[William Shatner] Terrifying nightmares
linked to inexplicable deaths.
Unconscious visions
that foretell of unspeakable tragedies.
And emerging technologies
that can engineer our wildest dreams.
Just like breathing, everyone dreams.
We might not always remember it,
but it happens every night of our lives.
Some believe our sleeping thoughts are nothing more
than nonsensical concoctions of the mind,
while others claim our dreams and nightmares
could be messages from beyond,
premonitions of the future,
or even secret signals
that have the power to transform mankind.
Could there be more to our subconscious stories
than we realize?
Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
♪ ♪
[crickets chirping]
[Shatner] It is said that the average person dreams
between one to two hours per night,
which adds up to about six years over a lifetime.
And while it might be easy
to dismiss these involuntary images,
thoughts and sensations that are conjured during sleep,
it's clear that dreaming is as hard-wired
into the human experience as breathing.
Yet, the meaning and purpose
of these enigmatic mental expressions
remains one of the longest-standing mysteries
of the mind.
[Kelly Bulkeley] Throughout history
and cultures all around the world,
people have turned to their dreams for reassurance,
wisdom, guidance and warnings of dangers to come.
People generally agreed
that dreams are valuable and important.
There's something about the intense visual qualities
of dreaming.
We are asleep.
And yet, our imaginations can create
these marvelous visual experiences.
Dreams hold so much influence over humans
because they're just inherently
a dramatic, attention-grabbing experience.
And in some cases, are very fantastic
and surreal and adventurous.
They just inherently grab us from childhood onward.
You've had experiences that didn't really happen,
but it's a piece of your life.
[Shatner] It appears we've been trying to make sense
of what happens when we slumber since the dawn of civilization.
The first documented dream was recorded
in 2500 BC in Mesopotamia.
The Egyptian Dream Book--
written on ancient papyrus over 3,000 years ago--
compiled 108 different dreams and their proposed meanings.
And in all this time,
we've yet to answer one very basic question.
What is the purpose of dreams?
There's a lot of disagreement among dream researchers
about why we dream, whether dreams have any meaning.
People will speak of God.
They'll speak of evolutionary wisdom.
Sigmund Freud was a medical doctor
and psychiatrist in Vienna, Austria,
who, in 1900, published The Interpretation of Dreams.
And in this book, Freud taught
that dreams are the royal road
to a knowledge of the unconscious mind.
By studying our dreams,
we learn about the deepest wishes and desires
and fears and instinctual drives within each of us.
Some of the theories about what happens
while we're dreaming
is, we're consolidating our memories.
Being able to take all of these different things
that have happened to us
throughout our lifetimes
and create a coherent self-identity.
That that's where our sense of self comes from.
Is that true? We don't know.
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
Inside this century-old hospital
lies the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory,
one of the few facilities in the world
trying to reveal
what is really happening while we sleep.
[Michelle Carr] The Dream and Nightmare Laboratory
was founded in 1991.
And we're really trying to form links between
what's happening during sleep and during dreams.
In the sleep lab, we measure these through brain activity
and eye movement activity and muscle activity.
You go through four different stages of sleep.
And when we first fall asleep,
that's called stage-one sleep.
This stage is very short.
Even in stage one, people will have dreams.
Then someone descends a bit further into a stage-two sleep.
They also will have dreams
that can sometimes be mundane or thought-like.
And then they descend even further
into a deeper stage:
stage-three sleep.
Dreams are very vague
and very hard to recall when people wake up.
And then, stage-four sleep, the deepest state of sleep,
where finally you enter REM sleep,
rapid eye movement sleep,
which is really the main stage of interest
for a dream scientist.
The brain practically wakes up.
We have more activation of emotional areas of the brain.
The eyes are moving, the muscles are twitching,
and people are usually in very vivid and elaborate
and wake-like dreams in this stage.
Let's say dream science has uncovered, like,
25, 30% of what's going on,
but there's still a lot to learn.
Like, 70% is completely unknown.
