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Episode 2: Why do we dream?

TAI: OK I know that dream stories sometimes they’re like really really boring, but like just bear with me. The rest of it gets better. The other night I had this dream. I was just walking out of my room with a book in my hand and then suddenly I see a spider and I accidentally just dropped the book down on him, squishing him and then when I picked him up you know he was dead. But then I remember hearing this thunderous roar, something slowly approached. And then this huge cockroach in a top hat was just like,

VOICE 3: What might be puzzling, you might have a deeper inner meaning.

VOICE 1: Or dreams could be aspirations like what you want to achieve or pursue in your waking life.

VOICE 4 :I used to think that dreams may not a lot of things and they’re super important, but now I just think that they are your brain filtering themselves.

VOICE 5: Why wouldn't we dream?

VOICE 6: When I was little I had a dream about my house kept on rolling around a dog bowl.

VOICE 7: What kind of dreams do you have?

TAI: They're weird.

VOICE 6: That kind of goes with the territory, right?

TAI: But like I don't really understand why we need to like see dog bowls. Dreams are just really weird because they're like these movies that our head makes and like I know our brain is working really hard to make these, but like why doesn't our brain just like power down.

KIEN: I think dreams are like a figment of your imagination when you’re asleep.

TAI: Now this is my brother Kien. I've talked to him a lot about dreams lately. He's got a lot of interesting ideas.

kien: It's a picture of like, like what you feel like. Like if you dream it’s a nightmare, maybe you’re feeling sadder that night or like maybe it's telling you like strangers are dangerous. Maybe it's like maybe it tells you about a lesson, something. You could have a dream like riding a horse. You could have a dream about. I think the way of your brain trying to communicate something, maybe not something important, but maybe just something and then you could remember.

TAI: How about we should look at you. Your brainwaves. So we can learn about dreams.

KIEN: Wait what?

DR ASST: So all the wires are going to be held onto your face with little bits of tape.

TAI: So I dragged my brother Kien to the Sunnybrook sleep clinic to look at his brain waves in an EEG machine. Here’s answers. I will extract.

KIEN: Don't try it at home cause you don’t have the machinery. So you’ll just be drawing on your brother’s head.

TAI: 16, 17 wires wires around.

KIEN: There’s so many wires on me.

TAI: Kien turn around. By the time the technician is done, KIEN’s head is covered in these wires. It just looks ridiculous.

KIEN: This feels weird.

DR ASST: I’m going to go test the wires. Make sure everything is connected properly, so don’t move around too much.

TAI: I head into the library to wait for Kueb’s EEG results as they come in and while we're waiting, I decided to ask Dr. Mark Bolus about why it is we sleep at all

MARK: During the day these harmful toxins accumulate in our brain and when you're sleeping you actually clear these toxins. Sleep is also thought to help consolidate memories. So if you go to a test or an exam without having slept, you actually do more poorly compared to someone who's actually slept and had time to consolidate their memories.

TAI: Because like it's hard for your brain to form memories when it’s like oh I have to feel. I have to see. I have to smell. I have to hear. I have to taste. Do I really need that memory of that overly aggressive cockroach attacking me? And like what's going on in my brain to make that happen?

MARK: So dreams are one of those things are really you know not so well understood, but dreams are thought to be a recollection of different sort of I guess fragments or little snippets of what happened during the day. It's almost like your brain is reliving those events

TAI: But he's putting them together wrong.

MARK: Yeah, but it depends on the stage of sleep actually. The closer you are to being awake, so if you begin dreaming right as soon as you fall asleep, your dreams are actually more similar to what the events were really during the day, but as you go deeper into your sleep at night, memories become a little more fragmented. They’re a little bit more different, but are a little bit more piecemeal compared to what actually really happened.

TAI: I just thought of something. Would it be like just imagine there's just like a parent, a dad, let's say, and then he just has to like sit down just do a lot of work, tippetty tappety top and then their just, their kids are like hi daddy, wanna play? And the dad would just be like you know what I have some work and then he just sits them in front of the TV. It's a metaphor. Do you think dreams are just the subconscious way to occupy that conscious while the unconscious does all the stuff it's been trying to do to catch up on the day?

MARK: Yeah that's a really, really interesting way of putting things.

DR ASST: So you want to look up and down for me? Just with your eyes, not your head. Now how about left and right just with your eyes.

MARK: Something like a sneeze or a head or fast head movement or talking or whatnot will cause all these little lines to swoop around.

TAI: What's happening in our brains when we're sleeping? What is it like?

MARK:The brain goes through several sleep cycles and during each of these different stages in fact the brain wave activity is different. The eye movement activity is different. Our muscle activity is different.

TAI: Kien actually isn’t asleep for this. We're monitoring his waking brain, but Dr. Bolus even said himself that that actually very similarly resembles REM sleep and it still looks pretty freaking cool. So at first glance, it kind of looks like a 6-year-old kid got hold of a pen and a piece of paper. There's a bunch of just squiggly lines. There's one for his chin. One of them apparently is his heart. And there's some even for his eyes. And another cool part is that the squiggles are just constantly updating, so we can see the live information of Kien's brain

KIEN: My brain feels weird doing that.

