Our Big Fat Dream Episode

0:01Speaker 1:Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:11Speaker 2:Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry. And this could not be more of a good old-fashioned Stuff You Should Know episode if it tried.

0:22Speaker 1:That's right. I think you're right.

0:25Speaker 2:Yeah. Think about all the elements here. All three of us are present.

0:28Speaker 1:Mm-hmm.

0:29Speaker 2:I just had a kind of an awkward intro. Oh, yeah. This is the main topic that we've done like five subtopics on already, but we didn't do the main topic yet. This is a straight ahead stuff you should know classic episode.

0:45Speaker 1:Yeah. And watch this. I'm going to have a little surprise for you in the audience. You ready? Yeah. All right. It is 101 on the dot. I was having a dream six minutes ago.

1:00Speaker 2:Oh, really?

1:00Speaker 1:Yeah.

1:02Speaker 2:What was it?

1:03Speaker 1:Well, I don't know, but I scheduled my nap to happen right before we recorded, which I do sometimes. And I have my clock set for 1255. And it was kind of one of those naps where I was like, am I even sleeping or am I just getting good rest? I can't tell if I'm asleep. And then I could tell I was having a dream and all of a sudden my alarm went off. And I woke up, splashed my face, came down, and here you are.

1:36Speaker 2:Are you sure you're not still dreaming? Have you done a reality test? Oh, no.

1:40Speaker 1:That's a good call.

1:41Speaker 2:Because you could still be dreaming. I don't feel quite right.

1:48Speaker 1:Yeah, I can't remember the dream. But when I woke up, I was like, oh, this will be funny because I'm going to be recording in five minutes and everyone's probably going to be knocked out by the fact that I was literally just dreaming minutes ago.

1:59Speaker 2:I'm sure they will. I'm sure they will. Even more impressive, Jerry is dreaming now.

2:03Speaker 1:Right, yeah. I woke up, she fell asleep.

2:06Speaker 2:So, yeah, we're talking about dreams. Chuck, do you typically have dreams? Do you often remember them? Do you never remember them? Are they nightmares? What's the deal?

2:17Speaker 1:No nightmares. I used to have recurring dreams when I was a kid.

2:20Speaker 2:About what?

2:22Speaker 1:I had a very specific recurring dream about Gilligan's Island many times when I was a kid. That was a little bit of a scary dream. I don't think it would qualify as a nightmare per definition.

2:33Speaker 2:I could see Lovey Howell being like drunk, like being overly friendly, doing that to you as a kid.

2:40Speaker 1:But yeah, I mean, I still remember, like I remembered my dream this morning when I woke up because I woke up right after it happened. And it was kind of a funny thing Emily did in the dream. So I was like, I just had this dream. It was kind of funny.

2:55Speaker 2:Can you share or?

2:57Speaker 1:Oh, sure. I mean, people sharing dreams is the most boring thing ever. So, yeah, I'll give the most condensed version is we were in New York going to some some weird exclusive like art opening event or something interactive. I don't even know what it was. It doesn't matter. And there were celebrities there. And we went in a few times because we figured out there was a back way to get in. And when we walked in, we were walking by people and Emily was like, hey, I think that's that girl. from that movie. What was it?

3:28Speaker 1:And I was trying to find out. And then we passed Rachel Dratch, actor Rachel Dratch.

3:33Speaker 2:Okay.

3:34Speaker 1:And she looked up because she thought like they were talking, we were talking about her and Emily went, oh, not you. I know you, Stephanie. And one kept walking.

3:43Speaker 2:That's a pretty good dream, actually. Yeah.

3:45Speaker 1:And I told Emily that she just cracked up.

3:48Speaker 2:Rachel Dratch, man. Yeah.

3:50Speaker 1:She's the best.

3:51Speaker 2:That's out of nowhere. She is great.

3:53Speaker 1:Um, What about you? Or go ahead. What's your question?

3:57Speaker 2:Well, I was going to say, have you seen the movie? I don't remember what it's called, but where Nicolas Cage starts appearing in like everyone in the world's dream.

4:05Speaker 1:I haven't seen that yet. I heard it's pretty good.

4:07Speaker 2:It is. It's actually really good. Especially as far as like, you know, a standard Nick Cage movie these days goes.

4:14Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, there's a lot of them. What about you? Do you dream and remember your dreams typically?

4:20Speaker 2:I dream and I remember them enough to... to just kind of give like general outlines of them or know that like that was unpleasant or that was stressful or that was weird. But you know, like I have such trouble like relating thoughts and ideas normally that when I try to do it with dream stuff, it makes it, it's just a big mess. So I'm not even going to try, but they very frequently have to do with like me having to like, um, Get get this thing done over here and then this thing has to be done over here. And I also have to make sure that all these people are comfortable, too. It's like it can get kind of tiring sometimes.

4:59Speaker 1:Yeah, I sort of have the same thing. My most recurring dream now isn't a specific thing, but it's a specific motif, which is I'm trying to get somewhere and I can't get there.

5:12Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, I could see that.

5:13Speaker 1:Like a plane flight or I'm supposed to be at a place or whatever, and I keep getting derailed. And that happens. I had that dream all the time now.

5:21Speaker 2:Okay, that is extremely interesting. I think that's worth looking into. So we'll revisit that because it comes up in a couple of places. Like you just tapped a couple of different dream components on the head with that.

5:34Speaker 1:Yeah, and then when I was younger, and then we'll start the show, I used to always have the– And this is like in my 20s, the teeth shattering or teeth falling out dreams.

5:44Speaker 2:Okay. We'll talk about that too.

