Originally published at: All the Feels in Inside Out 2 - The Happiest Pod on Earth
47: Join Ariel, Stef, and special guest Helen Garcia from Yellow Chair Collective for a heartfelt, hilarious, and insightful discussion on Inside Out 2 and the emotional rollercoaster that is adolescence. This episode unpacks how the film portrays anxiety, perfectionism, and identity shifts with surprising nuance, and why so many of us saw our younger (and current) selves in Riley’s journey. Whether you cried, cringed, or left the theater texting your therapist, this episode holds space for it all!
Summary
00:00 Hosts and guest intros
01:10 Inside Out 2, its massive marketing push, and what got left behind
04:00 Spoiler warning and movie synopsis
06:00 Anxiety’s debut and the anatomy of a panic attack
09:00 When Joy can’t reach Anxiety—symbolism of helplessness
11:00 Emotion combos, Internal Family Systems theory, and dynamic identity
14:00 The evolving sense of self and grounding techniques
17:00 Cultural misattunement during puberty (e.g., immigrant family dynamics)
20:00 Why Riley’s experience didn’t feel universal for everyone
22:00 Cultural TikToks reimagining emotions: Wu Ting, Honor, Filial Piety
24:00 Core belief shifts: “I’m not enough” and perfectionism
27:00 Visual art therapy and naming personal narratives
30:00 Complexity vs. affirmation-only approaches
32:00 Revisiting Joy, Sadness, and emotional integration
34:00 Classroom tools for building identity through the school year
37:00 Changing education systems and honoring the whole child
39:00 Perfectionism as a survival response in racialized and immigrant communities
42:00 Reflections on gamification, experiential learning, and emotional literacy
47:00 Symbolic meanings in control boards and character design
51:00 Are we all driven by one dominant emotion?
54:00 The fragility of identity and metaphor of the belief system design
56:00 Ice skating, burnout, and overachievement culture
58:00 Sports as metaphor for identity, connection, and drive
59:00 Where to find Yellow Chair Collective and final thoughts
Transcription
Speaker 1 0:00
Shrink wrap radio, number 300 on the neuroscience of dreaming with Robert Haas.
Speaker 2 0:07
Shrink wrap radio, all the psychology you need to know, and just enough to make it dangerous. It’s all in your head. And now here’s your host, Dr Dave music.
Speaker 1 0:27
My return guest today, after a long absence, is Robert J Haas and we’ll be discussing recent developments in the neuroscience of dreaming. Robert Haas MS is author of the book Dream language. He’s also a director and past president of the International Association for the Study of dreams. He’s on the faculty at Hayden Institute for Dream leadership training and a former adjunct faculty for Dream studies at such institutions as Sonoma State University, Richland College and Scottsdale College, a former corporate executive scientist and researcher with training in Gestalt and humanistic psychology, he now devotes his skills to dream studies for which he has been a frequent guest on radio and TV and an internationally acclaimed lecturer and instructor for over 30 years. His unique, simple but powerful dream work approach is based on his training in Gestalt therapy and background in Jungian studies the neurobiology of dreaming, plus his pioneering research on the significance of color in dreams. Now here’s the interview. Bob Haas, welcome back to shrink wrap radio. Well, thank you. It’s great to be back. Yeah, it’s been five years since you were here, back on episode number 90, announcing the 2007 dreams conference and speaking about the language of dreams. Now this is going to be episode number 300 and you can help me celebrate, yeah, you can help me celebrate our 300th shrink wrap radio. And of course, after our interview, I’ll ask you to say a few words about the upcoming 29th annual iasd conference. That’s the International Association for the Study of dreams. But before we get into that, I understand you’ve been doing some work on recent developments in the neuroscience of dreaming.
Speaker 3 2:27
Yes, there’s a tremendous amount of interesting stuff going on now, particularly since over the last decade, certain researchers have been able to use brain scan equipment, PET scans, MRI, things of that sort, or fMRI, to understand what Saturn’s of the brain are active and inactive during the dreaming. Tremendous amount of research out there, and I basically just been kind of compiling it and reporting on it. Yeah,
Speaker 1 2:57
yeah. And you’ve done a terrific job. You sent me a couple of articles that that you’ve written, and very impressive. So what are some of the more exciting things that neurological research has discovered about the dreaming brain?
Speaker 3 3:10
Well, just just kind of going into past history, way back in 1952 the discovery of REM occurred, and at that point in time, we suddenly realized that we dream a great deal of our evening two hours, or roughly for adults, about 24% of our sleep time is spent in in dreaming, or in vivid dreaming. What is what typically happens in what’s known as the REM state, which is a rapid eye movement, but now what? What’s happened during through a lot of other testing and research has been done, as they found that we really dream throughout the entire night, even outside of REM state. However, the Dreaming is the dreaming that we think of as dreaming, which is the more vivid dreams and all still occur during this, this REM state. So there’s been a lot of focus with with brain scan type research on neuroscience, on the REM state as being more associated with the kind of vivid dreams that we typically think of. And what has occurred is that the researchers have found that during our this REM state or this more vivid dream state? A great deal of our brain is active. It’s actually awake. And there are other parts of the brain that are that the activity is diminished in or they’re relatively asleep, and they really create the sort of characteristics we see in a dream, for example, the parts of the brain that tend to be asleep, if I can use that simple term when we dream, are the parts of the frontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is our thinking brain, and the rational thinking part of our brain. If. And other areas like motion and parts of the brain responsible for waking consciousness remain pretty much inactive, and what that does is it tends to make our dreams the kind of bizarre characteristics that that we see in our dreams we because there’s no rational filtering going on or rational directing of the dream activities so dreams can hyper Connect.
Speaker 1 5:27
Yeah. Is that because that prefrontal part of the brain that you were talking about is asleep?
