Night Visions — Understand and Get More Out of Your Dreams
Episode Stats
Summary
When you really stop to think about it, it s an astonishing fact that we spend a third of our lives asleep. And part of that time we re dreaming. What goes on during this unconscious state that consumes much of us lives? And how can we use our dreams to improve our waking hours? Here to unpack the mysterious world of dreams is author and dream nerd, Alice Robb, the author of Why We Dream: The Trans transformative power of our nightly journey.
Transcript
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we're at mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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when you really stop to think about it it's an astonishing fact that we spend a third of our
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lives asleep and part of that time we're dreaming what goes on during this unconscious state that
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consumes much of our lives and how can we use our dreams to improve our waking hours
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here to unpack the mysterious world of dreams is alice rob the author of why we dream the
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transformative power of our nightly journey today on the show alice first shares some background on
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the nature of dreams why their content is often stress-inducing and how they can influence our
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waking hours from impacting our emotional health to helping us be more creative we then turn to how
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to get more out of your dreams including the benefits of keeping a dream journal and talking
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about your dreams with others we also get into the world of lucid dreaming and some tips for how to
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start controlling your dreams after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is slash dreams
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all right alice rob welcome to the show thanks so much for having me so a while back ago you wrote
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a book called why we dream the transformative power of our nightly journey uh where you take a deep dive
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into the science and the cultural history of dreams what led you down that path why did you write a book
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about dreams i have always been interested in dreams i have always had very vivid dreams ever since i was a
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child which might be related to i haven't always been the best sleeper i might wake up a couple times
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in the night and i remember when i was around the time that i started thinking about doing this as a book
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i was just having such intense dreams some of them nightmares and they were impacting my day
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so much i was working in a magazine and i would just find myself kind of like you know something
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would trigger a memory of a dream during the day i would just be kind of um i felt impacted by them
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and it felt like there wasn't really a way to talk about those experiences and that in the world that i
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was you know moving in dreams were kind of seen as this taboo subject they were kind of boring maybe it's a
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little narcissistic to talk about your dreams but i started reading more about them and i read some
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you know i found that there was an amazing body of work from both the hard sciences the social sciences
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on dreams and i just wanted to spend some time delving into that let's talk about what goes on in
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the brain when we do dream if we dream it's going to happen in the rim cycle the uh you know the rapid
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eye movement phase of sleep is that right yeah so one thing that sometimes surprises people is that
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we all basically i mean unless we're you know maybe very drunk or very high or extremely depressed
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we're typically having dreams every night every time you have a REM cycle so most people depending
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how long you sleep have four or five REM cycles every night and they get progressively longer and
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more intense over the course of the night so when you first fall asleep you might just have a little
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bit of kind of playback like you're brushing your teeth again in your dreams and then it's towards the
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end of the night that you're having those more intense story-like dreams that are the ones that we tend
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to remember and talk about so that's why if you if you wake up more frequently during the night you'll
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also have more opportunities to wake up during a REM cycle okay so we dream typically four to five
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times during the night so it's not like one continuous dream the entire night it's going on
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and off yeah you can have something called REM rebound where if you're deprived of REM you can
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then have like a very intense your brain's kind of catching up on it so that if you're doing something
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that suppresses REM like drinking or drugs and then you stop doing that you can have very intense
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REM rebound and kind of dream all night but more typically it's distributed throughout the night
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does anything change in our brain whenever we start dreaming like in the electrical signaling or the
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chemical release yeah so the state that your brain is in during dreaming looks a little bit like your
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brain when you're awake and free associating or daydreaming like it's a little bit like an intense