5:46Speaker 1:Yeah.

5:47Speaker 2:The last one I have to share, it's a recurring dream. It starts out really nice. It's a beautiful woman, totally naked. And then as I look up higher and higher, it's the head of Abraham Lincoln.

6:04Speaker 1:You should just, I don't know, don't go all the way to the head.

6:08Speaker 2:Do you get the reference, though, from Dazed and Confused? No.

6:13Speaker 1:I do remember that, though, now that you mention it. Yeah.

6:17Speaker 2:One of the friends is like, probably best not to look too deeply into that one.

6:20Speaker 1:That's right. Anthony Rapp in that scene. That's right. Yeah.

6:24Speaker 2:So, yeah, I've never had that dream. That would be pretty weird, you know?

6:29Speaker 1:I bought it because I'm just still waking up, you know? Sure.

6:33Speaker 2:Um, so Charles, we're talking about dreaming and you can't really talk about dreaming unless you talk about sleeping. So let's do a brief overview. We've done a bunch of episodes on sleep, so we'll just kind of keep it short.

6:45Speaker 1:Yeah. Uh, as far as the stages of sleep, you're right. We've, we've covered this a lot, but the first three stages are non rapid eye movement, sleep in REM sleep. And then after stage three, and it depends on the person, but you know, about an hour and a half or two hours after you go to sleep, uh, you're, supposed to fall into REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. And this is where generally you're going to be dreaming. And they used to think you only dream during REM sleep, but now they know that you can dream in both.

7:14Speaker 1:But REM sleep is like where you have like the most intense dreams, the ones you're more likely to remember, that kind of thing.

7:21Speaker 2:Yeah. And we didn't really know about REM sleep until the 50s. I was surprised to find that out. But when we did discover REM sleep, people are like, oh, OK, there's different components to sleep. We need to start looking into that. Your body does all sorts of interesting things. But the one really important aspect about REM sleep is in addition to like this is where you have your dreams, dreams, you are paralyzed, essentially. And they think the reason why is so you don't act out your dreams physically because you're experiencing them as reality otherwise. And that it's possible that your eyes are moving during rapid eye movement sleep because you're dreaming. They thought for a long time that you were looking at different things in your dreams with your eyes in physical reality while you were sleeping. And they just couldn't prove it. And there were a couple of studies that were like, Actually, I think that's true.

8:18Speaker 1:Yeah, but I don't think they... They didn't prove it, though, did they?

8:22Speaker 2:No, but... So, like, they cracked open the heads of poor little mice, and they figured out how to look at what they call basically the eye directional cells, and they found that they were in sync with where the mouse's eyes were looking at any point during REM sleep. Strongly suggests that.

8:42Speaker 1:What did the mice say about what they were dreaming about?

8:45Speaker 2:They just said... Okay. They're like a beaker from the Muppets, it turns out.

8:51Speaker 1:Oh, beaker. I love beaker.

8:53Speaker 2:And then the other study that I think it was really interesting was they got with some lucid dreamers and they said, hey, we want you to, in your dream, we want you to imagine you're looking at a circle. And then we want you to trace a circle with your thumb and look at that in your dreams. And the lucid dreamers were so good, they were able to do this. And they found that when the lucid dreamers were imagining the circle in their dreams, their eyes moved in kind of a stuttery step movement in the circle that we would normally see when someone was awake and imagining it. When they looked at their thumb, their dream thumb, their eyes moved smoothly like it does in waking life when we're actually looking at something.

9:35Speaker 1:Your dream thumb.

9:37Speaker 2:Dream Thumb's pretty, there's something there. We've said a lot of dumb things over the years, but Dream Thumb's up there. Thanks, man.

9:45Speaker 1:I love it. As far as how, like, we're going to talk a lot about dreams and whether or not everyone dreams. And we don't know for sure, like, they think everyone dreams. Sure. And that some people just may not remember as well as others. And we'll kind of dig into that a little bit. But they do think... that people generally dream multiple times a night. Um, they don't know exactly how long they last. And, you know, the reason why obviously all this stuff is, is because someone's asleep and, you know, you can't do a study where someone like hits a timer when a dream starts, they can just kind of go by hooking them up to machines and surmising whether or not they're dreaming. Right.

10:21Speaker 1:So you can't get like actual, you know, dead evidence about it. But they do think you dream multiple times a night and they last a few minutes, maybe up to a half an hour. And they think you probably dream a couple of hours a night.

10:34Speaker 2:That's surprising because I've always heard like dreams last like just a few seconds.

10:38Speaker 1:They seem like they last hours.

10:40Speaker 2:Which would actually explain the rapid eye movement. Like if we're doing that while we're dreaming, we're moving back and forth, that would suggest that our dreams are happening in much faster time than real waking time.

10:52Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good point.

10:54Speaker 2:Well, I'm basically a dream researcher now.

10:57Speaker 1:As far as, you know, dream theory, you know, obviously we have to mention Freud. I kind of honestly get tired of mentioning Freud now because I feel like every time we mention Freud, we then say, But no one really believes that anymore.

11:12Speaker 2:Well, the very fact that we consider dreams to conceivably be symbolic and try be trying to tell us something that in and of itself is the influence of Freud that still lasts today. So there's even though a lot of this stuff seems crackpot, there's like the basis of it is is still applicable.

11:31Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's the solution I came to as well, which is like he birthed a lot of ideas. Mm hmm. And that maybe is his value these days.

11:41Speaker 2:Birthed him right out of his sphincter.

