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Before you reject my diagnosis of your nightly psychosis I’ll give you five good reasons. First, when we start to dream, we see things which are not there, so we hallucinate. Second, we believe things that could not possibly be true, so we're delusional. Third, we get confused about time, place and person, so we're suffering from disorientation. Fourth, we have these wildly fluctuating emotions, and then how wonderful, you woke up this morning and you forgot most if not all of that dream experience, so you are suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any one of those five symptoms while you're awake, we'd probably be seeking psychological or psychiatric treatment, but for reasons that we still don't fully understand that seems to be normal

During REM sleep, we have these bizarre hallucinogenic, these vivid narratives, these emotion-filled story experiences

If I wake you up out of REM sleep, there’s somewhere between 80 to 90% probability that you were going to report a dream

When I wake you up out of tonic REM sleep, when the eyes aren't moving, there’s around 80% probability. If I wake you up out of real sleep, when your eyes are darting back and forth, there is 95 to 100% probability that you're going to report a dream

A wonderful scientist has looked at the proportion of REM sleep across different mammals and what he found was that we, human beings, are a complete anomaly when it comes to our relative amounts of REM sleep. In other words, he found that across most other primates, REM sleep was usually averaging about 9% of the sleep period. However, we, human beings, on average have a REM sleep proportion of about 20%

REM sleep, however, does seem to be quite fundamental and fundamental from a life necessary perspective. There were some studies done back in the 1980s and there are studies that have not really been replicated. They took rats and they deprived them of sleep, totally, and what they found was that rats on average will die somewhere between about 13 to 17 days after total sleep deprivation. In other words, rats will die almost as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation. It's that that essential

REM sleep has many different brain features to it. The first of which is, as we spoke in the first episode, your electrical brain wave activity at the top of the brain, the cortex, looks almost identical to that which you have when you're awake, which is stunning because you're not conscious, you're lying completely still, no presence of muscle tone whatsoever. Yet your brain seems to be just as on fire with electrical activity as it is when you're awake

When you look at the brain during REM sleep compared to non-rem sleep, you see motor regions of the brain lighting up, you see visual regions of the brain lighting up, you see memory related structures lighting up like the hippocampus, and you see emotional related structures lighting up like the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex

One function of REM sleep seems to be creativity, associating memories together so that you can come up with these wonderfully divine solutions to problems you couldn't answer when you're awake. REM sleep is a form of overnight therapy

When you are in REM sleep and you're dreaming, the next day you are better able to assimilate and associate memories and come up with these creative insight solutions. It turns out that sleep is necessary for that, and not just sleep but dream related sleep. REM sleep is necessary for that but it's not sufficient, you not only have to be asleep and dreaming to get those benefits, but you also have to be dreaming of the very things that you are trying to solve the next day

A scientist was looking at different patient populations who had undergone really painful difficult emotional experiences, for example a very bitter painful divorce. And she would be recording their sleep, looking at their different stages of sleep, and she was collecting dream reports from them, and then she would track them and their progression clinically over the next year. What she found was that some of those participants, about 50% of them, ended up getting clinical remission from the depression that was instigated by the painful experience they'd gone through. The other half did not get clinical remission from their depression, they remained depressed. Then she used those two classes to go back and have a look at the sleep and dream reports, and what she found was some differences in REM sleep, but more interesting were the differences in the dreams. Both of those sets of individuals were dreaming at the time of going through those difficult emotional experiences, some of them however were dreaming of that challenging experience, others were not. Those who dreamt but also dreamt of the problematic experience were the ones who went on to get clinical resolution from their depression. Those who dreamed but did not dream of those events seem to be the ones who did not get clinical remission from their depression. In other words, when it comes to dreaming, it's not just about sleep, and it's not just about dreaming, it's about dreaming of the specific things that you're trying to get the functional benefit from

It seems that when we're asking what the functions of dreaming are, one of them is to resolve challenges from our daytime experience. It's an emotional first aid

There was really only about 2% of your dreaming life that was a very faithful replay and reiteration of your waking life. However, what they did find was something even more interesting to me, which comes back to this idea of overnight therapy, they found that there is something that is taken from your waking life into your dreaming life, that is: emotional concerns and people of significance

A key function of dreaming is about dealing with our waking experiences and particularly the things that are salient to us

In some ways Freud shifted dream science from spiritual, philosophical condition to very much a neuroscience, it was of the mind and therefore of the brain

There was something about our dreams that was veiled and masked, and Freud believed that he understood the decryption code to our dreams and if you tell him your dream, he has the special filter. And when he pull that dream through the filter, then magically out on the other side is the true meaning of that dream

I think dreaming just as we've spoken about is a very solid window into the things that you should be concerned about from your waking life. It's very obvious that whatever it is that we typically dream are the things that our brain is telling us the human being – this is the stuff that's essential, this is the stuff you need to work through

In my mind, a life unexamined is not a life well lived. And that isn't just applicable to your waking life, it's especially applicable to your dreaming life

I don't think we yet know what the algorithms of transformation of real-world experience to dream experience have. We each have our own unique abstraction algorithms so that indeed we can have consistent representation of real-world experiences in symbols, but it's not going to be the same for everybody. Your way of abstracting your real life to your dream life could be entirely unique to you and mine could be entirely unique to me, making it very difficult for a third party to come in and say “okay Matt, here's what your dream means” but you can know what your dream means if you explore your dreams over time, not just that one dream

When you are awake and you're given some information, you produce the most obvious links and obvious associations because you're very much blinkered and you have noradrenaline on board. But when you go into dream sleep, it's almost like the Google search, when you're awake you go straight to page 1 and it's very related. But do that same search when you're in the dream state and you go straight to page 35 and it's an utterly bizarre page

