How Fever Dreams Work

Fever dreams can be unsettling experiences. These ramped up nightmares are vivid, detailed and only happen when the human body experiences a fever. What is it about the combination of fevers and dreams that make these night terrors so hellish? Learn all that and more in today's episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, stuff you should know is going on tour.
Do do do one of the deeds, my friend. Okay,
So starting August eighth in Toronto, that's in Canada. We're
gonna be at dan Fourth Music Hall. And then Chicago,
we're gonna be there the next night, August nine, at
the Harris Theater at Chicago. We want to see your faces.
Step it up, Step it Up. Vancouver or the Vote

(00:23):
Theater September. That's gonna be a great show, I think,
don't you. It's gonna be a great of one. And
then in Minneapolis at the Pantageous Theater where we've been before.
It's lovely September. Yeah, and then we're gonna swing down
to Austin. It's gonna be during Austin City Limits, although
it has nothing to do with Austin City limits. Will
be there October ten, yes, and then we're going to

(00:43):
Lovely Lawrence, Kansas go Jayhawks, yeah on October eleventh. And hey,
if you're in Kansas City or anywhere in that area,
this is your chance. Get in your car. Yeah. Uh,
if you are anywhere near Brooklyn, well then you should
go to the Bellhouse October. Will be there all three nights,
and finally, we're gonna wrap it up here in Atlanta
at the Bucket Theater on November four for a benefit

(01:05):
show where we are donating all of the money's to
Lifeline Animal Project of Atlanta and the National Down Syndrome Society. Yep.
So for all this information again visually and for links
two tickets, just go to s y s K Live
dot com. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House

(01:26):
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
How are you? I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Priyant,
There's Jerry. Jerry's got a salad. Everything is normal, which
means it's time. There's stuff you should know. That's right,

(01:47):
Jerry's got the schwarmest special she said, Oh really, yeah,
she loves it. How you doing. I'm good man, feeling
despite myself kind of relaxed. Okay, I'm not feeling feverish.
If that's what you're driving at. No, that's not what
I was driving at. Uh yeah, no I'm not. Do
you get fevers a lot? No, not anymore. Although I

(02:08):
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 fevers have you had? Not a ton since
I was a kid. Yeah, not a lot of adult fevers.
I mean I've had like, uh, hip hop fever, rock
and roll fever, yellow fever. I've had the fever for

(02:30):
a flavor of a pringle. Oh Man, me too. What
are those? Those aren't even potato chips? Are they? Their
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 unicorn pizza? It's a little much.

(02:50):
There's a restaurant in New York, I'm not quite sure where,
maybe lowery Side. They have unicorn pizza. It's like um
dough okay, good start um, like a nice pestel colored
frosting instead of sauce. UM, A mound of cotton candy, um,
nerds or pop rocks maybe um, and then some other stuff.

(03:14):
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 like nerds. And pop
rocks and stuff. 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 C O two

(03:36):
trapped inside during the manufacturing process, that c O two
suddenly is released in a pop So it's just a
little bubble of C two. That's gotta be good for you.
I'm sure it's funny. My head of roommate in college, like,
not many adults eat candy, Like people eat chocolate and
stuff like that, candy bars, but candy candy, I don't

(03:58):
know when adults is just a little strange. Yeah, do
be candy? Sure? Like what mentos? Not mint mentos? Like
candy mentos. I like those. Well. I had a roommate
that would go to the convenient store next and this
is college granted, but he still eats the stuff, I think,
and he would go with like fifteen dollars and buy

(04:22):
you know, like giant sweet tarts. You know it's big
chewable ones and like uh, fun dip and nerds and
just all kinds of candy fun dip, remember liquor made
there's the same thing I think, Yeah, it's just right,
Like I don't have a foot, but I've got my
Lika made. Oh man, can you can you guys out

(04:46):
there in podcast lantel over stalling because we are big time,
because we happened 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,
but apparently no one's really gotten to work on figuring

