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- [00:01]
Host 1
Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place, what it's doing, what it's done and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.
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Host 2
Support for this show comes from the
- [00:39]
Host 1
Guardian and their new show Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of the Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources the Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness and much, much more. Go to theguardian.com stateside to learn more and listen. Wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube, that's theguardian.com stateside. Most of us don't take dreams that seriously. Or maybe we just don't think about them very much because we have no idea what to make of them. They feel like brain noise, weird little stories that dissolve the moment we wake up. And even when they linger, we tend to treat them as curiosities at best. But. But there's a long tradition that goes back to Freud that takes a very different view, that dreams are surfacing something real about us. They're a glimpse into our unconscious minds. There's also modern dream science and sleep labs, where researchers have learned a lot about what dreams are, why they happen, and what they reveal about the sleeping mind. And yet, despite all that, dreams still retain this mythical status.
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Host 2
We understand them better, for sure, but
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Host 1
there's something unavoidably strange about them.
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Host 2
I'm Sean Ehling, and this is the Gray Area.
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Host 1
Today's guest is Michelle Carr. She's a neuroscientist who studies dreams and nightmares. Her argument is that dreams are not random. She thinks they're tied directly to memory, emotion and mental health in ways we're probably only beginning to understand. But she also goes further than that, suggesting that dreams don't just reflect our lives and our mental health. Dreams also shape our waking life. And she says we can cultivate the ability to interact with our dreams to make them more useful.
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Host 2
Michelle Carr, welcome to the show.
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Michelle Carr
Thank you. Happy to be here.
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Host 1
What is your simplest answer to the
- [03:38]
Host 2
question, why do we dream? What are dreams for?
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Michelle Carr
I don't Know, I don't know that there's a simple answer to that question, unfortunately. But, you know, I tend to think simple.
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Host 2
Simplest.
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Michelle Carr
Yeah. Okay, simple. It's just, to me, dreaming is just our conscious experience while we're sleeping. You know, all throughout the day, we're conscious. We're having experience experiences. We're feeling things, we're perceiving things, we're thinking about things. And that processing, it just continues while we're asleep, and it continues in different ways. And I think that has a lot to do with the functions of sleep and in helping us to kind of sort through our memories and sort through our experiences in a meaningful way. But to me, dreaming is just. It's like our sleeping form of consciousness. It's how we experience being alive while asleep.
- [04:35]
Host 2
That's such a good way to put it. I mean, because I heard you use the word conscious. Do you think we're actually conscious when we're sleeping?
- [04:42]
Michelle Carr
I think it's a form of consciousness. It's definitely different from waking consciousness. But, you know, even during the day, we go through all sorts of different states of consciousness. Sometimes we're really focused on a task. Sometimes we're daydreaming. Sometimes we're completely oblivious to what's happening around us, and we're completely lost in our inner world. And I think during sleep, we go through similar experiences which I would say are conscious. Some part of us is feeling, is living, is, you know, experiencing, remembering, thinking, you know, even though we're asleep. So that's. That's consciousness to me.
- [05:16]
Host 2
You know, there's this tradition. I guess it goes back to Freud, but it probably goes. It's probably much older than that, but it's where we get a lot of these ideas that dreams are symbolic and connected to unconscious emotions. What does modern neuroscience say about that?
- [05:37]
Michelle Carr
No, I think there still is a kind of a big field of research around how dreaming. In dreaming and in sleep states, we do seem to be processing a lot of emotions and maybe a lot of things that we don't necessarily think about while we're awake. And in part, it might be because we're suppressing. We don't want to think about these things. We're suppressing these thoughts and these emotions while we're awake, which is kind of a more Freudian idea, But it's also something that does bear out in modern research as well. But in part it's just that in dreaming, the brain is functioning in a different way. You know, our emotions are activated in a different way, and our thoughts are Connected in a much more loose and fluid way than they are in waking life. And so we do think this is maybe part of the function of. Of REM sleep or of dreaming is in allowing us to draw to the surface like emotional conflicts or stressors and to think about them and engage with them in a way that's adaptive. So it helps us. Some people call it like an overnight therapy during sleep that is helping us to adapt and to engage more in a better way the next day.
