Oh hey, so up top. This episode is exclusively sponsored by Satfa 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 are 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
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What a dream?
Oh why it's still your friend's fiance who commits everything to spreadsheets? It's Ali Ward. This is part two of Onerology. We cover so many burning questions in the field of dreams with one of the world's top researchers. Go back to part one and start there. What are you doing? This is part two? Go back start with that. Come back here. Okay, let's get the good stuff, but really quick.
Thank you to everyone at Patreon dot com, slash Ologies who've submitted questions for this It costs a dollar a month or more to join. Thanks to everyone rating and subscribing and leaving reviews. Also, I read every single one. There were so many lovely ones this week. But I have to shout out Tremendous who shared the show with their husband, who looked it up and said that I'm their mom's cousin.
Here's the deal. My dad was one of eleven and my mom was one of six. I have so many cousins were related to most of Montana, so I'll be honest. I have no idea who Tremendous is. I don't know which cousins child spouse wrote that, but shoot me a text.
People were family, Okay. On neurology dreams, chuck yourself in for answers about where creativity comes, neuroimaging, the imagination, creepy tooth dreams, foods and dreams, mental health and dreaming, relaxed fish medications, and your sleep Lucid dreaming a newly discovered
part of the brain. What sleep stages are important for cleaning out your brain, your dog's naps, and more with author researcher, psychology and sociology professor dream expert and owneurologist, doctor g William Domhoff.
Can I ask a few questions from listeners, from people who listening now, No, not right now, but they know that you're coming on.
Oh I told them, and now you're a say that.
No, not a hot mic at all. Okay, this inquiry was burning a hole in the minds of Hannah News, Dantuin, Mazie Lopez, Corey Jesswan, and first time question askers Andy Cornaccia, Trevor Derning, Marvette Fudge, Jess Nan, and Travis Gibson, who all needed info on whether our dreams have any meaning? What's the point? So yes, everyone needed to know that straight out of the gate. Okay, a ton of people
want to know. Essentially, Joe Mueller wants to do things really have meaning and dreams like seeing certain objects or the recurring dream of teeth falling out like so many people have the dream of their teeth are falling out, which seems weird.
Do they have any meaning? First of all, people do have certain common dreams like flying they under their own power, or teeth falling out, but they're very rare, in other words, in your whole dream life. And we've we've studied this by like, we have two week dream journals from students and one percent of them, you know, four dreams out of hundreds will have teeth falling out, and certain individuals
will have it. But if we all talk about it, this is where a whole not being rigorous and in the lab and really you know, not projecting things on your participants. We call it creating demand characteristics and creating expectations. And also if you've heard a lot that people have dreams that their teeth fall out pretty soon you think you have one or you have, but they're very rare. But they are the kind of dreams that we really studied a lot to try to get to this symbolic meaning.
But I honestly don't know what the symbolic meaning of that is in dreams. If there is any symbolism, there could be symbolism. You know, for Freudians it's castration. I think, you know, teeth falling.
Out Patron's Mallory Skinner, Kat and first time question askers Christian rob Justin Goodheart and Leanne Murray as well as me your father, have all had nightmares of teeth rotting out of our skull and just falling out like overripe peaches from a tree. What does Domhoff say about this?
But for your teeth listeners, Yes, your teethe listeners. Go on dreambank dot net. Pick we've got it limited, so the thing doesn't crash. Pick two dreams series at a time, and put in the word teeth, teeth, put teeth and tooth. Put it in or mode or so it'll be tooth or teeth, And in three seconds it will tell you how many dreams have a tooth in it? Huh? And it'll give you a tooth column and a teeth scull.
So if you put in tooth, teeth, gums, tongue, mouths, you'd get I call him for each one, and you'd get what's call a contingency.
Let's take a little down the teeth dreams timeline of life to get to the bottom of it. Shall we I need to? Okay? So, in his nineteen hundred publication The Interpretation of Dreams, one doctor Sigmund Freud said that dental dreams are mental dreams, and they represent issues with things like castration and repressed sexual urges and the compulsive
desire to pleasure ones self. So I went to make a withdrawal from doctor dom Hoff's dreambank dot net, and I looked into his archive to find that, yes, the percentage of the twenty thousand collected dreams that even mentioned tooth or teeth is very low. It's less than a percent, and some of those are just mentioning a toothbrush and not even tooth trauma. I read one dream account from a participant identifying as Barb, who dreamt on March second,
nineteen eighty one. Quote, we go to the park par I'm wearing a long formal gown and I have one high heeled shoe on and one off. I walk on tiptoes with the right foot and hope no one notices my missing shoe. There is a buffet table, lots of high class snotty women. A tooth with a feather on it falls out of my mouth onto the table. I'm embarrassed, I say, nonchalantly, Oh pardon, very french.
Like and classy.
I pick it up. It reminds me of an engagement ring. I feel the empty place with my tongue. I realized there had been another one that fell out sometime earlier. Why did Barb dream this?
Also?
Barb?
I would party with you. You sound fun as hell to be a mess with. Now I've heard that these dreams, these kind of oral embarrassment and horror dreams, mean some fear of a loss of control. But I looked up a twenty twelve study to get some stats. It's called Dream Motif Scale. It was published in the journal Dreaming, and it provided some numbers on our fucked up teeth dreams.
And despite my assumption that one hundred percent of everyone has these dreams, the researchers report that only thirty nine percent of those studied had what they called a TD, which stands for tooth dream at least once. Sixteen percent of people reported that their TD were recurrent, and eight percent were like, I have these all the damn time, doctor,
Why why? Why? And thankfully for us, there is a twenty eighteen study that answer set and it's called Dreams of Teeth Falling Out An Empirical Investigation of physiological and psychological correlates. Thank God. Okay, so the authors of this preface by saying teeth dreams are enigmatic because they don't fall under the rubric of the continuity hypothesis, which just means dreaming about normal shit that happens every day. But again, why okay, this is huge, Hold on to your molars.
Their findings supported the dental irritation hypothesis, which means you dream of teeth falling out when you have a dental problem. That's it, sometimes months before it actually gives you any problems. So maybe you're due for a crown replacement, or you should slow down on the white strips. But let's get to the cooler dreams.
But there's a better one that's tantalizing, and that is flying. Because up is good in our thinking when we look at all the work that's been done on meaning in waking life, up is good, down is bad, left is bad, right is good this kind of stuff. But flying, think of all the metaphors. I'm walking on air, I'm high as a kite. I hope they don't prick my balloon and I fall, And so we express elation through height,
through flying. I'm walking on air, over the moon, over the moon, the whole ring, cloud nine high right now, And that's the kind of temptation. It just makes sense to think those dreams must be symbolic. Two. In other words, we have what one researcher calls a waking state bias, so it lures us into putting more into the dream that's there. Going back to that hypothetical, if I have one hundred and fifty of your dreams, I think I could know a lot about you, A whole lot. What
I know something you don't know. I don't think. So what i'd know is what I would learn from you. If I could sit down with you and say I would like to have an anonymous interview with you for research purposes, I wish you know answer as honestly as you can, and I ask you what your feelings are towards your mother, what your feelings are towards your two sisters, What are some of your regrets, what are some of
the things you worry about? I think that I would then learn from that interview what I've already learned from your dream If I wanted to know what I can learn from your dreams, I think I've just view for an hour in an anonymous, honest interview. And so that means that dreams have meaning. Dreams have personal meaning. Occasionally they'll have cultural meaning. For example, in societies they're hunting.
In gathering societies, they dream more of animals, lo and behold, that's a cultural kind of difference, and of.