(05:10):
out what fever dreams themselves are. So it's largely anecdotal. Yeah,
so you're gonna have to bear with us something. We'll
leave it. We'll leave that there for now. But I
guess a good place to start is by talking about
both those things separately. Uh, and starting with fevers. You
know you've always heard ninety eight point six fahrenheit is

(05:31):
the normal internal body temperature of human um. That in
that was a big study that that is really ninety
eight point two what um, depending on like how old
you are, what time of day it is, what you're
doing where you If you put it in your butt
or in your under your armpit, or in your mouth

(05:53):
or in your ear, or all of them at once,
that'd be something else. Uh, it can vary a little bit.
So I think there is 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 ninet eight point six, let's say

(06:15):
you typically tend towards five run cooler. Yeah, your body
temperatures still during the average day gonna fluctuate plus or
minus about a degree fair height either way. Yeah, So
I looked a little bit into the ninety eight point
six and the original um dude that came up with
that was a a German physician named Carl Reinholdt August Vondelick.

(06:39):
That was good, a good one. When eight sixty eight
he wrote a book, Well he did 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 that exactly? And everyone went said, everyone always says,
you know the comedian Rory Scoville, No, he should just

(07:02):
check him out. He does these weird things, like he'll
just do his whole routine with the German accent, like
for no reason, whatsoever. I like 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's done shows with like a severe

(07:23):
Southern accent and one just normal accent, and he'll do
a German thing. He just like people, I guess. So
he's great. He's one of my favorites. So anyway, UM
sixty eight he wrote a book called after these experiments,
called doshen Elkin Pharma and kind can Heighten. And I

(07:46):
looked at It's funny. The real translation I think of
that is on the temperature in diseases, but if you
type in Google Translate, it comes out as the behavior
of the intrinsically warm in sick units. That's the subtitle. Yeah,
So anyway, he's a guy that came up with ninety
eight point six and that stood for a long time.

(08:07):
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. And then hundred
thirty years later we finally got around to verifying whether
that was actually true or not. Well, I mean it
says a ninety two that they said it was ninety

(08:28):
eight point two from another study, but then everything I
still read says point six. So all right, well, I
know what you're talking about, though I had heard in
the last few years that they're like that point six
jazz is kind of kind of made upright, So, um,
the point is is that your body is going to
be roughly somewhere around there, right, that's your normal body temperature,

(08:48):
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 temperatures are regulated
by something called the hypothalamus. And like I said, depending
on the time of day, your body temperature is gonna fluctuate,
and that's tied to sleep apparently, so as your body
temperature is rising, usually in the late afternoon, is about

(09:10):
where it peaks during the day. That's associated with wakefulness
alertness not necessarily just having a high body temperature, but
an incline in the temperature in your body means you're awake,
you're alert, you're ready to go right, ready for action.
If once it starts to decline, that's associated with drowsiness,

(09:32):
and it hits it's um, it's trough. Your body temperature
is at its lowest right about before you wake up,
and that's actually associated with R E. M. Sleep. So
there are some 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,

(09:54):
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. Okay, I was being coy, you

(10:33):
said stage very nicely. Okay. Uh So, if your body
gets let's say, some bad bacteria gets in it, and
your body is alerted warning intruder is coming, your immune
system kicks into gear and it starts producing this biochemical

(10:56):
material called a pyrogeny. This is my new favorite thing
the body does. 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. I understand answer your question, then, oh yeah,

(11:16):
can I So these pyrogen's, right, they are um these
biochemical markers that are released by the immune system in
the body or and this is why I love this.
There's some bacterias, some pathogens that make humans sick that
produce pyrogen's naturally. So when they show up, they just

(11:37):
start releasing them, and they just give themselves away. It's
they're big dummies in that way. They're like, hey, where's
the party. They kick open the door. They're carrying like
a pony keg under one arm, their guts sticking out.
It's just that that's that's like that kind of bacteria, right.
So the pyrogans enter the bloodstream and they travel to
the hypothalamus because remember the hypothal mis controls your um

