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- [00:00]
Michelle Carr
This message comes from NPR sponsor Capella University. Interested in a quality online education? Capella is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella. Edu.
- [00:17]
Tonya Mosley
This is FRESH air. I'm Tonya Moseley. We've all had them, those unsettling dreams that jolt us out of sleep. Maybe you're back in high school, unprepared for a final exam or searching desperately for something that you've lost. Strange, vivid scenarios that feel real in the moment and leave us rattled when we wake up. My colleagues here at FRESH AIR are no exception. Here's what keeps some of them up at night.
- [00:43]
Terry Gross
I'm driving a convertible and suddenly I'm thrown through the roof of the car into the sky and I'm flying, which sounds very liberating. But unlike Superman, I feel powerless. I'm terrified. And then I wake up.
- [01:00]
Michelle Carr
I'm walking in the airport.
- [01:01]
Tonya Mosley
I'm trying to find my gate, and I can't seem to find it. And then I find myself at the.
- [01:08]
Michelle Carr
End of the terminal, sort of like.
- [01:10]
Tonya Mosley
Truman show esque, where he reaches the edge of the soundstage.
- [01:15]
Terry Gross
I'm on a cruise ship and it's doing barrel rolls down the side of giant waves. Mind you, I've never been on a cruise ship. My college contacts me to tell me there's been a mistake and I'm missing a whole bunch of credits. So I didn't really graduate. And my nightmare is that I have to leave my life, move back halfway across the country and I have to finish my degree.
- [01:37]
Michelle Carr
My whole life, I've had dreams about losing my wallet. Now that I have a six year old daughter, I dream about losing her.
- [01:46]
Tonya Mosley
If any of those feel familiar, you're not alone. Most of us will have at least one nightmare before the year is out. Some of us have them every month. And for millions of people, up to 6% of the population, nightmares are not occasional terrors, but weekly torments that disrupt our lives. Yet despite how common they are, many of us still think of nightmares as random misfires of our sleeping brains, unsettling and ultimately meaningless. But what if we've been understanding them all wrong? My guest today, Michelle Carr, is a dream scientist who runs the Dream Engineering Laboratory at the University of Montreal. And she spent two decades watching people sleep, measuring their brain waves, tracking their heart rates and waking them up mid nightmare to try to understand what's really happening. In her new book, Nightmare A Dream Engineer's Guide through the Sleeping Mind, Carr argues that nightmares aren't random at all. They're learned, which means they can be unlearned. Through lucid dreaming and what she calls dream engineering, Carr writes that we can actually rewrite our nightmares and break the cycle they can sometimes create. Michelle Carr, welcome to FRESH air. MICHELLE carr, welcome to FRESH air.
- [03:02]
Michelle Carr
Hi. Thank you for having me.
- [03:05]
Tonya Mosley
Okay, before we get to the premise of the book, I want to start with really the most basic question, and that is, why do we dream? And why do some dreams turn into nightmares?
- [03:17]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, that's such a big question to answer. But over the past couple decades of dream science, we've started to uncover some of the what we think are some functions of dreaming. And in particular, it seems like in dreams, we're kind of processing our recent experiences and memories and especially those memories that are really emotional and important. So significant things that happen to us during the day and during dreams, it seems like we're kind of reworking recent memories and maybe making associations to other things we've experienced in the past, trying to learn how to deal with these scenarios and how to adapt. And it seems like dreams are kind of preparing us in a way for what's to come the next day. So they seem like they're supporting some adaptation for humans. And why do they turn bad? Well, of course, we all experience stressful things and kind of difficulties and conflicts in our life when these are really more severe. When we go through trauma or severe adversity, this can trigger nightmares, essentially. The emotional memory is so intense that it disrupts this function of sleep and jolts us out of sleep into wakefulness.
- [04:31]
Tonya Mosley
The purpose of dreams. I can't help but think that it almost sounds like therapy, like self therapy. You know, we're processing with ourselves, you.
- [04:40]
Michelle Carr
Know, while we're sleeping. Yeah, that is something that some researchers have called it, that dreaming is a form of overnight therapy, kind of helping us to deal with and to adapt to the difficult things that we face in life.
- [04:52]
Tonya Mosley
The problem is sometimes we have no idea what they mean. You know, there's so much symbolism in them. It's not just straightforward.
- [04:59]
Michelle Carr
Yeah. I mean, I don't always necessarily even try to know what the dream means, necessarily. It's more of just like an experiential process. And often I like to think that they're helping us even if we don't remember them, even if we don't know what they mean. It's kind of a natural process of the sleeping brain.
