Dr. Matthew Walker

So thank you for being vulnerable and sharing.

It's emotional first aid.

There are.

And the short answer to your question, do we simply go into sleep, start dreaming, and then rewind the videotape and replay in a faithful recapitulation the waking day in our dreaming night?

And the answer is no.

And here again, the scientist I mentioned before, Robert Stickgold with Roar Fossey, they looked at this question and it was a very difficult study to do.

They did what we call experience sampling during the day.

And they would give you sort of like a little beeper and they would set it to go off multiple times throughout the day.

And then you would write down what it is that you were experiencing right in that moment.

And again, they were trying to build up this sort of time lapse photography, as it were, of your waking day experience.

And then they would bring people in and they would start to record their dreams at night.

And then they would match those two and ask, what is the degree of overlap?

What is the Venn diagram proportional percentage of those two things aligning?

And what they found was that there was really only about 2% of your dreaming life that was a very faithful replay and reiteration of your waking life.

However, what they did find was something even more interesting to me, which comes back to this idea of overnight therapy.

they found that there is something that runs through like a red thread narrative from your waking life into your dreaming life.

That is emotional concerns and people of significance.

If there is anything in terms of an algorithm that seems to overlap and predict where those two Venn diagrams sort of collide, it really is in the emotional, personal significance space

once again pointing us to perhaps a reaffirmation that a key function of dreaming is about dealing with our waking experiences and particularly the things that are salient to us.

I mean, it really started, you have to give credit in some ways to Freud.