It's actually very, very difficult to study dreams
because we do not have direct access to them.
- Oh, here we got some eye movements. -Yeah, there.
[Carr] So, in all of our scientific studies,
we wake people up, sometimes repeatedly during the night,
so that they can report some of their dreams.
- Sit up when you're ready. - Okay.
But probably 95% of dream activity
is still completely forgotten.
[Shatner] Apart from scientific curiosity,
you might wonder,
why should we even care about dream research?
Well, many of mankind's greatest ideas and innovations
are said to have been inspired by brain activity during sleep.
[Tony McMahon] There are many great minds
whose dreams have helped them
to formulate some of their greatest work.
So, for example, Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev,
actually dreamt the periodic table.
That's the table of all the elements.
Einstein claimed that dreams
helped him to realize the theory of relativity,
and how the observer perceives time and space
according to where they are.
The Google search engine, uh, was invented in a dream.
Larry Page describes that he woke up from a dream
and immediately started scribbling out a plan
that was to list and rank all Internet sites.
But there are breakthroughs in every field of endeavor.
Another example
would be Paul McCartney's song "Yesterday."
He dreamed that he was listening
to this just beautiful piece of music,
and he persuaded the Beatles to perform it,
and it became their all-time hit.
[cheering, applause]
Famous people like Edison and Tesla
really wanted to access the creative sleep state
as you're falling asleep.
They thought that was the kind of key
to creativity and invention.
And so, they developed this steel ball trick
where they would hold a steel ball in their hands,
and then, as they fell asleep, as their muscles relaxed,
the steel ball would drop, and it would wake them up.
And then they would record whatever that creative,
imaginative idea and dream was that had happened.
[Bulkeley] What these stories of creative insights
and inventions through dreaming tells us is that
if we devote ourselves
to a task, to a challenge, to a problem,
and we throw ourselves at it, our dreams will help us.
And I think that that if you can tap into that resource,
nothing will stop you.
[Shatner] Could a better understanding of dreams
help us unlock our greatest innovations and achievements?
Perhaps.
And as scientists continue
to probe our sleeping subconscious,
what might be revealed?
Dream science is still seen as peripheral and weird.
But your dreams 15 years out
can predict the onset of Parkinson's.
But nobody knows that.
Your nightmares are a huge part
of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Nobody's asking questions about that.
We are dreaming in every stage of sleep.
This is a lot of your lived experience.
You wouldn't walk around all day just ignoring your thoughts
and saying, "Oh,
those don't have any influence on my behavior
or my emotional well-being."
But that's what we're doing at night.
But dreams are in touch with more than the science can see,
and that is fine with me as a scientist,
and makes it so much more interesting
to work on as a challenge.
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
In a working-class section of the city,
a quiet yet unsettling epidemic starts to unfold.
A group of young Southeast Asian immigrants
belonging to an ethnic group known as the Hmong
succumb to a truly nightmarish fate.
- [panting rapidly] - They are dying
in their sleep.
[Her] In January of 1987,
the L.A. Times published an article about
over 140 Hmong men dying in their sleep
with no real explanation.
The CDC did autopsies on the individuals,
they couldn't find any reason
on why these individuals passed away.
There was no sign of a heart attack or a stroke.
They were young, they were healthy,
they didn't have prior existing health conditions.
Looking at the surface of the story,
there's no reason for these men to have died.
There's still a lot that we don't understand
about why this happened.
But one thing that's really interesting about these cases
is that a lot of these men reported
that in the days preceding their death,
they were having terrifying nightmares.
It was really a mystery.
[Shatner] Public health officials coined the term
"Sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome"
to at least categorize these bizarre deaths,
but it doesn't explain the cause.
And it certainly begs a truly haunting question.
Could bad dreams actually cause healthy men
to suddenly die in their sleep?
According to Hmong culture and belief, nightmares can kill.
In the Hmong tradition, dream is how the spirit world
and deceased communicate with the living.
