Brain Surgeon REVEALS the NEUROSCIENCE of Dreams & What They TRULY Mean! | Dr. Rahul Jandial

Dr. Rahul Jandial 0:00 The ultimate gift of the human mind, I think, is dreaming. Love and all those things, yes, but the process of dreaming. Now, I'm gonna be bold here. This is a conversation. I think we sleep because we must dream.

Lewis Howes 0:10 He is a dual-trained neurosurgeon who has both an MD and PhD, and he's based out of the world-famous City of Hope Hospital here in Los Angeles. He's a researcher and author of 10 books and countless academic papers on the brain, Dr. Rahul Jandial. Why, after dozens of years of doing brain surgeries, being a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind, did you want to dive into understanding dreams?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 0:36 I mean, you've put it right where it needs to be. This is a big topic. When color TV showed up, the dream reports of thousands of people being asked, woken up in their sleep to, "What are you dreaming about?" the dreams started to be more in color.

Lewis Howes 0:49 I've woken up, but not been able to move or speak.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 0:52 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 0:53 And I feel like I'm screaming, but nothing's coming out.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 0:55 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 0:56 What is that?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 0:56 Sleep paralysis. What you describe about... This is great. Just give me a minute to take this one, 'cause this one I got a lot of science. What the-

Lewis Howes 1:04 Do you think our dreams have meaning in our waking life?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07 Well, that is the massive question, right? So that's the, um... What I would say is-

Lewis Howes 1:13 Welcome back, everyone, to The School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Dr. Rahul Jandial in the house. Good to see you, man. Welcome back.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:22 My pleasure.

Lewis Howes 1:23 The last interview we did blew up. People were fascinated by it. You are a neuroscientist who studies the mind, but also a brain surgeon who has been helping remove cancer for dozens of years, uh, to over thousands of patients. And so you studied the material brain, but also the spiritual side of the brain as well, the mind, let's say.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:47 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:48 And you're an expert in both. And the last interview we did, we talked about many different things around these topics, but you have a new book called This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life. And this is interesting, as we were talking before, that there's not really anyone who is a scientist of dreams out in the world yet, except for you're starting this path. You're, you're starting to talk about the neuroscience of dreaming, which I think is fascinating, because you told me about a third of the time we don't remember what we're doing in our lives. A third of the time we're asleep, and a lot of us don't remember our dreams. We don't understand our dreams. They don't make sense to us. We have nightmares. We have erotic dreams. We have inspiring dreams.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 2:34 Right.

Lewis Howes 2:34 We have dreams where we feel like we're falling, or dreams where we feel like we're about to die, and then we wake up-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 2:40 Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:40 ... in a shock. We have all these weird moments. Sometimes we remember, and we, we, we, we overemphasize what the dream was, but it really didn't happen. And then other times we have no clue what happened in our dreams. And so why, after dozens of years of doing brain surgeries, being a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind, did you want to dive into understanding dreams?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 3:06 I mean, you've put it right where it needs to be. This is a big topic. There's a reason people haven't been tackling it, 'cause it's like trying to grab a cloud or, like, trying to hold onto something that's just like, we all know what it is. We know what dreams are. We all have had dreams. I don't have to explain to you what a nightmare is. You know [laughs] what it is. I know what it is. Yeah, we don't talk about it. We can't really wrap our minds around it, but it's something we all experience. It's something we all undergo. So your question about why did I wanna, uh, write a book on dreams, what I would tell you is I was asked to write this book.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 3:39 So the way I've... My journey that's ended up here, uh, a lot of it is, you know, I have sons. I have three, as we were talking about. They're 18, 19, and 22. I've taken care of thousands of cancer patients. Um, I've done surgery in South America, that these experiences are also part of my resume. Now, I happen to have a PhD in neuroscience, and I'm a neurosurgeon, but there are other neuroscientists, there are other neurosurgeons. I, I, I believe, and in this conversation, when you see me, hear me say I believe or I wonder or could it be, it's out of respect for you and your listeners, because you, you don't want anybody coming on this topic and saying, "Aha, I got it all figured out, one, two, three." No. It's an exploration. I'm looking at fragments and pieces across broad scientific things. I'm bringing my own stories into my own experiences, and I'm saying, "Look. Look at these little..." They're almost like fireflies, these little glimpses of knowledge that we now have, or that 3,000 years ago they were talking about lucid dreaming, they being Aristotle. Like, what is the consistent pattern? Uh, not, not my dream, not your dream, but what if we look at 10,000 dreams? Do we start to see some patterns?

Lewis Howes 4:56 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 4:56 We do, and we'll get into that. Nightmares and erotic dreams are essentially universal. Falling dreams and teeth falling out have happened for hundreds of years across cultures. Like, when you went from carriages to cars to electric vehicles to television, those dreaming patterns are consistent. So the first thing I thought, "Wait, wait a second. They're being driven by the brain."

Lewis Howes 5:19 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 5:20 Then, when Technicolor came in, dream reports, people cataloging what dreams are going on, right? That's where I'm studying, is like, well, how are... What dreams happen most commonly? What dreams don't happen at all? So two things popped into my mind. I was looking at this and saying, when color TV showed up, the dream reports of thousands of people being asked, woken up in their sleep to, "What are you dreaming about?" uh, the dreams started to be more in color. So clearly waking life fed dreaming life. And then the other thing I noticed was rarely did they report math in dreams.

Lewis Howes 5:55 Yeah, I don't think I've ever had a math dream.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 5:56 Thank God. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 5:57 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 5:58 That doesn't sound fun. But, but there, most people... W- we look at 10,000 dreams. Everybody's had a nightmare, nearly every... When, in science, when I say everybody, I don't mean 100%. It's like, you know, above 90-ish, it gets to be essentially universal nightmares and erotic dreams. Very few ... Lots of emotional dreams, lots of visual dreams, a lot of movement dreams, and we'll get into that, but very few math dreams, right? Like, very few people said... And even the scientists that say, "I came up with the idea of dreaming," it's a visual thing, like the snake eating itself or two comets moving apart. And what I realize now, that those, you know, what we dream, and now in the last 20, 30 years, we could have brain scans. That's a s- that's a simple word, but we're gonna dissect that in this conversation. Like, the metabol- how much glucose your brain is using. Where's that glucose being used? What's the electricity? So when I say brain scan, there's a lot of different ways of scanning brain information. The brain scans at night, in a machine, with people sleeping, with people dreaming, they were notably dampened. Not off. Let's change all of this. Th- there's no part of your brain that's off, otherwise it'd be a stroke, you know? That part would die. But everything in the brain is a modulation. It's always, like, f- 51/49. Nothing is ever on or off. It's not a switch. There's blood flow always

Dr. Rahul Jandial 7:20 going everywhere, okay? If a branch is blocked, then you have a stroke. What happens is the executive network in the prefrontal cortex, just the f- the part of the brain behind the forehead, the w- the part that does reason and logic and maths, it's, it's 49, it's 48. During the ... Right now, it's probably 51, 52, but it's dampened at night. And so dampening the executive network in our dreams allows for them to be illogical, allows them for them be wild, in my opinion, and also explains why you're not doing math.

Lewis Howes 7:53 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 7:53 'Cause that's needed for math.

Lewis Howes 7:56 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 7:56 So that, I just, it took my breath away. I was like, "Wait a second." So some patterns of dreaming, from thousands of dreams, can be explained by some patterns of the dreaming brain, and that was, uh, the idea in my head. And, uh, my publisher i- in London, Penguin UK, um, we were talking about doing a different book, and that's gonna be the w- the next one hopefully. But, um, you know, she said, "We, we, we need, we..." And I think she meant, like, the publishing world, and readers, and people in general, like, it ... They're, they, they're real s- they're, they're real ... You know, they put out books that are like, french fries. I love french fries.

Lewis Howes 8:40 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 8:40 But they also wanna put out some stuff like, "Look, this an important book." We need a book about dreams explained, about the science of it, the story of it.

Lewis Howes 8:50 Eh.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 8:51 A love letter to dreams, because there is no dream scientist. You c- it's not a field. I'm a neuroscientist with life experiences trying to put together brain scans, dream reports, uh, neurons in a petri dish, to, to put together a story of what I think is happening in dreams and dreaming.

Lewis Howes 9:10 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 9:10 So that's how this started.

Lewis Howes 9:11 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 9:11 There's this ... And it just ... Once that happened, there's been an ignition in my mind for about 18 months.

Lewis Howes 9:16 So there's been a, there have been reports on lots of different dreams, right? There's been, like, people documenting their dreams.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 9:22 Yeah, yeah.

Lewis Howes 9:23 And there's s- there's studies around that.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 9:24 F- great question, first of all. Uh, uh, again, not my dream or your dream, but there are great dream banks.

Lewis Howes 9:31 Uh-huh.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 9:32 Uh, people for s- uh, decades have, uh, woken people up in sleep labs. They put an electrode on to make sure they're sleeping. They say, "Hey, wake up. What are you dreaming about?" And they write it down.

Lewis Howes 9:42 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 9:42 Yeah. So that, that world's been happening, okay? That's where I'm getting, like, the, uh, you know, a certain percentage report dreams of falling, certain percentage dreams of, uh, you know, of being chased, a certain percentage of math. Really? That's really low.

Lewis Howes 10:00 It's not there, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 10:02 Everybody, nightmares. Everybody, sexual erotic dreams. Okay, so y- I ... That pattern is not mine.

Lewis Howes 10:06 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 10:07 It's what other people methodically have been cataloging, by people either sending in or writing, journaling, uh, or sleep labs, being, you know, woken up.

Lewis Howes 10:17 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 10:18 And that, that's where I'm getting those patterns.

Lewis Howes 10:19 Do you think our dreams have meaning in our waking life?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 10:22 Well, that is the f- that's the massive question, right? So that's the, that's the, um ... Um, what I would say is, let's go backwards a little bit. My answer is yes, but, but to be able to share with you how to go by, go about extracting that meaning-

Lewis Howes 10:40 Yes

Dr. Rahul Jandial 10:41 ... one, it's gonna be individual. I, I, I can't tell you what your dreams are about, and you can't tell me what my dreams are about, so it's a process of self-examination. Yes, uh, dreams have meaning. Not all dreams, b- right? Not all our waking thoughts are fresh or, or, you know, or important, or worth holding onto. But what ... Let's get to that as can ... Do dreams have meaning? But w- with your permission, you know, let's, let's ar- let's equip people with what is happening in the dreaming brain-

Lewis Howes 11:10 Yes

Dr. Rahul Jandial 11:11 ... and then what different dreams mean-

Lewis Howes 11:13 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 11:14 ... so then they have a playbook at the end. Um-

Lewis Howes 11:16 Yeah

Dr. Rahul Jandial 11:17 ... a- and what I would say is the dreaming brain is ... This was the essential question, is, okay, so you got all the dream patterns, right? So we got w- what we dream. You, you're looking at what people have cataloged. Uh, to make sense of why we dream, that's your essential question that we get to. And then there's this, like, th [laughs] this, this thing, like, like, the, the dreaming brain and the waking brain, right? Like ... And so th- and I believe these big ideas are applicable to everybody, like, getting groceries, frustrated, w- why am I stressed out, why am I overreacting? Like, all the, all the things for living a better waking life, you can't separate them from that, that third of your life you spend sleeping and potentially dreaming, right? So I go way, way back to try to understand this, a- and to make sense of it for myself, and, and I think you'll find there's, there's science and there's stories, but there's synthesis. So first thing is all life- ... is, is governed by the rotation of the planet.

