Conjoined Dreamers

Is the dream world a solitary creation of the sleeping mind, or can we share these spaces of fear, wonder and desire with other dreamers? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore Carl Jung’s collective unconscious as well as the science of linked dreaming via computer interfaces.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stup
works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff with blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. In
the last episode in the series this week, we started
off by talking about a couple of different dream worlds.
We talked about love Craft with Cadath and author and

(00:26):
the Plateau of Lange. We talked about Boheas and his
circular ruins. The one I immediately turned to is a
comic book one. Uh it is Little Nemo in Slumberland.
Have you ever read these book? I've never read them.
There By A windsor Mackay, there were these great turn
of the century comic strips that appeared in newspapers, and

(00:46):
they were these huge comic strips to not like the
ones that were used to nowadays. But every one of
them began with this kid named Nemo falling asleep, falling
into a dream world, having an adventure, and then waking
up in the very last panel. So I always think
of Little Nemo in Slumberland. But then, uh we, I
guess should acknowledge that that Doctor Strange movies coming out

(01:07):
in the next month or two, and Marvel has their
own like dream universe, and there's like, like a major
Doctor Strange villain is Nightmare. He's like personification of nightmares.
Be interesting to what exceed to what extent they incorporate
dreams and they're going a whole like the whole quantum
science sort of angle. Yeah, I don't know, I'm curious too.
I mean a lot of the interviews about that movie

(01:28):
have have talked about, you know, how they're going to
explore alternate realities and things like that. So we'll see,
we'll see. Maybe maybe Nightmare in the Dream Rails will
be in Doctor Strange two or something like that if
it does well enough. But then of course there's wonder Land,
there's Odds, there's even the Matrix is kind of like
a dream world, right. That is something something to that

(01:49):
keep coming kept coming up for me, is that to
a large extent, virtual reality is the new dream world.
And a lot of these shows they kind of kind
of you can you can sort of trade in and
out in their treatment of dreams or virtuality. Yeah, and
with the virtual reality thing, like it kind of makes
me think of, um, the very popular nineties comic The Sandman,

(02:09):
the Neil Game Sandman book. There's there's also sort of
like a major aspect of like confronting reality. We talked
about this in the last episode. Wh's real, What's not?
How do you know when you're in a dream? That's
a very common trope and dream fiction. Yeah. One that
instantly comes to mind too, Dreamscape. Did you ever see this? No?

(02:29):
I haven't seen that. It's pretty great, has some some
wonderful effects. There's a guy that turns into a serpent
in the dream. It's okay, it's pretty cool. Um, there's
night Marion Elm Street. I don't think he's ever been
given the really a neuroscientific treatment um, which I think
would be interesting. Like after I saw Inception the first time,
I was like, this is pretty good, but I would

(02:50):
like to see an inception Nightmarre Nemes Street cross over.
There's your reboot for Nightmare in Elm Streets. And they
tried that a couple of years ago and it didn't
quite work out. I love the reboot, but me, most
people did not like it. Um. Another piece of fiction
that comes to mind my My, the fantasy series I'm
obsessed with by our Scott Baker. There's a there there

(03:13):
are these groups there's a group of sorcerers in it
uh and they are known as the Mandate, and they
are carrying on this tradition of warning the world about
this uh, this threat that that is in the Far North,
that was was fought and defeated in a huge, nearly
catastrophic war centuries and centuries ago, and they they're warning

(03:35):
everyone that could come back. And every is part of
your initiation. Each one of these Mandate sorcerers uh uh
absorbs the dreams of the schools founder Sessawatha. So every
night they're plagued with nightmares of this first Great War,
the first Apocalypse. So that then then in the Waking War,

(03:56):
they have this this fresh and intense um reminder of
why they need to warn everyone. That reminds me of
two things of No, I'm gonna try not to spoil
it too much, but Game of Thrones there's a lot
of that going on in there with a brand he's
having these like prophetic dreams. Yeah, they give a very

(04:16):
weird space that I'm I think it's still they're still developing,
they're still unrolling exactly how dreams work in that world.
And then uh, we're gonna talk about in this episode,
but various tribes around the world that that have dreams
is like a major important part of their culture and
how they decide to do things as a community. Yeah,
all right, before we move on, we need to get
a little bit of house cleaning out of the way. Yeah.

(04:39):
So this week's episodes, if you haven't listened to the
previous one, are sponsored by Falling Water, which is a
new TV show coming out on octobert on USA Network.
They approached us about working together. Yeah, they said, hey,
we like to sponsor a couple of episodes on dreams,
and we said, well, that's great because we would love
to do a couple of episodes on dreams. Uh. And

(05:00):
we've covered the topic in the past, we'll cover it
again in the future. So it's a perfect match. We'll
talk more about it in the sponsor breaks but and
I don't want to spoil it too much. Falling Water
is the science fiction mystery about entering other people's dreams.
This episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind Though, is
gonna be about Carl Young, the collective unconscious, and the
current science of linked dreaming. And like last episode, we

(05:24):
were put in touch with Dr Moran Surf, who's a neuroscientist,
and we're gonna touch base with him at the end
of this episode and talk to him about some of
the ideas and research that we're throwing around. Uh in
these in the in the pair of these episodes. Yeah,
so we're gonna talk about the collective unconscious and young,
We're gonna talk about conjoined and shared dreaming. Should be

(05:44):
quite inexperience. But let's let's start with Carl Young and
the collective unconscious. And I'm going to defer to you
a lot in this section because I know this is
this is more your area of expertise. Oh, I wouldn't
say that, but yeah, when I was in grad school,
Young came up a lot. One of my UM, one
of the professors that was on my thesis committee is
very much in the young In school of thought. He

(06:06):
was constantly trying to invoke young and collective unconscious and
archetypes into my work. UM and the other professors, like
many in academia, didn't think that there was a legitimate
foundation for yous work, and so they sort of pushed
against that. But yeah, I have some familiarity with him,
so let's touch base with him. Uh. Young was a

(06:27):
Swiss psychiatrist who founded what's known as analytic psychology. He's
known mainly for the descriptions of extroverted and introverted personalities
and his theory that there is an underlying universal understanding
of symbolic representations. Most of this work that we're going
to refer to was in the early part of the

(06:47):
twentieth century. Now you're probably thinking of Sigmund Freud. Well, yeah,
he and Sigmund Freud met in seven. They began as collaborators,
but they eventually had intellectual disagreements and disliked one another's
approaches to psychoanalysis. Young himself felt he was more about
putting humans in a historical context and finding the meaning

(07:09):
and dignity of their lives in the universe. So he
was a pretty metaphysical guy. Yeah. I you know, I
haven't seen this film, but Cronenberg's David Kronenberg's two thousand
and eleven film A Dangerous Mind has Michael Fastbender as
Young and Vigo Mortison as Freud. It looked like I
was totally on board, and that movie just kind of

(07:29):
came and went, and I haven't remembered to watch it.
I think I I distinctly remember when it came out
and saying, oh, that looks good, but maybe a little serious.
I'll come back to that when I'm in the mood
for a serious movie. And I'm so rarely in the
mood for a serious good movie. I just tend to
go for goofy uh or bad movies instead. But I'll
come back to this one at some point. Uh. And

(07:50):
you know another popular cultural tie in that for me anyway,
is I'm quite fond of the Peter Gabriel song from
two Rhythm of the Heat, which has an excellent, like
accelerating drumbeat, but when lyrics that say, like the rhythm
is around me, the rhythm has control, the rhythms inside me,
the rhythm has my soul. And apparently this is he

(08:12):
based the lyrics here, and that the songs structure itself
on Carl Young's experiences while observing a group uh of
nocturnal ritual dancers in the in the Sudan. So this
is one of the things about Young that I didn't
really know until doing the research for this episode. I mean,
he was pretty well traveled. It wasn't like he was
just sitting at home spitting these theories out and not

