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

Why, after dozens of years of doing brain surgeries, being a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind, did you want to dive into understanding dreams?

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

Woken up, but not been able to move or speak. I feel like I'm screaming, but nothing's coming out.

What is that? Sleep paralysis. What you describe about... This is great. Just give me a minute to take this one because this one, I got a lot of science. What the...

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

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

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

My pleasure.

The last interview we did blew up. People were fascinated by it. You are a neuroscientist who studies the mind, but also a brain surgeon who has been helping remove cancer for dozens of years to over thousands of patients. You studied the material brain, but also the spiritual side of the brain as well, the mind, let's say. You're an expert in both. The last interview we did, we talked about many different things around these topics. But you have a new book called This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life. This is interesting because we were talking before that there's not really anyone who is a scientist of dreams out in the world yet, except for you're starting this path. You're starting to talk about the neuroscience of dreaming, which I think is fascinating because you told me about a third of the time, we don't remember what we're doing in our lives. A third of the time, we're asleep, and a lot of us don't remember our dreams. We don't understand our dreams. They don't make sense us. We have nightmares. We have erotic dreams. We have inspiring dreams. We have dreams where you feel like we're falling or dreams where you feel like we're about to die, and then we wake up in a shock.

We have all these weird moments. Sometimes we remember and we overemphasize what the dream was, but it really didn't happen. Then other times, we have no clue what happened in our dreams. Why, after dozens of years of doing brain surgeries, being a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind, did you want to dive into understanding dreams?

You've put it right where it needs to be. This is a big topic. There's a reason people haven't been tackling it because it's like trying to grab a cloud or trying to Hold on to something that's just like, we all know what it is. We know what dreams are. We all have had dreams. I don't have to explain to you what a nightmare is. You know what it is. I know what it is. We don't talk about it. We can't really wrap our minds around it, but it's something we all experience. It's something we all undergo. So your question about why did I want to write a book on dreams? What I would tell you is I was asked to write this book. So the way my journey that's ended up here, a lot of it is I have sons. I have three, as we were talking about, they're 18, 19, and 22. I've taken care of thousands of cancer patients. I've done surgery in South America. These experiences are also part of my resume. Now, I happen to have a PhD in neuroscience, and I'm a neurosurgeon, but there are other neuroscientists, there are other neurosurgeons, I believe, and in this conversation, when you hear me say, I believe, or I wonder, or could it be, it's out of respect for you and your listeners, because you don't want anybody to come in on this topic and say, Aha, I got it all figured out.

One, two, three. No, it's an exploration. I'm looking at fragments and pieces across broad scientific things I'm bringing my own stories into my own experiences, and I'm saying, Look at these little... They're almost like fireflies, these little glimpses of knowledge that we now have. Or that 3,000 years ago, they were talking about lucid dreaming, they being Aristotle. What is the consistent pattern. Not my dream, not your dream. But what if we look at 10,000 dreams? Do we start to see some pattern? We do. Then we'll get into that. Nightmare and erotic dreams are essentially universal. Falling dreams and teeth falling out have happened for hundreds of years across cultures. When you went from carriages to cars to electric vehicles to television, those dreaming patterns are consistent. The first thing I thought, Wait a second. They're being driven by the brain. Then when Technicolor came in, dream reports, people cataloging what dreams are going on. That's where I'm studying. It's like, What dreams happen most commonly? What dreams don't happen at all? Two things popped into my mind. I was looking at this and saying, When Color TV showed up, the dream reports of thousands of people being asked and woken up in their sleep to, What are you dreaming about?

The dream started to be more in color. So clearly, waking life fed dreaming life. Then the other thing I noticed was, rarely did they report math in dreams.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever had a math dream. Thank God. That doesn't sound fun.

But Most people, we look at 10,000 dreams, everybody's had a nightmare. In science, when I say everybody, I don't mean 100%. It's above 90-ish. It gets to be essentially universal nightmares and erotic dreams. Very few, lots of emotional dreams, lots of visual dreams, a lot of movement dreams, and we'll get into that. But very few math dreams, right? Very few people said... And even the scientists, I say, I came up with the idea of dreaming. It's a visual thing, like the snake eating itself or two It's moving apart. And what I realized now that what we dream, and now in the last 20, 30 years, we could have brain scans. That's a simple word, but we're going to dissect that in this conversation. How much glucose your brain is using? Where is that glucose being used? What's the electricity? When I say brain scan, there's a lot of different ways of scanning brain information. The brain scan at night in a machine with people People sleeping, with people dreaming, they were notably dampened. Not off. Let's change all of this. There's no part of your brain that's off. Otherwise, it'd be a stroke. That part would die.

But everything in the brain is a modulation. It's always like 51, 49. Nothing is ever on or off. It's not a switch. There's blood flow always going everywhere. If a branch is blocked, then you have a stroke. What happens is the executive network in the prefrontal cortex, just the part of the brain behind the forehead, the part that does reason and logic and math, it's 49, it's 48. Right now, it's probably 51, 52, but it's dampened at night. Dampening the executive network in our dreams allows for them to be logical, allows them to be wild, in my opinion, and also explains why we're not doing math because that's needed for math. Interesting. It took my breath away. I was like, Wait a second. Some patterns of dreaming from thousands of dreams can be explained by some patterns of the dreaming brain. That was the idea in my head. My publisher in London, Penguin UK. We were talking about doing a different book. That's going to be the next one, hopefully. But she said, We need, I think she meant the publishing world and readers and people in general. They put out books that are French fries.

I love French fries, but they also want to put out some stuff like, Look, this is an important book. We need a book about dreams, explained about the science of it, the story of it, a love letter to dreams, because there is no dream scientist. It's not a field. I'm a neuroscientist with life experiences, trying to put together brain scans, dream reports, neurons in a petri dish to put together a story of what I think is happening in dreams and dream. That's how this started. What's that happened has been an ignition in my mind for about 18 months.

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

Great question, first of all. Again, not my dream or your dream, but there are great dream banks. People for decades have woken people up in sleep labs. They put an electrode on to make sure they're sleeping. They say, Hey, wake up. What are you dreaming about? And they write it down. That world has been happening. That's where I'm getting a certain percentage report, dreams of falling, certain percentage, dreams of being chased, a certain percentage of math.

Really, that's low.

