#1 Neuroscientist: How to Unlock the Power of Your Mind Using The Science of Dreaming

The Mel Robbins Podcast

Neuroscientist Dr. Rahul Jandial reveals how dreaming is a powerful, underused tool for creativity, emotional processing, and self-discovery. The episode explores the science of dreams, lucid dreaming techniques, and how to harness dream states for personal growth. Mel Robbins emphasizes that everyone dreams—even if they don’t remember—and that dreaming shapes our waking lives.

Key takeaways

• Dreaming occupies a third of our lives
• Dreams help process emotions and memories
• Lucid dreaming can be trained with simple techniques

Transcript preview

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Do you ever wonder about your dreams? You know, you ask yourself, what does that dream mean? What does that nightmare mean? Could I control what I'm dreaming about? Are they random? Like, does this mean anything? Could I stop this nightmare if I don't like it? What's actually happening in my brain while I'm dreaming? remember every single detail of their dreams, this is my husband, while some of us don't remember anything. And what if you keep having the same dream over and over and over again? As you could probably tell, I am so fascinated by this topic and I'm thrilled that for the very first time you and I are going to dive deep into the science of dreaming, nightmares, what your dreams mean, what they're trying to tell you, and more importantly, how to harness your dreams to unlock the full power of your mind and the mind and the potential of mind and the potential. of your life. I'm so excited for you to meet our expert today. He is one of the most highly regarded cited and distinguished doctors in the entire world. Dr. Rahul Jandial is a world-renowned cancer surgeon, neuroscientist, and pioneering neurosurgeon who is here to teach you and me about all of the fascinating things that your brain is doing when you're dreaming. Today you're going to learn how to tap into the power of your dream state to create deeper connection, problems unlock more creativity and clarity and even create deeper meaning in your life. So your dreams can help you solve problems, they can give you clues about your health and help you make predictions about your future and if you're thinking Mel I don't dream. You're wrong. According to Dr. John Deal, we all dream and what you're about to learn about the science of dreams will change how you think about your life both the one you're living while you're awake and the one you're living while you're dreaming and you will never look at what's possible the same way again. honor to spend time with you and to be together. And if you're a new listener, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. I'm so glad that you're here. I cannot wait for you to meet today's guest, The extraordinary, Dr. Rahul Janjal. He's here to share the science of dreaming and how to unlock the full power of your mind. Dr. Rahul Janjal is a world-renowned cancer surgeon, neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosurgeon and neurosur scientist. He is won award after award after award and is one of the most cited and distinguished doctors and surgeons alive today. He is the medical director of neurosurgical oncology and Scull-based surgery at City of Hope Medical Center in Los Angeles, which is one of the top cancer hospitals in the world, where Dr. John Dial operates on brain cancer and spinal tumors in adults and children with stage four cancer. his own research lab, the John Diall Laboratory, at the City of Hope Cancer Center, which focuses on developing cutting edge neuroscience and cancer treatments. He also serves as a professor within the division of neurosurgery at City of Hope, where he teaches doctors from around the world, the most innovative cancer surgery techniques and brain tumor research. He received his medical degree from the University of Southern California, his PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, his PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, and a cancer surgery specialization at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the author of 10 best-selling books and over 100 academic articles on surgery, neuroscience and cancer biology, including his most recent New York Times best-selling book, This is Why You Dream. Dr. John D'all knows the brain inside it out and one area of the brain that he is fascinated by is dreaming. And the science of why you dream and what your dreams mean and how to use them, to build deeper connections and more meaning in your life. Please help me welcome the remarkable Dr. Rahul Jondial to the Mel Robbins podcast. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Oh, well, thank you for getting on a plane. Thank you for carving out the time. I have never talked about the topic of the science of dreams on this podcast. I have so many questions and I cannot wait to dig in. And here's where I want to start. How could my life be different? based on everything you're about to teach us that we need to know about dreaming if we apply all this to our lives what's going to change? Well when you have the insight that we spend a third of our lives dreaming you'll be excited to learn that there are simple steps where you can influence your dreams, remember your dreams and cultivate the direction or dreams to live a life that is not possible simply with the waking brain. Wait a third of our life is spent dreaming? at any part of sleep and even when you fall asleep and when you're waking up. So now we are thinking that a third of our life is spent dreaming. Wow. That sleep and dream phase of our day and of our whole lifespan is something that we should cherish, that we can access, that we can influence. And it's our own personal therapist, if you will, in some ways. So that's the biggest goal that I have for today. Dreaming is not an accidental bite product. It's something essential for the human mind. It's your nightly reset. Okay, you've already delivered because I had never thought about the fact that you spend a third of your life sleeping, right? But I've always thought about it as a reset or rest. The idea that we could crack open a third of our lives and really understand what our brain is doing and what it's trying to tell us, that's pretty cool. Yeah, and it's not in activity your brain is on fire when you sleep your body's resting and I'll explain to you how we have those measurements but when I saw that when I was thinking about dreaming and I thought about wait a second that's not a quiet time in our skulls every we go to bed we think ah the computer screen went down yeah and we wake up we hit the keyboard and now we're awake no no it's it's engaged blood is coursing electricity is firing so that means we got to figure out What's going on? It's got to be essential. I would love to hear you talk about how does understanding what you're doing in a third of your life, your dream life? How does it help you take control of your awake life? When you realize your dreaming brain is working with your imagination, your life experiences, your memories, that any glimpse you have of that is a portal to your life. It's a portal to what you're living, but from a perspective from the dreaming brain perspective which is much more imaginative much more sexual much more emotional and that's digesting processing and delivering the same readout on the experiences you had during the waking day where your brain is a little bit different and so you have two windows to your own experiences and when you catch a little flare of a dream in the morning not all dreams but some dreams of reflection to where, hey that's an interesting perspective on my life that a therapist can't have because it's in my head. So to me it's sort of like the ultimate wellness hack, it's free. It's something that I think as we have this conversation, there are ways, there are simple ways that have been done by like Salvador Dolly or other people for a long time, Aristotle, that we can introduce into our life when we fall asleep and when we wake up. leaning in to the third of your life, which is your dreaming life, changed your life? It's made me more creative. It's made me, I think, more emotionally balanced. It's given me little windows in which when I wake up, I take a moment to pause. And those five, ten minutes in the morning, if you stay in bed, if you don't grab the phone, that window is an interesting idea generator for me. I've done it for decades. Other people have written about it. Now we've got the measurement. that shows when you're waking up and when you're falling asleep. Those 10 minutes you have the electrical fingerprints of being awake and asleep. The guys who have done creative things and art often talk about this. So I'm trying to pull in what Dolly was writing about and then, you know, what neuroscientists are studying in big cities. I cannot wait to dive into this. I can already tell that those first zero to 10 minutes of my day are going to be completely different after. talking to you and learning from you. Now one thing I just want to address up front because we asked our global audience about dreams and 26% said either well I don't dream or I don't remember my dreams and if you're somebody who doesn't remember your dreams or doesn't thank you dream I'd love to have you speak directly to that person and tell them what is possible for them based on what you're about to teach us. Yeah I mean if you don't remember you don't remember your dreams, I mean if you don't remember your your dreams. This episode is especially for you. That's how I feel because the practical and simple answer is when the Lutnant publishing house was working on this book, a lot of them came in when they were editing saying, I'm dreaming a lot more or remembering my dreams a lot more. So one, dreaming and remembering dreams can be cultivated. Two, you may not remember your dreams now, but you remember nightmares when you were a kid. And I can tell you after having taken care of 15,000. patients that at the end of life dreams will return for you. So right now you may not have dream recall but it can be cultivated and it's a it's there for you it's just not the window in your life journey to where it's a prominent feature but I think it can be. I was trying to a friend this weekend and she she adamantly said I don't dream and I said I don't think that's true. Is it true that people don't dream? Well if you have people, so again I'm gonna try to explain to explain the science the dreams and people who don't remember the dreams, if you put those electrical stickers and record the electricity, it's firing on both of them. So that suggests that the dreaming process is happening. It's just a matter of recall, but that nightly dreaming process happens for all humans all the time. It's so important. It makes us sleep, it exposes us to threat and then it safely when our bodies are paralyzed, you know, we will wild out. We do things we couldn't imagine. We do things we wouldn't dare. Like what? Well I mean all the things we fly we fall we run from monsters we get into awkward social situations like that's not stuff we would choose to do during the day but it seems to be liberated at night and so that might suggest a little bit about why we dream. What is your opinion on why we actually dream? Like what do you think the purpose of it is? Neurons that you don't use will wither because they're so metabolically demanding. believe in what some of the exotic scans are showing is that emotion, creativity, sexuality, imagination, these regions that we don't fully use during the day, it's like high intensity training. They're liberated, rehearsed, kept warm when we dream, so they're accessible for us during the day when we face our challenges. the brain that are ramping up. There's no on or off. They're ramping up. And during the day they ramp down and the executive network of these regions and the CEO of our brain has to put it all together to get on the tube, to get on the subway, to get the kids to school. But at night those neurons that we don't use during the day, those concepts we don't use during the day, if we don't rehearse them, we don't keep them activated in some way warmed up, they may not be accessible for us later in our life. even as species. How do you know when a dream does mean something versus when your mind is just doing something? There are five sort of categories of dreams. There's the obvious dream. You have anxiety about giving a talk, you show up, you're naked at the days or whatever. That's just your day anxiety rolling right into your dream anxiety. You're called genre dreams, end of life. So you're at the end of life and they tend to be of reconciliation, not of doom. And then pregnancy dreams report in these surveys and questionnaires, pregnant women report certain patterns of dreams about names, about rolling over in bed and these sort of things. And then there's like dreams that are like, you know, just random thoughts. They're not gonna, they don't need to be deciphered or even reflected upon. because they're not attached to anything deeply emotional or deeply visual. Then the last one that I think is the dream to reflect upon. And what's that one? And that's the one that has a strong emotional imprint and a strong central image. And so if you have the opportunity to wake up a little slower or you've had a dream with a strong emotional imprint and a strong central image, and so if you have the opportunity to wake up a little slower or you've had a dream with a strong emotional imprint, try to hold, is and if it's got a strong visual image, that's the one that I think is the portal to how you're doing, how you're reflecting upon life, how you're processing things. Can you give me an example or a couple examples of what that might look like? For example, there were reports of Vietnam veterans when they're going through a divorce they would have their war dreams return. And so it's metaphorical and they would be emotional and visual. in a difficult relationship and the interaction was always in this like like an elevator falling. It's like a normal conversation but they're just, the emotion is just that the butterflies, you know, it seems like it's casual and then as that relationship improved, that there wasn't that dropping, that crashing elevator sort of feeling. So and whether that gave me an answer, I don't think it was about getting an answer. It's about getting an answer. It's about getting an answer. It's about reflecting looking backward and engaging the dream thoughts that you have had that is a portal to your brain that only dreaming can provide because it's a lens that's emotional and visual and imaginative so to me it's an insight to myself and then I have to try to put it together with what's happening in real life and what's happening in my dream life. dreams happen in? Can you like teach us about that? I have some blocks here that you're set up. So the first one we fall asleep, sleep entries, N1. So sleep entries N1. How long is that last? Well, it's variable. The time that's most fixed is this thing we're going to get to called rapid eye movement. Okay. But it's longer in the beginning, then it goes to N2, which is deeper into sleep. Okay. These are, then it goes to N3. only happen occasionally in these deeper sleep phases. Okay. And that most of the dreaming happens in REM sleep. And rapid eye movement is when your eyes are wagging out behind your eyelids. It's not that the eyes are doing anything. It's just that when you're in that brain mode, that's how your eyes behave. And this was thought to be where you have the wildest dreams. In REM. In REM. In REM. In REM. And REM. into the night so the thought is that dreaming is most vivid closest to when you're waking up okay but that's not what we're seeing now we're seeing that dreams when you wake people up can happen when you're falling asleep through the entire night and