#1 Neuroscientist: How to Unlock the Power of Your Mind Using The Science of Dreaming

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:01:45):

I'm excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Mel Robbins (00:01:47):

Oh, well, thank you for getting on a plane. Thank you for carving out the time. I have never talked about the topic of the Science of Dreams on this podcast. I have so many questions and I cannot wait to dig in. And here's where I want to start. How could my life be different based on everything you're about to teach us that we need to know about dreaming? If we apply all this to our lives, what's going to change?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:02:13):

Well, when you have the insight that we spend a third of our lives dreaming, you'll be excited to learn that there are simple steps where you can influence your dreams, remember your dreams, and cultivate the direction or dreams to live a life that is not possible simply with the waking brain.

Mel Robbins (00:02:31):

Wait, a third of our life is spent dreaming?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:02:34):

Dreams can happen at any part of sleep and even when you fall asleep and when you're waking up. So now we are thinking that a third of our life is spent dreaming.

Mel Robbins (00:02:46):

Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:02:47):

That sleep and dream phase of our day and of our whole lifespan is something that we should cherish, that we can access, that we can influence. And it's our own personal therapist, if you will, in some way. So that's the biggest goal that I have for today. Dreaming is not an accidental bright product. It's something essential for the human mind. It's your nightly reset.

Mel Robbins (00:03:10):

Okay. You've already delivered because I had never thought about ... I thought about the fact that you spend a third of your life sleeping, but I've always thought about it as a reset or rest. The idea that we could crack open a third of our lives and really understand what our brain is doing and what it's trying to tell us, that's pretty cool.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:03:33):

Yeah. And it is rest, but it's not inactivity. Your brain is on fire when you sleep, your body's resting. And I'll explain to you how we have those measurements. But when I saw that, when I was thinking about dreaming and I thought about, wait a second, that's not a quiet time in our skulls. We go to bed, we think, oh, the computer screen went down, then we wake up and we hit the keyboard and now we're awake. No, no, no. It's engaged, blood is coarsing, electricity's firing. So that means we got to figure out what's going on. It's got to be essential.

Mel Robbins (00:04:07):

I would love to hear you talk about how does understanding what you're doing in a third of your life, your dream life, how does it help you take control of your awake life?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:04:18):

When you realize your dreaming brain is working with your imagination, your life experiences, your memories, that any glimpse you have of that is a portal to your life. It's a portal to what you're living, but from a different perspective, from the dreaming brain perspective, which is much more imaginative, much more sexual, much more emotional. And that's digesting, processing, and delivering the same readout on the experiences you had during the waking day where your brain is a little bit different. And so you have two windows to your own experiences. And when you catch a litle flare of a dream in the morning, not all dreams, but some dreams, I think they invite a process of reflection to where, hey, that's an interesting perspective on my life that a therapist can't have because it's in my head. So to me, it's sort of like the ultimate wellness hack.

(00:05:18):

It's free and it's something that I think as we have this conversation, there are simple ways that have been done by Salvador Dolly or other people for a long time, Aristotle that we can introduce into our life when we fall asleep and when we wake up.

Mel Robbins (00:05:34):

How has leaning in to the third of your life, which is your dreaming life, changed your life?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:05:43):

It's made me more creative. It's made me, I think, more emotionally balanced.

(00:05:50):

It's given me little windows in which when I wake up, I take a moment to pause. And those five, 10 minutes in the morning, if you stay in bed, if you don't grab the phone, that window is an interesting idea generator for me. I've done it for decades. Other people have written about it. Now we've got the measurement that shows when you're waking up and when you're falling asleep. Those 10 minutes, you've have the electrical fingerprints of being awake and asleep. The guys who have done creative things and art often talk about this. So I'm trying to pull in what Dolly was writing about and then what neuroscientists are studying in big cities.

Mel Robbins (00:06:27):

I cannot wait to dive into this. I can already tell that those first zero to 10 minutes of my day are going to be completely different after talking to you and learning from you.

Mel Robbins (00:06:39):

Now one thing I just want to address upfront because we asked our global audience about dreams and 26% of people said either, well, I don't dream or I don't remember my dreams. And if you're somebody who doesn't remember your dreams or doesn't think you dream, I'd love to have you speak directly to that person and tell them what is possible for them based on what you're about to teach us.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:07:05):

Yeah. I mean, if you don't remember your dreams, this episode is especially for you. That's how I feel because the practical and simple answer is when the London Publishing House was working on this book, a lot of them came in when they were editing saying, "I'm dreaming a lot more or remembering my dreams a lot more." So one, dreaming and remembering dreams can be cultivated. Two, you may not remember your dreams now, but you remember nightmares when you were a kid. And I can tell you after having taken care of 15,000 patients that at the end of life, dreams will return for you. So right now you may not have dream recall, but it can be cultivated and it's there for you. It's just not the window in your life journey to where it's a prominent feature, but I think it can be.