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

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

Well, that's the massive question. What I would say is, let's go backwards a little bit. My answer is yes. But to be able to share with you how to go about extracting that meaning, one, it's going to be individual. I can't tell you what your dreams are about, and you can't tell me what my dreams are about. It's a process of self-examination. Yes, dreams have meaning. Not all dreams. Not all waking thoughts are fresh or important or worth holding on to. But let's get to that is, do dreams have meaning? But with your permission, let's equip people with what is happening in the dreaming brain, and then what different dreams mean. Then they have a playbook at the end. What I would say is the dreaming brain is… This was the essential question is, okay, so you got all the dream patterns. We got what we dream. You're looking at what people have cataloged. To make sense of why we dream, that's your essential question that we get to. Then there's this thing, the dreaming brain and the waking brain. I believe these big ideas are applicable to everybody, getting groceries, frustrated, why am I stressed out, why am I overreacting?

All the things for living a better waking life, you can't separate them from that third of your life you spend sleeping and potentially dreaming. I go way back to try to understand this and to make sense of it for myself. I think you'll find there's science and there's stories, but there's synthesis. So first thing is all life is governed by the rotation of the planet. Let's just start with square one. Let's just get to the basic here. Whether it's those hot springs deep in the ocean and there's some bacteria there, or Or a Venus fly trap that opens and closes, or the moon and the tides, or sleep. This is governed because that was the foundation on a which life arose. When you look at that, what I would say is the material, the living material on planet Earth, follows that, whether it's the tide or the plankton or fish or all migration, but also the material in our brain. Really? There's nothing in our skull that if you pieced it out, there's no special ingredient, like from krypton or something. Everything in nature is also Everything inside our skull in these brains, right? That's connected differently.

It's functioning differently. But that was the first thing that really tripped me out. I was like, we, too, follow the laws, fundamental laws of Earth's rotation, these circadian and rhythms you're hearing about and cycles and seasons. And that was the first time I said, Okay, so the brain is the waking brain and the sleeping brain are doing a 24-hour cycle for as long as the run you have on this planet. That's the first thing. That cycle, it actually... I love this topic, by the way. There are people who go in a cane for six months. It's still in a cycle. It's not based just on dark, black-out shades or not. The tissue in our bodies, the cells, we're following this Earth's rotation. If we say that there's the waking brain and the sleeping brain, and every 24 hours, it does its things. Two-thirds waking, one-third sleeping, and that happens for the most part for how long you live. Now, a surgeon in training, I might skip a few nights Maybe I've had 500 or a thousand nights, but overwhelmingly, I follow this cycle, too. In that cycle, we have to ask ourselves, Well, what's going on in the dreaming your brain.

Right away, I'll tell you, it's so important. There's something called sleep pressure. You could defy a lot of things, but you go a day without sleeping, there's something building inside you saying, sleep, sleep, sleep. You'll fall asleep in a dangerous You'll fall asleep standing up. Sometimes you'll fall asleep even though you haven't eaten. There's something fundamental called sleep pressure that makes us follow that rhythm, right?

Your body will force you to sleep eventually.

Well, I would say your brain.

Your brain just shuts off.

It builds a pressure. You can startle people and they'll wake up. But at some point, there's this pressure that's bringing you down to sleep. Really? You see that? I think torture techniques were based off of that. We saw that nobody could stay up a third night in the hospital. They tried to get us to a long time ago, the battle day. Really? Yeah, but second night, you could do. Third night. So there's a sleep pressure that the brain generates. Not the body, the brain. Just to give you just examples like we're talking about, regular examples. We're not trying to get... We'll bring the science in, but the complexity is in the concept. We can put hearts from one to another, liver from one to another, lungs from one to another. They all follow that person's brain's order. Really, what we're talking about is the brain is saying, I need to sleep. The brain is saying, I need to sleep. The brain is saying, Okay, there's some threat going on, or you got some demands. You're running an ultramarathon, you're a surgeon on call. I can go a day, but I need to sleep. That's the first thing in this discussion is, why do we need to sleep?

Now, I'm going to be bold here. It's a conversation. I think we sleep because we must dream. Now, let me just set that up for you. What happens when you go without sleep? You have surges in rem and dreaming sleep right away. First thing you do when you've gone a day without sleep, if you put that person in a brain scan, but there's exquisite ways of checking it, is that the first thing they do is they dream wildly. That's an interesting thing to me. The longer we go in our night of restful sleep, the more you're dreaming on the tail end. Maybe mental clarity, if we take that phrase, comes from having that longer night's sleep. Well, what happens in that fifth, sixth, and seventh hour? You're dreaming more. So when I start to see these patterns, I wonder, one, the brain, not the body, needs to sleep. And then what is the brain doing in sleep? Just check this out, man. It's doing something that if you put electrodes on the surface of our scalps and we all fall asleep, at night, during the day, the measurements are wavy. There's different ones depending on how you're engaging.

At night, there are some sharp 90-minute patterns. That stuff is designed. That's built-in.

Really? Yeah.

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

Lever's fine. Lungs are fine moving between humans. Wow. What I'm trying to point out there is that it's the brain that's running the show. It's on the earthly pattern. It wants to sleep. In that sleep, what is it doing? It's dreaming. The brain In my opinion, with respect and humility, the brain needs to dream. The sleep is so that the brain can dream and stay finetuned and stay fully adapted and stay fully enriched in all the corners of his mind without just the boring part of our day. If the brain only did what we did, driving the 101 or doing this, which is fantastic, but it would become rigid. It would become like an arm that's never past a certain distance. You get a contracture. Well, the brain tissue, my opinion, that dreaming is the brain's way. Other people have other ideas, like it's threat training or it's a nighttime therapist. I get that, and I think in some capacity, but at the most fundamental level, it's like high-intensity training for your mind. At night, it just goes wild to make sure all those capacities and resources, imaginations, if you will, are accessible to if you needed them during the day, if the environment or evolution needed it.

That's the big explanation about what's happening when we sleep. We're dreaming. Dreaming is important. It's metabolically active. It's electrically active. It puts us at risk. Even if you are in danger, your brain will force you to lie down so it can sleep to dream. That's how fundamental I think dreams are.

Now, what if people... That's powerful. I'm glad you shared that. What if people are listening or watching and say, Well, I can't remember any of my dreams, and I don't think I dream at all because I can't remember them. So what's wrong with me? And should I be worried if I don't have dreams?

