Dr. Rahul Jandial
Appearances
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Great question. First of all, let's equip people with what is happening in the dreaming brain and then what different dreams mean. So then they have a playbook at the end. Yeah. And what I would say is the dreaming brain is, this was the essential question is, okay, so you got all the dream patterns. So we've got what we dream. You're looking at what people have catalogued.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
To make sense of why we dream, that's your essential question that we get to. And then there's this thing like the dreaming brain and the waking brain. And I believe these big ideas are applicable to everybody like getting groceries, frustrated, why am I stressed out, why am I overreacting, like all the things for living a better waking life, you can't separate them from that
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
that third of your life you spend sleeping and potentially dreaming, right? So I go way, way back to try to understand this and to make sense of it for myself. And I think you'll find there's science and there's stories, but there's synthesis. So first thing is all life is governed by the rotation of the planet. Let's just start with square one. Let's just get to the basic here. Like,
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Like whether it's like those hot springs deep in the ocean and there's some bacteria there or a Venus fly trap that opens and closes or the moon and the tides, um, or sleep, right? Like this, this is governed because that was the foundation on a, which life arose. Right. And when, when you look at that, what I would say is the material, the living material on planet earth.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
follows that whether it's the tide or the plankton or fish or you know all migration but also the material in our brain really like there's nothing in our skull that if you pieced it out there's no special ingredient like from krypton or something everything in nature is also everything inside our skull in these brains right that's connected differently it's functioning differently but that was like the first thing that really tripped me out i was like
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We too follow the laws, fundamental laws of Earth's rotation, these circadian rhythms you're hearing about and cycles and seasons. And that was the first time I said, okay, so the brain is, the brain is, the waking brain and the sleeping brain are doing a 24-hour cycle for as long as the run you have on this planet. Interesting. That's the first thing. That cycle...
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
It actually, you know, there was like, I love this topic, by the way. There are like people who go into canes for like six months, it's still on a cycle. Like it's not based just on dark blackout shades or not. Like we, the tissue in our bodies, the cells, we're following this earth's rotation, okay?
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
So if we say that there's the waking brain and the sleeping brain, and every 24 hours it does its things, two-third waking, one-third waking,
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
sleeping and that and that happens for the most part you know for how long you live now a surgeon in training i might skip a few nights um so maybe i've had 500 or a thousand nights but overwhelmingly i follow this cycle too and in that cycle we have to ask ourselves well
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
what's going on in the dreaming brain and right away i'll tell you it's so important there's something called sleep pressure you could you can do you could defy a lot of things but you go a day without sleeping there's something building inside you're saying sleep sleep sleep you'll fall asleep in a dangerous spot you'll fall asleep standing up sometimes you'll fall asleep even though you haven't eaten like there's something fundamental called sleep pressure
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
that makes us follow that rhythm, right? Your body will force you to sleep eventually. Well, I would say your brain. Your brain just shuts off. It builds a pressure. You can startle people and they'll wake up. But at some point, there's this pressure that's bringing you down to sleep. Really? You see that? I think torture techniques were based off of that. We saw that.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Nobody could stay up a third night in the hospital. They tried to get us to a long time ago, the battle day. Really? Yeah, but two nights, second night you could do. Third night, so there's a sleep pressure that the brain generates. Not the body, the brain. Just to give you just examples like we're talking about, like regular examples.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We're not trying to get, we're bringing the science in, but the complexity is in the concept. We can put hearts from one to another, livers from one to another, lungs from one to another. They all follow that person's brain's order. So really what we're talking about is the brain is saying, I need to sleep. The brain is saying, I need to sleep.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Brain is saying, okay, there's some threat going on or you've got some demands. You're running an ultra marathon. You're a surgeon on call. I can go a day, but I need to sleep. So that's the first thing in this discussion is why do we need to sleep? Now I'm going to be bold here. This is a conversation. I think we sleep because we must dream. Now let me just set that up for you. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
What happens... When you go without sleep, you have surges in REM and dreaming sleep right away. First thing you do when you've gone a day without sleep, if you put that person in a brain scan, but there's exquisite ways of checking it, is that the first thing they do is they dream wildly. Right? So that's an interesting thing to me.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
The longer we go in our night of restful sleep, the more you're dreaming on the tail end. So maybe mental clarity, if we take that phrase, comes from having that longer night's sleep. Well, what happens in that fifth, sixth, and seventh hour? You're dreaming more. So when I start to see these patterns, I wonder, one, the brain, not the body, needs to sleep.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And then what is the brain doing in sleep? i just checked this out man it's it's doing something that if you put electrodes on the surface of our scalps and we all fall asleep at night during the day the waves the the measurements are uh you know sort of wavy there's different ones depending on how you're engaging at night there are some sharp 90-minute Patterns. That stuff is designed.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
That's built in. Really? Yeah. So that's not new. We don't have that when we're awake. No. If something startles us, the electricity will be different. If we meditate, the electricity will be different during waking. But at night, you're all something programmed. then that's not new, Lewis. That's the stuff that I've known for 20 years and sleep people have known for 40 years.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
What I'm trying to do is give you an explanation, a synthesis. That's not random. That's not a glitch. Seven billion brains on a 24 hour cycle. Sleep pressure. You got to lie down. You got to sleep. The brain is saying you got to sleep. And when it's sleeping, it's doing this. 90 crisp cycles. REM sleep. You've seen the charts. They're like, they look like Lego.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
They look like the top of a Tetris thing or a Lego thing. That is something fundamental that's happening, in my opinion. And so that's why I think we must sleep, but I think what's the most important part of sleep is the dreaming. My kidney and my liver don't need to sleep. You could take part of the liver from a mom and put it in the child.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
It's no longer connected, the transplanted liver, to the web of nerves. Liver's fine. Lungs are fine moving between humans, right? So what I'm trying to point out there is that it's the brain that's running the show. It's on the earthly pattern. It wants to sleep. And in that sleep, what is it doing? It's dreaming. The brain, in my opinion, with respect and humility, The brain needs to dream.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
The sleep is so that the brain can dream and stay fine-tuned and stay fully adapted and stay fully enriched in all the corners of his mind without just the boring part of our day, right? If the brain only did what we did, driving the 101 or doing this, which is fantastic, but it would become rigid, right? It would become like an arm that's never stretched past a certain distance.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
You get a contracture. Well, the brain tissue, my opinion, that dreaming is the brain's way. Other people have other ideas, like it's threat training or it's a nighttime therapist. I get that. And I think in some capacity, but at the most fundamental level, it's like high intensity training for your mind. At night, it just goes wild to make sure all those capacities and resources are
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
imaginations, if you will, are accessible to you if you needed them during the day, if the environment or, you know, evolution needed it. So that's like the big explanation about what's happening when we sleep. We're dreaming. Dreaming is important. It's metabolically active. It's electrically active. It puts us at risk.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And even if you are in danger, your brain will force you to lie down so it can sleep to dream. That's how fundamental I think dreams are.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Well, I would say the genius is built in. So that's happening whether you want it or not. And the essential question of, I've had people ask me that, like, well, if I don't remember my dreams, is it useful? I mean, if you're not remembering them... So let me take that one apart a little bit. Here's my thinking on it.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We'll bring in imagination and even sports visualization to try to understand that. And... We'll bring in something called autobiographical memory. So let's start with memory first, okay? It's not what you're seeing on TV or like, you know, remembering names or addresses. I like my iPhone. I don't remember phone number again, you know? Like there's that kind of memory.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Then there's procedural memory, like riding a bike, tying your shoelaces. Then there's episodic memory, remembering episodes of your life. So we have lots of different shades and types of memory. And the one that connects me to the fact that I was here with you maybe about two years ago is something called autobiographical memory. When I...
