Hey, friends, it's good to see you. It's good to be here. This is the sixth and final incarnation of this book study group on the lucid talisman. And it's been a lot of fun for me. We're not gonna be able to finish the book tonight, but we're going to almost finish the book. And I want to leave room for discussion at the end so we'll see how it goes. But I would like to just start off as usual with opening up to any aha moments or queries that resulted from last week in which we went over witching hour practices and Inception practices. So working with dream signs, and working with essentially sleep interruption, techniques, including including supplements, meditation, things like that. So anything, what's coming up for you, for those of you who were here last week, can make some space and you can raise your hand and we'll get to you.
anyone had any new dream amulets to share experiences of the liminal. Quiet tonight okay, that's cool. We can roll with Quiet. It's a quiet Thursday night in May. So what I'll do then is we'll get started with the reading and if you're new here, and it's tough for me to tell what we've been reading is loose a talisman forgotten lore. Oh, I see you, Laurie. Yeah, I'll get to you in a second. So we're reading lucid talisman, forgotten lore, and working with amulets and talisman, for dreaming for working for liminal objects to increase and produce and vivify our dreams. So with that, I'm going to go to Laurie Yeah, you got a question?
No, I had a comment about liminality my use of the word um, I was in a very I just want to share this with the group because this is insane. I'll do it real quickly. I woke up the other morning, actually was last Tuesday. And I was really in between worlds I and I was writing my dreams down and I was really paying attention to the state checks that I'm having in my dreams are very important things and I'm writing them down and I just feel in between waking and sleeping and waking and I have my icon press on the table because it's really I'm going to put it in the microwave and I have my iPhone, and I'm really judiciously writing down and then I put my eyes something in the microwave for 20 seconds, and I find my I phone, not the I conference. So I just want to share very very
soon, because that stayed was like such a great dream quality. There's
nothing like I can't explain like, I just kind of so I just thought I'd share that with the group.
I'm sorry for the death of your iPhone. But wow, yeah, there's the there's the metaphor, the dreaming, metaphoric action and practice. Oh, well, you know these things you know what I love about this work? about any kind of dream work. But especially lucid dream work, is how our words worlds do begin to emerge in generally in healthy ways, but sometimes we come up against these these these accidents, these accidents that occur and it I'm not talking about necessarily like injuries, actual acts, accidents, and I say this because there has been a little bit in the research world in the last few years. I would call it some naysaying. Peer reviewed articles talking about is lucid dreaming harmful. Let's look at you know, and then it ends up being sort of not original research but sort of a compilation of past studies looking at this and that. And here's two things that have been brought up, which I do think are important to notice. One is that sleep interruption practices if done too often, will reduce sleep. Total sleep totals, right sleep quality in comes out of that. And I think that's kind of a no brainer, but if it's done sustainably if we're practicing sustainably and sleep interruption is happening not every night, but it's it's something that's that's been incorporated and we're able to be flexible and for instance take naps during the day, things like that to make up for it. It's not really a problem. And so I think that's a bit of a little bit of Yeah, I think it's a little overblown. The second thing that has come forth is that that there is a small segment of populations of folks who are in their mid 20s who are beginning to exhibit schizophrenic symptoms. And lucid dreaming is a a symptom. It's basically intensified dreaming and scattered sleep patterns is a symptom of schizophrenia. And so schizophrenics often as they're emerging into, as the disease progresses, they began having intrusive hypnagogic hallucinations, and also intrusive lucid dreaming so they began having lucid dreams. And of course, this can come with some some elements of schizophrenia. Not everyone, of course, has the symptom, but confusion between waking and dreaming occurs later and lucid dreaming seems to be a symptom that you know, intensifies that, that's led some poor research to conclude that lucid dreaming causes schizophrenia in may even intensify it. I think that also is overblown. I think really what's going on is as I say, it's a symptom set. So I just wanted to put those two things out there because you might hear that in an often the way that sort of poor journalism is these days is it always leaves with a question is this and this bad for you? And usually when, usually when a title of an article on journalism is posed as a question, the answer is no. Right? It's just like, it's just Linkbait basically, but I didn't want to say that lucid dreaming has been overwhelmingly shown to have positive effects on folk psychology, including resilience, emotional intelligence, even IQ test scores, which is actually probably based on things like more related to resilience again, I think. I think it kind of goes, it goes blues are these measures are not great. But lucid dreaming improves people's lives in a lot of in measurable ways. And then some of the kind of cool stuff that's been coming out is about how lucid dreaming can be effective for post traumatic stress disorder, for instance, and I just saw that Charlie morally and if y'all follow him or don't follow him, you should, because Charlie morally just just completed a study with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, ions, a study on PTSD. I believe all veterans in lucid dreaming therapy so they did a lucid dreaming therapy injunction and their results are really promising. Total scores basically if there's a threshold for PTSD symptoms, and many of the participants went below the threshold, not only during the study, but have remained so six months after the study is completed. This is all really positive, positive stuff and I think Charlie is going to be talking about that in London sometime in the next couple of weeks. I think it's on zoom as well, that you can get tickets for and so yeah, so anyway, it's interesting. That just triggered my thought about you know what to hear about phones blowing up people, but what happens in the back of people's mind is, oh, is this dangerous? Am I gonna slip into where I can't differentiate waking and dreaming and overwhelming? The answer is no. The answer is no. Once we basically take a look at the things that I just described. So with that sort of delightful note, it's actually a good lead in today's today's chapter because we're starting with the scary chapter. I didn't want to end with it last time, that because I didn't want to send you to bed on a scary chapter. So we're going to we're going to start that now. And it basically involves some cultural practices in history involving sleep paralysis. And the entities and how talismans can be effective in a protective sense for these things, and so that's where we're going to go for the first part, and then after that, we're going to talk about lucid dreaming alchemy. So I'm on page 66. Here. The chapter is called protection. For years, I've had objects keep visual over me at night. But the connection between liminal objects and dreams, reasserted itself spontaneously. Some time ago, in the middle of the afternoon, I lay down on the futon in my office and I fell into a light sleep. And here's the dream report. I tried to get up and I realized that I missed sleep paralysis. I roll off of the couch, separating my phenomenal body and I enter a lucid dream state. I find myself standing in accurately portrayed version of the room, but my vision is cloudy. My eyes hurt too. Deeply in my ocular cavity. I looked down and now I'm holding a large triangular wedge of obsidian, which is a dark volcanic glass. Without thinking intuitively, I pushed the sharp obsidian edge into my eye area. It's like inserting an old school Nintendo cartridge into a game player. There's a perceived click when the obsidian is in place. The pain in my eyes stop. Now I can see clearly and I feel that I'm more fully here. I then flip my body backwards onto itself. The dream body cancels itself out. We're intersex and I find myself bodyless in a dark, spacious void. So that was interesting. So when I woke up, I was struck by how the obsidian had spontaneously showed up from my dream. And I remembered that that actually I had several pieces of obsidian in the room. There in a bowl that had I had placed into one of the corners of the room months ago when we had moved into the house. I hadn't thought of them since I picked up the obsidian long ago from a natural source in California and had been using it for stool stone toolmaking. And while I knew about obsidians reputation in some circles for absorbing negative energy, and I have at times placed obsidian in a room purposefully, I had never at that point used it ritualistically
