April 11, 1865. President Abraham Lincoln is feeling downcast as he
speaks with his friend and bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon.
He tells Lamon he’s highly perturbed about a dream he had the other night, in which he’d
seen a corpse lying atop a catafalque in the White House’s East Room as “the subdued sobs
of mourners” filled his ears. When he asked a soldier who it was, the soldier replied,
“The President. He was killed by an assassin.” A few days later, while watching the play “Our
American Cousin,” at Ford’s theater, Lincoln was shot by an assassin. He died the next day.
Today we’re going to take you down the rabbit hole of the meaning of dreams, an age-old
conundrum we intend to get to the bottom of. We need to start with a few real-life cases of
people who had recurring dreams, and there’s no better place to start than Lincoln,
a man who was obsessed with his dream life. He wasn’t shy about telling others about it,
either, despite the fact that his arguably superstitious fascination might have seemed
below a man of such high intellectual standing. One recurring dream he told his cabinet about
happened many times during the Civil War. He said that he often dreamed he was on a
“singular and indescribable vessel that was moving with great rapidity toward
a dark and indefinite shore.” He said that he had this very same dream before “nearly
every great and important event of the war.” This included some of the Union’s greatest victories,
such as Gettysburg and Antietam. For him, it meant great changes were afoot, but as you’ll soon see,
modern psychologists may have disagreed. It might sound crazy to us in 2023 that the
President of the USA would tell his cabinet about his dream life, but in those days,
people were fascinated by dreams. Sometimes a well-known person’s dreams would appear in
newspapers, as did Lincoln’s many times. It was thought back then that dreams might be able to
unlock doors to the future. That they might be portents, messages about what’s going to happen.
Lincoln was one of those people that often remembered his dreams. We all dream,
maybe four to six dreams a night if our brains are in working order and we are not on certain
drugs that can affect our sleeping patterns. They usually last ten to twenty minutes,
but because we aren’t using our logical faculties when we dream, dreams can feel much longer. That’s
one theory. Another says because it’s related to the sleeping brain being at a lower temperature.
We are also effectively paralyzed in sleep, which is a good thing since we can’t act out with our
muscles what’s going on in the dreams. Some people wake up but remain paralyzed, a condition known as
sleep paralysis, which can be scary as hell as you scream and shout and try and move your arms
while you can still hear the person next to you snoring. If you’ve experienced it, you’ll know
what we mean when we say it’s frightening. There are four stages of sleep, taking about
90 minutes a cycle. It’s during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) part of the cycle that we have
the most vivid dreams. The REM stage gets longer the further we are into our night’s
sleep. REM’s relation to dreaming was only really defined in 1953, a long time before
Lincoln went on his trips down the river. The dreams we remember are the ones we have
just before waking. Still, even if we remember them in vivid detail at first,
because of certain neurochemical conditions scientists don’t always agree on, we forget
them throughout the day. But the big ones can stay with us forever. Lincoln used to write his dreams
down after waking, which, as you’ll see later in this show, was probably a very good idea.
Lincoln wasn’t the only one who thought his dreams were more like visions of the future.
Dreams have been seen as prophesies since time began. Alexander Hamilton Stephens,
who was the Vice President of the Confederacy throughout the Civil War,
said the same thing as Lincoln. He said he also saw the future during his nightly bouts of Zzzs.
While he was in prison at Fort Warren at the end of the war, he said he had a number of recurring
dreams, and he wrote them all down. He said he’d often wake up in tears after dreaming about being
at home and saying goodbye to his slaves or visiting his deceased sister. He wrote,
“For the most part, my dreams seem nothing but the aberrations of my own mind…Still, they seemed to
be so much more…special visitations…visits portending something.” He believed God
might somehow be part of these dreams. So, here we had two men of high intellectual
caliber living in an age of rationality and reason, fighting on two different sides,
who both believed dreams could be portents (a picture of the future). As we said,
these portents were published by newspapers. The public lapped the stories up. Many people
thought Lincoln’s “The Janus-Faced Vision” dream was him seeing his own demise.