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Host 1
So is that to say you think
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Host 2
it's we're dealing with emotions in our dreams that we're repressing or that we don't want to deal with when we're awake?
- [07:04]
Michelle Carr
It's not only the emotions we don't want to deal with. I think it's all. All of our emotions are being processed while we're sleeping. But for sure, there are studies that show, for example, if you actively try not to think about a problem before you go to sleep, maybe a personal conflict or an emotional situation, something that's going on in your. If you try not to think about it, then you're more likely to dream about it. And that dreaming about kind of stressful things or whatever conflicts are going on, it can help you to process them, it can help you to think about them in a new way that's potentially adaptive. And even in the absence of dreaming, REM sleep seems to serve this function that it reactivates emotional events, emotional memories in a state, a brain state, a mental state that helps us to process these things. It's easier than thinking about them while awake, in a way.
- [07:57]
Host 2
Is there something to the idea that maybe dreams are just the brain running simulations?
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Michelle Carr
Yeah.
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Host 2
While we're sleeping?
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Michelle Carr
Yeah.
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Host 1
Is there something to that?
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Michelle Carr
There's definitely entire theories written about the simulation model of dreaming that dreaming is a simulation of and that can be framed in different ways. It's kind of a simulation in a sense, that it's allowing us to re experience things, memories that we've had from the past. But there is also kind of a predictive element to it that it's presenting us all sorts of new versions. Because dreaming doesn't just replay memories. Right. It creates new scenarios that we've never experienced before. And so part of the simulation view is that it's allowing us to experience all sorts of variations on things that we might be likely to experience in the future.
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Host 2
So many dreams have this dual quality of being, both recollection and imagination. And so what's going on there? Like, how do you think about that? Relationship between dreams and memories.
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Michelle Carr
Yeah, I mean, I think you described it pretty spot on for what, what we think is happening, that there is kind of a reactivation of a lot of memories. You're drawing from pieces of memory, not like entire episodes or entire even characters or people. Like often you'll dream about, say, someone. We dream very often about people who are in our lives, friends and family members. But even in the dream, the visual representation of the person is often an amalgamation of other things. Like I dream of my mother, but for some reason she looks like my friend. And also this stranger that I saw the other day. Right. This is also, we think, part of how, just how the brain is working during REM sleep especially, that there's a lot of, kind of excessive activation in cortical areas of the brain where memories are stored in a lot of association between different things, connections between things that aren't necessarily the same when we're awake, that when we're awake we have kind of a more restricted activation of memory networks. And in REM sleep, it's just like broadly spreading throughout the brain and allowing us to associate all sorts of new ideas and new concepts.
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Host 2
So REM sleep, rapid eye movement, is that. Yeah, that's like deep sleep, right?
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Host 1
Is that where the majority or all of dreaming occurs?
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Host 2
Or can we also dream in different phases of sleep?
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Michelle Carr
We dream in every phase of sleep. But REM sleep, it feels. People subjectively feel like they're very deeply asleep during REM sleep, but it's actually a much more active phase of sleep. You're. Your brain looks almost like it's awake and there's a lot of kind of twitches in the body. And that's when, yeah, your eyes are moving rapidly and your heart rate and your respiration rate might change. And so REM sleep occurs a lot at the end of the night and in the morning. And it is associated with the most vivid dreams. The most, a lot more like sensory motor activity and perceptual vividness and emotional intensity. And that all has to do with kind of the activation in the brain and the body that's going on at the time. But we do dream in every other stage of sleep, you know, from the moment you first start to fall asleep, which is called stage one, already you start to have really bizarre images that can pop into your mind. And in non REM sleep as well, which occurs more predominantly early in the night, people have dreams, but they can be maybe more thought like, so there's more of a, a feeling of like, I'm thinking About something rather than I'm like fully immersed within a dream. And sometimes people just, they have the feeling that they were conscious but didn't really have a dream at all. Like, you know, you can wake someone up out of a deep slow wave sleep and they might say, well, I feel like I was asleep, but I don't. There was no immersive dream to speak of, just kind of consciousness.
