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

The ultimate gift of the human mind, I think, is dreaming. Love and all those things, yes, but the process of dreaming. Now, I'm going to be bold here, this is a conversation. I think we sleep because we must dream. He is a dual-trained neurosurgeon who has both an MD and PhD, and he's based out of the world-famous City of Hope Hospital here in Los Angeles. He's a researcher and author of 10.

Books and countless academic papers on the brain, Dr. Rahul Jandial. Why, after dozens of years of doing brain surgeries, being a PhD in neuroscience, and understanding the mind, did you want to dive into understanding dreams?

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

I've woken up but not been able to move or speak.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

What is that?

Sleep paralysis. What you describe about, this is great. Just give me a minute to take this one, 'cause this one I got a lot of science.

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

Well that has the massive question, right? So that's the, what I would say.

Is.

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

My pleasure.

The last interview we did blew up. People are fascinated by it. You are a neuroscientist who studies the mind, but also a brain surgeon who has been helping remove cancer for dozens of years to over thousands of patients. And so you studied the material brain, but also the spiritual side of the brain as well, the mind, let's say. And you're an expert in both. And the last interview we did, we talked about many different things around these topics, but you have a new book called, this is why youy Dream. what your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. And this is interesting because we were talking before that there's not really anyone who is a scientist of dreams out in the world yet, except for you're starting this path. You're starting to talk about the neuroscience of dreaming, which I think is fascinating because you told me about a third of the time we don't remember what we're doing. in our lives. A third of the time we're asleep and a lot of us don't remember our dreams. We don't understand our dreams. They don't make sense to us. We have nightmares. We have erotic dreams. We have inspiring dreams. We have dreams where we feel like we're falling or dreams where we feel like we're about to die and then we wake up in a shock. We have all these weird moments sometimes we remember and we overemphasize what the dream was, but it really didn't happen. And then other times we have no clue what happened in our dreams. And so why, after dozens of years of doing brain surgeries, being a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind, did you want to dive into understanding dreams?

I mean, you put it right where it needs to be. This is a big topic. There's a reason people haven't been tackling it, 'cause it's like trying to grab a cloud or like trying to hold on to something that's just like, we all know what it is. We know what dreams are. we all have had dreams. I don't have to explain to you what a nightmare is. You know what it is. I know what it is. We don't talk about it. We can't really wrap our minds around it, but it's something we all experience, it's something we all undergo. So your question about why did I want to write a book on dreams? What I would tell you is I was asked to write this book. So the way I've, my journey that's ended up here, a lot of it is, you know, I have sons. I have three, as we were talking about, they're 18, 19, and 22. Taking care of thousands of cancer patients. I've done surgery in South America. That these experiences are also part of my resume. Now, I happen to have a PhD in neuroscience and I'm a neurosurgeon, but there are other neuroscientists, there are other neurosurgeons. I believe, and in this conversation when you see me, hear me say I believe or I wonder or could it be, it's out of respect for you and your listeners, because you don't want anybody coming on this topic and saying, Aha, I got it all figured out. One, two, three. No, it's an exploration. I'm looking at fragments and pieces across broad scientific things. I'm bringing my own stories into my own experiences. And I'm saying, look, look at these little, they're almost like fireflies, these little glimpses of knowledge that we now have, or that 3,000 years ago they were talking about lucid dreaming, they being Aristotle. What is the consistent Not my dream, not your dream. But what if we look at 10,000 dreams? Do we start to see some patterns? We do. Then we'll get into that. Nightmares and erotic dreams are essentially universal. Falling dreams and teeth falling out have happened for hundreds of years across cultures. Like when you went from carriages to cars to electric vehicles to television, those dreaming patterns are consistent. So the first thing I thought, wait a second, they're being driven by the brain. Then when Technicolor came in, dream reports, people cataloging what dreams are going on, right? That's where I'm studying, is like, what dreams happen most commonly? What dreams don't happen at all? So two things popped into my mind. I was looking at this and saying, when Color TV showed up, the dream reports of thousands of people being asked and woken up in their sleep, what are you dreaming about? The dream started to be more in color. So clearly waking life fed dreaming life. And then the other thing I noticed was rarely did they report math in dreams.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever had a math dream.

Thank God. That doesn't sound fun. But most people, we look at 10,000 dreams, everybody's had a nightmare, nearly everyone. In science when I say everybody, I don't mean 100%. it's like, you know, above 90-ish gets to be essentially universal nightmares and erotic dreams. Very few, lots of emotional dreams, lots of visual dreams, a lot of movement dreams, and we'll get into that. But very few math dreams, right? Like very few people said, and even the scientists that say I came up with the idea of dreaming, it's a visual thing, like the snake eating itself or two comets moving apart. And what I realized now that those You know, what we dream and now in the last 20, 30 years, we could have brain scans. It's a simple word, but we're gonna dissect that in this conversation. Like the metabol- how much glucose your brain is using, where's that glucose being used? What's the electricity? So when I say brain scan, there's a lot of different ways of scanning brain information. The brain scans at night in a machine with people sleeping, with people dreaming, they were notably dampened. Not off. Let's change all of this. There's no part of your brain that's off, otherwise it'd be a stroke, you know? That part would die. But everything in the brain is a modulation. It's always like 51-49. Nothing is ever on or off. It's not a switch. There's blood flow always going everywhere, okay? If a branch is blocked, then you have a stroke. What happens is the executive network in the prefrontal cortex, just the part of the brain behind the forehead, the part that does reason and logic and math, it's 49, 48. Right now it's probably 51-52, but it's dampened at night. And so dampening the executive network in our dreams allows for them to be illogical, allows them for be wild, in my opinion, and also explains why you're not doing math. That is needed for math.

-Interesting.

-So, it took my breath away. I was like, wait a second. So, some patterns of dreaming, from thousands of dreams, can be explained by some patterns of the dreaming brain. And that was the idea in my head, and my publisher in London, Penguin UK, we were talking about doing a different book, and that's gonna be the next one, hopefully.

But.

You know, she said, we, we need we, and I think she meant, like, the publishing world and readers and people in general, like, if they're, they're real, they're real, you know, they put out books that are like French fries. I love French fries, but they also want to put out some stuff like, look, this is an important book. We need a book. about dreams explained about the science of it, the story of it. A love letter to dreams because there is no dream scientist. It's not a field. I'm a neuroscientist with live experiences trying to put together brain scans, dream reports, neurons in a petri dish to put together a story of what I think is happening in dreams and dreaming. -Wow. -That's how this started.

-Why is this?

-And it's just, once that happened, it's been an ignition in my mind for about 18 months.

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

Great question. First of all, again, not my dream or your dream, but they're a great dream bank. People for decades have woken people up in sleep labs. They put an electrode on to make sure they're sleeping. They say, hey, wake up. What are you dreaming about? And they're writing it down. Yeah, yeah. So that world's been happening. Okay. That's where I'm getting like the, you know, a certain percentage report dreams of falling, certain percentage dreams of, you know, being chased, a certain percentage of math. Really?

That's not very low.

Yeah.