And so, they come to us in our dreams,
and they communicate their needs and how they're doing.
There are many spirits.
There are good spirits and evil spirits.
The poj dab pob, for example, are evil spirits.
So, dreams are a place to receive communication.
Uh, however, if you don't listen to the spirit,
it can come to your nightmares and kill you.
[Andrew Collins] This is something which is not unique
to this particular population.
Um, in East Asia,
for instance, there was a strong belief
in a creature that could invade dreams
known as the Leyak.
The term "nightmare" has its own origin,
and it comes from this supernatural creature
in East European tradition called the mara,
that could shape-shift
and enter into the dreams,
and could even bring about death.
[Shatner] Demonic entities and evil spirits
that prey upon their victims in the dream world
can be found in folkloric traditions around the world.
But what is so confounding about the nightmare deaths
that ravaged the American Hmong community in the 1980s
is that, inexplicably,
these men all seemed to experience
the same horrific dream.
[Her] There are some men who survived,
and they shared with us
that they had nightmares for many nights in a row.
They would see these evil, dark figures
come and sit on their chest, that would suffocate them
and kept constricting their body so they couldn't breathe.
They could not scream, they could not move.
Spouses of-of the men who passed away
shared similar stories.
So, we believe that in these dreams,
evil spirits called the poj dab pob
was visiting the person,
causing the sudden, unexplained death.
[Shatner] Was the same supernatural entity
really squeezing the life
from these men in their nightmares?
The Hmong community certainly believes it's true,
but how might the scientific community
try to interpret this phenomenon?
This reminds me a lot of other phenomena
that we've studied, such as,
in sleep paralysis, a specific type
of usually very terrifying dream experience
that happens right at the onset or the offset of sleep,
and most of our body is paralyzed.
And often, people will hallucinate
some kind of threat or menacing figure
suffocating them or sitting on them.
[Bulkeley] There's some thought that these could be related
to some extreme form of, um,
sleep paralysis or night terror that occurred to these people.
I'm not sure that's the case.
Not all of the men died, necessarily,
of the same exact physiological process
with the heart or some other part of the body,
so it makes it all the more likely
that whatever triggered their actual dying
was something, as strange as it might sound,
psychological or even spiritual.
And it sure sounds like some kind of dream phenomenon.
But how could something kill you in your dreams?
[Shatner] Could psychological distress
have been the cause of the nightmare-induced deaths
of around 140 healthy men?
Some believe it's a distinct possibility,
based on the shared experience the Hmong had
in their war-torn homeland.
[Her] In 1954, the United States CIA
recruited them to fight against communism
during the Vietnam War.
Ten percent of the Hmong population
passed away during this war.
And after the United States left the war,
the Hmong became enemies of the state
and they were persecuted.
To escape genocide from the communist government,
they then fled to other countries,
like the United States.
These men had just survived a devastating war,
so they were going through a traumatic,
traumatic time in their life.
[Shatner] Was psychological trauma
from the Vietnam War
connected to these inexplicable nightmare deaths?
All we can do is speculate.
But strangely, by the late 1980s,
these unexplained deaths all but stopped.
And the Hmong believe it proves this phenomenon
was a matter of spirituality.
[Her] As these men were dying,
it was a crisis in the community.
They didn't know what was going on,
and so, it took elders and shamans coming together
and talking to the spirits to have a better understanding.
And the spirits shared that these men
were not honoring the spirits like they had done in the past.
When they came to America,
they were no longer building an altar to pray to them,
offering animals as sacrifices to honor and feed the spirits.
So, the spirits were then angry and causing harm to the living.
Since then, we recognize that we have to continue
making sure that, um, the spirits are being honored
as well as, um, supported.
And so, that helped reduce the number of these deaths.
But we believe that nightmares still kill even today.
The mere suggestion that a nightmare can kill
is profoundly disturbing.
It really makes the thought of dying in your sleep
a bit more unsettling, doesn't it?
Perhaps less alarming
is the notion that while we slumber,
our brains may be able to open a window
and allow us to predict the future.
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
Nestled in the hills of the Peloponnese
lies one of the ancient world's
most remarkable medical sanctuaries
that has been preserved for over 2,000 years.
Today, it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
but in the time of Classical Greece,
it was something more.
A sacred destination for pilgrims to be healed
in their sleep.
[Horowitz] Thousands of years ago,
people were dreaming in temples,
and these were specifically for healing.
One of the most famous ones
is the Epidaurus,
where people would try to have dreams
of the Asclepieion, the serpent god
who would come down and heal you in your sleep.
And so, people would sleep surrounded by these serpents,
and they would ask for a dream visit
from the healing serpent god.
[Moss] Asclepius is the Greek and Roman god
of healing through dreams.
You go to his temple, really, not for diagnosis.
You go in hopes of a sacred experience of healing.
And we have testimonies, I mean, written reports,
of what happened in the Temple of Asclepius,
and they're quite fascinating.
We see people who believe
that they've been healed of specific physical symptoms
after interaction with a sacred being.
[Shatner] In the ancient world, many believed that dreams
offered more than spiritual guidance.
One of the most influential voices of the time
argued that dreams could diagnose illness
from deep within the body.
[Moss] One explanation comes from
the most renowned physician of the ancient Greek world.
Galen was the personal physician
of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor.
He wrote a number of treatises on diagnosis through dreams.
And he said that the reason why dreams
can give you an accurate diagnosis
of what's going on through the body
is that there's some function of consciousness during sleep
that may travel through the body
and bring back a really exact report
of what's going on inside the body.
[Shatner] Today, nightmares or visions
that seem to foreshadow disease before physical symptoms appear
are known as prodromal dreams.
But is this phenomenon real or imagined?
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
As night begins to fall over her suburban home,
43-year-old Kathleen O'Keefe-Kanavos
heads upstairs to go to bed.
And as she drifts off to sleep,
she is visited by a strange messenger.
I had gone in for my yearly mammogram,
and I had gotten a clean bill of health.
And that night, I had the strangest dream.
And all of a sudden, my dream froze
like, like the page on your computer freezes.
And in the middle of that frozen page
was a door.
And through that door
walked a Franciscan monk-- in the brown robe--
and this monk took my hand,
put it right on my breast, and said, "Do you feel that?"
and I said, "Yeah."
And he said, "That's breast cancer."
You go back to your doctor tomorrow
and you tell him you need exploratory surgery
to find this cancer.
[Shatner] Was the arrival of this strange visitor
simply a figment of Kathleen's imagination?
Or did she experience a real prodromal dream?
An accurate assessment of her health
delivered during sleep?
Whatever the case, Kathleen was convinced
it was all too haunting to ignore.
[Kanavos] I said to the doctor,
"I need exploratory surgery to find this breast cancer.
I know I have it.
I need you to do this.
I'm not leaving without a yes."
And so, long story short,
I had the surgery,
and when I first woke up,
I was told that, yes, it was breast cancer.
My first reaction was, I just started crying.
"Well, thank goodness
they found that cancer early enough."
And so, the monk was right.
[Shatner] Was Kathleen's dream a miraculous coincidence,
or proof that the ancients were right,
that dreams really do have the power
to diagnose and even heal?
This doesn't make sense of the typical,
traditional, modern, Western medicine.
And yet, it does make more sense if we think of dreaming
in its traditional healing capacity,
as giving us insights into these kinds of
illnesses and problems.
The mysteries of dreaming
involve our rediscovering things that earlier people knew,
things like the healing power of dreams.
I think there's something in the idea that
amongst all the things going on in dreams,
dreams can be body talk,
and the message may come veiled as a messenger
who has our best interests at heart.
We've been taught that a dream is just a dream.
You don't really need to pay any attention to it.
It's just the mind firing off neurons
when you're asleep.
But I've always said it has to mean something.
I'm not really sure why I listened to that monk
other than it was such an odd dream.