Well, I would say the genius is built in. So that's happening whether you want it or not. And the central question of... I've had people ask me that, If I don't remember my dreams, is it useful? If you're not remembering them... So let me take that one apart a little bit. Here's my thinking it. We'll bring in imagination and even sports visualization to try to understand that. We'll bring in something called autobiographical memory. Let's start with memory first. It's not what you're seeing on TV or remembering names or addresses. I like my iPhone. I don't remember phone number again. There's that memory. Then there's procedural memory, like riding a bike, tying your shoelaces. Then there's episodic memory, remembering episodes of your life. We have lots of different shades and types of memory. The one that connects me to the fact that I was here with you, maybe about two years ago is something called autobiographical memory. I have gone through so many different things in so many different countries and places, but I feel as if I have been the... I've inhabited and lived all of those experiences. Think about that, right? What's the thing that stitches all my life together?

That's a type of memory. It's called autobiographical memory. I think by design and importance, it's to some rare cases, it's to avoid waking and dream confusion. So it has this wild run at night, but when you wake up We'll talk about that transition. The transition between a dreaming brain and waking brain, it's not a hard line. It can be fuzzy in the morning, and that's why some people report sleep paralysis and goblins and weird stuff. But The autobiographical memory has to come back into command because that's what stitches our waking life together. That's what's get food, get to work, get on the subway. The autobiographical memory takes over every morning when we wake up. For it, I think for us to stay, to not be confused about what reality is because we had such a wild ride, the memory is designed to have dreaming fade to the background. I think it's happening. Electrically, it's happening. What we're catching are a few glimpses of it bleeding into our waking brain and say, Man, last night, what was going on in my head? Those are the glimpses and the flares of the dreaming brain bleeding into the waking life.

Those are the ones that we want to pay attention to. That's the way I'm thinking about dreaming and trying to explain it, too.

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

That's terrifying. I know, right? But you're asking me to tackle giants of mystery.

Tell me everything what it is.

In one afternoon. But again, with humility, if you hold on to the concept, if you just say, Look, there's We don't have to do a study, but I get what he's saying. We're on planet Earth. We clearly have to sleep. I believe him. Our brain is the thing that needs to sleep. Now what he's saying is that, Hey, check this out. While you're sleeping, you're dreaming. Whether you remember none of it, a little of it, or some of it, you're dreaming. If we hold on to that and then always come back to… If one person later on is like, I am a cycle of waking brain, dreaming brain. If you just walk away one thing, you're waking brain, dreaming brain, 24 hours, waking in times, whatever life is. Waking brain. And just to ask yourself, is this contribution to my thinking, to my emotion, from the waking brain or the dreaming brain or somewhere where it blends? So When you sleep paralysis, a third of people have experienced it. I haven't, but when I started writing my sleep paralysis, what you describe about This is great. Just give me a minute to take this one because this one I got a lot of science.

What the dreaming brain also does is not just hyper emotional and hyper visual and dampened logic. That we open with hyper emotional, hyper visual, dampened logic. That's there. What it also does is it locks down your body. You're temporarily paralyzed. There's some exceptions or reflexes or sleep walking, but in general, you're temporarily paralyzed so the dreaming brain can let loose, be emotional, be wild, and in the morning, that paralysis has to come off. Interesting. That we can all agree on. That's the dreaming brain and the waking brain. When there is a mismatch of your waking your dreaming brain, the mind is coming to, but the chemicals that have locked down your body, the chemical paralysis is still there. People will wake up locked in their body. That's what you're describing. Then on top of that, they start describing goblins and monsters and different things, lurking, intruders.I've never experienced that.I've never experienced that either. But that's described so much so that if you go to Italy, you go to Africa, you go to other places, they all have a similar story of being locked in the body and having a threatening presence in the room and sometimes a feeling of suffocation.

That grouping is something humans experience and something cultures have come up with their own stories about. If people want to look it up, it's like the succubus, the incubus and succubus comes from that. It's a famous painting of the goblin on top of a woman who's asleep. What I want people to go is, I see. That sleep paralysis that Louis brought up was because the dreaming brain and the waking brain, they don't just snap to the next phase. Sometimes they bleed into each other. That's called sleep exit. That little window is called sleep exit. Sleep entry is a fascinating one, too, but sleep exit.

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

My favorite time.But.

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

She's not wrong.

It's more of just like, Surrendering to, I can't move.

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

The sleep world, yeah.

Very good. That, again, doesn't happen in a millisecond. You don't blink your eyes and go into that mode. It bleeds. I remember this, how do I explain? I was diving away. I don't do it anymore. But I was diving in the caverns of the Yucatan, where the fresh water meets the ocean water. There's four feet where it's blurry. I was like, Yeah, it's not going to go from a fresh water river to ocean in a hair. There's a period of overlap. Interesting. If you hold on to that, your waking brain is starting to enter your dreaming, your sleeping brain. That window, there's a word for it. It's called hypnagogic and hypnoponic. It's a topic. Forget about that. Because I want to have a conversation. Sleep entry. Sleep entry is also a 15, 20-minute period where you can be in these liminal spaces where you're like, I'm remembering a lot, but man, I'm having some wild and thoughts. Lucid dreaming is when you've been asleep and then the awareness you're in a dream returns. That's a whole different topic. She's right, it's a blended state, your significant other. But sleep entry has been channeled by Salvador Dali and others in movie Inception as a place to extract fresh ideas.

Your fresh ideas might be great. My fresh ideas might be bad. I'm not saying that's the way to become a creative genius, but people have used that window, and now there's some devices that when they feel you fall in the sleep, they'll wake you up. So sleep entry is the blurry movement from the waking brain to the dreaming brain. That is an interesting space for creativity. Sleep exit is the dreaming brain to the waking brain. Sometimes the body stays locked in and locked down, and the mind comes back, and that freaks people out. That's called sleep paralysis. Wow. That's That's my synthesis.

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

Great question, first of all, because now we have the concept. If you believe your dreaming thoughts are ones you want to hold on to, if they're nightmares, maybe you want to forget, but nightmares won't let you forget. That's a different topic. They arrive in children for a different reason. But what I do now, because I have the luxury of a bed and curtains, it's out of respect for all the people in this world that don't have that. But I believe when I have had a good idea… I actually forget that. My last 100 bad ideas have come from somewhere in sleep entry and sleep exit. When I'm driving around LA or whatever, I'm in LAX or Heathrow, whatever it is, when I go, Oh, interesting thought. It's not an aha moment. When you have a thought that you don't know where it came from, I believe it's from that nightly process that's going from. That work you're putting in at night on your own, the design for the brain to dream, to stay creative, to stay enriched, to activate emotions and sights that are way beyond what you would even choose for during the day.

