"High intensity training for the mind": A neurosurgeon explains why we dream

"High intensity training for the mind": A neurosurgeon explains why we dream
Plus, are dreams trying to send you a warning about your health?

By MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED JUNE 15, 2024 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Iwoke up exhausted this morning. It’s not that I didn’t get a good sleep — I did. It was just an incredibly busy one, full of running, climbing and at one point flying across a room. As I opened my eyes to the new day, it took a few moments to realize that I had not, in fact, spent a night engaged in intense, impossible physical activity. “Our brains are not resting when we sleep,” explains Rahul Jandial, MD, PhD, whose latest book is “This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life.”

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You open this book with the evolutionary case for our dreams. Why do we need to dream?

The answer is based on neurodevelopmental biology. The fundamental principle of neurons, neural tissue, is that either you use it or you lose it. When we look at brain activation, brain electricity and glucose utilization, our brains are not resting when we sleep. In fact, the electricity can be seen as equivalent. The question then is, what is going on with the brain activation? Imagination and emotion are being liberated, meaning those neurons are activated. They’re using up glucose, they're sparking electricity through neurotransmitters that typically aren't during waking life.

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Some of us always remember our dreams and seem to experience them very vividly, while other people say they never dream. They never think about their dreams; they never remember their dreams. Do you think our dreams then are having the same impact on us in relation to our waking selves?

.....Those people who recall vivid dreams versus those who don't, they have the same brain electricity and the same brain glucose utilization between them. So I think the dreaming process is churning, no matter what the memory. The dream recall varies. And that residue you were talking about is very important. The dreaming brain turning into waking brain is not a crisp moment. There are a few seconds of lingering transitions, called sleep exit. That's an area where you can hold onto a dream memory. People can cultivate this a bit. You can recall your dreams more. Not always, not every time. But just to know that that capacity is there, albeit limited, is fascinating to me. It bookends the sleep entry period, going from waking brain to dreaming brain. There are a few minutes there were people like Salvador Dali said they extracted interesting ideas. So while the recall is variable, the dreaming process is happening robustly in all of us.

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It speaks to an intersection that a lot of us are not always comfortable with. You can't just stay in the science realm here. This is philosophical, what you're talking about here.

When they asked me to prepare this book, I said, “I just need to have one permission — that where there will be gaps of knowledge, I want to say, “I believe. Could it be? I wonder? Wouldn't it be an elegant hypothesis?” I want to be upfront with people. There's no way to say that nightmares arrive in kids to cultivate their sense of self versus other. I can tell you that they arrive at the same time as another capacity called theory of mind, where it becomes, “Somebody smiling doesn't always mean some goodwill for me.” When I put those things together, it's an invitation to people to think about, why do we have to tell Johnny, ’It was only a dream?” That invites the thought that waking thought and dreaming thought before nightmares arrive are blurred. Why do nightmares cluster in families? Falling dreams and teeth falling out dreams don't. I wonder if those universal processes that come through families show where there's a cognitive inheritance, like risk-taking. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/06/15/high-intensity-training-for-the-mind-a-neurosurgeon-explains-why-we-dream/