Harvard Neuroscientist Dr. Baland Jalal Explains ”Sleep Paralysis, Lucid Dreaming and Premonitions: Expanding our Awareness into the Mysteries of Our Brain During Sleep”

“Dreams are one of the great mysteries of science. In their bizarre complexity, they can reveal deeper truths about who you are at the most basic level.” Researcher at Harvard University and the World’s leading expert on sleep paralysis, Dr. Baland Jalal Watch this interview on YouTube here https://youtu.be/nE15JIqy5rU On the episode you will learn: ✔ Who is Dr. Baland Jalal, and how did he find his way to study neuroscience and sleep, becoming the world’s leading expert on sleep paralysis?  ✔ How is Dr. Baland connected to Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix of the DNA structure and Dr. V.S. Ramachandran? ✔ What is sleep paralysis and what happens to the brain while this is occurring? ✔Why is the time just before we go to sleep and the time just before we wake up important for increasing our creativity or gaining insight? ✔ Are premonitions real, and can we access important information from our dreams? ✔Can we actually travel to places we have never been? ✔ What is lucid dreaming and how can we gain insight from what we see in these dreams? ✔Can lucid dreaming be beneficial for our waking hours? ✔What advancements in neuroscience do you think could help us in the future with our dreams? 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 #224 (that was postponed from April due to our guest’s busy travel and work schedule) we are going to go beyond where we’ve ever gone before on this podcast, and cover some topics that you might have questions about, like I did, and I’ve found Dr. Baland Jalal[i], from Harvard, the world’s leading expert on sleep paralysis, who has published 48 peer reviewed academic papers as well as a book from Cambridge University Press, to answer our questions.   We’ve covered dreams before, on EPISODE #104[ii], with Sleep Scientist Antonio Zadra and his book When Your Brain Dreams: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep but I left out some parts of the dream world that I thought might be too weird for this podcast, until I heard Dr. Jalal connecting the brain to our dreams, and this changed everything for me. I mentioned on EPISODE #211, that when I first was introduced to Dr. Jalal, his team sent me an email with his Harvard Bio and a write-up about his work on dreams but little did I know that his work would open my mind to places it’s never been before, as I began to explore sleep paralysis (something I’ve experienced—just once which was enough for me, I just had no idea there was a name for it), lucid dreams (that I flat out thought I was crazy for having), and learning how my brain operates while dreaming, which revealed more truths about who I am at the core than I knew before coming across Dr. Jalal’s work. I’ve gone on to study English scientist and professor of neuroscience, Mathew Walker and often tune into his podcast that’s all about sleep, the brain and the body[iii] to see how we can all learn more about ways to improve our sleep, which we all know to be one of our top 5 health staples. I did create this podcast to bring credibility to some of the concepts that used to be considered weird, but now, science and FMRI scans show why these practices that 20 years ago were not mainstream, are now commonly used in our schools and work environments.  Before watching Dr. Jalal’s lectures, I don’t think I would openly talk about the experiences I’ve had with the dream world, but I thought if I’ve experienced these things, what if our listeners have also, wherever you are listening to this podcast in the world, and perhaps hearing from Dr. Jalal WHAT these bizarre things called dreams actually are, WHY we have them, and see if they can expand our self-awaren