Course, for every member of every indigenous society all over the world, there is a different relationship with dreaming. But Professor Tomhoff also notes in his most recent book, The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming, that his research has found, unsurprisingly that the dreams of people in indigenous societies more often feature them as the victims of aggression, which just mirrors
the very tragic reality both historically and presently. And a paper on the Plane's Vision quest paradigm in the journal American Indian noted that in Native in indigenous context, there's typically quote no separation between the world as dreamed and
the world as lived. It continues that in non indigenous culture, the distinction between waking and dreaming is largely a consequence of culturally reinforced theories of mind that have resulted in a bifurcated worldview for most Euro Americans, so modern Western
culture separates them a bunch now. The nonprofit organization Worldwide Indigenous Science Network has also started doing what they call dream work, which is collecting dream journals and providing a network to share the role of dreams in their lives.
But what about in our futures? So patrons Amy Naramatsu, R. J. Deutsche, Emily Staffer, krab Brynn Mpeva, Victoria Edding, Zoe first time question askers Ifana Chamatsko, Taylor, Clinton Nan fl Rabbit, Ariana O'Connor, and Kaylin Bennett all wanted to know about that dreamy nostalgia feeling and deja vu, and about nocturnal premonitions. What has Professor Dohmhoff seen in his decades of research?
So, dreams have meaning, but I don't think they have the profound or symbolic, prophetic, any of those kind of meanings which have been attributed to them in almost every culture, because there are some cultures actually really don't give it damn about dreams, but most there's a whole lot that do. And they are ones that then we can learn from because they have dreams are prophetic. They use dream to decide where to go on the hunt and so on.
You have to have certain dreams to enter certain professions like warrior. You have to have certain dreams before you be initiated in the manhood. And then of course, just like our society, then they may have ways to induce that dream.
And the role of consciousness altering plant medicine goes deep, deep, deep into history, and for more on that, I will link a twenty twenty paper from the Journal of Psychedelic Studies called the Role of Indigenous Knowledges in Psychedelic Science, and that comes hot out of the gates, acknowledging how much colonialism and past scientific research have excluded indigenous knowledge
and not given credit where it's due. And essentially it says that in some cultural frameworks, psychedelics aren't just for trip and balls. They're a tool used in concert with our brain's own mechanisms to use these altered states of consciousness to our benefit and our growth. So mushrooms, they are not just for enjoying the lights at the next meeting of the Juggalos, but our dreams hallucination adjacent. First time question askers Kevin Parachan, Sophie Fournier, and Wendy Lockhart wanted.
To know what happens is that all gets blurred and people talk about altered states of consciousness, and so suddenly they're saying dreams are like hypnotic states, or like drug states, and so on. What the neuroimaging research reveals is that hypnosis is not like psychedelics or hallucinations or like dreaming. In other words, every one of those states has a different network supporting it, and the dreaming network is different
from all of those altered states of consciousness networks. And so one of my strong claims, of course, gets me a lot of trouble is to say you can't learn anything about dreams by studying hallucinations or hypnotizing people, or studying psychedelic drug states. That doesn't teach you about dreaming. Dreaming is a normal, every day occurrence in virtually everyone
that we know of. There may be a few people that don't dream, and it'd be great if neuroimaging would study them, because I do think there might be a few. But at any rate, I think that we have to understand a dream, we first of all have to be sure that the mental activity is not sleep talking, or from a brief arousal or from sleep paralysis, and then
study those dreams. Then we could make comparisons, but to try to understand dreams on the basis of psychosis, which is what famous neurologist of the mid nineteenth century said, Give me the secret of dreams and I will tell you the secret of psychosis. Of course, then Freud quoted that with great approval, and famous philosophers have said that. Important people have said that, Yeah, we believe it right.
What about Professor Domhoff.
I don't anymore if I ever did.
What about dreams and sleep quality? Victoria Edding wants to know if I remember a lot of my dreams one night, or if they're vivid, does that mean I got good or bad sleep? And Jenna Knalana wanted to know how do stressful dreams or nightmares affect the quality of the sleep you're getting? Do you have a good, cozy sleep?
Do you have better dreams?
I think I can say with confidence that people that are in really anxiety, that are really highly roused in some way, whether through drug states or tensions or whatever it may be, that's going to affect sleep quality, and it then may affect dreams. It's not the dreams that are it's not bad dreams that are causing it. It's vice versas.
So. Patron Dominique McDermott asked why they feel more tired after a night of intense dreams, But according to doctor Domhoff, it's not your nightmares messing up sleep. It's the tension and discomfort you already have that are giving you the bad dreams again. Sleep hygiene, coziness, temperature control, stress mitigation can all give you better sleep, which will help you have a better tomorrow. But some types of stress go way deeper than others.
Here's where PTSD victims, God love them. That's just a tough thing. But when they're studied with neuroimaging or EEGs, their brains day and night are just really activated. They are on fire. So the brain of a person sleeping, they're not sleeping like a non PTSD person. Their brain is fired up. Their vigilant. One of the attention networks also has a vigilance aspect to it, and that's the vigilance network. You know. Right now, we're paying attention. We're
in this particular room. We can hear sound. But if we suddenly heard a loud noise, or if I noticed out the window that the building was falling, we would totally change everything in our body. Our digestion would stop, this would stop. Every bit of energy would be mobilized just on that particular focus, and I'd be no more
imagining or thinking. I'd be totally a kind of focus, that salience part of the attention network is still on in these PTSD victims, and so it really he really does distort their sleep, and the brain is then much more activated, and they're going to have more dreams because they're more activated, and because they're got incredibly deep and burned in personal concerns, they're going to dream about those things now. Contrary to the view that people just keep
dreaming the same nightmare, they don't. Really. We have the dreams on dream Bank. We have the dreams of Vietnam Vet. And he's quite a guy that was a medic in Cambodian Highlands in nineteen seventy or seventy one. He saw horrific, unbelievable human slaughter death. His dreams are full of fright, and he's one of the few people that could write them all down, and he kept them all his life. He's probably seventy now, and his dreams are just constantly vigilant,
constantly agitated, constantly. You know, somebody comes in there and he's talking to an old friend and all of a sudden he sees somebody other corner right turn and just gets fiercely angry, and you know, goes at him or they get in the conflict. So the vigilance, it's in his dreams. But I would know that if I talked to him, because he tells me and he writes stories, and he has a website and he puts his poems and thoughts up there. And I once saw a lecture
he gave to high school. I'd laugh, but it was so sad because he went in and told him what it was like. Yeah, they I mean, it's just scared the but Jesus out of him. Yeah, I mean it was overwhelming. And so even the accounts we often give of these things, we soften them for people. If we're really say what the horrors were like, it's so overwhelming for other people, so you don't you don't say them,
but he said them. And I think PTSD then is the example on this because it's so different from normative dreaming, and it's more like than the answers to these questions that where these people are temporarily in that kind of agitated state, maybe.
Your buddy's depression or anxiety have shown up. And if so, you're not alone, even though mental health struggles can make you feel like it. And his research supports.
That well, the interesting thing that we found with people with any kind of diagnosis, and it's not totally certain, but the interesting finding which shows how important it is to use a scientific coding system. The main way their dreams differ is there are no friends in their dreams. No friends, no people that they call friends. In one case or two that we studied as well as the individual dream series, it was only their parents and their sister,
they had no friends. In another study where you had dreams from might think I think one hundred and six dreams from schizophrenics and it's on dreamresearch dot Net under interesting findings in their dreams, there's just all strangers in O theres no family and no friend. So if I was reading through a dream series and I got about five ten dreams into it and nobody has been mentioned as a friend, I immediately and I antenna go up.
