Casey gets his voice back

Casey Harrell is a goofy, lighthearted chatterbox whose love for language helped him become an accomplished environmental activist. In 2020, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and slowly began losing the ability to speak. He sang his last song to his infant daughter and fell into silence. But, now, with the help of 256 microelectrodes implanted directly into his motor cortex, he’s learning to talk once more. It isn’t easy. Guests: Casey Harrell and Levana Saxon. You can donate to their GoFundMe here. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:49Speaker 01

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• 1:29Speaker 02

  I'm Julia Longoria. This is Unexplainable.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  I don't know if you can hear me. Can you hear me over there?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  I'm on a video call, having trouble starting an interview.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I'm in Miami, Florida. The interview is in Oakland, California. I don't know if Gabrielle can hear.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Can you hear Julia on your headphones, or?

• 1:55Speaker 04

  No, but I'm wondering if maybe I should try and join from my computer.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Starting a remote interview can be a little awkward. Takes a while for everyone to get settled. I'm used to that. But this, this is different. I can't hear the person I'm trying to interview, Casey Harrell, but I think I can hear him breathing.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  And I can see him on my computer screen. His mouth is covered by a machine that's helping him to breathe.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Can you hear Julia, Casey?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Can you hear me?

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Okay, great.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  Yes, and we are learning. The first thing about communicating with each other, and that is that you will have to go slowly, and I take a lot of time to communicate.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Great.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Seems to work.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  I can do that.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  I read about Casey on the news.

• 3:00Speaker 06

  This ALS patient, Casey Harrell, lost his ability to speak.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Casey was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2020. It's a neurodegenerative disease that slowly weakens and paralyzes you. Within three years, it affected his speech. He could no longer speak to his daughter.

• 3:21Speaker 07

  In 2023, Casey Harrell was implanted with sensors in his brain.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  He agreed to let scientists at UC Davis implant 256 electrodes in his motor cortex, the part of his brain that controls the muscles in his mouth.

• 3:37Speaker 07

  And using his speech-related brain activity, the system was able to decode his words.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Researchers trained an artificial intelligence system to read his brain signals when he was trying to speak and predict what words he was trying to say.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  Allowing people with disabilities to talk by just thinking about a word.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  By just trying to talk. Casey can get the system to say what he's trying to say. Researchers told me it's the first system they've heard of that's good enough that Casey's using it when the researchers aren't around, just to live his life.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  Researchers say it's 97% accurate.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  And it's fast, they say. Before this, some ALS patients, like Stephen Hawking, could slowly type sentences by using their eye contact or small muscles in their face to control a computer. Casey's system is described as instantaneous.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  It makes people cry who have not heard me in a while.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  This week on Unexplainable, listen to Casey Harrell and me stumble our way through a conversation, one of the first of its kind, through a brain-to-speech AI computer interface.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  What do you want to know about me?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Who are you? What's your name? What do you do? And how are you talking to me right now?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  For 3 minutes and 48 seconds, I'm just staring at Casey Harrell's face. I don't know that I've ever looked at someone's face for that long in silence. It's becoming clear that our communication isn't exactly going to be instantaneous.

• 6:36Speaker 05

  Okay, I am Casey Harrell, and I am a person who has a specific disease that has left me totally paralyzed, and I cannot talk to my family or my friend, or to work without my brain to computer interface device that I have right here.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  I couldn't tell if he was done talking, but I took a chance and asked another question. I wonder when you hear that voice out loud, what's your relationship to it? Like, does it feel like you?