We'd become so boring if our brains didn't dream at night. The capacity would be constrained. When I have an interesting idea, I try to think about, did that come from my dreaming brain, or have I been working with that? I've been giving these talks on creativity. There's an incubation period and an extraction period. I believe habits during the day was like colored television, more colored dreams, put some red-colored goggles on people, and they had more red-colored dreams. I believe I do things like I like to flip through magazines or I listen to different music and I take different routes home. I believe I'm feeding my dream life. And then at sleep entry or sleep exit, I try to hold on to, What was I thinking about? What was I thinking about? How did I feel about that? What was that going on? To do that, you can't have the alarm, which is a luxury. The first thing you can't check is your phone because the minute you check your phone-Switching to somebody else. That autobiographical memory is onto the day. What you want is that autobiographical memory, the thing that stitches every day together, not to come on so fast.

To some people, you can read about it, but the concept is there to slow down the sleep exit or to pay attention to the sleep entry and jot down or hold onto those windows. I believe, for me, whether it's coming up with a new surgery, coming up with an idea for science, or working LA ballet now or writing. When I have had a good idea, it's come from those spaces. Interesting.

Not from being rushed and waking up with an alarm and going right into that.

That's important. You got to shelter and food and you got to stay employed, showing up on time. It's a luxury. But if you're really trying to take yourself to the next level, my process for extracting ideas is to work with my dreaming life. Wow, that's amazing.

You mentioned nightmares. Why do you think kids have nightmares and also kids or teens start to have erotic dreams at the same time? I'm sure they wish they had more erotic dreams than nightmares. But why do we need both erotic dreams and nightmares as we're growing up?

All right. So again, we return to the foundation of our conversation that these are back to what we dream. Okay. That's been described for a long time. I'm not coming at this new, right? When we look at the pattern of what people dream, there's simple stuff like, Oh, you have a flight tomorrow. You have a dream about missing your flight. You don't need to interpret that. You know what that is. Or you got a presentation tomorrow. You have a dream about showing up naked or something behind the podium. We know we get that. But why would you have nightmares? It's chapter two for a reason because I wanted to come across and just say, Look, this is a work of imagination. There's nobody that can take these few glimpses of science and life and come up with a fool proof, Hey, I got it all figured out story. Here's what's interesting about nightmares. If there's anything that would make somebody say, Look, this dreaming thing is not good for us, why do we have nightmares? It feels like a glitch. It feels like a mind's mistake, if you will. I don't think it is. When you look at the patterns, to understand it, there are two types of nightmares.

There's the one with the big idea. But let me get to the other one that's easier. If you have been traumatized, assaulted PTSD nightmares are flashbacks. It's a bad memory on loop, stamped with raw emotion. Can't shake it. That we have some firmer understanding of. If you're struggling and you have worsening headaches, you say, Hey, You got to think about seeing a doctor. If you're an athlete, you have worsening pain. The key is if you have worsening new onset and progressive nightmares, talk to your doctor or therapist about it. It could be a psychological thermometer that things are not going well for you. That's a big topic, and I think other people are in that space. I'll leave that one there. The one that interests me is having three sons. Each of them at one point, I had to to them, It's all right. It was only a nightmare. It was only a dream. The first thing I thought was, Does that mean they didn't… Now I'm looking at a neurodevelopment. To understand this, I went into a whole different space. We're not born walking and talking. You see kids, they're putting things together. The movements become fluid.

You're physically not born made, and you're cultivated physically. I believe mind is also being cultivated internally. One example would be, you got to remind kids it's only a dream. That means at some point when they're young, likely they're confusing or cannot separate dreaming thoughts and waking thoughts. At that time, when you ask them what they think about, it's very in general. I mean, this one kid might tell you the wildest thing. I'm not telling that person or that parent that that's not what they're experiencing. But the pattern is the dream reports of children, and some families signed up for this. I studied it. They followed their dream reports from age 2 to 20.Longitudinally.What are you dreaming about now? What are you dreaming about now? What are you dreaming about now? Their dream These are simple. It's like a table or a blanket. Interestingly, when they dream of animals, they're not often pets. They're like beings and monsters and Teddy bears. I can't explain all of that, but That's what they're describing. It's not the pet that they have that's in their dream. As we're learning to walk and talk to H-2, 3, 4, something's going on in the mind.

There are some structures. I need a moment for this one. There's a type of cognition that's developing. First is visual-spatial. Then these developmental scientists, they looked at it that the wildness of kids' dreams correlates more to the complexity of how they navigate visual spatial things. They have a test called block design. It's not how well they can spell it, remember. The more three-dimensional they are, that parallels complexity of dreaming in a child. So all the parents out there, you don't make them memorize. In my opinion, I did cultivate their sense of gymnastics, music, art, whatever you can, different foods, different diversity experiences. It's not being correlated to the logic. So that also makes me feel like that guides a little bit. And then what happens is they develop this thing called… At some point, they realize it's just an example. That teacher or that uncle or that person, they're smiling and saying, Hey, I want to help you. But the capacity develops. It's called theory of mind, where you start read the other person's intention beyond just what they're saying. Interesting. Yeah, that develops. Kids are gullible. That develops.

Theory of mind.

Yeah, T-O-A. People can look it up. Theory of mind. Just like there's a, I could throw the ball, that develops. At a certain age, around five or six, seven, the idea of that person's intentions may not be completely clear, or they might be misrepresenting their intentions. It's interesting. Or maybe I shouldn't trust them where maybe they would hurt me. These important concepts arrive in the brain at the same time as nightmares arrive. I think if I were to say, Why do we… Then these nightmares all go away for kids. Then as adults, we get them if we have trauma. They come as a wave. Interesting. It's crazy. I might be completely wrong, but I would love to hear somebody come up with a better…

You're not just gullible all the time. What everyone says…

I think nightmares make the mind.

Nightmars make the mind.

Yeah, they make you sharp. They give you a sense of self versus other. They make you less gullible. They create a sense of threat. The fleeing and the terror, I think it guides the cult observation of this thing called theory of mind, where you realize just because the person is smiling, that doesn't mean they have good intentions. Interesting. That is cool, right? They're not arriving for all of us at age eight, six, and then fading for most of us as we get into adolescence without a reason. That's not a glitch in the system. My belief, I wonder, again, with humility, and I'm taking on big things here. If that's not what it is for you, I believe it. I'm not saying I got it all figured out, but I'm just here to show you. We are in many ways still that dynamic as adults. So at the grounded level, your struggles with your lover, you're struggling with your partner. You're a dynamic ecosystem of mind and body. I just want to take people back to, Look at that. There's a certain part of the brain that gives you that capacity. We'll get into that some other day.