But if I had not believed him,
I believe I'd be dead today,
and you wouldn't be speaking to me.
If dreams do, in fact, have the power to heal,
then telling someone they'll feel better
after a good night's sleep
may have a deeper meaning than we think.
And there's growing evidence that dreams
can influence our waking lives in other ways as well.
Because researchers have developed a technology
that allows people to unlock new potential
as they sleep.
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
This esteemed university has produced remarkable innovations
in computer technology,
pioneering work in medical imaging
and advanced robotics.
But recently,
MIT researchers have been developing technology
to quite literally engineer our dreams.
[Horowitz] Dream engineering
is a pretty new field,
under a decade.
And what it means is if we took all these technological advances
in sensors, devices, in A.I.,
and we aimed them at dream science,
how can we help people shift what they dream about
to better themselves the next day?
Historically, the way that people tried to determine
whether they could control a dream is
they'd show you a stimulus, maybe a scary film,
and then you would fall asleep.
And then they'd wake you up, maybe four hours later,
eight hours later, and they'd say, "What'd you dream about?"
Well, you'd say, "I have no idea."
And the really simple shift that we made was,
we said, "Let's focus on the whole sleep onset period."
It's where your imagination starts turning into pictures.
Where you're dreaming, but you can still hear
- the outside world around you. - [indistinct whispering]
That's when we try to slip something into dreams.
If we can control a small piece of a dream,
then we can run a controlled experiment on a dream.
[Shatner] Can technology really control
the content of our dreams?
Well, in 2017, that's exactly what Adam Haar Horowitz
and other researchers at MIT tried to find out.
And they would create a groundbreaking
glove-like device known as Dormio.
This is the Dormio device that we built at MIT.
This device is a research prototype.
It works really well in the lab.
This is not built for consumers at home.
The way this will work is we put this on
before someone goes to bed.
You have these sensors.
This person's sleep will be tracked,
and then Dormio looks for a special moment in sleep
where dreams are beginning
but you can still hear the world around you.
In that special moment, that device will talk to you.
"Remember to think of a tree,
remember to think of a fork,
a volcano, Beyoncé," your pick.
And we found that 92% of people who came in
would have a dream where directly they would report
the thing that we suggested.
We're hitting this 92% number, which feels pretty exciting,
and feels like it opens up a lot of ground for new experiments.
[Shatner] Will dream technology such as Dormio
one day allow us to live out our wildest fantasies
while we sleep?
Climb to the summit of Mount Everest?
Win the World Series with a towering home run?
Or fly to a galaxy far, far away?
It's certainly an enticing prospect,
but how can shaping our dreams when we first fall asleep
actually help us while we're awake?
[Carr] Right when you fall asleep,
the brain is, uh, what we call "hyperassociative."
And it's kind of like creative thinking,
that you are making links between concepts
that you don't normally link.
Recently, there was a study where they had people
try to do these hard-to-solve math problems.
They found if people fell asleep for just one minute,
they were almost three times more likely to suddenly come up
with the hidden solution to these problems.
[Farahany] Dormio is designed to help people
access that state as you're falling asleep
to try to extend that period of creativity.
So, imagine that you are dreaming
about flying, uh, above the clouds.
And the researchers say, "What were you dreaming about?"
and you say, "I was in the clouds and I was flying,
but I had this incredible contraption, this new way
of being able to paraglide through the clouds."
And the researchers play audio about paragliding
and clouds and flying.
And then you fall asleep again,
and extend the dream
so that you start to develop more of it.
And now you're able to describe that invention.
[Horowitz] We can boost creativity, we can improve
somebody's learning
just by playing the right bedtime story,
maybe in a foreign language,
which helps them learn French faster.
That's a study.
How well you learn something
with a 10X difference is dependent on your sleep
and your dreams.
[Shatner] Devices like Dormio
could have a profound effect on creativity and learning,
but studies have also revealed
an even more astonishing application
for dream-shaping technology.
It may have the power
to save millions of lives.
