Understanding Your Dreams

So, Doctor, I love this topic because I'm one of those people that when I have a dream, I will wake up and try to decipher everything about it to learn what the message is, what I'm supposed to be realizing or, or taking away from that dream.

So let's begin with does everyone dream, and do we dream every night?

Answer, yes, yes.

[laughs]

[laughs]

So all of us are dreaming every night, and the question is not about did I dream, it's a question of do I remember what I dreamed.

Part of it is our curiosity about our dreaming.

Part of it is our busy lifestyles.

You know, I have a lot of people who jump up out of bed and immediately grab their phones.

When we dream, we're using a different part of our brain.

We're using the default network, and that is, uh, it has a sort of on/off.

When it's active, the part of our mind that is goal-focused, the part that would grab the phone when we first jump up, um, that has to...

They, they can't work at the same time.

So one is thinking outside, let's just put it simply, and one is thinking inside.

And so when we wake up in the morning, that thinking inside part of ourself is active.

If we just leap out of bed and start to do, then the thinking outside activates and we lose it.

We just lose the dream.

What happens in our brain when we're dreaming?

Well, a couple... a lot of things happen, but just in, in terms of, um, you know, our sort of bigger topic here about how can we change our life using our dreams, um, you know, all day long, we're very, very busy, and we have a lot of things to do, and we're checking off lists, and we're in motion.

But all of the things that we're experiencing all day long, we have responses to, and those responses can be everything from emotions to, um, ideas to criticizing those ideas and shutting ourself down.

All of those parts of our brain then, when we go to sleep, they're taken offline.

And the imaginative part of ourself, the part that sees beyond pattern, the part that thinks about the future, that, um, organizes emotions and draws from all of the responses of the day to go to new places and have different ways of thinking, new perspectives, that lights up and becomes extremely active.

So it's a way for us to, you know, get the other side of the story, if you will, of everything that happened in our daytime.

Does the way we live a particular day, so for example, if we're extremely stressed out or if we may happen to be calmer, does the way we, we experience that day impact our dreams that night? D- does a particular way make them more vivid or intense?

Yeah, definitely.