Oh hey, so up top. This episode is exclusively sponsored by Stfa and this is the first in ologies history, the first one we've ever had sponsored by just one company, and it's Sotfa Luxury Mattresses, which is perfect because I love sofas. If you're looking for a new mattress, trust me, just go straight to sofa dot com slash ologies. They have mattresses with inner springs, they have memory phone, they have adjustable firmness, they have white glove delivery, they have
so many good reviews. People love their sofas, as do I. It's so luxurious, it's so plush. Who knew sleeping can get better? SATA did? That's s doubleatva dot com slash ologies. What a dream? Oh hey, it's your friend's fiance who commits everything to spreadsheets aliboard. We are back. It's the top of twenty twenty three. We're going to talk about hopes and dreams, but not hopes at all, just dreams, just dreams, all dreams. So this episode is a dream.
It was years in the making. This expert has been at the top of the dream research game for decades. I have waited through the pandemic until everyone was quadruple vaxed and rapid tested. And also his new book just came out this fall. The timing was right. I went to Santa Cruz, a college town in this crunchy enclave on the California coast, where he has been a professor since nineteen sixty five. And I walked around the misty, rainy you see Santa Cruz campus until we spotted each other.
Are you in the white coat? Ah? Okay, cool, I see, I'll walk through, And then ducked into the offices. We said hello to his colleague.
All Lords and is in Barbara Laurs.
She's my very lifelong residence fare And we posted up at his desk, and he has an affable smile, contagious warmth, and surprising humility for someone who is so celebrated in
this field. He is a distinguished Professor emeritus and a research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has written several books on dreaming, including the Scientific Study of Dreams and the Emergence of Dreaming, and his latest twenty twenty two release, The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming, The Where, How, when, what and Why of Dreams. This dude knows dreams, wrote the actual book on them, and also really quick before
we ask him one million not smart questions. Thank you to everyone supporting for a dollar or more a month at patreon dot com, slash ologies and submitting the questions for the show. Thanks to everyone for leaving reviews. I read them all every week, and this week Cam left one that said do yourself a favor and listen to as many episodes as possible, even if they sound odd, like the one about flags. Cam and everyone else, Thank
you and welcome to Owneurology. Owneurology. It's not easy to say, but it's an established field, stemming from the Greek word for dreams. And this man runs the research site dreambank dot net and has been privy to thousands of dream records over decades of research. And he lets me ask him things like what even is a dream? Why do we do it? Our dreams? A wish that your heart makes our dreams ghosts? Are we smarter when we dream more? Why is sleep important? And what does it all mean?
So this week we'll arm you with the fundamental facts of dreaming, some brain basics, and sleep trivia, and then we'll be back with him next week to answer so many Patreon questions explaining all the weird stuff that happens to us when we dream, from nudity to flying to
teeth dropping from their sockets. It's all good stuff. So pull up the covers and open your ears for author, researcher psychology and sociology, professor, dream expert and onnirologist, doctor g. William Domhoff Bill Domhoff pronouns he him and title your doctor Domhoff.
Right, yeah, Professor. I prefer might tell my students Professor Donoff, you can call me Billy. You can call me professor donmalf Doc.
You don't good people ever, just call you doc.
No, No, okay, Willie Wild, Willie Billy George.
Now I got to ask, first off, how much sleep do you get a night? Because I feel like you're more productive and you look more well rested than I do.
I'd probably get eight to nine hours sleep a night.
Have you always been that way?
Yeah? I've always been a night owl that sleeps in. Which was so it was when I went to college the first year, the nine your courses and I had an eight am class it was on botany, and they'd get in there and he'd start to show slides and the fall asleep, fall asleep. So I never again took a class before ten in the morning. And then when I became a professor, I never taught a class before ten or eleven. I m's preferred late morning or afternoon,
so I really get rolling later at night. And that was reinforced when I had young children, and so we'd get the kids to bed and then maybe nine nine thirty I'd start in and go to two or three. So for some reason, that's when I think the best. And we do know from research that there are you know, night owls and larks, and people do their circadian rhythm does differ. One of the things that I want to emphasize is that on every generalization I make, there's huge
individual differences people huge individual differences. The processes are the same, but we still.
Vary for more on those broad chronotypes like being an up and out a morning person versus a midnight cyber goblin. You can listen to the circadian rhythms episode which is called chronobiology that's in the show notes. But wait, what is this one? Is it onrology? I had to check. Also, have you heard of the term ourology? Neurology, own neurology. Yes, yeah, that would that's apparently that would be you're you would be an on neurologist.
Yeah, that's a Greek word, yes, for dreaming. Yeah, we don't use it much, I know, I know we used we once used psychopompologists. No carrier of souls to the underworld.
That's an even better ology. Use that.
You know, you call me a psychopompologist. They kind of took you over the river sks.
Yeah, oh I love that. Okay, So Professor Domhoff and his men, we're really the only ones to use the term psychopompologist, and I love it. But onerrology is the one that you're going to hear more often in the literature. But if you become an oneerrologist, though, and you want to spearhead an industry wide change to psychopompology, hey, follow your dreams. At any point during your dream research, have you had to watch people in the lab sleeping and dreaming?
Has that ever been part of the research?
I just once one or two nights, and I've watched videos of it, and certainly in the very early days.
And we're talking to other people's studies from the late nineteen fifties early nineteen sixties, there.
Were people that watched people's sleep, and there was one especially great one looking at the influence of external stimuli on dreams, which is very minor in dreams because dreams are an act of imagination and we're basically screening everything else out. Hey, they taped these people's off, eyes open, and they're in the bed and they fell asleep so they could watch their eye movements, and they not only
watch their eye movements, they wig a little light around. No, I didn't phase them at all, because all that kind of incoming input goes into a kind of a terminal lower part of our brain where it's no the gates are down. In other words, when that is we say included. But when it's excluded, like do not enter, you're going no further. So those stimuli don't have any impact.
What about when it's waking you up, Like if you hear cat meowing and meowing and in your dream there's a tiger after you or something. You wake up and your cat's just hungry.
