Brain Surgeon REVEALS the PURPOSE of Dreams & What They TRULY Mean! | Dr. Rahul Jandial

Welcome to The School of Greatness! I'm your host, Lewis Howes, and today we're diving into the fascinating world of dreams with our guest, Dr. Rahul Jandial. Dr. Jandial is not only a renowned neurosurgeon but also a neuroscientist with a deep understanding of the human brain. In this episode, we'll explore the significance of dreams, their impact on our waking life, and the mysterious workings of our minds during sleep. Whether you're curious about lucid dreams, the role of nightmares, or the connection between dreams and reality, this conversation promises to enlighten and inspire. So, get ready to unlock the secrets of your dreams and discover how they shape our lives. Let's jump right in! Buy his new book for yourself and a friend - This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking LifeIn this episode you will learnThe potential meanings and implications of our dreams in daily life. Strategies for remembering dreams and the benefits of waking up without an alarm. The psychological and developmental roles of different types of dreams. How dreams might influence the realization of real-life goals and experiences. The biological and mystical aspects of dreaming, including the significance of the pineal gland. For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1603For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Eckhart Tolle – https://link.chtbl.com/1463-podRhonda Byrne – https://link.chtbl.com/1525-podJohn Maxwell – https://link.chtbl.com/1501-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rahul Jandial?

  The ultimate gift of the human mind, I think, is dreaming. Love and all those things, yes, but the process of dreaming. Now, I'm gonna be bold here, this is a conversation. I think we sleep because we must do.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  He is a dual-trained neurosurgeon who has both an M.D. and P.H.D. And he's based out of the world-famous City of Hope Hospital here in Los Angeles. He's a researcher and author of 10 books and countless academic papers on the brain. Dr. Rahul John Dial.

• 0:25Lewis Howes?

  Why, after dozens of years of doing brain surgeries, being a P.H.D. in neuroscience and understanding the mind, did you want to dive into understanding dreams?

• 0:36Rahul Jandial?

  I mean, you've put it right where it needs to be. This is a big topic. When color TV showed up, the dream reports of thousands of people being asked, woken up in their sleep, "What are you dreaming about?" The dreams started to be more in color.

• 0:49Lewis Howes?

  Woken up, but not been able to move or speak.

• 0:52Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Lewis Howes?

  And I feel like I'm screaming, but nothing's coming out.

• 0:55Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 0:56Lewis Howes?

  What is that?

• 0:56Rahul Jandial?

  Sleep paralysis. What you describe about... This is great, just give me a minute to take this one, because this one, I got a lot of science. What the...

• 1:04Lewis Howes?

  Do you think our dreams have meaning in our waking life?

• 1:07Rahul Jandial?

  Well, that's the massive question, right? So that's the, um... What I would say is...

• 1:13Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Dr. Rahul John Dial in the house. Good to see you, man, welcome back.

• 1:21Rahul Jandial?

  My pleasure.

• 1:22Lewis Howes?

  The last interview we did blew up. People were fascinated by it. You are a neuroscientist who studies the mind, but also a brain surgeon who has been helping remove cancer for dozens of years to over thousands of patients. And so you studied the material brain, but also the spiritual side of the brain as well, the mind, let's say.

• 1:47Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 1:48Lewis Howes?

  And you're an expert in both. And the last interview we did, we talked about many different things around these topics. But you have a new book called, "This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life." And this is interesting, because we were talking before, that there's not really anyone who is a scientist of dreams out in the world yet, except for you're starting this path. You're starting to talk about the neuroscience of dreaming, which I think is fascinating, because you told me about a third of the time, we don't remember. What we're doing in our lives. A third of the time, we're asleep and a lot of us don't remember our dreams. We don't understand our dreams. They don't make sense to us. We have nightmares. We have erotic dreams.

• 2:32Lewis Howes?

  We have inspiring dreams. We have dreams where you feel like we're falling or dreams where you feel like we're about to die. And then we wake up in a shock. We have all these weird moments. Sometimes we remember and we, we, we, we over emphasize what the dream was, but it really didn't happen. And then other times we have no clue what happened in our dreams. And so why, after dozens of years of doing brain surgeries, being a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind, did you want to dive into understanding dreams?

• 3:05Rahul Jandial?

  I mean, you put it right where it needs to be. This is a big topic. There's a reason people haven't been tackling it because it's like trying to grab a cloud or like trying to hold on to something that's just like, we all know what it is. We know what dreams are. We all have had dreams. I don't have to explain to you what a nightmare is. You know what it is. I know what it is. We don't talk about it. We can't really wrap our minds around it, but it's something we all experience. It's something we all undergo. So your question about why did I want to write a book on dreams? What I would tell you is I was asked to write this book. So the way I've, my journey that's ended up here, a lot of it is, you know, I have sons. I have three, as we were talking about, they're 18, 19 and 22.

• 3:49Rahul Jandial?

  I've taken care of thousands of cancer patients. I've done surgery in South America. That these experiences are also part of my resume. Now I happen to have a PhD in neuroscience and I'm a neurosurgeon. But there are other neuroscientists, there are other neurosurgeons. I believe, and in this conversation, when you see me, hear me say, I believe, or I wonder, or could it be, it's out of respect for you and your listeners. Because you, you don't want anybody coming in on this topic and thinking, uh huh, I got it all figured out. One, two, three, no. It's an exploration. I'm looking at fragments and pieces across broad scientific things. I'm bringing my own stories into my own experiences.

• 4:33Rahul Jandial?

  And I'm saying, look, look at these little, they're almost like fireflies, these little glimpses of knowledge that we now have. Or that 3,000 years ago, they were talking about lucid dreaming, they being Aristotle. Like what is the consistent pattern? Uh, not, not my dream, not your dream. But what if we look at 10,000 dreams? Do we start to see some pattern? Oh. We do. And we'll get into that. Nightmares and erotic dreams are essentially universal. Falling dreams and teeth falling out have happened for hundreds of years across cultures. Like when you went from carriages to cars to electric vehicles to television, those dreaming patterns are consistent. So the first thing I thought, wait, wait a second. They're being driven by the brain.

• 5:18Rahul Jandial?

  Hmm. Then when Technicolor came in, dream reports, people cataloging what dreams are going on, right? That's where I'm studying is like, well, how, what dreams happen most commonly? What dreams don't happen at all? So two things popped into my mind. I was looking at this and saying, when color TV showed up, the dream reports of thousands of people being asked and woken up in their sleep, what are you dreaming about? Uh, the dreams started to be more in color. So clearly waking life fed dreaming life. And then the other thing I noticed was rarely did they report math in dreams. Yeah, I don't think I ever had a math dream. Thank God.

• 5:57Rahul Jandial?

  That doesn't sound fun, but, but there, most people, we look at 10,000 dreams, everybody's had a nightmare, nearly every, in science, when I say everybody, I don't mean 100%. It's like, you know, above 90 ish, gets to be essentially universal nightmares and erotic dreams. Very few, lots of emotional dreams, lots of visual dreams, a lot of movement dreams. And we'll get into that, but very few math dreams, right? Like very few people said, and even the scientists, I say I came up with the idea of dreaming. It's a visual thing, like the snake eating itself or two comets moving apart. And what I realize now that those, you know, what we dream, and now in the last 20, 30 years, we could have brain scans.

• 6:40Rahul Jandial?

  It's a, it's a simple word, but we're going to dissect that in this conversation, like the metabol, how much glucose your brain is using? Where's that glucose being used? What's the electricity? So when I say brain scan, there's a lot of different ways of scanning brain information. The brain scans. At night, in a machine, with people sleeping, with people dreaming, they were notably dampened. Not off, let's change all of this. There's no part of your brain that's off. Otherwise, it'd be a stroke, you know? That part would die. But everything in the brain is a modulation. It's always like 51, 49. Nothing is ever on or off. It's not a switch. There's blood flow always going everywhere. Okay? If a branch is blocked, then you have a stroke.

• 7:23Rahul Jandial?

  What happens is the executive network in the prefrontal cortex, just the part of the brain behind the forehead, the part that does reason and logic and math, it's 49, 48. Right now, it's probably 51, 52, but it's dampened at night. And so dampening the executive network in our dreams allows for them to be illogical, allows them to be wild, in my opinion, and also explains why we're not doing math. Because that's needed for math.

• 7:55Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 7:56Rahul Jandial?

  So then I just, it took my breath away. I was like, wait a second.

• 8:00Rahul Jandial?

  So some patterns of dreaming, from thousands of dreams, can be explained by some patterns of the dreaming brain. And that was the idea in my head. And my publisher in London, Penguin UK,

• 8:19Rahul Jandial?

  we were talking about doing a different book. That's gonna be the next one, hopefully, but

• 8:25Rahul Jandial?

  you know, she said, we need, and I think she meant like, the publishing world and readers and people in general, like, they're real, they're real, you know, they put out books that are like, french fries. I love french fries, but they also wanna put out some stuff like, like, this is an important book. We need a book about dreams explained, about the science of it, the story of it.

• 8:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Rahul Jandial?

  A love letter to dreams, because there is no dream scientist. It's not a field. I'm a neuroscientist with life experiences, trying to put together brain scans, dream reports, neurons in a Petri dish to put together a story of what I think is happening in dreams and dreaming.

• 9:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 9:10Rahul Jandial?

  That's how this started.

• 9:11Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 9:11Rahul Jandial?

  And it's just, what's had happened has been an ignition in my mind for about 18 months.

• 9:16Lewis Howes?

  So there's been a, there have been reports on lots of different dreams, right? There's been like people documenting their dreams.

• 9:22Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Lewis Howes?

  And there's studies around that.

• 9:24Rahul Jandial?

  Great question, first of all. Again, not my dream or your dream, but there are great dream banks. Uh huh. Uh, people for decades have uh woken people up in sleep labs. They put an electrode on to make sure they're sleeping. They say, hey, wake up, what are you dreaming about? And they write it down, yeah, yeah. So that that world's been happening. Okay, that's where I'm getting like the uh, you know, a certain percentage report dreams of falling. Certain percentage dreams of uh, you know, uh, being chased, a certain percentage of math, really, that's It's out there, yeah, yeah. Everybody nightmares, everybody sexual erotic dreams. Okay, so you, I, that pattern is not mine. Right.

