Better Sleep Month Part 2 – This is Your Brain on Dreams – #591

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This is a reworked and upgraded episode of Bulletproof Radio for Sleep Month so you can explore dreamland. Deidre Barrett, Ph.D. guides us through the science of dreaming, nightmares, and even sleepwalking. You'll also learn how to remember and interpret your own dreamscapes. And my favorite hack using a dream incubator to put your dreams to practical use. Major Sleep hacking here. Sleep we all want a piece of it. Either you're getting some or you're not.

I've shared with you all the ways.

That I hacked my own sleep and how it changed my life and how I'm up to the point where I can get about two hours of deep sleep and two hours of REM sleep in six hours, which has been really transformative for how I feel, even how I look on the show. I've brought in top sleep experts to share their research and offer up some really solid hacks you can use. And since sleep is one of the things I get asked about the most, I just created a multimedia sleep series as part of Better Sleep Month, although frankly, every month should be Better Sleep Month. So I've chosen the most compelling and useful interviews from Bulletproof Radio, coolest articles from the blog, and a batch of different videos each week. I'm going to bring you the best bulletproof tips and tools for sleep that I know how to gather so you can start sleeping better. Get hooked up with Sleep on the blog@blog.bulletproof.com and check out Dave Asprey on Instagram, where I post all the good stuff. So listen on, read on, and get your own piece of the night.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is a psychologist from the Harvard faculty. Her name is Deirdre Barrett and she's the author of books including Committee of Sleep and Supernormal Stimuli and an expert on lucid dreaming and how dreams contribute to creativity and problem solving. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Deirdre hi, I'm glad to be here.

Deirdre, the reason I wanted to interview you today is that you are the.

Editor in chief of the journal Dreaming.

And you've been the president of the International association for the Study of Dreams and things like that, and you even make something called dream art. In the whole history of Bulletproof Radio, I haven't talked too much about dreaming, a couple shamanic interviews here and there. But so many of the world's top inventors talk about having a dream where they solved a problem, and a lot of people Listening to the show today are interested in problem solving or self awareness. And I wanted to just have a real open conversation with you. How did you get into the idea of studying dreaming because it's kind of out there?

Well, I think my situation is probably similar to most dream researchers in that I had very high dream recall as a child and I think I had more vivid, wild, interesting dreams than average. And so if your own dreams are especially interesting and you remember them clearly, I think it's rather automatic to be just fascinated. I mean everyone has some of that weird parallel world experience remembered, but I think I had more than average. So I think that most people get interested in psychology and go into psychology and then they pick a specialty well into grad school. But I think I did sort of the opposite that I was just always fascinated by dreams. And as I got to maybe junior high age or so I got that if people were going to pay me to just think about dreams all the time, that I needed to major in psychology and go to graduate school in psychology. So I kind of picked the specialty before I picked the general field.

Oh, that's interesting. So it was just a personal interest that drove you to pick becoming a Harvard psychologist just because dreams were so cool even as a kid?

Yes.

How do dreams change? I know kids almost live in a dream world. Like when I look at my kids brain waves on the EEG equipment and yes, I hack my kids brains but I you see a lot of theta state and when we're babies we're almost constantly in this dream time and as we become adults our brains shift. At what age do kids sort of come out of the dream state and start being more aware of reality and how often do we go into it and when do we lose that if ever?

Well, I mean there are two things going on there. One is the theta state you're talking about. That isn't actually when our full blown dreams occur, but it's definitely a more imaginative imagery related state state. And that is gradually waning. But the other, the more specific thing that's gradually waning is that kids not only sleep more hours but a higher percentage of their time is in rapid eye movement sleep when we're actually dreaming. Late stage fetuses have the most REM time. God knows what they're dreaming about. But then babies have you know, the most of any post birthday creatures and then toddlers a little less and older children a little less than that. So it's not a sudden. Oh they quit at this age. It's a very gradual Decline that almost plateaus in the young adult years. But actually there's a slight loss of percentage of dream time even throughout the adult life cycle. But it's mostly from babyhood to. To the story of young adulthood.

I'm going to ask you another very strange question here. Last year I came down with a brain eating amoeba GI bug. And for four months I had really bad GI problems before I figured out what was going on. I got this from something as dramatic as eating salad in Arizona as sort of a random thing. But the first week when I had this, every night I would wake up with nightmares. I haven't had a nightmare in 15 years. I've done a lot of personal development work, but these were always things threatening me, threatening my company and just sort of doom and gloom things that were.

So out of character for me that.

I'm absolutely certain that they were correlated with this really bad gut infection that I had. Have you seen research or have you come across this in patients where when people have something physically wrong with them, they start having nightmares?

Yes. I don't know anything about your particular amoeba, but bacterial infections that raise your fever a fair amount definitely make people report more nightmares. And probably they're actually having more nightmares because the body is registering things are wrong, but also the fever is simply disturbing sleep. And since you have to wake up to remember a scary dream, you may simply be remembering more nightmares, but you're probably having more also. And then there are other mechanisms. Viruses trigger a lot of interferon in your body, which again is just kind of telling your body something's wrong and you don't necessarily have a fever, but a lot of biochemical things are off. So yeah, a lot of infections can cause you to have more nightmares. And any number of drugs that you take for those infections also can. The forgetting the name of the main, the best modern anti malarial drug, but it has a lot of side effects, but including daytime extreme anxiety for some people, but it causes dramatic nightmares. So sometimes it's the treatment of the infection, not just the infection.

So the pharmaceuticals can do that. I also routinely ask people I'm an expert in toxic molds because I grew up in a basement that had toxic mold and I filmed a documentary called Moldy. And for people listening who haven't heard me talk about it, it's@moldymovie.com.