Well, it's possible, but way more rare than people want to believe. Because we have this enormous need to think that we're somehow processing external stimuli that our dreams are influenced by recent events, but when it happens, as one of my colleagues one says, the dream has a greater influence on the stimuli than the stimula I have on the dream. So if you ring a bell, they're hearing a symphony, or you ring a bell and they hear
something entirely different. So there's no real connection with the external world in dreams, and when to the degree there is, what happens is in one of the ways people get confused about what's in a dream is that as we awaken, we're also having imagery, and in that transition kind of period you may still have imagery or thoughts, but in terms of what is a dream, those aren't really dreams. There's a lot of experiences, mental experiences we have during the night that are not dreams.
So that gait that goes down metaphorically is part of the thalmus, which is a nugget right in the center of the brain that acts as your information station, and it gathers intel from your body's senses and processes it so your cerebral cortex can figure out exactly what the hell's going on. Thanks to pathways called the thalamo cortico thalamic circuits, which is a term I dare you to
try to work into casual conversation. You simply can't. But yes, the thalamus noodles around with learning and memory as well as sleep and waking, and some research suggests that external stimuli makes it into our dreams somewhere between nine to eighty seven percent, which is how has that ranged even possible?
Because it's tough to study how much of the waking world makes it into your dreams because part of the research involves watching people sleep and then tickling them with a feather or squeezing parts of their limbs, and then waking them up and being like, what were you dreaming about? Were you dreaming about the feather? And results have really varied and sleep subjects maybe they're just waking up pissed.
I don't know. But in doctor Domo's new book, The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreamings, he lists several factors that need to happen to allow spontaneous and undirected thinking aka dreaming. So those things are an adequate level of cortical activation
in the brain. There's also the blocking of external stimuli via those gating mechanisms in the thalmus, and also a loss of conscious self control through deactivating three networks in your brain, the frontoparidle control network, the dorsal attention network, and the salience ventral network. There will not be a quiz, and it is okay if you remember none of that.
But the point is it's not just about which areas of the brain are active, but also which ones are told to chill out for now so that we can sleep. And not all dreaming happens in REM and not all imagery is dreaming because we're not fully asleep the whole night what.
And some of them were actually awake well at other times. There's one particular experience where where our mind is awake but our body is still in this state of paralysis called atonia. And so you're awake and you're thinking it
and you can't move, but that's not dreaming. The EG record, the electro on cephalogram says you're awake, but your body has not the usual change that happens from when you're awaking from this particular stage of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep, which we'll call REM sleep, and that stage of sleep is unusual and it has this sleep paralysis kind of aspect. So and then we have many awakenings
during night. All that gets confused in and mumbled into thinking it's a dream, but most of them aren't.
And my biggest giant question is what is a dream? But before I ask that, I want to ask a little a little bit about you, because you were so prolific and you are so well recognized in this field. When it came to for me researching who knows the most about dreams, it was like all signs pointed to you. But you also have this other full career where you're a sociologist who's written textbooks. At what point in your long career did you say I want to go do dream research.
I started out in dream research. I was a psychology undergraduate major. I did that in my junior year, but I wasn't really sure because I didn't know for sure what I wanted to do. I graduated in psychology. I'd had two or three social courses, but I still I
wasn't sure I wanted to do grad school. My advisor said, oh, you got to go to grad school, and he wanted to send me to the University of Iowa, which was famous for this behavioristic stuff and conditioning learning with pigeons and rats, and I didn't like it at all, and so I wasn't sure what I was going to do. And then, oh my goodness, so I quickly went down enrolled in Kent State University, which was near my home
raised in the suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. And I went to Kent State and they were glad to have me because I'd been a good student at Duke where I went undergraduate, and there I really got into it. And even though I had these professors that my interests weren't the same as theirs, they really were exciting in terms of rigorous thought and how to do experiments and so on. But it then went to the University of Miami had a brand new program and it was called humanistic and personality.
In other words, they weren't doing what traditionally psychology had done, and that's why I said, Wow, I'm going there. And when I arrived, by coincidence, there was a visiting professor named Calvin S. Hall, and he was it turns out he was the finest expert in psychology about dreams, and he was very rigorous psychologist. He'd been trained as a behavior geneticist in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
And Calvin S. Hall was the mentor that we mentioned who co coined the term psychopropology. But yes, he was a well respected psychologist and studied how fast smart little rats could make it through mazes as well as pioneered this method still known as the open field test, and that is where they put a little mouse on a checkerboard table and observed it venturing around to determine heritable
traits of emotionality. Akaa, how freaked out they get being in an open space, based on how scared their parents were. And for more on your own heritable emotionality now that we're all right, from visits with our family, you can see the personality psychology episode which we'll link in the show notes. But yes, doctor Calvin Hall.
He bred the brave with the brave, and the scared with the scared, and so he bred for temperament and mice within four or five generations. So he's very rigorous. But then he got interested in dreams and he brought that rigor to dreams and he developed a what's called a coding system, which I best can describe as you put things in boxes. You put elements in a dream
in boxes. So if I have a dream that I was sitting in my house and a friend walked in and he had his dog and the dog bit me, Well, the setting is my house, the character is my friend, and there's an animal character, this dog, and there was an aggression.
The dog bit me, and Bill says that a bite would be an example of physical aggression, of course, so that goes in the physical aggression box. Wait, the what box? Okay? So his mentor, Calvin Hall and then this other guy, Robert Vandcastle, developed a quantitative system. It is known as the Hall, vand Castle dream coding system. This was back in the nineteen sixties. What the hell is a dream
coding system, We're all asking. So it's a way of taking dream reports from subjects and then indexing them to measure who is dreaming about what, how often? And some of the tags they assigned to these dream reports are characters, the people who appear, settings, objects, activities, success and failure, misfortune and good fortune, emotions, and then social interactions. And
social interaction has subcategories for friendliness, sexuality, and aggressions. So this coding system forever changed psychopapology and also showed that humans tended to dream about pretty similar things. Based on this now quantitative research and dream scientists were kind of able to forge this new world of research just by saying, give me, you're tired, you're friendly, your horny masses yearning to dream free.
