Rahul Jandial: Lucid dreaming, divergent thinking, and erotic thoughts

0:00Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton. This is the show that tries to understand what's really going on in our minds. Today, I'm chatting to Rahul Jandial. What if what you're experiencing in your dream life in that hyper-emotional state is actually a harbinger or a red flag for something you haven't even recognized about yourself during the day? And exploring the hyper-emotional components of your dreaming might be just a different look at how you're seeing yourself cope or not cope with the challenges of your waking life. Some people feel well during the day and they have these nightmares come through.

0:37I think they should be asked about like temperature. I think a nightmare pattern can be a clue to things you may or may not recognize about yourself during the day. Rahul is a leading neurosurgeon and neurobiologist. He's overseen groundbreaking science at the Jandial Lab in Los Angeles, has spent years doing incredible complex cancer operations and travels the world performing and teaching brain surgery in underserved hospitals. He's fascinated by the neuroscience of dreams. In his latest book, This Is Why You Dream, he delves into the incredible scientific research on dreams and how dreaming affects our waking life.

1:17I've got to admit, I'm pretty obsessed with dreams. I spend probably way too long going down like Google rabbit holes looking into ridiculous meanings of dreams and what's going to happen in my future due to these dreams. But really, reading this book has given me, I guess, a little bit more permission to take them more seriously and to actually find out a bespoke meaning of what they mean to me. And actually, during the reading of this book, I started having some pretty wild dreams, which I'm desperate to talk to Rahul about. Rahul reckons we need to be paying attention to our dreams. They're like nocturnal therapists.

1:57What a great phrase. In that they can allow us to have a bit of safe space to rehearse real life scenarios we might be anxious or confused about. Or maybe it's that your dream life is flagging something that you haven't even recognised about yourself yet. Oh my God, there's so much in this chat. You are going to love it. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just... Speaking into the void. But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title?

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3:48That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. OK, to Rahul in just a moment. But first, have you got your tickets for the Happy Place Festival this summer? We're going to be back at both Chiswick House and Gardens and Tatton Park. And I'm particularly excited because we've got a brand new area called the Nutrition Hub. There's going to be gut health Q &A sessions and talks on how to nourish your body and soul and embrace food freedom. And on each day, there are going to be men only workshops, which is amazing because we want more men there thinking that well-being is for them. That is what it's all about.

4:31So bring your boyfriends, bring your dads, bring your mates, your brothers, your cousins, whoever. We want them there. Do go and get your tickets. I cannot wait to see you. you just need to head to happyplaceofficial.co.uk. Right then, mind-blowing stuff incoming. Here's the show.

5:09Rahul, it's so lovely to meet you. Thank you so much for coming along today to chat about something very specific, which I'll get to in a moment. Ironically, I slept like shit last night and I had no dreams. I slept so badly. But during the reading of your book, I had the most intense and wild dreams because it was on my mind, which I think leads us into all sorts of avenues of conversation about where dreams come from and why. You say at the very start of your book that alongside your incredible career as a brain surgeon, you have always been utterly fascinated by dreams. What is it that piques your curiosity about dreams?

5:50I had an experience. First of all, thank you for having me on. I was maybe 28. I'm 50 now, 29, 30. And we do this operation called awake brain surgery. So the brain itself cannot feel. It feels through the nerves it sends out to our face and body. So for some patients to figure out the specific address of language, we numb up the scalp, we open up the bone. When the brain is exposed, essentially naked, we wake them up and we tickle the surface of the brain with a faint electrode. The patient doesn't feel it, but when you tickle the surface of the brain, neurons, they communicate with electricity, very faint electricity, but electricity nevertheless.

6:27And I remember there was a patient and she said, oh, this is a nightmare I've had since I was a kid. And at that point, I was learning the craft, but it struck me and stuck with me. I said, you just reactivated a nightmare. And I said, that's a massive question. For thousands of years, people wondered, like, where do dreams come from? Because the understanding was flawed that the brain is passive or quiet or inactive during nighttime. No, at night, the brain is throbbing hard. And then this made me realize dreams come from the human brain. And there's evidence of that right here in front of me.

7:06So as I moved on my journey, a laboratory, growing neurons, taking care of patients, thousands of brain surgeries, met 10 ,000 people or more, all the human stories that were in it, my publishing life evolved. three sons, 18, 19, 22. So it wasn't just, I wasn't just a professor. There was a lot of other things in my life. And so the last two books I've written with Penguin, one was about the brain. Second was a memoir with my own struggles and themes of resilience, trauma, stress, struggle is the emphasis on that one. And so the publisher said, okay, we want a scientific exploration of dreams and dreaming.

7:44We know it's an incomplete science, but we wanted to be an author that people can say, yeah, this guy, his ideas and synthesis about nightmares or erotic dreams, we can vibe with that. We want to hear from him. So I am so fortunate to have this opportunity, but that's the long arc of me with dreams and dreaming, something I noticed in my late 20s, massive exploration of neuroscience and patience and humanity and personal life journey. And then to this moment, we're having this conversation. It's brilliant because I think from all the books that I had or even magazines as a teenager, dreaming has been talked about in popular culture in quite a sort of fanciful way and a sort of mystical way.

8:27And you are, of course, approaching it from a lens of curiosity, but also with your neuroscientist hat on so we can look at why we're dreaming and what's happening within the brain. I don't want to be too basic here, but I think it's important when we're talking about dreaming to get the language right for myself and the listeners from the start. So the brain is the organ. How are you describing the mind? How do you differentiate the two? Because sometimes I think we conflate them and confuse them. Yeah, that's a massive question. It's one people have struggled with. My explanation is this. The brain creates the mind, and the mind can also return back to create the brain.

9:07The brain has two states that it enters without us asking every 24 hours while we're on this planet, and that's the waking brain and the dreaming brain. We don't ask to go to sleep. We don't activate dreaming. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I'm like, please, gosh, can I just go to sleep? Well, actually, that's a good point, though. But if we skip a night of sleep, then the pressure, the sleep pressure kicks in. So there's something driving these rhythms. But the way to think of the mind coming from neurons and just a little way to conceptualize the brain, it's not like the other organs. It's not like a liver that it's sliced in half.

9:39It looks like tiles. It's more of an ecosystem of molecular, microscopic, 100 billion jellyfish that are spraying tiny chemicals, you know, the ones you've heard about, dopamine, these kind of things, but also electricity toward each other. When you get all of that together and they synchronize and we see patterns of this kind of synchrony in nature, like fireflies will start beating together. You see self-organizing phenomena, even termites will make mounds. So the neurons coalesce in petri dishes in my lab without me poking and prodding them. So there's something fundamental underneath it. And then there's the mind that's above it.