I had never connected obsidian and sleep paralysis either. And sleep paralysis really is a kind of lucid dreaming it just doesn't start off so pleasantly. And sleep paralysis, we are awake and aware that we cannot move and we sometimes can feel an ominous Sensed Presence, or worse nightmarish images like aliens or monsters that can integrate into waking reality. A ha I think the obsidian reveals itself as a true liminal object is traversing both the waking and the dream world versions of my office and more than that, the obsidian is taking on a healing role that clarifies my vision allows me to move into the next Arena in the dream without fear. So like obsidian the lucid talisman has a strong presence when the lights are off, it's satisfyingly heavy in the engravings can be discerned easily in the dark. So in of course, any dream amulet has this night presents basically. In fact, I think I have one of my obsidian pieces here. Yeah, here it is. This is one of the pieces that I picked up at Lesson One of the obsidian hills where you're allowed to take technically a bucket of obsidian per day. But I just I just took a few dollars from mine in my backpack, beautiful stuff. Really weird to work with. You can really kind of put your hands up unless you're wearing gloves if you're trying to make tools with it. But it is something that's been used since I I've learned more and more about as something that absorbs negative energy in it also can redirect vision and so in there's even lucid dreaming cultures in Mexico that come that are ancient, that use obsidian, right the obsidian mirror that and there's practices that go far beyond what I'm describing today. So I think that I would say obsidian like iron like bone. You know, like greens, like certain kinds of certain herbs are one of these almost universal liminal magical objects and their magical properties are emergent when we are in liminal spaces. And that's what the obsidian did is that showed it just showed up it let it let itself it let me know that it was here in a way that I didn't know before. So once I put together the effectiveness of women on objects for creating feelings of safety and for opportunities for healing in the dream, I researched the history of Talisman spending time in my local theological library I routed around the dusty stacks for images of talisman and magical objects. Eventually I came across a reference describing a modern by which I mean a late 19th century Hebrew talisman that's described as cabbalistic. In translation, that talisman decreed in the name of the angels of the God of Israel, I conjure you all kinds of Lilin male and female and demons, male and female by the power of the Holy Name. Here I don't know if you can see this very well. But here is an image from a book published in 1913 by Montgomery on this particular talisman, made of silver. So what is the Lilin Lillian's are hosts of night demons that are first mentioned long before in Babylonian seals Psalm 1800 years before the Common Era. So much, much later came the Judaic tradition of Lilith, the owl footed, half human demoness who steals upon folks at night and molest them. So Lilin Lillith. They were all blamed for the Unexplained Death of infants at night, probably what we would call related to SIDS today. They're also blamed for the plague of supernatural assault that was termed the Incubus in the Middle Ages. And again, this is today we would call this sleep paralysis with a nocturnal pressing spirit or a hypnagogic hallucination but in Middle Ages, it was the Incubus so I realized that this silver pendant could have been a sleep paralysis amulet made specifically for protecting against nightmares. So Shelly Adler, who was a medical anthropologist from San Francisco has detailed the connections of Lilith to the comment night maladie one mentioned in the Talmud, which is around 500 C rings with authenticity, and I would say relevance today. And so quote, one must not sleep in a house alone for whoever sleeps in a house alone is seized by Lillith. So this wisdom remains true today, a sleep paralysis attack is much more likely for those who suffer from social anxiety and who are in general feeling unprotected or unsafe when alone. And I've had many people tell me and I've experienced this as well is if you normally sleep with a partner and then you sleep alone, social anxiety increases is a greater likelihood of having sleep paralysis. So Shelly Adler goes on to mention that there are also eighth century Aramaic incantation bowls with more Lilith related spells. So soon, thanks to this trusty library that caters and old books that no one reads anymore. I had the primary source in hand, and this was a 1913 monogram, and I hit the gold mine. The texts that he collected were riddled with references to Lilith and her Babylonian consorts, the incantation bowls were once placed in people's homes and they listed every possible demon by name, just in case. And what's more is there is some clear indications that the demons showed up in sleep and dreams. So here is one of these six the seven this one is a incantation ball from the sixth or seventh century from nuphar. You can see the Wilmarth creature in the center and then sort of the names of the demons surrounding as well as the prayer itself and the incantations themselves. So Montgomery's Bowl number eight translates to read, thou Lilin male villi and the female Louis hag and gal ghoul. You are the bane of the rabbi Joshua, and you should not appear to them, which was the married couple, either by dream at night, or by slumber by day. And so these bowls would be blessed by a rabbi and then buried upside down in the house that serves to protect and this was a this was a marriage. Right is the marriage bowl. So this text particularly shows that these creatures are connected to dreams as well as afternoon naps. Right, in which sleep paralysis is very common and sleep paralysis is common in afternoon naps for the for those who are prone to sleep paralysis. So we've barely scratched the surface of the secret history of sleep paralysis and its role of Talisman of protecting against these night visitations. But what's clear from my sweeping and very preliminary investigation is that the use of ritual objects to combat sleep paralysis is a very old technique that's known as Apple topia, which is rituals and objects that combat fear. So if you suffer from nightmares, or from nighttime tears of any kind, dreaming amulets can serve as an appetite apotropaic amulet It's a mouthful. apotropaic amulet a sacred object that provides protection. We don't have to fear the Babylonian night visitors though. Our nightmares are authentic, visionary experiences that are further shaped by our own local sources, folklore, ancestry, local environmental conditions. And this is the way I see it that we co create what haunts us right in this imaginal realm, as well as what brings us to new heights. So oddly enough, once the fear of sleep paralysis is vanquished the state can take you into other extraordinary states, not only lucid dreaming, but also these out of body experiences and also ancestral visitations.