So we have all these boxes for minor misfortunes, major misfortunes, types of aggression, physical and on physical, whether you befriended me or I befriended you, it's very detailed. And what happened was taking his course, I also learned an amazing thing for that time period, and it's still always always surprising to us, and that was it had just been discovered in nineteen fifty three that our sleep, contrary to being just a simple sort of one undifferentiated state, in
fact has these various stages we call them. And one of these stages this rim sleep stage, which we go into four or five times a night, about every ninety minutes. This stage of sleep is what we call really activated. That is, your breathing rate changes, and your heart rate changes, your little twinges that you'll see it in your dog. It's the work pause or moving, and then it's called rapidie move and sleep because your eye eyes are moving. And it's even the name of It's funny because the
person who originally studied it the high movements. They jump all around, and he was going to call him jerky eye movements, and he decided that wouldn't be right. They would be known as gems and they would be jerky eye movements, so he called them rapid eye movements.
Who was this guy? Okay? Doctor Nathaniel Kleitman, a renowned sleep researcher, in his student Eugene Azarinsky, and they hooked up willing volunteers to electrodes in nineteen fifty three and discovered the REM phase of sleep, which is called a paradoxical form of sleep because it has a lot of similarities to being awake. Your cerebral neurons are firing with the same intensity as you're waking hours, and you're only in REM sleep about twenty to twenty five percent of
the night if you're an adult. But babies they're in that zone roughly eighty percent of their sleep time. Although dream scientists know that their brains aren't having the same level of dream activity that fully developed adult brains have, but what is happening when our eyes are darting around shiftily under our lids.
It gave people more of a sense that these eye movements maybe we're tracking dreams, which was one of our early beliefs. But in fact, I think the studies show that our eye movements are just jerking around randomly, and people have desperately tried to find patterns in them that
would relate to dreams, but that didn't happen. But the point is very simple, and that is that if you combine the seeming finding that we only dream during these rapid eye movement periods when our brain is basically activated again certain parts of our brain that later turned out but we'll get to that probably later, then if you then collect a dream during that period, and which we call a verbal reins because we're very psychologists, all we have if you want to ask me what a dream is,
as you know it or I know it, a dream is a verbal report of a memory of a subjective experience that you had during the night.
From a scientist perspective, they are data hounds and they can't work with what they don't know.
So you have this particular report, like the one I just gave, and then we sit down and we have it on a piece of paper typed out, and then we say, oh, there's a character, there's an animal, there's a social interaction, there's a setting. So you combine those two and we could be scientific. Now you have to understand that psychologists used to have in those days what we called physics envy, and that is that we want
to be scientists just like you. We want you to recognize that we're scientists just like you, So we have to be serios. And suddenly we have a situation where we have people in a sleep lab with this big clunky In those days of EEG was enormous. It was this big, clunky, clunky machine, and that made us look pretty scientific. And we've collected a dream during a rem period, which is supposedly only when we dreamt, and then we
get the verbal report and we quantify it. So the title of my dissertation was this is sort of like, please notice we are scientists, but it's set in a pretty assertive manner. So the title of my dissertation was a quantitative study of dream content using an objective indicator of dreaming, like, wow, how could you get more scientific than that?
Very lab coat?
And furthermore, we would say this is the only known one to one relationship between a physiological event and a psychological event. In other words, remsleep equals dreaming. That it was called the rem dream equation. So how could I not go into dream research as a person that was interested in human motivation? Why we do the silly things
we do, the things we know we shouldn't do. That we watch absurdities unfold every day, you know, in the culture, in what we're doing, in whatever realm of life that we're in. The other hooker was you got to understand in the fifties, in the early sixties, Freud and jung and the neo Freudians were the sort of they were
in the atmosphere. And even though psychologists shied away from all three, and there were very few Freudians, no Jungens, still their metaphors, their images prevailed their ideas, and we had the expectations that you know, they we were testing there some of their ideas, no question. But the point is Freud had that right metaphor, the kind of metaphor that works. And Freud's phrase was dreams are the royal
road to the unconscious, a royal road. Today we know they're a bumpy, little, unpaved road to the mundane, I would say, except for a few very interesting kind of dreams that we can talk about.
And just a quick context. So Sigmund Freud was a pioneer in psychoanalysis, and Carl Jung thought that the symbols and the meanings of things that happen in dreams really depend on the context of those events or objects to the dreamer, and that dreaming can be used as kind of a creative tool to solve problems. For it was like, no, if you dream of corn dogs, you're a secret little perv and dreaming is just a way to keep you sleep as you plumb the depths of your repressed subconscious.
So we know dreaming happens in longer and longer cycles through the night, But what is your brain doing while you're snoozing?
And so sure enough, what happens is we dream when our brain is at a certain level of activation if there's no incoming stimuli. We dream during some parts of our non rem sleep too, particularly at stage that might hear me mention later non rem two and non REM two is very similar and it's a blood flow, and if you are trying to awaken people, they'll awaken as readily to a lighter tone, just the same as REM sleep.
So there's just slight differences in certain ways between REM sleep and non ramsleep, and that's on the level of activation. And so my claim is that once there's adequate level of activation and there's no incoming stimuli, you're going to dream if you have a mature and intact neural substrate that supports dreaming.
I've always wondered what does a brain in normal daily life look like in an MRI versus a dreaming one.
They are different, And that was the mind blower of the nineteen nineties. Parts of our brain remain deactivated even while parts of the brain do activate during REM sleep
and non rem too sleep. What does that mean? More specifically, it means that the parts of our brain that are related to the external world, which means sensory systems, visual systems, sensory motor system but also what's called the executive network, which you could think of as the conductor of an orchestra, that whole executive network that lets us know what time it is how much more time before we have to get on the bus when our child's going to arrive home.
