Pod Insights Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee BITESIZE | What Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You About Your Waking Life | Dr Rahul Jandial #518 About this episode Have you ever woken up from a vivid dream and wondered about its meaning? Or perhaps questioned the purpose of dreaming altogether?
Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.
Today's clip is from episode 458 of the podcast with one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons and author of ‘This is Why You Dream’, Dr Rahul Jandial.
Rahul’s belief is that we sleep in order to dream. In this clip, we explore why we dream and what our sleeping brain reveals about our waking life.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Rangan Chatterjee? See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 458 of the podcast with the neurosurgeon and author Dr Rahul Jandial. Rahul's belief is that we sleep in order to dream. And at this clip, we explore why we dream and what our sleeping brain reveals about our waking life.
2:01 Rangan Chatterjee? You make the bold assertion that perhaps the reason we sleep is so that the brain can dream.
2:10 Speaker 01 I do, yeah. Dreams are for everyone. They are inside everyone. They pop up in everyone. Even if people say they don't dream, I don't have to tell you what a nightmare is. I believe we sleep
2:24 Speaker 01 because the brain must dream. The easiest way for me to say where I come to that conclusion is from the glimpses of transplant surgery, neuroscience, what happens when we go a day or two without sleeping. There's something that builds up. It's called sleep pressure. We don't ask to sleep. And if we try not to sleep after a day or two, sleep has to happen. The second thing is dreaming is a robust electrical and metabolic activity that happens in the dreaming brain, which is liberated during sleep. So when we think of our brains,
3:04 Speaker 01 the metabolic activity, the usage of glucose, the measurements of electricity are robust while we sleep. Our bodies are sleeping, but our brains are not resting. Our brains are not sleeping. The dreaming brain and the waking brain, at times, the electrical activity can be so similar that it was called paradoxical sleep. So the first thing we all have to accept as a measurement, not my opinion, is that the brain is not resting while we sleep. The brain is doing something very fundamental because it forces us to sleep. Different regions are dominant while we sleep. The dreaming brain fires up the imagination network, if you will,
3:49 Speaker 01 and logic is dampened. That's a measurement on FMRI. The waking brain has more executive network function and we can get into that and less imagination network function. So even though the electrical activity can be similar, if not identical, it's generated by very different ensembles of neurons in the dreaming brain and the waking brain. So when you start to look at all of this process that sleep puts us down, sleep will take risk to sleep. What happens when we sleep? Our brains are on fire, right? I put livers into other people, we don't reconnect the nerves. Sleep isn't really for the liver in some fundamental way.
4:31 Speaker 01 Yes, there are some metabolic changes that happen during sleep and those benefit people, but the massive thing happening in the sleeping body is the brain is throbbing with glucose usage and metabolic activity and electrical activity. So when I look at that, it makes me think that the process of sleep is for the benefit of dreaming.
4:51 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, it's so powerful. If we think about what happens in our body through an evolutionary lens, the fact that certain parts of our brain are more metabolically active when we sleep and in particular when we are dreaming, it's hard not to make the case that dreaming therefore must serve a very powerful function for us, right?
5:17 Speaker 01 Right. If we go a day or two without sleep, when we are forced to sleep, something builds up inside us, dream pressure, sleep pressure. The dreaming starts to happen earlier in that sleep. So it's almost like it's waiting to get out. The vivid dreams and REM stages change when you go a day or two without sleep and then end up falling asleep. So it almost feels like there's something building up that must occur because when the brain goes without it a day or two, it jumps off earlier. So those kind of conceptual things are my interpretations, but it's a measurement that the activity is robust while we sleep in our dreaming brains. The executive network is the dominant network while we're awake.
6:01 Speaker 01 It's focused on what's called task on. It's looking for things to do outside. It's using reason, it's using logic. When we go from waking brain to dreaming brain, this is a measurement, the executive network is dampened.
6:16 Rangan Chatterjee? Mm-hmm.
6:17 Speaker 01 Okay. So then if things are robust equally... Then something must be heightened in the dreaming brain. That's really what the magic in my mind and beauty of dreaming is. That it's a what what compensates for the dampened executive network is the limbic system, which is emotional networks, as well as the imagination network, which other people call default mode network. But I call it the imagination network. So you have a hyper emotional, hyper visual dreaming brain. And you have dampened logic in the dreaming brain.
6:49 Rangan Chatterjee? You just use the word magic. And there is a mystery to dream that we all know. You know, what do our dreams mean? What was it that I dreamt about last night? What does that actually mean? Doesn't mean anything. Can dreams help us predict the future? All these kind of things that people will say cultures have written about and reported for years. But I love the fact that as a neurosurgeon, you're using the word magic when you're talking about the this mystery of dreaming.
7:18 Speaker 01 Learning just a glimpse of how they may be working and the patterns that have had been there since antiquity that are now partially explicable. You leave with a sense of you leave more impressed.
7:32 Rangan Chatterjee? Do you think dreams can help us deal with things like trauma and negative thoughts and chronic stress?
7:39 Speaker 01 I would ask that people not ask dreams to be something we wouldn't want our waking thoughts to be. Right? Our waking thoughts are wild and all over the place. And sometimes they help us and sometimes we ruminate and not every waking thought is worth holding on to. What is happening in dreaming that first? Some people have said that maybe the dreaming brain functions partly. I don't think you can capture it with one thing, but sort of as a nocturnal therapist. As you get into the later parts of sleep, you tend to have more of these vivid dreams and REM sleep. And people tend to have more positive emotional valence, which is like just affect as they engage longer sleep. That maybe clarity that comes with good sleep is because you've had vivid dreams at the tail end of it.
8:24 Speaker 01 See, that's a hypothesis, but. That's where they come up with the, maybe it serves as a nocturnal therapist. But what I would say is, yet some of my patients, they have PTSD nightmares. So dreams are, they're a double edged sword. For some, they can help people cope. So my answer is, can they help people with trauma? Is they can. I think there's nocturnal processing going on. If you pay attention to your dreams and the context of your dreams, and if you try to remember your dreams, you're more likely to remember your dreams. But there is something happening there where I think that hyper emotional state leans therapeutic. Not for everybody, but in general, it leans therapeutic.
9:09 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, I think so too. A lot of sleep researchers call REM sleep the part of the sleep cycle which we can consider emotional first aid, where we are processing the emotions of the day. And I've heard some researchers say that it's when we take off the emotional, something's happened, let's say something negative. We take off the emotional edges of it and lay it down in a much more rational, less emotional state during REM sleep. And it's always been fascinating that to me. One of the most important things for us as humans is to process what happens to us, right? We have to deal with negativity all the time, you know, how do we do that?
9:53 Rangan Chatterjee? If REM sleep is where we take off those negative emotional edges and REM sleep is also where a lot of these vivid dreams take place, then to me, it kind of makes sense, yeah, well, perhaps dreaming is a way for some of us.
10:09 Speaker 01 Very good.
10:10 Rangan Chatterjee? The process of dreaming may be your attempt to process some of the events of your life.
10:18 Speaker 01 What I would say is, and I mean this with the utmost respect when I use words like likely or maybe, it's to leave room. It's not that I haven't, if there was a factor or measurement that I had, I'd, trust me, I would be bringing it. But, but when you say that, my, my mind goes likely. Massive life events, genre dreams, where your waking life experiences are so profound that you're also having them in some ways in your dreams, tend to have a comforting, tend, right? We're just, we're giving, we're giving an impression here. They tend to have a positive emotional therapeutic role.
10:59 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
11:00 Speaker 01 Then, and I, and I think that's the dynamic nature of dreams. So, end of life for some of my patients that are at the end of their journey, they have dreams of reconciliation, or these expansive dreams about their whole life, almost as if the dreams are their, their partner or shepherd in this complex process.
11:18 Rangan Chatterjee? That's interesting. So, you do a lot of cancer surgery. So, a lot of your patients at the end of their lives, so with terminal conditions, are having dreams. And are those dreams, in your experience, comforting for them?
11:34 Speaker 01 Not always, but surprisingly so.
11:36 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay, that's interesting.
