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00:01Terrifying nightmares linked to inexplicable deaths, unconscious visions
00:08that foretell of unspeakable tragedies and emerging technologies that can
00:16engineer our wildest dreams.
00:20Just like breathing, everyone dreams.
00:24We might not always remember it, but it happens every night of our lives.
00:28Some believe our sleeping thoughts are nothing more than nonsensical concoctions of the mind,
00:35while others claim our dreams and nightmares could be messages from beyond,
00:42premonitions of the future, or even secret signals that have the power to transform mankind.
00:50Could there be more to our subconscious stories than we realize?
00:54Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
01:01It is said that the average person dreams between one to two hours per night, which adds up to about six years over a lifetime.
01:23And while it might be easy to dismiss these involuntary images, thoughts, and sensations that are conjured during sleep,
01:32it's clear that dreaming is as hardwired into the human experience as breathing.
01:39Yet, the meaning and purpose of these enigmatic mental expressions remains one of the longest standing mysteries of the mind.
01:51Throughout history and cultures all around the world, people have turned to their dreams for reassurance,
01:56wisdom, guidance, and warnings of dangers to come.
02:00People generally agree that dreams are valuable and important.
02:04There's something about the intense visual qualities of dreaming.
02:08We are asleep, and yet our imaginations can create these marvelous visual experiences.
02:15Dreams hold so much influence over humans because they're just inherently a dramatic, attention-grabbing experience.
02:25And in some cases are very fantastic and surreal and adventurous.
02:30They just inherently grab us from childhood onward.
02:35You've had experiences that didn't really happen, but it's a piece of your life.
02:42It appears we've been trying to make sense of what happens when we slumber since the dawn of civilization.
02:49The first documented dream was recorded in 2500 BC in Mesopotamia.
02:55The Egyptian dream book, written on ancient papyrus over 3,000 years ago, compiled 108 different dreams and their proposed meanings.
03:06And in all this time, we've yet to answer one very basic question.
03:11What is the purpose of dreams?
03:14There's a lot of disagreement among dream researchers about why we dream, whether dreams have any meaning.
03:21People will speak of God.
03:23They'll speak of evolutionary wisdom.
03:26Sigmund Freud was a medical doctor and psychiatrist in Vienna, Austria, who in 1900 published the interpretation of dreams.
03:35And in this book, Freud taught that dreams are the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious mind.
03:43By studying our dreams, we learn about the deepest wishes and desires and fears and instinctual drives within each of us.
03:52Some of the theories about what happens while we're dreaming is we're consolidating our memories.
03:59Being able to take all of these different things that have happened to us throughout our lifetimes and create a coherent self-identity.
04:07That that's where our sense of self comes from.
04:10Is that true? We don't know.
04:13Sacre-CÅ“ur Hospital, Montreal, Canada.
04:18Inside this century old hospital lies the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory, one of the few facilities in the world trying to reveal what is really happening while we sleep.
04:31sleep the dream and nightmare laboratory was founded in 1991 and we're really trying to form
04:38links between what's happening during sleep and during dreams in the sleep lab we measure these
04:43through brain activity and eye movement activity and muscle activity you go through four different
04:49stages of sleep and when we first fall asleep that's called stage one sleep this stage is very
04:55short even in stage one people will have dreams then someone descends a bit further into a stage
05:02two sleep they also will have dreams that can sometimes be mundane or thought-like and then
05:10they descend even further into a deeper stage stage three sleep dreams are very vague and very hard to
05:18recall when people wake up and then stage four sleep that deepest state of sleep where finally
05:25you enter REM sleep rapid eye movement sleep which is really the main stage of interest for dream
05:32scientists the brain practically wakes up we have more activation of emotional areas of the brain
05:40the eyes are moving the muscles are twitching and people are usually in very vivid and elaborate and
05:46wake-like dreams in this stage let's say dream science has uncovered like 25 30 percent of what's
05:53going on but there's still a lot to learn like 70 is completely unknown it's actually very very
06:00difficult to study dreams because we do not have direct access to them oh here we got some eye movements
06:09so in all of our scientific studies we wake people up sometimes repeatedly during the night so that they
06:14can report some of their dreams sit up when you're randy but probably 95 of dream activity is still
06:22completely forgotten apart from scientific curiosity you might wonder why should we even care about dream
06:29research well many of mankind's greatest ideas and innovations are said to have been inspired by brain
06:40activity during sleep there are many great minds whose dreams have helped them to formulate some of their
06:50greatest work so for example russian scientist dmitry mendeleev actually dreamt the periodic table that's
07:00the table of all the elements einstein claimed that dreams helped him to realize the theory of relativity
