Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Why Dreams? Brain Science and the Case for Lucidity
22 Plays1 year ago
Why are we talking about dreams? We all dream every night, but most people don't remember it. As brain imaging gives us a clearer picture of dream activity, lucid dreaming could gain mainstream attention in the Western world. Here's why that matters — and how it builds on a long tradition of dream interpretation.
This is part 3 of an intro series on sleep, memory, and dreams.
Connect with us at SuenoLabs.com. We're currently looking for contributors and podcast guests!
Disclaimer: This show is for informational purposes only. Sueño Labs does not provide medical advice.
Featured in this episode are clips from Prophetic AI.
Recommended
Transcript
The Fantasy World of Dreams
00:00:00
Speaker
Have you ever stopped to wonder why every night you slip into this fantasy world that's partly memories from the day, partly hopes and expectations, and partly just bizarre things happening inside your imagination? And then we just wake up and no one ever talks about it. From a psychological standpoint, is that really the healthiest attitude to have about our dreams?
Introduction to Swinio Labs Series
00:00:29
Speaker
Tonight, we're talking about why dreams. Everyone dreams every night, but we don't often remember them. Why is that? Are there things that we could do to remember our dreams more effectively? And what's the benefit of pursuing dream retention? I'm Jimmy Leonard. This is Swinio Labs.
00:00:57
Speaker
Welcome to Swinio Labs. This is part three, the third and final installment of our introductory series on why sleep, memory, and dreams.
Western Culture's View on Dreams
00:01:07
Speaker
To be honest with you, dreams is probably the topic of those three that is most fascinating to me and is also the most frightening to talk about on a podcast.
00:01:18
Speaker
Frightening in the sense that in the Western world, at least, we often put dreams outside of the norms of science and serious conversations. You know, maybe from time to time, you'll be talking with a friend or a family member and you'll mention this really strange dream that you had
00:01:38
Speaker
and you'll kind of laugh about it and then you'll move on. Certainly, it features in movies where somebody might have a premonition or a nightmare. But if we're really thinking about our day-to-day rhythms, it's common to talk to somebody about how well you're sleeping or maybe some of the health effects you're having of not sleeping well. But do we ever really talk about
00:02:01
Speaker
how we're dreaming. Does that question even make sense to us? Have we considered that there could actually be a healthy, productive sort of dreaming and maybe a harmful, unproductive sort of
Scientific Challenges in Dream Study
00:02:14
Speaker
dreaming? What's the difference? Do we have a say in that? From a scientific standpoint, dreams are tricky because it's almost impossible to prove anything about them.
00:02:26
Speaker
We have seen a number of experiments where we can track what's happening in the brain during REM sleep, which is the sleep cycle where dreams occur. We'll get into that. There have been some interesting studies where we're able to see some brain activity that is correlated to certain images or topics that actually do give the researchers some sort of sense of what somebody is dreaming about. They're able to see that on a screen.
00:02:51
Speaker
There have also been a number of attempts to document evidence of lucid dreaming, which is the conscious awareness and control of somebody's dream while they're in it. If you go online, there are all sorts of videos and forums where people will talk about their own experiences dreaming
00:03:08
Speaker
their own tips and tricks for how to dream better or to have more lucid dreams, but it's all very difficult to prove. If I tell you that last night I had a dream about dancing llamas and flying pigs and fire-breathing dragons, I could just be making it up, right? You really have no way of knowing that. You have no way of validating that what I'm saying actually happened. And it even becomes sort of this gray area, right? The fact that I can say it right now means that
00:03:35
Speaker
I'm capable of imagining it, but what's the difference between imagining and dreaming?
