Shadowing Practice: Why Do We Dream? (The Strange Psychology Behind It) - Learn English Speaking with Video
Choose a practice mode
Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.
218 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Every night, more than 8 billion people on Earth enter a very strange state while they sleep.
2
Your body becomes completely paralyzed.
3
You drift through vivid hallucinations for hours, and then you wake up, almost forgetting everything that just happened.
4
But here's the shocking part, that loss of control state is actually a superpower.
5
In 1862, a chemist was stuck trying to figure out the structure of benzene.
6
Frustrated, he fell asleep.
7
In his dream, he saw snakes curling into circles and biting their own tails.
8
Boom.
9
The answer appeared, and it completely changed modern chemistry.
10
The same thing happened to Paul McCartney.
11
He woke up, and the legendary song Yesterday was already fully formed in his mind.
12
In other words, your brain can solve complex problems, even while you're asleep.
13
But to do that, it puts aside its usual logic, mixes memories together, creates a distorted and irrational world, and then leaves you with only a vague feeling when you wake up.
14
So what are dreams, really?
15
Why does the brain need such a strange mechanism every single night?
16
Today, we're going to decode one of the most mind-bending mysteries of the human experience and the real science behind dreams.
17
First, we need to rewind time to an old laboratory at the University of Chicago in 1952.
18
There, a researcher named Eugene Aserinsky had an idea that people back then thought was very strange.
19
Staying up all night just to watch other people sleep.
20
At the time, scientists believed that when we sleep, the brain simply shuts off like a lightbulb.
21
But when Aserinsky hooked electrodes up to his son's head and other volunteers, he was surprised.
22
After a few hours of calm, deep sleep, their brains suddenly lit up.
23
Brain waves started going wild, as if they were awake solving calculus problems or racing in a Formula One competition.
24
And most fascinating of all, their eyes.
25
Under closed eyelids, their eyeballs were darting back and forth rapidly, like they were watching a high-speed tennis match up close.
26
They called it REM, Rapid Eye Movement Sleep.
27
And every time Aserinsky woke a volunteer right when their eyes were moving like that, most of them would shout, Oh my god, I was just having an incredibly vivid dream.
28
So what's actually happening inside your head at that moment?
29
There are four extremely important biological changes.
30
First is complete paralysis.
31
Your brainstem sends a powerful chemical signal to lock down your major muscles.
32
Why?
33
It's a smart safety mechanism from nature.
34
It stops you from accidentally swinging your arm and punching your spouse while dreaming you're an MMA fighter in the ring.
35
Without this system, dreams would turn into real-life disasters.
36
Second is realistic hallucination.
37
During REM sleep, your visual cortex becomes highly active, making dream images incredibly vivid.
38
That's why in dreams, colors look bright and details feel unbelievably sharp.
39
To your brain, seeing with imagination at that moment can feel even more real than seeing with your eyes.
40
Third is the disappearance of logic.
41
This is the part I find the funniest.
42
The prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for reasoning, judgment, and self-control, suddenly becomes much less active.
43
That's why in your dream, riding a giant chicken to go buy bubble tea feels totally normal and reasonable.
44
You don't question it at all until you wake up and think, what on earth did I just dream?
45
And finally, memory wipe mode.
46
The chemicals needed to form long-term memories, especially norepinephrine, drop to very low levels.
47
It's like your brain is saying, hey, all this crazy, illogical stuff doesn't need to be saved to the hard drive.
48
Just delete it.
49
That's why just 10 minutes after waking up, most of your dream details quickly fade away.
50
That's the perfect setup for a high-end virtual reality movie theater inside your skull, where you're the director, the main character,
51
and the only audience at the same time.
52
But this movie theater doesn't run randomly all night long.
53
It follows a very strict schedule that scientists call the sleep cycle.
54
Each night you go through about 4-6 cycles, and each one lasts around 90 minutes.
55
Think of it like a rollercoaster ride.
56
First you enter light sleep, called NREM 1 and 2, short for Non-Rapid Eye Movement,
57
Meaning, this is the stage where that fast eye movement of REM hasn't shown up yet.
58
At this point, you can be easily awakened by a small noise or even the sound of your cat walking by.
59
Next, the ride drops deep into the stage of deep sleep called NREM3.
60
This is when delta waves, which are long, slow, powerful brain waves, take over.
61
During this stage, your body is doing maintenance work such as repairing tissues, building muscle, strengthening your immune system.
62
If you get woken up here, you will feel extremely groggy and disoriented.
63
And then, once the body has been taken care of, the brain suddenly goes, alright, time for some entertainment.