That network's deactivated the whole night. And we also have networks in our brain. They're called attention networks, and they're sort of watching and they interact a lot with the executive network. But the executive network is kind of slacking off, so to speak. The attention networks slack off a little bit. And what happens is when the attention and executive networks
are relatively deactivated, we call it. Then, what happens is the neural substrate, the set of brain areas that support a network for imagination, for selfhood, for memory, for internal thinking, that network becomes more salient, just like when you start to daydream, when you drift off, when your mind wanders, parts of that network are what we dream with. And that was the key that dreaming is an intensified form
of mind wandering. Dreaming is based on our imaginations. The same network that supports imaginative thought like a really good daydream is basically the network that supports dreaming. And that to me was huge because it connected dreaming and waking thought.
So the part of your brain that daydreams and imagines is on the night shift as a dream maker? What okay? But what are we dreaming about? Writing on unicorns, eating chowder, redecorating the dining room, peeing our pants? What's happening?
To get to the core of it, dreams are most revealing for somebody that's researching the meaning of dreams. In terms of fact, they're about our personal concerns seventies seventy five percent of the time, and of course that's what we daydream about. Oh my god, I hope my kids do an okay school? Why did I say that to the boss yesterday? What am I gonna wear next week? To that wedding? I mean, all of these personal concerns
are what we drift to. I have to laugh because in the sixties there was a study done where a professor was in a classroom introductory psychology class and he had a little starter gun that did the gun you shoot off when for a race in a track meet? And he said, periodically in the quarter I'm going to I tell you how that gun I'm gonna go bang, and I want you to immediately write down what you were thinking.
Oh my god.
So only the overall results were there's only twenty five percent of the people in the classroom we're listening fully to the lecture at the time that the starter gun was shot. I mean, our minds are all over the place. I know the students aren't paying attention. I know they're struggling to get back to pay attention. We all do that, especially we're you know, in certain parts of a lecture, if we've heard that part before, then we drift off. Why did that guy talk about that again? Will he
get to anything new? Wonder why they ever made him a full professor? You know, all of these things are going through your mind as you listen to this talk, and we're all the same way. We know that from research. I'm not speaking personally. It's just an example, of course, based on solid research.
Well, what about people who self identify as artists, are really creative, or people who have deficiencies in attention like or executive function issues like ADHD. Do they dream differently?
Well, there's some there. First of these huge individual differences in all of us. The best example I can give you is about music, and that is that I know from different studies, but all from the studies my students do did in my courses, and that is that if you are a person that's really interested in music, you will dream about music. You will hear music in your
dreams more frequently than the rest of us. So if I see a lot of music in dreams, a lot of playing music talking about music, then I can make the rather obvious inferences what's your strongest interest? And they say, oh, music.
So if you are creative, chances are you are creative in the dream world. But what if your attention networks and executive networks kind of go offline in your waking hours.
Well.
July twenty twenty two study called Dream Recall and Dream Content in Children with ADHD noted that sleep and dream studies for neurodivergent folks are a bit lacking, But this found that after studying the dreams of one hundred and three ADHD kids and one hundred kids in a control group, quote dream recall frequency and general dream characteristics like dream length and bizarreness didn't differ from children without ADHD, but the dreams of the children with ADHD were more negatively
toned and included more misfortunes and threats, more negative endings, and physical aggression toward the dreamer. The dreams seemed to reflect the inner world of the child with ADHD, and the researchers noted that quote from a clinical point of view, it would be very interesting to study whether the negatively toned dreams change during treatment pharmacological and or psychotherapeutic in
a way similar to how sleep quality improves. So, if you are neurodivergent and you have bad dreams about fitting in, science backs it up. But what if you've been medicated
and you're not dreaming as much? Well, I looked it up and in a twenty twenty Frontiers in Psychology paper titled Dreams, Sleep and Psychotropic Drugs, researchers noted that you might not be dreaming less, but you might be sleeping more soundly and getting up fewer times in the middle of the night, which is coherent with the arousal retrieval model that states that nighttime awakenings help you remember your dreams that are encoded into long term memory, and therefore
you have more dream recall. So sometimes remembering fewer dreams is a sign that you're saw on logs pretty hard. Either way, get that sleep, it's so good for your brain. Oh, and from both Part one and two will be donating to a charity of Professor Domhoff's choice, and we'll tell you more about that charity next week. But both episodes are sponsored by SAPA. Today's episode is exclusively sponsored by SOTFA because rule number one of dreaming, you got to
sleep to dream. SAFA has a sleep loog on their site and it recommended this tip that I love, which is set an alarm, not to wake up, but to go to bed. Set an alarm at night, wind down, floss your teeth, get and jammies, and get stoked to get into a comfortable bed, nice sheets, a clean pillowcase, and a mattress that you're excited to sleep on. I used to have a very different relationship with sleep where I didn't fully appreciate how good sleep really is. What's
something that is free but also makes you happier. It helps your body heel and you'll look better when you're well rested. So if you have a bad relationship with your mattress, please get a sofa. Do it for both of us. One thing I love about SOAFA is that they have a lot of different options. They have mattresses with coils, they have memory foam they have adjustable firmness. They have crib mattresses, and they're made to order. They're not stuffed at a box. They delivered to you by hand.
So if you have been looking for a mattress that makes you excited to go to sleep and get the sleep and the dreaming that you deserve, check out Sofa. You can learn more at SAFA dot com slash ologies. That's subleatva dot com slash ologies. Okay, back into it. So, speaking of studies, Professor Domhoff just published one with his research assistant. This is a twenty twenty paper titled from Adolescence to Young Adulthood in two dream Series the Consistency
and Continuity of characters and Major personal Interests. And it was published by the American Psychological Association. And this study analyzed five thousand dream reports from two subjects and you can find them at dreambank dot net. But here's what they were about, because I know you want to know where.
We had dream journals from two different young women who had kept their dreams for their own reasons, with no interest in science or anything else. One of them was blind, in fact, twelve or thirteen years old, and she'd wake up and tell her dreams to her mom, and her mom had said, you know, you like your dreams so much,
why don't you tape them? And so now she's thirty years old and she looks on the web about dreams, and lo and behold, she finds my two research sites that were created by this research assistant, Adam Schneider, who's a great graphic designer. And I'll match him against anybody as far as spreadsheets and so on. And so we have two research sites, dreamresearch dot net and dream bank
dot net. So they come across these and they look at them and then they say, hey, I got these dreams from when I was twelve to twenty five.