(08:33):
like applying them to the real world. He was observing
a lot of I guess, anthropological ways that the collective
unconscious may manifest. Yeah, I mean a lot of academics
so certainly of his time even would have been perfectly
happy to just remain in the in their study and
write all this. But he went out in the field.
So apparently he found something dark, primal and irresistible, and
the accelerating rhythm that these individuals were creating, and he

(08:56):
feared was going to possess him, that he might be
sucked into their collective psychoical experience. Huh. Here's here's a
quote from what he said. The natives easily fall into
a virtual state of possession. That was the case. Now
is eleven o'clock approached, their excitement began to get out
of bounds. The dancers were being transformed into a wild horde,
and I became worried about how it would end. Well,

(09:19):
So let's we're gonna try to keep it brief because honestly,
and I wouldn't be surprised if this already exists out there.
But you could have an entire podcast dedicated to young um.
But we've only got so much time here. Here's a
brief look at his psychological theories. He began working with
word association to uncovered groups of emotionally charged ideas that

(09:41):
were stored in people. Uh. He coined these terms. This
is the term complex that we use nowadays. And he
connected this to a psycho somatic theory about schizophrenia, in
which he thought complexes influenced our biochemistry, which then subsequently
lead to mental illness. He also brought about the term

(10:02):
which you've probably heard about, individual ation. Uh. He thought
that despite a normal life, all people undergo a developmental
journey that is signposted for them by archetypal images. Now,
if you listen to our episode on myth that we
did a couple of months ago, we we delved into
that quite a bit. We we talked about more about
Young's archetypal work and symbolic work than the collective unconscious,

(10:26):
but it's there too. And at the end of his life,
he theorized that the more uncertain we are about ourselves,
the more we have kinship with all things, because everyone
is uncertain, from I don't know, uh, squirrel out in
the yard to me and this podcast studio. Uh. And
he said the alienation that he received from the science community,

(10:50):
which I referred to earlier, that manifested as what he
called an unexpected unfamiliarity within himself. So this kind of
brought that about for him. Now, archy types and myth
big one, right, And I said we talked about earlier.
If you, if you weren't there for that episode, here's
a quick breakdown. He became increasingly interested in the connection
between human psychology and our myths, folklore, and fairy tales,

(11:12):
and he began to interpret thought processes as a result
of mythological symbolism. The collective unconscious, which we're going to
talk about a lot today, was how these archetypal images
manifested despite cultural differences around the world, right, Like people
in a tribe in the Amazon are having very similar
archetypal images to somebody in London, for instance. His evidence

(11:38):
was that there are strong parallels in dream imagery across
all these different cultures, and collective unconscious represented a form
of the unconscious mind, memories and impulses that were not
aware of That's what he's referring to when he says unconscious.
He thought that that was common to all of mankind
as a whole. And originated with our inherited structure of

(11:59):
the brain. So he thought of it as being like
a biological structure of the brain that all humans shared. So,
in other words, it's the aspect of your psyche that
stems not from personal experience and conditioning that's personal unconsciousness,
but from everything that came before in the conscious experience
of humanity. It's not a personal acquisition, but a psychic heritage.

(12:20):
It's not the realm of complexes, but of archetypes. It's
the deep dark waters, and the personal consciousness is the
sunlit shallows. Yeah, and I wanna touch on this briefly.
To Young wasn't entirely consistent with how he regarded collective
unconscious uh. So, for instance, sometimes he thought of it
as being connected to genetics, more biological and saying earlier.

(12:43):
The other times he would talk about it as being
a demonstration of communion with something divine, a space outside
of ourselves that we all access. Uh, similar to the
when we were just talking about Frederick van Eden in
our last episode. It's kind of something outside of ourselves
that's influencing our dreams. So it's not quite easy to
pin down Young on like what you know what he's

(13:04):
talking about here. Is he just talking about collective unconscious
as like being a biological phenomenon we all share, or
is it like he really believes in some kind of
astral space that we all access together, or you know,
just in reading some of this stuff about the encountering
the drummers, um and and the rhythm and then looking

(13:25):
at this, it seems like he was a guy that
was was very open about not only his his own uncertainties,
but but open to how everything might actually connect. So
he had this idea of the unconscious, the collective unconscious, uh,
that that he very much believed in, and he but
we have, had validity to it, but was perhaps open
to exactly how it connected with the universe. I think so. Yeah.

(13:48):
I think he was primarily concerned with the not just
the human project, but sort of like the universal project, right,
and he wanted to know what maybe the ultimate question
what am I doing here? What? It is very existential
right now, speaking of that question what am I doing here?
One might very well ask that question about the collective unconscious?

(14:09):
What what's the possible application for all of this aside
from just uh, you know, staring into your nown navel. Yeah, yeah,
that's true, and a lot of academics, including some of
my thesis committee, would have asked that question. Well, Young's
theories are more prevalent than any application of his actual ideas,
especially when we're talking about therapeutic practice of psychology. But

(14:33):
his word association tests that I mentioned, that's become a
standard for clinical psychology with rating scales that have been
designed to test personality. I think a lot of us
have taken so, so this would be like the therapist
is saying like father, king, mother in these words, and
you tell them what them, what they mean to you?
I think so. Yeah, But I think it's I think
maybe that's closer to what he was doing, and that's

(14:55):
evolved into sort of a more complex version of the test,
more like the BuzzFeed type quiz of like what Game
of Thrones character? Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's
really been his influences on BuzzFeed quizzes, Uh individuation which
I mentioned earlier, that's been incorporated into many theories on

(15:16):
personality development and the myth archetype theories have been partially
embraced by those who are looking to understand humans as
symbol using beings and this isn't a lot of different
disciplines communication, art, philosophy, and definitely in linguistics. It led
to Joseph Campbell, who we also talked about in that
Myth episode, and his whole hero's journey theory, which has

(15:38):
been very popularized. A lot of people have heard probably
more about the hero's journey than they've heard about Young. Uh.
It was popularized mainly by Star Wars and George Lucas
talking about having used it while he was writing the
scripts for those. There's countless books on storytelling that also
talk about the hero's journey being like the inherent narrative
that we all turned to. You know, speaking of narratives,

(16:01):
I know that we have some Dune fans listening to
the episode, fans of Frank Herbert's Done and and uh
and many of them up to also fans of Brian
Herbert's work Um continuing on with that universe. But in
the Done novels, the Bennie Jessers Sisterhood, they possessed a
collective memory that was heavily based on Young's collective unconscious.

(16:21):
I didn't know that, Yeah, yeah, I knew there was
some connection, but I had not researched it to just
the other day to see like there was definite connect
continue there did that come up when you and Joe
did the Doune episode. We didn't get into a lot
of the heavier like psychological philosophical stuff as much. I mean,
we certainly could. There's there's actually a whole book out
there called the Philosophy of doone. But but certainly an

(16:44):
area we could explore. Yeah. So in the book, this
gives the Bennie jestered inborn abilities, memories and modes of behavior,
and it key points in the novels. It also opens
up the individual too harmful past lives essentially, And according
to Frank Herbert's son Brian, and he had studied the
work of Young and as well, and also had studied
the work of Young's associate, Dr Joseph b. Rhyan. So

(17:08):
you might be listening to this and saying, Okay, this
young character, I've heard of him before, This all sounds interesting.
Did he have any evidence for all this? Well, his
main evidence was what I mentioned earlier, the strong parallels
and dream imagery across different cultures. That's mainly what he's
stuck to um And and that's why there's a lot
of criticism leveled against him. Yeah. I mean, if your