10:13The best way for me to think about it is if you have a stadium with 80 ,000 people in it, each person is a neuron. But the roar of the stadium as you approach, that's the mind. It's something above that's created from the pieces, but doesn't rely on each individual piece. It's sort of an epiphenomenon. phenomenon, the sound of an engine, right? The roar of a stadium. That's the way or the symphony of an orchestra. There's something more than just the individual pieces. And those principles apply even down to inorganic matter, like crystals form things, termite mounds, beaver dams, like the self-organizing thing is there in human nature and as well as nature in general, at its most elevated form is 100 billion neurons coming together to, you know, to have this conversation with each other.

10:59Yeah, I wanted to have a deeper understanding of that, because in the book, you say that we are simultaneously creators of our dreams, yet also helpless participants. And I think that relates to that sort of definition, because you have to go here, right, are dreams informed by circumstance and what we're imbibing in the day? Or do we get down to a more molecular level and look at the electricity that's moving around the brain? So are we more one than the other? Are we creating it? Are we participants? Or is it just a direct that split into 50-50? So the dreaming brain, so now that we, let's establish that the brain goes through these two states throughout our life, two-thirds, one-third, sleep and waking.

11:44The major thing going on in sleep is dreaming. It's not a passive process. It's not a quiet process. The electricity is throbbing. The glucose is being used. You might feel rested in the morning, but your brain was doing anything but resting. So if we establish that, the question becomes, how do we inhabit our waking brain? How do we get a sense of autobiographical memories, actually the scientific term when all my waking days and we see aberrations of this in patients that have a loss of sense of self and phantom pain. So patients inform me quite a bit. But during the day, we are the driver of our car, if you will.

12:20And we steer the direction of it. We inhabit it mostly unless psychedelics. You can have some dissociative states. I have patients who wake up and they say, the example would be car is moving, but you're watching it from above. That's a dissociative state with the waking brain, psychedelics. We can get into that. Then there's the waking brain in general, which is you're driving, you're steering. I'm on the tube. I'm flying here. I have a podcast. That's really driven by a collection of structures called the executive network. That would be like saying, you know, parts of the front of the low, parts of the parietal low, parts of the reptilian brain.

12:52It's not one spot. It's an ensemble that kicks up together to perform something. It's called task on. So during the day, we're mostly task on. In the dreaming brain, it's mostly the imagination network. You're creating. Your imagination is running wild. That's what's happening there. The experience for the person is to truly inhabit that space. So the best way to think of dreaming is you're in the driver's seat of a car you can't control. It's lurching all over the place. It's jumping. You're on the top of a building. You're in some awkward social situation. So a car, you fully inhabit it. And the reason I'm pointing that out is psychedelic states, there's an ego dissolution that comes from it.

13:36So the wisdom that might, the insight that might come from psychedelics for some patients, like some of my cancer patients, is from being a little bit removed from what's happening. Whereas, just stay with me now. And first of all, I love this. No, because it's massive stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so exciting. And just a framework so people can say, oh, okay, just how can I hang information on that, right? Waking brain, dreaming brain. Waking brain can also have a psychedelic dissociative state where there's an ego dissolution. You're not in the driver's seat anymore. You're looking at the car from a distance.

14:09The dreaming brain, you fully inhabit the experience. You are central. There is no ego dissolution. What we're seeing with these fancy machines is the default mode network is active, whereas in psychedelic states, you might feel like you're in a dreamy state, but your default mode network called the imagination network is dampened. Uh, so you are, uh, you're able to perceive things that your waking brain has experienced with a step removed perspective. Like for my cancer patients that we must all terminal cancer patients or people at the end of their journey or struggling with a journey that, that my body made something that's consuming for me, me from the inside.

14:53They can have an existential crisis and this psychedelics are being explored in major centers And they say, wait a second, that they have a sort of a connection that we're all from atoms and we're all cells and this must happen at some point. So they get a sense of peace from it. That's from being able to step away. Whereas dreams is you're on a wild ride. Where is it taking me and what is it for? That's the way to understand it, my mind. Yeah. I guess the interesting thing is that both say we actually had Professor David Nutt on the podcast a while back talking about psychedelics, which was fascinating.

15:25And I am on a deep dive myself trying to learn as much as I can about that. And I guess a similarity that I could draw from looking at the dream state, but also psychedelics, is that they both could prompt divergent thinking for us to look outside of the box and to go, oh, wow, I'm seeing this from a different angle. Or certainly with dreaming, we see it within the realms of creativity that people have incredible dreams that catalyze ideas that then turn into something tangible or into an action. And I guess that reading your book has really helped me see the point of having dreams, that they can really propel us in.

16:08I mean, they could guide us in certain ways, but also in the realms of creativity, they seem really important. Do you think we should be taking dreams more seriously? Absolutely. And even if we don't, they're putting in the work while we sleep that keep us adaptive and creative. I think they feed the aha moments. But just to go backward on what you said, I love what you pointed out there. Divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is a luxury. So when you're under threat, you actually don't want divergent thinking. You want maximal task on executive network, all the things you think about, like, is this silhouette a threat or not?

16:41Getting to a job interview on time takes executive thinking, right? You want logic, you want reason, you want timetables. So we need that. What I would say to people is when we're not in that mode, it's not like the brain is hibernating. It's always on. It's just a ratio or a balance or percentage of task outward, task on executive function. and when things are under control or you're driving on a country road or you're shaving and you're just performing a light task that doesn't require a lot of attention, the imagination network fills up the space in the brain. It's either 51, 52 % executive network because you got something in front of you, you got to get done or things are under control, then the imagination network dials up.

17:26It's never on off and that balance is very important. And so when the imagination network, like in mind wandering, is dialed up a little bit and executive network is not so heavily relied upon, if you will. Right. There just shifts here. It's modulation, not on off. That's when you have divergent thinking. And that's the luxury is to have divergent thinking. So for creativity and now I like to think about measurements and then my opinion or conclusion. So a lot of times I think people are mixing up things. Study show. I don't know what that means. I mean, I know measurements. I know. There's really a context when you hear a percentage and you think, what?