He had the dream just after he’d been elected in 1860. He said he
was looking into a looking glass, but what looked back at him were two faces,
one of them much paler than the other. Lincoln told his wife, Mary, about this,
and he also told a number of close friends. After he was assassinated, this dream,
as well as the floating dream and the White House funeral dream,
was printed in various newspapers. One story said that after he told Mary about the two-faced dream,
she said to him, “That means you will be reelected - but I don’t like its looking pale…that looks as
if you would not live through your second term.” Lincoln was super spooked by this dream, thinking
it could indeed mean he’d be a dead man during his second term. He actually died after just 45 days
into that second term. He was so unnerved about this dream he tried to tell himself it was “the
natural result of some principle of refraction or optics.” We told you he was a very rational man.
Some of you might now think Lincoln was crazy, but maybe his dreams did teach him something,
as we will explain in detail soon. We can find many more stories of people
who felt their dreams were a portent. There’s the story told by the satirist Mark Twain,
who said he had a dream of his brother’s death. At the time, Twain, real name Samuel Clemens, was 23.
He had a dream his brother was dead and was so convinced that he had to be calmed down
by his sister. At the time, both brothers worked on a steamboat called Pennsylvania.
To cut a long story short, he and his brother got split up. Pennsylvania sank,
and the brother died on it, along with 250 others. Later the scene at the funeral was
exactly what young Twain (Samuel) had dreamed of. It comes as no surprise then that he later joined
the Society for Psychical Research. Twain was a very, very sharp and intelligent man,
but he believed dreams held a mysterious power. He once wrote, “I came in with Halley’s Comet
in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said,
no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together; they must go out
together.’ He died one day after Halley’s Comet's perihelion. Twas a very good guess he made!
Dr. James Watson said before he wrote about the double helix structure of DNA, he had dreams about
a double-sided staircase of, in some accounts, two intertwined serpents. Paul McCartney dreamed
up the song “Yesterday” and wrote it when he woke up. Dimitry Mendeleev, who created the
modern periodic table in the 19th century, once wrote, “I saw in a dream a table where all the
elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.”
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, said he used to have the same dream over and over in which
he was in a giant house with many floors and rooms, which he later realized were
different parts of the psyche. Still today, we often fill in personality archetypes tests
for fun or in the interview process for a job. Jung worked closely with Sigmund Freud until the
two had a famous falling out. It was these two that became widely known for trying to
explain what dreams were from a psychological point of view, not a neurobiological point of
view. They didn’t believe in dreams as messages from God or other forms of divination. For them,
dreams were firmly rooted in the person and could tell you a lot about that person.
While they differed greatly regarding what they thought about the mind, they both understood that
dreams were powerful things. Freud thought more about how dreams were manifestations of repressed
desires and unconscious conflicts, while Jung once said, “They do not deceive, they do not lie,
they do not distort or disguise.” He said dreams could be linked with archetypes and universal
themes and show us the purpose of our lives. So, for Jung, dreams may show a path forward,
a development, but he also said, “I have noticed that dreams are as simple or as
complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit ahead of the
dreamer’s consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any better than any of you,
for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp.” For Freud, who, to be frank, was quite dark,
a recurring dream would be a reenactment of something traumatic that had happened
to someone in the past. The dream might be the only way this person can awaken these
dark forces. He also believed dreams were a way to release a repressed sexual desire.
So, if he’d read that Lincoln had dreamed of a “singular and indescribable vessel that was moving
with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore,” he would no doubt have said the vessel was
Lincoln’s penis and the dark and indefinite shore was his repressed sexual desires. Jung might have
said what many of you would think, that Lincoln’s vessel was his unconscious mind on an adventure of
sorts to attain personal growth. But there’s much more to dreaming that these two guys came up with.
So, right now, we have discussed three types of recurring dreams. One is the dream as
possibly a portent, as you saw, very popular in Lincoln’s day and, although we didn’t discuss it,
popular throughout most of history. Type two is a dream as being part of creative inspiration,
what ancients might have said was being touched by the Gods. Type three is the dream as a symbol,
a coded message that can tell us something deeper about ourselves. This is how we usually
think of recurring dreams in this day and age. What’s strange is that people tend to have the
same dreams. According to the Sleep Foundation, between 60% and 75% of American adults have
recurring dreams, with women having them a bit more often than men. 77% of those recurring
dreams are negative, with car crashes and your teeth falling out being common. Other common
recurring dreams are being chased, falling, flying, being naked in public, and finding
yourself unprepared for something important, such as having an exam or public speaking.
