From WXXI news this is connections I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made in June of 2006, nearly 20 years ago, when, let's say, a 27 year old Rochester teen launched himself down a flight of stairs in the middle of the night, in the middle of some kind of a dream.

Okay, it was me, and I landed at the bottom of the stairs, not really knowing why I had done that.

I didn't remember the dream at all.

I knew there was some kind of fight or flight going on.

The next night I bolted down the stairs and out the door, out onto 31 F and stopped running when my feet started bleeding.

I woke up only at that point.

Disappointed to know that at 2 a.m.

I had to jog past people walking the dog in the middle of the summer night and try to act normal.

What is it about our dreams that makes us do certain things?

Now most of you are not like me.

Mike Birbiglia and I, we've got something in common.

The comedian who's been on this program, we've talked about our sleep issues.

I don't have to do with Mike does Mike has to sleep in a sleeping bag zipped up to his neck so he doesn't do harm to himself.

I've kept thing I've got this thing under control, but I have wondered for years, why do we dream?

What goes on when we are asleep?

What does it tell us about ourselves?

And how much can we overanalyze this?

And how much can we actually learn about what dreams mean to us, about our fears, about our hopes, our relationships with other people?

Well, for the past four years, former Democrat and Chronicle journalist Erica O'Brien has turned her attention to reporting on the dream world.

She's gone deep, interviewing people about their dreams and collecting hundreds of dream stories, and she's preparing to debut her exhibition, Other People's Dreams, at the Rochester Contemporary Art center.

But first, she and some of her dream interviewees are joining us this hour to talk about maybe what we know about our dreams, what they might mean.

And later this hour, we're going to be joined by really an expert of sorts in the field who can help us make sense of more of it.

Erica Bryant, this was such an interesting thing that you reached out to tell us, but we were instantly like, yeah, we're definitely doing that.

Welcome back to the program.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Nice to have you and Erica, by the way, as an artist, associate director of writing at the Vera Institute of Justice, what is the Vera Institute of Justice?

It's a nonprofit that's based in New York City that's devoted to ending mass incarceration and improving rights for immigrants and protecting immigrants rights.

Well, thank you for being here.

It's great having you.

And next to Erica is DeVita Rogers, who is one of the dream interviewees, I suppose I am Erica convinced you to open up your your dream brain to her, Yeah.

Yeah, she's really cool like that.

And and, well, we're going to be talking about that with John Gary as well, a musician and artist who is sharing some dreams.

Nice to see you in studio.

Thanks for being here.

Yeah.

how did Erica convince you to talk about this?

How did you get in touch?

Well, I saw some of her collage work at, Maybe the yard's first.

And, I met her there, and she said that her collages were dreams of her own, and she was kind of, you know, soliciting dreams from people.

This was before she set up her little interview table at the public market.

and I tend to write my dreams down if I can.

when I wake up.

So, I, I emailed her back.

And if you write your dreams down.

If I can wake up and remember the dream, I will pick up my phone and try to type it in.

How often are you doing that?

a couple times a year, probably.

I just a couple of times.

So you're not remembering your dreams very often?

or I don't remember them in sufficient detail or I have to go to the bathroom before I can type.

I mean, that's me the other way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

no.

That is so interesting, John.

Well, Erica, let me just back up and ask you for a description of why this project, entered your mind, your consciousness, why you wanted to pursue it.

Well, I've always been very interested in dreams.

Just fascinated by them.

my own dreams and my dreams of my family and friends.

And I started making collages to sort of preserve and depict these dreams.

And so I, I had a show at Rochester Contemporary Art center.

It was called 4040 vision, where I had done 40 dreams, but they were just my dreams and maybe a couple of dreams for my family.

But as part of that show, people started to tell me their dreams and I just loved them.

And so I was so excited.

Like John, hopefully he'll get a chance to tell you his dream a little bit later.

But when I heard John's dream, I was just, you know, so just thrilled by it.

And I think that I'm just fascinated by, that part of the brain that is not, you know, controlled or incarcerated by logic and reality and I really like what the brain creates when it's sleeping.

and it just kind of, I don't want to say out of hand, but I really I really got into it and, I started I started collecting more and more dreams and making more and more little art objects to honor them.

You know, I'm I've seen migraine art over the years because I'm a migraine sufferer and I get the visual auras, and there's some really great artists who've depicted migraine aura in that way.

Dream art is are you picking a scene from what's described?

Is that typically what you're doing?

Yeah.

It'll be usually it'll be seen.

It'll be the most striking image to me from the dream.

So it's almost like taking a photograph of the, most outstanding moment in the dream to me.

So, it'll it'll be like that.

And sometimes I'll do a couple different scenes from the same dream, almost like a storybook where you illustrating a person's dream.

I suspect there are people who've been in the public market or like, oh, everyone's got the dream lady on.

you know, what kind of what kind of trust you feel like you have to, to earn, to have people open up because some people are like, oh, yeah, I've got weird dreams.

But for some it's pretty personal.

It can be difficult, I think, to talk about.

I think, well, I don't try, you know, I don't try to extract the dreams by force.

If people, people.

I will find that a lot of people want to share a lot of people who say, oh, you know, I don't remember my dreams, but if they do remember their dreams, they're sort of excited to share them.

a lot of the times, because I in many cases, nobody's ever asked them or tried to, you know, try to talk about their dreams with them and, yeah, the public market.