Everybody nightmares, everybody sexual errant dreams. Okay, so that pattern is not mine. Right. It's what other people methodically have been cataloging. by people either sending in or writing, journaling or sleep labs being, you know, woken up. And that's where I'm getting those patterns.

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

Well, that is the massive question, right? So that's the, what I would say is, let's go backwards a little bit. My answer is yes. But to be able to share with you how to go about extracting that meaning?

Yes.

One, it's going to be individual. I can't tell you what your dreams are about, and you can't tell me what my dreams are about. So it's a process of self-examination. Yes, dreams have meaning. Not all dreams. Not all awakening thoughts are fresh or important or worth holding on to. But let's get to that is, do dreams have meaning? But with your permission, you know, let's equip people with what is happening in the dreaming brain and then what different dreams mean. So then they have a playbook at the end. And what I would say is the dreaming brain is, this was the essential question is, okay, so you got all the dream patterns, right? So we got what we dream, you're looking at what people have cataloged, to make sense of why we dream, that's your essential question that we get to. And then there's this thing like the dreaming brain and the waking brain, right? And I believe these big ideas are applicable to everybody getting groceries frustrated, why am I stressed out? Why am I overreacting? All the things for living a better waking life, you can't separate them from that. that third of your life you spend sleeping and potentially dreaming, right? So I go way, way back to try to understand this and to make sense of it for myself. And I think you'll find there's science and there's stories, but there's synthesis. So first thing is all life.

Is.

Governed by the rotation of the planet. Let's just start with square one. Let's just get to the basic here. whether it's like those hot springs deep in the ocean and there's some bacteria there, or a venus flytrap that opens and closes, or the moon and the tides, or sleep, right? Like this is governed because that was the foundation on which life arose, right? And when you look at that, what I would say is the material the living material on planet Earth follows that. Whether it's the tide or the plankton or fish or, you know, all migration, but also the material in our brain.

Really?

Like there's nothing in our skull that if you pieced it out, there's no special ingredient like from krypton or something. Everything in nature is also everything inside our skull and these brains, right? that's connected differently, it's functioning differently. But that was like the first thing that really tripped me out. I was like, we too follow the laws, fundamental laws of Earth's rotation, these circadian rhythms you're hearing about and cycles and seasons. And that was the first time I said, okay, so the brain is the brain is the waking brain and the sleeping brain are doing a 24 hour cycle for as long as the run you have on this planet.

Interesting.

That's the first thing. That cycle, it actually, you know, there was like, I love this topic, by the way. Like, there are like people who go into caves for like six months. It's still on a cycle. Like, it's not based just on dark black out shades or not. Like, we're, we, the tissue in our bodies, the cells, it, we're following this Earth's rotation. Okay, so if we say that there's the waking brain and the sleeping brain, and every 24 hours it does its things, 2/3 waking, 1/3 sleeping. And that happens for the most part, you know, for how long you live. Now, a surgeon in training, I might skip a few nights. So maybe I've had 500 or 1000 nights, but overwhelmingly I follow this cycle too. And in that cycle, we have to ask ourselves, well, what's going on in the dreaming brain? And right away, I'll tell you, it's so important there's something called sleep pressure. You could defy a lot of things, but you go a day without sleeping, there's something building inside you saying, sleep, sleep, sleep, you'll fall asleep in a dangerous spot. You'll fall asleep standing up. Sometimes you'll fall asleep even though you haven't eaten. There's something fundamental called sleep pressure that makes us follow that rhythm, right?

Your body will force you to sleep eventually.

Well, I would say your brain. Your brain just shuts off. It builds a pressure. You can startle people and they'll wake up. But at some point, there's this pressure that's bringing you down to sleep. Really? You see that, I think, torture techniques were based off of that. We saw that nobody could stay up a third night in the hospital. They tried to get us to a long time ago, the battle day.

Really?

Yeah, but second night you could do third night in pot. So there's a sleep pressure that the brain generates. Not the body, the brain. Just to give you just examples like we were talking about, like regular examples. We're not trying to get, we'll bring the science in, but the complexity is in the concept. We can put hearts from one to another, livers from one to another, lungs from one to another. They all follow that person's brain's order. So really what we're talking about is the brain is saying, I need to sleep. Brain is saying, I need to sleep. Brain is saying, okay, there's some threat going on or you've got some demands, you're running an ultra marathon, you're a surgeon on call, I can go a day, but I need to sleep. So that's the first thing in this discussion is, why do we need to sleep? Oh, I'm going to be bold here. This is a conversation. I think we sleep because we must dream. Now, let me just set that up for you.

Wow.

What happens when you go without sleep, you have surges in REM and dreaming sleep right away. First thing you do when you've gone a day without sleep, if you put that person in a brain scan, but there's exquisite ways of checking it, is that they did... First thing they do is they dream wildly.

Right?

Like, so that's an interesting thing. to me, the longer we go in our night of restful sleep, the more you're dreaming on the tail end. So maybe mental clarity, if we take that phrase, comes from having that longer night's sleep. Well, what happens in that fifth, sixth, and seventh hour, you're dreaming more. So when I start to see these patterns, I wonder, one, the brain, not the body, needs to sleep. And then what is the brain doing in sleep? I just checked this out, man. It's doing something that if you put electrodes on the surface of our scalps and we all fall asleep at night, during the day the waves, the measurements.

Are.

Sort of wavy. There's different ones depending on how you're engaging. At night there are some sharp, 90 minute patterns. That stuff is designed. That's built in.

Really?

Yeah.

So that's not new.

We don't have that when we're awake.

No. If something startles us, the electricity will be different. If we meditate, the electricity will be different during waking. But at night, you're on something programmed. then that's not new, Louis. That's the stuff that I've known for 20 years and sleep people know for 40 years. What I'm trying to do is give you an explanation, a synthesis. That's not random. That's not a glitch. Seven billion brains on a 24-hour cycle, sleep pressure, you got to lie down, you got to sleep. The brain is saying you got to sleep. And when it's sleeping, it's doing this. 90 crisp cycles REM sleep. You've seen the charts, they look like Lego, they look like the top of a Tetris thing or a Lego thing. That is something fundamental that's happening, in my opinion. And so that's why I think we must sleep, but I think what's the most important part of sleep is the dreaming. My kidney and my liver don't need to sleep. You could take part of the liver from a mom and put it in the child. It's no longer connected the transplanted liver to the web of nerves. Liver is fine. Lungs are fine moving between humans.

-Wow.

-Right? So what I'm trying to point out there is that it's the brain that's running the show. It's on the earthly pattern. It wants to sleep and in that sleep, what is it doing? It's dreaming. The brain In my opinion, with respect and humility, the brain needs to dream. The sleep is so that the brain can dream and stay fine tuned and stay fully adapted and stay fully enriched in all the corners of his mind without just the boring part of our day, right? If the brain only did what we did driving the 101 or doing this, which is fantastic, But it would become rigid, right? It would become like an arm that's never stretched past a certain distance. You get a contracture. Well, the brain tissue, my opinion, that dreaming is the brain's way. Now that people have other ideas, like it's threat training, or it's a nighttime therapist. I get that, and I think in some capacity, but at the most fundamental level, it's like high intensity training for your mind. At night, it just goes wild. to make sure all those capacities and resources, imaginations, if you will, are accessible to you if you needed them during the day, if the environment or, you know, evolution needed it. So that's like the big explanation about what's happening when we sleep. We're dreaming. Dreaming is important. It's metabolically active. It's electrically active. It puts us at risk. And even if you are in danger, your brain will force you to lie down so you can sleep to dream. That's fundamental I think dreams are.

