After a long day when we lay down to rest, that’s when our brains really fire up to help us dream. Dr. Rahul Jandial is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who oversees the Jandial Lab at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how dreams help or brains function, why they are essential to memory and why dreams across cultures are remarkably similar. His book is “This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life.”
This episode originally aired on June 4th, 2024.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] If put on the spot at a Hollywood pitch meeting, very few of us could instantly come up with a detailed plot for a highly compelling movie with believable dialog scenes in places we may never have been. Fantasy sequences and rich symbolism. And yet we do something like this every time we fall asleep. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Scientists say we all dream even if we wake with no memory of it. Specific imagery and events may vary, but we all have scary dreams sex, dreams, dreams of returning to school and dreams of trying over and over to do some simple thing. The way we make meaning of dreams may vary by culture, but the essential content is remarkably similar across cultures. So what does this tell us about our brains, and do they somehow need to dream in order to function? Dr. Rahul Jandial is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist. He oversees the Jandial lab at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles and through his nonprofit organization, International Neurosurgical Children’s Association. He performs and teaches brain surgery in underserved hospitals in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. His book is called “This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life.” Rahul, welcome to Think.
Rahul Jandial [00:01:21] It’s a pleasure to be on.
Krys Boyd [00:01:23] So you write that dreams are a different form of thinking. Our brains might be more active when we’re asleep than when we’re awake.
Rahul Jandial [00:01:33] Certain features of our minds and brains have a top speed. Only the dreaming brain can achieve. So just to jump into that, the emotional systems and structures of our brain are called limbic structures. It’s not one spot in the brain. It’s a collection. It’s a symphony of different instruments, if you will, and the dreaming brain. This is a measurement, not my interpretation can have more metabolic usage of glucose in those structures than the waking brain. So the top speed of our emotions, if you will, is higher, is faster than the top speed of our emotions during the day. So I think those kind of insights give us a sense of why dreams feel so real and why they’re so often emotional and wild and passionate and awkward.
Krys Boyd [00:02:18] What makes our thinking during dreaming so different from what happens when we are awake and engaging with the world through our senses?
Rahul Jandial [00:02:27] That is the essential question. I love that. I love starting with that is. So just as a foundation and I would I would say for your listeners to step back for a second and just imagine a person asleep, the brain is not asleep when the person is asleep. The body’s a bit cooler. The heart has a little, you know, spark electricity called an EKG that persists. But inside the skull, the electricity generated by those neurons is wild. It’s vibrant. The usage of glucose is active. It’s throbbing with activity. So the brain is not asleep when we sleep. And that’s important for people to realize that your brain is on a 24 hour cycle. The waking brain and the dreaming brain, usually two thirds waking, usually one thirds dreaming. And that this is there’s no period where the brain is off. There’s no real period where the brain is resting. And so then your essential question is why? What’s the dreaming brain like versus the waking brain? And that’s the way to understand it. So briefly, the waking brain is really focused outward. Most of the time it’s prime for that. It’s something called executive network, a whole different collection of structures that do reason and logic and pay attention to the outside world. We call it task on the dreaming brain. That executive network is dampened, so you can have jumps in logic that don’t make sense. You can have awkward situations, you can have the illogical sort of the way you opened up your segment. So that’s the first difference in the waking brain and the dreaming brain. The dreaming brain, the executive network is dampened. The other thing that happens in the dream brain is the emotional systems and the imaginative network technically called the default Mode Network. The Imagination Network is liberated in the dreaming brain more so than it can be in our waking brain. So we have more divergent thoughts. So if we start to see our brain as a 24 hour cycle, like with the Earth’s rotation, waking brain dreaming, brain dreaming brain less logical, more emotional, more imaginative, then we can piece together what kind why dreams feel so different than waking thoughts.
Krys Boyd [00:04:42] Some dreams are so bizarre that we might imagine we could experience the same thing if we were to take some hallucinogenic drug. But on psychedelics, it turns out that default mode network, the Imagination Network, is actually less active.