07:09and how the observer perceives time and space according to where they are the google search engine
07:17was invented in a dream larry page describes that he woke up from a dream and he immediately started
07:27scribbling out a plan that was to list and rank all internet sites but there are breakthroughs in every
07:38field of endeavor another example would be paul mccartney's song yesterday he dreamed that he was
07:48listening to this just beautiful piece of music and he persuaded the beatles to perform it
07:55and it became their all-time hit famous people like edison and tesla really wanted to access
08:04the creative sleep state as you're falling asleep they thought that was the kind of key to creativity
08:10and invention and so they developed this steel ball trick where they would hold a steel ball in their
08:17hands and then as they fell asleep as their muscles relaxed the steel ball would drop and it would wake them
08:25up and then they would record whatever that creative imaginative idea and dream was that had happened
08:33what these stories of creative insights and inventions through dreaming tells us is that if we devote
08:40ourselves to a task to a challenge to a problem and we throw ourselves at it our dreams will help us
08:48i think that if you can tap into that resource nothing will stop you could a better understanding of
08:54dreams help us unlock our greatest innovations and achievements perhaps and as scientists continue
09:05to probe our sleeping subconscious
09:07dream science is still seen as peripheral and weird but your dreams 15 years out can predict
09:20the onset of parkinson's but nobody knows that your nightmares are a huge part of post-traumatic stress
09:27disorder nobody's asking questions about that we are dreaming in every stage of sleep
09:34this is a lot of your lived experience you wouldn't walk around all day just ignoring your thoughts
09:40and saying oh those don't have any influence on my behavior or my emotional well-being but that's what
09:45we're doing at night but dreams are in touch with more than the science can see and that is fine with me
09:53as a scientist and makes it so much more interesting to work on as a challenge
10:04los angeles california the 1980s in a working-class section of the city a quiet yet unsettling epidemic
10:12starts to unfold a group of young southeast asian immigrants belonging to an ethnic group known as the
10:19mong to come to a truly nightmarish fate they are dying in their sleep in january of 1987 the l.a
10:32times published an article about over 140 mong men dying in their sleep with no real explanation
10:39the cdc did autopsies on the individuals but they couldn't find any reason why these individuals passed
10:45away there was no sign of a heart attack or a stroke they were young they were healthy they
10:50didn't have prior existing health conditions looking at the surface of the story there's no reason for
10:56these men to have died there's still a lot that we don't understand about why this happened but one thing
11:04that's really interesting about these cases is that a lot of these men reported that in the days
11:09preceding their death they were having terrifying nightmares it was really a mystery public health
11:16officials coined the term sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome to at least categorize these bizarre
11:24deaths but it doesn't explain the cause and it certainly begs a truly haunting question could bad dreams
11:34actually cause healthy men to suddenly die in their sleep according to monk culture and belief
11:42nightmares can kill in the monk tradition dream is how the spirit world and deceased communicate with
11:49the living and so they come to us in our dreams and they communicate their needs and how they're doing
11:56there are many spirits there are good spirits and evil spirits about that ball for example are evil spirits
12:02so dreams are a place to receive communication uh however if you don't listen to the spirit they
12:09can come to your nightmares and kill you this is something which is not unique to this particular
12:16population um in east asia for instance there was a strong belief in a creature that could invade dreams
12:27known as the laia the term nightmare has its own origin and it comes from this supernatural creature
12:40in east european tradition called the mara that could shape-shift and enter into the dreams and could even
12:49bring about death demonic entities and evil spirits that prey upon their victims
12:57in the dream world can be found in folkloric traditions around the world but what is so confounding
13:06about the nightmare deaths that ravaged the american monk community in the 1980s is that inexplicably
13:13these men all seem to experience the same horrific dream there's some men who survived and they shared
13:21with us that they had nightmares for many nights in a row they would see these evil dark figures come
13:27and sit on their chest that would suffocate them and kept constricting their body so they couldn't breathe
13:33they cannot scream they cannot move spouses of the men who passed away shared similar stories so we believe
13:41that in these dreams evil spirits called the fall that fall was visiting the person causing the sudden
13:47unexplained death was the same supernatural entity really squeezing the life from these men in their nightmares
13:56the mong community certainly believes it's true but how might the scientific community try to interpret
14:04this phenomenon this reminds me a lot of other phenomena that we've studied such as in sleep paralysis a
