Huberman Lab
GUEST SERIES | Dr. Matt Walker: The Science of Dreams, Nightmares & Lucid Dreaming
08 May 2024
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series, where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today marks the sixth episode in our six-episode series all about sleep with expert guest, Dr. Matthew Walker.
Today's episode focuses on sleep and dreaming as well as lucid dreaming. We talk about what's happening in your brain when you dream, both mundane dreams as well as heavily emotionally-laden dreams, and we discuss how to think about and perhaps even interpret the content of your dreams.
Chapter 2: What is the biological mechanism behind dreaming?
And we talk about lucid dreaming, which are dreams that occur while in sleep, of course, in which you are aware that you are dreaming. And because, unfortunately, they are relatively common, we also talk about nightmares and both what to do about nightmares as well as how to think about nightmares.
This being the final episode in the six-episode series all about sleep, I put the call out on my social media handles for any and all questions about sleep that I could direct to Dr. Matthew Walker. So as today's episode closes, I ask him those questions, focusing specifically on the questions that were most frequently asked by you, the audience, and he answers them in rapid succession.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp.
BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out online. I've been doing therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I had to do therapy against my will, but of course, I continued to do it voluntarily over time because I really believe that doing regular therapy with a quality therapist is one of the best things that we can do for our mental health.
Indeed, for many people, it's as beneficial as getting regular physical exercise. The great thing about BetterHelp is that it makes it very easy to find a therapist that's optimal for your needs.
And I think it's fair to say that we can define a great therapist as somebody with whom you have excellent rapport, somebody with whom you can talk about a variety of different issues, and who can provide you not just support, but also insight. And with BetterHelp, they make it extremely convenient so that it's matched to your schedule and other aspects of your life.
If you'd like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of the electrolytes, magnesium, potassium, and sodium, and no sugar.
As I mentioned before on this podcast, I'm a big fan of salt. Now, I want to be clear. People who already consume a lot of salt or who have high blood pressure or who happen to consume a lot of processed foods that typically contain salt need to control their salt intake.
However, if you're somebody who eats pretty clean and you're somebody who exercises and you're drinking a lot of water, there's a decent chance that you could benefit from ingesting more electrolytes with your liquids. The reason for that is that all the cells in our body, including the nerve cells, the neurons, require the electrolytes in order to function properly.
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Chapter 3: How do dreams influence creativity and emotional well-being?
With Element, that's very easy to do. What I do is when I wake up in the morning, I consume about 16 to 32 ounces of water and I'll dissolve a packet of element in that water. I'll also do the same when I exercise, especially if it's on a hot day and I'm sweating a lot.
And sometimes I'll even have a third element packet dissolved in water if I'm exercising really hard or sweating a lot, or if I just noticed that I'm not consuming enough salt with my food. Thank you so much for having me. When we're getting enough quality sleep, everything in life goes so much better.
And when we are not getting enough quality sleep, everything in life is that much more challenging. And one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to have the appropriate mattress. Everyone, however, has slightly different needs in terms of what would be the optimal mattress for them.
Helix understands that people have unique sleep needs, and they've designed a brief two-minute quiz that asks you questions like, Do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Or maybe you don't know the answers to those questions.
Chapter 4: What techniques can help with dream interpretation?
If you go to the Helix site and take that brief quiz, they'll match you to a mattress that's optimal for you. For me, it turned out to be the Dusk, D-U-S-K mattress. It's not too hard, not too soft, and I sleep so much better on my Helix mattress than on any other type of mattress I've used before.
So if you're interested in upgrading your mattress, go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman, take their brief two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress for you. And for this month only, May 2024, you can get up to 30% off all mattresses and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get 30% off and two free pillows.
And now for my conversation with Dr. Matthew Walker. Dr. Walker.
My dear good fellow, Dr. Huberman.
Today is the sixth and final episode in the six episode series that we've been recording on sleep. During episode one, you told us about the biology of sleep and some actionable items to get the basics of sleep well worked out for each of us. And it's highly particular to our individual needs. And you explained how to define those needs.