And I would add guided journeys to that as well. I've experienced that as well coming out of a sleep paralysis encounter where and a spooky figure shows up. I trust in the moment I kind of just surrender a bit to it. The figure becomes fully materialized and doesn't want to harm me, in fact, takes me with it to view the cosmos and so I've experienced this, and this is the same narrative structure as fairy abductions and as alien abductions, right and so fairy you know, the old fairy myths for medieval times the narrative structure is very similar. And I've had one of these experiences more than one and yeah, there's something different. It's it's got a different feel than a sort of what I would call the average lucid dream. So as to which objects are best for these purposes, is a matter of personal belief and it's tied to cultural traditions. And some cross cultural themes include, again, animal bones, certain stones, iron and other metals, such as copper and silver, mirrors, dried herbs at certain times of the year. So again, my approach is pragmatic. It's not dogmatic. We're not purely rational creatures when we're in the dream state, or we're hovering somewhere between betwixt using amulets to protect yourself while you sleep. Just works, it just works. Keeping the lucid talisman or your dream amulet on your bedside table or under your pillow and use it use it as a physical reminder to ground yourself performing relaxation techniques to pray or to prepare for your favorite middle of the night dream practices. And as such, you can create your own ritual and you can get guidance from ritual practitioners who you trust Yeah, so I that's that's that chapter and it's it's, it briefly goes into the work of sleep paralysis. And in some of you know that I've written an entire book on the topic and this is what it looks like. That's in its second edition now. And I talk about in this book, is a book designed for people who do have sleep paralysis and are scared by it about how to kind of get over the fear, work with it, and then move into lucid dreaming states as well as out of body states in some of these other extraordinary or anomalous states of consciousness that emerge from those from it starts really weird, but we can turn it and that's sort of the double edged sword of those who who have these encounters is that those who have sleep paralysis, basically, you're being called to be a dream, visionary. This is this this is a skill that can be developed. And even after all these years when I have sleep paralysis today, I'm still scared when it first happens, because that's part of the emotional, it's just part of it. But when I go through my protocols, when I remind myself, which is very simple, it's just reminding myself that this is sleep paralysis that this is a biological hiccup, that I'm safe in my bed. And then if I'm still feeling fearful, I focus on on someone that I love. And so this has changed over the years, you know, someone who could be someone that I admire could be right could be a religious figure. When I was 14 years old, it was the girl I had a crush on. And it worked. Right like that's what dissolves my sleep paralysis. That was lucky find, right? I'm really glad that that happened. And in so and so once we sort of dissolve that fear. We're still in this liminal state and we can use our intentionality just like in lucid dreaming to move into what's next. And for many that looks like an out of body experience. You know, there's a doubling of consciousness that happens at this point, where the phenomenal body the perceived body where my self is located, has a separation in location and from where I am sleeping. So, we travel, in other words, or you could say the other way that the world becomes more porous and enters into us. And so kind of depends on your worldview about how these things work. But talismans are helpful and I tell you ever since I have I use my obsidian much more more carefully these days and and I'm not plagued like I was by sleep paralysis when I was younger, there any before I go on, are there any questions or thoughts? That come up on that on that material?
Hey, Jerry
Oh, you're muted still.
Ah, I just have sleep paralysis fairly frequently in my 20s. And, you know, when it comes about, you know what it started. It started with a bang on it happened almost every single night. And, you know, it can be terrifying. I mean, you feel like there's this presents evil presence in the room. And you try as hard as you can figure, if I could just move the finger, you know, it'll go away and you can't, you know, and this was happening right? After Night. And after a while, however, you know, it I guess I'm conscious dawned on me that no matter how terrifying it was, or how bad it was, nothing ever, you know, bad happened to me afterwards. So after a while, I started to become curious, what exactly is this? And the more curious I became the less and less fearful it became. So I reached a point where I said, I want to explore this. I said, I'm not going to fight it. In any way. You know. It wasn't so much of determination as I was losing my fear of it, and just adds a break where I said, Okay, I'm going to use it now to explore where I can go and once that happened, it stopped immediately Yeah, what? It just went away.