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Host 2
If the brain is processing memories while you're dreaming, is it also reorganizing them in some way, Almost like changing the shape of the memories themselves so that the construction of the memories are different as a result of the dreams or dreaming?
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Michelle Carr
Yeah, I think there's kind of multiple steps in the process in one phase, maybe more. In non rem sleep, it seems like there is a role of the brain in just reactivating and strengthening a specific memory. Like if you learn something during the day, then during the night, during non rem sleep, it seems like that memory is reactivated just to make sure that you hold onto it, essentially. But then there's also, like I was mentioning, kind of an association between other memories. So one thing we've noticed is that in dreams we'll see recent memories from the past day. They'll often be associated with other memories from a week ago or from years ago. And we think this is kind of reflecting a broader function of sleep in helping us to integrate memory into our entire autobiographical memory network. Whatever I experience today, I don't want to just hold on to that memory. I want to associate it to everything similar that I've experienced in the past. What are all of my related memories? So that's a type of reorganization, I think that's happening in placing the memory in the context of other similar things that have happened in the past.
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Host 1
If dreams do serve some function for the brain, is there some reason why
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Host 2
our brains seem almost designed to forget them? Like, why do they have to be so incoherent? Why do we forget the vast majority? You know what I mean?
- [13:46]
Host 1
It seems like our brains, if there
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Host 2
is a reason for this, our brains could have done us a solid and just make them coherent and memorable so we could sort them out. Like what? Why are they. Why are they both useful and necessary, but also like almost impenetrable to the dreamer? It doesn't make any sense.
- [14:03]
Michelle Carr
I think that's a huge question, and I think it's actually part of the reason that dreams have not been taken seriously and that the assumption has been that they're not useful, they're not functional, is because we all Go through our lives forgetting almost all of our dreams, Right? Even if you remember your dreams, you remember like 30 seconds in the morning three times a week. So it's normal that you would assume, oh, that's insignificant. Nothing is happening. But if we do a research study and we wake someone up 20 times during the night, every single time they're dreaming. Not every, but let's say, like 70% of the time they're dreaming something, right? So that activity is happening all through the night. We forget it. And so the assumption is that nothing is going on there, and that is not useful. But I don't know, to me, the fact that we forget it doesn't mean that it's not useful. And there's some theories that maybe we forget it because it's so bizarre and incoherent that it would be confusing to the mind to hold on to all of these memories. It's a way of keeping our waking life separate from our inner life. That's kind of one theory about why we forget it. It could just be purely a biological explanation. You know, we're in a state, a brain state, where memory encoding is just not possible in the same way that is possible in waking life. But nevertheless, you know, just because I don't remember something even in waking life doesn't mean it didn't do something. Like, every conscious experience that I have in waking life is probably connected to my emotions, it's connected to my memories. Consciousness is having an impact. Even if I don't remember everything that I thought about or experienced today. If I did it, if I experienced it, if I was conscious, there was some impact there. You know, I think dreaming is the same thing. It's just we don't have the recollection, so we kind of dismiss it.
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Host 1
I know several people who treat their
- [16:10]
Host 2
dreams like they are urgent messages. It is their subconscious mind trying to tell their conscious mind something important, and they have to figure it out. Is there any way to play that game with yourself without essentially just projecting whatever story you want to project onto your dreams?
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Michelle Carr
There's definitely ways of working with your dreams in order to get insight. And there's research studies on this process showing that, yes, having discussions about dreams or going through other processes of working with dreams, you can get personal insight, you can get creativity, you can get knowledge about maybe problem solving, for example. But your question, I think you're implying, is the message really from the dream, or are you just kind of through thinking about it and talking about it in waking life, you just come up with a response. Anyways, that's a bit harder to get at. But there are some research studies showing that, for example, if you if you discuss your dream in a certain method versus discussing a waking life memory, you're going to get more insight out of the dream discussion. Or if you, you know, if you dream about a certain problem or dream about a certain creative topic, you're going to draw more creativity and more insight out of that than if you just think about it or talk about it. There's a lot of confounds in there scientifically, but you know, short answer is I think there are ways of working with dreams and using dreams and at the end of the day where precisely the insight came from, it might be hard to pinpoint and a lot of dreaming is completely random. I think it's not all like Big messages to decipher.