I'm wondering what why are they no friends? And then as I'm reading and now I'm coding too, I'm counting friends, animals, characters, mother, father or you know this guy only dreams about his father, never his mother. What's going on? And then we study it more seriously, either with our coding system or we create a word string. And that's why I know people basically dream about things that they're familiar with seventy five
seventy seventy five percent of the time. But here I should say that I am no clinician of any kind, whether psychological or medical. And if people do right to me at my website and ask about these things, some of these things, and I say, look, you've got to go to the sleep disorder clinic, and you've got to have expert medical attention ask them. But you shouldn't ask me. You shouldn't get your advice I don't think from anybody
on the web. But I could be wrong on that, but you shouldn't get any advice from me.
Planic clinician can can help reduce the waking anxiety, which can help reduce the nmers and.
Some you know, some kinds of drugs sometimes and certainly psychotherapies of various kinds can help people. So we all need someone to lean on.
I love him well. I wanted to ask about that because we did have a lot of folks who wanted to know about different substances SSRIs or melatonin or spicy foods, any brain medication, especially things that are sleep aids Do they change how we dream?
My statement is on this is at any time, if we go on a drug, or if we go off a drug, in other words, we change our neurochemical our biochemistry, then those things may happen and there may then be an adjustment. But again I'm no medical expert, and you know, it's one of those things that I look at as a possible window for me into understanding dreams.
So if you're getting some help from medication, you are also not alone. High Let me introduce you to my own brain buddy Effects or but patrons Mariah McGregor, Kitlyn Schmidt's, Kitlyn Ramirez, and Becky pot Roff and first time question asker Olympia Silv wanted to know what is up with
antidepressants and vivid dreams. And the deal is they're not necessarily causing the dreams, but they're suppressing rem sleep and in the case of lexapro zolofs and balta on a few others, it can mean that you might be having these micro awakenings and remembering the dreams more. Also, stress and sadness in your waking hours can mean it's on your mind more in your sleep so addressing fears or concerns in therapy or with lifestyle changes that might benefit
your mental health may improve things while you're sleeping. Also, those side effects of really vivid dreaming on antidepressants are apparently the worst in the first few weeks, but you can definitely ask a doctor about timing the medication differently, which could help. I just started taking Mind at night and it's helping me function better in the morning, so
there's that. Also, melatonin may give you Bonker's dreams if the dose is too high, so experiment with that, Timothy Wang who asked, and melatonin is also connected to a neurochemical called vasotocin, which kind of helps erase your memory of dreams so that you don't get confused between them and reality. So if you're on a medication that's blurring those lines. Earl of grahamble Cain asked about chantex that might be why it's your bong boguarding your dreams maybe
a little bit. And I'm sorry to report that TC has been shown to repress rem sleep. Evan Davis, Ashley Adar, and Ellie Wheeler. So if you have a medication that's affecting your sleep, first time question askers Laura Rayfield and Katie Giassovitch. Talk to your doc about changing your timing. Maybe try to cultivate the best sleep hygiene you can manage and treat your brain well. But enough about pills.
Let's talk about cheese. So Scott Sheldon, Paul Smith, Luke Lafemina, Stephanie Leski, and Francesca Parelli wanted to know, in Francesca's words, is it true that eating cheese before bed makes dreams more intense? And I had to look into this for us. I knew you needed to know. Here's the deal. So a two thousand and five study showed the blue cheese gave people vivid dreams and cheddar made them dream about celebrities.
And it's not important that this was a tiny study or that it was funded by the British Cheese Board, which is a great name for a charcuterie related propaganda machine, the Cheese Board. I love that, but yes, so further studies have disproven that as just delicious flim flam. Now, the reason that you may actually be swept away to dreamland in a tide of fondo is because one cheese in Europe is usually the last meal of the evening,
so it's a scapegoat cheese. And two eating late at night can cause your temperature to rise and mess up your sleep, making you wake up more to remember your weird dreams. And then also three lactose baby, not all of us can digest that shit. And guess what, Having a three am bubbling colon is a nightmare in every fashion. And also Julia Fisher, the chocolate you're eating before bed isn't necessarily a dream inducer, but the caffeine may be
interrupting your sleep and making you remember your dreams. Sidney Tubes, Rachel Kendrick, Scott Sheldon, Christina Johnson, and Crystal Simon's try eating earlier if your evening meal or fourth meal is causing you some knockedal stress. Just consider what a three am l scorcho gordida does to your butthole. Now imagine that's your brain trying to sleep.
You know what I mean.
I give a couple lectures back when I taught on nightmares, and for instance, people have nightmares when they have high fevers. That was going to be my next question.
It was your question, actually, Pascal Peran, Miranda Harder and Ellie's Wabele who asked about cooking up wild brain activity. Let's say, with fever dreams. Does a different part of your brain activate when the temperature is high?
Or is that a hallucination?
More questions around brain temperature. I'm still not fully understood, and so it's in the realm of not guesswork, but of still work in progress. And I happen to be very interested in it academically because brain temperature is related to level of activation. When we're highly activated, we're metabolizing better, cells are working more efficiently, So that really then relates
to a lot of energy use. When we're really highly activated and we're metabolizing all our cellars, metabolizing really fast, we're using up a lot of energy and that gets to then sleep.
A few folks wanted to know why physiologically we dream. I'm looking at you, Lauren Cooper, Hannah Johnson, Bethany Barlow, and Sidney Are we defragmenting our drives? Is it like cleaning up after a party. In Sleepy John's words, dreaming is how the brain cleans out the lint filter.
True or false. Here's the strange thing about sleep. For decades, centuries people have looked for. Sleep is somehow resting something, or it's getting rid of poisons and toxins, or it's time to lay in stores of kind of energy. Those age old concerns are still being studied, but nobody has done studies that, and this is among a community of serious sleep researcher where they all come to agree.
So folks are working on it, but it takes a lot of research for a scientific community to stand behind something. So we don't know if dreams specifically clean your brain, but we do know that sleep itself does. There have been plenty of studies that during sleep, your body's cerebral spinal fluid gets into your brains nooks and crannies and washes away beta, amyloid and tau proteins that act as plaques, which can lead to the development of Alzheimer's and dementia.
So sleepy time can save your mind. But check this out, kados so literally. This week, a study titled a mesothelium divides the subarachnoid space into functional compartments, published in the journal Science, reported that there's a new part of the brain we didn't know about until this week. This is like finding a hidden room in your basement. I guess the attic. We didn't know there's a membrane in your brain. They are now calling the subarachnoidal lymphatic like membrane or slym.
I don't know if that's pronounced slym or slim or slime. I hope it's slime because the neuroscientists who discovered it think it might help separate the clean cerebral spinal fluid from the dirty stuff and once again helped to clean your brain. What else did they say?
So?
They said that deep non rem sleep is the most important stage for brain cleaning, and that sleep is critical to the function of the brain's waste removal system. And this study shows that the deeper the sleep, the better. Hout bonkers that this is fresh information. We literally did not know last week. What an exciting time to be alive and.
Asleep, and so it's a genuine puzzle for them. But there's one thing that I think we do know about sleep, and sleep is a state of adaptive inactivity. Adaptive inactivity, what does that mean? Well, seeds think of the seeds for a tree, or they can be dormant for hundreds or even thousands of years, trees lose their leaves, insects go underground seventeen year locust torpor, which is a kind of really beyond sleep where body temperature goes much lower.
Now, for more on nature's ability to go offline, you can see the dentdrology episodes on trees, the somnology episode on sleep, we've got a molecular neurobiology episode on brain chemicals, and the thermophysiology episode on body heat, or also the ersenology episodes on hibernating bears.