Well, well, thanks for sharing that and you that's your like a case study and sleep paralysis, success, basically, like you, you learned through your own self practice what basically is being taught now at the clinical level, thanks to psychologists like Brian Sharpless, who has done a lot of work on making sleep paralysis treatment. Using cognitive behavioral therapy, basically as the template but doing everything that you just talked about from that perspective. That said, you said a couple of things I really love when your current when your curiosity was great enough or bigger than your fear. And this is, this is i Yeah, that's it. I mean, you nailed it. There's a case study that, that I love that that came out from a reader of mine. Who suffered from sleep paralysis a lot and she was a clothing designer. And she would have these like vampiric creatures show up, you know, at the night and leer over her and of course, you can't move during these vision states right there. We it's a victimhood state by by almost by definition, and one night she became curious about what this vampiric figure was wearing. And so she started kind of hyper fixating on the stitching of the gown and have this sort of old fashioned almost Victorian, you know, gown that this that this creature was wearing, and the experience diminished and dissolved and went away. And then it happened again, she got really interested and so she actually was like, Oh, I really hope it comes back and it did and she, she basically studied the garments and then when she woke up, she drafted them, and then she designed an entire clothing series based on these based on these designs, and ran ran a fashion show. This was about a decade ago in South Africa. So the creativity that came out of of her alchemize in her fear from sleep paralysis like resulted in you know, came out through through for creative template so, so that's that's just something that's really remarkable about it. The there's a transfer transformational aspect to these things and there's a question saying in the chat, how is the paralysis different from not being able to move when you're dreaming? So it is different in but the mechanisms the biological mechanisms are the same when it happens for someone who so there's kind of two ways to look at sleep or two ways. That kind of differentiates there's folks who have it as a sleep symptom of a condition such as sleep apnea or narcolepsy. And, generally, those folks suffer more from sleep paralysis. It also can be a sleep symptom for a larger health struggle, where sleep is being disrupted and is disrupted sleep is also instigating sleep paralysis. But when it comes on its own and you don't have those conditions, and it's every once in a blue moon. What happens is it's called isolated sleep paralysis. And in this case, the mechanism is the same but it only lasts maybe 30 seconds to a minute long. And so what happens is, is that we we feel that we've woken up, but we're still in a REM sleep in terms of our muscle paralysis, the muscles are they're actually relaxed, they're completely right. They've they've moved into the state of not firing. And so all the major skeletal muscles are relaxed, including the diaphragm and so when you try to gulp for air and see paralysis, what happens is it feels like pressure on the chest increases. And you can feel pressure on your throat. And it comes with this sense of this sense of presence as well. And so we begin connecting the dots like this sense presence is, is the one that's holding me down. And so that's the nocturnal pressing spirit. And it's cross cultural, and there's all kinds of different, you know, interpretations and meanings for it. But it goes away naturally. Now, what happens in dreams is that we're probably okay if you've ever had the dream where you're like, it's a nightmare. You're scary. You're running from monster or bad guys, and you start running it and suddenly it's like running through molasses and you're probably you're experiencing sleep paralysis at that time to probably you're in such an agitated state that the muscles are getting, you know, from the brain like you need to run into you're bumping up against the physical paralysis of those various muscles and you're feeling your body's sluggishness. You're actually in the dream, and that's been interpreted in the dream as like, I can't, I'm moving slowly. I think that there's a lot of dreams of that nature where we're actually feeling our sleep paralysis. So they're related but they're not the same right? And it does go away and it's it is natural, and there's nothing, you know, it doesn't it's not harmful, like there's no harmful effects of having this except that it's disquieting. It's that it's disturbing. And if you don't have a paradigm before it, what happens is that we become fearful and we assume kind of, we kind of go back to like, whatever sort of fear based paradigm we had, usually when we were children, you know, like it's a demon or it's, you know, or whatever, you know, getting dragged to hell if you come out of a Christian context or and so that's what happens when we don't have a paradigm for something. We go back to our old paradigms, wherever there's a gap. I'm seeing. Oh, okay. Thank you, Laura. Yeah, I just want to say about that. It's, I can, of course, blab on about sleep paralysis forever and ever. I think it's fantastic. It's just, I just even though it's scary. I just, there's something about it that I just love about it. I think that some so much create dark creativity comes out of nightmares and the scary stuff. Like so much that's just so juicy. And that speaks to our human condition and what's real and what's important and why are we what are we fighting for all these kind of questions that come out of like the horror literature or are exciting to me. So, we are going to shift gears we're shifting gears and we're going to read the chapter on alchemy. So, this, this some of this really goes into the the actual imagery of the talisman itself, but it does have a larger context. imagery and text on the lucid talisman is inspired by ancient philosophy that questions the nature of reality. And when we question reality, we wake up to our lives. So in particular, much of the lucid talismans inspiration draws from the medieval study of alchemy, which at its heart was the pursuit to transform base metals into gold. Psychologically, this practice mirrors the transformation of consciousness throughout our lives. So akin to the medieval alchemists, our process through life is to transmute based desires in ancient impulses into creative art, wisdom, and knowledge right scientific achievement. So at its most basic level, the lucid Tasman is constructed around a duality of waking and dreaming depicted as the sun in the moon sides of the talisman. And so those are the two sides. And so waking life is depicted as the sun. And this is solar consciousness when we're awake our way of being our way of thinking is primarily an ordering force that includes the intellect, the light of reason, and focused attention the gift of focused attention, right. Traditionally solar consciousness is, is gendered as masculine, and is depicted as active and questioning. Dreamy life is depicted as the moon and this is lunar consciousness, in dreams and intuitions. This is traditionally the feminine aspect of consciousness that receives insight. This way of thinking is akin to surrender. And a different logic is at work here. It's nonlinear. And it's image based. And when we're in the presence of the moon, we have access to Creative Forces, images and ideas that we usually shove aside in waking life. So in medieval times, these two modes of consciousness were depicted as the king and the queen equals in the firmament.
