Our Big Fat Dream Episode

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, everybody. You already like YouTube, so how can YouTube get any better? Well, we're talking premium, because premium is the super-charge way to experience YouTube. Add free, which means uninterrupted videos, of course. Background play, which lets you keep listening with your screen locked, or offline downloads. You can download your videos to watch anywhere, even without Wi-Fi connection. I mean, as researchers ourselves, like, I'm researching all day long for the show, and I really love not having ads on YouTube premium because it really speeds up the learning process. Whether you're relaxing at home or on the go, it's built for you, because your YouTube experience just got even better with premium. So if you like YouTube, you'll love premium. Sign up now for your free trial, terms, and conditions apply. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. 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

1:03stuff you should know at the moment, if it tried. That's right. I think you're right. Yeah, think about all the elements here. All three of us are present. I just had a kind of an awkward intro. Oh, yeah. This is the main topic that we've done like five sub-topics on already, but we didn't do the main topic yet. This is a straight ahead stuff you should know classic episode. Yeah. And watch this. I'm going to have a little surprise for you and the audience. You ready? Yeah. All right. It is 101 on the dot. I was having a dream six minutes ago. Oh, really? Yeah. What was it? 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 12.55. And it was kind of one of those naps where I was like, am I even sleeping or am I just

2:07getting 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. I woke up, splashed my face. Okay. And then I woke up. 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. I'm sure they will. I'm sure they will. Even more impressive. Jerry is dreaming now. Right. Yeah. I woke up cheap, Alice sleep. 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? No nightmares. I used to have recurring dreams and I was a kid about what?

3:08I had a very specific recurring dream about Gilligan's Island many times when I was a kid. Okay. I think it was a little bit of a scary dream. I don't think it qualifies a nightmare per definition. I could see a lovely howl being like drunk, like being overly friendly, doing that to you as a kid. But yeah, I still remember, 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. Can you share or? Oh, sure. I mean, people sharing dreams is the most boring thing ever. So yeah, I'll give the most condensed version as we were in New York going to 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

4:11that girl from that movie. What was it? And I was trying to find out. And then we passed Rachel Dratch, actor Rachel Dratch. And she looked up because she thought like we were talking about her and Emily went, oh, not you. I know you Stephanie. And what kept walking. That's a pretty good dream actually. Yeah, and it's old Emily that she just cracked up. Rachel Dratch, man. Yeah, she's the best. That's how to know her. She is great. What about you? Or go ahead, what's your question? I was going to say, have you seen the movie? I don't remember what it's called, but where Nicholas Cage starts appearing in like everyone in the world's dream. I haven't seen it yet. I heard it's pretty good. It is. It's actually really good. Especially as far as like, you know, a standard Nick Cage movie these days goes. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of them. What about you, do you dream and remember your dreams typically? I dream and I remember them enough to just kind of give like general outlines of them

5:13or 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. They very frequently have to do with like me having to like 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 to it. It's like, it can get kind of tiring sometimes. Yeah. I sort of have the same thing. My most recurring dream now is in a specific thing, but it's a specific motif, which is I'm trying to get somewhere and I can't get there. Oh, yeah. 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 that time now. 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.

6:15Like you just you just tapped a couple of different dream components on the head with that. 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. Okay. We'll talk about that too. Yeah. A last one I have to share. It's a recurring dream. It starts out really nice. It's a beautiful woman totally naked. Uh huh. And then as I look up higher and higher, it's the head of Abraham Lincoln. You should just matter. No. Don't go all the way to the head. You, uh, do you get the reference though from, uh, days and confused? Uh, no. I do remember that though. Now that you mention it, yeah. One of the friends is like probably best not to look too deeply into that. That's right. Anthony rap, uh, that scene. That's right. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, I've never had that dream. Uh, that would be pretty weird. You know, I bought it because I'm just still waking up, you know?