Yeah.

I really didn't have a problem I actually ran out of because I was giving people like, carrots and beets and things for the dreams.

And I actually ran out because I had to go buy more carrots because there were so many people y thought.

And I was kind of trying to make it like a dream like experience, like I was at the public market and this lady gave me a carrot and I gave her a dream and and, it's that movie right there.

Yeah.

That is really, all of which is leading us to other people's dreams, which is going to run from June 6th through the 14th of June next month.

The opening reception.

Friday, June 6th at 6 p.m. at Roca, right?

Yep.

And so I know that Erica and Blue and the team at Roko, they'd love for you to check out, the exhibition of other people's dreams here.

Do you feel like you have learned anything yourself?

I mean, I, I don't want to ask you to be the sort of the psychological researcher or the PhD, and I'm dreams now, but do you feel like you've learned something about how what our dreams are telling us?

I don't know.

I don't know that it's I don't know that I know what dreams are telling us and where they come from and what.

There's all sorts of different theories about if they're unexpressed desires, if they're messages from God, if they're, you know, there's all kinds of different ideas about where dreams come from.

but I have learned a lot about commonalities in dreams, in, I mean, in my sample sizes, people in Rochester.

And, but I'll find things that just keep turning up, like Big Bird is one that I wouldn't have expected.

Big bird A lot of people dream about Big Bird.

Do you think that'll change if they define PBS kids?

That.

Oh, big birds live in your dreams, everybody.

Look, I've got PBS funding on my brain this week, but Big Bird of all things Big Bird, right?

And I remember one time I was at the public market, and I had like three people mention Big Bird separately, and I thought, okay, why?

And and then I thought about I was like, I guess that makes sense because it's a very large bird.

It's a, you know, it's a could be considered scary.

but one person, one person was frightened of Big Bird and another person, it was such that Big bird like, put him in their pocket.

So they were in the pocket of Big Bird, almost like a ostrich or not.

Ostrich was the thing with the pouch.

The kangaroo.

Like almost like a kangaroo experience.

So, I mean, who knows?

Wow.

well, listeners, I don't know if anybody wants to call in with their dreams, but.

Oh please do.

Eric is the person for this.

it's 844295 talk.

We're talking about dreams, and we're talking about Eric Brian's art and the exhibition that's coming up at Rocco and what she's learned and and really, I think in many ways it should make us feel, more connected.

I mean, sometimes I have felt very strange about, you know, my sleep experiences, but everybody's got some weird stuff that happens in our brains at night.

It's eight, four, 429582552636.

I have you call from Rochester.

2639994.

Email the program connections at six morgue or join us on the YouTube chat and the WXXI news YouTube channel if you're watching along there.

Well, let's ask John and David about what what they shared with you and, John, you want to go first here?

Okay, sure.

I'll, I'll read my dream that I what I wrote down for my dream when, I talked to Eric for the first time, and that was this Bill Murray ketchup packet food fight and a movie theater lobby dream.

So I dreamt that I was in a movie theater log lobby, and it was a fairly large space, like one of the big commercial chain theaters with the dark carpeting and sort of the, the brightest light source in the area is the concession stand, like the glass counter and everything, or and there were a lot of people around, and Bill Murray was in the crowd, and there was a giant pile of ketchup packets in the lobby, not in any kind of container, just they're like three foot high pile.

and Bill Murray jumped up on the concession stand and started winning these ketchup packets everywhere.

And then everybody else picked up ketchup packets and had a food fight with them, and they were splattering all over, like current Bill Murray or younger Bill Murray.

Bill Murray, you know, I didn't occur to it almost.

I, you know, it's I knew it was Bill Murray.

I can't even say that.

I could see that it was Bill Murray.

I just knew it was Bill Murray.

His memory.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Dream Bill Murray.

Okay.

Remind Bill Murray now and then what happened.

That's the dream.

That's it, that's it.

I mean, the experience of it was like it took a minute or two, you know, for this sequence of events where I'm waiting in the line and I'm seeing the big pile of ketchup packets and I see, oh, there's Bill Murray in line at the movie theater.

And then he climbs up on the concession stand, standing on the glass over the Junior Mints and the whatever attendees, and he starts flinging these ketchup packets.

Okay, so Erica, I mean, that's that's a lot of material to work with for an artist.

It is.

And I actually made a three dimensional, like, life size reenactment of this dream.

in the, Rochester Contemporary Arts, there's a upstairs studio, like, where my studio is, and I built the concession stand and made fake movie posters and had a dummy with a picture of Bill Murray's face on him.

And then John threw ketchup packets at him on a first Friday.

It was fun.

It was.

It was a lot of fun.

And it was amazing to see a dream.

I mean, obviously it didn't look like the dream, but just to see like a physical manifestation of your one of your own dreams is weird and fun.

Wonderful.

So what do you have with Bill Murray?

What's going on with you?

Nothing.

I like Bill Murray.

Fine, but sure.

you haven't tried to peel back what that was all about.

Oh, I think it was just kind of random stuff.

See, I do, I think sometimes a dream is just like a car crash of things in your brain.

You kind of just pop together for not any particular reason.

And then I'm sure there are some things like, I mean, I'm in the second half.

I'll talk a little bit more about the one dream I remember from the last week in which my partner calls me from like across town.