And you beautifully described in-depth protocols for, let's call it optimizing one's sleep. And then a third episode focused on caffeine, napping, and also food intake and its impact on sleep. We talked about the relationship between sleep and learning and memory and creativity.
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Chapter 5: What causes nightmares and how can they be treated?
And then of course, in the fifth episode, just prior to this one, you beautifully described the literature and actionable tools for connecting sleep to emotional health and mental health, as well as the relationship between lack of sleep and certain mental health challenges or conditions. Today we are going to dive into a truly exciting and fascinating topic, which is dreaming.
I can think of fewer topics more intriguing than dreams. I know there's a lot of interest in lucid dreaming, that is one dreaming while being aware that one is dreaming. You'll tell us more about that. But I think dreams just intrigue and fascinate us for so many reasons, but not the least of which is that At some point, we all seem to have them, and they seem to have a relevance for our lives.
They're not just epiphenomena, as we say. So today, I know you're going to explain what they do and do not provide for us, and I'm really excited to dive into this topic. It's something that I've been fascinated by, and I know many people are fascinated by. So just to kick things off, How do we define dreaming? What is a dream? What is a dream state?
You would think it's fairly simple because when people say, oh, I had the strangest dream last night, everyone seems to know what a dream. And by the way, dreaming is, we take it for granted. We say, oh, I had a strange dream last night. Just think about it though. Last night, both you and I and everyone listening, as long as they slept, we all became flagrantly psychotic.
Now, before you reject my diagnosis of your nightly psychosis, I'll give you five good reasons. First, when we start to dream, we see things which are not there, so we hallucinate. Second, we believe things that could not possibly be true. So we're delusional. Third, we get confused about time, place, and person. So we're suffering from disorientation.
Fourth, we have these wildly fluctuating emotions, something that psychiatrists call being affectively labile. And then how wonderful You woke up this morning and you forgot most, if not all of that dream experience. So you are suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any one of those five symptoms while you're awake, we'd probably be seeking psychological or psychiatric treatment.
But for reasons that we still don't fully understand, that seems to be a normal biological and psychological, and in fact, and I'll describe the data, absolutely necessary life support, perhaps necessary set of experiences to go through. So that's the peculiarity of dreaming, but how do we define it?
One of the loose definitions that we often use in sleep science is that a dream is any report of mental activity upon awakening. So I'll come into the laboratory and I'll wake you up and I'll say, what was going through your mind? And if you just say, nothing really. then we note that down as no dream report. But if you were to say, well, you know what?
I was actually just thinking about the next time you're going to come in and wake me up, then we would report that as a dream. But that's not really what most people mean when they say, I had this strange dream. What they're referring to is dreaming that takes place during the stage of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep.
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Chapter 6: What is lucid dreaming and what are its benefits?
There is some evidence that that may be the case, but your eyes are moving back and forth. It seems that these are... impulses that are going to your eyes that don't have a strong correlation with what it is that you're dreaming visually in the scene. That's not the case. But that's a little bit of a definition of what dreaming is and also when dreaming occurs.
I should probably note, by the way, that we human beings, we seem to be special in our REM sleep dreaming amounts. Now, I've just done a little bit of a sleight of hand.
Chapter 7: How can one improve their ability to lucid dream?
When I say REM sleep, I'm going to infer that it's dreaming. Charles Nunn, wonderful scientist, has looked at the proportion of REM sleep across different mammals. And what he found was that we human beings are a complete anomaly when it comes to our relative amounts of REM sleep. In other words, our dream sleep. He found that across most other primates,
REM sleep was usually averaging about 9% of the sleep period. However, we human beings, on average, including when we're young, will have a REM sleep proportion of about 20%. So if you plot the amount of REM sleep of primates in a graph, they're all sort of clustered around this mean. And then all of a sudden, on the far right-hand side, you've got this one single data point that sticks out.
That's us, human beings. And we don't fully understand why it is that we have such exceptional amounts of REM sleep. Now, I've done a lot of hand waving and written some theories about why that is, but it's still very unclear.
