I wish I knew how it would feel to be free. I wish I could bring all the chains holding me. I wish I could say all the things that I should say, say I'm loud, say I'm clear for the whole round. I wish I could share all love that's in my heart. Remove all the parts that keep us apart. I wish you could know what it means to be me. Then you'd see and agree that every man should be free.
I wish I could give all I'm longing to give. I wish I could live like I'm longing to live. I wish live. I wish I could do
all the things that I can do, though I'm
way overdue, I'd be stunned and anew. Well, I wish I could be like a bird.
Be like a bird in the
sky. How sweet it would be if I Could
Fly to the song, cause I'm feels.
I know. Welcome everybody. It's so nice to be here with you, and I feel like we're a little crew. Now. I see so many familiar faces. I see as you're popping in, it's like, ah, there's all my people. I know it's a those are the cameras on. I'm really getting to, like, see your faces. And just want to preach. Appreciate you all. Say hi. Theo, James Nelson, Wendy. Eileen Laurel, Richard, Karen, John Nita Carolyn. I just, I just want to appreciate all of you for having been such amazing companions. And this, this is our second to last call as a group, and this will be the last call where I'm going to be teaching you guys the the sort of practical elements of the lucid dream practice. And today is going to be really cool, because we're going to essentially do like the icing on the cake, and the practices we learned today are, for many of us, practitioners, game changers, but they're really only things you can use effectively once you've got those other pieces ready to go. So my wish for you all from this course is that even if you haven't yet been able to apply all the pieces. That was never the point. Six weeks is not much time. But now you have a map, and you have the teachings and the tools so you can build and practice your lucid dreaming practice in in a way that you can finesse and troubleshoot and tweak and so that as you go forward and practice more fully, you have a lay of the land, and you know what you're working with. And so tonight, we answer the question just, how do you make your lucid dreams last longer? Because one of the most frustrating things I saw some great examples of this this week in the group chats. What happens when you have your first moments of lucidity? You're like in the dream, you go, I'm lucid. And usually one of two things happens, either you immediately wake up because you got so excited, you're like, or else, what can happen as well is that you lose lucidity. I just want to see if I can jump this back into a bigger view. Give me one second so I
can chit chat with you guys. I want to see I want to see your faces a little bit more. Here we go. Yeah. So, so we're going to address this issue around once you're starting to get those beautiful moments of lucidity, how do you avoid either collapsing the dream so you're so excited, or the dream just kind of fades before you can actually do something, or you get lucid, but then something happens and you you get distracted by the dream, or you sort of forget that you were lucid, and you kind of get sucked back into a non Lucid state. And so you had this moment of lucidity, but you lose it. And so we're going to directly address those two super, super common issues. And once you have those practices down, it means you can make the most of every lucid moment you have. It means that when you've, you know, done all that good work to get lucid, you're able to really strengthen the stability of that, which means you can then effectively do your dream mission, right, which is creates a whole lot of opportunities for us. So we're gonna look at that, but we're also going to address fear and doubt coming now to the end of the sort of practice, time and learning time together. I know for many people, like many of you who've been booking one to one calls, it's been so beautiful to get to know you and kind of do these deep dives with individuals. I know, for a lot of people, some some independence, of fears and doubts about the practice, it's very natural for that to come up in this process. And so I wanted to give us a chance as a group to just address that, and I wanted to give you the chance to create what I call a emergency compassion response, an ECR, which is one of the tools I found the most helpful for addressing especially fear. So that's kind of the map for today. But before we just dive in, you may have noticed that the picture at the beginning of today was a here, a blank scroll. Now, as you know, every week, we've been working with a motto, starting with this moment matters to I awaken to this moment, you know, and moving forward. But this week, I want you to become your own teacher and your own guide. And so after sort of towards the end of this call, I'm going to invite you to, like, connect into where you are in your current practice, thinking about maybe where you could do a little do with a little extra support. And I want you to take this blank scroll and to create your own slogan, your own motto, to work with this week, something that is going to help you wherever you are, whether it's that you want to remember more dreams, be more disciplined about your state checks, or really expand into a non dual perspective. You're going to create a custom, a custom slogan for yourself, and then just to drop us in. I remember when I was younger, I went through a I had a really, really challenging period. I had I had lead poisoning, very, very bad lead poisoning, which completely tanked my life. I had a full neurological issue because of it. I collapsed in the street. I couldn't move, I couldn't think. And I ended up back home in the basement of my dad's house at like, 26 or 27 completely miserable, and I discovered Alan Watts. And I don't know who else is a Alan Watts fan, but I listened to every single recorded audio lecture he'd ever given. And there was a piece in one of his lectures that stuck with me and blew me away, speaking about life as a dream. And I found it again, and I just wanted us to listen to it as a group. And instead of a meditation, I I just, I'd love for you to just take the time as we listen to this beautiful excerpt, to connect into the incredible gift we have of this life and the nature of it. It's, it really is a beautiful piece. I'm just going to make sure I'm sharing my audio here as well. If you can just do me Fauci please. If you can't, if you can't hear the audio anything, just type it in the chat. I think I've, I think I've got this right, but fingers crossed.
Let's suppose that you were able, every night to dream any dream you wanted
to dream. Can you hear the audio?
And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say, Well, that was pretty great. But now let's um, let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Well, something is going to happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you, you would dig that and come out of that and say, Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it? Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today, that would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have of playing that you weren't God because the whole nature of the Godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he's Not. So in this idea, then everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep down, basic whatever there is and you're all that only you're pretending you're not.
I love that piece so much. Has anyone else listened to that original lecture? Yeah, you know that idea that if we could dream any dream, we would start with all the pleasure, all the wish fulfillment, right? So thinking of lucid dreaming, stage one, getting lucid flying, making love, wish fulfillment. But then over time, which does happen, we work our way up. Many of you have dream missions which are to face your shadow and to face what you're afraid of. And look how brave we are, right? Like how brave we are that when we could do anything, we often do choose things that might be hard, that will help us grow. And I know all of us, in our own way, have things that we are, you know, struggling with or facing. And sometimes it's really comforting to think that we chose that in some way, that we're brave enough certainly to face it down, and that our integration, our facing, our moving through our struggles and our challenges is in itself, a really powerful and meaningful experience, and that we go and do it again in the lucid dream. So what a beautiful reflection to start tonight with. And you know, in order to be able to do these practices, of course, we we really do need to have a stable, lucid framework. And the way we're going to look at it tonight is from a couple different perspectives, because I like to break the stabilization practices down to sort of like two different functions, and we understand a little bit of what's happening in the brain when you get lucid, this is going to make a lot more sense. So let me bring this up for you guys.
