Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

Can you talk about dreams and the importance of dreams?

The belief maybe 20 or 30 years ago was that dreams were just an epiphenomenom.

They were just a byproduct. And so the analogy would be,

think of the light bulbs that I think I can see behind you in that lovely background. When you

create this apparatus called a light bulb to produce this thing called light in the same way that the brain

has been created to produce this thing called dream sleep, called REM sleep, when you create light in the same way that the brain has been created to produce this thing

called dream sleep, called REM sleep.

When you create light in that way with a light bulb, you also produce this thing called

heat.

It was never the purpose of the light bulb.

It's just what happens when you create light in that way.

And the belief was the same thing for dreaming that when you create this thing called REM sleep, which serves lots of different functions, one of the conscious spin-offs, one of the by-products, is this thing called dreaming.

And that never made sense to me for the simple reason, which is this.

When we are dreaming, it is more consciously, energetically demanding

than not dreaming, is my assumption from a brain-based perspective. And any time Mother Nature

burns the most valuable unit in your body, which is called an ATP molecule, an energy molecule,

then it usually has some evolutionary advantage to it. In other words,

if dreaming is metabolically more active and you could have REM sleep without dreaming, but she still

added dreaming atop of REM sleep, then it must serve some benefit. And we've now discovered that

it serves at least two vital functions. The first is that dream sleep provides

a form of almost overnight therapy. That dream sleep is emotional first aid. And it's during

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