The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
27 Mar 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with researcher, neuroscientist, and author, Dr. Baland Jalal. They discuss human embodiment, the rubber hand experiments (which push embodiment beyond the physical), the deeper functionality of dreams, sleep paralysis, and a potential theory to explain alien abductions. Dr. Jalal is a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a Visiting Researcher at Cambridge University Medical School where he obtained his PhD. Dr. Jalal's work has been featured in the The New York Times, Washington Post, The Today Show, The BBC, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, NBC News, New York Magazine, The Times, The Telegraph, Forbes, Der Spiegel, Reuters, Fox News, Discover Magazine, VICE, and PBS (NOVA). He writes for Time Magazine, Scientific American, Big Think, and Boston Globe. The Telegraph and BBC described him as “one of the world’s leading experts on sleep paralysis,” and he was ranked the "top-rated expert in sleep paralysis in the world" on Expertscape based on scientific impact in the past 10 years. This episode was filmed on January 17th, 2025. | Links | For Dr. Baland Jalal On X https://x.com/balandjalalphd On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/balandjalal/?hl=en Read “Transdiagnostic Multiplex CBT for Muslim Cultural Groups: Treating Emotional Disorders” (2020) https://a.co/d/d1nZUwP Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object. So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self. The feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right?
Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly. This is very weird too, everyone.
So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?
Something was happening to me, and I was frozen and unable to speak, and I knew I had to wake myself up. Like, I'd try to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife. She'd have to come and shake me, and then I'd wake up.
So I was sleeping in my room, and then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me until it was on my chest, strangling me.
What did the monster look like? Well, I'll tell you.
Thank you.
Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Dr. Balan Jalal. He's a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a visiting researcher at Cambridge University Medical School. He's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other such publications.
The Telegraph and the BBC described him as one of the world's leading experts on sleep paralysis and the terrors and opportunities of dream, fantasy, and adaptation What did we discuss?
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