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kind of fantasizing and this is partly why it can be very good for creative thinking because
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the parts of your brain that produce emotion are very fired up and dopamine is is surging and the
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parts of your brain that are involved in rational thinking and decision making are quieter we're going to
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talk about the benefits of dreaming to our emotional health here in a bit but like do the researchers
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who study this stuff do they think dreaming does it serve any physiological purpose like does our brain
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physically undergo changes that we have to go through only through dreaming to maintain brain health
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yeah well so it's a little bit hard to disentangle like what are the physiological benefits of dreaming and
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what are the physiological benefits of sleep i mean we all know that sleep has enormous impact on
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mental and physical health sleep deprivation leads to increased risk of you know strokes heart attacks
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all kinds of diseases very detrimental to learning but there have been some studies that deprive
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rats of REM sleep specifically there's one way they study this where when you go into REM sleep your
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whole body is paralyzed except for your eyes so if you put a rat on like a little dish like a little
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floating dish then they will fall asleep and they can sleep but then when they go into REM they'll fall
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into the water and wake up so you can i mean if you're if you really want to torture a rat you can
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deprive a rat of REM sleep in this way um and they found that rats that are deprived of sleep completely
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will die in a couple of weeks and if they're deprived of REM sleep they will also die it might take like
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four to six weeks and they'll also perform worse at like survival related tasks so if they're you know
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in a maze and they've been deprived of REM sleep they won't do as well so i think being kind of into it
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that some of this applies to to humans as well but REM sleep tends to be the really deep sleep where
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you're kind of doing that like consolidating new memories and forming new associations well okay so
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whenever we have REM sleep that's when we dream there are changes going on in our brain dopamine
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is being released it's almost like we're awake and half asleep at the same time when we're dreaming
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let's talk about dream content are dreams primarily visual is it just we see stuff or can we also hear
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stuff in our dreams yeah they're very visual and but we all dream in different ways um first of all
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which is why i mean people often will ask me to say you know i dreamed about this so what does it mean
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and unfortunately unless i know them extremely well and know their dreaming patterns in history i can't
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usually answer that because we all have our own dream repertoire and our own dream languages so if
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you're an extremely auditory if you're a musician your dreams are more likely to feature music and sound
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but yes typically our dreams are very visual uh visually intense and sight is for most people the the dominant
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sense in dreams and most people now dream in color there was actually one really interesting study
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i read that found that people who grew up with black and white tv were more likely to dream in black and white
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and there was another study where a scientist had his students wear goggles all day that turned
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everything red and have them sleep in a sleep lab woke them up and asked them about their dreams and
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found that they started to have like red tinted visual imagery in their dreams so they can also be
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impacted the way we dream can be impacted by our recent experience as well okay so we we can hear in
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dreams so that does do blind people they just they typically just hear stuff in their dreams they
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don't see things it actually depends at what age they lost their sight if they lost it very young or if
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they've always been blind then they probably won't be able to see in their dreams but if they lost in
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adulthood then they might still be able to see is the content of most dreams pleasant neutral bad what does
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the research say there yeah so this really surprised me because when i went into this project i think i
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had the stereotype that dreams are supposed to be pleasant i don't know we talk about things being
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dreamy as a good thing um and freud talked about dreams as wish fulfillment and showing us our repressed
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desires i think that was kind of a just a cliche for a long time and then in the 1940s there were a couple
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of researchers who actually started applying content analysis to people's dream reports so they collected
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thousands of dreams and then they basically coded them so they coded like different interactions and