(17:31):
if your main evidence is essentially based in the world
of dream um, it's it's hard. You can see where
that would be a problem. Especially you know, as we
talked about in the last episode, you can't always rely
on human beings talking about their memories of their dreams,
because memories are inherently unreliable. Yeah, because we were engaging
in that process where we take the nonsense of memories. Potentially,

(17:54):
this is one of view of it. If you take
the nonsense of dreams and then you're recoding it into
some new form that's more narrative or more symbolic. I mean,
that's that's that's a several step process. It's not all
housed in the dream world. And you could also you
could say that the parallels between one, uh one people's

(18:15):
archetypes and another. You could say that these parallels could
just easily represent universal aspects of the human experience or
or even the evolution of human consciousness. Um and and
and for that you wouldn't necessarily need this collective unconscious.
We talked about this in the Myth episode two, that
there's like a couple of other people have proposed similar theories,
one of which is Alan Moore. UH. Comics and no

(18:37):
novelists have his new novel Jerusalem just came out. Um,
But he has this theory of what he calls idea space,
which is very similar to the Young in idea. But
again a lot of people say Allan Wore's crack pot.
So who knows, now, why would they say Young's a
crack pot? Why would they say Alan Moore's a crack pot? Well,
here are some criticisms that are leveled against Young because

(19:01):
of his interest in connecting his theories to religion and
cultural myth. He's considered an embarrassment by many people in
the psychology discipline. I mentioned here my own experience with
this UH in my thesis Freudians. Even in the psychology
psychology discipline, they say his archetypes are only metaphysical ideas

(19:23):
in their existence can't be proven, so why bother. He's
also criticized for failing to offer any kind of coherent
model for personality development, and then others just blatantly dismiss
him as being a mystic crackpot because he doesn't offer
any experimental evidence for his observations al right. Well, on

(19:43):
that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
we come back, we're going to go beyond Young and
and to be collected unconscious, and then we will enter
into the world of dreams again. All Right, we're back.

(20:14):
So morphic resonance. This sounds uh, here's a new term
for this episode. How does this tie into the collective unconscious? Okay,
so we're gonna go this is a This is like,
you know how there's Star Trek beyond. This is Young beyond.
So these are um ideas that tie in to Young's
collective unconscious, but are a little different. Morphic resonance was

(20:37):
primarily advocated for by a guy named Rupert Shell Drake,
and he was formally a recognized scholar in biochemistry. He
was a winner of his university's Botany Prize, a Harvard scholar,
he was basically a well renowned academic. Now he's shunned
by the scientific community, and he writes about the limitations
of contemporary scientific thought as being dogma ces. It reminded

(21:00):
me of our episode on Cargo cult science. His example
of this, and I talked about this briefly in the
last episode. His nemesis, his Richard Dawkins, the guy who
came up with the well a lot of a lot
of things, but mainly mimetic theory, uh. And he's interested
in the influence of cosmology on evolution. In this he

(21:25):
also thinks that the laws of nature themselves are prone
to evolutions, so we can't necessarily trust the laws of
nature because they're they're malleable, they're changing. That does sound problematic, yeah,
And he points to dark matter as being an example
of this because nothing in our science can begin to
explain it. And I'm just gonna give a little stuff

(21:45):
to blow your mind, uh insight into that. How many
times have we sat around and said we should do
an episode on dark matter and then we start looking
into it and we're like, oh boy, this is tough.
It's uh. It's definitely often refer to these as the
wing pool topics because it's like a swimming pool where
there's there's a deep drop off between the shallow and

(22:06):
the deep end. It's not a gradual zero entry scenario,
so that those those topics can be a little intimidating
to go after, but they can be fulfilling. So we'll
maybe we'll get around a dark matter at some point. Yeah,
one day. Sheldrake himself, as a child was fascinated with pigeons,
and this is important. I'm not just bringing up you
know something he liked. Uh. He especially liked that you

(22:29):
could release them far away from home, and yet they
would always make their way back, right, kind of like
the ravens and Game of Thrones. They always find their
way back. That's why we call him homing pigeons. In school,
he realized science couldn't yet explain homing pigeons, and they
just talked about it as being kind of an unobservable mystery.
So he became interested in the idea that biology and

(22:50):
heredity were similar to Young's collective unconscious, and that there
is a shared memory within species. This was influenced by
Hunt Henri Bergson's idea that memory isn't stored in our brain,
as it's instead a part of time and space. Memory
isn't in us again, it's like it's external to us.

(23:12):
So these ideas grew for shell Drake when he tried
what do you think psychedelics? Another psychedelic Avenger here, uh,
and transcendental meditation. Shell Drake now believes memory is a
function of time and not matter matter, meaning our brains,
and that it's shared by all living things. He calls

(23:32):
this sharing morpho genetics. And now he researches phenomena that
science dismisses. So for example, how dogs know when their
owners are coming home. You know that, like when a
dog will know before you get to the front door.
Maybe it's because they're hearing is a lot better than ours. Yeah,
that would be my first guy. But he's investigating that

(23:55):
it might have some kind of morphic resonance. Another one
is our human ability to predict when we're being stared
at from a distance. Oh, now, there's there's a lot
of interesting science to this. We actually have an older
episode on the science staring, and I know it's one
that Joe has wanted to revisit. What this reminds me again,
I go back to these comic book examples. Have you
ever read Animal Man, the DC comic character I haven't

(24:17):
got I haven't got around of that one. That one's
on the list yet another. Grant Morrison didn't create him,
but Grant Morrison had a great run on Animal Man,
and Animal Man as a character is able to tap
into what are called more shik fields that allow him
to sort of access these species memories. Now that I've
read this, I have to think that the people working

(24:38):
on Animal Man, especially Morrison, were influenced by Sheldrake, but
hit So. Sheldrake's hope is that all of this will
lead to a moment of what he calls coming out
in science, where people will be able to discuss these
topics without any fear of repercussion. So in two thousand
and eight he was actually attacked at a conference by

(25:00):
paranoid schizophrenic with a knife. So yeah, that's how far
this like weird division goes between like people who deem
themselves scientific and people who uh and what they see
as a pseudoscience. Right, that like it went so far
as it clearly provoked this this mentally ill men into

(25:22):
physically attacking him, but luckily he lived through it. Now
to to return to the collective unconscious in the dream world. Um,
of course, the idea of their being a realm of dreams,
or even a shared realm of dreams. Uh, it's not.
It's not something that that young um or anyone else
necessarily invented. I mean, this has been something that has

(25:43):
been explored in older modes of belief for a time.
I mean, certainly, there are plenty of examples where you
have prophetic dreams and dream communication. It is occurring between
especially between a divine entity and a human. But we
also have these ideas of a shared space. Yeah, and
we most often see those now in tribal dream world.

(26:03):
So Young himself actually that I was mentioning how he
kind of traveled around the world. He visited the East
African Alghani tribe in Kenya in and this is where
he came up with a term he used called big dreams,
because the al Ghani called their collective dreams big dreams,
and this was where the dreamer was dreaming for their

(26:24):
whole community and perhaps the whole world. It's kind of
a shamanic style that matched Young's theories very well. So
later on he would come to see this it's kind
of like a collective memory or bodily expression that all
humans shared due to biology. So again there this time
he's leaning on the biology thing. Uh. In the late

(26:44):
nineteen sixties, Catholic missionaries also discovered the Akure tribe in
the deep Amazon Uh and this is a tribe that
are semi nomadic. They number around eleven thousand people. When
asked how they had survived in the harsh Amazon for
so long, they said it was because of the guidance
that they had received in the spirit world while they
were dreaming. So now they're referred to as the dream

(27:06):
people of the Amazon because they have this unique daily
ritual they call wausa or it translates into dream sharing.
So here's how it works. Every day, they get up early,
like three four am early, and they gather in family
units around their communal fire, and they consume a special

(27:28):
tea and drink it so much that they end up vomiting.
So it's a sort of cleansing, purging part of the ritual.
So minus the t this is this is kind of
a ritual that a lot of people in America take
part in, especially around Marty Gras. Yeah. Yeah, except for

(27:49):
where it's going next. I don't know if people at
Marty Gras sit around and do this next. So you've
got order that negative energy from vomiting up your tea.
Then everybody takes turns telling each other what they remember
from their dreams, because they believe the dreams each contain
fragments of important messages from their spirit elders or a

(28:09):
powerful rainforest spirit known as Eru tom uh, and this
spirit is sometimes seen as being manifested as sort of
like an avatar, as a panther or boa constrictor. So
the idea here is the interpreting of these dreams is
really important since no person is getting all the information individually.

