Neurosurgeon Breaks Down the Science of Dreaming, The One Dream That Predicts The Future, How to Lucid Dream, and The Incredible Things Your Brain Does As You Die

What if your dreams could predict disease, unlock creativity, reveal hidden trauma—and even be controlled? Dr. Rahul Jandial, MD, PhD (dual-trained neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, founder of the Jandial Lab at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles, and bestselling author of This is Why You Dream) takes you inside the wild, cutting-edge world of dream neuroscience and the sleeping brain. Discover how this top brain surgeon can create a memory of a nightmare during awake brain surgery, what the brain does just before death, and how dream patterns may predict neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease. Learn why erotic dreams occur, how lucid dreaming can enhance your waking life, what happens during sleep paralysis, and why some people don’t remember their dreams—plus expert sleep tips to improve dream recall. Dr. Jandial also explores the deep links between trauma and nightmares, depression, and the eerie science of precognitive dreams and near-death experiences (NDEs). From the universal themes of falling and flying dreams to the latest on how AI might already be hacking your dreams, this is everything your brain’s doing while you sleep—and why it matters more than ever. Dr. Rahul Jandial's book, THIS IS WHY YOU DREAM: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735627/this-is-why-you-dream-by-rahul-jandial-md-phd/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Mayim Bialik?

  Why do we dream?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Dreaming is high-intensity training for creativity and imagination and emotion. There's mystery and magic to it, and it's a sacred space. If dreams are good for us, why do we have nightmares? We are inheriting our thinking and dream processes from our ancestors. When children dream of animals, they tend to dream of beasts, not puppies. Nightmares could be a warning sign for mental health issues. They're linked to depression, they're linked to suicide. We may have gotten it wrong, thinking death is when the heart stops beating. Your brain dies a few minutes after your heart dies. Death is electrical silencing of brain activity. The heart is stopped, but for three minutes after, there's an explosion of brain activity. It doesn't go out in a whimper.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  The last thing that the brain does is just launch all the neurotransmitters, all the electricity. Some people who are resuscitated say, "I saw my whole life story." It's consistent.

• 0:55Mayim Bialik?

  Or near-death experiences.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Those electrical patterns are like wild dreams. So maybe death is one last dream. There is one dream, or dream pattern, that predicts the future, and that's...

• 1:12Mayim Bialik?

  Before we dive into today's episode, I'm gonna ask you to do something very quick, very easy, but super helpful. I'm gonna ask you to hit the subscribe button. You see it? Go get it. Hit the subscribe button. It just takes a second, but it means a lot to us. You have probably noticed from all of the comments that we get, many people find that listening to MBB regularly is helping them feel happier, healthier, more inspired. And you know what? That actually is why we are doing this. It makes my heart swell to hear that so many of you are feeling inspired. So subscribing to this show, whether you're listening on YouTube, or whether you're

• 1:54Mayim Bialik?

  listening to it through a podcast app, it's the easiest way to ensure that you will never miss an episode. So we don't want you to miss a single one, and you don't want to miss a single one. So you'll get notified as soon as a new episode drops. All you have to do is subscribe. And share this episode with someone if you enjoy it. We're trying to spread the word. Help us do that. The best way to support our show is by subscribing, so do it now. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you. Let's get back to the good stuff. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 2:24Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 2:25Mayim Bialik?

  Welcome to our Breakdown.

• 2:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Jumped on my line there. We're so excited.

• 2:29Mayim Bialik?

  We're very excited because we're gonna find out what the heck is happening when our eyes close and it's night-night time.

• 2:39Jonathan Cohen?

  It turns out a lot more than we expected.

• 2:42Mayim Bialik?

  We used to think we understood what was going on in sleep and in dreams, but the science has changed so much and so rapidly. We're gonna be talking to Rahul Jandial. He's an MD, PhD, he's a neurosurgeon and a neuroscientist, and he wrote "This Is Why You Dream", and it's all about the fascinating science behind what we're dreaming, the cultural similarities of people's dreams, people's nightmares, what's the function of a nightmare? What's up with erotic dreams? Everybody wants to know. And what are the things that we can do to help us harness the power of lucid dreaming? And how can it impact our waking life?

• 3:24Jonathan Cohen?

  We're gonna talk about the imagination network and the executive functioning network, and how those interplay between our waking life and our sleep life.

• 3:34Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Jandial has a fascinating perspective as someone who literally operates on brains, holds people's lives in his hand, and is gonna describe for us how he can literally create a memory of a nightmare during open-brain surgery.

• 3:51Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, it's absolutely fascinating. We also get a little esoteric. We bring him into the MBB spiritual world. We talk about what the brain does right before it dies, and I was just like, my jaw was on the floor for that. You may have seen him other places before, but you've actually never seen him like you're about to.

• 4:11Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Jandial oversees the Jandial Lab at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles. He also has an unbelievable nonprofit, the International Neurosurgical Children's Association, where he performs and teaches brain surgery in underserved hospitals in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. He's the author of several books, including "Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon" and "Life On A Knife's Edge", but today we're gonna be talking about "This Is Why You Dream". Let's welcome to the Breakdown Rahul Jandial.

• 4:43Mayim Bialik?

  We talk a lot about dreams. It's something we talk a ton about. And this is why you dream was very helpful. And we wanted you to sort of give us the primer, first of all. Why do we dream?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Massive question, right? I mean, who should be given the opportunity to even answer that question? But my hypothesis, my understanding is based on neuroscience that's only been available for the last 20, 30 years. So of course, you trained in it. I'm 52, that was my training. And so the prior theories were just shots in the dark. Like, oh, it's threat training. Oh, it's nocturnal therapist. But what I found is that modern neuroscience shows that in a 24-hour cycle, our brain is never off. So when we sleep, you're not resting. Your brain is not resting.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  It's not like a computer screen that turns off. You click the keyboard and pops back on. So what's happening in that 24-hour cycle is you have like the waking brain and the sleep dreaming brain. And the metabolic activity, the glucose being used, the electricity that's being churned out by those neurons is burning hot when you sleep and dream. And so that speaks to something important must be happening. Like, you're not going to hold on to that capacity through evolution if it's not important. So then the idea comes, well, what? How is that dreaming brain different than the waking brain? And what you find in the waking brain is the executive networks tend to reign and dominate things. In fancy words, but dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex

• 6:28Speaker 01

  controls the executive networks and it keeps us, you know, able to drive on traffic and on the subway. And that's important. That area is dampened. Nothing's ever off in the dreaming brain. And other areas like the imagination network or the limbic system are liberated. So if the dreaming brain is a hyper-visual, hyper-imaginative state, my idea is the brain needs to let that loose to maintain that capacity. So use it or lose it. So the brain is saying, we need a safe space to let this imagination, to let this, you know, desire, to let this visual sort of adventures and awkward social situations happen in a safe space. Otherwise, we'll lose that, lose that complexity.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So my idea is, to put it briefly, is dreaming is high intensity training for creativity and imagination and emotion, based on the way the brain is different in those two states.