18:05Yeah. Am I in that percentage? Am I not? Or how do they measure that? Yeah. Yeah. Like, did you really get a million people to go out to nature and everybody else? And then the rest of the time when they weren't in nature, they had the exact same lives. So you could discern the difference. So I like to go through measurements and then interpretation. So when we just talked about creativity right there, they started putting people in machines where they can tell this executive network and imagination network because there are different splotches on the surface of the brain, right? Like if you flattened out the globe, you would say it's like Australia, Asia, and Central America would throb up just a little bit in activity when it's the imagination network.

18:42So you can see the patterns, if you will. When they look at poetry construction or book cover designs, they realize creativity, you need both. You need those divergent thinking to have those wild ideas and fresh ideas, but then you also need executive thinking to make sure it's a good idea, an applicable idea. So creativity in action is a little bit like what our brains do naturally in a 24 hour period. So for me, now my opinion is that yes, the dreaming brain liberates divergent thinking. It's hyper emotional and hyper visual with dampened logic. OK, that's measurable dreaming brain state. Yeah.

19:22And then what happens is then you start looking at not my dream or your dream, but 10 ,000 dreams. And you say, wait a second. This is the part that I just like I was like took my breath away. Very few people, when you ask about 10 ,000 dreams, surveys, questionnaires, waking people up in sleep labs, they've done that for decades. It's not what I do. But when you look at it and you say very few people say they do math, then you. Right next to it, you put up the picture of the dreaming brain and you see that the executive network, which is used for logic and math, is dampened down a little bit.

19:55And I said, wait a second. The patterns of brain activation and deactivation can explain what people are saying about dreams and that they tend to be hyper emotional. Falling dreams are consistent across centuries and across cultures. Teeth falling out, being chased. Nightmares and erotic dreams are universal. math is very rarely mentioned and when scientists do talk about it it's always a visual thing like the snake eating his tail so the first thing in this book i say chapter one is like we're at a place where some of the things that we've been talking about about dreams for so long from for even like aristotle and lucid dreams now there's some science we can say hey that's uh backed by rigorous science or that might sound woo woo but actually that's not or that's not we took it for that a dream dream symbol, like a bridge could mean the same thing for everybody, but it can't because our emotions are popping up different things individually.

20:49It must be understood within the context. That's what I like about it. And then back to your point about creativity, if our brains only performed the routine habits of the day inefficiently, because the brain's an energy hog, small five kilograms, 20 % of the blood flow. So it wants to be efficient in its patterns, getting to work. It doesn't want to be completely activated every time to do some routine task, right? But if it only did those things, much like if, you know, if only extended our arms a little bit, it would contract, you know, use it or lose it, you know, atrophy. All those concepts that apply for the flesh, for our bodies, they also apply for the flesh of the mind, the human brain.

21:29So I think what dreaming is, I think why we dream is to keep our minds open. It's to engage the recesses, the neurons and the capacities of our brain and mind. So they're there for us every day and they're there for us to be adaptive if the world were to suddenly change. Otherwise, we would become constrained and overfitted with the habits of our day. So it's actually just like just like creativity. Somehow the 24 cycle of the human brain gets things done. And when it's not getting things done, it's opening up doors and connection to perception and experience. To me, that's my opinion, but there's a lot of different glimpses of scientific information I can point out that would connect that to support my opinion.

22:13Well, I think we can probably see from our own life experience that there is an element of preparation for the next day or what is to come. You know, with a classic case of an anxiety dream, if you've got an exam coming up or a sporting event or you've got to do some public speaking, it's highly likely that you will have a dream that is based around that circumstance. and that that is perhaps the brain's attempt to prepare you for any of the outcomes that could happen in the unknown, which we're all sort of terrified about. A private rehearsal, a safe rehearsal where you don't act out your dreams.

22:49So those are some of the ideas. Again, those are ideas that maybe it's a threat rehearsal. Maybe it's your nocturnal therapist. I like the broader idea that it's all of those. Let's not hold dreaming to a constrained thing that we would in our waking life, right? dreaming is wild as F, right? So what's the function of that? Why would sleep be so important that it makes us lie down and exposes us to threat? We can go a day or two without it, but the sleep pressure will build. What is happening during sleep? It's not really my liver and heart that's sleeping. I did transplant surgery for a while.

23:26When we put a liver from somebody to somebody else we don't reconnect the nerves we sleep for our brains our brains drive sleep and what do they do when they're sleeping they're not chilling out they're dreaming well you actually say there's perhaps more activity in the brain when we're asleep is that the correct terminology to use nobody's asked me this no so uh this is this is this is phenomenal so this is a bit of this is this is measurements again um can i tell you a story about how this was all figured it out. Hit me. All right. So somebody put a bunch of electrodes maybe about 120 years ago on the surface of the scalp, okay, just on the outside.

24:01And they could measure electricity. That was called an EEG. And they checked it during the day and they're like, look, there are these squiggles. You know, your brain generates enough electricity, like an electric eel, but 100 billion of them to actually light up a dim bulb. That's what we're detecting. When we put electrodes on the surface of the heart, people know like, oh, that's an EKG. And we know what the electrical signature looks like, right? We've seen on television for a long time. We put 96 of those on the scalp, you get a different electrical signature. That's called an EEG. At that time, what they didn't do was pay attention that when the person was sleeping, there was still electricity.

24:35And so it took another 10, 20, 30 years for them to figure out the brain is not sleeping when we sleep. The electricity is persistent when we sleep. The metabolic activity is happening while we sleep. And then the squiggles of the electricity that were recorded, like the brain's electrical patterns, they were so similar to waking, not through entire stages of sleep, but through certain stages of sleep where we vividly dream, they actually labeled it paradoxical sleep. The brain electricity while sleeping and dreaming is indiscernible from the brain electricity while you and I are talking right now.

25:13Wow. I thought, wait a second, right? So if If they're the same, and back to your question, but Rahul's here telling me the executive network is dampened, so then something else must be heightened to make it even. And that's the emotional network called the imagination network slash limbic network. So as much as our logic is dampened to keep things equal, emotions are heightened. And what I say to people is, wait a second, they're heightened. And this is a measurement to a degree that we can't get to during waking life. No matter how hard you feel something, your waking brain just can't dial it up that hot.

25:52But in your dreaming brain, the emotional networks and emotional systems can get activated, not every time, but at their max top speed, they go higher than waking life. And to me, that's a portal like that. So whatever that generates, whatever my hyper emotional brain, dreaming brain generates, I want to pay attention to that because I don't have that. I'm not saying it's going to be good. I'm not saying it's going to be bad. I'm not I'm saying it's going to make sense to me. But that's a brain state that I simply don't exhibit during my waking life. And so the dreams to try to reflect upon, of course, if you have a speech and you show up naked, you don't have to interpret that.