Anyway, what sleep does is allows us to use less energy and at the same time not expend energy. So every animal sleeps differently for differing amounts of time relating to its ecological niche. Let me give you any two examples. On the one hand, bush elephants in Africa they sleep as little as two hours in twenty four and they can be moving for two three days without sleeping, and when they stop, they don't immediately quotes make up any sleep,
so they're really adapted to that little that niche. On the other hand, a possums sleep nineteen hours and a kind of bat sleeps twenty hours. Now that bath that sleeps twenty hours is really interesting. When does it come out at dusk and what's going on at dusk? The moths they're flying around, it's food supplies flying around. So it does everything in four hours, whereas the elephant is awake twenty two hours, which.
Means that some animals have to fuel themselves for longer stretches just to maintain homeostasis and keep their brain and their body type ofture up.
But think of it this way. If you had to be awake twenty four hours a day, that's a lot of foraging. That's a lot of hunting. That's a lot of farming that uses up a lot of food. It's far more evolutionarily adaptive if we take one third of the roughly one third, but it's really less off. There can be more of us, the more food supply and so on. Soa each creature is adapted. We are actually probably adapted. And this will surprise you. Just seven hours
a night, really, how do I know? My friend knows? My UCLA sleep expert friend, he studied three different honting and gathering societies with the whole crew of anthropologists and others that he helped organize.
Now for more details, you can see at twenty eighteen study titled sleep variability and night time activity among Tremani forger horticulturists by lead author doct Gandhi Yetish, who is doing a postdoc at UCLA's Center for Sleep Research. But researchers over the years studying the sleep habits of hunter gatherer cultures and agro pastoralists observed.
That they every seven hours a night. But it's actually they sleep seven hours a night roughly in the winter, but in the summer they sleep six hours. So and that's true. Reindeer, now, jump reindeer. They're way up there in the cold, cold Arctic. Hey, they're sleeping a lot less in the summer and they sleep a lot more in the winter. So this is enormous complexity to sleep
that has to do with ecology and with us. What's striking about us and where dreams can come in again, is that all the basically all other primates go to sleep when it gets dark and they wake up when it gets light.
Yeah, why don't we do that?
Why don't I do that? To chimpanzees sleep eleven or twelve hours whatever it is, we sleep basically seven or eight because we are not tied to the light dark cycle. We are tied more to a temperatures are internal temperature cycles are not tied to the light cycles. So when it gets dark everywhere in the world, the human beings huddle together and make a fire and they shoot the ball, and they talk about dreams and they talk about their myths,
and they hang out. They have a little fun and dance around, and we wake up and then our body temperature goes way down during the night. And here's the other part. The brain temperature can't go down, and that's REM sleep. The REM sleep is a thermometer. It's most likely my bet is on sleep researchers who say REM sleep is a way to reheat the brain periodically during sleep. That's its function, and it makes it so sleep can
go on. We cycle between REM and non REM. We go nonrim, then REM heat up a little, nonrim heat up a little, and then towards morning, the circadian rhythm we're build into us, our brain temperature starts to go up independent of REM very likely as we approach morning. So now we have a dual system going on that's heating our brain. How does all this relate to dreams? If dreams are tied to the level of brain activation.
Then the point is that when you're an hour or two into sleep, the default network, the parts of the fault network that are active during sleep, there's not enough activation to stay together. The network breaks apart. Front part breaks off from the back part. You know, it's the simplest language. We could talk about posterior and anterior and so on. Let's not. And at that point, if we awaken people, they might have an image or they oh I thought exert or say no, I don't remember a thing.
But during the RIM period you awaken them, they'll get a dream. Here's what we know. Probably from six let's say you're an eight o'clock waker upper, so from six o'clock on your brain is doing quite a bit of dreaming. What's important about that is that from our studies in the lab way in the past, we know that the dreams from the first REM period do not differ from the dreams from the second RAM period or the third REM period. My dissertation was one small step in that
two or three better studies came along. They confirmed a lot of what I wrote, luckily, but there were other things where I was wrong on and better data, bigger sample sizes, so we can collect a good sample of your dreams between I say, six and eight in the morning. And furthermore, we can get a lot of your dreams on spontaneous morning awakening. And when we do studies where we have people. I did a study in nineteen sixty three, just as there came to be answering machines on telephone.
I bought a couple of those, and I had the students phone in anytime they remembered a dream nice and most of them were morning awakenings seventy five or so percent, And that's what's predicted in other studies too. But sometimes you're just sitting there. Like one woman in the study, she was sitting in the backyard. She was studying in the sun, and the sun started to shift and she started to feel a little cold in her mind drifted off and she remembered a dream about skiing. So you know,
we have those kinds of things, and it happened. But the point is that we can get a good sample of dreams in a variety of ways, and for any future dream researchers out there. The last three pages of my new book explain exactly what we need to do, but that nobody is doing, and it has to start with your cell phone. We got to have every We got to have samples of people well from about age
nine or ten, and we didn't get into this. But we don't dream oftener well until we're nine to eleven years old, which will rite a lot of cages too.
If you have smologites more on kids sleep in a bit.
But at any rate, if we had people phone in their dreams anytime day or night, we have the voice to text, and then we have the text in a central place and we put them on the dream bank and we can search them with word strings. We can go to town. We can automate this thing and churn out so much. All we need is about a million or two million a year for about four years, and we could figure out which series we're right in which we're wrong.
That's it. That's all you need to get more. What is it psychopompologists.
Yeah, we'll escort you to the world of dreams.
Now, we will escort you through more of your questions in a moment, But first let's donate again to some relevant causes. And this week we're going to send it to two One is the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network that we mentioned earlier, which creates spaces for ethical collaboration between Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. And we're also going to donate to the research that doctor Bill Domhoff has dedicated his whole career too in efforts to further understand
who dreams, what and why. And also the day after part one aired, I got the sweetest text from Bill just saying that he had a great time chatting and that I did my homework well. Oh, and then he included an emoji of a bed and said the emoji above is an honor of STFA as a perfect sponsor,
so it's Domhoff approved. And on that note, those nations were made possible by the one and only sponsor of these episodes, SATFA, and today's episode is exclusively sponsored by SATVA because one's got a sleep to dream and STFA luxury mattresses are just like a first class ticket to Snoozetown.
Love them.
And usually I saved my secrets for the end of the episode. But as long as we're on the topic, this one time I had a dream. Once I arrived to this party and I was wearing like one of those high necked Victorian dresses that like sad ladies step off of a train in a dusty mining town. And I arrived at this saloon and like all of my relatives were there and they were drinking warm beer, and I leaned over to my mom, Fancy Nancy, and I was like, wow, what a party. What's the occasion, and
she was like, it's your wedding. And I looked up and my boyfriend at the time was waiting for me at the top of the aisle, and I was like, shit, I don't even drink beer or like him like that. And I was trying to figure out if there was a way I could like dip out the back. And then when I woke up in real life, I was on vacation with this boyfriend and I unfortunately knew that he was not the one. So thanks, dreams, you saved this man from dating me any longer. And also you
saved us a wedding and a divorce. Years later, I'm now hitched to someone I absolutely adore, but I still don't like beer.
Anyway.
Dreams, you gotta love them, but before you can dream, you gotta fall asleep, and the best way to do that is on a Satfa luxury mattress. Every SAFA is designed for better sleep with features only found on the world's nicest, most expensive mattresses. They are high, high quality, and what's more, Satfa will set up your mattress in the room of your choice and take your old one for no extra charge. And if you think you're gonna get that from one of those mattress in a box companies,
you're dreaming. Also, just a side note, I love the people behind Satfa. Shout out to all the folks handcrafting your mattresses to order in Queens, New York, in Austin, Hello. So treat yourself to a mattress worthy of your rest and get a good deal thanks to ologies. Right now save two hundred dollars when you purchase one thousand dollars more at stfa dot com slash ologies. That's s double atva dot com slash Ologies. Thank you, Sotfa. You truly
make me sleep easy. Okay, let's get back to explaining the imaging advancements that help us understand the dream world.