Wow.
So had two different people do that over the space of five years, and now we have parent dream series we can study. So the one woman that we named Dizzy, because we have everybody at anonymity and we change all the names, all the places, and we put the the dreams are all on the dream bank for you to look at. But there's no real names up there. It's all pseudonyms. But at any rate, Izzy she would have all these dreams about TV characters and movie characters and
zombies and so on. So when you ask her about these things in her dream, she said, I love horror. She'd been to horror you know conferences, you know where they all the people like horror films go. She goes to those things. Well, you know, they say, well, that's hardly news, but it does tell us that she dreams
about her concerns. And her dreams are also excellent for another thing to understand about dreams that relate to your point ally, and that is that she had these dreams of people she had crushes on the first time she had a couple dreams since she was twelve. She had a crush on TV or movie man, and then she got a crush on another TV or movie star, and she wrote them down, and then she started to write her dreams down. That's actually how she started to write
her dreams down. Well, we can figure out the percentage of her dreams where she's dreaming about these celebrities as we call them, or they're known people, but their celebrities she doesn't know them personally anyway, She has dreams about these crushes, and then it turns out she pretty soon having dreams about high school crushes. And there this one guy that appears throughout most of her high school years.
So if you ask her, do have romantic interest towards certain guys, she would say, oh, yes, yeah, I get crushes and they really last a long time. Here's the interesting thing, it's all imagination. If we finally asked her, well you ever get involved with these people? You know this is via email and all, and she knows it's anonymous, she said, I never even touched anyone. She was the most shy person, but her fantasy life was very rich. There's always to that. So whether you do the things
you dream, that's another story. And that's why I call it imagination. Now the other woman, the blind young woman we a code named Jasmine. Jasmine has a kind of blindness where she can see vague outlines. If you magnify things enough, she can read on a screen at any rate. She's always messing with her equipment, always with her computers, always with the sound equipment. And she was very, very interested,
also in music. But when she dreamt about famous characters we'll call them, it was like snow White or you know, something like that, a nice, harmless little video cartoon kind of character, or nice characters like Mary Poppins, not some horror movie or some crush or something that involves sexuality. So she had a very different set of interests and I could know all those through her dreams. So dreams present a portrait of your personal concerns and they portray how you view the world.
I'm curious too, in Jasmine's case, are you using the part of your brain that can see things visually? If you don't have sight, would you have sighted dreams?
It depends. It's an ideal question, thank you. And that is First of all, visual imagery is something we gradually develop out of seeing, but it is located in what are called secondary visual cortices.
Where in the brain is this, Well, the primary visual cortex is located in the occipital lobe, which is the very back of the brain. It's like your brain's but it's just above the nape of your neck, and the secondary visual courtesies are just above that, just a we smage closer to the top of your head.
What that means is that one of the parts of the brain that never activates in the whole sleep period is what's called your primary visual cortex, which is a significant part of your brain. So what you're seeing is the mental imagery that you can see. If I ask all of you right now, imagine you're sitting in your living room. What's your living room look like? How many windows are in there? What's the furniture look like? Now,
have your mom walk into that room. You can call up that visual imagery And.
Just a quick aside. There's a slim fraction of folks who don't have visual imaginations, and they have what's called aphantasia or imagery weakness, and a twenty twenty study found that about zero point eight percent of cited folks are unable to form visual mental images. But a twenty twenty two Consciousness and Cognition paper revealed that the majority of a fantasics, though they can't conjure mental imagery while awake,
nevertheless retain the capacity to experience rich visual dreams. So not so much when awake, but then it's a visual bonanza in their sleep. So people's ability to imagine can vary.
Now that visual imagery is not automatic, and it's not there at the start, how do we know? We know? Two ways? One is developmental psychology studies. People who are awake by you can are ways of doing studies that I don't dare get into detail on how we can see how good you are at visualizing, say, in your mind. But the other way is precisely blind people. If you are born blind or become blind before about age four,
you do not have visual mental imagery. But if you become blind after age seven, you will have visual imagery in your dreams, at least for many years. In one case, a woman gradually had less and less she was older, but she lost her sight at seven and so she didn't have much visual imagery. In other words, we've done studies of visual imagery in the dreams of the blind and other imagery. And this was done with a person who was doing a doctorate degree in which he brilliantly
gave people cassettes. This was older, gave them cassettes. He didn't know quite how to study him well. And that's where we come in. Because of this crazy little content system I've told you about. It's obsessively detailed, one might say. And we were able to create a taste, touch, smell percent, hearing percent, the visual percent, so we could go through.
We now have it all fancy on the computer and so we can create word strings for taste, touch, smell for various words, all the words for taste, smell, and so on, and then find all the dreams that have from these blind people to have those in them. Then we check them for false positives, things like oh, I see what you mean. Well, there, that's just a metaphor.
In any case, we can determine that the people that did not have any visual mental imagery because they were blind at birth or before, they dream of one guy, I really remember he could smell the cof he's holding onto his coffee cup and he can feel how warm it is, and he smells the coffee. We do that a little bit, we do or cited, but it's two three percent of the sensory images in our dream. But hearing occurs fair amount of dreams too, so we have
this mental imagery. It doesn't depend on the primary visual cortec.
I'm so confused about dreams because I could sit in front of a laptop and say, okay, write a movie, and I'd be like, I don't know what to write about. I don't know how to describe it. And then I fall asleep in my pants on the couch and I have this like fantastic odyssey with whatever, like pirates and hot air balloons. How does our imagination do that?