Mel Robbins (00:07:53):

I was talking to her friend this weekend and she adamantly said, "I don't dream." And I said, "I don't think that's true." Is it true that people don't dream?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:08:01):

Well, if you have people ... So again, I'm going to try to explain the science. People who remember the dreams and people who don't remember the dreams, if you put those electrical stickers and record the electricity, it's firing on both of them. So that suggests that the dreaming process is happening. It's just a matter of recall, but that nightly dreaming process happens for all humans all the time. It's so important. It makes us sleep, it exposes us to threat and then it safely when our bodies are paralyzed, we wild out. We do things we couldn't imagine. We do things we wouldn't dare.

Mel Robbins (00:08:41):

Like what?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:08:42):

Well, I mean all the things we fly, we fall, we run from monsters, we get into awkward social situations.That's not stuff we would choose to do during the day, but it seems to be liberated at night. And so that might suggest a little bit about why we dream.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:09:00):

Neurons that you don't use will wither because they're so metabolically demanding.

(00:09:07):

I believe and what some of the exotic scans are showing is that emotion, creativity, sexuality, imagination, these regions that we don't fully use during the day, it's like high intensity training. They're liberated, rehearsed, kept warm when we dream so they're accessible for us during the day when we face our challenges because those are the parts of the brain that are ramping up. There's no on or off. They're ramping up and during the day they ramp down and the executive network of these regions and the CEO of our brain has to put it all together to get on the tube, to get on the subway, to get the kids to school. But at night, those neurons that we don't use during the day, those concepts we don't use during the day, if we don't rehearse them, we don't keep them activated in some way, warmed up.

(00:10:03):

They may not be accessible for us later in our life as individuals or even as species.

Mel Robbins (00:10:09):

How do you know when a dream does mean something versus when your mind is just doing something?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:10:18):

There are five sort of categories of dreams. There's the obvious dream. You have anxiety about giving a talk, you show up, you're naked at the days or whatever. That's just your day anxiety rolling right into your dream anxiety. Then there are two types of what they call genre dreams, end of life. So you're at the end of life and they tend to be of reconciliation, not of doom. And then pregnancy dreams in these surveys and questionnaires, pregnant women report certain patterns or dreams about names about rolling over in bed and these sort of things. And then there's dreams that are just random thoughts. They don't need to be deciphered or even reflected upon because they're not attached to anything deeply emotional or deeply visual. Then the last one that I think is the dream to reflect upon.

Mel Robbins (00:11:20):

And what's that one?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:11:21):

And that's the one that has a strong emotional imprint and a strong central image. And so if you have the opportunity to wake up a little slower or you've had a dream with a strong emotional imprint, try to hold onto what that emotion is. And if it's got a strong visual image, that's the one that I think is the portal to how you're doing, how you're reflecting upon life, how you're processing things.

Mel Robbins (00:11:49):

Can you give me an example or a couple examples of what that might look like?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:11:53):

For example, there were reports of Vietnam veterans when they're going through a divorce, they would have their war dreams return.

(00:12:01):

And so it's metaphorical and they would be emotional and visual. I was in a difficult relationship and the interaction was always in this like an elevator falling. It's like a normal conversation, but they're just, the emotion is just that the butterflies, it seems like it's casual. And then as that relationship improved, there wasn't that dropping, that crashing elevator sort of feeling. And whether that gave me an answer, I don't think it was about getting an answer. It's about reflecting, looking backward and engaging the dream thoughts that you've had. That is a portal to your brain that only dreaming can provide because it's a lens that's emotional and visual and imaginative. So to me, it's an insight to myself and then I have to try to put it together with what's happening in real life and what's happening in my dream life.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:13:12):

I have some blocks

Mel Robbins (00:13:12):

Here that your team

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:13:13):

Set up. So the first one when you fall asleep, sleep entries N1.

Mel Robbins (00:13:17):

So sleep entries N1. How long does that last?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:13:19):

Well, it's variable. The time that's most fixed is this thing we're going to get to called rapid eye movement, but it's longer in the beginning. Then it goes to N2, which is deeper into sleep. Then it goes to N3. And the thought was that dreams only happen occasionally in these deeper sleep phases and that most of the dreaming happens in REM sleep. And rapid eye movement is when your eyes are wigging out behind your eyelids. It's not that the eyes are doing anything, it's just that when you're in that brain mode, that's how your eyes behave. And this was thought to be where you have the wildest dreams.

Mel Robbins (00:14:04):

In REM.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:14:05):

In REM. And REM increases as you go deeper into the night. So the thought is that dreaming is most vivid closest to when you're waking up.

Mel Robbins (00:14:14):

But

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:14:14):

That's not what we're seeing now. Oh,

Mel Robbins (00:14:16):

Wow. We're seeing

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:14:16):

That dreams when you wake people up can happen when you're falling asleep through the entire night and when you're waking up. So I think the big answer here is dreams can happen at any time when you're asleep, even during sleep entry and during sleep exit. I

Mel Robbins (00:14:37):

Love the blocks. And what I love about the blocks is that it, yes, shows us the different phases of sleeping, but it also kind of visually shows us that dreams are happening from the very beginning all the way through.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:14:55):

That is the current understanding and I believe it.

Mel Robbins (00:14:57):

It's super helpful to visualize it. So will you describe for the person that's listening or watching, how do you study dreams? How do you know that people have this electrical activity and that these parts of the brains are awake and working in all the phases of sleep?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:15:20):

A lot of ways.

Mel Robbins (00:15:21):

So

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:15:22):

One way to study dreams is to wake people up. So in sleep labs and some families have had their children participate over decades.

Mel Robbins (00:15:32):

No kidding.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:15:32):

Yeah. So you get these longitudinal studies where when their kids are woken up and then when they're teenagers and then when they're adults. And so you can see how dreams happen throughout their life. That's

Mel Robbins (00:15:47):

One

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:15:47):

Way. The other is they're at random times while they're measuring electricity also woken up and they're asked to write down their dreams. And then now more recently, people are falling asleep in these exotic scanners that are ... There's no radiation so they can participate, they can offer to be in there and we're able to now measure a heat map in the different brain regions, different continents, if you will, that are not activated but dampened or accentuated. The brain never goes on or off. If it goes off, it's a stroke. You have brain injury. So it's always a modulation by slightly more, slightly less. And so between the heat maps and the electrical currents and the decades of waking people up, plus the several hundred years of reports of people talking about dreams that's in the literature all the way back to Aristotle talk about lucid dreaming.

(00:16:43):

So I went about all of those things to put this together.

Mel Robbins (00:16:47):

What is the difference between the brain that you're using when you're awake and your brain when you're sleeping and dreaming?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:16:57):

Okay. So if you took the brain and you flattened it and thought of the lobes as continents, when you're awake, the executive network, the CEO, think of it as one continent is making the whole globe work,

Mel Robbins (00:17:15):

Sort

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:17:16):

Of a hub and spoke model, all the flight paths, all the airports, that sort of thing. When you're dreaming that executive network is slightly dampened and other continents are accentuated, a little warmer, a little bit more active. The things that are more active when you're dreaming on these heat maps, on these exotic scanners are the imagination network and the limbic system. Imagination network is a collection of structures that rise up when you're loosely connecting the dots, when you're not looking for the most obvious, it's called creative ideation. So creative ideation and more emotion than limbic structures, this is well studied that those are a little warmer. The heat map goes up when you're dreaming and asleep versus when you're awake. Now that makes sense because we just talked about the electrical activity being the same. So if the CEO is dampened in dreaming, then what else is lifted

Mel Robbins (00:18:18):

To make the electrical activity in your brain the same when you're awake versus dreaming. So it's the imagination network and the limbic system. Which

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:18:25):

Is the emotional structures of the brain, the deeper structures, hypothalamus, amygdala, all those things you hear about. Working in concert, not one structure up, one structure down.

Mel Robbins (00:18:35):

I want to read to you from your bestselling book, this is why you dream. And this is from the introduction. Today, the word dream means many things, ambition, an ideal, a fantasy, and the vivid narratives generated during sleep. Neuroscience is showing that the boundaries between sleep and waking are not so clean after all. Dreams can help you solve a problem, learn a musical instrument, a language, or a dance move. Practice a sport, give you clues about your health and make predictions about the future. Dreams can be spiritually enriching. Forgotten dreams can still shape your mind and influence your day. You can learn to remember dreams, prime their content, and even control them during something called lucid dreaming. But most importantly, dreams can offer the greatest gift that of self-knowledge. By interpreting your dreams, you can make sense of your experience and explore your emotional life in new and profound ways.

(00:19:42):

Talk to me about the self-awareness. Why does it give you more self-awareness?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:19:48):

Well, as we discuss in the beginning, when I say self-awareness, I think it gives you a new lens on what's going on in your life. So for example, practical example, some people feel like they're living well, doing well, coping well, and then they have nightmares pop up

(00:20:05):

And the nightmares are perplexing to them, but they're sort of the first warning signal, sort of a headache, if you will, that maybe they aren't doing well. And it's a reminder to reflect that, are you sure that you're living your best life possible? So in a wellness way, a flare of a nightmare can remind you that something is not going well with your mental health beyond the link with suicide and other things. So that's a practical example where nightmare disorder in people who seem to have it all is a clue that things really aren't at peace inside them. So that's one practical example.

Mel Robbins (00:20:43):

And it happens before you're actually conscious of it. So this is bubbling up from the subconscious. Exactly.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:20:49):

The awareness or the way that your dreaming brain has processed what is going on in your life. It gives you a litle bit of an insight that with your executive network and your CEO getting everything done that maybe you haven't taken the time to really unpack or look at. So that's on practical example that nightmares in people that seem to be doing fine is a reminder that maybe you're not. And it could be sort of a vital sign just like pain is or headaches are on people who seem to be doing well.

Mel Robbins (00:21:22):

How can dreams help you solve problems?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:21:25):

So these are surveys. We talked about measurements.

(00:21:28):

So now there are a lot of people who participate. They have dark games athletes, they play different sports and they rehearse in their lucid dreams or they'll take naps and if they recall their dreams. So they have a whole series of people that are looking for performance that feel that not if you dream about throwing darts, but if you dream at all and recall those dreams that that helps them with the performance. So there's a whole series of, these are surveys. Now I can't prove that this actually happens. You have to take their word for it, but they will learn a sport or a language and try to dream, try to lose a dream and there's some correlation that they are better at it. At a bigger level, when you dream about throwing a dart or running, the neurons for running are firing.

Mel Robbins (00:22:27):

Seriously?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:22:27):

Yeah, but that's what generates the electricity. So if I'm running and there's a motor strip here and it's sending down currents to my legs, when you're dreaming about running or you're being chased, those same motor neural movement neurons are firing, letting us have that electrical EK, the brain EKG. It's just the signal's not getting past your spinal cord into your legs. And so maybe that is true visualization and rehearsal. So that's the bigger concept that fascinates me. On the practical level, there's a lot of people doing surveys of and questionnaires of dreaming and skill acquisition.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:23:13):

There is an example we'll get into, it's a litle bit nuanced and that has to do with when men in their 50s develop Parkinson's disease and the brain withers 90 something percent, which in medical terms is almost a hundred, is 15 years before their dreaming pattern changes.

Mel Robbins (00:23:34):

Really? Yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:23:35):

And so everybody can look this up. It's called REM behavior disorder. You can look it up on Scientific Americans. So in that one way, REM behavior disorder, when the brain withers, its earliest warning sign was a change in dreaming 15 years prior where they act out their dreams. So that's one example. The other is that in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and when the brain decays and that sort of thing, people's dreams change. They start to talk more about animals and it's not their pets, it's beasts and things like that. These are reports and that almost mirrors when you ask children when they're four or five, six, they'll mention animals, but it's not really phyto or their puppy or their ... And so in some ways it almost feels like the brain is developing. And at the end of life, when it decays, it returns to its sort of immature, I mean biologically immature features.

(00:24:33):

So the dreaming pattern changes as we get these neurodegenerative changes. That's number two. And

(00:24:40):

Then number three is that some of my patients, you can't prove that maybe they're looking backwards, but they say if they have breast ... I take care of breast cancer patients when the cancer spreads to the brain. They mentioned that I've had a dream about my body. I had a dream about my breast. I had a dream about something physically wrong with me and I don't see too many having that dream and coming in and getting checked out. It's not forward, but when they come in and part of their journeys of having, how did you get diagnosed? How did it happen for you? In their story, they're called warning dreams. They will mention, "What's interesting is that I had this feeling in the past. I had this dream in the past, so I can't prove that the dream could have given them an early window and early detection." So those warning dreams, those are the three buckets I would say is to think about dreams and health.

Mel Robbins (00:25:41):

Wow. Dr. Jandial, how can dreams help you process trauma or traumatic experiences?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:25:49):

An idea is that a dream is your nocturnal therapist. It helps you digest difficult things, but we have nightmares, we have PTSD and flashbacks. I mean, I just want to say this, I'm not saying no, I would just say let your dreaming brain have as wide of a range of thoughts and experiences with our awaking brain. There's no perfect thought. There's no healthy thought or bad thought. I mean, we have a lot of things going on when we're awake. We have a lot of things going on when we're dreaming. So when you wake people up in the fifth, sixth, seventh hour, they tend to have a little bit more positive emotional skewing and regulation. So is that what dreams are doing? Maybe. At the same time, dreams with flashbacks and PTSD can keep your trauma alive. So there's no simple answer for that and PTSD can bring back nightmares and then it's just fascinating.

(00:26:48):

And one of the treatments of nightmares is to rescript the story with a journal before you go to bed. Think about how powerful that is. The power of suggestion is so powerful. I mean, I use knives and drills and chisels. I'm a physical practical person that the power of suggestion, the greatest example is that a nightmare, nightmare disorder, the treatment, people can look it up imagery rehearsal therapy, IRT.

Mel Robbins (00:27:15):

What does that mean?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:27:16):

It means before you go to bed, you write a happier, a better, a more kind ending to the nightmare that's torturing you. The recurrent nightmare that's torturing you is to journal the night before and then in your nightmares, the ending tends up not being so macabre and dangerous and difficult.

Mel Robbins (00:27:35):

Why do you think that it works?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:27:36):

Our greatest evolutionary adaptation is that we're storytellers. The tuft of neurons that are the newest, not the reptilian brain behind our throat or the limbic structures, the emotional brain, which are essential. You can't have thought without emotion. But I think the newest part of our brain is this area that if we injure it in surgery, not an oops moment, but like a risk of the surgery built in or a tumor's there or an injury's there, people have a hard time creating a narrative about their life and they have a hard time finding meaning because they can't sort of frame it the right way. So I think imagery rehearsal therapy works on nightmares because when people are going through a difficult time, they have to really tell themselves a different story about their own life. That's my opinion. And I think there's some pieces that are suggestive of that.

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Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:29:42):

The dreams are not completely random because you can go to the bathroom and wake up and you can slip back in your dream. You can have recurrent nightmares, you can electrically stimulate the surface of a rain and have an old nightmare pop up in the operating room, but just When I was talking to my sons, I was like, almost everybody had nightmares a couple of thousand years ago. Almost everybody had erotic dreams a couple of thousand years ago. About two thirds of people are falling or flying. About one third have teeth falling out. Not right now, but before TVs, before the horse and buggy, before fire, our ancestors. So there's a similar pattern of dreaming that's built in despite how much our world has changed. That's the simplest way for me to say that that design is built in. And so dreams are happening to us, but we're also feeding the content of the dreams.

(00:30:44):

That's not unlike our waking brain. We're navigating life. We're outward and we have our imagination and we have what's happening outside of us. When you fall asleep, it's the memories you've stored and the imagination you have plus some ancestral patterns of dreaming that we're inheriting, much like you could inherit mental health issues where somebody's better at math we're inheriting because there's no other way that surveys from Europe would still be ... They're still talking about falling and dreaming about two-thirds of the people hundreds of years ago as we are now with electric cars. There are some rules and boundaries to dream, no matter how wild it feels for us individually.

Mel Robbins (00:31:27):

Dr. Jandial, what are the rules and boundaries?

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:31:31):

Well, the on that I can tell you for sure is we rarely do math. If you go back four, five, six-

Mel Robbins (00:31:37):

Wait, do

Dr. Rahul Jandial (00:31:38):

Math? Math. Now somebody's going to write in, and I'm not saying 100%, but calculation is not really done. So all the scientists that had creative ideas, they're visual like the snake eating its tail or the chemistry chart. So now just stay with me. This is very important. Calculation and math is very rare in dreams. And the part of the brain that is dampened when we dream the executive network is the exact area that's done for raw processing power and calculation. And that was the thing that made me go, even if that's the only thing I can say that neuroscience can explain why most people, not everybody, why in the dream reports math is very, very, very rarely is very rarely done. And that fits the heat map where the executive network, it's a specific area called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. But more importantly, if you have a nail gun injury in that area, people struggle with math and that gets cooler in sleeping and dreaming.

(00:32:43):

And that fits why very few people over thousands and thousands of dream reports don't really talk about math. So even if it's that one example, it's the beginning of connecting science and dreaming and leaving people more interested in it, not less.

Mel Robbins (00:32:58):

Well, it makes a lot of sense because you gave us a fairly simple framework that I can certainly grasp.