Understanding our dreams

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Most of us don't take dreams that seriously. Or maybe we just don't think about them very much because we have no idea what to make of them. They feel like brain noise. Weird little stories that dissolve the moment we wake up.

And even when they linger, we tend to treat them as curiosities at best. But there's a long tradition that goes back to Freud that takes a very different view, that dreams are surfacing something real about us. They're a glimpse into our unconscious minds. There's also modern dream science and sleep labs, where researchers have learned a lot about what dreams are,

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (47 minutes, 7,809 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.