11:44Speaker 1:But of course, Freud was like, hey, none of this stuff is an accident. If you're having dreams, that means that you are living out some repressed desire that you can't act on in regular life. Probably, obviously, because it's Freud, probably a sexual desire. Carl Jung came around and said, yeah, I sort of agree completely. philosophically to a certain degree with you, my teacher, I guess. Yeah. But I don't think it's like a primal need and something that's repressed.

12:16Speaker 1:I think it's just like us reflecting on ourselves and maybe even trying to work through like problems that we may have.

12:25Speaker 2:Yeah. So to differentiate those two guys, Freud was like dreams conceal and Jung was like, no, no, no, dreams reveal. And he was basically like just read your dream. Like it's telling you something, but you don't have to be like, oh, what does this mean? You already know what it means. And that it uses mythic archetypes as this ancient basic language that any human can understand.

12:48Speaker 1:Yeah. Like the mythic archetype of Rachel Dratch. Exactly.

12:53Speaker 2:Who represented the trickster.

12:55Speaker 1:I mean, I also think it can vary. Like clearly, if I keep having the same dream of trying to get somewhere and can't get there, Like that may be saying something about my life. But I also think that it's just completely a complete random assimilation of just weirdo things popping into your head. Like Rachel Dratch at an art opening.

13:16Speaker 2:Right. I tend to think like there is some series of like like neural connections that happened in the last day or two. That didn't make me consciously think of Rachel Dratch. But when I put those things together while I'm sleeping, there's Rachel Dratch.

13:36Speaker 1:I tried to wonder or I tried to wonder. I wondered if I had like, you know, I do follow her on Instagram, but I don't think I'd seen her on Instagram anytime recently. But who knows?

13:47Speaker 2:See, to me, it's like maybe you remembered a joke that someone on SNL told that she was just standing like in the background of that you focused on her years back. And you associate her with that joke, but don't realize it.

14:01Speaker 1:Yeah. Debbie Downer.

14:02Speaker 2:That's kind of my take on it. And if you look at Freud, you look at Jung's interpretations or dream theories, I should say, we've really done away with Jung's more than we have with Freud's, you know?

14:15Speaker 1:Yeah. I think you're probably right.

14:18Speaker 2:But then that's like the psychoanalysis version of it. Along comes in the 70s some much more scientific ideas about what dreams are and why we dream. And they really dovetail with your interpretation that they're essentially just random bits of meaningless information that our brain struggles to put together into a narrative. And that that's that. There's no meaning. It's not trying to tell us anything. that grain silo over there isn't a giant penis that you wish you had.

14:49Speaker 2:Like it's just, just dreams. Like they don't, they're just a by-product of your brain firing while you're asleep. Yeah.

14:56Speaker 1:That's called the activation synthesis hypothesis, which is, uh, it's just neurological processes playing out. Uh, and in this case, it's the forebrain trying to make sense of just what's firing around a neuron wise while you're in REM sleep.

15:12Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just, Just like where it takes your brain firing while you're awake and puts it into like a narrative that usually fairly resembles reality. When you're sleeping, you're getting random impulses according to this. And so it's just doing its best. And sometimes its best is just plain old weird. Like there's Rachel Dratch, you know?

15:35Speaker 1:Yeah.

15:36Speaker 2:That's it.

15:37Speaker 1:Yeah. I think most of my dreams are odd. I don't ever have fantastical dreams where Like I'm a winged beast that's flying through, you know, prehistoric life or anything like that.

15:49Speaker 2:As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever flown in my dreams. Have you?

15:52Speaker 1:I don't think so. All of my dreams now are trying desperately to catch a flight that I can't catch. But yeah, not actually flying.

16:03Speaker 2:So there are some characteristics of dreams that these guys came up with the activation synthesis hypothesis pointed out. Alan Hobson and Robert McCarley, by the way, are the guys who figured this out. They said that there's illogical content, right?

16:18Speaker 1:Check. Yeah.

16:19Speaker 2:Odd sensory experiences.

16:21Speaker 1:Yeah.

16:22Speaker 2:Intense emotions.

16:24Speaker 1:Yeah, that happens.

16:25Speaker 2:Acceptance of strange events. That's my favorite one.

16:28Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. In dreams, you're always just like, oh, yeah, sure.

16:30Speaker 2:Right. And then difficulty in remembering them. And that it's just we just take that for granted. Right. Like, yeah, dreams are hard to recall. But as we'll see in a little while, there's that's just doesn't quite add up and make sense. And they've not figured out why that's the case quite yet.

16:46Speaker 1:Yeah. And the other, you know, those were from those two researchers since then. Other people have put forward that it's usually a first person perspective thing that features other people. And that they incorporate elements of waking life. And I found all that to be basically true. For sure. All right. So talking more about dreams and specifically Hobson and McCarley, who, you know, researched the stuff in the late 70s, that theory they put forward that it's like, hey, you're looking too deeply into this. It's just a bunch of random neurons firing and your brain trying to make sense of it all. It was a pretty controversial theory because I guess they were the first people to kind of put forward that dreams may not be this big, deep thing full of meaning.

17:31Speaker 2:Right.

17:32Speaker 1:But it didn't, like, explain why we dream.

17:36Speaker 2:No. I mean, it does in that it's saying there's no explanation aside from your brain just firing randomly. Right. Then they're like, just leave it at that. And other people are like, no, I will not leave it at that.

17:47Speaker 1:Right.