26:35You know what that is. But the the hyper emotional, hyper visual dreams that leave you a bit stirred. I think that's the process of self-examination because you're coming from a place your brain can't even get to while you're awake. Yes. And that's the power, I think. So we don't necessarily need to look at our dream dictionaries from the 90s to try and interpret what does it mean to dream about snakes or teeth falling out. But what we can do is take a look at that dream. And obviously, dream journaling is a really brilliant way to do this. So you can wake up and quickly write it down before those memories fade.

27:11And to then examine that and say, what is this trying to tell me about myself? Not some sort of weird dream interpretation, but what is this highlighting for me? Are we looking here at what I'm scared of, what I'm suppressing, these kinds of notions perhaps? Well, yeah, right away, a bridge in your mind in a dream and a bridge in my mind in a dream could mean very different things. So we can establish. It's more the emotion. Well, it's individual. It's your context. That might be the beginning of something. For me, it might be the end of something. Depends on what's going on in my waking brain, right?

27:43So the waking brain is feeding the dream life. And so the dream life is conjuring a bridge. It means something different for me than it does for you. It can't ever be the same. Number two is dream journaling. I'm just taking apart a little bit about what you said. The surprising thing about trying to remember your dreams, trying to dream more, as some people in the publishing house said, as you opened with reading this thing, made me dream more in those little periods. People are, how does that happen? Because it's a biological and electrophysiological phenomenon. When we take a placebo, we know there's no active chemical in it, but we feel better because the pharmacy in our mind has released it.

28:20So thought can activate other thoughts and other behaviors. Similarly, wanting to dream, trying to remember your dreams through dream journaling or whatever the process is. For me, it's a notes app. I go to my notes app before I go to my email. Once I have my email, my executive network is on, and that slippery memory of my dream life is gone, right? By design. Yeah. And so when people say, okay, now the dream to go after, in my opinion, right? It can't be a symbol for both of us. It's a hyper-emotional state. If you try to remember your dreams, you're better at it. People have reported this. The one to go after is the hyper-emotional one.

29:00And for me, what that is is it can – just stay with me here. sometimes it can confirm what you're thinking during the day. Like I got a speech to give. I'm stressed out. I'm stressed out of my dreams. It's I'm at the end of my life and my dreams are accompanying me with the thoughts and reconciliation with old people and lovers in my life. I'm pregnant and I'm having dreams about like rolling over in bed with a baby. Like sometimes they just directly accompany. But what if what you're experiencing in your dream life in that hyper emotional state that you cannot have is actually a harbinger or a red flag for something you haven't even recognized about yourself during the day.

29:38I'm not saying that's going to happen every time, but what if it were a psychological thermometer and exploring the hyper emotional components of your dreaming might be just a different look at how you're seeing yourself cope or not cope with the challenges of your waking life. Now that's a big statement, but I think it's possible. And if it's not possible every time by knowing today that your brain has an activated limbic system and imagination system more than can ever be achieved during the waking life, then just see the thoughts and emotions and experiencing that brain state is creating and reflect upon it, dissect it, consider it, ignore it, try to find some connections with your waking life or not.

30:27And the most practical example is if nightmares come to you unannounced once in a while, that's normal. If you have a pattern of increasing nightmares and they come out of the blue, some people feel well during the day and they have these nightmares come through. I think they should be asked about like temperature. I think a nightmare pattern can be a clue to things you may or may not recognize about yourself during the day. So I think that's where the hyper-emotional brain, the dreaming brain offers you access to your own life that maybe a therapist can't because it's your own mind, your own creation.

31:00Yeah, and it makes perfect sense. We are so heavily distracted in our everyday life. We're not going to take note of every single feeling, trigger, red flag, feeling, because we're constantly being pulled over here, listening to this, taking advice from somebody. actually what we start to do is distrust our own opinion about our own lives because it's so noisy. So actually, I think it's a really good way if we can analyze those dreams in our own bespoke way and know, you know, perhaps what's informed them, but also what we're missing about ourselves. I don't think that feels too far-fetched at all.

31:35I think it makes perfect sense. And I've got a new thing. It's called bespoke dream analysis. The only person who can do it is you. Yes, I love that. And what I would say is, again, for the listener, this is not some guaranteed thing like 10 ,000 steps. I mean, we're talking about dreams and dreaming. But if you can walk away with an understanding that some of the ideas here, some of the exploration is driven by modern neuroscience. I think for me, that's empowering. and the exploration of dreams is something that also reminds me that we're not totally in control, that there are drivers inside us.

32:15Everybody's had those dreams. You wake up and you're like, oh my gosh, I don't even want to remember that, let alone share that with anybody, right? And then we go about our day and we're highly functional people, but that's not a glitch. The dreaming brain is not a glitch. It's serving a purpose. It's metabolically expensive. There's rich electricity and not remembering our dreams, I believe is part of the design. Otherwise our waking life and dream life would be confused. And there are some patients that have that issue. But with all those things in mind, the things I've done are recognize sleep entry and sleep exit are interesting, blurry states.

32:52We can get into that. The things I've done is if I have an emotional dream, I don't try to ignore it now. I say, well, you're going to take a mind space because I caught a glimpse of myself I can't get elsewhere. And so for those people who are trying to be at the highest level or those people who are just trying to get out of bed because they're depressed, it's in this pursuit of wellness, those resources are there for all of us. They're free. They're hyper-personalized. It's introspection driven by your own brain offering you these glimpses. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold.

33:29That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Dr. India Woods here. As a veterinarian, I demand a lot of my scrubs on the job. That's why I show up in FIGS. FIGS are made for the sometimes crazy situations I find myself in. It doesn't matter if I have to squat, sit, bend, or even chase after one of my patients.

34:10FIGS moves with me and keeps me comfortable in the highest pressure situations. FIGS gives me one less thing to worry about. Get 15 % off your first order by visiting wherefigs.com and use code FIGSRX at checkout. That's wherefigs.com, code FIGSRX. I actually wrote down one of the lines and I think it's the end of the first chapter. Dreams are our nightly dose of wonder. I thought, yes, what an amazing gift if we can. And like I said, reading your book just heightened all of that because it was on my mind. And actually, what I think is so fascinating and really great for people to hear who are dealing with constant nightmares, which is a horrible thing, whether it's due to PTSD or you're just in a negative loop and you're having a horrible and triggering, reoccurring nightmare, is that you can do something about it.