7:18Sure. 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 and we're doing a bunch of episodes on sleep. So we'll just kind of keep it short. 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 R.A.M. sleep. Uh huh. 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 R.A.M. sleep, uh, rapid eye movement sleep. And this is where generally you're going to be dreaming. And they used to think you only dream during R.A.M. sleep. But now they know that you can dream in both. But R.A.M. sleep is like where you have like the most intense dreams, the ones more likely to remember that kind of thing. Yeah. And we didn't really know about R.A.M. sleep until the 50s. I was surprised to find that out. Um, but when we did discover R.A.M. sleep, people are like, Oh, okay, there's different components to sleep. We need to start looking into that.

8:19And your body does all sorts of interesting things. But the one really important aspect about R.A.M. sleep is in addition to like, this is where you have your dreams, dreams, um, you are paralyzed essentially. Um, you, and they think the reason why it's 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, right? I 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. Yeah, but I didn't think they didn't prove it there. Did they? No, but I was so like they cracked open the heads of poor little mice. And they figured out how to look at what they call basically the, the, the, the eye directional cells. And they found that they were in sync with where the mouse's eyes were looking at

9:24any point during R.A.M. sleep strongly suggests that. What did the mice say about what they were dreaming about? They just said, they're like a beaker from the Muppets. It turns out, Oh, beaker. I love beaker. 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 and we're actually looking at something. Your dream thumb dream comes pretty.

10:25We said a lot of something. Dump things over the years. Your dream comes up there. Thanks, man. 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. They don't know exactly how long they last. And you know, the reason why obviously all this stuff is is because someone's a sleep 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 booking them up to machines and surmising whether or not they're dreaming. Right. 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. That's surprising because I've always heard like dreams last like just a few seconds, but they said to you last hours, which would actually explain the rapid

11:29eye 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. Yeah. That's a good point. Well, I'm basically a dream researcher now. 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. Well, the very fact that we consider dreams to conceivably be symbolic and 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 still applicable. Yeah. I think that's the solution I came to as well, which is like he birthed a lot of ideas. And that maybe is his value these days. Birthed him right out of his sphincter.

12:30But 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 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. I think it's just like us reflecting on ourselves and maybe even trying to work through like problems that we may have. Yeah. So to differentiate those two guys, Freud was like dreams conceal and young 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

13:32any human can understand. Yeah. Like the mythic archetype of Rachel Dratch, exactly who represented the trickster. 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 weird, oh, things popping into your head like Rachel Dratch at art opening. Right. I tend to think like there was 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. I tried to wonder or I tried to wonder 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?

14:33See 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. Yeah. Debbie down. That's kind of my take on it. And if you look at Freud, you look at young interpretations or dream theories, I should say, we've really done away with youngs more than we have with Freud's, you know, yeah, I think you're probably right. But then that's 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 is in a giant penis that you wish you had.

15:34Right. It's just just dreams. Like they just they're just a byproduct of your brain firing while you're asleep. Yeah. 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 four brain trying to make sense of just what's firing around neuron wise while you're in REM sleep. Yeah. It's just just like where it takes your brain firing while you're awake, um, and puts it into like a narrative that usually fairly resembles reality. When you're sleeping, you're, you're getting random impulses according to this. And so it's just doing its best. And sometimes it's best is just plain old weird, like there's Rachel Dratch, you know? Yeah. That's that's it. 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.

16:35As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever flown in my dreams. Have you? I don't think so. All of my dreams now are trying desperately to catch a flight that I can't get me in. But yeah, not actually flying. So there are some characteristics of dreams that these, uh, these guys came up with the activation synthesis hypothesis pointed out. Alan Hobbson and Robert McCarley, by the way, are the guys who figured this out? They said that there's illogical content, right? Check. Yeah. Uh, odd sensory experiences. Yeah. Intense emotions. Yeah. That happens. Acceptance of strange events. That's my favorite one. Oh, yeah. And dreams are always just like, oh, yeah, sure. 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. Yeah. And the other, you know, those were from those two researchers.

17:36Since 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've found all that to be basically true. For sure. All right. So talking more about dreams and specifically, uh, Hobbeson and McCarley, who, you know, researched the stuff in the late 70s, uh, 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 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. Right. But it's, it didn't like explain why we dream. No, uh, no. I mean, it doesn't that it's saying there's no explanation aside from your brain, just firing randomly. Then they're like, just leave it at that. And other people are like, no, I will not leave it at that. Right. I guess also what, what you're saying is that it doesn't explain dreaming.

