Selects: How Fever Dreams Work

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your podcasts. When a group of women discover that they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. "I vowed. I will be his last target."

"He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves."

"We always say that trust your girlfriends."

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"There's a lot in life." "Listen to things, Dad, on the I-Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts." Everybody. Happy Saturday.

It's Chuck here.

And I'm here to deliver to you my pick for this week's Selects Episode.

This is from July 2017. It's the episode how fever dreams work.

“And quite honestly, you guys have picked this one because I don't remember much about it.”

So I'm going to listen to it all over again myself. So I hope you do as well. Hope you have a great Saturday and a great weekend. Here we go with. How fever dreams work.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of "I-Heart Radio." Hey, and welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm Josh Clark, this Charles W. Chuck Bryant, this Jerry Jerry's got a salad, everything's normal.

Which means it's time for Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Jerry's got the swarm of specials, she said. Oh, really? Yep.

She loves it. How you doing? I'm good, man.

Feeling of despite myself kind of relaxed.

Okay. I'm not feeling feverish if that's what you're driving at, and that's not what I was driving at. Yeah, no, I'm not. You get fever's a lot?

No? No? Not anymore.

“Although I haven't for a long time, like, I've never been like a fever person.”

I've probably had like a handful, maybe. How many fever's of you had? Not a ton since I was a kid. Yeah. Not a lot of adult fevers.

Right. I mean, I've had like a pop fever, I've had rock and roll fever. Yeah. Yellow fever. I've had the fever for a flavor of a brungal.

Oh, man. Me, too. What are those? Those aren't even potato chips, are they? They're potato crisps.

And those are good. They're mashed together potato parts. I don't think I want to know how those are made. No. It's like chicken McNuggets.

I think a unicorn just poops them out. Have you seen the unicorn pizza? It's a little much, there's a restaurant in New York. I'm not quite sure where maybe lower he's side. They have unicorn pizza, it's like dough.

Okay. Good start. Like a nice pastel colored frosting instead of sauce. Yeah. A mound of cotton candy.

Nerds or pop rocks, maybe? Oh, good lord. And then some other stuff. Supposedly, it tastes kind of good. I'll eat anything that has enough frosting on it.

I like frosting, but I'm not into like sugary candies, really. Oh, like nerds and pop rocks and stuff. Yeah. You know, I did a brain stuff once on pop rocks, and that was interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. Your tongue actually warms the pop rocks to the point where they melt, and since they have CO2 trapped inside during the manufacturing process, that CO2 suddenly is released in a pop. So it's just a little bubble of CO2.

Yeah. That's got to be good for you. I'm sure. It's funny my, uh, I had a roommate in college. Like, I don't not many adults eat candy, like, people eat chocolate and stuff like

that candy bars, but candy candy. Oh, no. For an adult is just a little strange.

Yeah. Maybe a candy? Sure. Like what? Mentos?

Not meant Mentos. Like candy Mentos? I don't know. I like those. Well, I had a roommate that would go to the convenience store next, and this is college

granite. Right. But he still eats the stuff I think. Okay. And he would go with like $15, and buy, you know, like giant sweet tarts, you know, it was

a big truble one. Sure. And like, uh, fun dip and nerds and just all kinds of candy. Fun dip. Or liquor made?

There's the same thing. Yeah. I think. Yeah. It's just like a stick and sugar.

Right. Like, I don't have a foot, but I've got my liquor made. Oh, man.

“Can you, uh, can you guys out there and podcast land till we're stalling?”

Because we are big time because we happen upon a topic that no one really knows what's what? Yeah. I mean, we're talking about fever dreams. We know about fevers.

Yep. Kind of know about dreams. Yeah. But apparently, no one's really gotten to work on figuring out what fever dreams themselves are.

So it's largely anecdotal. Yeah. So you're going to have to bear with us, um, we'll leave it, we'll leave that there for now. Yeah.

Uh, but I guess a good place to start is by talking about both those things separately,

and starting with fevers, you know, you've always heard 98.6 Fahrenheit is the normal internal

body temperature of the human. The 92, that was a big study that said it's really 98.2, depending on, like, how old you are, what time a day it is, what you're doing, where you, if you put it in your butt or under your armpit or in your mouth or in your ear or all of my ones, that'd be something else.

