Let me make sure to get everybody in from the waiting room
awesome. There we go. Okay,
so for anybody new here tonight. This is Ryan Hurd. Well, then I got somebody in the waiting room. There we go. He is an educator, author and dream researcher. He is interested in consciousness studies at the intersections of ecology spirituality. And material culture. His latest work is lucid talisman, forgotten lore. Ryan has been featured on NPR, CNN, coast to coast Sorry, I'm just letting people in. It's like pop in the waiting room. Psychology Today and many more with a background in both archaeology and dream research Ryan currently teaches we go excuse me, Ryan currently teaches graduate level courses at University for Peace in Costa Rica and National University in California. Right as a member of the International Association for the Study of dreams and abides by their ethical guidelines. His website is dream studies.org And I will have set for you in the chat. And it's been going strong since 2007. And He currently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. So let me get the recording started and I will just hand it over to him. Perfect.
Thank you. It's good to be here. It's good to be with you all again tonight. And I think we are in week five of this adventure. into reading the lucid talisman together and which has been really fun for me to go through. And interestingly, I have only found a couple of typos. So it's been going better than I thought so I always love to start with I guess a little bit of, you know, I wonder if who had a lucid dream since we last met. Raise your hand or put something in the chat. I would and I'm curious if you did have a lucid dream. Recently, how did you realize you're dreaming what was the manner of your
your Realization?
So Linda, said that she had had Why are you typing something out? Great. Great.
It's good to see some familiar faces. as well.
So yeah, the question is, is last time you went lucid in a dream, how did you how did you realize you? Were lucid? Linda writes, I realized that this always happens in my dreams, and then I knew I was in a dream so it's a repetition of some kind. Nice. Nice, Berry says I just knew it. That's cool. I'd love that that we just know sometimes. Tim says it was in my underwear and thought that was strange. That's great. So they so the embarrassment Induced Lucid Dream. The ei LD not as rare as you would think. It's so interesting, where there's so much variety, you know, when it comes to how people actually realize that they're lucid and and sometimes we just know, as Barry said, and sometimes we think it right. We have the thought this is a dream and sometimes we don't we just suddenly know we're in this world where the rules are different. Oh, and Tim also adds that he tested it by pushing his fingers through a table Nice. Nice. So reality check in Yeah, so. So last week, what we did was we went over reality checks. Oh, one more is coming. Through Hold on a second and I get to catch this in. Linda says this is my first one in a long time. I actually went through almost everything that was mentioned in last week's meeting. Okay, jumping, passing through the floor. Nice. And so what happened right after the last meeting, I couldn't push my hand through the wall. Ha, ha. Isn't that interesting? Sometimes sometimes. Yeah. So that's why it's good to have a variety of tactics, a variety of reality checks because we can get these false. These false negatives sometimes meaning that we talk ourselves out of the fact that we're lucid in a dream because we try one thing and it doesn't. It works you know, it works as expected or interesting. Yeah. Cool. So I love this and so yeah, one of the you know, the greatest thing about about lucid dreaming, Tom as we go through tactics and and all these things and I'm sure they Andrews talked about this too is is that you know the success rates are still you know, pretty poor, for specific tactics for going lucid. And so if you're experiencing frustration if you haven't had a lucid dream in a long time, and you know, you're like I'm doing all the things. Just know that you're not the only one in that boat. There is there's some secret sauce that goes into igniting that meta cognition that that self awareness in the dream that's linked to sort of intangibles in sometimes that's motivation. And so that's why groups that's why this kind of group we're in right now is are so important. Because they can really ramp up our motivation they can really, we get excited, right and we and we hear each other's stories and and then we go and we dream. And it happens we have a breakthrough and so we're really are stronger together when it comes to lucid dreaming, for sharing our stories and moving forward so what I'd like to do is I'm going to start I'm going to read because I've been looking at how many pages are left and it's a little daunting, so I'm not sure we're going to make it but I'm going to start reading from the towels lucid talisman book and then we'll we'll have some discussion along the way and as always, if you've got a thought or a question or something, just please put it in the chat. And and if I don't get to it, Alyssa will help me. So we're going to read the chat we're on page 51. We're going to read inception. So, as discussed in the last chapter, The Lucid talisman Hold on. Where's my talisman? Here it is. Here's the talisman of the day. There we go. The Lucid talisman excels at instigating lucid dreams as a reality check tool. That's kind of how it came into being if you make a habit out of the practice, you will soon question your awareness while dreaming. However, another way the talisman can operate is as a unique object that can spontaneously incept itself into your dreams. coming you know out of Christopher Nolan's film Inception. Hopefully you've seen this film if, if, if not just to yell at everything they've gotten wrong. Please watch the reception. It's worth it. One dreamer described how the talisman showed up in the middle of a disturbing dream and it helped the dream shift into a positive outcome float. I carried it on me for two days and slept with it under my pillow. On the second night I had a dream I was looking in the mirror at myself and my molar was falling out into pieces. I started to feel ill and I stuck my fingers in my mouth. And I pulled out the lucid talisman. I realized I was dreaming and suddenly I was floating in what seemed like space and I could see stars and galaxies and I was just like wow, this is amazing. So how's How's that for a transformation of objects going from the classic tooth falling out dream to the talisman popping out of the mouth. I just I think that's amazing. I've never had that dream. So when you're doing reality checks with the townsmen you're already making an association between lucidity and your dream amulet, right? No matter what kind of image you're using. But you can go further. by noticing the people the things the places that you dream about. You can leverage those recurrent dream images into more chances to go lucid. These are called dream signs. This is a phrase coined by Stephen LaBerge. For example, some recurring images may be your high school cafeteria, even if you've been out of school for 30 years. In fact, I talked about high school last night I turned 48 A couple of days ago I dropped about my high school all the way literally last night. It could be your childhood home. Could be bright colors. It could be the ocean. It's all very personal. Everyone has their own recurrent dream images. So you can anchor the lucid talisman are your dream amulet to your recurrent images and make them successful dream signs that trigger lucidity. So here's how to do this. In your dream journal. Look back over the last dozen or so dreams. Notice the places the images and people who show up recurrently repetitively, right. And the more recently the better. So this is really harnessing. Yeah. Are you seeing kind of like what is you know your current cycle of, I guess personal mythology we could say. So pick one that's vivid, slightly bizarre, but not too emotionally raw. And so you don't want to do this with imagery from say a recurrent nightmare theme unless you have additional support like more than you know, talking over the internet with somebody you know, I would say like one on one. And so slightly bizarre piece is important to you and this is a this is something that Tim Post who was a lucid dream educator out of the Netherlands came up with probably about a decade ago that the best dream signs are slightly bizarre. They're out of the ordinary. They're things that catch our attention. So you know, look for that. So before bed, you lay down you have your dream amulet in your hand. You close your eyes. Imagine being in the dream where that dream sign pops up. Imagine yourself saying the dream ah, when I see my childhood home, I know I'm dreaming. So what that tells me basically does by holding this while you're doing this is it's becomes just an anchor for you to do that practice. Physical objects just help us with our habits. That's that's really what this is about here is this becomes an anchor for a cognitive habit. Right? You know, we have car keys, we lose our car keys every day, but when we make habits of like hanging the keys up on our hook.
We don't lose them every day. So what is your habit with doing this kind of work? It's nice to have something to anchor you another thing you could do is you could combine the practice of dream signs and reality checks by bringing the talisman to the places that you recurrently dream about. For example, if you have a lot of dreams about looking into the mirror, you can take the talisman into the bathroom with you and while looking in the mirror notice the talisman notice that sitting on the sink and then say to yourself, Am I dreaming and perform a reality check. And so this is such a fun one. I recently it was actually it was not so recently it was a couple of years ago but I went up to a place that has spiral staircase which is one of my recurrent dream symbols. And I pulled my talisman out I took a bunch of photos with the talisman and the in that and I just walked up and down the stairs with the talisman and just tried to create this anchoring effect. And it did it works. This is one of these these images when I go up the stairs or something in the dream. I'm unlikely to realize that I'm dreaming. In fact, I had just last night I mentioned that I had dreamt about high school last night. It turned into a lucid dream. And in the dream I was trying to get to my high school locker I was trying to remember my combination to my locker. I could remember half of it in the dream this and it was very spooky. And then I ended up going into this room and in this room was these beautiful folio books and so like a folio is this like you know can be quite enormous. Like an art book that can be three feet high or even bigger than that. And this is a recurrent dream image for me. It's a really, it's a very ancient one for me. And as soon as I saw these beautiful folio books, I knew I was dreaming and in the dream the books were actually encased in blue class. They're beautiful, they're iridescent. And inside I could see that there are images there you know these sacred images and and I became lucid just immediately and then filled with joy. And so that's what a good dream sign does for us is that it's just one of these repetitive things and so we can discover more of them and focus our energy and bring them out bring out the power and so what are your repetitive dream images and this would be my my challenge to you is to like, you know, take a look at your journal, go back, make a list of like the stuff that keeps showing up. And then you want to highlight the stuff that's not particularly traumatic. Really go for these sort of normative dream images against slightly bizarre and see what you come back with and then use a couple of those to do some of these. Basically, these anchoring techniques as you go to sleep as you drift into sleep. It's very effective and the nice thing is, is that once you do the anchoring they could it can be weeks or even months until they show up and it can still spur a lucid dream. And so they're some of them really do have lasting I think power is a good way to say that. So that is my piece on that and now we're going to get into the good stuff, which is chapter called the witching hour. So let's add a few more lucid dreaming practices. To the toolbox. Be warned though they all involve sleep disruption in the middle of the night, which is the witching hour. If your personal life can handle a night practice it's worth the trouble because these techniques are supported by research for triggering lucid dreams. And all of these practices harness segmented sleep, which is not as unhealthy as it sounds. In fact, having eight hours of unbroken sleep is a modern sleep style that became popular due to social changes in the enlightenment. The Western way of sleeping was cemented into modern practice thanks to industrialization, and then the invention of the electric light bulb before the modern era, especially in locales where the winter night lasted 14 hours or longer. Sleep was broken into two periods throughout the night with social time or quiet reflection in between. In the pre modern paths, it was not uncommon for people to visit each other's homes in the middle of the night for intimate conversations, perhaps an illicit rendezvous. And indeed some people today who stay awake in the middle of the night, they might not actually be suffering from insomnia. This idea rests upon the notion of unbroken sleep, but rather simply be naturally attuned to this middle of the night consciousness.
Think that's a powerful idea. It's really supported by the anthropology of sleep. In fact, some some apologists that that was Carol workman Yeah, in her article on the ecology of sleep, wrote that the Western style of sleep compared to essentially all of the other traditional cultures in the world, the western style of sleep is the, quote, lay down and die model of sleeping because it's just like, we just give up for like, I mean, in the expectation that we just lay there for what you know, like seven to nine hours. No one else sleeps like this, and our ancestors did not sleep like this. So this middle of the night consciousness right, this may point to a biological cause for the witching hour, sometimes called the devil's hour. This storytime of vulnerability and fear of the night, some penet at midnight, others somewhere between two to 4am and it's tempting to consider that unwanted sleep disturbances such as nightmares, and sleep terrors, such as you know, these are parasomnias that these are the neurological reality behind this, this concept of right of the witching hour. Of course Church authorities probably targeted those who are known to deliberately cultivate these nocturnal states of consciousness and those would be healers, Dream visionaries who were decried as witches and sorcerers. So it's time to reclaim this secret awakening time this witching hour when you strip away the cultural baggage, it's a time of profound peace and contemplation. Well known by monks, mystics and meditators. Middle of the night consciousness is useful for calling lucid dreams and for extraordinary experiences. Drawn from esoteric practices from the east and the west. The practice of falling asleep with lucidity simply involves waking up from a dream and going back to sleep with the intention to not lose self awareness. As you slip between the worlds. In Tibetan dream yoga practices awareness is maintained by visualizing a symbol or an image on a specific part of the body. In the 1930s, Russian mystic Peter Uspensky wrote detailed accounts of his lucid dreaming imagery that he experienced right after falling asleep with, quote, definite efforts. An American psych psychiatrist Nathan repour, he would pepper his process of falling asleep with inquisitive attention to achieve lucidity. This was in the 1950s Stephen LaBerge calls this general endeavor the wake back to bed method. And so yeah, and Stephen was reading the stuff in the 1970s. Stephen LaBerge went to Arsalan he was was inspired by by Tibetan dream Buddhist practitioners. He was inspired by Uspensky he writes about all this in his earlier work. So here's how to do it. Timing is everything. Wake back to bed works best the second half of the night, especially about four to six hours after falling asleep. You may have to do some experimentation to find your perfect witching hour. So notice your own natural awakenings as a guide it's important also to stay awake long enough to activate the parts of the brain that allow for metacognition to thrive. Now, I wrote in this book I wrote 30 to 45 minutes is ideal, but actually it's closer to an hour. There's been there's been some recent research that says it's really 45 minutes to an hour is really the sweet spot. If it's too short, you may fall back asleep, you might feel sluggish. If it's too long. You might not be able to get back to sleep at all. And that's the rub and it's practice is enhanced with mental exercises as described below. And so, sleep interruption this is like you know, these are the methods that probably more than anything can cultivate lucid dreaming, but they also have the most I would say, you know inherent risk, although risk is it's kind of a strong word to use. We might lose some sleep, they might disturb our partner if we sleep next to a partner. That's really it. That's it. And so if you've got some flexibility and if you try this not every single night but if you're like this is a good way to do it. You can sleep in the next day, you know, that's, you know, target your time for maximum success, right. So I'm going to describe a couple more methods and these all you probably have heard about at some point first, we'll do mild, which is the demonically Induced Lucid dreaming, also named and deployed by Stephen LaBerge when he was attempting to scientifically validate lucid dreaming in the laboratory. Now, the backstory of this is the Burj was under a lot of pressure. He had to get the most out of his lab time. So He credits the method for mild forgiving him lucid dreaming pretty much on demand. And so mild is essentially a focus derivation of wake back to bed. And the difference is, is that the method targets perspective memory. So as you're settling down to sleep, you recall the dream from which you just awoke. That's an important part that I think a lot of folks forget about that piece. Imagine you're in that dream again. And except this time, you know, I'm dreaming so you envision yourself in the scene and you remind yourself that, you know, when you're back in the dream scene, you'll know you're dreaming. Yeah, so it's important to us to basically piggyback on the dream that you just woke up from, if you can recall it, even if you can just sort of feel the vague feeling of it. Because what we're going for is continuity of consciousness here and so you're just kind of hijacking back into that. That dream and that emotional. You know, I don't know what to call it. You know, flow, really, you can do mild with an older dream, but I think that it really is most effective in this way. So with some luck and some practice, you can hold on to self awareness and remember, this is a dream as you grade back into the dream world. Again, timings key chooses practice in the second half of the night when REM dreaming sessions are longer and better yet use a natural awakening from a dream to start the process. And so most of us are appear to be over 40 in this room. So like hey, when you have to like when your bladder says it's time to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom, come back. What was your dream? Go straight in, right here's some more practices. Dream reliving. This is another powerful derivation of falling asleep with the city and this is Scott sparrows dream reliving method. In a nutshell, spirits approach towards working with lucid dreams involves a focus on emotional, unfinished business. As a springboard for greater lucidity. Many lucid dreamers know that sometimes dreams end poorly, or they have nightmarish elements that are difficult or impossible to control. Sparrow contends that when it comes to unpleasant, lucid dreams, there's no bad dreams per se. Only unfortunate responses, unfortunate responses that perpetuate the roadblock to greater self knowledge. I think that's a really key thing. lucidity comes in a flux of resistance and openness to growth. So just because we become lucid in a dream doesn't mean we're ready for anything like all of our resistance comes with us all of our egoic foibles there are here welcome home right. We still we always have a choice presented to us we can move towards the unknown or we can resist that unknown. In Sparrow who is a PhD psychologist educator, he has really mapped with his dream STAR method and in what he's done, his work is amazing. Y'all should check out sparrows work if you haven't before, for lucid dreaming and just for any kind of really dream interpretation, dream work. Is five star methods is very effective. But he looks at and he's written about chronic and maladaptive responses that people have and lucid dreams and he just kind of is just like, you know, showing just because we're lucid, that
doesn't mean we're going to be wide open and brilliant. We're going to make repetitive choices. Sometimes we're going to make the choices that are easiest. Sometimes they're we're going to make a new choice. That's against our nature. The Carl Jung used to say this is the work against nature. It's what we want. We want to work against nature. But sometimes in lucid dreams, we're repetitive we make chronic choices. It's still just a dream. So we can always just like look back and be like oh look at there I am again making my choices like I do you know my gonna go down the scary stairs or I'm not gonna go into the light filled room. I'm gonna go into the light filled room, right. I mean, that's, that is how we generally tend to go. What happens though, when we make the choice, that's a little scarier or the choice we wouldn't normally make so by practicing dream reliving, we have an opportunity to change your attitude or our response to past dreams. So the result as as Scott Spiro has seen his own dreams as well so as clients is often a dream that ushers in Greater Life, courage, psychological healing, and even ecstatic union.
Here's how to do it, recall a dream or even a repetitive dream, in which a changed action or attitude on the part of the dream ego can be changed. Relive the dream in a closed eye meditation and focus on changing your responses. So the point is not to control the dream better, but rather to practice self control, with courage go to sleep. And wake up in the middle of the night. Again, you could use natural awakenings right. Recall the dream you want to work with. Focus your intention on being brought into that world. Lay back down to sleep with a strong intention to become lucid. When a dream emerges, and you may find this easier to incubate these kinds of dreams because they want to come participate with openness encourage openness, courage, and a willingness to be present to whatever emerges. And so when I was discussing what Stephen was saying, and Stephen LaBerge was saying about mild is that it's it's easier to hijack the dream you just had. Scott's recommendation with these is to actually go with a more emotionally you know, powerful dream that cannot be can be a different from a different night. And these this is a different tactic is effective, right? It is effective because again, these you know, these dreams, these unfinished business dreams, they want to be resolved. They're you know, they they're picking at us in the back of our head. They're just waiting for us to to shine the light on them and say what's happening here and face what's happening here. And so you know the door with the most pressure behind it, that's going to be what opens first
and I think these dreams you know, the dreams that are that come through with this sort of check technique can be really powerful to their they bring real possibility for change, real possibility for growth, for sitting in emotional truth can bring some real you know, good old existential beingness
here's another method, middle of the night meditation. This is perhaps the most ancient of the witching hour practices that comes to us from many schools of thought, including Tibetan Dream Yoga, as well as yoga nidra and Christian mysticism. The practice is best seen as a prerequisite to doing mild or dream reliving because it Prime's the mind for self awareness just before entering the dream world. You can of course incorporate your lucid talisman into a visual meditation if you prefer to have a visual focus while sitting. In that's certainly my story I have I have trouble with meditation, sitting meditation indoors, especially in the middle of the night. If my eyes are closed, because it's just, I'll just clock out so I go, I go visual. Here's how to do it. sit up in bed, do 15 to 45 minutes of concentrated meditation or breath work. Prayer, Mantra work it's also effective whatever you know, you know, Lina, to your traditions here and your spiritual practice. Once you settle back to sleep, recall your intention to stay aware as you fall asleep. So preaching to the choir I think on that one a variation of this one is middle of the night reading. Set your alarm, wake yourself up in the middle of the night. Again, four or five hours, maybe six hours after you fall asleep. On a small light open up a book on lucid dreaming or some other subject matter you find fascinating and read again I think the sweet spot here is somewhere between 30 to 45. Maybe an hour if you can, if you can do that. A variation that has worked for me is to read for a while and then journal about my intentions. This method works because reading also activates the parts of your brain that regulate self awareness and critical thinking followed by the strengthening of my intentions with written affirmations. And so sometimes if I tried to read in the middle of the night for a long spell, I'll just fall asleep. So if I read something that's really interesting, and I love to read about dreams in the middle of the night, that I go to my journal, this is what this was the method that I use when I was really trying to call lucid dreams. For a project that I had to have a lot of lucid dreams in a short amount of time and so this was the method that I use and it was really effective. I I got enough dreams for my project in that short enough time because I did that practice
I'm gonna briefly stopped there. Wonder if anything is coming up for y'all thoughts questions?
Kelly
so, I've
not been online live with you the last few weeks but I think I'm caught up listening to the recordings and I wanted to be here tonight because I had a couple of questions and what you're talking about right now is making me think of, of one and that is you know the difference. Well, let me back up a little bit somewhere along the line I read or heard and I certainly have experienced that keeping light on a low light, low level light of some sort like a salt lamp or something like that. That I will sleep lighter and I will have more dreams and have don't always become lucid but a better chance of becoming lucid because I'm dreaming so much because of that low light, which kind of runs counter to your recommendation of a really dark room at night. And now we're talking about the witching hour and the waking up in the middle of the night. I'm just kind of wondering, you know, are those two approaches interchangeable or would you recommend getting rid of the low light at night?
Yeah, yeah. So so that hear your comments had that conflict of kind of like what is you know, the most important thing going on, and I think that making a practice of having the light on. Is is is a recipe for poor sleep, right? When, when when a light even a tiny light is on we have more awakenings we definitely we have what's in this is you know when you have more awakenings in the middle of the night whether it's from noise or from light pollution, or whatever. They call it junk sleep. Because what happens is we don't get the cycles to be able to get nice deep sleep in the first part of the night and then we feel crappy when we wake up the next day. So I generally don't recommend keeping the light on for that. But if you were like you know like you're spending the night I don't know in like a haunted house and you're like I want to have this experience tonight and maybe I'll feel better with a light on anyway. You know go for it. But I yeah, I would say you want to target especially the second half of the night maybe maybe that's the thing maybe the second half of the night. Turn your salt lamp on those have such a you know, it's such a small glow, but it could indeed increase your awakenings give you more chances to skip in and you've already had hopefully most of your deep sleep and so you won't be you know, messing with that so much. Thank you Yeah, no problem. Yeah, it. This is one of the things is that, you know, there's been some articles in the peer reviewed literature in the last couple of years where some folks have been talking about how lucid dreaming is bad for you or are they the articles are like is lucid dreaming bad for you and they essentially conclude that yeah, you can if you did these sleep practices every night these these sleep disturbance practices. You might lose some sleep but nobody really does them every night. Or you know, and I don't recommend to folks to do it. Do them every night. I think we'd all burn out if we tried to do that. And as you know like with my what I call the immersion method, you know, do some practices and then rest and then see what comes. We shouldn't be working too hard because as soon as it's not fun. We're gonna lose we're gonna lose the thread. Any other thoughts or questions?
Oh Kirsten, person are off. Yeah.
Oh, and then he's got her hand raised. Okay. Okay, Chris. First, Kirsten, then, Kathy. Thanks. You're unmuted.
Oh, thanks. I just wanted to comment on your, your recent I was beginning to think this feels like a lot of work. I mean, like work work. And I thought somehow that's contradictory to me, but so I appreciate you're affirming the breaks between is not something you have to do every night or that you have to pursue it with Sorry, I've got a bum foot so I've got to have it raise. So I'm lying on my sofa. So I just wanted to say thanks it's good to be reminded that it's not you know, get the get the Oh, gotta get this done thing, which is our normal mo
So, right. Yeah. Because we're not asleep scientists in a lab that need need to get our hours in or is not going to work right we can relax our intention and wait for the times that will reveal it welling up within us and we can choose to choose our nights. And in Yeah, these sleep interruptions. They really are next level so sleeping there's there's sort of a line between the practices and that's it. Like are you willing to interrupt your sleep is a line that I think that folks need to be able to notice because when you cross that line, the chance of going lucid really jumps up pretty dramatically for many people, for many people and but you have to know yourself because sometimes there's very, very light sleepers. Who these methods aren't effective because they just can't get back to sleep. And so you've got to just gotta have a feel for your own. Your own sustainability right now, thanks for that. Yes, sir. And yeah, Kathy.
Yeah, can you hear me? Yes. Okay. I appreciate this section on Dream re living. I had never heard that describe, and I don't know anything about Scott. sparrows work so I'm going to look it up. But it it sparks something for me because my the dreams have been having my stuff that I'm remembering is all liminal in the last like two hours I wake up and like for instance last night that the images were fitted, but by the time I woke up enough to write it down, I was missing the image, the images but the emotional sensation that I had is this is this reoccurring stuff, and I it's got a flavor that I keep going back to that deeply emotional and I went oh, since 2017 Or so I went through a period for about three or four years in which I was waking up in terrified dreams at two and four and six. So I was referred to bring treatment stuff and blah, blah, blah. Well, my sleep has now gone to I can I can sleep for eight hours. I have not a clue. Well a lot of things happened in my life, but I have not a clue how it changed itself. And now I'm getting a lot of what appears to be psychological work. Coming up in this part of last two hours before upper limb aluminum dreaming this looks like good stuff to look at. Because I like the way you describe it in here. It's a very gentle way to describe what you say lucidity comes with a flux of resistance and openness to growth. It's like so Okay, okay, there's the rub.
Right? You're still yourself.
Yeah, I'm still myself and I, I get part of the run to the potency that I'm feeling. I can't put my hand on I can't put my hand on an image. I can I can tell you though, that where I'm sitting in my throat or my chest when I'm waking up, tells me that's that's important stuff. I somehow I got to go back into it. So thank you for putting that in.
Yeah. Well, I'm glad that that was resonating. And yeah, you know, so one of the things that we do know about about dreaming, yeah, and some recent work by a psychologist Josie Melanau ski who wrote a book called The Psychology of dreams. I think that's I think it's I think that's the title of the book psychology of dreams. Anyhow, she talks about her research were confirming that essentially dreaming throughout the night becomes more bizarre and more emotional. So later it goes and also more sort of deep it deeper and more long term memory material. Later in the night, or towards the morning, basically. So, given all the stuff that we know, we've got good psychological material coming out in the last couple of hours asleep. It's easier to have a lucid dream. We're having these long REM sessions. The brains waking up. There's more cortisol in the blood. So vigilance, you know, metacognition is easier. It's just it's a it's a really a recipe for doing deep work, whether or not we remember it. And so if we go lucid in these moments, we have this opportunity to this is Carl Jung would say to assist in that what's already happening. And and if we're not trying to control things, but really trying to learn things, then we don't we're not getting in the way, right? We're really just revealed, we're creating an opportunity to reveal more information, more emotional truth, because it's not always about information. It's just about oh, here's a feeling and I haven't let myself feel this feeling and we wake up with a feeling and it could be grief. Usually, it's grief. Let's be honest. It's usually a grief. It's it's usually something existential. It's not necessarily about a nightmare about being terrorized. It's about these sort of deeper softer. Yeah, heavy, heavier arts of being a human. And lucidity can really just assist on that, coming to consciousness and being able to sit with bass. And when we do that, you know, it lifts it doesn't solve the human condition. We're also going to die but, but it does help. It does help and we get to we get to move on and we stop projecting it onto everybody in our lives and we become better and better people in general. That is that's my my thought on doll. So yeah, I really, there's something special about these last few hours. And that's why, you know, if you sleep if you're usually working safe, you got a work schedule, you work five days a week and then you don't have to get up early on a Saturday and you sleep in a little bit. That's a powerful time because that's when we'll have a greater likelihood of lucid dreaming because we'll be sleeping at a time for Jen generally awake and so our circadian rhythm is still trying to do its thing but we're in REM sleep now. And a time that we're normally drinking coffee. And in that's when the lucid dreams come. So you know, that's the cycle adjustment technique that's um, that's that's another kind of technique but it comes comes naturally. Such fun stuff and I would love to get I wonder if Alyssa can help me with that it could you look up Scott sparrows website. It's the five star is the dreams it's the dream star. Something about dream star is the key word. Yeah, absolutely. And he has it and he also has a new it's a membership community and it's it's free. It's just you know, people are sharing. I'm part of it. We share. I share my blog posts. There are some very interesting dreamers in that community too.
Is that the dream star Institute. That's it. That's it. Put it in the chat for everyone. There's a comment in the chat too.
Oh, thank you. So yeah, so Tim says, I noticed that I have a project or a goal to accomplish. I'm more likely to have a lucid dream. Is that a form of intention? Yeah, I think it is. I think that when especially for going to sleep focused, and we're just working on, you know, a long term kind of focus II type deal that we're likely to dream about it. Or if we've spent a large amount of time working on something, we're going to keep thinking about it because it's the same creative mind awake and asleep. We're gonna keep thinking about it and keep working on it. You know, a few days ago, the new Legend of Zelda game came out. I don't know if anyone here cares about Legend of Zelda but my kids are really into it. And, and I really liked it too. And so I played it for a few hours between now and that it came out and guess what I've been dreaming about. I've been dreaming. Legend of Zelda had been dreaming about putting weapons together and all these creative things that you can do. And it's just, it's the creative mind still at work. And I love there's a prop. So there's a problem solving aspect to dreaming that is, I think inherent to and if you're interested in that you should check out their work and dear Dr. Barrett. She wrote a book called The Committee of sleep. You can find it on Amazon. It's brilliant. She just showcases all these great you know, historic examples of time that scientists and mathematicians made discoveries through their dreams. And she talks about how you can do this too. So just like you know, we can we can do this. We can go to sleep with a problem and ask for a solution. That's what dream incubation really is about.
Thanks, Alyssa. So I'm not seeing any more hand hand raise. Okay, cool. We're gonna we're gonna cruise. I think we've got Yeah, this is good. We're gonna start we're shifting gears slightly here. This is still a method but now we're moving into the dream supplement territory. So Galantamine? Galantamine is naturally derived, its plant material, and it's the only lucid dreaming supplement that currently is supported by scientific studies. The active compounds Galantamine hydrobromide it was originally synthesized from the snowdrop plant in the 1950s. It's also in daffodils by the way. Historically, the first evidence of using the memory increasing properties of galantamine come from Homer's Iliad, where Odysseus uses the snowdrop flower to combat the effects of memory loss. And I don't know if you remember this, it has been since you read the Iliad. But he and a man shipwrecked on searcys Island in she transforms them all into pigs, and then men forget who they are. And so Odysseus runs around finds the snowdrop plant Odyssey Thank you, and in brings them brings them back using snowdrop. Galantamine and derivatives are, were approved by the FDA in 2001. And it's largely used as a memory improvement supplement for sufferers of Alzheimer's disease and mild dementia. And only recently has a substance been used as a nitrogen or the dream enhancing supplement. So a nitrogen is any supplement or substance that can improve your dream. So Galantamine basically works by blocking the action of an acetylcholine esterase, which is an enzyme that breaks down in neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This is important because REM sleep when most lucid dreams occur, are associated with high levels of acetylcholine in the brain. So the presence of galantamine promotes dreaming sleep. The compound acts immediately to increase the duration of REM sleep and the dream state is also made more structurally sound. And so you stay in RAM for longer and you don't skip out of it to go into light sleep as often. In fact, not only just Galantamine increased the period of sleep that gives us dreams, but it also makes dreams more vivid and easier to go lucid. Stephen LaBerge work with a supplement for decades and his private Hawaiian retreats and even submitted a patent application for dream recall. enhancement. He was denied. In August 2018, I worked with the University of Texas Pan American on the first published clinical study of galantamine effectiveness for inducing lucid dream and this is with Dr. Scott Sparrow. Our study looked at how Galantamine affects dream content, the emotions and the settings of our experience. Subjects took the supplement in the middle of the night to take advantage of the longer REM cycles that occur in the second half of the night. We tested Galantamine, both with or without dream practices such as middle of the night meditation, such as dream reliving, and wake back to bed. And the conclusions were strong. Galantamine has a roughly three times correlation with lucidity and dreams compared to placebo. So pretty much simultaneously Stephen LaBerge and his colleagues published their own double blind study on Galantamine. They found that the likelihood for lucid dreams significantly increased for both four milligrams is specially for eight milligram doses compared to the placebo and their study had more subjects it was a larger, they had more subjects and so it was nice to have nice to see basically the same results with higher statistical power. So together these two studies show that Galantamine is reputation as lucidity pill is well deserved. But Galantamine should be handled with care and with healthy respect. Our research found that the effects of galantamine can be accentuated. If you combine to supplement with a witching hour practice such as dream reliving, or wake back to bed indeed, the combination of supplements to practice was more effective for inducing lucid dreams than either alone psychedelic researchers say set and setting so here is the last part of the chapter. The homework is to choose a witching hour practice to complement your lucid talismans supported a work of reality testing in my dreaming, and inception. The anchoring of your dream signs soon you will find yourself aware in your dreams. And so this is the big picture. This is what the dream research really has borne out in the last 10 years is that lucid dreaming tactics are most effective for inducing lucid dreams when they're when they're clustered together. This way, I've been teaching it for over 10 years. And then these studies came out after that, and they basically yeah, they're like, Yes, this is how this is how it works. And