18:38Francis Crick was like, okay, 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, um, Macarly and Hobbeson just seemed like random firing. But what it's actually doing is sorting through the inputs throughout the day and saying, I'll 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, an elf, you know, and that it's actually like, he called it reverse learning where you're, you're figure, you're sorting through the stuff from the day and that that's what your brain's doing when you're dreaming. Yeah. I don't fully understand that one. I think what he was saying is sure, guys, like, yeah, there's, 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. Yeah. All right. That's well, I think he, again, too, this, uh, research, like he basically was like,

19:38this is a starting point, like he didn't claim to be the, the final point on the matter. Yeah. It's true. Uh, people also think we might dream to process emotions, uh, that clearing the mind clutter kind of goes back to what Cric was talking about, uh, promoting creativity, perhaps, um, maybe as sort of like a dress rehearsal to something that may like scare you in real life. Obviously, like the dreams you have the night before, like a big interview or something in that case. Man, those are the worst that sleep is not refreshing. 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. No, I know or put a resume together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very fortunate. 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 have, we'd never said like, oh, this is the one or this is the most widely accepted one. Even among dream researchers, they're like, there's a divide between whether

20:38people think dreams are functional and do something and others who are like not just random. So that's not been settled, even among the people who study this for a living. Um, and I mentioned dream recall too, right? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's tough. Sometimes I don't remember them at all. Uh, I mentioned that the Rachel Dratch one I had just woken up from that dream. So I definitely remembered and that apparently is one of the keys, uh, 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 it like a dream journal and if you want to remember your dreams, yeah, uh, they say that, you know, to be a waken during that rim sleep is the time to do it. And, you know, they suggest things like setting an alarm to wake yourself up during rim sleep and like keep a pad and a pencil like, uh, if that's what you know, great, I would have a hard time falling back to sleep. So that's not for me.

21:39Right. 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 our REM sleep, like you're groggy for the rest of the day. Yeah. And during sleep studies, because or dream studies, I should say they wake you up purposefully during REM sleep. That'd be terrible for me. Yeah, 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. Taco Bell fourth meal. I rolled the dice about a week and a half ago and had Taco Bell. Oh, wow. How was it? It was great. I was in, I was in the drive-through 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. Did it really? I'm surprised. Yeah. It said that they had worked all that out. Oh, I had, oh, yeah. That's right. I think Taco Bell switched suppliers like basically on day zero. Yeah.

22:39Okay. Cool. That was good. I'm glad. And you haven't been pooping your pants for two straight weeks. Well, I did because I ate Taco Bell. That's why you could tell that you can tell the difference. That happened to me with Crystal once. Oh, oh, yeah. All right. That's probably edited that out. Moving on. 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 and it's up for debate whether they actually do dream because everybody dreams is the idea. 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.

23:40And if not, or if so, then is it just like they, you know, they have more trouble recalling than other people? Right. For sure. And then of course, there's been theories within the dream theory community sense 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. And keep it repressed. There's other people that have said that, you know, other things just like our 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. Yeah. I definitely subscribe to the neuro biological explanation for why dream recall is so hard because there's such. There's some really convincing parts to it, right? Yeah. Like the hippocampus, which is the little component that's responsible for

24:44consolidating short term memory into long term memory. It's, it, 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 short term memory of your dreams into long term memories. That makes sense. Yeah. I'm just now waking up quite honestly. Where what's going on? What's happening? He used such a pro that you just did like half of a podcast while you're still waking up. Oh boy. 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. Yeah. I mean, some people think that if you are like if you're someone who is very prone to introspection or maybe daydreaming, you might be better remembering your dreams during the nighttime or whenever you happen to sleep.

