It's an Inside Job
‘It's an Inside Job’ is the go-to podcast for professionals and leaders aiming to overcome stress, enhance leadership skills, and thrive both personally and professionally. Each episode provides expert insights and inspiring real-life stories, offering practical and proven strategies for building resilience, maintaining emotional balance, and achieving overall well-being.
Every Monday, join us for in-depth discussions on personal, professional, organisational, and societal resilience. On Fridays, tune in to 'Bitesize Fridays’ for your weekly dose of resilience, optimism, and well-being. These shorter episodes offer insightful tips and uplifting stories to help you navigate life's challenges and embrace a positive mindset as you head into the weekend.
Whether you're managing career challenges or seeking personal growth, this podcast delivers actionable advice and support to help you lead a balanced and fulfilling life.
After all, building resilience is an Inside Job!
It's an Inside Job
Harnessing the Power of Dreams for Emotional Regulation & Creative Inspiration: Practical Tips from Dream Research.
Get in touch with us! We’d appreciate your feedback and comments.
Ever wondered about the hidden meanings and functions of your dreams? Curious about how they can impact your memory, emotions, and creativity? If so, this episode is for you!
Welcome to this episode of "It's an Inside Job," where we delve into the captivating science of dreams with Karen Van Kampen, who is researching this topic for her upcoming book. Our conversation spans the various functions of dreams, from memory processing to emotional regulation and threat simulation. We explore the therapeutic benefits, creative inspirations, and sensory-rich experiences that dreams offer.
Three Benefits You'll Gain:
- Improved Dream Recall: Practical advice on how to remember your dreams and foster intentional recollection.
- Emotional Insights: Techniques for analyzing dreams to understand and resolve subconscious issues.
- Creative Boost: Explore how dreams can be a source of creative inspiration and problem-solving.
Exploring Key Concepts and Issues:
Functions of Dreams:
- Memory Processing: How dreams help consolidate memories.
- Emotional Regulation: The role of dreams in processing emotions and regulating mood.
- Threat Simulation: The idea that dreams prepare us for real-life dangers.
Nightmares and Psychological Impact:
- Understanding Nightmares: Their potential impact on mental health.
- Therapeutic Interventions: Techniques like image rehearsal therapy to manage distressing dreams.
Continuity Hypothesis and Threat Simulation Theory:
- Link to Waking Life: How our daily experiences influence our dreams.
- Mental Health Signals: Nightmares as indicators of underlying issues or preparation for threats.
Bio:
Karen van Kampen is currently writing a book on the science of dreaming, exploring the connection between our dreams and well-being and how we can use our nightly fictions to improve our waking lives. She’s sharing what she learns along the way @scienceofyouandme. Karen is the author of The Golden Cell: Gene Therapy, Stem Cells, And The Quest For The Next Great Medical Breakthrough, an exploration of the innovations in regenerative medicine told through the stories of physicians, scientists, and patients. Her writing has appeared in many publications including The Globe and Mail and National Post.
Contact:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-van-kampen-1a922587/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scienceofyouandme/
Website: https://www.karenvankampen.com/
Sign up for the weekly IT'S AN INSIDE JOB NEWSLETTER
- takes 5 seconds to fill out
- receive a fresh update every Wednesday
[0:00] Music.
[0:08] Back to It's an Inside Job podcast. I'm your host, Jason Liem. Now, this podcast is dedicated to helping you to help yourself and others to become more mentally and emotionally resilient so you can be better at bouncing back from life's inevitable setbacks. Now, on It's an Inside Job, we decode the science and stories of resilience into practical advice, skills, and strategies that you can use to impact your life and those around you. Now, with that said, let's slip into the stream.
[0:36] Music.
[0:43] Hey folks, welcome back to It's an Inside Job. I'm your host, Jason Lim. Well, in today's episode, we are going to dive into the fascinating world of dreams with our special guest, Karen Van Kampen. Now, Karen is currently writing an insightful book on the science of dreaming set to be published by Simon Schuster in Canada. Her work explores the connection between our dreams and well-being and how we can harness the power of our dreams to enhance our waking lives. So in this episode, we're going to explore the intricate connection between our waking and dreaming lives. Now in our conversation, Karen is going to take us through the possible functions of dreaming such as emotional processing, memory consolidation, learning, threat simulation, and problem solving. We're also going to discuss us the many uses of dreams and how they differ from their functions. Now, as you'll learn from our conversation, our dreams are windows into our state of mind, our sense of well-being. Karen is going to uncover for us what our dreams reveal about us and delve into the curious phenomenon of lucid dreaming. That is understanding how this phenomenon can be a tool for our self discovery and how we can flourish. Moreover, we're going to touch on dream engineering, exploring how we can control and actually shape our dreams. And so in today's episode, Karen is going to share with us tools and techniques to use dreams to improve our waking lives.
[2:04] Music.
[2:20] Who you are and what you do. Thanks for having me on the show.
[2:24] I'm a Toronto-based writer and I'm fascinated by dreams. It's part of, I'm really interested in looking at the science of trying to understand why we do and think and feel the things that we feel and dreaming is a big part of that. When I was about eight or nine years old, my dad started the first independent sleep lab in Canada and many many days I spent uh in his lab and he would hook me up and test out the electrodes to make sure that everything was working and I got pretty good at sleeping on command it was pretty fun and that started my interest in in sleeping and dreaming he never studied dreams dreams uh that interest is is mine and I wrote a book called the golden cell and it was all about regenerative medicine and I really looked into all the breakthroughs and innovations in stem cells and gene therapy and now I'm really interested in doing a book I'm writing a book on the science of dreaming and looking at the connection between our waking and dreaming worlds and how we can use our dreams to better our waking lives sleeping dreams we all do it hopefully we We get enough sleep and we have pretty decent dreams. But it is a fascinating area. Since the birth of psychology.
[3:47] I think people have been trying to understand the science and the philosophy,
[3:52] I guess, to some extent, behind dreams.
[3:55] I was wondering, could you speak a little about what brought you into that area? Obviously, it was your dad's lab. You were a guinea pig in that lab. Um, but what, as we know in a, in a, you are in the midst of writing a book right now, assembling through interviews and the science and such, what, what is the reason you've gone into dreams? What is, what really sort of lit your fire as a professional to kind of dive and spend a lot of time doing the research and in the midst of writing a book?
[4:28] I'm fascinated by dreams for many reasons, I'm sure as everyone is. And I'm fascinated about the fact that it's this common experience that we all have, yet it's so personal. So there's so many mysteries, there's some certainties, but there's so many mysteries that still exist. And I love just delving into a topic and really investigating and trying to understand, you know, why things work the way that they do. And so I love looking at dreaming in terms of the physiological phenomenon, but as well as a very personal experience. And so for me, I'm fascinated by what, you know, what are the possible functions of dreams? Why, why is it that we dream is on the one hand, and also how can we use our dreams? So I'm really interested in looking at differentiating between the possible functions but also the uses and we can all choose how we use our dreams and how we view our dreams and you know some people may choose not to look at them at all and some people may choose to reflect on them so I'm just really interested in that personal aspect as well as the common experience that we all share.