Rahul Jandial [00:04:58] Yeah. So that’s so that’s an interesting question. People who take psych and so I’m a cancer surgeon and psychedelics are being explored for therapeutic usage in patients with cancer when they have an existential crisis towards the end of life. So it has therapeutic uses and I’m glad that they’re being explored. But just because it feels like a dream state, just because you feel like you’re tripping out that it at the level of the brain. And that’s where we’re going to anchor all of our conversation at the level of the brain. The default mode network is is more active in dreaming and less active in psychedelics. So let’s get into that a little bit. What that means is when you are dreaming, even though the thoughts and experiences are wild, creative and imaginative, you fully embody the experience. You are in the driver’s seat of a car you cannot control. Now, with psychedelics, they can be creative, they can be imaginative, but the feeling is a bit more disembodied. You float above, you look from a distance. And that’s a fundamental difference between the dreaming stage or the feeling of a dreaming state would psychedelics and an actual dreaming brain. I think that’s an important distinction because with psychedelics being able to step back a bit and see your light from a distance, see your journey from a distance, I think that that helps with people coming to terms and acceptance with end of life issues. So when we return to what’s going on with the brain, I think we have a better understanding of what’s going on with our minds, with our dreams and with our minds on psychedelics.
Krys Boyd [00:06:33] You note something in the book that might surprise people, which is that regardless of how bizarre they might seem. Dreams have rules. What are some of those rules?
Rahul Jandial [00:06:43] Yeah, that this is a fascinating question. So when I was asked to write this book, you know, there is no real dreams of scientists. There isn’t a professor of dream science at university. So I, I pulled from a lot of different types of science history quotes from Aristotle, like what is the what are the patterns here that I can recognize? What are the patterns that people have reported on for thousands of years, such as lucid dreaming by Aristotle? And then what’s going on with at the brain level, at the neuroscience level in the last 20 to 30 years that we we didn’t have the luxury of that knowledge before. And so I tried to connect the dots between what’s going on in the dreaming brain and what’s going on with dreams. So your dream or my dream? Infinitely wild. But when you start looking at thousands and thousands of dreams, you start to see things that are, you know, not likely, for example, math. Now, of course, one of your listeners might say, Hey, I have a dream about math. I’m not disputing that. I leave everybody completely free and open to live the wildest dream like they have. But when you look at 10,000 dreams, you start to see that math is very rarely reported. And just stay with me there. Why that’s interesting is returning to the dreaming brain. As we discussed in the opening here, the executive network is dampened and so logic is dampened. And that kind of makes sense. That math would not happen often in the dreaming brain because the part of the brain that does math and logic is less active is dampened. So I started to see some things about dreams could be explained by some things about brain biology, brain activation, brain science, the rare dream being math. The universal dream is nightmares, whether we have them or not. I don’t need to explain to an adult what a nightmare is. So nightmares and erotic dreams. I would put those in the category of a universal dream. We all know what those are. You know, 95% plus, 90% plus. And then there are common dreams being, you know, falling, flying, being chased that have been written about for decades and centuries. And just think about that. That’s a consistent pattern between people, teeth falling out. It was also a common dream. So we have rare dreams, commondreams, usually based on anxiety and emotion. And we have universal dreams, nightmares and erotic dreams.
Krys Boyd [00:09:07] So Rahul, what do those common patterns in dreams tell us about why we dream?
Rahul Jandial [00:09:14] That’s also a big question, and what I would say is the answer to why we dream. Massive question, Right? I mean, a question for humanity. I don’t have the final answer. There is no there is no perfect answer. But from from what I see, to understand why we dream, we have we just have to accept a few things. The brain is burning hot when we dream. The electricity sparked by these 100 billion neurons, which are like microscopic jellyfish, they’re sparking electricity that we can measure with stickers on the surface of your scalp, much like we measure the heart and the electricity on the surface of the heart with an EKG. So it’s burning energy. It’s sparking electricity. It’s not a passive time. It’s not accidental. We all do it. It makes us life down and puts us at risk to predation. It’s an essential feature. So what is it? Why would that be? And I would return to developmental neurobiology, which means, like when we’re born, we learn certain things. We learned how to walk and talk. And if an eye is covered for treatment, then that part of the brain that receives those signals withers it’s called use it or lose it. What I think is happening at the most fundamental level is that dreaming is a built in high intensity training for our brain and our neurons in our mind. So it’s reaching to all these different corners that we may not use, we may not need to use during our waking life. And if we didn’t have this high intensity training with the dreaming process, those capacities, those emotions, those ideas, that creative thinking, the emotional scenarios, the the corners of our brain, that they would become derelict, it would no longer be available the next day when we needed it. So I think that there’s a fundamental thing going on with the dreaming brain that really keeps our brains finely tuned and our minds and us open minded others have said, it’s a threat rehearsal or it’s a nocturnal therapist. I don’t dispute that those are ideas. But I think it’s it’s it’s a much bigger feature than simply a threat rehearsal or nocturnal therapist.