Lewis Howes 12:19 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 12:20 Let's, let's just start with square one. Like, uh, let's just get to the basic here. Like, like whether it's, like, those hot springs deep in the ocean and there's some bacteria there, or a Venus flytrap that opens and closes, or the moon and the tides, um, or sleep, right? Like, this is, this is governed because that was the foundation on which life arose, right? And when, when you look at that, what I would say is the material, the living material on planet Earth follows that.

Lewis Howes 12:56 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 12:56 Whether it's the tide or the plankton or fish or, you know, all migration. Uh, but also the material in our brain.

Lewis Howes 13:03 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 13:04 Like, there's nothing in our skull that, if you pieced it out, there's no special ingredient, like, from Krypton or something. Everything in nature is also everything inside our skull in these brains, right? That's connected differently, it's functioning differently, but that was, like, the first thing that really tripped me out. I was like, "We too follow the laws, fundamental laws of Earth's rotation," these circadian rhythms you're hearing about and cycles and, and seasons. And that was the first time I said, "Okay, so the brain is, the brain is... The, the waking brain and the sleeping brain are doing a 24-hour cycle for as long as the run you have on this planet."

Lewis Howes 13:49 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 13:49 That's the first thing. That cycle, it, it actually s- you know, there was, like... I love this topic, by the way. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 13:56 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 13:56 I like this, like, go a s- there are, like, people who go in a cave for, like, six months, they're still on a cycle.

Lewis Howes 14:01 Oh.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 14:02 Like, it's not based just on dark blackout shades or not. Like, we're, we, the tissue in our bodies, the cells, it, we're following this-

Lewis Howes 14:11 Right

Dr. Rahul Jandial 14:11 ... Earth's rotation, okay? So if we say that there's the waking brain and the sleeping brain, and every 24 hours it does its thing. It's two third waking, one third sleeping, and that, and that happens, for the most part, you know, for how long you live. Now, a surgeon in training, I might skip a few nights, um, so maybe I've had 500 or 1,000 nights, but overwhelmingly, I follow this cycle too. And in that cycle, we have to ask ourselves, well, what's going on in the dreaming brain?

Lewis Howes 14:45 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 14:46 And right away, I'll tell you, it's so important, there's something called sleep pressure. You could, you can do, you could defy a lot of things, but the, you go a day without sleeping, there's something building inside you saying, "Sleep, sleep, sleep." You'll fall asleep in a dangerous spot. You'll fall asleep standing up sometimes. You'll fall asleep even though you haven't eaten. Like, there's something fundamental called sleep pressure that makes us

Dr. Rahul Jandial 15:10 follow that, that rhythm, right?

Lewis Howes 15:11 Your body will force you to sleep-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 15:13 Yeah

Lewis Howes 15:13 ... eventually.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 15:13 W- well, I would say your brain.

Lewis Howes 15:15 Your brain just shuts off.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 15:16 It's, it's this, it builds a pressure. You can startle people and they'll wake up. But at some point, there's this pressure that's bringing you down to sleep.

Lewis Howes 15:25 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 15:25 That w- that, you see that w- we, I think torture techniques were based off of that. We saw that. We, we, nobody could stay up a third night in the hospital. They tried to get us to a long time ago, the battle days.

Lewis Howes 15:34 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 15:34 Yeah, but two night, second night you could do. Third night in pa... So there's a sleep pressure that the brain generates. Not the body, the brain. 'Cause in, just to give you just examples like we were talking about, like, regular examples. We're not trying to get... We'll bring the science in, but the, the complexity is in the, um, in the concept. I can, we can put hearts from one to another, livers from one to another, lungs from one to another. Uh, they all follow the, that person's brain's order. So really what we're talking about is the brain is saying, "I need to sleep." Brain is saying, "I need to sleep." Brain is saying, "Okay, there's some threat going on," or, "You've got some ex- some demands. You're running an ultramarathon. You're a surgeon on call. I can go a day, but I need to sleep." So that's the first, the first thing in this discussion is why do we need to sleep?

Lewis Howes 16:22 Oh.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 16:23 Now, I'm gonna be bold here. This is a conversation. I th- I think we sleep because we must dream. Now, let me just set that up for you.

Lewis Howes 16:31 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 16:32 What happens when you go without sleep, y- you have surges in r- REM and dreaming sleep right away. First thing you do when you've gone a day without sleep, if you put that person in a brain scan, but there's exquisite m- ways of checking it, is that they, they, first thing they do is they dream wildly, right? Like, so that's, that's an interesting thing to me. The longer we go in our night of rest, quote, "restful sleep," the more you're dreaming on the tail end.

Lewis Howes 17:02 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 17:03 Right? So maybe mental clarity, if we take that phrase, comes from having that longer night's sleep. Well, what happens in that fifth, sixth, and seventh hour? You're dreaming more.

Lewis Howes 17:14 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 17:15 So when I start to see these patterns, I wonder, one, the brain, not the body, needs to sleep. And then what is the brain doing in sleep? Just check this out, man. It's, it's doing something that if you put electrodes on the surface of our scalps and we all fall asleep, at night, during the day, the waves, the, the measurements are, uh, you know, sort of wavy. There's different ones that y- depending on how you're engaging. At night, there are some sharp 90-minute patterns. Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. That stuff is designed. That's built in.

Lewis Howes 17:57 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 17:57 Yeah. So that's not new.

Lewis Howes 17:59 We don't have that when we're awake.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 18:00 No, during the w- uh, like, i- if something startles us, the, the electricity will be different. If we, if we meditate, the electricity will be different during, during waking. But at night, you're on, you're on something program. And that's not new, Lewis. That's the stuff that I've, we, I've known for 20 years, and sleep people have known for 40 years. What I'm trying to do is- Give you an explanation, a synthesis. That's not random. [laughs] That's not a glitch. Seven billion brains on a-

Lewis Howes 18:29 Wow

Dr. Rahul Jandial 18:29 ... 24-hour cycle. Sleep pressure, you got to lie down, you got to sleep. The brain is saying, "You got to sleep." And when it's sleeping, it's doing this, "Ruh, ruh, ruh, ruh," 90 crisp cycles. Uh, REM sleep. You've seen the, the charts. They're like, they look like Lego, they look like the top of a, a Tetris thing or a Lego thing. That is something fundamental that's happening, in my opinion. And so that's why I think we must sleep, but I think w- what's

Dr. Rahul Jandial 18:57 the most important part of sleep is the dreaming. My kidney and my liver don't need to sleep. You could take part of a liver from a mom and put it in the child. It's no longer connected, the, the transplanted liver, to the, to the web of nerves. Liver's fine. Uh, lungs are fine moving between humans.

Lewis Howes 19:17 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 19:18 Right? So you, what I'm trying to point out there is that it's the m- it's the brain that's running the show. It's on the earthly pattern. It wants to sleep, and in that sleep, what is it doing? It's dreaming. The brain, in my opinion, with respect and humility, the brain needs to dream. The, the sleep is so that the brain can dream and stay fine-tuned and stay fully adapted and stay fully enriched in all the corners of its mind without just the boring d- boring part of our day, right? If the brain only did what we did, driving the 101 or doing this, which is fantastic, but it would become rigid, right? It would become like, like an arm that's never stretched past a certain distance, right? You get a contracture. Well, the brain tissue, in my opinion, that dreaming is the brain's way... Now, other people have other ideas, like it's threat training or it's a nighttime n- a therapist. I get that, and I think in some capacity. But at the most fundamental level, it's like high-intensity training for your mind.

Lewis Howes 20:21 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 20:21 At night, it just goes wild to make sure all those capacities and resources, imaginations, if you will, are accessible to you if you needed them during the day, if the environment or, uh, you know, evolution, uh, needed it. So that's, like, the big explanation about what's happening when we sleep. We're dreaming. Dreaming is important. It's metabolically active. It's electrically active. It puts us at risk, and even if you are in dan- danger, your brain will force you to lie down so you can sleep to dream. Uh, that's-

Lewis Howes 20:54 Wow

Dr. Rahul Jandial 20:54 ... how fundamental I think dreams are.

Lewis Howes 20:56 Now, what if people... That's, that's powerful. I'm, I'm glad you shared that. I'm, and what if people are listening or watching say, "Well, I can't remember any of my dreams, and I don't think I dream at all-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 21:06 Yeah

Lewis Howes 21:07 ... 'cause I can't remember them."

Dr. Rahul Jandial 21:08 That's-

Lewis Howes 21:08 "So what's wrong with me, and should I be worried if I don't have dreams?"

Dr. Rahul Jandial 21:12 Well, I would say the genius is built-in. So that, that's happening whether you want it or not, and the central question of... I've had people ask me that, like, "Well, if I don't remember my dreams, is it useful?" I mean, what is it? Well, if you're not remembering them... So let me take that one apart a little bit, and here's my thinking on it. We'll bring in imagination and even sports visualization to try to understand that, and we'll bring in something called autobiographical memory. So let's start with memory first, okay? It's, it's not what you're seeing on TV or, like, you know, remembering names or addresses. I like m- I like my phone. I don't wanna remember a phone number again, you know? Like, there's that kind of memory. Then there's procedural memory, like riding a bike, tying your shoelaces. Uh, then there's episodic memory, remembering episodes of your life, right? So we have lots of different shades and types of memory, and the one that m- connects me to the fact that I was here with you maybe about two years ago is something called autobiographical memory. When I... I have gone through so many different things in so many different countries and places, but I feel as if I have been the, uh, I- I've inhabited and lived through all of those experiences. Think about that, right? What's the thing that stitches all my life together? That's a type of memory. It's called autobiographical memory. And, and so

Dr. Rahul Jandial 22:42 I think by design, by, and importance, um, it, it's to some rare cases, it's to away, uh, avoid waking and dream confusion. So it has this wild run at night, but when you wake up, and, and we'll talk about that transition, like, the s- the, the transition between dr- uh, s- uh, uh, dreaming brain and waking brain. It's not a hard line. It's a little... It can be fuzzy in the morning, and that's why some people report sleep paralysis and goblins and weird stuff. But, um, the autobiographical memory has to come back into command, 'cause that's what stitches our waking life together. That's what's get food-

Lewis Howes 23:24 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 23:25 ... get to work, get on the subway. So the autobiographical memory takes over every morning when we wake up, and for it, I think for us to stay, to not be confused about what reality is, 'cause we had such a wild ride, it, it, there, there's a m- uh, the memory is designed to have dreaming fade to the background. And so I think, I think it's, it's happening. Elect- electrically, it's happening, and what we're catching are a few glimpses of it bleeding into our waking brain and say, "Oof, man, last night, what was going on in my head?"

Lewis Howes 23:57 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 23:58 Th- those are the glimpses and the flares of the dreaming brain bleeding into the waking life. Those are the ones that, that, um, that we wanna pay attention to, you know? So that's the, that's the way I'm, I'm thinking about dreaming, and trying to explain it, too.

