Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

And then my brain, like after 10 minutes of searching is like, oh, by the way, your hands were full with groceries.

So you set the keys down on top of the car.

And then I went back and I walked and I grabbed my keys and sure enough, there they were.

But this is kind of weird if you think about it, right?

My brain had access to this information all along, but like it chose some random time.

It's not like even though the brain had the information, I had access to it, which is why I spent 10 or 15 minutes looking.

So let's start with a couple of scientific facts about sleep and dreams.

The first thing that we have to understand is that evolution doesn't waste any space.

We don't have anything in the body or the brain or the mind that doesn't serve some kind of function, okay?

And the first really weird thing is that dreams are highly conserved in animals and humans.

So basically mammals, all mammals dream, and we sort of know that they dream because there are certain signs of it, and we all dream.

So there must be some utility to dreams, otherwise we wouldn't dream.

Second thing that we know is that REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, which is the last phase of sleep,

Tends to be the most restful for human beings.

So when human beings get their REM sleep interrupted or they don't get sufficient REM sleep, their mental health, their physical health, their stress levels, their cortisol levels, like the body and brain don't function well unless we get sufficient REM sleep.

We also know that REM sleep is when dreaming happens.

So there's clearly a correlation between dreaming and health and fitness of the human being.

So that's like the first thing, that dreams exist, they happen in animals, they happen in humans, and there's some reason.

Now the question becomes, why though?

What is the function of dreams?