(28:29):
It's going out to everybody in fragments, So a village
elder tries to piece all this together. And the primary
instruction that these tribes have gained from all of this
is basically live in harmony with nature. Uh So, to
give you some examples of this. The more tangible actions
that they've taken from their collective dreams include finding plants

(28:50):
that they need in the forest for medicine and then
figuring out how to prepare those plants as medicine and
administering certain dosages. So that seems very interesting. As children,
they're actually taught that nightmares result in personal growth, So
when you're having a nightmare, you should move toward the

(29:11):
threat in your nightmare so that you can conquer your
fear and realize the dreams true message. Wow, that ties
in rather nicely with the demon dream that Fred and
van Eden defined the idea that you're you're fighting the
demon and overcoming it. And then of course that ties
in with some of the theories about dream that we
have today, in which they are their simulations or they

(29:33):
are a problem solving scenario. Yeah. So, and again because
of these similarities that it begs the question, you know,
let's think, like young, like, is this because human beings
are biologically all having these same experiences or is it
because we're accessing something outside of ourselves. It also seems
like this is such a far more modern approach to
dreaming than anything we have in like a Western certainly

(29:55):
a Christian tradition, where like if you're having a demonic dream,
then it's it's something you know it's at I'm like, oh,
it's either an actual demon or something about your personal
sin that you should feel bad about. But there's we
don't have like a robust system of dealing with nightmares
in our culture. So you remember in the last episode
we were talking about lucid dreaming and I was saying, like,
I just like it's just not for me, you know,

(30:17):
mainly because like I'm just not interested in that. I
just want the process to play out well. And maybe
like I'm unimaginative in this way. But uh. Similarly, like
in modern society, who likes listening to somebody else's dream? Right?
Like I so I was just listening to um uh
this podcast called nerdet and they did an episode where

(30:38):
they talked to a dream interpreter. And the funny bit
like at the beginning, the two hosts were talking to
each other and one host was like, I'm gonna tell
you about my dream, and the other host was like, no,
I don't want to hear about your dream, and she said,
go talk to this dream interpreter. And then they did
that on the same way, like people go, hey, I
had this crazy dream last night, let's try to unpack
it right, And I go, okay, See, I I feel

(31:01):
that the opposite on this, and I and I also
I often encounter that that that argument that that people
don't like hearing about other people's dreams, like the most
the most startling or the most noteworthy example of this
for me was when I read I don't know it
was in the movie too, but it was certainly when
I read Corman McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. There's
a part where the sheriff character played by Tommy Lee

(31:24):
Jones in the movie He's he mentioned to his wife
the guy this dream. He says, nobody wants to hear
about anybody's dream, but then goes on to share this
really potent dream that ties into the whole thematic structure
of the book because so clearly, like Corman, McCarthy can't
actually believe that, because he's a dream all the time.
To add additional insight, and as a culture, we love

(31:46):
TV shows about dreams, we do. We you know, we
mentioned all these bit different fictional properties that that have
existed or will exist very soon. And in the case
of the TV show, uh, and we clearly like to
hear about those dreams. And I find my own experience,
I like to hear about other people's dreams because it
gives me a little insight into how their mind works. Yeah,

(32:07):
so all of this is making me think, like my
reaction to this is very much like a sort of
modern contemporary one, which is like, let's stay closed off
from our dreams, like especially other people's dreams. Let's exists
in the waking world, right, whereas bring it back to
the aquar I mean, it seems like this, like you said,

(32:27):
it seems like such a mature way to experiences and
such a like like man like, I don't think I've
ever had a communal experience like that. We're like, oh,
my family, we all just sit around the living room
and we have have tea. I mean, other than the
vomiting part, but like have tea and sit around and
talk about what we thought about last night. You know. Um,

(32:48):
there's something kind of beautiful about it. Now. I do
have to say, if if we if like a workplace
made everybody coming on a Monday morning and instead of
brainstorming ideas, everyone shared their dreams. Okay, I could see
dreams getting a little but like on a on a personal,
like interpersonal level, I tend to like hearing about people's dreams. Well,

(33:10):
I mean, what we're getting into here is basically like
this isn't unique to that one specific tribe, right. But
they go a step further. They equate reality with dreaming
rather than with being awake. They also believe that all
inner qualities that make an individual unique exist separate from
the physical brain. Instead, when they dream, their soul enters

(33:31):
a multiverse where they learn all the things that are
going on in the world. This allows them theoretically to
move through time, though their focus is mainly on improving
the future, so they mainly in their dreams try to
look at the future rather than the past. You know,
this sounds like a dream world scenario that would fit
in with what we're seeing on Game of Thrones. Totally, Yeah, totally.

(33:55):
So they're basically they try to alter their dreams, and
if an elder interprets something bad is coming, they're going
to try to as a community sort of alter that
dream wise, but also by their behaviors in Waking Life.
And yes, they, like many of the other people we've
spoken about in this series, used hallucinogens to provoke these
vision quests. Here's a major example of a way that

(34:17):
this has affected their society. They had a dream, a
dream interpretation that they would seek conflict with the people's
of the north in Waking Life. All of their clans
united and called upon their Catholic missionary friends to assist
them because they were worried about this. And it turned
out a couple of years later, Ecuador and Peru were

(34:38):
about to allow oil companies to come in and slash
and burn the part of the Amazon that this tribe
lived in, so They see this as part of their
long building prophecy, and the prophecy basically goes like this,
our people, us the Northerners, were called the people of
the Eagle, and their people are called the people of

(34:58):
the Condor. And rather of than fighting over the Amazon,
they want their prophecies that we're all going to unite
and fly together, which immediately made me think of lucid dream.
Oh yeah, how else are you going to fly? Now?
Of course, in Australian Aboriginal mythology, there is also this
concept of the dream time, which is a bit more

(35:19):
complex than a mirror's dream world. But and it has
to do has to do with an ancient time of
the gods in the way that that time sort of
echoes through the current life of ritual. But but there
is a component of dream to it. So, hey, we
we've we've discussed Young and his take on everything. Yeah,
let's get into a little bit of Freud. Yeah, this
is the other, the flip side of the coin. So

(35:39):
Freud and Young famously didn't get along so much so
they made a movie about it. Freud, however, wrote about
dream telepathy in a piece called Dreams and Telepathy. Uh
and he says, there, Yeah, maybe there's a theoretical connection
between dreams and telepathy in this, but he says he
doesn't actually believe they're connected. He sees dreams as being

(36:02):
of course he does something that's in our unconscious telepathy
to him, though, wouldn't alter a dream since it would
come from an external source. Right, Yeah, Now it's interesting
the whole, Like how how Freud looked at dreams. I
was reading that, Like he believed that we had trouble
remembering content from our dreams in large part because our

(36:23):
dreams we're pulling out things we were uncomfortable with. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Well then he went on to write in another piece
called The Occult Significance of Dreams, this is the Freud
we don't hear often about um. In this book he
discusses telepathic or prophetic dreams, and he doesn't dismiss the
idea entirely, and he seems to indicate that, hey, you know,