Lewis Howes 24:14 Okay, I have so many questions I wanna ask here.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 24:16 Let's do it.

Lewis Howes 24:16 But there's, there's different types of dreams. There's nightmares, there's erotic dreams, there's- Weird, crazy dreams. There's sleep paralysis.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 24:26 Right.

Lewis Howes 24:26 And I think I know what that is, 'cause I think I've had that a few different times. So I'd love to start there, 'cause this is something I can relate to, where I've woken up, but not been able to move or speak.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 24:35 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 24:36 And I feel like I'm screaming, but nothing's coming out.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 24:39 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 24:40 What is that?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 24:40 [laughs] First-

Lewis Howes 24:41 'Cause that's terrifying

Dr. Rahul Jandial 24:42 ... I know, right? But you're asking me to, like, you're asking me to tackle giants of-

Lewis Howes 24:46 I, [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 24:46 ... giants of mystery, like-

Lewis Howes 24:47 Tell me everything what it is, yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 24:49 I- in one afternoon, you know? We're, but, but what I, again, w- with, with humility, if you hold onto the concept, if you just, if you just say, "Look, that was... Look, this, we don't have to do a study, but he, I get what he's saying. W- we're on planet Earth. We clearly have to sleep, right? Our brain, I, I believe him. Our brain is the thing that needs to sleep. And now what he's saying is, um, that, hey, check this out. While you're sleeping, you're, you're dreaming. Whether you remember none of it, a little of it, or some of it, you're dreaming." Okay? If we, if we s- if we hold onto that, and then always come back to, like, if one person later on is like, "Huh. I am a cycle of waking brain, dreaming brain." Just, if you just walk away with one thing, like, you're waking brain, dreaming brain 24 hours. Waking times, whatever life is. Waking brain. And just to ask yourself, "Is this contribution to my thinking, to my emotion, uh, from the waking brain or the dreaming brain or, or somewhere where it, where it blends?" So when you, uh, sleep paralysis. Um, a third of people have experienced it. I haven't, but when [laughs] I wrote, or started writing about sleep paralysis, the, what you describe about, uh, this is, this is great. Let, just give me a minute to take this one, 'cause this one I got a lot of science.

Lewis Howes 26:19 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 26:20 The, what, when you, what the dreaming brain also does is not just hyper-emotional and hyper-visual and dampened logic, right? That we, we opened with. Hyper-emotional, hyper-visual, dampened logic, okay? So that's there. What it also does is it locks down your body.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 26:44 So you're temporarily paralyzed.

Lewis Howes 26:46 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 26:46 There's some exceptions where reflexes or sleepwalking, but in general, you're temporarily p- paralyzed so the dreaming brain can let loose, be emotional, be wild, and in the morning, that paralysis has to come off.

Lewis Howes 26:59 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 27:00 Right? That's an, that we can all agree on, right? That's, that's the dreaming brain and the waking brain. When there is a mismatch, um, of you waking, your dreaming brain, the mind is coming to, but the chemicals that have locked down your body, right? The chemical paralysis is still there. People will wake up-

Lewis Howes 27:22 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 27:23 ... locked, locked in their body.

Lewis Howes 27:24 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 27:24 That's kind of what you're describing.

Lewis Howes 27:25 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 27:26 And then on top of that, they start describing goblins and monsters and different things, lurking intruders. I've never experienced it.

Lewis Howes 27:32 I've never experienced that either.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 27:33 But that's described so much so that if you go to Italy, you go to Africa, you go, go to other places, they all have a similar story of being locked in the body and having a threatening presence in the room, and sometimes a feeling of suffocation.

Lewis Howes 27:47 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 27:48 That grouping is something humans experience and something cultures have come up with their own stories about. So if people wanna look it up, it's like succubus, the incubus and succubus come from that.

Lewis Howes 28:01 Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 28:02 And there's a famous painting-

Lewis Howes 28:03 Wow

Dr. Rahul Jandial 28:03 ... with a goblin on top of a woman who's asleep. I-

Lewis Howes 28:05 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 28:06 What I want people to go is, "Ah, I see." That sleep paralysis that Lewis brought up was because the dreaming brain and the waking brain-

Lewis Howes 28:14 Uh-huh

Dr. Rahul Jandial 28:14 ... they don't just snap to the next phase, that sometimes they bleed into each other, and that's called sleep exit. That little window is called sleep exit. Sleep entry is a fascinating one, too, but sleep exit-

Lewis Howes 28:25 Yeah. I've almost, I've had it a couple times at night, like in the beginning of sleeping also, where I've, like, fallen asleep, but in the, 30 minutes later I've, like, woken up. It's almost I'm not asleep yet.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 28:36 Yeah, that's my favorite time, actually.

Lewis Howes 28:36 But I am for a minute. And so my fiancee says, I mean, this is just from her, uh, theories, but she says, you know, "That's you entering a lucid dreaming, like allowing that to happen, allowing the sleep paralysis to happen, 'cause you're half awake, half asleep. And if you stay there and you don't freak out and scream, like try to scream, you could actually enter..." She says that's what happens for her, and she enters the most incredible-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 29:00 Mm-hmm

Lewis Howes 29:01 ... lucid dreams that are vivid in memories for her.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 29:04 She's not wrong. L-

Lewis Howes 29:05 And so it's more of just, like, surrendering to, "Ah, I can't move." [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 29:08 Yeah. So she's not wrong. But again, so you know, uh, people are like, "What are they talk..." Like, if you just, if you, if, if you keep this conversation on the framework of dreaming brain and sleeping brain, uh, b- dreaming brain and waking brain, then you know where the explanations land. So what you're talking about is the waking brain entering the, the sleeping brain.

Lewis Howes 29:31 The sleep, the sleep world. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 29:32 The sl- very good. The, and that, again, doesn't happen, like, in a millisecond, like, "Oh."

Lewis Howes 29:37 Like a switch. Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 29:37 You don't blink your eyes and go into that mode. It bleeds.

Lewis Howes 29:41 Oh.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 29:41 And I remember this. How do I explain? When I was in, I was diving, way, I don't do it anymore, but I was diving in the caverns of, like, the Yucatan and, where the fresh water meets the ocean water.

Lewis Howes 29:50 Oh, that's crazy.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 29:51 There's like four feet or, where it's, like, blurry. And I was like, "Yeah, it's not gonna go from a fresh water river to ocean in, like, what? Like a hair?"

Lewis Howes 30:00 Yeah, right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 30:00 There's a period of overlap.

Lewis Howes 30:02 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 30:03 And so if you hold onto that, uh, your waking brain is starting to enter your dreaming, your sleeping brain. That window, there's a word for it. It's called hypnagogic and hypnopompic. Forget about that. I like c- 'cause I wanna have a conversation. Sleep entry. Sleep entry is also a 15, 20-minute period where you

Dr. Rahul Jandial 30:25 can kind of be in these liminal spaces where you're, you're like, "I'm remembering a lot, but man, I'm having some wild thoughts." Lucid dreaming is when you've been asleep, and then the, uh, awareness you're in a dream come- returns. That's a whole different topic. So she's right, it's a blended state, uh, your significant other.

Lewis Howes 30:43 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 30:44 But sleep entry has been channeled by Salvador Dali and others and in movie Inception as a place to extract fresh ideas. Your fresh ideas might be great. My fresh ideas might be bad. I'm not saying that's the way to become a creative genius, but people have used that window, and now there's some devices-

Lewis Howes 31:02 Wow

Dr. Rahul Jandial 31:02 ... that, that when they see you f- feel you falling asleep, they'll wake you up. So sleep entry is the blurry movement from, uh, the waking brain to the dreaming brain, and that is an interesting, uh, space for creativity. Sleep exit is the dreaming brain to the waking brain, and sometimes the body stays locked in and locked down, and the mind comes back, and that freaks people out. That's called sleep paralysis.

Lewis Howes 31:29 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 31:30 That's, that's my synthesis, and I-

Lewis Howes 31:32 That's interesting. Now, this might be off topic here, but I'm curious. To have an optimal day-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 31:37 Eh

Lewis Howes 31:37 ... is it better to wake up organically without an alarm or to wake up with something that is alarming you-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 31:46 Okay

Lewis Howes 31:47 ... when you wake up?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 31:48 So, a great question, first of all, c- because now we have the concept. So if you believe your dreaming thoughts are ones you wanna hold onto, [laughs] if they're nightmares, maybe you wanna forget, but nightmares won't let you forget. That's a different topic. They're, they arrive in children for a different reason. But what I do now, because I have the luxury of a bed and curtains, so it's out of respect for all the people in this world that don't have that, but I believe when I have had a good idea... Actually, forget that. Uh, my h- last 100 bad ideas have come from somewhere in sleep entry and sleep exit. And when I'm driving around LA or whatever, I'm, you know, I'm in LAX or Heathrow, whatever it is, uh, when I go, "Oh, interesting thought," it, that a- it's not a aha moment. When, when you have a thought that you don't know where it came from, I believe it's from that nightly process that's going vroom.

Lewis Howes 32:43 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 32:43 That work you're putting in at night on your own, the design for the brain to dream, to stay creative, to stay enriched, uh, to activate emotions and sights that are way beyond what you would even choose for during the day, right? We'd become so boring if our brains didn't dream at night, right? The capacity would be constrained. So when I have a interesting idea, I try to think about, "Did that come from my dreaming brain, or have I been working with that?" So I've been giving these talks on creativity, and people are ... So there's an incubation period and an extraction period. I believe habits during the day, whether it's, like, like color tele- television, more color dreams. Put some red colored goggles on people, and they had more red colored dreams. I believe, like, I do things, like I like to flip through magazines or I listen to different music and I, I take different routes home. I believe I'm feeding, uh, my dream life. And then at dream, at sleep entry or sleep exit, I try to hold onto, what was I thinking about? What was I thinking about? How did I feel about that? What was that going on? And to do that, you, you can't have the alarm, which is a luxury.

Lewis Howes 33:52 Sure.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 33:53 And the first thing you can't check is your phone, 'cause the minute you check your phone-

Lewis Howes 33:57 Switching to something else

Dr. Rahul Jandial 33:57 ... that auto- right, that autobiogra- autobiographical memory's onto the day. What you want is that autobiographical memory, the thing that st- stitches every day together, not to come on so fast. And to some people, I mean, you can read about it, but the concept

Dr. Rahul Jandial 34:12 is there to slow down the, uh, the sleep exit or to pay attention to the sleep entry and jot down or hold onto those windows. And I believe, for me, whether it's coming up with a new surgery, coming up with an idea for science, or working with the LA Ballet now or writing, like, when I have had a good idea, uh, it's come from those spaces.

Lewis Howes 34:37 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 34:38 So-

Lewis Howes 34:38 Not from being rushed and waking up with an alarm and going right into this thing.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 34:41 Yeah, I mean, that's important. You gotta, you know, shelter and food and get ... Hey, you gotta stay, staying employed, showing up on time. Like, I'm not... It's a luxury. But if you're really trying to take yourself to the next level, my process for extracting ideas, uh, is, is to work with my dreaming life.