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

Yeah.

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

Well, I would say the genius is built in. So that's happening whether you want it or not. And the essential question of, I've had people ask me that like, well, if I don't remember my dreams, is it useful? I mean, what is it? If you're not remembering them, so let me take that one apart a little bit. Here's my thinking on it. We'll bring in imagination and even sports visualization to try to understand that. And we'll bring in something called autobiographical memory. So let's start with memory first, okay? It's not, what you're seeing on TV or remembering names or addresses. I like my iPhone. I don't remember phone number again. There's that kind of memory. Then there's procedural memory, like riding a bike, tying your shoelaces. Then there's episodic memory, remembering episodes of your life. So we have lots of different shades and types of memory. And the one that connects me to the fact that I was here with you maybe about two years ago is something called autobiographical memory. When I have gone through so many different things in so many different countries and places, but I feel as if I have been the, I've inhabited and lived through all of those experiences. Think about that, right? What's the thing that stitches all my life together? that's a type of memory. It's called autobiographical memory. And so I think by design, by and importance, it's to some rare cases, it's to avoid waking and dream confusion. So it has this wild run at night, but when you wake up, and we'll talk about that transition, like this, the transition between dreaming brain and waking brain is not a hard line. It can be fuzzy in the morning and that's why some people report sleep paralysis and goblins and weird stuff. But the autobiographical memory has to come back into command because that's what stitches are waking life together. That's what's get food, get to work, get on the subway. So the autobiographical memory takes over every morning when we wake up. and for it, I think for us to stay, to not be confused about what reality is, because we had such a wild ride, the memory is designed to have dreaming fade to the background. And so I think it's happening, electrically it's happening, and what we're catching are a few glimpses of it bleeding into our waking brain and say, oof, last night, what was going on in my head?

Pride.

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

Okay, there's so many questions I want to ask here, but there's different types of dreams. There's nightmares, there's erotic dreams, there's weird, crazy dreams. There's sleep paralysis and I think I know what that is because I think I've had that a few different times so I'd love to start there because this is something I can relate to where I've woken up but not been able to move or speak. Yeah, and I feel like I'm screaming but nothing's coming out. Yeah, what is that?

That's terrifying.

I know, right?

But you're asking me to like, you're asking me to tackle giants of-- Giants of mystery. Tell me everything what it is. Yeah. In one afternoon, you know, but, but what I, again, with humility, if you hold on to the concept, if you just, if you just say, look, that was, like this, we don't have to do a study, but he, I get what he's saying. We're on planet Earth. We clearly have to sleep.

Right.

Our brain, I, I believe him. Our brain is the thing that needs to sleep. And now what he's saying is that, hey, check this out while you're sleeping, you're dreaming. Whether you remember none of it, a little of it, or some of it, you're dreaming. Okay? If we hold on to that and then always come back to like, if one person later on is like, huh, I am a cycle of waking brain, dreaming brain. Just if you just walk away one thing, like your waking brain, dreaming brain, 24 hours, waking times, whatever life is. waking brain. And just to ask yourself, is this contribution to my thinking, to my emotion from the waking brain or the dreaming brain or somewhere where it blends? So when you sleep paralysis, a third of people have experienced it. I haven't, but when I started writing my sleep paralysis, What you describe about, this is great. Just give me a minute to take this one, because this one I got a lot of science. What the dreaming brain also does is not just hyper-emotional and hyper-visual and dampened logic, right? That we opened with hyper-emotional, hyper-visual, dampen logic, okay? So that's there. What it also does is it locks down your body. So you're temporarily paralyzed. There's some exceptions or reflexes or sleepwalking, but in general, you're temporarily paralyzed so the dreaming brain can let loose, be emotional, be wild, and in the morning that paralysis has to come off.

Interesting.

That we can all agree on, right? That's the dreaming brain. and the waking brain. When there is a mismatch of you waking, your dreaming brain, the mind is coming to, but the chemicals that have locked down your body, the chemical paralysis is still there. People will wake up locked in their body. That's kind of what you're describing. And then on top of that, they start describing goblins and monsters and different things, lurking intruders, I've never experienced that.

I've never experienced that either.

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

Wow.

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

Yeah, yeah.

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

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

That's my favorite time of day.

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

She's not wrong.

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

So she's not wrong, but again, so, you know, people are like, what are they talking? If you keep this conversation on the framework of dreaming brain and sleeping brain, dreaming brain and waking brain, then you know where the explanations land. So what you're talking about is the waking brain entering the sleeping brain.

The sleep world, yeah, yeah.

Very good. And that again, it doesn't happen like in a millisecond. You don't blink your eyes and go into that mode. It bleeds. And I remember this, how to explain, I was diving, I don't do it anymore, but I was diving in the caverns of the Yucatan, where the fresh water meets the ocean water.

Where is it?

There's like four feet or it's like blurry. And I was like, yeah, it's not gonna go from freshwater river to ocean and like what, like a hair? There's a period of overlap.

Interesting.

And so if you hold on to that, your waking brain is starting to enter your dreaming, your sleeping brain. That window, there's a word for it. It's called hypnagogic and hypnopompic. Forget about that. I like because I want to have a conversation. Sleep entry. Sleep entry is also a 15-20 minute period where you can kind of be in these liminal spaces where you're like, I'm remembering a lot, but man, I'm having some wild thoughts. Lucid dreaming is when you've been asleep and then the awareness you're in a dream returns. That's a whole different topic. So she's right, it's a blended state, your significant other, but sleep entry has been channeled by Salvador Dali and others and in movie Inception as a place to extract fresh ideas. Your fresh ideas might be great. My fresh ideas might be bad. I'm not saying that's the way to become a creative genius, but people have used that window and now there's some devices that when they see you feel you falling asleep, they'll wake you up. So sleep entry is the blurry movement from the waking brain to the dreaming brain. And that is an interesting space for creativity. Sleep exit is the dreaming brain to the waking brain. And sometimes the body stays locked in and locked down and the mind comes back and that freaks people out. That's called sleep paralysis.

Wow.

That's my synthesis.

That's interesting. Now, this might be off topic here, but I'm curious, to have an optimal day, Is it better to wake up organically without an alarm or to wake up with something that is alarming you when you wake up?

So, great question, first of all, because now we have the concept. So if you believe your dreaming thoughts are ones you want to hold on to, if they're nightmares, maybe you want to forget, but nightmares won't let you forget. That's a different topic. They arrive in children for a different reason, but What I do now because I have the luxury of a bed and curtains. It's out of respect for all the people in this world that don't have that. But I believe when I have had a good idea, I actually forget that. My last 100 bad ideas have come from somewhere in sleep entry and sleep exit. And when I'm driving around LA or whatever, I'm in LAX or heat throw, whatever it is, When I go, oh, interesting thought. It's not an aha moment when you have a thought that you don't know where it came from. I believe it's from that nightly process that's going on.

