Great to finally get our research off the ground, funded, ready for clinically-rigorous testing and no longer accused of “pseudo-science”. Fantastic writing by Saga Briggs!

Dream Survey #990 - The 2024 Presidential election (The Day After) Anesthesia dreams typically a safe places for a patient to process anxiety and clearly the federal Presidential election caused a LOT of anxiety at Stanford with cranky colleagues everywhere. The day after the election, November 6, 2024, an elderly breast cancer patient dreams her own election results. In her surgical anesthesia dream she celebrates her candidate wins on television, while also being breast cancer-free, of course sharing the moment with her adoring husband (they were such a cute couple in pre-op when I met them). I don’t know who she thought had won the Presidential election (I didn’t ask) but regardless I think whatever her reality is she is less anxious about it all. #Breastcancer #PresidentialElection #StanfordAnesthesia

Happy Veterans Day! Anesthesia Dream Survey #779, a male military veteran after beginning gender reassignment surgery, suffering from chronic PTSD from active service diffusing explosives. Memories processed as a dream but this time he has become a woman. Thank you for your service, I see you behind the mask. Poster of our anesthesia cocktail provided. #PTSD, #Veterans

Congrats to Jasper on the best abstract award for our Stanford anesthesia dream PTSD research at the Society of Anesthesia and Sleep Medicine meeting! Research and patients are going to benefit.

Anesthesia Dream Survey #906 Orthopedic patients almost always have obvious surgical anesthesia dreams - they dream of a life they would have with their injured limb working again. Patient #906 was no different she came from Pennsylvania to see a specific hand surgeon at Stanford after exhaustive research. After crossing the country she finally had her surgery to hopefully resume what she loves - painting. She of course dreamt of painting with an uninjured right hand in vivid, hyper-real colors. Shared with full permission. @TheBorisLab @PilleriinSikka @stanfordanes #StanfordAnesthesia #orthopedicsurgery

Stanford Anesthesia Dream survey #209 - ChatGPT image One of my personal favorites of the nearly 1000 anesthesia dreams I’ve witnessed in my long career. This patient was a young female who came to Silicon Valley to work in tech - alone. Now with diagnosis of breast cancer and having surgery at Stanford Hospital. Anesthesia dreams allow our consciousness to access memories to process fear and anxiety with our memories functioning as psychological “antibodies” to process our fear into emotional acceptance - i.e. a happy and safe ending. Here our patient is walking in a rocky desert alone to a light, for hours and hours, afraid of death in her surgical anesthesia dream. Fear and loneliness with the spectre of cancer. Was she walking towards Heaven? After walking alone for hours she hears a familiar bark - it’s her childhood dog Casey (cocker spaniel)! Casey now walks with her. She is comforted by her dog and no longer is afraid. This is a common theme in our dream life - dogs making us safe. Casey has been dead for 20 years now but exists in hyper-vivid reality in her memory. Was this a portal to Heaven? Have we psychologically evolved with dogs in our brain development? Perhaps dogs dream of us too. All fascinating questions contained in a single (perhaps ancient) dream. #StanfordAnesthesia, #anesthesiadreams, #PTSD, #cockerspaniel , #HumaneSociety, #breastcancer

@bigthink @StanfordMed Patients 1 and 2 in their own words.

Big Think is the best ! Excellent description of where we have been and where we are going with this research. Source: Big Think

RT @bigthink: A team at @StanfordMed has developed a reproducible method of using common anesthetics to generate a “continuous and profound…

@shayla__love Shayla - we are increasingly finding our surgical anesthesia dreams fit a classic "fear-based" model (just like Dr. Pilleriin Sikka has been saying all along). Our dreams are recalling memories like "psychological antibodies" - to defeat anxiety. Sometimes they are cut short.

Dream Survey #815D We are fortunate to in America to not face war directly. Others, immigrants to our country, still carry that anxiety and that active trauma.. This anesthesia dream would fit the classical definition of a “nightmare” - negative and dark images of war. And yet that would be farthest from the outcome. Our emotional brain operates with different rules. Anxiety (and cortical memories) are processed into a desirable outcome - a brain movie with a conflict-resolved ending. A patient has leg surgery and dreams of being healthy and picking up arms to fight a war for his homeland. So far away, now working in Silicon Valley tech, but the anxiety for friends, family and country do not die - even in sunny California. Afterwards, the patient reported dreaming of being in the active war zone and in “high-definition”. And feeling relieved afterwards for days. Friends and family reporting he is so much more “chill”. Our emotional brain works differently and we can get recreate these experiences with anesthesia. Posted with full permission of de-identified patient. The clinical trials on PTSD to come. #anesthesiadreams #Ukraine #orthopedicsurgery #PTSD

Anesthesia Dream Survey #640C Our second dream image from ChatGPT. Patient corrected our dream survey over Stanford Epic through photos, messages and phone calls. We settled on this image, with full permission of patient. We grow older and sicker. In a busy day in the Stanford endoscopy suite in August 2023, a 2nd month anesthesia resident, CA-1 Aaron Brown asked if we could induce/see an anesthesia dream in a patient. So of the 8 patients that day, we chose this patient in a gap in the schedule when we could carve out an extra 10 minutes under anesthesia to induce a dream. Kudos to Dr. Brown for being inquisitive and motivated enough in a rush-rush environment to give this patient an extraordinary experience - time again with her late father. These dreams somehow are able to pull distant memories and create again a hyper-real, vivid experience across time to a joyous and safe space with the person this patient loved and looked up to the most - her father. Fly-fishing in the Sonora Pass (near Yosemite), young and healthy again and most importantly - safe. Time-travel of the heart to her emotional fortress. I hope my children will remember me one day like this when they are troubled or fearful- even when I’m gone. #anesthesiadreams #PTSD #ulcerativecolitis #goodfathers #flyfishing #sonorapass

Anesthesia dream survey #884C This our lab’s first attempt to use ChatGpt to convert surgical anesthesia dream surveys (logged into Stanford Epic) into images. As we start our “dream” clinic work (4 volunteers in) and design our PTSD trials (foundation funding announcement soon) we are trying to go back create more of these images from our previous surgical anesthesia "dream" patients. Out of about 900 surveys we have about 600 dream accounts from surgical anesthesia patients at Stanford. 884C is very typical of breast cancer surgical anesthesia dreams - healthy, loved ones, time acceleration, vivid and hyper-real. The dream looped a bit (repeated reading books) as patient read her daughter's favorite books - during pre-emergence from anesthesia for breast cancer surgery. Kudos to Boris, Pilleriin, Hadia and Jasper. Full permission and approval by patient. #anesthesiadreams #breastcancer #PTSD

RT @shayla__love: I wrote about people who had dream-like experiences when coming out of anesthesia, and said these dreams reduced their tr…

RT @TheBorisLab: Thank you Nina Bai @StanfordMed for this beautiful writeup detailing the story of our patient who, after an experience und…

RT @TheBorisLab: Very grateful to our two patients who were willing to share their profound experiences of reunion while dreaming during an…

RT @PilleriinSikka: Psychedelics are transformative. But can dreaming also be a transformative experience? Hear our participants describe t…