17:48Speaker 2:I guess also what you're saying is that it doesn't explain dreaming. Francis Crick was like, OK, you can explain dreaming without adding like symbolism and all sorts of weird stuff to it. You can just say like your brain is actually going through some steps that to, I guess, McCarley and Hobson just seemed like random firing. But what it's actually doing is sorting through the inputs throughout the day and saying, well, get rid of that. Oh, I want to turn this into a memory. Oh, let's see what happens if we do this. But while we're, um, uh, an elf, you know, and that it's actually like, he called it reverse learning where you're, you're figuring you're sorting through the stuff from the day and that that's what your brain's doing when you're dreaming.

18:28Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't, I don't fully understand that one.

18:32Speaker 2:I think what he was saying is sure guys, like, yeah, it's just random firing or it seems like random firing, but there's a, our brain, there's an evolutionary purpose to it. It's not just some byproduct. Like there's a reason for it, I think is what he was saying.

18:46Speaker 1:Yeah. All right. Well, I think he, again, to this, uh, research, like he basically was like, this is a starting point. Like he didn't claim to be the final point on the matter.

18:56Speaker 2:Yeah, it's true.

18:58Speaker 1:Uh, people also think we might dream to process emotions, uh, That clearing the mind clutter kind of goes back to what Crick was talking about. Promoting creativity, perhaps. Maybe as sort of like a dress rehearsal to something that may like scare you in real life. Obviously, like the dreams you had the night before, like a big interview or something in that case.

19:21Speaker 2:Man, those are the worst. That sleep is not refreshing.

19:24Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, man, thank God we've had this job for so long and haven't had to go through... that in life in a while.

19:29Speaker 2:No, I know. Or put a resume together.

19:32Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Very fortunate.

19:34Speaker 2:Um, so, uh, okay. So those are, those are theories that of like what dreams are, why we dream. And I think the fact that we haven't, we'd never said like, oh, this is the one, or this is the most widely accepted one. Even among dream researchers, there's like, there's a divide between whether people think dreams are functional and do something and others who are like, no, it's just random. So that's not been settled even among the people who study this for a living. And I mentioned dream recall too, right?

20:06Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's tough. Sometimes I don't remember them at all. I mentioned that the Rachel Dratch one, I had just woken up from that dream. So I definitely remember it. And that apparently is one of the keys because they say five minutes after the end of the dream, they say you've forgotten about half of it. 10 minutes later, you've forgotten 90% of it. So if you want to, you know, have like a dream journal and if you want to remember your dreams, they say that you know, to be awakened during that REM sleep is the time to do it. And, you know, they suggest things like setting an alarm to wake yourself up during REM sleep and like keep a pad and a pencil. Like if that's what you're into, great. I would have a hard time falling back to sleep. So that's not for me.

20:53Speaker 2:Right. That's also the reason why they wake you up like at terrible times. Because, you know, you don't want to, if you wake up in the middle of REM sleep, like you're groggy for the rest of the day.

21:03Speaker 1:Yeah.

21:04Speaker 2:And during sleep studies, or dream studies, I should say, they wake you up purposefully during REM sleep.

21:10Speaker 1:That'd be terrible for me.

21:12Speaker 2:I know. And I've read that the trick that the dream researchers use is they go, wake up, it's time for Taco Bell fourth meal. And that usually gets people up.

21:24Speaker 1:Taco Bell fourth meal. I rolled the dice about a week and a half ago and had Taco Bell.

21:28Speaker 2:Oh, wow. How was it?

21:30Speaker 1:It was great. I was in the drive-thru line Googling is it safe now to eat a Taco Bell because of the lettuce thing? And the internet said, oh, sure. You go right ahead, buddy. It's great.

21:43Speaker 2:Did it really? I'm surprised.

21:45Speaker 1:Yeah. It said that they had worked all that out.

21:47Speaker 2:Oh, I hadn't. Oh yeah, that's right. I think Taco Bell switched suppliers like basically on day zero.

21:52Speaker 1:Yeah.

21:53Speaker 2:Okay, cool.

21:54Speaker 1:That was good.

21:55Speaker 2:I'm glad. And you haven't been pooping your pants for Two straight weeks.

21:59Speaker 1:Well, I did because I ate Taco Bell. That's why, like, who can tell the difference?

22:04Speaker 2:That happened to me with Crystal once. Oh. Oh, yeah?

22:08Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. All right.

22:09Speaker 2:I should probably edit that out.

22:10Speaker 1:Moving on.

22:12Speaker 2:So I think you touched on something early on, too, if I remember correctly, if I recall. You said that some people say that they don't dream.

22:20Speaker 1:Yeah.

22:21Speaker 2:And it's up for debate whether they actually do dream because everybody dreams is the idea.

22:26Speaker 1:Yeah.

22:27Speaker 2:And they just don't recall very well. Or if some people don't dream. Yeah. And they found like, no, it seems like everybody dreams because they've studied people who say like, I never remember dreams so much. So I don't think I dream. They'll wake them up during REM sleep and say, what were you dreaming about? And those people can recall a dream. So they think, yes, everyone dreams, but do some people dream more than others? And if not, Or if so, then is it just like they, you know, they have more trouble recalling than other people.

23:00Speaker 1:Right. For sure. And then, of course, there have been theories within the dream theory community since Freud about like why we don't remember our dreams or we or we do. And Freud was like, well, you know, we forget them because if you remember, they are repressed feelings and wishes. So like that's the kind of thing you might want to push out of your head.

23:22Speaker 2:Right.

23:22Speaker 1:Keep it repressed. Right. There's other people that have said that, you know, other things just like are there's too much in the brain, basically. So you can't remember it all. And also waking up like you're some people wake up and it's really hard for some people to come around and remember anything when they first wake up.

