Dr. Rahul Jandial

When we sleep, the contents of our skull are throbbing with electricity.

They're mopping up glucose coming in through the blood.

So if you run in your dreams...

At the brain level, the experiences we have while we dream are real.

They just don't activate the body through the spinal cord and actually make you run in most cases.

Great question.

Again, there are patterns and insights here.

So during the periods where most vivid dreams happen, the body tends to be chemically paralyzed.

During the periods where vivid dreams don't happen in certain stages, you can get reflexive behaviors like sleepwalking.

Then on the third scenario, in some cases of dream dysfunction in patients with Parkinson's, they can actually act out their dream.

So it's not a universal thing.

But in general, our bodies are chemically locked down, temporarily paralyzed while we dream.

Without trying to remember the specific content of your dream, what I'm finding that people are reporting, and in my life also, is that you really want to chase the central emotion and the central image.

The central emotion because the emotional systems, the limbic system is liberated in your brain.

And the central image because dreams are very hyper visual.

So going back to your original point, some dream thoughts and experiences, they're just junk, understandably, as in our waking life.

But when they're emotional, when they're highly visual, when you wake up, I think trying to remember the feeling and the visual, the central image is the goal rather than the goal.

meticulous details of the dream.

In trying to remember the meticulous details of the dream, I think the dream memory slips away a little bit further.

But these are some of my ideas.