Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

And one of the major mechanisms it uses to talk to you, which I know sounds weird, is actually by using dreams.

So hi, I'm Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, and when I was in my psychiatry training at Harvard Medical School, I thought all this dream interpretation stuff was absolute BS.

Completely unscientific, and I still sort of believe that.

But it turns out that if we take a truly scientific perspective, which I hope to walk y'all through today, we will see how useful dreams can be.

And the weirdest part about this is that the people who think

dream interpretation is BS are actually the people that benefit the most from dream interpretation.

So I know that sounds weird, but like, hear me out.

Okay.

So when I was at HMS, I'm like, I studied to become a monk and was super into like mindfulness and things like that.

So I got kind of like two kinds of patients.

So one sort of patient was like someone who was like in tune with their chakras, like doing tarot, like communicating with their guardian spirit.

And they loved talking about like the deep symbolism of dreams.

Okay.

A really good example of this is I had a patient and then one of my supervisors recommended this book called The Cat by Marie Louise von Franz, which is a tale of feminine redemption.

So Marie Louise von Franz is like one of Carl Jung's contemporaries.

So this is a book that like talks about like the cat symbolism and dreams and like has all these like tale of the cat and the journey to the Virgin Mary and cat and mythology and all this weird like archetypal sort of stuff.

And my supervisor sent me this stuff and I was like, look, this stuff seems like complete BS.

So these people who love dream interpretation and tarot and all this kind of stuff, that's not actually who I found it really useful for.

I found it really useful for C-suite executives, developers that I was working with, esports professionals, and all kinds of pragmatic people.

logical, hyper data based people, people who are like, show me data, show me Excel, show me sources.