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they would label them as you know an instance of aggression or persecution or happiness they found that most
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dream content was actually negative i think up to about two-thirds in this set which has been
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borne out by other research and that the most common emotions and dreams were things like
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anxiety fear helplessness so yeah dreams are actually pretty nightmarish for the most part which made me
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feel better about my own dream life in this research where they code things and try to you know look
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at content specifically are there things that people dream about the most is it about relationships is it
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about scary situations what they ate during the day like what what are we typically dreaming about
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yeah i mean it's different for different groups of people and it changes throughout the lifespan so
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kids tend to have much simpler dreams very young kids will dream about just kind of basic sleeping and
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eating and then you can actually kind of track with developmental landmarks how their dreams develop so
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they'll start incorporating more human characters they'll start to take on a more active role and
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kind of be the protagonist of their own dreams around seven or eight or so and then just continue to
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develop in complexity but in terms of what people dream about i mean studies from the 40s found that
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and of course i mean yeah there's there's a lot of bizarreness and there are certain motifs that
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are common across cultures like flying and actually teeth falling out like that's like a human universal
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dream it's a horrible one scientist things like might be from like these old memories we have of
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losing our teeth as children but yeah i mean relationships a lot of survival related activities
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which kind of fits in with an evolutionary hypothesis that i can talk about but they also found you know that
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not a shocker like men tend to dream about sex more than women do men tended to also dream about
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other men more than women tend to dream sort of evenly about both men and women may have changed since
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the 1940s but yeah a lot of you know fear and flight and being chased by things these are all pretty common
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dream scenarios it was interesting about two about dreams in the content of it going back to that idea
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you said about kids when they first start dreaming it's very like i'm asleep i'm eating cheerios
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but then eventually they have other characters popping up in their dreams and these other characters
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they have their own agency like we understand that even though this is in my head i don't have control
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over these other characters inside of my head they still have their agency and i have my agency
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i think that's what's so interesting about dreams and why they're so powerful and why they do come up
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so much in in religion because it yeah it feels like you can be surprised in your dreams which is
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kind of a paradox right because you're the author you're making them it's like you know sometimes
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fiction writers talk about you know this character just showed me who they were but it's like okay but
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that is what's happening in dreams so they feel like they're coming from outside of ourselves
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you know freud would say that every character in a dream represents a different aspect of yourself
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which is something i think about when i'm trying to understand my own dreams
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but there's something very kind of playful about that can the content of your dreams influence how you
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experience real life or relationships the next day yeah definitely i mean dreams are so intense the
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emotions are are so real combined with this we have this sense that even though we know we came up
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with them we kind of feel like they're coming from outside ourselves and even when we forget them
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we can be tricked because we do forget most most people forget most dreams but we can be triggered
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during the day also dreams can show us things that we're trying not to think about so you know
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maybe you do feel a certain way about a relationship and that person is being really mean to you in your
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dreams and that makes you reflect on the relationship but even if it's totally like you don't see any
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reason for having a dream where you've cast you know someone you love as a perpetrator that can
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absolutely still impact how you treat them the next day there's a study that found like couples
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were more likely to argue in real life if they had you know had a dream about cheating on each other
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yeah i'm sure a lot of people listening to this podcast have had that experience where
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their spouse they had like a dream where you did something wrong in the dream like i don't know