Dreams in History and Culture
00:03:43
Speaker
And so it makes these conversations challenging. For someone to say that they're an expert in lucid dreaming and that they've accomplished all of these things and they're here to tell you how, we really can't
00:03:54
Speaker
validate that. We really can't know for certain that what they're saying has actually happened because there is no video to watch. There is no mark on their body or their psyche to know that these things have actually occurred. And yet, throughout human history,
00:04:11
Speaker
there has really been a profound importance placed on dreaming. I think many people in the West today might associate dreaming more with Eastern mysticism, but even if we look at the Abrahamic traditions, dreams are incredibly important in Jewish tradition. They are closely associated with powers of prophecy. There are
00:04:35
Speaker
many examples in Jewish Scriptures of someone having a dream from God, or even someone having the ability to interpret dreams through God. Dreams are, of course, common in Christian Scripture as well, too, in the New Testament.
00:04:53
Speaker
The Islamic faith similarly puts high emphasis on dreams, and many practicing Muslims believe that if you have a positive dream, it is a sign from God. Even if we look at Western traditions based on the work of people like Freud and Carl Jung, there's so much conversation around the hidden psychology of dreams and what does it say about a person's personality or past traumas that they have these sorts of symbols appearing in their dreams.
Society's Disinterest in Dream Recall
00:05:22
Speaker
We see across cultures and across time a high emphasis on dreams and their meanings. But I think it's fair to say if you talk to most people in America today, just busy working people, they will tell you that most nights they don't remember what they dreamt about.
00:05:48
Speaker
So of course, my thesis on this is that it is a symptom of a larger problem on some of our disconnect with the importance of sleep and how we engage with sleep in a healthy way. When we're sleeping better, we do sleep more deeply and more regularly, and we do have better dream recall. But part of it too is just a lack of interest.
00:06:14
Speaker
And I don't necessarily mean a personal interest, but it's more of a societal interest. If we aren't talking about our dreams, or we aren't putting value into our dreams, or we aren't seeing it as a good use of our time to learn how to dream better and to recall our dreams, then it kind of makes sense that our brain just tunes out what's happening during those sleeping hours.
00:06:41
Speaker
Now, I say this all as a very general introduction.
Dreams in Popular Culture and Science
00:06:43
Speaker
I think in the last 10 to 15 years, it's really starting to shift. Most people who do work on Dreams and you talk about Dreams will agree that a major turning point was the blockbuster success of the movie Inception. It's not the only movie that's ever focused on Dreams. It's not the only movie that has Dreams as a main plot point.
00:07:05
Speaker
But I think there's something about Inception as an action movie with A-list actors and sort of this really exciting plot that just exists in a normalized world of dreams, but also goes deeper into some of the bizarre, strange things about how time and space work in dreams, how dreams
00:07:28
Speaker
affect our waking lives and our waking selves and where those lines start to get blurry, that really piqued the interest of so many people to start to think about their dreams in a different way. At the same time, we've also seen so many advances in brain imaging and our ability to understand
00:07:46
Speaker
what parts of the brain are lighting up during a dream state, that we can actually measure and track these things, that there has been more research into the idea of, can we stimulate these sorts of things? And really, no matter how we slice it, Western science and dreams are always going to be an odd couple.
00:08:06
Speaker
Everyone dreams. Dreams are commonplace. They're expected. They're normal. They're part of the sleep cycle. But dreams are also bizarre. They're wild. Sometimes they're embarrassing or intensely personal.
00:08:22
Speaker
Many people around the world have a reverence for dreams or an idea that dreams could include some kind of premonition or divine inspiration. These sorts of things that are usually existing outside the laboratory.
00:08:38
Speaker
We know that dreams can affect us psychologically. Ask anybody who is living with PTSD if they've ever had nightmares. Ask any parent if they've ever had a child run into their room saying they had a nightmare. So we know that these effects can be visceral, but it's hard to collect any sort of empirical data on what's actually happening
Lucid Dreaming and Its Benefits
00:09:01
Speaker
in somebody's mind in the case of a dream.
00:09:05
Speaker
And when it comes to the question of something like a nightmare where the dream is distressing to somebody, the question becomes, well, is there anything we could do to make it stop? And what if the answer is yes? This is where the idea of lucid dreaming comes into play. So lucid dreaming, of course, is the awareness that you are dreaming while you are dreaming, but then also the conscious ability to decide what happens next.