(12:02):
your body temperature, and this is what they do, Chuck,
are you ready for what the pyrogens do. They go
to your hypothalamus and they dampen the heat sensing neurons
and the hypothalamus, and they excite the cold sensing neurons
and your hypothalamus, and they trick your hypothalamus in the

(12:22):
thinking your body is suddenly gotten very very cold, so
that your hypothalamus turns the temperature up and says, don't
let any of this heat out. We gotta we gotta
warm back up. It tricks your body and your hypothalamus
and 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

(12:44):
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 that it does. It's it's
trying to cook and burn and bake that bacteria until
it dies. It is your body's fighting. Like when you hear,
you know, like your fever broke, that's usually a good sign.

(13:04):
That means yeah, right, that your fever did its job
and it's cooked all that bacteria up and you're going
to be on the men soon. Uh So basically that's
what's happening. And this is the great thing about a fever.
But um, you know, 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 um.

(13:25):
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 starve 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,

(13:47):
But one of the 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, and that makes
it very hard on them and can actually cook some
of the ingredients inside yourselves. Yeah, I mean, it's like

(14:08):
working in a too hot of an environment. It's just
it's never fun for anyone. Although we've got some people
love that stuff, yeah, but they're still they might like it,
but they still aren't working fast. They might be happy,
but they're slow. So if you have a fever, what's
considered a fever now, if you're an adult and your

(14:30):
oral temperature is above one point four or if your
rectal or ear temperatures above one oh one then that's
considered a fever. If you're a kid, um, good luck
getting anything besides the rectal temperature, because it's just tough.
You have basically no right well ye which you have
as wiggly kids who aren't like, sure, stick something in

(14:53):
my ear for four seconds, but up the up the kazoo.
There's not really anything you can do about that. All
they can do is say, yeah, exactly. So the rectal
temperature for a kid above one point four and um.
With adults like you don't have to really worry about

(15:13):
your fever too much. If it if it tops a
hundred and five for you know, any period of time,
you probably want to do something about that. That's what
I saw was the hundred and five degree hype mark
was about where you should start to worry. Yeah, as
an adult, and you're gonna feel so awful. If your
temperature is one oh five, you're you've probably already been
to a doctor at that points. For kids, it's different though.

(15:36):
If you don't want to let your child get up
to one oh five, that's bad, bad, bad. So what
is it for kids that you really want to start worrying?
But did you say, you know what I'm not exactly sure.
I mean, it probably depends on whether you're a first
time pairent or this is your second kid. Well, and
it varies with the age, you know, it's like zero
to eighteen months. It's something, and like what you should

(15:57):
do is consult that 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.
And everything we're saying assumes that you have healthcare coverage.
That's right. Um, all right, so that's fever in general.

(16:18):
You got anything else on that? Yeah? One other thing? Um?
Uh the pyrogens um Piro. By the way, it's a mistake, man,
I did have some coincidence. No, it's not. What is
the Latin for fire, Greek word for fire? Yeah, Piro
def Leppard, right, Um, a great song. It really is

(16:40):
the whole album. Yeah. They just mentioned it in Rock
of Ages that 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

(17:01):
that song. Sure, But it's pretty uncreative, but you're basically saying, like,
here's our basket and we're gonna play every egg we
have into it. That's the one one thing we came
up with. I saw David Spade bit once and he
was talking about he was complaining it wasn't even comedy.
He's just complaining that he went and saw a big
country and they didn't play the song Big Count. Yeah.

(17:23):
He's like, it's the name of your band. It's the
one song everybody came to see and play it. He's well,
the longest, the long and short of it is I
totally forgot what the other thing I had to say
about Pyritans was, so I'll probably think of it. Oh,
I know what it was, Pyrogen's um. As your immune
system grows in ages and you become a grown up,

(17:45):
the pyrigans 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 gonna shoot up
quick and it's going to it's gonna get hotter faster.
So you do want to stay on top of a
kid's fever because their immune system is not used to
pyrogens coming and messing with their hypothalamus like an adults.

(18:06):
It is. Yeah, it'll spike much faster at this good point.
That's what I was trying to think of. Yeah, that's true.
You need to take that need take that rectal temperature
way more than you're 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,

(18:26):
pretty stern. Mean, by the time a kid is old
enough to where you can say, like, hey, put this
under your tongue, or hold still for a minute while
I put this in your ear, but pre that when
they're not sentient humans and they're just you know, crying,
whiny little sacks of flesh, you gotta stick it right
up the butt. Okay, Harry's laughing. She almost spit out

(18:48):
her schwarm a salad. Harry'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, it's a lucid dreaming.
Can you control your dreams? That's the same thing, wasn't it.

(19:11):
I think that maybe because no, we we did one
on dreams. I 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. Jill Hurley, where are you
when we need you? Our statistician, a minister of stats?

(19:31):
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 uh dreams. You know, if
you're psychologist, you you really love to spend time talking
and dissecting dreams, interpreting dreams. If you're a um more
into the neurology side of science, you don't really care

(19:54):
about that kind of stuff. Um. In fact, for many
years they thought it was called activation synthesis hypothesis, which
was you go to sleep and all these uh synapsters
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. Yeah, but that I mean,

(20:16):
that's complete. Bs. Well, you almost get the impression that
they came up with this, and the neurologists came up
with it to stick out their territory in response to
years of psychoanalysts saying, this is what dreams are like,
tapping into the collective unconscious or um, they're you're repressed memories.
Neuroscience said, no, nothing, they're just your stupid, wet brain

(20:40):
going crazy while you sleep. Yeah, which we all know
now is not true. I saw another one too. What's
that um threat simulation theory? Have you heard of that one? No,
but that's a great band name. Basically, it's you're training
to be a ninja while you sleep, Like your brain
is running threat simulations constantly, so that it's like working

(21:02):
itself out, like getting more and more agile and quick
and like, like, so you can get better at running
from a savor tooth tiger if you actually encounter it.
I can see that early on maybe, and there is
an evolutionary advantage to it, so evolutionarily speaking, it would
make sense. The point is it that one came along?

(21:23):
I was like, no, there's obviously some reason for dreams.
It's not just random yet. Well, and then maybe I
could have seen that early on. But then at some
point someone around the fire had a dream about Tuktok's
wife and woke up and went, whoa, there was no
savor tooth tiger and that I'm not sure what that meant, uh,

(21:43):
but I better not tell tuktok, right, you know. And
then they went, what's a rectal themome hasn't even been
invented yet, so uh. These days they've done actual studies, um,
with E e. G. Machines and MRI machines, and especially
in Italy, these Italian researchers basically put people to sleep,

(22:04):
not put them to sleep and the sleeper hole. They
lay them down in a nice Italian bed, feed them
some postaphazul, and get out the rectal thermometer and they
hook him 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? Um,
we'd like to talk about it and study what was

(22:25):
going on with these machines. And um. They actually what
they found supports the current the 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

(22:45):
our emotions through our dreams. 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
e G machine, if you looked at those dreamers brain waves,

(23:08):
it looked like the brain waves of somebody who was
sitting there forming and recalling memories. 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

(23:29):
processing our emotions and 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 emotion, whether it's the a magdala and
the hippocampus or the lingual gyrus, which I think we
just talked about that in another episode. I don't recall.
I can't remember, um, but they're all areas of the

(23:51):
brain that relate to emotion and memory, and some with
visual activity. And you know that kind of makes sense.
I like that theory and then under that current theory,
so that's like the the explanation for regular dreams. And
you can't just have a theory for dreams without including
nightmares or else your theory is broken. Right, So the
affect regulation theory considers nightmares. Um, basically, it's an emotion

(24:17):
that's being put into the process of being, of creating
a memory, a false memory, right, a dream memory, I
guess you put it. But it's a real emotion, right,
and um, it's so big it breaks the process. And
all of a sudden, this process of creating a fake
memory of fake experience, UM, goes haywire. And now all

(24:37):
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 night terrors. We did for sure, and sleep paralysis.