Krys Boyd [00:11:23] We don’t really dream in the way that adults would recognize until we’re old enough to walk and talk.
Rahul Jandial [00:11:29] So measurements are what we talked about with, you know, burning hot dreaming, brain sparking electricity that we can measure surveys and questionnaires. Families have signed up their children along with them. Over decades to be woken up at night and documented and written down. What are they dreaming about? And it seems like in the first few years after, after children learn how to talk, the dreams are quite boring and flat. And as they acquire the ability to be more imaginative, specifically three dimensional capacities, the dreams take on a more vivid and dynamic capacity. So I think there’s this parallel development of our our children’s waking brain and dreaming brain. They’re intertwined. I think that makes sense. And what happens is if you just look at it this way, only until nightmares arrive for all children. It’s a universal thing that arrives and people say, What does that mean? Well, adolescence arrives for most of us, almost all of us in our teenage years. We don’t ask for it. It comes right. It’s almost like the brain doesn’t change much. It’s almost like the maturation of the mind is built in. Similarly, the maturation that happens with the mind around age 4 or 5, six, seven, I think is built in and maybe driven by nightmares that nightmares are. When I had to tell my three sons, Hey, it was only a dream. And just think about that concept for a minute and we’re just having a conversation. This is my interpretation. You’re not a measurement or a survey that maybe children, they don’t know waking thoughts and dreaming thoughts and that that those are all blinded and blurry until nightmares arrive and help separate delineate that dream thoughts are from us are from a different state of mind versus waking thought. So I think nightmares have a feature. They’re universal. They’re right for all children. And interestingly, the only dream that clusters and families is a nightmare as powerful. And what that means, I think, will be explored for the generations ahead. But teeth falling out, being chased is not like grandpa has had a lot of dreams about falling out. And now I do too. But nightmares, cluster and families.
Krys Boyd [00:13:53] Rahul, you mentioned earlier there is no like Professor of Dream Science at some university somewhere. I wonder about the challenges of studying dreaming when you can put anybody in a scanner and know what their brain is up to. But then you have to take those results and then compare them with what people may or may not recall after the fact. I mean, what are the challenges of really trying to understand the dreaming brain as a scientist?
Rahul Jandial [00:14:20] It’s like grabbing a cloud. And I think everybody will accept, Yeah. That no one now or ever will ever be able to be an authority on dreams and have it all figured out. But we have a glimpse in this decade and the last few decades we’ve never had before. So the way dreams are understood historically in sleep labs done by other people is that people have electrodes placed on the surface of the scalp. Different, different sleep states are understood, and then they’re woken up and asked, What are you thinking about? Write it down. So we do rely on on the participant for that. Along the way, when these scanners were built a few decades ago, they were for for therapeutic and clinical purposes and specifically the fMRI. Well, there’s no it’s uses a magnet. There’s no radiation like with the Cat scan. And what people are thinking and how brain activation is happening, volunteers can participate. So you don’t have to have just sick people in there or people are being evaluated. So you have a lot of people signing up for this. And and what you find is people are falling asleep in sleep labs. There’s data coming from there. People are placed into these machines and they’re woken up. There’s data coming from there. And then people are asleep in hospitals being evaluated for epilepsy with these invasive fine threads placed into the flesh of their brain. And we’re getting real time data from there. And so that’s the those are the measurements that I have tried to connect with the surveys and questionnaires to shed light on on dreams and dreaming. Interestingly, lucid dreaming has the most rigorous science behind it, and we can get into that later. And dreaming in general, we we see patterns change from childhood. And then some of my cancer patients, as they approach end of life, their dreaming patterns change even as their brains make it withers. So I am trying to put it together by all of these incomplete pieces, yet leaving it completely open that it’s, you know, dreams and dreaming. We will never be able to just capture it.
Krys Boyd [00:16:35] Do you think dreaming patterns change for people toward the end of life because they have suffered physical damage to their brains and the rest of their bodies, or because they’re thinking about very different things than when they were healthy?