- [05:18]
Tonya Mosley
Your path is really interesting, your path into dream science, because it actually started with a personal experience. You had your first lucid dream in college. What happened during that experience that really changed the direction of your research?
- [05:34]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, when I was in college, I was actually still having something called sleep paralysis, which is where right when you're waking up from a dream, your body is still kind of physically paralyzed. And it's often a really frightening nightmare experience. And this happened to me once in college. And I was able to, rather than like really forcing myself to wake up, I was able to kind of relax and to stay asleep. And I felt like I woke up naturally. But what happened is I went into a lucid dream, which means I realized that I was still asleep and I was dreaming my dorm room, bedroom, essentially. It was fully vivid and it felt very realistic. And it was a really simple dream. I was just sitting in my dorm room, kind of looking around, but I was just so fascinated at how just moment by moment, my brain was producing this completely immersive simulation. And I was inside of it, experiencing it while I was asleep. And that just really fascinated me. And beyond that inspired me that lucid dreaming kind of helped me to get past this fearful sleep paralysis episode that I was having.
- [06:46]
Tonya Mosley
Right, you wanted to learn more too, about why, like, why this happens to us and how we can use it for our benefit. Dream science is still pretty new though. I mean, in the whole context of, you know, scientific research. And I think most of us have no idea how, how you even go about studying a dream. I mean, we might picture those sleep labs to test for sleep disorders. What's going on in your lab? What does it look like?
- [07:12]
Michelle Carr
Our lab is actually very similar to kind of a sleep clinic in that we invite subjects into the lab. There's two bedrooms that really, we try to make them look like comfortable bedrooms, like in a hotel with a typical nice bed frame and a bedside lamp. And we try to make it kind of warm and homey rather than a hospital bed or something like that. And before the subjects go to sleep, we hook them up to a bunch of different electrodes, a bunch on their scalp to measure brain activity, some on their face, measure their eye movements and their muscle tension. And we can even measure their respiration, their heart rate. So all sorts of signals essentially that we measure while the person is sleeping. And while they're sleeping, actually the experimenter is sitting in another room nearby and we're watching a video of them and also watching essentially all of their brain and body activity on a screen. And we can interact with them through a two way intercom, essentially waking them up when we want to Collect dream content.
- [08:19]
Tonya Mosley
So you're waking people up, and I just think it's really interesting you're not asking them, though, what are you dreaming about when you wake them up? You asked something very specific that you found is the key to recalling dreams really quickly.
- [08:32]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, actually. So when dreamscience first came around, they did ask the question, what are you dreaming about? But over time, dream scientists realized that this was actually essentially limiting dream recall because people have a really stereotypical and biased view of what a dream is. You know, we think of just these really narrative and elaborate and bizarre stories, like that's what a dream should be. But when we wake people up in the lab, we just ask them, can you tell me anything you were experiencing just before I called your name? And we asked them to lie still and to just allow any experience, any mental experience that they had to come back to mind. So it could be thought, it could be feelings that they were experiencing, or it could be a fully elaborate dream as well.
- [09:17]
Tonya Mosley
Michelle, you actually found something interesting in your research, that people who are prone specifically to nightmares also tend to be highly sensitive. So they're more creative, they're more perceptive, more empathetic. I mean, is that an overlooked upside to the issue of nightmares?
- [09:35]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, definitely. This was something that I found during my doctoral work, and it was kind of a surprise at the time. Although I will say that other. Other dream researchers had started to point to this before, that many people who have nightmares, it seems like they're just very highly sensitive people. Meaning they are really. They're very perceptually sensitive. They process the environment more deeply, and it's very highly correlated with things like creativity and just feeling things more deeply and aesthetic sensitivity. So even of those people who have nightmares, sometimes they'll say, even though I have nightmares, I use them as artistic inspiration. Or besides my nightmares, I also have really vivid, lucid dreams, and I have really a really vivid imagination. We actually looked at this in the lab. We asked people to just daydream for a few minutes. And what we saw is that the people who have nightmares, they were having these really bizarre and vivid and immersive daydream experiences. So they have a really prime access to their imagination, essentially.
- [10:39]
Tonya Mosley
I also want to make sure that we're clear. Nightmares are pretty typical. They're pretty normal for people. They vary. But there is a difference between a bad dream and a nightmare disorder that needs treatment. Can you briefly talk about that? I mean, you do encounter people who are basically just terrorized by sleep and going into nightmares.
