Michelle: A recent survey asked major companies if they planned to experiment with advertising inside our dreams. You know what percentage said yes? Mark: Oh, this is going to be bleak. I'll say... a horrifying 20%? Michelle: Try 77 percent. By 2025. Mark: Nope. Absolutely not. We're done. Shut it down. I don't want a Coke commercial playing while I'm trying to fly. Michelle: It's a terrifying thought, and it's exactly the kind of future-facing question that neurosurgeon and neuroscientist Rahul Jandial tackles in his book, The Nightly Dose of Wonder. Mark: A practicing brain surgeon writing about dreams... that's a perspective you don't get every day. It’s not a philosopher guessing, it’s a guy who has literally held a brain in his hands. It’s no wonder the book is so highly rated for making this stuff accessible. Michelle: Exactly. And he argues that before we can even think about companies hacking our dreams, we need to understand why we have them in the first place. And the answer is far stranger, and more profound, than you might think.

Michelle: Jandial starts with a pretty bold statement. He says, "In fundamental ways, you are never more alive than when you’re dreaming." Mark: Okay, that sounds poetic, but what does it actually mean? I feel pretty dead to the world when I'm asleep. My main activities are drooling and occasionally stealing all the blankets. Michelle: Well, from your brain's perspective, it's party time. He explains that the electrical intensity and energy consumption in certain parts of the brain during dreaming can actually exceed what they burn when we’re awake. Your brain isn't resting; it's running a full-scale, high-budget movie production every single night. Mark: A movie production starring me, a cast of people I haven't seen in 15 years, and a plot that makes no sense. So where does this 'movie' come from? Is it just random static? Michelle: This is where it gets truly wild. Jandial shares this incredible story from his world of awake brain surgery. Picture this: a patient is conscious on the operating table, their brain exposed. The surgeon is using a tiny pen-like probe to deliver small electrical currents to map the brain before removing a tumor. Mark: Hold on. A doctor can literally zap a person's brain while they're awake and they just... talk about what happens? Michelle: Precisely. And the patient will report vivid experiences. One zap might trigger a long-lost childhood memory. Another might make them smell lemons. And in one case, the surgeon zapped a specific spot, and the patient suddenly screamed. She was having a terrifying nightmare. Mark: You're kidding me. Michelle: Not at all. The surgeon removed the probe, and the nightmare stopped instantly. He applied it to the exact same spot again, and the nightmare returned. He could literally turn her nightmare on and off with a switch. Mark: That is one of the most unsettling and fascinating things I have ever heard. So dreams aren't messages from the universe or undigested bits of pizza. They're encoded, physical locations in our brain's wiring. Michelle: Exactly. They are a product of our neurobiology. Jandial explains that during the day, our brain is run by what he calls the "Executive Network." Think of it as the brain's CEO—logical, orderly, focused on tasks, a little bit boring and stressed out. Mark: I know that guy. He runs my life from 9 to 5. Michelle: But when we dream, the CEO goes offline. And another network takes over: the "Imagination Network." This is the freewheeling, spontaneous, creative department. It starts connecting memories, emotions, and ideas in ways the CEO would never approve of. It's not random chaos; it's divergent thinking. It's looking for weaker, more distant associations. Mark: So that's why I might dream about my third-grade teacher on a spaceship with my dog. The Imagination Network is just pulling from different files and mashing them together. Michelle: It's a "veritable storytelling instinct," as one scientist puts it. And what's amazing is how universal the results are. Jandial points to cross-cultural dream surveys. Whether you're a student in Japan in the 1950s or Germany in the 2000s, the top dreams are remarkably similar: being attacked or pursued, falling, school and studying. Mark: The dreaded "showing up for the final exam you never studied for" dream. It's a global phenomenon! Michelle: It is! And this suggests that these narratives are baked into our DNA. They're not just personal anxieties; they might be serving a deeper, evolutionary purpose. Which brings us to the really dark stuff.

Mark: Right, the on/off nightmare switch. That story is still giving me chills. But the book has a whole chapter titled "We Need Nightmares." Why on earth would we need something so awful? It feels like a bug in the system, not a feature. Michelle: Jandial makes a clear distinction first. A bad dream is just emotionally negative. A nightmare is so intense and terrifying that it always wakes you up. It’s a system override. Mark: Okay, I've definitely had those. The ones where your heart is pounding and you have to turn on the light to remember where you are. Michelle: And according to the book, these are especially common in children. Kids have nightmares about five times more often than adults. And it's not a coincidence that this happens during a period of explosive cognitive growth. He proposes a fascinating idea: nightmares might be a tool the brain uses to help a child forge their identity. Mark: How does being chased by a monster help you figure out who you are? Michelle: By creating a stark boundary. The nightmare is so terrifyingly other that it forces the child's mind to recognize, "That is not me. That is a dream." It helps them differentiate between their internal world and the external world, between waking thought and dreaming thought. It’s a fundamental step in building a sense of self as an independent mind. Mark: Wow, I never thought of it that way. It's like a cognitive bootcamp for building your own consciousness. But what about for adults? Are my stress dreams still building my personality? Michelle: For adults, it seems to be more about processing and rehearsing. The book talks about "threat rehearsal theory." Your brain runs simulations of threatening situations—social failure, physical danger—so you can practice your response in a safe environment. Mark: So my recurring dream about my presentation failing spectacularly in front of everyone is actually... helpful? My brain is just running drills? Michelle: It could be! He cites this amazing study of French medical students preparing for a huge entrance exam. The students who frequently had nightmares about failing the exam or showing up late actually performed about 20 percent better than those who never dreamed about it. Mark: No way. The anxiety in their dreams gave them a cognitive edge? Michelle: The theory is that simulating the event, even negatively, prepared them. It's like a mental flight simulator for stress. But what if the nightmares aren't about a specific future event? What if they're just... horrible and recurring? The book offers a really hopeful solution for that. Michelle: Jandial tells the story of a woman named Julia, a yoga teacher who lived a very peaceful life by day but was tormented by horrific, violent nightmares at night—beheadings, stabbings, things completely alien to her waking personality. Mark: That sounds awful. She must have felt like there was a monster hiding inside her. Michelle: She did. It was deeply disturbing to her. A friend recommended she try something called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy. It's a surprisingly simple but powerful technique. Mark: Okay, I'm intrigued. What did she do? Michelle: Her therapist had her pick one of her recurring nightmares. Then, while awake, she had to consciously rewrite the script. She would take the violent plot and transform it into something pleasant or benign. For example, if a dream involved a knife, she would rewrite it so the knife was just being used to chop vegetables for a beautiful meal. Mark: So she was directing her own dream movie, but after the fact. Michelle: Exactly. And she would add rich sensory details to the new version and rehearse it in her mind before sleep. The key insight here is a quote from the book: "The same imagination that is the source for nightmares can be used to break their terrible spell." Mark: That's brilliant. You're using the brain's own creative engine to fix its own bugs. Did it work for Julia? Michelle: It worked beautifully. Within a few weeks, the frequency and intensity of her nightmares dropped dramatically. Four years later, she rarely has them. She calmed her nightmares by using her imagination to create sunnier versions of the same tales.

