just late for an exam. Like we said at the beginning of discussion, there are a lot of commonalities in human dreams, like being chased, which I was by a bunny rabbit that bit me in the ass, being lost, being killed

in a disaster, and one that I've definitely never had, but apparently is really common, is finding a new room in your house. Huh. Okay, I've had the getting chased one. That one seems like a recurring thing. That often also triggers lucid dreaming, where I have some sort of super high jump gliding device, like I mentioned before, superpower that I can control, and I end up jumping around the city and easily escaping, and then I'm like, well, this is fun.

I could just toy with this thing that can only walk and run. But I've never had the finding a new room in my house dream. I don't think I've ever had that dream. That doesn't sound familiar at all. Same with the disaster thing. I never think about that stuff. Yeah, and interestingly enough, there are differences in the way men dream and women dream. Well, let me guess. Men leave the seat up in dreams. Hey, don't get me started on that one because I don't understand why the onus is on us to leave the seat down.

I'm standing up for men's rights right now. I always tell my wife, I'm like, hey, could you please be considerate? You're not the only one living in the house here. Can you please make an effort to leave the seat up when you're done? How's that working out for you? Not great, but I still have my pride. It's a strange hill to die on, I think. Honestly, put it up when you need it, put it down when you need it. Can we agree on this? It's a strange hill to die on, man, or pee on, whatever.

Fine, it is. I just, whatever. I don't know why it's on me. The seat works both ways. Why is it? I have to do something. Anyway, that's fine. Maybe 50-50.

Whatever. Look, it's not just the toilet seat positions, though. Men and women dream a lot of stuff differently, like sex dreams. the dream of doing it that we talked about. Men tend to dream of multiple partners, while women dream of high status partners. I think that probably applies to daydreams as well, right? I'm not sure men have to even be asleep to fantasize.

You are correct about that. Fine. Also, men have more violent dreams. Men dream more about men, and women dream more about both sexes. Men have more confrontational dreams, and women have more social dreams. This is really on the nose, man.

It sounds like guys basically dream action movies and women dream rom-coms. It's so predictable. Yes, yes, yes. You nailed it. Another interesting thing I learned, dreaming in black and white has gone down. It used to be more common. I'm not even sure I knew people ever dreamt in black and white. I don't know if I ever have.

Maybe I have. I don't even know if that's the kind of thing you can know about it. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say the reason it's becoming less common is that black and white movies, TV shows, photographs are also less. less common. Exactly. I think this relates to the reason people waking up and thinking they're being surrounded by demons has become less common and aliens as more common is a man. As high deaf and 3D movies, which I'm sure coming and who knows what else is coming, will that change our dreams too? If we were affected by dreams or if we were affected by black and white movies

back in the day and people would dream more in black and white, what's next as entertainment goes into its next iteration? I'm curious. It'll be interesting to see how dreams sort of match this. I bet you that heavily religious people or highly religious people dream more about demons than less about aliens and people who watch more sci-fi and believe in more UFO stuff dream more about aliens than they do about demons. Although I'm just sort of speculating here. You know, I think you're right.

But I'm also, again, maybe they're onto something just like my high school girlfriend was right to think that the dream of me on a horse meant I'm going to be a movie star. Back to the... Okay, fine. Look, I've purposely avoided talking about all those damn dream books and the meaning and symbolism dreams because they are mostly just the horoscopes of the dream world. But fine. Traditionally, dreams of horses have represented strength, power, and fun. So even if you don't become a movie star, Jordan, it would seem that your 10th grade girlfriend really, really liked you.

Yes, yes, going out on a high note. I'm sure there's a ton more, actually, that we could discuss when it comes to dreams. Even lucid dreaming could probably be its own episode, but it'll have to wait for another time. If y'all have more dream-related questions that might be a fit or topics for Skeptical Sunday, definitely send them on in, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. Thanks, Michael. This episode was truly a dream. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with a top sleep expert about why we dream, what happens when we sleep, and why chronic lack of sleep and driving while tired is more dangerous than driving under the influence of alcohol. Sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury.

Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. Sleep is a life support system. It is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality. And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is now having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, as well as the safety in the education of our children. It is a silent sleep-loss epidemic, and I would contend that it is fast becoming

the greatest public health challenge that we now face in the 21st century. The evidence is very clear that when we delay school start times, academic grades increase, behavioral problems decrease, truancy rates decrease, psychological and psychiatric issues decrease. But what we also found which we didn't expect in those studies is the life expectancy of students increased. So if our goal as educators truly is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times.

And by the way, 7.30 a.m. for a teenager is the equivalent for an adult waking up at 4.30 or 3.30 in the morning. If you're trying to survive or regularly getting five hours of sleep or less, you have a 65% risk of dying at any moment in time. When you wake up the next day, you have a revised mind-wide web of association. a new associative network, a rebooted iOS that is capable of defining remarkable insights into previously impenetrable problems. And it is the reason that you have never been told to stay awake on a problem. Instead, you're told to sleep on a problem. For more on sleep, including why we dream and how we can increase the quality of our sleep, check out episode 126 with Dr. Matthew Walker on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Thank you so much for listening. Show notes, as always, at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts included in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And you can find Michael Regilio at Michael Regelio on Instagram.

We'll link to that in the show notes, because as always, nobody can spell Regilio. Tour dates up for your comedy now as well, man. This show has created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millio Campo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer and I'm certainly not a sleep doctor, so do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Also, we might get things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday.

If you think we really drop the ball on something, please do let us know. We're pretty receptive to that. Y'all know how to reach me, Jordan atjharbinger.com. Remember, we rise by lifting others. share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose

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