But the nineteen nineties changed everything because of neuroimaging, and these neuroimaging studies showed for the first time the parts of the brain that were active during dreaming, and it wasn't really expected that parts of the brain would not
be active. For example, there was one very famous theory that said dreams were just a reaction to these random electrical charges called spikes that came from the brain stem, and these electrical charges ended up in the visual cortex, and then a visual cortex saw them, saw these spikes and said what the hell does that mean, and so tried to make sense out of him. That was his theory of dream called activation synthesis. Well, now we know
that part of the brain isn't even active. The whole theory was turned out to be wrong anyhow, But the point is that kind of neuroimaging study just said goodbye to that theory, which happens a lot of times in science. New technologies come along and things are solved.
Professor Domhoff recounts the work of doctor Ralph Wrighton, who, along with Word Halsteed, used neuroimaging in the nineteen nineties on people with brain injuries to develop what is known as the Halsteed writing neuropsychological battery, which is just another word for a lot of tests.
He had a questionnaire and the questionnaire said, has your injury influenced your dreaming? That's all it said. And if they said yes, and said how's it influenced, and then he would interview him and some of them say, well, I don't see the pictures anymore, and some would say I don't dream anymore. He then matched that up with the kind of X rays we had at that time, and he was able to show there are certain places that if you have a lesion in the brain, you
will lose dreaming. And there's two different places like that and other places. This relates back to mental imagery. If you have injuries in these secondary visual cortices, you won't see in dreams. You lose your mental imagery.
I lost it.
Now that becomes exciting because we're saying, wow, that's a connection then with and you also don't see images. You don't have good mental imagery in waking either. And that was done in a lab study by the same great cognitive psychologist, David Fowkes who did the developmental studies.
And then around the turn of this century a huge development occurred and it wasn't just having your thong underwear show over your low rise genes.
In two thousand, two thousand and one, the world changed, I think in terms of understanding the human mind, and that is the neuroimaging studies accidentally in a way discovered the imagination network, which is was called a default network. So you've got the person all hooked up, their participant, they're all ready to go into the NeuroImage machine. You say, okay,
we're just fine tuning things. Just relax. Then they notice, what's the record look like when we just told them to relax, And it looked the same and everybody and it was different from what you usually see. First, there's a task network. That's where we're getting you all hooked up so you can see whether you see a yellow lemon or a green pig or whatever it may be, or you have to pick this brown thing out of seven different colors. Where our executive network is really common
and visual, and you know, we're always really focused. But when we relaxed, we go into a different network, and so they call it, well, that's the default network, the non task network. Well, it's a crummy name because it trivializes that. It's the it's the inner you, it's the imagination, it's the semantic memory bank. It's the self network, it's the imagination network.
What these neuroimaging studies found on patients whose dreams had changed was.
If you get a lesion in your primary visual cortex, it doesn't affect your dreaming, nor in anywhere in your executive network. Doesn't affect your dreaming at all. And so when I realized that both the neuroimaging and the lesion network showed the same parts of brain were necessary for dreaming, so there goes you got dreams coming from the same network. It creates imagination.
How exciting is this? So the part of the brain making all this magic happen, dreams and imagination, it's called the default network, and Bill describes it in the twenty fifteen paper Dreaming and the Default Network, a review, synthesis and counterintuitive research proposal. And the default network doesn't sound like a lot's going on. It sounds like your printer on standby. But do not let the name fool you. So so many patrons asked something along the lines of
creativity and absurdity in dreams? Where is this coming from?
I'm looking at you, Gaelic Pearl Mofo, Sean Thomas Kane, Mary C. Mcaharn, Heather de van Volkenberg, Emily Staufer in first time question askers Samantha Jackson, Jon Ohlandau, Katie Pikes, Kylie Chapman, Eliza Miller, Archie de Delhi, Kelsey Quarterback, Heidi m Shelby, and Bryce Stewart and Maxine Lewis, who, in their words, wants to know why their mind invented a scenario of trying to put wheels on a kangaroo using pipe cleaners and empty thread rolls.
I have a question with that default network.
Is that why when we are working, working, working, We're sitting in a laptop, we're trying to come up with something, and then we say, fuck this, I'm gonna go for a walk, I'm gonna go take a shower, and then we have like our best idea ever is that this switch to the default network.
Yes, but that's your example is perfect. One of the people that studies is saying studies creativity and studies insights, we get insights. And he used the shower in there. I heard him is when you're in a shower, your executive network is attentive, but it doesn't have to be fully attentive. And your attention network is saying, I get fall down. This water could get too hot, but it's cool.
I mean it's it's relaxed. Yeah, and all of a sudden you're thinking, God, damn, that's where that paragraph goes. Speaking for me, Wow, how about this for a paper? People are studying creativity. It's a back and forth between the imagination network and this is executive network. When they get really good at it, I think, you know, and really refined. And it's hard work that they're doing getting the image but then doing all accounting of all the
little pixels. I mean, you know, this is detail work. But they're going to see this back and forth, but they're going to see you're mostly his fault networks up.
So neuroscientists are looking in painstaking detail at what areas of your brain light up, which probably makes their own brains light up as they do it. But Professor Domhoff delivered a great metaphor.
I think of the human brain, including the sleeping as a symphony orchestra. And we think of the symphony orchestra with all the different kinds of musical instruments out there that all have different roles, and we have a conductor and the conductor is doing certain things and telling this group to sing, do you know, go down, this group to go up. This comes strong, and so you listen to it and all of a sudden there's just very
no virtually no sound. Other times boom boom, boom boom, but it's in harmony and it's coming, it's moving around in such a way that it's that it's very smooth. And always think of that because of a number of reasons from the past in research the harmonious mind, but all also in some detailed work that a great sleep researcher did where she looked at our brainstem falling asleep. When we fall asleep, it's not just like abrupt or boom, it's just this. It is kind of this dance almost
or there's harmonious toning down and going silent. When we go to sleep, we have a whole stage called a sleep onset stage, and so when we close our eyes, then certain networks go down. At the same time, there's neurochemical things that are happening that I likened to that the conductor has looked at the clock, and it is a clock that's in us. The orchestra has looked up on the wall and seen or subjectively thought, Yes, it's about over. And so the conductor starts to tamp everything down.
And as the conductor sort of turns away, then say, the horns go down, we're just left with just you know, the softest part of it. What happens then the executive network starts to fall away, the attention networks go down a little bit, and there are studies of this of how they kind of disconnect from each other and different brain waves come up. So we're usually in a very fast brain wave state, let's call it beta. But as we drift into sleep, more alpha, and then theta veta
is a little less than alpha. They start to come into the picture and they move from the back of the brain to the front of the brain. So there's this gradual transition. And then this one researcher on sleep on Stday is a great phrase where he calls the default network the gateway to sleep. They's just the gateway to sleep. And we do if we awaken you in sleep on set you're having little mini dreams, oh for sure.
And that's so great when you start to realize that and you're like, oh, I'm pulling a sleep and my mom has this trick she taught me where if you need to fall asleep, but your brain is thinking about what you got to do, and stress out the way to help her fall sleep, she comes up with a category like let's say it's cars or fruit or boys' names or whatever, and she'll go, okay, apple, a B banana, see cherry, and she'll go to the alphabet. And her name's Nancy. We call it the fancy Nancy.