35:00And this was me learning this for the first time, that you can do imagery rehearsal therapy to help actually change the narrative. So talk to us about how this works and what you might do if you find yourself in this circumstance. Wonderful. You go back to the origin of these nightmares. Children dream of monsters when they've never seen a monster. Nightmares are a product of your imagination. As we discussed, the imagination network is liberated and dreaming. and what people are finding and what I've reported in here, imagery rehearsal therapy with therapists that you can actually rehearse before falling asleep.

35:33And some people with lucid dreaming in the nightmare, rarely but reported, that you can shape the direction of your nightmare by working with a therapist and rehearsing different imagined endings that then start to happen within that nightmare. Again, does it happen all the time? No. But just the fact that that can happen. You can re-script a nightmare that was partially out of your control or totally out of your control. And that there are rigorous reports about this. You can't measure that, but there are people who go to therapists, they practice this and they say, yeah, I feel better. I'm doing better.

36:10And to me, again, that's empowering, returning back to the theme that this imaginative mind, it's a double-edged sword. Sometimes it gives you a nightmare. Sometimes it gives you a creative genius, just like our waking thought. Let's not try to put things into too tight canisters. Waking thoughts can be all over the place. Dreaming thoughts can be all over the place. Just recognize that in your day, it's not just the waking brain that is playing a role, that in a 24-hour cycle, two-thirds, one-third, your dreaming brain is doing something. Call it subconscious, call it homeostasis, but it's not an irrelevant time of the day.

36:50And the question becomes, how can we feed it a bit? How can we hold on to what it's offering a bit? How can we redirect it a bit? How can we flirt with it a bit? Because it's elusive, it's dreaming. But there are things like imagery rehearsal therapy that point out that it's surprisingly can be influenced, right? You're not going to rein it in. You're not going to send it in a different direction just on demand, but that you can influence your dreams. You can influence your negative dreams to become more positive. Some people, when they have certain dreams, wake up with a better emotional affect.

37:26Creative people can feed their dreams like Salvador Dali did with this sleep entry period. Now that we have rigorous science that shows that the electricity of waking brain and dreaming brain actually overlap during that 10, 15 minute window. So for a person like me, I like seeing the measurement that confirms what Dali was doing or Edison was doing or Christopher Nolan in Inception. And then when there aren't measurements, it's okay. I'm not saying everything has to be proven but when there aren't measurements i like taking the pieces that are out there the brain scans the reports and saying oh that's interesting universal dreams everybody has nightmares what what the why yeah and also going back through centuries the themes are the same like we rarely dream about social media or tech and you know you state this in the book we're we're we're still basic in the terms of the themes that we're applying and also culturally what that might mean.

38:18They went from a horse and carriage to like an electric car and you're still having dreams of teeth falling out. There's something that's come and driven from, you know, it's inherited from our ancestors. The brains, there's this thing called cognitive archaeology or evolutionary psychology that it's not just our physical attributes that we inherit. We inherit our approach to thinking. We inherit potentially our pattern of dreaming. You say, wait a second. We're inheriting dreams from our ancestors. He's completely gone off, right? No, but nightmares cluster in families. And teeth falling out don't.

38:57That's a pattern. A lot of people have teeth falling out dreams. A lot of people have falling from the sky dreams. And that's happened for centuries. But when you branch out families, you can see nightmare disorders clustering around a branch. And so I don't have an answer for that. But I just want to leave people with this fascination that you're inheriting thoughts and dreams. And, you know, the cognitive function is coming down from your ancestors. Obviously, it's molded and modified, but it's not just we're born with a fresh brain. And the eye color came from mom and dad, but the brain is completely like a brand new tablet to work on.

39:35No, you're inheriting. We know that for mental health. But then why not disposition to risk taking? Why not dreaming? And so these are the kind of things I didn't think about, you know, until writing this book. So if we are, and let's talk about it really plain speaking, inheriting dreams, is that more due to learned behavior and what we experience from our parents, grandparents? Or is that DNA? And that is just the brain that you've inherited that's half your mom's, half your dad's. I was so just so into that, that it became chapter two nightmares, because the first thing when I was so what I was doing was in Los Angeles, I would go to different places and I would just like you said, just have a conversation.

40:17The first time I bring up like, hey, I'm thinking about tackling the science of dreams. And a lot of people are like, well, nightmare has got to be a glitch. You know, just that you're in a pub, you're somewhere. That's a, you know, sometimes adding too much academics to it can make the topic lose its sort of core. And so just talking to regular people, we all dream. They're like, well, whatever we get into, man. But, you know, erotic dreams, what is that about? And the nightmares, why do we need those? You're telling me dreams are useful? Come on. Why do we have nightmares? So that's why it's chapter two.

40:52I wanted to take on the big concepts first. And your point about inheriting, I don't, what I would say to you is this, if you would just give me a moment on this one to, chapter two is how do we need nightmares? by breaking down nightmares into two categories. The one we talked about earlier is adult onset nightmares. That's a different category. That's linked to stress and sometimes a warning flag of stress you may not recognize during your distracted day, as you pointed out brilliantly. That one we leave over there. Why do the nicest children who have never seen a monster, I mean, they all around the age, it's a pattern.

41:33It's a universal dream. Nightmares arrive for children. all children, four, five, six, seven, eight years of age. And you don't dream before this, right? You don't dream as a newborn baby. Well, it's hard to say, you know, but when they start talking and you start asking them about dreams and some families signed up their kids for, you know, what do you dream about from like from the youngest age all the way to 25? These called longitudinal studies. So you have some interesting patterns and measurements there for us to study. But when they start talking, you know, their report, these papers out there reporting, they're like, oh, it's a blanket.

42:05Oh, it's a table. You know, it's a table. It's not very dynamic. In development, just think of it as this way. Like, what is he talking about? Well, we learn to walk and talk, right? We're not born with that. Well, there's stuff going on with your mind. Your mind is being cultivated that you're not just born with. And so as you're learning to walk before you talk and then all the way up to adolescence, right? We can all agree there's something built in that's shaping our minds. And adolescence is a period where the brain doesn't change, but the mind definitely does, right? The brain scans look the same before and after puberty for the most part, but the person is different.

42:41So if we leave those, if you accept that from me, then what I'm saying is the pattern of dreaming shows that the mind is being cultivated. The first thing that happens is I've got three sons is why do we always have to tell kids, oh, no, it's okay, Johnny, or whatever their name is. It's okay, you know, my son's saying like it was only a dream. So to me, it's just a conversation. There's no measurement for this, but it seems like waking thoughts and dreaming thoughts may be blurred to the mind of a child until nightmares arrive and they get startled like, OK, there's something internal and external.