[5:42] Well perhaps we can start the conversation sort of general and then we can get more specific in and how it influences our mental, emotional, and physical resilience, and well-being, and such. But you are the most well-educated person I know in this area of dreams. And so I'd just like to maybe kick off the conversation by understanding what is the recent science about why we dream? I mean, obviously, there may be two or three, maybe multiple aspects. But what perhaps you could just clarify for our listeners and myself right now.
[6:19] Sure. There's possible ideas of functions of dreaming. So I think, and we can get back to this maybe later, but it's really interesting to look at what is a dream. And that I'm still really trying to delve into. And you'd think, you know, there's still so much debate over even what a dream is. So we could maybe talk about that too, if you'd like to. Because that's, that fascinates me so much how people look at dreams and view dreams differently um so possible functions of dreams uh it could be for memory consolidation memory processing uh learning those are two very big things and this is across the sleep sleep wakes the sleep cycle so it's this is different things are happening at different times during uh sleep and during dream sleep so there's uh memory consolidation, memory processing, and learning, there is a thought that it helps us process emotions. So coming to terms with our emotions, maybe processing them in a different way than we do in our waking lives. And another potential function is that it prepares us for life's problems, life's dangers.
[7:34] It's looked at as a threat simulation.
[7:37] So we can simulate different scenarios to prepare ourselves better in waking life. So those are some of the few things. And then we could also look at, say, the uses, right? Or it could be functions, potentially. It depends on, you know, it's people's, it's different perspectives.
[7:55] Uses could be for healing or there's long standing traditions of how they can be used in therapy or creative uses. So that's also, that's kind of getting into the use area versus the function, which is really fascinating for me.
[8:12] I want to dive into each of these. I think they're fascinating. Fascinating. But just to add my two cents to that, you know, David Eagleman is one of the neuroscientists I like to follow because he's able to take complex things like a science journalist and, you know, describe the functions of the brain in a very layman's perspective. And one of the things I pulled from one of his books, I can't remember which one exactly, it may be his latest. He talked about dreaming because the visual cortex, you know, the brain, you probably know this quite well, Karen, the brain is made up of different networks and these networks don't just form one organ. And they're constant competition for each other it's almost like the wilds of the of the the uh safari in a sense and one of the things he said is that the reason we dream or one of many functions that we dream is that because other parts of the brain might encroach on it it fires off by dreaming it fires off the visual neurons in that visual cortex and that staves off the gobbling up of of other parts of the brain trying to take up the visual cortex. Because he said if we didn't dream in this particular very sort of nuts and bolts kind of way, then more than likely over time, the other parts of the brain would eat up and
[9:32] take over those visual processing because it goes dormant for whatever, seven to eight hours. I was wondering, have you heard anything about that?
[9:41] I'm really interested in the whole idea that the prefrontal areas of the brain are, they quiet down at certain times when we're dreaming. So you have that, the limbic system and that emotional system is active and it's aroused, but then you have the quieting down of that area of your brain that deals with rational judgment, decision making, those kind of things. And it's interesting to think of it in terms of say for example rem dreams when we're those are the dreams uh dreams in rem sleep is when you have the most vivid bizarre wild dreams and that happens throughout the night in different um the sleep cycle goes four or five times a night so when you're in rem it's that's when you're having your more vivid dreams and it really makes it's interesting to think about what's happening in the brain and the activity that's happening when you look at it in terms of what's happening in your dreams. So, I find that really interesting. And how is it that, but we have, oh no, I was just thinking, but then we have this.
[10:47] There's this idea that we have the ability for rational thought to say, okay, I'm going to try and fly, or I'm going to try and, you know, I'm steering a ship, and then I go underwater, and I can somehow breathe. You've got this rational thought to create this scenario, but you also are being convinced that this is possible. So it's, there's the difference between the bizarre elements and the rational thought that lets you dream up these bizarre elements from what I understand.
[11:18] It's really interesting. Yeah. So rational thought for me would mean some level of consciousness or awareness that we are actually thinking, or have I misinterpreted what you're saying that we can have rational thoughts in a sleep state, right? So, what is really interesting, this gets sort of into what is dreaming.
[11:42] And from what I've learned, and was speaking with different researchers and scientists and dreamers as well, but the researchers and scientists, is that it's interesting to look at it. It's not that dreaming and waking life are completely separate. Separate it's you can look at it on a continuum of experience of thought and it's different it's altered states of consciousness so for a long time that it was it was thought that the brain is shut off or is you know not working shut off asleep when we're when we're sleeping and dreaming and that's not the case it's very active the brain is as we all know the brain is as active or even more active at certain times of the sleep cycle, like REM sleep. So when you look at dreaming, you can look at it as sort of an altered state of consciousness. It's a disconnected consciousness, is what I've been told as well, is that you have this, you've created this simulated.
[12:44] Virtual world, but it's disconnected from external stimuli, unless, which we can get into later, What I'm learning about is dream engineering and different things, how you can bring in external stimuli to shape your dreams. But overall, generally, you have this, you've created this simulated world inside your brain, but it's separated, it's disconnected from the outside world around you. That's kind of one way to look at it.
[13:16] I've got so many avenues here. There's so many trailheads I'm looking at for this conversation. I got to choose which one. Okay, so you said it's in a sense, it's a simulation. And a simulation would, in this case, would suggest it's not, dreams are not just visual. They can be auditory. So does dream states, do they create, do they take into the five senses? Are there more senses that are kind of built into this augmented reality or this disconnected dream state or state of consciousness, as I think you called it? So, yeah, it's multisensory. So you can, you know, your brain activity is allowing you to see in your dreams. They found that you're actually when you look at people in REM, their eyes are when their eyes move, they're actually following something within their dream, which is so fascinating.
[14:10] Yeah, it's multisensory. So you experience it. And it was really interesting. One of the things that really piqued my interest was when I was speaking with different scientists, and they said, sort of a resounding common thought is, you know, we, we discount our dreams, we devalue our dreams, we just we don't see the importance of them. But we look to our waking lives, and we look at all of the experiences and the thoughts that we have, and we reflect on our waking lives. We should do the same for our dreams, because if we spend a third of our lives asleep, you know, what's happening during this time? And it made me think about how...
[14:52] Self-development either on your own or if you're in therapy and you're looking to try and understand different perspectives maybe on yourself and you know reframe maybe an experience that happened in your life one of the things that I find so valuable about when you look at a dream is looking at your perspective and how you're reacting to something or what you're thinking about something it seems it's a bit of a portal into a different side of you that is accessible uh you just have to know how to accept access it and that's what i'd like to explore in the second half of our conversation i i'm just really curious so my my challenges i think that's a really good advice being able to analyze and maybe take apart our dreams to try to understand them more as we do in our conscious daily lives my challenges and maybe this is a common challenge is once i wake up the dream automatically fades it it just i might have sort of um.
[15:55] Little bits of maybe the little threads of it but i i generally can't remember the entire dream or i just remember a fragment or like the the immediacy of a dream like the last moments i find that the dreams that i do remember are those that's where i might have a nightmare or it's emotionally like emotionally invested like that's what I tend to remember but those may be fever dreams or when my body's too warm and it's wrapped up in too many blankets and it's trying to wake me up or whatever it is but is this a common thing where we tend to forget our dreams upon wakening.