- [18:07]
Host 1
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Host 2
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Host 1
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Host 2
Right, because you said earlier, and you say this in the book, that you know, you think of dreams as a kind of overnight therapy, right? Like if the brain is processing, reprocessing emotional experiences, maybe stressful ones. What do you make of nightmares which seem like the opposite of therapy, but the epigraph quote in the book is about how the nightmare is the most important and useful kind of dream. So tell me more about that.
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Michelle Carr
Yeah, nightmares do they do still seem to be related to the process I was talking about earlier. Nightmares tend to occur in people who have experienced adversity or severe emotional events or trauma. They're very strongly correlated to some type of adversity adverse experience and they often also have very recurring themes and the themes are often related in Some way to the adversity. Even if it's not. It might not be literal, but you might say, ever since I went through this breakup, I've started having these dreams of falling into empty space. It's not a literal relationship, but something about that stressful experience led to this recurring dream theme. And actually the person I quote, Ernest Hartman, he studied tidal wave dreams. He found that people started to experience these tidal wave nightmares, dreams of being overwhelmed by a tidal wave after experiencing trauma. And obviously it's not because they went through a trauma of being in a tidal wave. It's just that that that dream kind of embodies the emotion of being completely overwhelmed and helpless. So, yeah, so the dreams, nightmares, they do seem related to adverse memories. They do seem to be related to this process of trying to work through some difficult emotion. It's just that they're so intense, they're so emotional, they're so stressful that you're woken up out of sleep before any sort of adaptation can take place. So you just keep having this kind of nightmare on a loop, and it builds to a point, and even, often even physiologically builds to a point that someone. Their sleep is disrupted. And we suspect that that just means that the function is not fully happening, you know, so in order for the therapy and the regulation to take place, the nightmares need to kind of become less intense so that the dream can resolve and can evolve over time and allow this kind of process to take place.
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Host 1
Those patients you were talking about having
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Host 2
the tidal wave, those are people that experienced similar traumas, but these are disconnected people that were having the same recurring dream of the tidal wave.
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Michelle Carr
Yeah, it's what he called central images of dreams, which are these kind of symbolic images where. Yeah, he saw people from different. He was a clinician, so he saw patients. And people with different types of traumatic experiences would report this tidal wave dream. And, you know, we see it still in research. Of course, it's a very common dream theme, but it's not related to experiencing any sort of tidal wave in waking life. It's related to the emotion, the feeling of helplessness, the feeling of being overwhelmed.
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Host 1
Well, no other common. I don't know if I guess this
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Host 2
is a nightmare, but maybe for some people it's a dream. But these common things of, like, teeth falling out, flying, like these seem to be like, very common dream experiences.
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Host 1
What is the thinking around that?
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Host 2
Like, what is that a metaphor for or a symptom of certain kind of anxiety or.
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Host 1
Yeah.
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Host 2
Do you have any idea what that might be about?
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Michelle Carr
Yeah, so those are. They're called typical dream themes that people all around the world and all different ages and genders and cultures will have these same dream themes that again, they don't seem directly tied to waking life. They're more symbolic or metaphoric maybe. So the tidal wave theme is one. Or dreams of falling. And just a very common dream theme as well, the one, the teeth falling out. That is a very typical dream theme. But I'm not sure if it is metaphorical or symbolic or if it's actually. There was one study that suggested that it's just related to the actual sensation of grinding your teeth during the night. That people who grind their teeth and.