I've got to get there quick and I'm driving, but most of the road is magma.

Magma.

You, I love that.

Well, I think lava is when it's lava, but when it's outright magma inside the Earth.

So it was like lava.

Like red.

Yeah, it was like glowing lava.

And I, I was worried the entire drive if the car's about to sink into it, and I was able to navigate and get to the driveway where I needed to go.

And then I'm like, is the car torched?

Am I torched, like, what happened here?

I don't remember any of the any other part of that, like why that was happening.

So, like, what's going on with Erica?

Well, help me out.

Erica.

Brian, what's going on with me?

I don't know, I mean, is it a manifestation of anxiety?

Were you scared of lava as a kid?

I know I was.

I think it's lava nowhere near my phobia list.

I can go from a lot of whales, underwater.

objects like that are very large.

I can't even look at pictures of.

But not lava.

No.

I don't know, but it's like the metamorphosis of the Earth's heat churning.

There's a bunch of stuff that could be in there.

Wilford Pigeon's going to join us in our second half hour.

Professor of psychiatry, and public in public health sciences.

And the director of the sleep and Neurophysiology Physiology research lab at UMC.

So I'm sure he'll have some things to.

And before we get to the here, let me just mention a few things that have come in in here.

Sydney on YouTube says this is both weird and humorous.

Why do some dreams begin with something erotic but never go anywhere?

I always wake up before anything really interesting happens.

Imagine my my disappointment.

So poor Sydney is feeling teased by her dreams.

Like I at least could get a little action here and it never works out.

And was this a commonality that you got?

Tragic.

You know, people don't.

You were talking about, people being shy, perhaps about saying their dream.

People don't tend to share erotic dreams with me.

I've only had like a couple people go in that direction.

And I think probably because, you know, they don't want to offend me or that type of thing, but those might be dreams people keep to themselves.

I wouldn't offend you.

Wouldn't know.

No, I mean, I think anything on average people are going to share the love of dreams with you, right?

Right right right right right, right.

Because that's the awkward at the public market.

You're going to tell some woman like, you don't know you're, you know.

Well, apparently Sydney would.

Sydney, I'm sorry for you.

I hope that, I hope that the next dream gets a little bit further for you, but you can always try to go back into the dream.

That's a thing people do.

and you have really fired up the phone line, so hang on.

Let me just kind of clear up some of the phone lines here.

Erica Bryant's work has got people talking.

Ellie and Fairport first.

Hello, Ellie.

Hi, there.

this is a fascinating topic.

I'm so glad you guys are doing it.

I, as someone who has extremely vivid dreams nearly every night, and I can remember them from years.

For years, I wanted to know if in your conversations with people at the public market, if you had any interactions with people who can't remember their dreams but wanted to.

And I guess I'm just so curious about people who who either don't dream or can't remember their dreams.

And if you notice any patterns in your conversations with folks, Elliot, before Erica jumps in, I'm going to ask Doctor Pigeon for you.

In the second half hour.

I think people, I think everybody dreams.

It's just a question of whether you remember, because I think your brain's got to be on in some way.

But Talley's point, some people say they don't dream or don't remember any dreams.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think I do have an a bunch of people that will say they don't remember their dreams.

And my mother doesn't remember her dream.

She remembers maybe like three dreams in her life.

and so I don't I don't know why that is.

I think it might be people.

I think if you wake up at a certain point during the dream, you're more likely to remember it.

So people who don't remember their dreams, maybe they have a more, I don't know, regulated sleep cycle.

but that definitely is a pattern where there are some people that did they just don't remember their dreams.

But I've got something at the art show for them.

It's a dream generator where you can use the fragments of other people's dream and make your own dream out of things that came out of the unconscious of your neighbors.

So that's interesting.

and Ellie, a little bit of background here, that producer, Megan Mack, sent my way here.

why do some people remember dreams and some don't?

And can you learn how to remember your dreams?

Research shows it is a learnable skill, and a suggestion is to keep a dream journal.

John Gary is all over that.

so I think that's a good idea.

but you got to do it quick before you have to go to the bathroom.

Yeah.

Right.

When you wake up here, because it's a fade away, really.

It's really fleeting.

It's really.

Yeah, it's really, really fleeting.

but according to The Conversation, one of the most consistent predictors of more frequent dream recall has been a positive attitude towards dreaming.

If you think dreams are important, you're probably more motivated to try and remember them more often.

So go to bed thinking, I'm going to remember this.

I'm going to think about that.

I don't know, maybe it'll work for you.

It's it is very, very interesting the way our brains work there.

Dorothy in Rochester.

Next.

Hey, Dorothy.

Go ahead.

Hi.

yes, I'm calling because I had a dream this morning just before I woke up.

Where I have a cat in my house.

But in the dream, it was sitting on my windowsill on the second floor.

And then I opened the window to pick them up and bring them in.

What do you make of that, Eric?

Brian, do you want more cats?

I love cats and I see cats on the street but I really can't have more than one.

Oh so that I think it's probably an unexpressed wish or a you know, subconscious wish that you could bring in more cats.

Maybe it's your new pet.

One more dream and I'll give you the short version.

Okay?

My what?