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whatever you just could be anything it couldn't even be cheating it could just been like i i didn't uh
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pick up the kids when i was supposed to and they get angry at you in the dream and then when they wake
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up the next day like they're they're still angry at you and you're like what did i do i didn't do
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anything why are you angry at me oh i got mad at you in my dream and i'm still mad at you you're
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like okay yeah it's hard i mean the feelings are real you can't just uh can't just delete them
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okay so for millennia humans have looked to dreams to find meaning about life's big decisions what role
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did dreams play in early human cultures well they were much more integrated with life with daily
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life so you know doctors would use dreams in diagnosis people would use dreams to try to
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predict the future there were native american communities where dreams were really revered and
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communities would even like act out their dreams together to prevent something from that had happened
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in a dream from happening in real life they were just taken more seriously until maybe 100 years
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ago or so 150 years ago yeah you even talked about some of the founding fathers i think it was john
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adams and benjamin rush rush was a doctor so i'm sure this is why he did this but they would write
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each other their dreams they would have these correspondences like well here's what i dreamed
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about and yeah i had dreamed about this yeah it was just yeah it was something you did you just
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talked about your dreams even families in the 19th century in america probably sat around the fire
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and said hey i had this dream let's talk about what it means yeah there were dreams in newspapers
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there was i mean like the late 19th century there were newspapers in new york that would like illustrate
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people's dreams or there was like a dreaming contest where people would write in with their best dreams
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i think there was just a lot more outlets for people to talk about this thing that we're all experiencing
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every day and people would look to their dreams to figure out they would actually use it to predict the
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future or like i saw this in my dream so this means this is going to happen but then freud came
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along how did freud influence how we think about dreams in the west well freud was kind of a double-edged
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sword for dreams because on the one hand he made dreams almost the center of psychoanalysis
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the interpretation of dreams came out in 1900 very influential he asked his patients about their dreams
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but on the other hand his theory was not totally right we now know so his theory of one of his theories of dreams
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was that um dreams are usually wish fulfillment and they're showing us things that we secretly desire
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but we can't handle you know that we desire it so we've suppressed it i mean i think he was right that
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there's a lot of symbolism in dreams but he thought that most things in dreams were symbols for sex and i
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think that made people kind of embarrassed to talk about dreams they came to seem like a little dirty
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and i don't think there's that much basis for thinking that like climbing a ladder is actually a
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sexual metaphor the other part of the freud picture is that freud became so associated with dreams that
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when he kind of went out of style and he seems to be coming back which is interesting but when he went
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out of style there's a big backlash to freud in like the 70s and 80s dreams got a little bit swept
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under the rug and there were therapies like cbt which were more results based and didn't leave a lot
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of room for dreams so i think dreams were a little bit neglected for a few decades post freud
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well let's talk about this idea what the dream researchers are finding out now so freud had this
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idea that you know dreams can mean something they're symbolic but do dreams have universal
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archetypical meanings i'm sure everyone's seen those dream dictionaries where you're like well if i dreamt
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about teeth falling out it means this if i dreamt about a snake it means this does that hold any water
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yeah so dream dictionaries are very popular and i understand why because dreams can be so distressing
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that you're like why did i dream about you know whatever my teeth falling out but unfortunately i
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would not put a lot of stock in dream dictionaries because we all have such i mean different associations
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like our dreams are you know they're inspired by our lives so if i dream about a cat i happen to hate
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cats that cat is going to represent something very different for me than it is for someone who