We Oh, and I sort of want to share, you know, as you guys are going forward with these practices, without me, you can always come back to this map. And the reason why this map is helpful is that if you're if you're struggling, if you're like, ah, like, my practice just doesn't seem to be working. I don't seem to be getting lucid. Come back to this map and you can do it, almost like a quick check off. And you could start with, okay, am I really coming from the correct motivation? Have I got too graspy? Am I being too intense? Have I burned up all the play and pleasure, or am I really into it, but I don't have the discipline like making sure that you're, you know, you haven't the right type of motivation online, you know, why you're doing these practices, that that's gonna be really important. And then you kind of go through each of these. How is your dream recall? Are you using your your dream journal? Are you using your dream tagging? How's your day practice, your state checks, you know, bringing in those mindful moments, working with illusory form, and your night practice. I mean, this is the one that it sounds so obvious, but even just having three minutes of just intentional entry into sleep, right? And if all that's online, then you can go say, well, listen, do I have an awesome dream plan? Sometimes people have a dream mission that's not exciting enough. And I ask them, What do you want to do? And they're like, oh, you know, I think I should probably work on my like, I don't know, my jealousy shadow. I should work on that. I'm like, You don't sound excited. You should feel excited for what you want to do. If you're using that well, it's going to help motivate you from the inside out to get lucid. And then, of course, you know, you can always crank up the fire by doing techniques like wake back to bed, or, you know, trying different sort of rim and sort of supportive supplements, or like Galantamine blue tea. You can always play with those. So come back to this map at any time. But today, you see here, I'm gonna assume that you guys know what you're doing here. You're working on those foundations. This gets you lucid. But once you're lucid, knowing how to stabilize yourself and knowing how to stabilize the dream becomes absolutely imperative to do a successful dream mission, you need a good, stable, lucid self and a good, stable dream in order to be able to summon things and do things and spend more than just like 30 seconds in the dream. The cool thing is, you can be lucid in a dream for as long as a REM period lasts. You know, I think the longest lucid dream I've had has been, I'd say it was about between 18 and 22 minutes, which was long. I felt, it felt like I ran out of dream missions, and the end I was just on this unbelievable adventure, right? So there's ways you can really lengthen these experiences. So the way I like to think of it is like there's two dials, and I like to talk in terms of dials, because you are the dreamer. You are the one learning your own mind. I want you to know how to make adjustments depending on who you are and what you're experiencing, the dials are brightening. This is brightening the mind. So this is where we want to strengthen how lucid you are. So if you've ever had a lucid dream and you lost lucidity, you kind of ended up going back into a storyline, and then I just You just got sucked back in. You needed more brightening. This means more metacognitive capacity. This is the part of the brain, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that comes online and gets you lucid. You want to kind of strengthen that and keep it online. Now, ways to do this is essentially to help that piece of your brain, which is never normally awake at the same time as the dreaming brain, to to strengthen it by using it. So some of the things you can do super simple. You can say your name out loud, say the date, your location and other biographical information. You're kind of, like, turning on the rational, like, recall part of your brain. You go, Okay, how I do it is, I'm like, I My name is Mia. I'm in bed. I'm in Costa Rica. I have three cats. I am doing this tomorrow, like, I'll tell the date, and I just start saying biographical information that wakes up that part of myself. Another way you can do it, a really simple way, is just to keep affirming. I know that I'm in a dream. I'm having a lucid dream. I am lucid right now. So just having those confirmations, keeping your awareness, keeping that kind of meta cognitive awareness activated a great thing to do here is recall your sankalpa. So keeping the focus of the dream, keeping the lucidity by going, okay, cool. I know I'm in a lucid dream. What I decided to do my last lucid dream was I said, I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, summon a elixir of health. Cool, summon an elixir of health. So it helps keep you focused, too. Or you can say something like, you know, this is a really fun one. You can ask the dream. You say, lucidity boost, please. Or, like, hyper lucid. And if you actually put those requests into the dream, I'm curious if anyone else has had this experience where it will brighten. Actually, I know someone, someone mentioned in the WhatsApp group. This week, they did that too, and everything kind of brightened and got more more kind of high definition, more detailed. So for anyone who tends to be in the kind of dreamy range, really knowing what these practices feel like, and using these when you get lucid are going to be really key. Now, on the flip side, for a lot of people, it's the opposite problem. They get lucid, and they get super lucid, they come right online, and then everything kind of wobbles and crashes, and the dream goes dark, and then they back in their bodies, and you had, like, three seconds of lucidity, which is a, you know, it can be really disappointing after being so excited to get lucid. And so here you gotta remember that when that part of your brain comes back online, it kind of does tend to naturally want to revert back to the physical body where it's used to being. So when we want to do the grounding practices, we're grounding the attention of your consciousness into the dream, which is usually using a sensory stimulation to get the mind to focus and accept that the primary reality you wanted to focus on is the dreamscape. So really simple ways to do this is when you get lucid. The first thing I do is I just keep walking Rinpoche with with dreaming most, most of your dreams, not all, but most of your dreams, are happening in rim, rapid eye movement. And for whatever reason, you know, if you hold your eyes still too long, it means that your your physical eyes stay still too, and the natural rim patterns of sleep get interrupted, and often that wakes us up too, and so keeping some movement to your eyes, looking around, walking through space, I'm here. I'm here. I'm in the dream. That can be really grounding, if you couple that with doing things like body squeezing or body slapping. This is your dream body, right? So like in the dream, if you don't normally have a body, summon hands, like, find your hands. You're you have hands during waking state. So even if you tend to have no body in a dream, if you expect to see your hands, they will appear. And then, you know, like, you can rub, you can slap, anything like this again, it's going to create sensory stimulus that your brain goes, Oh, okay, cool, we're here. This is the reality we're in. Another way, another great way to do this, especially if, if you're noticing that the dream is about to end so it's getting shaky. It's maybe going from three dimensional to two dimensional. A quick way to help stabilize it is to keep your eyes wide open. Your dream eyes. Keep your dream eyes wide open. No dream eyes, but there are dream eyes. Put your dream arms out, and then spin, and this just causes a big flood of visual data to come into the brain. And again, it sort of sends that signal of like this is the reality to focus on. Now another thing, of course, with this, is regulating your emotions. So to ground into the dream space, it's good to have a practice where, when you get lucid, you make sure that you are just mindful of not, you know, getting too excited. So deep breaths, walking, cool. I'm in a dream. Okay, looking around, squeezing the body, and this is where you can start saying, Okay, I'm in a lucid dream. My name is Mia. I know that it's probably three o'clock in the morning right now. I live in Costa Rica. I three cats, and you can combine them. This is what we call like. I call this the lucidity bridge, and for exactly what it sounds like, it's going to bridge you from getting kind of a little bit lucid into fully lucid, grounded, stabilized reality. And this doesn't take long, like this entire process I'll show you mine in a second, five or 10 seconds. And so it's just, it's the very, very, very first thing you do, just to bring everything into stabilization.
So this is my one. This is and just so you know, like, this is what I do in almost every single lucid dream. So I have a standard one, because now I've learned, like, what, where I tend to get wobbly. And so for me, it's mostly about grounding into the dream. So when I get lucid before I put in my sankalpa, before I try and do any kind of dream mission, I just I start walking. I rub my dream body. I say my name out loud, my location, some biographical facts. If the dream is kind of wobbling, I'll do a spin. And then after like, five or 10 seconds, I just assess. I'm like, okay, cool. How does the dream feel? How do I feel? And I can usually Gage, okay, I'm fully lucid, or I'm still like, a little bit dreamy, which means crank up more brightness, or the dream's a bit shaky. Do a few more of the grounding practices, but you'll notice if you do some of these, and congratulations. I can't remember who did it, but someone used these techniques this week and managed to do that. So fantastic. You'll find that if you kind of stabilize the dream and stabilize your lucidity, you'll feel like you're in a very, very coherent physical reality. And then your ability to effectively do a dream mission in a nice, thick, stable dream with full lucidity, you're gonna have a lot more success in kind of collaborating with the dream space. Now, for those of you who had the experience of, you know, having the awareness that you're in a dream, but not being able to do anything in it, if you've had that experience where, like, you're like, kind of, you know, it's a dream, but you you don't feel like you have any power. That's because you're kind of like, you're on the lucid spectrum, but you're not really, really lucid. That's an example of when you really need to brighten your lucidity. You really need to crank up, like that, meta cognitive awareness. No, no. I know that I'm in a dream. I And as the dream, like the main dreamer in the dream, I have enormous ability to co create and collaborate. The more lucid you are, the less afraid you're going to feel, the more collaborative power you have. It's like being a much bigger figure. I guess it's kind of like, I think about Buddha, right? Like Buddha got lucid in waking state, or Jesus, right? Then their ability to do stuff in waking state was wild, because they saw into the nature of reality. They weren't afraid of people, they weren't angry at people, they didn't take material reality at face value, because they were fully and truly connected with the natural state of their reality. When you get lucid in a dream, you understand the nature of the reality you're in. You understand that the dream is fundamentally open and empty, and that every single thing in that dream is new, manifested back to you. So why would you be afraid? Why would you be angry, or why would you be disgusted? So that's like the super lucid spectrum you can get to. So if you've ever had those experiences where you just feel kind of like you're not able to do anything, focus on the brightening in terms of practical stuff. When you in a moment, you're going to design your own lucidity bridge, it's helpful to abbreviate it, as you'll remember with the dream mission. When you get into a dream, it's hard to recall big, long, complicated ideas. We want everything to be really essentialized into easy to remember sayings. So your sankalpa is going to capture your dream mission, and then you're just going to choose an abbreviation for your Lux ability bridge, like you'll see here. My abbreviation is walk talk, slap, which, out of context, sounds crazy, but you know what that means? I'm like, Okay, walk talk, slap. Walk talk, slap. That means I'm walking. I'm saying my name and I'm doing what is my way of activating my dream body. So this is the thing. When you when you do it, you're going to add this before you ever say your San culpa. It's like the it's the bridge between getting lucid and doing your dream mission. So I wonder if you guys just, I'd love you to do five minutes of creating your own lucidity bridge. And the best way to do this is to first assess if you've if you've had lucid dreams in the past, to think about if those dreams ended because they collapsed, or if they ended because you lost lucidity. So if they collapsed, more grounding, if you lost lucidity, more brightening. If you haven't had a lucid dream yet, I would really recommend just taking a similar one to mine. Just commit to like walking, doing some kind of like rubbing or slapping on your dream body and saying your your name and your facts out loud can be as simple as that, but yeah, just, let's just take three minutes, three minutes to write down no more than three things that you're going to do and like, ideally put those into three words, like I did, walk, talk, slap. So just taking a few minutes to do that. You