Interesting.

That work you're putting in at night on your own, the design for the brain to dream, to stay creative, to stay enriched, to activate emotions and sights that are way beyond what you would even choose for during the day, right? We'd become so boring if our brains didn't dream at night, right? The capacity would be constrained. So when I have an interesting idea, I try to think about, did that come from my dreaming brain or have I been working with that? So I've been giving these talks on creativity and people are... So there's an incubation period and an extraction period. I believe habits during the day, like color television, more color dreams, put some red colored goggles on people and they had more red colored dreams. I believe like I do things like I like to flip through magazines or I listen to different music and I take different routes home. I believe I'm feeding my dream life. And then at sleep, entry or sleep exit, I try to hold on to what was I thinking about? What was I thinking about? How did I feel about that? What was that going on? And to do that, you can't have the alarm, which is a luxury. And the first thing you can't check is your phone, because the minute you check your phone, Switch that in auto mode. Right, that autobiographical memory is onto the day. What you want is that autobiographical memory, the thing that stitches every day together, not to come on so fast. And to some people, I mean, you can read about it, but the concept is there to slow down the sleep exit or to pay attention to the sleep entry and jot down or hold on to those windows. And I believe for me, whether it's coming up with a new surgery, coming up with an idea for science, or working with the LA Ballet now or writing, like when I have had a good idea, it's come from those spaces.

Interesting. Not from being rushed and waking up.

With an alarm and going, yeah, that's important. You gotta, you know, shelter and food and get, you gotta stay in, staying employed, showing up on time, like, I'm not, it's a luxury. But if you're really trying to take yourself to the next level, my process for extracting ideas is to work with my dreaming life.

Wow.

That's amazing.

So you mentioned nightmares. Why do you think kids have nightmares and also kids or teens start to have erotic dreams at the same time?

Yeah.

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

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

These.

Are back to what we dream. Okay? That's been described for a long time. I'm not coming at this new. And so when we look at the pattern of what people dream, you know, there's simple stuff like, oh, you have a flight tomorrow, you have a dream about missing your flight. You don't need to interpret that. You know what that is. Or you got a presentation tomorrow, you have a dream of showing up naked or something behind the podium. Like we know, we get that. But why would you have nightmares? Like this chapter two for a reason, 'cause I wanted to come across and just say, look, this is a work of imagination. It is. That there's nobody that can take these few glimpses of science and life and come up with like a foolproof, hey, I got it all figured out story. So here's what's interesting about nightmares. If there's anything that would make somebody say, look, this dreaming thing is not good for us. Why do we have nightmares? That's like, it feels like a glitch, right? It feels like the mind, like a mind's mistake, if you will. I don't think it is. So when you look at the patterns, to understand it, there are two types of nightmares. And there's the one with the big idea, Let me get to the other one that's easier. If you have been traumatized, assaulted, PTSD nightmares are flashbacks. It's a bad memory on loop, stamped with raw emotion. Can't shake it. That we have some firmer understanding of. So if you're struggling and you have worsening headaches, you say, Hey, I got to think about seeing a doctor. If you're an athlete, you have worsening pain. The key is if you have worsening new onset and progressive nightmares, talk to your doctor or therapist about it. It could be a psychological thermometer that things aren't going well for you. That's a big topic and I think other people are in that space. I'll leave that one there. Yeah. The one that interests me is having three sons and is each of them at one point, I had to say to them, it's all right. It was only a nightmare. It was only a dream. So the first thing I thought was, does that mean they didn't, and I'm looking at, now I'm looking at neurodevelopment. To understand this, I went into a whole different space. We're not born walking and talking, right? So you see kids, they're putting things together. The movements become fluid. You're physically not born made, and you're cultivated physically, right? I believe the mind is also being cultivated internally. And one example would be, you got to remind kids it is only a dream. So that means at some point when they are young, likely they are confusing or cannot separate dreaming thoughts and waking thoughts. And at that time, when you ask them what they think about it, it is very... in general, I mean this one kid might tell you the wildest thing. I'm not telling that person or that parent that that's not what they're experiencing. But the pattern is the dream reports of children and some families signed up for this. I've just I studied it. They followed their dream reports from like age 2 to 20. Wow. Longitudinally like what are you dreaming about now? What are you dreaming about now? What are you dreaming about now? And their dreams are simple. It's like a table or a blanket. Interestingly, when they dream of animals, they're not often pets. They're like beasts and monsters and teddy bears. So I can't explain all of that, but that's what they're describing. It's not the pet that they have that's in their dream. And as we're learning to walk and talk to H234, something's going on in the mind. There are some structures. I need a moment for this one. There's a type of cognition that's developing. First is visual spatial. And then these developmental scientists, they looked at it that the wildness of kids' dreams correlates more to the complexity of how they navigate visual spatial things. They have a test called block design. It's not how well they can spell or remember. The more three-dimensional they are, that parallels complexity of dreaming in a child. so all the parents out there, you don't make them memorize, you know, in my opinion, I did like cultivate their sense of gymnastics, music, art, whatever you can, different foods, different diversity experiences, it's not being correlated to logic, right? So that also like makes me feel like that's that guides a little bit. And then what happens is they develop this thing called at some point they realize It's just an example. That teacher or that uncle or that person that they're smiling and saying, Hey, I want to help you. But the capacity develops, it's called theory of mind, where you start to read the other person's intention beyond just what they're saying. Interesting. Yeah, that develops. Kids are gullible. That develops.

Theory of mind.

Yeah, TOA. People can look it up, theory of mind. So that's a just like there's a, I can throw the ball, that develops at a certain age around five or six, seven, and the idea of that person's intentions may not be completely clear, or they might be misrepresenting their intentions.

Interesting.

Or maybe I shouldn't trust them, or maybe they would hurt me. These important concepts arrive in the brain at the same time as nightmares arrive.

Wow.

So I think if I were to say, why do we, and then these nightmares all go away for kids. And then as adults, we get them if we have trauma. They come as a wave.

Interesting.

It's crazy, right?

Wow.

I might be completely wrong, but I would love to hear somebody come up with a better.

So you're not just gullible all the time. What everyone says.

I think nightmares make the mind.

Nightmares make the mind.

Yeah, they make you sharp. They give you a sense of self versus other. that make you less gullible, they create a sense of threat. The fleeing and the terror, I think it guides the cultivation of this thing called theory of mind, where you realize just because the person is smiling, that doesn't mean they have good intentions.

-Interesting.

-And that is cool, right? I mean, they're not arriving for all of us at age eight, six, seven, eight, and then fading for most of us as we get into adolescence. without a reason. Like that's not a glitch in the system. My belief, I wonder again with humility, I'm taking on big things here. So if that's not what it is for you, I believe it. I'm not saying I got it all figured out, but I'm just here to show you like... And then people and that we are in many ways still that dynamic as adults. So whatever you're at the grounded level, your struggles with your lover or your struggle with your part. Like, you're a dynamic ecosystem of mind and body, and I just want to take people back to, like, look at that. Like, we're not. And there's a certain part of the brain that gives you that capacity. Like, there's. It's. We'll get into that some other day. But in that part, the. The newest part of the brain that pushed the forehead forward, there's a part that when it's injured or doesn't work well, we can't, like, make new opinions or we become gullible like this. There's some. Cellular basis to the theory of mind. But again, I think nightmares arriving for all of us at the same time as we're becoming like, oh, that person might hurt me or what do I want? Self versus other. I mean, self in italics. I think that's all happening in parallel for a reason. I think that's all happening in parallel. Chapter two.