Lewis Howes 34:57 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 34:58 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 34:58 That's amazing. So you mentioned nightmares. Why do you think kids have nightmares and also kids or teens start to have erotic dreams at the same time?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 35:09 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 35:10 Um, and I'm sure they wish they had more erotic dreams-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 35:13 [laughs]

Lewis Howes 35:13 ... than nightmares. But why do, why do we need both erotic dreams and nightmares as we're growing up?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 35:18 All right. So again, we return to the, the foundation of our conversation that, um, these are, back to what we dream, okay? Like, that's been described for a long time. I'm not come, I'm not coming at this new, right? Like, and so when we look at the pattern of what people dream, um, you know, there's simple stuff, like, oh, you, you have a flight tomorrow, you have a dream about missing your flight. You don't need to interpret that. You know what that is. Or you got a presentation tomorrow, you have a dream about showing up naked or something behind the podium. Like, we know. We get that. Uh, but why would you have nightmares? Like, that, it's chapter two for a reason, 'cause I wanted to come across and just say, "Look, this is a work of imagination."

Lewis Howes 36:01 It is.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 36:01 That there's nobody that can take these few glimpses of science and life and come up with, like, a foolproof, hey, I got it all figured out story. So here's what's interesting about nightmares. Um, if there's anything that would make somebody say, "Look, hey, this dreaming thing is not good for us," hmm, why we, why do we have nightmares? Like, that's like... It feels like a glitch, right? It feels like the mind-

Lewis Howes 36:26 Uh-huh

Dr. Rahul Jandial 36:26 ... uh, like the mind's mistake, if you will. I don't think it is. But, so when you look at the patterns- Um, to understand it, there are two types of nightmares, and there's the one with the big idea. But let me get to the other one that's easier. If y- if you have been traumatized, assaulted, PS- PTSD nightmares are flashbacks.

Lewis Howes 36:47 Yes.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 36:47 It's a bad memory on loop, stamped with raw emotion. Can't shake it. That we have some f- firmer understanding of. So if you're struggling and you have, uh, worsening headaches-

Lewis Howes 36:59 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 36:59 ... you say, "Hey, I gotta think about seeing a doctor." If you're an athlete, you have worsening pain. The key is if you have worsening new onset and progressive nightmares, talk to your doctor or therapist about it. It could be a psychological thermometer that things aren't going well for you. That's a big topic, and I think other people are in that space. I'll leave that one there.

Lewis Howes 37:19 Yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 37:20 The one that interests me is having three sons. I, and, uh-

Lewis Howes 37:26 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 37:27 ... is each of them at one point, I had to say to them, "It's all right. It was only a nightmare. It was only a dream." So the first thing I thought was, does that mean they didn't... And then I'm looking at the, the... I'm looking at, now I'm looking at, at neurodevelopment. To understand this, I went into a whole different space. Like, h- w- you know, we, we're not born walking and talking, right? So you see kids, they're putting things together. The movements become fluid. The... You're physically matu- y- not born made, and you're cultivated physically, right?

Lewis Howes 37:58 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 37:59 I believe

Dr. Rahul Jandial 38:00 the mind is also being cultivated internally, and one example would be you gotta remind kids it's only a dream. So that means at some point when they're young, likely they're confusing or cannot separate, uh, dreaming thoughts and waking thoughts. That, and at that time, when you ask them what they think about, it's very s- in general, I mean, this one kid might s- tell you the wildest thing. I'm not telling that person or that parent that that's not what they're experiencing. But the pattern is, um, the dream reports of children, and some families signed up for this. I've just, I studied it. They followed their dream reports from, like, age two to 20-

Lewis Howes 38:39 Wow

Dr. Rahul Jandial 38:40 ... longitudinally. Like, "What are you dreaming about now? What are you dreaming about now? What are you dreaming about now?" And their dreams are simple. It's like a table or a blanket. Interestingly, when they dream of animals, they're not often pets. They're like beasts and monsters and teddy bears. So I can't, um, explain all of that, but that's what they're describing. It's not the pet that they have that's-

Lewis Howes 39:03 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 39:03 ... in their dream. And as we're learning to walk and talk to age two, three, four, something's going on in the mind. There are some structures this... I, I need a moment for this one. There, there's a type of cognition that's developing. First is visuospatial. And the w- and then these, these developmental scientists, they looked at it that the wildness of kids' dreams correlates m- more to the complexity of how they navigate visuospatial things. They have a test called block design. It's not how well they can spell or remember. The more three-dimensional they are, the, the w- that parallels complexity of dreaming in a child.

Lewis Howes 39:46 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 39:47 So all, all the parents out there, you don't make them memorize, you know? In my opinion, I, I did, like, cultivate their sense of gymnastics, music, art, whatever you can, different foods, d- diversity experiences. It's not being correlated to logic.

Lewis Howes 40:03 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 40:04 So that also, like, makes me feel like that's, that guides a little bit. And then what happens is they develop this thing called... At some point, they realize, as just an example, that that teacher or that uncle or that person w- that they're smiling and saying, "Hey, uh, I wanna help you." But the capacity develops ca- it's called theory of mind, where you start to read the other person's intention-

Lewis Howes 40:32 Mm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 40:32 ... beyond just what they're saying.

Lewis Howes 40:33 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 40:34 Yeah, that develops. Kids are, kids are gullible. That develops.

Lewis Howes 40:38 Theory of mind.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 40:39 Yeah, TO... People can look it up, theory of mind. So that's a n- just like there's a, a, me, I can throw the ball, f- like, that's developed. At a certain age, around five or six, seven, and it, the idea of that person's intentions may not be completely clear.

Lewis Howes 40:56 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 40:56 Or they might be misrepresenting their intentions.

Lewis Howes 40:58 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 40:59 Or maybe I shouldn't trust them, or maybe they would hurt me. These important concepts arrive in the brain at the same time as nightmares arrive.

Lewis Howes 41:09 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:10 So I think if I were to say why do we... And then these nightmares all go away for kids, and then as adults, we get them if we have trauma. They come as a wave.

Lewis Howes 41:20 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:21 It's crazy, right?

Lewis Howes 41:22 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:22 I might be completely wrong, but I'd, you know, I would love to hear somebody come up with a better-

Lewis Howes 41:27 So you're not just gullible all the time.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:29 I think it-

Lewis Howes 41:29 What everyone says-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:30 I think nightmares make the mind.

Lewis Howes 41:32 Nightmares make the mind.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:33 Yeah. They make you sharp. They give you a sense of self versus other. They make you less gullible. They create a sense of threat. They c- they, the, the fleeing and the terror, I think it guides the cultivation of this thing called theory of mind-

Lewis Howes 41:47 Huh

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:47 ... where you realize just because the person's

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:50 s- smiling, that doesn't mean they have good intentions.

Lewis Howes 41:52 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 41:53 And that is, it's cool, right? I mean, that's... They, they're not arriving for all of us at age eight, six, seven, eight, and then fading for most of us as we get into adolescence without a reason. Like, that's not, that's not a glitch in the system.

Lewis Howes 42:09 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 42:09 My belief, I wonder, again, with humility, I'm, I'm, I'm taking on big things here, so if that's not what it is for you, I, I believe it. I'm not saying I got it all figured out, but I'm just here to show you, like... A- a- and then people, and that we are in many ways still that dynamic as adults. So whatever you t- at the grounded level, your struggles with your lover, or your struggle with your part-, like, you're a dynamic ecosystem of mind and body. And I just wanna take people back to-

Lewis Howes 42:39 Mm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 42:39 ... like, look at that. Like, we're not ... And there's a certain part of the brain that gives you that capacity, like, there's, it's, we'll get into that some other day. But in that part, the, the newest part of the brain that pushed us forward, forward, there's a part that when it's injured, it doesn't work well. We can't, like, make new opinions, or we become gullible. Like, there's, there's some cellular basis to the theory of mind.

Lewis Howes 43:01 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 43:01 But again, I think nul- nightmares arriving for all of us at the same time as we're becoming, like, "Oh, that person might hurt me," or, "What do I want?" Self versus other. I mean, self in italics. Um, I think that's all happening in parallel for a reason.

Lewis Howes 43:17 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 43:18 I think that's all happening in parallel.

Lewis Howes 43:19 S- so-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 43:20 Chapter two.

Lewis Howes 43:20 So n-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 43:20 Right out the gates

Lewis Howes 43:21 ... so if nightmares make the mind, what do erotic dreams do?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 43:26 Okay. So these are my f- that's why it's-

Lewis Howes 43:27 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 43:28 ... chapter three. I know everybody's gonna wanna hear about this one, but it's, you know, it's PG-13, but the, but the, I think the concepts are, you know, very mature. Um-

Lewis Howes 43:38 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 43:39 So again, w- again, we return to our primer that there's this ... W- we are a waking brain and dreaming brain, and it, they intersect. W- we, we stab. We, I, I think everybody knows that. It's a matter of to what degree and how. Um, that's the other universal dream. You know, I've never had a dream of teeth falling out, but it's been reported for centuries.

Lewis Howes 44:01 I've had it.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:01 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 44:01 Yeah, a few times.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:03 So there ... Dreams follow patterns, right? Um, people have dreams of falling, but that's like 20%, 60%. Like, you know, I-

Lewis Howes 44:10 I've had that, too. Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:11 But, [laughs] but I've had dreams of falling, but not, you know ... But everybody's had, essentially ... I mean, there'll be some people who say, "No, I've never had a sexual dream." Okay, I, I'm not here to-

Lewis Howes 44:20 A majority

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:20 ... invoke-

Lewis Howes 44:21 Majority.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:21 I mean, way ... I- in scientific terms, everybody.

Lewis Howes 44:25 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:25 So I call those two universal dreams.

Lewis Howes 44:28 Nightmares and erotic dreams.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:29 Right.

Lewis Howes 44:29 Universal.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:30 Universal dreams. Um, and I think when something is universal, a, a part of our ... It, there's awesome fields out there, like evolutionary psychology. Like, the gifts, the strengths and weaknesses today aren't just physical, that we're inheriting thinking patterns-

Lewis Howes 44:50 Eh, ho

Dr. Rahul Jandial 44:51 ... dreaming patterns. Um, th- and this is mind-blowing, but this has been well-known. I'm just able to put it, I think, into a framework now, is falling teeth dreams, they don't follow ... They don't ... Uh, teeth falling out, it doesn't follow a pattern, people. But nightmares cluster in families. Think ab- [laughs] when I say ... Exactly, I have the same ... Yeah. A- and I've known that 'cause I went through medical school, and they said that. I just didn't have a understanding of it. But I believe, and there is evidence, that we inherit not just our physical traits but our cognitive traits.

Lewis Howes 45:23 Oh, yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 45:24 And if we inherit our, uh, risk aversion or, or proclivity to risk, if we inherit our, uh, our parents' coping mechanisms or failure to cope, um, you know, we may be inheriting

Dr. Rahul Jandial 45:40 dreaming patterns.