Rahul Jandial [00:16:50] I think both. And just to, you know, just let’s hold the let’s not ask dreams and dreaming to be understood in a way we wouldn’t ask for the waking brain and the waking and our waking life that it’s going to be wild. It’s going to be all over the place. So patients who have dementia or brain injury who have had brain surgery, they’re dreaming patterns change. I’ve performed operations on children for therapeutic purposes for a large part of the brain is removed. They still have dreams. So it’s a it’s a wide, wide swath of stories that you’ll hear at the same time. What I find is fascinating that not always because dreams, you know, you can get PTSD, you can have flashbacks, you can have nightmares, interfere with your life. But interestingly, dreams come to the rescue towards the end of life. That surprisingly, despite the treatments and the surgeries and that these patients choose that their dreams are lean, they tend to be positive, the reconciliation of expansive memories of their life. And and that happens even while they’re getting chemotherapy or treatments that I’ve seen in my patients. And I’ve seen reports of. I think it’s fascinating that in some ways the dreaming brain and the dream of mind are a partner and maybe even a shepherd to your life experiences. And they and I and that’s and I’d say that’s the big statement. And I would just add that what we’re finding now is that the the last few minutes after and this is a very intense and important topic that once the heart stops and increasingly people’s brain electricity is being recorded, it’s not at that second that the brain stops that last surge of blood from the heart up the arteries in your neck. The brain doesn’t whimper. The measurements show that there’s this explosion of fireworks, of brain activity the minute or two after your heart stops. And that, again, it fits the the beauty and the mystery of the human brain that it does not whimper into oblivion. Its last act is, at least at the electrical level, looks a lot like a memory replay, looks a lot like a dreaming brain. And I think that’s fascinating to me that although I’m trying to understand dreams and dreaming from the dreaming brain, there are some things and features like why the deteriorating brain and the dying brain? The dreams don’t don’t deteriorate along with them necessarily. But the dreaming mind is sort of the last salvo is the last hurrah of the dying brain.
Krys Boyd [00:19:34] These common dream themes that have been identified across cultures trying over and over to do something, being frozen with fear, attacked, falling, arriving too late for school or a train or something. Those are all pretty negative. Why do you think, on balance, the content of our dreams is largely unpleasant?
Rahul Jandial [00:19:58] Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, or maybe filled with anxiety. And I think the way I understand it is So let me break that down in two ways. If people think dreaming. Or is like a nocturnal therapist. Maybe sometimes it can be. And they get that information from that. Deeper into the night. Closer to the morning. The the emotional valence tends to be positive when you wake up people that are dreaming. But what I see is that when you have a hyper liberated imagination, an emotional system in the brain collection of structures. Right. That makes sense, that dreams are experiencing from nightmares and erotic dreams universally. Those talk about high anxiety and high intensity. But also that the ones that tend to pop up are falling, being chased, emotional dreams, and also dreams that don’t make any sense. And to me, that’s consistent that these solar flares, the dreaming mind that comes from the dreaming brain, is one of high anxiety. And so why would it do that? I’m not sure I can answer. Why does it have to have a direct utility? But it doesn’t surprise me that those regions of the brain, when liberated and not stifled by the executive network, which is dampened, that dreams tend to be emotional and. And, you know, one of my earlier books, I just put that, you know, it seems to me that that we sleep in order to dream and dreaming is a way for our subconscious to have its moment that so much of the day is spent with the executive network holding back desires and emotions and divergent thinking that maybe for the most balanced and healthy brain and for the brain that we’re all the foreigners are being used, that the subconscious needs to be liberated and the subconscious leans emotional. And that fits with developmental biology. Whereas the reptilian brain came first and the emotional limbic structures came second and third was reason and logic with our prefrontal cortex.
Krys Boyd [00:22:10] Is there evidence that dreams are required for memory consolidation and sort of processing whatever we’ve experienced in a given day?
Rahul Jandial [00:22:19] I think people are starting to do surveys and questionnaires that if you nap, if you if you dream about something, is your memory improved the next day? Is your performance written to the next day? And I like that avenue of exploration. But the role of dreams and dreaming in consolidating memories, I don’t have a measurement for that. But people who dream of a lot of maze or people even dream three dimensionally, not directly about the maze challenge that they’re presented. It seems like to dream of something three dimensional or two, even lucid dream and tried to practice like a sport in your mind when you have partial control of your dream and dream trajectory. It seems to me the sprinkling of data suggests that it’s helpful.