I who lived in New York with my sister, she had passed away, and I had a dream that he was sitting in a rocking chair in my house, and I was doing dishes, and I hear the TV on, and I go in and he's sitting there, my rocking chair, and I ask him if he wants me to hook up a VCR for me.

So, no, I'm fine.

And that was it.

And that was it.

That was it.

That's awesome.

There's actually something really lovely about the response that I'm fine, isn't it?

I mean, it was that comforting to you, Dorothy?

Yes.

Yes it was.

Oh that's great.

I mean, so I think that maybe that's a dream that gives you some sense of peace, right?

I mean, but the cat's thing for sure.

What are you going to say about the cats, you know?

Oh, I thought maybe her cat was kind of inducing her dream because he wants a buddy.

I, I like that idea, too.

maybe you're dreaming and the cat standing on your head, you know, let me grab Jay and then bring it to be the story.

Hey, Jay has been waiting.

Next.

Hey, Jay.

Go ahead.

Hey, there.

It's great this topic is on.

I'm a bit of a dream, dork.

I run, I run ginger my life.

I run, dream work groups.

And one of the great things about groups is being able to create community through telling dreams and cultures around the world.

that's how folks share dreams.

So I was wondering, you know, in Erica's experience in this project, what is it been like for you to have, to create community through telling dreams and sharing dreams?

Oh, it's been it's been great.

And another thing that I've done is have dream art workshops where, you know, a bunch of people just sit around a table and make a piece of art that represents their dream.

And as you're sitting there for, you know, an hour, whatever.

everybody sort of talks about their dreams and you'll have dreams like the one that the lady just shared where a loved one comes back to from the dead.

And then you can, sort of talk about that.

And I think that the experience of sharing dreams, I really believe that the experience of sharing dreams is, you know, can be very meaningful and a nice way to, to connect to people because it's like, oh, okay, you can you can know a lot about a person from meeting them.

But then you to know what's going on in the sort of inner workings of their unconscious mind is another way of, of, of connecting that I really enjoy when you think, Jay, that's fantastic.

Yeah, it really think, you know, when we talk about it, dreams in a way that demystifies them and kind of brings them out of the so-called world.

and it helps us, it brings people together.

So I'm excited to see this project.

Thank you.

Yeah, Jay, thank you.

And I agree with you.

I mean, like, for anybody who's, like, talking about dreams is who.

I mean, we dream and we dream weird stuff.

Or literally I'm.

I could take emails all day.

Eric.

Brian, you have really inspired people to talk about this.

I've got people texting me who are driving who are like, I, you know, I'm just going to share.

There's so much great stuff here because everybody does it.

We don't always know why.

In fact, most time we don't know why.

What about you, David?

Well, what was what, what was your dream that you shared with Erica?

Yeah.

so I was back home in Sierra Leone because I was born in Sierra Leone, and I was, my I was on my old street with my friends, and, there comes a funeral procession, and we find out that it is, a person that we knew who is still very much alive, by the way, in real life, who died and, his funeral procession, like, happens.

And then right after his procession happens, there's another procession that's coming, and it's so huge.

It is long.

It's about like 80 to 100 coffins, all carried by, like, more men than you can imagine.

It's like probably 3 or 4 like men per coffin, maybe even more.

And they're all in this straight line.

It's super, super straight.

And again, like 80 to 100 coffins.

And in my head I'm looking around and I'm like, there's no way this is going to go right, because they can't keep being in this straight line with all that, like all these coffins on their heads.

and they start walking closer and closer, approaching us, and the line starts to curve and they all start to go like, woo, you know, like it's about to fall.

And I get so scared because I've never seen anyone drop a coffin, like, ever.

I've been to funerals before and that's never happened before.

And it really scares me a lot.

So I tell my friends, let's go upstairs, let's go to my house.

We run upstairs to the balcony and we're watching the procession from the balcony, and they're now super close and they're like, really directly, you know, on like under the balcony.

And we look down and indeed they fall, they all fall and the coffins fall.

Thankfully, none of the coffins open when they fell because I was like, I'm not ready to see a dead body today.

and then by some force, all the coffins open at the same time, like they all just forcefully open.

And I see all the men in there, and they they do look dead.

They do look laying down dead, dressed up like you would, like a dead person, I guess.

And I'm just terrified.

And I'm looking at it.

I can't look away, obviously.

And, I see one of the men in the coffin start to blink or, like, start to move, and I'm.

I'm like, this is about to be something spiritual, and I don't want to be around for it.

But before I could look away, all of the men in the coffin like this 80 to 100 coffin procession get up and they all start to do a flashmob dance.

Oh my goodness.

Yes, out of nowhere there's music, there's choreography.

It's insane.

I'm like, there's no way they planned this flashmob in the style of a funeral procession scaring everyone.

And that that was the dream went on to be something else.

But that was that was the weirdest part of it for sure.

Well, what do you make of it?

My dreams are really always long and extensive.

Sometimes they make sense.

I think that particular part of the dream was just, me being home and like, how much I think I miss home and I miss my friends, because they were all there and the person who had passed away initially is someone that we haven't spoken to in a while, and I think it was just a call to like, reach out to them.

the flashmob part of it, I have no idea.

I think my brain was just throwing things in there.

How often do you remember your dreams?

I write down all my dreams every night and every night.

Yes, if I can remember them, I write them down.

I date them because I know I will forget.

And I have some very interesting dreams and I like to keep them.