00:09:34
Speaker
Probably the best way I've ever heard it explained is if a regular dream is like you are watching a movie, a lucid dream is like you are directing the movie. You are the main character and you get to decide what you're going to do.
00:09:48
Speaker
So in the last few years, we've started to see this crossover where all of our understanding of the brain and its functioning is starting to mix with our questions about dreaming and how it all works.
00:10:04
Speaker
One company that's at the center of all of this is Prophetic. They're working on a device that allegedly is going to help induce lucid dreams. Now, how does the device work? Does the device work? We're actually following this on spendyourlabs.com. We've got an article about it. Go check it out. But I'm going to play a clip of company founder, Eric Wolberg, talking about this product.
00:10:26
Speaker
put this on, you go to sleep. And the focus ultrasound activates the prefrontal cortex, which we know is the neuroscientific definition of a lucid dream. A lucid dream is defined as the awareness that one is in a dream, which begets control over the phenomenological contents of that dream. So I had my first lucid dream when I was 12 years old. You know, I woke up from that and I was like, oh my God, what the... You know, Hagrid didn't pick me up on my 11th birthday, so I'm feeling a little weird. I've never heard anyone talk about this.
00:10:52
Speaker
And so I didn't really tell anyone about it, but I found like early internet forums where people were talking about this experience that they had in their dreams. And I was like, oh, that's what it is. And I think it's that last part that's really salient to me, you know, whether or not this device actually works or actually helps people to have more lucid dreams. Time will tell with that. I'm sure we'll have future episodes where we're reporting on it, but
00:11:15
Speaker
But that idea that somebody can have a vivid, lucid dream at a young age, but feel isolated in that, feel alone in that, feel like nobody else has ever had this experience until they actually get into a community where they find out, oh, this incredibly strange thing that happened to me is maybe not so strange after all.
00:11:41
Speaker
That's what I'm hoping to change through Swinier
Personal and Societal Benefits of Dream Exploration
00:11:46
Speaker
Labs. One of our goals is to break down the stigma around dream talk, particularly in America and the Western world. It is normal that people have dreams. It is normal that we have questions about our dreams.
00:12:01
Speaker
And if we want to step into this world of lucid dreaming and lucidity, it's going to rely on learning some skills. We're going to have to strengthen our memory. We're going to have to have some regular sleep rhythms to have that strong foundation of dream quality and dream frequency.
00:12:21
Speaker
And this really isn't just about, oh, I want to be able to fly or I want to talk to my favorite celebrity or something like that. Yes, it's true that a practiced, skilled lucid dreamer can go on wild adventures and do all sorts of crazy things, but there's also some really interesting benefits too. When we are able to control our dreams, we can face our fears. We can rehearse a skill that we
00:12:49
Speaker
aren't very good at, or we can prepare for a difficult situation, or a challenging conversation, or really we can be introspective. We can better understand ourselves. So this isn't about dream interpretation in the sense of, okay, I've got a dream dictionary. If you dreamt of a black dog, it means this. No, it doesn't work like that. Dreams are personal. They're unique to you.
00:13:13
Speaker
how you think of a dog is going to be different than how I think of a dog or how somebody else thinks of a dog all depending on whether or not you have dogs or like dogs or you were bitten by a dog at a young age, all of those things are going to impact. But understanding yourself
00:13:28
Speaker
Understanding your own unique dream signs and dream situations is going to give you that introspection to interpret your own dreams and to understand what your brain is trying to tell you during those sleeping hours. Another way to think about it is people spend about a third of their lives asleep. You might as well do something productive with it.
00:13:54
Speaker
So as to get into some of these deeper questions about how we can be more effective at remembering our dreams and even controlling what's happening inside of our dreams to an end of understanding ourselves better and understanding what's happening in our brains better.
00:14:12
Speaker
So this is the jumping off point. This is the motivation as to why it's worth having these conversations that maybe not enough people in our society are having to normalize and understand dreams. If you've made it to the end of these first three episodes, thank you for staying with me, and I hope that you continue on this journey through the podcast as we explore sleep, memory, and dreams.
00:14:45
Speaker
Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon.