Episode 7: Sweet Dreams

As far as Andrea and I are aware, no one really knows why humans spend 20-25% of our time asleep producing vivid, emotional, story-like hallucinations—our brains in states that mimic waking, while our bodies remain largely paralyzed and unable to act out these hallucinations. But philosophers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists alike have all thrown their hats into the ring when trying to understand this phenomenon which is so central to the human experience (though all mammals have REM sleep, until we get a better idea of what consciousness is, we’ll never know whether or not they dream!).

In this episode of Brains for Dinner, we share experiences of our first and most salient dreams (see Gemini’s attempt at Chantel’s first dream below) while describing some of

the common theories about what dreams are for. Memory consolidation? Unprocessed emotions? Random noise? Which of these theories best explain Andrea’s dream of being a goat? (sorry I’m having too much fun with AI dream generation for this post).

In this episode, we interleave our own dream experiences with known theories of why we dream. We hope you enjoy it, and will share your own experiences with us. Stay tuned for Part 2— on daydreams, and perhaps Part 3, does this relate to why psychedelics are showing therapeutic promise?

Meanwhile, here are some resources to support the podcast, including a link to the description of sculpture Chantel mentions, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, a YouTube video of Billy Joel talking about how dreams help him compose songs, the book Andrea mentions about mathematicians dreaming up solutions, and the paper that inspired this episode, The Overfitted Brain by Erik Hoel. We hope you enjoy this episode and will share your dream experiences and questions with us. Cheers :)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chantelpratphd.substack.com