11:37 Speaker 01 Very interesting. So, it's, it seems to have, back to your original point, where others have made about, it's a therapeutic, your dreams are a therapist, or they're, they're helping us process emotion, maybe. But if there was any stage where it suggests that it's end of life for people I've seen with cancer, and they're reported on that, genre dreams. All of them? No. Are they all coping well? No. But a surprising number, the dreams are a source of comfort for them, a way to reflect back on their life. So, it's, it's their partner. The, when we get to it, dream interpretation is really about the hyper-emotional
12:19 Speaker 01 dream as, as something that's reminding you to reflect upon what's going on in your own life. It can't mean the same thing for the same, for different people. Dream symbols, like a leaf can't be the same thing for many different people. A bridge can't be the same thing for many different people. It has to be understood in the context of your own life. And I think- The the hyper emotional brain state, whatever emotions, experiences it creates as part of the dreaming process is our portal to self examination. That's the biggest way to think of it. It's your it's your own brain's creation, so it has to be understood in the context of your own life.
12:59 Rangan Chatterjee? Of course, it's great to look at the science of what's happening in the brain, what's happening with electrical activity, but so much of dreaming is internal that maybe science will never fully understand, or at least to me. And given that we know from science how important our mind is, how we think, how we perceive things, then maybe one of the powerful lessons is, look, dreams serve a role, they're there for a reason, right? Pay attention to them, particularly the big vivid ones.
13:33 Speaker 01 I agree.
13:34 Rangan Chatterjee? And if you can then start to assign meaning in a way that it helps you, perhaps the onus is on us to spend time with ourselves, journaling, thinking, writing down whatever it might be, to come up with the meaning that works best for us.
13:53 Speaker 01 Right. What I'm telling you is nobody else can tell you what this means. It has to come from you. Your brain conjured it. It has to be interpreted by you. You can't go to a dream dictionary and say that this means the same thing. There are patterns, showing them naked in front of a podium, alarm not going off for an exam. So that I I try to conceptualize dreams. Those are the types of dreams that require no interpretation. They're obvious. You're waking intense, waking light, waking brain anxiety, and your dreaming brain anxiety are are highly intertwined. Those are common dreams. So people being chased, people feeling the anxiety of being naked, people falling are
14:37 Speaker 01 Convergent, like in evolution, convergent features of the human mind when there's waking anxiety. And to me, that suggests that the dreaming process is not a glitch. That it, uh, that it goes through certain experiences that we have in common. That have been reported from when people were on a horse and carriage all the way to an electric car. And we're exploring the science to, to really get you to the point that this is a built in process. It's a built in personalized process that your brain goes through every night. If you have the opportunity to dream more through auto suggestion. If you have the opportunity to remember more of your dreams in the morning by not quickly waking up.
15:19 Speaker 01 And trying to remember your dreams, which people report they can. You have given yourself access to, uh, your, your own mind during a state of hyper emotion that you don't have during the day. That's a rare window to yourself that you can't get by turning outward. And that dreaming should be a priority in our lives, particularly when we fall asleep. And when we wake up, sleep entry and sleep exit. And that this is afforded to us and it's free and it's possible. Not every time, not for everyone, but it shouldn't be neglected. It's quite the opposite of the glitch. It's, it's the rarest glimpse into your, into yourself.
15:58 Rangan Chatterjee? Quite a few people have asked about whether you can train yourself to start remembering your dreams. And a couple of times in this conversation, you've mentioned the term auto suggestion. What is auto suggestion?
16:09 Speaker 01 Auto suggestion is, people are reporting consistently when they, before they go to bed. That they say that I will dream, I will try to dream, I will try to remember my dream. They coach themselves before they enter this nightly dreaming process. And on, when they wake up over time. They start to remember their dreams more and more. So I do believe there is some science to support conceptually. That auto suggestion before you fall asleep can incubate feed the dreaming process. Not reliably even, but you have you got a shot at it. Christopher Nolan talks about inception. Edison mentioned it. They're just right when he's about to fall asleep. The thoughts that he's having at that time are interesting.
16:54 Speaker 01 And the thoughts he wants to dream about. He would try to have them at that moment. And you want the waking brain to come on as slow as possible. So you have the longest window to hold on to the residue and thoughts of your dreaming brain. Not grabbing your phone and going, letting the executive network kick in too rapidly. That the residue of your dreams, people report remembering their dreams more.
17:17 Rangan Chatterjee? And again, the meaning is subjective, really, isn't it? It's very hard.
17:21 Speaker 01 More than subjective, the meaning is personal.
17:23 Rangan Chatterjee? But we've got the agency to put the meaning that we want onto these dreams, don't we?
17:27 Speaker 01 And that is that's the power of reflecting on your dreams.
17:31 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
17:31 Speaker 01 That the process itself is self exploration, right? What is therapy but guided introspection? Well, well, dreams are your best therapist.
17:39 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, I love that.
17:41 Speaker 01 And what I would say is, um, just at a common sense level for me. When I have a good idea during the day. It's not because I'm like on my fifth espresso and just trying to push through the problem. It almost arrives to me when I'm slightly distracted.
17:57 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
17:58 Speaker 01 Right?
17:58 Rangan Chatterjee? And exactly.
18:00 Speaker 01 And it's hard for me to think that the that the extremely imaginative and liberated six, seven hours I'm spending every night. Are in some ways not contributing to my aha moments during the day. They're not arriving from the heavens. I think the dreaming processes is feeding my solutions and creativity during the day. Like there's all this. Task on, thinking about the world during the day. I mean, these are conceptual conversations. These are my, these are my opinions, but task on during the day. And then at night, you know, it's divergent thinking. And they're both feeding each other. The problems of my day, the complex operations with the creative, the idea generation now that I'm, that I is a part of my career. I'm thinking about during the day, then I go to bed.
18:44 Speaker 01 And then my dreaming brain has a chance at it. It's playing with it in whichever way, whichever degree. And then the next day starts and my dream, my waking brain is again on those problems. But there has been some contribution from the seven hours of sparking electricity and metabolic activity. I can't prove to you through a test, but doesn't that make intuitive sense? That, that, that the eight, seven hours of dreaming were, are not separate. Right? It's, it's my life being played out with the waking brain and dreaming brain. And my waking life is feeding my dreaming brain. And my dreaming life is feeding my waking brain. It's 24 hours in my head.
19:25 Rangan Chatterjee? This idea that the reason we sleep is so that our brain can dream. It's really, really powerful. And you hinted at something that happens at the end of life, which makes you even more convinced that dreaming is really, really powerful. So perhaps it'd be a good one to close on.
19:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, um, how, how the brain dies is, is powerful. And it really has affected me because there's a measurement that shows something very dramatic. So there are patients who are passing away and they have the sticker, tying it all together. Right? The stickers are on the heart. You have an EKG read. When you look at the monitor at the end, the heart has now stopped and it's a flat line. The brain electricity is still going. So the first minute or two, few minutes after cardiac death, the brain electricity is not just going.
20:26 Speaker 01 There's a massive explosion of activity similar to dreaming brainwaves, similar to expansive memory brainwaves, that the first few minutes after our hearts stop beating, where historically we have thought this is the time of death, the brain is having its final moment, maybe its best moment, massive release of neurotransmitters. The brain is not going out in a whimper. It's going out in explosion of activity. And that by itself shows us that we should be holding that loved one's hand longer. And then for me, it starts to explain things like near-death experiences, that in patients who have been brought back, maybe this explains why they, why they say they had memories of their whole life, like a film strip play in their mind.
21:09 Speaker 01 That the brain is a salvo of electrical and chemical activity is the way it says goodbye. And to me, that those brainwaves look a bit like dreaming brainwaves, that maybe death, maybe brain death in itself is our, is the one last massive dream.
21:29 Rangan Chatterjee? Like I'm tingling all over my body, that is.
21:32 Speaker 01 And I'll send you the references for that and look up, The Guardian had an article about this. This is a massive thing that's coming down the field.
21:40 Rangan Chatterjee? I mean, some nurses say, don't they, that they will continue speaking to patients after cardiac death, so that they know they're not alone.
21:50 Speaker 01 Then they've been right all along.
21:52 Rangan Chatterjee? I think the door that that opens as to the purpose of our brain, the purpose of dreaming, what this electrical activity being measured in the brain, what it actually means, is truly profound.
22:08 Speaker 01 I think so. Thank you. You've captured it well. For me, it's also comforting as a cancer surgeon.
22:18 Speaker 01 To occasionally start to share this story with my patients that not only is there a genius built in every night for us with the dreaming brain that keeps us adaptive and creative and adventurous and open minded, that in your final moments, a dreamlike, robust activity will be there for you to comfort you and to celebrate the life you've lived.
22:43 Rangan Chatterjee? Hope you enjoyed that bite sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're gonna love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the
23:24 Rangan Chatterjee? weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at drchattity.com/fridayfive. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.
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