[16:33] Yes it is so okay a lot of people and a lot of people think you know I've heard many times during the research so if if you're out or you're chatting with someone and you say you're writing a book on dreams, the first thing is either they'll tell you a really fascinating dream or, or they'll say, Oh, I don't dream. And so I've asked different scientists, and it's just that we don't remember our dreams when we wake up. So if you're going to use your dreams in different ways, a really good tool is to have a piece of paper and a pen at your bedside table. So and And also, I find that helps me fall asleep. So, you know, if I have something on my mind, if something's bothering me, if I'm trying to work through even, say, a.
[17:20] Work problem or trying to understand a concept anything if something's really pressing on my mind I find that I'm thinking about it as I fall asleep and if I am sometimes that's a that's the sort of a creative area an area sleep onset for creativity and so I find it's better for ideas you can get really great ideas at that point so I'll wake up and write down what I'm thinking But also, I find that if you put down something that's on your mind, it almost gives you the freedom to sort of let it go and get on with sleeping and dreaming.
[17:58] So, yes, it's very common to not remember your dreams.
[18:03] And a way to remember them is to report them, journal them. Them so you you take and then the intentionality the act of saying okay i'm going to use my dreams or i'm interested in looking at my dreams it's been shown that that actually helps you uh remember them so it's the it's it's that moment when you first wake up you have to you have to scribble down what you can i'm exactly the same so if i'm thinking about something then if i wake up and think about it. Sometimes I'll tell myself, oh, I'm going to remember this later. It's okay. I don't have to write it down, but it doesn't happen that way. Unless it's emotionally charged. Then if it's got this emotional salience to it, then I might remember, or as you said, a nightmare. So nightmares oftentimes are, as we know, frightening dreams. And you usually wake up, wake yourself up oftentimes before there's a resolution.
[19:06] Before you have that ending right so that's very common like a cliffhanger to be continued yes right but then the problem is it is a cliffhanger but then you have a recurring dream and it can be very very upsetting right so you can you can have a recurring upsetting dream and nightmares they can be debilitating so there's um one of the one of the therapeutic tools is it's called image rehearsal therapy and so during the day what you do is you rehearse a different way of looking at that dream and i found it fascinating um i was speaking with antonio zadra and i didn't realize i thought that it would be you would want to change the ending i would i always think of like if i have a nightmare it would be the ending that would be upsetting but off but it's dependent on the dreamer so it could be the beginning it could be a detail in the dream it's the dream can be changed in so many different ways to have
[20:11] a different reaction to the dream i found that.
[20:13] Fascinating so in a sense that's like reframing in uh talking about behavior psychology where we may not be able to influence the situation but we can influence our perception or situation by reframing or giving a different meaning but this is in case for the dreamscape or the dreams during the day we can actually remember our nightmare to the degree we can and try to find another perspective yes and it's and nightmares are uh related to our mental health which is an area that i really i'm very interested in looking at how our dreams reflect our mental health and our well-being. And a lot of people who have terrible nightmares, then also it can be an indicator of a mental health issue. So that's really important to look at.
[21:05] And one thing I found really interesting was this idea that dreams can be used as a marker for mental health. So not only do they show if you have, say, ill-being, it's ill-being and well-being. So So, let's say that you have ill-being during the day, you are more likely to have negative dreams. But what they've found recently is that if you have well-being, it actually also relates to your dreams. So, it can show, say, for example, peace of mind. That's a totally new area in well-being.
[21:46] Peace of mind. Yes.
[21:49] And Auntie Ravonzo and Pilar and Sika and different colleagues were looking
[21:53] at specifically how peace of mind influences our dreams. So if we're feeling it's that sense of harmony and contentment, and how does that reflect our dreams?
[22:07] And it's found that if you have peace of mind, you are more likely to have positive dreams. And if you have so well-being and then if you have ill-being then you're more likely to have negative dreams which i've it's it's very interesting because then that says could we one day look at how we can shape our dreams to have that peace of mind within our dreams say a calm state peaceful state in order to then uh shape our waking well-being so instead of just looking at one is it bi-directional so instead of going is it just from waking to dreams could we go the other way which is whether looking at well-being or ill-being that's reflected in nightmares and the our dreams are as you said can be a marker of mental health and so coming back to your paper pen um uh tool keeping in the side of the bed so if i wanted let's say i'm having a lot of great dreams or having a lot of terrible dreams by by doing the paper pen at the side of my bed and on the waking of consciousness i immediately do it so the more that i practice this.
[23:20] Tool that you've recommended does does it become easier to capture my dreams is it does so it's almost a habitual pattern that i create within my brain that's what i've been told so exactly so you get used to actually the idea of or the act I should say of reflecting and reporting on your dreams and it's very similar to the idea of you know writing down different things in waking life in order to reflect then you can do that practice of of recording and of reflecting so one idea which has been around for many decades is it's well established now that what happens in our waking life is often, predominantly, it's reflected in our dreams. So it's called the continuity hypothesis, and it's not just our experiences they've found, but it's our thoughts, our emotions, our preoccupations and concerns, which I'm really interested in, and how we take those and we carry them with us into the dream world. And so that's what we're exploring. So I find it interesting.
[24:31] If you look at what you're dreaming about, is there something that you keep coming back to? And one idea that was brought up is, you know, we don't in our waking lives, we don't look at things in an isolated way.
[24:48] We don't say, oh, we thought of this one thing or we had this one experience. We often look at it together, like as a whole. So if we look at our dreams in a similar way, and we look at different, we look for different patterns, or different themes, maybe we'll find something that's preoccupying us and weighing on our mind. And i find it interesting how what is on our mind what are we dreaming about and also how are we exploring that because it's not usually the same way we um as an example uh a very common dream a common stress dream i found are exam dreams so many people.
[25:34] Dream of exams even years after being in school so you'll dream about um the whole idea the exam stress but what's really unique and personal and this kind of gets into the whole idea that it's this common experience but it's also a very personal experience is that it's how it's the details so i might forget where the room is that i'm supposed to be writing the exam whereas if you dreamt it maybe you get there and the exam pages are blank so it's all about how we dream it is very personal and i find it really interesting how you can explore one concept one concern one preoccupation so many different ways and and then you just bring it and then you can think about it in your in your daily life and incorporate it for self-development or even just Just reflection, creativity. There's so many ways you can use it. In the audio version of this podcast, people can't see me smiling because when you said the exam dreams, even now, it's not so often. But when I was doing my clinical psychology degree, my graduate degree, part of it was a statistical course. And I was never a big fan of stats. But it was something I had to learn when I was writing my thesis and such.
[26:52] And there was these exams that we had to take. And stats wasn't one I really scored high on. And I still, to this day, have a stress that I haven't studied enough or I've been skipping classes. I never skip classes, but I have this dream. And it's like, I get up in the morning. And those are one of the things that I remember, one of those dreams. I know it's not a sexy dream.
[27:16] A statistical exam in university. But it just gets you. Yeah, yeah. It just stays with you. And you keep thinking, I had to live through this once. Why am I doing this again? That's what I always think. And I keep, I'm always down long corridors and I keep forgetting where I'm going. And then I think, but then I say to myself, my dream self, but I know where I'm going because this is the same classroom that I always went to, but it never seems to get me there.