• 10:06Rahul Jandial?

  It's what other people methodically have been cataloging by people either sending in, writing, journaling, uh, or sleep labs being, you know, woken up. Uh huh. And that, that's where I'm getting those patterns. Do you think our dreams have meaning in our waking life? Well, that is the, that's the massive question, right? So that's the, that's the um, um, what I would say is let's go backwards a little bit, my answer is yes. But, but to be able to share with you how to go by, go about extracting that meaning. Yes. One, it's gonna be individual, I, I can't tell you what your dreams are about. And you can't tell me what my dreams are about. So it's a process of self-examination.

• 10:49Rahul Jandial?

  Yes, uh, dreams have meaning, not all dreams. Right, not all our waking thoughts are fresh, or, or, you know, or important, or worth holding on to, but what, let's get to that as can, do dreams have meaning? But with your permission, you know, let's, let's, let's equip people with what is happening in the dreaming brain. Yes. And then what different dreams mean. So then they have a playbook at the end. Yeah. And what I would say is the dreaming brain is, this was the essential question is Okay, so you got all the dream patterns. Right, so we got what we dream. You're looking at what people have catalogued.

• 11:31Rahul Jandial?

  To make sense of why we dream, that's your essential question that we get to. And then there's this like, this, this thing like, like the dreaming brain and the waking brain, right? Like, and so, and I believe these big ideas are applicable to everybody, like getting groceries frustrated. Why am I stressed out? Why am I overreacting? Like, all the, all the things for living a better waking life. You can't separate them from that, that third of your life you spend sleeping and potentially dreaming, right? So, I go way, way back to try to understand this. And to make sense of it for myself. And, and I think you'll find there's, there's science and there's stories, but there's synthesis. So first thing is all life

• 12:16Rahul Jandial?

  is, is governed by the rotation of the planet. Let's, let's just start with square one, like, yeah, let's just get to the basic here, like, like whether it's like those hot springs deep in the ocean and there's some bacteria there. Or a Venus flytrap that opens and closes. Or the moon and the tides.

• 12:37Rahul Jandial?

  Or sleep, right? Like, this, this is governed because that was the foundation on which life arose, right? And when, when you look at that, what I would say is the material, the living material on planet Earth follows that. Whether it's the tide, or the plankton, or fish, or, you know, all migration. But also the material in our brain. Really? Like, there's nothing in our skull that, if you pieced it out, there's no special ingredient. Like, from krypton or something. Everything in nature is also everything inside our skull in these brains, right? That's connected differently, it's functioning differently. But that was like the first thing that really tripped me out.

• 13:22Rahul Jandial?

  I was like, we too follow the laws, fundamental laws of Earth's rotation. These circadian rhythms you're hearing about, and cycles, and and seasons, and that was the first time I said, okay, so the brain is, the brain is.

• 13:41Rahul Jandial?

  The waking brain and the sleeping brain are doing a 24 hour cycle for as long as the run you have on this planet.

• 13:48Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 13:49Rahul Jandial?

  That's the first thing. That cycle, it actually, you know, there was like, I love this topic, by the way. I like this, like, go aside. There are like people who go into canes for like six months, it's still in a cycle.

• 14:00Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 14:01Rahul Jandial?

  Like, it's not based just on dark blackout shades or not. Like, we're, we, the tissue in our bodies, the cells, it, we're following this earth's rotation, okay? So if we say that there's the waking brain and the sleeping brain, and every 24 hours, it does its things, two third waking, one third sleeping, and that, and that happens for the most part, you know, for how long you live. Now, a surgeon in training, I might skip a few nights. Um, so maybe I've had 500 or a thousand nights, but overwhelmingly, I follow this cycle too. And in that cycle,

• 14:40Rahul Jandial?

  we have to ask ourselves, well, what's going on in the dreaming brain?

• 14:45Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 14:45Rahul Jandial?

  And right away, I'll tell you, it's so important, there's something called sleep pressure. You could, you can do, you could defy a lot of things, but you go a day without sleeping, there's something building inside you saying, sleep, sleep, sleep. You'll fall asleep in a dangerous spot. You'll fall asleep standing up sometimes. You'll fall asleep even though you haven't eaten. Like, there's something fundamental called sleep pressure that makes us follow that, that rhythm, right?

• 15:11Lewis Howes?

  Your body will force you to sleep eventually.

• 15:13Rahul Jandial?

  Well, I would say your brain.

• 15:14Lewis Howes?

  Your brain just shuts off.

• 15:16Rahul Jandial?

  It's, it's, it's builds a pressure. You can startle people and they'll wake up. But at some point, there's this pressure that's bringing you down to sleep.

• 15:24Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 15:24Rahul Jandial?

  That, that, you see that, I think torture techniques were based off of that. We saw that. We, nobody could stay up a third night in the hospital. They tried to get us to a long time ago, the battle day.

• 15:33Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 15:34Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah, but two night, your second night you could do, third night in pot. So there's a sleep pressure that the brain generates. Not the body, the brain. Cause in, just to give you just examples, like we're talking about, like, regular examples, we're not trying to get, we'll bring the science in, but the, the complexity is in the, um, in the concept. I can, we can put hearts from one to another, livers from one to another, lungs from one to another. Uh, they all follow the, that person's brain's order. So really what we're talking about is the brain is saying, I need to sleep. Brain is saying, I need to sleep. Brain is saying, okay, there's some threat going on, or you've got some some demands. You're running an ultra marathon, you're a surgeon on call. I can go a day, but I need to sleep.

• 16:17Rahul Jandial?

  So that's the first, the first thing in this discussion is, why do we need to sleep? Oh. Now, I'm gonna be bold here, this is a conversation. I, I think we sleep because we must dream. Now, let me just set that up for you. Wow. What happens when you go without sleep? You have surges in REM and dreaming sleep right away. First thing you do when you've gone a day without sleep, if you put that person in a brain scan, but there's exquisite ways of checking it, is that they, the first thing they do is they dream wildly. Right? Like, so that's, that's an interesting thing to me. The longer we go in our night of rest, quote, restful sleep, the more you're dreaming on the tail end. Mm-hmm.

• 17:02Rahul Jandial?

  Right? So maybe mental clarity, if we take that phrase, comes from having that longer night's sleep. Well, what happens in that fifth, sixth, and seventh hour? You're dreaming more. Hmm. So when I start to see these patterns, I wonder, one, the brain, not the body, needs to sleep. And then, what is the brain doing in sleep? I just checked this out, man. It's, it's doing something that if you put electrodes on the surface of our scalps, and we all fall asleep at night, during the day, the waves, the, the measurements are, uh, you know, sort of wavy, there's different ones depending on how you're engaging.

• 17:43Rahul Jandial?

  At night, there are some sharp 90-minute patterns. Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. That stuff is designed, that's built in. Really? Yeah. So that's not new. We don't have that when we're awake. No, during the, like, if, if something startles us, the, the electricity will be different. If we, if we meditate, the electricity will be different during, during waking. But at night, you're all, you're all something programmed. Then that's not new, Louis. That's the stuff that I've known for 20 years and sleep people have known for 40 years. What I'm trying to do is give you an explanation, a synthesis. That's not random. That's not a glitch.

• 18:27Rahul Jandial?

  Seven billion brains on a 24-hour cycle. Sleep pressure, you got to lie down, you got to sleep. The brain is saying you got to sleep. And when it's sleeping, it's doing this.

• 18:39Rahul Jandial?

  90 crisp cycles, REM sleep. You've seen the charts, they're like, they look like Lego, they look like the top of a Tetris thing or a Lego thing. That is something fundamental that's happening, in my opinion. And so that's why I think we must sleep, but I think what's the most important part of sleep is the dreaming. My kidney and my liver don't need to sleep. You could take a part of the liver from a mom and put it in the child. It's no longer connected, the transplanted liver to the web of nerves. Liver's fine. Lungs are fine moving between humans.

• 19:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 19:17Rahul Jandial?

  Right? So what I'm trying to point out there is that it's the, it's the brain that's running the show. It's on the earthly pattern. It wants to sleep. And in that sleep, what is it doing? It's dreaming. The brain, in my opinion, with respect and humility, the brain needs to dream. The sleep is so that the brain can dream and stay fine tuned and stay fully adapted and stay fully enriched in all the corners of his mind without just the boring, boring part of our day, right? If the brain only did what we did, driving the 101 or doing this, which is fantastic, but it would become rigid, right? It would become like, like an arm that's never stretched past a certain distance.

• 20:01Rahul Jandial?

  You get a contracture. Well, the brain tissue, in my opinion, that dreaming is the brain's way.

• 20:09Rahul Jandial?

  Other people have other ideas, like it's threat training, or it's a nighttime therapist. I get that, and I think in some capacity. But at the most fundamental level, it's like high-intensity training for your mind. At night, it just goes wild to make sure all those capacities and resources, imaginations, if you will, are accessible to you if you needed them during the day, if the environment or, you know, evolution needed it. So that's like the big explanation about what's happening when we sleep. We're dreaming. Dreaming is important. It's metabolically active. It's electrically active. It puts us at risk. And even if you are in danger, your brain will force you to lie down so it can sleep to dream.

• 20:53Rahul Jandial?

  That's how fundamental I think dreams are.

• 20:56Lewis Howes?

  Now, what if people... That's powerful. I'm glad you shared that. And what if people are listening or watching and say, "Well, I can't remember any of my dreams, and I don't think I dream at all."

• 21:06Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Lewis Howes?

  Because I can't remember them. So what's wrong with me? And should I be worried if I don't have dreams?

• 21:11Rahul Jandial?