So if nightmares make the mind, what do erotic dreams do?

Okay, so these are my, that's why it says chapter three. I know everybody's gonna want to hear about this one, but it's, you know, it's PG-13 but the, but I think the concepts are, you know, very mature. So again, again, we return to our primer that there's this, we are waking brain and dreaming brain and they intersect. We stab, we, I think everybody knows that it's a matter of to what degree and how. That's the other universal dream. You know, I've never had a dream of teeth falling out, but it's been reported for centuries. I've had it. Yeah. Yeah, a few times. So there dreams follow patterns, right? People have dreams of falling, but that's like 20%, 60%. Like, you know, I had that too.

Yeah.

But, but I've had dreams of falling.

But not, you know, but everybody's had essentially, I mean, there'll be some people say, no, I've never had a sexual dream.

Okay.

I'm not here to a majority. Majority. I mean, the way in scientific terms, everybody.

Yeah, yeah.

So I call those two universal dreams.

Nightmares and erotic dreams. Universal.

Universal dreams. And I think when something is universal, a part of our, there's awesome fields out there, like evolutionary psychology, like the gifts, the strengths and weaknesses today aren't just physical that we're inheriting thinking patterns, dreaming patterns. And this is mind blowing, but this has been well known. I'm just able to put it, I think into a framework now is falling teeth dreams. They don't follow, they don't teeth falling out. It doesn't follow a pattern in people, but nightmares cluster in families. Think about when I say exactly, I have the same.

Yeah.

And I've known that because I went to medical school and they said that I just didn't have a understanding of it. But I believe, and there is evidence, that we inherit not just our physical traits, but our cognitive traits. And if we inherit our risk aversion or propensities to risk, if we inherit our parents' coping mechanisms or failure to cope, we may be inheriting dreaming patterns. Interesting. And I think that we have to be open to that. That's why nightmares are right for every kid, man. That's not happening by chance. I may not have the explanation for it. I think it cultivates the sense of self and gives you mind reading ability with somebody else. That's called theory of mind. That's my opinion. Then the next one comes is sexual dreams. And this one is interesting. because let me break this down for you. It's different because when my sons were born, we're born with like the marble, you know, and what you've heard this, use it or lose it, you know, like if you cover a child's eye because they have some health issues, that part that goes to the right side of the brain, the left side, each eye goes to both occipital lobes. It's not this one to this one. It's this crossing. If you cover those parts with or they repurpose, it's an adaptive system. Use it or lose it. You've got the neurons, the 100 billion neurons. They like microscopic jellyfish. Use them or you're gonna lose them. That makes sense. And that's what happens for vision, hearing, taste, movement. If you wrap somebody's arm, the motor area, will wither.

Wow.

Okay, so that's built in. But this is... But how does a touch become a caress? That's a capacity from the same sensation. Now it can become erogenous. Right.

Right.

There aren't new nerves being laid down in our fingertips, right? But when a lover's touch is different than intention even.

Right?

Not even a touch is. So that capacity develops in the human brain around the time of 11, 12, and 13.

Interesting.

And it's not after puberty. It's not like puberty, however people can see puberty, but you don't go through bodily puberty and then say, I think I'm turned on. It's different. You get turned, you your brain develops the ability to be turned on, I believe, through erotic dreams.

-Wow.

-That erotic dreams are, again, the mind's cultivation for desire. And then you start to see changes in the sensation part of the brain, where now it's not just, now erotic touch is possible.

-Mm-.

-You know, without getting too deep into like child rearing and all that, but sensuality arrives. It's not prepubescent, it's not there. It must come at a certain time. And around that time, people who have never had intercourse, people who have been castrated chemically for cancer treatment, people who have had chemotherapy, people who have had their ovaries removed, they still have the product dreams. Really? It's not the body saying, I like it. Let's think more about it. I think it's the other way around. Wow. And that it arrives and in the biggest sense, wouldn't that be an important thing for people to procreate? That desire arrives and the fact that it arrives before, so here it's not use it or lose it. You know, Here you go. It's time to use it.

Comes before it's ready.

Very good. Yeah. So it's something, it's, I would love a conversation at a different time with somebody else, but that doesn't follow normal neurodevelopmental pathways. Usually it's like, yeah, I can see, and if I cover an eye, I lose that ability. You're sort of equipped, and then you cultivate. Here it arrives, and again, erotic dreams, like in that J. Cole song, wet dreams, he says he, I think I'm smashing, but I'm, but I'm sleeping. Wow. So before he has his first relationship, intimate relationship with this person, he's, he's rapping about, like, he's, he's performing the act in his dreams and his erotic dreams before they even happened in real life. That's not the usual order of how the brain and nerves work. So again, my humble opinion is, wow. Erotic dreams are the embodiment of desire. They make sure that we want, and that's advantageous for us as creatures, species, and people.

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

That's a big question. Do they have to dream something or think something first before they can actualize it? I think there's two ways to think of that. There's the things you want and you pursue. And the way I would look at that is returning to another example is that the dreaming brain and the waking brain is one way to understand it. the structures in the brain during waking life, they're called the executive network, the one we talked about, are dampened down. So if you have a goal, pursue it. This conversation is not to be like, hey, just dream around all the time. Like, you got to get after stuff. You got to get things done. And that's the executive network, and that's what drives you to your goals. You can think about your goals, you can choose your desires. And I, that's, that's been most of my life. But then the role of dreams in that, I think are twofold. One, because I have thought about this for myself, and again, it's my story with respect. I believe that if I have chosen a goal with my waking brain, contributions are coming from my dreaming brain. I'm incubating thoughts. It's feeding me. It's feeding some aha moments. I'm using sleep entry. I'm using sleep exit. And then the bigger one for me is, are there things I want? Are there things I hope for that my waking brain just does not have access to? And that's the big question in the beginning, like what's the meaning of dreams? And then, you know, if we look at what is happening in the dreaming brain, returning to our, is that it's hyper-emotional. It's hyper visual. And this is some real profound stuff when I was learning about this and reading about it. The, and I can't get into brain anatomy too much, but I would just say the executive, think of if you flatten out your brain, the executive network would be like different continents and countries going, going revving up a little bit. And the imagination network, which is liberated in the dreaming brain is different other countries coming up. You know, it's like Balaji waterfall. Some come up, some comes down. It's a toggle. And so your brain at its most emotional, metabolically, electrically is in dreaming. You can't rock that hard during the day.

Really?