Speaker 3 5:34
Yeah, the dorsalatal prefrontal cortex is a part of the frontal cortex that really is responsible for our rational thought, and that tends to be inactive. But now that the a whole bunch of centers are active in our dreams, for instance, in particular, the emotional processing, the emotional brain, the emotional part of our brain, called the limbic system, is highly active, also parts of the frontal cortex, lower frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate, which deal with analytical problem solving, learning and problem solving, about those kinds of activities, are quite active. And the really interesting thing is that our visual our primary visual cortex, is not active, the part we see with which is interesting because we’re seeing our dreams. However, what is active are the centers all around that the association cortex in principally the visual association cortex. And what that means is that the things we see in our dreams are really associations, visual associations and visual metaphors associated with the stuff being processed more deeply within the brain. So, you know, people have worked with dreams a long time. Know that, you know, they look at Dream imagery as associations. However, now it’s been shown as to why that is that that visual association cortex is what’s creating the images in our dreams. So we see the sensitive pictures of what is going on inside of our brain, pictures of the emotions being processed, for example.
Speaker 1 7:12
You know, that part actually seems to me to be in line with some of Freud’s early insights. I mean, he talked a lot about associations, and he was, he was trained as a neurologist, and of course, they didn’t have all the tools that we have today. And boy, I think he would just be tickled.
Speaker 3 7:34
Stuff. It would be a lot of this is actually supportive of you, even more than Freud, yeah, particularly the part about how the brain can learn and how the brain does problem solving, dealing with unresolved issues of the day and providing cues as to how one might solve it, testing dream scenarios, and thus Actually self rewarding and learning. So there’s a lot of activity going on there that the June would be proud of as well.
Speaker 1 8:06
Yeah. Now that relates to the whole question of, you know, what’s the function of dreaming? Why has it evolved? What you know, maybe you can speak to that a bit.
Speaker 3 8:18
Okay, yeah, there has been an awful lot of theory, theories related to the function of dreaming over time, and some of the brain scan activity is actually helping to consolidate some of those theories into a few areas that seem to make sense. And one of them, the first thing, is the finding that the limbic system, or this emotional brain is highly active has led a lot of researchers to believe that the brain is processing unresolved emotional or at least emotionally important issues of the day. A bunch of researchers now feel that that’s the case that we’re really dealing with emotion and emotional processing in our dreaming activity, also the fact that the active frontal regions, the anterior cingulate, cingulate, and some other areas of the brain are active. This is an indication that perhaps the brain is involved in learning and problem solving and protect in particular, adaptive learning, which is something revenue. So talked about
Speaker 1 9:28
in his theories was that I don’t recognize that.
Speaker 3 9:31
Rebso, I’m sorry. Robin, so announcing that correctly, yeah, his theory is that what we’re doing is we’re we’re learning to adapt to threat, threats in our daily life. He considers it somewhat of an evolutional thing, but where our brain learns to adapt to threats. However, one of the probably the best and most expanded theories is what Ernest Hartman. Has talked about he he basically says what’s happening is we’re creating new connections and dreams. We are weaving new material into established memory in an emotionally guided fashion. In other words, emotions guide our learning and dreams. And he basically says that the images created in the visual association cortex are picture metaphors. They are essentially a way our minds make connections, a way of noting emotional similarities. So the picture of a door and a dream might relate to feeling open or needing to protect yourself, etc, in waking life. So there’s an emotional similarity being pictured in the dream, and that they not only are making these new connections, but they’re revealing new perspectives. So in in his way of thinking, his theory is that that we’re actually learning something in our dreams, and we wake up from our dreams with perhaps a new perspective on things. And I think most of us can kind of sense that when a lot of times we’ll go to bed at night with a real problem on our minds, wake up in the morning and it seems to feel differently to us, we have a little bit of a different perspective on it. So so Hartman may be right about that we may be actually making new connections. He calls it being he calls it hyper connected, and actually learning something from it. Well, of
Speaker 1 11:29
course, I’m also thinking now about all the scientific breakthroughs and, you know, associated with dreams that there are a number of famous examples of people who have been scientists or writers, creative people who’ve been struggling with a problem, with an issue, thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it, and then finally, they have a breakthrough as a result of the dream. Yeah,
Speaker 3 11:57
probably one of the best books, if people are interested in that. On that as Deidre Barrett’s committee of sleep came out a few years ago, but she did a whole bunch of qualitative research on those incidents of creative problem solving and dreams. And what Ernest says about that is when we sleep and dream, because the rational centers are not guiding things. Our emotions are guiding things. Our brain hyper connects. That is, if we have a problem to solve, you know, infinite number of connections can be made on with past memories, past solutions, new creative solutions, etc, by neural hyper connection in our brain, and all this tends to get sorted out or selected as we dream and potential new creative solutions can emerge, yes,
Speaker 1 12:55
and I’m hearing in the in the thing about trying to deal with the unfinished business of the day, I’m hearing echoes again of both Freud and Jung. In terms of Freud talked about day residue and felt that there was always something in the dream from the previous day. And I’ve always found that to be true. If I look carefully at my dreams, and then, what is it that young adds to that? And how does, how does this new? How do these neuro scientific findings support Jung’s view? Okay,
Speaker 3 13:31
yeah, let me see if I can answer that. One thing Freud talked about is condensation, where various images will condense into new solutions. So that’s similar to what Hartman mentioned as well. So there is actually a part of the brain called the right inferior parietal cortex, which tends to create the scene of the dream and probably helps with this condensation as well. In other words, if you have two different ideas, two different thoughts that that emerge out of this hyper connected activity going on in your brain trying to resolve some problems, they will merge into a single image, and that image will represent a new perspective or a metaphor on the solution. So one way that the dream tends to work is to basically create these connections that may not have been observable before, may not have been thought of before. So that’s one way that they go about problem solving. And Freud would be proud of that. But what you basically said is the dreams go further than that. They he had a theory called compensation. He said that dreams will actually compensate for your misconceptions in life. In other words, they’ll guide you. They will show you where you’re having a problem, and they will guide you to. Towards a new solution. Now it turns out that when you look at the functions of the frontal part of the brain that are active in dreams, particularly the anterior cingulate, the basal ganglia, medial prefrontal cortex and some orbit frontal parts of the brain, those are all involved in waking life problem solving at an unconscious level. And basically, what they do, they’re responsible for your gut feeling. In other words, you know, you’re trying to solve a problem, you’ll have this gut feeling, something right about this solution? Well, that’s what’s going on. I’m missing
Unknown Speaker 15:33
a word there. The What feeling,
Speaker 3 15:35
yeah, the gut feeling, gut feel, you know, intuition, gut feeling, okay, right? Okay. And so what happens in dreams is that part of the brain is pretty active. And some of the latest research on those centers of the brain basically indicate something like this. Is the way that they act together in solving a problem. Is the basal ganglia, anterior cingulate will will first recognize that there’s a conflict or a problem. The anterior cingulate will mediate that problem. Will guide the rest of the active brain towards finding a solution. It will also imagine, in waking life, it’ll imagine new solutions. So in you know, the counterpart of that in dreaming is it will create dream scenarios, it will spit out little dream trials to test various solutions. And then when the anterior cingulate also has been shown to provide cues to other parts of the brain. So this is this guidance, perhaps that Jung talked about, that there is a guiding function going on in the dreams, and it will select solutions that work, that it observes to work. So there’s a least a function there capable of selecting green scenarios that work. Also the part of the frontal part of the brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, contains a capability. For it, for having a sense of knowing. So there’s this sort of internal wisdom that can come up within the dream. And so basically, you’re getting a function here where you’re testing dream scenarios, you you’re getting cues as to how to move forward, which is the guidance that Jung talked about, the you get a sense of knowing or capability for that. So then the these parts of the brain can essentially pick a solution that works. And what I’ve observed in dreams is a self rewarding this is when you get those very positive dreams, the ones that you know you’re going along and dream also the dream ends in a positive fashion, which is the way the dream has of emphasizing the learning. It’s kind of a emotional reinforcement that, hey, this is the correct way to go, that you wake up with now you sometimes you’ll get the opposite the nightmare, where you have emotional reinforcement, but it will be a reinforcement towards, hey, this is right, because there is a sense of knowing inside the dream. So this emotionally reinforced, this emotional reinforcement is what Hartman says is, is drives the learning process. You learn from that. So there’s a sense that there may be an actually emotionally report, reinforced learning process taking in place in dreams.