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Host 2
Well, that takes some of the mystery out of it. Yeah, that's. I mean, that, that you know, that
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Michelle Carr
maybe because it's a weird theme. Right? And. Yeah, it's a very. I don't know. So there's some suggestion that some themes. And even the dream of falling or flying, like, is it symbolic or is it more related to physical sensation? The fact that you're horizontal in your bed. So maybe in your dream you're trying to perform all of these activities, but on some level your brain is also processing your physical sensations, your physical reality. So, like in dreams, often you try to use your arms or like, use your. Your body, and then you feel like you can't move or you feel like you don't have control in the same way that you do in waking life. And it's hard to say. Is that like a psychological theme or is it just the brain's like, no, I literally, I can't move my body, you know, so. So there's some physical incorporation of. That's. That's adding to the bizarreness of dreams in a way that's actually. It's physical and it's not psychological.
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Host 2
Well, you have people in your. In your sleep lab that you can monitor while they're dreaming. Physiologically, what's going on during a nightmare with our bodies?
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Michelle Carr
Well, there's definitely research suggesting that in the kind of. In the last minutes of a nightmare, you can see increases in heart rate and respiration rate and some other kind of. Maybe increases in muscle twitches or more, More rapid eye movements occurring. But the, you know, there's. There's also instances where people can have nightmares and you don't see anything like it. It looks like they're perfectly calm in a REM sleep period. There's no changes in their, their physiology, and they still might wake up and say, I just had a really intense nightmare. So so it's not a perfect one to one link, but I think globally there does seem to be more physiological arousal, more kind of micro awakenings, more disruptions to sleep occurring in people who have frequent nightmares that they are a bit more physiologically aroused during the night and also during the day usually. So.
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Host 2
So in those cases the brain is behaving, reacting as though it is real physiologically the same way it is responding the same way it would in your waking life if you were scared, right?
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Michelle Carr
Yeah, yes, definitely. In some cases somebody's having a nightmare and they're, when they wake up, their body is in a, in a state of serious stress, then are there cases
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Host 2
where maybe dreaming is not a safe space, as you put it?
- [29:06]
Host 1
Right.
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Host 2
Like if, can you actually do psychological harm to yourself? Right. If you're experiencing really traumatic nightmares or traumatic dreams and your body is responding physiologically the same way it would if it was actually stressed out, can you actually do harm to your body during dreams even though you're asleep?
- [29:26]
Michelle Carr
Well, I think that yeah, having frequent nightmares, having distressing nightmares, it is harmful. And I think that's becoming more and more evident in the research on post traumatic stress disorder, of course. But just more generally there's links between having really frequent nightmares and having a lot of different psychiatric symptoms or even links to higher suicide risk. But there's also physical links like recent research suggesting there's more self reported cardiovascular disease and more spikes in cortisol hormone, like stress hormone in the morning and earlier mortality rates for people who have frequent and distressing nightmares. So I think there's a real toll on the body and we don't know the specific source. Is it the psychological element of the nightmare? Is it just the fact that you're really disrupting sleep so repeatedly and it just becomes such a source of stress rather than rest, which we need sleep to recover, we need sleep to function well. But in general, yeah, I think severe nightmares, they are harmful for people.
- [30:41]
Host 1
I've always been interested in lucid dreaming. I do not think I've ever actually
- [30:44]
Host 2
done it, but I'm very intrigued by it. So can you just say what lucid dreaming actually is and what you find interesting about it? Because you do find it very interesting.
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Michelle Carr
Yes. Yeah. So lucid dreaming is just when you become aware of the fact that you're dreaming while you're still in the dream. And so that opens up a lot of possibilities because you have kind of an increased level of agency or control or consciousness in the dream and you can kind of in the moment decide how you want to act in the dream, react in the dream, what you want to do. So in the context of nightmares and nightmare therapy, it can be very useful because if you're having a bad dream and then in the dream you realize, oh, this is just a dream. It's almost like when you wake up from a bad dream and you had that sense of relief, like, oh, thank goodness, that was just a dream. You know, you realize, okay, this isn't real, this threat that I'm experiencing. It's not really going to, you know, kill me or anything. So you can feel more, like, less. Less distressed, and you can feel more in control, and you can decide to change the dream however you want, really. So it kind of opens a doorway to engaging with dreams in a new way. And it can be really powerful for people who have experienced nightmares to suddenly have more agency and have more control in how they dream.
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Host 1
All the obvious question is, how the hell do you do that? That's what it.
