This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life
By Rahul Jandial, M.D. (’95)
Humans spend roughly a third of their life asleep, and a good fifth of that time is dreaming. For the average American, that adds up to some six whole years in dreamland.
It’s pretty well understood that we need some good shut-eye to recharge our batteries, process new memories, and flush out waste. But what’s to account for the two hours per night that we spend concocting vivid sexual fantasies about our math teachers or fending off attacks from faceless axe murderers?
In his book, brain surgeon and neuroscientist Dr. Rahul Jandial posits a simple theory: we have evolved to dream.
As he writes, dreaming is both energetically expensive and dangerous—our bodies are essentially paralyzed during REM sleep. And yet, whether we remember them or not, nearly all of us dream. In fact, evidence of dreaming dates back nearly to the dawn of recorded human history, and surveys have shown surprising consistency in the types of dreams that people experience. As strange and psychedelic as they can be, he writes, dreams allow us to play out worst-case scenarios, test new relationship dynamics, and process complex emotions with remarkable sensory accuracy. In other words, dreaming is universal—and essential.
Jandial’s book is a fascinating compendium of the latest research into the physiology, function, and future of dreams. He explores the meaning of those ubiquitous “cheating” fantasies, what dreams can reveal about our mental and physical well-being, and how dreaming can enhance creativity. (Take Salvador Dalí who devised a method of awakening himself mid-dream to tap into his fantastically creative subconscious.) Jandial saves some of the best material for last—the science of lucid dreaming, the slippery interpretation of dreams, and the possibility of dream engineering.
Even when his theories seem to touch the realm of science fiction, Jandial’s research is grounded in a deeply human project. “Dreams are our nightly dose of wonder,” he writes. “To ponder the meaning of dreams and dreaming is to explore the meaning of life itself.”
—Leah Worthington
My Brother’s Keeper: The Untold Stories Behind the Business of Mental Health―and How to Stop the Abandonment of the Mentally Ill
By Nicholas Rosenlicht, M.D. (’77)
We have more effective treatments for mental illness than ever before. Good luck getting access to them. The gulf between efficacy and availability (not to mention affordability), helps explain why so many people who suffer from severe mental illness wind up in emergency rooms, on the streets, or in prisons, instead of receiving proper care. In this passionately argued polemic, veteran psychiatrist Dr. Nicholas Rosenlicht, a clinical professor at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine, provides example after maddening example of psychiatric patients falling through the proverbial cracks. He convincingly argues, however, that these cases “do not illustrate breakdowns in the system, but rather fully expected consequences of the system working exactly as designed and intended.” Don’t be fooled by the gentleness of the title and cover; this is a fierce broadside against the entire for-profit healthcare system in America, one that will further stoke the public’s anger at rapacious drug companies, swollen hospital bureaucracies, and inhumane insurers whose “deny, defend, and depose” posture has already led to violence. In the end, Rosenlicht offers a sensible prescription for how we might yet arrive at a healthcare system that works for everyone. If only we could fill it.
—Pat Joseph
California: State of Nature
California Academy of Sciences
If you haven’t been to the Cal Academy of Sciences for a while, there’s a new permanent exhibit (newish, anyway: it opened last May) that you’ll want to visit. To your right as you enter, just past the Osher Rainforest dome, past the stairs to the Living Roof, you’ll find California: State of Nature, a colorful, multilayered exhibition highlighting the connectedness within and between our native ecosystems, including those found in forests and coastlines, deserts and cities.
Not surprisingly, Cal connections to the exhibit are abundant, including fire ecologist Rebecca Wilcox ’08, who narrates the film in the fire theater featuring a cultural burn led by the Amah Mutsun Tribe, and UC Berkeley anthropologist Dr. Kent Lightfoot who is featured in another video central to the exhibit alongside urban ecologist Prof. Christopher Schell, whose critter cams capture Berkeley wildlife like raccoons, foxes, and coyotes in their element. Exhibit content developer Paige Laduzinsky ’07 said she wants visitors to realize that “they don’t have to go to the Amazon to experience nature. We want them to come see that all this nature exists in our own backyards.”
As usual at the Academy, it’s a family-friendly affair with plenty of interactivity to please the young ones, from smelling the pungent scent of fetid adder’s tongue to laying hands on casts of animal scat (touchable poop!) to scampering through a tunnel that simulates under-roadway wildlife passage. Adults, meanwhile, will learn about intricate connections in ecosystems such as kelp forests, where the loss of keystone species like otters and sea stars can lead to a boom in sea urchins—voracious consumers of kelp—and ecosystem collapse.
Of course, no exhibit called State of Nature could fail to report how global warming, habitat loss, and other pressures are driving countless species to the brink. The taxidermied body of Monarch, one of the last of the California grizzly bears (Cal’s mascot), which were hunted to extinction, is a grim reminder of the words of Aldo Leopold, who wrote that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
It’s not all bad news, though, and a running theme of the exhibit is the ways in which humans are helping to restore the natural world. Efforts at the Cal Academy of Sciences to breed and replenish endangered Sunflower stars and the recently completed removal of four dams from the Klamath River are prime examples of how humans might yet forge a more hopeful narrative for themselves and the planet. California’s nature may be badly wounded, but with time and care wounds can heal.
—P.J.
Macro
By Brijean
From the first words of the opening track—“let’s go / let’s go / let’s go” singer-songwriter Brijean Murphy ’12 croons over quivering strings—Macro invites listeners to lose themselves in a genre-defying sonic journey.
The second album from Oakland duo (Murphy and her partner/producer, Doug Stuart) Macro meanders seamlessly from breathy psychedelic to percussive symphonic to downright funky. Like a kaleidoscope, the tracks seem to loop and dilate—at times focusing on a simple strummed chord progression, before blossoming into expertly layered, yet utterly danceable bops.
The percussive instrumentals are on point, no doubt thanks to Murphy herself, a long-time percussionist-for-hire who has toured with the likes of Toro y Moi, Mitski, and Poolside. It can be hard to pick a favorite song, but the album contains a little something for everyone. I’m partial to the irresistibly playful “Counting Sheep,” which tickles with its opening line (“one, two, buckle my shoe”) before unfolding into a supple, lounge-y love song.
Originally released in July, 2024, Macro might just be the perfect soundtrack for spring. Give it a listen, ideally somewhere sunny with a cool drink in hand.
– L.W.
How to Break Up with Your Phone (Revised and Updated)
By Catherine Price, M.J. ’06
Early on in How to Break Up with Your Phone, author and journalist Catherine Price asks readers to try taking a modified version of the Smartphone Compulsion Test. Score five or above, and it is likely that you use your smartphone in problematic ways. And good luck scoring lower than that. “I mean, come on,” Price writes. “The only way to score below a 5 on this test is to not have a smartphone.”
The phone that’s likely sitting within arm’s length away from you right now was purposefully designed to hijack your dopamine system and turn you, to borrow a tech term, into a repeat “user.” Our devices, she writes, hook us like slot machines. No wonder, then, that the typical American checks their phone 144 times a day. Or that, on average, we spend four and a half hours a day on our phones, which equates to more than a quarter of our waking life.
If all this freaks you out, that was Price’s intention. What follows is the 30-day plan she designed to help you do something about it. Every day over four weeks, Price guides you through a simple exercise, like reflecting on when and why you use your phone. At the end of the digital detox, you take a 24-hour trial separation from your phone, what she calls a “Digital Sabbath.” But make no mistake: Her plan isn’t digital abstinence. Price has no problem with you using your phone—if that’s what you actually want to be doing. She just wants your phone to go “from being your boss to working for you.”
Since it was first published seven years ago, How to Break Up with Your Phone has sold more than 150,000 copies and is now available in more than 35 countries. But “technology itself has also changed a lot since 2018,” she explained in her newsletter, “and so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to fully revise and update the original.” For this new edition, she decided to stick with the same title, even though, as she acknowledges, a more accurate one circa 2025 might be How to Break Up with Your Wireless Mobile Device. After all, she writes, “it won’t be long before smartphones are supplanted by a new technology.”
How to Break Up with Your AI Companion, coming soon to an e-reader near you.
—Esther Oh
American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It
By Margaret Morganroth Gullette, M.A. ’64
In the first 18 months of the pandemic, more than half a million people died of COVID infections. An estimated 21 percent of those people were nursing home residents.
“Tens of thousands of older adults and disabled people died in miserable circumstances, unnecessarily,” writes Margaret Morganroth Gullette, resident scholar at Brandeis University and outspoken cultural critic on ageism and age studies, in her 2024 book American Eldercide. What began as a March 2020 Los Angeles Review of Books essay titled “Ageist ‘Triage’ Is a Crime Against Humanity,” is as much a scholarly exposition as it is a piece of activist literature.
Gullette recasts the pandemic as an “Eldercide” (capital “E” included) in which “the most vulnerable among us” suffered “humiliating and lethal government abandonment” that led to untold premature deaths. The disproportionate—and unnecessary—loss of life among America’s older populations, she argues, is the direct result of rampant ageism compounded by a litany of other “isms,” including ableism, sexism, and racism. Triage may be a necessary evil of emergency medical care, but must that automatically target the elderly? Gullette calls into question the fundamental assumption that older people are closer to death and therefore more easily discarded.
Leaning, at times too much, on long-winded exposition, Gullette’s book touches on everything from the shadow of eugenics to toxic masculinity to the selfish over-indulgence of youthful partygoers. The voices of older folks are notably absent. Yet, her point is well-taken. This could have all been prevented, and still can be, she says, with more visibility, more funding, more staffing—in short, more attention to the people we can all hope to become: the elderly.
Gullette, whose other books include Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, Agewise, and Declining to Decline, is unafraid to make sweeping statements. These, while powerful, might not sit well with everyone. Case in point: She concludes her book’s dedication to the nursing facilities residents who died of COVID with words that call up the Holocaust: “Never again.”
– L.W.