we we just so so when you cluster your when you make your plan to have a lucid dream. Don't just try one thing at a time. Don't try to you know, it's just do a couple of things together and see how they work. See how it see how the vibe is right? And in and then if it doesn't happen within a week. And sometimes if you're doing say, if you're doing sleep interruption, you can't do that five nights in a row. I mean, at least I can't, you know, choose a few nights. Let yourself rest. See what happens. See what comes to you the dreams that emerge, knowing full well that it could be another maybe even two weeks before a dream emerges? Because of the way that dream delay works this nine to 11 day cycle of dream delay, that mysteriously is working through us so it's not just what we do tonight doesn't just affect us. It comes back up almost two weeks later. However, if you take Galantamine, you will feel the effects and there's not a question about that. The main thing I would say about Galantamine that I didn't write in the in the book here is that you really want to take it in the middle of the night. You don't want to take it as you're falling asleep. Because it junks up. Your deep sleep gets in the way and it can cause some really bizarre feelings. As well as inducing sleep paralysis for some people. If it's taken in the first part of the night. It's a very safe, it's a very safe supplement. In the US, you can get it on Amazon, you get over the counter. And pretty much all of it is coming from more or less the same sources. And so it's not regulated, but most have, most of them are listing or third party bioassays about its purity. Sometimes Galantamine comes with choline, as well and I don't recommend that just because calling can be really harsh for some people, and some people don't fall back asleep after having a choline supplement in the middle of the night. So that is, that would be my recommendations for Galantamine the let's see. Actually there is something else I can say about Galantamine. I think that it really is more than just a lucidity booster. I mean, we know that it works on memory. We know that it helps folks who you don't even have to have dementia to feel Galantamine effects I have friends in their 70s, who take Galantamine every day and they take higher doses than recommended here. They just take it because they say I do better at the crosswords when I have 16 milligrams of galantamine in the morning. And, you know, and it doesn't have any long term effects, then it's been studied and studied zillions of times, and it's it's very safe. However, this is something that it seems to do with dreaming is that the content of lucid dreams
and dreaming in general, after Galantamine does have some differences. Dreams tend to have little more bizarre content. They have more I would say extreme emotionality, they have both, both negative and positive. Emotional ranges. But, but of course, powerful negative feelings are very impactful. Right? And so what's interesting is, is that folks who have a powerful Galantamine sort of soaked dream where they say that was really dark and maybe even disturbing. They still report that they feel better in the morning. And so there seems to be perhaps a potential rating or a health thing happening with Galantamine that perhaps it's doing this thing where it's, it's bringing out that unfinished business. It's by invitation by because it's working with memory, and memory is emotional as schematic. And so we're inviting memory. We're inviting unfinished business to a certain degree. So it has a healing effect. So some people take it and they say, this is not for me. It didn't work right. Couldn't get back to sleep. Other people say I had very bizarre accounts. Oh, a question about taking it in. If you take it in the morning. It doesn't know it doesn't because it's half life is too short. And so it's not it's not in. It's not in the bloodstream, but it's how you go to sleep if you take it in the morning. And so I would recommend that Galantamine to be taken intermittently, I would recommend that it'd be taken at most once every, for this purpose, once every three days. Just to see its effects. There, it does have a habituation rate, just like everything. So if you start having Galantamine all the time, it's going to lose those, you know, novel cognitive effects. The novel, The novel piece being right, the most salient aspect of it is still it's going to help with your memory, but it's not going to be like yeah,
so I'm kind of like on the fence if I should go into this next chapter, because it's the spooky chapter. So maybe we'll wait. Maybe we'll wait for next week. No, he I think we'll wait. I don't want to leave y'all like after like talking about nightmares. Unless we had time to discuss it so. So let's just let's just, it's the top of the hour. Anyway, let's let's open up to any questions or discussion. And we'll call it from here
Hey, Laurie
you can come on up, Jess. Yeah,
I can hear you. Okay,
thank you. I'm really enjoying this course. And since I've been doing it I'm remembering my dreams. I'm able to write them down. I'm really getting my state checks going like stuff I know in my dream, like dream about my x dead people. Vivid colors like I know everything. And I'm beginning to also feel aware in the dreams, not lucidly dreaming yet. But there is this interesting thing I want to share with you and maybe you could give me some insight, which is this. It's kind of like I'm collecting I'm trying to collect morning mist. I have dreams and then I say I have to remember this stream. And then I'm entangled in it. And of course, it's per per mutating. And before I know it, I don't remember anything on top of all the very clear stuff going on, but it's almost like a intrusive experience that I'm hanging on to these dreams. I wake up in the morning and I'm interfering with really what's a very natural liminal kind of place as I'm kind of expressing my underlying urgency or anxiety to hold on and hang on to what's happening, which is antithetical to this mythical language and land we're in and you know, backing off and really suggesting to myself the lightest and lightest of touches, like when I'm meditating awareness itself can only be like a feather, amount of attention applied. So I'm kind of saying I think I have an antidote to this. Thing that have you heard
of this kind of
dream holding and and any other thoughts you may be able to?