(24:57):
We've covered it all. I think I guess we were.
They haven't done a dreams one, all right, So let's
take another break. We're gonna come back and finally talk
about fever dreams. You robbed me of a Saturday night

(25:30):
fever reference. I just want to go on record this
thing that I was wrong, So Chuck, here's where everything
just kind of goes totally off the rail. We've talked
about fevers, We've talked about nightmares. The problem is really
understanding both doesn't necessarily amount to understanding them together. Right, So,

(25:54):
knowing what fevers are, knowing what dreams are, it doesn't
mean you know what fever 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. Feel kind of dumb at this point
in the podcast. But a fever dream is um, basically

(26:14):
a nightmare on steroids. It's just so vivid and so
real and scary. Um that happens, you know, when you
are sick with a fever. Yes, obviously, so their fever dreams, right,
so they are a thing. Yeah, but the scientific literature
on them is super thin, non existent. Kids seemed to

(26:35):
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. Whether or
not that's true or just a memory is uh or
you know what do you call it, like a memory
bias or whatever, There's no one really knows. Yeah, well

(26:55):
that 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 I had had a
fever dream. I I don't think I've ever had a
fever dream. I did when I was a kid. I
don't remember having fever dreams. I remember being sick as
a kid and having like nightmares when I was sick,
so like they're noticeably worse than your average nightmare. Really,

(27:20):
so would you keep waking up from them? Mm hmmm,
that I don't remember. See, that's that's a big question
to me. Um. Well, let's talk about the anecdotal theory
of what is behind fever dreams. Right, So, when your
body is undergoing a fever, we said that your body
is not functioning at its top performance. Um, and that

(27:41):
includes the brain. The brain itself is an extremely special
organ if you didn't know already, it's like, I think
two of the body's mass, but it requires twenty of
the body's energy. Yeah, and the neurons compared to regular
old dumb cells. Uh uh, they they burn or they

(28:02):
need about between three times more energy than a regular
dumb cell in your body. Right. And so when all
these chemical processes, when all of this UM energy is
being exploited to power cells, UM, it produces the byproduct
of heat. So the brain is super sensitive to overheating

(28:22):
right already, just under normal circumstances, and it's generally taken
care of, uh by by your body, like it's you
know that it's cooled down and regulated. Right. So, Um,
if you have a fever and your brain is not
operating at optimal conditions, but you're asleep, so it's trying

(28:44):
to go through its normal processes. Um, if you have
a nightmare, it's entirely possible that that nightmare is going
to be far far worse because the normal processes have
broken down, or it's even further possible apparently. Um. The
amygdalas frequently implicated with nightmares because it has to do

(29:04):
with being terrified or angry or fearful. Um, the amigdala
might be functioning at an abnormal level and it's just
basically going haywired while you have a fever. Yeah, and
then the fact that most dreams occur during R E
M sleep, and I think that's when you're body is
warmest sleep anyway, right, that's when see, this is where

(29:28):
it all gets kind of hinky. During R E M sleep,
your hypothalamus says I'm done, I'm not working right now,
so it stops regulating temperature, which is usually why your
body temperature is lowest right before you wake up. 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. You. I mean, you may be like

(29:51):
sleeping with too many blankets, your room might be a
little too warm, or maybe it's my stupid you know,
schedule of my see, I mean it could be you know,
it might have cut off a couple hours before or something. Right,
it could be right, so fires up after I get up.
Because supposedly, um, when you are sleeping and you're in
R E M sleep, your hypothalamus is not regulating temperature

(30:14):
during that period. So if you if you are already hot,
and remember high body temperature is 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

(30:34):
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. Yeah,
I'm just suggestible you had anxiety dreams. Yeah, but not