23:43Speaker 2:Yeah, I definitely subscribe to the neurobiological explanation for why dream recall is so hard because there's such there's some really convincing parts to it. Right.

23:53Speaker 1:Yeah.

23:54Speaker 2:Like the hippocampus, which is the little component that's responsible for consolidating short term memory into long term memory. It's it it's like stays asleep a little longer than the rest of your brain. So you don't just immediately get to assembling your your short term memory of your dreams into long term memories. That makes sense.

24:13Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm just now waking up, quite honestly. What's going on? What's happening?

24:19Speaker 2:You're such a pro that you just did like half of a podcast while you're still waking up.

24:24Speaker 1:Oh, boy.

24:26Speaker 2:Neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and norepinephrine are both involved in memory consolidation, and their levels dwindle and do weird stuff while you're having REM sleep. So there's like a lot of reasons why you probably aren't great at recalling your dreams and then some people are really good at it and they're just freaks of nature.

24:46Speaker 1:Yeah i mean some people think that if you are uh like if you're someone who's very prone to introspection or maybe daydreaming you might be better remembering your dreams during the nighttime or whenever you happen to sleep yeah uh but you can you know they say you can train yourself to remember your dreams uh you know the the dream journal like i mentioned earlier is is one way to at least record them. But if you want to increase your dream recall, first of all, you have to fall into that REM sleep, obviously. There are things that can prohibit you from at least remembering your dreams, like drinking booze or smoking pot or like exercising right before you go to bed. That can definitely affect your dream recall. And then you can, you know, you can train yourself. I think we talked about this in other episodes.

25:35Speaker 1:Might've been lucid dreaming. Can you control your dreams? Like when you go to bed, Say, like, as you're falling asleep, try and just say, like, I'm going to dream. I'm going to remember. I'm going to remember these dreams. I'm going to do it.

25:46Speaker 2:I've heard it's best to say, I must. I must. I must remember my dreams.

25:52Speaker 1:And, again, if you wake up right out of a dream, you're more likely to remember it. Probably if it's a super, like, intense or vivid dream, you're more likely to remember it.

26:02Speaker 2:Right.

26:03Speaker 1:And I have, like, I try to do the thing where if I'm having a dream that I'm really enjoying and I have to wake up and go to the bathroom. I really try and just keep that dream running in my head and try and get right back to it. And sometimes that works.

26:15Speaker 2:Yeah. That's that's yeah. And not only are you trying to remember the dream, you're trying not to wake up.

26:21Speaker 1:Yeah.

26:21Speaker 2:Just from peeing too. Yes. That definitely works. Like you're just, there's a certain level of consciousness that you'll let your brain rise to. Right.

26:28Speaker 1:Right.

26:28Speaker 2:I actually have a dream that I remember because I woke up straight out of it. Literally. Um, It was cool. It was one of the neatest things that's ever happened to me. So I was laying in bed, sleeping, dreaming that I was sitting in a car. And as I got out of the car, I was getting out of bed because I had to get up to pee myself. And like, it felt very much like as my right leg got out of the bed and the car, like my right leg was awake. But like the rest of my body hadn't woken up yet because it was still in the car, but my leg was in my bedroom still.

27:05Speaker 2:And so as I got up out of bed, I was getting out of the car in my dream and I just slowly transferred from the dream world into waking reality in my room. Wow. It was really neat. Like the interior of the car and the edge of the bed were one in the same. And it was like just some, I don't know, like portal or threshold or something that.

27:29Speaker 1:I went through.

27:30Speaker 2:It was really, really cool, man. Yeah.

27:32Speaker 1:Yeah. I love that stuff. I mean, that's why I love dreams. Cause they're just, it's, they can be just so bizarre and put you in a completely like weird state of mind without, you know, any substances for sure. So, uh, they apparently, you know, and this is, um, I encourage you to go to listen to the lucid dreaming episode. Can you control your dreams? Cause that's the idea that, you know, you're asleep, you know, you're dreaming and you're in control of your dream. Like dream sailing, I think is what we called it or other people have called it for sure.

28:02Speaker 2:And that was 2009, so that was like an early one.

28:06Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a minute ago. But dream incubation is another thing, and that's if you want to dream about a certain thing, you try and kind of do the same thing, like focus your attention on that thing as you're going to sleep. And a lot of times people, there is one sort of subset of researchers that say, or maybe just people that think that you can like come up with creative solutions for maybe mental or creative blocks while you're dreaming. And so they will try and induce or incubate a dream as they're going to sleep.

28:41Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's basically like, I want to dream about this. And so you will hopefully dream about it, especially if you like kind of prime yourself throughout the day to dream about that one topic. And people have shown you can come up with solutions to waking life problems in your dreams. And there have been some famous examples of it. One that usually gets mentioned in any kind of list of those, there's Kekele, the German chemist, who discovered the structure of the benzene molecule, which sounds like, okay, great.

29:18Speaker 2:It required completely different thinking than everything he had been trained to up to that point, because he was a chemist in Germany in the mid-19th century. And at that time, they thought every molecule... Was linear in arrangement. And he was like, this is not the math is not adding up like this thing does not work in a linear shape. What am I missing? And he he slept one night and dreamt of Ouroboros or Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. And when he woke up, it was just clear as day to him that the benzene molecule was in a ring arrangement, a circular arrangement rather than linear.

29:53Speaker 1:And he was right.

29:55Speaker 2:Yeah.