Yeah, Doug and Darlene, your comment about brightening, that's a really good one, too. So you're talking about how shifting your focus to peripheral awareness makes everything more crisp and bright. It's kind of like when we were doing the mindful moment practice of widening the scope of apprehension again, like letting more of the data of the environment in is really, really great. And also, yeah, like shifting focus from one thing to another to another observing detail, you can use your looking as a way to ground into the reality too. That's really good. And yes. Gretchen, you know, most lucid dreams are what we call a Dream Induced Lucid Dream, a build and a Dream Induced Lucid Dream is where you are in the dream, a non lucid dream. And something about the dream induces you to get lucid. So maybe you notice something strange, maybe you do a reality check and it causes you to get lucid within the dream. So that's, that's a really big way that we get lucid. And, yeah, listen, if you can, if you can practice the stabilization enough in waking state that you start doing it in your dreaming state, you will get lucid, but here, usually you need to activate the lucidity first. That can cause a bit of a rush of energy. It can cause a little bit of, almost like brain state destabilization, because you're you're entering literally a unique brain state that you never experience, except for lucid dreaming, and so having a few minutes to let let that part of your brain come back, come online, and live cooperatively with the dreaming mind. Just give me like 10, five to 10 seconds to let that happen. We'll put and I love that one. Brighten, spin. Feel excellent. The location where you're sleeping. So if you go, if you're saying the biographical facts out loud, it's got to be stuff about your waking state. You can think about this like you're trying to remember who you are in waking state. You're bringing back all that memory of like because you might have been in dream. You're like underwater at some Palace, hanging out with some mermaids and and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, who hang on. A second, hang on. This is a dream. My name is Peter. I'm in Ohio. I'm in a hotel right now, in a bed. I'm not an underwater palace with mermaids. So bringing that waking state into the dream to brighten your lucidity, so that you know where you are, you know who you are. You have full waking state consciousness, but you're in the actual dream. Can you hover or fly? You can. But the trick with that, John is that it's really exciting to fly, and sometimes what happens is, if we're flying or moving, that can become almost like the beginning of the dream mission. And you This is and so just give it five seconds, like you just want five seconds. Of the reason we walk is just to keep movement going with the dream and to keep a sense of calm. And after like five seconds, then go into flying. But, but the trick here is, like, if you spend that just that three to five seconds stabilizing, you have a really good chance of doing your dream mission. The cool thing about this practice, too is that as you experiment like every 30 to 60 seconds in a dream, if you're getting lucid, you can start proactively stabilizing the dream. The way you have really, really long lucid dreams is by proactive stabilization. So let's say you do your dream mission, and you're kind of heading towards the end. It's been about five minutes, you might go. Let me just check in with the dream. Let me check in with myself. Ah, you know, I noticed that I'm like, I'm getting a little euphoric. I'm getting a little dreamy. Brighten or, okay, you know what the dream is, kind of darkening, or it's getting a little patchy, or a little bit bad graphics. Let me ground and so if you proactively stabilize using this throughout the dream, that will help to extend it longer and longer and longer. So, yeah, so lucidity boost. You mean in terms of pulling lucidity boost, you can literally just ask your brain to boost your lucidity. I know it sounds wacky, but remember, your unconscious mind is cooperative. So if you say, lucidity, boost, now, often what happens is the dream will brighten, will become better graphics, you'll be more grounded. And so again, you can do that proactively throughout the dream too. Lucidity. Boost, please. Again, not an order like a loving, collaborative request. And often the mind will react to that. So awesome. So then I want to talk a little bit quickly about dream surfing, which is when we're practicing lucid dreaming, even when we extend our dreams. You know, Rem periods naturally come to an end. And so you know, you'll you'll know this just from your own experience with your dream world, where you know, especially during the morning, when you have lots of REM we tend to kind of go between dreams. You'll have one dream kind of comes to an end. You might wake up in between, then, okay, back into a dream. And this is kind of like natural rhythm to like being in a dream, dream ending back into a dream when you're lucid, if you are in a dream, and either it ends early, like didn't quite get to stabilize it, or you finished a dream mission, and then the kind of the dream ended, you'll often end up in this kind of dark, bright space that feels like nothing, or it feels like it's like you have no body. You're just in this floating space. Now, because most of us aren't practiced at hanging out in liminality, we go, Ah, it's over. There's nothing here. And we tend to, like, revert back to our bodies. And so then the dream is over, but you can dream surf, which would mean that instead of popping back out to your body, a way to essentially have lucid dream after lucid dream after lucid dream all in one go is that when the dream ends, you're going to dream surf. I love this technique. It's the best because I know that if I get lucid. In the morning, I'm going to have at least three or four lucid dreams in a row, because I know how to surf. So what happens is the dream starts to disassemble. Everyone's versions a bit different. You end up in whatever kind of in between space you end up in. Usually it's kind of a dark, bright space. And even if you begin to feel a little bit of the sensations of your your physical body, don't pay attention to them. Like, don't go back into the body. Lean back into the darkness, like, like, with your awareness. So really put your focus in, your attention and your intentionality into what is the fertile void. Because you're not nowhere. You're still having a lucid dream. There's just no no visual content, and so nice thing to do is when, when the darkness comes, is affirm to yourself, I'm still lucid dreaming. I'm still lucid dreaming, and know that you're still in a dream. Focus on the darkness, and then what you're going to do is plant what I call a dream seed. And a dream seed is anything. Pick something that is easy, memorable and has like, a high emotional quality. Mine is kittens. I always have to laugh every time I teach this. Mine is kittens. And so I just go, okay, kittens, kittens, kittens. And I plant the seed into the darkness, and I'm imagining that kittens are going to emerge other darkness. And I'm really like, I'm like, putting all my my manifesting intentionality into it. And inevitably, something emerges from the darkness, usually kittens, sometimes strange kittens, but kittens, or, you could be thinking, beach, beach beach beach, or, you know, Paris, Paris, Paris, whatever. And the minute you see some dream content beginning to emerge, I want you to just again, focus all your attention on it, like let it come closer. Let it come closer. Let it come closer. It's going to thicken, it's going to strengthen, and it's going to form around you, and you're going to pop back into a dream, and the first thing you're going to do is stabilize it, right? So brand new dreams can be a little flimsy, so take some time to, like, walk, get your dream body online, let the dream get nice and thick, nice and stabilized, and now you're at the beginning of a whole new dream, which means you usually have a good run of room ahead of you. So and if you do that, you can essentially do that for multiple dreams. And if you can just keep that presence of mind, keep your mindful awareness really activated, you can surf from dream to dream to dream, which is really cool. Oh yeah, Lauren, I actually got your email. I'm going to reply to you because I was like, ah, that's so interesting that you don't in the dream. You don't notice. But I think we can work with that, because it's one of those things that, because it's so different from what you're experiencing in waking state, if we start to train what we call your prospective memory, I'll send you an email with a little bit more detail about it, but you can really start to get your mind primed to say, the next time I'm walking, the next time I'm running, the next time I'm like, you know we'll choose, choose what feels strongest the next time I'm walking, I know that I'm dreaming. The next time I'm walking somewhere, I know that I'm dreaming. And anyone can use this kind of technique with anything in your dreams, if you have a deceased loved one that you always see in your dreams, and you don't realize they're dead in the dream, the next time I see my auntie, I know that I'm dreaming. The next time I see my auntie and know that I'm dreaming, we can use that as a way to activate the sort of people within the dream. Yeah, excellent. So what I'd love to do now is I'm going to open it up to questions about stabilization, about activating lucidity and dream surfing, before we then later go into talking about the fear and the doubt. So if anyone has questions about you know this, anything we've discussed tonight, please feel free to raise your hand. Thank you. Hello. MCs three. It's like a code name. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Well,
it's just me approximating artificial intelligence to get there before AI actually arrives. I rice. I had
a pretty powerful dream a number of years ago, which still is, is something to hang my hat on. So I was sleeping, and I think I was having a lucid dream. At that time, I hadn't been studying lucid dreams, particularly then, but I had gone into a room. The doorknob was red hot. There was a prosthetic from my sister underneath the bed, and I walked by a big chair where a person who was either a man or a woman, I couldn't tell the difference. I couldn't tell from the voice, and then it was too much in the dream ended after I saw that person, and I woke up, I thought, and I looked around in the room, and it seemed like, you know, I was awake in that room. Suddenly, a huge arc of electricity from one end of the room to the other went across, and it said, you don't think that you're in control. Do you you know it was the lady in the dream that was speaking to me that woke me up, telling me that I wasn't really in control. Was I in a lucid dream at that time?
So no, so that would be what I call a like a really strong, vivid dream, right? So lucidity is defined by knowing that you're in a dream as you're dreaming. So if you had been lucid, then you would have walked in and gone, huh? I'm in a dream. What an odd dream. You would have seen that figure in the chair and being like, wow, this is a really interesting dream. Figure in my dream. Maybe they represent a part of myself. I'll ask them, like, seem pretty scary. What do you represent? But you had no fear, because you were like, Oh, I know that I'm in a dream. And so this is a really great question, because it's like, often we have these very powerful dreams. And I just want to confirm, like, a non lucid dream can be very powerful. Prophetic dreams are often non lucid dreams, right? Dreams of prophecy, you can have these beautiful dreams that are teaching you something, even if you're not lucid. What defines a lucid dream is your clear awareness that you're in a dream as you're dreaming. Does that clarify it a bit more
well? I'm not saying that I won't become confused about whether I'm lucid or not in the future,
but this is how we learn. Like the the best way to ask yourself is to go, did I know I was in a dream? Did I know at when I was right there in the dream? Did I look around me and go, this is a dream. And if you did, you were lucid. If you were just kind of caught up with the dream, it was a non lucid dream.
Can I pop another short dream at you? It's sort of,
I just think I'd love it. I would say you and I could chat forever. But I just want to make sure I get through everyone who has a chance to ask a question. Otherwise I would I'm the worst of this because you and I, like I run away with people on dreams forever. So I'm going to be, try be mindful and get through everyone. But thank you so much. Okay, all right, Maria,
hi. Maria, hi.