Yeah. By measurement. So then it says to me, so if there is a meaning, If I can gain further insight into myself, I must look at the ways my dreaming brain is exceptional. I'm not going to look at my dreaming brain for a math solution, but I might look at what my dreaming brain is putting forth for an emotional solution, an emotional insight. That's the thing that really, I mean, a lot of this is, But the meaning of dreams is that the act of self-examination with the recognition that I hope you leave today is that's a hyper-emotional state. What is the value of emotion? It's profound. When people have injury to these areas, they can't even make any decisions. Like decision making requires emotion, instinct requires emotion, My dog, Frankie, she knows when I'm sitting in a booby trap, like, hey, we're going out for date night. Frankie, come here. She's like, there's some brilliance to emotion, right? And we have become, again, don't get me wrong, you got to wake up, you got to go to work, you got to get it done. And that takes the waking brain and that takes the executive network. But if you want insights that can't be gained through the executive network, through always focusing outward, then you are getting glimpses of your own brain, your own life's hyper-emotional states through dreaming. And I think there's insight to be found in that. And that is the way to dream interpretation is to recognize the ways that your dreaming brain is exceptional. So the way I look at dream interpretation, if I could just jump into that, that's like the last chapter. Yeah, we go rock all day. But this is like, if it fits nicely here is, is there are dreams, you know what they are, you know, they're like, it's like naked behind the podium, you had a speech to give, late for a flight. You know, there's no dream interpretation there. You know what that is. There are dreams that make no sense at all. There's no emotional stamp on them. It's just, it's just, it's clutter. We have thoughts during the day we don't pay attention to.

Yes.

There are dreams that parallel your life. And the two most important ones are end of life dreams and pregnancy dreams. Really, as reported when people are pregnant, patients are pregnant, they have a lot of dreams about babies and rolling over babies and anything, you know? So that doesn't need interpretation. And people at the end of life with a cancer diagnosis, and then my patients tell me that they're thinking about like finish lines and visiting people from the past. Really? The dreams are accompanying you, right? you're making those dreams. So of course the dreams fit what's going on in your life. Again, those don't need to be interpreted. You know what's going on. You're dying and your dreams are comforting you.

You've worked on a lot of people who have only had a year or a few years left to live.

Cancer.

What are most of those dreams of people who are dying?

Okay, that's a big question. That goes back to the last conversation we had. I am surprised by how valiant most cancer patients are. When I look at cancer patients in general, I would think most would fall apart, right? Because it's quite the word, it's quite the journey. But it's overwhelming, not all. Some suffer, some handle it poorly, understandably. But they do well. They show up for their appointments. They're brave. They dig down for strength and composure and They find meaning, sometimes they are able to enjoy some things more knowing that the finish line is in view. They're not encumbered, as I mentioned last time, with fuss. And those patients, when you talk to.

Them.

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

-Wow.

-And so again, the hyper-emotional dream. So if we have dreams that don't need interpretation because you're falling or you're flying and you're falling or you're giving a talk and you show up naked or you're at the end of life and it's comforting you or it's just... There's no emotional feeling to it. I believe if you are to go after a dream to really reflect upon. You wake up and that intense dreaming life gives you a little glimpse, a little peek at something. Don't waste that. And the one to choose is the one with a powerful central image and a powerful emotion. And that to me, as that makes sense with what's going on in the brain, hyper-emotional, hypervisual, right? I'm trying to make sense of it. And just be aware that a lot of times it's symbolic. It's not gonna be literal, right? Because we talked about the executive network is dampened. And hyperemotional, hypervisual brain, it's a storyteller. You want to extract the meaning out of the story, much like a good movie. It's not, hey, why am I... So for example, some veterans when they're having trouble with a marriage will have dreams of war, but they don't generally dream of war. So you have to be able to think about it and try to... I can't give you that answer. I don't know if you're a veteran or not. I think that's where it's hard to go online and say, I dreamt of a leaf for a bridge. What does it mean? No, it's different for its individual. And you may not be able to figure it out, let alone somebody else. But if you have the luxury to remember your dreams or through auto suggestion and journaling, you're trying to remember dreams more, which can happen. Those are the ones to go after. The hyper emotional ones, the hypervisual ones. And just keep them here. You got 15 things in front of you. You're focusing out where your executive network is on. But don't forget about that glimpse you got into your hyper-emotional brain and what it produced about you. Yeah. For you.

Wow. That was fascinating. I feel like we're like 1% of all the things we could be talking about right now. Why do some people have lucid dreams? Why are lucid dreams important? And how can we enter lucid dreams? Faster.

Okay. That got two chapters out of nine. So that's a big one. And just to be clear what lucid dreams are, I have not had them, but Aristotle wrote about them 3,000 years ago. So this is not like, it's not some current thing. Okay. What is new is the understanding again we return to your body's locked down, executive network and logic are dampened, emotions are up, vision's up. When your body is locked down in lucid dreaming, what happens is there's one part of the body that's still not locked down, one of those eyeballs. So when you're waking up in the morning, it just happens that The muscles to the eyeballs are not locked down. The muscles to the breathing, of course, because you're still breathing in lucid dreams or in dreaming in general. So what lucid dream experts and people looking into that have started just recently after 3,000 years of many different cultures and books writing about, I felt I was awake in my dream and I could steer the direction of the dream. So not only were you an actor in the dream, you're the director.

Interesting, right?

That's been written about for thousands of years. Right, right, right. But what they can do now is in these sleep laboratories, they put the stickers on their head to measure the electricity to prove they're asleep. Because I could imagine, like, you know, some of my friends, they'd be like, I just, I woke up. How do you know you didn't just wake up?

Right.

How do you know you're awake in a dream? So you have to prove you're asleep through the whole time. Because otherwise you might just wake up. Right, right, right. Yeah, I I'm lucid dreaming and then fall back asleep, right? So some essential questions to be asked. So the electrical measurements or the stickers on the head, the sleep spindles is a certain spike that proves your sleep. You can't fake being asleep to the EKG of your mind, if you will, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they started communicating with them. They'll say certain things and they'll They come up with this technique called left, right, left, right, and they'll move their eyeballs left, right, left, right, answer simple questions, and that's progressed to some people being able to demonstrate when they enter, when lucidity arrives within their dream, they will signal to the people out standing outside the window. And so there are these back and forth experiments going on. so far as even basic things like, oh, what's two plus two? And they'll try to do a left, right, left, right four times. And some of you might say, well, I thought you can do math, but that's part of the magic and the mystery of lucid dreaming, is that the executive Network is coming back online a little bit. So for that awareness to happen inside your dream, proven by sleep spindles on a EKG, EEG, you can't fake. when the awareness comes back, that primer we're talking about, the executive network comes back too. So they can do a little bit of basic math.

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

Like 49.51 yeah.

So where is that when the lucid dreaming is happening? What is happening? Is it kind of rocking back and forth like this constantly or is it one side and then it comes back?