But in that part, the newest part of the brain that pushed the forward, there's a part that when it's injured, it doesn't work well. We can't make new opinions or we become gullible. There's some cellular basis to the theory of mind. But again, I think nightmares arriving for all of us at the same time as we're becoming like, Oh, that person might hurt me. Or what do I want? Self versus other. I mean, self in italics. I think that's all happening in parallel for a reason. I think that's all happening in parallel. Chapter 2, right at the gates.So.

If nightmares make the mind, what do erotic dreams do?

Okay. That's why it's just chapter 3. I know everybody's going to want to I'm not going to talk about this one, but it's PG 13, but I think the concepts are very mature. Again, we return to our primer that there's this… We are waking brain and dreaming brain, and they intersect. We stab. I think everybody knows that it's a matter of to what degree and how. That's the other universal dream. I've never had a dream of teeth falling out, but it's been reported for centuries.I've had it. Yeah.

Yeah, a few times.

So dreams follow patterns, right? People have dreams of falling, but that's like 20%, 60%. I've had that, too.

But I've had dreams of falling, but everybody has had essentially...

There'll be some people say, No, I've never had a sexual dream. Okay, I'm not here to...

A majority.

In scientific terms, everybody. Yeah. So I call those two universal dreams.

Nightmare and erotic dreams.

Universal. Universal dreams. I think when something is universal, a part of our... There's awesome fields out there like evolutionary psychology, like the gifts, the strengths and weaknesses today aren't just physical, that we're inheriting thinking patterns, dreaming patterns. This is mind-blowing, but this has been well known. I'm just able to put it, I think, into a framework now is falling teeth dreams, teeth falling out, it doesn't follow a pattern in people. But nightmares cluster in family. When I say, Yeah, exactly. I have the same. I've known that because I went to medical school and they said that. I just didn't have an understanding of it. But I believe, and there is evidence, that we inherit not just our physical traits, but our cognitive traits. If we inherit our risk aversion or proclivity to risk, if we inherit our parents coping mechanisms or failure to cope, we may be inheriting dreaming patterns. Interesting. I think that we have to be open to that That's why nightmares arrive for every kid, man. That's not happening by chance. I may not have the explanation for it. I think it cultivates the sense of self and gives you mind-dreening ability with somebody else.

That's called theory of mind. That's my opinion. Then the next one comes is sexual dreams. And this one is interesting because... Let me break this down for you. It's different because when my sons were born, and we're born with the marble. And what you've heard this, use it or lose it. If you cover a child's eye because they have some health issues, that part that goes to the right side of the brain, the left side, Each eye goes to both occipital lobes. It's not this one to this one. It's this crossing. If you cover it, those parts, whether or they repurpose, it's an adaptive system. Use it or lose it. You got the neurons, the 100 billion neurons, they're like microscopic jellyfish. Use them or you're going to lose them. That makes sense. And that's what happens for vision, hearing, taste, movement. If you wrap somebody's arm, the motor Our area will wither.Wow.Okay, so that's built in. But how does a touch become a caress? That's a capacity from the same... From the same sensation, now it can become erogenous. There are new nerves being laid down in our fingertips. But when a lover's touch is different than an intention, even, even it touches.

That capacity develops in the human brain around the time of 11, 12, and 13. It's not after puberty. It's not like puberty However people conceive puberty. But you don't go through bodily puberty and then say, I think I'm turned on. It's different. Your brain develops the ability to be turned on. I I believe, through erotic dreams. Wow. That erotic dreams are, again, the mind's cultivation for desire. Then you start to see changes in the sensation part of the brain where now it's not just... Now erotic touch is possible. Without getting too deep into child rearing and all that, but sensuality arrives. It's It's not prepubescent. It's not there. It must come at a certain time. Around that time, people who have never had intercourse, people who have been castrated chemically for cancer treatment, people who have had chemotherapy, people who have had their ovaries removed, they still have erythroidic dreams. Really? It's not the body saying, I like it, let's think more about it. I think it's the other way around. And that it arrives. And in the biggest sense, wouldn't that be an important thing for people to procreate? That desire arrives. And the fact that it arrives before, so here it's not using it or lose it, it's, Here you go.

It's time to use it.

It comes before it's ready.

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

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

That's a big Do they have to dream something or think something first before they can actualize it? I think there's two ways to think of that. There's the things you want and you pursue. The way I would look at that is, returning to another example, is that the dreaming brain The waking brain and the waking brain is one way to understand it. But the structures in the brain during waking life, they're called the executive network, the one we talked about, are dampened down. If you have a goal, pursue it. This conversation is not to be like, Hey, just dream around all the time. You got to get after stuff. You got to get things done. That's the executive network, and that's what drives you to your goals. You can think about your goals. You can choose your desires. That's been most of my life. But then the role of dreams in that, I think, are twofold. One, because I have thought about this for myself. Again, it's my story with respect. I believe that if I have chosen a goal with my waking brain, contributions are coming from my dreaming brain. I'm incubating thoughts, it's feeding me, it's feeding some aha moments, I'm using sleep entry, I'm using sleep exit.

Then the bigger one for is, are there things I want? Are there things I hope for that my waking brain just does not have access to? That's the big question in the beginning. What's the meaning of dreams? Then if we look at what is happening in the dreaming brain, returning to her, is that it's hyper emotional, it's hyper visual. This is some real profound When I was learning about this and reading about it, the… I can't get into brain anatomy too much, but I would just say, if you flatten out your brain, the executive network would be different continents and countries revving up a little bit. The Imagination Network, which is liberated in the dreaming brain, it's other countries coming up. It's like Balazia Waterfall. Some come up, some comes down. Sure. It's a toggle. And so your brain at its most emotional, metabolically, electrically, is in dreaming. You can't rock that hard during the day.

Really?

Yeah. By measurement. Then it says to me, So if there is a meaning, if I can gain further insight into myself, I must look at the ways my dreaming brain is exceptional. I'm not going to look in my dreaming brain for a math solution, but I might look at what my dream brain is putting forth for an emotional solution, an emotional insight. That's the thing that really I mean, a lot of this is... But the meaning of dreams is that the act of self-examination with the recognition that I hope you leave today is that's a hyper emotional state. What is the value of emotion? It's profound. When people have injury to these areas, they can't even make any decision. Decision making requires emotion. Instinct requires emotion. My dog, Franky, she knows when I'm sitting in the booby trap like, Hey, we're going out for date night. Ricky, come here. She's like, There's some brilliance to emotion, right? We have become, again, don't get me wrong, you got to wake up, you got to go to work, you got to get it done. That takes the waking brain and that takes the executive network. But if you want insights that can't be gained through the executive network, through always focusing outward, then you are getting glimpses of your own brain, your own life's hyper emotional state through dreaming.