43:23There's something waking thought and night thought that actually happens at the same time as another cognitive development called a theory of mind, which is basically the ability to anticipate and think about what others may be feeling mind reading. Maybe your uncle is smiling, but that doesn't mean they have a benevolent intent. How interesting. So that all happens at the same time. Imagination, the ability to sense us versus other, reading people's true intentions, not just going by outward actions. All of that happens at the same time as nightmares arrive. And so for me, that can't be a coincidence.

43:59I can't measure that. I can see that in my own kids. They were having night terrors probably about the same age. And you're like, wait, am I getting something wrong here as a parent? I think most people start questioning themselves as parents. but it's a developmental progression. And then nightmares, overwhelming majority go away. And kids rarely get nightmare disorder. Like adults get it. Like you have nightmares, the next day is messed up. Yeah. Kids are like, oh, I had monsters, wake up. And then the next day like, there's a developmental thing going on. I think nightmares are needed for the cultivation of the human mind in children.

44:33And similarly, I think erotic dreams arrive before the erotic act. And there's something there that is a cultivation of the mind. And the simplest example I can give you is, you know, the nerves in our fingers, they don't change once we go through puberty or once we have erotic dreams. The capacity to feel sensuality, to feel erotic touch goes by the same nerves in your hands. It's the brain that has changed. And the pattern that I'm seeing, it's incomplete. We're going to get a lot more information and I'll be back, you know, a handful of years from now. You'll be like, wait, this was right. This is wrong.

45:11I'm not here to say I've got it all figured out. But erotic dreams arrive before puberty. Erotic dreams happen after menopause. Erotic dreams happen in patients with chemical castration for prostate cancer. That's a cognitive thing. And it all it all it all arrives around the same time. And and the changes in the brain that allow for sensuality happen after. it's not like the brain said, I'm ready to be turned on. And then erotic dreams arrive. How interesting. It's erotic dreams arrive and the brain says, I can feel it now. And to me, that's got to be linked in some way. I mean, most people listening to this will have had a dream where they're having sex with someone they shouldn't.

45:52A work colleague, it could be their best friend. What does it say about desire? Because I think you can wake up feeling either absolutely brilliant or really unnerved and unsettled. Like, oh, God, I'm going to have to see that person. This is so mortifying. Does it speak to a hidden desire? What is it telling us? I can't answer that question without just offering you a few puzzle pieces. And I think people can put it together for themselves. Nightmares and erotic dreams are universal dreams. When you say universal in medical statistics, you know, like 92, 94, that means everybody, essentially.

46:27They happen across cultures. They arrive before the erotic act, almost like a training, if you will. The brain changes without ever having sex. The brain gets prepared to feel sensuality. These are patterns that happen. Then a great majority of erotic dreams in surveys and reports, there's infidelity. Like that's like 80, 80 something per 70, 80. Like it's a lot of infidelity. So what does that mean? Do you, uh, that's what I've been asked this question. Does this, if you have a, you know, a thing about your ex, well, it doesn't mean something. Well, I mean, I think there's some common sense to it.

47:02If you're secretly desiring your ex and you have a dream about your ex, maybe that means one thing. If you're in a great relationship, you're over somebody, you have a dream about your ex. I don't think it's a latent desire. And then if you're not in a good relationship, you have a dream about an ex and leads to fighting. You know, I mean, I think these are more relationship issues. But I think erotic dreams cultivate a deep and broad desire. Interestingly, I think they shape the brain because of the way they arrive. If interestingly, in the reports, the people to whom this desire is, you know, extended, if you will, they tend to be a small group of people.

47:41It tends to be people around you. It's kind of a prosaic group, too. It might be a repellent boss. It might be like, oh, that person, what's going on? I can't make sense of that. But it's a wild act. Yeah. But with a narrow group of people and there's I can't explain that other than with, you know, maybe just a wild leap at evolutionary psychology. Like some people, there are things that maybe our ancestors, there are patterns that were there during these bottleneck phenomenons when species shrink and expand that maybe erotic dreams were, you know, keeping us within the tribe during a population decimation or something like that.

48:17That's just a hypothesis. There's no measurement for that. But if you ask me why it's small group of people with wild acts, I like the wild acts. That means it keeps like inconsistent with dreaming. You know, let's let's thank you for thank you for letting me, you know, be creative. But but the small group of people is just, you know, and sometimes it's awkward. Yeah. Yeah. Erotic dreams. I think most people will be nodding their head listening going, oh, like we've all had them. We've all had them. Another phenomenon that I'm fascinated with is lucid dreaming. First of all, can you explain what that is and your interpretation of it, but also why some people can and why some people can't?

48:58I can't answer the last one, but it is inducible that a lot of people lucid dream. When I say a lot, I don't know, maybe it's like 20, 30, 40 percent. I mean, there's a survey. So when I say that, it's not because I'm avoiding a number. I'd love to say 22.4, but I'm just saying about a third people report lucid dreaming. To understand lucid dreaming, first, I thought there's no science for this. I ended up dedicating two chapters in the book to it. There's some rigorous science to it. So we talked about dreaming brain and waking brain, right? Those are two distinct brain states. When you go from waking to sleeping slash dreaming, when you go from waking to dreaming, there's the sleep entry period, right?

49:39That's like, we talked about that, this blurry state where you kind of, it's a hybrid state. When you wake up, sometimes there could be a mismatch and your body can be locked down while you're awake. That's like sleep paralysis, but sleep exit is also a blurry state, a hybrid state. In the middle, right? So if that's in the first five, 10 minutes and it's the last five, 10 minutes of a six, seven hour sleep session, whatever it is, in the middle, as we talked about way earlier in this podcast, in this discussion is you can have a sense, wait, I'm actually in the dream while you're having the dream.

50:17So the first thing I was like, come on, these people are just waking up and pretending like I need a measurement for this one. And they can. Those same stickers on the scalp will prove the person is asleep. They're called sleep spindles. You can't fake that measurement. And then the body is mostly paralyzed, but the eyeballs can move. And they're like through a glass window with proof that they're sleeping. You got people asking questions and people are using Morse code with their eyeballs. Wow. And this is, I'm looking at this in detail. So lucid dreaming is real. It can be measured. It's not just somebody pretending to be awake.