[27:41] Okay. That's fascinating that a lot, this is a comment I never knew.
[27:46] I never really shared it. It's not that exciting. Right. And I usually forget about it until I have the dream, but I didn't that I thought I least, at least i find that fascinating when you talk about yeah common is exam dreams what really yeah so that's really cool and what is also really interesting if you're if anyone's interested in doing an analysis of their dreams and to compare how common um say uh emotions are versus other people's dreams i found this fact there's this really fascinating uh website dreamresearch.net and it's basic by william domhoff and it's an invaluable resource it's amazing and so it goes through there's um it's called the hall vandecastle uh dream content uh analysis and coding system and it's really interesting because there's these norms that you can compare your own dreams to So you can look at these norms that were put together and you can say, do I have more aggressive dreams than compared to these norms? Do I dream about certain things more than other people? And it's really a neat thing.
[29:02] Way to look at your dreams in comparison to what are common emotions common thoughts those kind of things um because also uh they've found that it's it's quite remarkable approximately 80 percent um of our dreams or a majority if you'd like to say of our dreams are negative so sorry 80 percent you said that's what i've read that 80 in different places i've read that approximately 80 of our dreams they have a negative tone of some sort and so i find that really interesting um there's different there's different theories why um we can talk about what you find that really resonated for you when it were in regards to why 80 or close to 80 has a negative tone own it makes me think about how two things it makes me think about how we carry our preoccupations and concerns with us into our dreams so it's it's like a testing ground we're we're going through all of these different preoccupations and we're thinking about them in different ways our mind is has is free it's it's more in certain times of the night where we can associate things more freely, think about things in a different way. So it reminds me of how there's that continuity is the first thing.
[30:31] And if there's things that are weighing on us, then we'll play those out in our dreams. And these can be.
[30:39] All different types of problems. So the exam dream, or maybe you're just trying to figure out how to solve a problem at work, or maybe you're preparing for a presentation, or there's all different things that we could be preoccupied by. Maybe you're thinking of an upcoming job interview or anything that comes to your mind.
[31:00] And then the other thing is one of the possible Functions of Dreams, and it was many years ago now, several years ago now, was by Antti Ravanzo, and it's called The Threat Simulation Theory. And so he came up with this idea that we test, we try out all these different threats in our dreams. It prepares us. So trying out all these scenarios in our dreams prepares us for whatever dangers we may encounter in our waking life. Life so um he was telling me about how one of his nightmares was a recurring nightmare he he in the summers he spent his summers at a summer house about an hour outside of turku in finland and they would have these thunderstorms and they would he would watch them come rolling across the water and then some or and he would see that or sometimes he'd be woken up in the night and And his parents would get him, they would all go to the car for safety until the storm was over. And so he had a recurring dream about thunderstorms, but it would be played out in different ways.
[32:15] So it would sometimes just be a storm. Other times, he said he paired it with actually a dream that was in Terminator 2 about a nuclear explosion. So then sometimes the thunderstorm would morph into this nuclear explosion and
[32:31] he didn't know what he was running from. So that's one idea is that we're using our dreams to simulate in this simulated virtual world, and he talks a lot about that, we're using it to simulate different potential dangers in order, and it's a good thing. It's helping us prepare so it's not that it's it's not that it's always a bad thing it's that we have to try and prepare i almost wondered if it's connected to this negativity bias that all of our brains have and just to inform any listeners who don't know it i know you understand what it is karen but it's the idea that our brains tend to constantly search the environment for potential threats or dangers to life and limb and so we tend that's why we tend to look for problems that's why we tend to see the negative side of things and that's obviously the negativity bias do you think that that's a little bit of a logical connection between this threat simulation.
[33:31] Threat simulation theory, And he looks back to, you know, the hunter-gatherer times when it was that fight-or-flight response, and you have to, you're preparing yourself, you have to run, you have to hide. Do you run? Do you run? Do you hide? What do you do? Let's try out all these different things to increase our chances of survival. And while the threats today are obviously much different, one thing that I found so interesting, I was talking to him and I was asking about COVID and it was so remarkable how we had this, how overnight this new threat they found became incorporated into our dreams. And so suddenly, you know, most of us pre-COVID-19 pandemic, most of us were probably not dreaming about masks and the danger of, say, you hear someone coughing in a crowded space and you don't have a mask, the danger of potentially contracting the virus. And then suddenly it was almost overnight.
[34:41] We carried this new threat into our dreams and it was reflected in our dreams so quickly. And it really showed how our stress, our daytime stress is reflected in our dreams.
[34:56] And I found that so interesting. interesting um i don't know about you no no i find that fascinating because one of the things right after covid right i talk a lot about the brain and leadership and you know relationships and such and communication and one of the things that corporations kept approaching me even a magazine asked me to write something on something called proximity bias and proximity for those who use english as second language is distance because of people had a lot of people not everyone but a A majority of people had social anxiety being around crowds, even after COVID had pretty much passed as the dangerous COVID. Today, we have COVID. It's just like the flu kind of thing. But anyway.
[35:38] People had social anxiety. People had proximity bias, right? How close do I get to someone, right? Or when it came to meetings or teams or on Zoom. So I can see that I, myself, someone who works with this every day, I was susceptible to this too. What you speak of really resonates with me because I remember back to those dreams. And back to the Finnish researcher you were talking about, where he was dreaming of nuclear bombs or the mushroom cloud. I haven't thought about it years until you kind of triggered my thinking. I remember I used to love this band called Alphaville, the German band, and they had a song called Forever Young, right? Yeah. And I remember in the 80s, you used to see Gorbachev and Reagan. They were talking about nuclear war and disarmament and that song. And I remember it wasn't a constant dream, but I had to dream quite often about nuclear war, about mushroom clouds over the city of Toronto and such. And what would I do? I don't remember the details, but I remember remnants of the feelings of those dreams.
[36:44] You wake up with that sort of, exactly. And sometimes you wake up and not remember the details of a dream, but I often wake up and left with a feeling. And then I try I lie there and try and rewind in my mind what was I thinking about what was why am I left with this feeling and there's nothing like when you wake up from a great dream and you just feel kind of great and I feel that it is carried with you that sense of you know it's that feeling of sometimes wonder or just contentment and it can carry with you through the day as well, the opposite is true. If you've had a very upsetting dream, you know, if you suffer from nightmares, often people don't wanna go to bed because they're worried that they're gonna dream of the same recurring event, which is so difficult. You know, so there's that.
[37:39] Music.
[37:47] First part of our conversation karen explores the multi-faceted functions of our dreams the first one is memory consolidation processing dreams help in organizing and solidifying our memories the second was learning who are dreaming aids in learning and integrating new information the third was emotion processing or emotional processing where dreams allow us to process emotions and come to terms with various experiences and the fourth which is the most curious i think is threat simulation. By simulating threats in different scenarios, our dreams prepare us for the real-life dangers and problems of our waking lives.
[38:24] Now, in Karen's research, she emphasizes that dreaming and waking life are part of a continuum of consciousness, with dreaming being an altered state disconnected from external stimuli.