Krys Boyd [00:23:09] What kinds of neurobiological changes happen in the brain that allow for dreaming. You mentioned like glucose processing, but we also are adrenaline lowers during dreaming, even if we’re having a really stressful dream. Right?
Rahul Jandial [00:23:22] Right. So this is this is an interesting question. So when I try to understand. Why we accept logic to go away. Why we are not. Focused overly on something that’s related to calculation. Seeing that in the dreaming brain, a measurement of the executive network is dampened, it makes sense. And even scientists, when they have breakthroughs, it’s like the snake eating its own tail. It’s all visual. It seems to be at least one, not all, but it seems to be. Scientific breakthroughs related to dreaming also tend to be visual insights, if you will. And then what I saw was when I looked at the chemicals related to the dreaming brain versus the waking brain, and that was to try to understand sleep paralysis, why people have these nightmarish, not technically nightmare experiences when they come out of sleep, when it goes from dreaming brain to waking brain. I also noticed that there were some studies that suggested adrenaline is less. And what does adrenaline do for us during the day? It’s complements the executive network. It looks for the signal in noise. And what happens with the dreaming brain is as the executive network is dampened, those structures are less active. They’re not off, they’re just dampened. The adrenaline also is dampened. And that that’s consistent because in the dreaming brain, our thinking is looking almost for the noise. It’s looking for patterns in the noise and not hyper focused. Divergent thinking is what happens. So to me, that was interesting connection that might explain both the anatomical as well as neurochemical shifts that are consistent between the outward focused on the ready waking brain and the wildly creative imaginative, loosely looking for loose associations, dreaming brain. And then your question about like, well, how can how can that be? Adrenaline is not the only thing that leads to frightened fear. The bodily components seem to be persistent and. And some dreams happen without. Some nightmarish dreams can happen without the physical reaction. Some nightmares. Dreams can happen with the physical reaction. And some have suggested not my idea that maybe that’s that’s where it’s the emotional therapist is to have a bad dream or to live a difficult scenario, but not have the physical bodily responses that that sort of an exposure therapy where you’re reliving past trauma in a less physically stressed out, emotionally imprinted state. I don’t have evidence for that, but I do like that apotheosis.
Krys Boyd [00:26:10] You mentioned sleep paralysis. Approximately 40% of people listening to our conversation have has experienced this. Maybe the other 60% are thinking, what is that? Can you describe what sleep paralysis feels like for people?
Rahul Jandial [00:26:24] I’ve never had it. But when putting this book together, when I was putting this book together, I was surprised. And the numbers always throw me off 40%, 30%. But I can tell you, I’m pretty confident a third of humans have experienced or routinely experience something called sleep paralysis. So returning to the foundation of our discussion. Waking brain. Sleeping brain. But when we go from sleep, waking brain to sleeping brain or waking brain, a dreaming brain, which I think is synonymous because we can dream at any stage of our sleep that when you go from waking brain to dreaming brain, it’s not like it happens in a second. There are these 10-15 minutes called sleep entry. On the other side, when you go from dreaming to waking, there’s there’s another window called sleep exit. And so sleep paralysis is something for some people worse than a nightmare feeling. It’s a nightmarish experience when you wake up. And a couple of interesting things about it is described across cultures. People have come up with their own cultural stories to explain it, like Incubus and Succubus Art has been made about it. And what’s happening is commonly reported is people feel the frozen, they’re locked in their body, that there’s some demonic structure goblin sitting on their chest, making them feel suffocated. And that they have a feeling of a lurking intruder. And when I was studying this and I thought, wow, this is a very consistent sort of descriptions, these three things that happen. And in clinical medicine and surgery, we also have these things that when you have these 2 or 3 things together, it means this, you know, things will cluster in their presentation. We call it symptoms and signs. So I thought this is fascinating to me, that one, it’s not a you know, it’s commonly described one third of people. It’s sort of consistently described. And the idea I have about the suffocation experience is that in dreaming, most of our muscles are paralyzed temporarily, but the except our diaphragm, which pulls our lungs down. So it leads to an inhalation. We breathe in with that. So like a flat muscle at the bottom, our lungs that separates our lungs from our liver and and