Lewis Howes 45:41 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 45:42 And I think that that, we have to be open to that, that that's why nightmares arrive for every kid. That's not happening by chance. I may not have the explanation for it. I think it cultivates the sense of self, uh, and sense ... It gives you mind-reading ability with somebody else. Uh, that's called theory of mind. That's my opinion. Then the next one comes is, uh, sexual dreams. And this one is, is, uh, interesting because ... Let me break this down for, for you. It's different because when, when my sons were born and w- w- were born with, like, the marble. You, you know, it's ... And what you, you've heard this, use it or lose it. You know, like, if you cover a child's eye because they have some health issues, that part that goes to the right side of the brain and the left side, one ... Each eye goes to both occipital lobes. It's not this one to this one. It's this crossing.

Lewis Howes 46:36 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 46:37 If you cover those parts, wither or they repurpose. Right? It's a, it's a adaptive system. Um, use it or lose it. You got the neurons, the 100 billion neurons. They're like microscopic jellyfish. Use them or you're gonna lose them. That makes sense, and that's what happens for vision, hearing, taste, movement. If you wrap somebody's arm, the motor area will wither.

Lewis Howes 47:02 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 47:02 Okay? So that's, that's built in. But h- this is ... But how does a touch become a caress?

Lewis Howes 47:12 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 47:12 That's a capacity from the same, fr- from the same sensation.

Lewis Howes 47:17 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 47:18 Um, now it can become erogenous.

Lewis Howes 47:21 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 47:21 Right? There, there are new nerves being laid down in our fingertips, right? But when a, when a lover, a lover's touch is different than a intention even. Right? Not even a touch. Just ... So that capacity develops, uh, in, in the human brain, uh, ar- around the time of 11, 12, and 13.

Lewis Howes 47:40 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 47:41 And it's, it's not after puberty. It's not like puberty, however people conceive puberty, but you don't go through bodily puberty and then say, "I think I'm turned on." It, it's different. You get t- you, you, your brain develops the ability to be turned on, I believe, through erotic dreams.

Lewis Howes 48:02 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 48:03 That erotic dreams are, again, the mind's cultivation for desire, and then you start to see changes in the sensation part of the brain, where now it's not just ... Now erotic touch is possible.

Lewis Howes 48:20 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 48:21 You know? I, uh, without getting too deep into, like, child-rearing and all that, but sensuality arrives. It's not chil- prepubescent. It's not, it's not there. It, it must come at a certain time. And around that time, people who have never had- ... uh, intercourse, people who have, uh, been castrated chemically-

Lewis Howes 48:48 Mm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 48:48 ... from cancer treatment, people who have had chemotherapy, people who have had their ovaries removed, they still have erotic dreams.

Lewis Howes 48:54 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 48:54 It's not of the body saying, "I like it. Let's think more about it." I think it's the other way around.

Lewis Howes 49:00 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 49:00 And that it arrives, and in the biggest sense, wouldn't that be an important thing for, for people to procreate, that desire arrives? And the fact that it arrives before... So here it's not use it or lose it, you know, it's, "Here you go. It's time to use it."

Lewis Howes 49:19 It comes before it's ready.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 49:20 R- very good, yeah. So it's something that it's, uh, I, I would love a conversation at a different time with somebody else, but that, that doesn't follow normal neurodevelopment- de- neurodevelopment of pathways. Usually it's like, yeah, I can see, and if I cover an eye, I lose that ability. You're sorta equipped, and then you cultivate. Here, it arrives.

Lewis Howes 49:39 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 49:39 And the, again, erotic dreams, like in that J. Cole song, Wet Dreams, he says he, he, "I think I'm smashing, but I'm, but I'm sleeping."

Lewis Howes 49:47 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 49:48 So before he has his first

Dr. Rahul Jandial 49:50 relationship, intimate relationship with this person, uh, he's, he's rapping about, like, he's, he's performing the act in his dreams, in his erotic dreams, before they've even happened in real life. That's not the usual order of how the brain and nerves work.

Lewis Howes 50:06 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 50:07 So again, my humble opinion is-

Lewis Howes 50:09 Wow

Dr. Rahul Jandial 50:09 ... um, erotic dreams, um, are the embodiment of desire. They, they make sure that we want, and that's advantageous for us as, as creatures, species, and people.

Lewis Howes 50:23 Do you think the brain and the mind have to dream something first before it can actualize it in real life?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 50:29 Mm, that's a big question. Um, do they have to dream something or think something first before they can actualize it? I think there's two ways to think of that. There's the things you, there's the things you want and you pursue, and the way I would look at that is, um, returning to another example, is that the, the dreaming brain and the waking brain is one, is one way to understand it, but the structures in the brain during waking life, they're called the executive network, the one we talked about, are dampened down. So if you have a goal, pursue it. This conversation's not to be like, "Hey, just dream around all the time." Like, you gotta get after stuff. You gotta get things done, and that's the executive network, and that's what drives you to your goals. You can think about your goals. You can choose your desires. And I... That's, that's been most of my life. Um, but then the role of dreams in that I think are twofold. One, 'cause I have thought about this for myself, and it's, again, it's my story, I, with respect, um, I believe that if I have chosen a goal w- with my waking brain, it's been c- you know, contributions are coming from my dreaming brain. I'm incubating thoughts. It's feeding me. It's feeding some aha moments. I'm using sleep entry. I'm using sleep exit. And then the bigger one for me is, are there things I want, are there things I hope for, that my waking brain just does not have access to?

Lewis Howes 52:09 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 52:11 And that's the big question at the beginning, like, what's the meaning of dreams? And then, you know, if we look at what is happening in the dreaming brain, returning to our, is that it's hyper-emotional. It's hyper-visual. And this is some real profound stuff when I was learning about this and reading about it. The... And I can't get into brain anatomy too much, but I would just say, the execu- think of if you flatten out your brain, the executive network would be like different continents and countries going, going, revving up a little bit, and the imagination network, which is liberated in the dreaming brain, is diff- other countries coming up. You know? It's like Bellagio waterfalls. Some come up, some comes down. Like-

Lewis Howes 52:58 Yeah, sure

Dr. Rahul Jandial 52:58 ... it's, it's a toggle. Um, and so your brain at its most emotional, metabolically, electrically, is in dreaming. You can't, you can't rock that hard during the day.

Lewis Howes 53:13 Really? [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 53:13 Yeah. By measurement. So then it says to me, so if there is a meaning, i- if the, if, i- if I can gain further insight into myself, I must look at the ways my dreaming brain is exceptional. I'm not gonna look at my dreaming brain for a math solution, but I might look at my, what my dreaming brain is putting forth-

Lewis Howes 53:37 Mm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 53:38 ... uh, for an emotional solution-

Lewis Howes 53:40 Yes

Dr. Rahul Jandial 53:40 ... an emotional insight.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 53:43 Right? Like, that's, that's the thing that really, I mean, a lot of this is. Um, but the meaning of dreams is that the act of self-examination with the recognition that I hope you leave today is, that's a hyper-emotional state.

Lewis Howes 54:01 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 54:01 What is the value of emotion?

Lewis Howes 54:03 Yes.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 54:03 It's profound. When people have injury to these areas, they can't even make any decisions. Like, decision-making requires emotion. Instinct re- requires emotion. My, my dog, Frankie, [laughs] she knows when I'm setting a booby trap. Like, "Hey, we're going out for date night. Frankie, come here." She's like...

Lewis Howes 54:20 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 54:22 There's some brilliance to emotion, right? And we have become... Again, don't get me wrong. You gotta wake up. You gotta go to work. You gotta get it done. Like, that, and that takes the waking brain, and that takes the executive network. But if you want insights that can't be gained through the executive network, through always focusing outward- Then you are getting glimpses of your own brain, your own life's hyperemotional states through dreaming, and I think there's insight to be found-

Lewis Howes 54:53 Wow

Dr. Rahul Jandial 54:53 ... in that, and that that is the way to dream interpretation, is to recognize the ways that your dreaming brain is exceptional. So the way I look at dream interpretation, if I could just jump into that, that's like the last chapter.

Lewis Howes 55:05 Yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 55:06 And we could rock all day, but this is like... it f- fits nicely here, is, is there are dream, f- there are dreams, you know what they are. You know? They're like p- it's like naked behind a podium, you had a speech to give, late for a flight. You know, you- there's no dream interpretation there. You know what that is. There are dreams that make no sense at all. There's no emotional stamp on them. It's just, it's just, it's clutter. We have thoughts during the day we don't pay attention to.

Lewis Howes 55:31 Yes.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 55:32 There are dreams that parallel your life, and the two most important ones are end-of-life dreams and pregnancy dreams.

Lewis Howes 55:40 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 55:40 If, as reported, when people are pregnant, patients are pregnant, um, they, they have a lot of dreams about babies and rolling over babies [laughs] and na- you know. So that doesn't need interpretation. If people at the end of life with a cancer diagnosis, and then my patients tell me that they're thinking about like finish lines and visiting people from the past.

Lewis Howes 56:00 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 56:01 The dreams are accompanying you, right? 'Cause you're, you're making those dreams, so of course the dreams fit what's going on in your life.

Lewis Howes 56:07 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 56:08 Again, those don't need to be interpreted. The... You know what's going on.

Lewis Howes 56:11 Sure.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 56:12 You're dying, and your dreams are comforting you.

Lewis Howes 56:14 You've worked on a lot of people who've-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 56:17 Yeah

Lewis Howes 56:17 ... only had a year or a few years-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 56:18 Right

Lewis Howes 56:19 ... left to live.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 56:19 Cancer patients?

Lewis Howes 56:20 What are most of those dreams of people who are dying?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 56:23 Oh. Okay, that's a big question. That goes back to the last conversation we had. Uh, I am surprised, um, by how, by how valiant most cancer patients are. When I look at cancer patients in general, I would think most would fall apart, right? 'Cause it's, it's quite the word, it's quite the journey. But it's overwhelming... Not all. Some suffer. Some handle it poorly, understandably. But they do well. They show up for their appointments. They're brave. They're, they dig down for strength and composure, and, um, they find meaning. Sometimes they are able to enjoy some things more, knowing that the, the finish line is in view.

Lewis Howes 57:02 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 57:02 They're not encumbered, as I mentioned last time, with, with fuss.

Lewis Howes 57:06 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 57:06 Um, and those patients, when you talk to them, uh, um, they will report... Again, not all. I'm make, uh, simple statements here. But a lot of them report that the dreams they have are positive.

Lewis Howes 57:23 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 57:23 They're

Dr. Rahul Jandial 57:24 helpful. They're not of being eaten alive. They're not of, "What did I do to get this?"

Lewis Howes 57:28 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 57:29 It's reconciling with lovers and family. It's having an expansive view of their life. The dreams in these cancer patients, and it, this is reported in other, other people who study this, uh, dreams comfort you toward the end of life.

Lewis Howes 57:46 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 57:47 And so again, um, the hyperemotional dream, um... So if we have dreams that don't need interpretation 'cause you're falling or you're fly- you're flying and you're falling or you're giving a talk and you, you show up naked or you're, you're, it's end of life and it's comforting you, or it, it's just gib- you, there's no emotional feeling to it. I believe if you are to go after a dream to really reflect upon, you wake up, and that intense dreaming life gives you a little glimpse, a little peek at something. Don't waste that.