That's great because it's putting you into that more imaginative mode. Yes, and back and forth, and vigilance is going down. Tension networks are now saying she's messing around, We don't need to watch anymore. Yeah, and you shift into that and as you go to sleep. If you waken people in the first hour, sometimes you'll get a dream from them. But literally, when we're a couple hours into sleep now and a half to two hours into sleep, this network that's got a front and the back to it, those
parts break apart. See, So back in the back, in the front of the brain, they're these important arts and then they're connected through these highways back and forth. But when those highways break apart, then they're isolated, and then you can't dream anymore. Oh, but that's also the way consciousness works. Consciousness is a property of a very big network. Dreaming is a property of portions of the default network,
plus these secondary visual and sensory motor courtesies. That's why we can see and hear and smell and taste and run and feel exhausted after tracing back and forth, you know, I trace back and forth in a convention hall trying to you know, trying to get out of it just a week ago, you know, at some meeting and trying to figure out which entrance. There's people going everywhere, and I go back up the steps. When I woke up,
I got it was exhausting, you know, a whole set. So, and of course that's the charm of dreams.
Does that term wear off ever, or does it wear on?
So?
Patrons Aaron Sorens and Diane Dode, Christila Force, RJP seventeen Case Penix, Julie Debris, Bastion Peel and Debbie Potts and Darley and Scapura all had questions about dreaming at different ages, and Emily Stufferdes Swan and Julie Noble asked do babies dream? When do dreams start.
One great psychologist, a cognitive psychologists, did longitudinal studies in a lab of children from three to fifteen, and their results were really exciting because they show that dreaming only develops gradually and it relates, we now know, to the maturation of the default network, as well as the cognitive development of imagination and ability to tell a story which we call narrative, to degenerate mental imagery, to have an
autobiographical self. All of those things are gradual cognitive achievements. You can do things at five that you couldn't do it four, and you can do things at six you couldn't do at five, and so on. Only humans have a default network, and it is only functional by age five to seven and not fully mature till nine to eleven.
What about when you see your dog going.
And moving his.
Little feet because his brain is activated.
A lot of us wanted to know about critters in dreamland, including specs, Owl, Jesse Hurlbert, Aliameyer's, Corey Bridget b Sidney Taups, sou g Lori Fishman, First time askers Jules Crawford, Citieipend, Allison l and Kate Timms, who asked, I've heard a lot of people saying that animals don't dream, maybe their brains just do it differently. What do you think when my tiny little poodle, I'm going, oh the world.
Yeah, I know. I never usually talk about animals and dreaming, Yeah, because that gets people. So No, I'm just curious. I'm just curious. Well, I think that his brain is activated. He's woofing and he's pause, are moving. We've all seen it. But that doesn't mean they're dreaming. It doesn't follow from that behavior.
You're the expert.
Well, thank you.
And when your goblin is working and making flipper pause, that is called heaven and the best. But also myoklonos which is a type of muscle jerking, and that plus little fluttering eyelids and eyes are associated with remsleep, which accounts for about twelve percent of a dog's life. And if you're thinking, oh, okay, that's only about half as much as a human's twenty five percent of rem sleep. Right, No, No, that's twelve percent of the dog's life. They're not their sleep,
they're life. They're only awake forty four percent of the time. According to a nineteen seventy seven study on dog sleeping, they're living the life and they're sleeping through it. But are they dreaming? This is where science gets divided. So even though some researchers found that lab rats learning a maze had the same, very specific brain activity during sleep, leading to the assumption that yes, the rats were dreaming about the maze, other scientists say that if you cannot
take a report, you don't know who's dreaming. If only there are a book about animals when they Dream, I will actually. Philosopher David Penuguzman published the book When Animals Dream a few months back, so there you go, and in it there are accounts of cephalopods changing colors during sleep states, and fish who have brain activity during sleep that looks the same as when they're singing songs underwater. Which that made me learned that zebrafish sing, I guess,
and they're not just performers. I went down a rabbit hole and it turns out zebrafish are connoisseurs as well. According to the twenty eighteen paper The Effects of Auditory Enrichment on zebra Fish Behavior and Physiology, researchers exposed a bunch of adult zebrafish to two hours of Vivaldi music twice a day for fifteen days, and overall, apparently zebrafish exposed to such auditory stimuli were less anxious and they
had lower levels of inflammatory cytokines and cortisol. So if a fish can benefit from relaxing, please trust that you deserve peace and self care as well. If you're like in my dreams, let's discuss that. So, lucid dreaming is when you know you're dreaming and you can get some kind of control over the situations and the characters, kind of like the star trek Holidac but free and it's
in your own brain. In tons of you such as Susan L. Tatum, Michelle Lee, Brenna Lynch, aaronhem Mia, MTB, Kaylee Evans, Toby Tobias, Shay Walker, and Johann E wanted to know is lucid dreaming legit and who can do it? What is lucid dreaming is at a different part of the brain. Is it even a real thing or is it just a kind of a euphemism for just daydreamingdam you're wincing.
You're wincing like a poor.
Lucid dreams are a very rare, maybe real thing that had been hyped, out of sight, warped, everything, hustled beyond belief. And it's a painful topic for me. You're right, I thought she canna ask me about lucid dream because I have foot in two worlds. I certainly get along with all, at least most of the dream researchers and whatever they're doing. And I'm curious. But I have my foot merely strongly in the scientific world. If I say there's no reason
to believe it, we don't believe it. So most of the studies of lucid dreaming are quite bad, bumber, the first serious studies. I didn't tell you, we're done by a person. I'll go nameless. All people will go nameless. And in this particular dissertation done at the prestigious university where you could at that time in the seventies they could create their own program. And he had created his own program. He wasn't in a department, he wasn't trained in psych or anything else at any rate. He was
both the participant in the experimenter. So fourteen of the seventeen instances of lucid dreaming were lo and behold the experimenters. It was also the subject and then he writes a popular book on it, and so on. So this is what is mostly going on. And in an article about later he got into the dreams turned out after he had been a hippie kind of person for a while and always hints at maybe it had used drugs and
so on. Another guy was hilarious. He had insomnia, so he would go to bed and wake up, get up half coffee which had blew my mind, and he'd finally go to sleep five six am and eight half lucid dreams. This woman had had scary dreams as a young kid five to seven and feared witches. Now what that creates a state where you're afraid of sleep, you're scared to go to sleep, you don't want to go to sleep, and there are that kind of thing can happen to people.
So that person is likely very vigilant during sleep. So once this dissertation based on the person's own dreams was published, then other people tried to do studies using EEG and other partition dissipants, and they would find that there was more of an EEG state, this alpha state I mentioned. It's different from our usual waking state, but it's not like what dream sleep looks like or other forms of sleep, so they were very iffy.
So that was in the groovy nineteen seventies. But let's skip to the lit twenty tens, when neuroimaging was more widely available, and now this legend of lucid dreaming could be observed, and.
The researcher had trained a number of participants to have lucid dreams. She used. Out of these thirty some people, there were five or six that said that they were having I think it was three or more lucid dreams a week at home. So she gets them in the lab and maybe two have one or two instances. It's very few, but the interesting thing is that there's a lot more activity in the executive network, a lot more activity.