Yeah. It can vary a little bit. So I think there's a bit of a slight sliding scale to that number. Yeah. For sure.

“But I think the key is is it's going to be roughly around there.”

And even if you have an average body temperature that's not exactly 98.6, let's say you typically tend toward 97.5. You run cooler. Yeah. Your body temperature is still during the average day, going to fluctuate plus or minus

about a degree Fahrenheit either way. Yeah. So I looked a little bit into the 98.6 and the original, um, dude that came up with that was a German physician named Carl Reinhold August 1, Delic. That was good.

Good one. When 1868, he wrote a book, well, he did a, his studies where he had this temperature rod. He would stick under the armpits of all these people. He's like, where do you want?

Exactly.

And everyone would say, everyone always says, oh, yeah.

You know the comedian, Rory, scoval, no, you should just check him out. Okay. He does, he's weird things like he'll just do his whole routine with a German accent. Okay. Like for no reason whatsoever.

I liked the sound of that. And he did one about stealing old people, like kidnapping old people for the German accent. He's from South Carolina. I think, but he, he's done shows with like a severe Southern accent and one just normal accent.

And he'll do a German thing. He just likes the most of the people. I guess so. He's great. I will check him out.

Thanks. He's one of my favorites. Anyway, 1868, he wrote a book called, "After these Experiments" called, "Dose Veele-Hotten," "Dia, Elken, Pharma," and "Kyken, Heighten." That is good.

And I looked, it's funny, the real translation I think of that is on the temperature in diseases. But if you type in a big Google translate, it comes out as the behavior of the intrinsically warm and sick units. That's the subtitle?

Yeah. Cool. Anyway, he's a guy that came up with 98.6, and that stood for a long time. But that's just so, that was just based on his observations, his study. And it's stuck.

It was an average.

“It wasn't like this is what you should be.”

It was just the average of all these people. Right.

And then 130 years later, we finally got around to verifying whether that was actually true

or not. Well, I mean, it says in '92 that they said it was '98.2 from another study. But then everything that's still read says '98.6. All right. I know what you're talking about though.

I had heard in the last few years that they're like '98.6 jazz is kind of made up. So the point is, is that your body is going to be roughly somewhere around there, right, that you're normal body temperature. And then depending on the time of day, it's either going to be a little cooler in that or a little warmer than that.

And our body temperature is regulated by something called the hypothalamus. And like I said, depending on the time of day, your body temperature is going to fluctuate.

So as your body temperature is rising, usually in the late afternoon is about where it peaks

“during the day, that's associated with wakefulness, alertness.”

Yeah. Not necessarily just having a high body temperature, but an incline in the temperature in your body. Yeah. I mean, you're awake.

You're alert. You're ready to go, right? Yeah. That's a source to decline that's associated with drowsiness. And it's, it's, it's trough your body temperature is at its lowest right about before

you wake up, right. And that's actually associated with REM sleep. Yeah. So there are some stuff starting to come out, just bear with us, everybody, we're laying the groundwork.

So your body temperature changes.

The hypothalamus is directing the whole thing and sleep and wakefulness has something to do.

“It's related to your body temperature changes.”

All right. Good night. You take it from here. Well, you know what? Let's take a break because I'm not sure where I should go.

We'll be right back. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.

You doctor this particular test twice in selling stress. I doctor the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Some like the greatest disinfectant.

They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Great. The Westby End. My mind was blown.

I'm Stephanie Young. This is LoveTrap. Laura Scott's new police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at America for County as Laura Owens has been indicted

on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice has served in Arizona. Listen to LoveTrap podcast on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

He plays stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends. Oh my god, this is the same man.

A group of women discovered they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands.

They said, oh hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends, trust me babe. On the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, everyone? I'm EcoVotem. My next guest, you know from stepbrothers, anchor man, Saturday night live, and the big money players network, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

“I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really”

give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come. Look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really

sweet. He goes, but there's so much lock and ball. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall, and it doesn't feel funny anymore, it's okay to quit.

If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right. It wouldn't be that.