belly that is there because we breathe, of course, when we’re sleeping and dreaming. But the when we’re really running or laboring to breathe, we have muscles between the ribs and also in our neck. They’re called accessory muscles. And it seems like these are not that these are paralyzed and dreaming. So somehow when we wake up and we feel locked into our bodies and we try to take deep breaths because we’re panicking, not having the additional muscles available to pull in the biggest breath we want to pull in, I think could create the feeling of suffocation. That’s one. And why do we freak out? The body is still locked down, paralyzed, but the mind has started shifting from the dreaming brain to the to the waking brain, from the dreaming mind to the waking mind. And that happens to do with something called serotonin, I think. And serotonin is obviously used for antidepressants, but it’s also used in psychedelics, as we talked about before. So I think the lurking intruder and these consistent reports of there’s a goblin on my chest is the it’s some sort of mismatch of serotonin coming online too early. So you’re waking up, but your body’s locked down, you’re freaking out. You feel like you’re suffocating. You can’t pull in as much as you want to. And to try to explain the whole scenario to yourself. Your brain is having psychedelic experiences that that think there’s actually a goblin sitting on your chest and the lurking intruder. The third feature, I can’t give a specific answer, but I know something called Awake Brain Surgeon. We gently tickle the surface of the brain in certain regions, temporal parietal region, you can have patients report feeling of somebody over their left or right shoulder. So although those three things suffocating goblins, lurking intruder feels really out there, the fact that it’s in a third of people and it’s consistent across cultures and stories have been built are really search deeply to try to come up with a scientific explanation for and that’s my best shot.
Krys Boyd [00:30:49] Rahul, how much does my sleeping brain or does anyone’s sleeping brain reveal about their waking life when it comes to erotic dreams?
Rahul Jandial [00:30:59] Yeah. This is I wanted to do I wanted to be very fair with this chapter, as with the book. I’m not the person who’s sitting here and saying I got sexual dreams figured out. I’m not saying that at all. And here’s what happens. I would think about erotic dreams. First, let’s look at the patterns of how people have reported them. If you ask surveys across different cultures, erotic dreams are reported 90 plus percent of the time that the only, only thing dream, that’s that you’re universal. Essentially universal are nightmares as one. Two, they arrive for us before the erotic act. So that’s interesting to me. Or we’ve never had sex, but we dream of the sexual act. And again, I think that’s a feature of our mind that’s built in just like adolescence, going in in reverse. I think erotic dreams come to remind us of what must happen, that procreation must take place and serve as an instructor or a driver toward that. Number three, erotic dreams. What I found interesting was a high rate of infidelity in these surveys. 87%. So other, you know, intimacy with other partners and and that and then then the other other some other reports suggested that healthy relationships, as well as unhealthy relationships, almost an equal measure, have infidelity dreams. And what I would say so if you have a dream about an ex lover and you’re actually not longing for them, that it’s just a solar flare of desire that’s built into your system. That’s the way I’ve come to understand the common question I’m asked if you, you know, if you have an erotic dream about an ex, what does that mean? If you’re not really longing for them and you have really moved on in your waking brain, I think that’s just that’s just how erotic dreams work. They they flare out and they’re an embodiment of a desire. And the reason I say that is that erotic dreams happen. The the group of people that they’re about tends to be quite narrow in these reports. It’s not a chimera of your perfect fantasy figure. It’s, you know, people within your tribe, people within your collective rappelling bosses, family members, even when you’re younger. And that’s interesting to me that it’s a narrow group, but the acts are while the emotions are wild. And so when I look at erotic dreams, to me, they’re the as I title of the chapter, the embodiment of desire. They they persist after menopause and after chemical castration for prostate cancer. They arrive before the sexual act and they occur in people who’ve never had sex. So sensuality arrives around the time of erotic dreams and before the physical maturation. Those timelines are very suggestive to me that erotic dreams cultivate the mind and then the body for all of us to procreate. And that that drive is very strong and can happen toward or with people that aren’t your intimate partner at that time.
Krys Boyd [00:34:21] You note that the creative process can be a lot like dreaming. How do you try to use dreams and the creativity of them as a brain surgeon?