- [11:00]
Michelle Carr
Mm. Yeah, bad dreams are just less intense than nightmares. Sometimes we use the definition that to qualify as a nightmare, it really has to interrupt your sleep. Like it jerks you out of sleep because it's so intense. And to qualify as a nightmare disorder, it really has to cause waking distress and kind of interfere with someone's quality of life. We often see that people are really. They're unable to like, concentrate during the day. They're constantly like, this nightmare keeps intruding into their mind. And they really are afraid of sleep. They avoid going to sleep. Anytime they have a nightmare, they want to get out of bed and avoid sleep as much as possible. So it really creates a more significant pathology. But bad dreams are completely common and everyone has them occasionally.
- [11:49]
Tonya Mosley
Something that really surprised me about this is just how much the body shapes our dreams. I mean, cause I think most of us think about it's happening in our mind, it's our subconscious. But the sounds, the sensations, what we typically experience during the day, our bodies is also coming to play in our dreams. How much of dreaming is just the brain trying to make sense of all of what our bodies experience during the day? Can you explain this?
- [12:16]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, I think this is still a really a big open question in dream research, but it's definitely something that's become more and more of interest over time. Initially, there was kind of this view that while you're asleep, you know, your body is lying there still. And there was this view that dreamings are something that just happens in the brain. It's just brain activity and you're completely disconnected from your body. But now we realize that that's really not true, that there's all sorts of activation happening in the body. And especially during REM sleep, which is when we have the most vivid dreams. So, you know, we see changes in heart rate, we see little muscle twitches, little contractions of muscles all throughout the body. And there's really rapid eye movements. There's some, you can see facial expressions, even emotional expressions. And over time, we're starting to see that there's some correspondence that what we're dreaming is directly related to what is being experienced in the body. To some extent.
- [13:15]
Tonya Mosley
You write about some of the bad dreams that are common among people, like falling. A common dream that people have are of their teeth falling out. It's one of those classic anxiety dreams that people have assigned all types of symbolic meaning to. But your research suggests something much more straightforward. Specifically about this kind of dream about teeth falling out. What's really happening?
- [13:39]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, yeah. In general, there's all types of these bad dream themes that people all around the world will report. And what's funny is for some of them, like the dream of teeth falling out, it seems like there might just be a physical component, which is that a colleague of mine, they did research that showed that people who have this dream of their teeth falling out, they also have more dental irritation in the morning, meaning maybe their jaw or their mouth is sore. And that's because a lot of us grind our teeth or clench our jaw during the night. And so this dream might just be incorporating that physical sensation. You know, the mind is trying to make sense of why my jaw is drained, and it creates this bizarre dream of your teeth falling out.
- [14:19]
Tonya Mosley
So the answer might be just going to the dentist or getting that, like working through the grinding of your teeth, huh?
- [14:25]
Michelle Carr
It might be, yeah. I mean, I think there's always, you know, it's a balance, and this is kind of a recurring theme in my book, is there's this real balance between the psychology and kind of the physical part of dreaming. So I think even if there is a physical explanation, the fact that one person would have a really distressing dream of their teeth falling out, whereas another person might just dream of, you know, eating delicious foods. They're like different ways that we can interpret these sensations. So there still might be a psychological component to how we experience this.
- [14:56]
Tonya Mosley
I'm very curious about how our sleep schedules, or the lack of one, spill into our dreams. Say you're working the graveyard shift or you're bouncing between shifts and your body clock is completely thrown off. How might that show up in our dreams?
- [15:12]
Michelle Carr
I think definitely having an inconsistent sleep schedule or being sleep deprived in any way can increase the incidence of nightmares. One thing we see is that people who consistently go to bed too late are more likely to have nightmares. And really anything that kind of, you know, disrupts the structure of your sleep. Essentially what we see is when you have a. A consistent sleep schedule and you get enough sleep, your sleep is very kind of. We call it consolidated, and it follows a very specific pattern across the night. But when this is disrupted, you can, you know, the different sleep stages are going to get intermixed and you're going to wake up a lot from sleep. And this can potentially cause bad dreams and even nightmares.
- [15:57]
Tonya Mosley
Right. Because I think what I'm hearing from you and what I gather from your book is that really getting into REM sleep is so important, and not only for our sleep hygiene and health, but just overall our ability to recall dreams and mitigate nightmares.
- [16:14]
Michelle Carr
So REM sleep is actually where we're most likely to have nightmares. But really all of the sleep stages, you know, having deep sleep and having REM sleep, which occur at different times in the night, you know, we have much more deep sleep early in the night and then we have much more REM sleep closer to waking up. It's all really important, I think, for maintaining the functions of sleep for mental and emotional well being. And when one is disrupted, it can aggravate or interrupt the functions of another state. But with nightmares, we especially see that they're most likely to happen during REM sleep, which is a really. It's a brain state that's quite, it's quite wake like. It looks almost like wakefulness when we're looking at it, looking at the brain activity. And it's a really. There's also a lot of emotional activation in the brain and, and the body is almost experiencing wakefulness, but it's disconnected from the typical waking world.