There's a lot in line. Listen to things, Dad, on the I-Hart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I was being coy, you said the stage very nicely. Okay.

So if your body gets, let's say some bad bacteria gets in it. Yeah. And your body is alerted warning, intruder, it's coming.

a pyrogen.

Okay, this is my new favorite thing the body does.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. Well, you knew that before, right? Or did you just not know the mechanism? I mean, I knew humans get fevers, and I knew the fever was to kind of like, cook

out everything. I didn't understand the mechanism. All right. We'll take this part then. Oh, yeah.

Can I? Yeah. So these pyrogens, right? They are these biochemical markers that are released by the immune system in the body. Yeah.

Or, and this is why I love this, there's some bacteria, some pathogens that make humans sick that produce pyrogens naturally. Yeah. So when they show up, they just start releasing them, and they just give themselves away.

Yeah. They're big dummies in that way. Right. They're like, "Hey, where's the party? They kick open the door?"

Yeah. They're carrying like a pony cake under one arm. Yeah. They're gut sticking out. Yeah.

That's like that kind of bacteria, right?

“So the pyrogens enter the bloodstream, they travel to the hypothalamus, because remember”

the hypothalamus controls your body temperature. And this is what they do, Chuck, are you ready for what the pyrogens do? Yes. They go to your hypothalamus, and they dampen the heat-sensing neurons in the hypothalamus, and they excite the cold-sensing neurons in your hypothalamus, and they trick your hypothalamus

in a thinking your body suddenly got very, very cold so that your hypothalamus turns the temperature up and says, "Don't let any of this heat out. We've got to warm back up." It tricks your body and your hypothalamus in creating a fever. That's right.

And they do this because, well, they don't do this because, but what happens from there, they do this because they're dumb, but what happens from there is, like you said, the fever, what a fever is, and why you want that fever for at least a little while. Sure. That it does.

It's trying to cook and burn and bake that bacteria until it dies. Right. It is your body's fighting, like when you hear like your fever broke, that's usually a good sign. That means that your fever did its job, and it's cooked all that bacteria up, and you're

going to be on the men's soon. Yeah.

“So basically that's what's happening, and this is the great thing about a fever, but a fever”

makes you feel like crap because it's a lot of hard work to kill all those things. Well, it is. There's a lot of your sympathetic nervous system is kicked into high gear, which I found out is one reason why they say you want to feed a cold star of a fever because you don't want to introduce digestion because it requires the parasympathetic nervous system.

Right. Fight or flight. And you don't want those two things going on while your body has a fever. It's just a lot of extra work for it, right? One of the things that is going on when your body has a fever, when that temperature rises,

it's hard enough on your organs, but it's also hard on the level just the fact that they're operating outside of their normal operating temperature. Yeah. And that makes it very hard on them and can actually cook some of the ingredients inside yourselves.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like working in a too hot of an environment, it's just never fun for anyone.

Right. Although it got some people love that stuff. Yeah. They're still, they might like it, but they still aren't working fast. Yeah.

That's true. You know, they might be happy, but they're slow. So if you have a fever, what's considered a fever now in 2017, if you're an adult and your oral temperature is above 100.4, or if you're rectal or ear temperature is above 101, then that's considered a fever.

If your kid, good luck getting anything besides the rectal temperature, because it's just tough. You have basically no right. Well, which I was wiggly kids who aren't like sure, stick something in my ear for four seconds.

Yeah. But up the, up the, up the, because you, there's not really anything to do about that. All they can do is say, "Glavin?" Yeah. Exactly.

So the rectal temperature for a kid above 100.4, and what the adults, like, you don't have to really worry about your fever too much, if it, if it tops 105, or, you know, any period of time, you probably want to do something about that.

“That's what I saw was the 105 degree Fahrenheit mark was about where you should start”

to work. Yeah, as an adult, and you're going to feel so awful if your temperature is 105, you've probably already been to a doctor at that point. Let's hope so. For kids as different, though, if you don't want to let your child get up to 105, that's

bad, bad, bad. So what is it for kids that you really want to start worrying about? Did you say? You know what? I'm not exactly sure.

I mean, it probably depends on whether you're a first-time parent, or this is your

Yeah.

Well, and it varies with the age, you know, it's like, zero to 18 months, it's something.