29:55Speaker 1:I mean, you hear stories like that or that Mary Shelley, um, dreamed up Frankenstein or other musicians like famous songs came to them in their sleep. And I hear that stuff. And I think that that like the solution to the benzene molecule or the seed of the idea of Frankenstein was in their brain already. And the dream allowed it to be tapped into or something. I don't know. I mean, it's there's obviously nothing to prove that, but it just sort of makes sense to me.

30:25Speaker 2:That's my take on it, too, that it was already there and they're their dream state just allowed them to think about it in different ways than they do in waking life.

30:36Speaker 1:So cool.

30:37Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw yesterday and let it be. We're both dreamt by Paul McCartney river of dreams. Um, that one where it's like in the middle of the night, that Billy Joel song.

30:48Speaker 1:Yeah.

30:49Speaker 2:You didn't like my Billy Joel impression.

30:51Speaker 1:No, I thought it was funny.

30:52Speaker 2:Uh, that one was, came to him in a dream.

30:54Speaker 1:You're not gonna sing yesterday.

30:56Speaker 2:No.

30:56Speaker 1:Okay.

30:57Speaker 2:Uh, Beethoven, uh, had a, uh, Some music come to him in a dream. 99 Loof Balloons. Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze.

31:07Speaker 1:Yeah.

31:07Speaker 2:And are you familiar with Apex Twin?

31:10Speaker 1:Oh, sure. Okay.

31:11Speaker 2:Apex Twin apparently is a hardcore lucid dreamer and has made bunches of songs by lucid dreaming, like purposely going to sleep and dreaming to work out music.

31:23Speaker 1:Cheat code. That's what they call that.

31:28Speaker 2:You got me with that one.

31:30Speaker 1:Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit more about dream meetings and nightmares right after this.

32:02Speaker 2:Okay, Chuck, so I think this is going rather well. What do you think?

32:08Speaker 1:I agree.

32:09Speaker 2:So there's that whole divide about whether dreams mean anything or if they're just random.

32:14Speaker 1:Right.

32:16Speaker 2:Most people, I would say, are like, no, it's not random, man. I had this one dream, and it said that I should go pursue a career as a sailor, and here I am a sailor, and I've never been happier, right? Mm-hmm. I've got a virgin voyage on the brain, I guess.

32:32Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. I mean, my, my grandfather, after he passed, came to me in a dream very specifically when I was like 10 years old. So, you know, you hear something like that and I, I'm not, uh, you know, super woo woo. So I don't necessarily think that he came to me in a dream and like something metaphysical happened. Um, to me, it was just a kid trying to make sense of losing his grandfather and a dream, like providing some relief. Maybe.

32:58Speaker 2:That's neat. I, I, I kind of, there's like a kernel of me that is, is like, it's possible that your grandfather was somehow visiting you.

33:06Speaker 1:Yeah. I'd like to believe that's true. It was, it was very powerful. I still remember it, you know, all these years later.

33:11Speaker 2:That's neat. Did he, he, was he very critical of you in the dream?

33:15Speaker 1:Yeah. Uh, no, he, he literally walked up to me and said, uh, you're going to be okay, bud. And that was it.

33:24Speaker 2:Oh, wow.

33:25Speaker 1:Yeah. Like super, I was like, Yeah. Granddad's really on the nose. Yeah. It still makes me emotional. Years later, I was like 10 or 11 years old and I'm 55. Good Lord.

33:39Speaker 2:I mean, I can imagine that's like a lifetime experience that not everybody gets. It's like, yeah, that's a really special thing that happened to you.

33:47Speaker 1:And you hear those stories. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. You hear stories all the time about like way more involved dreams than that of like, you know, people from the beyond, like getting in touch and stuff. I think it's interesting.

33:58Speaker 2:Check out this new card trick I just learned. All right. Back to dream meanings and symbols, I think is kind of what most people point to, which is why I said Freud's influence is still around today. Anybody who's like, no, dreams are symbolic and you have to interpret them. You're following in Freud's wake.

34:21Speaker 1:Yeah, and there are like some stock sort of explanations or guides for this kind of thing. Like when I mentioned my teeth falling out, it's a very common dream. Not surprisingly, it usually indicates anxiety about something. What you said, anxiety about appearance. So I never really thought about that, but also maybe feeling deceitful or concerns about your health. Teeth falling out? Then my teeth literally fell out, which is kind of funny.

34:53Speaker 2:Did you dream that they went right back in?

34:56Speaker 1:No, that's funny. But I do think that maybe my teeth grinding, it might have been a sort of reaction to me grinding my teeth at night.

35:05Speaker 2:That's interesting.

35:06Speaker 1:Yeah.

35:06Speaker 2:Yumi has a recurring teeth falling out dream where she'll have some sort of diamond somewhere or there's a diamond somewhere in the dream. Usually it's in like a ring and it falls out. And she knows that that's her signal that her teeth are all about to fall out.

35:24Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Yeah. I thought you were about to say she gets grills.

35:28Speaker 2:You would love a grill, actually. There's a grill museum in Atlanta. Did you know that?

35:33Speaker 1:No, but I'm not surprised.

35:35Speaker 2:There is one. We haven't been yet.

35:37Speaker 1:Atlanta's got to be one of the grill capitals of the world.

35:39Speaker 2:I would guess so. Because it's also like the trap music capital of the world. And those two things go hand in hand.

35:45Speaker 1:For sure. What about falling in a dream?

35:48Speaker 2:This one sucks, I can tell you firsthand. It's typically thought to mean that you feel out of control of your life.

35:57Speaker 1:Yeah.

35:58Speaker 2:Being chased. I like this one, that you're evading responsibilities.

36:02Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense.

36:04Speaker 2:What about fire?