  Well, I would say the genius is built in. So that's happening whether you want it or not. And the essential question of... I've had people ask me that, like, "Well, if I don't remember my dreams, is it useful?" I mean, what is it? Well, if you're not remembering them... So let me take that one apart a little bit. Here's my thinking on it. We'll bring in imagination and even sports visualization to try to understand that. And we'll bring in something called autobiographical memory. So let's start with memory first, okay? It's not what you're seeing on TV, or like, you know, remembering names or addresses. I like my iPhone. I don't want to remember phone number again, you know? Like, there's that kind of memory. Then there's procedural memory,

• 21:56Rahul Jandial?

  like riding a bike, tying your shoelaces. Then there's episodic memory, remembering episodes of your life. Right? So we have lots of different shades and types of memory. And the one that connects me to the fact that I was here with you maybe about two years ago is something called autobiographical memory. When I... I have gone through so many different things and so many different countries and places. But I feel as if I have been the I've inhabited and lived through all of those experiences. Think about that, right? What's the thing that stitches all my life together? That's a type of memory. It's called autobiographical memory. And, and so

• 22:41Rahul Jandial?

  I think by design, by and importance,

• 22:49Rahul Jandial?

  it's to, some rare cases, it's to avoid waking and dream confusion. So it has this wild run at night. But when you wake up, and we'll talk about that transition, like this, the transition between

• 23:05Rahul Jandial?

  dreaming brain and waking brain, it's not a hard line. It's a little, it can be fuzzy in the morning, and that's why some people report sleep paralysis and goblins and weird stuff. But

• 23:16Rahul Jandial?

  the autobiographical memory has to come back into command. Because that's what stitches our waking life together. That's what's get food, get to work, get in the subway. So the autobiographical memory takes over every morning when we wake up. And for it, I think for us to stay, to not be confused about what reality is, because we had such a wild ride. It, it, there, there's a, the memory is designed to have dreaming fade to the background. And so I think, I think it's, it's happening, electrically it's happening. And what we're catching are a few glimpses of it bleeding into our waking brain and say, oof, last night, what was going on in my head?

• 23:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 23:57Rahul Jandial?

  Those are the glimpses and the flares of the dreaming brain bleeding into the waking life. And those are the ones that, that that we want to pay attention to. You know, so that's the, that's the way I'm thinking about dreaming. And trying to explain it, too.

• 24:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so many questions I want to ask here, but there's, there's different types of dreams. There's nightmares, there's erotic dreams, there's weird, crazy dreams. There's sleep paralysis. And I think I know what that is, because I think I've had that a few different times. So I'd love to start there, because this is something I can relate to, where I've woken up, but not been able to move or speak.

• 24:35Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Lewis Howes?

  And I feel like I'm screaming, but nothing's coming out.

• 24:38Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 24:39Lewis Howes?

  What is that?

• 24:41Rahul Jandial?

  Because that's terrifying. I know, right, but you're asking me to like, you're asking me to tackle giants of giants of mystery. Tell me everything what it is, yeah. In one afternoon, you know, but, but what I, again, with humility, if you hold on to the concept, if you just, if you just say, look, that was, like, this, we don't have to do a study, but I get what he's saying. We're on planet Earth, we clearly have to sleep, right? Our brain, I, I believe him, our brain is the thing that needs to sleep. And now what he's saying is, um, that, hey, check this out, while you're sleeping, you're, you're dreaming. Whether you remember none of it, a little of it, or some of it, you're dreaming.

• 25:23Rahul Jandial?

  Okay, if we, if we, if we hold on to that, and then always come back to like, if one person later on is like, huh, I am a cycle of waking brain, dreaming brain. Just, if you just walk away one thing, like, you're waking brain, dreaming brain 24 hours, waking in times whatever life is. Waking brain, and just to ask yourself, is this contribution to my thinking, to my emotion, from the waking brain, or the dreaming brain, or, or somewhere where, where blends? So when you, uh, sleep paralysis,

• 26:06Rahul Jandial?

  a third of people have experienced it. I haven't, but when I wrote, I started writing about sleep paralysis, the, what you describe about, uh, this is, this is great, look, just give me a minute to take this one, because this one I got a lot of science. What, when you, what the dreaming brain also does is not just hyper emotional and hyper visual and dampened logic, right? That we, we opened with, hyper emotional, hyper visual, dampened logic, okay? So, that's there. What it also does is, it locks down your body. So you're temporarily paralyzed. Right. There's some exceptions with reflexes or sleepwalking, but in general, you're temporarily paralyzed,

• 26:51Rahul Jandial?

  so the dreaming brain can let loose, be emotional, be wild, and in the morning, that paralysis has to come off. Interesting. Right, that's an, that we can all agree on, right? That's, that's the dreaming brain and the waking brain. When there is a mismatch. Of you waking, your dreaming brain, the mind is coming to. But the chemicals that have locked down your body, right? The chemical paralysis is still there. People will wake up. Locked locked in their body. That's kind of what you're describing. And then on top of that, they start describing goblins and monsters and different things lurking intruders. I've never experienced.

• 27:32Lewis Howes?

  I never experienced that either.

• 27:33Rahul Jandial?

  But that's described so much so that if you go to Italy, you go to Africa, you go to other places. They all have a similar story of being locked in the body. And having a threatening presence in the room and sometimes a feeling of suffocation.

• 27:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 27:47Rahul Jandial?

  That grouping is something humans experience. And something cultures have come up with their own stories about. So if people want to look it up, it's like succubus, the incubus and succubus comes from that.

• 28:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:01Rahul Jandial?

  And it's a famous painting with a goblin on top of a woman who's asleep, right? What I want people to go is, ah, I see. That sleep paralysis that Lewis brought up was because the dreaming brain and the waking brain. They don't just snap to the next phase, that sometimes they bleed into each other. And that's called sleep exit. That little window is called sleep exit. Sleep entry is a fascinating one too, but sleep exit.

• 28:25Lewis Howes?

  I've almost, I've had it a couple of times at night, like in the beginning of sleeping also, where I've like fallen asleep. But like 30 minutes later, I've like woken up. It's almost I'm not asleep yet.

• 28:35Rahul Jandial?

  That's my favorite time.

• 28:36Lewis Howes?

  But I am for a minute. And so my fiance says, I mean, this is just from her. Uh, theories, but she says, you know, that's you entering a lucid dreaming, like allowing that to happen. Allowing the sleep paralysis to happen because you're half awake, half asleep. And if you stay there and you don't freak out and scream, like try to scream. You could actually enter, she says, that's what happens for her and she enters the most incredible lucid dreams that are vivid and memories for her.

• 29:03Rahul Jandial?

  She's not wrong.

• 29:04Lewis Howes?

  And so it's more of just like surrendering to, ah, I can't.

• 29:08Rahul Jandial?

  So she's not wrong, but again, so. You know, people are like, what are they talking like, if you just, if you, if, if you keep this conversation on the framework of dreaming brain. And sleeping brain, dreaming brain and waking brain, then you know. Where the explanations land. So what you're talking about is the waking brain. Entering the sleeping brain.

• 29:31Lewis Howes?

  Sleep world, yeah, yeah.

• 29:32Rahul Jandial?

  Very good. And that, again, doesn't happen like in a millisecond.

• 29:36Lewis Howes?

  Like a switch.

• 29:37Rahul Jandial?

  You don't blink your eyes and go into that mode. It bleeds. And I remember this, how to explain, I was in, I was diving, wait, I don't do it anymore, but I was diving in the caverns of like the Yucatan and where the fresh water meets the ocean water. There's like four feet or it's like blurry. And I was like, yeah, it's not gonna go from a freshwater river to ocean. And like, what, like a hair?

• 30:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, right.

• 30:00Rahul Jandial?

  There's a period of overlap.

• 30:02Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 30:03Rahul Jandial?

  And so if you hold on to that, uh, your waking brain is starting to enter your dreaming, your sleeping brain. That window, there's a word for it. It's called hypnagogic and hypnopompic. Forget about that. I like, because I want to have a conversation. Sleep entry. Sleep entry is also a 15, 20 minute period where you can kind of be in these liminal spaces where you're, you're like, I'm remembering a lot, but man, I'm having some wild thoughts. Lucid dreaming is when you've been asleep and then the, uh, awareness you're in a dream comes returns. That's a whole different topic. So she's right, it's a blended state. Uh, your significant other, but

• 30:43Rahul Jandial?

  sleep entry has been channeled by Salvador Dali and others and in movie inception as a place to extract fresh ideas. Your fresh ideas might be great. My fresh ideas might be bad. I'm not saying that's the way to become a creative genius, but people have used that window and now there's some devices that, that when they see you, feel you falling asleep, they'll wake you up. So sleep entry is the blurry movement from uh, the waking brain to the dreaming brain. And that is an interesting, uh, space for creativity. Sleep exit is the dreaming brain to the waking brain. And sometimes the body stays locked in and locked down. And the mind comes back and that freaks people out.

• 31:27Rahul Jandial?

  That's called sleep paralysis.

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 31:29Rahul Jandial?

  That's, that's my synthesis and I.

• 31:31Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting. Now, this might be off topic here, but I'm curious. To have an optimal day.

• 31:38Lewis Howes?

  Is it better to wake up organically without an alarm? Or to wake up with something that is alarming you?

• 31:46Rahul Jandial?

  Okay.

• 31:46Lewis Howes?

  When you wake up?

• 31:47Rahul Jandial?

  So, great question, first of all. Because now we have the concept. So, if you believe your dreaming thoughts are ones you want to hold on to. If they're nightmares, maybe you want to forget, but nightmares won't let you forget. That's a different topic. They're, they arrive in children for a different reason. But what I do now, because I have the luxury of a bed and curtains. So it's out of respect for all the people in this world that don't have that. But I believe when I have had a good idea. Actually, forget that. My last hundred bad ideas have come from somewhere in sleep entry and sleep exit. And when I'm driving around L.A. or whatever, I'm, you know, I'm in LAX or Heathrow, whatever it is.

• 32:31Rahul Jandial?

  Uh, when I go, oh, interesting thought.

• 32:35Rahul Jandial?

  That, uh, it's not an aha moment, but when you have a thought that you don't know where it came from. I believe it's from that nightly process that's going.

• 32:42Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 32:43Rahul Jandial?

  That work you're putting in at night on your own. The design for the brain to dream, to stay creative, to stay enriched. Uh, to activate emotions and sights that are way beyond what you would even choose for during the day. Right? We'd become so boring if our brains didn't dream at night, right? The capacity would be constrained. So when I have an interesting idea, I try to think about, did that come from my dreaming brain? Or have I been working with that? So I've been giving these talks on creativity and people are. So there's an incubation period and extraction period. I believe habits during the day. Well, it's like, like colored television, more colored dreams. Put some red colored goggles on people and they had more red colored dreams.