• 7:23Mayim Bialik?

  Why are there nightmares? Meaning, if that's the place for me to, to play and have imagination and creativity, why are so many people plagued by a high level of negative intensity with dreams?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Come on, if dreams are good for us, why we have nightmares? That's, that's a straight up question. I think it's an important one. The way I've, and I made that chapter too, because I wanted to get in front of it.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  What we find with nightmares, so now, now you can go back like 50 years or 100 years, and now some of the stories start even with like Aristotle writing about lucid dreaming. So those are surveys, questionnaires, people are logging things for centuries. And then there are measurements. We went and talked about the dreaming brain, and that was more of things we can measure, and I try to link the ideas. Nightmares arrive for children, no matter how healthy the upbringing. These are called longitudinal studies. Like, they had families say, here's our four year old, and ask them about dreaming until they're like 24 years old. And so you get an idea of how dream, dream patterns arrive at which age.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And every kid has, every kid has a nightmare. And they tend to arrive at age four, five, six, seven, something like that. So as far as pediatric nightmares, they arrive and almost overwhelmingly, they, they, they go away. Kids don't really have nightmare disorders. So the best way I've come to understand nightmares is to break them into two categories. Pediatric nightmares that arrive for healthy kids, and then latent life nightmares that sometimes pop up once in a while. Or more concerningly, like after trauma or PTSD, they become recurrent. And those are some of the, those nightmares, I think, have to be understood to be a little bit different.

• 9:08Mayim Bialik?

  This guy.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  She's pointing to you.

• 9:11Jonathan Cohen?

  How many fingers are pointing back?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  That's funny. But tho- tho- so tho- those are two separate themes for nightmares.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  And adults, I think nightmares could be a warning sign. If you look at the pattern of nightmares, not the occasional nightmare. But what we call progressive, like a headache, not a big deal. A headache the next day, worse, worse, stronger. Progressive nightmares could be a warning sign for mental health issues. They're linked to, that doesn't mean they're causing suicide, but they're linked to depression, they're linked to suicide. So I, I see them as adults, maybe a vital sign rather than blood pressure and pain and temperature. And then I see them in, in children and children, it's all hypothetical, but the, they happen to come at the same time as the cultivation of theory of mind. So just like we learn to walk and talk, uh, we, we also are, the mind is being cultivated, right?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  It starts to sense, get a sense of self versus other. And then it becomes, you know, then it develops sexual, um, features. And then, and then there's adolescence, the flesh looks the same, but the mind is going through a lot of changes. There has to be something, a universal cognitive feature, like nightmares arriving at age four, five, six in every kid. It's, it's got to be cultivating or fine tuning the, the mind aspect, uh, more so than the brain. So those are, that's the sort of the two ways I think about it.

• 10:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Have there been links between children who are under some sort of increased stress with frequency of nightmare?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  I, I don't have a specific answer for that. And so the, uh, the surveys on children are limited. Uh, but I think that's a question that I asked originally, like, there was this terrible thing, like in, I don't know if it's Belarus, where the kids weren't picked up in orphanages. And then they've scanned their brains and it was like, they were smoother. Um, there was a lack of those folds that allow surface area to develop. The same way, I was like, well, kids who've had a harder life must maybe they have more nightmares. And I didn't find that as an obvious link.

• 11:15Mayim Bialik?

  But you talk about trauma and the connection between trauma and sleep, which I thought was really interesting. Because to me, it's a little bit of an opening. You talk so much about how what happens at night is in many cases a reflection of also what your brain is working on in the day. So if you're working on a lot of trauma or you're talking about neglect, right? Like constitutional neglect. It wouldn't surprise me that that sort of makes its way into the nightmare world as well, or the sleep world.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I, yeah, so just to reverse, like, you can't, the waking, the waking mind experiences and memory are of course feeding the dreaming mind. That goes way to the concept of like, can you interpret dreams? It's like, does a basket mean the same thing for all of us? It's hard, given that we're always adding our own imagination, our own memory into it. But yes, it seems reasonable that people who are struggling that that would be reflected in some way in their dreams. I, I just didn't find a lot of, you can't actually, you can't actually search like some of these things. It's all like tangential, like imagination and trauma on kids. And so you're, it was really like hunting for links because there is no, I don't think so, but there isn't like a professor of dream science.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  It's not really a science. It had to pull from trauma, imagination, perception. But your point is well taken.

• 12:32Mayim Bialik?

  I'm, I was just thinking, like, I've been to a lot of doctors. I've been to a lot of therapists, right? No one ever says, how are you, like, what are you dreaming about? Or what is your dream life like? Like, how many hours are you sleeping a night, right? The psychiatrists love to ask that. And I'm like, well, what kind of five hours do you want me to describe to you? You know?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 12:55Jonathan Cohen?

  We're going to get into dream interpretation later because I think there's a fascinating exploration about how we assign personal meaning that you explain. But let's step back a little bit and get some of the overview in terms of, can you talk a little bit about this idea of smoothness that you just mentioned in brain structure? Because I think a lot of people don't quite understand that, myself included. And then talk about, you know, the, the evidence that you saw of dreams being in the brain through awake surgeries.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Ooh, okay. So first of all, thank you. I I try to be clear about measurements, surveys. I'm not disparaging anybody or any approach. But sometimes it's too easy to say the is the brain does this or this is good for your brain. It may be true, I just need that one step further explanation. Where at what scale is it at the like the flesh? Is it at the electrochemistry like where we, you know, we might take antidepressants? Just just one step deeper gives me a sense that it's been explored a little bit. So that said, the when you when you look at the brain, much like like the Grand Canyon,

• 14:09Speaker 01

  you can see like the different types of dinosaurs, like there's sedimentary layers. You can you can, you know, you can date how old the neurons are based on evolution. And so what happened most recently was the the it's not really modular because but it's connected. The reptilian brain, the mammalian brain with emotions, instinct, which is its own kind of genius. And then the prefrontal cortex, which is the part that over time pushed our foreheads forward. It the frontal bossing we have is from that growth. And so to accommodate that growth, the forehead was pushed forward. But also like a pizza, it had to be like smushed together like an accordion to fit inside the skull.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  So those ridges are a way to have a greater surface area of what they call the cortical canopy. And the neurons are all on top. So when you see the brain, the other thing, the brain's not a homogeneous structure. You know that like when you when you look at the side, there's different anatomical regions. There's different fibers under a microscope, there are different cell types. It's not like the liver where you you cut it wherever you cut it, it just looks like tiles. And so what what happens is the the neurons, if you think of them as like molecular jellyfish, the bodies are all on the surface. And then the tentacles are coming down, sort of like a mushroom to the to the brain stem that controls your body.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  So to to fit in all of those neurons on the cortical canopy. And there's a lot of like, you know, sort of ecology terms that I love. Like to understand the brain, you kind of have to think of it as an ecosystem and as a garden. And cortex means bark, like it's the top, you know, centimeter that's where the neurons are situated. So.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Once in a while, when there's a deep-seated tumor, we have

• 15:58Mayim Bialik?