36:06Speaker 1:Fire, maybe it's about renewal, or maybe it's about some anger that you have repressed, or maybe purification, perhaps, or destruction.

36:15Speaker 2:Yep.

36:16Speaker 1:Or.

36:17Speaker 2:I don't think I've ever had this one. Have you ever had one about being naked in public?

36:22Speaker 1:I don't think so. But that's a pretty common dream, I think, supposedly. I don't think I've had being naked. Or maybe I did when I was younger. I don't know.

36:34Speaker 2:But they typically think you have probably had an embarrassing situation and you're still processing it.

36:41Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. But the issue with all this stuff is... I said these are sort of stock explanations. You know, they sell books and they get clicks for articles, but it's hard to get a stock explanation because it's so, you know, you can see like somebody might see something is like awesome in a dream where other people might see it as a threat. It gets very culturally specific, obviously. And even within the own, you're like one culture, things can be interpreted in contradictory ways. So it's hard to sort of say like, well, this is what that means.

37:15Speaker 2:Right. It definitely seems much more pop culture than scientific for sure.

37:20Speaker 1:For sure.

37:21Speaker 2:And then there's, you had mentioned recurring dreams, your recurring dream of running late for something. Those are, that's, that's a thing. Recurring dreams, especially recurring unpleasant dreams are a horror that can be, that can befall humans, which is very sad. Recurring dreams don't have to always be unpleasant, but from what I could tell, unpleasant recurring dreams are essentially non-existent, that the best you can hope for are neutral recurring dreams. Most of the time they're at least unpleasant, if not, you know, straight up bad dreams.

37:57Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there's a distinction I mentioned earlier, but that we were going to get into it between bad dreams and nightmares. If you're talking about just like real sleep research, a nightmare specifically means that you or like it wakes you up. Like it's so bad, you wake up, you know, obviously generally like scared.

38:22Speaker 2:That means, do you remember the end of Don't Be Dumb was a nightmare for you? Do you remember? Because you woke up from it. That's right.

38:30Speaker 1:You pulled me into Don't Be Dumb at the end.

38:32Speaker 2:It was great. It was a great ending.

38:34Speaker 1:In a very new heart way.

38:36Speaker 2:There's another, there's an author, a neuroscientist named Siddhartha Ribeiro, Ribeiro, I think. They wrote The Oracle of Night, colon, The History and Science of Dreams. And they, I thought, made a pretty interesting case for dreams having some sort of meaning, even not symbolically, but at least they're not just random, the byproduct of random neural firings.

39:00Speaker 1:Right.

39:00Speaker 2:And he said it's because the existence of recurring dreams shows that you couldn't possibly have the same dream if your neurons are just firing randomly. Right.

39:11Speaker 1:Yeah.

39:11Speaker 2:You could not have a recurring dream like there that in and of itself shows that there is something to dreams that they do serve some purpose or they do have some meaning to us, which I thought was rather clever.

39:22Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I probably agree with that. Recurring nightmares is probably kind of one of the worst things. And it's very, very sad in that veterans and people suffering from PTSD in general often have recurring nightmares. And that's actually one of the criteria for diagnosing PTSD. There was a study in 1998 that found two to eight percent of adults have nightmares and or problematic nightmares at least, and 52% of Vietnam veterans did. And that's tough stuff because that's clearly, you know, things that are either buried or that you just can't get over or deal with still in your waking life.

40:03Speaker 2:What's neat about that, though, is they have figured out forms of dream therapy for PTSD specifically, but it can also be used by anyone having recurring bad dreams or nightmares. Where you essentially train yourself to imagine a different ending for that nightmare. Right.

40:23Speaker 1:Yeah.

40:23Speaker 2:So as for PTSD, like your nightmare is the event that gave you PTSD. So you're re-experiencing it over and over every night, which it's just mind boggling how awful that sounds. Right.

40:37Speaker 1:Yeah.

40:39Speaker 2:This therapy is like, OK, in this next dream, you're going to like in the end, you're going to fight this person off or you're going to suddenly be at home and at peace or whatever. And it's kind of like that dream incubation idea where you eventually, hopefully, are able to change the end of that nightmare. And from what I was reading, that usually frees the person from that nightmare. They never have it again after that.

41:06Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the turn your frown upside down of hellish nightmares.

41:11Speaker 2:For sure. Right. So at the very least, it's heartening that there is a solution, a potential solution, because nightmares, whether you have PTSD or not, they're linked to self-injury and suicide. Yeah.

41:27Speaker 1:And, you know, even just at the bare minimum, it's going to give you perhaps sleep deprivation and it can interfere with your, you know, normal routines during the day, your job, your relationships. Uh, they think there may be a genetic predisposition to frequent nightmares, but they don't know what that is. Uh, but they also say, well, it also could be maybe, uh, the same like genetic or at least driven by genetic risk factors of mental health conditions that may be underlying behind the dreams. Yeah.

41:58Speaker 2:And that actually ties into, um, nightmares and bad dreams being a, um, A characteristic or a trait of Parkinson's disease.

42:07Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. You found that.

42:08Speaker 2:And specifically Parkinson's disease with dementia. I guess 78% of people with Parkinson's disease with dementia have recurring nightmares.

42:19Speaker 1:Oh, man.

42:20Speaker 2:Or at least bad dreams. I'm not sure if they actually meet the criteria for nightmare where you wake up, but it's not pleasant to go to sleep if you have Parkinson's with dementia.

42:30Speaker 1:Yeah. We talked about we did a whole episode on fever dreams to remember that.

42:35Speaker 2:Mm hmm.