Lewis Howes 58:24 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 58:25 And the one to choose is the one with a powerful central image and a powerful emotion. So be- and that to me is, that makes sense with what's going on in the brain. Hyperemotional, hypervisual, right? I'm trying to make sense of it. Um, and just be aware that it, a lot of times it's symbolic. It's not gonna be literal, right? 'Cause we talked about the executive network is dampened, and the hyperemotional, hypervisual brain is, it's a storyteller. It, it, you wanna extract the meaning out of the story, much like a good movie.

Lewis Howes 59:04 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 59:04 It's not, "Hey, why am I..." So for example, some veterans when they're having trouble with a marriage will have dreams of, of war, but they don't generally dream of war. So you have to be able to s- think about it and try to... I can't give you that answer. I don't know if you're a veteran or not. I think that's where it's hard to go online and say, "I dream- I dreamt of a leaf or a bridge. What does it mean?" No, it's, it's different for... It's individual. And you may not be able to figure it out, let alone somebody else. But if you have the luxury to remember your dreams, or through autosuggestion and journaling you're trying to remember dreams more-

Lewis Howes 59:44 Mm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 59:44 ... which can happen, um, those are the ones to go after, the hyperemotional ones, the hypervisual ones. And just, just, just keep them here, you know? You got 15 things in front of you. You're, you're focusing out where your executive network is on. But don't forget about that glimpse you got into your hyperemotional brain and what it, what it produced-

Lewis Howes 1:00:06 Mm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:00:06 ... about you.

Lewis Howes 1:00:07 Yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:00:08 For you.

Lewis Howes 1:00:09 Wow. That was fascinating.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:00:10 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:00:10 I feel like we're, we're at, like, 1% of all the things we could be talking about right now. Um, why, why do we l- why do some people have lucid dreams? Why are lucid dreams important, and how can we enter lucid dreams faster?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:00:29 Okay. Um, that got two chapters out of nine, so that's a, that's a big one. Um, and just to, just to be clear what lucid dreams are, um, I have not had them, but Aristotle wrote about them 3,000 years ago. So this is not like- It's not some current thing. Okay? What is new is the understanding, again, we return to your body's locked down, y- executive network and logic are dampened, emotions are up-

Lewis Howes 1:01:01 Mm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:01:01 ... visions up. Well, when your body is locked down, uh, in lucid dreaming, um, what happens is there's one part of the body that's still not locked down, one of the eyeballs. So you, if, when you're waking up in the morning, it just happens that the eyeball, the muscles to the eyeballs are not locked down, and the muscles to the breathing, of course, right? 'Cause you're still breathing in lucid dreams or in dreaming in general. So what lucid dream experts and people looking into that have started just recently, after 3,000 years of many different cultures

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:01:37 and books writing about, "I felt I was awake in my dream-

Lewis Howes 1:01:40 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:01:41 ... and I could steer the direction of the dream." So not only were you an actor in the dream, you're the director.

Lewis Howes 1:01:48 Interesting, right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:01:49 That's been written about for thousands of years.

Lewis Howes 1:01:50 Right, right, right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:01:51 But what they can do now is in these sleep laboratories, what, they put the stickers on their h- head to measure the electricity to prove they're asleep, 'cause I could imagine, like, you know, some of my friends, they'd be like, "I just, I woke up." How do you know you didn't just wake up?

Lewis Howes 1:02:07 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:02:08 How are, how do you know you're awake in a dream? So you have to prove you're asleep through the whole time, 'cause otherwise you might just wake up-

Lewis Howes 1:02:14 Right, right, right

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:02:14 ... and say, "Yeah, I re-

Lewis Howes 1:02:15 Yeah

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:02:15 ... I'm lucid dreaming," and then fall back asleep, right? So some essential questions to be asked. So the, the electrical measurements or the stickers on the head, the sleep spindles is a certain spike that proves you're asleep. Can't f- you can't fake being asleep, uh, to the like, you know, to the EKG of your mind, if you will, right? The EKG-

Lewis Howes 1:02:34 You can't fake it. Yeah, yeah

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:02:34 ... you can't fake it. And then, um, you know, they started communicating with them. They'll say certain things and they'll, they come up with this technique called left, right, left, right, and they'll move their eyeballs left, right, left, right, answer simple questions, and that's progressed to some people being able to demonstrate when they enter... When lucidity arrives within their dream, they will signal to the people out, standing outside the window. And so these, there are these back and forth experiments going on, um, so far as even basic things like, "Oh, what's two plus two?" And they'll try to do a, a left, right, left, right four times. And somebody might say, "Wait, I thought you couldn't do math." But that's part of the magic and the mystery of lucid dreaming, is that the executive n- network is coming back online a little bit. So for that awareness to happen inside your dream, proven by sleep spindles on a EKG, a E- EEG you can't fake, when the awareness comes back, that primer we're talking about, the executive network, comes back, too.

Lewis Howes 1:03:40 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:03:40 So they can do a little bit of basic math.

Lewis Howes 1:03:42 So it's like when you talked about in the beginning, what is it called? Like-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:03:46 49, 51.

Lewis Howes 1:03:47 Yeah. So where is that? When the lucid dreaming is happening, what is hap- Is it kind of rocking back and forth like this constantly-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:03:53 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:03:53 ... or is it one side and then it comes back? Like-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:03:56 That's a good question. It's fragile. That's a very good question. So you've, y- you've gone from dreaming brain, or you've gone from waking brain to dreaming brain, and what happens is a little bit of the waking brain returns, but in little flourishes. They report... It's not like, "Hey, I'm lucid dreaming. I got 90 minutes."

Lewis Howes 1:04:14 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:04:15 "Let's, let's ride this."

Lewis Howes 1:04:16 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:04:16 Like, I get it. Like, I just... You know, somebody might be able to, but I wanna, I wanna leave you with the fascination, like, uh, these overlap states which are really fascinating. Sleep entry, sleep exit, a bit of awareness returning-

Lewis Howes 1:04:29 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:04:30 ... within proven sleep, that it's, uh, that it is something, um, that it's something, it's something fragile. It's something fleeting. Think of, like, birds and murmurations and Aurora Borealis. We're not talking about... And that, that, that's also the lesson for people who are listening, is stop thinking that your brain is wires and on and off. Think of it as, think of it as dreaming brain, waking brain, waking brain, dreaming brain. Think of it as executive network mostly interacting here, a little bit of imagination network returning because I'm, I'm daydreaming while we're talking, a little bit of blend, right? Well, lucid dreaming is coming to awareness that you're dreaming within your dream, and for some people, being able to steer

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:05:18 the content of their dream.

Lewis Howes 1:05:19 That's crazy.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:05:19 Stuff like Christopher Nolan likes to talk about-

Lewis Howes 1:05:21 Yeah

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:05:21 ... in movies and stuff like that. But what I'm here to tell you is it exists. They have proven that it exists. I'm, I'm not saying you lucid dream. I have not. Aristotle wrote about it. But they have proven with responses from preserved eyeball movement, documentation, that that person is asleep, with the electricity of sleep, that they're, they have been able to communicate with people, uh, who are in dreams.

Lewis Howes 1:05:47 It's crazy that they can steer their dreams.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:05:50 That's what they report.

Lewis Howes 1:05:51 Isn't that crazy?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:05:51 Yeah. But if you, if you step back a little bit and, and stop thinking of it as the brain on, off, wired, hardwired, not wi- If you start to think of it as states, as tides, right? As flows, as seasons, and every night there's the waking brain and dreaming brain, and there's sleep entry and there's sleep exit, and sometimes lucidity returns, it starts to make sense of a lot of the stuff I've been seeing in the hospital.

Lewis Howes 1:06:17 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:06:17 Well, I mean, people wake up from anesthesia, they're... Some people are awake during. They communicate in anesthesia during our awake brain surgery.

Lewis Howes 1:06:24 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:06:25 And people wake up and they're dreaming gnarly stuff. You can give people certain medicines and they have more lucid dreaming, something based on acetylecholine. The reports of lucid dreaming go up with galantamine. So what that tells me, not, not to get too medically about it, is that when you mess with pills and drugs and the dreams change, like this is a biological process.

Lewis Howes 1:06:46 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:06:47 It's not coming from the heavens. It's coming from our brains.

Lewis Howes 1:06:50 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:06:50 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:06:51 Well, speaking of the heavens, when we dream- Are our dreams in our brain or in our minds? And is our mind on this earth and planet-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:04 [laughs] Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:07:05 ... or is it in another realm?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:08 Big stuff, man. We could be like-

Lewis Howes 1:07:09 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:09 ... around a fire 500 years ago, asking. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:07:12 3:00 AM, you know? [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:13 Yeah. Or, yeah. Um, I mean, th- that's why this is so special for me, is that-

Lewis Howes 1:07:18 And you may not have the answers.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:19 No, I mean-

Lewis Howes 1:07:20 I'm just curious what-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:21 I, I, I have, I have some direction-

Lewis Howes 1:07:23 Yes

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:24 ... to those questions. I mean, if somebody told-

Lewis Howes 1:07:26 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:27 Just the fact that you asked me that question means, like, I'm doing all right, you know? No, but it's, uh, it's... I am fortunate to have, uh, people ask me just to weigh in on that, and I, what I'm trying to do is build it on science-

Lewis Howes 1:07:43 Yes

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:43 ... but bring it to you in a way where you can go home and talk to your family about it.

Lewis Howes 1:07:45 Yes.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:46 Right? Like, that's-

Lewis Howes 1:07:47 So what are-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:47 So-

Lewis Howes 1:07:47 What is your thoughts on that?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:07:48 So the s- first thing is the brain and mind thing can't be separated. It's not like software, hardware. The brain, tha- that's a whole big topic, but the m- the mind is an emergent phenomena that emerge, like, comes from, from the brain. One example would be, like, uh, we see it, the crystals form. We see even inor- an organic matter, right? It's a self-organizing thing. Termites can make mounds.

Lewis Howes 1:08:11 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:08:11 Um, stadiums with a roar outside, right, is more than the 80,000 individuals inside. That roar is my best way of understanding what 100 billion neurons do. Uh, the, the mind comes from it.

Lewis Howes 1:08:25 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:08:26 Now, the m- what we think can go back and shape the brain. Um, so it's a reciprocal interaction. Our habits can shape the brain. Um, our brain creates the habits, so the brain/mind, I don't think you can really separate it out. The ultimate gift of the human mind, I think, is dreaming. Love and all those things, yes, but the process of dreaming. Um, so let's, let's for one second say we're talking about brain and mind as one thing, okay? We'll just call it brain/mind. Um, and I was reading about this. Oh, this is, this is great. Um, here's a story. Of course they had to come from

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:09:06 the heavens till abou- uh, our understanding until about 100 years ago. You plop down, you're not doing anything, and then you wake up. And whether you tell somebody or not, you're like, "Man, I was on fire last night-

Lewis Howes 1:09:18 Right

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:09:18 ... in my thoughts."

Lewis Howes 1:09:19 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:09:19 So if you're asleep and you're hibernating, or you're deactivated, or whatever the phrase was, it had to come from something external.

Lewis Howes 1:09:28 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:09:29 How... It's in there. How could inactive flesh of the brain, the resting brain... The brain doesn't rest at night.

Lewis Howes 1:09:36 It's act- it's activated

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:09:36 The brain doesn't rest ever. Brain rests when you're dead.

