Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. Today is the first in a

multi-part series talking all about these things called dreams and were better to start

than the utter absurdity of the act of dreaming itself.

Because last night you became flagrantly psychotic,

and it will happen again tonight and in fact it will happen multiple times tonight

Now before you reject my diagnosis of your nightly psychosis, allow me to give you five justifying

reasons. First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there, so you

were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true, so you were delusional.

Third, you became confused about time, place, and person,

so you were disoriented.

Fourth, you had wildly fluctuating emotions, something that

psychiatrists call being effectively labile. And fifth and wonderfully delightfully you woke up this morning and you forgot most if not all of this bizarre dream experience so you are suffering from amnesia. Now if you were to

experience any one of these five symptoms while you were awake you would perhaps be seeking significant psychological attention and treatment.

Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear,

the brain state called REM sleep and the mental experience that goes along with it, called dreaming, are both normal biological and psychological processes. And as we will learn are truly essential ones as well.

Now, REM sleep is not the only time during sleep when we dream. If you use the liberal definition of

dreaming as any mental activity reported upon awakening from sleep, such as me going into a patient's room at night and

we wake them up, and I say, was there anything going through your mind?

And they say, well, I was just thinking about rain which by the way sounds

desperately British to me technically if you use that very loose definition of any mental activity that you report, such as bland thinking, then you will

dream in almost all stages of sleep. But the things that most of us call dreams, those really hallucinogenic, those movement-filled,

those emotional and bizarre experiences with a very rich narrative, they largely come from the stage of sleep

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