Shadowing Practice: What happens to your brain when you’re dreaming - Learn English Speaking with Video
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In the modern age, we've lost our reverence for the dream state, but more and more evidence is accumulating which suggests
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that REM sleep was absolutely critical to the evolution of the special cognitive capacities that human beings evidence and our special creativity.
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There are some people who believe that dreams really are just kind of a throwaway thing.
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There are other people that think that dreams actually do serve a purpose.
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Human REM sleep has a lot of very peculiar characteristics.
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Every 90 minutes we go into REM sleep and our bodies become paralyzed, yet our brains are more activated than they are during waking consciousness,
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and we're forced to watch these things we call dreams.
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So why would Mother Nature do something like that?
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The older models, when you look at Freud and you look at more Jungian thought, and there's still people who really use the Jungian thought of dream analysis,
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is really that you analyze the dreams.
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The dreams are there for a purpose.
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For some people they say it's about wish fulfillment, it's about the things that you're never able to do in your day, you're actually fulfilling at night.
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There other people who will say that it's actually telling you something.
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If there's a lot of fear that's going on, if there's a lot of anxiety, it's manifesting itself in your nocturnal world so
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that analyzing it can help to open up thoughts about what you need to do during the day.
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So a lot of people who subscribe to the psychoanalysis, the onion thought, will really focus a lot on dreams, the meaning, and how it can be used to help you during the day.
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Now if you go to more modern thought, there are some people who believe that dreams really are just kind of a throwaway thing.
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They're just a way of your brain processing what's happened during the day but there's really no meaning to them.
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A lot of imagery of just flashes of what happened.
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There are other people that think that dreams actually do serve a purpose but what that purpose is we're not really sure.
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So some people will believe
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that it actually does have some psychological representation of what's going on in the day
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but there's no need to sit and really analyze it.
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Other people like myself think
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that dreams are almost a reenactment of what happened during the day
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but it's a way of you figure out your brain processing
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to figure out what does it need to hold on to and remember and what can it just throw away.
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So it's like your brain has a large filing cabinet
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and it's opening up each drawer and it's taking in various images and memories from the day, consolidating what it needs to and puts it in whatever file
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and then if there's something that doesn't fit in any of the files and doesn't really belong, you'll forget about it.
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So it's a way of really getting a succinct way of storing things in your brain.
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We see glimpses of these other possible worlds in our dreams.
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What REM sleep normally does is it creates all kinds of bizarre ideas but all kinds of creative ideas as well.
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When our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic acquired greater access to the REM sleep state both during sleep and during waking consciousness,
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it helped to fuel the onset of cumulative cultural evolutionary processes.
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We know that REM sleep is especially important for human beings because it creates these dissociative experiences and associative experiences.
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Dissociative experiences are something
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that lots of us experience with this dreamy states where you feel like you're not quite yourself
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and you're in like a deja vu experience
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or a fluid mental state a flow state
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but you're not sure what's real what's unreal
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because you're immersed in all this imagery
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but as you go through those kinds of dissociative states it starts to relax
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or resolve into an associative state so that things
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that were previously unrelated get combined and
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when unrelated ideas combined creative innovative things happen and REM sleep promotes
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that associative state big time our culture has lost its reverence
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for the dream state whereas traditional cultures absolutely reverenced dreams
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and I think some do references would help the culture
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because it would create more openness to creativity
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and disparate ideas this can help us solve the unknown unknowns
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and help us get creative solutions to the problems people are facing.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “What happens to your brain when you’re dreaming”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: dream, sleep, Rem, brain, experience. This video has 35 sentences and 754 words to shadow. The speech runs for 4:42. The speaker talks at a natural 161 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| analyze verb | /ˈæn.əˌlaɪz/ | To subject to analysis. |
| combine verb | /kəmˈbaɪn/ | To bring (two or more things or activities) together; to unite. |
| consciousness noun | /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/ | The state of being conscious or aware; awareness. |
| creativity noun | /kri.eɪˈtɪv.ᵻ.ti/ | The ability to use imagination to produce a novel idea or product. |
| imagery noun | /ˈɪmɪd͡ʒɹi/ | The work of one who makes images or visible representation of objects. |
| unrelated adjective | Not connected or associated. | |
| anxiety noun | /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/ | An unpleasant state of mental uneasiness, nervousness, apprehension and obsession or concern about some uncertain event. |
| flash verb | /flæʃ/ | To cause to shine briefly or intermittently. |
| solve verb | /sɒlv/ | To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out. |
| evolution noun | /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/ | A manoeuvre of troops or ships. |
| whereas | /(h)wɛɹˈæz/ | In contrast; whilst on the contrary; although. |
| belong verb | /bɪˈlɒŋ/ | To have its proper place. |
| representation noun | /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/ | That which represents something else. |
| relax verb | /ɹɪˈlæks/ | To make something loose. |
| psychological adjective | /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/ | Of or pertaining to psychology. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| open up verb | To open. |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
| throw away verb | To discard (trash, garbage, or the like), to toss out, to put in the trash. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who believe · people who really · people who will |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've lost · has lost |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 13 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, doesn't, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, flash /flæʃ/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, representation /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/, evolutionary /ˌiː.vəˈluː.ʃən.ɛɹ.i/
- Long words — get the stress right: creativity /kri.eɪˈtɪv.ᵻ.ti/, anxiety /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, representation /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/, psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like analyze, combine, consciousness.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.