(36:45):
maybe these could be true. Maybe it's a real thing.
Since this, many experiments have been conducted to see if
there's a connection, if there is something actually going on
with what Freud coined is dream telepathy. Sometimes this kind
of parapsychology is referred to though as the third rail
of psychology. So remember how I was referring to Young

(37:07):
and how he's often dismissed in academia. Of course this
stuff gets the same treatment. Uh, many people treated as pseudoscience.
They think it's going to ruin your career, so they
try to stay away from it. Hence, it's very difficult
to find quote unquote legitimate sources on this topic, right,
Like usually we're looking for peer reviewed research papers for
the episodes that we do, and it was a little

(37:29):
more difficult on stuff like this because no peer review
journal is going to publish something about dream telepathy and
there's unless there's like super concrete evidence. Yeah, so you're
the sources that you you end up going to in
a lot of a lot of cases, there's a steep
drop off in believability and uh and even like the
rigors of research. Well, there's two fairly recent studies that

(37:53):
I think are worth siting here. There's Stanley Krippner and
Montague Ullman in the nineteen seventies and eighties, they were
at the I think it's May Minoties Medical Center in Brooklyn.
Sorry if I'm getting that wrong. Uh. They were testing
for dream telepathy there and they were verifying it with
an e g. Everything I read about these guys immediately

(38:14):
made me think that they were the inspiration for Ghostbusters.
So with this dream to telepathy though, but we're talking
about the supposed ability of one individual to speak to
another through dream exactly, yet that they could speak through
dreams and share dreams without technological hookup like we talked
about with Dr Seraf Uh. And then there was a

(38:36):
study by Carlyle Smith at Trent University in Ontario, and
he showed students photos of an individual and he asked
them to dream about the problems of that particular person.
Wasn't necessarily a person that they'd ever met before. Now,
the senders and the receiver's identities were totally unknown even

(38:57):
to the experimenters. The first experiment was about their health,
the second was about their life problems. In post analysis,
Carlyle Smith found that there were more what he referred
to as hits than controls, where an image or concept
from the person's dream correlated to the real problems of
the individual sender. Now you can take this with a

(39:20):
grain assault too, I suppose, right, like in the same
way as like fortune cookies, right, like, like there's a
certain percentage that like a fortune cookie is vague enough
that almost all of us will I guess, like see
a little bit of ourselves and it identify. Yeah. Yeah,
that this gets into the Foyer effect that Joe and
I did an episode on a while back. If you have,
like certainly with like personality tests, like if enough stuff

(39:43):
clicks off for somebody, they'll buy into the whole package. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
And that's similar to what we're dealing with with mutual
dreaming here too. Yeah, this is the notion that two
lucid dreamers can share and experience the same dream. So
you find this within loose to dreaming communities, which that
can sometimes be like a message board or read it

(40:04):
for him in some cases. Uh, But you'll find individuals
who claimed to have experienced this together sometimes who even
find at times dubious claims of it taking place in
a laboratory setting. Essentially, two or more lucid dreamers say
that they encounter each other and then afterwards confirmed that
all three shared the same details of the encounter or
the setting. So it kind of matches up with some

(40:24):
of these experiments that you were just talking about. So
it's the idea that it's an idea that feeds on
notions of dream, telepathy, and collective unconscious to a certain extent.
And it reminds me a bit of a sci fi
novel that came out titled Vert v u r T
by Jeff Noon. It's it's really good. It's um It

(40:45):
involves a like a kind of a cyberpunky kind of future,
except there's instead of technology, there's a there's a hallucinogenic
drug called vert and it comes in feather form, so
essentially you get these multicolored feathers and you suck on them,
and then it allows everyone to enter into a shared
alternate reality that is essentially a dream world, and you

(41:05):
can then interact with other people who are taking VERD
at the same time. Isn't it funny how much of
our fiction is based around us being able to share
a reality together when we already share a reality together
that is and it it maybe it's just that, like
people inherently feel alienated from one another, like we have
to enter some other kind of states so that we're connected. Yeah,

(41:28):
I mean, certainly when people are when there is a
physical disconnect I think you know, it certainly makes sense.
But yeah, you have plenty of times where you're you're
entering into this virtual experience with people that you you
share the the actual experience with. Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay,
So we've spent most of this episode talking about theories, right,
collective unconsciousness, young Freud, dream, telepathy, mind to mind communication

(41:53):
without wires, right, but what about the wires. We're using wires, right,
there's a technology in science to this whole thing. Yeah,
and this brings us to Traveloge. Uh you might not
think it, but yeah, travel Edge plays an important role here. Um,
so the Traveloge hotel chain. You might not think of

(42:15):
travel Lodge as a major player in futurist predictions, but
you do see this from large future concerned companies. From
time to time, they all commission some sort of a
study on where what what's the future of their business
with the future of of life is it intersects with
their business? And indeed you see more and more companies
that are devoting people and resources to future readiness. And

(42:35):
in two thousand and eleven, travel Edge commissioned noted futurist
dr Ian Pearson to weigh in on where hotel technology
is going, and indeed what the experience of checking into
a hotel might consist of in the year twenty thirty five.
I'm absolutely on board with this. I always sleep better

(42:56):
in a hotel. I don't really even the first night.
Yeah mean I some of the best experiences of sleep
I've ever had have been in a hotel. I mean,
I certainly love trip to New York. When we stayed
at the Yotel in Hell's Kitchen, Man, I slept great there. Ok, well,
maybe you'll sleep even better in So basically what happened

(43:19):
here is Pearson did a six month study and then
he laid out his vision of a future in which
nearly any surface or fabric in a hotel room maybe
electronically enhanced to make your stay better. So maybe they
made a particularly nostalgic cent or it's a virtual display. Uh,
maybe it's UM. It's turning your walls of the room
into a scenic vista or even a room in your

(43:40):
own home so you feel like you're actually at home.
This is kind of like what we end up talking
to Dr Surf about UM. The idea of linked dreams,
or influencing your dreams by using sensory applications outside and
that's exactly where Pearson goes because of course you check
into a hotel room. A few notable examples aside, you're

(44:01):
probably checking in that hotel room for one key purpose,
and that is to go to sleep. And when we're sleeping,
we dream. So Pierson's predictions deal with this a lot
of not only using virtual reality and even virtual sex,
which goes into but technologically augmented dream states. So some
of the dream enhancement notions are are fairly physical and

(44:24):
they're involving some of these things we've already discussed, so
surfaces that they can be turned into displays in a
mid light um devices that in it a fragrance, that's
that even in a sleeping state, you're going to process
and could have bed sometimes at night with that. My
wife and I have this little device actually maybe that's
where the idea for this device came from. You put
like a various scented oils into it and it puts

(44:47):
a spray out under your room, and then the device itself,
another setting on it can make it glow so the
room has like a particular hue to the color. It's nice.
So so yeah, some of the the technolo ology here
is along about those lines, but also special pjs. They
use yarns that contract under our electric fields. I don't

(45:08):
I hope those are disposable electronic pjas. I don't know
that I would want to wear somebody else's pjs. Well,
I'm guessing the fumigatum, but probably. And then on top
of that you can add in some heating and cooling elements.
So essentially you have a garment that can you know,
hug you, massage you and and and in doing so,
it's like a thundershirt. Yeah, like a thundershirt that is

(45:28):
going to influence your dreams, linking imagery and sound and
even physicality to create a fully tactile dreamscape. So how
is this going to play out? Well, he predicts the
active management of our dreams through dream management systems. This
will allow us to manipulate the course of our dreams,

(45:51):
you know, basically just sort of primus like, well, I
want to I want to have a dream that I'm
at the ocean, so ocean sounds, ocean smell piped in.
Maybe somehow you program the garment or the bed itself
to create that sensation of waves rolling across you and
then falling away. So it's not so much as I'm
gonna physically accept your dream, but I'm going to do