Oh, I guess you.

“Like what you should do is go consult your doctor?”

Yeah, exactly. But, you know, any kind of temperature you should, for a child, you should kind of be a little more alert about. Right. But we're not in medical experts here.

No, we're not. We're saying it seems that you have health care coverage. That's right. All right, so that's fever in general. You got anything else on that?

Yeah. One other thing, the pyrogens, pyro by the way, it's no mistake, man, I did have some coincidence. No, it's not. What is it?

Latin for fire? Greek word for fire. Yeah. Pyro. Eight.

Def leopard. Right. Great song. It really is. It's a whole album album.

Yeah.

“Yeah, they just mentioned it in rock of ages.”

Yeah. It comes up. They should have a song called Pyromania. Wonderful. But that's pretty cool.

It's like the antithesis of your band, your album and your song, all being the same name, like big country. Oh, I love that song. Sure. But it's pretty uncreative.

But you're basically saying like, here's our basket.

And we're going to put every egg we have into it. Yeah. That's the one, one thing we came up with. Yeah. I saw David Spade bit once and he was talking about his complaining.

It wasn't even comedy. He was just complaining that he went and saw a big country. And they didn't play the song, big country. No. Yeah.

Really? He's like, it's at a name of your band. Yeah. It's the one song everybody came to see and he's playing. Yeah.

He's funny too. Well, the long and short of it is I totally forgot what the other thing I had to say about Pyrojins. So I'll probably think of it. Oh, I know what it was.

Pyrojins, um, as your immune system grows and ages and you become grown up, the pyrojins have a little less of an effect on you. So where if you're a kid and your immune system is young and inexperienced, your fever is going to shoot up quick and it's going to get hotter faster. Right.

So you do want to stay on top of a kid's fever because their immune system is not used to pyrojins coming and messing with their hypothalamus. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was trying to think of.

Yeah, that's true.

“You need to take that, uh, need to take that rectal temperature, way more than your”

comfortable with. I don't recall that ever having been done to me. Well, because you don't remember being a baby. No, but my parents were pretty strict. Pretty stern.

No, and by the time a kid is old enough to wear it, you can say, like, hey, put this under your tongue or hold still for a minute while put this in your ear. Yeah. So, pretty that when they're not sentient humans and they're just, you know, crying whiny little sacks of flesh.

I got you. You got to stick it right up the butt. Okay. Jerry's laughing. She almost spit out her swarm of salad.

Jerry's done plenty of that, so she knows. Okay.

So, into dreams, um, I always think we've done a general show on dreams.

I think we did, finally. I didn't find it. What? Still? No.

Yeah. Can you control your dreams? That's the same thing, wasn't it? I think that was the same. Maybe so.

Yeah. But no, we did run on dreams. That didn't see it. Wow. I can't believe it.

I can't believe it. Well, this contributes to the little by little. Someone will know. Okay. Jill Hurley, where are you when we need your, our statistician and minister of stats.

Right. All right. Well, we'll talk about dreams a bit here, then, even though we've explained this in various episodes here and there, to some degree. But dreams, you know, if you're a psychologist, you really love to spend time talking

and dissecting dreams, interpreting dreams, if you're a more into the neurology side of science, you don't really care about that kind of stuff. In fact, for many years, they thought it was called activation synthesis hypothesis, which was you go to sleep and all these synapses are just randomly firing and they don't really add up to even a story.

You just do that when you wake up because you're human. Right. Yeah. But that, I mean, that's complete BS. Well, you almost get the impression that they came up with this, and the neurologists came

up with it to stake out their territory in response to years of psychoanalysts saying, this is what dreams are, like tapping into the collective unconscious or their your repressed memories, neuroscience said, no, nothing, they're just your stupid wet brain going crazy while you sleep. Yeah, which we all know now is not true.

I saw another one, too. What's that? Threat simulation theory. Have you heard of that one?

Basically, it's you're training to be an NGO while you sleep, like your brain is running

“threat simulations constantly so that it's like working itself out, like getting more”

more agile and quick and like, like, so you can get better at running from a save or tooth tiger, right, if you actually encounter it, I can see that early on, maybe. Sure. And there is an evolutionary advantage to it. So evolutionary speaking, it would make sense.

The point is, it that one came along and was like, no, there's obviously some reason for dreams. It's not just random. Yeah, well, and then maybe I could have seen that early on, but then at some point someone around the fire had a dream about took took's wife and woke up and went, whoa, there was

no Sabre II tiger in that room, not sure what that meant. But I better not, they'll took took, you know, and then they went, what's our rectal thermometer, it hasn't even been invented yet. So these days, they've done actual studies with EEG machines and MRI machines, and especially

in Italy, these Italian researchers basically put people to sleep, that put them to sleep.

And it's a sleeper hole. They lay them down in a nice Italian bed, feed them some pasta fuzzul, and get out the rectal thermometer. And they hook 'em up to all these wires and machines, and then they will wake them up at different points in the night and say, hey, what were you dreaming of?

We'd like to talk about it and study what was going on with these machines. Right. And they actually, what they found supports, the current prevailing theory. I don't think it was their theory. I think it was around, but their research supports it called affect regulation theory,

which is basically that we control our emotions or we process our emotions through our dreams. Yeah. And these Italians found support for this, and that when they woke people up and asked them what they were dreaming about, the ones who had the best recall were the ones who had the most theta waves in their frontal lobes, which are slow-moving waves, right?

Yes. And when you look at an EEG machine, if you looked at those dreamers, brain waves, it looked like the brain waves of somebody who was sitting there forming and recalling memories. Right.

“So these people said, that's what they're doing.”

That's what all of us are doing. While we're dreaming, we're forming memories. We're taking emotions that we've experienced through the day, and we're creating memories out of them, so we can file them away, so we're processing our emotions in our dreams. That's the point of dreams.

That's the current understanding. Yeah. And then, I mean, other parts of the brain that have been active all sort of deal with the emotion, whether it's the amygdala and the hippocampus or the lingual gyrus, which I think we just talked about that in another episode.

I don't recall. I don't remember. But they're all areas of the brain that relate to emotion and memory, and some with visual activity and, you know, that kind of makes sense. I like that theory.

Yeah. And then, under that current theory, so that's like the explanation for regular dreams. And you can't just have a theory for dreams without including nightmares or else you're a theory's broken. Right.

So the affect regulation theory considers nightmares, basically, it's an emotion that's

being put into the process of creating a memory, a false memory, a dream memory, I guess you put it. But it's a real emotion, right? And it's so big, it breaks the process, and all of a sudden, this process of creating a fake memory, a fake experience, goes haywire.

And now all of a sudden, you're enduring some terrible, horrifying experience, because the emotion that was being processed was too big and got out of control, and now you have a nightmare. T-s for you. Yeah.

“I think we did one of the night terrors, right?”

We did. For sure. All right. And sleep paralysis. We've covered it all, I think.

I guess we really haven't done a dreams one. All right. So let's take another break. I can finally talk about fever dreams. In 2023, former Bachelor Star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity

scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctor this particular test twice in selling, right? I doctor the test once.

It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Some like the greatest disinfectant. They would uncover a disturbing pattern.

Greg Olespie and Michael Marancini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is LoveTrap.

“As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.”

Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at America for County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until Justice has served in Arizona. Listen to LoveTrap podcast on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

He plays stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends, I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girl Friends. Oh my god, this is the same man.

A group of women discovered they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. They said, oh hell no, I vowed, I will be his last target.

He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to The Girl Friends, trust me babe. On the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everyone? I'm Jacob Odin.

My next guest, you know from stepbrothers, anchor man, Saturday night live and the big

money players network, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

“I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really”

give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings, I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come. Look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really

sweet. He goes, but there's so much lock and ball. And he's like, just give it a shot, he goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel funny anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.

It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there, yeah, it would not be. Right. It wouldn't be that. There's a lot in life.

I think stat on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You robbed me of a Saturday night fever reference. I just wanted to go on record is saying that I was wrong. So check, here's where everything just kind of goes totally off the rail. We talked about fevers, we've talked about nightmares.