25:44Yeah. But you can, you know, they say you can train yourself to remember your dreams. You know, the dream journal, like I mentioned earlier 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 might have been lucid dreaming. Can you control your dreams? Like when you go to bed, say like as you're falling asleep, trying to say like, I'm going to dream. I'm going to remember. I'm going to remember these dreams. Gonna do it. I've heard it's best to say I must. I must. I must remember my dreams. 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

26:47it. Right. 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. Yeah. That's, that's. Yeah. And not only are you trying to remember the dream, you're trying not to wake up. Yeah. Just from peeing to yes, that definitely works. Like you're just, there's a certain level of consciousness that you'll let your brain rise to. Right. Right. I actually have a dream that I remember because I woke up straight out of it. Literally, it was cool. It was one of the neatest things that's ever happened to me. So I was, I was laying in bed sleeping, dreaming that I was in a 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, my right leg got out of the bed. And the car, like my right leg was awake. Uh-huh. But like the rest of my body hadn't woken up yet because it was still in the car.

27:48But my leg was in my bedroom. 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. Uh-huh. And it was like just some, I don't know, like portola threshold or something that I went through. It was really, really cool, man. Yeah. I love that stuff. I mean, that's why I love dreams because 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 it's what we called it or other people have called it for sure.

28:48Um, that was 2009. So that was like, yeah, early one. Yeah, it was a minute ago. But a dream incubation is another thing. And that's if you want to dream about a certain thing, uh, you try and kind of do the same thing, like focus your attention on that thing as you're going to sleep. Um, and a lot of times people, there, there is one, uh, sort of subset of researchers that say, or maybe just people that, um, think that you can like come up creative solutions for maybe mental or creative blocks while you're dreaming. And so they will try and induce or, uh, incubate a dream as they're going to sleep. Yeah. Um, and it's, it's basically like I want to dream about this. Um, 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've been some famous examples of it. Um, one that usually gets mentioned in, in any kind of, um, list of those, uh,

29:53KKLA, uh, the German chemist, who, um, discovered the structure of the benzene model, uh, molecule, I mean, which sounds like, oh, okay, great. Uh, it was, it required completely different thinking than everything he'd been trained to into 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 in dreamt of or a borosis, a snake eating its own tail. Mm-hmm. And when he woke up, it was just clear as data him that the benzene molecule was in a ring arrangement, a circular arrangement rather than linear. And he was right. Yeah. I mean, you hear stories like that or that Mary Shelley, uh, uh, dreamed up Frankenstein, uh, or other musicians like famous songs came to them in their sleep. And I hear that stuff. And I hear that stuff. And I think that, um, that like the solution to the, uh,

30:58benzene 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. That's my, uh, take on it too. Yeah. That is already there and, and they're, their dream state just allowed them to think about it in different ways in this and waking life. So cool. Yeah. I saw it yesterday and let it be. We're both dreamt by Paul McCartney, river of dreams. Um, that one was like in the middle of the night, that Billy Joel song. Yeah. You didn't like my Billy Joel impression? No, I thought it was funny. Uh, that one was, came to him in a dream. You're not gonna sing yesterday? No. Okay. Uh, Beethoven, uh, had a, uh, some music come to him in a dream, 99 Loof Balloons. Uh, Jimmy Hendrix, purple haze. Yeah. And are you familiar with Apex Twin? Oh, sure. Okay. Apex Twin apparently is a, um, hardcore lucid dreamer and has made bunches of songs by, by lucid dreaming,

32:04like purposely, like going to sleep and dreaming to like work out, you know, music. Cheat code. That's what they call that. You got me with that one. Uh, should we take a break? Yeah. Okay, we'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit more about, uh, dream meanings and nightmares right after this. Hey, everybody, YouTube Premium takes something you already love, YouTube, and makes it even better. The content, the creators, the feeling of finding exactly what you're into for every mood and moment of your day. Like, uh, for example, let's say you want to learn to cook, but you don't have time to go take cooking classes across town. Well, you can find tons of instructional cooking videos all without ads on YouTube Premium. That's right. Premium transforms that experience into a more supercharged, enhanced way to enjoy YouTube.

33:08A YouTube Premium subscription gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits, including, but not limited to add free. So we're talking about uninterrupted videos, background play, so background play lets you keep listening with your screen locked and offline downloads. You can download your videos to watch anywhere, even without Wi-Fi connection. That's pretty awesome. And smart downloads automatically downloads videos by your favorite creators. So even if you forget to download it ahead of time, Premium has you covered. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial, terms and conditions apply. Okay, Chuck. So I think this is going rather well. What do you think? I agree. So there's that whole divide about whether dreams mean anything or if they're just random.