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Host 2
I mean, it sounds amazing, right? My experience, and I assume this is common, is when I wake up, it is abundantly clear to me that, oh, that was a dream.
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Michelle Carr
Yeah.
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Host 2
And it becomes clear to me that. And not clear. But what is baffling to me is looking back, reflecting on the dream, it's so obviously bizarre, right? Like, it is so obviously not real life because there are things that are happening that just make no sense in the physical world as we understand it, right? And you think, how. How did I not notice that something was off here? Right? So, like, how is it that you can become aware of the fact that you're dreaming while you're dreaming?
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Michelle Carr
Learning how to become lucid. I think you already started the process. I mean, part of it is, you know, first steps you keep. Keep a dream journal and start to notice what are the recurring elements of bizarreness in your dreams. So usually our dreams aren't just completely randomly bizarre every night. They're kind of these recurring things that happen that are bizarre in our dreams. Like maybe we often dream about a pet who passed away years ago. That's bizarre. But it's something that we can use as a clue into the fact that we're dreaming. Or maybe we fly a lot in our dreams. Obviously, we never fly in waking life. So over time, you can start to kind of collect these dream signs. These are signs in your dreams that recur frequently that could clue you into the fact that you're dreaming. And from there you can do different practices, like wake up early in the morning and spend maybe 20 minutes really setting a. Setting an intention and visualizing yourself having a lucid dream. You can think about the dream that you just remembered or think about any dream that you have and think to yourself, okay, if I notice that I'm flying, or if I notice that I'm interacting with my pet who passed away, then I will remember that I'm dreaming and just really visualize yourself becoming lucid in a dream. And if you do this for like 20 minutes, then when you. You fall back asleep, you're much more likely the next time you dream to remember. To remember something. Something will clue you in, some. Some element of bizarreness. Yeah. And you'll have that aha moment.
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Host 2
Like, ah, if you.
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Michelle Carr
It's a dream.
- [34:55]
Host 2
Yeah, well, I keep. I keep waiting for that, but. And I've heard the thing about doing the dream journal. The problem is
- [35:04]
Host 1
I don't want to
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Host 2
write in a journal in the middle of the night or even when I first wake up. I just want some freaking coffee. But my recollection of the dream seems to vaporize pretty quickly. Like, if you don't. If you don't write it down immediately, 15 minutes later, it's. It's, poof, it's gone. Is that a common thing? Is there a reason for that?
- [35:26]
Host 1
Why it seems to fade so fast,
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Host 2
even if it's incredibly vivid and you wake up, you know, horrified or whatever.
- [35:33]
Michelle Carr
I don't know what the reason for it is, but it's definitely a thing. I mean, even in dream labs, we're very careful about waking people up really gently. And we tell them when you wake up, like, don't even open your eyes. Don't move. Just lie there and just allow yourself to remember as much as you can and just keep your eyes closed and just report, just speak out loud, whatever you can remember. Because otherwise, even if we tell them, I mean, in the past, we might ask them to write their dream down, but even the process of, like, turning on a light and opening a notebook, and it can lead to some of the dream kind of disappearing. So they're very fragile memories. I mean, one thing that you can do is you can try to. When you get into bed at night, you can try to remember your dreams from the prior night. There seems to be a lot of, like, kind of. Dreams are very fragile. The memory of them is very fragile, but they're also very there. It's almost like, you know, when you smell something specific and suddenly a memory comes into your mind. Dreams seem to have this, like, associative component. Like if you. Something in the day might suddenly remind you, oh, I dreamt about that last night. Like, the memory seems like it's still there in some way. It's just hard to access. And for some people, like when you get back into bed at night and you kind of close your eyes and imagine yourself, like, try to recall what you dreamt the night before.
- [36:57]
Host 2
When you have people in the lab and they're dreaming, physiologically, do you know when they're lucid dreaming? Is there any sign that, that, that that's happening? Does it look any different than non lucid dreaming, which I assume is the vast majority of dreaming?