42:36Speaker 1:That was interesting.

42:37Speaker 2:We did one on sleep paralysis.

42:39Speaker 1:That's right.

42:40Speaker 2:And we did one on night terrors, too. So, yeah, both of those episodes are out there. I think sleep paralysis was called like the worst thing that can happen to you while you're sleeping, maybe. Right.

42:51Speaker 1:And that the sleep paralysis is when you like you're asleep, but you picture yourself awake and there's like someone at the foot of your bed.

42:58Speaker 2:Yeah, and because you're in REM sleep, you can't move. Yeah.

43:02Speaker 1:Oh, God.

43:03Speaker 2:And then night terrors are similar in that you appear to other people to be awake because you're screaming and fighting somebody off and your eyes are open, but you are still asleep.

43:17Speaker 1:Yeah, kids usually get those, but adults can as well. And then what about this idea about premonitions? There have definitely been people that have at least said that they had a premonition about some very specific historical event, sometimes big time, and sometimes just, you know, little things that happen in people's families. But, you know, the big ones are ones that get all the press. Like in the 1960s, there was a Canadian dreamer named Kathleen Lorna Middleton who had a lot of dreams about things that she had no connection to. And she at least claimed to have predicted things Through her dream, a landslide in South Wales that killed 144 people about an hour before. And supposedly the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Yeah. She foretold in a dream.

44:11Speaker 2:And she doesn't seem to have been like attention seeking or anything like that. She does seem to have been like this. These were her experiences. Of course, scientifically, you're like, well, there's a lot of things you can point to that that explain this. why people think there's such a thing as precognitive dreams. Um, your dreams might be a little ambiguous so that you're kind of retroactively going back and be like, yes, that's what that was, was saying. Um, or your brain just wants to identify patterns naturally. We talk about that a lot.

44:45Speaker 1:Yeah.

44:45Speaker 2:Um, so it could be putting together stuff that's not really necessarily connected. Um, selective memory coincidence. Uh, Yeah, it's just there's not really any room for it in science, typically. But I found an article that pointed out that quantum physics actually has room for precognitive dreams.

45:08Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?

45:08Speaker 2:Yeah. It basically says that under some quantum theories, like quantum gravity, I think, it allows for this, where past, present, and future are not following any kind of linear order like we think of time. Instead, they all kind of coexist. And this quantum interpretation of precognitive dreams just basically says in certain states, in this case dreaming, the dream state, we're able to access future events just like we are past events or present events when we're waking.

45:40Speaker 1:Hmm.

45:41Speaker 2:Pretty neat.

45:42Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty cool. I mean, between 17 and 38% of people dream. say they have had at least one precognitive dream in their lifetime. Uh, and I think definitely if you have like a willingness to accept, like, um, accept that kind of thing in general and maybe accept ambiguous information and put it together in a way that makes sense. Like you may be more prone to be like, Hey, but I dreamed this thing. And you know, who knows that assassination was sort of a political assassination was much more of a thing when Robert Kennedy was assassinated and, Maybe Kathleen Lorna Middleton was a fan of the Kennedys and it's something that that concerned her.

46:24Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good explanation.

46:26Speaker 1:But, you know, it maybe it's not also to be explained. And maybe I mean, who knows? Maybe people can really dream stuff that's going to happen. I don't know.

46:35Speaker 2:I don't either. I don't either, Chuck. And I think that it takes a big man to admit something like that. All right.

46:41Speaker 1:We're a couple of big men.

46:44Speaker 2:You got anything else about dreams right now?

46:46Speaker 1:I do not.

46:47Speaker 2:Okay. Well, that was our dream episode. People have been calling for that for a while. Hopefully you guys liked it.

46:52Speaker 1:I know, yeah.

46:53Speaker 2:And since we're wondering whether you guys liked this episode, I think I just accidentally triggered listener mail.

47:01Speaker 1:That's right. This is Sammy Davis Jr. 's story. I don't know if you saw this.

47:04Speaker 2:It's pretty fun.

47:06Speaker 1:Hey, guys, fairly new listener. Someone wrote in with the Sammy Davis Jr. story, and you asked for more, so here it is. When my elderly father passed in 2006, we heard a story from the wife of my dad's business partner. She told us that there was a time when the four of them were in Las Vegas together and attended a Sammy Davis Jr. concert. My mother, who had gone out to the restroom just before the concert began, came back in. The lights went down. Sammy began his first number, and my mother returned from the restroom. It was dark, and she couldn't remember or see where they were sitting. And as she stumbled between the tables, she started calling out, Vic, where are you? Vic, where are you?

47:44Speaker 1:And it wasn't too long before Sammy completely stopped the show and asked from the stage, Vic, babe, where are you? Mom got back to her table and Sammy started the concert over again from the very beginning. Later that year, very sadly, my mom also passed away and I was able to tell this story as part of her remembrance, adding that I could imagine her arriving in heaven asking, Vic, where are you? That is from Cliff in Madison, Wisconsin, one of my new favorite towns.

48:12Speaker 2:Yeah, that is a great town. And that's a great story, Cliff. Thanks a lot for sending it to us. One of the better Sammy Davis Jr. stories I've ever heard.

48:20Speaker 1:Yeah, doesn't get much better than Sammy Davis Jr. addressing you from stage.

48:24Speaker 2:For sure. If you want to be like Cliff and send us an email with a great story that's also kind of a tribute to your late loved one, we think those are the tops, as Sammy might say. At the very least, Mel Torme would say it.

48:37Speaker 1:For sure.

48:38Speaker 2:You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

48:46Speaker 1:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.