So I have a question about dream surfing. I have never done that before, but I experience sometimes having lucid dreams without having a mission plan. And if I don't have a mission plan, I find that I'm like, Okay, what do I do? And I kind of like Luci and wake up. So I'm wondering if I were able to serve dream surf, and I already did my mission plan, and so the next dream I don't have a plan, then I would find myself like, what do I know
this is a really good point, because, hey, it's a great problem to have, but it is a real problem. I had this happen many times where, like, I did my dream mission, and then I was able to stabilize. And then I had this moment too, where I'm like, uh, what do I do? And trying to come up with something on the spot could be challenging. This is why, I mean, I wanted to keep it simple for you guys, so I didn't have you prepare, like, multiple dream plans. But I always have, like, a plan A, A, plan B, and then my fun time. And so my plan A will be like, whatever's most important. My Plan B will be like, the next dream plan I want to do, and then my plan C is like, fun. So then, you know, if I'm if I've got through two dream missions, then maybe my fun for that month is like, I mean, I love, I love, like, flying on dragons, griffins. I like mythical creatures, so centaurs, so I'll usually summon mythical creatures, and then just go off on, like, a little quest adventure. And at that point, you know you've done two really important dream missions. Fun is fantastic. So to start with, what you can do is have your main dream mission, and then have a fun plan. Just have like a and once I finish my dream mission, I'm going to fly up into the stars cool or I'm going to go around eating anything I can see in the dream. I'm going to experiment with Dream taste. A really fun thing to do as a backup plan, if you, especially if you're a newish lucid dreamer, is experiment with taste and smell and touch it blows my mind. I can go to a fridge in a lucid dream. I'm going to touch it. It's as cold as metal. I'm going to taste everything in that fridge. And everything has a unique taste. And even just that is like an amazing, fun experience to have. So have a plan A and then have, like, a little fun escapade on the back end.
Okay, great. Thank you, of course. Thank
you. Hi, Angel.
Okay, yeah, this is just some clarification to follow up on the other questions I've already asked you, since it's my last opportunity, because my mind is still blown when you said that I was lucid, but not fully lucid, like the degrees of lucidity is really so I knew I was in a lucid dream, but I couldn't control anything, and so I was doing the bright techniques, so just kind of focus on that can't control anything around me, Lux, and also with the void dream surfing. And you said, lean into the darkness. When I meditate, and I see the void and I lean into it, it's kind of like that. What
is the meditation practice? You Is it like an emptiness practice? Or what's
Yeah, if I'm doing my emptiness practice, yeah? And I could, interestingly
enough, because that's a really great question, and you're making me think about two things I've never connected together. So with with that type of you know, when you're you're doing a meditation and you're investigating the field, you're often investigating the field in order to disassemble it, because you're like feeling into subtler and subtler and subtler levels of energy, sound, vibration, and as you look very closely, it disappears because there's nothing there. So with emptiness practice, we're dismantling with the dream surfing where we're assembling. So I almost want you to almost think of it as the opposite, where I want you to reify it. I want you to find something solid so it's almost like leaning in, like you're really wanting to watch a TV show, like and and like I want you and visualizing like, really, instead of just like feeling into like, you're going to choose something and you're going to really strongly visualize it, like when I think of kittens, I literally, I'm visualizing kittens, and then it's becoming real, because I'm so in some ways, you're conjuring a material reality, whereas with emptiness practice, you're like, you're disassembling so you can kind of play with it like that. Yeah, okay, great, yeah. Because with the question, sorry, I think I didn't, I didn't answer your first question, because this one was sorry. Because this one was
so interesting. I No, I think you did. It was to do the Brighton when I know I'm lucid, but I'm not fully lucid and can't control stuff. Yes, but
also something I would say to you about that, because I know some people, actually, a few people, have had this issue where you're aware you're dreaming, but either you're like, stuck in a, like, a observer's perspective, or like a third party view, or you're watching a movie, or you feel like you can't control anything, if you're if you want to experiment with something, what you can do is kind of end that dream so you can stay lucid and go, Okay, I'm going to close my eyes dunk. And then you go, when I open my eyes, I'm going to be at a beach, and so you can kind of reset the scene. And sometimes that, kind of, like, frees you up from whatever stuckness you were in. So you can try that as well. Like, sometimes if you're, if you have, if you're in a dark dream, for instance, you've got lucid but the dream is really dark. You can reset a dream as well. So something you can try. Awesome. Thank you. My pleasure. Gilda, alright, we're going to go to Linda, and there will be one more question answer session at the end. So for anyone who's holding a question later, but we will get all the way through to Linda. Hi, Gilda,
very excited. Seems like this is a new skill I needed to add to my my dreaming reality. Um, I've been doing dreaming forever more, and so, for example, I can't say I'm back in my physical body when I'm having this. This a lot of the experiences that you, that that you have related for us to will fly this. Daniel, I have had ongoing forevermore, and I write them all down, but I do not will them. They arrive to me, and I'm being trained in the individuation process in order to individuate through the dream story. So my question is that it, for example, I had a healing dream. The figure showed up. I had a pain in the very strange place, and a figure showed up, and so, and I knew at that moment that I was healed. And that's it. Like I you were lucid, that's a dream. Yeah, I knew that I was healed. And when I woke up in the morning, and then that was it, that's the end of that. And then in the morning, when I wake up, I am healed. So I have these experiences all the time, and I will, since in the daytime I am, my being is connected to the night time, then there's an inner intelligence that seems to bring forth what you need to work on this, that the other. But I don't will it. So I'm wondering how to now that I'm learning that there's a part that needs to will grounding and brightness or whatever else you
get. You can think of it this way. Well, first of all, let me ask you in like in that dream you had, where you had someone come to heal you, were you lucid during that dream? Did you know you were in a dream? Okay, so you, oh, how do you tend to get lucid?
Well, I can't say that. My being said, Oh, I'm lucid. No, my being new in that experience that I had, I was healed. So the connection different
to knowing if you which, by the way, I completely love, and I think, yeah,
the connection was there, and I was aware of it, and I embodied it. And end of story, I don't, I don't in all of these dreams, which I am an amazing tracker of. I don't say I am doing this or I am doing that. I simply co create with what's happening
with with any of these practices. I think it's like, whatever works for you, like, if you find that you've got this amazing dream life and you you're in some kind of co creative relationship that you love and you're happy with, keep exploring that there's no, there's no, like, correct way or incorrect way to do these practices. For for some people, it sounds to me like you have a very natural, automatic connection to these things, and so it's awesome. This is more for, like, if you are wanting to train a particular skill. So, yeah, right, because one, because one of the gifts of being able to be a little bit more intentional is we can prepare and and experience things that are, I guess, important to our development, or things that we want and not most people don't have what you have. Most people don't have I don't have that. I don't have kind of like things that just happen to me. I noticed that my non lucid dreams tend to be pretty mundane. And so for me, I make the most of my dreams by training with lucidity and getting lucid. But you can, you will find the balance. And so maybe for you it's like, oh, you keep this kind of more fluid relationship open. But you know, maybe every now and then you're like, Okay, I do. I do want to work with more of an intention, and your intention and your intention might just be something like, ah, I'd like to receive wisdom. You could keep like an open ended intention. If you already have so much support in the dream space, you could just do it more open endedly. I find being specific has been very helpful for me. But again, like you know your mind, trust yourself and kind of go as you go with with what's what feels good to you.
I find wonderful all your references for Dream surfing and all these other things. These are maps that one can incorporate, whether one is willing, willing it or not it just it definitely expands the vocabulary.
Yeah, it's just like, you can I love it, add it on, try it on. And like, oh yeah, for everybody, for everybody listening, like, with these kinds of courses, I mean, I've given you a lot to work with. Yes, write things on experiment. See what works for you, right? Okay,
yeah, and I've had dreams with cats. By the way, I'm also a cat person, and I'm glad you guys showing up. You know, these, all these cat images coming into the dreams since we started the course, and I'm going, Oh, that's me. Yes, yes. And we so very connected. We had cats for so we are very well connected to it. So we say, wow. So like I said, I will it, but it just and then one one acknowledges and moves story. So we're very thankful, and it's beautiful. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Gilda, thank you. All right, Hannah, second,
you click, yeah, there we go, yeah. Can you hear me now? Yes, I got you okay.
So earlier tonight, you talked about collapsing a dream versus losing lucidity. So could you expand on those two so,
lucidity, you know, we talked about this moment of knowing you're in a dream, knowing who you are, knowing like having this awareness sometimes when you get lucid in a dream, the dream itself, like the kind of actual space you're in, destabilizes. And it collapses. Isn't like it ends the story. You mean the story ends, yeah, like the actual dream, okay. And so that can kind of collapse. And this is where you might end up in that kind of, like dark in between space or or kind of just wake up back in your body. So sometimes you'll have a lucid dream, but it only lasts three seconds, because you got lucid, and then oh, and then ah, and then you wake up. So the collapse is what happens just before you wake up. And, okay, you're lucid, you can often, it's like you can kind of see the reality disassemble itself. It goes from being like a three dimensional reality to kind of fading away or crumbling away. So that's what I mean by the collapse of the dream. But you're still lucid, so your awareness is still there. The dream just kind of goes away. The other one is the opposite, where the dream stays. So the dream stays nice and thick and it's stable, but your awareness that you're dreaming gets lost. So you were like, I'm dreaming. And then sometimes what happens? And these are great stories, you might be like, Oh my god, I'm in a lucid dream. And then the dream figure says to you, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're not in a lucid dream, and it talks you out of it, and then you kind of believe them, and then you fall back into the storyline of the dream. I see you lose lucidity. Yeah, so those that's kind of the distinction that is that a bit clearer? I see, yeah, that's good. Thank you, perfect. Thank you.
