I woke up exhausted this morning. It’s not that I didn’t get a good sleep — I did. It was just an incredibly busy one, full of running, climbing and at one point flying across a room. As I opened my eyes to the new day, it took a few moments to realize that I had not, in fact, spent a night engaged in intense, impossible physical activity. “Our brains are not resting when we sleep,” explains Rahul Jandial, MD, PhD, whose latest book is “This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life.”
In it, Jandial, a Los Angeles neuroscientist and neurosurgeon, explores why the brain stays active even as the rest of the body is dormant, makes the case for nightmares, unlocks the health signals our sleeping minds may be trying to tell us and reveals the new science of how to potentially give ourselves a more interesting, aware dream life. I talked to Jandial recently via Zoom about the mystical, sometimes “transcendent state” of dreaming, and why you can’t do math when you’re asleep.