• 7:17Speaker 05

  It feels like a particular version of me.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Can you say more about that? Like, what version?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Here, a whole 2 minutes and 45 seconds pass.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  The improvements in artificial intelligence has made it so everyone can have a voice that sounds like them.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll say, like, I think that you have this incredibly unique experience of losing the ability to communicate and then regaining a version of it.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  But I had to use a version of my voice that is all from public presentations, so that is what I hear.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  For a second, I was like, "What is he talking about?" But then I realized he was still answering my first question. I had just barreled through, not waited for the rest of his response. I was being rude.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  How do you want me to answer you? And I have more to say, you have already started talking.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Would it be possible?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  What was invisible to me, but visible to people in the room, like producer Gabrielle Burbay and Casey's assistant, Robert, was a second screen above Casey's computer. An interface where Casey's intended speech was appearing instantaneously as typed out words. Sometimes the system would get them 100% correct, and other times, not so much. So in each of the silences that I experienced, Casey was using his eye gaze to correct those words. And then he'd press play to have the AI version of Casey's voice speak the words. I'm learning the cadence. I apologize. I'm pretty sure I interrupted you.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  From this point on, Gabrielle starts texting me from the room to make sure I don't interrupt. I'd like to ask you some questions. I'll try to keep them limited because I don't want to take up too much of your time. And, you know, you, please tell me if you're feeling tired and you need to stop. But I guess I'll start by just asking you, if you, you know, to the extent that you're comfortable,

• 9:40Speaker 02

  tell me about how you learned that you might lose your voice.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  And, and what, what that was like. Did it happen all at once? Did it happen gradually? Did it happen one word at a time? Tell me about that experience.

• 10:00Speaker 05

  I have all the time in the world. I have nothing to do for the rest of the day.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  Believe that it is obviously late where you are.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  It is, but I, I have nothing else to do either. So I'm just hanging out. I've been looking forward to this conversation, so.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  Robert, can you adjust where the computer cursor is? Yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  I was diagnosed with this disease about five years ago, but the disease started in my legs, in my arms. It began to impact my voice about two months after I was diagnosed. It was a slow-motion car crash.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  You wake up one morning and you cannot sing anymore.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  But it is not like everyone cannot understand you after one day.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  That took about a good year of time.

• 11:01Speaker 05

  I work in an international organization, and the first people who could not understand me were the non-native English speakers, the people who were not working around me every day, could not understand very much.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  Then I began to rely on other people to translate for me, like my assistant and my wife and my daughter. It is really funny and very unlikely that a three-year-old can translate for you.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess I'm curious about Casey before all of this went down. Like, what was your relationship to words?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  I'm eager to get to know Casey as a human, not just as a user of a brain-to-words interface. I know from my reading that he works as an environmental advocate. The Guardian wrote a piece about him in 2021 with the headline, "Casey Harrell: The Climate Activist Taking On Wall Street." I'm waiting for "climate activist" Casey to come through. But at this point, Casey begins to squint his eyes. I'm not sure what's happening.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  His assistant, Robert, comes into the frame, explains he's having a coughing attack.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  We could probably all use somebody pulling up on our head and elongating our neck multiple times during the day, but only Casey gets this treatment.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a smart ass.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  It is just a flesh wound.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  A Monty Python reference. A dark one. A man after my own heart. Classic.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  So as you can see, I am very much a verbal person and I love words. And I miss being able to talk as fast as I can think.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  I sense that.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Being totally honest here, it's been nearly 20 minutes since I asked my question. I've just cut out the silences so you can hear what he has to say.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Losing my voice is the number one problem that I have regarding this disease. It is utterly crippling to me.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  I would rather be able to talk than any other thing that this disease has taken away from me. And also be able to sing again.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  What's the first song you would like to sing again if you could sing again?

• 13:41Speaker 05

  I would probably sing the song "Baby Beluga" from Raffi.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  That song always makes me cry because my parents used to sing it to me.

• 13:53Speaker 05

  It is the last song that I sang.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  I wonder, like, you talked about your three-year-old daughter being a translator for you. Oh, you're typing again. Forgive me, I'll...

• 14:13Speaker 05

  Go ahead, I can listen in time and also compose what I am saying.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Great. Yeah, I guess I was just wondering about your relationship with your daughter. Like, I'd imagine that you began to lose your speech as she was sort of gaining hers. It sounds like maybe that's the timeline.

• 14:31Speaker 05

  My daughter is a master communicator and they began to talk when they were five months old.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Wow, five months old, amazing.

• 14:39Speaker 05

  I began to have symptoms of this disease when they were born, so they had never seen me without this disease. But obviously, I was different when they were very young. They were learning to walk when I was having trouble walking. And they were ready to use full sentences when I was beginning to not be understood. It was very strange. It was like the old saying, "There's not room in this house for both of us to be doing these things."

