Brain Fact Friday on ”The Neuroscience of Dreams: Expanding Our Self-Awareness”

Everything you’ve got in your life is an expression of your level of awareness (Bob Proctor) and when you change your level of awareness, everything starts to shift. It’s fascinating. Today’s podcast I’m going to share how my awareness expanded as I began researching for an upcoming interview and what’s absolutely amazing about this experience, is that “once the mind has been expanded, it will never go back to its original state. Awareness is not something you lose.” (Bob Proctor). On this episode we will cover: ✔︎ Why lifelong learning is important for expanding our levels of awareness. ✔︎ What we all should know about dreaming and the brain. ✔︎ Review of our sleep cycle and REM sleep. ✔︎ Tips for remembering our dreams. ✔︎ Opening our mind up for new ways to improve creativity, business ideas, and sports training with our dream world. For returning guests, welcome back, and for those who are new here, I’m Andrea Samadi, author, and educator, with a passion for learning, understanding difficult concepts, and breaking them down so that we can all use and apply the most current research to improve our productivity and results in our schools, sports environments, and modern workplaces. On today’s EPISODE #211, “The Neuroscience of Dreams: Expanding Our Self-Awareness” I’m going to cover how an understanding of neuroscience connected to our dreams, could open up doors of possibility in our lives. This topic is not one that I was planning on covering, but as my awareness expanded while researching for an upcoming interview, I thought back to when some other topics that many people perceived as “weird”, are now readily accepted in our schools and workplaces, and perhaps, as new research and studies evolve, this topic could provide us with a new way of creative problem solving, or ways to generate new ideas in the business world, or even a new tool for mental rehearsal in the sports world. Before we get into this episode, I do want to start out by thanking you, the listener for tuning in. While writing this episode, I woke up to an email from Anuj Agarwal, the founder of Feedspot, who ranks podcasts based on content, followers, and traffic, letting me know that we had made ranking for The Best 30 Neuroscience Podcasts.[i] For those who have listened to our earlier episodes, you’ll know that I didn’t set out to go in this direction of Neuroscience, (it wasn’t even on my roadmap) but we ended up here by chance, when an educator urged me to go in this direction almost 10 years ago.  So to hit this achievement, in a relatively new field of study for me, without a background in science (other than the fact I did teach 9th grade Biology for a semester), it’s a true honor, and I’m beyond grateful to continue to host this podcast, and that you are finding these episodes as helpful as I am. This is the reason why I thought about launching this podcast in the first place—to show that anyone can learn and apply these skills, backed by science, whether you have a science degree or not. This cutting-edge research is important for all of us to know, understand and apply and I’ll be researching in this field anyway, so I figured, I might as well share what I’m learning on this platform. With our analytics, I can see where listeners are tuning in from by Country, and do appreciate all the messages you send to me on social media, letting me know that you listen and what you are learning.  I can now put some faces to the downloads, as I got to recently meet Sarah Eaton, from Queensland, Australia, who works with the Australian Government, and Ellie Mercado from Ossining, NY working in the field of education with social and emotional learning among many others who tag me on posts, and let me know this information is helpful and important. We do have a Facebook Group[ii], if you do want to stay connected to others around the globe as well. Moving on now to this week’s episode, and Brain Fact Friday, where I want to make a connection to an