I call it imagination roaming freely. You see, when we're awake, you're constrained by these other networks, these these networks that are oriented towards the waking world, these executive and attention networks. So you're constrained at night, you're roaming freely and instantly. The same thing in the morning when you wake up in the morning, whether you wake up from a dream or not. And if it's a relaxed wakening, which it is for most human beings, even in honting and gathering societies,
people are all around fire. They feel safe. Say you wake up gradually and the parts of the brain that are activating the most are not immediately the executive network or the attention network foggy, and you'll have a lot of drifting waking thoughts. And in my case, I'll wake up in the morning not from a dream, and I'll say, that's where that paragraph should go. I got to move that paragraph. That's what that didn't sit right. Then I'll
quickly note something down. You'll make changes in the manuscript, revealing what I do with most of my time.
Seriously, this dude has written over twenty books, and they're not zombie fanfic. He's written twenty legit sociology and neurobiology textbooks in his waking hours, and then he dreams about paragraphs when he rests. But what about a relaxed awakening. Let's talk about that for a second. So, according to the twenty nineteen book Dreams, Biology, Psychology, and Culture, the circums, dances around, and awakening also play a really big role
in how often you can remember your dreams. So, for example, like if a person in a dream study has to complete a task as soon as they wake up, that distraction interferes and messes up dream recall compared to participants who are allowed to enjoy the languor of bed and fart around and think about their dreams the night before. But there's a ton of individual factors that influence that wildly, and remembering the details of your dreams may or may not be helpful to you. It depends on who you ask.
In other words, you're waking. Reflections and thoughts that are triggered by your dreams are used by a few writers, not a lot, and not a lot by poets, And there's books and articles on that where you ask a lot of poets artists to set and do they use their dreams, and a few do and most don't. So in your case, I would suggest then that you tape record your dreams and see if you see, and then
your reflections on your dreams become useful. There's some people who believe, oh, we solve problems in dreams if you talk about cognition and complex thinking. The fact is that sometimes people do solve problems reflecting on their dreams. There was one study done, for instance, where the professor asked the students to try to dream about something that's been
bothering them. So they collected these dreams and the students said, well, you know, like two of the fifty say related anything at all to a problem in the student's minds, and judges independent judges. That means some other psychologists that you're working with they go through and they say, yeah, that
dream seems to relate to that particular problem. But the one I like best in that study was this woman had a dream when she woke up and she was wolfing down pills if I forgot to make my pills, gulp and gulp down pills, And she woke up and I said, I think I better write down a schedule to remind me to write to take my pills. But the dream she didn't solve a problem in that dream,
but reflecting on that dream, it changes. And then another woman had a dream where she'd been having trouble with her menstrual cycle and she'd been to the doctor about it and so on, and she has a dream about running any When she wakes up and she reflects on the dream, she said, I think I forgot to tell the doctor that I have been doing a lot of running. And of course we know women that run miles and miles and miles. It can affect your menstrual cycle. So
it's a reflection on the dreams. But I don't believe, contrary to many, that dreams solve problems and dreaming is not a problem solving mechanism. I disagree with that kind of view because first, we forget ninety eight percent of our dream ninety five to ninety nine.
Will say, now, that's going to kill you as a researcher to think of how much data is just not recollected if I'm waking. Does that kill you?
Yeah, Well, it's fascinating. And the trouble is we can't figure out why. It's the easiest kind of study there is to take people that are what we call high recallers and low recallers, and they've been compared on every personality test and every cognitive test, and we don't get high correlations. So I can't say, oh, you dream because
of this, you you don't dream because of that. Now people are trying that with neuroimaging studies of people that say they dream frequently and people that say they rarely dream, and there are differences in the activation levels of some parts of that neural network. So that's just an infancy, but it could then turn out to be useful, and so we end up with things like this. If one of the best predictors of whether you recall dreams is whether you're interested in dream now, why might you be
interested in dreams? Then becomes a question she wants to know about your dreams? Well, one of my students did a study of that, and she asked people how interested it were in their dream and she got the highs and the lows, And with the highs, the interesting thing was several of them thought they'd had a dream that was psychic and so they had a dream that their sister was ill or their grandfather was very sick, and those dreams were very upsetting to them, and they called
the people to check, which people often do. So what happens is if a thousand people, million people tonight dream that their grandfather has become gravely ill, one of those grandfathers is going to die that night by chance, So that person is going to think they're psychic. The other people, they often do call their home. I know that because we've done studies where we ask people about types of dreams, and then we asked, basically, you ever had a dream
that led you to take any action? And they'll say, while I dream my grandfather died and I called home and he hadn't as relieve, but the other ones in that study. This is where dreams are fun. I mean a lot of times, even though we have more negative dreams have more misfortune than good fortune. They have more aggression and friendliness and so on. They have a negativity bias, as does much of our making thought.
For more on this startling and bumber info, see the paper A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind by two Harvard professors who used a mood tracking app to learn that about forty seven percent of the time are thinking about things that make us anxious or sad, rather than just enjoying being alive on the planet. And the research wrote, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering
mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost, and that's partly why some experts say that mindfulness can help shift your mental habits away from the dark recesses of why did I do that, Why did I do that? Why did I do that? Or what if a disaster happens? Thoughts that are all too familiar for some of.
Us, but any rate. In this particular study where we ask if it led the action, there were two women about forty five who had had a dream that their boyfriend was cheating on them. Now and it's on a questionnaire and it's anonymous. This one woman who dreamed of her boyfriend cheated on her. They were actually sleeping in the same bed. She said, I was so angry I socked him in the arm. The other woman was not in the same with her boyfriend when this dream happened.
But she said, I didn't speak to him for two days. Can you imagine, Yeah.
I feel so real. You feels so hurt by it, and no matter how real it feels, you're not allowed to physically or emotionally abuse anyone. When you wake up. We got that. We're good. There, go have a nap, and in it you can take a Louisville slugger to both headlights, you can slash a hole in all four tires, and then you can wake up and be nice.