Let’s have a look at the dream of teeth falling out; obviously not a very nice dream. It goes
without saying that if your teeth really are falling out in real life, then this anxiety
would be expected, but most people who have this dream usually have perfectly good teeth. So,
it doesn’t fall into what we call the continuity hypothesis, which means dreams just being an
extension of our waking thoughts or worries. Losing teeth in a dream, often just pulling
them out really easily with your fingers, seems to go a lot deeper than dental hygiene concerns.
The ancient Greek dream interpreter Artemidorus Daldianus said different teeth could represent
different people in a household, so losing teeth could mean fearing someone’s death. He also wrote,
“It is quite reasonable that some of the teeth, when they fall out,
signify the loss of…possessions.” That was almost two thousand years ago, and things haven’t changed
much. We generally relate losing teeth in a dream to some kind of insecurity looming over someone.
Freud once theorized that losing teeth in dreams was a fear of sexual impotence,
possibly a fear of castration for men, and a fear of infertility for women. This was all
related to the fear of powerlessness, he said, and for Freud, the greatest
of all insecurities was losing your genitals. Some more recent studies have confirmed that
people who dreamed about losing their teeth often suffered from higher levels
of depression and anxiety and, in real life, and are worried a lot about feeling helpless
and losing control. They were stuck in a loop of anxiety and depression, and so their bad dreams
recurred. Researchers also said this dream is common when people face transitions in their
lives. Some other studies related such dreams to actual tooth irritation, such as teeth grinding
when people sleep, but that’s a long shot. Obviously, some dreams are very easy to
understand. Lots of people have a dream of not being able to find a bathroom, and then they
wake up and find they are in need of a pee. Other dreams are far less easy to understand,
such as trying to turn on a light in a dream. It would seem pretty obvious in the symbolic
sense that the dream would mean someone needs some clarity in life, an answer to a question.
Perhaps they’ve found themselves in a difficult situation in life but can’t find a way out and
so need some light. This again relates to the feeling of being anxious and powerless.
But why is any of this happening at all? What actually makes us dream
of these things? It’s not as if we go to bed wanting these dreams to happen. Sure,
some dreams are just us seemingly mixing and mashing up parts of the day we’ve had. A movie,
for instance, can affect what we dream at night, but sometimes we have the trips of a lifetime, and
the content of the dream doesn’t seem to relate to anything you can easily explain. We can turn into
producers of epic movies, yet the movies don’t seem to be based on our day-to-day lives. Why?
We know from looking at brain activity that the limbic system is very active during sleep. The
limbic system plays a huge part in processing our emotions, motivations, and memories. The amygdala
is also part of this system, and during REM – remember the dreamy part of our sleep cycle – the
amygdala, which processes fear and anxiety, is very active. Meanwhile, the part of the brain
that is not very active is the reasoning and logical thinking part, the prefrontal cortex.
It’s like watching a movie without a director, just lots of memories and feelings that run wild.
You have this big bag of memories and fears and emotions all swirling around,
but your so-called “executive suite” is hardly switched on. That’s why your dreams are so crazy;
it’s why they can defy logic. It’s thought that when people have lucid dreams,
when they know they are dreaming and can impact the outcome of their dreams, some part or parts
of the frontal cortex are turned on. But again, why are our brains doing this to us? Why did
evolution make us this way? Dreams have been with us forever, and they are here to stay, but why?
Our brains are certainly mysterious things. There is much we have stored on these hard
drives in our heads than we’re not always aware of. These hidden memories, symbols,
and feelings can sometimes come out when we’re not exactly dreaming, and we think this might be an
answer to why we dream or have recurring dreams. Researchers from the Center for Psychedelic
Research at Imperial College London wrote a paper in 2019 about the effect of the substance
dimethyltryptamine (DMT) on humans. DMT is a very powerful, sometimes life-changing hallucinogen,
something Joe Rogan likes to to talk about. He’s not alone. The researchers wrote:
“From the altered brainwaves and participants’ reports, it’s clear these people are completely
immersed in their experience — it’s like daydreaming only far more vivid and immersive;
it’s like dreaming but with your eyes open.” People on DMT, especially long exposure doses
after taking a South American ritualistic concoction known as ayahuasca, have reported
going on journeys and finding solutions to problems – sometimes overcoming life-long
depression or PTSD. In fact, right now, Johns Hopkins in the USA is doing similar experiments
in a lab with psilocybin (magic mushrooms). Their early reports show incredibly positive results in
helping people with chronic mental issues. A report noted, “Scientists believe that
psilocybin mushrooms place people into a ‘waking’ dream state. The reasons for this are that these
mushrooms create brain states that usually only occur when a person is sleeping. Analyzing the
biological similarities and differences of psilocybin use…opens up the doors for
using psilocybin mushrooms as a therapy for diseases like depression and anxiety.”