64
The roller coaster shoots back up, taking you into REM sleep.
65
This is when the most vivid dreams happen.
66
Here's something interesting.
67
Sleep cycles are not the same throughout the night.
68
In the first half of the night, your brain focuses more on deep sleep to recover the body.
69
As morning gets closer, REM stages become longer and more frequent.
70
That's why the weirdest, longest, and most memorable dreams usually happen around 5-6 am, right before that annoying alarm clock goes off and ruins everything.
71
And you know what?
72
Humans aren't the only ones who dream.
73
Scientists have observed REM sleep in most mammals and even birds.
74
Even your dog dreams.
75
If you see your dog sleeping with its legs twitching and making little growling sounds, a good chance it's dreaming about chasing a giant squirrel in its own private dream park.
76
And this is where the story starts to get even more interesting.
77
Before Eugene Azarinsky discovered REM sleep in 1952, humans had no real idea what was happening inside the mind during sleep.
78
Without brain scanners or electrodes, for thousands of years people tried to explain this movie theater using imagination and religious beliefs.
79
Take the ancient Egyptians.
80
To them, dreams were not created by the brain, but were direct messages from the gods.
81
They valued dreams so much that they even built sleep temples.
82
People would go there, fall into a deep sleep, and the next morning, professional dream interpreters would help decode the will of the gods.
83
And their interpretations were pretty fascinating.
84
If you dreamed of dying in a terrible way, don't worry.
85
The Egyptians said that was a good sign, meaning you would live a long life.
86
If you dreamed about peeing into the Nile River, congratulations.
87
Your crops would thrive, and money would flow in like water.
88
Back then, dreams were basically like a weather forecast for your fate.
89
This idea lasted for centuries, until the early 20th century, when one of the most controversial figures appeared, Sigmund Freud.
90
He was the one who pulled dreams down from the divine world back into the human mind.
91
In 1900, Freud published his groundbreaking book, The Interpretation of Dreams.
92
He proposed a theory that still makes people blush today.
93
Freud believed that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
94
According to him, every dream is a wish in disguise.
95
Do you have hidden desires, dark urges that society and morality will not allow you to act on while awake?
96
Do not worry, your brain lets you act them out in your dreams.
97
But because these desires can be embarrassing, the brain uses symbols to encode them.
98
For example, dreaming about a key or a stick, well, according to Freud, it often relates to male genitalia.
99
Then his student, Carl Jung, took the idea even further.
100
Jung believed that dreams are not just about personal desires, but also contain shared symbols of all humanity,
101
like the hero, the wit, or the monster.
102
To Jung, dreams are the mind's way of helping us become more balanced and whole.
103
For a long time, Freud and Jung made the whole world believe this.
104
Every dream is a coded message waiting to be solved.
105
And if you don't understand your dreams, it means you're missing out on a huge secret about yourself.
106
But when modern brain imaging tools like fMRI and PET scans came along, neuroscientists started to notice a harsh reality.
107
The brain during dreams works in a very mechanical and practical way.
108
They began to move away from Freud and Jung.
109
Instead of asking, what does this dream mean?
110
They asked a more survival-focused question.
111
Why would evolution keep such an energy-consuming and risky mechanism like dreaming?
112
And from there, the five biggest modern scientific theories were born.
113
The first theory, activation synthesis theory.
114
This one is probably the most boring.
115
Scientists suggest that dreams don't really have any deep meaning at all.
116
During REM sleep, your brainstem sends out random, chaotic, electrical signals to the cortex.
117
Imagine your brain like a kid randomly flipping light switches on and off.
118
Your cortex, the part responsible for making sense of the world, suddenly receives a bunch of messy signals.
119
It panics.
120
It can't leave things chaotic, so it tries to stitch together those random images and sounds into a story that makes some kind of sense.
121
The result?
122
A crazy dream is born.
123
In other words, dreams are just your brain trying to find patterns in chaos.
124
It's like looking at cracks on a wall and imagining you see a face.
125
The second theory?
126
Memory consolidation theory.
127
This is the most widely supported theory today.
128
Scientists see dreams as the brain's save button.
129
All day long, you collect tons of information, learning a new language, practicing a piece of music, or even remembering what your co-worker war this morning.
130
At night, during dreams, the brain starts sorting everything out.
131
It's like a librarian cleaning up a messy pile of books.
132
It decides what's important to store in long-term memory and what should be thrown away.
133
In 2010, researchers ran a famous experiment.
134
They had volunteers practice a very difficult 3D maze on a computer.