(46:13):
everything with the environment of the hotel room to accept
it for you. A lot of this makes me think
of something that we've both covered. I think you and
Julie did a previous stuff to blow your mind about this,
and I've covered it elsewhere, a s MR. I'm wondering
if these people who are investigating this are looking into
the effect of a s MR. There are whole SMR

(46:34):
video series that are all designed to make you go
to sleep and wake you up. There's even a podcast.
Did you know there's a whole podcast that's designed to
help you go to sleep? Uh, some people use they do,
but a s MR. We should define this. This is
of course when and you have to listen to the
past episode to get the full breakdown. But essentially, certain

(46:55):
people here certain types of sounds and has an exceedingly soothing,
even you four effect on them. And this might be
the sound of someone whispering. My wife experienced, this is
the experiences this actually specifically with the sound of somebody
drawing her. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's very
popular with the YouTube community. There's a number of YouTubers

(47:17):
who make a living doing it where they like kind
of perform roles whispering into a three D microphone. And
I'm very susceptible to it. It totally works. It it
Uh people call it brain orgasms. It like makes your
brain tingle in your spine kind of tangle down your
back and stuff. Yeah, yeah, way, it totally works for me. Well, well,

(47:37):
that and all these additional dream priming techniques, they make
a lot of sense that they're very much grounded within
like either current or very near technologies. But then Pearson
takes it one step farther. He says dream linking to
other people will be possible, So if a friend is
dreaming at the same time, it may be possible to

(47:59):
communicate with him via your dream. Sleepers will also be
able to play games in their sleep using feedback from
image recognition and emotion detection. So he says that with
the aid of brain monitoring, will be able to record
the dreams that we're having, uh, play them back later,
even continue on with them where we left off, or
experience the dream completely again. He says. It says that

(48:22):
we we may use active contact lenses that'll that'll that
will work along with skin connectivity monitors with the dream
management software to detect a nightmare and then either change
the course of your dream or wake you up. He
says that dream management systems could even be used for
edgecuricational or study purposes, so instead of just dreaming about whatever,

(48:42):
you can actively do your homework in your dream. Yeah.
So these are very similar to devices we talked about
in the last episode. But let's just cover them again
very quickly in case, uh, somebody listening to this one
hasn't heard about. Yeah, because it's as as far out
there as that last example from Pearson may seem, and
it seems very sci fi. Uh. We see the groundwork

(49:03):
already coming together in in current technology. So as we
as we discussed in our last episode, you have psychophysiologist
Stephen Lebert with the Lucidity Institute, and he uses e
g s to look into and at the electra electrical
brain activity that takes place during sleep, monitoring dream activity.
And this has allowed the development of a number of

(49:24):
different devices such as the Nova dreamer Um, which it
looks like a cross between a sleep mask and like goggles, uh,
and it detects the rapid eye movement of r M
sleep and the dreams that are likely taking place underneath it,
and deliver splashing light queues to let the user know that, hey,
you're you're having a dream right now, Wake up, go lucid,
fly around, do whatever you want. And as I mentioned

(49:46):
in the last episode, there's there's another device that's been
advocated as doing something similar by a guy named Keith Hearn.
He called it the dream Machine, uh, and it was
never made commercially available, but it's a similar principle basically
that it can detect when you're dreaming uh and then
uses either like a visual or auditory cues to wake

(50:06):
you up or let you know that you're dreaming so
that you can control the dream. Yeah. Now, it's also
worth knowing the U. S Military has explored the use
of VR goggles. They help trauma stricken individuals who wake
up from a nightmare and then calm them, distract them,
and then conceivably allow them to enter re enter the
dream world in a calm or state. This would be

(50:26):
I guess this would this would be more of a
priming system as opposed to an active dream manipulation. I
wonder how well that would work together with the m
d m A therapy that we talked about for PTSD individuals. Yeah,
I don't know, you know, you know, I don't remember
reading anything in our research about m d m a's
effect on dreams, like and in fact, I don't think

(50:47):
I've heard anything clinical or just interpersonal about that. Yeah,
but I can't remember. It's been a while since we
did those But so and when it comes to observing dreams,
because certain and when we start talking about sharing dreams,
there are a few different scenarios. Like one is one
person dreams and the other one observes. Another is that

(51:07):
both are engaged in the dream sharing together as a
collaborative effort. So in two thousand eleven, scientists that you
see Berkeley demonstrated the use of fm or I to
measure the brain activity of volunteers as they watched short
video clips. Then a computational model crunched the fm ri
I data and reproduce the images. So on. Essentially, they

(51:29):
would be thinking of one thing and then this this
they're getting an on screen interpretation of what they are thinking.
And the results are imperfect at this stage, we're talking
colorful blurs uh basic shape or sense of size or movement.
But they match up, I mean surprisingly well, considering that
the technology is doing what seemed the domain of magic

(51:50):
in previous ages, looking into a person's mind and seeing
what they're thinking about, breaking through that last barrier of privacy,
which we think that we all have. We talked to
drs sor If about this a little bit about another
study that does something similar, and the way he describes it,
it makes me think of like that right now, we're
at low resolution and we're working our way up to
get to like a regular type resolution. We're not quite

(52:12):
at an HD level yet with our dreams, but they're
just so they're just these blurry, grainy things that you
could interpret as being you know, visuals. Yeah, at the
time of this initial study, the researchers predicted that we
were just a few decades away from enabling people to
read or view another individual's thoughts and intentions and ultimately
even their dreams, allowing us to to to play back

(52:34):
a dream and edge a little closer to some of
Ian Pearson's predictions. Alright, but what about so I'm thinking
of something we talked about on a lot of how
stuff work shows brain computer interfaces. You and Joe did
a whole episode on techno telepathy. Now, what about when
you're like literally hooking up wires to somebody's brain. Yeah,

(52:59):
this is this is one of those areas where the
current technology is not it's not quite up to sci
fi levels by any means, but it's certainly it's it's
certainly close enough to where it's just it's really astounding
to think that we're actually pulling some of this off.
So for years now, scientists have been developing lots of
different technologies for brain computer interfaces, and in physical terms,

(53:20):
it makes sense because the brain is an electrochemical machine
and its activities are expressed in ways that are detectable
to machines that are sensitive to electromagnetism and all. You
can divide the whole process up into three basic technological
elements neuroimaging, transmission, and neurostimulation. And we've already touched on
the neuroimaging a bit. We use fm R I, we

(53:42):
use U electro and cephalography UM or magneto cephalography to
observe the activity. For input, you've got a few different options,
certainly implanted electrodes which would be very invasive obviously, but
then also focused ultrasound or transcranial magnetics stimulation. You put
a nice friendly electro magnet against your head carefully a

(54:05):
line a lined over your scalp to target a particular
part of the brain, and it pulses inward to stimulate
electrical activity in the targeted region of the brain. So
one of the studies that I read about, and uh,
it's from a Gizmodo article in two thousand eight, it
said a research team at the a t R Computational
Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan were successfully able to display simple

(54:29):
images produced in the human brain on a computer screen
using these technologies. Now, this is similar to what you
were talking about earlier. We bring it up again with
Dr Serif in the interview and he says he thinks
that they repeated or maybe did like a better version
of it in But this is a colleague of his,
so he was very familiar with this and explains it

(54:50):
far better. But the essential gist as it converts electrical
signals sent to the visual cortex into images that are
then translated onto the computer screen the way that did
they tested this when they showed the test subjects six
letters in the word neuron, and the subjects succeeded in
reconstructing that word on screen with their brain. So basically,

(55:11):
it comes down to a scenario where if we can
observe the what's physically going on to cause a particular
dream image, if we can observe it, translate that into data,
and then retranslate that back and and and make that
same physical process appear in another individual's brain, we can
conceivably allow two brains to communicate with each other. We

(55:34):
can allow brains to maybe even share a share our
mind state, and the more far fetched a versions of it,
the one that I really like this is obviously a
science fiction scenario. Although I mean, if we've got the
technology to do this, I don't see why we wouldn't
hook up a human brain to an animal brain and

(55:54):
and see what kind of interface you get there. Well,
I'm glad you mentioned that, because just to give you
an example out there for everyone where we are with
this technology experimentally, we have linked to rats, We've enabled
a human to move a living rats tail with their mind,
and we've even managed to allow limited brain to brain

(56:15):
communication with humans, taking brain activity from one person and
injecting brain activity into the second person. In a multinational
two thousand fourteen study, we had a team. The team
of researchers involved use e e g. Caps and uh
TMS equipment. So we're talking about trans magnetic stimulation transcranial magnets, Yeah, exactly.