Are most of the dreams that you have, mundane and everyday?

And or are they sort of in what you just described with the coffin flash mob, you know, cinematically strange?

a lot of them are elaborate.

Most of, some of them are kind of mundane.

so sometimes I won't write them down, but I will remember them, especially if it's a short dream.

I won't bother to, but, a lot of them are very elaborate, and they turn into something else.

Like last night I had a dream I, like, jumped out of a burning building, and before that it was a motorcycle chase.

It was.

It's always something happening and there's always some terrifying factor.

And and there's always some weird.

I cannot explain this happening.

And I don't see this happening in real life portion of it.

You're remembering in a given week, how many, how many times are you remembering your dream when you wake up?

Realistically, I want to say maybe 3 to 4 like mornings I will wake up.

Wow.

So half or just more than half?

That's remarkable.

Yeah.

John for you is just a few times a year.

Well, it's a few times a year that I have one that I can remember to write down.

I have more dreams than that.

They're not all as interesting.

Yeah.

no, I it's just so interesting how often we remember or don't.

And, David, have you ever, I can recall dreams in which something deeply unpleasant was happening.

And I said, in the dream, I'm dreaming and I'm going to wake up now and try to control it that way.

And so I had somehow blended in an awareness there.

Had that ever happened with you?

All the time, I yes, Erica mentioned going back into your dream.

I've mastered how to do that.

Now wait a second.

So if you wake up from a dream that you like, you can return to I can return.

It's just that, of course, everything won't be exactly as I want it to be, but the setting will be the same.

Something will be the same, and I'll be back in it.

Sometimes I can redo a thing in the dream if I didn't like it.

Yeah.

Wow.

I mean, like John, you.

Now it's like mustard packets.

But it's the same fight with Bill Murray.

Would you.

Would you do it again?

no.

I mean, it was fun the first time I read that completely new and original dream.

I don't know.

I think these these dreams are kind of a gift that you should use, right?

I mean, I'm not being woo about it.

It's just like your brain is producing this soup of stuff and somehow synthesizing something you can remember.

And, like, if you're a creative person, I mean, I've, I've used dreams for songwriting.

I have used dreams for for drawings and stuff.

So it's, it's a resource.

Yeah.

What what do you make of that idea that dreams have a have a utility?

Erica.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, I've made so many things that came out of dreams.

Now, I just think it's fun.

I don't know that I've made anything useful.

I've made things that are, I would say, deeply unuseful.

But I think that, it's important to do that.

Like, not everything has to have a purpose.

And I think dreams offer us an opportunity to to remember that, like, not everything has to be comprehensible and not everything has to make sense.

and it's important to, have that time in which you are suspended from reality and maybe bring a little bit of that into your waking life.

Like, I really think it's good to bring, like John said, bring your dream self into your waking life.

Okay.

Who?

Erica, you have this is this is going to be I'm not even going to mention the phone number or the email for the rest of the hour, and we're gonna get flooded.

So what we have to do is take a break here.

If you've shared a dream story, I will try in the second half hour to get to as much as we can or your thoughts in general about this.

And when we come back here, we're going to bring in Doctor Wilfred Pidgeon from, the Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Lab at MSK.

So we're talking dreams.

There is an exhibition coming up here.

Other people's dreams.

Eric O'Brien is the artist and creator and the conceptual iser of this very fascinating, this fascinating hour of connections.

Obviously, everybody's kind of fired up to talk about dreams, but you can see the exhibition coming up June 6th through June 14th at Roko, the Rochester Contemporary Art center.

The opening reception is the first Friday, June 6th, starting at 6 p.m. at Roko.

They would love to see you there.

Let's take this break, come back, talk dreams and connections.

I'm having Dawson Friday and the next connections.

My colleague Rachel Stephen is in the host chair.

In the first hour, black women in the United States are three times more likely to die from pregnancy related causes than white women.

But a growing movement of community based doulas is stepping in to help.

In our second hour, in the height of prom season, we talk about how the event has grown from a rite of passage to a cultural phenomenon a fashion and flash.

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This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

For four years, artist Erica Bryant has been listening to people's dream stories and created the exhibition Other People's Dreams, that you can see at Roko starting June 6th.

And here she is with John Gary and to Beta Rogers, who are two of the dreamers who told their stories to Erica.

They're telling their stories here in connections and that has inspired many of you to share your stories.

And we're going to try to keep, kind of cycling through those and trying to think about what our dreams mean.

Let me bring in Doctor Wilfred Pidgeon, who's a professor of psychiatry and public health sciences and the director of the Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Lab at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Doctor Pidgeon, thanks for being with us.

Absolutely.

Good afternoon.

And to be clear on the expertise, because Will is a very, humble person.

sleep is the expertise.

Dreams are a passion.

I'm not going to tell people that, Doctor Pigeon, that you can tell them everything that every dream means.

Exactly.

and I that would be impossible to begin with.

But in general, let me let me ask you this here, is there a risk of overanalyzing our dreams or can we learn something about ourselves, our desires, our lives, from our dreams?

yes.

Is going to be the answer.

So if we can both overanalyze and utilize.

Right.

So, as with with so many things, so, there was some.

So I was listening.

You guys look great on streaming, by the way.

And, so it was an awesome conversation and, I'm glad to be able to to continue it in any direction you want to go.