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
I have gone through so many different things in so many different countries and places, but I feel as if I have been the, uh, I've inhabited and lived through all of those experiences. Think about that, right? What's the thing that stitches all my life together. That's a type of memory. It's called autobiographical memory. And, and so I think by design by and importance, um,
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
it's to some rare cases it's to away avoid waking and dream confusion so it has this wild run at night but when you wake up and we'll talk about that transition like this the transition between dreaming brain and waking brain it's not a hard line it's a little it can be fuzzy in the morning and that's why some people report sleep paralysis and goblins and weird stuff but
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
The autobiographical memory has to come back into command because that's what stitches our waking life together. That's what's get food, get to work, get on the subway. So the autobiographical memory takes over every morning when we wake up. And for it, I think for us to stay, to not be confused about what reality is because we had such a wild ride.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
The memory is designed to have dreaming fade to the background. And so I think it's happening. Electrically, it's happening. And what we're catching are a few glimpses of it bleeding into our waking brain. It's like, oof, man, last night, what was going on in my head? Those are the glimpses and the flares of the dreaming brain bleeding into the waking life. Those are the ones that...
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
um that we want to pay attention to you know so that's the that's the way i'm thinking about dreaming and trying to explain it too
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Because that's terrifying. I know, right? But you're asking me to tackle giants of mystery.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
In one afternoon, you know. But again, with humility, if you hold on to the concept, if you just say, look, we don't have to do a study, but I get what he's saying. We're on planet Earth. We clearly have to sleep.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
right our brain i i believe him our brain is the thing that needs to sleep and now what he's saying is um that hey check this out while you're sleeping you you're dreaming whether you remember none of it a little of it or some of it you're dreaming okay if we if we if we hold on to that and then always come back to like if one person later on is like huh i am
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
a cycle of waking brain dreaming brain just if you just walk away one thing like you're waking brain dreaming brain 24 hours waking times whatever life is waking brain and just to ask yourself is this contribution to my thinking to my emotion uh from the waking brain or the dreaming brain or or somewhere where where it blends so when you uh sleep paralysis um
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
A third of people have experienced it. I haven't. But when I started writing about sleep paralysis, what you describe about... This is great. Just give me a minute to take this one because this one I got a lot of science. What the dreaming brain also does is not just hyper-emotional and hyper-visual things. And dampen logic, right? That we open with.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Hyper-emotional, hyper-visual, dampen logic, okay? So, that's there. What it also does is it locks down your body. So, you're temporarily paralyzed. Right. There's some exceptions or reflexes or sleepwalking. But in general, you're temporarily paralyzed so the dreaming brain can let loose. Be emotional, be wild. And in the morning, that paralysis has to come off. Interesting.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
That we can all agree on, right? That's the dreaming brain and the waking brain. When there is a mismatch of you waking your dreaming brain, the mind is coming to, but the chemicals that have locked down your body are Right. The chemical paralysis is still there. People will wake up locked, locked in their body. That's kind of what you're describing. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And then on top of that, they start describing goblins and monsters and different things, lurking intruders. I've never experienced that either, but that's described so much so that if you go to Italy, you go to Africa, you go to other places, they all have a similar story of of being locked in the body and having a threatening presence in the room and sometimes a feeling of suffocation. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
That grouping is something humans experience and something cultures have come up with their own stories about. So if people want to look it up, it's like succubus, the incubus and succubus come from that. Yeah, yeah. And it's a famous painting with a goblin on top of a woman who's asleep. Right, right. What I want people to go is, ah, I see.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
That sleep paralysis that Lewis brought up was because the dreaming brain and the waking brain, they don't just snap to the next phase, that sometimes they bleed into each other. And that's called sleep exit. That little window is called sleep exit. Sleep entry is a fascinating one too, but sleep exit.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
So she's not wrong. But again, so, you know, people are like, what are they talking about? If you just, if you, if, if you keep this conversation on the framework of dreaming brain and sleeping brain, dreaming brain and waking brain, then you know where the explanations land. So what you're talking about is the waking brain entering the sleeping brain. The sleep world, yeah, yeah. Very good.