Then comes finally a neuroimaging study by a guy that was really into lucid dreaming, and he gets I think it was four guys from in their mid twenties to early thirties who have been really working out it on lucid dreaming for a long long time, very prolific lucid dreamers. But he's got fifteen nights of imaging on these guys. He gets two instances, one from each of two guys. That's that's not a lot same thing. He has got some of these areas that are active during waking and
very important for consciousness, it's believed. Then we get to another interesting point in the literature. Now the people have tried to study consciousness that are really good. Thing is that there are parts of it's called the frontal poll or the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex. This particular area in the brain has been studied and it's really a key part of the executive network. But it has two parts, one that is sort of more active towards the external world
and one that monitors our internal world. And so I just wrote a paper that's going to be published in March in which I humble dream researchers have the nerve to write about dreaming and consciousness, in which I say dreaming happens in a certain area in the hierarchical network that leads to consciousness, and what differs is in lucid dreaming.
I put forth the hypothesis that in loose dreaming, the internally oriented part of the executive network has been reactivated, because if our brain is constantly fluctuating in its activation levels, which I believe it is. Our networks right now are changing a million times. If I suddenly notice the sound, or if I notice out the window, I notice, my goodness,
its stopped raining, it's sunny. You know. All of that changes our brain all the time, and so coming out of sleep like that, momentarily we could have that particular network.
And when it comes to lucid dreaming, it's pretty rare. But some research, like the twenty eighteen paper titled Frequent lucid Dreaming associated with increased functional connectivity between frontopolar cortex and temporo parietal association areas, found that though we don't understand the neurobiological basis of lucid dreaming, evidence shows that there's involvement of these areas called the anterior prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex, and people who were able to
lucid dream frequently had significantly higher resting state functional connectivity between these areas. Mumbo jumbo, you're screaming at your windshield. You're like, I don't know what you're talking about. How do I make out with the weird, horny green eminem in my dreams? That's all I care about, and I understand you. So I scoured the internet to give you these unproven tips. But some people say good sleep hygiene,
a comfortable room and sleeping setup, including temperature. Remember go cold, don't get too hot under there. Start dream journaling during waking hours. Check in with yourself to make sure you're in reality, like look at your hands, poke stuff to make sure it's real, so that you do it in your dream and say, holy shit, this is a dream. Also, before you go to sleep, set an intention and think to yourself tonight, when I dream, I'm going to remember
i'm dreaming, I'm going to do it. And you can also try sleeping five or six hours and then getting up and reading or doing something active and then going back to bed for an hour and see if you get that sweet sweet in between worlds lucid dreaming reward. So I hope that helps. Tony Vessel specs owl art by d and Leah Morris. But don't get too desperate for it. You're better off just dreaming normally and then play in a video game when you're awake or something.
Now you get what's the heavy part, and maybe say you got a sensor to the settle what I am comfortable with is people go around and say, I can teach you to lucid dream. I can give you techniques to lucid dream. I can there's technologies that can help you lucid dream. And I used to have a flyer that I passed around in my class from a guy that was a doctor I guess, down just a little
town below Santa Cruz. You know, he had machine and he's standing there looking and he said he could, you know, come down and he'd have you a lucid dream with his machine. I mean this gets into hustles, this gets into maybe grift even I don't know, and so it
gets uncomfortable for me. But what the problem is, what's difficult to say is look, if lucid dreaming is a typical and there's a study out there that says none of the technologies and methodologies have improved lucid dreaming for those who do not lucid dream, may I dare ask the question of can we possibly study the life histories of those people? I mean, it's too much pressure for people.
People keep thinking, oh, I can lucid dream if I work hard enough, and that's just not true.
Yeah, and you can fly if you work hard enough, and you know, all the things were told to try harder. You can do it if you try. There was a great book on psychotherapy that talked about that we end up if we're not careful, and we do this in our society tremendously. It was a great book by this title called Blame the Victim, Blaming the victim. And so if you didn't prosper in my psychotherapy, what the.
Hell's wrong with you?
I mean, they're not my fault. You didn't try far. I told you the instructions, you know. I mean, things get turned around. Kid comes to school, they are not nourished, there's no books in their house because their family has been unfairly treated. And then you to say to the kid, you're not concentrating, you're not trying hard enough. Yeah, why
don't you develop your vocabulary? I mean, I mean, so you're already blaming the victim, you know, and here we're talking about social class and race and gender and etc. But we blame the victims. Yeah, but what's the matter with you? I mean, because you can't lose a dream? I mean, so that happens in all of this kind of stuff.
Well, that was going to be my very last question, my my just had to ask, because I've got you here, what would you do if you found out? Physicists cal Tech put out a paper next week saying, holy shit, we figured out multiverses are real, there are parallel universes, time travel is possible. We figured out that dreams are actually a parallel universe.
What would you do.
If I trusted the physicists, I'd believe it. I've shamed my mind before. I did give a lecture that actually got listened to on this, I want to plug it. Thirty nine thousand views. That's a big time for negative especially A dream researcher called the awesome Lawfulness of your nightly Dreams, and I was in dead serious mode. But at any rate, the interesting thing that I ended with it's similar to what you said is I said, we actually lead two lives. We lead a life that's waking,
and we lead another life that's dreaming. And I said they differ because in the waking life, we pick up right where we left off, but in my dreaming life, it starts over each time. We have a different dream life each night. But if I have lots of dreams from you, and I have actually four thousand from Izzy the Young Woman or Iver her dreams from twelve to twenty five. You see that her life, it has all
these episodes. She's, you know, see one of these crushes, or she's at a horror movie, or she and her brother arguing in some way, and it can be in a sense, a certain sense, very thematic. We have the dreams Dorotheis, she named herself. We often would let people give their own pseudonyms, but it got out of hand and I thought about putting that goofy stuff up there. So at any rate, but Dorothea was something very educated woman, born at probably the eighteen nineties. But we had six
or seven hundred of her dreams. I forget what it is, but in seventy two percent of those dreams there's one of seven things happening. This is poignant. In her twenty percent of her dreams, she's either buying, preparing a meal, or eating a meal, you know, something doing with me. So that was her biggest theme. There was also I'll get to the point in part in a minute, which is her last dream that she mailed as before the
home in Hawaii wrote and said she was dead. She also would often dream of missing the bus or the train. But she also had dreams about five ten percent of just which she's trying to go to the bathroom and her people people in the bathroom, and it's just you know, a.
Problem, hey, who hasn't been there, right, Renee, you and oriel Vans can't have and you're probably just sleeping with a full bladder. And by you I mean we anyway, less toilet, more poignant.
So towards the end of her life she retired to Hawaii and arrest and she lived in a real nice place. She swam every day. She seemed to be in fitting health. She would mail periodically these dreams too, in this case my mentor Calvin Hall. And then I you know, heirded all the files and put them on dream bank. The last dream before she died, which if you didn't know her that she twenty percent of her dreams were about food, you'd say, oh my god, it's a premonition of her death.
But in her last dream.
She's sitting around the table and with her siblings. She had several siblings, and she used a phrase, a very proper phrase. She said, mother had dished too liberally to know my brothers and sisters. And there was nothing really left for me to eat. And then I saw a hambone sitting at the end of the table or sitting on the floor. That was a dream. So now you said, my god, you know treminition, I mean death. I mean
it's only a bone. She's not getting to eat. But no, this is always happening to her in her dreams, with these siblings and not getting you know, there's always this sort of I get kind of behind tip of all of this, you know. Yeah, yeah, I'm sort of the left out one in the litter. Yeah. So she has a separate life. M it's a second life.
If there's any Rick and Morty fans out there, you might be haunted by the episode Night Family, in which Rick uses a machine to have his nocturnal self do the chores of his waking self, including getting like a ripped set of abs. But then the ultimate conclusion that they come to is that we as waking people, are just the servants of our sleeping selves.
Creepy.
I loved it. I think about it constantly. Well, last questions I always ask is what is hard about your work? What's the hardest thing about dreams?