Well, so let me let me start with, with this then here, is there any way to know how often our dreams should have meaning to us?

Should we generally not try to overanalyze them or are there times where something is there some sort of a trend in dreams that will indicate to us a desire, a fear, a pain, something like that?

Yeah.

So all of these interesting questions, I think the most interesting questions are those that us science geeks, geeks actually can't answer.

So there's some things that we can.

And you know, you know, you touched on them earlier.

So I might throw some of those at you.

in general, I'll say this, it's it's a really personal experience.

So if it feels important, it's probably important.

which is a pretty simple and silly thing to say, but no, I make sense.

That's it.

So you were talking earlier about and you hit on, you know, does everybody dream?

Yes.

Everybody dreams.

How often?

3 to 5 times a night.

or more.

For some people, typically the last, hour or hour and a half of the evening of our sleep period is going to be when we have the most, intense or weird or most, most epic kind of dreams.

but, but, yeah, we all dream.

And why don't we remember it?

so in order to remember something, we have to pop it into some of our, our memory cells, or our memory banks.

And we need to actually think about it for half a second or, you know, 2 or 3 seconds.

So even in our semi-conscious state of of moving between sleep stages, being half awake, half asleep, if we process it for a little bit, then we'll remember it.

if we don't process it, it's in there somewhere.

But it's, it's not easily, drawn back out from those those neuron clusters.

Well, I'm trying to serve the audience.

And I have two emails and a YouTube comment about sex dreams.

So just in general, Doctor Pigeon here, do sex dreams have any meaning to us, or are they just part of the experience and they're part of the experience.

So, Yeah.

Okay, a different experience we all have.

and, kudos to, to read up for being able to, potentially, go back into those if she wants to.

Well, not necessarily the sex dreams, although I don't know if you know.

But regardless, here, that's an amazing thing to kind of be able to do.

And Doctor Pigeon, can you it does it help if there are things that you would like to try to manipulate into in your dreams, to be thinking about them before we go to sleep?

I mean, is there any reason to think that that would, inform or affect our dreams?

absolutely.

So you're actually hitting on something that that can move us beyond, what's important and not only what's important to us, in our normal dream and work lives, but for people who may have, nightmares, or may have, chronic experiences that they want to work on, what we can do is incubate not only dreams, but the kind of dreams within.

So earlier you were talking about just saying, having been a reader, you're reading up, having the intention to dream alone can help you recall dreams beyond that.

Actually, the reader was talking about and you were talking about having a low level of consciousness in dreams.

So being aware that I'm dreaming and that's actually called lucidity or lucid, the act of lucid dreaming.

So having consciousness while in your while while dreaming in the if you remember the movie inception.

so it was, DiCaprio was, was the lead character and the idea was, I'm going to go into the dreams and I'm going to do stuff, and I'm going to even do stuff to other people's dreams.

But we can't do the latter.

But we can become conscious of the fact that we're dreaming and then decide, you know, maybe I'm going to go down this street this time, or, you know, maybe I'll try this, which for people who have recurring nightmares, is actually, a treatment that can work, that works well for three narratives.

Wow.

So if, Yeah.

Pretty cool, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Are recurring nightmares common doctor pigeon?

No.

Not terribly common.

And, very highly associated with, trauma exposure and post-traumatic stress disorder.

So, of course we know, right?

Nightmares and PTSD hand in hand.

so Eric Bryant, again here, I'm, I'm not trying to elevate anybody to certain levels of expertise.

They can't handle here.

But I want to ask you, in general, when you're talking to people at the public market, they're sharing dreams.

Stories are nightmares.

Were nightmares part of that?

I mean, or was that more unusual?

Oh, sure.

No.

People definitely have nightmares and definitely share them.

one of the one of the dreams, I would say that really struck me the hardest out of the whole public market like collection process was a person who talked about a dream result and set in a movie theater, and they had to go to the bathroom and all the stalls were taken.

And except for one, the last stall, and instead of having a flusher, the the toilet had puzzle pieces magenta and green and blue puzzle pieces.

And they, they were confused.

And so they just pressed one of them that was near where the flusher should be, and that button was the over fled the world and kill everyone button.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

And so like the creation of that and then the and I was, you know, trying to think about what it meant like the feeling of guilt even though, like it was this person's fault, even though they weren't the one that created this toilet, you know, it was sort of like a trap that they fell into.

it's intense, but it was very.

Yeah, very intense.

And, there are people who have the one recurring nightmare, actually, is the little, the main image of my show, on the local website is a dream, from Danielle, who's a great photographer in town, who would dream repeatedly that there was a mummy in his childhood home that could not pass the French doors between the living room and the dining room.

So it was very important that these doors stay shut so that the mummy couldn't get out.

And that was a dream.

He had more than once.

Oh, I mean, the hard part, as Doctor Pigeon says, is we might never know fully why.

And that's that's what messes with you a little bit.

But boy, to anybody who's really struggling with recurring stuff and I've been there at times that that can be really, really difficult.

let me get a question for Doctor Pigeon from Marcia, who says I never get more than 30 to 45 minutes of deep sleep a night.

Is that a reason why I do not dream?

So, doctor pigeon, I think your message earlier is that we are dreaming whether we realize it or not.

But Marcia seems to think she doesn't and doesn't get a lot of deep sleep.

