Why Do We Dream?: A Q&A With Neuroscientist Rahul Jandial

My dreams are often like action movies. I’m being chased by villains, racing to save a child from doom, or trying — vainly — to fly as the ground crumbles beneath me. One time, a dream ended with credits rolling across my field of view as a haunting pop song played. (I woke to find that song was set as my alarm.)

My experience isn’t that unusual, according to neuroscientist and neurosurgeon Rahul Jandial, MD, PhD, author of This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life. Being hunted, falling, and flying are universal dream experiences.

When we dream, the central executive network of our brain shuts down, which allows us to suspend our disbelief and not question the weird time, space, and logic jumps that take place in our dreams. This is why you may dream you’re having an ice cream in a Paris café with an old boyfriend when your current boss shows up and demands an overdue project. You turn to look at her, and suddenly you’re in the office.

Forget the folklore of dream interpretations. Jandial’s book explores and explains the frontiers of dream science to help you better understand your dreams — and the power they have to improve your life, alert you to possible illness, and provide insights about your deepest desires, your relationships, or your life choices.

We spoke to Jandial from his office in Los Angeles.

Experience Life | Let’s dive right in to the topic many people are the most interested in: How can you change the narrative in your dreams? Tell us about lucid dreaming.

Rahul Jandial | There are two types of narrative re-scripting within dreams. First, through therapy, there is something called imagery rehearsal therapy to actually re-script the narrative of your nightmares to a positive direction. The second one is steering the direction of your lucid dream. For these two areas, there is substantive scientific evidence.

Nightmares are a product of our own imagination. The dreaming brain is the imagination network liberated, without the constraints of the executive network. The dreaming brain is hyper emotional, hyper imaginative, with dampened logic. And we can measure that.

We can obtain measurements from the dreaming brain and the waking brain. This is a 24-hour cycle. Your brain never turns off. It’s always throbbing. It’s always using up glucose. It’s always sparking electricity.

So, what does the dreaming brain offer us? It offers us dreams of course, and the most fascinating ones to me are nightmares. They’re universal. They wake us up in fear. No matter how gentle your childhood, they arrive for everybody around age 4, 5, 6, 7. Nightmares arrive, and then they fade. They almost serve sort of a cognitive cultivation. Children have not seen monsters, yet they imagine monsters.

In adults who have nightmare disorder, imagery rehearsal therapy is something that’s documented to work. … Before going to sleep, if you imagine a different ending to your recurring or frequent nightmares, you can actually start to change the direction of the nightmares as they pop up in your dreaming mind.

In adults who have nightmare disorder, imagery rehearsal therapy is something that’s documented to work. … Before going to sleep, if you imagine a different ending to your recurring or frequent nightmares, you can actually start to change the direction of the nightmares as they pop up in your dreaming mind. Now, that doesn’t mean for everyone and every time. We’re not talking about absolutes here. But just the fact that that’s possible, to me, is so powerful because it suggests that imagination can be both our compass and our engine to living the life we want.

More than a third of people can train and learn to lucid dream, and there is rigorous evidence for that. Now, a lucid dream is becoming aware that you’re in a dream while in a dream. For most of us, we look backward, like, “Oh, that was just a dream,” when we wake up. Lucid dreaming is in the middle of a dream saying: “Wait a second, I think I’m dreaming.” That feeling for some, they can steer the direction, and the landscape of their dreams. Even if that’s just a handful of people — not everyone, and not all the time — how powerful is that? The waking brain and the dreaming brain are not separate; they see each other. During the day, when we have mind wandering, it’s a little bit of our dreaming brain finding a way to our waking brain.

If you think about what you want to dream about, as you enter dreaming, something called sleep entry, you can, through suggestion … influence your dreams. Your belief does change something at the electro-physiological level in your brain.

Believing and thinking about dreaming has the potential to improve dream recall in the morning. So, whether that’s writing in your notes app, which is what I do, or journaling, I try to protect that time, those precious moments, in the morning. It’s an important window into yourself. It’s accessible, it’s free, it’s personalized. And all the effort we spend on wellness, it’s there for us as a gift, really: the “solar flares” of our dreaming brain during a hyper emotional, hyper imaginative state — fed by your life.

EL | You note that sleep scientists observe people sleeping in a laboratory and use measurements like their eyeball movement to prove that they’re lucid dreaming. What are some of the tested strategies for learning to lucid dream?

RJ | Wake up about five hours after falling asleep, and then stay in bed, and try to drift back into sleep. That’s waking up during [one of] the last REM [periods] of your sleep, and then lingering back into sleep and trying to hold on to awareness. That sounds really far-fetched, but there is rigorous science that shows again, by proving in sleep labs, that these people have learned to lucid dream more.

The big question is, If we don’t remember our dreams, are we dreaming? Well, the electricity of somebody who doesn’t remember their dreams is just as wild as somebody who actively and vividly remembers their dreams. So, the dreaming process is always happening.