DR ASST: Grind your teeth a little bit.

KIEN: What?

DR ASST: Grind your teeth a little bit. Pretend like you're chewing gum.

TAI: Oh yeah the little part where he sneezed was like this huge black blob.

KIEN: I sneezed.

DR ASST: Yes. I thought he had sneezed.

TAI: Would it be possible to use special sciencey technology to be able to determine whether someone's dreaming?

MARK: The brain actually has characteristic brainwave activity when you are actually dreaming. Unique characteristics the brain is providing us, particularly through the EEG or the brain wave activity, that can tell us that the brain is actually dreaming, rather than just like sleeping alone.

TAI: So Dr. Bolus says that if you think you're running in your dream or if you are running in your dream, your brain might send a signal to your leg and they can see that in the EEG. But there's a reason why your leg doesn't actually get up and start kicking

MARK: One of the special things that happen in sleep is that people actually become paralyzed.

So that's why you can’t act out your dreams right. Some people might have had the experience as you’re waking up that you feel like you're waking up, but you're paralyzed right.

TAI: And you’re still paralyzed.

MARK: Exactly.

TAI: That’s super freaky and then you get the feel, you have to like dark shadow and it's like crushing you.

MARK: And what's actually happening is that the brain in those few moments there has been delayed in making you not paralyzed anymore right because when you wake up part of waking up is that you're not paralyzed anymore. There's a whole neurotransmitter system that's responsible for paralyzing you.

TAI: So maybe we need to sleep to clean out these toxins, the bad stuff that collects in our brains while our body is busy doing that our conscience is just like picked up and just like ploop, dropped in front of the mind TV to get weird fragments of our lives combined with our ideas. Like I guess it makes sense, but it's still really kind of weird.

TAI: Kien your brain looks brainy and squiggly, that’s all I have to say. You know what that means? You have a very serious case of the squiggles.

KIEN: No!

TAI: Your brain was squiggling. Even your heart was squiggling. Your heart was squiggling.

KIEN: No. No. I don’t want to have squiggles.

TAI: There are lots of squiggles.

KIEN: Could I see?

TAI: Oh should we show him when he sneezed? Kien I want you to try to figure out where the part was when you sneezed.

KIEN: Umm, that.

DR ASST: Yup, that’s it.

KIEN: I was like, looks like the stock market kind of.

TAI: Based on looking at the squiggly stock market of Kien's brain activity, I keep thinking back to what Dr. Bolus said about how we're just, we're frozen in our sleep, but our brains are still really active at different stages in the sleep cycle because in my waking life, I’m using you know a lot of brain power as we saw to like do things like thinking and making decisions. Like in my dream, that brainpower is kind of just like put aside. This other dream mind takes over. And I just I don't have any controls. I’m just I'm wondering would I be able to harness that brainpower to be able to control the dream? And if I could control my dreams, I would be able to diffuse my nightmares. I could schedule a rematch with that cockroach and apparently there are people that already do this. They're called lucid dreamers. So I decided to call up Robert Wagner who writes about this stuff, so he could teach me in the way of kicking the cockroach butt!

ROBERT: if you want to learn how to lucid dream, an important thing is to develop good dream recall. The first thing you have to think about when you wake up is what was I just dreaming because if you start thinking about other things within a minute or two, you won't even be able to recall your last dream

TAI: Just fades away.

ROBERT: There’s some techniques that can help people lucid dream. Would you like to hear about some of those?

TAI: I actually I've found a trick myself to have lucid dreams.

ROBERT: Oh good. Tell me what you're doing.

TAI: I got this idea based off the movie, Inception. It's the scene where they say, did you wake up today? Can you lead to all the events that happened today or did you just appear here. So sometimes in the day I'll just quickly remember, am I dreaming and I'll just try to go think back to the beginning of the day when I woke up and everything that followed that to see.

ROBERT: You know some lucid dreamers have a variant of that. They'll ask themselves throughout the day critical questions like how did I just get here or what was I just doing? Am I dreaming right now? And a lot of times what will happen is that if they start doing that during the daytime

TAI: Then it falls into a pattern at night.

ROBERT: Exactly. And then in your dream state, you'll ask yourself how did I just get here? And when you realize that you can't remember how you got there then you can ask yourself, am I dreaming this? And a lot of times you realize that oh yes I am dreaming.

TAI: Yeah that's what I do.

ROBERT: When I was a junior in high school, I was reading this book that said that a person should try to find their hands in the dream state and realize they're dreaming. But there really wasn't a technique and so what I did was this. Each night before I'd go to sleep, I’d just look at the palms of my hands and I’d tell myself quietly over and over in my mind, tonight in my dreams I'll see my hands and realize I'm dreaming. Tonight in my dreams I'll see my hands in my dreams and realize I'm dreaming. Realize I'm dreaming. And I would say that for about three or four minutes until I got so sleepy that I had to fall asleep. So what happened after three nights of doing this, before I went to sleep, on the third night I was walking through my high school hallway and suddenly my hands popped right in front of my face. And I said oh my hands. Oh this is a dream. And it was so amazing to realize that these football players were actually dream figures and this wall that felt so cool and nubby just like a brick wall should, it was actually made of dream stuff.