Speaker 1 18:29
I’m wondering about what young calls big dreams, and I’m wondering if that somehow ties into the emotional reinforcement.
Speaker 3 18:37
Yeah, exactly that. You know, that’s exactly what you were talking about. This is when you make a real, real neural change in the learning process. You know, you really change something in your personality, and you get these big dreams where you have a very huge amount of emotional reinforcement towards the learning of whatever was transpiring in the dream.
Speaker 1 19:02
I seem to recall some research that suggested that over the course of the night, when they wake people up every time that they go into REM sleep, that there’s a kind of evolutionary process that seems to be happening with the dreams, starting out very symbolic and and then reaching greater clarity towards the last dream cycle in the morning. Does that ring a bell? And I’m wondering if it might relate to what you were saying about the testing of different possible Yeah,
Speaker 3 19:34
yeah. That’s pretty much how it seems to take place. That’s the observation, anyway. Is you know, sometimes good dreams get real complex and they flip between topics because there’s so many other aspects to the problem that come up. So the dreams will start to slosh back and forth during the night, but when they’re working on a singular issue, you can have, if you can remember enough dreams from the evening, you’ll actually see that each dream is taught. Talking about a similar theme, and there tends to be clarity over the night as as that goes on. And I’ve been actually able to collect a number of those examples and show how it really does appear that the brain is testing various solutions. It’ll what it’ll first do is, usually the first set of dreams will be illustrating your feelings, illustrating the situation you’ve gotten yourself in. It’ll illustrate it metaphorically. Then it may do it once or twice, and it’ll add a little twist to it. It’ll it’ll bring in separate ideas. And then finally, if the dreams last lawn up, and if the problem actually gets resolved, you’ll get some your final dreams will be quite clear, and you’ll you’ll see direction setting actually taking place in your dream. Let me give you an example. Yeah, that’d be wonderful. Okay, here’s one that’s kind of interesting, this dream had kept happened to an executive. He was running a division, and he was told that he may, he may lose a job, but he was like in these late 50s. So he figured this is the end of his career. The end of his life is big disaster for him. So he had dreams all night when he was that he was on this boat in an underground tunnel, and all night he’d be just on the boat. He’d be looking out the windows into darkness, trying to find a way out, trying to find a way to escape. And then later he would, he would be dreaming that he was wanting someone to help save him. You know, somebody helped me. Okay, so here was the dream basically representing his feelings. The dreams picture our feelings is what’s going on. So the dream was picturing his feelings about being trapped in this endless situation, no way to get out, no way to control the situation, etc. Well, then suddenly, towards one of the later dreams, a voice behind him said, no one is at the wheel. And at that moment, now, this was the guidance that that you talked about, and in the compensation that you talked about that said, Hey, you’re looking at this problem wrong. And he said, No one’s at the wheel. And looked down, and he saw that the wheel of the boat, there was absolutely nobody driving the boat. He was just kind of floating around through this tunnel. So there’s a great metaphor for saying, hey, nobody’s in charge of this situation. Okay? And at that moment, he got the thought in his mind, this is the the new information, new way of looking at things, new perspective that dreams can bring about. You got the thought in that? Well, maybe I better grab hold of the wheel. So he goes down. He grabs hold of the wheel, which is kind of a metaphor for take charge of your life. Take charge of the situation. Guy. You can’t nobody else is gonna help you out. So he goes and grabs hold the wheel. At that moment, the dream changed itself, reinforced by having having the boat exit this ice cave that he was in into a beautiful, calm stream, sunlight in the air, music in the air, singing, etc. In other words, it was this big dream that basically was self reinforcing this as the correct solution. So the dream was metaphorically saying, Look, guys, nobody’s gonna help you out of the situation. Take Charge your life. And this is the way out. You know, this is things will be better. And so in so you can see the processes Jung was talking about taking place in this dream is pretty obvious. Yeah,
Speaker 1 23:47
that’s a great example. You know, one of the things that students often ask me is, why are dreams so bizarre? Why don’t they just come out and say what they mean? If they’re meaningful, why don’t they just come out and say it?