The problem is really understanding both doesn't necessarily amount to understanding them

together, right. So knowing what fevers are, knowing what dreams are, doesn't mean you know what fevers dreams are, but you can make stuff up if you want. Yeah, and I don't, I'm, boy, I don't even think we even said, if you've never had a fever dream, you might even know we're talking about, oh yeah, you'll kind of dumb at this point

in the podcast, but a fever dream is basically a nightmare on steroids. Yeah. It's just so vivid and so real and scary that happens, you know, when you are sick with a fever. Yes.

Obviously. So they're fever dreams, right? So they are a thing. Yeah. But the scientific literature on them is super thin.

Yes. But the kids seem to get them, if not more, at least they stand out more to children. And so anecdotally, people seem to recall having fever dreams more when they were kids. Right. Whether or not that's true, we're just a memory, or you know what you call it, like a memory

bias or whatever. Yeah. Yes. No one really knows. Yeah.

Well, yeah. I mean, we don't really know. Because I don't remember the last time I had a fever and if I did, whether or not had a fever dream, I don't think I've ever had a fever dream. I did when I was a kid.

I don't remember having fever dream. Yeah. I remember being sick as a kid and having like nightmares when I was sick. So like you, they're noticeably worse than your average nightmare. Yes.

Really? So would you keep waking up from them? That I don't remember. So that's a big question to me.

“Well, let's talk about the anecdotal theory of what is behind fever dreams, right?”

Okay. So when your body's undergoing a fever, we said that your body's not functioning at its

No.

And that includes the brain.

The brain itself is an extremely special organ if you didn't know already.

“It's like, I think 2% of the body's mass, but it requires 20% of the body's energy.”

Yeah, and the neurons, compared to regular old dumb cells, they burn or they need about between 300 and 2500 times more energy than a regular old dumb cell in your body. Right. And so when all these chemical processes, when all of this energy is being exploited to power cells, it produces the byproducts of heat.

So the brain is super sensitive to overheating. Right? Yeah, and it's generally taken care of by your body, like it's cooled down and regulated. Right. So if you have a fever in your brain is not operating at optimal conditions, but you're

asleep. So it's trying to go through its normal processes. If you have a nightmare, it's entirely possible that that nightmare is going to be far worse because the normal processes have broken down. Or it's even further possible, apparently the amygdala is frequently implicated with nightmares

because it has to do with being terrified or angry or fearful. The amygdala might be a functioning at an abnormal level, and it's just basically going, "Hey, why are you having a fever?" Yeah, and the fact that most dreams occur during REM sleep, and I think that's when you're a body is warmest.

No. And sleep anyway, right? That's when, see, this is where it all gets kind of hinky. During REM sleep, your hypothalamus says, "I'm done, and I'm not working right now." So it stops regulating temperature, which is usually why your body temperature is low

as straight before you wake up. Oh, I thought it was highest right before you wake up. No, it's highest in the afternoon while you're awake. It's lowest right before you wake up.

I feel like I always wake up hot.

I mean, you may be sleeping with too many blankets, your room might be a little too warm like it. Or maybe it's my stupid schedule of my AC. I mean, it could be. You know, it might have cut off a couple hours before something.

Right. It could be, right? So it fires up after I get up. Because supposedly, when you are sleeping, and you're in REM sleep, your hypothalamus is not regulating temperature during that period.

So if you are already hot, and remember high body temperatures associated with wakefulness, then maybe you are waking up more frequently than you normally would, and when you wake up in the middle of a dream, you're more prone to remember it. If you wake up in the middle of a nightmare, it's going to seem even worse than one that you had and woke up normally from.

Yeah, I mean, I had a series of not nightmares last night, but just sort of anxiety dreams, and I don't have any anxiety about anything right now.

“I think it was just after reading all this stuff.”

Oh, yeah. I'm just suggestible. Yeah, anxiety dreams. Yeah. But not about like nothing specific.

No, like there's, you know, usually if I have anxiety dreams, it's like because something's going on in my life, I'm anxious. Sure. Yeah. But I'm just a researcher.

I think so. I mean, you're dedicated. But they're also celebrity dreams, because you know, I've talked about those before. No. Yeah, yeah.

That I have just celebrity dreams all the time. But they're just very normal that I'm just like friends with celebrity people. But where are they? Were they anxiety ridden last night? Yes.