[38:34] She says that dreams are multi-sensory experiences that reflect our daily lives and emotions. She also suggests that reflecting on our dreams, just as we do with our daily experiences, well, that is important, it is key, since we spend a significant portion of our lives sleeping. Karen also mentions the continuity hypothesis, that what happens in our waking lives is a reflection in our dreams. So it's not just our experiences, but it's also the thoughts and the emotions and the preoccupations and the concerns we've had throughout the day that show up in our dreams.
[39:06] And our ill-being or sense of well-being, well, that's reflected in our dreams. And if we're constantly having nightmares this could be a reflection of our mental health and so whether we're having good dreams neutral dreams or bad dreams you know if there is connective tissue between if there's a recurring dream recurring theme then maybe we should take some time and to look at it to analyze it to understand at a deeper level what's going on in our brains because that may be a message a signal that we need to address or that we could benefit from so now let's slip back into this dream with part two with my fascinating conversation of dreams and how we can use them.
[39:49] Music.
[39:57] People sometimes say to me, you know, Jason, I get up at three, four in the morning, my mind's just racing with all the things that I might forget or I have to do. And one of the techniques I was taught early in the graduate school when I was both in clinical and corporate was that, you know, through the day, check in with yourself. What are your concerns? What are the things that you need to remember or need to plan or structure, right? And by doing this through the day, what happens is that our brains are able to settle down because they think that, okay, Jason has written this down. It's calendared in. He's scheduled it. He's talked to the person. He's made a to-do list. And so by the time you come to sleep, most of us, that's when we start thinking about it or when we're just so exhausted. We sleep and then all of a sudden our brain wakes us up and then you're going to forget this. You're going to forget this. But I have found time and time again over the years of experience working with different people that if they kind of just catalog and do a little sort of an inventory check once or twice during the day, it doesn't really build up. And over time, I'm not saying this is the light switch, it's more of a dimmer switch.
[41:03] By the end of doing this a few times, they find that they're not waking up at 3, 4, 5 in the morning, you know, and can't get back to sleep. And again for me it's really interesting yeah i'm also making the connection with what you're saying with the pen and paper but at your bedside table what and so i was also it's very interesting i i read something about how you could give your because rumination really impacts your sleep quality and potentially the idea is that it also could whatever you're ruminating ruminating over you could bring it with you into your dreams and you could dream about that it impacts your sleep quality, it's been found that you'll wake up more if you're concerned or worried.
[41:47] So it really is yet another, I find another sign that we really need to address what might be on our mind. And I was reading somewhere, one tip was to, as you said, give yourself a certain time to think about these things. So that because if you push, push it away during your waking day, during the waking time you can always distract yourself with so many things but then i find that when you lie down at night then different thoughts will come back but if we have certain times in the day that maybe we could look at these things what are we thinking about what is pressing on our mind then maybe we're lighter our mind is lighter when we lie down i find that so interesting i guess it's almost along the same mechanism as processing emotions we can push emotions away they'll go away but they will come back so much more intensely. But if we process them, then the message is being received from our physiology to our psychology. And they slowly peter out. They quiet down.
[42:51] And so what they found, this was many years ago, on thought suppression, was that if you try and suppress a thought, it will rebound during the day. They also found that it rebounds at night. So if we're trying to, the whole act, the actual act of suppressing the thought, rather than, this was the thing that I found so fascinating, not exactly, it might not be the emotional attachment to the thought. So it's the act of trying to suppress, not necessarily what the thought is about, that makes it rebound. So it was Daniel Wegner and Megan Kozak-Williams and colleagues, they did this study, this white bear experiment. And so they had people sit and they had some people think about a white bear and some people could think about whatever they wanted to think about. And then there were other people who thought about the white bear and they went. So the people who there were two groups, sorry, there were two groups who thought about a white bear.
[44:02] The people who were told not to think about the white bear later, it rebounded. The idea of the white bear rebounded and it just kept popping into their mind. But if you're allowed to think about something, it's not going to rebound into your mind in the same in the same way. So i find that interesting and they chose a white bear because it's it's neutral and it relates to dostoevsky he talked about a white bear but it's really interesting so if you sit and you say okay.
[44:30] I'm going to think about the white bear for two minutes and then after that you say i'm not going to think about the white bear then you had to tick on a piece of paper how many times you thought about the white bear and it was remarkable how many times it kept popping into your mind So I, it really says that we have to, we have to deal with what's on our mind, I think. As in waking life. Yeah, yeah. My evil producing mind right now is thinking about playing golf where you could actually tell, tell your buddy, hey, don't, don't think about that sand trap or the water trap. Right? Right. Exactly. Don't do that, folks. It's just. Yeah. You're sitting there. I see. Are you standing there thinking, I see that water. I can't think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Maybe I should aim for the water. Maybe I should aim for the water and then I won't get there. Exactly.
[45:18] I was wondering, before we go into the tools of sort of dream utilization, one fascinating area I'd like to talk to you about is, I guess, lucid dreaming. Perhaps you could maybe define what lucid dreaming is and, yeah, from your research.
[45:36] So lucid dreaming is the conscious, it's the awareness that you're dreaming. So let's say you're, pick any dream, you're walking, you're maybe walking through a forest, and then you look at something and say there's, oftentimes something bizarre happens or something that doesn't seem to make sense. And it's atypical. And then you say, wait, that shouldn't be happening. And then you are aware, you say, I'm, you say to yourself, I'm dreaming. So lucid dreaming is an awareness that you're dreaming while you're in the dream state. So it's really fascinating because once you have awareness, there's all different ranges of lucidity. So you can have that pure awareness of being in the dream state.
[46:27] But often for me, I will say to myself, oh, I think this is a dream. But then I tell myself but I'm really interested in what's going on right now so I'm just going to let myself be carried away with the dream so yeah.
[46:44] It's a state that comes and goes. Just because you get lucidity, it's very difficult to maintain.
[46:52] But if you are able to maintain this awareness, this consciousness during the dream state, then you're able to work on controlling your dream. So you could change your dreamscape, the dream world, how it looks. You could change what you're doing, who's in your dream. Dream and then of course this could be for for fun it could be for entertainment you could try and fly i've talked to different people and a lot of people say when they first realized that they were dreaming they decided to go outside and fly because it's so exciting that that feeling that you'd be able to fly other but there's many uses you could use it for creativity you could use it to solve a problem there could be therapeutic uses the thing that i'm really interested in is how this could potentially be used to let's say cultivate a calm dream state say you're you can do certain things if you practice during the day how you cultivate a calm mind maybe if you are able to control and manipulate shape your dreams from within your dreams you're able able to create this calm state and then or different therapeutic uses you could use it to.
[48:09] Say uh control a recurring nightmare or even just a bad dream there's so many ways that you could you could use it um a recent study this was so fascinating and it's it.
[48:24] Just you know catapults the the dream research and specifically lucid dream research is uh ken pallor at northwestern university and karen conkley who was the lead author on this study they did um for the first time ever they achieved two-way communication from the waking world to the.