Well, that gets to the other thing that's about dreams. One of the reasons they're so fascinating to us, I use that. We have a term, fancy term. It's called embodied simulation. Now, that's what a dream is. It's an embodied simulation. And what does that mean? First of all, simulation is when you're putting yourself in some hypothetical scenario. You're driving along and you're thinking, what if I pulled
over here and when in that gas station? And what if I then played the jute box and I started to listen to music, And what if I really started to really do what I want to do, which just to sing and show people I can really sing. So I've just simulated a scenario. I'm driving along, I'm going to pull into this gas station and into its little store, and I'm going to go in there and sing. That's
a simulation, but an embodied simulation. What that means is that when we really get intensely into a dreaming part of the brain, areas that are activated are not only our imagination, but also these secondary visual, auditory, and motor corteses. And you can sometimes call this up in your mind and imagine yourself running. You're really running and you're really afraid.
You can work yourself up and get a sense of that, and you're being man and you're being chased by that dog that you're scared of down the street.
I have a feeling that doctor Domhoff had a bad experience with a dog, which saddens me, and I didn't ask about it, but anyway.
So at that point it becomes not just sort of abstract thought, but we are maybe shaking a little bit or really feeling a sense of running. All of that is what I mean by intensified form of mind wandering, because we know that the secondary visual courtesies and motor courtesies are activated during dreaming, and what that means is
it does feel real. We experience dreams as real while they are happening, and we wake up and it's usually gone in a flash where we say, my god, I can't believe that I was actually arguing with that guy that I never would argue with in my life. I was actually talking to that person never talked to, or I was giving Jimmy Carter advice, you know. And so they feel so real, and so for most of us that we shake that feeling. But some dreams can feel more than real.
Bill says that one type of embodied simulation is a little more profound.
And that is occasionally this is a rare dream now, but people sometimes have dreams of deceased loved ones. Not just that you're walking around with your dad and mom, but you recognize who are deceased, but you recognize that they're alive. Yeah, and you can't believe it.
Yeah, this happened to me like literally like two nights ago. Yeah.
I was like, Dad, you're back, you know, yes, and back to life. Dreams. Those dreams are so powerful for people. And here's the striking thing. One of the founders of anthropology of modern anthropology, an English guy named Edmund Tyler. He said dreams in the spiritual world, dreams and religion are very closely tied, because these occasional dreams of somebody being alive are really so real to people they tell other people.
You'll never guess who I read it to.
And in that sense, some myths, this is another phrase I really like. Many myths are dreams that have been told and retold. If I tell you a dream in which this amazing thing happened where so and so was back to life, and that dream kind of grabs you or resonates like it did for you, you might tell my dream, but it would be just slightly altered by you. With every time a story is told, it gets oldered slightly.
We call it leveled and sharpened. The minor stuff falls out and the stuff that's interesting gets sharpened and embroidered. You know, the big guy in the dream becomes a giant. So that kind of embroidering of dreams that have been told and retold may well relate to some of our mythologies. Now, I want to tell a little story related to that about when you ask people for dreams. When I first read research on these back to life dreams, I was very interested. I wanted to see if very many students
had that kind of dream. And I used to teach these very large classes, whether it was introductory psych or personality or of course on dreams, and I would give them these anonymous questionnaires. This particular questionnaire, I just asked, this very general question, have you ever had a dream of a deceased loved one in which they seemed to be alive? And to my surprise, and these are all eighteen to twenty year old, and they probably hadn't experienced
even the deaths of their grandparents. Shit in a lot of the cases, but four or five students had dreams in which their dog was alive, their cat was alive, and they loved it. And I was so taken aback. And one of my daughters really had a dog she really loved, and I told her about, you know, these dreams I'd collected, and she said, Dad, I dream about him being about her dog being shot. I'm just so joyful when I see him and he's, like you do alive.
So if you've had that experience, now, now turned to one of our studies, and he's up on the web on the dream bank. His name Zed Sudan name is ed pseudonym, whatever the right word is.
This twenty fifteen paper titled Dreaming as Embodied Simulation was published via the American Psychological Association, and it deals with dream journals that this anonymous subject ed recorded on his own for decades, never intending them to be public, but later passed them on to researchers in case they could help other people going through difficult emotional times.
And we call him the widower. This is a man that never had an interest in dreams in his life, and then his wife got seriously ill a third time of tancer returned third time when when the first two times they thought it was a beat, so it was really you know, she was going to live on. So it was a disastrous year or so, and she went through a horrifying gradual death through stomach cancer. So you
can imagine how dramatic it was. But at any rate, shortly after after she died, within a month, he had a dream in which she was there and she was alive, and she looked alive, and he couldn't believe it, and he was kind of frightened, but and she assured him, she reassured him she was okay. We call these reassurance dreams.
I'm okay, it's okay. And then he was really discombobulated guy after this, And several months later he met another woman and he was thinking about getting married to her, and he had a dream in which his you know, we'll say this one might be highly motivated. But she had a dream in which his deceased wife said you should get married again. Oh so he had these moving dreams. But anyway, in his diaries, which made me the dreams so valuable, he wrote, he said, you know, I'm not
a religious guy. I'm scientifically or annual, although he wasn't a scientist, but he said, I swear she visited me a couple of those times. I swear she visited me a couple of those times. That is the connection dreams have with the spirit worlds. And here's another saying about this. We have people that interpret our dreams. The people that interpret our dreams are the first professionals in human history.
They are called shaman. You are sick, you are confused, You go to the shaman, who I call the first psychoanalyst. And you go to the shaman and you say, I'm feeling ill and the shaman dives into the world of spirits, often through a dream, and finds out which evil spirit, which malevolent thing. You know, which spirit is mad at you for whatever reason. And often it's random. You just had bad luck, this spirit was annoyed and picked you. He tells me it's okay, or what the spirit said,
and then I can go work that day. And I think that's what you know, a lot of people in our societ do. They have the function making it so the rest of us are able to go out and work. Their job is to keep us working in terms of we don't collapse into all our all our neurosis and anxieties and angers and fears and resentments and all the rest that go with human beings. Being injustice collectors.
They're like mood mechanics.
Yes, that be a good word for Yeah, they got to do it or you can't work, I mean. And if they do it right, they inspire us, as some tend to do, then we really feel good about ourselves.
What about when you see a big book on the shelf at a bookstore and it's like the dream Encyclopedia, and it's like you had a dream about owls. It means you might be pregnant or whatever. Do you find any correlation between the symbolism of dreams and any of your research? No, okay, that's what I thought the answer was going to be.