Well, there's a million things that are difficult for dreams because scientists like to observe. You can't observe dreams. You can't make them happen. In other words, you can't do experiments where you do this or that. It didn't work. I mean, we try to drop water on people whispering area. You tape their eyes open and flask and you tell them stuff during the day. It doesn't. It really works.
It's the mind doing its own thing. I used to call it the spin of the cognitive rolodex, except nobody has a rolodex anymore.
I remember what they are. It was a desktop address book. You can ask your grandma anyway.
So semantic memory banks are being stirred up. But it's hard then, because we can't experiment and we can't observe, and we're at the mercy of you telling the dream. So we've done this elaborate study. We awaken you in the middle of the night and say would you report your dream? And you say, I can't remember, which is maybe true, but it could not be true. So you're
at the mercy of the participant. If you're like certainty, any scientist wants to control the variables, and if you can't control the variables, you're gonna say that ain't my feel So that's one of our problems. The other problem is that because the work on dreams did not leave to as was early thought by some people in the late fifties and early sixties, might be a key to
mental health. There really was that belief, and some key psychoanalysts of that era who were mds and very big deals they helped some of the early dream researchers to get grants. So there were grants for dreaming. But when dreaming turned out to be not going to be useful in terms of medications or studying psychosis or so on, the money did dry up. And I understand it, and I appreciate it, and I believe it. And in other words,
I'm not outscolding anybody. Why aren't you studying dreams? There's Alzheimer's, there's people's attention definite disorder, as you know, and all of these things of waking command our attention, and there's PTSD. These are things that command the tension of federal government. As far as the foundations, they of course want to make them say look good, and so they find topics that are relevant. It would make their name even more lustrous than the millions they made, and so dreaming does
not fit into that category. But the hardest thing of studying dreams in the past was being up all. I mean, if you have a sleep dream, lamb, somebody's going to be have to wake up and wake up those participants. Yeah, right, So you have to learn to be what it's like to be a participant. And it ain't fun to be awakened at one or two am and then jostled two hours later and so on. So participants don't necessarily last. I mean, that's enough of that. That's it. I'm out
of here. And if you just get him. In our first night, one dream in the set of dreams I studied, the guy dreamed that the machine was electrocuting. Look you at all these wires on it. It's called electro and step. So he thought the machine was zapping. You know, it has its said a little problems.
What about your favorite favorite thing about what you do? You've been doing this for years and years and years.
Well, some it's just I like to discover new things. I didn't want to just add to the details on vision or learning. I wanted to know the Royal road to the unconscious, the meaning of life, why we are so crazy, why we believe the things we believe, why we fight with each other so much. I mean, all those things have been part of my research life in
one way or another. So I was interested in using the best methods, the most serious quantitative methods, most objective methods, to study the toughest questions, just the challenge of dreams. And when you have a great mentor that done so much and has enthusiasm for it, and I might say, we've replicated his work again and again, and his coding system has been used all over the world. Carrying that on it had some meaning. And he was also a
person that said I think you're okay. We all need to have a mentor that says, you know you're right for this field. When we go to college, we're looking for something that we like that likes us. So if you say, oh, I love psychology and you haven't done so well in the statistics or experimental side, and then somebody has to say, you know, maybe you ought to go into some more qualitative field. So they like something
that didn't like them. It's like finding any match, right, So you find something you really like where it likes you, and so dream research was that for me. You ask me what keeps you going about dream For all of their negativity, and they are negative, there's some real fun in studying dreams and reading dreams.
Patron Scott Sheldon asked thoughts on dream journals and I think by now we know Professor Domhoff is a fan. But would he read yours? Can they sign up and fill up your dream coffers at the dream Bank?
No, no, no, no, we're very wary. We only use I mean, the thing is, I don't you've heard of all the pranks have been done on researchers, the pilt down man, the fake bones in the British Museum that fooled people. So I am very sensitive to that in terms of I know people can make up dreams. I know they can change them, you know. So I don't take any We don't collect any dreams over the web.
I'd never take a dream off the web. These are people that write me and then I say, well send me a photo copy, or when did you start writing them down? Or I got a set of dreams that got timestamp on them, you know, so I know that that person wrote those dreams down in the past. Just write them down, don't look at them. Just write them down every day for a month or two, and that hits you into it if you stop and you analyze and think, and when then you start to project onto it.
Just write them down. If you can study your own dreams, you want to, just write them down, just keep them, just put them in the drawer, don't even look. Just keep them. The more you do it, you more get in the halb.
Well, I'm gonna start writing my down.
I will.
I'll let you know how it's going to.
You did start writing them down?
No, I'm going to start.
I'm going to start.
This is a voice them.
I'll do voice to texts on my phone. That way they're digitized and I can later if I need to analyze them, I can.
The voice of text work as well. I've I've been trying to tell dream researchers for ten years to get a voice to text.
Well, this is a call to the to the universe. Get with that, dreams searchers.
We got a plan here. Yeah, we got a plan of how to get the dream and we're gonna and I've got I now know a person who can analyze him.
And if I do submit them later to his research. Can I pick a cool name like Jimminy Diamond or something.
You can just yeah, but don't go too far.
I won't do Jimmy Diamond. I'll do like Lynette or something, something Rhonda, something like that. This has been an absolute dream of mine, fulfilled. I have been wanting to interview you for years and this did not disappoint.
It was a time.
Thank you so much for doing that my pleasure.
I hope it's I hope it's serious enough. I mean, I hope not. No, this is perfect.
So there you have it.
Ask smart people sleepy questions and just know that that's the best way to learn anything. Bill and I had just such a lovely time chatting. We talked for over three hours on this rainy Tuesday in his office. Just so glad I asked him if I could ask him your questions.
So.
His new book is called The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming. It's linked in the show notes if you want to know more. All the details are in there. Alongside his research site dreamresearch dot net. I also have a ton of links on my site at Aliward dot com, slash ology, slash on, Neurology, which is linked in the show notes. We're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at ali Ward on both. I'm also at ali Underscore Ologies
on TikTok. Now I'm giving it a shot, y'all. Thank you Aaron Talbert for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group with help from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis. Thank you Emily White of the Wordery for making professional transcripts, and Caleb Patton for bleeping episodes. Those are up for free at aliwar dot com, slash Ologies, dash Extras. Susan Hale handles merch and so much else, and Noelle Dilworth does our scheduling. Thank you to everyone supporting on Patreon dot
com slash ologies. Thank you Zeekrodriguez Thomas and Mercedes Maitland for working on kid friendly shorter versions of classic episodes. Those are called smologies. They're up at Alleyward dot com slash Smologies. Kelly ar Dweyer makes our website and she can make yours. Nick Thorburn made the theme music, and lead editor for this episode was Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.
Thank you so much, you are wonderful. We heart you additional editing by Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media. Who I would marry in a saloon with warm bruskis And if you stick around, I tell you the secret. But I already told you one in the middle of the episode. So right now, I'm gonna just go over to Grammy. I'm literally recording this on my bed. I'm gonna see if Grammy's gonna make any barking noises in her sleep. Okay, she's awake, she's just breathing at me. That was uneventful.
But when she does bargain, her sleep sounds like this. I'll do my best impression. She sounds kind of like a chicken. Okay, bybye, that wasn't a very good app secret.
No, it wasn't. She was sleeping right before.
Then.
Can I do a different secret?
That's really funny that it's still recording.
My other secret is that it's raining really hard in California right now, and I had just gotten out of the shower and I was not wearing clothes and it was raining, and I dashed out onto the porch because I've never been nude in the rain, but now I have, so you're armed with that knowledge. Sorry everyone, Bye.
Bye.
Dreams. They feel real while we're in them, right it's the.
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