I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

It's now I think quite clear that the dreaming actually serves a function.

The brain is working all night long to process the information we took in during the day.

For every two hours we spend a week wandering through the world, experiencing all the

myriad things that we experienced during the day.

For every two hours of that, the brain simply has to shut itself off from that world for

an hour to just stop and figure out what it means.

That's Robert Stickel, whose new book when brains dream.

Pulls back the curtain on those tantalizing, frustrating, bizarre nighttime movies in our

head, which seem to make little sense, but which he argues are essentials who are being

able to make sense of our waking world.

By exploring possibilities that are more sober day time brains would never entertain, dreams

are expanding our minds.

I'm so happy to be talking with you today because dreams have always meant a lot to me and

you're the person to talk to about dreams.

I love your book.

Thank you.

One of the things I like about it so much is you go back to the very beginning and a

lot of us think that Freud was the beginning of analyzing dreams.

But I saw in your early pages that there were people who were really at work on it before

him in ways that he didn't acknowledge.

That's absolutely true.

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