34:08Right. 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? I've got our virgin voyage on the brain, I guess. Right. Yeah. I mean, 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'm not, you know, super woo-woo. So I don't necessarily think that he came to me in a dream and like something that a physical happened. To me, it was just a kid trying to make sense of losing his grandfather and a dream like providing some relief maybe. That's neat. I kind of, there's like a kernel of me that is like it's possible that your grandfather was somehow visiting you. Yeah, I'd like to believe that's true. It was very powerful. I still remember it, you know, all these years later. That's neat. Did he, he was a very critical of you in the dream?

35:09Yeah. No, he literally walked up to me and said, you're going to be okay, bud. And that was it. Oh, wow. Yeah. Like super, I was like, you know, grandad's really on the nose. Right. Oh, yeah. It still makes me emotional all these years later. I was like 10 or 11 years old and I'm 55. Good Lord. 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. And you hear those stories. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. You hear stories all the time about like way more involved dreams in that of like, you know, people from the beyond like getting in touch and stuff. I think it's interesting. Right. 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.

36:11You're you're following in Freud's wake. Yeah. And they're 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. This what you said said anxiety about appearance. So I never really thought about that. But also maybe feeling deceitful or concerns about your health. Teeth falling out. Or your teeth literally fell out, which is kind of funny. Did you dream that they went, right back in? 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. That's interesting. Yeah. 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 in the dream.

37:11Usually 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. No, interesting. Yeah. I thought you were about say she gets grills. You would love a grill actually. There's a grill museum in Atlanta. Did you know that? No, but I'm not surprised. There is one. We haven't been yet. Atlanta's got to be one of the grill capitals of the world. I would guess so. Because it's also like the trap music capital of the world and those things go hand in hand. For sure. What about falling in a dream? This one sucks. I can tell you firsthand. It's typically thought to mean that you feel out of control of your life. Yeah. Being chased. I like this one that you're evading responsibilities. Yeah. That makes sense. What about fire? Fire. Maybe it's about renewal or maybe it's about some anger that you have repressed or maybe purification perhaps or destruction. Yeah. Or I don't think I've ever had this one.

38:12Have you ever had one about being naked in public? 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. But they typically think like you have probably had an embarrassing situation and you're still processing it. Yeah. That makes sense. But the issue with all this stuff is, I said these are stock explanations. They sell books and they get clicks for articles. But it's hard to get a stock explanation because it's so, you can see somebody might see something as awesome in a dream where other people might see it as a threat. It gets very culturally specific, obviously. And even within one culture, things can be interpreted in contradictory ways. So it's hard to say like, well, this is what that means. Right. It definitely seems much more pop culture.

39:12Yeah. The scientific for sure. For sure. And then you would mention recurring dreams. You're recurring dream of running late for something. That's a thing. Recurring dreams, especially recurring unpleasant dreams, or a horror that can be, that can be fall humans, which is very sad. Recurring dreams don't have to always be unpleasant. But from what I could tell, pleasant recurring dreams are essentially non-existent that the best you can hope for are neutral recurring dreams. Right. Most of the time they're at least unpleasant if not, you know, straight up bad dreams. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there's a distinction I mentioned earlier 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 are like it wakes you up. Like it's so bad you wake up, you know, obviously generally like scared.

40:16Does that mean 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. You pulled me into Don't Be Dumb at the end. That was great. That was a great ending in a very new heart way. There's another, there's an author, a neuroscientist named Siddhartha Ribeiro. Ribeiro, I think. They wrote the Oracle of Night, Colin, 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. Right. 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. Yeah. You could not have a recurring dream. Like they're 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.

41:16Yeah. I think I probably agree with that. Yeah. 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. Yeah. There was a study in 1998 that found two to eight percent of adults of nightmares or problematic nightmares at least, and 52 percent of Vietnam veterans did. I know. And that's tough stuff because that's clearly, you know, things that are either buried or that you just can't get over a deal with still in your waking light. 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?