Speaker 3 23:59
Well, that’s a really good question, and one of the reasons for that is that the centers that are actually inactive in the dreaming process, not only are the rational centers inactive, but some of this brain center is responsible for what’s known as episodic memory, our working memory with the ability to recall an episode an actual situation, those are really inactive in dreaming, and it’s probably part of the reason why we don’t recall our dreams very well. Yeah, I
Unknown Speaker 24:36
wanted to ask you about that. Yeah. I’ll get
Speaker 3 24:39
to that the second but what happens in the dream is because the the episodic memory is inactive, the actual thing that occurred, for example, in this guy’s dream, the fact that his boss told him he was fired, did not occur in the dream, but the part the dream was working on. Brain was working on the emotional impact to him, to his self worth, to the situation, is what the brain was working on, because that part of the brain is active. The emotional centers of the brain, the limbic system, is acting so it selectively works on emotionally important situations the day, but the emotions and the emotional impact surrounding that not so much recalling the event itself, and it’s because the episodic memory is inactive.
Speaker 1 25:30
Now, dreams are I like to say they’re kind of like smoke. You know? They kind of dissipate unless we rehearse them to ourselves immediately upon waking or write them down in a journal. Probably most of us can’t remember more than five or or 10 dreams over the course of our lifetime, unless we’ve made special effort to do so. Why is that? Why is it so hard to why do they just disappear?
Speaker 3 25:59
Yeah, good question. Well, a big part of it has to do with what I just mentioned, the fact that episodic or working memory is offline. And there’s a whole bunch of reasons that a lot of research has been done on on why we can’t recall our dreams, and it is been linked at times to such factors as thin boundaries, the ability to visualize. People who visualize more can, for example, recall the dreams more openness, creativity. Some studies have shown that people who are more creative tend to have more recall of dreams and various other physiological and external factors, such as, for example, just melatonin levels near the end of the sleep cycle, and how we our sleep cycle aligns With our circadian rhythms and surrounding light levels, for example, will change melatonin levels and cause us to wake in different cycles. So all these things have been studied, but basically it has to do with memory. It has to do with episodic memory, a very recent piece of research by Marzano and team, which was reported this last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that there really is a neurological mechanism for green recall that seems to be taking place. They found that when they put EEGs on a number of subjects and control subjects in their in their lab that several certain frontal and temporal regions in the brain which are involved in encoding memory episodes in the waking state were also active in the dream state or in the sleep state. And for example, they found that when these areas became active within about five minutes before waking, usually there was dream recall and they found that with recallers and non recallers, there was a different activity in these areas. So it really does seem to be part of how your memory, how each individual’s memory systems operate, and that maybe have a whole bunch of other factors, like psychological factors and and chemical factors and things associated with but there are truly neurological differences in recallers and non recallers.
Speaker 1 28:39
Yeah, that’s fascinating and and I would think there would have to be something like that going on. Let me run something by you. One of Freud’s early notions was of the dream censor, that one of the reasons that dream seems so strange is that forbidden wishes have been disguised through a process of dream censorship. But in reality, we know that people do sometimes dream of things that would be morally abhorrent to them. Dreams are not immoral, but amoral. That is moral considerations don’t necessarily come into play. Would this be because areas of the prefrontal lobes involved in moral judgment are not active in REM sleep? Well,
Speaker 3 29:24
actually, the the answer is yes, and no, I don’t think a lot of people believe that Freud was correct on on his assumption that there’s a censorship going on, because it’s quite the actual opposite. I think when you really observe dreams, you’ll see it, nothing gets censored Exactly. Your whole soul is revealed in more detail you would ever want it to be in a dream. And so I think censorship is it was definitely not the case. But when it comes to moral judgment, there’s two parts to moral judgment. There is a there’s an internal, unconscious sense, like I said, a sense of knowing, a sense of what’s correct, which is dominated by parts of the dream or parts of the brain that are actually active in dream, things like the medial prefrontal cortex and and those lower regions are really involved in social interaction, and they really do understand how the world works at an unconscious level, and what works and what doesn’t. So there is a sense of moral judgment, like I said, your gut feeling, your intuition, your you know the little angel standing in your corner, you’re in the right corner of your shoulder saying, Hey, this is the right way. All that seems to take place at an unconscious level and is involved in the part of the dream that seems to know how things work. There’s another part of moral judgment which seems to dominate our waking life, and that’s the rational parts of the brain, the dorsal Lara, prefrontal cortex and all the memories and associations that we have been fed through our life, through, you know, a religious upbringing, through our parental upbringing, through society, things of that sort. So there’s a rational set of moral judgments that in waking life tend to override the unconscious set of moral judgments, but in dreams that rational stuff is is offline. Okay, so the rational moral judgments would typically not find their way into dreams, except where they have created a conflict. And so what one of that’s, you know, this point is a good one, because what it brings up is the exactly the kind of stuff the dreams deal with. Dreams deal with with conflicts, conflicting perceptions and they will, for instance, the basal ganglia and the anterior cingulate are heavily involved in detecting conflicts, anomalies, things that don’t fit. So when you have in a waking situation that relates to a moral judgment and it doesn’t fit your internal gut feeling, it doesn’t fit what you know internally, the dream will work on that. There’s an example, one example I have that of a in fact, a number of here’s a good one. This person was who was getting involved in a spiritual concept, new spiritual concepts, which just seemed right to him, and it really clicked and seemed very white, right? Very, very good. But these were in conflict with his upbringing as as a child. I think it was a Catholic upbringing or something as a child. And so he had, and he was, he was also, I think, in Spanish origin, so it probably was a Catholic upbringing. But he had a dream one night where he was flying in this airplane, and this airplane landed in a circular fashion in this Latin American village, and as it landed, there was a priest standing in the center of the circle, and the priest had a rifle and said, Get out of here, threatening our village. So you can see the kind of a metaphoric standpoint he was in this new airplane. This the he was flying around with these new concepts, but they were definitely in conflict with and threatening his old Latin American child childhood upbringing and his religious upbringing. So that’s how the dream will show these conflicts, and then it’ll go on to work on on those particular conflicts.
Speaker 1 33:52
Often there’s a kind of recognition in the dream that you’ve kind of alluded to in our mutual friend Jeremy Taylor’s talks about the aha experience. And I know you’ve written a bit about the moment of surprise. Say a little bit about that in the brain, this moment of surprise.