That's a good question. It's fragile. That's a very good question. So you've you've gone from dreaming brain, you've gone from waking brain to dreaming brain. And what happens is a little bit of the waking brain returns, but in little flourishes. They report, it's not like, hey, I'm lucid dreaming. I got 90 minutes. Let's ride this. I get it. Like, I just, you know, somebody might be able to, but I wanna leave you with the fascination. Like, these overlap states, which are really fascinating, sleep entry, sleep exit, a bit of awareness returning within proven sleep, that it is something... that it's something fragile, it's something fleeting. Think of like birds and murmurations and Aurora borealis. We're not talking about... And that's also the lesson for people who are listening, is stop thinking that your brain is wires and on and off. Think of it as think of it as dreaming brain, waking brain, waking brain, dreaming brain. Think of it as executive network mostly interacting here, a little bit of imagination network returning because I'm daydreaming while we're talking, a little bit of blend, right? Well, lucid dreaming is coming to awareness that you're dreaming within your dream. And for some people, being able to steer the content of their dream. It's crazy stuff like Christopher Nolan likes to talk about in movies and stuff like that. What I'm here to tell you is it exists. They have proven that it exists. I'm not saying you lucid dream. I have not. Aristotle wrote about it, but they have proven with responses from preserved eyeball movements, documentation that that person is asleep with the electricity of sleep, that they have been able to communicate with people who are in dreams.

It's crazy that they can steer their dreams.

That's what they report.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah.

But if you step back a little bit and stop thinking of it as the brain on/off, wired, hardwired, if you start to think of it as states, as tides, as flows, as seasons, and every night there's the waking brain and dreaming brain, and there's sleep entry and there's sleep exit, and sometimes lucidity returns, it starts to make sense of a lot of the stuff I've been seeing in the hospital.

Really?

Well, I mean, people wake up from anesthesia, they're suppositive, people are awake, they communicate in anesthesia during our awake brain surgery. Really? People wake up and they're dreaming gnarly stuff. You can give people certain medicines and they have more lucid dreaming, something based on acetylcholine. The reports of lucid dreaming go up with galantamine. So, what that tells me, not to get too medically about it, is that when you mess with pills and drugs and the dreams change, like this is a biological process. Wow. It's not coming from the heavens. It's coming from our brain. Really?

Yeah.

Speaking of the heavens, when we dream, are our dreams in our brain or in our minds? And is our mind on this earth and planet? Or is it in another realm?

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

3:00 a.m., you know?

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

And you may not have the answers, I'm serious.

No, I mean, I have some direction to those questions. I mean, if somebody told... Just the fact that you asked me that question means like, I'm doing all right, you know? No, but it's, I am fortunate to.

Have.

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

Yes. That's what is your thoughts on that?

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

Wow.

Now, what we think can go back and shape the brain. So it's a reciprocal interaction. Our habits can shape the brain. our brain creates the habits. So the brain mind, I don't think you can really separate it out. The ultimate gift of the human mind, I think, is dreaming. Love and all those things, yes, but the process of dreaming. So let's for one second say we're talking about brain and mind as one thing. We just call it brain slash mind. And I was reading about this. this is great. Here's a story. Of course they had to come from the heavens till about our understanding till about 100 years ago. You plop down, you're not doing anything, and then you wake up and whether you tell somebody or not, you're like, man, I was on fire last night. Right. So if you're asleep and you're hibernating or you're deactivated or whatever the phrase was, It had to come from something external. It's in there. How could inactive flesh of the brain, the resting brain, brain doesn't rest at night. It's actually brain rests when you're dead. Right. There's no, there's no, like I said, the electricity in sleep is so similar to the electricity during waking, they call it paradoxical sleep. you're on when you're asleep. Okay, so but they didn't know that. Nobody could know that until this is a great story. I don't think it's been told, but it's the story that I've come to understand. So that makes sense. It had to come from something outside of us. You're out cold and you're thinking that kind of stuff. Monsters and pterodactyls and erotic dreams and nightmares. Okay, so that came from the heavens or the gods or omens. But what happened was somebody about 100 years ago did a surgery for a brain tumor, then there was a physician there and they had just figured out at that time that you could put a wire wasn't just for sending electricity, it was for measuring it. So when you put a sticker on your heart and you know the electricity of a heart, it's from the nerves on the surface of the heart, it's not from the muscle. Interesting. EKG is the measurement of the electricity in the nerves on top of your heart. Okay? When we shock you to recharge your heart, we're just shocking the three nerves, not the muscle. Muscle just listens. Well, what if you put 96 stickers on your brain, you would get a measurement that's called EEG. Okay? What he did was he put a sticker right on top of the hole. Like a skull had a hole, but the stitch work, the flesh was covered. We do that still sometimes, but In that area where there was no skull, but the size of a coin, he put a little sticker on there, a little wire. On the brain?

No, or just on the skull?

Yeah. But there was a hole. Surgeons do it on the brain, but.

There was a hole.

And healed flesh. He put it just on top of the flesh with the hole underneath. He thought he's gonna get better readout, I guess. Right.

The hole, that would be a direct line to the brain.

Yes, but not touching the brain.

Well said.

Got it. And then he got, He got squiggles. And that was like, and that was where the EEG was invented about 100 years ago. The interesting part was when they all left the room or whatever they were doing, the person fell asleep, nobody paid attention to it, but the squiggles were happening at night. It was the squiggles during the day, and then flatline at night. So somebody could have said at that point, like, wait a second, that flesh is not inactive. Then 60 years ago, somebody in Montreal, Dr. Penfield, he was, so now he's numbing up the scalp, laying it open, patient is on relaxing medications but not on a machine, drills the hole, like ice fishing, takes it off, sees the covering of the brain called the dura, incises it, the surface of the brain is there, and then they lighten up her medication. and he's got like a little fountain pen that delivers little electricity. And he's mapping it. And he's trying to find the thing. The patient has seizures. He says, before the seizure, I always get this feeling, this aura. He thinks if he can find where that feeling originates, dissect out a little bit of that tissue, he can break the seizures. He ended up being right. That's a whole massive field now. Imagine major centers around the world. seizure surgery. But at some times when he would zap, because he's marking, you know, the patient reports desire. And one patient reported a night, a recurrent nightmare that they had been having.

Interesting.

You zap the surface of the brain with a little faint electricity. The brain doesn't have nerve endings of its own, so you can touch it, you wouldn't know. Certainly. You wouldn't feel it when you, yeah, not you, but this is known, and I've done the surgery. This is established stuff. Awake brain surgery. You can cut the brain. You don't feel the pain. No, you only.

It only feels through its tentacles.

So when you're doing an awake brain surgery, you only.

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

The patient is awake and you're in.

There and they can talk to you and you can dissect the brain and they don't feel a thing. Is this the one? I mean, you see the videos of, like, I guess.

Yeah, we've got. Play violin or guitar where it's okay, you know, connecting.

It's so crazy.

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

Wow.

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

Wow.

That I can say with certainty. Everything else, this has just been a fascinating First of all, that's a ride. And the ride will continue, you know? But that we can say was certain. Dreams are an electrical process of the human brain.

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

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

Yes.

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

Chemicals change, which create different dreams.

Yeah.

Interesting.

That's yet another example of dreams must come from the brain.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Not from some other realm.

Right.

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

And I'm happy to get into all of these things. Like aura is a thing, A-U-R-A, people look it up. That's a hunch. So I'm not, I think a lot of the stuff is real. I just think it's muddy and it's easy to manipulate. I would say be careful. So the pineal gland has been, you know, because of its location, people thought it's the mind's eye. Descartes, philosophers have commented about it. What I can tell you, is as a brain surgeon. What is it? I can take it out and the person is exactly the same. Really? Pineal gland surgery, pineal cystoma, pineal gland.