We know that 80% of people with PTSD
will have recurring nightmares of the same topic every night.
These are really high stakes
because we know that if you have nightmares,
it increases your likelihood of attempting suicide by 4X.
So, if you're working with folks who are,
for instance, post-combat veterans,
and they struggle with suicidal ideation,
one of the most surprising results that we've gotten
is that just by having people choose a dream,
instead of whatever difficult dream comes naturally,
when we follow up a week later,
they significantly reduce their suicidal ideation.
That just a shift in the dream landscape
can shift their waking thoughts so much
has been a big surprise and, also, uh, really moving.
What happens if at scale, the three million people
who are struggling with those specific kinds of nightmares
suddenly aren't scared to go to bed at night?
The exciting thing about dream research
in the next ten years is it being applied,
and the implications for mental health and for learning.
How would that change the world?
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
Psychologist Dr. Keith Hearne
monitors a test subject who has achieved
rapid eye movement sleep, or R.E.M.,
a mental state when dreams are at their most vivid.
Suddenly, his test subject performs a series
of predetermined eye movements similar to Morse code
and successfully communicates, "I'm dreaming."
This experiment provides the first verified
scientific evidence of a phenomenon called
lucid dreams.
Lucid dreaming is the kind of rare brain state
when you know you're dreaming and can steer that dream.
It's kind of this magical space where
it seems like anything is possible
and that heightened state of awareness
is a really extraordinary one.
But lucid dreaming is a more rare occurrence.
There's probably a reason
that we don't enter into lucid dreaming every night
and that not everybody enters into lucid dreaming
and that it's a rare occurrence.
[Carr] Usually, lucid dreamers can control
the dream content to some extent.
And so, we really want to better understand,
how are lucid dreamers able to do this?
We found that lucid dreams are very useful
in the treatment of nightmares.
Lucid dreaming can also be used
to practice real-world skills.
Athletes and musicians can use the dream world to practice,
say, snowboarding or playing their musical instrument.
Or someone who's writing a novel,
they could enter into a lucid dream and actually
engage with one of their characters.
So, there's a lot of different uses to lucid dreaming,
and-and that's why we study them.
[Shatner] Could lucid dreams provide the next stage
of personal awareness and growth?
Perhaps.
Yet, the problem is, as little as one percent
of the population experience lucid dreams on a weekly basis.
But what if we all had access
to a device that could trigger this powerful state?
[Horowitz] There's a new tech start-up called Prophetic,
and they're working on
an idea of a head-worn device called the Halo.
And the idea is to blast
focused ultrasound into your brain
and to activate it while you're asleep.
And their hope is that that would make you
more likely to have lucid dreams,
because in lucid dreams,
that part of your brain is more active.
But so are other parts of your brain.
So, they have a really hard job ahead of them,
but I am totally excited to see more people
entering into the dream tech space.
[Shatner] If we could all gain access to lucid dreams,
when the conscious and subconscious mind seem to merge,
will we be able to not only push
our understanding of dreams farther
but also, finally answer the most elusive mystery:
why do we dream?
[Bulkeley] We tend to depreciate dreams
and treat them as irrational nonsense,
but dreams reflect a profound source of wisdom
that is very closely correlated
with people's most important, uh, emotional concerns,
uh, and interests in waking life.
But it's something that we just haven't quite figured out yet.
[Farahany] We should stay open to the possibility
that the state of dreaming may give us access to ourselves
and an understanding of ourselves in ways
that have never before been thought possible.
There's been a lot learned over the past couple of decades,
but it's still, in many ways, a science in its infancy.
Whether it's glimpsing future events before they occur,
healing the body
or learning entirely new skills,
dreams seem to be far more powerful than we may think.
But as science continues
to delve deeper into the mystery of dreaming...
...what else might we discover?
Could we unlock hidden powers?
Or open a new door to a world of nightmares?
Pondering these questions
will no doubt keep many of us awake at night
for a long time to come, because for now,
they continue to remain...
...unexplained.
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