50:53And it's in the middle of sleep. It's not in the beginning. It's not a hybrid state that where the transition was a little blurry. Going from waking to dreaming, a little blurry. Which you would maybe assume. Which you would assume, right. I was scuba diving in Central South America. In Mexico, they have where rivers meet ocean. You go from freshwater to saltwater. When your mask is down there, it gets blurry, literally blurry, like you're swimming through oil for about a meter. There's not a sharp line between freshwater and saltwater. There's not a sharp line between waking and dreaming or dreaming and waking.

51:28This is a bit different. Lucid dreaming is in the middle. You're like, oh, my executive network is just partially back up a little bit. And you're, oh, I'm aware I'm in the dream. That's how they describe it. And for some people, they can actually steer the direction of the dream. That is wild. And yeah, it is wild, but there's science that suggests that awareness has returned to the sleep state. So what I would say is now, rather than being in the driver's seat of a car you can't control, maybe you can have temporarily one hand on the wheel. You are in a dream. It's still wild and illogical and mostly out of control.

52:08But there's an awareness and there may be a way to direct it a bit. And that doesn't mean that you're going into a wakened state. It just means that those balances are... Thank you for clarifying that. You're still asleep. Yeah, you're still asleep. It's a hybrid state. I had my first lucid dream from reading your book. That was fantastic. I've never had one before that I can recall. And I was in a petrol station, a gas station, and a huge commercial flight was really low to the ground flying. And I was like, that looks a bit dodgy. It crashed into the petrol station. Huge explosions like I'm in a film and I'm sprinting like I'm in a sort of action movie.

52:46Visual, emotional. So visual. I was terrified. And then in my head I thought, I think this is a dream. I think this is okay. And when I woke up, I was like, oh my God, I think that was a lucid dream. There was a moment of lucidity. Reference your book. Is that a lucid dream? I had never had that distinction during a dream where I was like, oh yeah, I think this is a dream. I think this is okay. Because normally you don't, you're just away with the drama of it. And like you say, the emotion, it was phenomenal. It was like such a cool experience. I loved it. And I'll leave it to you if it's good or bad or whatever, but, and I'm glad it was, it was phenomenal.

53:20It sounds like being a film. It's great. What I would say to that is for the listeners, lucid dreaming is, you can learn it. It can be induced. You can learn a lucid dream. And if you are a lucid dreamer, you can lucid dream more. And you're going to say, okay, where I got measurements for that. I got some real hardcore science for that. So I had to give it two chapters going in. I was thinking lucid dreams. I don't want to talk about that. But in the end, it's two out of nine chapters. So here we go. There's a medicine, glantamine, that we use for a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, the original one, not dopamine, serotonin, the ones you're familiar with.

53:57If you give a patient that for cognitive issues, let's keep the medical stuff to the side, they report lucid dreaming. Okay. Here's the part. You double the dose and the now to lucid dreaming also goes up dose dependent escalation is the closest we can get to causality in pharmacology right so drugs it's it's a electrophysiologic chemical thing in your brain lucid dreaming certain drugs can definitely raise the amount of lucid dreams a person has so it's real it's inducible now of course you're not going to want to take the drugs But then recently, those same experiments where the stickers prove they're asleep and the eyeballs move left and right, communicating with somebody who's, you know, with a clipboard and a white jacket or however you imagine it.

54:49They put people on certain training regimens on how to lucid dream more. Usually it's sort of waking up an hour earlier and then trying to stay awake as you're drifting in and out. There's certain sleep disruption patterns and people can look that up. So with that technique, trying it on a group of people, going to the sleep labs, that technique showed they were doing more of this eyeball communication. Wow. And for me, that's important because it's not a questionnaire. Like, yeah, I came on this podcast and I'm dreaming a lot more. Okay, I believe that. But at some point, I like to see when it's – and when I see it, it really – it affects me because it's like, ah, I can take that to people.

55:30I can take that to people who are skeptical at the pub or the petrol station and be like, look, they're not faking it. They're asleep. Their eyeballs are saying, I'm lucid dreaming. Left, right. Yes, yes. They have these little Morse code set up. And the ability to do that went up with this training session. Yeah, it's incredible. And so people can explore it on their own, but there's science to it. It's inducible, like the experience you had. And there's proof that it's inducible. Well, it was inducible for me just reading about it. Like it did something to sort of catalyse that happening for the first time.

56:07What about recurring dreams? Because I think it's probably the thing that when the theme of dreams comes up in conversation with friends, family, recurring dreams seems to be something that piques our interest hugely. We all probably have one recurring dream, if not a couple. I have one where I'm in a house and it's my house, but it's not my house. and I discover a new room or two new rooms. I didn't know they were there. And there is so much excitement. I'm very lucky my reoccurring dream has a positive outcome and positive emotion. I wake up with this kind of like, I don't know, I feel refreshed.

56:40I feel excited. I feel like there's new possibilities. It's quite a literal sort of interpretation from what I'm experiencing in it. But I probably have it, I'd say, twice a year. And I've had it from as far back as I can remember. Again, should we be paying attention to recurring dreams or are they informed by what we're experiencing every day? Therefore, they're more common. I don't have a perfect answer for that. I think you raise a good question. Recurring nightmares and recurring dreams, what they mean, there isn't a lot of science or a lot of exploration on that. Because they're sort of the brain on a certain electrical loop.

57:20So the first thing I described to you about an hour ago was tickling the surface of the brain and there was a recurrent dream that came up. We are finding that dreaming in general, but recurrent dreams, nightmares in particular, they're like, it's like setting off a set of dominoes. Just a little tickle of electricity can set off some pathways that generate this recurring nightmare. Recurring nightmares are a loop of electrical activity that gets set off in the brain. not unlike just loose comparison to a seizure a runaway train that does its own things once it's triggered or sparked so recurring dreams and recurring nightmares to me is i don't have something uh insightful to offer about are they meaningful or not i'll leave that to the listener and the person who's having those dreams but they do point out something different that the dreaming brain may have its own memory system.

58:16Let me be bold here. Wow. Because it's got to have its own memory system because some patients with severe dementia still have sharp dreams. It's got to have on a practical level its own memory system because people and I have you get up and go to the bathroom and you're awake for the most part. And then you lie down, you slip back in a dream. So there may be some dreaming capacities that have access to memory because we're talking about recurrent dreams. And so that's how I flirt with that topic is that there are some things that suggest that the dreaming mind can access parts of the brain, not just being hyper emotional, as we said, not just a unique brain state, but maybe able to open up doors that the waking brain can't.