Michelle: And that ability to rewrite our inner world, to use our imagination to solve problems... that's the gateway to the book's most mind-bending idea: that dreams are a creativity engine. Mark: I've heard the stories, like Paul McCartney dreaming the melody for "Yesterday." But it always felt like a lightning strike, a one-in-a-million fluke. Does the book suggest it's something more systematic? Michelle: Far more. Jandial argues that the dream state is the optimal biological state for creativity. Remember the CEO Executive Network being offline? That's the key. Our waking brain is great at convergent thinking—finding a single correct answer. But dreams excel at divergent thinking—generating many new, unexpected ideas. Mark: Because the logical, judgmental CEO isn't there to say, "That's a stupid idea." Michelle: Precisely. And he tells the most astonishing medical story to prove this point. It's about a patient of his named Anna. For years, Anna wanted to be a screenwriter but suffered from terrible writer's block. She just couldn't come up with compelling stories or characters. Mark: I think every creative person can relate to that feeling. Michelle: Then, Anna is diagnosed with an arachnoid cyst—basically a fluid-filled bubble growing in her brain. And this cyst just happened to be pressing directly on her dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Mark: Which is...? Michelle: The headquarters of the Executive Network. The CEO's office. As the cyst grew, it physically suppressed her brain's logical, filtering part. And paradoxically, she was suddenly overwhelmed with an unstoppable urge to write. Characters, plots, and dialogue flooded her mind. The cyst was curing her writer's block. Mark: Wait a minute. So a brain injury basically turned her into a creative genius by mimicking a dream state? That's... a heck of a way to cure writer's block. I'm not sure I'd recommend it, though. Michelle: Definitely not! But it's a perfect, if extreme, illustration of the principle. By dampening the executive functions, her Imagination Network was set free, just like it is every night when we dream. The book is filled with examples—the dream of the snake eating its tail that gave the chemist Kekulé the structure of the benzene ring, revolutionizing chemistry. Or Otto Loewi dreaming the experiment that would prove nerve cells communicate with chemicals, which later won him a Nobel Prize. Mark: Okay, so this is a real, powerful phenomenon. But how do we do that without the brain cyst or waiting for a Nobel-Prize-winning dream to just happen? How can a regular person tap into this? Michelle: Jandial discusses a few techniques, but one of the most interesting is focusing on the state of "sleep-entry," that weird, floaty period just as you're drifting off. It's a creative sweet spot. Researchers at the Paris Brain Institute tested this. They gave people a tricky number puzzle. The ones who couldn't solve it were told to recline in a chair, holding an object. Mark: The old Salvador Dalí trick! He'd hold a key, and when he fell asleep, it would drop and wake him up. Michelle: The very same. And when the participants were woken up the moment they entered that sleep-entry state, they were almost three times as likely to discover the hidden rule and solve the puzzle. A single minute in that twilight zone was, as the researchers put it, "a cocktail for creativity."

Mark: So we've gone from dreams being electrical sparks in the brain, to necessary nightmare-simulators, to a hidden source of genius. It feels like we're ignoring a massive part of our own minds, this whole second life we live every night. Michelle: Exactly. Jandial's point is that we have this nightly dose of wonder, this built-in neural playground for insight, healing, and creativity. It's not just fluff. It's a core cognitive function. The real question he leaves us with is: are we paying attention to it? Mark: And it makes that opening statistic even scarier. If this space is so important for our own well-being and self-discovery, the idea of companies wanting to colonize it with ads for burgers and beer feels like a profound violation. Michelle: It's a new frontier for neural rights. And Jandial, as a neuroscientist, is sounding the alarm. But his ultimate message is one of empowerment. By understanding our dreams, we can better understand ourselves. He closes with a line that has really stuck with me. Mark: What is it? Michelle: "To ponder the meaning of dreams and dreaming is to explore the meaning of life itself." Mark: Wow. That puts my dream about being late for an exam I didn't study for into a whole new perspective. It makes you think about your own dreams differently. We'd love to hear about the strangest dream you've ever had that actually taught you something. Find us on our socials and share it. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.