135
One group took a nap and dreamed about the maze, while the other group just rested or slept without dreaming about it.
136
The result?
137
The The group that dreamed about the maze solved it much faster later in the day.
138
This showed that when you dream about something you're learning, your brain is actually practicing and improving that skill in the background.
139
The third theory, threat simulation theory.
140
Do you have nightmares?
141
Have you ever dreamed about being chased, falling, or being attacked?
142
Of course you have.
143
I'd bet all of us have at some point.
144
So why does that happen?
145
Evolutionary psychologists believe dreams are like a virtual reality training room for survival.
146
Our ancestors lived in a world full of predators and enemies.
147
If you dreamed about running from a saber-toothed tiger, your brain was practicing real survival responses.
148
How to run faster, where to hide.
149
Because you are in a safe place, your bed, you can rehearse the most dangerous situations without getting hurt.
150
Thanks to these practice sessions and dreams, when you face real danger the next day, your reactions can be faster and more accurate.
151
Nightmares, it turns out, are like a fast-track survival training course for your brain.
152
Our fourth theory, social simulation theory.
153
This is a modern version of the threat theory.
154
In the 21st century, we're not afraid of saber-toothed tigers anymore.
155
We're afraid of social judgment.
156
Dreams shift to simulating stressful social situations.
157
A heated argument with your boss, a disastrous date with your crush, or the classic one, standing in front of a crowd,
158
giving a speech, and realizing you forgot to wear pants.
159
This is how the brain helps you handle complex relationships.
160
It lets you practice dealing with emotional conflicts like embarrassment or rejection.
161
Dreams are where we test out social scenarios so we can become more skilled social beings.
162
The fifth theory, creativity and problem-solving theory.
163
This is the key to explaining the stories of Kekulé and Paul McCartney I mentioned earlier.
164
In dreams, because the brain's logical center is much less active, it's no longer limited by physical rules or social expectations.
165
It freely connects ideas that normally have nothing to do with each other.
166
It lets you truly think outside the box.
167
A problem you can't solve while awake because you're stuck following rules.
168
In a dream, your brain might throw out a crazy but effective solution.
169
Dreams are like an unlimited creative lab, where some of humanity's greatest ideas get delivered straight to your mind at 3 a.m.
170
And this is where things start to get a little unsettling.
171
Because the next theory doesn't just change how you see dreams, it changes how you see your own brain.
172
It was proposed by the famous neuroscientist David Eagleman and is called the defensive activation theory.
173
To understand this theory, you need to know one shocking fact about the brain.
174
It is highly plastic, neuroplasticity.
175
Brain regions regions don't stay fixed.
176
They constantly compete for territory like countries on a map.
177
If one region stops being active, even for a short time, nearby regions will quickly move in and take over that space.
178
Experiments have shown that if you are completely blindfolded, the auditory and touch cortex can start invading the visual cortex in as little as 40 to 60 minutes.
179
The brain does not allow any area to sit idle.
180
Now think about our ancestors.
181
They slept in complete darkness for 8 to 10 hours every night.
182
In that darkness, the visual cortex had no input to process at all.
183
This created a huge evolutionary risk.
184
If you go 10 hours without seeing anything, your visual system could start getting taken over by other senses.
185
And when you wake up, your vision could weaken, or you might even lose some color perception.
186
So what was evolution's solution?
187
Dreams.
188
According to David Eagleman, dreams may act like a screensaver, a biological screen protection system.
189
About every Every 90 minutes, the brainstem sends bursts of visual images into the visual cortex just to keep it busy,
190
so it can signal to other brain regions, Hey, I'm still working.
191
Don't take over my territory.
192
In other words, we might dream to protect our ability to see.
193
Dreams are not just artistic movies.
194
They are a territorial battle happening inside your skull.
195
This perspective flips everything, turning dreams from something mystical into a brutally practical biological tool.
196
So in the end, which theory is actually correct?
197
Is it about cleaning up memory, practicing survival, boosting creativity, or just protecting vision?
198
The most honest answer from science right now is probably all of them.
199
Evolution is incredibly good at making the most out of things.
200
Dreams may have started for a simple, technical reason like protecting the visual cortex,
201
but over time the brain has used that same mechanism to do many other jobs.
202
emotional processing and memory building to creating legendary music.
203
What I find most fascinating after all this research is the strange contradiction of humans.
204
We've taken pictures of black holes millions of light years away.
205
We've decoded the entire human genome.
206
We've created artificial intelligence that can write and draw.
207
And yet, we still can't fully agree on why our brain runs its own movie theater every single night.