59:01And I'll give you some measurements and hard evidence for that. And that comes from brain degeneration with Parkinson's disease. This one blew my mind. It's not just a disease of rigidity and movement. It's a rigidity in being able to speak and thought. And a small group of people, men in their 50s, has something called REM behavior disorder. People can look it up, but I call it dream enactment behavior. And what happens is they're usually in a fight or they're fleeing something. And then when they wake up, the bed partner's waking them up that they're actually fighting with their bed partner, right?

59:32So they're acting out their dream. Those people, when they're acting out their dream, in the daytime, their movements might be rigid. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Dr. India Woods here.

1:00:17As a veterinarian, I demand a lot of my scrubs on the job. That's why I show up in FIGS. FIGS are made for the sometimes crazy situations I find myself in. It doesn't matter if I have to squat, sit, bend, or even chase after one of my patients. FIGS moves with me and keeps me comfortable in the highest pressure situations. FIGS gives me one less thing to worry about. Get 15 % off your first order by visiting wearfigs.com and use code FIGSRX at checkout. That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. But when they're acting out the dream, their movements are fluid. For that moment, the Parkinsonian rigidity is not there.

1:00:58When they talk during the day with Parkinson's and their voice is stifled, when they're screaming during dream and act behavior, their voices are loud and fluid. That's science. That's not me giving you some fancy. You people can look up dream and act behavior and REM behavior disorder Parkinson's and this movement of fluidity for Parkinson's patients only when they're acting out their dream is something wonderful for people to look up. It's called paradoxical kinesis. It's incredible. Yeah, right, right. I was like, oh my gosh, should that be chapter one? That's why I was like fighting. No, but paradoxical kinesis is movement that just doesn't make sense.

1:01:37The body shouldn't be able to do it only when it's driven by the dreaming mind. And so when you talk about recurrent dreams and these sort of things, it brings me back to that there are some capacities in the brain that only the dreaming mind can access. Dreaming brain and mind have access to. but boldly there's at least one example at least one unicorn where the dreaming brain can command the body better than the waking brain can it's called paradoxical kinesis so i don't know what it means i just love that it stirs me it just makes me just more open to thinking about myself and what's possible and we're going to learn but those few unicorn examples are in the book and And it's like, and I want people to leave away with like, I learned, I understand dreaming more than before, quite a bit more than before.

1:02:27There's some practical takeaways. But man, I'm actually in more awe and more wonder, having learned a little bit that the understanding has left you with more fascination, not like, oh, I guess we got that figured out. Quite the opposite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Paradoxical kinesis. But that's what seems really exciting about what you do is that you're at the top of your game globally, yet you still feel you've got so much more that you could uncover and discover about the brain, about the dreaming brain and just how it operates. That feels incredible. Like there's still so much development and so much for us to uncover.

1:03:06And that's coming from someone that knows it all. it's not it's you know it's not a hyperbole or it's not you know i'm not extending myself to say that in the exploration and construction of this book there was a bit of a intellectual rebirth for me because what happens when you're 50 um it's not it's not an age thing but um you know i've operated in like eight or different ten hospitals around the world from bolivia to ukraine three sons have joined me, not in the operating room, but in the travels, 18, 19, 22. As I mentioned, I've been a cancer surgeon for 15 years, neurosurgeon for 25, an intensely lived life.

1:03:49I'm not going to say it's good or bad. And you start to wonder that you're starting to, and you have this wonderful life where, as I mentioned, a couple of days, I'm a cancer surgeon, then I'm here in London and doing this. And you just think, I'm reaching maybe the best that life has to offer, you know, you just start to get a point where in the construction of this book, it made me go back and say, wait, with this fresh lens, I can re-approach everything that I've already been doing. You know what I mean? Like, so what I did, like the other day, I went to the National Gallery and I don't, I don't know much about art or literature.

1:04:26I mean, I read, I'm into these things, but I'm backing into them with neuroscience. So what I did was I like had a glass of champagne and walked before the national gallery, they have the restaurant just to the side, the champagne and oysters or whatever. And then I just walked around and I just looked at stuff and I was like, how would my, how do I, how do I look at this divergently? How would these pictures stimulate my dreaming brain? How does art stir us? Why do we feel wonder and awe? Like I was just like a kid again. And I just, um, and this was just a couple of days ago. And, um, And that's what this book has done is it's excited me to a new lens to life with the inclusion of some of the things I've learned about the dreaming brain.

1:05:12Well, it's magical. And it's been not only a joy talking to you today, but reading your work and getting a real glimpse at the world of the brain and the way that you've described it. It feels completely digestible to someone that doesn't have a science background. So thank you for that. And there are stories in there about patients. It's brilliant. It's a brilliant book. And I hope that everyone listening to this goes off and has some real wild dreams this evening and then can reflect on them the next day because it's just infinitely interesting. But thank you so much, Rahul. It's been wonderful talking to you.

1:05:48Likewise. Oh, my God. Rahul, I don't even know where to start. What I am going to do is start jotting down my dreams every morning as soon as I wake up. And then I'm going to spend a little bit of time reflecting over my morning coffee, thinking about what they mean. The brain is an incredible thing. If anything, I've been enlightened, but I'm even more confused because I've got so many more questions to ask. We're going to have to get Rahul back for a part two. Rahul's book, This Is Why You Dream, is out now. Another book you absolutely have to read is Sociopath by Patrick Gagney. This is our Happy Place book club pick for May.

1:06:25so there's going to be loads of really cool stuff on the At Happy Place Book Club Instagram account across the month. This book is a mesmerising memoir detailing Patrick's battle to create a place for herself in the world and a deeper understanding of people like her, sociopaths. Patrick has battled with her darker impulses her whole life until she eventually began to wonder if there was a way for sociopaths to integrate happily into society. And I'm so excited. I cannot tell you how excited to say that Patrick will be on this podcast in just a couple of weeks time. I am so looking forward to that chat.

1:07:09All right, until next week, then a massive thanks again to Rahul, to the producer Anushka Tate at Happy Play Studios, and to you. Happy dreaming, lovelies.

1:07:46Hey, I'm Dr. Z and I'm a neurosurgeon. So that means long hours, early rounds, late nights, and everything in between. And through it all, I wear figs. They're comfortable when it counts and functional when I need them the most. So where do you wear your figs? On shift, on call, on the couch in the break room listening to this podcast? Wherever it is, they fit right in. And now listeners of this podcast can get 15 % off their first order. Just head to wearfigs.com and use code FIGSRX at checkout. That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX.