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We spend roughly two hours every night in another world. Dreamland. That adds up to about six years of our lives spent in this mysterious realm. Some people remember every vivid detail. Others wake up with only a lingering feeling. And a few swear they never dream at all. I'm not one of them. I have vivid dreams I sometimes wish I could forget. Sometimes I can even control my dreams. We'll get to that. But first, what are dreams and what are they actually for? Why do we keep having the same ones over and over? And why can some of us control them? To help us make sense of it all, I spoke to one of the world's leading sleep and dream researchers, Dr.
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Bob Stickold, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center.
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And he's a visiting professor at mit. In the media lab, he spent decades studying how and why we dream and what our dreams reveal about memory, trauma, and creativity. First, we'll take you inside your brain while you sleep and explore the different kinds of dreams we experience. Then we'll dive into some of the surprising and sometimes scary ways some people are trying to control our subconscious through a practice known as dream hacking.
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We can turn you into a drunk. We could probably talk you into voting for me.
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I'm Soni Kassam, and this is 1440 explores. We're on a mission to uncover the essential knowledge that explains your world. Stay with us.
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You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it business history.
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You know why? Why?
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Because it's a show about the history of business.
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Available everywhere. You get your podcasts.
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All right, it's around 10:30 at night and I am getting very sleepy, so it's time for bed. Normally, I scroll through my phone and yes, that's it's a very bad idea. But today is not like other days. And so hopefully, once I settle in, I will go to sleep. My eyes have closed, I've mostly lost consciousness, and I've entered what's called a hypnagogic state. I notice flashes of color, random faces, that weird sensation of falling. It's not full on dreaming, more like sensory snippets and floating thoughts. Dr. Stickgold says think of it as an Entry ticket to dreamland.
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You could have a hypnagogic dream where you're just seeing a geometric pattern, or you're seeing a street scene, or you're just thinking about something sort of strange and bizarre that you would never think about if you were fully awake.
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Around 70 to 75% of us have experienced these moments at least once. Then about 90 minutes in, my eyes start fluttering back and forth. This is called REM, for rapid eye movement sleep. That's when the real dreaming starts. Your eyes dance beneath your lids, your muscles go quiet, and your brain lights up like a switchboard. Here's what's happening. In REM sleep, your emotion and memory centers, the amygdala and hippocampus, start pulling scenes from your past and present. Your visual cortex then kicks in, turning those fragmented moments into vivid images. At the same time, your prefrontal cortex, the part that keeps things logical, goes offline, letting your thoughts run wild. Then random signals from your brain start firing. Your brain scrambles to make sense of it all, stitching together a story in real time.
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Dreams and rapid eye movement sleep tend to be more visual, more emotional, more bizarre.
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Your brain is essentially running a nightly workshop, melding memory, emotion, and neural chatter, all while the boss, your logic center, is off duty. All of this adds up to some pretty zany dreams. Like the time I fell in love on Mars while sitting with my feet dangling off the edge of the planet. Or the time Frankenstein flushed my mom down the toilet. I was 10 and scarred for life. I clearly remember my dreams, but some people say they never dream. But here's the truth. Everyone dreams. You just might not always remember it. And Dr. Stickgold says that memory gap often boils down to how and when your brain wakes up.
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When people ask me how come I don't remember my dreams, I tell them with the arrogance of a Harvard professor, I say, well, it's because you fall asleep quickly. You sleep soundly through the night, and you leap out of bed when you wake up in the morning. You can only remember dreams when you wake up from them. And you can only remember them if you wake up slowly enough to give them a chance to sort of stabilize in your mind.
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In fact, even little distractions like opening your eyes or grabbing your phone can erase those dream traces in instantly. Brain scans also support this. People who consistently recall dreams show more activity in brain areas tied to memory and self awareness. And they tend to wake up during REM sleep more often. So if you say, I never dream, you're still dreaming. You're just missing the moments needed to remember them. That brings us to the big question, why do we dream? Dreams have been decoded, dissected, and even considered divine for thousands of years, but scientifically, we still don't fully know. Modern science does point to several practical functions, like having different tools in one toolkit. Here are four leading theories. First is memory consolidation. REM sleep helps your brain sort through the day's events, tucking away what matters and letting go of the rest.
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Dreams are usually about things that are going on in our life that are incomplete and are concerns of ours. I think their function is to identify in our vast memory stores old memories that might be useful to help us deal with issues we're struggling with today.
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Second is emotional processing. Dreams can act like an emotional sandbox, letting you replay events in a calmer, less threatening way.
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Our brains are trying to ask us something. They're trying to say, huh, what about this? You were almost in a car accident yesterday and you were terrified about it, and you've been feeling scared since then. What about bumper cars? You're not scared when you're on bumper cars. The brain isn't trying to tell us you don't have to be scared about being in a car accident. Your brain is trying to be a rather clever therapist and offer you suggestions about ways to think about a problem, but ultimately leaving it to you to answer.
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It's also why people with PTSD often report intense recurring dreams. It's believed their brains are trying and sometimes struggling to emotionally digest what happened. Third is creative stimulation. When you're awake, your thoughts follow a script, but in dreams, the guardrails come off, ideas collide, a stubborn problem suddenly clicks into place. It's just your brain unchained, free to make connections it can't during the day.
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Thomas Edison told people all the time that when he was working on an invention and got stuck, at some point he would sit in this chair he had and he would rest his arm on the arm of the chair, holding a key over a tin plate that he put on the floor. And he would think about the invention, think about the snag, and let himself fall asleep. And of course, as he fell asleep, his hand relaxed, the spoon would fall out of his hand and hit the plate and wake him up. And he said that when he woke up, he had the answer to his problem.
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Some even believe that dreams help us simulate threats. Basically a dress rehearsal for dealing with real world dangers. Still, some experts say dreams are nothing more than neural noise. Your brain trying to make sense of random electrical chatter. So dreams might be memory organizers, emotional editors and creative incubators, or they might not mean much at all. But not all dreams are created equal. Some scare you, some trap you, and some make you fly. In a moment. Different kinds of dreams and why a bad dream isn't the same as a nightmare that's right after this.
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Listen. Learning has never been harder. The Internet is overwhelmed with low quality content, clickbait with little substance, AI generated slop and opinions masquerading as facts. Curious people like you are left sifting through noise instead of finding what matters. Enter 1440 topics we've curated the highest quality resources from across the Internet. Think data, visualizations, captivating videos, long form journalism and pair them with staff written overviews to make every subject easy to understand and explore. Want to learn about venture capital or how new weight loss drugs work? Do you keep reading about CRISPR but are missing the best 101 on the breakthrough technology? Find all of this and so much more at join140.com 1440 topics separating what's worth your time from the rest of the Internet.
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Dreams let's break down the different types, starting with the most common nightmares. We've all had them. You wake up panicked, sweating, heart racing. But not every bad dream is a nightmare. Dr. Stickled makes that distinction. Simple.
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So if you wake up and you're in a cold sweat, that's a nightmare, and that's due to the release of adrenaline during your dream. But if you wake up from a bad dream and say oh God, that was horrible, but your heart isn't racing and you're not sweating, that's what we would call a bad dream.
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So bad dreams leave us uneasy but not physically affected, while nightmares trigger your body's fight or flight response. What are the reasons for why someone might have like nightmares more often than someone who might never have nightmares?
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We don't have good answers to that question. There's, there's, there's data that says that people with ptsd, post traumatic stress disorder, people with other anxiety disorders, tend to have more nightmares than other people. And to me that's just sort of almost a no brainer that the brain, when we're sleeping, is trying to deal with the issues that we are dealing with during our day. And so if we're struggling with anxiety, with trauma, then those are the things our brain is going to be paying attention to while we're asleep and is more likely to roll them over into nightmares.
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Nightmares may also be tied to another phenomenon, one I know too well. The most Vivid one happened to me about a year ago. I was over at my parents house. It was the middle of the night and a shadowy figure was inches from my face. No nose, just two scary shifty eyes staring right at me with a wide, twisted smile. I couldn't move or speak. My heart was beating quickly in my chest. Then I finally screamed until my mom rushed in and woke me up. This is called sleep paralysis. It sounds like a horror movie. And for centuries many cultures believed it was a demon, a ghost, or a spirit sitting on your chest. Today we know sleep paralysis happens during REM sleep when the body is temporarily paralyzed to stop us from acting out our dreams. That muscle shutdown is totally normal. But in rare cases, your mind wakes up before your body does. And that's when things get scary.
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When we wake up in the morning, about half the time we're coming out of REM sleep. And on very rare occasions, we come out of REM sleep piece by piece so that we're awake, we're oriented in our bedroom, we can see all around our bedroom, but we're still paralyzed and we're still dreaming. So we see monsters in the corners, we see monsters in our chests. Although that's, we think, more common in sleep apnea.
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Sleep paralysis also happens to be common in people who are sleep deprived. Turns out roughly one in five people experience sleep paralysis at least once in their lives. And about 7 to 8% experience it regularly. Next, there are recurring dreams, the reruns. You know, those scenes that seem to hit repeat no matter how much you change. Running late to a test, falling, teeth crumbling in your mouth. These recurring dreams surface across cultures because they tap into emotional strange attractors, memory loops that your brain keeps returning to.
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So your brain is constructing a dream for you and it says, okay, okay, we're dreaming about something. We're trying to understand something that happened yesterday that was kind of unpleasant. What do we got? Oh, dinosaurs, right? It's sort of like those dreams about teeth falling out. I realized that each of us spent probably close to a year of our life when we had a tooth in our mouth that we could turn around and get stuck the other way. You know how you can do that? Don't do that, kids. Don't turn them. It's like these small T traumas happening over and over again in our lives until again they form one of these strange attractors, one of these memory nodes that have so many components attached to it that they end up being an easy go to when your brain's trying to say, well, what Is this like.
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And finally, perhaps the most surreal, lucid dreams. When you become aware that you're dreaming while still in the dream, Sometimes you can even control the plot. About half of us will experience a lucid dream at some point in life, and for a lucky few like me, it happens regularly. For me, I developed an ability to transport myself in dreams. I'll step into a closet, imagine a place, and bam, I'm sent somewhere new. As we learned, when you're fully asleep, your prefrontal cortex, the part that handles logic, self awareness, and impulse control, is usually offline. But in a lucid dream, that logic center flickers back on, creating a hybrid state.
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And so lucidity is just a mixed brain state where most of the brain is still fully asleep and dreaming. And a little part of it up front is waking up just enough to say, oh, wait a minute, this is a dream. This isn't real.
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It's that reawakening in the brain's control center that allows you to be both the main character and the director of your own movie. But why are we able to do this? Why can I transport myself through a closet in my dreams?
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So what works in a dream is you go through a door. You can't be in the middle of your ancestral home in your dream and say, oh, I'm going to make this Paris, and it becomes Paris. But you can walk through a door, and it becomes Paris. Or wherever you are, you can spin around in place two or three times and stop and be in Paris. And the reason it works is because all three of those methodologies and going into the closet and coming out is perfect, forces the brain to construct a new visual image, a new visual landscape for the dream.
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So it's almost like your brain is rebooting.
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Yeah, that's right. You're taking your brain and you're saying, okay, shut off what it's doing now and come back on. Once you become curious in a dream about whether it's a dream or not, there are wonderful little tricks you can do, like try to read a clock or try to turn the light on with a light switch. It almost never works. You can try to read a book, and the print never looks legible. It dances or it changes. So all of those are easy ways to spot that you're dreaming and thereby become lucid.
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Okay, now that we've covered the basics, let's dive into a new frontier. Dream manipulation. Can we actively shape our dreams? Can others plant ideas into someone's mind? It turns out, yes, to a pretty remarkable Extent. Back in the 1990s, Dr. Stickgold made a big discovery. We can guide the content of our dreams.
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It's really easy to influence dream content. You just have to have them thinking about it before they fall asleep.
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In one experiment, students were told to think about a tree as they fell asleep. The results were stunning. 92% had at least one tree related dream. And here's the kicker. The more they dreamed about trees, the more creatively they performed, including on a test that asked them to think up crazy uses for a tree.
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And someone wrote down a toothpick for a giant. Or you could take a branch and use it to brush your teeth. You know all these crazy ideas.
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That's the good side of dream influence. But there's another more unsettling side.
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The bad and the ugly is that other people can get into your dreams the same way.
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Case in point, in 2021, the Beer Company Coors paid people to watch videos of beer, snow and mountains, then listened to ads as they fell asleep. This is from a video Coors put out.
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The idea was that we're trying to place this surreal Kors ad into people's subconscious.
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We came up with stimulus film about clean mountain air, refreshing streams. The result? Many reported dreaming of Coors and Chris mountain scenes without any conscious memory of hearing the audio. I saw some mountains. I think it was something to do with Kurs. It turns out this doesn't just work with dreams, it works with sleep too. If you quietly play someone the phrase M&MS. Over and over while they're sleeping, or Skittles, same idea. The next morning, they'll have a clear preference for whichever candy they heard. And these kinds of experiments don't stop at candy. Researchers have paired the smell of cigarette smoke with the stench of rotten fish while people trying to quit smoking were asleep. The result? They smoked significantly fewer cigarettes for a month without ever remembering the smell.
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So we can affect their longer term feelings and beliefs and desires. We can turn you into a drunk. We can turn you into an alcoholic. We could probably turn you into a crack user. We could probably talk you into voting for me.
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In other words, if someone refined this method, ads, politics, behavior, they could potentially shift beliefs, habits or voting decisions all while you sleep. It's a bit unnerving and a future worth talking about. So where does that leave us? We started this episode learning how REM turns our brains into messy, magical story machines. We saw how dreams clear our mental clutter, organizing memories, processing emotions and lighting creative sparks. Then we traveled through the dream spectrum, lucid flights, nightmare jolts, paralyzing terrors, and those bizarre repeating stories. And now we've glimpsed a new frontier, the possibility of dream hacking, the idea that what happens when we sleep isn't completely our own and may not remain private. But for tonight, as you close your eyes, think about this. Your mind isn't just resting, it's working. Want to remember what it creates? Well, tell yourself I'm going to remember my dreams, then jot them down the moment you wake up. Whichever plot unfolds next, it's uniquely yours. Sleep deeply, dream boldly, and see what your inner world has to teach you tomorrow.
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And keep digging, because there's so much gold down there.
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Many thanks to Dr. Robert Stickold for for being our guide in this episode. Thanks for listening to 1440 explores. I'm Soni Kassam. Make sure to follow the show and leave a review on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts and let us know what you think@podcastoin140.com while you're at it, start your learning journey with us at join140.com subscribe to our free daily and weekly newsletters on world affairs, business and finance, society and culture, and much more. 1440 explores is a production of Rhyme Media for 1440 Media. This episode was produced by Dan Bobkoff and me. It was fact checked by Meher Kozelbach. Our sound designer is Jay Cowett, the Executive producer at Rime is Dan Bobkoff and the executive producers at 1440 are me and Drew Steigerwald. See you next time.