- [17:14]
Tonya Mosley
You lay out in the book Stress dreams and work dreams are often under that category. People are having dreams where they're over and over doing a task at work that they can't quite complete. You write that up to 75% of adults experience these kinds of reoccurring stress dreams. You call them dreams of inefficacy. Can you explain that?
- [17:36]
Michelle Carr
Yeah. So this is a very, very common, typical dream theme. So you know, the vast. The majority of people have had this kind of dream where you're trying again and again to accomplish a specific task. And often there's all sorts of obstacles that crop up in your way. So examples are like trying to get to a flight on time or trying to get to an exam that you're supposed to be taking or you realize you were meant to take it and you forgot to. But this theme of like trying to accomplish a goal and the whole dreams just seems to be endless attempts and often not even succeeding. And we think that this is related to kind of maybe one of the broad functions of dreaming which is to help us to rehearse different skills. This is obviously like really important to waking life is accomplishing tasks and having goals and knowing how to work towards them and learning new skills. And we think that dreaming is just kind of reenacting these scenarios where the purpose is actually just to try to practice and to reach towards the goal and not necessarily to accomplish it.
- [18:52]
Tonya Mosley
That's so interesting. So when someone has a reoccurring work dream where they can't complete a task or they're perpetually failing, what is our subconscious actually trying to work, work through? Is it problem solving, or is it more like the brain is just spinning its wheels because it can feel like that sometimes it does feel like that.
- [19:11]
Michelle Carr
I think both are possible. I mean, sometimes we do actually see a solution to a problem, a really creative one that comes up in dreams, and sometimes it seems to be just about the process, the process of trying to accomplish a task. So one thing that's been shown in research studies actually, is a lot of people will have bad dreams about exams or about school or about their performance. And in one study, they looked at medical students who were taking a big exam, and they found that those students who had that classic anxiety dream of like showing up to the exam without a pencil or without having studied or they felt unprepared, even if the dream was really stressful and unsuccessful, those students performed better on the actual exam than the people who didn't have that dream, which supports this idea that it's even if the dream is not successful, it's helping us to prepare in some way, either motivating us or just mentally rehearsing material that's related to the exam in some way. It's adaptive.
- [20:13]
Tonya Mosley
Our guest today is Michelle Carr, a dream scientist who studies nightmares and what happens in the mind and the body when they occur. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Moseley, and this is FRESH AIR.
- [20:26]
NPR Announcer
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- [21:31]
Tonya Mosley
This is Ira Glass of this American Life.
- [21:33]
Michelle Carr
Do you know our show? Okay, well, either way, I'm going to tell you about it. We make stories that hopefully pull you into the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations.
- [21:43]
Tonya Mosley
And then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening.
- [21:48]
Michelle Carr
That's right. I'm talking about stories that make you miss appointments, this American life, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:55]
Tonya Mosley
I want to switch gears and talk about how our childhoods impact our dreams and nightmares, because your research actually shows that childhood adversity, even before age 6, can lead to nightmares that continue until adulthood. Can you explain what's happening in a young child's brain when they experience trauma that creates these lasting nightmare patterns?
- [22:22]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, so that's definitely something that we have found in other researchers as well, that even very early childhood adversity is strongly linked to frequency of recalling nightmares in adulthood. And there's even some theory that the actual themes of nightmares might still be related to childhood experiences. And, you know, one theory looks specifically at what's happening to children when they're very young and they're going through adverse experiences, that it changes certain kind of emotional how the brain processes emotion. Essentially, it almost. It matures or ages the brain more quickly than is normal. And because of this, it can encode or hold onto adverse memories in a way that's more vivid than we typically like. Most of us forget the vast majority of our really young childhood experiences, but when we're exposed to adversity, we kind of. Our brain quickly matures and tries to hold onto those more stressful experiences. And we think those might be related to the themes of nightmares and why nightmares keep recurring over time. This is still kind of an open question, but it's one that we're interested in exploring.
- [23:42]
Tonya Mosley
And when you talk about experiences, I mean, you're talking about going all the way back to this time period where we think we don't remember anything. So before age is three and under, so three and a half and under. How is it possible that a trauma that we don't consciously remember still can create nightmares decades later?
