Dr. Rahul Jandial

Can you do it?

I tried the techniques and I realized I think I've been doing it in the morning when I wake up, when I was on call and the pager would go off and I would sleep and fall asleep and there was that it's sort of awaking and returning and floating in a hybrid state.

I have only done it once.

The concept that we aren't just fully awake or fully asleep I think is powerful.

The definition of nightmares requires that you wake up and you have a searing memory of what happens.

A bad dream is a bad dream, but a nightmare wakes you up.

The patterns, you know, the patterns of reports, when you look at them, are interesting.

Nearly universal at age 4, 5, 6, 7, nightmares arrive for all children.

Whether they've seen scary monsters or not, they talk about monsters.

And when they first arrive, we have to tell our children, my sons are in university now, all three of them, but when they were younger, hey, this is just a dream.

and so before nightmares kids may not know the difference between waking thoughts and uh dreaming thoughts so that's interesting that'll never be proven but it's an interesting pattern to look at and then they sort of universally fade in children around six seven eight nine maybe one percent have them and they rarely tend to have nightmare disorder which is like the memory of the nightmare ruins the next day

And so that's a very interesting pattern.

And then for most of life, nightmares are uncommon, a few percentage.

And then they...

They return as a warning sign for Parkinson's and other diseases, and then they return when people are having very stressful events, and then they obviously return in PTSD, whereas that's a flashback.

That's a replay of something bad that happened.

But nightmares in adults are very different than nightmares in kids.

I think nightmares in kids are sort of cultivating and training the mind, much like erotic dreams do and much like adolescence does.

There are these three phases of...

children's mind development, nightmares arriving and serving some purpose, erotic dreams arriving before the erotic act, and then adolescence arriving, and it doesn't change the substance of the flesh, but it definitely changes the mind.