14:12specific type of usually very terrifying dream experience that happens right at the onset or the offset of
14:20sleep and most of our body is paralyzed and often people will hallucinate some kind of threat or menacing
14:28figure suffocating them or sitting on them there's some thought that these could be related to some
14:34extreme form of um sleep paralysis or night terror that occurred to these people i'm not sure that's the
14:41case not all the men died necessarily of the same exact physiological process with the heart or some
14:48other part of the body so it makes it all the more likely that whatever triggered their actual dying
14:55was something as strange as it might sound psychological or even spiritual and it sure sounds like some
15:02kind of dream phenomenon but how could something kill you in your dreams
15:06could psychological distress have been the cause of the nightmare induced deaths of around 140 healthy
15:14men some believe it's a distinct possibility based on the shared experience the mong had in their war-torn
15:22homeland in 1954 the united states cia recruited them to fight against communism during the vietnam war
15:3010 percent of the mong population passed away during this war and after the united states left the war
15:35the mong became enemies of the state and then were persecuted to escape genocide from the communist
15:42government they then flooded other countries like the united states these men had just survived a
15:48devastating war so they were going through a traumatic traumatic time in their life was psychological
15:54trauma from the vietnam war connected to these inexplicable nightmare deaths all we can do is speculate
16:02but strangely by the late 1980s these unexplained deaths all but stopped and the mong believe it proves
16:12this phenomenon was a matter of spirituality as these men were dying it was a crisis in the community
16:20they didn't know what was going on and so it took elders and shamans coming together and talking to the
16:26spirits to have a better understanding and the spirits shared that these men were not honoring the
16:32spirits like they had done in the past when they came to america they were no longer building an altar
16:38to pray to them offering animals as sacrifices to honor and feed the spirits so the spirits were then
16:45angry and causing harm to the living since then we recognize that we have to continue making sure that
16:53the spirits are being honored as well as supported and so that helped reduce the number of these deaths
17:00but we believe that nightmares still kill even today
17:03the mere suggestion that a nightmare can kill is profoundly disturbing it really makes the thought
17:10of dying in your sleep a bit more unsettling doesn't it perhaps less alarming is the notion that while we
17:17slumber our brains may be able to open a window and allow us to predict the future
17:24epideorus greece nestled in the hills of the peloponnese lies one of the ancient world's most remarkable
17:37medical sanctuaries that has been preserved for over 2 000 years today it's a unesco world heritage site
17:45but in the time of classical greece it was something more a sacred destination for pilgrims
17:53to be healed in their sleep thousands of years ago people were dreaming in temples and these were
18:01specifically for healing one of the most famous ones is the epidaurus where people would try to have
18:09dreams of the asclepion the serpent god who would come down and heal you in your sleep
18:16and so people would sleep surrounded by these serpents and they would ask for a dream visit
18:22from the healing serpent god asclepius is the greek and roman god of healing through dreams
18:29you go to his temple really not for diagnosis you go in hopes of a sacred experience of healing
18:37and we have testimonies i mean written reports of what happened in the temple of asclepius and
18:43they're quite fascinating we see people who believe that they've been healed of specific physical
18:48symptoms after interaction with a sacred being in the ancient world many believe that dreams
18:58offered more than spiritual guidance one of the most influential voices of the time argued that dreams
19:05could diagnose illness from deep within the body one explanation comes from the most renowned physician
19:13of the ancient greek world galen was the personal physician of marcus aurelius the stoic emperor
19:19he wrote a number of treatises on diagnosis through dreams and he said that the reason why dreams can
19:25give you an accurate diagnosis of what's going on through the body is that there's some function
19:30of consciousness during sleep that may travel through the body and bring back an exact report
19:35of what's going on inside the body today nightmares or visions that seem to foreshadow disease before
19:43physical symptoms appear are known as prodromal dreams but is this phenomenon real or imagined
19:55cape cod massachusetts october 1998. as night begins to fall over her suburban home
20:0343 year old kathleen o'keefe cannabis heads upstairs to go to bed
20:11and as she drifts off to sleep she's visited by a strange messenger i had gone in for my yearly mammogram
20:20and i had gotten a clean bill of health and that night i had the strangest dream
20:26and all of a sudden my dream froze like like the page on your computer freezes and in the middle of
20:33that frozen page was a door and through that door walked a franciscan monk in the brown robe and this
20:45monk took my hand put it right on my breast and said do you feel that and i said yeah and he said that's breast
20:53cancer you go back to your doctor tomorrow and you tell him you need exploratory surgery to find this