[48:46] Dreaming world so there was a subject christopher masrick was in the lab and they practiced during the day um cues to know that he was lucid so you would use cues to know like let's say you heard a sound sounds external stimuli so if you hear it in your dream you know that you you are dreaming you could use sound you could use some people use uh smell light touch different external stimuli so he when he was in his dream he had they made this eye signal to say to indicate that he was lucid so he became at when he first joined this lab he had not had a lucid dream so then he got very good at it and he was one of the people who i chatted with and he said it's the intentionality and he started a dream journal and writing about his dreams and really reflecting on them then he started to lucid dream and karen was waiting for the eye signals to signal that he was he was in he was lucid in his dream because this happens when you're in rem and so your body is paralyzed but your eyes go back and forth and ram the rapid eye movement of rem so he did the.
[50:06] Predetermined practiced eye movements to indicate. And then the fascinating thing was that she threw, it was a recorded voice. It was her voice and it was a calm recording of her voice. She asked him.
[50:22] Uh math problems so there's only one obviously there's only one right answer with a math problem they were he had practiced doing this so he knew that this would happen but he didn't know what math problems he would get so he answered correctly he answered uh it correctly twice so then it showed that not only can many many years ago the uh groundbreaking uh experiments Experiments with Stephen LaBerge and Keith Herron, they show that you can signal that you are lucid from a dream. So that has been known for a very long time. But the fascinating part and what's new now is that you can communicate back and forth. And so if you look at all the potential uses for this, even just in terms of dream research, you can study dreams from within. You can see how long is, how does time work in dreams? You know, how long does a scenario play out versus real time?
[51:25] There's so many different aspects that you can study. And in terms of psychology, all the different questions that we could ask in our waking life, maybe there's potentially, there's questions that we can ask in our dreaming life.
[51:41] And so there were several different groups at the same time. So it was American researchers, a group in the States, a group in France, in Germany, and in the Netherlands. So they were all separately working on these two-way communication lucid dreaming studies. And then they all came together when they found out that they were working at the same time, then they came together and published together. So it really shows that this was across different populations using different stimuli and achieving this two way communication. So this conduit that they've between the waking and non waking state, as you said, you can manipulate time, you can manipulate what have you to ask certain questions. And I think you were also sort of referring to it to some extent to that. This could actually be, um.
[52:38] A technique, a sort of a therapy technique to help people deal with ill-being or well-being in the sense that if you are feeling well-being, how can you continue it? Or if you're having these nightmares, which could be an indicator of mental health or our preoccupations or worries or concerns or phobias even, that this conduit that they've discovered could be a new type of therapy technique? Or has it already launched into some early steps into?
[53:10] I think that this is where they're looking. working potentially how could this potentially be used as a therapeutic tool from my knowledge it's not being used right this is all new the two-way communication so the possibilities now they're looking into well-being is an area i'm really interested in and i found out that this is an area that is there's a lot of research going on now and how dreams can be used to to impact our well-being and better our waking lives so there's so many different possibilities with this um it's fascinating and there's another area it's just so fascinating so this gets into this gets into the idea of dream engineering so that is it sounds to me that this is you know the next frontier in dream research it's how we can shape guide control, our dreams for different purposes.
[54:06] So there was, as an example, I spoke with Adam Horowitz and he, along with his colleagues at MIT and Harvard, they developed this, he developed this device, it's called Dormio, and basically it's using technology to help you understand. Dream about this particular thing so I can do you want me to tell you how it works yeah yeah I'm fascinated it's so it's so interesting the mic is all yours okay so basically the way it works is he's an example of a tree but you can you can decide whatever you want to think about and this is this is looking at the area of the time of sleep it's sleep onset so it's that beginning of the sleep cycle when and this has been found to be a time of potentially of great creativity so he you can look at take the idea of a tree and as you're falling asleep you can.
[55:10] You're trying to think about a tree you're falling asleep and then when you reach sleep onset when this device it's like a it's a glove but it also can you can also do this anyone can do this at home without the device about around 10 to 15 minutes after you fall asleep get into bed you usually start falling asleep and then you're woken up with say either a sound if you're not using this device or it could be um touch so it could be uh you could feel something on your hand and then what they found is that when you're you're thinking about a tree you're thinking about it in all different creative ways. It's not that you're just thinking about it in this one concrete way. So you have this time in which it's this creative reassociation time in your mind where you can, you can explore and delve into things in a totally unique way. And it, you know, reminds me of how it's related to say, it's your, it's your brainstorming in a different way, but it's your, you're going into the sleep cycle.
[56:21] So it's like when you're brainstorming your mind wandering during the day and you let your mind wander, you start thinking about things in different ways. But this is a different, it's a different type of brainstorming. And I find that so interesting. So let me just make sure I rewind and understand here. So if I wanted to be creative about a tree, so just before I go to, as I go to sleep, I'm thinking about the tree and I try to keep my mind on the tree. And before I do that, maybe I set my smartphone to go off in 20 minutes or something. Just 15, about 10 or 15, let's say 10 or 15 minutes. And so as I move from that consciousness, slide through that spectrum into unconsciousness or the dream states.
[57:04] This is the most creative point. And at that 10 or 15 minute point, I get up, use your other first tool that you said, paper and pen at my side, and just start writing. Just write anything as silly or as profound as that thought or pictures come. Get them down. Emotions, thoughts, metaphors, pictures, whatever. Is that what I understand?
[57:27] Exactly. So I'm going to try and do this. I haven't done it yet, but I'm going to do it. So it's going to be great. Great. So, I want to do it on what is a dream. So, I want to just keep the word instead of tree, I want to have the word dream in my mind. And obviously, it's on my mind quite a bit right now. But so, I'm thinking about it all the time. So, I want to see how I can look at it. It made me think of it because when I'm talking to different scientists and researchers, I love the idea of looking at dreams as this, you know, continuum of experience and continuum of thought and how you how during the day our thoughts were so um there's all these things coming at us and we're not able to have this freedom of thought so it's there's this continuum of experience so i want to look at what is a dream is it is it this multi-sensory um experience is it a virtual simulated reality that's disconnected from our all the different ways we can look at dreaming so i'm going to try and do it. And then I'm going to do a timer. I have it all set up and I'll do a timer. And Adam was helping me with it. It's great.
[58:37] Well, that's incredible. I was just thinking about your, uh, your husband, who's a painter, you have this brilliant, uh, orange painting behind you. That's something he could definitely do, you know, to help his, he seems like a very super creative guy already, but I guess he could become a super creative guy, but nonetheless. So that's what happened.
[58:54] So that's a lot of writers, artists, they can also do that with lucid dreaming. So what they do is they dream about i've i was speaking with someone about this and they dream about uh benjamin baird was telling me how you you dream about walking and opening a door to let's say an art gallery and you're looking at all these paintings but all the paintings you're looking at are a creation of your mind so you're creating these paintings in your dream and then if they wake up certain artists or composers he was speaking with a composer they wake up and then write down the ideas or sketched it out and this came it's so fascinating how it's it's part of you it comes from you but it's a different aspect of you it's a different side of you that you can tap into.