- [24:03]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, it's something we still don't fully understand, but there is just a little bit of research suggesting that people who have had early adversity, they do have earlier memories, early recall for memories. And they do have. They remember their dreams from an earlier age, and they remember having bad dreams from an earlier age than is typical. So, yeah, we don't fully understand it, but in some ways, it might just be we're encoding our emotional responses. So even if we don't have the exact memory of what happened, we remember the emotional response on kind of an implicit or a subconscious level. And maybe the sprouting up in dreams. But this is all still pretty, you know, it's pretty speculative so far, but it's definitely something we're looking into because of how important that would be to know about if this really early experiences are triggering nightmares even much later in life.
- [25:02]
Tonya Mosley
You give examples of adults whose nightmares trace back to events like their parents separation or their parents divorce. One person developed dreams of being cheated on. Another dreams of falling into emptiness. I've just always wondered, why do these dreams turn into symbolic transformations? Meaning why doesn't the brain just replay the original event? Why is it using symbolism?
- [25:28]
Michelle Carr
Well, in the first place, dreams very rarely replay actual events. This is kind of one thing that we know is that although our dreams incorporate fragments of experience, you know, you might incorporate a person that you saw or, you know, I don't know, something you. An interaction you had. It's just pieces of memory that are reassociated during dreams. And they make kind of novel experiences when you have them. So in a way, I think this is just a natural process of dreaming to kind of break down our memories into little bits and pieces and then reassociate them into new things. So with like a really emotional experience, one very important piece of that is just the emotion. And the emotion might be I feel completely helpless and overwhelmed. And the dream takes that emotion and seems to associate it with other images, other experiences that the dreaming mind says, this makes me feel helpless and overwhelmed. And one of the examples that I love by this researcher, Ernest Hartman, he found that after trauma, a lot of people will experience what's called the tidal wave dream. This is a dream that you're in the ocean and all of a sudden a tidal wave is about to overtake you. And it's really, it's a symbol, but it just shows that absolute feeling of helplessness and of being overwhelmed and feeling powerless.
- [26:53]
Tonya Mosley
If childhood adversity, the traumas that you experience as a child, can create these lasting nightmare patterns, are there things that parents and caregivers can do? Are there ways to intervene when a child is having nightmares to prevent them from becoming these lifelong reoccurring themes that they dream about later in life?
- [27:16]
Michelle Carr
Definitely. The treatments for nightmares work just as well for children as for adults. So, you know, the basic techniques are to rewrite a nightmare. So if a child has this recurring bad dream, you could help them to come up with a new version of the dream that's more empowering and more positive. And with children, you might, you know, suggest using magic or inviting, you know, A fairy tale character into the dream and make it creative and make it fun. You can do this with drawing as well. Kids can draw like a new fun version of their dream and you just help them to visualize and to practice imagining. This more pleasant dream practices before sleep, and that can help them to reduce nightmares. And children can also become lucid in dreams. There's some work on helping children to become lucid and to choose to fly away or choose to do whatever they want within the dreamscape.
- [28:16]
Tonya Mosley
Sometimes when someone has had a very vivid nightmare, a bad dream, they often describe it, saying, I dreamed about this all night, but how long, realistically, how long do nightmares or bad dreams last? Are they quick or do they last throughout the night, truly?
- [28:33]
Michelle Carr
Oh, that's a good question. I don't know that we know for sure, but I would expect that most bad dreams and nightmares, they're going to be occurring within one sleep cycle. And usually at most REM periods are reaching like 25, 30 minutes. But I would think most bad dreams and nightmares are much shorter. They're kind of maybe five minutes or something. But I don't have data on that. That's just my. From what I know about REM sleep and dreaming altogether. Yeah.
- [29:03]
Tonya Mosley
Are there negative physical health effects from having nightmares that you found, especially those who have reoccurring nightmares?
- [29:12]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, there are some studies now suggesting that having like frequent and severe nightmares can have immediate and potentially long term physical health consequences in the first place. Often when someone wakes up up from a nightmare, their body is in a real state of distress. Maybe suddenly their heart is pounding and they're sweating and they can't breathe, or they're breathing really quickly. So that's a real physical state of distress. And we see some alterations in stress hormones that are produced in the morning right after a nightmare. People self report that they have less physical energy and feel poor physical health the day after a nightmare. And more recently, there's even some research finding that people who have frequent and severe nightmares, they also report having more cardiovascular problems, potential heart problems. And there's even suggestion recently some findings showing links to earlier mortality. So earlier death rates.
- [30:18]
Tonya Mosley
You also, you talked about differences in people who, I don't know if you would call it acting out their dreams, but there are certain populations of people who have tics or movements. What is happening when that happens? Does that kind of fall into the category of like dreaming, the physical aspects of dreaming as well?