This might explain what our dreams are there for. Maybe they are our brain’s way of assessing
problems we have, such as anxiety issues, an exam we have, or the threat of being dumped or losing
a job. This anxiety plays out in stories, as it does when people have colorful waking
dreams on DMT or psilocybin. The researchers call these waking dreams on those substances
mystical experiences, and our dreams could also be said to be mystical experiences.
Months after one of the psilocybin studies, 80 percent of the participants that experienced
these waking dreams said they were among the five most “personally meaningful and spiritually
significant experiences of their lives.” 50 percent of people said it was the single most
personally and spiritually meaningful experience of their lives. They were all basically dreaming
while awake. Now it seems we’re going back to the days of the ancient Greeks and of Lincoln,
feeling dreams hold a much higher power than simply being manifestations of a movie we
watched last night or, as Freud thought, all related to our repressed carnality.
It’s more likely that Gods are not in our heads, and we are not seeing the future when we dream,
but our limbic systems are throwing up memories and anxieties that mean
something if we analyze what happened. It’s no wonder Lincoln feared his
assassination. He knew people wanted him dead. In 1861, he was informed of the so-called
Baltimore Plot. It doesn’t matter if there was a real threat or not. He was told there was,
and it must have played on his mind. Perhaps his dreams just opened him up to his greatest fears.
As for why musicians can write songs in dreams or scientists can have a eureka moment while asleep,
it seems pretty obvious these things were already on their minds, but their dreams
opened up new doors in the back of their minds. There are, of course, some wonderful theories out
there regarding our dreams. We love this one from 16th-century China. It’s in riddle form:
“Once Chuang Chou dreamed that he was a butterfly. He fluttered about happily, quite pleased with the
state that he was in, and knew nothing about Chuang Chou. Presently he awoke and found that
he was very much Chuang Chou again. Now, did Chou dream that he was a butterfly, or was the
butterfly now dreaming that he was Chou?” It sounds similar to the brain-in-a-vat
hypothesis. Is our reality just a dream, and are we merely brains in a vat of nutrients connected
to a supercomputer? Can we sometimes break out of his dream, like in The Matrix, when we take
the Red Pill? Is taking DMT or psilocybin like taking the Red Pill? Ok, so we don’t think there’s
a matrix, and we doubt we are brains in vats, but perhaps dreams can show us another reality,
one we can considerably learn from. Studies have shown that the majority of
people in the world believe that dreams can show us hidden truths. It’s not crazy to suggest that,
it seems. It’s just that science can’t fully understand dreams. We don’t know how these
dreams are organized, especially when they are spectacular trips worthy of a movie screening.
All we know is our brains can conjure up amazing things while we are dreaming or having waking
dreams on powerful substances - that we should add should not be taken outside of a professional
setting until we understand them more. So, it’s possible that, like Lincoln,
we have recurring dreams in an attempt to understand ourselves better and figure out our
reality. Sometimes we can’t, and so we get stuck in a loop of bad dreams. Scientists have sometimes
said that’s what happens with depression; people get stuck in a seemingly eternal loop
of the same negative thoughts. It would make sense that our dreams also get stuck in loops,
but in the dream, we are trying to get off this running wheel. It’s possible that in some dreams,
we make a breakthrough. We’re sure many of you have woken up from dreams feeling like a weight
has been lifted off your back. These could be said to be breakthrough dreams. Scientists admit that
dreams can heal; they just don’t know why exactly. A British scientist also working on psilocybin
studies said the dream-like trips in his studies helped people to get off their never-ending cycle
of repetitive negative thoughts. Maybe that’s what dreams are, people running around trying
to make sense of things and sometimes trying to find pathways out of trouble.
Although, we don’t think there’s anything otherworldly about our dreams. Nonetheless,
what we don’t know about ourselves is indeed a somewhat magical and sometimes frightening
universe that nonetheless needs to be explored. Your dreams are your friend,
even if it might not seem that way at times. Now you need to watch “Near Death Experiences
Examined.” Or, check out the meaning of life in “History of the Entire Universe (In 25 Minutes).”