Thank you.
Stephanie,
Hi there. Hi. Stephanie, Oh,
good. So nice to speak with you in person, in the ether world or whatever, right? So, I have a question. I've had lucid dreams inconsistently through my life. I'm anyway about the grounding part, so just, I'll focus it on so I've lost dreams before, just from being over excited, kind of you've talked about here, where I just, I recognize I'm dreaming, and maybe I move too fast to try something like, I like I want to try, you know, putting my hand through a wall or going through and, and sometimes that all works, and I can do it or whatever. And, but sometimes I'll do something and it's almost like, over excited, and then I'm it, it disappears, like it's short lived, but I maybe, at least I have the lucidity for a bit. But there's another way that I noticed that I lose dreams sometimes, which is a little different feeling, which is I'll recognize I'm dreaming in whatever way and and something about recognizing it, it suddenly I become self conscious in a way, like as if, oh, now I have to create the environment like I don't. It's not this, this, this literal, but it's like the feeling is, whereas if the environment just arose and I'm in this environment, and then I become aware I'm dreaming for some reason, and and then suddenly it's like some kind of pressure or responsibility. And it's weird, because I am visually creative in my waking life, I'm a painter, so it's not like a lack of visual creativity or something, but there's something about the awareness that you got
performance anxiety. It's just like, nuts. But, and then what happens? Does that wake you up, or do you lose this
because, because I suddenly am not sure, and it's a little bit related to what you were just talking about about, I don't know what to do with the dream or the environment. It's kind of like what and you were talking about, you know, having a plan A, a plan B. I have some of that. But then also, like, the thing, like you're saying Plan C, fun. It's totally what you're saying, like, performance anxiety, because it's like, like, oh, like, I wanted to do this, but then it's like, oh, how do I create that? Like, the suddenly, the the in landscape becomes over simplified, or something. It's not as rich or as like the road suddenly, then the road begins to like, it's it things,
yeah,
I sometimes like that. One of the, one of the jokes I have with some of my advanced lucid dreaming students is that sometimes the dream goes bad. Graphics. Yeah, like, what? Like, yeah, those faces are, like, pixelated or paper mesh. So, and this is the thing is, like, we'll talk about this with fear too. But when you understand that your dream is an immediately thought responsive environment, so the minute you have, like, a fear or a worry that, like, it's not going to be good enough, interesting and like we make it happen. So here, here's I'm going to have you do I'm going to have you really make it simple. Your job when you get lucid for the next couple lucid dreams, is not to go do anything. Your job is to be a scientist, experimenter of the lucid dream, and to go and touch as many textures as you can, to go taste things like you get lucid, you go, Oh, I'm gonna explore this dreamscape. I'm gonna, I'm just gonna, and I'm not gonna do crazy stuff. I'm just gonna, like, pick things up. I'm gonna, like, experiment with what they feel like. I'm gonna touch things. And you're actually just going to show interest and appreciation in the dream it is as it is. And when you do that a couple times, you're going to start like normalizing just being in the dream and trusting that when you turn a corner the dream makes a scene like something will exist. You are not respond like this, I'm saying, yeah, right, control the dream. The minute you think you're controlling dream, you're gonna get stick figures,
right? Yeah, it's yeah. You're telling me, you know, touch something or taste. And I think, like, you mean, and it'll still be there, even if I'm Yeah. So you're saying it, it will. And
I think this is, this is where we have to take responsibility for our belief systems. Go, Okay, hang on. Whatever belief I have that somehow you think your unconscious isn't gonna or you think you're not gonna create these, like, critically test that and adopt a new thing. Go, hang on. I'm getting rid of that. It's a bad belief. I'm gonna say, wow. Every night my dream, and I create these incredible spaces. When I get lucid, we're just going to create more incredible spaces. I'm just a collaborator. I'm not responsible for it. I'm just here to appreciate the art of my unconscious mind. Make your job for the next few dreams, just to be to appreciate the incredible work that your unconscious mind does, knowing that you're not doing it, and once you've reset that relationship, you'll be able to be a collaborator, versus going in and thinking like, somehow you've got to, like,
right? Make it all happen, no? And so it that it actually makes me want to cry. It's like such a weird Yeah, reflection, yeah,
which we learn about ourselves through the process where we go, gosh, yeah. Like, maybe, maybe you're the kind of person who has had to take on and feels responsible for managing around. Oh,
yeah. And you go, and that's playing out in different ways, sure.
And then yeah. And here you get to practice, like, Huh? Like, what if I trusted that life would be life, even without me controlling everything? What if I trusted my dream would be a dream without me having to manufacture every detail? Yeah, a beautiful little micro cause into practice.
Okay? Super helpful way to think about it differently. I have to and
let me know if you, if you get Luci and you explore it, let me know. I'd love to hear Okay, thank
you for that beautiful Yeah.
All right, Linda, Jim, I'm going to take Linda as my last question, but you can keep your hand up, because I'll have you at the at the end. Hi, Linda, hi.
This has been so exciting. I really am thrilled with everything that that you're giving us. I haven't I mean, I'm so new that the excitement for me is that I'm actually remembering my dreams and putting them in a journal. And I think that I, I knew I was in the dream, but I was kind of in the background, like not, not having a body, but, yeah, yeah, but um, then suddenly, uh, my old sleep habits came back, and I could not get to sleep, like till four in the morning and I, I'm the answer to that question is probably just go back to class one and re, we re watch your video and look at your notes.
But, but first Are you? Are you falling asleep and then waking up and can't get back to sleep? Or you just can't get to sleep in the first place? Can't get to sleep in the first Oh, damn Linda. Feel here. Okay, do you take I mean, the answer would be, actually, go to Session Two, session two. But what I would encourage you, because I've been working with some people with your sleep as well. Like, look at it from two perspectives, a physiological perspective, like, ah, like, am I taking care of my body. Am I taking natural like sleep support, whether it's taking chamomile tea before bed, or taking some alpha theanine or five HTP or b6 like these amazing, like natural supplements that can really help. I can resend that with the email. So the kind of the physiological element Am I making sure I'm, you know, eating well enough, and all the basic things, take care of the body. And then there's a psychological element, which is like, Are you reading gripping thrillers before bed, or are you on the phone, or are you in bed thinking about ruminating about things? And if, and if there's, like, a psychological component, then looking at doing practices like, you know, whether it's a yoga nidra practice or a hypnotherapy practice, or, you know, doing a physical shaking practice before bed. But look at it through those perspectives, like it could be a physical thing, or maybe it's like a stress or a psychological thing, and that'll give you a clue, like, how to approach going back to sleep. For
me was that I didn't do all the things that were were working, but I had such a positive mind about it that I thought, oh, it's not a problem, and it'll come. We
always do that. We whenever we need to do our practices, we can often kind of like,
yeah, which brings up whether it's important to do it every night, forever, or do we take breaks? Do we have weeks off? Should I get a teacher? Can I with the
inductions, with, like, the lucid dreaming induction practices, or with the with which bit,
uh, remembering my dreams and getting keep working at being lucid?
I mean, I think for me personally, I think, I think keeping a dream journal, if for as long as you can, is always awesome. And the reason why is because, if you have an active dream life, you can return back to lucid dreaming at any moment. I find, like sometimes, like getting the engine started on remembering the dreams, like sometimes that can take a minute. But if you, if you, even if it's just that, you know, five days, we can kind of five days a week, you're just tapping into your dream space. It's like, it's like, if you message your friend every now and then, versus like you ghost them for four years and you come back and you're like, Hey, can you give me something? So it's just like, keeping that relationship open. So I, I'd always work with dream recall, there's, there's, no universe where I'd ever stop doing my dream journal, even if I'm not doing like active lucid dreaming practices. But the lucid dreaming stuff, you can kind of take on actively for a period where you really want to work with it, and you can take periods off if in that moment there are other priorities in your life. But having that dream recall is the basis.