• 33:28Rahul Jandial?

  I believe like, I do things like, I like to flip through magazines or I listen to different music and I, I take different routes home. I believe I'm feeding my dream life. And then at dream, at sleep entry or sleep exit, I try to hold on to, what was I thinking about? What was I thinking about? How did I feel about that? What was that going on? And to do that, you, you can't have the alarm, which is a luxury. And the first thing you can't check is your phone. Because the minute you check your phone.

• 33:56Lewis Howes?

  Switching to something else.

• 33:57Rahul Jandial?

  Right, that autobiographical memories onto the day. What you want is that autobiographical memory thing that stitches every day together. Not to come on so fast and to some people, I mean, you can read about it, but the concept is there to slow down the the sleep exit or to pay attention to the sleep entry. And jot down or hold on to those windows. And I believe for me, whether it's coming up with a new surgery, coming up with an idea for science or working with the L A Ballet now or writing like. When I have had a good idea, it's come from those spaces.

• 34:36Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 34:37Rahul Jandial?

  So.

• 34:38Lewis Howes?

  Not from being rushed and waking up with an alarm and going right into this thing.

• 34:41Rahul Jandial?

  That's important. You gotta, you know, shelter and food and get, you gotta stay staying employed, showing up on time. Like I'm not, it's a luxury, but if you're really trying to take yourself to the next level, my process for extracting ideas is to work with my dreaming life.

• 34:57Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's amazing. So you mentioned nightmares. Why do you think kids have nightmares? And also kids or teens start to have erotic dreams at the same time.

• 35:09Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Lewis Howes?

  And I'm sure they wish they had more erotic dreams than nightmares. But why do, why do we need both erotic dreams and nightmares as we're growing up?

• 35:18Rahul Jandial?

  All right, so again, we return to the the foundation of our conversation that.

• 35:26Rahul Jandial?

  These are back to what we dream. Okay. Like that's been described for a long time. I'm not, I'm not coming at this new, right? Like, and so when we look at the pattern of what people dream.

• 35:42Rahul Jandial?

  You know, the simple stuff like, oh, you, you have a flight tomorrow. You have a dream about missing your flight. You don't need to interpret that. You know what that is. You got a presentation tomorrow. You have a dream of showing up naked or something behind the podium. Like, we know, we get that. But why would you have nightmares? Like, that's chapter two for a reason. Because I wanted to come across and just say, look, this is a work of imagination.

• 36:00Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 36:01Rahul Jandial?

  That there's nobody that can take these few glimpses of science and life and come up with like.

• 36:09Rahul Jandial?

  A foolproof, hey, I got it all figured out story. So here's what's interesting about nightmares.

• 36:15Rahul Jandial?

  If there's anything that would make somebody say, look, hey, this dreaming thing is not good for us. Why do we have nightmares? Like, that's like, it feels like a glitch, right? It feels like the mind.

• 36:27Rahul Jandial?

  Like, a mind's mistake, if you will. I don't think it is, but. So when you look at the patterns.

• 36:35Rahul Jandial?

  To understand it, there are two types of nightmares. And there's the one with the big idea. But let me get to the other one that's easier. If you have been traumatized, assaulted. PTSD nightmares are flashbacks. Yes. It's a bad memory on loop. Stamped with raw emotion. Can't shake it. That we have some firmer understanding of. So if you're struggling and you have. Worsening headaches. You say, hey, I gotta think about seeing a doctor. If you're an athlete, you have worsening pain. The key is if you have worsening, new onset and progressive nightmares. Talk to your doctor or therapist about it. It could be a psychological thermometer that things aren't going well for you. That's a big topic, and I think other people are in that space. I'll leave that one there. Yeah.

• 37:20Rahul Jandial?

  The one that interests me is. Having three sons. And. Is. Each of them, at one point, I had to say to them. It's all right. It was only a nightmare, it was only a dream. So the first thing I thought was. Does that mean they didn't? And I'm looking at. I'm looking, and now I'm looking at neurodevelopment. To understand this, I wanted to do a whole different space. Like. You know, we're not born walking and talking, right? So you see kids, they're putting things together. The movements become fluid. You're physically not born made. And you're cultivated physically, right? I believe the mind is also being cultivated internally. And one example would be.

• 38:05Rahul Jandial?

  You gotta remind kids it's only a dream. So that means at some point when they're young, likely they're confusing or cannot separate. Uh dreaming thoughts and waking thoughts. That and at that time, when you ask them what they think about, it's very. In general, I mean, this one kid might tell you the wildest thing. I'm not telling that person or that parent that that's not what they're experiencing. But the pattern is um the dream reports of children. And some families signed up for this. I've just I studied it. They followed their dream reports from like age two to 20. Wow. Longitudinally like, what are you dreaming about now? What are you dreaming about now? What are you dreaming about now? And their dreams are simple. It's like a table or a blanket.

• 38:48Rahul Jandial?

  Interestingly, when they dream of animals, they're not often pets. They're like beasts and monsters and teddy bears. So I can't explain all of that, but that's what they're describing. It's not the pet that they have that's in their dream. And as we're learning to walk and talk to age two, three, four. Something's going on in the mind. There are some structures. I need a moment for this one. There there's a type of cognition that's developing. First is visual spatial. And and then these these developmental scientists, they looked at it.

• 39:26Rahul Jandial?

  That the wildness of kids' dreams correlates more to the complexity of how they navigate visual spatial things. They have a test called block design. It's not how well they can spell or remember. The more three dimensional they are, the the that parallels complexity of dreaming in a child. So all the parents out there, you don't make them memorize, you know? In my opinion, I did like cultivate their sense of gymnastics. Music, art, whatever you can, different foods, diversity experiences. It's not being correlated to logic. Right. So that also like makes me feel like that's that guides a little bit. And then what happens is they develop this thing called.

• 40:11Rahul Jandial?

  At some point, they realize. It's just an example, that that teacher or that uncle. Or that person that they're smiling and saying, hey, I want to help you. But the capacity develops, it's called theory of mind, where you start to read the other person's intention. Beyond just what they're saying. Interesting. Yeah, that develops.

• 40:36Rahul Jandial?

  Kids are gullible, that develops. Theory of mind. Yeah, T O, people can look it up, theory of mind. So that's a, just like there's a, uh, I could throw the ball. Like, that develops. At a certain age, around five or six, seven. And the idea of that person's intentions may not be completely clear. Or they might be misrepresenting their intentions. Interesting. Or maybe I shouldn't trust them, or maybe they would hurt me. These important concepts arrive in the brain at the same time as nightmares arrive. Wow. So I think if I were to say, why do we, and then these nightmares all go away for kids. And then as adults, we get them if we have trauma. They come as a wave. Interesting. It's crazy.

• 41:21Rahul Jandial?

  Wow. I might be completely wrong, but I, you know, I would love to hear somebody come up with a better. So you're not just gullible all the time. What everyone says. I think nightmares make the mind. Nightmares make the mind. Yeah, they make you sharp. They give you a sense of self versus other. They make you less gullible. They create a sense of threat. They, the fleeing and the terror. I think it guides the cultivation of this thing called theory of mind. Huh. Where you realize, just because the person's smiling, that doesn't mean they have good intentions. Interesting. And that is, it's cool, right? I mean, that's. They, they're not arriving for all of us at age eight, six, seven, eight. And then fading for most of us as we get into adolescence. Without a reason.

• 42:06Rahul Jandial?

  Like, that's not, that's not a glitch in the system. Wow. My belief, I wonder, again, with humility, and I'm taking on big things here, so. If that's not what it is for you, I believe it. I'm not saying I got it all figured out. But I'm just here to show you, like. And then people, and that we are in many ways still that dynamic as adults. So whatever you're, at the grounded level. Your struggles with your lover, your struggle with your partner, like. You're a dynamic ecosystem of mind and body. And I just want to take people back to, like, look at that, like, we're not. And there's a certain part of the brain that gives you that capacity, like, there's, it's, we'll get into that some other day, but. In that part, the newest part of the brain that pushed the forward, forward.

• 42:50Rahul Jandial?

  There's a part that, when it's injured, it doesn't work well, we can't like. Make new opinions or we become gullible like this. There's some cellular basis to the theory of mind. Wow. But again, I think nightmares arriving for all of us at the same time as we're becoming like, oh, that person might hurt me, or what do I want? Self versus other, I mean, self in italics.

• 43:15Rahul Jandial?

  I think that's all happening in parallel for a reason. Wow. I think that's all happening in parallel. So, chapter two, right out the gates. So if nightmares make the mind, what do erotic dreams do? Okay, so these are my, that's why it says chapter three. I know everybody's gonna wanna hear about this one, but it's, you know, it's PG 13, but the, but I think the concepts are, you know, very mature.

• 43:38Rahul Jandial?

  So again, again, we return to our primer that there's this, we are waking brain and dreaming brain and they intersect. We stab, I think everybody knows that, it's a matter of to what degree and how.

• 43:53Rahul Jandial?

  That's the other universal dream. You know, I've never had a dream of teeth falling out, but it's been reported for centuries. I've had it. Yeah. Yeah, a few times. So their dreams follow patterns, right? People have dreams of falling, but that's like 20%, 60%, like, you know, I. I've had that too. But, but I've had dreams of falling, but not, you know, but everybody's had essentially, I mean, there'll be some people say, no, I've never had a sexual dream. Okay, I'm not here to. A majority, majority. I mean, wait, in scientific terms, everybody. Yeah, yeah. So I call those two universal dreams. Nightmares and erotic dreams, universal. Universal dreams.

• 44:32Rahul Jandial?

  And I think when something is universal, a part of our, this awesome feels out there like evolutionary psychology. Like the gifts, their strengths and weaknesses today aren't just physical. That we're inheriting thinking patterns, dreaming patterns. This is mind blowing, but this has been well known. I'm just able to put it, I think, into a framework now is falling teeth dreams, they don't follow, they don't, teeth falling out, it doesn't follow a pattern in people. But nightmares cluster in families.

• 45:08Rahul Jandial?