  MyobioX Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? The bag you carry everywhere? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14-karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. I'm personally obsessed with Quince's 100% European linen wide-leg pants.

• 16:42Mayim Bialik?

  I can wear them year-round because I live in Southern California. They feel like PJs, but it looks like I put a ton of effort in, whether I'm dressing for casual workdays, lazy weekends, or vacation vibes. I'm also obsessed with their sheets, so soft. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work with ethical factories and cut out the middle people, so you pay for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just apparel. Quince brings that same approach to everything they make, from hotel-quality bedding to kitchen essentials and thoughtfully-designed furniture. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was MyobioX Breakdown.

• 17:26Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  To get to a deeper brain structure, that means you're going to have to go through the cortical canopy. And to do that safely, patients choose, particularly with language, something called awake brain surgery. I know, it's been going, it's for 60, 70 years. It's what's done at all the elite centers. Yeah, it's possible because the brain doesn't feel touched directly. In the exposed brain with the person awake, if you touch just gently the surface of the brain, there's no feeling that somebody touched me. Perception is all through the nerves that come out of our skull and our body. So when we Whereas movement like Lombard Street right here, we know this is motor does hand. This is motor, this does hand. But language is usually left temporal lobe and it's a it's a neighborhood, but it's not a specific address.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  That address has to be determined in each person when they're awake. So the scalp is numb. They're under anesthesia.

• 18:22Jonathan Cohen?

  How big a hole are we talking about?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  About a about a cookie size.

• 18:26Mayim Bialik?

  He likes big cookies.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:27Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Mrs. Fields nibblers, yeah. Twelve for a uh that's it's an interesting question, you know, in the past.

• 18:36Mayim Bialik?

  Like it could be an Oreo size.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Not for this. It depends.

• 18:39Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  It depends on uh we try to do the smallest hole possible. But it has to provide sufficient exposure. So the incision is in the sideburn and you know, it's a medium cookie sized hole in the skull.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  It's done behind the hairline with an absorbable stitch. You don't see the scar.

• 18:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Cause you're taking a flap out of the skull in order to access.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Like ice fishing, but you know, you make one hole. You lift that piece of skull out.

• 19:05Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  And you put on the back table like a cookie. And then the brain isn't just there. It's covered with a sheath, a little bit like a nylon parachute called a deramater. And then you lift that up and you incise that and then it's something beautiful. I mean, it's opalescent, it's not gray, it's shimmering. I mean, the I mean, it's not the whole thing about the brain is is like nothing you've seen before. And the fact that that it's that way when it's getting so much blood flow, like shouldn't it be red? But so there's there's mystery and magic to it immediately when you look at it and it's a sacred space. So now with like a faint pen, it looks like a fountain pen, the tiniest bit of electricity. You're looking for disruption of function. So that means uh the patient has got a drape and somebody's sitting there talking to them.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  They've been, you know, they've woken up, they're still a little groggy, but the scalp is numb. So they're not in pain. And you you march, you tickle a little spot and you see if it disrupts her speech. So they're asked to count or sing or speak in different languages.

• 20:04Mayim Bialik?

  A language that they know, obviously.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Um, yeah.

• 20:06Mayim Bialik?

  You can't be like, you speak Mandarin now.

• 20:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Just by touching that.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's well, the the reason is that if you if you injure their primary tongue, they lose all languages that they may have learned. But if you grew up with English and you learn Spanish like I did, if you go, if you injure Spanish, I'll still be able to have English. So there's.

• 20:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Wait a second.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:28Jonathan Cohen?

  English and Spanish. Primary tongue. Primary tongue and secondary languages are stored in slightly different areas.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  I, we, storage may, may not be the right word, but if you injure the primary tongue, you lose all languages subsequently learned.

• 20:39Mayim Bialik?

  So basically, the structure for language is established in whatever your primary tongue is. God doesn't know what people are gonna be and where they're gonna grow up. So you have a template in your brain. I mean, depending on how chomsky you wanna be. Like, there's a, there is language that is built. Upon that language, you build other languages.

• 20:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Which is.

• 20:58Mayim Bialik?

  He loves this.

• 20:58Jonathan Cohen?

  No, no, I, I understand that, but to think that as you're poking around, it could be the difference between how, like.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Confetti-sized pieces.

• 21:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Confetti-sized parts of the brain that would cause someone to lose one versus the other is amazing.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  And, and the way to think of that is, it's not necessarily that little piece, but that piece could be the hub of something bigger, right? Like Heathrow or LAX, you disrupt that.

• 21:24Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  You're changing the world.

• 21:25Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  That's an excellent question. The, the language thing, and so the natural questions are like, well, well, well, what if you learn both? Or what if?

• 21:33Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  What if Braille, sign language? So there's a lot of interesting questions that others, when, when they do these operations, will bring to you. And so it's a field that's always interesting to read. But back to the, so they'll, you'll, it's one, two, three, four, five, six, and you tickle? And they don't, they say one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and they don't pause. What you're looking for is something called speech arrest. And if you hit a, if you hit the next confetti piece that you're mapping out, they'll go one, two, three, three, three, three, three.

• 22:04Mayim Bialik?

  The record skip.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  And then you put a red piece of confetti. So that means to get to the deeper part of the brain, you cannot.

• 22:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Go through there.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Dissect through that little piece. So in the end, it looks like Swiss cheese that you've made little portals in to get to the deeper brain to dissect out.

• 22:20Jonathan Cohen?

  And you're finding the least destructive pathway to get deeper.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that, I think that's a fair way to put it, that you don't wanna lose any part of your brain. But the, you're going through areas that don't have functional significance um, for language and communication. When that happens, back to dreams, uh, and it's been reported, uh, from the Montreal experience for a while, and it's, it's not a. It's not some sort of like magical recent thing. It's just that people are in my field. They don't take these things and think about how that could be broadly relevant. But sometimes when you tickle, you can activate people's nightmares, recurrent nightmares they've had since they were a kid.

• 22:59Mayim Bialik?