I got so excited about different ideas. I thought, oh my goodness, I can play the piano. I can learn to speak Spanish, I can verb on. I went off in this huge thing, and I thought, well, I can't do that. But it sounded like, you know, you keep working at this. You are collaborating with your subconscious. And they may be
sure. I mean, the thing, I mean, I think there is an ever growing list of things that people are discovering they can do in lucid dreams. I think we have only scratched the surface. And so the cool thing with all of us is that, I mean, I'm just sharing stuff that I know, but what do I know? I mean, I know, like the tiniest bit of stuff, but we're all collectively pushing the edge and figuring stuff out. And that's what's so amazing about this. Like you might find like, wow, like, I actually was able to access a collective unconscious Language Center and learn Spanish six times faster. And if you do that, tell me, because I'm learning Spanish. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Linda. Thank you. All right. Okay, so we'll have a jeez. These sessions go quick, huh? I really want to get to the fear and the doubt aspect of this practice, so it's probably gonna take us maybe 1015 minutes to get through that, and then I'll close with another Q and A. But for many of you, during this experience, you may have noticed that fear and doubt came up. And I'm not. I'm a really visual human being, so I'm super grateful that mid journey got invented. I think about fear and doubt. You can look at this image, and I love this. I was working on this today, and I think about them as you know two, two aspects of my psyche. I've met both. I've summoned both a personification of my fear. I've summoned a personification of my doubt. I've met them in my dream, and it was so powerful because each of them were humanized. My fear actually appeared to me. I summoned my fear, and it appeared as this massive gorilla in a kind of like tuxedo that was kind of torn and stained, and he was kind of like trying to be like a sophisticated person, but he was just a big animal, and he was circling me, protecting me, like but he couldn't distinguish between a real threat and A non real threat. And so I felt my fear is this like powerful animalistic thing, kind of trying to pretend it was rational, like with its little suit and tie, but completely unable to distinguish between the fear of an email of rejection and a tiger, right? And it so, so much compassion to my heart to understand my fear. It has similar experience with my doubt. And, you know, I just want to encourage you to understand that like fear and doubt are not the enemy on this journey where every time you feel a doubt about your practice, or you feel a little bit of fear, that's an incredible clue of where you can go to next in your practice, because it's showing you where maybe there's like, a little bit of, you know, disintegration in your system, something that has been trying to protect you, that you know now you have the opportunity to work with and integrate so that if that protection is no longer needed, you don't have to be stuck in a kind of over inflated protection cycle with either of those, and doubt is often protecting us just as much as fear. And so it's supernatural to feel these things. And when it comes to the doubt, I mean, I love this because, you know, obviously with the, you know, I've trained with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. And you know, doubt is one of the, one of the, the great obstacles to practice. And the answer to doubt is is real faith and and trust. And I think when you're feeling into where you have doubt, this is where having your heart felt motivation online is going to be really important, if your sense of why you're doing this work is more inspiring and more important than the doubts that arise. You can hold your doubt with compassion and continue to take action towards what is important to you. You don't even have to eliminate your doubt. If you keep your practice and you're committed to your practice, your doubt will naturally subside, because ultimately, truth reveals itself, but the faithfulness and the committedness of ourselves depends on what we believe in. So if you experience a lot of doubt, I would really encourage you to connect back into why you're doing this and this. I think this goes with anything make your make your why bigger and braver than your doubts. It's that simple fear. On the other hand, um, fear is a really amazing gateway to work with and with our dreaming space, because our dreams are so vivid. Even in a lucid dream, sometimes we encounter things that feel afraid. Sometimes we're afraid to lucid dream because we're like, I don't know what I'm going to find in my mind. So many of my clients, when they come to me, have a fear that if they get lucid, they're going to see something they're not ready to handle, experience something they're not ready to handle, that they can't trust their minds. And they have all these fears that are operating. It's super, super natural and supernatural, but supernatural and the best way to approach our fear is not by trying to get rid of it. It's by building a strong, compassionate state that you can access again that's bigger than the fear, and so this is where we work with something that I call an emergency compassion response, and ECR, I sent out a question with the email this morning around you know, like, what makes you feel safe and strong and full of powerful love and an emergency compassion? Response is a practice that I designed that I use myself, and I get all my clients to do, where I have them choose something, and you're going to do this in a moment. Choose something, whether it's a word or a mantra, a hand gesture, something simple that you can do pretty quickly or say pretty quickly, that evokes the sense of like strong compassion and my one, for instance, is I use the whole point of prayer. And if you don't have one and you're not sure which one to use, I highly recommend it is, excuse me. It is such a powerful prayer to use. Simply, I'm sorry, forgive me. Thank you. I love you. I'm sorry, forgive me. Thank you. I love you. I use this response to anything in my waking state life that feels
uncomfortable, disturbing, upsetting, scary, disgusting, anything that I have a aversion response to, I try to catch myself and respond with, I'm sorry, forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Just inside of my own system, right? If it's a person, I'll do that silently to the person in my mind. And what happens, of course, is that what we're doing here is we're training our minds to go from the default response of like, aversion, fear, rejection, avoiding, to leaning in with compassion and love. And every time you do that, it's like a rep, like if you're working out the gym, every time you do a set of compassion, you get stronger. And then what you can face and what you can hold your capacity increases. And practicing during the waking state is really powerful, because, of course, what you want to be able to do is to feel fearless when you're going into your dream space, because you know, no matter what arises, you can meet it with compassion. I'll give you an example. One of the turning points for me my lucid dream practice was I used to have dreams, oh, so many dreams about zombies and about skeletons, which were like one of my my worst fears, like, I couldn't even look at, like, like, little, tiny plastic Halloween skeletons. Like, I had such a intense fear of anything undead, so disturbing to me. And so when I started doing the transformation of fear practices, a lot of my nightmares were working with zombies and skeletons, and I was doing pretty good, you know, like, I was able to, like, hug a skeleton and do the stuff. But one, one time I was having a nightmare where, you know, I'm in this place, I got lucid, but there were, like, 300 zombies. Like, it was a lot of zombies, and I lost my nerve even when I was lucid, you know, because realistic I was, this was literally my worst nightmare. I just decided, You know what, I'm going to change the dream. So I closed my eyes, I went to spin. And normally that will, like, change a dream, open my eyes still in the dream. Like, did it again, open my eyes still in the dream. And I was thinking, like, it's like, you know what? My if my unconscious isn't spinning me out, it really wants me to take this opportunity. I thought, okay, cool. I'm just, I'm going to summon all my courage. And so I stood there, and I did the prayer. I put my hands out, and I just started chanting, you know, I'm sorry, forgive me, thank you. I love you. And the zombies were coming up to me, and, you know, touching me, and but then within like 10 seconds of doing this, all the zombies cracked up laughing, and like the sun came out, they all transformed into humans, and they were laughing like it was the biggest joke ever. And there was this incredible lifting of, like, the darkness of the moment, and just completely transformed. And I remember thinking like, wow, like the capacity that we have in our dream space, and I think in our waking space too, to massively impact what's happening if we respond to what we're afraid to with compassion, because the dream is thought responsive, right? Like immediately thought responsive when you respond to something that you're afraid of with more fear, more fear happens. It becomes like a mirror effect. If you are able to train yourself with an emergency compassion response to as your default respond to anything that upsets you or disturbs you with this incredible, brave, loving feeling. You change everything. And then when you have a few experiences like that, you become, you know, more sort of open and braver to working in your own dream space and also in your life. Because instead of having to, like, manage and avoid the scary things you trust yourself to be able to hold and transform whatever you find. And so this practice is, it sounds simple, but it's super, super powerful. And I just want to give you guys a couple minutes to have a think about here. I'll bring it back up. Think about something. Mine's so hot upon a prayer, maybe yours is one of my clients. Her word is just love, love, love, love, love, love. I have another client who, like, summons a ball of light. I mean, just think about what it would be for you that something that you could visualize, say or practice that fills you up with that kind of powerful love, if you want to share it in the chat, be great. I know this can be a little tricky to come up with, so if you're open to sharing, we can take inspiration from each other. Please do that. Yeah, exactly the mantra of compassion on money. Padme hung my husband. I got him to make one. His is gate, para Gatte, para San Gatte. Boris vaha, right. He just goes. And I sometimes I hear him at night when he wakes up from, like a sleep paralysis, you know, got a cat.