42:17Yeah. 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? Yeah. The therapy is like, okay, 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. Yeah. It's the turn your brown upside down of hellish nightmares. For sure. Right. So at the very least, it's heartening that there is a potential solution, because nightmares, whether you have PTSD or not,

43:17they're linked to self-injury and suicide. Yeah. And even just at the bare minimum, it's going to give you perhaps sleep deprivation, and it can interfere with your normal routines during the day, your job, your relationships. They think there may be a genetic predisposition to frequent nightmares, but they don't know what that is. But they also say, well, it also could be maybe the same like genetic, or at least driven by genetic risk factors of mental health conditions that may be underlying behind the dreams. Yeah. And that actually ties into nightmares in bad dreams, being a characteristic or a trait of Parkinson's disease. Oh, yeah. You found that specifically Parkinson's disease with dementia. I guess 78% of people with Parkinson's disease with dementia have recurring nightmares. Oh, man. Or at least bad dreams. I'm not sure if they actually meet the criteria for nightmare or you wake up, but here, it's not pleasant to go to sleep if you have Parkinson's with dementia.

44:24Yeah. Yeah. We talked about we did a whole episode on fever dreams too. Remember that? Mm-hmm. That was interesting. We did one on sleep paralysis. That's right. And we did one on night tears 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. And isn't that the sleep paralysis is when you like you're asleep, but you picked yourself awake, and there's like someone at the foot of your bed. Yeah. And because you're in REM sleep, you can't move. Yeah. Oh, God. And the night tears are similar in that you appear to other people to be awake because you're screaming and fighting somebody off in your eyes are open, but you are still asleep. Yeah. Kids usually get those, but adults can as well. Mm-hmm. And then what about this idea about like, uh, premonitions like I, you know, there have definitely been people that have to at least said that they have.

45:24That they had a premonition about some very specific historical event, sometimes big time and sometimes just, you know, little, little things that happen in people's families. But you know, the big ones are ones that get all the press like. And in the 1960s, there was a Canadian dreamer named Kathleen Lorna Middleton who. Um, had a lot of dreams about things that she had no connection to. And she at least claimed to have predicted 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. And she doesn't seem to have been like attention seeking or anything like that. She does seem to have been a. Like this, 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 why people think there's such a thing as precognitive dreams.

46:25Your dreams might be a little ambiguous so that you're kind of retroactively going back to me 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. Yeah. Um, so it could be putting together stuff that's not really necessarily connected. Um, selective memory, coincidence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just there's not really any, any room for it in science. Typically, but I found an article that pointed out that quantum physics actually has room for precognitive dreams. Oh, yeah. 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, this quantum interpretation of precognitive dreams is basically says in certain states, in this case, dreaming, the dream state, were able to access future events, just like we are past events.

47:31Or present events when we're waking. Hmm. Pretty neat. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I mean, between 17 and 38% of people 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 dream 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 concerned her. Yeah. That's a good explanation. But, you know, it may be it's not also to be explained. It may be, I mean, who knows? Maybe people can really dream stuff that's going to happen. I don't know. I don't either. I don't either, Chuck.

48:31And I think that it takes a big man to admit something like that. All right. We're a couple of big men. Uh, you got anything else about dreams right now? I do not. Okay. Well, that was our dream episode. People have been calling for that for a while. Hopefully you guys liked it. I know. Yeah. And since we're wondering whether you guys liked this episode, I think I just accidentally triggered listener mail. That's right. Uh, this is Sammy Davis Jr. story. I don't know if you saw this. Mm-hmm. It's pretty fun. 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. And 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, um, the, uh, 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.

49:31And as she stumbled between the tables, she started calling out, Vic, where are you? Vic, where are you? 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. Oh, wow. Later that year, uh, 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? Uh, that is from Cliff in Madison, Wisconsin, one of my new favorite towns. 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 have ever heard. Yeah, it doesn't get much better than Sammy Davis Jr. addressing you from the stage. For sure. Uh, 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 tour may would say it.

50:31For sure. You can send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Warning. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grownups. Lingo Kids. Only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Mabel Kids. Everything Kids Love. Download now for free. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.