  What does that look, what does that look like when you're?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  They're freaked out. They say, "It's a nightmare I had when I was young."

• 23:04Mayim Bialik?

  Oh.

• 23:05Jonathan Cohen?

  They're re-experiencing in that moment.

• 23:07Mayim Bialik?

  They're not falling asleep.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  So it's the only thing I, yeah, it's the only thing I can say about dreams is that they come from the brain because I've activated one. Everything else is a conversation. That's how I opened the book.

• 23:21Mayim Bialik?

  So when you think about in terms of how information is coded in the brain, like this is intricate and fascinating because we're talking about a localization, right? That is producing an experience.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Because the electricity is reverberating like aurora borealis all across the brain. It's not like that spot does that only and the next spot does creativity. It's just that spot is in a certain hub that if you trip it up, it throws off all kinds of synchrony throughout the brain. Rather than like this does this and this is where creativity lives and this is where love lives. It's just really not like that. And the old best example I can come up with is, is the way like financial markets work or airports work through hubs and flights and different things. You could, you know, technically he throws a very small place on the planet, but you're going to have a larger scale disruptions with it. I think that's how you think about spots in the brain. Not that they, that spot does that and then the next spot does the next thing.

• 24:16Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm going to ask something that might make you uncomfortable because I greatly appreciate your desire and need for clarity and evidence. So this is a little bit more metaphysical.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 24:26Jonathan Cohen?

  The idea that the nightmare is in the brain. To, if, if we think about, we talk a lot to physicists and talk, think about the hard problem of consciousness. It could also be that there.

• 24:41Jonathan Cohen?

  Wired in the brain because you've had the experience so they're recreated by those mechanisms, but they didn't necessarily start initially in the brain. Do you know what I mean?

• 24:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Like where they where they were experienced first, it could be that you've had those repeated grooves and therefore now it's mapped.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  That doesn't make me uncomfortable at all. I think that's fascinating. I don't know if

• 25:09Speaker 01

  some energy is crossing the skull to initiate or seed cognitive experiences. I haven't seen that. I'm not opposed to that. I'm open to that. What I would add is of the dreams, the nightmares as a species of dreams, it follows, it's the only dream that follows sort of a hereditary pattern. So

• 25:33Speaker 01

  adding to that, what I would say is we are inheriting our thinking and dream processes from our ancestors. And and so that might sound woo woo to some, but I want to provide the evidence for that is that when children dream of animals, it's not puppies. It's not Fido. They tend to dream of beasts.

• 25:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  And so you see certain patterns of thought. And you say, well, of course, that makes sense because you can get depression from family. You get bipolar, you can get schizophrenia. And nightmare disorder clusters in family, but teeth falling out doesn't cluster in family. Being, you know, flying doesn't cluster in families.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  And then nightmares and erotic dreams are almost universal. They always arrive at approximately the same time, no matter the country and no matter the era. And so you start to see that, much like we, in my opinion,

• 26:26Speaker 01

  much like, you know, when you're born, you're not walking and talking, it's cultivated in you. And if you, if you don't encourage that person to walk and talk, or if we cover an eye for medical purposes, where those neurons would receive that signal, they wither. I think same thing with the cultivation of the mind is what we engage with children. But also there are some patterns of five or six, they all get nightmares. Because I I'm a pediatric neurosurgeon, my passion also in other countries and you see like, oh, five or six, they all have nightmares. I've had three sons. I've had to tell them it's only a nightmare. And then it makes you think like, can they not discern dream thoughts from day thoughts until nightmares? So I can never prove that, but those are the

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Metaphysical adjacent questions that I also like to ask and then oh, they get uh, they get erotic dreams, but they've never seen or uh, had the erotic act. It arrives before, almost like a, a guidebook. And then they go through adolescence. Um, not perfectly, a lot of mental health issues happen there, but those three things, nightmares, erotic dreams and adolescence are mental changes, mind changes that happen. I, I feel like that's built in, uh, that's built in from the neurons and unlikely to, not impossible, but unlikely to come from outside the skull.

• 27:44Jonathan Cohen?

  There's a few things you touch on here. Um, one of them is the universality of symbols in the dream and I never considered that. I, I, for example, have dreamt a lot about tigers or lions chasing me. I've never had an experience with a tiger or lion. I wonder if that is her inherited through ancestral connection. And I also wonder, are there universal animals that are dreamt across cultures more commonly than others?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Uh, so I, I was really looking for that. Um, and I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of things and there were some mentions of like pterodactyls. I was like, this, come on, this is just, but that's just a mention, I can't, uh, we need more.

• 28:26Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  So, so what you're saying is imagine if the next thirty years, if we took away all the judgment and made it anonymous and let everybody sort of log their dream thoughts, patterns, content. Somebody other than me, twenty, thirty years from now will have more brain surface recording, uh, recordings, plus more of that like granularity of surveys and all things they can like, they can connect.

• 28:52Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  And so, yes, the uh, beasts more than pets was something I noticed in a paper or two. It's your surveys, I thought that stuck out to me. Uh, nightmares being inherited, I said, maybe that, you know, that, that uh, that's linked. Um, but um, yeah, dreams and children are interesting because uh,

• 29:15Speaker 01

  You have to rely on their communication, so they have to develop it first. And one interesting pattern that I found was their complexity, their dreams was linked more to the complexity of their visual motor maturation than it was like math and memory. I was like, that's interesting, you know, like the, which one's feeding which? Is it because you're getting good at your physical environment? And then your dreams are that way? Or is the dream becoming colorful? And then you can navigate your physical environment better? I'm not sure, but I like those kind of questions.

• 29:49Mayim Bialik?

  There's an example in the book where you talk about attempts to predict personalities based on reports of dreams. And there was this one study you talked about where the dreams were almost the opposite of the personality predictors, meaning the question was, can we decide who is the most mature? Who's the most sophisticated? Who's the most, you know, analytical of a thinker based on their dreams? And it turned out that people with like the craziest, most like creative dreams were actually the people who were not necessarily the most creative or imaginative people in their day life. Can you talk a little bit about some of those discrepancies?