Speaker 3 34:10
Yeah, one of the things I’ve noted in trying to observe how these particular brain centers might might work, is that when these connections are made, there seem, they seem to and a lot of people say, is there a message in my dream? But if there’s any kind of message or compensation or connections that are being made in our dreams, they’re often observed at moments of surprise in the dream itself and in the last example, excuse me, example I gave of the guy floating around in the boat and trying to find his way out, the moment when the connection was made that no one was at the wheel. That was the moment of surprise and the dream. He looked down, and he was surprised to see that there was absolutely nobody controlling the boat. And so if you, if you look throughout, look at your dreams, and you’re wondering, Where is this compensation taking place? Where is this message from a quote, messaging quotes, because dreams don’t always give you a message you can understand. But where is this? Look for the points of surprise in your dream, and you will see that in there is a picture metaphor of something, some new insight that you can pull out of the dream. What
Speaker 1 35:36
about lucid dream? Sometimes lucid dreamers talk about using that moment of surprise as a trigger to become aware of the fact that one is dreaming and and to go into that lucid state. What does neuroscience have to tell us about lucidity?
Speaker 3 35:57
Well, lucidity, some of the more the later research. There was some earlier research done with EEG that was, I think labers did, Steven Burge, where he saw that when he looked at the EG and the person was in the lucid state, the EEG looked very much like wake of the waking state consciousness. And what some of the later research has shown is this part of the medial frontal cortex, from a part of the brain that regulates cognitive control, becomes active, becomes more active than it was. So in essence, we are truly arriving at a somewhat waking, conscious like state. However, the rest of the brain is still dreaming. Okay, so that we have a degree of free will, we have a degree of consciousness that we did not have before, and a degree of self reflection, we suddenly realize we are ourselves in the dreams. We’re not just, you know, wandering through the or having the dream drag us through, through our actions in the dream, we are now able to control our actions. We observe ourselves. We see ourselves as our ego self, so it allows us then to do some things that we wouldn’t normally be doing in dreams. Oh, it’s kind of interesting, if people have been actually healing on themselves and things like that. So there’s maybe some power in that. But one of the things that’s a lot of fun to do, and it also is an interesting way to explore what you call the unconscious, is to turn around and quit flying in dreams and doing all that kind of stuff. That’s fun, but turn around and talk to the dream cares. Act, ask them where they came from. Ask them, you know, questions about themselves, and you’ll get some interesting answers, because, you know, in one sense, they’re all parts of you, so you’ll be finding out about other parts of your personality. But an even more exciting and really interesting thing to do is realize that there is this collective unconscious. There is this intelligence behind the dream that you can tap into. For example, one of the things I like to do is turn around and say, dream. Show me something I need to know. And what will typically happen is the dream will sparkle out, you know, the scene of the dream will spark an out. Neil in the dream will maybe shoot you down a tunnel or take you to another dream, and it becomes a very meaningful dream that you’ll you’ll find yourself now entering into,
Speaker 1 38:41
well, that sounds really exciting. I have to confess, I’ve not had much success at lucidity. I’ve had maybe two or three dreams that I can recall where lucidity kind of more or less spontaneously happened. How did you manage to did that come naturally to you, or did you go through some kind of training to develop that? No,
Speaker 3 39:02
it’s it’s been with me. It was just natural. I don’t do it that much either. It’s usually somewhat spontaneous, although I find that if I really want to do it, I’ll put the intent in my mind before I go to sleep at night. And that will usually have a I’ll have a better chance of having a lucid dream than than otherwise. There are a couple good books, or some, some books by La Burge on some of his techniques. There’s also one out by Robert Wagner and some co authors called lucid dreaming. That’s that’s got some really good hints as to how to trigger lucid dreaming, and also talks a little bit about what I just mentioned, how to what to do in your lucid dreams to explore this, this new state of consciousness that that you find yourself in, yeah,
Speaker 1 39:50
well, all these techniques have evolved for working on one’s dreams that we collectively refer to them as dream work. Breck, and how does, how do these neuroscientific findings relate to those methods, either supporting them or not supporting them?
Speaker 3 40:12
Well, I like to the way I like to work with with dreams and feel that they’re really the most effective dream work methods are the ones that work with the dream the way your brain does. Okay. For example, talking about a dream and trying to guess what it means, you’re using a part of your brain that was asleep at the time. So it’s not going to work. It’s rare that it works. You’ll go on for hours trying to figure out what a dream means. So the rational thought about dreaming is not going to work. You’ve got to think like the dreaming brain did. So the parts of the brain that are active are responsible for what I mentioned before. They’re responsible for seeing things in terms of association and metaphor. So working with Association and metaphor, which is a fairly common way of working with dreams, is a is right on, you know that’s that’s going to get you further than talking about what the dream means. In other words, if I dream of a door, my association with the doors can be different than yours. I may think it’s an opening, somebody else will associate with a closing. So getting those associations out are necessary. The second thing that’s absolutely necessary is understanding your dreams about your feelings. It’s about emotions. It’s about emotional processing for so techniques that work with emotional content is absolutely important. And then thirdly, the union approach, essentially looking for the insight or the new connections that are taking place in the dreams. Look for the moments of surprise. Look for the seeming guidance or new discoveries in dreams. And also look for how the groom dream self rewards or emotionally, basically learns at the end that the emotional emphasis either positive or negative, because there’s there’s a message in that you know you’re either being led by the dream in the right direction or you’re being given some sort of Warning. So using what we’ve learned about the brain in in working with the dream is is probably the most effective way. Yeah,
Speaker 1 42:28
let me ask you again about that aha experience as a guide to that you’re on the right track in terms of understanding the dream. Okay, because you said surprise in the dream that’s one thing, but then there’s this kind of surprise that can happen, say, in a dream group, where people are sharing their own different associations, and at some point the dreamer may light up with this kind of aha sense of recognition,
Speaker 3 42:57