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loves cats for example but there are certain kind of archetypes and patterns that exist particularly
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around like trauma and grief and mourning so there was one researcher who studied a bunch of people
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who were grieving the loss of a loved one and found that their dreams actually followed
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a trajectory almost like the stages of grief that we talk about so like in the immediate aftermath of
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a loss they would have really disturbing dreams that the person was alive again there's still kind of like
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a kind of denial and grief is a time when even people who don't remember a lot of dreams often say
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that they do and then they might have as they kind of moved on in the grieving process they might have
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dreams about the person saying goodbye or going on a journey or they see them at the tarmac and
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they're getting on a plane and then later on maybe years later they would report like more pleasant dreams
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about just seeing the person and kind of hanging out or exchanging words of comfort so it sounds like
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dreams they can actually help with grieving sadness uh stress yeah definitely i mean there was
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another study of people who were going through divorce that looked at their dreams right after
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the divorce and then a year later that actually found that people who were having more dreams about
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their ex right after the divorce were coping better a year later so there's definitely a lot of work
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emotional work that we're doing in our dreams and actually um with like severe depression there's a
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really marked decrease in dream recall so that might be kind of a chicken and egg thing where you're not
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doing the work you you can't do the work of like emotional processing in your dreams and that contributes
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to the depression and depression prevents dreaming but yeah and that can be a sign of a depression
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lifting can be the return of dreams we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
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and now back to the show so what do dream researchers think is the purpose of dreaming psychologically
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why do we essentially live another life inside of our heads when we're unconscious at night i mean
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there are a lot of theories i mean there's this evolutionary hypothesis which is that we're
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practicing for stressful events in a low stakes environment so take something like the exam dream
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which is another almost universal dream that you um you have a test i mean i i still have this all the
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time and i graduated from college more than a decade ago you're going to an exam and you overslept it
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you forgot to take the test the test etc and the idea is that you do that and then you remember
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in real life oh i have to set an alarm for that project or this presentation or whatever and that
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also would kind of explain why in addition to these very modern anxiety dreams like exams we also have
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these even people who live in cities will have dreams about like being chased by wild animals things like
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that but yeah in terms of emotional processing i think it's dreams can be a kind of exposure therapy
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where things that you aren't quite ready to confront in real life you can kind of start working through them
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in your dreams there's an idea too that dreaming is a chance for our brains to be creative and even
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solve problems what does the research say about problem solving in our dreams yeah well in your
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dreams you're in this kind of looser state where you're working with a much wider range of memories
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right so you're bringing in your it's like the soup and you've got like the sandwich you ate yesterday
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but also like your friend from middle school who you hadn't thought about in years so it's this time
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we're kind of letting ourselves go cognitively and coming up with yeah just like more unexpected
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connections and i think this is partly why a lot of people find they're more creative right when they
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wake up and yeah there's studies that show that people give like more surprising answers on word tests
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when they're woken out of a rem stage things like that and of course i mean countless examples of
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writers and artists and musicians coming up with breakthroughs in their dreams yeah i think was it
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paul mccartney like it was uh which song let it be or no which one was it that he he had he had the tune
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in a dream no it was yesterday it was yesterday yeah yeah you heard the tune for yesterday and he woke up
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and he had the tune so he came up with like some like random lyrics it was something about scrambled
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eggs and then he wrote the lyrics later yeah and yeah i mean i read like while i was working on the
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book i read like graham green has a published dream dictionary nabikov has a published dream