Lewis Howes 1:09:39 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:09:39 Um, there's no, there's no... Like, like I said, the, the electricity in sleep is so similar to the electricity during waking, they call it paradoxical sleep.

Lewis Howes 1:09:50 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:09:51 Like, you're, you're on when you're asleep, okay? So, but they didn't know that. Nobody could know that until, until... This is a great story. I don't think it's been told, but it's the, [laughs] it's the story that I've come to understand. Um, so that makes sense, it had to come from something outside of us. You're out cold, and you're thinking that kind of stuff? Monsters, and pterodactyls, and erotic dreams-

Lewis Howes 1:10:14 [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:10:14 ... and nightmares. Okay, so that came from the heavens, or the gods. They were omens. But what happened was, somebody about 100 years ago did a surgery for a brain tumor, then there was a, a physician there, and they had just figured out at that time, uh, that y- you could put a... A wire wasn't just for sending electricity, it was for measuring it. Right? So when we put a sticker on your heart, and you know the electricity of a heart, right? It's from the nerves on the surface of the heart, it's not from the muscle.

Lewis Howes 1:10:42 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:10:43 It's in, in... EKG is the measurement of the ner- electricity in the nerves on top of your heart. Okay? When we shock you to wake, uh, recharge your heart, we're just shocking the three nerves, not the muscle. Muscle just listens. Um, well, what if you put 96 stickers on your brain? You would get a measurement. That's called EEG, okay? What he did was he put a sticker on, right on top of the hole. Like, a skull had a hole, but the stitch work, the flesh was covered. We do that s- still sometimes. But, now, in that area where there was no skull but the size of a coin, he put a little sticker on there, a little wire.

Lewis Howes 1:11:17 On the brain?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:17 No, no. On the surface.

Lewis Howes 1:11:18 Or just on the skull?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:19 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:11:19 But there was a hole.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:20 Surgeons do it on the brain, but-

Lewis Howes 1:11:21 There was a hole, so like-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:23 And healed flesh. He put it just on top of the flesh with the hole underneath. He thought he's gonna get better readout, I guess, right? But-

Lewis Howes 1:11:31 The hole, that would be a direct line to the brain.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:34 Yes.

Lewis Howes 1:11:34 But not touching the brain.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:35 Well said.

Lewis Howes 1:11:35 Got it.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:36 And then he got, he got squiggles, and that was like, and that was where the EEG was invented about 100 years ago.

Lewis Howes 1:11:43 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:43 The interesting part was, when they all left the room or whatever they were doing and the person fell asleep, nobody paid attention to it, but the squiggles were happening at night. It wasn't squiggles during the day, and then flat line-

Lewis Howes 1:11:55 Right

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:11:56 ... at night. So somebody could have said at that point, like, "Wait a second, that flesh is not inactive." Then 60 years ago, somebody in Montreal, Dr. Penfield, he was, uh... So now he's numbing up the scalp, laying it open. Patient is on relaxing medications, but not on a machine. Drills the hole like ice fishing, takes it off, sees the covering of the brain called the dura, incises it, and the surface of the brain is there, and then they lighten up her medication. And he's got, like, a little fountain pen that delivers a little electricity.

Lewis Howes 1:12:34 Uh-huh.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:12:35 And he's mapping it, and he's trying to find the thing. The patient has seizures, says, "Before the seizure, I always get this feeling, this aura." He

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:12:46 thinks if he can find where that feeling originates, dissect out a little bit of that tissue, he can break the seizures, and he, he ended up being right, and it's a whole massive field now. Imagine, major centers around the world.

Lewis Howes 1:12:57 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:12:57 Seizure surgery. But at some times- When he would zap, 'cause he's marking, you know, the patient reports desire. And one patient reported a nightmare, a recurrent nightmare that they had been having.

Lewis Howes 1:13:12 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:13 You zap the surface of the brain with a little faint electricity. The brain doesn't have nerve endings of its own, so you can touch it and you wouldn't know. Cer-

Lewis Howes 1:13:21 Wouldn't feel it

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:21 ... when you... Yeah, not you, but this is known, and I've done the surgery. This is established stuff. Awake brain surgery, you can cut the brain. You don't f-

Lewis Howes 1:13:29 You won't feel the pain.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:30 No. You only f-

Lewis Howes 1:13:31 Crazy

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:31 ... it only feels through its tentacles. Right.

Lewis Howes 1:13:34 So when you're doing an awake brain surgery, the pa-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:36 You only, only the scalp feels it, but we numb it up

Lewis Howes 1:13:38 ... the patient is awake-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:40 Mm-hmm

Lewis Howes 1:13:40 ... and you're in there-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:41 Mm

Lewis Howes 1:13:41 ... and they can talk to you.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:42 And, and you can dissect the brain, and they don't feel a thing.

Lewis Howes 1:13:44 Is this the one where-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:45 But the-

Lewis Howes 1:13:45 I mean, you see the videos of, like, I guess-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:46 Yeah, with the guy playing guitar

Lewis Howes 1:13:47 ... viol- violin or guitar-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:49 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:13:49 ... where it's like, okay, you know.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:50 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:13:50 Connecting. It's so crazy.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:13:52 But when he was mapping it, a nightmare, which is a type of dream, would return, and he took, he took the pen off, nightmare broke.

Lewis Howes 1:14:02 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:14:03 At that moment, we knew that dreams... The only thing I can say with certainty today is dreams come from our brain. They do not come from the heavens.

Lewis Howes 1:14:11 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:14:12 That I can say with certainty. Everything else, this has just been a fa- fascinating-

Lewis Howes 1:14:16 [laughs] Fascinating ride

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:14:17 ... facility. It's b- And the ride will continue, you know? But that, that we can say with certain. Dreams are an electrical process o- of the human brain.

Lewis Howes 1:14:26 When you've done brain surgeries, um, have you noticed people, you know, six months later saying, "I used to have this type of dream, and now those are gone," or, "I have these different dreams now," after brain surgery? Have you ever s-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:14:40 That's a good, that's a good question. Um, a lot of dreaming changes. Very good question. Uh, and I've tried to keep the medical world out of it, even though it informs dreaming quite a bit, but the patterns I saw from, like, drug, drug dreams, anesthetic dreams are just... I couldn't find a way. And that's also, again, to let you know, like, if it didn't fit, if there wasn't a, if it wasn't gonna be a thoughtful, um-

Lewis Howes 1:15:09 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:15:10 ... love letter to dreams and dreaming, I'll tell you, and I'll tell you, I can't... The, the pattern of dreams that happen with anesthetics and stuff, I can't say, "Aha, this one causes this, and this could mean..." There's no... I can't find meaning, and it's that wild.

Lewis Howes 1:15:25 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:15:25 The ones that you're seeing here I feel good about.

Lewis Howes 1:15:28 Yes.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:15:29 But patients with brain injury, brain surgery, on medications, on steroids for swelling, th- their dreams change completely. There's a brand-new dream life, and what it says to me is, again, dreams come from the brain.

Lewis Howes 1:15:46 Right.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:15:46 If you take a pill that goes in your blood to your brain-

Lewis Howes 1:15:49 Chemical

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:15:49 ... chemical

Lewis Howes 1:15:50 ... chemicals change-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:15:50 Right

Lewis Howes 1:15:50 ... which create different br- uh, dreams.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:15:52 Electric. Yeah, yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:15:53 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:15:53 That's a yet another example of dreams must come from the brain.

Lewis Howes 1:15:59 Interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:00 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:16:01 So it's not from some other realm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:02 Right.

Lewis Howes 1:16:02 What about the pineal gland?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:06 Mm-hmm.

Lewis Howes 1:16:07 You hear a lot of this in, you know, ancient texts and mystics and meditators and yogis talking about the pineal gland and, like, the power of the pineal gland to activate the mind and the brain and create more powerful visions and...

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:24 And I'm happy to get into all of these things.

Lewis Howes 1:16:26 Uh-huh.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:26 Like, aura is a thing, A-U-R-A. People look it up.

Lewis Howes 1:16:30 Uh-huh.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:30 That's a, that's a hunch. So I'm not... I think a lot of this stuff is real. I just think it's, it's muddy, and it's easy to manipulate.

Lewis Howes 1:16:39 Uh-huh. Oh, sure, sure.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:40 So I would say be careful. So, um, the pineal gland has been p-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:48 you know, because of its location, people thought it's the mind's eye. Descartes, philosophers have commented about it. What I can tell you is-

Lewis Howes 1:16:56 As a brain surgeon, what is it, what is it for you?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:16:57 ... that I, I can take it out, and the person is exactly the same.

Lewis Howes 1:17:00 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:17:01 Mm-hmm. Pineal gland surgery, pineal-

Lewis Howes 1:17:02 You can, you can-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:17:02 ... pineocytomas, pineal gland. Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:17:04 Have you ever taken one out?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:17:04 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:17:05 You've taken-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:17:05 It's part of neurosurgery.

Lewis Howes 1:17:06 You've taken one out of a-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:17:07 Yeah. You come in through the back here. It sits between lobes. So people can look that up, is, um, pineal gland or... It's, it's a gland. Whether it's got cancer in it or whether it's just a cyst, non-cancerous but growing and pushing, whether it's normal pineal or abnormal, when you remove it, they have almost no significant consequences.

Lewis Howes 1:17:31 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:17:31 Yeah. A- and the melatonin is bottomed out, and they still sleep okay. So I'm not here to s- I'm not here to go against the whole world-

Lewis Howes 1:17:38 Sure, sure, sure

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:17:39 ... of things that are out there. But again, if we're having a conversation, you come into my house, w- we're, we're hanging out, we're taking a walk, and you ask me that question, I'm trying to come to you both with things I can't make sense of, [laughs] anesthetic dreams. Pineal gland, no, they're being removed across the world, and there isn't... The pituitary gland, if you take that out, you gotta take a bunch of hormones and medicine. That's a big deal.

Lewis Howes 1:18:07 Oh, interesting.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:18:08 The pineal gland, the ones that has, has been given sort of this transcendent value, that comes out and goes in the ba- [laughs] in the canister and-

Lewis Howes 1:18:16 It's fine

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:18:16 ... and the next day, we don't change the stuff the patient's on. They don't need some replacement thing. And it makes melatonin, and I wrote about it in my last book. When, when the melatonin drops to zero or nothing, they're still sleeping all right.

Lewis Howes 1:18:32 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:18:32 So I'm not gonna say don't take melatonin or take melatonin. We're not doing health advice. I mean, w- I don't mean, like-

Lewis Howes 1:18:37 Sure, sure, sure

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:18:38 ... we can't go there, but-

Lewis Howes 1:18:38 Yeah, yeah

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:18:39 ... where I'm at is concepts, exploration.

Lewis Howes 1:18:42 And what about... And does the pineal gland impact dreams or dreaming? Do you know? After you remove it, p- people still dream?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:18:50 It doesn't have those kind of connections. One-

Lewis Howes 1:18:52 Interesting

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:18:53 ... the dr- back to the dreaming, the, when I, when I talked to you about, like, if the brain was laid flat and different continents and countries are up, the imagination network liberated in the dreaming brain, different countries and continents and oceans are up for the executive network trying to get the day's work done. The, the, the pineal is like, I s- it's irrelevant in that map of things that come up when you sleep

Lewis Howes 1:19:17 Huh

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:19:18 That thing that goes 51% when you sleep, pineal gland isn't. Not even a bench warmer.