I think there's insight to be found in that. That that is the way to dream interpretation is to recognize the ways that your dreaming brain is exceptional. The way I look at dream interpretation, if I could just jump into that, that's like the last chapter. We could rock all day, but this is like, it fits nicely here, is there are dreams, you know what they are. It's naked behind a podium. You had a speech to get late for a flight. There's no dream interpretation there. You know what that is. There are dreams that make no sense at all. There's no emotional stamp on them. It's just this clutter. We have thoughts during the day we don't pay attention to. There are dreams that parallel your life. The two most important ones are end-of-life dreams and pregnancy dreams. Really? As reported, when people are pregnant, patients are pregnant. They have a lot of dreams about babies and rolling over babies. That doesn't need interpretation. If people at the end of life with a cancer diagnosis, then my patients tell me that they're thinking about finish lines and visiting people from in the past. Really? The dreams are accompanying you because you're making those dreams.

Of course, the dreams fit what's going on in your life. Wow. Again, those don't need to be interpreted. You know what's going on. Sure. You're dying, and your dreams are comforting you.

You've worked on a lot of people who have only had a year or a few years left to live. What are most of those dreams of people who are dying?

Okay, that's a big question. That goes back to the last conversation we had. I am surprised by how valiant most cancer patients are. When I look at cancer patients in general, I would think most would fall apart, because it's quite the word, it's quite the journey. But it's overwhelming, not all. Some suffer, some handle it poorly, understandably, but they do well. They show up for their appointments. They're brave. They dig down for strength and composure, and they find meaning. Sometimes they are able to enjoy some things more knowing that the finish line is in view. They're not encumbered, as I mentioned last time, with fuss. Those patients, when you talk to them, they will report, again, not all. I'll make a simple statement here, but a lot of them report that the dreams they have are positive. They're helpful. They're not of being eaten alive. They're not of, What did I do to get this? Interesting. It's reconciling dealing with lovers and family. It's having an expansive view of their life. The dreams in these cancer patients, and this is reported in other people who study this, dreams comfort you toward the end of life.

Wow. Again, the hyper emotional dream. If we have dreams that don't need interpretation because you're falling or you're flying and you're falling or you're giving a talk and you show up naked or it's end of life and it's comforting you. There's no emotional feeling to it. I believe if you are to go after a dream to really reflect upon, You wake up and that intense dreaming life gives you a little glimpse, a little peek at something. Don't waste that. The one to choose is the one with a powerful central image and a powerful emotion. And that, to me, that makes sense with what's going on in the brain, hyper emotional, hyper visual. I'm trying to make sense of it. And just be aware that a lot of times it's symbolic. It's not going to be literal, right? Because we talked about the executive network is dampened. And hyper emotional, hyper visual brain, it's a storyteller. You want to extract the meaning out of the story, much like a good movie. It's not, Hey, why am I... For example, some veterans, when they're having trouble with a marriage, will have dreams of war, but they don't generally dream of war.

You have to be able to think about it and try to... I can't give you that answer. I don't know if you're a veteran or not. I think that's where it's hard to go online and say, I dreamt of a leaf or a bridge. What does it mean? No, it's different for... It's individual. You may not be able to figure it out, let alone somebody else. But if you have the luxury to remember your dream or through auto-suggestion and journaling, you're trying to remember dreams more, which can happen, those are the ones to go after, the hyper emotional ones, the hyper visual ones. Just keep them here. You got 15 things in front of you. You're focusing out where your executive network is on. But don't You get about that glimpse you got into your hyper emotional brain and what it produced about you for you.

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

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

Interesting, right?

That's been written about for thousands of years. But what they can do now is in these sleep laboratories, they put the stickers on their head to measure the electricity to prove they're asleep. Because I could imagine, with some of my friends, they'd be like, I woke up. How do you know you didn't just wake up? How do you know you're awake in a dream? So you have to prove you're asleep through the whole time. Because otherwise, you might just wake up and say, Yeah, I'm lucid dreaming, and then fall back asleep. So some essential questions to be asked. So the electrical measurements or the stickers on the head, the sleep spendels is a certain spike that proves your sleep. You can't fake being asleep to the EKG of your mind, if you will. The EKG, yeah. Then they started communicating with them. They'll say certain things, and they come up with this technique called left, right, left, right, and they'll move their eyeballs left, right, left, right, answer simple questions. And that's progressed to some people being able to demonstrate when they enter, when lucidity arrives within their dream, they will signal to the people outstanding outside the window.

And so there are these back and forth experiments going on. So far as even basic things like, Oh, what's two plus two? And they'll try to do a left, right, left, right four times Sometimes. Somebody might say, Well, I thought you couldn't do math. But that's part of the magic and the mystery of lucid dreaming is that the executive network is coming back online a little bit. For that awareness to happen inside your dream, proven by sleep of the spendels on an EEG, you can't fake, when the awareness comes back, that primer we're talking about, the executive network comes back, too. So they can do a little bit of basic math.

It's like when you're talking about the beginning, what is it called?

4951?

Where is that? When the lucid dreaming is happening, what is happening? Is it rocking back and forth like this constantly, or is it one side, and then it goes back?

That's a good question. It's fragile. That's a very good question. You You've gone from dreaming brain, you've gone from waking brain to dreaming brain. What happens is a little bit of the waking brain returns, but it a little flourishes. It's not like, Hey, I'm lucid dreaming. I got 90 minutes. Let's ride this. I get it. Somebody might be able to, but I want to leave you with the fascination. These overlap states, which are really fascinating, sleep entry, sleep exit, a bit of awareness returning within it's a proven sleep, that it's something fragile. It's something fleeting. Think of like birds and murmurations and Aurora Boreales. We're not talking about. And that's also the lesson for people who are listening is, stop thinking that your brain is wires and on and off. Think of it as dreaming brain, waking brain, waking brain, dreaming brain. Think of it as executive mostly interacting here. A little bit of imagination network returning because I'm daydreaming while we're talking a little bit of blend, right? Well, lucid dreaming is coming to awareness that you're dreaming within your dream, and for some people, being able to steer the content of their dream.

That's crazy. Stuff like Christopher Nolan likes to talk about movies and stuff like that. But what I'm here to tell you is it exists. They have proven that it exists. I'm not saying you lose a dream. I have not. Aristotle I wrote about it, but they have proven with responses from preserved eyeball movements, documentation that that person is asleep with the electricity of sleep, that they have been able to communicate with people who are in dream.

It's crazy that they can steer their dreams.