  Think about it. When I say, yeah, exactly, I have the same. Yeah, and I've known that because I went through medical school and they said that. I just didn't have a understanding of it. But I believe, and there is evidence, that we inherit not just our physical traits, but our cognitive traits. Oh, yeah. And if we inherit our risk aversion or propensity to risk, if we inherit our, our parents' coping mechanisms or failure to cope, you know, we may be inheriting dreaming pattern. Interesting. And I think that that, we have to be open to that, that that's why nightmares arrive for every kid, man. That's not happening by chance. I may not have the explanation for it.

• 45:51Rahul Jandial?

  I think it cultivates the sense of self and sense, it gives you mind reading ability with somebody else. That's called theory of mind. That's my opinion. Then the next one comes is sexual dreams. And this one is, is interesting because, let me break this down for you. It's different because when, when my sons were born, we were born with like the marble. You know, it's, and what you, you've heard this, use it or lose it, you know, like, if you cover a child's eye because they have some health issues, that part that goes to the right side of the brain and the left side, one, each eye goes to both occipital lobes. It's not this one to this one, it's this crossing. Mm-hmm.

• 46:36Rahul Jandial?

  If you cover it, those parts wither or they repurpose. It's, it's an adaptive system.

• 46:43Rahul Jandial?

  Use it or lose it. You've got the neurons, the hundred billion neurons, they're like microscopic jellyfish. Use them or you're gonna lose them. That makes sense. And that's what happens for vision, hearing, taste, movement. If you wrap somebody's arm, the motor area will wither. Wow. Okay, so that's, that's built in. But this is, but how does a touch become a caress?

• 47:12Rahul Jandial?

  That's a capacity from the same, from the same sensation.

• 47:18Rahul Jandial?

  Now it can become erogenous. Right. Right. There are new nerves being laid down in our fingertips, right? But when a lover's touch is different than an intention even, not even a touch is. So that capacity develops in the human brain. Around the time of 11, 12, and 13. Interesting. And it's, it's not after puberty. It's not like puberty, however people conceive puberty, but you don't go through bodily puberty and then say, I think I'm turned on. It's different. You get, you, your brain develops the ability to be turned on, I believe, through erotic dreams. Wow.

• 48:02Rahul Jandial?

  That erotic dreams are, again, the mind's cultivation for desire. And then you start to see changes in the sensation part of the brain. Where now it's not just, now erotic touch is possible. You know, without getting too deep into like child rearing and all that, but sensuality arrives. It's not prepubescent. It's not, it's not there. It must come at a certain time. And around that time, people who have never had

• 48:42Rahul Jandial?

  intercourse, people who have been castrated chemically for cancer treatment, people who have had chemotherapy, people have had their ovaries removed, they still have erotic dreams. Really? It's not the body saying, I like it, let's think more about it. I think it's the other way around. Wow. And that it arrives. And the biggest sense, wouldn't that be an important thing for for people to procreate? That desire arrives. And the fact that it arrives before, so here it's not use it or lose it. You know, it's here you go. It's time to use it.

• 49:18Lewis Howes?

  Comes before it's ready.

• 49:20Rahul Jandial?

  Very good. Yeah. So it's something that it's I I would love a conversation at a different time with somebody else with that. That doesn't follow normal neurodevelopment, neurodevelopment pathways. Usually it's like, yeah, I can see, and if I cover an eye, I lose that ability. You're sort of equipped and then you cultivate. Here it arrives. And that, again, erotic dreams, like in that J. Cole song, Wet Dreams. He says, I think I'm smashing, but I'm, but I'm sleeping.

• 49:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 49:47Rahul Jandial?

  So before he has his first relationship, intimate relationship with this person. Uh, he's, he's rapping about like, he's he's performing the act in his dreams, in his erotic dreams. Before they even happen in real life. That's not the usual order of how the brain and nerves work. So again, my humble opinion is

• 50:11Rahul Jandial?

  erotic dreams are the embodiment of desire. They they make sure that we want. And that's advantageous for us as, as creatures, species and people.

• 50:23Lewis Howes?

  Do you think the brain and the mind have to dream something first before it can actualize it in real life?

• 50:29Rahul Jandial?

  Hmm, that's a big question.

• 50:32Rahul Jandial?

  Do they have to dream something or think something first before they can actualize it? I think there's two ways to think of that. There's the things you there's the things you want. And you pursue. And the way I would look at that is um, returning to another example is that The dreaming brain and the waking brain is one way to understand it. But the structures in the brain during waking life, they're called the executive network, the one we talked about, are dampened down. So if you have a goal, pursue it. This conversation is not to be like, hey, just dream around all the time.

• 51:16Rahul Jandial?

  Like, you gotta get after stuff. You gotta get things done. And that's the executive network. And that's what drives you to your goals. You can think about your goals. You can choose your desires. And that's been most of my life.

• 51:31Rahul Jandial?

  But then the role of dreams in that, I think, are twofold. One, because I have thought about this for myself. Again, it's my story with respect.

• 51:44Rahul Jandial?

  I believe that if I have chosen a goal with my waking brain, it's been, you know, contributions are coming from my dreaming brain. I'm incubating thoughts. It's feeding me. It's feeding some aha moments. I'm using sleep entry. I'm using sleep exit. And then the bigger one for me is, are there things I want? Are there things I hope for that my waking brain just does not have access to? And that's the big question in the beginning, like, what's the meaning of dreams? And then,

• 52:17Rahul Jandial?

  you know, if we look at what is happening in the dreaming brain, returning to our, is that it's hyperemotional. It's hypervisual. And this is some real profound stuff. When I was learning about this and reading about it, the, and I can't get into brain anatomy too much, but I would just say, the executive, think of, if you flatten out your brain, the executive network would be like different continents and countries going, revving up a little bit. And the imagination network, which is liberated in the dreaming brain, is different, other countries coming up. You know, it's like Bellagio waterfall. Some come up, some comes down. Yeah, sure. It's a toggle.

• 53:02Rahul Jandial?

  And so your brain at its most emotional, metabolically, electrically, is in dreaming. You can't rock that hard during the day. Really? Yeah, by measurement. So then it says to me, so if there is a meaning, if I can gain further insight into myself.

• 53:24Rahul Jandial?

  I must look at the ways my dreaming brain is exceptional. I'm not gonna look at my dreaming brain for a math solution. But I might look at my, what my dreaming brain is putting forth.

• 53:38Rahul Jandial?

  For an emotional solution, an emotional insight. Right? Like, that's, that's the thing that really, I mean, a lot of this is. But the meaning of dreams is that the act of self-examination with the recognition that I hope you leave today is, that's a hyper emotional state. What is the value of emotion? It's profound. When people have injury to these areas, they can't even make any decisions. Like, decision-making requires emotion. Instinct requires emotion. My, my dog Frankie, she knows when I'm setting the booby trap, like, hey, we're going out for date night.

• 54:19Rahul Jandial?

  Frankie, come here. She's like, there's some brilliance to emotion, right? And we have become, again, don't get me wrong, you gotta wake up, you gotta go to work, you gotta get it done. Like, and that takes the waking brain and that takes the executive network. But if you want insights that can't be gained through the executive network, through always focusing outward, then you are getting glimpses of your own brain, your own life's hyper emotional states through dreaming. And I think there's insight to be found in that. And that that is the way to dream interpretation, is to recognize the ways that your dreaming brain is exceptional.

• 55:01Rahul Jandial?

  So the way I look at dream interpretation, if I could just jump into that, that's like the last chapter. We could rock all day, but this is like, if it fits nicely here, is, is, there are dreams, you know what they are, you know, they're like, it's like naked behind a podium, you had a speech to give, late for a flight. You know, there's no dream interpretation there. You know what that is. There are dreams that make no sense at all. There's no emotional stamp on them. It's just, it's just clutter. We have thoughts during the day we don't pay attention to. There are dreams that parallel your life, and the two most important ones are end of life dreams. And pregnancy dreams. Really? If, as reported when people are pregnant, patients are pregnant.

• 55:45Rahul Jandial?

  They, they have a lot of dreams about babies and rolling over babies and, you know. So that doesn't need interpretation. If people at the end of life with a cancer diagnosis, and then my patients tell me that they're thinking about like finish lines and visiting people from the past. Really? The dreams are accompanying you, right? Cause you're, you're making those dreams. So of course the dreams fit what's going on in your life. Wow. Again, those don't need to be interpreted. You know what's going on. Sure. You're dying and your dreams are comforting you. You've worked on a lot of people who've Yeah. only had a year or a few years left to live. Cancer patient. What are most of those dreams of people who are dying? Okay, that's a big question. That goes back to the last conversation we had. I am surprised

• 56:30Rahul Jandial?

  by how, by how valiant most cancer patients are. When I look at cancer patients in general, I would think most would fall apart, right? Cause it's, it's quite the word, it's quite the journey. But it's overwhelming, not all, some suffer, some handle it poorly, understandably. But they do well. They show up for their appointments. They're brave. They're, they dig down for strength and composure and they find meaning. Sometimes they are able to enjoy some things more knowing that the, the finish line is in view. They're not encumbered, as I mentioned last time, with, with fuss. Mm-hmm. Um, and those patients, when you talk to them,

• 57:13Rahul Jandial?

  they will report, again, not all, I'll make a simple statements here. But a lot of them report that the dreams they have are positive. Wow. They're helpful. They're not of being eaten alive. They're not of, what did I do to get this? Interesting. It's reconciling with lovers and family. It's having an expansive view of their life. The dreams in these cancer patients, and this is reported in other, other people who study this,

• 57:43Rahul Jandial?

  dreams comfort you toward the end of life. Wow. And so again,

• 57:49Rahul Jandial?

  the hyper emotional dream.

• 57:52Rahul Jandial?

  So if we have dreams that don't need interpretation because you're falling or you're flying and you're falling or you're giving a talk and you show up naked or it's end of life and it's comforting you. Or it's just, there's no emotional feeling to it. I believe if you are to go after a dream to really reflect upon, you wake up and that intense dreaming life gives you a little glimpse, a little peek at something. Don't waste that. And the one to choose is the one with a powerful central image and a powerful emotion.

• 58:33Rahul Jandial?

  And that to me, that makes sense with what's going on in the brain. Hyper emotional, hyper visual, right? I'm trying to make sense of it.