Have you ever taken one out?

Yeah. You've taken part of neurosurgery.

You've taken one out of her?

Yeah, you come in through the back here, it sits between lobes. So people can look that up is pineal gland or it's a gland, whether it's got cancer in it or whether it's just a cyst, non-cancerous but growing and pushing whether it's normal pineal or abnormal, when you remove it, they have almost no significant consequences. Really? And the melatonin is bottomed out and they still sleep okay. So I'm not here to go against the whole world of things that are out there. But again, if we're having a conversation, you come into my house, we're hanging out, we're taking a walk, and you ask me that question, I'm trying to come to you both with things I can't make sense of, anesthetic dreams, pineal gland, no, they're being removed across the world and there isn't the pituitary gland. If you take that out, you got to take a bunch of hormones and medicine. That's a big deal.

Interesting.

The pineal gland, the one that has been given sort of this transcendent value, that comes out and goes in the canister and it's fine. And the next day, we don't change the stuff the patient's on. They don't need some replacement.

Thing.

And it makes melatonin. And I wrote about in my last book, when the melatonin drops to zero or nothing, they're still sleeping all right.

Really?

I'm not gonna say don't take melatonin or take melatonin. We're not doing health advice. I mean, I don't mean like you can't go there, but- Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Where I'm at is concepts, exploration.

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

It doesn't have those kind of connections.

Interesting.

Back to the dreaming. When I talk to you about, like, if the brain was laid flat and different continents and countries are up, the imagination network liberated in the dreaming brain, different countries and continents and oceans are up for the executive network trying to get the day's work done. The pineal is like, It's irrelevant in that map of things that come up when you sleep. Huh? That thing that goes 51% when you sleep, pineal gland. Not even a benchwarmer.

What's the primary purpose of the pineal gland?

We don't think it has a primary purpose. I know. Well, we can look it up, but there are parts of the body. It's like the appendix of the brain. We can remove it and it doesn't change.

And people still live long lives.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But you don't have to, what part.

Of the brain, if you remove it, is gonna be, you're not gonna be able to perform the same way.

Well, okay, that's a bigger concept.

And how much of the brain can you still have? Can you remove or have left to still live a great life?

Yeah, so let's take that, that's an interesting question that when you, if you think of the brain laid flat as a Yes. As different continents and countries, right? It's like a mosaic, it's like a puzzle.

If you cut out half of the continent.

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

Half? Half the brain.

Yeah. Not the reptilian and not the emotional instinct, but half the hemisphere, the two walnut.

So.

What that points to is this, it's what we call some areas you bump into it with a suction at 20 20 20x and it leads to a change. Some areas, nail gun injuries happen and you take out that part of the brain, you know, like car, like, you know, like framers that use the pneumatic nail guns. And when they kick up a little higher, they'll spray a nail through the thin floor of the. Yeah, this part of neurosurgery is taking out the penetrate. It's called penetrating trauma. depending on where it goes, they can handle a nail in one frontal lobe or the other, but hitting both frontal lobes, it changes a person. So some areas have redundancy, other areas can't take a joke. Some areas, you could take one occipital lobe and you basically just lose your rear view mirror, you don't lose sight, but if you take both or injure both, so there's, that's what neurosurgery is about, is knowing what you can go through, what to expect on the person waking up after you do that.

Wow.

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

Yeah, this is brain. It's diverse.

Oh yeah. Structures and connections in there is beautiful.

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

Six. I was training, yeah. Really? Yeah. -What are you doing? -Gunshot wounds, nail gun injuries, fights, you know. But so you learn with trauma, what.

Parts of the brain can handle trauma?

-'Cause you're not doing those types of surgeries. You're doing cancer removal. -Now it's- -Right, but that informs me if I'm getting to a deeper tumor and it's inside and it's got a normal brain on the outside, that has informed me along with mapping, what is the route that I can get to the tumor? This is fascinating. But not injure the person. that's, that's neurosurgery. It's not the, it's not the chopsticks in a jar. Like the tech, the hands, it requires skill, but there's something more to it that I love. And the stories from the patients informed the last decade and a half and still are informing this book. And so it's the patient stories and the neuroscience on top of the nail gun. And that's what we open with. Look, I'm trying to come at you with, like, Petri dish stuff. Nail gun stuff, wow. Heavens, networks, I'm trying to bring it all in to have done a real proper look at dreams and dreaming.

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

Well, I think, you know, you, you, you said something really important there that In trying to understand dreams and dreaming, I understood myself better. If you read this book and you find something interesting, learning more about your brain and mind will form your waking life. Then when people say, the brain is this, you'll say, wait a second, because you're going to walk away learning about neuroscience, you're going to walk away learning about art and literature, nightmares, erotic dreams. And more importantly, you know, for me, it was, it's sort of my, it's my gift. This is my legacy that somebody tried to put together something that, like, how's somebody gonna do it and take a proper shot at this? And I'm very happy with the honesty there. And you'll see phrases like, Could it be? I wonder. I'm tempted to speculate. So I'm not just telling you, I'm taking you through how I'm thinking. And so, well, I mean, it's, I.

Mean, how long have you been a brain surgeon for now?

Wow, 25 years.

25 years. And what it sounds like is you've had 25 years plus your residency. So it's called 30 plus years of researching the brain and as a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind. When you first came on, you talked about the brain as kind of these waves and patterns.

Brain waves.

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

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

Exactly.

It's not a switch.

And then to me, it sounds like, you know, last 30 years you've been able to interpret these waves and patterns through all the different operations you've done through the different case studies you've seen of people coming in before and after and now deepening your research. in understanding the brain, the mind with dreaming. And so I'm so excited for people to get this book. This is why youy Dream. And I'm excited to dive in more with you. I think we got to do probably multiple episodes on this because I'm fascinated by this. I want to know more about how also, you know, the health benefits of dreaming, how much we should be sleeping to maximize our dreams and our Optimal Health. and so many other questions around this. If you guys have a question on dreams, leave a question below and we'll try to get to that in our next episode in the future whenever we can get you back on.

Pleasure.

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

Yeah, I'm feeling good about it and you know, I think the usual things, where to get a copy on Amazon or where are the publishers are just doing a massive thing. They sold it. It's already picked up in 22 translations. Wow. They believe in it. And they've been reading this material and the two things that really touched me were, this can never be explained. Like, you know, because I'm a surgeon. I want answers. I want to fix. But they're like, this can, it's dreaming. Rahul, it'll never be fully explained. We want to know what you think and pull from everything you've lived through. It's amazing. And then the New York Publisher just was like this email, and just the first sentence just took my breath away, a little book, a little bit. And it was-- it just put this book is important. Wow. Period. I was like, okay. That's a mic drop moment for me.

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

Your Instagram? Dr. John Dall, but you know, I'm an old timer, man.

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

No. Okay.

You know, I mean, I Instagram.

Yeah.

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

We could take each chapter deeper.

Well, let's do it. I appreciate you being here.

Memory is important. Memory is the thing that determines whether The event remains traumatic in your mind.

Whether it's painful still for you.

So let's get into that.

So we just need to heal the.

Memory of the trauma. This is exactly where I'm taking it.