That's what they report. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. But if you step back a little bit and stop thinking about as the brain on, off, wired, hardwired. If you start to think of it as states, as tides, as flows, as seasons, and every night there's the waking brain and dreaming brain, and there's sleep entry, and there's sleep exit, and sometimes lucidity returns, it starts to make sense of a lot That's all the stuff I've been seeing in the hospital. Really? People wake up from anesthesia. They're suppulsive. People are awake. They communicate in anesthesia during our awake brain surgery. Really? People wake up and they're dreaming gnarly stuff. You can give people certain medicines and they more lucid dreaming, something based on acetocolamine. The reports of lucid dreaming go up with galantamine. What that tells me, not to get too medically about it, is that when you mess with pills and drugs and the dreams change, this is a biological process. It's not coming from the heavens. It's coming from our brain. Really? Yeah.

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

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

3 AM.

That's why this is so special for me is that-You may not have the answer. No, I have some direction to those questions. Just the fact that you're asking me that question means I'm doing all right. But I am fortunate to have people ask me just to weigh in on that. What I'm trying to do is build it on science, but bring it to you in a way where you can go home and talk to your family about it. What is your thoughts on that? The first thing is the brain and mind thing can't be separated. It's not like software hardware. The brain, that's a whole big topic, but the mind is an emerging phenomenon that comes from from the brain. One example would be we see it, the crystals form, we see it in an organic matter. It's a self-organizing thing. Termites can make mounds. Stadiums with a roar outside is more than the 80,000 individuals inside. That roar is my best way of understanding what 100 billion neurons do. The mind comes from it. Now, what we think can go back and shape the brain. It's a reciprocal interaction. Our habits can shape the brain.

Our brain creates the habits. The brain mind, I don't think you can really separate it out. The ultimate gift of the human mind, I think, is dreaming. Love and all those things, yes, but the process of dreaming. Let's for one second say we're talking about brain and mind as one thing. We just call it brain/mind. I was reading about this This is great. Here's a story. Of course, they had to come from the heavens, our understanding, till about 100 years ago. You plop down, you're not doing anything, and then you wake up, and whether you tell somebody or not, you're like, Man, I was on fire last night in my thoughts. If you're asleep and you're hibernating or you're deactivated or whatever the phrase was, it had to come from something external. It's When you're in there. How could inactive flesh of the brain, the resting brain… The brain doesn't rest at night. It's activated. The brain doesn't rest ever. The brain rests when you're dead. Like I said, the electricity in sleep is so similar to the electricity during waking. They call it paradoxical sleep. You're on when you're asleep. But they didn't know that.

Nobody could know that until… This is a great story. I don't think it's been told, but it's the story that I've come to understand. So that makes sense. It had to come from something outside of us. You're out cold and you're thinking that stuff? Monsters and pterodactals and erotic dreams and nightmare. Okay, so that came from the heavens or the gods, their omens. But what happened was somebody, about 100 years ago, did a surgery for a brain tumor. Then there was a physician there, and they had just figured out at that time that you could put a wire. It wasn't just for sending electricity, it was for measuring it. When we put a sticker on your heart and you know the electricity of a heart, it's from the nerves on the surface of the heart. It's not from the muscle. Interesting. Ekg is the measurement of the electricity in the nerves on top of your heart. When we shock you to recharge your heart, we're just shocking the three nerves, not the muscle. Muscle just listens. Well, what if you put 96 stickers on your brain, you would a measurement that's called EEG. What he did was he put a sticker right on top of the hole.

The skull had a hole, but the stitch work, the flesh was covered. We do that still sometimes. But in that area where there was no skull about the size of the coin, he put a little sticker on there, a little wire.On.

The brain?No, on the surface.Surface. But there was a hole.

Surgeons do it on the brain.

But there was a hole.

And healed flesh. He put it just on top of the flesh with the hole underneath. He thought he's going to get better out, I guess, right?

The hole, that would be a direct line to the brain.Yes.But not touching the brain.Well said.

Got it. Then he got squiggles. That was where the Ege he was invented about 100 years ago. The interesting part was when they all left the room or whatever they were doing, and the person fell asleep, nobody paid attention to it, but the squiggles were happening at night. It wasn't squiggles during the day, then a flat line at night. So somebody could have said at that point, Wait a second. That flesh is not inactive. Then 60 years ago, somebody in Montreal, Dr. Penfield, he was... So now he's numbing up the scalp, laying it open. Patient is on relaxing medications, but not on a machine, drills the hole like ice fishing, takes it off, sees the covering of the brain called the dura, incises it. The surface of the brain is there, and then they lighten up her medication. Patient. He's got a little fountain pen that delivers a little electricity, and he's mapping it. He's trying to find the thing. The patient has seizure and says, Before the seizure, I always get this feeling, this aura. He thinks if he can find where that feeling originates, dissect out a little bit of that tissue, he can break the seizures.

He ended up being right. It's a massive field now. Imagine major centers around the world, seizure surgery. But at some Sometimes when he would zap because he's marking the patient reports desire. And one patient reported a night, a recurrent nightmare that they had been having. Interesting. You zap the surface of the brain with a little faint electricity. The brain doesn't have nerve endings of its own, so you can touch it, you wouldn't know. Wouldn't feel it. Not you, but this is known, and I've done the surgery, this is established stuff. Awake brain surgery, you can cut the brain. You won't feel the pain. No. It only feels through its tentacles.

When you're doing an awake brain surgery-Only the scalp feels it, but we numb it up. The patient is awake, and you're in there, and they can talk to you.

You can dissect the brain, and they don't feel the thing.

Is this the one? When you see the videos of, I guess, violin or guitar where it's like, okay, connecting.

It's so crazy. But when he was mapping it, a nightmare, which is a type of dream, was returned, and he took the pen off, the nightmare broke. At that moment, we knew that dreams, the only thing I can say with certainty today is dreams come from our brain. They do not come from the heavens. That I can say with certainty. Everything else, this has just been It's fascinating. It's fascinating ride. The ride will continue. But that we can say we're certain. Dreams are an electrical process of the human brain.

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

That's a good question. A lot of dreaming changes Which is a very good question. I've tried to keep the medical world out of it, even though it informs dreaming quite a bit. But the patterns I saw from drug dreams, anesthetic dreams, I couldn't find a It's also, again, to let you know, if it didn't fit, if it wasn't going to be a thoughtful love letter to dreams and dreaming, I'll tell you, and I'll tell you, the pattern of dreams that happen with anesthetics and stuff, I can't say, Aha, this one causes this and this could mean… I can't find meaning in it. It's that wild. The ones that you're seeing here, I feel good about. But patients with brain brain surgery, on medications, on steroids for swelling, their dreams change completely. There's a brand new dream life. What it says to me is, again, dreams come from the brain. If you take a pill that goes in your blood to your brain.