I mean, that's a long that's a short answer based on a long, painful set of a long journey. And first of all, when you know, I said in the fifties, clinical lore is all around you, in the dreams of the railroad to the unconscious, and Freudian symbols hats, hats are phallic symbols. But we did other studies, and I've studied dreams of like I have four thousand dreams in this one woman. And we looked through and we did word searches and found the unusual dreams, big sample, went through,
tried to make sense out of them. And one example, she's had ten dreams about bananas. But in the one dream the banana was clearly a phallic symbol. In other words, the banana turned into a penis hello. But in all the other dreams the bananas were just sitting there with other things and so on. So there was a famous statement that's made about Freudians that probably Freud didn't make. But the famous statement is there are some days when a cigar is just a cigar.
PS. I tried to figure out if, like Liza Minelli or something said this, and all I found was that Freud dot Org says it wasn't Freud who said it, but if he did say it, he said it ironically, meaning that a cigar is never just a cigar. A cigar is also a dick, according to Sigmund.
But here's the interesting thing about these neuroimaging studies that I emphasize so heavily in the last ten to fifteen years, and that is that when you study the network in the waking brain that is activated when you say something metaphoric to somebody. In other words, they're going to decode this metaphoric statement I made. Cross that river when you come to it. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Part of the brain that activates during an interpretation of
a metaphor or generating a metaphor. Asked me to make up a metaphor that those particular areas are not active during dreaming, oh weird, or only partially active. I should say it's a more complex story. In other words, the networks that make it possible to experience emotions, to make symbolic statements, to understand symbolism, and the networks that allow you to recall specific memories. Those networks are not functional
during dreaming. Dreaming has far less emotion in it than the stereotype say, it has far as I can tell, virtually no symbolism. And furthermore, if we study your dreams, there are no specific memories in them. There are no episotic memories we call them where oh, yes, I was with my sister at the zoo two weeks ago kind of memory. Instead, the memory bank we draw on in
dreams is what are called semantic memories. That is sort of my general view, my general conception of my friend Joe, or your general conception of your younger sister that we draw on.
So we tend to drum up general vibes from life, but not replay exact scenarios as we remember them. So dreams aren't a time machine made of your own jiggly memories.
So we have cognitive insufficiencies during dreams, that there are certain things we can't do well during dream We don't have as much emotion as I've already said. I don't think there's much symbolism and dreams. There's not episotic memories. And of course the most obvious is we don't know where we are. In rare cases, for some people, they will think they are aware they are dreaming. In other words, it starts to use a little part of the executive network.
They still even though they think they're dreaming, they don't say yeah, and I'm in bed, I'm in my house, and etcetera, etcetera. And they still don't really have what we have during waking life. So that network we're dreaming with is partial. It's a network that's very important in human beings, and it's only in human beings. It's a network that's probably seventy five thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand years old, and of course that's being studied
like crazy by evolutionary anthropologists. Cognitively, modern human beings could be as recent as one hundred thousand years ago, and that's a lot more recent than we thought ten years ago or twenty years ago.
For more on this, you can see papers like the Role of dreams in the Evolution of the Human Mind, which says that dreams aren't just a rehearsal for shit hitting the fan real bad. They're more of a general virtual practice for life, and they could have played a big part in human cognitive capabilities. So our ancestors twitched and dreamed so that we could walk around one day wearing underpants and eating cereal and building rockets, sometimes all at once.
And so if you look at the you know, the brains of chimpanzees, monkeys and so on, they have some of the structures that are part of our imagination network. Incidentally, the technical term is which is just an accidental technical term, I have to name it first. It's called the default network. It means when we're not doing something, when we're not on a task, we just go into this state, which is the state of mind wandering and daydreaming. So we
mind wander and daydream with the default network. But that default network has only one small part of things, and so therefore dreams are not as the same as waking, the same as consciousness. They're not a form of consciousness. They have parallels with consciousness.
So much more on this in Part two. We get to the really juicy stuff via your questions, everything from sex dreams to teeth falling out and how to control your dreams and more of that will be out next week. Here's a tiny preview. Can I ask a few questions from listeners? Is that okay? Okay? That's all you get for a preview From next week? You need to come back because we will have a marathon Q and A with your dream questions and they are all so good,
Like is there an intersection between dreaming and hallucinating? Does sleep quality affect your dreams? Why don't Baby's dream lucid dreaming, flying in dreams, the imagination and dreams reducing nightmares? And why rest is so critical? Meanwhile, ask specialists your sleepy questions, because why else would they study this for decades if they didn't want you to know? And links to dreambank dot net and his new book are in this show note, and so are our social handles. We're at Ologies on
Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali word with one L on both. I'm on TikTok at Ali underscore Ologies. Please say hello and to submit questions for future episodes, you can join Patreon at Patreon dot com slash Ologies for about twenty five cents an episode, and Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Susan Hale for managing that and so much more. Thank you Noel Dilworth for all the scheduling. Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook
group with assists from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Fealtis. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts and Caleb Patton bleeps them. Kelly ar Dwyer works on our website and can make you one. The incredible Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio is our new editor, with some assists from the ever helpful Dared Sleeper. The theme music is by
Nick Thorburn of the Band's Islands. And if you stick around until the end of the show, I'm going to tell you a secret, and this week it's that I live on a steep hill and things roll down the hill and then I think they stay there for decades because I've had to go to the bottom of the hill after I've dropped things off of the hill, such as the rechargeable battery for a power drill, and at the very very bottom of the hill, aside from a bunch of old Pepsi bottles from the eighties, the coolest
thing I found was a glass skull completely intact. I don't know how it fell hundreds of feet down this rock covered hill or what it was doing down there, but I'm pretty sure it's not cursed. It seems friendly. But now I got a glass skull on my bookshelf and it was free. Okay, we'll see you next week for more dreams. Byebye. Do you have any dream?
Yeah? I'm all alone. I'm rolling a big doughnut in the snake where our death.
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