• 58:45Rahul Jandial?

  And just be aware that a lot of times it's symbolic. It's not gonna be literal, right? Because we talked about the executive network has dampened. And the hyper emotional, hyper visual brain, it's a storyteller. You want to extract the meaning out of the story, much like a good movie. It's not, hey, why am I, so for example, some veterans, when they're having trouble with a marriage, will have dreams of war. But they don't generally dream of war. So you have to be able to think about it and try to, I can't give you that answer. I don't know if you're a veteran or not. I think that's where it's hard to go online and say, I dreamt of a leaf or a bridge. What does it mean? No, it's different for, it's individual.

• 59:30Rahul Jandial?

  And you may not be able to figure it out, let alone somebody else. But if you have the luxury to remember your dream or through auto suggestion and journaling, you're trying to remember dreams more, which can happen.

• 59:47Rahul Jandial?

  Those are the ones to go after. The hyper emotional ones, the hyper visual ones. And just, just keep them here, you know? You got 15 things in front of you. You're focusing out where your executive network is on. But don't forget about that glimpse you got into your hyper emotional brain and what it produced about you, for you.

• 1:00:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that was fascinating. I feel like we're like 1% of all the things we could be talking about right now.

• 1:00:18Lewis Howes?

  Why do we, why do some people have lucid dreams? Why are lucid dreams important? And how can we enter lucid dreams faster?

• 1:00:28Rahul Jandial?

  Okay. That got two chapters out of nine, so that's a, that's a big one. Uh, just to, just to be clear what lucid dreams are. Um, I have not had them. But Aristotle wrote about them 3,000 years ago. So this is not like, it's not some current thing. Okay. What is new is the understanding, again, we return to your body's locked down. Executive network and logic are dampened. Emotions are up, visions up. Well, when your body is locked down, uh, in lucid dreaming, what happens is there's one part of the body that's still not locked down.

• 1:01:13Rahul Jandial?

  One of those eyeballs. So you, if, when you're waking up in the morning, it just happens that the eyeball, the muscles to the eyeballs are not locked down. And the muscles to the breathing, of course. Right? Cause you're still breathing in lucid dream or in dreaming in general. So what lucid dream experts and people looking into that have started just recently, after 3,000 years of many different cultures and books writing about, I felt I was awake in my dream.

• 1:01:40Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:41Rahul Jandial?

  And I could steer the direction of the dream. So not only were you an actor in the dream, you're the director.

• 1:01:48Lewis Howes?

  Interesting, right?

• 1:01:48Rahul Jandial?

  That's been written about for thousands of years.

• 1:01:50Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:01:51Rahul Jandial?

  But what they can do now is in these sleep laboratories, what, they put the stickers on their head to measure the electricity to prove they're asleep. Cause I could imagine like, you know, with some of my friends, they'd be like, I just, I woke up. How do you know you didn't just wake up?

• 1:02:06Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:02:07Rahul Jandial?

  How, how do you know you're awake in a dream? So you have to prove you're asleep through the whole time. Cause otherwise you might just wake up and say, yeah, I'm lucid dreaming and then fall back asleep. Right? So some essential questions to be asked. So the, the electrical measurements or the stickers on the head, the sleep spindles is a certain spike that proves you're asleep. You can't, you can't fake being asleep, uh, to like, you know, to the EKG of your mind, if you will, right?

• 1:02:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:35Rahul Jandial?

  And then, um,

• 1:02:38Rahul Jandial?

  You know, they started communicating with them. They'll say certain things and they'll, they come up with this technique called left, right, left, right. And they'll move their eyeballs left, right, left, right, answer simple questions. And that's progressed to some people being able to demonstrate when they enter, when lucidity arrives within their dream, they will signal to the people outstanding outside the window. And so there are these back and forth experiments going on. So far as even basic things like, oh, what's two plus two? And they'll try to do a left, right, left, right, four times. And somebody might say, well, I thought you can do math. But that's part of the magic and the mystery of lucid dreaming is that the executive network

• 1:03:23Rahul Jandial?

  is coming back online a little bit. So for that awareness to happen inside your dream, proven by sleep spindles on a EKG, EEG you can't fake. When the awareness comes back, that primer we're talking about, the executive network comes back too. So they can do a little bit of basic math.

• 1:03:42Lewis Howes?

  So it's like, when you talked about in the beginning, what is it called? Like?

• 1:03:45Rahul Jandial?

  Forty-nine, fifty-one.

• 1:03:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so where is that? When the lucid dreaming is happening, what is happening? Is it kind of rocking back and forth like this constantly? Or is it one side and then it goes back?

• 1:03:55Rahul Jandial?

  That's a good question. It's fragile. That's a very good question. So you've, you've gone from dreaming brain, you've gone from waking brain to dreaming brain. And what happens is a little bit of the waking brain returns, but it little flourishes. They report, it's not like, hey, I'm lucid dreaming. I got ninety minutes. Let's, let's ride this. I get it. Like, I just, you know, somebody might be able to, but I wanna, I wanna leave you with the fascination like, these overlap states, which are really fascinating, sleep entry, sleep exit, a bit of awareness returning within proven sleep, that it's a, that it is something, that it's something, it's something fragile, it's something fleeting.

• 1:04:40Rahul Jandial?

  Think of like birds and murmurations and aurora borealis, we're not talking about. And that, that, this also the lesson for people who are listening is, stop thinking that your brain is wires and on and off. Think of it as, think of it as dreaming brain, waking brain, waking brain, dreaming brain. Think of it as executive network mostly interacting here. A little bit of imagination network returning because I'm daydreaming while we're talking. A little bit of blend, right? Well, lucid dreaming is coming to awareness that you're dreaming within your dream. And for some people, being able to steer the content of their dream.

• 1:05:18Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 1:05:19Rahul Jandial?

  Stuff like Christopher Nolan likes to talk about in his movies and stuff like that. But what I'm here to tell you is it exists. They have proven that it exists. I'm not saying you lucid dream. I have not. Aristotle wrote about it, but they have proven with responses from preserved eyeball movements, documentation that that person is asleep with the electricity of sleep. That they have been able to communicate with people who are in dreams.

• 1:05:47Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy that they can steer their dreams.

• 1:05:49Rahul Jandial?

  That's what they report.

• 1:05:50Lewis Howes?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:05:51Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah. But if you step back a little bit and stop thinking of as the brain on off, wired, hardwired, not, if you start to think of it as states, as tides, right? As flows, as seasons, and every night there's the waking brain and dreaming brain and there's sleep entry and there's sleep exit and sometimes lucidity returns. It starts to make sense of a lot of the stuff I've been seeing in the hospital.

• 1:06:16Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:06:17Rahul Jandial?

  Well, I mean, people wake up from anesthesia, they're supposed to, people are awake during, they communicate in anesthesia during our awake brain surgery.

• 1:06:24Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:06:24Rahul Jandial?

  And people wake up and they're dreaming gnarly stuff. You can give people certain medicines and they have more lucid dreaming, something based on acetaminophen. The reports of lucid dreaming go up with galantamine. So what that tells me, not to get too medically about it, is that when you mess with pills and drugs and the dreams change, like this is a biological process.

• 1:06:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:06:46Rahul Jandial?

  It's not coming from the heavens. It's coming from our brain.

• 1:06:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:06:50Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:51Lewis Howes?

  Well, speaking of the heavens, when we dream.

• 1:06:55Lewis Howes?

  Are our dreams in our brain? Or in our minds? And is our mind on this earth and planet?

• 1:07:04Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Lewis Howes?

  Or is it in another realm?

• 1:07:07Rahul Jandial?

  Big stuff, Matt. We could be like around a fire 500 years ago.

• 1:07:12Lewis Howes?

  3am, you know?

• 1:07:13Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah, or yeah. I mean, that's why this is so special for me is that.

• 1:07:18Lewis Howes?

  And you may not have the answers.

• 1:07:19Rahul Jandial?

  No, I mean, I have, I have some direction.

• 1:07:23Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:07:23Rahul Jandial?

  To those questions. I mean, if somebody told, just the fact that you asked me that question means like I'm doing alright, you know? No, but it's, it's, I am fortunate to have.

• 1:07:36Rahul Jandial?

  People ask me just to weigh in on that. And what I'm trying to do is build it on science, but bring it to you in a way where you can go home and talk to your family about it.

• 1:07:45Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:07:45Rahul Jandial?

  Like that's.

• 1:07:46Lewis Howes?

  So what is your thoughts on that?

• 1:07:48Rahul Jandial?

  So the first thing is the brain and mind thing can't be separated. It's not like software hardware. The brain, that's a whole big topic, but the, the mind is an emergent phenomena that emerge, like comes from, from the brain. One example would be like, we see it, the crystals form, we see an inner organic matter, right? It's a self organizing thing. Termites can make mounds. Stadiums with a roar outside, right? Is more than the 80,000 individuals inside. That roar is my best way of understanding what 100 billion neurons do. They, the mind comes from it.

• 1:08:25Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:08:25Rahul Jandial?

  Now, the, what we think can go back and shape the brain.

• 1:08:30Rahul Jandial?

  So it's a reciprocal interaction. Our habits can shape the brain.

• 1:08:35Rahul Jandial?

  Our brain creates the habits. So the brain mind, I don't think you can really separate it out. The ultimate gift of the human mind, I think, is dreaming. Love and all those things, yes, but the process of dreaming. So let's, let's for one second say we're talking about brain and mind as one thing. Okay, we'll just call it brain slash mind.

• 1:08:56Rahul Jandial?

  And I was reading about this.

• 1:08:59Rahul Jandial?

  Oh, this is, this is great. Here's a story. Of course, they had to come from the heavens till about, our understanding till about 100 years ago. You plop down. You're not doing anything. And then you wake up and whether you tell somebody or not, you're like, man. I was on fire last night, my thoughts.

• 1:09:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:09:19Rahul Jandial?

  So if you're asleep and you're hibernating or you're deactivated or whatever the phrase was. It had to come from something external. How, it's in there. How could inactive flesh of the brain, the resting brain, the brain doesn't rest at night. Brain doesn't rest, the brain rests when you're dead.

• 1:09:38Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:09:40Rahul Jandial?

