Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

And the best evidence of this comes from nightmares and PTSD.

So when a human being has a traumatic emotional experience, a traumatic experience, let's say,

One of the diagnostic criteria of PTSD, when you get traumatized and then like that affects you in a way that debilitates you and you have a clinical diagnosis that interferes with your life, one of the key clinical features of PTSD is actually nightmares.

So if you have a trauma and you have persistent nightmares, those two things are related.

And we also know they're related because as you treat PTSD and the symptoms of PTSD go down,

their nightmares actually start to go down as well.

And when the nightmares disappear, then the people are feeling well.

So we actually have a really concrete piece of evidence that what happens to you in life, especially emotionally, it manifests in some way in your dreams.

Now, just because there is an evolutionary reason why we dream, that doesn't necessarily mean that the symbols or archetypes that people describe in dreams are actually correct.

Like, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but just because scientifically we know that all people dream and that if you have PTSD, you have nightmares.

You have a lot of like psychoanalysts, people like Freud, right, who said, okay, if your teeth are falling out in a dream, that means you are afraid of death.

If you have a dream of a phallic object, that means you're in the phallic phase and penis, penis, penis, anus, anus, anus, phallus, phallus, phallus.

So you have all of these like texts by psychoanalysts and therapists about archetypes and symbolism where they say like this is true.

I don't really buy that on a scientific level.

I think that it's fine to make that interpretation.

It's fine to have that as a hypothesis.

But there's a gap for me between the science of dreaming and all of these psychoanalytic interpretations.

But we sort of know that there is some connection, right?

So how do we understand what that connection is?

And that's where we have to get to literally how the brain and how the mind work.