The very best person to interpret your dreams is probably you

Everyone can have a bad dream – when you go up into your waking life, it doesn't seem to bother you too much and maybe we'll just say that's a bad dream. When it really becomes a nightmare is when you wake up and that blanket of strong nightmare emotion is still wrapped around you and you can feel it, you know that my emotional state is still heavy, and I know exactly where it came from, and it was from that nightmare

What are nightmares doing? If anything at all, there are at least two theories. One is that it's simply the system failing, the system gone wrong and we're not processing, we're not moving through things and therefore nightmares are maladaptive, they're not warranted, they're not normative. The other is that they are adaptive and they are meaningful, and it's us really trying to go to a very specific pain point and we continue to process it over and over, perhaps to the point where we get resolution, but sometimes we don't so it keeps cropping up

The therapy image rehearsal therapy will have you sit down with a therapist and at first, you'll describe the nightmare that you're going through, and you'll write that narrative down. Then working with a therapist, you will agree to think about a more neutral ending to that nightmare. So let's say that I was involved in a very difficult car crash, just horrific, and once a week I just continue to have the nightmare of the car crash, I know that I'm traveling towards the junction, I apply the brakes, the brakes have failed, I am just looking around, I'm trying to maneuver but nothing is going to change, I go through the red light and someone sideswipes me and that's the end. And I relive that time and time again and it's awful. So I with a therapist would then start to create the alternative. So I go back to the story, I press the brakes, and the brakes don't work, but gradually I think “well, I'm just going to reach over to the handbrake, and I'm going to gradually apply the handbrake, and that slowly is going to bring the car to a nice safe stop, and then I'm going to call the emergency services, the car is going to get towed, I don't go through the junction, I survive, everything's fine.” So, you rehearse this alternate ending, and you keep going through that rehearsing. And then you go to sleep the next night. And you'll probably have a high chance of that nightmare again, but if you keep doing that, once you've got that alternative ending essentially what you're trying to do is every time you reactivate the memory of the trauma car crash and then you rehearse this alternate ending, it's like me going into the word document and editing the section that was really horrific and bad, and replacing it with something that's neutral or even positive. And over time, when I sleep, and I will consolidate that memory. I’ll come back the next day and I’ll do some more editing, and more updating, and time, after time, after time, gradually you dissipate the narrative that is fixed inside of the brain and the nightmare frequency decreases in proportion

Now modern-day neuroscience with its techniques is starting to overlap with classical clinical psychology and we're developing this next forefront of methods that really harness and fine-tune the brain's ability to undergo effective therapy

One of the ways if you really wish to remember your dreams is not just to jump up out of bed and start trying to write them down. Don't. Lie in bed, keep your eyes closed, and gradually rehearse that dream over and over in your mind

When you dream your brain paralyzes all of your voluntary muscles so that you can dream and dream safely and you don't act out your dreams, with the exception of at least two muscle groups, your extraocular muscles that move your eyes, and your inner ear muscles for some reason

Maybe just 10 to 20% of the population are natural lucid dreamers. So, from an evolutionary perspective I could say “well, if it was so powerful, it was so meaningful, because we know everyone sleeps and for the most part, we can say that almost everyone dreams, if that's the case then those must clearly serve a purpose.” But the fact that very few people are lucid dreamers tells us that it isn't necessarily beneficial. But there is an inherent flaw in my argument there, because that assumes that we have stopped evolving, and of course we have not, and so perhaps that 10 to 20% of the population who are natural lucid dreamers are at the forefront of human evolution

Breathing or relaxation, guided meditations, all of those stop your mind from being able to play on itself and go through that rolodex of anxiety. You can do breathing techniques, you can listen to sleep stories, you can do your own type of body scan

Remove the clock face from the bedroom

If you don't sleep the first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories

If you can't truly pay back your sleep debt and you're constantly running that short sleep cycle, it's like compounding interest on the loan, it just escalates dramatically, and that's why I think we see that short sleep really does predict ill-health outcomes and more an early mortality

There is something that has been demonstrated called sleep banking which is where I know I'm going to go into debt, so I sleep longer and I create credit to begin with, and then I spend that credit as I go into debt, and it seems to lessen the impact of that debt. It doesn't remove the impact entirely, but it does lessen it

As we go through our teen years our circadian rhythm shifts, it gets sort of pushed into the future and we like to go to bed much later and wake up much later. Then into older adulthood, it drags back a little bit, and we find our sweet spot. But then as we get older, it starts to regress back to what happened when we were children, we want to stay up late but we can't we go to bed so early, and we wake up early

There seems to be no correlation between how much REM sleep that you're getting and whether or not you remember your dreams

Have you ever had that experience where you are waking up, and you know you were dreaming, and you just cannot capture it, and you think it's gone, I’ve forgotten it? And then two days later, you're in the shower, you're looking at the shampoo bottle, and the label all of a sudden just unlocks the memory of that dream, and it comes flooding back. As a neuroscientist that tells me an important thing, that memory is in existence but previously it was unavailable. This is the difference between availability versus accessibility. The memory was available, but you'd lost the IP address to go and retrieve it. Available, not accessible. If most of our dreams are still always implicitly remembered but we always fail to have accessibility, those memories arguably, according to my theory, are always available, they're always in our brains, we just don't have conscious accessibility to them. That doesn't change the fact that our dreams may shape huge amount of our behavior, implicitly

If you could give just one tip for getting better sleep what would that be? Regularity. Just keep things regular. If you get regular sleep a lot of things will start to take care of themselves. Stop worrying about buying supplements and thinking it's going to be a quick fix, get the basics of your sleep in place

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