Like I was hanging out with a band Luna, okay. Dean, where I'm of Luna. All right. And that was, but there was, I can't remember exactly what was going on. But, you know, that was anxiety involved.

Like I was trying to get somewhere and couldn't get there, like the typical stupid dream stuff. Yes, you know? Yeah. But some, have Dean was in there somehow.

Yeah. Did you turn today? I don't know him, but I think I know why they were in there. That's all I'll say. Okay.

(laughs) Wing, wink. I guess so. Here's another thing that was in our own article. I thought was interesting.

It just a little tidbit. Was that some recreational drugs, like a math and ecstasy, can raise brain temperatures. Right. That is one of the reasons.

I think that it like kill so many brain cells when you do those drugs. Yes, supposedly, you're not supposed to take ecstasy and warm climate.

Yeah, never, I've heard that.

Yeah? Just Norway. Hmm. Well, there you have it. Only it's fall barred.

(laughs) Um, what else is there anything else in here? No, man. I can't believe we stretched this one out as far as we did. Alrighty.

We never have to talk about fever dreams again. Chuck, good.

“If you want to do more about fever dreams, well, you might as well start at howstofworks.com,”

there's nothing wrong with that.

for yourself. And if you are a researcher and you know more stuff about fever dreams that you can point us to, let us know. Yeah.

“Um, in the meantime, I think I said search bar somewhere in there, which means it's time”

for the listener, man. Uh, you know what, I think another reason the anxiety dreams is because I'm barreling through the season of Fargo. Uh-huh. Yeah.

And the two episodes I watched last night, which I believe were, if there are ten, I think it was eight and nine, were both just like, ratcheted up with chin. I'm sure that's what it was. And I think that probably had some to do with it. That happens to me sometimes I'll be watching something and I won't realize how on top

of me it's gotten. And then all of a sudden like, it goes to an ad and I'm like, really uptight about like this scratching. Then washing machines sail that's going on somewhere and I don't understand why. And I'm like, oh, wow, that TV show really got to me.

Yeah. I think Fargo had some to do it. I think you may have nailed it. Um, all right. I'm going to call this one Garden variety fan mail, which we don't read a lot of these.

So I'm going to dig in.

“Uh, hey guys, that's all this is fan mail.”

You guys are doing a great job. Always have. It's clear that with every episode you take great pains, provide the most accurate information you can. And the most thoughtful way possible.

How ironic that you would read this on the few between the first day.

Uh, this has never been more evident to me than in the episodes you did on puberty.

I know it's been a little while since these came out. But just listen to them and it was touching to see how frequently you tried to reassure young listeners what they're experiencing is normal and that there was nothing wrong about what was happening. Uh, to hear too grown men do their best, talk to young boys and girls about such sensitive

material was a pleasure. Uh, yes, at times I could practically feel you nervously twitching while, uh, uh, trying to discuss, um, menstruation and an informative yet reassuring way, but it was absolutely charming. Just read it for him what we've always known at you two are just a pair of great dudes.

Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I like this guy. Uh, I've only been listening for a few years, but I'm lifetime fan now. Uh, if you're keeping count, like to put in a vote for DC for live shows. Uh, Josh.

Uh, E-D-E-E-E. Uh, sorry. E-D-G-E is edge. And then add two else. Edgele?

Edgele? Sure, yeah. Josh, Edgele, or Edgele? I like Edgele, or Edgele, or Edgele, or Edgele, or Edgele, or Edgele, or Edgele, or Edgele, or Edgele? I think Edgele, Edgele sounds like a kid next to her.

Josh, Edgele. It's Josh. And Josh, you know what we usually come to DC once a year, um, I don't think we're coming this year, though. No, we probably will be there early-ish 2018.

Yeah, DC's always great to us, so what will definitely be back?

Yeah. Uh, and you can always fly somewhere in the Continental United States, or Canada. Josh. Take that acella express up to Brooklyn. Exactly.

It's a pleasure train. There you go. There's rectal thermometers everywhere.

“Uh, and if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us both and Jerry in email to”

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On the iHartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Water. My next guest. It's Will Ferrell.

My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel funny more, it's okay to quit.

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