• 30:30Speaker 01

  I was fascinated with that. In Parkinson's and other things, there are these thoughts. So this is going to take a little bit, but it's a very beautiful concept here. So this, so now this is measurements, like it's going to feel wild. But there is one dream or dream pattern that predicts the future. And that's in Parkinson's patients. When they get something called REM behavior disorder, people can look it up. It's almost invariably men in their 50s. They start having, what I like to call it, dream enactment behavior because REM behavior disorder, who's going to get that? But they end up acting out their dreams.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Their temporary paralysis of dream life is not there and they attack their bed partners.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  And so those people that have that ninety four to ninety six percent in the future fourteen years thirteen fourteen fifteen years later will develop Parkinson's. So a change in your dream pattern, like you could look this up on Scientific American like this is not a it's things we know, but I I tried to really connect it all. But a change in dream pattern can predict the actual degeneration of the brain with Parkinson's. Fourteen years advanced REM behavior disorder. Those people, the first question they asked were, are they just wilding out at night because they're just raging hard during the day? And it was like, no, they were gen- in general, as a survey. They were sort of mellow, docile people, and then they were just raging out through their dream changes.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  So it's not clear like a wild waking life equals a wild dream life. And what I like about that is we wouldn't expect the waking life to be. Look, there are a lot of thoughts I have that I don't want. There are a lot of thoughts that I have that are interesting. There are, you know, the let's leave dream cognition, dream experiences, because those neurons are going. Even if you're neurons are going on fire when you're running, being chased by something by a tiger. It's just that your leg muscles aren't going, but the neurons in the motor strip are recording activity. Right? So it's happening at the brain. It's just not resonating through the body.

• 32:41Jonathan Cohen?

  It's fascinating. I'd like to touch back on what you were talking about in children, the idea of understanding the waking life through nightmare, meaning the differentiation between

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:55Jonathan Cohen?

  the those two worlds. Can you talk a little bit more about how they the evolutionary process almost of?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  It's a conversation, right? So but I'm just saying there's some really interesting things here that. Well, first of all, when people say, oh, I don't dream, also, I've never met somebody who doesn't know what a nightmare is. It's a universal dream. I mean, I guess you could, somebody could say, I've never had one, but you know, I mean, it's it's a it's a species of dream we've all had, and we all know what it is. And part of a nightmare, which is very different than other dreams is by definition, it's got to wake you up. And it's got to sear your memory.

• 33:29Mayim Bialik?

  Not just a bad dream. You make a distinction between like, people have shitty dreams all the time. Nightmare is a different class.

• 33:35Jonathan Cohen?

  It's like almost you don't want to go back to sleep. It's like, it's that intense.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  And, and we know what nightmares are because, uh, they've, you know, they freak you out, you wake up and the memory is, is wildly active and it's seared. Imprinted. Whereas bad dream is, it's, you wake up and there's a residue and what happened? Oh, I don't want to feel that way anymore. You know, most dreams are looked at in the rearview. The nightmare is the only dream that wakes you up. Slaps you around and says, you're gonna remember this. So that's interesting in its own way. Um, and then when you think about, in children, I have three grown sons, all of them. You know, and I've taken care of a lot of patients, thousands.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Um, the, all of them, at some point, I had to tell them, it was only a nightmare. Which, which when I started writing this, putting this book together, I was like, does that mean they didn't know until then? Is the nightmare serving that purpose? I don't have those answers, but it's, it is a very interesting thing. That, I, they have to be taught, that this, this thing you just went through in bed, it didn't really happen. It's in your head. And that's a whole different lifestyle and life and adventures you have. And that's, that's a very interesting training ground for the mind.

• 34:46Mayim Bialik?

  So there are, there are children who, I mean, we just had Jim Tucker on, a psychiatrist who studies children who claim to have lived other lives. He studied about 2,000 cases at UVA. And, uh, he was at the UVA, uh, Division of Perceptual Studies. And, you know, in many cases, these kids are explaining an experience that is more real than a dream. More real than even a memory. It's like a lived experience. What about people who have dreams that they say and report feel more real than a dream? Is that a thing? Because this universe over here might be like, it's an experience. They're channeling it from another consciousness. Like what, is, is there a categorical difference?

• 35:30Jonathan Cohen?

  I, I think it's fascinating as a training ground because.

• 35:35Jonathan Cohen?

  Physiologically, we experience that fatigue sometimes after a crazy nightmare. Or when we go through something, if it's an erotic dream, we feel aroused. Or if it's terror, we-

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Blood pressure's through the roof. Yeah, I hear you.

• 35:46Jonathan Cohen?

  So it's an inter- it's interesting to think about those things as a training ground and how we differentiate what's real. It could be, if we're thinking about the evolutionary benefit, some of our awake, mental daydreams or mental ruminations can also have that same experience, right? They can cause physiological change. And if we say, wait a second, that's not real either. Are we having them as children? Again, this is just a hypothesis. Are we having them as children so that we can also say in our waking mind, wait a second, I can control some of where my mind goes and I don't have to follow it?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  That's an interesting, that's an interesting concept. I'm just trying to draw the line between it's your imagination network. Okay, so I'm just gonna back up a little bit. I can't say yes or no to, is it,

• 36:39Speaker 01

  I'm alive and there's an energy entering me outside, from outside my skull as an adult. I can't, I don't know, I don't have any evidence for that. I'm not saying other people aren't, if they're feeling it, they're feeling it, you know? They're not hurting anybody, I'm not against it. But the, I can't tell you that we're inheriting cognitive features from our ancestors. That shouldn't be a surprise. I can't tell you that your dream patterns fit that. I could tell you that Aristotle was talking about lucid dreams. And there's hardcore evidence now that proves it. So that there are thousands of years of dream reports that fit some patterns that this is not accidental. That there's a dreaming process that's running.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Universal dreams, common dreams, very infrequent dreams, math, calculation. Now, somebody might have it, but in general, because that-

• 37:29Mayim Bialik?

  I speak not my native tongue in my dreams. It's not normal.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  And so your, your dream is infinitely wild, yours is infinitely wild. But when you start looking at thousands of dreams, math is very rarely reported. And then going back to our original conversation, that dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is dampened, which is what does calculation. Because we know when people get injured there, they get a calculia, which they can't do math. So I'm just putting a few of those patterns together. And then as far as- Imagination, so that's really fascinating because that's, I think that's what makes us. Uh, I don't know, that's the thing that I, that's the genius I love the most. So, a couple of things about that. The newest neurons that are being formed in, in the MPFC, the medial prefrontal cortex. Um, they're all related to like social cognition, like if you have injury there, they can't change their political views.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Or they don't get social faux pas. So I think it's really exciting. It's not like we're getting stronger at like memorizing numbers to. To advance with each other and, and life, but it's a social interaction that happens. That said. I think dreaming cultivates that. Um, uh, let's just try out things in, in that area. And so what happens? In the dreaming brain is, uh, the imagination network, uh, they default mode, they have different, they have different names for it. I like to call it. The imagination network, it's the thing that when we daydream is our mental workspace. So there are. If, if you think of structurally as the brain is like continents, they take turns being dominant and not dominant, never off, because that's a stroke.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  It's never, nothing's ever off. It's, it's just the modulation. You, you wake up and you're focused on getting something done. Your mental workspace, your imagination network is dampened. Uh, because that right now you actually have to get some executive things done. Things are under control. You don't have to search for food. You're able to now drift back into your own thoughts and have imagination. And to your point, uh, imagination while we're awake. Or, you know, wild imagination in our dream life, I think is, is. Is crucially important to pushing our, the complexity of our thoughts forward.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Um, because that's where we're running the ideas, the counterfactual thinking. If I go here, this happens. If I go here, this doesn't happen. Like. It's, it's choices that have made us who we are, right? We're not just reflexive. Going back to children, you know, I, I think nightmares.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  That when you, when you have to tell a child that it was only a dream, maybe that liberates imagination during the day. Like you can let some things real, run wild, it's just my idea. Back to you, like you can let some things run wild, but you don't have to actually carry out the act. You can imagine, wait, my uncle is smiling at me, but do they really wish me well? That's called theory of mind, being able to put yourself in other people's shoes. So whether daytime imagination feeds nighttime or whether, I, I don't think it can be separated. But that's, that's because the brain for 24 hours is on, it's just on in different ways.