- [30:40]
Michelle Carr
Right? Yeah, there's something called dream enacting. And it can happen sometimes with nightmares or really emotionally intense dreams that people maybe from a really sad dream, you might wake up and you're actually crying or you might shout right at the end of a nightmare. So this can happen even in non clinical conditions. But in one condition in particular called REM behavior disorder, people really, they start acting out their dreams a lot. And this often occurs in men over 60. And it's actually an indication of it's often, I mean, up to 90% of people who develop this sudden acting out of usually violent dreams, they might start punching or kicking while they're asleep and they dream about these aggressive or violent things. And it's actually one of the earliest indications of someone developing neurodegeneration. So up to 90% of people who have REM behavior disorder, they will go on to develop some type of neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson's. I think it's the most common within a decade of diagnos. So it's actually a really, it's an early indicator that something, you know, some kind of neurodegenerative process has, has begun in the brain and it's resulting in this acting out of aggressive dreams, essentially.
- [32:04]
Tonya Mosley
That's so interesting. And it's primarily in men over 60.
- [32:07]
Michelle Carr
Yeah. I think the vast majority of cases are they suddenly occur in men over 60. It's like, well, I don't know percentages, but yes.
- [32:17]
Tonya Mosley
Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Michelle Carr, a dream scientist and author of Nightmare Obscura. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH air.
- [32:29]
NPR Announcer
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- [33:32]
Tonya Mosley
Talk a little bit about sleep engineering. Walk us through the progression. How do you help someone move from being overwhelmed by nightmares or bothered by bad dreams that keep them up at night to having some control over them?
- [33:48]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, there's a lot of different methods we can use that would fall under the umbrella of dream engineering, which is the study of ways and methods that we can use to influence the content of dreaming. You know, you can use visualization and kind of mental reflection just prior to sleep already that can influence the content of dreams. But increasingly, we're looking at ways to actually almost directly interface with someone's sleeping mind, you know, while they're in the lab. And to do that, we're starting to explore different types of sensory stimulation or even brain stimulation, ways of directly influencing the sleeping body and kind of through the sleeping body, getting into someone's dreams.
- [34:29]
Tonya Mosley
What are some of the ways that you do that?
- [34:32]
Michelle Carr
So one of our approaches has been, and it's something called targeted reactivation, which sounds complicated, but it's basically just we're pairing sensory cues with a specific learning task or lucid dream task prior to sleep. So people are basically associating different sensory cues, like a flashing light or a beeping sound. They associate those with a learning task, and then when they're in sleep, we represent the sensory cues. So a flashing light, a beeping sound while someone is dreaming, in theory, this is through association. It's reactivating that memory. So what they were doing prior to sleep, that's associated with that cue. And in some of our research, we're looking at actually trying to help people become lucid by using these sensory cues. Like, someone might notice their dream suddenly flashes red light, or they hear this beeping sound in their dream. And we're hoping to remind them that they're dreaming. So remember, you're in this experiment. We're presenting this flashing light to you, and this is a dre.
- [35:35]
Tonya Mosley
What's the equivalent of that at home? You know, someone preparing the sensories around their sleep before they go to bed.
- [35:42]
Michelle Carr
Yeah. There are already many techniques that can help you to have lucid dreams at home. And one of them does. It involves really paying attention to your sensory experiences. And specifically, you can try, you know, you're lying in bed, you're still, and your eyes are closed, but you try to cycle your attention through your different senses. So you try to pay attention to any visual experiences that you're having, even if your eyes are closed and what are you hearing and what are you feeling in your body? And really paying attention. It's almost like mindfulness is how I often think of it. You're aware of what you're experiencing. And this awareness, it's the same type of awareness that you're wanting to cultivate in the dream. So by doing this in wakefulness, you're more likely to later remember, to become aware, remember to notice what you're experiencing when you're in a dream and become listening.
- [36:34]
Tonya Mosley
You work so closely with sleep labs and with sleep hygiene. What do you think about the increase in the use of sleep trackers like smart rings in general?
- [36:44]
Michelle Carr
I think a lot of people benefit from them. I mean, they can help you to keep a consistent sleep schedule and see how much sleep you're getting. The risks kind of come in that they're not always very accurate, although I think they will just get more accurate with time. But sometimes they misrepresent your sleep. And the thing is, they especially do this to people who have slightly different sleep than is typical. So sleep trackers work really well on just normal sleep, let's call it. And if your sleep is slightly different, then it's going to be worse at judging your sleep accurately. And this can cause a problem because if you wake up and your sleep tracker tells you you had bad sleep, you're actually going to feel worse, you're going to feel less rested and you're going to. I mean, research shows people will even perform worse on cognitive tests just told that they had poor sleep, even if it wasn't true. Wow.