(56:35):
And they used this to allow them to communicate, to
eat with each other using signals of numbers, lights, and colors.
And they did this across a across the across the continent,
I believe it was like France to India. And in
two thousand fourteen, researchers at the University of Washington published
a study showing that they were able to establish a
technologically mediated, non invasive brain to brain interface which allowed

(56:59):
one person to cause movement and another person's body without
speech and across the internet. That is fascinating and terrifying. Yeah,
then something that well, I mean, you and Joe went
into it pretty heavily in the technotal leaf of the episode.
But I'm sure this is something we'll keep coming back
to as more and more research is conducted in the area.

(57:20):
It seems like you're basically talking about to two separate
dreams that are correlated to a certain degree by the
observation and manipulation of a dream management system. Again, two
people are dreaming and you have a computer spitting out
sea salt smells at you. Um Or, you are really
experiencing the same dreams, the same reality. Two brains connected

(57:40):
in a way that permits both dreamers to dream. Essentially
is a single double decker brain, um Or, we work
where one dreamer is, you know, essentially an observer mode perhaps,
But that idea of like two brains as one, like computing,
is one like that. I have a hard time imagine
exactly what that would be like. I mean, that's that's
a level of personal connection that is beyond the human

(58:04):
experience totally. I can't like, and we get into this
with Dr Serf, I can't imagine the physical experience. I'm
trying to understand what it's like other than just like
feeling electrical stimulation in the brain. Um So we turned
to him for this. He's the expert in this field.
Uh we talked to him last episode, but if you know,

(58:25):
I'll reintroduce him here. His name is Dr Moran Serf.
He's a professor of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg
School of management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern University,
and he focuses on studying brain surgery patients their emotions,
their dreams, their behaviors. Uh, he's He's recognized because he
had a former career as a hacker, breaking into banks,

(58:49):
stealing their money and proving to them that there is
security flaws in their systems. So people look at that
as a great metaphor of he is now hacking into
brains and dreams. So let's turn to interview with him
and get some more on what it would actually be
like to share a dream state with someone else. Darker
serve what is your view as a scientist of Young's

(59:11):
collective unconscious? So the idea that things in the outside
world penetrate our dreams and become symbols that have meaning
in our dreams is very likely. We know from studies
that were done not long ago, many years after Young
theo is emerged that show that we can actually make
you dream things by doing them when you're awake. So

(59:34):
if you play tees a lot when you're awake, you're
likely to actually dream about bricks falling from the sky
on you to night after. So we know that things
on the outside world penetrate our dreams. And what Young
basically said is that things in that's a role that
are really important go into our dreams, and because they're
important for how many people together, they're gonna go into
many people's dreams and all of them are going to

(59:55):
somehow get to experience what happened in the world in
the same way. Now now Young don't really have the
mechanism for that, but now we know even about a mechanism. So,
for instance, we know that in the months after nine eleven,
many people in New York had shared dreams about a
nightmare's event with planes crashing or with people going through

(01:00:16):
horrific experiences. This is because there was a shared experience
that happened to us when we're awake, and our dreams
reflect the experience that are awake brain goes through, so
it also went into many people's dreams. And the therapists
that helps a lot of people work with things help
them by looking also not just that they're awake selves,
but also on their dreaming selves. In the same way,

(01:00:36):
we know that if you just look at dream diaries,
what people write about their dreams when they wake up,
you see that there are teams that emerge, and those
teams even make sense in the context of the geography,
the location, the cultural experiences. So if you look at
the western world and you ask people what the worst
dreams you've had, you will hear a lot of dreams
about being late for work and missing a meeting, or

(01:00:59):
being embarrassed in public, or stuff like that. If you
go to countries where the amount of meetings that people
have to attend are smaller, about the amount of the
famine and troubles with beasts are higher, you would hear
a lot of small dreams about being attacked by animals
or being in a grave circumstances where you have no food.
And this has suggests that experiences in the outside world

(01:01:22):
goes through your dream and be conseperency. The answer the
world shove. But many people you can expect to have
a lot of dreams happen to a lot of people
in a very similar narrative. You took it one that
further and suggested that they actually the dreams have a
meaning that we can extract and go backwards. So we
can ask people what you dreamed, and if we see
that many people have a similar narrative or similar story

(01:01:42):
or similar symbol in their dream we can kind of
figure out what the community goes to. So if a
people a lot of people in their dreams dream about
being eaten by a beast, maybe there's a grave thing
that happens right now to the our community that affects
them and the priests the symbol of bad things happened.
So he took that and tried to figure out in
the biggest success as what happens to everyone. So in

(01:02:05):
this particular episode, one of the things that we looked
at was a Japanese study that seemed to indicate that
we could uh using brain computer interfaces, look at imagery
of what a person was dreaming. How close are we
now to to actually being able to witness another person's dreams?

(01:02:26):
I think the study is sort of I'm thirteen. So
this is a study by a colleague of mind, professor
Yukikamiani from Kyoto, Japan. And what they did is they
did something remarkable, which is they used detected in our dreams,
we actually see content that their visuals are like movie
to actually extract the story by looking at the part

(01:02:46):
of the brain that sees things. If you look at
the brain of a human. There are many, many components
to it. In the back of the brain has a
big part of it that actually corresponds to the images
that you see. So if you see a house, there's
a part of the brain is like that. If you
see a face, a different part light up. If you
see colors or shapes, or objects or text, all of
those things in the outide world have a call it

(01:03:10):
in the brain. So what Camani and his colleagues did
was first mapped those So they took you and they
put you in the magnetic machine that kind of looked
at your brain from the inside, called the f m ALI,
and they mapped your brain and they found a part
of the brain that corresponds to seeing faces and seeing objects,
and seeing houses, and seeing familiar people and unfamiliar people,

(01:03:31):
and many many things they could map have a clear
collet in the brain. And then they had you go
to sleep, and they waited for you to go to
sleep and really get into deep sleep or dreamstays, and
then they just looked at the same part of the
brain and try to identify what images you may see.
And they saw that maybe the part of the brainet
his face is light up, and they said okay, right now,
you see a face and then immediately after another part

(01:03:53):
light up, and it's the part that says it's a
familiar thing, and you say, okay, maybe it's the face
of someone that you know. And then a third thing
happens and it lights up and maybe it's a landmark
that you're familiar with. It comes up, and just by
that they could kind of create a suggestion to what
your narrative is. You're going with someone that you know
to a place that you're familiar with, maybe it's your house,
and you see two individuals in talk and then they

(01:04:16):
would wake you up, ask you to tell them what
your dream is and compel how well they are. Decoders
were able to predict what your dreams. And because we
can extetend decoders where they were wrong and where they
we're right, we can actually do better in the next iteration.
So then you've got to sleep again. Then we wake
you up after five minutes and ask you again. The
computer learns again what you did correctly and what you