21:03cancer was the arrival of this strange visitor simply a figment of kathleen's imagination or did she
21:11experience a real prodromal dream an accurate assessment of her health delivered during sleep
21:18whatever the case kathleen was convinced it was all too haunting to ignore i said to the doctor i need
21:28exploratory surgery to find this breast cancer i know i have it i need you to do this i'm not leaving without
21:39a yes and so long story short i had the surgery and when i first woke up i was told that yes it was breast
21:52cancer my first reaction was i just started crying well thank goodness they found that cancer early enough
22:02and so the monk was right was kathleen's dream a miraculous coincidence or proof that the ancients
22:12were right the dreams really do have the power to diagnose and even heal this doesn't make sense of
22:20typical traditional modern western medicine and yet it does make more sense if we think of dreaming in
22:26its traditional healing capacity as giving us insights into these kinds of illnesses and problems
22:34the mysteries of dreaming involve our rediscovering things that earlier people knew things like the
22:40healing power of dreams i think there's something in the idea that amongst all the things going on in
22:45dreams dreams can be body talk and the message may come veiled as a messenger who has our best interests at
22:53heart we've been taught that a dream is just a dream you don't really need to pay any attention to it it's
23:00just the mind firing off neurons when you're asleep but i've always said it has to mean something
23:11i'm not really sure why i listened to that monk other than it was such an odd dream but if
23:20i had not believed him i believe i'd be dead today and you wouldn't be speaking to me
23:27if dreams do in fact have the power to heal then telling someone they feel better after a good night's
23:34sleep may have a deeper meaning than we think and there's growing evidence that dreams
23:40can influence our waking lives in other ways as well because researchers have developed a technology
23:46that allows people to unlock new potential as they sleep
23:56the massachusetts institute of technology cambridge massachusetts this esteemed university has produced
24:03remarkable innovations in computer technology pioneering work in medical imaging and advanced robotics
24:12but recently mit researchers have been developing technology to quite literally engineer our dreams
24:22dream engineering is a pretty new field under a decade and what it means is if we took all these
24:30technological advances in sensors devices in ai and we aimed them at dream science
24:37how can we help people shift what they dream about to better themselves the next day historically the
24:44way that people tried to determine whether they could control a dream is they'd show you a stimulus
24:50maybe a scary film and then you would fall asleep and then they'd wake you up maybe four hours later
24:57eight hours later and they'd say what'd you dream about oh you'd say i have no idea
25:01yeah and the really simple shift that we made was we said let's focus on the whole sleep onset period
25:09it's where your imagination starts turning into pictures where you're dreaming but you can still
25:15hear the outside world around you that's when we try to slip something into dreams if we can
25:22control a small piece of a dream then we can run a controlled experiment on a dream
25:27can technology really control the content of our dreams well in 2017 that's exactly what adam har
25:35horowitz and other researchers at mit tried to find out and they would create a groundbreaking
25:41glove-like device known as dormio this is the dormio device that we built at mit this device is a research
25:51prototype it works really well in a lab this is not built for consumers at home
25:56the way this will work is we put this on before someone goes to bed you have these sensors
26:03this person's sleep will be tracked and then dormio looks for a special moment in sleep
26:10where dreams are beginning but you can still hear the world around you
26:15in that special moment that device will talk to you remember to think of a tree
26:20remember to think of a tree remember to think of a fork of volcano beyonce your pick and we found
26:28that 92 percent of people who came in would have a dream where directly they would report the thing
26:35that we suggested we're hitting this 92 percent number which feels pretty exciting and feels like it
26:42opens up a lot of ground for new experiments will dream technology such as dormio one day allow us to live
26:50out our wildest fantasies while we sleep climb to the summit of mount everest
26:58win the world series with a towering home run or fly to a galaxy far far away
27:05it's certainly an enticing prospect but how can shaping our dreams when we first fall asleep
27:15actually help us while we're awake right when you fall asleep the brain is what we call hyper
27:21associated and it's kind of like creative thinking that you are making links between concepts that you
27:27don't normally link recently there was a study where they had people try to do these hard to solve
27:34math problems they found if people fell asleep for just one minute they were almost three times
27:39more likely to suddenly come up with the hidden solution to these problems dormio is designed to
27:46help people access that state as you're falling asleep to try to extend that period of creativity
27:52so imagine that you are dreaming about flying above the clouds and the researchers say what were you
27:59dreaming about and you say i was in the clouds and i was flying but i had this incredible contraption