The other thing, and that's a very, I can go very philosophical about the functions of REM sleep and how it changed as we made the transition as a species from tree to ground. Because don't forget, as we mentioned in one of our episodes, when you're hanging like a bird on a tree or you're resting on a branch as a primate up in the trees, and you go into REM sleep, you lose muscle tone.
So it's quite a fragile state when you're 30 foot up in the air and you've got gravity desperately wanting to bring you and your limbs down to the ground. But when we made the transition down from tree to ground, We no longer had to worry about that. Did that open up the opportunity for more REM sleep to occur? And that explains why we human beings have that. We don't know.
REM sleep, however, does seem to be quite fundamental. And fundamental from a life necessary perspective, there were some studies done back in the 1980s. And there are studies that have not really been replicated. And I think I agree as to why, because ethically, you know, they're right in that gray zone.
In fact, for me, I find them quite uncomfortable when I speak about them or even teach them in class. They took rats and they deprived them of sleep, totally. And what they found was that rats, on average, will die somewhere between about 13 to 17 days after total sleep deprivation. In other words, Rats will die almost as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation.
It's that essential. But then they did something different. They said, well, what about the different stages of sleep? So they selectively deprived them of either non-REM sleep and REM sleep. The hypothesis was perhaps that non-REM sleep is, from an evolutionary perspective, a much older form of sleep. The first stage of sleep that came into being was non-REM sleep.
And the way we answer that is we look across phylogeny and these sort of different branches. And what we find is that in insects and in reptiles, amphibians, and fish, they all seem to have non-REM sleep. But for the most part, with a few exceptions, they don't seem to have REM sleep. But if you look at birds and mammals, they do have REM sleep.
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Chapter 8: What sleep challenges do older adults face?
You're lying completely still, no presence of muscle tone whatsoever, yet your brain seems to be just as on fire with electrical activity as it is when you're awake. Coming down a step though, there are these unique pulses of electrical, almost like lightning bursts that come up from the brainstem up to this sensory relay center in your brain called the thalamus.
And then they were initially recorded out in the back of the brain in the visual cortex. Hence, this PGO waves describes the three sites that I've just mentioned. It goes from the brainstem, the pons, up to the thalamus, a part of it called the geniculate, and then out to the back of the brain called the occipital cortex, PGO.
What they found was that those bursts of PGO wave activity were very much linked to these rapid eye movements. So once you got this burst of a PGO wave, this sort of brainstem up into the brain burst, then you got one of these rapid eye movements. So it was linking something there with the eye movements.
And I told you that when you're having these eye movements, that's a state where there's a high probability of dreaming. And is it a surprise then that the final destination of that lightning bolt where it sort of strikes is at the back of the brain in the visual cortex? Probably not. There's also been some links with those PGO waves and learning.
Not so much that those PGO waves seem to consolidate memories. In other words, they may not be critical for sleep after learning, but they seem to be related almost to sleep and initial learning. And the more that animals learn, the greater the amount of PGO wave activity they have when they go to sleep. So PGO waves are unique.
PGO waves don't simply just hit the back of your brain, that we've now measured them in all sorts of different cortical areas, and they seem to light up. The lightning splits, as it were, and it strikes all sorts of cortical areas. So then the question was, well, let's take humans and let's put them inside of brain scanners.
Let's allow them to fall into REM sleep, and then we'll start scanning the brain. What did we find? It was very interesting. When you look at the brain during REM sleep compared to, let's say, non-REM sleep, you see motor regions of the brain lighting up. You see visual regions of the brain lighting up, just as we described. You see memory-related structures lighting up, like the hippocampus.
And you see emotional-related structures, like the amygdala and something called the anterior cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, I should say. If I were to just show you an expert, a brain imaging map with memory centers related in terms of their activity, emotion centers, visual centers, motoric centers, and I were to say to you, Andrew, this is a scan that we got from an individual.
Just describe the type of experience that you think this person was having in the scanner. You would probably look at it and say, well, They were probably recollecting things from their past memory structures. They seemed to be having a visual experience, but there was also probably movement involved in that brain scanning experiment. And also there seems to be some degree of emotionality to it.
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