Dr. Matthew Walker

First, they showed you lots of very specific images, images of cars, of women, of houses, of men, of dogs, of cats, of just a whole category of different visual elements.

and your brain was being scanned as you're awake watching each of these.

And then using this clever analysis, they were able to build up this very specific pattern, this very specific template of activity that for you, Andrew Huberman, said he is now looking specifically at a set of keys, or he was looking at a car, or he was looking at a woman, or a man, or a house.

And we knew ground truth in terms of what your brain looks like when it is seeing these different categories.

And then they did something clever.

Then they let those individuals sleep and go into REM sleep.

And then they started waking them up and getting dream reports.

But once they got the dream reports, the analysis sort of team remained blind to those reports.

What they did was almost like a forensic team that goes hunting for DNA at a crime scene.

They had the DNA and they started going around and searching to see if they could find a DNA match.

but here they weren't using the DNA.

They were using these templates of a woman's face or a car or a house.

And they would search through this electrical, this brain activity, sort of static of your dreams at night and find these matches.

And then we could wake you up, get the dream report and see how well did our brain performing a sort of algorithm

match with your actual subjective report when you came out.

And it was stunning how close.

So I could tell you were dreaming, but you were also dreaming about a house and a car.

You're dreaming about a woman, it turns out.

And we started to want your dreams, as I said, were your own.

But now