What would you say to her?

I would want to know, how she knows that she's not getting deep sleep.

So?

So I feel sometimes that I didn't have a great night's sleep.

But if I had been sleeping in my lab and people put electrodes on me, they said, listen, pal, you actually had 27 minutes of REM sleep and these 20 minutes of other sleep, so, it's quite possible that we don't feel like we get deep sleep for any number of reasons.

but we might still be getting it.

but certainly, if we don't have enough REM sleep, which is rapid eye movement sleep, a lot of you know about, and that's typically when dreaming occurs.

If we don't have enough REM sleep, then, then we don't dream as much.

But one cool thing that our brain does is if we are REM deprived for a night or two the next night, there will be a rebound of REM sleep.

so I don't know if you've ever experienced, some sleep deprivation for whatever reason, for a couple of nights and then you have a what?

The crazy dreams come, or the long, intense, epic dreams.

And that can sometimes be because your brain is saying, you know what?

I need more of this REM sleep.

I need to catch up.

And here it is.

And then you get a flash mob of coffins.

You get the Michael Jackson thriller song.

Well, yeah.

do either of you, John or Davida, noticed a difference in your dreams based on how much previous sleep you had?

If you were sleep deprived?

I, I haven't noticed.

I haven't been looking for any kind of correlation.

Like be interesting to look for it now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Me neither.

But I think maybe when I started grad school and I had to stay up longer, when I did sleep, I would always have intense dreams, but I again think I have intense dreams in general.

So I've had dress dreams, and they usually they're work related and they're always.

I've been worked for at Kodak for a very long time, but they're always at Kodak.

So I can have a stream tomorrow, tonight.

And it would be at Kodak, even though I haven't been there in 15 years.

Okay, John, I'm glad you mentioned that.

so stress frames are incredibly common in a what a what what seems to occur is that there are different levels of stress streams.

so they can, of course, just be an indicator that, hey, you better watch out.

You're kind of stressed.

You might want to do something about that.

it's it's incredibly common for the level of stress in our lives to also be reflected in the intensity of the stress stream.

So we may all have I don't know if it's a favorite, but we all have.

Many of us have a common stress stream.

So I went to the exam, but it was in the wrong room.

I showed up naked.

That kind of thing.

Incredibly common for our own.

Whatever our our common stress stream is.

can be more intense if there are more intense stressors in our lives.

how do we interpret that?

For me, I just interpret if I'm, you know, I'm not paying.

If I haven't paid attention to my day life and I'm having my stress dreams, I would just say, oh, maybe I'm under more stress than I thought I was.

Well, makes sense to you, Jen.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think it sounds like a lot of people have been there.

I bet you there's a lot of codec stress streams in this town.

Unfortunately, there probably are, to all day, right to us on YouTube saying I was reciting a poem in my dream that I had never heard before, and I woke up and frantically wrote it down before I forgot it in that.

Cool.

I love that I have heard songs a song.

The one time it happened, I heard a song in a dream and I recorded it.

next day.

It's not a very good song, but.

But you woke up and you remembered enough.

I remembered enough, and then I filled it out because I needed more than, like, three lines for the song.

Don't you want to know how your brain put that song together?

Isn't that so interesting?

It's a pretty mundane song.

Oh, you know, like a song?

Yeah, yeah.

If it was a better song, I'd be in it more.

I have a lot.

I have a number of songs that, or at least at least in part, Inspired by Dreams.

I have one, one song that's just a litany of things that have happened in dreams.

So.

Wow.

Yeah.

Awesome.

well, let me get back to your phone calls.

Dave in Rochester next.

Hey, Dave.

Go ahead.

Hi, Evan.

Thanks for taking the call.

but full disclosure here.

I used to work with you, and I worked Dave Indiana, so I want to know I'm fascinated by this, by this topic.

I look forward to seeing Erica's exhibit.

Thank you so much for, having this conversation.

And I want to know if Erica or if Doctor Pidgeon can answer this as gleaned through the artistic process or the research, any insight into the source of dreams.

And I have this recurring dream that perplexes me every time I have it.

Here it is.

So when I was a teenager, I played competitive ice hockey, and in my dream, I'm at my age now, like 4050, 45, whatever.

And I'm invited to play on my old team and I tell everyone that I'm too old to play.

But they explain that they're allowed to a roster one overage player.

So I'm very excited about this opportunity to play again, and I'm in the dressing room with the players.

They're all young, but they're accepting me and as I'm playing up my skates, my skate lace breaks and no one has an extra lace.

Not the coach, not the trainers, like no one.

And I end up hobbling around the rink on one skate, asking anyone like I'm fully dressed in my jersey, but I only have one skate on and I'm asking anyone if they have a lace.

And I keep getting stopped by fans and people I know, and I have to extract myself from the conversation to find this lace.

And in the meantime, I keep getting an eye on the clock and I can see that the game has started and the clock is ticking down, and I and I never get on the ice and, you know, in like real life, I don't feel this compelled compulsion to relive my hockey days.

I don't care, I don't I don't want to be around rinks anymore.

But I in my in my dream, I'm really excited about this opportunity and I want to know why I have this dream.

I have it like once a year.

It's just incredible.

I suck.

So thanks for letting me share with you and I. I don't know that I'll have any answers today, but thank you, Dave.

Very, very interesting.