Psychologist Melinda Powell explains through the lens of spiritual alchemy, the king and the queen represent the exoteric and esoteric realms respectively. The king represents the visible physical world, the queen, the invisible, subtle spiritual realm. The king requires the Queen to give meaning and depth to his active principal, whereas the Queen requires an active principal to bring her subtle essence, the souls creative imagination into manifestation. And here is an ancient depiction of the marriage of the sun and the moon. And of course, these dualisms break down right these gender dualisms break down even in medieval texts, and with the birth of the hermaphrodite. So we're moving beyond the duality. So in lucid dreaming, things get interesting. In the lucid dream, you know, you're dreaming, like awake in life. You can make active choices, you can focus your attention, you can remember intentions that you set earlier. You can make a choice to manifest objects out of thin air. But lucid dreaming is not a perfect virtual reality. It's not a blank slate. Rather, we're still meeting the energies of the dream. That lunar consciousness that brings us insight and creative ideas. We can learn from the dream spontaneous imagery to surrender to the moment and to honor the visual emotional structure of the dream without overpowering it. So ultimately, when we balanced the active and receptive elements of our dreams, this new wave of dreaming appears it's the marriage of the sun and the moon. This is the alchemy of lucid dreaming, balancing waking awareness with the wisdom of dreaming consciousness to create opportunities for self knowledge, power, and healing. And we can see this concept play out in a 19th century wood engraving. And you can see here the wanderer literally busting through the duality of night and day and see for the first time, the third realm characterized by unknown forces of celestial nature. I'm sure you've seen this before. It's colorized here, but the Wanderer is breaking out of of that duality into a third space. So because the talisman is a liminal object that promotes contemplation the design is full of alchemical easter eggs with deep roots. For starters, the stars on that list of Talisman are drawn in the same style as the woodcut so yeah, we did that we like figured out the way that they did it on the woodcut and we did it just like that on the talisman itself. It was really fun. So lucid dream work. This is kind of the core of the book I say if there is if you're going to take one section about what's my perspective of lucid dreaming this this is a lucid dream work as I practice it today is wrapped up in this powerful core concept of the marriage of the sun and the moon. Lucid Dream work is not just about exploring is not only about exploring dream images and symbols, but also the choices we make in our dreams. Our choices are often hidden in waking life, but in lucid dreams, the decision point behind what happens to us and what we allow not to happen is easier to spot as well as the consequences to our thoughts or beliefs and our actions. So right action, what is right action it can only be felt in the particulars of the dream. And only the dreamer has the authority to know what that feels like. There's no final, better or ultimate goal here. From my from this perspective, this much is true lucidity emerges in maturity not as total dream control but as a conscious dance with the dream as it arrives. The dance shifts between active and receptive postures of the Sun in the moon, which we embody by asking questions and making space for an answer. This lucid dance is about shifting from abstract ways of knowing to more emotional involvement in the dream and vice versa. So ultimately this flow allows for a conversation between the dreaming ego and the self arising currents of the moment. And so in alchemical depictions here, the king and the queen merge into that inner unity that transcends the opposites right. So we go non binary, and when do we know that we have made good choices in our lucid dreams? It's always debatable. But awakening from a dream with increased vitality or energy is a good sign. Waking up with a feeling of dread or a sick feeling in the stomach is a sign that we have worked against ourselves in some way. Or maybe that we have bitten off more than we can chew. Over days and weeks a transformative dream will continue to reverberate in effect waking life attitudes and choices. So when psychologists for Rebbe Boggs, Iran researched how people approach the divine in lucid dreams, she discovered that those who take an active seeking stance in the dream often find lucid outcomes, largely mirror their own expectations. But when the dreamers took receptive postures, not seeking but opening up to mystery, a different pattern reveals itself. They found themselves in new situations and candolyn aspects of the Divine that surprised delighted and sometimes challenged them.
So the willing surrender, I would say would be the archetype to to move into here. Right. And in sleep paralysis, we're moving from the unwilling surrender to the willing surrender. That's the that's the destin movement. Sometimes the way a question is framed in the dream makes all the difference. So rather than demanding, for instance, I want to find God. Try to ask an open ended questions such as what is beyond my senses. One of my earlier lucid dreams and this came from when I was 20, showcases what can happen when the seeking energy is out of balance. And here's the dream report. I rock it up through the sky filled with layers and layers of clouds. I'm looking for God. And then I see an old man with a big white beard sitting on a cloud. He leans down to pure at me and he barks and I wake up and when I woke up, I got the joke. I found what I was looking for my preconceived notion of the Divine laughing at my ridiculous search. The bearded white man on a cloud is a parody of that Old Testament God that I've rejected years before, as limited and culture bound. And so Dreams really do have a sense of humor. Once you realize that you're often the butt of the joke. That's true. We just have to, we have to just take it sometimes. So I'm always careful to not use lucid dream work to chide myself for not acting this way or that way in the dream. And that's key. It's not about blame, but about noticing our patterns. And knowing that there's always going to be another opportunity to make a different choice the next time we lay down to sleep. Right, so we don't start moralizing the content of our dreams, even our lucid dreams because we are literally different constructs in our, in our lucid dreams. We're embodying different mythologies. And so I think that there's a danger for lucid dreamers more than other kinds of folks who work with dreams to to allow that, that sort of moral piece that's not flexible, move into the dream world and even shift the way creativity moves, especially when it comes to sexuality, I found because especially the way that sexuality and terror and spirituality, all are like intertwined, right? If you really, if you look at the traditions if you'd look at transcripts of transcendent experience, if we look to our own experiences bringing bringing our waking life morality into these things, it's inappropriate that doesn't make sense. So another inspiration for the alchemy of consciousness can be found in the 1595 wood engraving known as the alchemist laboratory. And this engraving the hermetic philosopher Kunis depicts the work of scientific alchemy with a focus on various forms of knowledge use in the lab. And so you've probably seen this one as well. All right, and they're ancient wood carving. What you may have missed is that in the back of this drawing, and the back of the carbon is a doorway that leads to what may be a bed chamber and above the door reads the Latin phrase Dormans digitala, which translates to sleep with vigilance. Sleeping with vigilance is a paradox. It's meant to confuse the rational mind. But we could also convincingly argue that it's a depiction of lucid dreaming. And so you're not going to be able to see it, but I'm going to point to it way back there. You can see that there is where it says door means vigil and there's a little doorway in behind the doorway. There's like the little edge of what looks like to be a sleeping mattress and a pad. I'm not really sure about that last part, but I wish I could just like Blade Runner and be like enhance enhance, but I can't do that here. It's very cool. So we so yeah, so we we took the font from the actual wood carving and we and we added it to the talisman and so the the actual font type here this is an original font that we use is the font from the woodcarving wishes in the Creative Commons. So further we use the lettering of this, of the words in this drawing to piece together the font for an original and parallel phrase in the sun on the Sun side of the talisman lucid a VV which is so this this is not a historical Latin phrase, but it works as live with lucidity. And so this is lucid living the mindset for going about the day in a way that promotes our self awareness of our intentions of our emotions and our actions in order to transcend the illusion of ordinary life. The phrase lucid living in this context was coined by Beverly to Urso, who is a frequent experimental subject and Stephen LaBerge is early studies. Lucid living is about participating more fully with your whole self. So everything is on board, your passion, your willpower, your empathy, your decisiveness, vision, and clarity. So you get to see the flip here. Lucid living is not just the bridge that allows waking awareness into the dream world. It's about bringing that deep lunar imagination back into the waking life. And so we're really infusing our waking life with this with this deep intuitive way of knowing. And then another last symbol I want to talk about is the or Boris, which is on the Towson on both sides, the snake eating its tail. It's another symbol that moves beyond the dual dualisms towards healing integration, which is a cross cultural symbol, and we can see it as representing the continuity of the birth and death cycle. Or Nietzsche's eternal return perhaps infinity, infinity and wholeness. And so, that is that's the one part of the coin that was really kind of fun because it it stays on the coin why everything else changes the snake kind of penetrates in between the layers and so it moves between between the layers. So that is the chapter on alchemy. I think that it would be helpful if i These last few sections are really short. And they're really practical. And so I might actually be able to do it. Let me see which one's more practical. If y'all have any questions now's a good time to put it in.