Chemicals change. It's great. Different dreams.

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

Interesting. It's not from some other realm.

What about the pineal gland?

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

I'm happy to get into all of these things. Aura is a thing, A-U-R-A, people look it up. That's a hunch. I think a lot of the stuff is real. I just think it's muddy and it's easy to manipulate. I would say, be careful. The pineal gland has been… Because of its location, people thought it's the mind's eye. I think our philosophers have commented about it. What I can tell you is…As.

A brain surgeon, what is it for you?

I can take it out and the person is exactly the Really? Pioneal gland surgery. Piinecytomas. Have you ever taken one out?

Yeah.

It's part of neurosurgery.

You've taken one out of a-Yeah.

You come in through the back here. It sits between lobes. People can look that up is pineal gland or It's a gland, whether it's got cancer in it or whether it's just a cyst, non-cancerous, but growing and pushing, whether it's normal pineal or abnormal, when you remove it, they have almost no significant consequences. Really? Yeah. And the melatonin is bottomed out, and they still sleep okay. So I'm not here to go against the whole world of things that are out there. But again, if we're having a conversation, you come into my house, We're hanging out. We're taking a walk. You ask me that question. I'm trying to come to you both with things I can't make sense of. Anesthetic dreams. Pineo gland. No, they're being removed across the world, and there isn't the pituitary gland. If you take that out, you got to take a bunch of hormones or medicine. That's a big deal. Interesting. The pineal gland, the one that has been given this transcendent value, that comes out and goes in the canister. It's fine. The next day, we don't change the stuff the patient's on. They don't need some replacement thing. It makes melatonin, and I wrote about it in my last book, when the melatonin drops to zero or nothing, they're still sleeping all right.

Really? I'm not going to say don't take melatonin or take melatonin. We're not doing health advice. I don't mean we can't go there, but where I'm at is concepts, exploration.

Does the finial gland impact Are you in dreams or dreaming? After you remove it, people still dream?

It doesn't have those connections. Interesting. Back to the dreaming. When I talk to you about if the brain was laid flat and different continents and countries are up, The Imagination Network, Liberated in the Dreaming Brain. Different countries and continents and oceans are up for the executive network trying to get the day's work done. The pineal is irrelevant in that map of things that come up when you sleep. That thing that goes 51% when you sleep, a Pineal has in it. Not even a bench warmer.

What's the primary purpose of the Pineal gland?

We don't think it has a primary purpose. Really? We can look it up, but there are parts of the body. It's like the appendix of the brain. We can remove it, and it doesn't change much. People still live long-wise. Oh, yeah. You don't have to...

What part of the brain, if you remove it, is going to be, you're not going to be able to perform the same way.

Well, okay, that's a bigger concept.

How much of the brain can you still have? Can you remove or have left to still live a great life? Yeah.

Let's take that. That's an interesting question. If you think of the brain laid flat as different continents and countries, it's like a mosaic, it's like a puzzle.

If you cut out half of the continent.

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

Half? Half the brain?

Yeah. Not the reptilian and not the emotional instinct, but half the hemisphere, the two walnut. So what that points to is this. It's what we call some areas, you bump into it with a suction at 20X, and it leads to a change. Some areas, nail gun injuries happen, and you take out That part of the brain. Like framers, they use the pneumatic nail guns, and when they kick up a little higher, they'll spray a nail through the thin floor.Right here.Yeah. This part of neurosurgery is taking up the… It's called penetrating trauma. Depending on where it goes, they can handle a nail in one front of lobe or the other. But hitting both front of lobes, it changes a person. So some areas have redundancy, other areas can't take a joke. Some areas, you could take one occipital lobe and you basically just lose your rear view mirror. You don't lose sight. But if you take both or injure both. That's what neurosurgery is about, is knowing what you can go through, what to expect in the person waking up after you do that. That's neurosurgery. Surgery. But it also informs that we have to stop looking at the brain as some homogenous thing.

That you return to a slice through and you'll see all different shapes in there. It's not like cake. It's not like liver. It It looks the same. Yeah, this is diverse.Structures and connections in there. It's beautiful.

How many people have you seen have a nail gun in their brain? Six.

When I was training, yes. Really? Gunshot wounds, nail gun injuries, fights. You learn with trauma, what parts of the brain can handle trauma.

Because you're not doing those types of surgeries. You're doing cancer removal.

Right. But that informs me if I'm getting to a deeper tumor and it's inside and it's got a normal brain on the outside, that has informed me, along with mapping, what is the route that I can get to the tumor-This is fascinating.but not injure the person? That's neurosurgery. It's not the chopsticks in a jar. The My Hands, it requires skill, but there's something more to it that I love. The stories from the patients been formed last decade and a half and still are informing this book. It's the patient stories and the neuroscience on top of the nail gun. That's what we open with. Look, I'm trying to come at you with petri dish stuff, nail gun stuff. Wow. Heavens, networks. I'm trying to bring it all in to have done a real proper look at dreams and dreaming.

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

Well, I think you said something really important there that in trying to understand dreams and dreaming, I understood myself better in trying to... If you read this book and you find something interesting, learning more about your brain and mind will inform your waking life. Then when people say, The brain is this, you'll say, Wait a second, because you're going to walk away learning about neuroscience, you're going to walk away learning about art and literature, nightmares, erotic dreams. More importantly, For me, it's my gift. This is my legacy that somebody try to put together something that... How is somebody going to take a proper shot at this? I'm very happy with the honesty there. You'll see phrases like, Could it be? I wonder. I'm tempted to speculate. I'm not just telling you. I'm taking you through how I'm thinking.

How long have you been a brain surgeon for now?

Wow, 25 years.

25 years. What it sounds like is you've had 25 years plus your residency, so call it 30 plus years of researching the brain and as PhD in neuroscience and understanding of the mind. When you first came on, you talked about the brain is these waves and patterns. I remember you talking about like birds moving in waves and patterns.

The electricity does move like that. It's not on/off. Exactly. It's not a switch.

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

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

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

Instagram, Dr. John D. Hall, but I'm an old-timer, man. Dr.

John D. Hall. You're a young, old-timer, right? You're still young. Do you have a website also, though?

No. But I mean, I-Instagram?

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

We could take each chapter deeper.

Let's do it. I appreciate you being here. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel, exclusively on Apple podcast. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you, and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.