- [37:37]
Tonya Mosley
Can you share a success story? Maybe someone who came to you with a nightmare or nightmares and was able to transform their sleep?
- [37:45]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, there are several examples, I guess. One example was a subject who had this recurring nightmare of being chased by a really realistic tiger throughout her house. And she said she'd had this nightmare ever since she was a child. And she remembered actually when it was triggered when she was very young. And there was this experience of her house had been broken into once, and that's what triggered this nightmare. And when she participated in one of our studies, over time she was able to kind of rescript the dream through this kind of natural process of visualization. And the tiger transformed into a cartoon in one session. So it suddenly turned into this cartoon. And it remind her of a childhood cartoon that she used to watch with this friendly tiger. So it was no longer so threatening. And what she realized just after that one experience is that ever since she was young, even though she didn't think about it too much, she had really always harbored this fear around being alone in her bedroom and going to sleep. And she really often avoided going to sleep because of it and didn't have a very good sleep schedule because of it. And just by shifting this one childhood nightmare that she had, it shifted her relationship to sleep. So after that she said she was going to bed early and she didn't feel this discomfort anymore that she always associated with sleep and dreaming.
- [39:22]
Tonya Mosley
Michelle Carr, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much.
- [39:27]
Michelle Carr
Thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed this conversation.
- [39:31]
Tonya Mosley
Michelle Carr is the author of Nightmare Obscura. Coming up, TV critic David Biancooley reviews the second season of the Netflix show A Man on the Inside. This is FRESH AIR this week.
- [39:44]
David Biancooli
And up first from NPR News, the House votes on the Epstein files. President Trump reversed course and said go ahead, but his Justice Department may yet block the release of some documents. Also, we get key unemployment numbers from the government a month and a half later. What do the indicators say? Listen this weekend up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [40:07]
Terry Gross
Hi, it's Terry Gross. If you'd like Fresh Air interview collections with filmmakers or comics or musicians or staff favorites and more, sign up for Fresh Air plus. It will make those car rides, meal prep and the treadmill more entertaining. And you'll get daily Fresh Air podcast episodes ad free. Learn more and sign up@plus.npr.org making time.
- [40:32]
Podcast Host
For the news is important, but when you need a break, we've got you covered on All Songs Considered. NPR's music podcast. Think of it like a music discovery show, a well deserved escape with Friends and yeah, some serious music insight. I'm gonna keep it real.
- [40:47]
Tonya Mosley
I have no idea what this story is about.
- [40:49]
Podcast Host
Hear new episodes of All Songs Considered every Tuesday wherever you get.
- [40:53]
Tonya Mosley
Podcasts, actor Ted Danson and TV writer producer Michael Schur, who teamed up for the successful afterlife comedy the Good Place, have gotten together again for another sitcom, Netflix's A Man on the Inside. The series is back with season two, and our TV critic David Biancooli says the show is one of the most entertaining and relatively unappreciated series currently on tv. Here's his review.
- [41:20]
Podcast Host
Michael Shore's inspiration for A Man on the Inside was a really unusual one. It's based on a documentary from Chile called the Mole Agent, which told the story of an octogenarian hired by a private eye firm to solve a case of theft in an elder care facility by going undercover as a new resident. Shore cast Ted Danson, the pivotal player in his wildly surprising the Good Place sitcom in the central role and surrounded him with endearing and talented co stars and supporting players. The first season of A Man on the Inside was very funny and its central mystery was a good one. But most of all, the series was about family and friendship and explorations of such issues as trust, usefulness and mortality. Like the Good Place, it was a very philosophical comedy. And now for season two, A Man on the Inside returns with an even stronger story. With the way Michael Schur flipped the entire premise of the Good Place for season two of that show, you know he's capable of some unexpected plot twists and he serves up several of them here. This time the setting is a small college where a wealthy and abrasive major benefactor has rubbed lots of people the wrong way. The school administrators come to the detective agency run by Julie, played as last season by Lila Rich Creek Estrada, to investigate acts of theft and vandalism targeting the controversial donor. And she in turn dispatches Charles, played by Ted Danson, to go undercover by assuming a role he once held in his own past, professor of engineering. This allows for a whole new cast of supporting characters, and this season of A Man on the Inside delivers magnificence. One faculty member, a music teacher, is played by Danson's real life wife, actress Mary Steenburgen, who charms Charles instantly. Me too.
- [43:18]
David Biancooli
You look so familiar. Could we have met before?
- [43:23]
Michelle Carr
Somehow possible. But most people our age recognized me from Lavender Highway. Now it's good. Goodbye baby. Well, it's goodbye baby.
- [43:38]
Terry Gross
Well, it's not like me to stay too long.