208
Dreams remain as a reminder that the universe inside the human mind is just as vast
209
and mysterious as the one out there.
210
So tonight, when you lie down, close your eyes, and start to feel your body go still, enjoy it.
211
You're about to enter the greatest, strangest, and most private movie theater in the world.
212
It's the only place where you can fly, talk to people who are gone, solve the mysteries of the universe, or just grab bubble tea with a dragon.
213
If you saw yourself in those weird movies last night, hit the subscribe button and share this video with a friend who loves dreaming as much as you do.
214
And don't forget to flex the wildest dream you've ever had in the comments.
215
I'm honestly curious.
216
There's still a whole universe of mysteries you haven't discovered yet.
217
Click on the video on your screen to continue the journey of becoming smarter.
218
I'm Apex, see you next time.
Download App
Everything you need to speak fluently
AI PronunciationScore every sentence
IPA PracticeMaster every sound
VocabularyBuild your word bank
Vocab GameLearn while playing
📺 Same Channel
B21
Psychology of People Who Go Quiet When They’re Hurt
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
C17
The Psychology of People Who Love Cats
University StudentsWorking Adults
C13
Why Do Humans Have to Pretend to Sleep to Fall Asleep?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C18
Why People Who Prefer Being Alone Often Had This Childhood | Hidden Psychology Truth
University StudentsWorking Adults
C12
The Psychology of People Who Are Too Aware
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
Psychology of People Who Imagine Fake Scenarios Before Sleep
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
Where Do You Go When You Sleep?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
Psychology of People who Imagine FAKE Scenarios
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
Psychology of People Who Have No Friends
University StudentsWorking Adults
C18
The Psychology of People Who Feel Everything Deeply
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C139
People Who Think Too Much | Psychology Explain
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
✨ Recommend Video
C12
52 sentences
What happens to your brain when you’re dreaming
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
66 sentences
How to sleep better by knowing your chronotype
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
126 sentences
Therapy for the Vibe-Coded Brain
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
386 sentences
All of Human Psychology Explained in 20 Minutes
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1286 sentences
The Psychology of People Who Want to Do Everything
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1277
4 sentences
Sleep Is Your Superpower - Matt Walker
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C110
208 sentences
Why You Need to Read Hard Books
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
53 sentences
Why Do You Lose Track of Time When You’re Having Fun?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
368 sentences
Essentials: Neuralink & Technologies to Enhance Human Brains | Dr. Matt MacDougall
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
104 sentences
You're Too Self-Aware to Be Happy | The Psychology of Deep Thinkers
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
369 sentences
C1 English Listening Practice Podcast
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
Learn English with YouTube: Dive into Dream Psychology & Boost Your Skills
Ever wondered why we dream? This fascinating video not only uncovers the science behind dreams but also offers a fun way to practice English! Whether you’re working on english speaking practice or prepping for IELTS speaking practice, the engaging dialogue and clear explanations make it perfect for learning. Let’s explore how to use this video to sharpen your skills.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication (From the Video)
- "vivid hallucinations" – Great for describing intense experiences: "The movie had vivid hallucinations that felt real."
- "safety mechanism" – Use when talking about protection: "Our body’s safety mechanism stops us from harming ourselves."
- "drop to very low levels" – Handy for explaining changes: "Energy levels drop to very low levels after a long day."
- "mind-bending mysteries" – Perfect for exciting topics: "Space is full of mind-bending mysteries."
- "highly active" – Describe busy situations: "The city center is highly active on weekends."
Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide: Master Pronunciation & Flow
Shadowing (or shadowspeak) is a fantastic way to improve english pronunciation and fluency. Here’s how to use this video:
- Watch once for context: Focus on the story of dreams and REM sleep. Let the ideas sink in—don’t worry about words yet!
- Pick short clips (10-15 seconds): Choose parts with clear speech, like the explanation of "REM sleep" or "biological changes." Pause and repeat after the speaker, mimicking their tone and rhythm.
- Focus on connected speech: Notice how words link, like "lock down" or "high-speed." Copying these small details will make your speaking sound more natural.
- Practice daily: Even 5 minutes a day with this video will help. Over time, you’ll feel more confident with complex sentences and new vocabulary.
Remember, every mistake is a step forward. Keep practicing, and soon you’ll be using these phrases like a pro—while impressing others with your knowledge of dreams too! 🎥✨
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | hasn't shown · has been taken · have observed |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was stuck · be saved · can be easily awakened |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | waves, which are · ones who dream · one who pulled |
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.