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I had a nightmare last night.
It started like many of my dreams: I was on vacation with my extended family. This time we were in Australia, visiting family friends in a big house. Things took a turn when – in a way I can’t quite explain – I became embroiled in this Australian family’s jewelry theft and smuggling operations. And I lied in front of those close to me, to protect myself and my co-conspirators. Before I woke up, I was afraid of being sent to prison.
The dream seems bizarre, but when I take the narrative apart, there are clear connections to my waking life. For example, I recently listened to a podcast in which a pair of novelty bobby pins suspiciously disappears during a family gathering. Plus, I’m moving tomorrow and I still have my bags to pack. When the movers arrive in the morning, if I haven’t finished packing, I will be faced with the consequences of my lack of preparation – a crime, at least to my subconscious.
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Dr. Rahul Jandial, neurosurgeon, neuroscientist and author of This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life, says the main themes and images of vivid dreams like these are worth considering and understanding. trying to make sense of it. . (For my part, I have decided that the next time I have to move, I will take the day before!)
Dr. Rahul Jandial
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I spoke with Dr. Jandial about what else we can learn from our dreams, including some of modern science’s most remarkable discoveries and theories about the dreaming brain.
1. Dreams are not random
From dream diaries recorded in ancient Egypt and China, to reports by anthropologists in the Amazon, to surveys of modern Americans, evidence shows that our dreams have a lot in common. For example, being chased and falling are pretty consistent.
“Reports of nightmares and erotic dreams are almost universal,” says Jandial, while people rarely report dreaming about mathematics. Jandial says the lack of math makes sense because the part of your brain primarily responsible for logic — the prefrontal cortex — isn’t usually involved in dreaming.
2. Our brains are super active when we dream
Jandial learned something fundamental about dreams during brain surgery.
It was awake surgery – he had numbed the scalp and partially opened the skull. (The brain does not feel pain). Jandial operated on the left temporal lobe, where language is usually found. Working carefully to avoid damage, he proceeded millimeter by millimeter, stimulating neurons and asking the patient to count to ten at each location.
But after such an electric shock, Jandial’s patient experienced a nightmare that had been recurring since childhood.
Since then, research has confirmed that nightmares, and all dreams, result from brain activity. “Now we know, through different measurements of electricity and metabolic use, that the dreaming and sleeping brain is hot. There are sparks of electricity. We may be asleep, but the brain is on fire,” says Jandial.
3. When you first wake up or while you’re falling asleep, it’s a fertile time for creativity
Salvador Dali had a method for capturing his thoughts as he fell asleep, which Jandial recounts in This is why you dream. The artist was sitting on a chair and holding a large key above a plate on the floor. When he dozed off, the key would fall on the plate and wake him up. He would then draw what he remembered from his last moments of sleep – a source of inspiration for his surrealist paintings. Brain imaging studies support the potential of sleep entry as a moment of insight, Jandial says.
Luckily for those of us who prefer to fall asleep and stay there, thank you very much, you can also draw inspiration from your dreams when you first wake up. “I have all my ideas when I wake up slowly,” Jandial says. He writes down what he remembers in the first minutes after waking up, before checking the news or Instagram. Not everything is great: “But when there are good ideas, it’s from that era. It’s not from 2 p.m. with my espresso,” he says.
4. Nightmares? Write a new script
Jandial says nightmares related to occasional stressful events, like my dream about jewelry being stolen, are usually nothing to worry about. But if you’re stuck in a loop of recurring scary dreams, there’s something you can try: image repetition therapy.
This is something you can do with a therapist. “If (a patient has) a recurring nightmare of an explosion or a plane crash, he will go to the therapist and draw him the dream map, the dreamscape, if you will, and then he will repeat that the plane landed safely,” or that they returned home after a car ride instead of crashing, Jandial says. Over time, he says, many patients experience changes in their nightmares.
5. Dreams about cheating are normal. They don’t mean there’s something wrong with your relationship
In surveys, a majority of people report erotic dreams. And for people in relationships, these dreams contain “high rates of infidelity, whether people report being in healthy or unhealthy relationships,” Jandial says.
But sexy dreams also have rules. “When we look at the pattern of erotic dreams, the actions seem wild, but the characters are surprisingly tight. Celebrities, even family members, repulsive bosses; it’s a small collection of people as models. Jandial and others theorize that sexual dreams about people we are familiar with could be a trait our brains evolved to keep us open to procreation and increase the species’ chances of survival.
6. Near the end of life, dreams can provide comfort
Treating patients at the City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles, Jandial observes a phenomenon he calls “dreams to the rescue.” For some end-of-life patients, “even if the day is filled with struggles, the dreams are of reconciliation, of hope, of positive emotions. I was surprised to find that end-of-life dreams are common and that they are positive.
Jandial says there is evidence that death can come with a final dream. “Once the heart stops, with the last stream of blood traveling up the carotid (artery) to the brain, the brain’s electricity explodes within a minute or two of cardiac death… These patterns look like broad electrical brain wave patterns of dreaming and memory recall,” Jandial says.
7. Dreams can be “a portal to your inner self” – and to your mental health
Everyone has anxiety dreams from time to time. Some are literal, like dreaming that you’re naked on a podium when you actually have to give a speech the next day, Jandial says. But others may be more symbolic, and these are worth considering.
Jandial remembers having some during the pandemic. In waking life he had just learned to sail. In the dream, he was sailing on a boat and “there was a huge waterfall,” he says. “And I was sailing horizontally and I had to constantly keep the tiller, or tiller, up the river just to go straight and not fall.”
He interprets it as his brain’s way of helping him through a difficult time. He was raising teenagers and working as a cancer surgeon amid COVID fears. “For me, at that time, there were wars on several fronts. And what I’ve managed to do is by avoiding going all over the waterfall, you’re doing it.
He says if you have a powerful dream, it’s worth thinking about why. “Dreams with strong emotion and a powerful central image are those not ignore,” he said. “The dreaming brain serves a function, and if it gives you a nugget of an emotional and visual dream, think about it. It is a portal to yourself that no therapist can access.
And the repeated anxiety dreams, he says: “I think that’s something to pay attention to. This could be a vital sign for your mental health.
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