- [37:11]
Michelle Carr
Generally it looks, it looks like REM sleep. But we ask people when they're lucid to give us signals. Because when you're lucid, you can control your body, basically. So if somebody becomes lucid during REM sleep, we ask them to look left and right three times really quickly with their eyes, left, right, left, right, left, right.
- [37:32]
Host 2
And they respond to that. You can communicate with people while they're dreaming?
- [37:35]
Michelle Carr
Yeah. So then we, that's how we can tell that they're lucid is if they give us that clear signal. And they could do other things too. Like there's experiments where they communicate with people asking them to smile or to frown. They, and they'll do that in the dream, but their actual face will smile or frown. So there will be signals of that.
- [37:56]
Host 1
So in that case, what actually is
- [37:58]
Host 2
the difference between being awake and being in a state of lucid dreaming? Right. I mean, it seems like they're awake, but their eyes are closed. If you're responsive, if you can communicate, in what sense are you not awake?
- [38:11]
Michelle Carr
I mean, the brain is definitely still in a different state. It looks like REM sleep and there's still like a completely immersive dream experience that they're in. But if someone's in a lucid dream and I present, I could speak to them and they might hear it in the dream, but maybe in the dream, rather than it being me speaking to them, it's, it's some stuffed animal in their dream that's talking. So it's like the dream is still occurring and it's, it's incorporating these real physical sensations into it. So the body is still pretty much completely immobile. It's just these little twitches that can occur when they're in REM sleep.
- [38:52]
Host 2
What about lucid dreaming as a learning tool?
- [38:54]
Host 1
If you're tinkering with your memories, can
- [38:55]
Host 2
you also implant new knowledge? Right. Like this is a thing I have heard people that are part of like super high performing organizations, like elite athletes or special operator types. I've heard them talk about
- [39:09]
Host 1
intentionally using
- [39:11]
Host 2
lucid dreaming as a way to like train and practice while they're sleeping.
- [39:17]
Host 1
Is that, is that a thing? Can you do that?
- [39:19]
Host 2
Can you learn while you're sleeping in that way?
- [39:21]
Michelle Carr
That is a thing. Yeah, definitely. It's, it's reported a lot anecdotally, you know, like you said, like elite athletes or musicians reported as well that dreaming offers a way to, to practice certain skills. And you can do cool things in the dream. Right? Like I think I give an example in my book. But there's one swimmer who in the dream would swim in a pool, but the water instead of being water, it would be more like jello or gelatin. So there's a bit more resistance. So it felt like a more physical training. Or some people say they can feel the muscle memory differently in a dream. It's forming or. I don't know, I don't know how it functions. But experimentally. There's some evidence too that asking people to practice even simple learning tasks that we designed in a lab, like throwing darts or what are some recent ones playing harmonica. I think some simple lab learning tasks that we ask people to do if they practice it within the lucid dreaming environment. It does seem to have some benefit to actual memory consolidation and performance after sleep.
- [40:36]
Host 1
Other than dream journaling, where else would
- [40:39]
Host 2
you recommend people start if they want to go down this road and try to hone this skill? Because it is a skill. Right? Is that fair to.
- [40:48]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, I think so. I mean, so the lucid dreaming techniques is one part of it, but another is just using visualization and especially maybe in the pre sleep period. I mean, most of us spend, you know, our last minutes before falling asleep just like worrying about things or thinking about the day or thinking about everything we have to do tomorrow. And it's. You could Instead spend that 20 minutes really visualizing different, you know, different types of dream experiences. You know, there's a really strong link between what's going through our mind in that, that last period before we fall asleep and what, what we dream about at night. So if you want to practice a skill, visualize and set the intention to have a dream about that, or if you want to, if there's a creative problem you're working through, reflect on that before sleep. Or if you have a nightmare, then, you know, visualize a more adaptive version of the dream, a more, more positive version of the dream before you fall asleep. There's, there's I mean, you could do anything really, but I think people just assume that they they have no influence over what they dre, so we don't even try. But I think simple techniques like that, actually having some intentional visualization and doing it a few nights a week I think would be impactful.
- [42:43]
Host 1
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- [44:57]
Michelle Carr
so good, so good, so good.