right, right? Well, what happens in dream groups is people are working with associations and metaphors. They’re suggesting associations and metaphors, and all of a sudden, one of them will click with the dreamer that was pretty close to the association that might have created the dream image. So that’s what the AHA is. It’s like, okay, that connects, that connects, and that’s important and dream groups. What’s actually, actually the method I use is much quicker and much much stronger, because it actually allows the dream to speak by speak itself. In other words, we can sit around and suggest associations and maybe one or more click but if you just let the image in the dream. Speak, you’ll get something that you’ll get the emotions immediately that created the image. I’ll give you example, and it’s called Gestalt therapy. I was training Gestalt work, okay? And I do a very simple version of Gestalt. I do a scripted six question Gestalt. My students call it the six magic questions, but it’s just a way of allowing the thing in the dream to speak and then and the emotions to come out. So you’re not guessing at what created that thing or what what it means. So here’s an example. This was a girl who was she was absolutely frozen in fear of taking on a new job for fear of being fired. She had been fired before from her job after her job was done, after what she was hired to do was done, they told her they no longer needed her, and she thought that was going to happen to her again. This new job was clear across country. She didn’t want to sell her house, and she had, at the time of the dream, she had to, she had to be on on the job in like, three weeks, and she hadn’t even sold her house yet, and this is going across country, so she was totally frozen. Well, she had the following dream. She dreamed that her friend Judy was painting she had painted her walls Gray, and her friend Judy came in and painted them blue and red. And in the dream, she tried to wipe it off, and then woke up screaming. It was a terrifying nightmare. And. Didn’t sound like a nightmare, but that was, it was a night wear to her, wow. And so I said, look around the dream and pick something that attracts your attention, because I want you to become that thing. And she looked around the ring. She said, the rag, you know, it just, just drew her attention. And this is important, because when you’re working with gesture at work, you want to go with the thing that somehow draws you to it, because there’s some emotions in that that are important to you. So she became the rag. And I said, Okay, as the rag Tell me about yourself, she says, I’m a rag in somebody’s hands. My purpose is to be handy and clean things up so it’s kind of represented what your job situation, says, but then she goes on to say, I like being available, needed and used, but I fear getting thrown away when the job is done. So this was a rag speaking, but you could see the emotions that came out when she was the rag not only describe how she felt about the job, why she wanted the job, but also the fears came out. They were spoken immediately, the fears getting thrown away after the job is done. And we didn’t find out about this job situation until after working on the dream. So you can see that the core of her being frozen came out in becoming the thing in the dream, allowing it to speak and looking at the conflict between I like being available, needed and used, and my fear is being thrown away after the job is done. She was frozen between those two things and couldn’t move. And we wouldn’t have known that by sitting around doing associations, thinking about the dream, you have to really let the dream speak in order to get these emotions to come out. Yeah, and so that’s why I like that.
Speaker 1 46:49
Well, I’m sure my listeners are wondering, what are the six magic questions?
Speaker 3 46:56
Okay, well, the six magic questions just guide you through this Gestalt work you could, you could freely become the image and then just speak but, but they help guide you through it. The first one is when you’re when you’re when she was the rag. I basically said, What are you? What is your purpose? And she says, My purpose is to be handy and clean things up. The last next one is what you like about being the rag? And she says, I like being available, needed and use what you dislike? A beat about being the rag. I dislike being thrown away after the job is done. What do you fear about being the rag? She said, discarded. And what do you desire about being the rag? And she said, to be useful and wanted to be used and useful. So that’s the you can see when you ask those six questions. You help to guide the person through very important questions coming very important responses coming out. And it also allows you to get to the conflict, the I like, I dislike, I fear and I desire, usually reveal the conflict the person is in that created the image to begin with. That’s what Freud would be happy with, because it’s a condensation of the image. Is a condensation of the conflicting feelings.
Speaker 1 48:17
I love the way that you’re able to digest these complex theories and then rewrap them in a in an easy to grasp fashion. I wanted to ask you about Alan Hobson, who I know has been one of one of the movers and shakers, and I heard him interviewed years ago on a radio program, and essentially, it seemed like he was saying that, well, dreams have no meaning. They’re not really expressing anything. We just kind of project those meanings on to them. Has he changed his view as time has gone along?
Speaker 3 48:54
Well, what is so interesting? It just about everything that I have talked about in here from the neurosciences for sick. It came from Alan, his colleagues, and, of course, Matt, and very, very many other studies, but, but Alan provided the core for all this. So it’s funny, that funny that he actually says that. But he’s trying. He’s trying to be a peer researcher, and basically, until he can sort out the, you know what I have just spoken about, they sort out the fact that there is a meaning, actually, that the dreams function to provide a meaning, he’s pretty well Not going to admit to it, and it is. There’s still a lot of controversy over how much of this meaning comes out as we dissect the dream and how much was actually there in the dream itself. So you know, he’s going to be a little reluctant to cross that boundary unless it’s absolutely proven. But I think Alan. For example, is, while it was one of the first to say that that, because the limbic system lights up in our dreams, it gives us a reason to believe that the dream really is working on with all emotional issues. And so gradually, as he can see the proof, he will, he will be willing to speak it. But he is, he is, he is one of the, one of the very best researchers that we have in the field and, and it’s, you know, so I think he’s just trying to retain, you know, that basic sense of research, yeah, and it’s not going to make statements unless they really can be proven. Yeah,
Speaker 1 50:42
yeah. Well, I can respect that however. You know, as as a therapist, to me, it doesn’t really matter which came first. You know whether, whether it’s projection after the dream has happened, or whether, you know, those issues actually form the dream, either way, it’s revealing of, yeah, underlying material. Yet,
Speaker 3 51:06
I think what I had observed we did a whole session on is there, is there meaning dreaming in our last conference? And we’re going to do another one this time. But I think what the researchers have now done is divided, divided function. What is the function of dreams? From is there meaning in dreams? Because I think most people realize that just as you stated that whether the dream inherently had the meaning or you pulled it out as you used it for your therapy, there is meaning, and it’s personal meaning to the individual. It’s meaningful to the therapist, etc, and it does reveal what’s going on inside the person, like I just showed in this example. But is that part of the function of dreaming? Is the dream really there to do that? So I think this division between function and meaning will help sort out some of this argument. Yeah.
Speaker 1 51:54
Now you just mentioned the conference, and I believe that you’re the chair of this 29th conference that’s coming, right? That, right? Yeah, yeah. So, so give us the pitch, okay,
Speaker 3 52:06
yeah. We’ve got a every year, the International Association for the Study of dreams puts on an annual conference, and it’s an international conference, totally global. There’s usually about 30 countries represented in these conferences. This is our 29th one. It will be in Berkeley this year at the Berkeley Marina Doubletree. It’s called sailing on the sea of dreams, and it will occur on June 22 through 26 it’s a four and a half day event, totally open to the public. There’ll be 180 presenters,
Unknown Speaker 52:44
really tough part is choosing which things to go, yeah.