So yeah, there's two chapters, but I think what I can do, the one chapter is on how to activate your talisman and I can find a way to get you this information in another way. It basically talks about how to charge consecrate and activate your talisman ritualistically. And so I think I think I might have a PDF of this little element and I'll find a way to get it to y'all. I think what's more important is I read this last section on integration, excuse me.
Integration, you now have the tools to put your talisman into service. When if you put into practice this forgotten lower, you'll see results quickly. Truly quickly, two weeks is the average time it takes to have a lucid dream after learning the most effective methods once the necessary prerequisites are met, such as good dream recall and getting enough rest in the first place. And so that's pure review. By the way that two weeks I didn't just pull that out of the dark places like this is this is what the lucid dreaming education studies are showing us. And so if you've been doing stuff and it's taken longer than two weeks, probably you're working too hard. Most likely so now it's time to design your own personalized lucid dream practice with the help of a dream amulet or talisman. This chapter shows you how to integrate the techniques that are detailed into a working strategy. So first, you want to pick the practices you want to test and don't I don't recommend more than a few lucid induction practices at a time. honing them down to three to four activities allows for focus as well as a good data later on for what worked and what didn't suit you. And you won't burn out too much. Right from working too hard and not having fun. So if you're a beginner who's never had a lucid dream, I recommend starting with a focus on improving your dream recall and going to bed with a strong intention. And then use your talisman or your dream amulet. To do reality testing. Keep it simple. With out dream recall. lucidity is a moot point. So build those bridges between the worlds and stick with it. Then let yourself rest. Many beginners have done this and had their first lucid dream within a week. If you've had lucid dreams before, but you need a boost at an inception practice by analyzing your dream journal for missed opportunities and for repetitive dream imagery. And so that's working with dream signs right? We talked about that. I think that last week or the week before. If previous lucid immersion sessions did not cause a breakthrough, add a witching hour practice to finish the job. So that's to sleep interruption right sleep interruption does require a higher level of commitment. So choose your week of practice carefully ask yourself is this a good time in my life to disrupt my sleep? Am I ready to forego my nightly Netflix for a while so I can go to sleep with intentionality. If you have a partner it's a good idea to have their support as they might be disturbed by middle of the night alarms or lights turned on for journaling. Consider dream supplements like Galantamine only if other tactics do not first bear fruit and so I really do recommend that if you move into the territory of dream supplements is yeah, don't start with them. But build your foundation. Build your practices, build your dream recall. Be in an emotionally good place then jack it up with the Galantamine because it's it'll blow it up but you want to be ready for it but it does. So setting up a talisman practice and these are basically some bulleted points. Activate your talisman confirm that you can remember at least four dreams a week. If not, keep working with the dream journal and read more about dreams to increase your motivation. Next, pick a few lucidity induction techniques as discussed in the book. So these are all the ones that that are quite commonly talked about. Right? Wild, mild, middle the night meditation, reality checks. Pick three or four of them. For the first time, set up a short but intense lucid immersion of about a week. Keep it simple. Do the work and have fun and take good notes as you go along. Keep your dream journal active. And then afterwards, relax your active desire and see what comes your way put your talisman away to recharge. This is essential. Now you're taking stock. Are there any patterns that arise from the dreams themselves or from waking life? reviewed your dream journal to locate new potential dream signs and if you had a lucid dream, which techniques were you using, not just the night before, but also like for the last two weeks? That's this is a tricky point. Because lucidity can be triggered by what we just did. And this is obvious if it's like a wake back to bed situation. But sometimes we beat emerged into lucidity and we're like, Okay, was it the reality checks? Was it I don't know what was it? And we sometimes we will not know. But if we keep a record of what we're doing, and we look back we'll begin to see patterns emerge about what is effectively helping and what's not. And on the other hand, we get to see what's really bad for us, right and so for instance I we've talked about sleep paralysis, but we haven't talked about sleep terrors. pavard Knocked tourists. So this is an entirely different sleep kind of symptoms that can happen mostly happens to kids. If you've had children. You know, they wake up they're really confused. They can thrash about and then they finally come to sometimes it can feel like they're having a seizure. And they come to and they have no recollection of what it was. These tend to go away. Usually by age six, age eight. Sometimes it goes into puberty that stops it's rare with adults but it does happen sometimes when we stress ourselves and so I discovered my perfect recipe for nightmares or sleep terrors, which is to agree to help my buddy move his house at midnight and before going to his house, drink 24 ounces of coffee. Move a bunch of heavy shit. Go home try to sleep, blah, night terrors. It was awful. But I clearly stressed myself I stressed my body and in the caffeine which is right caffeine and why was that? I don't even I can't I can't. I don't know why I did it. But I did it and that's what happened. And so we begin to learn when we take when we journal we see what what happens and we can begin to notice it. Same thing with sleep paralysis like what can instigate it. You know, what are our sleep triggers for sleep paralysis, and most people don't want to have it but like in the case of like, Oh, I really wish it would come back. You know if you're prone to sleep paralysis previously and you'd like it to come back because you want to work with it. You can kind of like basically amp up your sleep triggers that may help induce it such as sleeping on your back or having caffeine at an odd time. Right or taking a nap. Doing these kinds of things and can can emerge into moving into that gateway and then going into a lucid dream or going into out of body experience. So you're sort of like reversing, you know, what most people are trying to stop you can be like, Oh, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna do it. So, let's see where was I? The last thing is when you see your motivation rising again after a dry spell, clear the path for another week and escalate the components of your practice if necessary. Escalating meaning really moving into sleeping eruption. Or perhaps moving working with with herbs and supplements and things of that nature. Yeah, so we actually did it. So we read everything except the Activation Chapter which I'm going to get you in a PDF form and then we'll find a way to make that happen. That was fun. So it's 10 minutes after the hour, and we can open it up to discussion and I'd love to hear what's coming up for you. And and after that, I've got a couple of announcements.