- [44:59]
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- [45:33]
Host 2
Is there any danger in maybe trying to control your dreams too much? Is it possible that lucid dreaming might interrupt whatever purpose dreams are supposed to serve? Right. You should maybe get out of the way and, and let the brain do its thing because there's some reason for whatever you're experiencing or dreaming.
- [45:52]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, that's definitely a question that comes up. I mean, largely the control that we have is very minimal. So when I say like visualize something, you're not gonna like, incept the exact. It's not like inception where you construct the exact dream that you want. It's still a very spontaneous and creative process. But for sure that there are some reports of people who feel like they're having too many lucid dreams. They're lucid all the time and they feel tired when they wake up in the morning. Some people report that. And in those cases it seems like actually becoming more passive. Like just letting the dream occur as it would, not trying to control it too much can, can actually help them. But I think the vast majority of people will not run into that problem. I mean, most people who try really hard to have lucid dreams, they'll have one a week, you know, and that's like five minutes of their entire sleep time for the whole week. So I don't think it's interrupting with any natural processes for the average person.
- [46:56]
Host 2
Well, I just, I just think it's crazy that we can, we have the ability to wake up inside of a dream. Right. Like, I guess you could think of that as some kind of edge case. But to me, the fact that that is a thing that we can do says something about the nature of consciousness. I don't know what that is, but it surely says something about it, right?
- [47:29]
Michelle Carr
Yeah, yeah. I do think dreams, they, they reveal in a way, I think are more revealing of what consciousness is really is really like, because I think in waking life we kind of, we, we have this idea that consciousness is pretty straightforward. Like we experience what's around us visually, we experience who's talking with us. We think of the world as very concrete and as our experience in the world as Being very straightforward. You know, we see lights, we perceive time. We, you know, we focus our attention. We think of it as very straightforward. But I think the reality is much more like dreaming that our actual. What we're actually experiencing, moment by moment, is in consciousness, is really much more fluid and associative and not. Not based in just the world around us and just realities. It's much more mysterious and hard to define.
- [48:36]
Host 2
Yeah, I feel like the. The ghost of Freud is maybe smiling up, down upon us right now.
- [48:44]
Michelle Carr
Right.
- [48:44]
Host 2
Like, is this. Is this a case where Freud is still useful? This idea I think he called dreams the royal road to the unconscious. Right. It's this idea that we have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind that's not immediately accessible to us, but it is still operating on us. Does that help or does that give us a model to make sense of what we're talking about here?
- [49:10]
Michelle Carr
I guess it is a model. I just don't know. I don't know if it's all unconscious or. Yeah, it's. I don't know. It just all seems so, like, illusory. Like, we have the illusion of having just a conscious mind and everything else is unconscious. But I don't know if it's really all unconscious or if it's just. We're just not. We don't have the tools to conceive of it in the same way as I. It's beyond me.
- [49:43]
Host 2
I don't. Well, there's something weird afoot. I guess you can. We can all agree on that. And. I know. I just. I. I just think it's awesome that there is such a thing as dream science and that there are people smarter than me, like you, working as dream scientist, and hopefully you'll figure this out for the rest of us. But I really. I really enjoyed the book, and I learned a lot about my own mind, I think, and I'll see what I can do with that in my eternal quest to lucid dream. But I really did enjoy it, and I enjoyed this conversation. And thank you for coming on.
- [50:21]
Michelle Carr
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
- [50:23]
Host 2
Once again, the book is called I've
- [50:24]
Host 1
got it right here, Nightmare Obscura.
- [50:27]
Host 2
Michelle Carr. Thank you.
- [50:29]
Michelle Carr
Thanks.
- [50:35]
Host 1
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I had a lot of fun. I mean, it's dreams. It's fun to talk about dreams.
- [50:42]
Host 2
How can it not be?
- [50:44]
Host 1
But we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749 please
- [50:56]
Host 2
also rate review subscribe to the podcast
- [51:00]
Host 1
this episode was produced by Thor Neuerider and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today.
- [51:33]
Host 2
Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and
- [51:36]
Host 1
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- [51:51]
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- [52:19]
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