• 40:35Mayim Bialik?

  So in terms of, I want to get a little bit into lucid dreams. Because lucid dreaming is a state where the body in theory is asleep, but the mind is able to maintain access to this kind of imagination network.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:55Mayim Bialik?

  Right? Explain for people who don't know, and I have such a funny lucid dreaming story. My kids were homeschooled until high school and there's a lot of cool and quirky kids in the homeschool community. And there's this one kid, I won't name him, but if he's listening to this, hello. And he was really into lucid dreams. And I remember thinking like, what an unusual thing for like a 12 year old kid to be like talking to all the other kids about. And I used to kind of like tease my kids about it, like, oh, your friend and his lucid dreams. This is a thing.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  It's a thing.

• 41:26Mayim Bialik?

  Is a thing.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:27Mayim Bialik?

  Explain what lucid dreaming is and why people are interested in accessing it.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  So this is massive.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  When I was asked by my publisher, this was in London, that they always wanted a book that was gonna be, bring in neuroscience, but don't smash people's dreams and magic, right? Or just crush it, just actually ignite it because some things can be understood.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  And I thought, and then, you know, there's gonna be a chapter on lucid dreams. I was like, oh, lucid dreams. I ended up putting in two chapters in the book.

• 41:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Did you know about it ahead of time?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  I knew about a little bit, but it was it was the thing I wanted to avoid.

• 42:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, it was out there.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  It was out there. It was the most woo.

• 42:04Mayim Bialik?

  You go deep.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  I gave it two chapters. Nothing else got two chapters because that was refreshing for me, too. So this is a little bit of a long wind up on this, but I think people should know. For me, lucid dreaming, the first thing I was like, they're just faking it. I'm asleep and so but we have a way, you know. So just like you put the three electrodes on the surface of the heart and you get a little electrical squiggle for EKG, you know, all those television shows. Well, that's really the three nerves that are on the surface of the heart. So they're generating a little bit of electricity. You put 96 scalp electrodes and you record that you get all these waveforms and beautiful patterns. Almost look like earthquakes. Well, there's something called a sleep spindle. You can't fake being asleep on that. You know, so that's the first thing I was like, all right, proved to me they had sleep spindles.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Because in the epilepsy world, you know when they've fallen asleep because there's a sleep spindle, right? So it's not just going to be somebody like, I'm lucid dreaming, I'm in heaven, I'm flying over the moon. You might be, but I gotta see that you're truly asleep when you're.

• 43:03Mayim Bialik?

  So you're looking, just to clarify, you're looking for physiological evidence, electro, sorry, electrophysiological evidence that this person, by all of our diagnostic criteria for sleep, is asleep. But what is going on when they're lucid dreaming?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  That's the that's the basis because I don't want to get duped, you know, like that's not because then it then there's, you know, it's not rigorous. Outside of that, um, the way I think about is like when we talked about, I don't think we're ever fully awake or fully asleep and you find these what I call liminal states. Going from the waking brain to the sleep dreaming brain, there's like a sleep entry period where the electricity overlaps that it's two different states. And then when you wake up, sleep exit, there's a there's a there's a sort of an overlap period. And I think that makes sense like you it's not going to be a millisecond that you change, you know, frames of mind, doesn't happen in nature. It doesn't happen in estuaries as rivers meet oceans, you know. But lucid dreaming is in the middle.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  It's not falling asleep, it's not waking up. It's you're in the middle of sleep, couple hours in. And you have a return of awareness that you are actually in a dream. Usually it's in the rear view like, oh, I had a dream. Oh, I had a bad dream. But this is, oh, I'm dreaming while asleep.

• 44:20Mayim Bialik?

  But how can you be asleep if you're thinking I'm dreaming?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Well, that's.

• 44:23Mayim Bialik?

  Is it a thing?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  It's a thing. So I'm gonna set this up for you. So, uh, the, the person is there in a sleep lab. They've got the electrodes behind a glass is a sleep researcher. The electrodes are showing they're asleep. Part of the paralysis that happens in our body when we sleep temporarily, the parts that are spared are breathing and eye movements. So what, what they do is they'll communicate and set up codes. That, hey, one plus one is two, true or false? And they'll, they'll make eye movements as a way to communicate like Morse code.

• 45:00Jonathan Cohen?

  Wait a second. The person sleeping is communicating with a sleep researcher?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  With the sleep spindle, so they are asleep.

• 45:06Mayim Bialik?

  So the way you test it is you, you say to the patient, there are certain ways that you're going to indicate to me when you're lucid dreaming. Cause they're conscious. So they come up with little like ways so that when they're sleeping, they.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Three eyeball movements to the left, yes.

• 45:23Jonathan Cohen?

  That's crazy to me because I just assumed that they were aware enough to be aware of their dream. But they're still in the dream zone.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  That's an interesting point. Yeah, but and also meaning they can hear from somebody outside of their dream.

• 45:36Mayim Bialik?

  No, they are able to communicate to the researcher. I'm in it, we're in it. Let's lock in.

• 45:42Jonathan Cohen?

  That's wild to me. I always assumed that it's like, oh, I now I'm in the matrix and I know I'm in the matrix versus not knowing. But they're actually standing at the bridge of both of those worlds.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  And so, and, and that's, you know, I'm, I'm a cancer surgeon. I'm a nurse surgeon. I'm gonna drive down this 101, you know, to City of Hope. There is the, the science on that is just so rigorous and undeniable. And that. I think that's why I love this book is there's things you're gonna think are no way and yes way and the things you're gonna say like, oh, I assumed that to be, but no, it's not true. So just stay with the lucid dreaming thing. That's one. Then, number two, it can be cultivated. Physiologically, we put people on some Alzheimer's medicine, they come back and they say, we're having a lot more lucid dreams. So whenever a chemical increases a dream pattern, there's-

• 46:28Mayim Bialik?