  There's no, there's no, like, like I said, the electricity in sleep is so similar to the electricity during waking, they call it paradoxical sleep. Like, you're, you're on when you're asleep, okay? So, but they didn't know that, nobody could know that until. And so this is a great story. I don't think it's been told, but it's the, it's the story that I've come to understand.

• 1:10:05Rahul Jandial?

  So that makes sense, it had to come from something outside of us. You're out cold. And you're thinking that kind of stuff? Monsters and pterodactyls and erotic dreams and nightmares? Okay, so that came from the heavens or the gods, they're omens. But what happened was somebody about 100 years ago did a surgery for a brain tumor, then there was a physician there and they had just figured out at that time.

• 1:10:30Rahul Jandial?

  That you could put a, a wire wasn't just for sending electricity, it was for measuring it. Right, so when you put a sticker on your heart and you know the electricity of a heart, right? It's from the nerves on the surface of the heart, it's not from the muscle.

• 1:10:42Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:10:42Rahul Jandial?

  It's, EKG is the measurement of the electricity in the nerves on top of your heart. Okay, when we shock you to wake, recharge your heart, we're just shocking the three nerves, not the muscle. Muscle just listens. Well, what if you put 96 stickers on your brain, you would get a measurement, that's called EEG, okay? What he did was he put a sticker right on top of the hole. Skull had a hole, but the stitch work, the flesh was covered, we do that still sometimes, but. In that area where there was no skull, about the size of a coin, he put a little sticker on there, a little wire.

• 1:11:16Lewis Howes?

  On the brain?

• 1:11:17Rahul Jandial?

  No, no.

• 1:11:17Lewis Howes?

  Or just on the skull?

• 1:11:18Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Lewis Howes?

  But there was a hole?

• 1:11:19Rahul Jandial?

  Surgeons do it on the brain, but.

• 1:11:21Lewis Howes?

  There was a hole, so.

• 1:11:22Rahul Jandial?

  And healed flesh. And put it just on top of the flesh with the hole underneath. He thought he's gonna get better readout, I guess, right? The hole, that would be a direct line to the brain. Yes. But not touching the brain. Well said. Got it. And then he got, he got squiggles. And that was like, and that was where the EEG was invented about a hundred years ago. Wow. The interesting part was, when they all left the room or whatever they were doing, and the person fell asleep, nobody paid attention to it, but the squiggles were happening at night.

• 1:11:52Rahul Jandial?

  It wasn't squiggles during the day, and a flat line. Right. At night. So somebody could have said at that point, like, wait a second, that flesh is not inactive.

• 1:12:03Rahul Jandial?

  Then, sixty years ago, somebody in Montreal, Dr. Penfield, he was, uh...

• 1:12:11Rahul Jandial?

  So now he's numbing up the scalp, laying it open, patient is on relaxing medications, but not on a machine, drills the hole, like ice fishing, takes it off, sees the covering of the brain, called the dura, incises it, the surface of the brain is there, and then they lighten up her medication. And he's got like a little fountain pen that delivers a little electricity. Uh huh. And he's mapping it. And he's trying to find the thing. The patient has seizures, says, before the seizure, I always get this feeling, this aura. He thinks if he can find where that feeling originates, dissect out a little bit of that tissue, he can break the seizures. And he ended up being right. That's a whole massive field now. Imagine, major centers around the world.

• 1:12:56Rahul Jandial?

  Wow. Seizure surgery. But at some times, when he would zap, because he's marking, you know, the patient reports desire.

• 1:13:08Rahul Jandial?

  And one patient reported a nightmare, a recurrent nightmare that they had been having. Interesting. You zap the surface of the brain with a little faint electricity. The brain doesn't have nerve endings of its own, so you can touch it, you wouldn't know. Certainly. Wouldn't feel it. When you... Yeah, not you, but this is known, and I've done the surgeries, this is established stuff. Awake brain surgery, you can cut the brain, you don't... You won't feel the pain? No. You only, it only feels through its tentacles.

• 1:13:33Lewis Howes?

  So when you're doing an awake brain surgery.

• 1:13:36Rahul Jandial?

  Only, only the scalp feels it, but we numb it up.

• 1:13:38Lewis Howes?

  The patient is awake and you're in there and they can talk to you.

• 1:13:41Rahul Jandial?

  And you can dissect the brain and they don't feel a thing.

• 1:13:43Lewis Howes?

  Is this the one where, I mean, you see the videos of like, I guess.

• 1:13:46Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah, with a guy playing guitar.

• 1:13:47Lewis Howes?

  Violin or guitar where it's like, okay, you know, connecting is so crazy.

• 1:13:51Rahul Jandial?

  But when he was mapping it, a nightmare, which is a type of dream, was returned and he took, he took the pen off. Nightmare broke.

• 1:14:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:14:02Rahul Jandial?

  At that moment, we knew that dreams, the only thing I can say with certainty today is dreams come from our brain. They do not come from the heavens.

• 1:14:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:14:11Rahul Jandial?

  That I can say with certainty. Everything else, this has just been a fascinating.

• 1:14:16Lewis Howes?

  Fascinating ride.

• 1:14:17Rahul Jandial?

  It's been, and the ride will continue, you know, but that, that we can say with certain. Dreams are an electrical process of the human brain.

• 1:14:26Lewis Howes?

  When you've done brain surgeries, um, have you noticed people, you know, six months later saying, I used to have this type of dream and now those are gone, or I have these different dreams now after brain surgery?

• 1:14:39Rahul Jandial?

  That's a good, that's a good question. Um, a lot of dreaming changes. Very good question. Uh, and I've tried to keep the medical world out of it, even though it informs dreaming quite a bit. But the patterns I saw from like drug, drug dreams, anesthetic dreams are just, I couldn't find a way. And it's also again, to let you know, like, if it didn't fit, if there wasn't a, if it wasn't gonna be a thoughtful, um, love letter to dreams and dreaming, I'll tell you, and I'll tell you, I can't, the, the pattern of dreams that happened with anesthetics and stuff. I can't say, aha, this one causes this and this could mean, there's no, I can't find meaning in it. It's that wild.

• 1:15:24Rahul Jandial?

  The ones that you're seeing here, I feel good about.

• 1:15:28Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:15:28Rahul Jandial?

  But patients with brain injury, brain surgery, on medications, on steroids for swelling, their dreams change completely. There's a brand new dream life. And what it says to me is, again, dreams come from the brain. If you take a pill that goes in your blood to your brain.

• 1:15:49Lewis Howes?

  Chemicals change, which create different dreams.

• 1:15:52Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:53Rahul Jandial?

  That's yet another example of dreams must come.

• 1:15:58Rahul Jandial?

  From the brain.

• 1:15:59Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Yeah. Not from some other realm.

• 1:16:02Rahul Jandial?

  Right.

• 1:16:02Lewis Howes?

  What about the pineal gland?

• 1:16:06Rahul Jandial?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:06Lewis Howes?

  You hear a lot of this in, you know, ancient texts and mystics and meditators and yogis talking about the pineal gland. Like the power of the pineal gland to activate the mind and the brain and create more powerful visions and.

• 1:16:24Rahul Jandial?

  And I'm happy to get into all of these things, like aura is a thing, A U R A, people look it up. That's a, that's a hunch. So I'm not, I think a lot of this stuff is real. I just think it's, it's muddy and it's easy to manipulate.

• 1:16:38Lewis Howes?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 1:16:39Rahul Jandial?

  Be careful. So, um, the pineal gland has been, you know, because of its location, people thought it's the mind's eye. The philosophers have commented about it. What I can tell you is.

• 1:16:55Lewis Howes?

  As a brain surgeon, what is, what is it for you?

• 1:16:57Rahul Jandial?

  I can take it out and the person is exactly the same.

• 1:17:00Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:17:00Rahul Jandial?

  Mm hmm. Pineal gland surgery, pine, pine cytomas, pine.

• 1:17:03Lewis Howes?

  Have you ever taken one out?

• 1:17:04Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Lewis Howes?

  You've taken.

• 1:17:05Rahul Jandial?

  It's part of neurosurgery.

• 1:17:06Lewis Howes?

  You've taken one out of her?

• 1:17:07Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah. You come in through the back here. It sits between lobes. So people can look that up is, um, pineal gland or, it's, it's a gland, whether it's got cancer in it or whether it's just a cyst, non-cancerous, but growing and pushing. Whether it's normal pineal or abnormal, when you remove it, they have almost no significant consequences.

• 1:17:30Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:17:31Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah. And, and the melatonin is bottomed out and they still sleep okay. So I'm not here to, I'm not here to go against the whole world of things that are out there. But again, if we're having a conversation, you come into my house, we're, we're hanging out, we're taking a walk. And you asked me that question. I'm trying to come to you both with things I can't make sense of and aesthetic dreams. Pneum gland, no, they're being removed across the world. And there isn't the pituitary gland. If you take that out, you gotta take a bunch of hormones and medicine. That's a big deal.

• 1:18:07Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:07Rahul Jandial?

  The pineal gland, the ones that has been giving sort of this transcendent value, that comes out and goes in the canister and

• 1:18:15Lewis Howes?

  It's fine.

• 1:18:16Rahul Jandial?

  And the next day, we don't change the stuff the patient's on. They don't need some replacement thing. And it makes melatonin. And I wrote about it in my last book, when the melatonin drops to zero or nothing, they're still sleeping all right.

• 1:18:31Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:18:32Rahul Jandial?

  I'm not gonna say don't take melatonin or take melatonin. We're not doing health advice. I mean, I don't mean like we can't go there, but

• 1:18:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:39Rahul Jandial?

  Where I'm at is concepts, exploration.

• 1:18:42Lewis Howes?

  And what about, and does the pineal gland impact dreams or dreaming? Do you know, after you remove it, do people still dream?

• 1:18:50Rahul Jandial?

  It doesn't have those kind of connections.

• 1:18:51Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:52Rahul Jandial?

  Back to the dreaming, when I talk to you about like that the brain was laid flat and different continents and countries are up. The imagination network liberated in the dreaming brain. Different countries and continents and oceans are up for the executive network trying to get the day's work done. The pineal is like, it's irrelevant in that map of things that come up when you sleep.

