What do your nightly dreams have to do with the rotation of the planet?

Why are so many musicians blind?

Can blind people learn how to echo locate like a bat?

Once we find alien life on other planets,

should we expect that aliens have dreams at night?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University,

and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between how the brain works

and how we experience life.

I sort of personally have a love-hate relationship with dreaming because we take it so seriously.

We find ourselves in some bizarre situation that doesn't make any sense.

But while you are there, you buy it hook, line, and sinker.

You are emotionally tossed around and buffeted in the winds of situations

that the moment after you wake up, you realize weren't real. And more importantly, they

typically make no sense at all. So why were you so caught up in that situation? I've always

called dreaming, sticking my head in the night blender, by which I simply mean

that I don't necessarily look forward to it because I don't know where it's going to take me,

and I generally feel that all that emotional energy I expend isn't that useful.

But whatever your take on dreaming is, it's one of those absolutely

insanely bizarre facts about our existence that we totally take for granted. You wake up and you say,

oh, wow, I was just having a dance party with a pack of wild monkeys.

Or I was just at work where I forgot to put on pants and I was trying to hide behind my desk.

...