• 15:10Speaker 02

  At around this point in the conversation, I did something that I do a lot in interviews. I asked Casey if he could remember a specific story of when his daughter helped to translate for him. And that led to one of the longest pauses in the conversation, a full four minutes.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  My daughter was with me at a medical appointment a number of years ago, and I was in with a speech therapist.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Then a whole nother three minutes and five seconds of silence.

• 15:38Speaker 05

  He was supposed to be a specialist with the disease. He could not understand me for the life of him and was getting very frustrated.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Another four minutes.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  Then my daughter stood up in the middle of the room and stopped doing the coloring book that they were given and said to the doctor, "But you just had to do what you..."

• 15:53Speaker 02

  I'm struggling to follow.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  One more.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Do you mean one more question?

• 16:10Speaker 05

  I am feeling a little pressed for time, so it is not getting it because I am rushing through.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Casey's assistant, Robert, theorized that sometimes Casey's trying to talk too fast and the system can't pick up what he's trying to say. That's gotta be incredibly frustrating.

• 16:32Speaker 05

  I am doing this to myself because I am still in a mindset that is for a normal person.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  I see. You're not actually rushed, you're just thinking at the rate you want to think.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  At this point, Casey has another coughing attack.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  So, part of the disease, and it is how most people die, is because of their lives not being able to breathe in air on their own.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  I see.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  Good fucking times.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  About three hours go by like this, trying to get deeper with Casey but being interrupted by a coughing attack or the AI system just not being able to pick up on his thoughts quick enough. And then, in one case...

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Julia, you're muted.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  I just muted myself. Sorry. I was telling you this whole thing. Sorry about that.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  I can hear that there's a ruckus starting at your daughter's home and stuff, so it seems like the ruckus of the evening has begun. I don't want to keep you any longer.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  I have like a million more questions, but I can leave it there.

• 17:53Speaker 05

  Of course, you did not ask everything, but I really had no expectations for this interview. And I do not mean that in a bad way.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  It was really, really lovely to meet you.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Very glad to meet you as well, and I will talk with you over email soon.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Sitting there for almost three hours with Casey, mostly in silence, it was easy to forget how incredible it was that this man was using a brain-to-text AI interface to talk to me. At the end of the interview, I just sat there for a few minutes by myself, feeling pretty exhausted. I imagine that's just a tiny fraction of how exhausted Casey was feeling.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  It felt like a lot of things were left unsaid between us.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  I wondered if the people in his life, his loved ones, felt the same way.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my name's Levana Saxton. I am a mom. I am Casey's wife and primary caregiver. That's after the break.

• 19:27Speaker 00

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• 22:07Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Could you tell me how you and Casey first met? Yeah, sure. So I was working at Rainforest Action Network. Casey and Levana met through work. They were both environmental advocates, and they were supposed to co-facilitate a talk with high schoolers. I found out later he knew who I was, had spotted me at a party and asked about me.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  And he figured out that who, you know, who he was going to be co-facilitating with. And before we met in person, he called me a couple of days before, you know, had a great excuse of calling me to plan the presentation. He was so charming and eloquent and like energetic and enthusiastic and positive and affirming. And I got off the phone and immediately told my roommate at the time that I had hoped that this guy was single and cute because he totally made an impression on me over the phone. He just seemed like an incredible human being that I could just keep talking to forever, you know?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Am I hearing a boing, boing? You are. That means he is, his axometry is dipping. I need to go check on him. Yeah, for one second. That's it.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  All right.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Great news. Robert is in there, so I can turn off the monitor. Okay, great. And he was just having, like, sleep apnea. So it wasn't like a more serious situation.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Levana turns off the monitor in that moment. I realized the fuzz I'd been hearing intermittently throughout the interview is the noise of Casey's room and the various machines surrounding him, the machines that are keeping him alive. I realized that's always in the background for Levana. She's his primary caregiver, always on call. So I wanted to ask you about the process of Casey losing his speech. Like, how did it happen for you?