[59:43] That's fascinating because you know again my brain's making some connective tissues here between with what you're saying and some of the things that i i do or i you know in my practice as a sparring partner with uh my clients and one of the things you know sometimes where we We may be at a party, this happens, someone's telling our names, we forget their names, and we're thinking, thinking, oh, I can't remember. But then when we're driving home, it pops up. And so sometimes what I say to clients is if they're working to try to crack a code or there's some sort of conundrum they're trying to work through, is that, you know, load the mind with all the data, all the information you have, the facts and such. Just load it up so you have some information base and then go for a run, go for a walk, You know take your dog for a walk and just let it go and, And with all that information that you fed your brain, it starts crunching because now it has the freedom because you're focusing on the blue sky or the birds or a podcast or something. And so your brain goes, okay, the conscious mind is, it's busy with something else. Now I have time to crunch it. And sometimes by the end of the walk or the end of the run, the initial threads of a new solution or insights are coming up. Is this kind of connected to what you're saying, but in obviously in the dream state?
[1:01:02] I'm just, I'm nodding because that's what I do too. So if I'm having something that I can't figure out, or I'm trying to figure out a way, the other day I was trying to figure out a way to describe this one type of dream research. And I just, I thought, okay, I've got to get, I've got to get out. So I actually, usually I run, but I was up north and I went for a kayak. And while I'm part of my mind is focusing on paddling and thinking about the trees around me in the water, there's that default, there's this part of my mind that then starts thinking about what's on my mind. And I love that. That's what I do, too. It reminds me. Yeah, it's so it's wonderful. Wonderful. It reminds me of so there's in terms of functions, we talked a little bit about how dreams, dreaming sleep across the sleep cycle can impact memory as well as learning. And it reminds me of two things. The first one, well, actually I'll talk to, so basically Robert Stickhold and Antonio Zadra have, have this theory and it's called Next Up. And I find it so interesting how during REM sleep.
[1:02:19] We make these weak associations so it's a different way of learning so instead of going through um one task and trying to master a task in a certain way we might be associating a memory with all of these different um things in our semantic memory so um i was speaking with antonio zadra and he He said, it's like opening up these drawers in our autobiographical memory and trying to figure out where things fit together. And it makes me think about how you can take something that happened and then you might pair it with something that happened so long ago in your childhood. And I find it so interesting how we make these associations and your mind is so creative. It's free to make these creative associations. It's really interesting that way. I'd like just to rewind back to a conversation about lucid dreaming. We talked about how it can be advantageous and, you know, some of the research, fascinating research. My question is, how does someone get into the practice of lucid dreaming? Like, how do you start it? How can you be conscious? I think you've talked about a few things, but I just like to kind of open that up a little maybe. Because I think that's also talking about sort of the tools for dream utilization, I think. Yes.
[1:03:48] There's different uh practices there's different tools that you can use and i'm going to go into it as well and i'm going to in my book i'm going to have a toolkit at the back to try and give tips that i've learned from different researchers and scientists and it goes very far back and uh stephen laberge wrote a lot about it um there's different practices that you can do to help uh the potential of lucid dreaming so reality checks so they're not sure why this happens but oftentimes times in dreams you don't have the right number of fingers so something to i'm not sure why uh i don't think they know why but so during the day you're supposed to do reality checks and say be aware of your surroundings i'm here right now i'm sitting at my desk i'm looking at my hands i have 10 fingers this is what i see i see a glass doing these reality checks and then when you're in your dream you could look at your hands and see how many fingers you have or sometimes there's a problem with the light switch if you try in your dreams to turn on and off a light sometimes it doesn't work I've read there's different things that or reading I think I read something about if you try and read a piece of paper what's on it that's difficult so you can do those kind of things little reality checks also it's the intentionality of saying I want to have, I'm going to really try and have this lucid dream.
[1:05:14] And you can do it from falling asleep, or you can wake yourself up in the middle of the night. Some people wake themselves up and then go back to sleep with the intention of having a lucid dream. So you could just at night fall asleep thinking, oh, I'm going to try and have a lucid dream. I'm really going to think about if I'm dreaming. And then, or you could set an alarm, wake yourself up and say, say okay now i'm going to now i'm going to try and fall back asleep with the intention it's that intentionality again yes and also i when i spoke with different people um it's.
[1:05:51] The regular act of writing down your dreams and recording your dreams and thinking about your dreams and the reflecting on the waking, your waking world and your dream world. So am I, what is in my, what am I looking at? This is all, you know, it's a simulated reality going through my brain right now. What do I see?
[1:06:13] How is it similar when I'm in my dream world? And then trying to tell yourself when you are lucid to be aware i always just get too excited and then i just and either i wake up or i let myself just be carried on by my dream i gotta work on that yeah yeah no okay so it's intentionality i guess also with the tree example when it came to creativity it may be just that the intention of dreaming about how to see a tree in another creative process that intentionality without waking yourself up at 10 or 15 minutes but it could be a way into that lucid dreaming aspect and that gets into with the tree example that we talked about that that type of dream engineering that gets into the idea of dream incubation so you incubate on a problem or something that you want to think about and then And you can take that and really explore it, whether it be a tree or what is a dream or anything, and just really explore that. It's really interesting. And so I guess, I'm sorry. No, no, no.
[1:07:20] I was also thinking about, back to what you're saying, how dreams, or at least recurring dreams, or recurring themes of dreams, whether they be...
[1:07:32] Good dreams or bad dreams, depending on how we define it, that could be an indicator of mental health or some mental challenge, such as rumination,
[1:07:42] if it's more negative thinking that we're thinking about and how it comes up. So would you say some of these lucid dreamings, these techniques you talked about, reality checks, intentionality, and incubating are ways of us trying to deal with these dreams to try to understand the elements the dna to try to help ourselves move from ill being to well-being, i i look at i'm really interested in how we can use our dreams to better our waking lives however we want to so exactly to to better our well-being we could use lucid dreaming we could use dream incubation we could use dream analysis you you could use the different tools to see what patterns are happening in your dreams and then it's up to us to choose if that has meaning or not so, do we what meaning do we take from it maybe there isn't any maybe we feel that there isn't or maybe we feel that there is and definitely i find that it's ways that we can use our dreams to better our waking lives and that's what really fascinates me about dreams how it's this you know we spend a third of our lives sleeping and a great portion of that dreaming and how we can really learn a lot about ourselves and.
[1:09:01] Try and solve problems and come up with creative solutions and all these different things that we try to do during the day we can also look at doing it at night when we're sleeping and so recurring dreams if it's the same sort of similar maybe not identical course but similar dreams around the same theme it may not be something negative but is it a way sometimes the unconscious mind is trying to communicate to the conscious mind to to recall something because a lot of the.
[1:09:30] Times as you say it's a very strange uh territory ecosystem we're working because it's it's uh it merges and it morphs but i sometimes wonder if if person's having a recurring dream let's say it's not nothing super negative or super good but it's just a recurring dream right would that indicate there may be something that the deeper mind state is trying to connect or to communicate to the the conscious mind it makes me think personally why do i keep dreaming about something what could be the reason why and so i would be looking if that happens to me i'm looking for common themes like it might not be the same dream but maybe there's something that i'm trying to explore work out go through and it could be positive or negative why do i keep coming back to this one thing what is what is this indicating and i think it goes back to it's our choice how we how we use our dreams because a lot of people just don't pay attention to sleep or to dreams and there's obviously much there's a lot of awareness about the importance of sleep there's there should be the same awareness for the importance of dream sleep and how How important it is for our physical health, our mental health.
[1:10:58] Our well-being and personal development and how we can see ourselves differently.
[1:11:04] That's what I'm so interested in.