Okay, one last chance for the introverts in the room
so, um, thank you. Thank you for this journey of the last six weeks. I've really enjoyed it. We've found a deadly misinformation piece about about homers work in here that I get to correct in the next edition. I'm excited about that and I've realized that there's some words that are easier to write and harder to say. I wanted to let you know about a couple of things that are coming up for me people have been asking how can we stay connected? How can we can you extend and I can't extend the book or I'm actually booked next week. But what I can tell you about is that I'm doing a free webinar tomorrow night at 8pm. Eastern on how to call and prepare the way for impactful lucid dreams and Elissa if you could share that link for that one. And it's you can just register for it and and I'll be doing it live. And taking some questions at the end. Great folks will be will be there and also just so you know I'll be also at the end of that webinar. I'll be telling you more about my about my new online course that's going to begin next week as all which is called lucid ignition. Which is a three week process of doing basically what we read about in the last few weeks here and sort of did ourselves is a moving through a lucid immersion practice. Really focusing on tactics and strategy, as well as working with the dreams. And I'll be doing that through five live sessions Mondays or Tuesdays and Thursdays over the next three weeks. And so if you show up for the webinar, there'll be some bonuses for that. And so I encourage you to check that out. But feel free to also read about the course if you're interested. And if just know I will be around still for sure. With with the nightclub this has been a lot of fun for me. And I'm looking forward to more to doing more stuff here. And just Yeah, yeah, really seeing sees communities has been really, really fun for me. So, so thank you and if there are any questions right now again, I saw I did see someone had a hand raised and that I missed it. I can still take a question or two or comment. Have you seen the question in chat what I mean by impactful and so me address that really quickly and then I'll move to you Kelly. The question is about impactful, lucid dream is in the webinar. I talk about basically lucid dreaming as a spiritual life practice and that's what the Course lucid ignition is about is you all know my biases now. I do you know, when you look at sort of there's there's sort of an uninitiated lucid dreaming scene and then there's folks who want to use it for what are basically the core aims shamanism, healing wisdom reclaiming power, reworking myths, and that's the kind of impactful lucid dreaming that that I'm drawn to. And that is what we'll be discussing in the course. As well as tomorrow night and so what we'll be talking about tomorrow night is preparing for it by basically creating a container that's safe in that allows us to move into deeper spaces. So yeah, hey, Kelly.
Um, hey,
Ryan. So my question I guess I don't really even know how to form the question exactly. But I've had the experience of you becoming lucid in a in a dream and then trying to engage with dream figures or engage in the dream and in a and then then experiencing paralysis like I'm in the drain and I'm moving freely and progressing and but then when I get sort of intense or focused about doing something or engaging with thing, then the then then I can't then it's like, I can't move and I'll and I've even had the experience we're trying to talk and I'll hear my voice get really gobbly and you know what, and I'm basically I'm kind of slowly waking up, but I am experiencing paralysis after not being paralyzed. So I don't Is there a way to mitigate that or work with that, so we won't do that.
So there's a couple of layers. Yeah, and, and I don't know which of these is true to yours. So I'll just lay lay them out. But the first is, I think you said it pretty plainly about you're probably already waking up. And so often when we go lucid in the first place is when the that we have more metacognition, the brain is warming up, it's waking up. And there's there's more movement happening in the in the frontal part of the brain. And so it's easy to slip into waking from lucidity. And so we go lucid as sort of almost you could say as a symptom of waking up. It's like that's a real flatland, like neurological take on what lucidity is, especially in the early morning, so that said we can always work with the emotional impact of of how we are in these experiences. And a cat the cat is arriving. And so she's gonna just like mess my scene up now. And so what that means is are they where's the resistance? Right. So that's an interesting question like to think about, metaphorically, where is my resistance to? Well, what is my resistance to what's emerging in this dream? Or is the resistance towards that is the resistance happening of the dream towards what my intended intention is and where I want to take it? And is there friction between the two? And so I've noticed that sometimes that for instance, flying and I think I talked about this briefly can be fun, but it also can be in the spirit of defensiveness or resistance. And so we can we can be flighty and I've had experiences for example, where I tried to use flight to fly away from from bullies. And yet when I decided to turn around to face them, suddenly I have all my strength and powers back. When I tried to run away, I get stuck. And so one of the one of the examples is that I'll I'll, you know, crawl out of a window to get away from pursuers. And I'm trying to fly away and don't get stuck in the branches of a tree in my dream, and I'll become just completely or Briars or electrical lines or right all these sort of things get in the way. But when I turn around to face sort of what I'm running from, suddenly all those feelings go away. The paralysis, the muddy feelings go away and I like just the dreams like Yes, and I can blast off and then I so in this one dream, I literally was stuck in a tree. And I was like, What am I doing? I'm just like, stuck here. Like, what? What's happening? And I had this thought, what if I tried to go towards the bullies and I literally blasted off out of the tree, like a rocket. And when I landed, I landed in the stadium on some bleachers sitting right next to these guys that were that were running after me in the scene before. And then we'd like eat some popcorn together and a dream. It's like a washed organized sports, which was odd, but there you go. So So I think that there's emotional levels, but also the biological
thing I think in my case is almost like excitement. It's like I start to get really excited about what's happening in the dream. And then that may be, you know, starts the waking up process because I'm too excited or something.