Lewis Howes 1:19:23 What [laughs] what's the, what's the primary purpose of the pineal gland?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:19:28 We don't think it has a primary purpose.

Lewis Howes 1:19:29 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:19:30 I know. Well, this... You, you... We can look it up, but there are parts of the body, it's like the appendix of the brain. We can remove it and it doesn't change much.

Lewis Howes 1:19:37 And people still live long lives?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:19:38 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. D- you know, you don't have to-

Lewis Howes 1:19:41 What part of the, what part of the brain, if you remove it, is gonna be... You're not gonna be able to perform the same way?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:19:48 Well, okay, that's a bigger concept, so-

Lewis Howes 1:19:51 And how mu- and how much-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:19:52 Yeah, that's a bigger question

Lewis Howes 1:19:52 ... of the brain can you still have?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:19:53 Yeah. So-

Lewis Howes 1:19:54 Can you, can you remove or have left to still live a great life?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:19:58 Yeah. So let's take that... Uh, le- that's an interesting question, that when you... If you think of the brain laid flat as a-

Lewis Howes 1:20:06 Yes

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:20:06 ... as different continents and countries, right? It's like a mosaic, it's like a puzzle.

Lewis Howes 1:20:10 If you cut out half of the continent-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:20:12 Well, we, we do surgeries in children where we remove half the brain, hemispherectomy.

Lewis Howes 1:20:17 Half? Half the brain?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:20:19 Yeah. Not the, not the reptilian and not the emotional instinct, but half the hemisphere, the two walnut. So what, what that points to is this. It's what we call some areas you bump

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:20:33 into it with a suction at 20, 20, 20x and it leads to a change. Some areas, um, nail gun injuries happen and you take out that part of the brain, you know, like carp- like, you know, like framers, they use the-

Lewis Howes 1:20:49 Nail guns

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:20:50 ... pneumatic nail guns, and when they kick up a little higher, they'll spray a nail through the thin floor of the-

Lewis Howes 1:20:55 Right here

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:20:56 ... yeah. Uh, this part of neurosurgery is taking out the penetra- it's called penetrating trauma. Depending on where it goes, they can handle a nail in one frontal lobe or the other, but hitting both frontal lobes, it changes a person. So some areas have redundancy, other areas can't take a joke. Some areas, uh, you could take one occipital lobe and you, uh, basically just lose your rear view mirror. You don't lose sight. But if you take both or injure both... So there's, that's what neurosurgery's about, is knowing what you can go through, what to expect in the person waking up after you do that.

Lewis Howes 1:21:29 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:29 That's neurosurgery. But it also informs that we have to stop looking at the brain as some homogenous thing.

Lewis Howes 1:21:35 Ah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:36 That return to like a slice through and you'll see all different shapes in there. It's not like, it's not like cake. It's not like-

Lewis Howes 1:21:42 Right, right, right

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:43 ... foam. Homa- like liver, it looks the same.

Lewis Howes 1:21:46 Yeah. This is d-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:46 Brain is struc-

Lewis Howes 1:21:47 ... diverse

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:48 Oh, yeah. Structures and connections in there is beautiful.

Lewis Howes 1:21:51 So how, I mean, how many people have you seen have a, a nail gun, like, in their brain come to you?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:55 Six [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:21:56 Six?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:56 When I was training, yes.

Lewis Howes 1:21:57 Really?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:57 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:21:58 When you were a tra-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:21:58 Gunshot wounds, nail gun injuries, fights, you know. But so you learn with trauma what parts of the brain can handle trauma.

Lewis Howes 1:22:06 'Cause you're not doing those types of surgeries. You're doing cancer-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:22:08 No, it's ca-

Lewis Howes 1:22:09 ... removal. But-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:22:10 Right, but that informs me if I'm getting to a deeper tumor and it's inside and it's got normal brain on the outside, that has informed me, along with mapping, what is the route that I can get to the tumor-

Lewis Howes 1:22:22 This is fascinating

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:22:23 ... but not injure the person, right? That's, that's neurosurgery. It's not the, it's not the chopsticks in a jar. Like, the te- the hands, it requires skill, but there's something more to it that I love. And the stories from the patients informed the last f- decade and a half, and still are informing this book. And so it's the patient stories and the neuroscience on top of the nail gunning. That's what we opened with. Look, I'm trying to come at you with, like, Petri dish stuff, nail gun stuff-

Lewis Howes 1:22:52 Wow

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:22:52 ... heavens, networks. I'm trying to bring it all in, um, to, to have done a real proper look at dreams and dreaming.

Lewis Howes 1:23:02 This Is Why You Dream, uh, Dr. Rahul. This is, this is a m- this is powerful. I wanna do a, a two-part with you-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:23:08 Okay

Lewis Howes 1:23:09 ... just 'cause I feel like there's so many more questions I wanna dive into that we'd, we've gone, like, 5% of what I wanna talk about. Um, but I want people to get this book 'cause I think this would be a great baseline for you to understand a lot more about the neuroscience and the re- the remarkable meaning behind your dreams, understanding your dreams better, and having a better roadmap for navigating your dreams for the future. But I'd love to have you come back on and do part two of this. I think it'd be really powerful.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:23:38 Well, I think, you know, you s- you, you, um, you said something really important there, that in trying to understand dreams and dreaming, I understood myself better. In trying to... If you read this book and you find something interesting, learning more about your brain and mind will inform your waking life.

Lewis Howes 1:24:00 Yes.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:24:01 So then you'll... Then when you, people say, "The brain is this," you'll say, "Wait a second." 'Cause you're gonna walk away learning about neuroscience, you're gonna walk away learning about art and literature, nightmares, erotic dreams. And more importantly,

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:24:15 um, you know, for me, it was... It's sort of my, um, it's my gift. Um-

Lewis Howes 1:24:21 Mm

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:24:21 ... this is my legacy, that-

Lewis Howes 1:24:23 Yes

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:24:24 ... uh, somebody tried to put together something that, like, how's somebody gonna do it, you know, take, take a proper shot at this? And, uh, I'm very happy with, uh, the honesty there. And you'll see phrases like, "Could it be? I wonder."

Lewis Howes 1:24:39 Mm.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:24:39 "I'm tempted to speculate." So I'm not just telling you, I'm taking you through how I'm thinking. And so-

Lewis Howes 1:24:45 Well, I mean, it's a-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:24:46 You know?

Lewis Howes 1:24:46 I mean, how long have you been a brain surgeon for now?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:24:49 Uh, wow. 25 years.

Lewis Howes 1:24:51 25 years. And what it sounds like is you've had 25 years plus your residency, and so-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:24:56 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:24:56 ... call it 30-plus years of researching the brain, and as a PhD in neuroscience and understanding the mind. When you first came on, you talked about the brain as kind of these waves and patterns.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:25:08 Mm. Brain waves.

Lewis Howes 1:25:09 I remember you talking about the, like, uh- Like birds-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:25:12 Mm-hmm

Lewis Howes 1:25:12 ... moving-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:25:13 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:25:13 ... in waves and patterns.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:25:15 The electricity does move like that. It's not on/off.

Lewis Howes 1:25:18 Exactly.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:25:18 It's not a switch.

Lewis Howes 1:25:19 And then to me, it sounds like, you know, the last 30 years you've been able to interpret these waves and patterns through all the different operations you've done, through the different case studies you've seen of people coming in before and after, and now deepening your research in understanding the brain, the mind, with dreaming. And so I'm so excited for people to get this book, This Is Why You Dream, and I'm excited to dive in more with you. I think we gotta do probably multiple episodes on this, because I'm fascinated by this. I wanna know more about how also, you know, the health benefits of dreaming.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:25:55 Mm-hmm.

Lewis Howes 1:25:55 How much we should be sleeping to maximize-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:25:57 Sure

Lewis Howes 1:25:57 ... our dreams and our optimal health, uh, and so many other questions around this. If you guys have a question on dreams, leave a question below, uh, and we'll try to get to that in our next episode in the future, whenever we can get you back on.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:26:11 Pleasure.

Lewis Howes 1:26:12 Um, but Rahul, this has been super inspiring. How can we, how can we get a copy? How can we support you? And, um, what else can we do to support this?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:26:22 Yeah. I'm feeling good about it, and, um, you know, I think the usual things. You know, where to get a copy, on Amazon or wherever the publisher... They're just doing a massive thing. They sold it... It's already picked up in 22 translations. I think-

Lewis Howes 1:26:34 Wow. That's amazing

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:26:35 ... they believe in it, and they've been reading this material. And the th- uh, and the two things that really touched me were, this can never be explained. Like, you know, 'cause I, I'm a surgeon. I want answers.

Lewis Howes 1:26:48 Yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:26:48 I want to fix. But they're like, "This can... It's dreaming, Rahul. It'll never be fully explained. We wanna know what you think, and pull from everything you've lived through." And it's-

Lewis Howes 1:26:59 Amazing

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:00 ... and then the, and then the New York publisher just was like, this email, and just the first sentence just took my breath away a little book, a little bit. And it was, they just put, "This, this book is important."

Lewis Howes 1:27:12 Wow.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:12 Period. I was like...

Lewis Howes 1:27:14 Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:15 It's a mic drop moment for me.

Lewis Howes 1:27:16 I'm excited for this. Where, where are we, where are you spending most of your time online? Should we follow you on social media, your website?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:21 Instagram is Dr. Jandial, but, you know, I'm an old timer, man.

Lewis Howes 1:27:25 Dr. Jandial. You're, you, you're young, old timer, right? You're still young. Um, do you have a website also, though?

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:32 No.

Lewis Howes 1:27:32 Okay. [laughs]

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:33 But, you know, I mean, I-

Lewis Howes 1:27:34 Instagram.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:35 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:27:35 Instagram.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:36 Instagram, and...

Lewis Howes 1:27:37 Follow you there, and, um, get the book. This is gonna be powerful. For anyone that you know in your life who maybe a- talks about dreams, they're gonna be fascinated by this as well. So get a couple copies, give it to a friend. Again, Rahul, I'm very excited about this. This Is Why You Dream. Make sure you guys get a copy. Appreciate you very much for being on, and for part

Lewis Howes 1:27:58 one of hopefully many-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:27:59 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:27:59 ... on this topic, 'cause I'm s- there's so many more follow-up questions I have, but I wanna let people start with this first. So...

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:28:06 We could take each chapter deeper.

Lewis Howes 1:28:08 Well, let's do it.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:28:08 All right.

Lewis Howes 1:28:08 I appreciate you being here.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:28:09 Memory is important, but memory is the thing that determines whether the event remains traumatic in your heart and mind.

Lewis Howes 1:28:16 Whether it's painful still for you.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:28:18 Very good. So let's get into that.

Lewis Howes 1:28:19 So we just need to heal the memory-

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:28:21 Right

Lewis Howes 1:28:21 ... of the trauma.

Dr. Rahul Jandial 1:28:22 This is exactly where I'm taking it