Dr. David Eagleman

If you're a monkey that drops into the world sort of already fully baked and you don't need to have much plasticity, you don't have much dream sleep either.

Everybody dreams.

All animals dream at night.

Even like animals at the bottom of the ocean.

Yes.

It's harder to measure stuff all the way at the bottom of the ocean, but fish do have what is equivalent to dream sleep.

where you're just zapping activity in there.

And by the way, even animals that have gone blind, like there's a mammal called the blind mole rat, which lives in darkness and has eyes, but they're blind because over evolutionary time, they've lost vision, but they still dream because the dream circuitry is so ancient that

This is so ancient that all animals have to defend themselves against the darkness by keeping their visual systems going.

And so even though the animal went blind, the rest of the brain didn't catch up.

I mean, that's how evolution goes.

It might be that the particular pathways that could travel down, you know, maybe there's some meaning there.

My own suspicion is that it's like if I went to your bookshelf and I picked a random book up and I flipped to a random page and picked a random sentence,

I might find some meaning in that.

I might say, oh, that was just the sentence that I needed to hear.

But it's not really.

It's just that it has some meaning to me.

Anyway, the point is, if you blast random activity in there, I might dream about something where I wake up and say, oh, that was pretty useful.

But the thing that I think gets overlooked is that most dreams are totally useless and bizarre.

There are probably a lot of things, but I got to say, the thing that I've been thinking about so much lately is just about our political interfacing with one another.