  Malaria pills as well.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  You know what? That's the chapter that I didn't write was effects of drugs on dreams. Cause I couldn't find any patterns for it. And, you know, and then so now what people can do is they can try to develop the ability to lucid dream and there's some techniques that are in the book that I'm not familiar with. And what I liked about it was they weren't just saying, hey, by the way, last night, I was lucid dreaming three times. They said, come back in the lab, prove that you're asleep with those sleep spindles. And now communicate with our I Morse code.

• 47:00Mayim Bialik?

  So we know you can hear us.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  At an increased rate while asleep, that you've actually developed the ability to lucid dream. I like that kind of, hey, prove it to us.

• 47:09Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 47:10Jonathan Cohen?

  So what is the benefit of lucid dreaming?

• 47:13Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I would like to speak to that because one of the methods in here is yoga nidra. Is one of the methods for getting into lucid. Have you ever done yoga nidra? So that's what it is. Yoga nidra is putting your body to sleep while keeping your mind awake. And in the yoga nidra that I do, she keeps saying, do not sleep, do not sleep. And she takes you through a whole, and he describes it in the book. You go through an entire body calming down elaborate exercise. My yoga nidra, it takes like 40 minutes, like it's a thing. And you're trying to get to that state. I never thought of it as I'm in the lucid dreaming phase. But you get into this very sleepy, strange. You almost feel like your body can't move, like it's asleep, but you're still able to listen to her words.

• 47:57Mayim Bialik?

  I haven't had like dreaming experience. I've fallen asleep sometimes, but that's not lucid dreaming.

• 48:03Jonathan Cohen?

  My experience of this, which again, I never associate with lucid dreaming, but I think there's some overlap here is that I have, you know, when I started as a teenager doing somatic energy work. And people would lie on a massage table and they would often, through relaxation, quickly go into what I call it a still point, which is that space in between awake and asleep, where they're way off experiencing vision and emotion and heightened emotion and often memory, but they're still somewhat aware.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, not completely unconscious.

• 48:39Jonathan Cohen?

  Not completely unconscious, what, because they can, and they kind of shift in and out of that space, sometimes going deeper into one, sometimes coming up. And you can have intense emotional processing happen in there.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  And what I would say is that I don't know the exact details and the terminology, but for those who are listening, if you look at 24 hours and you start to see these things that are, if we get away from thinking about it, the brain is hardwired, but more as 100 billion-ish jellyfish that are creating these worlds of electricity that we can measure. It's easier to understand that during the day, people with narcolepsy could just quickly fall asleep and have some, some unique experiences, emotions, thoughts and feelings during that time. That, that shouldn't feel fringe. Or if you haven't slept for two days, you're gonna have some different feelings.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  And in surgical training, we, we, 36 hour shifts three times a week. So sleep deprivation does things. Sleep entry is not a millisecond phenomenon. Salvador Dali wrote about it as a, as a, as a place where he could extract clever ideas. Lucid dreaming in the middle is the return of awareness. And what I like about it is, this is dope. The, remember I mentioned the, the dreaming brain, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex that does math is dampened and we see very few dream reports of math that all fits. People who lucid dream in FMRI machines, that that that area has more activity.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  So it's consistent that awareness and the executive sense is returning in what they're describing, but and also in the brain activity. Like, that's that's rigorous. It's unbelievable. And then people, when they wake up, like, sleep paralysis, you know, a third of people have these like, you know, like they're being violated and they're demons. It's so consistent that different cultures have set up the same story for it. And so and then and then you wake up and then and then you have different experiences. You can do, you know, transcend, you know, you can meditate and have different thoughts and creativity during the day. You can have too many espressos and have different. So if you just realize that in a 24 hour cycle, it's not on off, it's not hardwired.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  And that cognition, whether it's the waking brain or or the sleeping brain, that there it's fluid, you know? And I think that, to me, that's liberating, that at at any time, I might find a clever idea. Like, I listen to a lot of rap music in my car. And when the beats get into a certain rhythm, I have different thinking. So I have my own rituals to try to find the nuggets that I can't sitting in front of a laptop with a triple espresso. Right? That's meant for a different type of thinking. That's my take on it.

• 51:30Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to touch more on that in a second, but to rap lucid dreaming. Have people reported any physiological differences from lucid dreaming to regular sleep? More energy, more clarity, emotional processing?

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Not a measurement, but surveys and reporting that it tends to be an overall positive experience. Some of the ways that people lucid dream, you have to disrupt sleep. So you got to be a little careful about that, like, wake up before you would and then try to, you know, in the morning, like an hour and a half earlier and then go back to bed, but don't let yourself fall fully asleep. So there's there's a certain luxury you have to have. You're right.

• 52:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  If you're just trying to get the kids to school, you may not have that luxury, or you may do it on vacation. But sleep disruptions are a concern. It tends to be overall positive. It can be cultivated. It's rigorously proven. A third of people are reported on their own. And I think it just, it speaks to the brain and mind in a way that should excite people for what's still undiscovered.

• 52:24Mayim Bialik?

  I wonder if it's also touching on the cusp of, you know, when you're having a nightmare or a bad dream, and you wake yourself up, right? There's that in-between space, right? Where I'm, I'm able to say, right, where I'm able to say like, oh, I don't, I don't want to see what's about to happen. I'm gonna wake myself up. So people who are lucid dreaming are possibly in that liminal space and able to kind of hold that.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  If I may, the, when you're asleep, you're not, I mean, if you smell smoke, you will wake up. The doors aren't completely shut to your mind. If you hear an alarm, you will wake up. So perception is dampened. And there's a central structure called the thalamus that lets things filter up and it controls movements heading down. And if people have a little bit of injury to that area, for the first few months, they report more lucid dreaming.

• 53:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Interesting.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  So the-

• 53:15Mayim Bialik?

  That filtration, yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Right, and that, there's a, there's a thermostat for arousal even when we're asleep, because you won't sleep through a fire or a massive alarm going off. So you're not completely shut down. And the degree to that arousal, maybe you're modulating it on your own. Maybe a night where it's waking you up, like an alarm. Maybe lucid dreamers are, have cultivated that. But that's rigorous. This is not-

• 53:39Jonathan Cohen?

  I knew someone, I, I was having nightmares at the time, and I would tell a friend that I was having it. And she was like, well, just tell yourself not to do that.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's interesting.

• 53:47Jonathan Cohen?