- [43:45]
David Biancooli
I remember that song. Was that you?
- [43:48]
Tonya Mosley
That was me.
- [43:49]
Michelle Carr
That was my band. I was 18 years old.
- [43:52]
Terry Gross
We played at Woodstock.
- [43:54]
Podcast Host
Wow.
- [43:55]
David Biancooli
You know, we had weirdly similar lives because When I was 18, I was on the local news for growing a really large squash. So I guess we both understand fame.
- [44:09]
Podcast Host
Another man on the Inside newcomer is David Strathearn. I've loved his work ever since he played a bookstore owner on the Days and Nights of Molly Dodd in the 80s. You may remember him from such movies as the Firm Lincoln or Good Night and Good Luck. In A Man on the Inside, he gives Danson someone really feisty to play against. It's not Sam and Diane from Cheers, but I cheer every scene they play together.
- [44:35]
David Biancooli
So what's your specialty? Within the department I teach romantic poetry and the 19th century novel. Just one novel? Sounds easy.
- [44:46]
Podcast Host
Droll.
- [44:47]
David Biancooli
If you'll excuse me, I have to get ready. I assume you're going to the cocktail party later for Brad Vinck. I am out of professional necessity. You don't approve of Vinnick? Do I approve of Vinnick? Did Antigonus approve of Esus? Boy, I don't know. I apologize. I forgot what you teach. I'll ask it in a way you can understand. Did Garfield approve of not having Leslie lasagna? Ah, come on now. Engineering is an advanced science. Oh, yes. That bridge is big. What if we built one that's bigger?
- [45:28]
Podcast Host
Yet another new cast member and terrific foil for the other actors is Gary Cole, who plays the wealthy donor, Brad Vinick. Like Steenburgen and Danson, Cole also broke out as an actor in the 1980s in the murder mystery miniseries Fatal Vision. He's bounced ever since between comedy and drama, including memorable stints playing the same character, Kurt, on the Good Wife and the good fight in A Man on the Inside. His character enjoys repelling just about everyone, including investigator Julie.
- [46:02]
Michelle Carr
Mr. Vinick.
- [46:03]
Terry Gross
Julie Kovalenko, the PI in charge of the investigation.
- [46:06]
NPR Announcer
I'll tell you what.
- [46:07]
David Biancooli
I told a story. I was in Belarus for a wedding, and I didn't use my own passport so I could surprise them. Wait, wait. Which investigation?
- [46:17]
Terry Gross
Wheeler College. The portrait.
- [46:19]
David Biancooli
Oh. Oh, right, yeah.
- [46:21]
Podcast Host
Listen, I'm pissed off.
- [46:23]
David Biancooli
I'm giving Wheeler a lot of money and this is the thanks I get.
- [46:26]
Terry Gross
I have a lot of promising leads, and I assure you we will find the person responsible.
- [46:33]
David Biancooli
You seem confident, competent. Pretty hot, too. I like that. How old are you?
- [46:38]
Terry Gross
Oh, you're definitely not supposed to ask me that.
- [46:41]
David Biancooli
Say you're over 30.
- [46:42]
Podcast Host
Michael Schur, whose other comedy credits include Parks and Recreation, and his writing staff clearly have a blast making this show. Some character names are playfully preposterous. One entire episode, set at a Thanksgiving dinner seems to be an extended parody of the intense holiday feast episode of the Bear. And as it progresses, the show finds ways of involving actors and characters from last year. Yes, that means Sally Struthers and Stephanie Beatrice are back without forgetting to focus on Charles and his family, especially Mary Elizabeth Ellis as his daughter, Emily. A Man on the Inside is a light, easily digestible show, but it's also full of moments that linger with you. Some thoughtful, others emotional. And what lingers with me the most after previewing all of season two is what a deeply gifted and impressive actor Ted Danson is. And not just here. Think of it. On TV since the 80s, he's been outstanding as a supporting cast member on Curb youb Enthusiasm and Damages, and as the central character on Cheers, Becker, the Good Place. And now you can add to that list his late career work on a man on the inside. This may end up as one of his most triumphant credits of them all.
- [48:03]
Tonya Mosley
David Biancooli is professor of Television Studies at Rowan University. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Met, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Chaloner directed Today's show with Terry Gross. I'm Tanya Mosley.
- [48:40]
NPR Announcer
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- [49:14]
Terry Gross
Hi, it's Terry. Our co host Tanya Mosley and I will be doing an end of the year Fresh Air plus bonus episode answering listener questions about the show and about ourselves. You can send the questions now to Fresh AirPlus P R dot org with plus spelled out. That's Fresh AirPlus@NPR.org.