Why do brains dream? And what's going on with the bizarness of dreams? Why doesn't your clock work in

your dreams? And even though you spend a lot of your day working on cell phones and computers,

why do those almost never make appearances in your dream content?

There are so many cool questions that we're going to address today.

Is dream content the same across cultures and across time?

Are dreams experienced in black and white or in color?

Why do I think about dreams as the strange love child between brain

plasticity and the rotation of the planet? What is the relationship between schizophrenia and dreaming?

And in the future, will we be able to read out the content of somebody's dream?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes, we sail deeply

into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

And how we experience our life includes our

nocturnal life. We spend a third of our lives with our eyes closed, lying still and

horizontal like a meat robot that's been switched off.

But why?

In the last episode, we talked all about sleep.

Why brains do that and why all animals do that and what is happening in the brain during sleep?

Today, we're going to zoom in on one of my favorite subjects, a very strange thing

the brain does, which we call dreaming. We spend a fraction of our sleep time locked in a different

reality, swimming around in plots, which aren't real, and they're often not even realistic, but which nonetheless

convince us entirely. And today, we're going to see what that's all about. Humans have been

...