(30:55):
about like nothing specific. No, like there's you know usually
if I have anxiety dreams and just like because something's
going on in my life, I'm anxious. But it was
just a research huh, I think so. I men, you're dedicated.
But they were 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

(31:16):
normal that I'm just like friends with celebrity people. But
were they were the anxiety written last night? Yes, Like
I was hanging out with a band Luna Dean were
um of Luna 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,

(31:37):
you know. But some Dean was in there somehow. Yeah.
Have you talked to him today? I don't know him,
but uh, I think I know why they were in there,
That's all I'll say. Okay, wink wink, I guess. So.
Here's another thing that was in our own article I
thought was interesting and just a little tidbit, was that, um,

(31:58):
some recreational drug like meth and ecstasy can raise brain temperatures.
That is one of the reasons they think that it
kills so many brain cells when you do those drugs. Yes,
supposedly you're not supposed to take ecstasy and warm climates. Yeah,
never have heard that. Yeah, just norway. Well there you
have it, only it's fall barred. Um what else is

(32:23):
there anything else in here? No? Man, I can't believe
we stretched this one out as far as we did. Alright,
we never have to talk about fever dreams again, Chuck good.
If you want to know more about fever dreams, well
you might as well start at how stuff works dot com.
There's nothing wrong with that, um. And you can also
just go around and look at how sparse the researches

(32:44):
on the internet 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. UM. In
the meantime, I think I said search bars somewhere in there,
which means it's time for a listener mail. Uh, you
know what. I think another reason the anxiety dreams is
because I'm barreling through this season of Fargo. And yeah,

(33:09):
and the two episodes I watched last night, which I
believe we're if there are ten, I think it was
eight and nine, we're both just like ratcheted up with sin.
I'm sure that's what it was. And I think that
probably has something to do with it. That happens to
me sometimes I'll be watching something 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

(33:32):
like really uptight about like this scratching washing machine sale
that's going on somewhere, and I don't understand why. I'm like,
oh wow, that TV show really got to me. Yeah,
I think I think Fargo had something to do it.
Think you may have nailed it. Um, all right, I'm
gonna call this one garden variety fan mail, which we
don't read a lot of these, so I'm going to

(33:52):
dig in. 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 do you take pains to
provide the most accurate information you can in the most
thoughtful way possible. How ironic that you would read this
on the fever dreams of Uh, there's never been more
evident to me than in the episodes you did on Puberty.
I know it's been a little while since he's came out,

(34:14):
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. To hear two grown men do
their best talk to young boys and girls about such
sensitive material was a pleasure. Yes, at times, I could
practically feel you nervously twitching while trying trying to discuss

(34:34):
um menstruation in an informative yet reassuring way. But it
was absolutely charming, just reaffirm what we've always known. You
two are just a pair of great dudes. That's nice. Yeah,
I've only been listening for a few years, but I'm
a lifetime fan. Now. Uh, if you're keeping count, like
to put it in a vote for d C for
live shows. Uh, Josh, h E d G E E.

(34:59):
Sorry E d G E is edge and then add
two els edgel Josh edgel or a gel, I like
edgel for ed Gil, Gil for Edgar. I think edgel
edgel sounds like a kid next door. Josh, it's Josh
and Josh. You know what. We usually come to d

(35:19):
C once a year. Um, I don't think we're coming
this year though, now we probably will be there earli
ash two eighteen. Yeah. DC is always great to us,
so we we'll definitely be back. Yeah. Uh, and you
can always fly somewhere in the continental United States or Canada. Josh.
Take that Sola Express up to Brooklyn exactly. It's a

(35:40):
pleasure train there you go. There's rectel thermometers everywhere. Uh.
If you want to see us on tour, go to
s y SK Live dot comference tickets. You can get
in touch with us on Twitter at Josh I'm Clark
or s Y s K podcast. You can join Chuck
on Facebook dot com, slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, or
slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us both

(36:02):
and Jerry an email to Stuff podcast at how stuff
Works dot com and has always joined us at our
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For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
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