[1:11:07] Another question that just sprang to mind is, is there a connection between sort of hypnosis and I'm not talking sort of trick stage hypnosis, I'm talking deep therapy hypnosis and the dream state? Is this somewhere along this continuum between conscious and unconscious or between awareness and dream state? So, it's another altered state from what I understand. It's another altered state of consciousness.
[1:11:34] And how different, even how when we're daydreaming, mind wandering, that's an altered state of consciousness. Consciousness and what was really interesting i'm just writing about this now um there's a group and they call themselves the dream team they're at stanford and it's through uh boris heifetz lab and it's harrison chow and pillar and sika and colleagues and they're looking at anesthesia induced dreams so what they found is that when you come out of anesthesia and it's a gentle slow awakening before it's just under the surface of consciousness you get into this very peaceful calm state of mind and it's during this time that people are having the most the word that is being used is that when I speak with different dreamers is transformational. There's have, they're having these transformational dreams and it reminded me what you were saying, because it's similar to.
[1:12:44] Psychedelic medicine so how it's the role of a very powerful experience to change your thoughts behaviors in your waking life because it seems quite remarkable that say one dream could have such an impact on a person but when you speak with these people it's so.
[1:13:03] Impactful and so what's happening is they're revisiting something in this peaceful calm state of mind so you're you're you don't have that arousal that emotion that emotional arousal but you're revisiting what could potentially be a very traumatic experience but it's as if in this peaceful state of mind you're able to process differently and what's happening is then when you come back into the waking world you it's your people are the way that they think about the traumatic the past traumatic event has changed their mindset has changed different people who were suffering from ptsd their symptoms are gone their nightmares are gone it's unbelievable that's really interesting i was going to ask you a question but you've already answered my question because i was listening to a documentary i can't remember it was a podcast or something where soldiers coming back from american soldiers coming back from iraq and afghanistan where they had severe i mean crippling ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder and they they were doing um again through therapy uh psychedelic therapy where it's just that where
[1:14:17] they talked about where they they reached such a sort of a different state.
[1:14:21] Of consciousness a different state of mind that it's this peace is this tranquility and then you can bring up the trauma but from that perspective wherever the mind is they see it from it's it's a whole new level of reframing if i may just use my vernacular and then they come out of it and and those preoccupations those concerns the worry the trauma it is literally or metaphorically melted away, I should say. And they're able to deal with it. I just found that fascinating. I wasn't thinking we're going to go down that avenue, but that was brilliant how you brought that up. Because I used to work with trauma and that's why I find it so super fascinating, right? This is a couple of decades ago, but I just find that fascinating part of the research that you've explored.
[1:15:13] It's so interesting. And so this is very new, and this is happening right now. So what they're now doing is they're looking at it in a non-surgical setting. So they're now looking at it in the lab to see if what's happening, first of all, and to understand it better. We know that they know at this point that the dreams are always or almost always positive. So that's different than typically ordinary dreams which most of our dreams are negative so first of all they're very positive they're so vivid that people call them hyper real they're more than real and i spoke with one person and she said it's more like an experience than a dream you feel that you're really experiencing it so that's what's really unique about these and then it's the transformational aspect because you're oftentimes people are exploring things that may be difficult or things that they wish they had and then they they achieve them in in um in their dreams and so they're looking at this in the in the non-surgical setting and to see how can this be used as a therapeutic tool and that i'm so excited to see what happens because that's amazing that is amazing i'm very Very respectful of your time, Karen. I have one last question. Oh, a couple last questions.
[1:16:32] I was wondering, what did you learn yourself? You've immersed yourself so deeply in the science and the research and the conversations with people in these fields.
[1:16:42] What have you learned about yourself in the process of putting this book together?
[1:16:48] I've learned that we need to value our dreams. We need to look at our dreams in a different light. I personally, I'm now looking at them in relation to how I look at my waking experiences and my waking thoughts and my perceptions and how I can look at my dream experiences and what I'm exploring in my dreams and see what I can get out of that to understand a bit more about what's on my mind. How can i use my dreams and how it's this continuum it's not that dreaming and waking are these separate things there is a continuum and we should look at our dream experiences the way that we look at our our waking experiences and how we can learn from them.
[1:17:41] Fascinating it's such a brilliant conversation i have a dozen more questions i think there may have to be a part two but if people want to follow you if they wanted to reach out and see what you put out there how can they follow you karen or where can they follow you thanks so i just started uh on instagram it's called science of you and me and what i'm doing the The intention is that I'm going to be sharing what I learn along the way. I just every time I have one of these interviews and I meet with someone new, I'm just astounded by all the different things that I learned. And so I'm going to be taking different things that I'm learning and insights along the way and sharing them there. And I would love to hear from people and understand what interests them about their dreams and what they're because it's such a it's such a mysterious altered state of consciousness. that we don't fully understand. So what is it that some people would like to know more about? I'd love to hear from them. Brilliant. I'll be sure to include that in the show notes. Karen, thank you very much for your time today and sharing your knowledge,
[1:18:49] experience, and all your research. I'm really looking forward to this book when it lands. When, we don't know, but that doesn't matter. I'm still looking forward. But in the meantime, we can follow your adventures in Dreamland and the research through Instagram. Thanks so much. This was a great conversation. Thank you. Cheers, Karen.
[1:19:05] Music.
[1:19:14] You know, after this conversation with Karen, you know, I will and I am thinking more deeply about what dreams mean to us and to spend some time. You know, Karen was very articulate talking about certain tools that we can use, such as the pen and paper method to capture thoughts, lucid dreaming, dream engineering. And how our dreams, if there are certain trends, if there are certain reoccurring topics that we dream about, this could be a message from our deeper consciousness to our conscious minds that there may be something to address, something that we need to look deeper into. You know, such as nightmares. If there is a consistent nightmares, well, this is a reflection of our mental health. If we have dreams that fulfill us with awe and we feel awakened and refreshed when we get up, well, that's also a brilliant reflection of our mental health, whether that be well-being or ill-being, regardless along this spectrum. That same spectrum is the same spectrum of consciousness from the dream world to our waking world. And that our preoccupations, our thoughts, our emotions, our concerns, well, we carry them in all states of consciousness. And that if we apply some of the research and learnings that Karen has discovered, well, that could benefit us in the sense of resilience and equanimity and well-being.
[1:20:40] And to access our dreams, well, they're not as easy as our waking lives. When we're awake and we're conscious, it's easy to process and take things apart. But dreams, it's going to take a little more practice. And throughout the episode, Karen's given us a lot of tips and techniques.
[1:20:55] And again, it's like anything else. We practice enough, it becomes habit. It becomes easier. We become more adept at it. So use dreams as a tool to find more resilience, greater optimism and a stronger sense of well-being. Karen, I just want to send you a big thank you for sharing your research and I'm really looking forward to this book when it gets launched. But until then, you can follow Karen's research and adventures in dreamland on Instagram at Science of You and Me. I'll be sure to leave that link in the show notes. Well folks, thank you for showing up for another week and allowing me to be part of your week. I'm always open to hear your feedback and your comments, so please share them with me because it helps me to create a better show for you all. So until the next time, we continue this conversation. Keep well, keep strong, and we'll speak.
[1:21:48] Music.