28:03this new way of being able to paraglide through the clouds and the researchers play audio about
28:10paragliding and clouds and flying and then you fall asleep again and extend the dream so that you start
28:18to develop more of it and now you're able to describe that invention we can boost creativity we can
28:24improve somebody's learning just by playing the right bedtime story maybe in a foreign language
28:29language which helps them learn french faster that's a study how well you learn something with a 10x
28:37difference is dependent on your sleep and your dreams devices like dormio could have a profound effect
28:44on creativity and learning but studies have also revealed an even more astonishing application for dream
28:52shaping technology it may have the power to save millions of lives we know that eighty percent of
29:03people with ptsd will have recurring nightmares of the same topic every night these are really high
29:10stakes because we know that if you have nightmares it increases your likelihood of attempting suicide by 4x
29:17so if you're working with folks who are for instance post-combat veterans and they struggle with suicidal
29:25ideation one of the most surprising results that we've gotten is that just by having people choose
29:32a dream instead of whatever a difficult dream comes naturally when we follow up a week later they
29:38significantly reduce their suicidal ideation that just a shift in the dream landscape can shift their waking
29:45thoughts so much has been a big surprise and also really moving what happens if at scale the three
29:54million people who are struggling with those specific kinds of nightmares suddenly aren't scared to go to
30:00bed at night the exciting thing about dream research in the next 10 years is it being applied
30:06and the implications for mental health and for learning how would that change the world
30:15you
30:16all university england april 12 1975 psychologist dr keith hern monitors a test subject who's achieved
30:27rapid eye movement sleep or rem a mental state when dreams are at their most vivid suddenly his test
30:36subject performs a series of predetermined eye movements similar to morse code and successfully
30:43communicates i'm dreaming this experiment provides the first verified scientific evidence of a phenomenon
30:52called lucid dreams lucid dreaming is the kind of rare brain state when you know you're dreaming
31:01and can steer that dream it's kind of this magical space where it seems like anything is possible and that
31:09heightened state of awareness is a really extraordinary one but lucid dreaming is a more rare occurrence
31:18there's probably a reason that we don't enter into lucid dreaming every night and that not everybody
31:23enters into lucid dreaming and that it's a rare occurrence usually lucid dreamers can control the dream content to
31:31some extent and so we really want to better understand how are lucid dreamers able to do this
31:38we found that lucid dreams are very useful in the treatment of nightmares lucid dreaming can also be used to
31:46practice real world skills athletes and musicians can use the dream world to practice say snowboarding or
31:55playing their musical instrument or someone who's writing a novel they could enter into a lucid dream and
32:03actually engage with one of their characters so there's a lot of different uses to lucid dreaming
32:09and that's why we study them could lucid dreams provide the next stage of personal awareness and growth
32:17perhaps yet the problem is as little as one percent of the population experience lucid dreams on a weekly
32:26basis but what if we all had access to a device that could trigger this powerful state there's a new tech
32:36startup called prophetic and they're working on an idea of a head worn device called the halo and the idea
32:45is to blast focused ultrasound into your brain and to activate it while you're asleep and their hope
32:52is that that would make you more likely to have lucid dreams because in lucid dreams that part of your
32:59brain is more active but so are other parts of your brain so they have a really hard job ahead of them
33:06but i am totally excited to see more people entering into the dream tech space
33:12if we could all gain access to lucid dreams when the conscious and subconscious minds seem to merge
33:18will we be able to not only push our understanding of dreams farther but also finally answer the most
33:27elusive mystery why do we dream we tend to depreciate dreams and treat them as irrational nonsense
33:37the dreams reflect a profound source of wisdom that is very closely correlated with people's most important
33:44uh emotional concerns uh and interest in waking life but it's something that we just haven't quite
33:50figured out yet we should stay open to the possibility that the state of dreaming may give us access to
33:58ourselves and an understanding of ourselves in ways that have never before been thought possible there's
34:05been a lot learned over the past couple of decades but it's still in many ways a science in its infancy
34:15whether it's glimpsing future events before they occur healing the body or learning entirely new skills
34:24dreams seem to be far more powerful than we may think but as science continues to delve deeper into
34:31the mystery of dreaming what else might we discover could we unlock hidden powers or open a new door to a world
34:41of nightmares pondering these questions will no doubt keep many of us awake at night for a long time to come
34:49because for now they continue to remain unexplained
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