Rahul Jandial [00:34:33] Well, this one I have specific answers for some things. Thank you again for we were we’ve indulged big concepts and there’s some some stuff at the application at ground level. So the the dreaming brain has more creative ideation and it connects looser dots. It’s more like designing a car, like not like fixing an engine, which is what we do with our waking brain. As a generality and again, returning to waking brain and dreaming brain, that transition is called sleep entry. And for four decades and even Edison, Salvador Dali and Christopher Nolan, they talk about this period being sort of a liminal state between waking and sleeping. And now we know that, you know, at the neuroscientific level that there are features of both during this unique time period, people incubate or people try to extract thoughts from that period or try to extend that period by repeatedly waking up during that that window because the creative thinking is more divergent versus convergent, that you’re looking for losers, associations, creative types feel like that’s a window that they can use and that they can feed their dreams and waking up slowly during sleep and exit as they journal, going to bed and waking up that they can on occasion have access to thoughts they don’t when they’re just awake on their double express. So for me for a while, because what I do is also three dimensional tumors within within the body, they take on different shapes. There’s an anatomy that distort anatomy. It’s it’s almost like flying through a minefield or going through a forest. And when in the past and sometimes now for complex cases, I’ll look at the pictures and rotate them in my mind as the last thing I do before I go to bed. And even if I’m not dreaming about those tumors and anatomy, if you will, I rarely do that with somebody in London picked up on the fact that I have a lot of, like visual dreams sailing, scuba diving, navigating forests that the dreaming pattern of. You know, three dimensional creativity, I think helps me navigate the surgical terrain the next day or in general, I believe it’s a training ground for me to think in a certain way to when I have that moment or if I’m able to draw upon a maneuver without necessarily thinking it through. And when it comes to my aid and helping the patient during a complex part of the operation, I do feel that it’s being fed by the creativity of my dreams.
Krys Boyd [00:37:08] Do highly creative people report more vivid, more intense dreams than everybody else?
Rahul Jandial [00:37:14] I think so. I mean, the survey suggests that I mean, you know, it’s hard to statistically pin that down. But definitely there are more nightmares and there’s like nightmare creativity projects. And and I’m excited to see I hope somebody listens to this or potentially reads the book says, hey, wait a second, this is interesting. When the when more dream banks are built and and they’re more inclusive and more people are brought in. I love I’m curious to see those patterns evolve because I’m relying on decades old stuff and the inherent limitations with that. And as neuroscience evolves, as neuro imaging evolves and neurotechnology evolves and we’re we’re getting more and more granularity in the, in the dream reports by people. I just I’m excited to see how those links can can form and whether whether creative people have more vivid dreams or remember their dreams more or use their dreams more. These are questions I think that aren’t going to be hard to answer in the years and decades ahead with a lot more certainty than I can now. But yes, there are reports and surveys that suggest creative people have more three dimensional capacities and more nightmares. Remember their dreams more, and even have more lucid dreams like athletes, gamers, visually creative people have more lucid dreams.
Krys Boyd [00:38:37] A report earlier you mentioned lucid dreams where we are dreaming but aware that we are dreaming. Whenever I have one of these, I try to take advantage of it by making myself fly, but they don’t come very often. Are there ways that we can induce lucid dreams?
Rahul Jandial [00:38:56] I’ll give you four quick things about lucid dreaming that you can hold on to. One is about 20-30 years ago. Actually, what is a lucid dream? So first of all, you know, most when we wake up, we’re like, that was only a dream. When we wake up, we recall the dream experience as only a dream or a dream. But lucid dreamers, while they’re dreaming, they say, Hey, the dream is ongoing. But I’m aware that I’m in a dream. Usually awareness of the dream only happens after the fact. So that’s a that’s an interesting thing because how would you prove that, Right? Because I’m skeptical by nature and by training. I mean, somebody could just wake up and say, I’m lucid dreaming. So one the surface electrodes that measure the brain’s electricity, they can prove if somebody is asleep. Two movements in our eyes are usually random and people in sleep labs are using controlled left right eye movements to communicate with the people that are researching. And there’s sort of a morse code while those electrodes are proving that that person is asleep. So that’s powerful. Putting people in scanners, you start to see a little return of the executive network. That area that I said was dampened. That’s consistent that a bit of logic and awareness returns. Number three, there’s a dementia medicine called Galantamine. It works on a neurotransmitter that’s not the usual called the C two calling, which is quite relevant. But when they take this drug, people come in saying, Hey, I’m having a lot of these lucid dreams. I’m in a dream, you know, aware that I’m in a dream. You double the dose and the lucid dreaming goes up. So at the pharmacological chemical level, dose dependent escalation and really proves it proves cause and effect. And then the last thing is for people who want to lose the dream, it tends to be about a third of people can. And but it is inducible. And the way I see that for confidence, there’s a technique called mild. People can look it up. I’ve only had a dream once when I was writing this book and but these people, when they do this training or after a few weeks of waking up a little early, trying to hold on to being awake and slowly sliding back into sleep, the technique is available for you online. They proved they could lose the dream in the sleep labs with those surface electrodes, with the Morse code type left right eye movement. And I like that kind of scientific intensity to proving lucid dreaming is real and it can be cultivated.