Yeah, you're right. Doug Darlene, the feeling response is a good way to put it. What you what you're trying to do is find, almost like a a trigger word or something that will help you activate that feeling response. The best thing to do is like, imagine that you come face to face with something that maybe triggers you a little bit. You want something easy that you can fall back on, that's going to help you activate that feeling. So you can think of what that feeling is, but then try and create a easy trigger that's going to be the compassion response. That trigger is going to be what activates the feeling you uh, John, is it? I quiet my mind, I open my heart, and I ease suffering where I find it, it, it might be. I mean, if you, if that's very entrenched, like if you're very, very familiar with that. I mean, mine's pretty long. I'm sorry, forgive me. Think, well, I You might even want to just choose the most powerful bit of that it might just be like, I open my heart, I quiet my mind. I open my heart. I ease suffering. I open my heart. I open quiet my mind, I ease suffering, right? So like, think of something almost like creating a mantra out of it. I uh oh, another one. Actually, Brian, I know, I know you. That's a reverse Tongan, something I've been playing with in the dream has been doing tonglen with the dream figures. And that's amazing. If you have a tong Lin practice, that is the most powerful compassion response. It is like, wow. Like doing a doing a shadow integration using a Tongan sublime. And you can do Tongan with the dreamscape, which is also phenomenal. So if you have that practice of taking sending and taking breathing in the pain, the darkness, the suffering, breathing out relief, that's powerful, beautiful. Good job, guys. I love what I'm seeing here, and you can take time with this. The trick is, how you want to use this is you want to practice in waking state. So don't, don't wait until things are hard in a dream. Don't, don't wait till you're in a nightmare. We want, we want this to be a tool that you have prepared in your back pocket. So once you've chosen what it is, work with it. When you're in situations of any kind of discomfort, if you're feeling agitated, if you're upset by somebody, even if it's you're reading the media and you're getting really annoyed at the news, like whatever it is, like practice this default. One of the most beautiful things about this practice, it just utterly thrills me, is that if you do the practice in the waking state, and you start doing the lucid dreams, it's got to the state now in my life, where, in my non lucid dreams, the default reaction, often, when something terrible is happening or scary is happening, is I do the upon a prayer. I'm not lucid, it's just such a habit. And of course, doing that in a dream, even if I'm not lucid, completely changes the dream and transforms it, and it's amazing. So it's a wonderful practice for just retraining the habit of our mind. Anyway, yeah, all right, Wow, beautiful. So then I think we have a few more minutes to take some questions. On anything that you want to talk about. Gosh, I know we covered so much, just from a practical perspective. I don't know how long the recordings are going to be up. I have them in my Google Drive if, if you want to access them for a long time, you can save them. So you can just go to your Google Drive and save them actually, you know what? Let me just quickly take you through this before we do questions. Oh, yeah. Also, because this is our last class, for those of you who are interested in staying in touch, I have a newsletter where every week I send out lucidity boosts, and this week, actually, I'm sending out a newsletter about I recorded a new meditation, which is about the unconscious mind. So let me just bring it up for you. I'll see if I can give you a link to it. Yeah, here, I'll put this in the chat for you guys. So if you want to stay in touch, just because I want you to sign up for it. If you do, if you're not interested in kind of receiving the future events, and you know, it's, I know it's like, there's a billion emails out there. But if you want to get, like, the weekly guidance and the different meditations and all that kind of stuff, then do jump in here. I can't access the chat for some reason. Hang on. I feel like, Zoom never lets me do more than like, one thing at a time. Here you go. So you can just put your name and your email there, or click one of the links that I've sent in the email. And the Yeah, the next, the next meditation I'm sending out is actually one about connecting with your unconscious so it allows you to feel if there's any fear or resistance or blocks to lucid dreaming, wrap that in love, and then dialog with your unconscious in order to, like, help remove the fear in the blocks. I found that getting people to do waking state practice with your unconscious is incredibly effective because your unconscious, your dreaming mind, is listening all the time. So if you've ever struggled with, you know, having any kind of subtle fears or resistances, that meditation is going to be awesome, and then also just a reminder that we have the only lucid dreaming retreat that Andrew is doing next year, him and I will be doing that together here in Costa Rica, and again, because it's one of those things that sell out and poor, Andrew always has to deal with the inevitable emails of disappointment of people on the waiting list as our core lucid dreaming crew. Just wanting to invite you first, and I'll send out the link to that too. But you can go to Blue spirit.com and all the information about it is there. It's really It's such a beautiful space, too. I live five minutes down the road from blue spirit, and it's like on this incredible private beach. It's in the jungle with all the monkeys. And, I mean, it's just such an amazing place to do a lucid dreaming retreat, so you want to kind of get away in the winter period. Really recommend making the application for that. And then, you know, of course, just reminding you guys to work with your own motto this week. It could be your emergency compassion response. It could be working with all the previous things, but really think into what you need in this moment to strengthen your practice. And if you're in the WhatsApp groups, you can share it there. But otherwise, just like beginning this process of being your own guide, being your own lucid dreaming teacher, being your own scientist of your mind, and, you know, creating this kind of roadmap for yourself as we kind of transition out of here. So let's do some final questions. Anyone have a final question? I think probably have time for about three questions. I Yeah, the streaming retreats are amazing because you're you're suddenly like, you're in this field with people, where everyone is focused on the on lucid dreaming. And the way we're going to teach it is that, you know, we also do the wake back to beds during the process. So that way everyone's kind of doing it at the same time and gets to, like, report in the morning, and I don't know, just it creates like, a little lucidity bubble, which is really helpful for getting a boost, for sure. Yeah, yes, and the hope on upon a prayer. If you, if you want to try that, I highly, highly recommend it. All right, James. Hi, James. New Face,
hello. Hello, Hi. How you doing? Sorry, my resolution is pretty bad here. I don't know if it's just coming through, but no, I got you good. Okay, yeah, I I feel like I'm stuck back at step one, and maybe I didn't realize I was stuck at step one until you got to step four last week, talking about kind of a mission oriented approach. And maybe, I think the motivation that I had been using was very much like mission oriented, like wanting to fly or wanting to have some I'll kind of accuse myself of some spiritual materialism is like wanting to do the lucid dream, or, like wanting to have the spiritual attainment, wanting to some jewelry kind of thing. But that, I guess I was, it's kind of pretty flat in terms of, like, a broad motivation. I mean, it's heartfelt in a way. I'm, I'm an engineering type person. So, like, I can get behind a task, but I'm just realizing it's kind of blank.
You know, do you know how you find the juice? It's so simple. You just, like, ask yourself, why? Like? Why like? Why do you want to have the spiritual experience of accomplishment. And by the way, if no judgment here, if you find the answer is like, Oh, I'm really competitive and I want to be an advanced Lux dreamer because I want to beat everybody. Okay, okay, maybe that's not the right motivation, but you might find you're like, huh, because something about that seems really interesting to me. Okay, cool. And then go deeper. What's interesting about it that, like, you have a sincere interest, like, something's motivating you, you just have to kind of peel back the layers until you find like, like the core of it. Do you have, do you have a sense of, maybe, why you were attracted to doing some of the spiritual practices?
I mean, yeah, I haven't been able to come up with, like, a concrete reason I have a lot of, maybe before, when I was first encountered, like, Tibetan Buddhism, and was studying about the accomplishments of the monks and stuff, and I was like, wow, this is pretty cool. But that, on its own, is kind of like, I mean, it's a kind of like, appreciation for those who have attainment in the marks and the cities and stuff. So it's like an admiration factor. But I don't know, somehow it isn't carrying as much weight. It used to be, like a real awe inspiring kind of feeling, and then, you know, but something being, I think you even highlighted maybe in the heartfelt motivation part, when you spoke about it, you're like, ah, that's really cool. Was maybe, like, you were reaching for something more than that. I don't remember your exact verbiage, but yeah, it might take time to, like, uncover something, but,
you know, like, do a little digging, because, like, it's one of those things that's worth it's worth asking yourself, because the cool thing about a heartfelt motivation is it doesn't have to be, it doesn't actually have to be profound or spiritual necessarily. It just has to be true for you, and you can trust that you do have a true, heartfelt motivation. You might just have to kind of peel back the layers of I think I should, or that seems appropriate, or that's really epic. You might have to peel back some of the conceptual, intellectual layers and like, you know, it's cheesy, but the cliches are real. Like, tap into, like, the inner child, like, what's the and like, if it's as simple as being like, I want to be in a reality where I can do magic. That was one of the first things that I got so excited about. I was like, I want to do magic. I grew up reading all the magical fantasy books. I want to do magic, and that was my motivation for a period of time. And then you'll find it might evolve. So I'd say, just sit with it. And I think you're right. Like, if you go back to number one and get, like, a little bit more heart juice, juicing up the practices, and then as you're tweaking those, it'll it'll fire a bit better, because if you just like go objective, let's go, not so sexy to the unconscious mind, right?
Cool. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah,
all right, Wendy, we're going to go, Wendy. We're going to go Wendy, John and Amber tonight.
I just really thank you so much for this course and for giving it so freely. And it really has shifted me, which I knew it would. I love the whole thing about heartfelt motivation. I did though the one time class with Andrew and you, yeah, months ago, and I was just so impressed, and it shifted me. And this, again, has shifted me. And it isn't even so much about lucid dreaming as it is about every day, focusing on that heartfelt motivation. It isn't about dreaming, it's about my life. This is what I want in my life, and to transfer it to dreams is wonderful, and I have I'm so grateful I had some really powerful experiences in my life, of hyper lucid dreams of actually the most powerful one was becoming a blade of grass
very Zin,
I can't even tell you, it's too long a story, but it was amazing, and so I'm grateful for that. And I really liked your answer to the woman who had performance anxiety, because I feel like I'm a little bit there waking myself up once I get lucid thinking, I have to do something Sure, of course, and I want to just appreciate things. And I found this morning, I was waking up, maybe hypnopompic, maybe lucid. I knew I was dreaming, but I went through this whole series of different images, including birds. I have a whole thing about birds. So birds. Birds are my kittens, you know, right? And, and I just want to say, thank you so much. I'm I really appreciate everything you're offering and who you are and how accessible and personable you are. You're just delighted.
It's my it's my sincere pleasure. Wendy, honestly, like it's been such a, I mean, such a gift to connect with so many amazing dreamers and so many committed practitioners. So thank you for your beautiful, kind words. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm gonna, I am gonna send out a survey feedback survey this week. If you have time and would like to help, it would mean a lot to me to just give some feedback on your experience with the class, so that myself and Andrew and the nightclub team can kind of get a sense of how these five weeks of teaching have helped. And any of those who of you who have had a good time and willing to give me a testimonial and just that would really help me as I'm continuing to build my teaching practice, I'd be super grateful for that. Jon, hello.