• 1:19:17Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 1:19:17Rahul Jandial?

  That thing that goes 51% when you sleep, pineal gland is in it. Not even a bench warmer.

• 1:19:24Lewis Howes?

  What's the, what's the primary purpose of the pineal gland?

• 1:19:27Rahul Jandial?

  We don't think it has a primary purpose.

• 1:19:29Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:19:29Rahul Jandial?

  Well, we can look it up, but there are parts of the body, it's like the appendix of the brain. We can remove it and it doesn't change much.

• 1:19:37Lewis Howes?

  People still live long lives.

• 1:19:38Rahul Jandial?

  Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. You don't have to

• 1:19:41Lewis Howes?

  What part of the, what part of the brain, if you remove it, is gonna be, you're not gonna be able to reform the same way?

• 1:19:48Rahul Jandial?

  Well, okay, it's a bigger concept, so.

• 1:19:50Lewis Howes?

  And how much of the brain can you still have?

• 1:19:53Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Lewis Howes?

  Can you, can you remove or have left to still live a great life?

• 1:19:58Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah, so let's take that, that's an interesting question that when you If you think of the brain laid flat as a

• 1:20:05Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:20:06Rahul Jandial?

  As different continents and countries, right? It's like a mosaic, it's like a puzzle.

• 1:20:10Lewis Howes?

  If you cut out half of the continent.

• 1:20:12Rahul Jandial?

  Well, we do surgeries in children where we remove half the brain, hemispherectomy.

• 1:20:16Lewis Howes?

  Half, half the brain.

• 1:20:18Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah, not the reptilian and not the emotional instinct, but half the hemisphere, the two walnut. So what, what that points to is this, it's what we call some areas, you bump into it with a suction at 20, 20, 20x. And it leads to a change. Some areas, nail gun injuries happen and you take out that part of the brain. You know, like carp, like, you know, like framers that use the

• 1:20:49Lewis Howes?

  Nail guns.

• 1:20:49Rahul Jandial?

  Pneumatic nail guns and when they kick up a little higher, they'll spray a nail through the thin floor of the

• 1:20:55Lewis Howes?

  Hair.

• 1:20:55Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah, this part of neurosurgery is taking out, it's called penetrating trauma. Depending on where it goes, they can handle a nail in one front of lobe or the other. But hitting both front of lobes, it changes a person. So some areas have redundancy, other areas can't take a joke. Some areas, you could take one occipital lobe and you basically just lose your rear view mirror. You don't lose sight, but if you take both or injure both, so there's, that's what neurosurgery is about. Is knowing what you can go through, what to expect in the person waking up after you do that.

• 1:21:28Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:21:29Rahul Jandial?

  That's neurosurgery, but it also informs that we have to stop looking at the brain as some homogenous thing. That you return to like a slice through and you'll see all different shapes in there. It's not like, it's not like cake, it's not like flan.

• 1:21:43Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:21:43Rahul Jandial?

  Like liver, it looks the same.

• 1:21:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, this is

• 1:21:46Rahul Jandial?

  Brain is

• 1:21:47Lewis Howes?

  Diverse.

• 1:21:48Rahul Jandial?

  Oh, yeah. Structures and connections in there is beautiful.

• 1:21:50Lewis Howes?

  So, I mean, how many people have you seen have a nail gun like in their brain?

• 1:21:54Rahul Jandial?

  Six.

• 1:21:55Lewis Howes?

  Six?

• 1:21:56Rahul Jandial?

  When I was training, yeah.

• 1:21:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:21:57Rahul Jandial?

  Gunshot wounds, nail gun injuries.

• 1:22:01Rahul Jandial?

  Fights, you know, but so you learn with trauma. What parts of the brain can handle trauma?

• 1:22:06Lewis Howes?

  Because you're not doing those types of surgeries. You're doing cancer removal.

• 1:22:09Rahul Jandial?

  Right, but that informs me if I'm getting to a deeper tumor. And it's inside and it's got a normal brain on the outside. That has informed me along with mapping. What is the route that I can get to the tumor?

• 1:22:22Lewis Howes?

  This is fascinating.

• 1:22:23Rahul Jandial?

  But not injure the person. That's that's neurosurgery. It's not the it's not the chopsticks in a jar like the tech, the hands. It requires skill. But there's something more to it that I love. And the stories from the patients. It informed the last decade and a half. And still are informing this book. And so it's the patient stories and the neuroscience on top of the nail gun. That's what we opened with. Look, I'm trying to come at you with like Petri dish stuff. Nail gun stuff.

• 1:22:51Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:22:52Rahul Jandial?

  Heavens, networks. I'm trying to bring it all in. Um, to to have done a real proper look at dreams and dreaming.

• 1:23:02Lewis Howes?

  This is why you dream. Uh, Dr. Rahul, this is, this is, this is powerful. I want to do a two part with you.

• 1:23:08Rahul Jandial?

  Okay.

• 1:23:08Lewis Howes?

  Because I feel like there's so many more questions I want to dive into that we. We've gone like 5% of what I want to talk about. Um, but I want people to get this book because I think this would be a great. Baseline for you to understand a lot more about the neuroscience. And the remarkable meaning behind your dreams, understanding your dreams better. And having a better roadmap for navigating your dreams for the future. But I'd love to have you come back on and do part two of this. I think it'd be really powerful.

• 1:23:37Rahul Jandial?

  Well, I think, you know, you, you, um. You said something really important there that. In trying to understand dreams and dreaming, I understood myself better. In trying to, if you read this book. And you find something interesting.

• 1:23:55Rahul Jandial?

  Learning more about your brain and mind will inform your waking life.

• 1:24:00Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:24:00Rahul Jandial?

  So then you'll, then when people say the brain is this, you'll say, wait a second. Cause you're gonna walk away learning about neuroscience. You're gonna walk away learning about art and literature, nightmares, erotic dreams. And more importantly, um, you know, for me, it was, it's sort of my, um, it's my gift.

• 1:24:21Rahul Jandial?

  This is my legacy that.

• 1:24:22Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:24:24Rahul Jandial?

  Somebody tried to put together something that like, how is somebody gonna do, you know, take a proper shot at this? And, uh, I'm very happy with, uh, the honesty there. And you'll see phrases like, could it be? I wonder, I'm tempted to speculate. So I'm not just telling you, I'm taking you through how I'm thinking. And so.

• 1:24:45Lewis Howes?

  Well, I mean, it's, how long have you been a brain surgeon for now?

• 1:24:48Rahul Jandial?

  Uh, wow, 25 years.

• 1:24:50Lewis Howes?

  25 years. And what it sounds like is you've had 25 years plus your residency. So call it 30 plus years of researching the brain and as a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind.

• 1:25:04Lewis Howes?

  When you first came on, you talked about the brain as kind of these waves and patterns.

• 1:25:08Rahul Jandial?

  Brain waves.

• 1:25:09Lewis Howes?

  I remember you talking about like, uh, like birds moving in waves and patterns.

• 1:25:15Rahul Jandial?

  The electricity does move like that. It's not on off.

• 1:25:17Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:18Rahul Jandial?

  It's not a switch.

• 1:25:19Lewis Howes?

  And then to me, it sounds like, you know, last 30 years, you've been able to interpret these waves and patterns through all the different operations you've done through the different case studies you've seen of people coming in before and after, and now deepening your research in understanding the brain, the mind with dreaming. And so I'm so excited for people to get this book. This is why you dream. And I'm excited to dive in more with you. I think we gotta do probably multiple episodes on this because I'm fascinated by this. I wanna know more about how also, you know, the health benefits of dreaming, how much we should be sleeping to maximize our dreams and our optimal health. Uh, and so many other questions around this.

• 1:26:01Lewis Howes?

  If you guys have a question on dreams, leave a question below, uh, and we'll try to get to that in our next episode in the future, whenever we can get you back on.

• 1:26:11Rahul Jandial?

  Pleasure.

• 1:26:11Lewis Howes?

  Um, but Rahul, this has been super inspiring. How can we, how can we get a copy? How can we support you? And, um, what else can we do to support this?

• 1:26:21Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah, I'm feeling good about it and, um, You know, I think the usual things, where to get a copy on Amazon or where the publishers are just doing a massive thing. They sold it. It's already picked up in 22 translations.

• 1:26:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow, it's amazing.

• 1:26:34Rahul Jandial?

  They believe in it. And they've been reading this material. And the two things that really touched me were, this can never be explained. Like, you know, because I'm a surgeon. I want answers. I want to fix. But they're like, this can, it's dreaming, Rahul. It'll never be fully explained. We want to know what you think. And pull from everything you've lived through.

• 1:26:59Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 1:27:00Rahul Jandial?

  And then the New York publisher just was like this email. And just the first sentence just took my breath away a little bit. There was, they just put, this book is important.

• 1:27:11Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:27:12Rahul Jandial?

  Period. I was like,

• 1:27:13Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:27:14Rahul Jandial?

  It was a mic drop moment for me.

• 1:27:15Lewis Howes?

  I'm excited for this. Where are we, where are you spending most of your time online? Should we follow you on social media, your website?

• 1:27:21Rahul Jandial?

  Instagram, Dr. John Dill, but you know, I'm an old timer man.

• 1:27:25Lewis Howes?

  Dr. John Dill. You're young old timer, right? You're still young. Do you have a website also, though?

• 1:27:31Rahul Jandial?

  No, but you know, I mean,

• 1:27:34Lewis Howes?

  Instagram.

• 1:27:34Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Lewis Howes?

  Instagram.

• 1:27:35Rahul Jandial?

  Instagram.

• 1:27:36Lewis Howes?

  Follow you there and get the book. This is going to be powerful. For anyone that you know in your life who maybe talks about dreams, they're going to be fascinated by this as well. So get a couple of copies, give it to a friend. Again, Rahul, I'm very excited about this. This is why you dream. Make sure you guys get a copy. Appreciate you very much for being on and for part one of hopefully many on this topic, because I'm, there's so many more follow up questions I have. But I want to let people start with this first, so.

• 1:28:06Rahul Jandial?

  We could take each chapter deeper.

• 1:28:07Lewis Howes?

  Well, let's do it. I appreciate you being here. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review. On Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately

• 1:28:47Lewis Howes?

  that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.