And that's certainly a thing too and so excitement. Any kind of right, you know, too, if you become too excited, you can wake up grounding exercises, how do you ground yourself is the question how do you ground yourself in a waking life and those activities can be useful in the dream as well. And so attending to breath, attending to your body. Attend into your feet on the ground, the dream ground even, you know, these grounding activities. Connecting to the dream source can keep you can keep you put. Okay, that's good.
Thank you. That's very helpful. I just had a thought about something too. I don't have scary dreams very often. Of course probably. I'll have a whopper tonight but but when I used to have a lot of scary dreams, I would not I would be excited in the dream but wouldn't wake up like I would you know what I mean? I would somebody sometimes people would have to wake me up because I'd be you know, making noises and stuff. But if I'm having a good dream like flying or you know are excited about something then I wake up so weird, right? Like when I I'm scared and I want to wake up you know, I've had my dog wake me up. But But when I'm wanting to continue with the dream that wake up
Yeah, seriously, that's a good dog. Yeah, it is. It is. God isn't it that that in so nightmares in so the way that it works, I think is is that extreme emotion. It's negative or positive tends to wake us up. And so whether that be fear or angst, right, or excitement or ecstasy those deaths when we open our eyes and so yeah, yeah. So it's interesting how if it's possible to close your eyes and move back into the dream afterwards because sometimes the dream is right there still of course, if it's a nightmare, you might not want to do that. And and that's always as I say, dreamers choice. Oftentimes, I get up and I splash water on my face, and I say, No, thank you. I'm not. I'm done for that for the night. Thank you for that. I'll come back some other time. Other times, I'm more courageous and it's just up to it's up to the dreamer. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Great questions. Kathy.
Thanks. This is great, Ryan. I was just reading in alchemy chapter one page A you talked about the psychologists. Bugs are on and her ruling about the will being to be willing to surrender. As key and in the paragraph above, you talk about waking up with a feeling of dread or sick feeling the stomach on the other hand is a sign that we have worked against ourselves in some way or that we may have bitten off more than we can shoe. And I just about choked on that. Because that's what's happening for me a lot right now. And I went back to the we did and one week ago or something in the chapter that included dream reliving, where you talked about lucidity comes with a flux of resistance and openness to growth. And so I mean, it seems to me that must be what's happening for me. I'm doing a ton of spiritual work right now and cleansing and I had done some work with some channelers over the last two years and stopped doing the work. They were given me a lot of information, but I decided that I felt disempowered by their work with me and I, I had in May I could find it. And I thought it might be in my dreams. And the way that you're describing this really to me feels like it supports my maybe intuition about where I thought I needed to go next, which was into my own personal empowerment. But I feel like looking at your words here that I'm tripping myself up in ways that I don't and I don't know if I've bitten off more than I can chew. I mean, it's a lot of stuff. I've bitten off more than I can chew. I am I'm working against myself. I have a feeling I'm working against myself. Do you have anything to say about that?
Well, just that I've been there, you know and so you know, Jeremy Taylor used to say that no dream ever comes to laugh at us and say ha ha this is happening and there's nothing you can do about it. And I think that's a really a nice reminder that the the process of what dreaming is bringing to us is through conflict. But what the dream work is doing is conflict resolution. And so we're sometimes it's conflict in a true sense. And sometimes it's the conflict of paradigms of our self view, right? Perhaps the self view from when we were children compared to as we are as adults and just things getting in the way. There's all kinds of different ways of looking at what could be happening in what your story brought up in me was a time of a memory of a time where I was doing some really deep dream work and certain emergent content became available to me that was edging around. It was edging around trauma, but I wasn't sure if it was my trauma or collective trauma or what was going on but it was big. And what happened at that moment. Is is that I had essentially my digestive system sort of seized up and so I went into basically a flare of flare up and I had to stop I had to do crazy amounts of of cleansing to be able to be functional again and it took a period of a week and and at first of first I just did the usual say is cut out alcohol I cut out coffee I cut out you know all the things that are known, you know, that inflame me when I'm in a flare, and but it wasn't enough. And so I then I moved into into deeper cleansing and finally I ended up cleansing with saltwater and in doing you know, a full a full cleanse for a number of days and after three days a dream came forth. And in that dream what was being hinted at was became very clear and and it was very powerful and and revealing for you know, it has to do with my history, but it also had to do with patterns that were present in my life, you know, at that moment in time. And it was remarkable. And had I not cleansed I would not have had that dream. Right. And so you have to trust your intuition to that point in realize that there's sometimes when we do this work alone, we need greater support. And so that support might be somatic, but it also could be social. So it could be you know, more than being an internet community but having a face to face, you know with a healer you know, we're counselor and or someone right and so more more of that work and like what what does that look like? What What is it look like when I need more support? Is the question.
Cool. Thank you for that. And good luck. I think you're onto something. Jerry
you're still muted Jerry.
Alright, alright, just like your comments. Back from the 70s I started reading the series of books that were written by Carlos Castaneda us. I don't know if you're familiar with him. But he put out he wrote a total of nine books. I think he died in 1996. And the last book was the art of dreaming. And I started rereading that. And I just would like to know Are you familiar with his work or can you make any comments on it? Hey, Jerry. Yeah,
I love Carlos Castaneda in but I haven't read that last book. And I think we talked about that last time, if you recall that, but he is a powerful dreamer, you know, and this is something that has come up in a lot of circles before is how does Castaneda know what he knows. But yeah, I would encourage you to keep the keep reading especially I would say stick to book one. As I think the most authentic of his work. Okay. Thanks, Jerry. Castaneda, our old friend. So, so thank you all. I know it's late and I appreciate y'all stain. It's it's been a really great 90 minutes and I hope that we connect again and I will keep an eye out. Listen, I will work together on how I can get you this PDF for the missing chapter of lucid Towson, but it's an important one because it talks about how you can practically take your dream amulet and basically make it ready for for ritual use. So with that, I wish you well I wish you sleeping well. I wish you good vibrant, beautiful dreams.
Let me get everyone unmuted so they can say bye
bye
Thank you. Bye. Bye, everyone. Bye everyone. See you