Speaker 3 52:47
But what we do, and these are people from all over the world, what we do, though, is we divide the conference into multiple tracks. So if you’re interested in research, there’s a whole research track that doesn’t interfere with the other tracks. So you can see everything there is going on in research. And there’s some somewhere around 50% or so, just just in research alone. And there’s a clinical track. So you know, if you’re trying to get your you know, clinical CES, which we are, or interested in, in what’s going on purely from a psychological standpoint. You go to that track if you’re interested in spiritual aspects of dreams, or the Psy aspect of dreams, or dream art, things of that sort, there will be tracks on that, even anthropological tracks on how different cultures around the world. Deal with the deal with dream. So we have we divided into tracks, plus we will record the conference, at least the presentation section sessions, not the workshops, but the presentation session. So people can, if they can’t go to everything which you can’t, they’ll at least be able to get recordings. And this year we have some really good keynotes. Fred Alan Wolf, Dr quantum, okay, you start in the movie. What the Bree What the Bleep Do We Know will be our opening keynote? Patricia Garfield, who has is a prize winning offer, author of over 11 books on dreams, will be another keynote. And then lastly, Tracy Khan, last but not least, Tracy Khan, PhD, she’ll be talking on research, Dream research, via another key keynote. We have a whole bunch of it’s not just a conference, but a whole bunch of fun events too. We’ve got a green dream art exhibition that will be taking place at the conference and at a local gallery, we’ve got a Dream Telepathy contest run by, actually, Bob and Castle, who did a lot of the early Dream Telepathy research. So you’ll get to participate in that and it. Dreams. The conference ends with a costume dream ball and where we all dream, all dream. We all dress up as our dream characters and have a lot of fun. There’s a dream hike along the bay, and also a cruise at the San Francisco Bay one evening where we have a dessert cruise the chocolate fountain, so you can drink or eat as much chocolate as you want. So that’s a conference. And if you’re interested, go to www.as dreams.org, that’s the iasd site. That’s a S, D, R, E, A, M, s.org,
Speaker 1 55:38
for more information, okay, well, thanks for that run down. I look forward to seeing you there, and hopefully some of my listeners as well. So Bob Haas, thanks for being my guest once again today on shrink wrap radio. Thank you.
Speaker 1 56:01
I hope you learned as much as I did from this engaging conversation on the neuroscience of dreaming with Bob Haas. I’m really impressed by the way he’s able to keep all those brain regions and their functions on the tip of his tongue, given that he’s not really a neuroscientist himself, rather, he’s a dedicated instructor who’s really pulled together a lot of the latest research in a very compelling way. I was particularly glad to be reminded of his six step approach to working on dreams, which, as he mentioned, is basically derived from Gestalt therapy. I was quite impressed by Gestalt therapy in my early days of clinical practice, and use that approach quite a bit in my therapy at that time, including dream work. So of course, I’m quite familiar with the technique, but Bob has added something really nice here by boiling the essence of Gestalt dream work into a series of six simple steps that anyone can understand and use now, of course, the idea of giving dream characters a voice can also be seen as Jungian active imagination. I’m not aware of Fritz Perls, the pioneer of Gestalt therapy, ever having given any credit to Jung, there are some real similarities, and I don’t know if pearls was perhaps influenced by Jung or just happened to develop his ideas independently. Pearls was originally trained as a psychoanalyst, so there would be some theoretical kinship. In any case, I have a copy of Bob’s 2005 book Dream language, which I pulled off the shelf after our interview, and I’d forgotten that he had his six magic steps spelled out on the very first page of that book. I’m happy to be reminded of these because I’m teaching a lifelong learning class on dream work at Sonoma State University, which starts in a couple of weeks, and this will be a good technique to share with those students. So thanks again to Bob for giving me a lot of fresh ammunition to bring to my own teaching.
Speaker 4 58:07
That’s right. Shrink Wrap. Radio coming at you now. Yo, everybody, let’s get down. There’s a new MC in town talking psychology interviews. Dr Dave is all the rave. Ain’t no slouch on the digital couch. He’s on the pod podcast. Got the vibe you want to be in the know. Talking shrink wrap radio, shrink wrap radio, shrink wrap radio, I’m talking shrink wrap radio. Radio, shrink wrap radio. All right.
Speaker 1 58:52
Hello again, everyone. Welcome to the Big 300th anniversary show. Yay. In the past, I’ve tried to do something different to celebrate the 100th and the 200th episodes. Union analyst Monica Wickman has been an enthusiastic supporter of this effort, and she suggested that she’d be up for interviewing me for this episode as a way of marking the occasion. But I was a bit shy, and time has a way of just moving ahead, and I wanted to get the next episode out. So I know some of you out there have been on board for all 300 episodes. When I first got the idea for shrink wrap radio, some seven years ago, I had no vision of how long it would go on or how much ground we would cover. Looking back, I have to say, it’s been a very fulfilling journey, and I feel blessed by all of you who’ve come along for the ride. I have been working a bit ahead. So it’s now several weeks since I conducted the interview you just heard with Bob Haas. I’ve already been teaching my dreams. Last for two weeks for Sonoma State University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Program, and I’m happy to report that it’s going well. All of this brings us much closer to the International Association for the Study of dreams conference that Bob Haas talked about that’s coming up in June at the Berkeley Marina double tree. That’s June 22 through the 26th of 2012 and you’re all invited to attend. And you’ll find a link to the conference website in the show notes at shrink wrap radio.com and don’t forget that you can earn four continuing education units in dream work for listening to selected past interviews on dreams and you can be sure that more dream courses will be on the way as time goes by. And closely related are the 26 continuing education units you can earn, along with a certificate of completion on Union approaches. Just go to the store tab on our shrink wrap radio.com site for more information. At present, there is no new wise counsel episode to announce. I think there are a few more left in the queue, and so I’ll let you know as they get put on the wise counsel site, and there are also no new transcripts. Those of you who signed up to transcribe episodes, please finish them up or let me know that you won’t be able to do so, so I can reassign them to other volunteers, as always. Big thanks to all of you who have made one time or continuing financial contributions to help support shrink wrap radio. If you appreciate the in depth coverage you get here and haven’t yet added your financial support, please join the ranks of those who have made that commitment. In fact, your donation would be a wonderful way to celebrate this 300th episode and help us to get to number 400 and don’t forget our amazon.com links, both for the books you hear about here and for all your Amazon purchases.