Oh, hi, Mia. It's been a fantastic course. You've been an amazing teacher. So you know, thank you greatly, greatly for that. I've got a question. I don't know quite how to phrase it, but I've got, I've got a really rich and vivid dream life with occasional lucid dreams. But I haven't managed to get into a practice where it's, you know, two or three times a week. It's once every few months. And they're always magnificent, but they're rare treats. But because one of the things I love about my dream life is I go to sleep, I don't know where I'm going to go, I wake up and I'm surprised by the imagination and creativity and all that things for an advanced practitioner, assuming I get there one day, um, does it impact on your non lucid dreams? Because it can, it seems like you at the moment, anyway, there's like, I'm doing work and work to try and get the lucidity going, which is great, but I don't want to lose that kind of creativity and surprise element where I the non intentional dreams, because some of the best dreams I've ever had. And,
I mean, it's a great question, and again, like, Well, again, let, I'll speak from two perspectives. No, that's not a rule. That doesn't happen. As a rule, there's not like, a you're getting your there's no like, there's no like, finite amount of juiciness in the dream world. And you either get an anomalous dreams, or if you're having too much fun in your lucid dreams, and you're going to have to be filing in your non lucid dreams. But if we have a fear or an expectation around it, we can make it be so, right? So just being in mind, like, again, the dreaming practice is really a mirror, and so you're going to watch how you have a self fulfilling prophecy. So if I were you, like, I would go, okay, cool. Actually, what can happen, and what often happens is, I know for me, the more I'm getting lucid, the better my other dreams tend to be too, because the degree of intentionality, the awareness, the care I'm taking, right? And so it's very true that when you have a good lucid dreaming practice, it generally improves the state of all of your other dreams. You're you're responding better to your nightmares, which is transforming them. You're filling your lucidity cup during the day. So you've got all kinds of interesting imagery and stories to work with. And so if I were you, I would just adopt like I know, as my lucid dreaming practice grows, how my dreams are just going to continue to flourish. All of my dreams are going to continue to flourish and start holding that as your view, and that will become your self fulfilling prophecy. It's a good one, and I wish that for you. Oh, thank you. Thanks, Jon, all right. And last but not least, is it? Emeric, is that right?
Hello, Mia, that is correct. Yes, hello. This has been fantastic. You're an emanation of a dream. Dakini, so for sure, thank you so much. A specific
compliment, I think I would never normally get out of this context. I love it. Yeah,
absolutely. Two questions. One, I'm curious, with your ability to dream lucidly, as you do, if you still come across characters who either pretend or don't go along with the entire story, that you are actually lucid it's almost as if they still have their own intention and will, and then also, rarely I can. I will have a dream, lucid dream in the morning, and I can wake up from that dream where it like fades out. And then I'll actually wake up from it very rarely, but I have not yet been able to fall asleep and maintain my awareness. And this is one where I can feel it's getting better, where I'll be I'll be aware of my dreaming, or, excuse me, I'll be aware of my breathing, and I can hear my body breathing, and it's completely relaxed, and then all of a sudden, I'll either wake myself up from that, or I'll just go sure to dream. And I'm wondering if you have any advice or anything on that, yeah. And thank you. Once again, it's been really lovely.
Oh, my pleasure. Great questions. First of all, with the dream figures, yes, and we didn't even get to cover this, because it's this could this could have been a In fact, I'm actually designing a six month advanced training next year, because I was like, you just can't do this stuff in short periods of time. But dream figures are a whole spectrum of independent consciousness, right? And as you'll know, like, some of them are just like, and others are, like, incredibly invested in the fact that if someone came up to you tomorrow and said, Hey, listen, Emeric, this is all just an illusion, dude. Like, you're like, okay, cool, thanks, man. Like, that's what they're experiencing. So sure, I think it's like sometimes helpful. That's why I call them dream figures, not dream characters. I like that. Charlie Marley's distinction. I don't treat them like they're not aspects of consciousness. Is an amazing guy who has, he's got disassociative identity disorder, which means that he has, I think they used to call it multiple personality disorder. He has different personalities that inhabit his waking state body different times. It's a very complex sort of psychological construction. He learned lucid dreaming, and he has done interactions with his different parts in his dreams. What he finds interesting is that each part has their own memory of the dream from their perspective. Wow, under like our dream figures, just because their consciousness, consciousness is temporary, doesn't mean they're not conscious, so that dream, right? And so that's why it's so important when we go into the dream world, to be respectful, to be friendly, to be kind, to be compassionate, because a you are working up karma, and yeah, like some of these figures, they're really living their life. It's not your job to, like, tell them their consciousness is a temporary illusion. It's all good. The trick, of course, is, I'm sure you're to work skillfully, is, you know, there's no point. There's no need to convince dream figures of the truth when we're working within the dream space, you're going to choose what your objectives are. As long as you're just showing compassion and love, you will find those super lucid dream figures who can teach you things. You'll find those dream figures who know more than you, and those, those are the figures you want to be interacting.
Yeah, it's been my experience as
well. Yes, for the wild, the wake and juice, lucid dreaming, or the falling asleep, conscious you're doing this, I'm guessing in the morning, right? Not the evening, right? Like
no in the evening. So I'll have a little meditation practice before I go to bed. And then when I fall, when I go lay down in bed, I'll breathe. And then I'll just bring my awareness and sharpen it, and then I'll try to maintain my awareness. Sleep yoga, a Dream Yoga kind but, okay, but, but not very, very like No, no
sleep cycles, right? So like at the beginning of the night, you're just going right into non REM, right? And sleep yoga is like a non dual experience that that is the most stage nine of Dream Yoga, if you want to do the falling asleep conscious or wild practice where you stay conscious and go into the dream, you want to start practicing that from three o'clock, four o'clock onwards in the morning, because you want to be able to go straight into a rim cycle, straight into a dream. If
you Yeah, that's that's easier for me. I've done that with lucid dreaming, but I but I never am aware of myself falling asleep. But I'll be aware when I'm all of a sudden in a dream, and then something will be strange in the dream, then I'll just do it, or whatever different. Because,
okay, yeah, you if you want to do if you want to learn how to do sleep yoga practices like start with the falling asleep conscious into a dream. The big thing with this is, anyone who who does this practice, no, it's you have to learn how to navigate sleep paralysis consciously.
Often, yeah, I have a lot of experience with it. Yeah, no,
but that's a good sign sleep paralysis is a gateway right into a lucid dream. If you know how to work with it, this is where you're you know an emergency compassion response is excellent. If you find yourself in sleep paralysis, you're passing into a dream. Your body has paralyzed itself in preparation for a dream. Of course, it's scary having audio hallucinations. Someone walked screaming, terrifying, right? So we learn how to recognize the delusion of the loose nations. I'm sorry, forgive me. Thank you. I love you. I generate, I generate so much love. I generate so much compassion. I listen to the sleep paralysis I pass through it, the dream starts to form, and then you pop into the dream. So work first with like going into a REM cycle, and do that with, like, your meditation practices, if you're if you're already getting to sleep paralysis, work with the sleep. So
that's okay. I'll do that's a good idea. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah. I'm excited for that. I'm really curious about that experience, and then also allowing myself to be eaten by creatures and other things that terrify me in the dream. So that's gonna be my next thing as well. Because the fear,
I mean, I still remember what it feels like to be given by a
zombie. Congratulations. Very few people in the world get to to say such thing, to
live, to live their delicious night. Yeah.
All right. Well, thanks
so much, so much. And good luck with that. Yeah, beautiful. All right, you know what? Glenda, I will take you. Will sneak you in here. Let's do it. Let's do it. If anyone needs to go, please go. I just, I thanks. My last chance to chat. So I just love to Oh,
you are, you are such an expert at this. You understand how the MIA works. Wow, it's impressive. I have yet to have a lucid dream, but when you said the paralysis, that was a dream. Few mornings ago, I was in this dream and I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I was asleep. I mean, no, I was in bed and I couldn't move. And my mother had showed up, who's, of course, deceased, and I wanted to go to her, and I couldn't move. I couldn't move my arms, and I couldn't get up now and then. So I talked to myself for a minute or so, I'm sure, it seemed while, and I said, I'm going to get up him, Sol, and I actually got up. And, of course,
I woke up. But you know, this is so next time, like anyone who's having this experience, what I want you to do next time is to recognize, like, ah, if you're stuck, you're in sleep paralysis. And this is, go, go, go. Okay, cool. This is a good thing. If I'm in sleep paralysis, it means my body has got to that final stage where it's preparing me for a dream. Wow, your job in sleep paralysis is to relax like Do you guys remember those toys, like the Chinese finger traps, where you put your fingers, and if you try to pull your fingers apart, it gets tighter and tighter. If you resist sleep paralysis. It gets scarier and tighter and tighter. The way to get out of it is to push in and then it releases. So it's the same thing you want to lean in and surrender and relax. Okay, cool, I'm in sleep paralysis. Relax, breathe, relax. Use your emergency compassion response, generate love in your body, and then you will naturally go into the dream. Whoa, it's a cool one. So it's these are what these.
Full otherwise have a beautiful week, and look forward to chatting to you guys very soon. Bye. Bye bye. Karen bye Pilar by