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dictionary like they've been such a part of um yeah of artist process yeah i think uh salvador dolly
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he did hypnotic or hypno it's like yeah like hypnagogic imagery which are those are the images
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like right as you're falling asleep i don't know if you've ever noticed them where you're like just
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in between and you can it's almost like a little bit like lucid dreaming and that you have a little
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bit of control you're kind of like seeing stuff and you're aware that you're seeing it but yeah those
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are like kind of on the dreaming spectrum yeah so he would hold like a heavy key or something metal in
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his hands and then whenever he fell asleep you know you become limp your body goes limp and he would
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drop it and make a noise and he'd wake up and like whatever was in his head he's like all right i'm
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going to paint melting clocks now yeah right yeah in addition to being related to creativity and
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problem solving uh dreaming is also connected to just learning in general and language acquisition in
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particular what's the connection there there was actually a study of students who were in a french
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immersion program that found that they had not only did they have actually have spent a greater
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proportion of the night in rem sleep while they were in the program but also the students who started
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dreaming about french more made greater gains and there was a study at harvard in the 90s by a guy named
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robert stick gold and he was inspired by an experience he had where he went mountain climbing
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with his family and it was like really intense day and then as he was falling asleep noticed that he was
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replaying a really difficult moment right kind of as he was falling asleep and then so he devised a study
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where he got a bunch of students to sleep in the sleep lab and had them play tetris during the day
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so he got like some people who had never played some people were experts and then he would wake
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a researcher would wake them up um like at various points in the night and ask about their dreams and
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found that most of them were dreaming about tetris and particularly the ones who were new to it so
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they were kind of like working extra hard in their dreams to master this new skill and then dreaming
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about tetris would correlate to doing better at it and it's been replicated yeah yeah so what all this
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research is showing about dreams is that it does something in our brain like we can solve problems it
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can help us process stress help us process grieving it can help us be more creative and so what this
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research is suggesting is that you know we shouldn't uh take our dreams for granted we can actually
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use them to our benefit we're kind of going back to uh the role dreams played in humans lives you
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know 100 200 years ago so let's talk about what some of the research says about how we can get more
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out of our dreams and one thing that the research shows that keeping a dream journal can be really
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beneficial what are the benefits of keeping a dream journal yeah i mean it's so easy i think to get
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more from your dreams because you are probably already having them you're just forgetting them so
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it's a little bit like you know you have this whole source of of insight and knowledge and potential
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creative ideas and if we don't keep a dream journal or do some practice to remember them we're just kind
00:27:29.400
of throwing away this potential gift and it's pretty easy for most people to remember more of their dreams
00:27:37.620
one of the biggest things is actually just um this might sound kind of woo but it's true but just
00:27:44.700
believing that they are important and do have insight and kind of saying that to yourself as you fall
00:27:51.980
asleep and reminding yourself of your intention to remember your dreams you know if we've convinced you
00:27:57.820
and yeah a dream journal i think is probably the most powerful tool when i was working on the book i kept a
00:28:06.240
dream journal i mean it's on my phone but just like in the notes app because i was thinking about dreams
00:28:12.060
all day like i was remembering dreams four times a night like i would wake up every couple hours write
00:28:17.940
them down and go back to sleep i wouldn't necessarily recommend that as a way of life but it was
00:28:22.060
interesting it's kind of proof of concept but yeah i mean there are apps you can use some people do
00:28:27.640
voice notes phone paper diary i think the other big thing with a dream journal is to really make it a
00:28:34.620
habit so even if you don't remember your dreams just write that in the morning like just write no
00:28:39.740
recall um just to kind of reinforce the habit and then also to do it literally first thing because
00:28:46.860
any kind of engagement with the physical world can just kind of eliminate those memories and when
00:28:54.860
you're writing this stuff down is it just stream of consciousness like you were like i dreamt that i was
00:28:59.760
writing a unicycle while listening it's just you don't you don't try to put a structure to you just
00:29:05.020
kind of just whatever okay and lots of i mean like if i'm doing it you know honestly there are lots of
00:29:10.320
gaps i think this is one of the reasons that dreams are hard to recall right is like they typically don't