The electricity of somebody who doesn’t remember their dreams is just as wild as somebody who actively and vividly remembers their dreams.

Make dreams, thinking about dreaming, and trying to hold on to your dreams in the morning a part of your daily habits. Be slow to rise if you have that luxury. It’s not going to be the first night, from what I’ve read. It works. But it takes effort.

EL | I hope this isn’t too personal, but I had a dream that my husband had cheated on me and I woke up so mad at him. For the first four hours of the day, I couldn’t look at him, even though I rationally knew it was a dream and didn’t believe he would cheat. Why do sometimes our dreams really endure? And what should we interpret from that?

RJ | That’s an interesting point on the residue of an emotional dream. The dreaming brain is metabolically active, sparking electricity, using glucose, just like the waking brain. The executive network was dampened; that gets out of the way. That’s why we can have illogical jumps. That’s why dreaming about math is very rare.

The dreaming brain can have emotional top speed, if you will, that the waking brain can’t get to. So, when you tell me you experience something at night, those neurons are firing just the same as if that experience really happened. The “top speed” can be higher than the top speed of any emotion during the day.

So to me, it’s not surprising that sometimes dreams affect you during the day. They endure; they color your temperament. It speaks to the biology of the dreaming brain and its hyper-emotional states that the waking brain cannot get to.

The emotional systems in the waking brain might go 100 miles per hour at their most emotional, but the dreaming brain can get [even faster]. Not always, but when it does, it shouldn’t surprise you that the next day — you’re so viscerally affected by it.

EL | What about some of the myths about dreaming — such as if you die in a dream, you’re going to die in real life? Or what it means if you are falling in a dream?

RJ | The people that died in real life, they didn’t come back to tell us. Falling and being chased — through centuries, through cultures — is a common dream.  What it speaks to is that if this is common to people in other parts of the world, from writings when there was a horse and carriage, there’s something built in. The dreaming process, we’re inheriting it from our ancestors. It’s not an accident.

EL | What about using dreams for practicing a new skill? If you influence your lucid dreams to practice kicking a soccer ball into the goal 20 times, is there evidence that that can translate into skill in your waking life?

RJ | Athletes, dancers, and gamers tend to have more lucid dreaming. People who have more visual spatial orientation tend to have more lucid dreams.

EL | You write about identifying early warning signs of health issues from your dreams.

RJ | These are called warning dreams. Again, these rely on surveys and questionnaires, but some people with cancer and other diseases have felt that in the past they had dreams that may have suggested they should get evaluated.

For the withering brain, the first warning sign is a change in the way someone dreamed 15 years ago.

There is one true warning dream, the unicorn that dreams do predict the future, and that’s called REM behavior disorder, something I’ve relabeled as dream enactment behavior. Men in their 50s who act out their dreams — usually assaulting their bed partner when they’re thinking about protecting them —  almost invariably, 15 years later, they will develop Parkinson’s or a related neurodegenerative condition. … For the withering brain, the first warning sign is a change in the way someone dreamed 15 years ago.

EL | As you’ve done research for this book, what are some of the most powerful stories that have stuck with you related to how a dream influenced someone’s life or their understanding of themselves?

RJ | Read about something called paradoxical kinesia. Patients who ended up having Parkinson’s, classically, their voices are stifled and their movements are rigid. But when they act out [elements of (or things in)] their dreams [while dreaming], their voices are loud and clear, their movements are fluid. It’s completely inexplicable, that the dreaming mind in Parkinson’s has control over the body in a way that the waking mind does not. The symptoms of rigidity are somehow fixable only through the dreaming mind. That’s a big concept, completely inexplicable. It’s down at the level of the nerves meeting the muscles in your arm, and the dreaming brain accesses that in a different way.

And then there are the stories of my cancer patients. You would think the cancer patients would just have terrifying nightmares, but their dreams serve as a shepherd and companion. I’m not saying every single time. I don’t want to give a sheen that it’s all positive; cancer patients struggle. With some of them, many of them toward the end, the dreams are of reconciliation, of something expansive, something positive. That’s always surprised me, as well as comforted me.

EL | Can we solve creative problems during dreaming?

RJ | When we go from our waking brain to our dreaming brain, that sleep-entry period, it’s not crisp, it’s a blurry state of 10 or 15 minutes. As mentioned by Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison and Christopher Nolan in the movie Inception, during that time people feel they can introduce or extract thoughts. Not every time, not always, but there is a portal there for original ideas. Of course, original idea doesn’t mean creative genius. That’s got to be tested.

Sleep exit is on the other end. These hybrid or blurry states offer insights. That’s when we’re not completely under our own control. These windows may offer precious insight into ourselves that really no other technology or app or technique can. The liberated imaginative process is connecting dots we can’t connect during the day, and then it kind of bubbles up for that aha! moment.

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