Speaker 5 1:02:11
Hello. My name is Kelly Sullivan Walden. Some people call me Dr dream. I’m a hypnotherapist, Dream therapist and author of the book. I have the strangest dream, and I’m on the couch with Dr Dave.
Speaker 1 1:02:24
Well, how appropriate. It just so happens that my next interview will also be about dream work, and my guest will be Kelly Sullivan Walden. More about that in a bit. First, let’s listen to a few recent emails from our shrink wrap radio listener community. First we hear from Patricia, who responded to my thanks for both a one time and a continuing contribution. And I wrote her, thinking she might have accidentally contributed twice, and she responded, Hi, David, yes, those were intentional. I’ve been listening for a couple of months, but hadn’t gotten around to recharging my PayPal account so I could donate. Finally took care of that and sent a retroactive donation as well as the subscription. Thanks for all the great work you do. I listen to both podcasts regularly now, and I feel my happy dons have increased as a result. Best regards Pat. And I love that reference to happy Don’s from a recent interview. I’d already forgotten about the term, and it made me smile even just now, just seeing the word again. And of course, I’m smiling widely for receiving these two donations from a relatively recent listener who’s who’s joined, unfortunately, wise counsel is going away. They’re just a few more episodes in the queue, and then that’ll be all for wise counsel. But it just means I’ll be doing more shrink wrap radios. Really. Nothing changes that much since, since I’m the person who chooses the interviewees and sets up the show. And the only difference is I tended to go I tend to go into I spend more time here on shrink wrap radio, since that was the first one. That’s my first passion. Next we hear from Jason, who also responded to a thank you from me for his donation. And Jason writes, David, you are most welcome. I was introduced to shrink wrap radio via my depth psychology program that I’m finishing up at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Tom Eisner provided the class with a link to your Monica Wickman interview on alchemy. Since then, I’ve been listening to many of your shows. In particular the Jungian oriented ones had learned a bit just from listening, and it’s fun to get a voice attached to some of the authors. The interview with Tom Eisner came together really well, I thought since listening to. Show, I’ve been interviewed myself. After listening to the interview with Jane Teresa Anderson, I signed up to have a dream of mine as material for Dream working on her show. It comes out April 6. She’s good. I had to keep reminding myself that she doesn’t know me. I had been meaning to donate for a little while, and your frequent reminders were helpful. Keep up the good work, Jason. Well, I’m glad to hear, Jason that the frequent reminders worked and weren’t too offensive. And April 6 has already come and gone, so I will have to go to Jane Teresa Anderson’s website and listen to the dream work that she did with you that’ll be very interesting to hear. She was a great guest here. I know she’d be up for coming back, and perhaps I will bring her back. Finally, here’s one more from long time listener and supporter Jo In Australia, and she writes, Hi David. I just wanted to let you know how very much I enjoyed your interview with Dr Peter Flom on your wise counsel podcast. Such a dynamic conversation, and most interesting to hear about the disorder that he lives with and has adapted to so very well. It’s a great pity that you will not be continuing the wise counsel series, and I’m sure your work there will be greatly missed by listeners there, you certainly are leaving on a very high note, just when I thought that interview would be hard to top, I listened to shrink wrap radio episode number 299, and what a wonderful interview. That was too. Dr John Beebe is another wonderful guest, and I was thrilled to hear you both discussed the film A Dangerous Method, while incorporating interesting historical details to come to contrast with the artistic license used by the film director and so many other enriching aspects to the interview. Since your next episode will be number 300 Let me congratulate you in advance, a lovely milestone, and I hope you will use it as a good excuse to celebrate cheers from Joe. Joe, just in time, your email is the celebratory email. So I thank you for that, and I thank you for your continuing support financially, trans transcriptionally, somebody’s done a lot of transcripts and and emotionally and spiritually. So I think that better wrap it up for today. You can send your emails as always, to shrink at shrink wrap radio.com, you can also leave comments about individual shows in the comments area on the site. You can leave voice mails on Skype where I’m shrinkpod, or on our phone at 206-337-0622, or better. Yet, purchase our iPhone or Android app on our store at shrinkcraft radio.com, and then you can directly leave messages, voice messages or emails, very easily, thanks to longtime dream worker, author and International Association for the Study of dreams, conference chair, Bob Haas for sharing his work on recent developments in the neuroscience of dreaming. My next episode will be with yet another dream worker and author, Kelly Sullivan Walden. She’s going to be a workshop presenter at that June iasd conference. I keep mentioning, as I was looking through their program, I was struck by her topic, which involves supplying Joseph Campbell’s journey of the hero model to dream work. Now this is something I’ve been working on myself, and so I was eager to get her take on that. I’m planning to attend her workshop in June, and in the meantime, we can all get a preview in the very next episode, she’s a very original and energetic and charismatic woman, and I know you’re going to enjoy this next episode. So until then, this is Dr Dave saying it’s all in your mind. You’ve
Speaker 6 1:09:13
been shrink wrapped by Dr Dave all the psychology you need to know and just enough to make you dangerous. You.
Media/Characters Mentioned
• Inside Out 2
• Inside Out (original)
• Riley and her emotions
• Joy
• Anxiety,
• Sadness
• Anger
• Ennui
• Envy
• Embarrassment
• Nostalgia
• Bing Bong
• Bob Iger
• TikTok trends
• Meet the Robinsons
• Yellow Chair Collective Podcast
Topics/Themes Mentioned
• Anxiety attacks
• Panic attacks
• Perfectionism as survival response
• Identity formation and core beliefs
• Internal Family Systems theory
• Racialized trauma and cultural disconnection
• Emotional literacy in education
• Art therapy and expressive interventions
• Gamification and experiential learning
• Cultural reinterpretation of emotion
• Belief systems and the fragility of self
• Sports as identity development
• Western emotional frameworks vs cultural concepts
Helen Garcia, ACSW
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