Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho)

Author of “Mist-Bound: How to Glue back Grandpa” (Penguin) the multi-award-winning SEasian fantasy bestseller for families, translated into multiple languages.

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

Career highlight: on the same page as Blackpink on @NikkeiAsia !! (article @ linkinbio)

HUGE THX to Nikkei & esp Marco @monkeyrockworld for penning an amazing piece about Mist-Bound’s trek out into the world, beyond the shores of M'sia & Singapore where it was born (cont)

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.

The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body.

His name is David Eagleman.

He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams.

Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since.

Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual.

You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open.

Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves.

This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed.

In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first.

Now sit with the implication of that for a second.

Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years.

If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight.

But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep.

Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense.

Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal.

They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise.

The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied.

The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you.

Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops.

So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly.

Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation.

A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium.

And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case.

Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep.

Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it.

For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all.

They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking.

The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream.

You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen.

Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

Hanoi TV covered the launch of Mist-Bound’s Vietnamese edition!

🙏🏻❤️for giving it such an amazing platform.

🙇🙇‍♀️for with every new reader, Memory Glue gets to be brewed anew, and my dad (Grandpa in the book) gets to be saved once more by my daughter, his only grandchild.

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

@JalenGreen @PlayersTribune Rooting for you from Singapore, Jalen! (Except against Houston)

[Honford Star @honfordstar]

⚔️Coming May 13 (but shipping now)—Red Sword, the new novel from the International Booker Prize-shortlisted, National Book Award and Philip K. Dick Award finalist duo, Bora Chung and Anton Hur.

Order now from https://t.co/ewqAP91FRA

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

@luvinlele_ 🥹🥹🥲🫶❤️

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

Thank you so much @luvinlele_ for reading and reviewing Mist-Bound!! 🙏❤️

[📚🦝17/53 😼 🎶 @luvyapz]

°•° #luvisbookreview •°•

#MistBound : #HowtoGlueBackGrandpa by #DarylKho @darylkho #AlodiaDwinkarinardy (translator)
📖 328 @elexmedia via #PerpuskitE
🌟 4/5
🖇️ [https://t.co/vMuDScdg3J]

Sweet memorable book!!

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

Blows my mind that Mist-Bound Korea not only made it into this gorgeous bookstore in Seoul (Youngpoong Starfield COEX) but sold out in its first week there!

🙏🏻x100 for all the amazing #bookspot pics from various Korean bookstores: Aldwin, Amy Lee, Youngmi Ko and Bryan Hwang!

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

Translated by rockstar Korean author Bora Chung (Int’l Booker Prize+ US National Book Awards finalist) + published by Sam & Parkers, Mist-Bound is now lit and launched in time for the Lunar New Year in Korea!

#korea #booklaunch #booktranslation #translated #middlegradebooks

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

The pop up book on dinosaurs

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

The Employment

by Patricio Plaza & Santiago Grasso

https://t.co/7fpSAyViMf

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

@moniza_hossain You must!!!

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

Not to forget Richard Woo and Katie Lee for helping to make this happen!
#translation #booktranslation #dementiaawareness #alzheimers #middlegradereads #indonesia #southeastasian #folktale #MONSTERS

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

😵Mist-Bound’s Indonesian edition was in the Top 5 Bestselling Translations for all of 2024 since launch in March (10 straight mths) for its publisher Elex Novels (Gramedia)!

🙏seribu: translator Alodia Rinardy+Team Elex for bringing Alexis’ adventure to Indonesian readers.

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

@careyfblankensh @jenazantian Big congrats, Carey!!

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

@IsmeerNabeel haha you’re too kind Nabeel 🙏🏻🫶

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

The Mist has landed in the Land of the Ascending Dragon- VIETNAM, as Xứ Sở Sương Mù!

Cảm ơn rất nhiều to Mist-Bound’s translator Kieu Ngan Ha & Kim Đồng Publishing for making this possible! Shoutout too to my Vietnam rep and chum Richard Woo! (1/2)

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

#vietnam #translation #booktranslation #bookdeal #booklaunch #southeastasia #asianstories #vietnamesebook

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

Kim Đồng Publishing House is the oldest and most well-known kids publisher in Vietnam (since 1957!), famed for the generational classic Crickets Diary (To Hoai), and for bringing Roald Dahl, CS Lewis, Asterix and many more to Vietnamese readers.

[Daryl Kho (I'm more active on IG: @darylkho) @darylkho]

@Jonathan_Feigen Greetings from Singapore, Jonathan. I’ve ardently devoured your articles ever since the Tmac-Yao days. Will miss your Rockets coverage & pray it wont just end. A blog in the future, if a fan may so humbly request? Whatever your plans- my very best wishes for your next adventure!