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. I didn't... It was so gradual at first that I didn't really notice. And he noticed and said, hey, you know, I feel like my voice is a little more gravelly.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  And I was like, yeah, it's kind of sexy. Like, it was a little bit lower.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  I'm a sucker for a very low voice. I was like, huh, I could get used to this. But then, like, you know, very quickly, it started getting a little bit worse. And I noticed it most when he was singing. One night, he sang "Our Daughter to Bed." The next day, he tried, and nothing could come out. We're like, okay.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  It was just silence?

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  For a while, she says, she and their daughter could still understand Casey fairly well and be able to translate for him to other people. Until slowly, they just couldn't anymore.

• 26:15Speaker 07

  Every interaction was grueling.

• 26:21Speaker 07

  We spent a good year or two where

• 26:26Speaker 07

  every time he tried to share anything with me, I could not understand it. And what's wild is for people who are losing their voice, I have since learned,

• 26:37Speaker 07

  it is often difficult to understand what you sound like to others. You sound relatively the same to yourself.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Really?

• 26:46Speaker 07

  So for him, he couldn't tell when what he was communicating had no, like, I could just not understand it at all. And if I was involved in transferring him, you know, from his chair to the bed, like, I, like, I, there's, I can't even tell you. There's just like countless stories where like, I was like crushing his foot with the wheelchair, you know, like, something horrible is happening to him and he's trying to communicate it to me. And I just have no idea why he's so upset or what's happening. So there's a, there's a particular sort of torture that comes along with being

• 27:26Speaker 07

  entirely dependent on somebody else for your well-being and then not having that person be able to understand you. But sort of they can if you just try hard enough and you stick with it for 10, 20 minutes.

• 27:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was, it was really, really, really rough.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  So when Levana and Casey heard through a cousin that researchers at UC Davis were trying out this AI interface that might help Casey communicate, both of them were curious and hopeful from the very beginning. The researchers tried to temper their expectations.

• 28:09Speaker 07

  Don't do this because you think you're going to be able to use it to communicate.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Communicate normally again. The technology is just not there. They'd need to implant 256 electrodes in his motor cortex. The motor cortex is more muscular?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  It's not like it's trying to read his every thought, right? It's trying to read. What is it trying to read?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  His intended speech. I certainly do not ever want to hear Casey's unedited thoughts.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Nor would he want those to be shared, I assume. So he has to try to move his muscles or imagine that he's moving his muscles. They then gave Casey a bunch of prompts that he'd attempt to speak out loud. His motor cortex would send signals to his mouth to move. And they'd train the AI on those brain signals to teach it what his brain looks like when he's trying to say those things.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  When we were in the hospital recovering from brain surgery, they came by and said, you know, just wanted to schedule with us a time for our first research visit. Let's, you know, turn the lights on and see what happens. They were like, just in case, do you mind if we bring a whole film crew?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  We're like, uh, sure, you know, why not? We were really surprised by that ask.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  We were told best, best case scenario is that it would take six to nine months for the brain surgery to heal, for Casey to learn it, for it to learn Casey.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  We just thought it was going to be so cool that we'd be able to talk when the researchers were here and they committed to giving us like an hour a session to having some personal use. So that was everything. We're like, oh, my God, two times a week.

• 30:17Speaker 07

  For one hour, we're going to be able to actually have a full, real conversation with each other. And at that time, two hours a week of real conversation felt like everything. Because it had been years we'd been able to actually just sit down and casually talk to each other.

• 30:38Speaker 07

  So that's what we were hoping for. And what we got was like so much more.

• 30:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, so.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  It's okay.

• 30:55Speaker 07

  So yeah, when it came, when it came at that, that first scheduled visit with the film crew and the, you know, the low expectation and the everything and we were plugging him in and then like,

• 31:09Speaker 07

  and then it just worked. You know, we were just all in so much shock. It was so amazing.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  What did he say? What's the first thing he said?

• 31:19Speaker 07

  They, he surprised me the first time that we were going to hear the first version of his synthesized voice.

• 31:28Speaker 07

  I didn't know that they were doing this, but they asked him, what does he want his first synthesized voiced words to say? When, you know, we're all together.

• 31:39Speaker 07

  And he had them put in our wedding vows or his wedding vows to me.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 31:51Speaker 07

  Which was, yeah, really intense.