(01:04:36):
did in corectly, and you've got to sleep again. And
after a few trials, you can actually get to a
level where we can predict with a very high accuracy.
What is the visuals that you see in your mind? Now,
there's a lot of limitations to death. One is that
we don't really know if the visuals that you see
correspond to the same visual that you interpret. So maybe
you see a familiar person, but for you as your

(01:04:58):
dad's and I think it's your mom. But just the
fact that we can actually get something and predict something
about the contact of your dream is already remarkable because
we can actually give it to you and ask you
to reflect on that. And that's something that most people
don't have. Most of us just forget our dreams when
we wake up. Now a computer can tell you what
it thinks you dreamt of. And this might kind of
like the the you know, the the the lightbulb in

(01:05:20):
your brain and say, oh my god, yes, I definitely
remember having seen this and death. So this is a
way to give us access to something that our brain
hides for us every night. So do you believe it
will ever be possible for for two minds to share
the same dream? Uh? In a sense similar to UH,
I guess like mutual dreaming. That is the idea that

(01:05:41):
sometimes stuffed around. So here are the challenges in having
two brains share the same dream, but also we know
how to solve those so it becomes a technical problem
rather than a philosophical one. So the challenges are that
in order for you and I have to share the
same dream at the same time, we actually have to
get to dreams state at the same time. So the
fact that we're to sleep at the same time, it
doesn't mean mere dreaming at the same time. There are

(01:06:03):
different things to be asleep and to drink. Then we
know that each friend has its own kind of cycle.
If you want it takes you five minutes to get
your dream, it takes me twenty minutes. So in order
to share the thing, we first have to just make
sure that we're both do make at the same time.
Already not easy, but that's something that we can actually hit.
If we just let you sleep in and find next
each other, we're gonna at some point hit this moment.

(01:06:24):
That's that one. Now we want to actually not just
have your dream happened to you in my veravor to me,
but somehow we want to control the content unless we
know we can do using a stimuli that actually penetrates
the sleep and navigate the dreams. Some extent. So we know,
for instance, that if I spray water on you when
you're dreaming, it's likely if I can wake you up afterwards,

(01:06:47):
you will tell me that you have dreamt on something
that's to do with water. You might have You might
say something like I was by the ocean, or I
was seeing a waterfall, something like that. So here's one
thing we can do. We also know that the smells
manipulate dreams in certain directions. So we know that if
you're asleep and I spread the smell of roses next
to your nose, you will probably have a dream that
has to do with something positive. It won't be roses

(01:07:09):
that you dream of, but you will do something positive.
I mean, if I spread the smell of boat and eggs,
you will dream of something negative. So we can kind
of nevigate the balance of your dream with smells. So
the idea is that with touch and with sound and
with the smells, we can actually shift your dreams in
certain directions. Now, right now, it's not specific, like we
kind of can move you to a positive or negative

(01:07:30):
to something that you know. I means don't though, but
this is just technical now, once we figure out if
we can actually change your dream or make you think
of something. When I'm controlling it from the outside, it's
just a matter of mapping it's perfectly and finding what
smells for you really make you think of your mom,
what smells for me really make me thic of my mom.
And then we basically could have the two of us
slip out by side and spread the corresponding smells for

(01:07:52):
the two of us, and now both of us go
to the same idea of dreaming about our mothers. And
if we really get to a level where we can
control a lot of the negative mother's father's people, we know, people,
we don't like, people, we like people, places we've been to,
we can start imagining a world where we really have
two people sleep there and each gets stimulus that makes
them go to the same experience. So you and I

(01:08:14):
go spend the evening together and then we go to sleep,
and instead of the evening just being over when we
both retired into our old world, we kind of continue
the experience together in our dream world. That's the science
fiction yet of this, But the reality is that we
know that we're going in this direction because we know
a lot of the components, and now it's just a
matter of finding the perfection and making it really a reality. Now,

(01:08:38):
if you want to go real science fiction, we can
imagine that being one step above, which is instead of
someone from the outside world just manipulating both of our
prints at the same time and making a huge dream
of a mid dream of a and just controlling for
that being the same a, we can imagine that I'm
looking at your brain and using the thing that camitality
this guy that you mentioned in the previous study, by

(01:08:59):
reading your brain and seeing that you right now see
someone that you're familiar with and immediately spray the smell
that makes you take someone familiar reading. And so I
read one person's brain and write into the other person's
plame and basically make the people share a dream by
me just manipulating one after I read the other. That's
quite science fiction right now. But the technology behind that

(01:09:20):
is what we know right now. So it's just a
matter of finding if we can actually do that, or
it's gonna main uh the O with without any poof
So let's stick to somewhere in between, like what the
modern sciences and the and the science fiction theory that
you just throw at us, what would a shared dream stay.
If we were using brain to brain interfaces, be like,

(01:09:42):
would it just be simply electrical signals going back and
forth or would it be more sensory oriented like you
were talking about touch, smell sound In the long In
the long term, we might be able to actually really
stimulate brains and activate them. Right now, we're not really
good at that, and partially just because we don't have
access to brains so in order to still that the

(01:10:03):
bringing it to open one and stickulate those inside, and
there aren't the many people who will happen to do that,
So most of our work is coming with just looking
at the brains and kind of imaging it, also looking
at what's coming out without touching anything. If you talk
about animals like mice and rats, are studies right now
that actually do what I just mentioned. They read the
brain of one rat and they and they stimulate the

(01:10:25):
brain of another one. They actually share content from one
rat to another. This was done last year by grouping
the Duke University in Brazil, where they basically had one
right think one thing, then it acculated the brain of
another rat and they basically shared an experience across you know,
Brazil and North Carolina but that's in the world of
animals and the world of humans. We are as really

(01:10:47):
as invasive as we are with animals, so we don't
really get to change things in a very specific level
in your brain. So the only thing that is those
two is changing the environment and hoping that your dream
is going to all. So that's where we are right now.
We basically activate your senses from the outside and hope
that your brain is gonna take you to the experience
it by itself. So we can change the temperature in

(01:11:09):
the room, and we can change the smell in the room,
and we can speak to you, and we can even
flesh light into your eyes that are closed and hope
that this is gonna all make you dream of the
right thing. So there are studies that show that you
can actually navigate your dream using smells. Some smells make
you dream of positive things, some of negative things, something

(01:11:29):
to do more specific things that were actually in your
experience before, or some memois in your wake self have
a smell attached them, and if I spread that smells
when you're asleep, it will take your brain to the
same experience. So smells this one kind of big category
of things that we play with right now sounds also works,
so I can actually we'll spell in your ear some
message and it will penetate your dream. We all know that,

(01:11:52):
for instance, from your alarm clock. Oftentimes when you're asleep
you allowm buzzes, and in terms of just waking up
for the first few seconds, you can have incorporate the
alarm sounds into your dream, and then at some point
it's just too much and you wake up. But we
know that there's a level by which content can actually
get into your sleep, penetrate it and become part of
your dream other than break you up. And the same
as too for touch in order if we touch you

(01:12:12):
in certain locations at certain times, you will have an experience.
The classical story is that if I make your legs
moved in your dream, you will kind of feel like
you're falling. That's that's a classical experience that it will
often report in their dreams. So all of those are
just ways to change something that makes your brain hopefully
take the content and change it accordingly. It's not specific enough.

(01:12:33):
Now we don't really know you know, how to really
make you go and imagine how it was when you
and your mom went to the shopping more at age four.
But we're getting there, so it becomes a technical problem
rather than just a philosophical one. We actually starting to
map the possibilities and slowly getting too more and more
accurate abilities when it comes toneticating. All right, So there

(01:12:59):
you have at the elective unconscious, uh, the conjoined dream,
both in a sort of mystical terms, uh, psychological terms
and even hard science of the nearer and distant future.
If you want more on these related topics, if you
want to look up some of the episodes we discussed here,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

(01:13:20):
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(01:13:40):
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