  She was able to stop her nightmares like, like that and just say, I'm not doing that.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  So what I did find with that was, people could search this, is part of the therapy, their cognitive therapeutic techniques for nightmare disorders is actually re-scripting a nightmare by repeatedly thinking of having a more favorable ending. I think, come on. But that's out there, and that is effective. So the waking mind can influence the dreaming mind even in the most wild type of dream called a nightmare. So I just, I just like leaving it not, not completely on off.

• 54:22Jonathan Cohen?

  Talk a little bit more about the importance of creative imagination and how we can increase problem solving and access to that creative imagination by utilizing our transition points in and out of sleep.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  For something to be creative, it has to be clever and useful. You can't be like, "I had a creative idea, it's an electric car." What's already out there? You know what I mean? So you gotta be a student. You gotta know, to be creative, you gotta know all the dots before you can come up with new ways to connect the dots. So I think when we talk about creativity, which is really the thing I value most in my life now, is idea generation. Okay, I'm a specialist at bad idea generation. And they happen for me in the morning because I have the luxury now of a bed and being able to set the time or not set the time to wake up. But before I go on Instagram, I go to my Notes app. And whatever I'm thinking in the morning, I did that this morning too.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  I think I got up at four, I just stay in bed, stay in bed. And then at five or six, and I don't know, whatever I was thinking during that time, that was definitely different. Not necessarily psychedelic or way out there. They weren't like, you know, purple elephants and stuff like that. But it's just a different way of thinking about the problems that I'm rolling around in my mind. And then I always write things down when I get up. I put down a few thoughts. And then like, at the end of the week, I look at it, I'm like, "Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea." That's interesting. And so idea generation toward creativity or toward anything, toward a relationship, toward employment of any sort. For me, the sleep exit window is very important for that. Dolly wrote, and so did Edison, in that movie.

• 56:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Inception.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that the falling chair thing, that's how the feeling of falling will pop you out of your dream state, falling asleep state. And that's what Dolly and Edison did. They put their notebooks, which is cool, right? Now you have the science to explain like Dolly, Edison, Aristotle. They put their notebook, they're working on something, and they'd have like a key in their hand and a metal thing. And they'd drift off to sleep, and the key would hit the metal pan, they'd wake up, and they'd quickly write down what they're thinking. Like, that's out there, magic craftsmanship. You can get that on Amazon.

• 56:37Jonathan Cohen?

  Talking about Edison and this idea of basically extending the window, if you're not having your experience of dreams. It's potentially you're lowering your executive functioning side. And so that you're able to harness a whole host of creative options. And in that state, you're able to really, like, you're just harvesting in there.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Not for everyone and not every time, but it is possible and it can be cultivated.

• 57:09Mayim Bialik?

  I want to talk about people who don't remember dreams or don't have access to any of this. Cause like you're telling me all these things, those things, nothing's in there except like the shit that I did wrong. You know, over the last 20 years, nothing's in there. I very, very rarely remember my dreams. I know that I'm having them. I very, very rarely, very rarely remember them. When I do have them, they're usually like horrible and bad. Like all these things, even lucid dreaming, I'm like, there's nothing to go in there.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  So I have cancer patients and a lot of them didn't have a lot of dream recall in their 30s, 40s and 50s. But with when they face that, uh, end of life dreams arrive or shepherd them. Um, they tend to be favorable. You would think they're going to have nightmares. Cancer surgery, cancer treatment equals nightmares. No, end of life. So then you have the nightmares that arrive for all children, even the ones that, you know, had the mildest upbringing. So the longitudinal pattern, like right now, yeah, like, uh, there's no windows. I'm like, I'm just shut down, right? Uh, but the pattern of dreaming and recall changes throughout life.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  And, um, what I will say is that there are reports and people, there are surveys. I don't have measurements for it, but people do, uh, have, they have increased dream recall. They journal what they're thinking about going to bed. They slow down when they wake up. Does that mean every time? Does that mean every solution's there? But even if that's just a 5% capacity, isn't that great? That it's free, it's personalized to you. And that's the ultimate bio hack that we haven't ever thought about. And I, I like leaving those windows open for people. If not now, but maybe at some point in your life, just to know like that's how that that's how that works. Dolly tried it. Oh, it didn't work for you? Okay.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  But you know, that's that's there for those who are able to access it. And even if you can't get to it now, that at a different time in your life, dreams will serve different purposes.

• 59:12Mayim Bialik?

  When I've had like the like wake up and like, oh, what am I thinking? It's always something like really insane, like I'm falling off a cliff. You know, like it doesn't seem creative or useful or like, what if this happened? Like, I can't imagine, and I, again, there's different kinds of brains. I can't imagine that being like, oh, that's so useful. I'm gonna make a painting of it.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  I don't think it, I don't think it's metaphorical. I don't think it's linear. I think it's, imagine the neurons that would be lost that serve a greater function if you didn't wild out in your dreams, you know? I think it's sort of a preservation of capacity, not a last night I had this dream and that equals this solution.

• 59:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, explain what's happening in problem solving. So when I was a full-time writer, I used to say I would hit a wall in what I was doing. And the best thing I could possibly do was take a walk without any stimulation or a nap. And once I had a nap, I would wake up, I'd be like, oh, it's so, I need to go this way, not the other way.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  And there are surveys of people, it tends to be visual spatial, like Tetris and video games, different things. Again, visual spatial components, um, that they'll nap or they'll use sleep as a way to those who nap did better on this. There's, there's a lot of that out there. I'd encourage people to look into that. Um, I can't prove it. I do believe it. Um, but back to your point about creativity, um, the people are like, oh, dream sharing. I was like, the last thing I want to share of my dreams, you know? That's not, that's a wild space, but I think it speaks to, um, a preservation of capacity. I've seen so much, whether it's addiction, cancer treatments, chemo fog, brain injury,

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  that, uh, brains are injured, minds are not working, but there is rehab for the injured. If the injured brain And the injured mind can recover through certain steps. Why can't those steps be applied to all of us? And I think that's the that's the big theme of my first book is that there is recovery of the injured brain and it doesn't grow new neurons. The neurons you have repurposed. It's not like the liver respouts and fills the space. So I like leaving all of that for people to know that it's possible, it's possible, you know? That's I think that's the biggest message is that it's possible within some constraints.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  And I'm trying to share those with you.

• 1:01:36Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to pause here. There is so much more to talk about with Dr. Rahul Jandial. We hope you will tune in for our next episode where we do a much deeper dive into some of the more esoteric aspects of dreams. So stay tuned for episode two. And don't forget to follow us on Mind Bialik Breakdown on Substack. We've got a ton of fun bonus content, things you won't get anywhere else. Our newsletter is from there, so please join the community over there. Join the conversation and especially we want to talk about this episode. So please join us on Substack.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

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