• 31:56Speaker 07

  It also really weird.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  It's kind of funny because my experience of talking to Casey was like, I think in a way it was like opposite from your set of expectations. Right? Because I had read all of these reports of it like working so much better than they thought and it being so great. I was just sitting in silence, looking at him, waiting for the voice to come out. Which was like for like, sometimes it would take like.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Really long time.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. I had never been so like simultaneously in awe of a piece of technology and so frustrated by it.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Is that your experience?

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think I'm still mostly in awe, right? Because it's like, what do they say? Happiness is directional.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  You lived through how it was before.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. If he, if we went directly from like him speaking normally to this technology, then yeah, sure. I'd probably be frustrated, but because directionally, his communication is getting better all the time.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  To me, it's fantastic.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Shortly after, you know, we discovered that we could use it functionally for daily conversation and work and everything, the team was able to put together like a button, basically, that Casey can click when he wants to, um, wants to be able to talk without the transcript being recorded, so that we can talk as a family in private and not have that data.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Be researched.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Be researched, exactly. And we don't use it that often.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  You don't use it very often?

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Our lives are so overwhelmed with transactional conversations in terms of just like health and logistics of our everyday lives, that the kind of, the conversation.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  The button, the button pushing conversation doesn't happen that often.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. They're like, hey, let's, let's, let's talk about something really mushy and sweet. Or like, let's take time to talk about, you know, something we don't want everyone in the world to know about. Yeah, we just haven't, we don't have time for that.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  I mean, it's hard to have those conversations, even when you don't have ALS or have to communicate.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  So the most immediate, you know, transformation in our lives with a computer is now, you know, when he's thirsty, he can get water. When he has an itch, he can get scratched. Like his basic, basic needs that most people don't even realize that they have, but the thousands of needs, the ones that he.

• 34:54Speaker 07

  Chooses to ask for help with, which he said he only bothers us for about 10% of the needs that he has throughout the day. But of those 10%, when he's asking for help, he can get help right away instead of just sitting there and suffering and, you know, and then having me freak out and panic over not knowing why he's suffering and not being able to figure out what he needs. Like, it's just a massive shift from that, you know?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But there is a lot that's still not there.

• 35:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, but now there's a possibility of that, right? Side note, it's still, it works when he's asleep, when he's in deep sleep.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Really?

• 35:40Speaker 07

  Super wild, yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 35:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, just a quick call out. If there are dream researchers, our brain, you know, sleep researchers out there, please get ahold of Braingate, because I'd love for someone to come and try to understand what the heck is happening in his dreams, because you can actually see words be produced and, and watch his brainwaves change on screen when he's in deep sleep.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Wow. Do you remember like a dream statement that, that was, that he said or meant to say or whatever?

• 36:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, there's one time when in his sleep, he asked me for something specifically. You know, he said my name and he asked me to do something, but I could tell he was totally asleep because the brainwaves were in sleep pattern and he was, you know, totally knocked out. But then when he woke up, I asked him, you know, the first thing I said was, were you, you know, were you just having a dream where you were asking me for something? And he's like, yeah, it was. I'm like, okay.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Really? Wow.

• 36:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  One last question, if you don't mind, is just, you know, I guess you learn that like when he dreams, he speaks to you. When you dream, does he talk to you? Do you hear his voice?

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a great question. I unfortunately don't dream anymore.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Not enough deep sleep to get there. I don't sleep enough to dream anymore. Yeah, I have to be on edge and wake up all the time. So my dreaming is so few and far between now. Who's got time for dreams? Yeah. I'll get there. We're working on it. But yeah, my... Great question. I don't have a great answer.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by me, Julia Longoria, and edited by Jorge Just and Joanna Solotaroff. Erica Huang did the mixing and the sound design. Fact checking by Melissa Hirsch. Our team also includes Meredith Hodenot, Bird Pinkerton, Noam Hasenfeld, Christian Ayala, Sally Helm, and Amy Padula. If you want to learn more about Casey Harrell and Levana Saxon, and you might even want to donate to help their family, you can go to our show notes and our transcript for a link to their GoFundMe. If you have thoughts that you want to share with us, we're at [email protected]. And if you'd like to support this

• 38:41Speaker 02

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• 39:02Speaker 02

  Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back soon with another episode about everything we do not yet know.