00:29:14.960
come in narratives they're images and they're disconnected and sometimes people will try to like
00:29:22.560
impose a narrative on them but yeah i mean you don't have to do that you can just leave question
00:29:28.000
marks or let them kind of flow what insights have you gotten about your life from keeping a dream
00:29:33.540
journal i mean i'm kind of a believer that like one dream doesn't necessarily like i'm not going to
00:29:41.540
like change my life based on a dream but if i keep having a repetitive dream that's something to look at
00:29:48.240
in my life i think they've helped me realize things that i maybe didn't want to realize i definitely
00:29:54.440
think that doing it increased my self-awareness yeah were you able to notice a pattern with your
00:30:01.820
dream journal you know if you're having really distressing dreams were able to correlate that with
00:30:06.060
you're going through a stressful time in your life in awake world yeah sometimes i mean i think
00:30:12.520
sometimes if i was going through a truly stressful experience i would take a break like it could be too much
00:30:19.160
to keep a dream journal during those periods but other times they would kind of like you know they
00:30:24.800
can also be very funny i think your dreams have like a real sense of humor and they can make things
00:30:29.260
seem a little lighter like i don't know i remember i was stressed about my about this book coming out
00:30:34.640
and i had a dream about my agent and someone i knew in middle school chasing me down the street
00:30:40.080
and i don't know it's just kind of allowed me to be like okay this is like ridiculous
00:30:43.620
it's just a book but yeah i think they're fun dreams how can talking about your dreams with
00:30:50.340
other people help you gain more understanding because that's kind of like you said it's kind
00:30:53.980
of looked down upon because people like i don't want to hear your dream and also the problem with
00:30:57.720
talking about your dreams your dreams are so nonsensical there's no narrative arc so it's you
00:31:02.200
just telling someone just like random stuff that's happening in your head and like well that's not
00:31:05.420
really interesting but you've talked about there's actually groups of people getting together where
00:31:10.220
they can just talk about their dreams yeah so actually i learned about these this was a trend
00:31:18.280
in the 80s of dream groups um and i learned about it from a therapist where i was interviewing in
00:31:24.320
manhattan and i asked if i could come to one of his dream groups which was like kind of a cross
00:31:29.620
between group therapy and dream analysis and he said that that would be not really fair to the
00:31:37.720
participants but he offered to arrange one for a group of my friends and it's basically a way to
00:31:43.420
like impose a real structure on a dream conversation so what we did is i printed out a dream of mine
00:31:50.980
it didn't make a lot of sense i think it involved hillary clinton doing a line dance and we went through
00:31:58.040
it almost like we were doing like a passage analysis in english class so like first i read it then
00:32:04.100
people asked me questions to clarify the content of the dream so if there was a car they would say
00:32:12.040
like is it red and then in the next round they asked people everyone had to imagine that it was
00:32:16.460
their own dream so they would say okay you know if i dreamed about a line dance it would mean whatever
00:32:22.000
because i used to line dance with my family and then you kind of go through a series of stages like
00:32:26.640
this and it was really i mean we ended up spending like an hour and a half six people just talking
00:32:34.560
about one dream and we all enjoyed it and i am still in slash lead a dream group like what eight
00:32:44.420
years later and we meet once a month and we take turns bringing in a dream but it's like we were saying
00:32:50.980
people feel like they need to bring in like a good dream like it has to have a narrative arc and it has to
00:32:56.200
be a certain length but it's so not true because sometimes people bring in a dream that's like
00:33:00.800
four disconnected sentences and you still have just as much to talk about but it's it's sort of
00:33:08.920
therapeutic and ends up kind of feeling like a book club except that you didn't have to read a book
00:33:14.360
and imagine these other people they bring their own experiences and they might say well it means this or
00:33:21.160
it could mean this and it might not but it gives you something else to think about like well maybe it
00:33:26.080
could be yeah yeah or it brings up other associations for you and i mean i think that's
00:33:31.620
sort of how i look at my own dreams i try not to be literal about it but just like what feelings does
00:33:35.780
this evoke what does this remind me of yeah yeah so maybe start a dream group with your family when
00:33:40.780
your kids wake up taking to school that would be a natural one yeah just talk about your dreams
00:33:45.940
let's talk about this about dreaming lucid dreaming you talked about you went through a phase
00:33:51.500
i think you were in college yeah peru i went through a similar phase when i was in high school
00:33:56.480
where i found some weird website on the internet in the 90s about lucid dreaming what's lucid dreaming
00:34:02.800
so lucid dreams are dreams where you are aware that you're in a dream and you might even have
00:34:12.060
some level of control over what happens in the dream so this happens a lot to kids naturally it's a bit less
00:34:22.220
common in adults unless they're making an effort but it's super cool and i got into it when i read
00:34:31.380
i wonder if this is this book was by the same person you found in the 90s because steven leberge has really
00:34:38.060
done a ton of both academic and popular work on uh on lucid dreaming and training people to lucid
00:34:44.260
dream but i came across this book when i was on um an archaeological dig in peru in college and i
00:34:52.320
didn't have a lot of other things to do there was no internet so i read this book and started doing
00:34:58.420
these exercises and meditations and started having lucid dreams and yeah actually that was the other
00:35:03.960
origin story of the book because that was a big dream phase yeah so when you're in a lucid dream
00:35:08.400
you can tell yourself i'm dreaming i want to fly now so i'm going to fly yeah i mean so there's sort
00:35:15.000
of different levels of lucidity a lot of people actually experience lucidity when they're in
00:35:20.760
nightmares sometimes to get out of them so you might be you know let's say you're being like
00:35:25.500
chased by a monster and then you have kind of a flash of awareness and you're like
00:35:29.380
no this monster doesn't exist i'm in a dream you wake yourself up but if you were in a lucid dream