Erica, do you want to kick it to Doctor Pejic?

Yeah, yeah, to the doctor.

All right.

Doctor pigeon, what do you think?

I think I want to kick it back to Erica.

So dangerous to do like the 32nd dream interpretation, right?

So we could have a little cup for, you know, for a buck.

I'll do a 32nd dream interpretation.

so, really cool.

Interesting dream.

I would I don't pay me for this advice, because it's really just drawn out of the ether.

if it were my dream, I would.

I would wonder about it.

There are things in my life, that, that what I wanted to do in the second half of my life.

Do I want to do I want do I want to get back on the ice?

And if I am going to get back on the ice, I better get my shoelace, my skate laces, in order.

So whatever the heck that means.

And I just.

I made that up, right?

So I.

But Doctor Pigeon didn't know that I, I don't know that, Carl Jung or, Sigmund Freud.

Well, he Davison, you know, he doesn't want to get back on the ice.

He's missing his job to get back on the air.

Metaphorically.

There's something else.

Okay, okay.

And the fact that it's recurring.

Does that mean anything different?

The fact that if a dream that we have Dave or anyone else has it multiple times here, would that tell us anything more useful?

I think if you asked 20 people like me, we wouldn't be able to agree on that.

Okay.

I think what happens is that there are some cool things, that, that are floating around in our memory stores and we keep pulling them back up, like, you know, why don't we take a look at these old photographs?

I kind of like this one.

so.

And the more we do that, the more it's available to us.

It's closer to the top of the pile.

in contrast to some of the dreams that we have that seem to make little or no sense, that really is just, you know, our brain is itself an AI machine.

and sometimes we just, when we enter dreaming, it's sort of like asking your brain to pull together a story, and it just goes around looking for stuff.

And sometimes it's really hallucinatory, like, what is this about?

These things don't go together.

but I did see the flower shop today, so maybe that's why there are flowers here.

And sometimes it's a beautiful story that that, you know, has meaning.

So it varies widely.

recency bias and dreams.

Interesting.

Gina says most nights I cannot open my eyes and my dream.

Sometimes I have to tilt my head in order to see a sliver of my surroundings.

I'm not really stressed about it.

Sometimes I'm driving and I can't open my eyes.

Often I am traveling on a seat that has wheels and a control controller down the roads.

Also, please don't commit me, Gina.

No one's going to commit you.

Everybody's kind of dealing with this stuff.

We're all trying to figure out our our own weirdness here.

And then that in Rochester back in the 90s, a group of friends and I used to do a weekly dream analysis group together with a brief go around.

And then each week we would work together on one person's dream.

We use techniques from the book Living Your Dreams by Gail Delaney.

Basically, it was way to break down each variable of the story and translate it to an association that rings a bell for the dreamer, that sensation.

And once you string this language back together, it tells a much more lucid story about what's going on in your mind.

It's a very intimate experience from those years, years of working on dreams like that.

I would say that dreams are autonomic poetry.

Okay, to the artist in the room, Erica, how do you like that analysis of dreams?

I don't know what the word order.

What was it?

I have no autonomic poetry.

So how about dreams?

Are poetry of the mind?

Sure, I definitely believe it.

And I think I'm guessing just from context, that it's just, it means that it's sort of generates itself and you're not consciously doing it.

And I definitely think they're poetry.

It's very, very poetic and that we should bring them into the real world.

Well, so in our last minute here and Dave, I hope you find your last to I'm with, I'm with you there.

It's probably very frustrating and I want to thank everyone who has shared their dreams.

I couldn't even get all of them on the air here.

But in some ways, Eric Bryant, that's a testament to the work that you did here.

You've you've struck a chord with people.

They ought to come out and see the exhibit, other people's dreams starting on June 6th, running through June 14th at Roko.

what do you want to leave with listeners as we think about our dreams here, Eric Bryce, remember your dreams.

That's it.

Try to remember them.

Try to remember them.

Yeah.

It's not easy to do, I don't I'm kind of with John.

For me, it's much more unusual when I remember one.

Now it's it's very unusual.

And even when I have like a sleep terror experience, which I'm told by my partner occasionally still happens.

you know, she's usually like, what is wrong with you?

And I'm like, nothing.

Why did you wake me up?

Like, I'm fine, I just have, I don't know, I wasn't I don't remember any dream there.

So brains are strange things.

Dreams are strange things, but we all have them.

They're not woo.

And you shouldn't feel strange about that.

So to everyone who has shared, thank you very, very much, Doctor Wilfred Pidgeon, you are generous with your time.

Thank you for sharing the expertise with us and we hope to talk to you again.

Have a good rest of the week.

Thank you very much.

And David Rogers, boy, what interesting stories.

Thank you for being willing to share them with us.

Thank you guys for having me.

John Gary, musician and artist.

Anywhere we can find the music that's about your dreams?

yeah.

If you go to and your favorite streaming app, and you look for Kelly's heroes, Kelly spelled with an e y at the end, not just a Y. Kelly's heroes.

here you have our first album.

One of the songs on the first album is this litany of dream scenes, Kelly's heroes.

Thank you, John.

Thanks for being here.

Eric.

Brian.

Thank you.

We'll see you at Rocco next month.

Here.

Thanks for being here.

Sweet dreams.

Everybody talk with you tomorrow.

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