TAI: That's really cool. Now I find that the method I'm using, I feel like after I‘m aware that I'm dreaming, I can't really do anything from there. I can't be like I want to fly or I want to go through that stubby wall, which I actually know is just dream stuff. What's a way that you can do that?

ROBERT: The first thing you want to do is calm down when you realize that you're having a dream

TAI: That’s good.

ROBERT: Because what happens is sometimes people get so excited that they wake themselves up.

TAI: Oh my God, I’m dreaming. Oh my God, I’m dreaming. Oh no, I’m awake now.

ROBERT: When you realize you're dreaming and you've calmed down then rub your dream hands together or touch something that'll kind of give you a sense of being grounded in that dream space. And some people even shout out more awareness now and sometimes it's like the lights get turned up in the dream and it's like the dream is responding to their requests for more awareness. Then the final thing is that you have to realize that dreams are a little bit reflective and so it'll reflect back to me my beliefs and expectations. So if I was going to go flying in a lucid dream, one thing that I would do is remind myself that gravity does not exist in the dream world. And so when we change our beliefs and expectations, oh it's easy to fly, there's no gravity here. You can change the lucid dream.

TAI: Let's say I use these techniques and I start to be able to have lucid dreams and I start to control them and I become like a super awesome dream wizard, what kind of impact would that have on my regular life?

ROBERT: I really don't think that lucid dreaming means necessarily that you control that dream. Lucid Dreaming means that we can relate to the dream with more awareness and then with that knowledge, the lucid dreamer can change their waking life. They can realize, oh wait a second, I guess I do have a concern about that. For example, there was even one lucid dreamer who had a fear of insects and in her lucid dream, she shrank herself down to the size of a cockroach and then had a talk with a dream cockroach and realized they really weren't so bad after all, as she began to get over her fear of insects.

TAI: Hello. I'm Mr. Cockroach. I’m made of gross, but I'm practically immune to radiation.

ROBERT: And we're really not so bad after all.

TAI: Exactly. Just a quick reminder when I look at my, when I look at my hands.

ROBERT: Right. So you look at your hands and while you're looking at your hands you tell yourself quietly in your mind, tonight in my dreams when I see my hands, I’ll realize I'm dreaming.

TAI: I’ll know I’m dreaming. Thank you so much. This is Mr. Cockroach and I want to thank you for your time with me

ROBERT: Mr. Cockroach, this has been a blast.

TAI: Testing. testing. This is Tai. I am at my bed and I'm going to bed and using the process that I was taught to try to have a lucid dream and I’m going to just get right into. Tonight in my sleep, I will look at my hands and know that I'm dreaming. Tonight in my sleep, I will look at my hands and know that I'm dreaming. Tonight in my sleep, I will look at my hands and know that I'm dreaming. Tonight in my sleep I look at my hands and know that I’m dreaming. I'm tired. I'm going to get ready to go to bed. Light off. Good night recorder. Good morning. This is Tai and this is the morning after the previous recording where I tried to have a lucid dream. I can’t, I don’t have any recollection of my dream. So I don’t know if I dreamed at all. Maybe I didn’t. So I’m pretty sad.

TAI: I'm not quite the master dream wizard yet, but I'm going to practice it a lot. My thirst for vengeance is unquenchable. So I'm going to keep practicing. I’ll get that cockroach one day. Mark my words.

VOICE 1: In our dreams, we find our goals and we find what we want to strive for.

TAI: I like this idea that your aspirations in your waking life could be connected to your dreams when you sleep. And if my aspirations is to become a dream wizard, maybe I just need to hope and dream about it.

[TAI SINGS DREAM SONG]

Good evening. Welcome to this dream auditorium. I’m Mr. Cockroach, the dream wizard, your entertainment for tonight. And without further ado, let’s go into the dream magic.

Magic, magic, magic.

Deadly toxins, deadly toxins, giving you brain disease.

Deadly toxins, deadly toxins, giving you brain disease.

And then you forget away and then you forget away.

Mixed together, to make memories.

Mixed together, to make memories.

And then you mix them together, mix them together.

[Alarm sound]

Thank you so much for listening. I'm Tai Poole. This show was produced by Veronica Simmonds and Yasmine Mathurin. Our digital producer is Olivia Pasquarelli. Today my guests were Dr. Mark Bolus and Robert Wagner. Thanks to Crystal Duhaime for the editorial assistance. The theme music is by the legendary Johnny Spence. Also big thanks to Johnny for helping me write and record the Dream Song.

KIEN: Next time on Tai asks why: infinity or zero?

CLIP: If I feel like my brain is kind of exploding out of my skull then I feel like I'm making some progress and that's why I really personally find infinity cool.

TAI: Till next time. I'm Tai. Keep asking why.

TRANSCRIPT: Tai Asks Why - Season 1, EP 2

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