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Atheopagan Web Weaving 2023 https://theapsocietyorg.wordpress.com/aww2023/\nRemember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com.\nS4E11 TRANSCRIPT:----more----\n\xa0\nYucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca,\nMark: And I'm Mark.\nYucca: and this week we're going to talk about dreams.\nMark: Ooh.\nYucca: Actually can't believe we haven't talked about dreams yet.\nMark: It is kind of surprising. We were, we were both kind of mystified as to why we haven't done that yet.\nYucca: Yeah, and I'm quite curious because we've never had this conversation. Not only have we not had it on the podcast, but we haven't had it off of recording either. So I don't know what your thoughts, opinions, experiences with dreams are. So I look\nMark: Oh, well, I, I, I hope, I hope they're shocking.\nYucca: Shocking. Okay. Well, I think a good place to start is def definitely with what are dreams.\nRight?\nMark: Yeah. And I, as you say, I don't know whether we'll have a similar perspective on this. I tend to think of dreams as kind of like the, the brain running a screensaver, drawing on bits of memory and themes of concern, and. Things that are kind of weighing on your mind, whether it's your conscious mind or your unconscious mind, and then putting together these fantastical sort of stories in a.\nIn a very, in an almost random sort of way. There's a lot of random generation in, in dreams that you can see. So that's what I think is the brain doing that and contributes to imagination. It solves problems. You know, we have so many examples of people who have discovered things waking up in the middle of the night going, aha, it out.\nRight?\nYucca: Yeah.\nMark: So that's what I think it is. How about you? Yuck.\nYucca: Yeah. Your, your understanding. It really reflects mine as well. It's something that I haven't dug into research on. Right. I don't have a deep understanding of neurobiology. You know, I certainly have read articles here and there and things like that, but it's not something that I've really done a lot of research in.\nBut, but what you were saying about it being basically our, our brains. Processing stuff, right, our experiences, putting together ideas and there being a randomness to it. But I think there's also sometimes parts of it that aren't quite as random though, because we are trying to figure stuff out.\nMark: Yeah. Oh,\nYucca: we're definitely trying to figure stuff out, piece it together, and there's definitely. There. I mean, there's different kinds of dreams that we can get into. But that sometimes it's just our brain rerunning through the stuff that we're doing during the day. Right. And sometimes it's working on, you know, particularly difficult experiences that we had, you know, running through trauma or things like that is, but I, I think it's a way that, that our.\nthat our brains are trying to make sense of what's going on. And it seems like there's something in there tied in with the sleep that we don't really understand a lot of the mechanisms for yet. We know that sleep is really important for us. We know that it evolved. Really early on because we see it in lots of other species.\nWe see it in very, very different species than us. I remember a few months back there was an announcement about a scientist suggesting that they had recorded what appeared to be spiders having r e m sleep, which is. Type of sleep that we have dreams in that of course they're not inside of the, the minds of these creatures, but that looking at the way that they behaved seemed to match with what we thought other creatures did at the same time that they were going through r e m.\nAnd so if it is so widespread, there has to be a really important purpose for it.\nMark: Right, right. Well, there's no. . Well, there's two questions there, right? I mean, the first one is, what's the point of sleep? And we have really not very good answers\nYucca: Yeah, we know what happens when