What Are Dreams About? | Episode 1008 | Closer To Truth

Throughout history, dreams have fascinated and mystified. Messages from God? Images of the subconscious? Much about dreams is myth. What's real? Featuring interviews with Robert Stickgold, Deirdre Barrett, Christopher Isham, and Patrick McNamara.

Season 10, Episode 8 - #CloserToTruth

Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.

Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

#Dreams #Consciousness

[donaldjmccann]

I am a software developer. I would guess that more than 50% of the intractable problems I have faced over 50 years of programming were solved when I was sleeping. The answers did not come to me in a dream, ; I just woke up and had the full-blown solution in my head. I learned very early to "book-mark" these solutions, so that I remembered them when I awoke. Now that I am an old man, I find the process works more efficiently, as I can nap whenever I run into such problems. I have never encountered a problem that I could not solve while sleeping.

[everything]

This truly is one of the best channels on YouTube, deserves more subscribers!

[chriscalderon]

Once in a while I have vivid lucid dreams I swear its more real then waking life.

[johnhannon]

“Dreams are real so long as they last. Can we say more of life?”
- Havelock Ellis

[jeffreyphillips]

I wrote down my dreams for 5 years when I was in my 20's. What a hodgepodge of totally weird mental scrambled eggs

[mrsmilesaway]

I've had a dream showing me what's going to happen with me in the future and it did happen. Exactly like in the dream. It was hair raising and profound. I agree with the dude who says there are big dreams. Yes, there are. Once you experience this first hand yourself, you just know there is something more to dreams than just brain maintenance.

[Dion_Mustard]

I dream every night and extremely vividly. So I am lucky because some people I know do not remember their dreams. I have many flying and travelling dreams.
The best dream I have had was about 10 years ago. I recall being sort of in a sleep paralysis state where I was aware of my bed but also in the dream world..this is the absolute truth....the next thing I knew I was flying out of my body just like superman with my arms stretched out..I was flying over fields at night time..I even recognised the fields..I saw horses and sheep and as I flew down towards them they ran away as though they were aware of me approaching..I kept flying and I could feel my stomach tightening and turning just like when you travel fast on a roller coaster..I kept flying for some time and eventually I flew back into my bedroom and straight into my stomach area then I awoke suddenly..
I will never forget that dream and wonder if it was an illusion or some sort of separation of consciousness..who knows but I keep wishing for a similar dream to occur.

[maryosgood]

Dreams are a doorway. Much to learn about this topic.

[humlakullen]

I find it really bizarre to have the exact same dream twice. It happens only a few times per year, but it could be two nights in a row, or days go by before the same dream occur again. Instinctively I assume that dream is more "important" than the rest, but I still haven't been able to make sense of them. Anyone else had the same dream more than once..?

[alientreker]

Lucid dreaming obviously includes the brain's executive functions. Speak of this please.

[serenerhapsody]

How about in the cases of dreams wherein you are aware that you are aware that you are dreaming?
I remember in the past having dreamt that I feel into a polluted river...and telling myself in that dream not to worry 'because it is just a dream anyway'.

[Upgradezz]

I dream and sometimes they forecast the future. I've also experienced that the good I become in my moral life the accurate those dreams become in predicting.

[nathanielm]

I'm truly mystified by people who believe that dreams are random brain activity or purely rehearsal but perhaps they do not have the so called "big dreams", i always have. I'm convinced they have a purpose and one broadly in line with the Jungian's idea of the Self. As pointed out here, not all dreams are "big dream" and many are mere rehearsal, but anyone who has experienced the rich symbolic language and creativity of dreams would be hard pressed to subscribe to the idea that there purpose can be explained solely on the level of brain activity.

[richardbedford]

At the end of a heavy dream there is a warm fuzzy feeling which erases the memory of the dream's content.

[xspotbox]

There are three gateways into consciousness, dreams, meditation and psychedelics. All are similar, but fundamentally different phenomena. When we meditate, we don't sense of conscious self, it's perception that's changing. This way allow us to experience finer structure of own living force, touch that place where our thoughts originate and explore all the way back up again, to a state of extreme sensitivity and sensual awareness.
Dreams are kinda different, it's like we take world to a same sort of journey by letting our imagination to create whatever it desire and place us in a movie seat. That separation of holistic impression to imaginary self and lucid environment seems to be the most miraculous mechanism that exist in nature hardly anybody pay attention to.
This could mean there is no self, it's something in our brain that call out that illusion, just like it can create observer inside observer and even make dream beings feel materially alive and full of emotional reactions. In reality, brain is all those entities at once, every little bit of dreams is produced and controlled by exactly same mechanism. And it never goes away, no matter what we do it will always project some sense of body, space, motion, light and conscious mind. How can energy do all that, project into alert observer and many personalities by creating illusion of physical existence at same time, where does all that energy and information come from, this should be possible to discover experimentally. For energy to flow, there must be difference between potentials of force. But if we back track source of those cellular potentials, it all come down to DNA molecules in cells core, since they are the origin of all cellular mechanics.
Perhaps we need the third key to unlock entire fragment, how does psychedelic drugs make our dreams different, when dreams are hallucination in any case. What makes a difference, this is a weird question, people experience clear sense of conscious awareness, even when their dreams are stoned as *.

[MisterNarrador]

sleep paralysis: I experienced about 1000 times.
random dreams: all my life
Lucid dreams: rarely
Other Realities dreams: Very Rare, I listened to music I never heard before.

Real Life Strange: Enlightenment, I was in a state of enlightenment only for a few minutes twice in my entire life. Rivers of detailed information flew throw my brain, with details about everything and I understood why the wind blew and what direction it was going, why birds fly and their purpose, I was describing absolutely everything with lot's of details. the trees, the earth, everything communicating with each other. and interacting in their own ways.

Past life: I just keep having those Djavu feelings thousands of times. a lot of them bring back memories of other lives where I was another person.

Life is very difficult to understand, some people live on their own reality in a very strange way. the vast majority just lives on a very common ordinary life. we still have a lot to learn, this life is very strange and science is just beginning to understand.

[tracyeichel]

I suffer from tonic clonic seizures multiple times a day and I got goosebumps when I heard you say the connection between dreams and epilepsy because I have those feelings just before I have a seizure sometimes I call it aura I have no health insurance no way to get help from my epilepsy 😩
Nobody to talk to about it nobody can relate to nobody who understands the things that I go through I'm lost in this world that I have no clue I've only had seizures since

[Chris-Alia]

We compartmentalize all day to get through this life...and when we sleep, our brains are like “Finally!, A break from compartmentalization.”

[catherinemoore]

I have been astounded by a couple of my own dreams: people I had completely forgotten and who didn't mean much to me appeared in my dreams and made me realise the kind of person I have become after more than 40 years without once thinking about them. Very powerful. Very strange.

[MohamedMohamed-trrz]

The holy Prophet pbuh said God takes our souls when we sleep at night, and returns them when we wake. To some He doesn’t return them, hence why they don’t wake up. Our bodies reach a temperature minimum at certain stages of deep sleep.

Our souls are essentially traveling. There’s a concept of ‘Astral travel’ and the ‘astral realm’ which is pretty interesting.

Interestingly enough we are said to secrete DMT when we sleep and when we die. Also interesting is Descartes take on the seat of the soul.