00:35:34.940
if you use that moment to like become lucid instead you could say oh okay this monster isn't real and
00:35:41.820
also now i'm gonna fly away and do whatever other like fantasies i might have and i went on when i was
00:35:49.700
working on the book i went on a whole like two-week lucid dreaming retreat in hawaii where we did
00:35:55.640
meditations every day and various exercises to induce lucid dreaming but i would say the main
00:36:02.180
thing before like trying to get into lucid dreaming would just be to improve your regular dream recall
00:36:08.380
because it's very easy to improve your dream recall it takes a bit more effort to try to do lucid
00:36:15.340
dreaming which i think might be why it tends to be like high school kids who get into it but although
00:36:20.740
it is extremely cool but if you increase your dream recall and get that to a really good point
00:36:25.480
often people will just have like a lucid dream or two naturally so what are some other things you
00:36:31.140
can do besides you know doing a dream journal what are some other things you can do to induce a lucid
00:36:35.880
dream so stephen laberge who i mentioned he was the first person to prove the existence of lucid dreaming
00:36:43.240
in the lab when he was a kind of hippie grad student at stanford has this method that he calls reality
00:36:51.620
checks so the idea is that throughout the day um like say once an hour you would do something to
00:37:01.860
you might um poke your hand with your finger and if it doesn't go through then you know that you're
00:37:11.140
awake or you might jump up in the air and if you fall back down that means you can't fly you're awake
00:37:18.120
but the idea is to really like pay attention to your surroundings and not make assumptions that
00:37:25.080
you're awake or asleep but actually ask yourself in a serious way and the idea is if you do this
00:37:30.800
regularly throughout the day because we dream about what we do during the day you'll ask yourself the
00:37:36.600
same question in your sleep and you might get a different answer right you'll notice your finger
00:37:41.120
going through your hand you're like oh i'm dreaming i've also marketed these devices where you
00:37:47.460
these goggles you put on your head and they can like tell if you're in rim sleep and then like it
00:37:51.660
flashes a red light and you're supposed to be able to see your red light in the dream and it's like
00:37:55.700
all right i see the red light i'm dreaming is there anything i mean i gotta be honest i would start with
00:38:01.180
a notebook for a dream journal i think there's been periodically you know people will get excited
00:38:06.820
about a new fancy goggle but i would start with the dream journal have you benefited from lucid dreaming
00:38:13.400
like have you had you gone into a dream like i want to have a lucid dream and i want to intentionally
00:38:18.100
explore x topic i mean do you do that so i think there absolutely are people who do that there are
00:38:24.700
people who you know masterful lucid dreamers who will relate like hack it and you know athletes who
00:38:32.780
practice their event in a lucid dream or you know explore a really dark topic i kind of resist the
00:38:40.020
idea that they need to be useful i've mostly just used lucid dreams to fly and i find it really
00:38:45.960
joyful but yeah i think they're fun okay and you also talked about another technique so you do the
00:38:53.380
dream recall do the reality checks another thing too um is you can wake yourself up you know maybe
00:39:00.700
before that last rim cycle so this is probably going to be about four o'clock three o'clock in the
00:39:06.300
morning and then go back to sleep thinking okay i'm going to have another rim cycle i'm going to
00:39:11.920
intentionally have a lucid dream and that can that can help too and i've that idea has helped me
00:39:18.100
reframe i've been getting up for some reason i've been waking up at four o'clock every morning for no
00:39:22.620
reason it was like wide awake and before i'd be like oh geez so frustrating could have slept another
00:39:26.720
two or three hours yeah now i'm like well i get this is a chance to maybe have a lucid dream so i'm
00:39:32.400
going to try to go back to sleep and maybe have a lucid dream yeah i mean i think that's one of the
00:39:37.160
things that i love about thinking about dreams and lucid dreams is that yeah it's a way to kind of
00:39:42.260
reframe those interruptions and they can be a new opportunity to either remember a dream or
00:39:47.280
set an intention but yeah so as with regular dream recall with lucid dreaming the kind of desire and
00:39:53.780
intention really matter and so we tend to have our most intense REM cycles later in the night towards
00:40:00.340
the morning so that's also going to be the best time to try to have a lucid dream and we're talking
00:40:05.780
about REM rebound earlier so if you've been deprived of REM through like an episode of depression for
00:40:10.740
example or sleep deprivation when you get back into it you can have really intense REM and the same is
00:40:17.500
actually true of like taking a nap and also so if you do like a quick sleep deprivation from like
00:40:23.580
4 to 4 45 or something and then if you fall back asleep you'll probably at the least have very
00:40:30.020
intense dreams but that would also be a really good time to try to have a lucid dream well alice this
00:40:36.440
has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your work
00:40:39.700
oh thanks well you can google me alice rob and the book is called why we dream the transformative
00:40:49.340
power of our nightly journey and it should be available at all the normal online retailers
00:40:55.240
i also wrote a book that came out last year that's probably slightly less relevant to the art of
00:41:01.860
manliness podcast about uh which was a memoir about growing up in the ballet world in new york but that's
00:41:08.420
called don't think dear on loving and leaving ballet okay i've heard ballet can be really intense
00:41:14.320
uh it can yeah yes all right well alice rob thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:41:20.080
thank you so much for having me my guest today was alice rob she's the author of the book why we dream
00:41:26.300
it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find more information about
00:41:29.580
our work at our website alicerob.com that's rob with two b's also check out our show notes at
00:41:34.520
aom.is slash dreams we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:41:38.800
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:41:50.160
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00:41:53.980
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00:42:09.260
until next time it's brett mckay reminding you to listen to aom podcast but put what you've heard into