Krys Boyd [00:41:21] Pretty much for all of human history that we know of. Humans have tried to decipher meaning in their dreams. Why are dream dictionaries and dream websites mostly nonsense when they tell us that having a tooth fall out means we’re worried about money or whatever they might say?
Rahul Jandial [00:41:40] Yeah, well, I. What I would say is I would let everybody come to their own conclusion because now that we understand there’s a waking brain and dreaming brain and that when you you dream of a bridge. In my and I dream of a bridge in my cancer patients at the end of their life. Dream of a bridge. Does anyone doubt that that could those the meaning of a bridge could mean completely different things for you, me and my patient, for them at the end of life? For me, cultivating a relationship or breaking a relationship for my child, going to the university for them, you know, exiting life, if you will, for you, it could mean an infinite amount of things. So I think when you think about that, the. Central image and the emotion, the the hyper visual, hyper imaginative, hyper emotional solar flare, that that is the dream, if you will, in a in a romantic way that comes from your brain can only really make sense in the context of what’s going on in your life. And that’s that’s the fundamental thing. It’s created by you. It can only be understood by you. It cannot be the same thing because my brain is going through different experiences. And I think that way if people look at dreams not as this thing that floats above, but the dreaming brain is metabolically active, chemically active, sparking electricity. The dreams come from a biology. Dreams come from a chemistry. Dream comes from an activity. Dreams come from an activity within the brain, from the brain. I think people realize that dreams are our personal. The meaning of dreams are uniquely personal. And because they come from the brain. They do follow some universal patterns that we discussed earlier.
Krys Boyd [00:43:40] You note in the book that we forget dreams by design. Why are these intense experiences that seem to be evolutionarily necessary, only rarely available to us once we are up and fully conscious?
Rahul Jandial [00:43:54] The shortest answer and simplest answer I can give is to avoid avoid dreaming mind and waking mind. Confusion that can happen in some rare cases. We have this thing called autobiographical memory, like, you know, tying your shoelaces, procedural memory, remembering events, your life, a semantic memory of all different types of memory. They’re all in the same space. But autobiographical memory stitches the experiences of our lives together that it’s me that has been through all the stations of life here. And I think returning to autobiographical memory, returning to executive network to the matter at hand, waking up and knowing that, you know, if you have the luxury of a bad not everybody does. But that if that if one has the luxury of a bed that where where they are sleeping like the continuity of waking life is actually fundamentally important. The luxury of mind wandering or the importance of dreaming is part of that. But I think waking up and knowing the days before and planning for the days ahead requires are dreamscape or wild imaginative dreams to sort of take the back seat and not be so prominent. That said. All that activity is not going to waste. I think it’s high intensity training. It keeps us open minded. And when we do have that creative moment during the day, it’s because of the work that’s been put in while we sleep.
Krys Boyd [00:45:20] Dr. Rahul Jandial is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist. He oversees the Jandial lab at City of Hope Cancer Center in L.A. and also performs and teaches brain surgery in under served hospitals around the world. His book is called “This Is Why You Dream” What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life.” Rahul, this has been so interesting. Thank you for making time to talk.
Rahul Jandial [00:45:43] Pleasure’s mine. Thank you for the wonderful questions.
Krys Boyd [00:45:45] You can find us on Facebook and Instagram. You can get the podcast wherever you like to get your podcasts, or you can listen to it at our website. Think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