I think, you know, if I hear you correctly, is that the desire to go lucid is sort of wrecking the vibe of the dreams themselves in the liminal space in the morning. Is that more or less?
Yeah, that's a definitely a component of it, I think for sure. Let's just even work with that. So yeah.
So yeah, yeah, that in I think it takes practice. Basically, it sounds like you're really you've got the paradigm down this, you know, especially with meditative practice, and thinking about that, that feather touch of consciousness and self awareness and and noticing how desire can be, you know, powerful and how it can get in the way, right. So like, what is it when does it become like grasping and, and so and there's a certain quality to to self awareness of the dream where it's, it's this, it's, it's this vigilance aspect and if there's too much vigilance, it becomes a wall, it can become almost painful. I mean, we can like anxiety basically. And so, you know, when we hype when we're hyper vigilant, we don't want to be hyper vigilant. You know, like, I you know, there's folks who, who suffer from hyper vigilance. You know, I think about, you know, new mothers who, you know, have newborns they, they can't sleep well. They have lucid dreams and they don't want them they just want to sleep. They're like, How can I turn my brain off? Right? They're like I want to make it stop. And so in so just to show you like, right, yeah, there's this whole spectrum of things that can happen with our self awareness, and our vigilance. And so we want to what we want is a nice healthy level. of vigilance that that is curious, right and is sort of in so maybe that's a good way to think about it is like leading with curiosity and in delight and and and then noticing when when it's not when we're not in that space. I don't know if that's helpful, but yeah, you're on mute.
So sorry. It is very helpful and I do really appreciate this and you're so right about the quality and energy group work because I've gone from like switch off to switch on and I will really take that to heart, that quality of curiosity and and openness and not going for it. Because I think I wrecked my back once lucidly dreaming. I was so determined to do it. And I finally had my lucid dream, and I flew off, and when I woke up in the morning, I was in a back spasm that I had never in my wildest imagination, so I think I need to back way off,
so to speak. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Yeah. If we see this too, right, this, this effect of hyper excitement when we become lucid sometimes can lead to awakening. And that can feel really frustrating as well. And so it's one of the things that that takes a little bit of work is to is to sort of emotionally regulate in the dream and just not get so geeked out that we that we wake up. Yeah. Thanks for that. That's this. Those are nice, nuanced kind of perspectives. Okay, so Kelly, and then Kathy. Oh, are you saying that Kathy was first? Okay.
Good to meet Kathy.
Okay, thanks. This request. Perhaps we can get a couple more weeks with you, Ryan, then this isn't enough. More just this is just juicy material. So I'm just throwing that out there.
Thank you. for that. I appreciate it.
All right, Kelly.
Yeah, I would I would echo that. This is the recordings were great. And tonight is really good as well. Um, again, what, what Laurie was just sharing reminded me of another kind of question. I had a little bit different maybe. But this might also be tied to the fact that I do have a lot of light in my room when I'm sleeping. Not not necessarily, you know, intentionally. It's just slipping in through windows and whatnot. But one of the challenges that I have I have two really big challenges one is journaling after journaling my dreams like it's just hard for me to do that. For you know, I'm either really tired and I don't want to fully wake up or, or just they just slip away so fast. Once I start the writing. I can lay in bed and think about it and can retain a lot more than I can when I actually try to write them down. But the other thing that Laurie was talking about, it's not it's not exactly the same but this this issue that I have, it's it's like you know, my dreams are I have some powerful, very, very powerful dreams that are easy to remember. And when I when I wake up, it's like, I was dreaming and I cannot recall them clearly. But so much of the time my dreams are very samsaric and I just like I wake wake up from the the night samsara and just kind of roll into the waking samsara without even you know, it's just sort of almost seamless, and then it's like, oh, I'm awake and I was dreaming and now it's like it's all just kind of blended together and, and maybe that has something to do with the memory you know, maybe maybe strengthening memory somehow but or maybe it's just from being too tired because I have too much light in the room. But any thoughts about that about how to kind of identify, you know, a line between the sleeping dream and the waking dream?
Well, I mean, sadly, no, I wish I did. I almost feel like that align doesn't exist, right and so, so the more I get into this work, the less I really feel like I kind of understand about things and and it sounds to me like that your awareness has increased to a level where you're seeing that waking life is an emotional dream like you're sleeping dreams. That's what I heard you say I mean, that's not the words that you spent. It's a project maybe it's a projection of onto your dream life but yeah, like waking life is samsaric and our dreams are samsaric. And, you know, and of course, when it comes to writing down that stuff, you know, you get to a point where like, I've written down the dream of me going to my walk into my high school hallway like a zillion times do I need to write it down again? And the answer is no, no, I don't I have to write it down again. And so I tend to write down the dreams now that are, you know, more interesting, more bizarre that have some something potent in something emotional to it. And it doesn't it I don't have to, I just don't have the time or the energy right now to to go that far that deep and so, so So I'm segwaying that into a practical way of like, well, how do I remember the dreams that are like what are the important dreams or whatever? Because they do slip away. And it's such a pain to write details when you wake up. This just tried to focus on the most salient emotion or image right it's the central image of a dream. This is what Ernest Hartman would talk about the psychiatrist, Ernest Hartman. This central image of a dream holds sort of the key to you know, everything that's around it, and so it's it's a little it can be bizarre. It could be emotional. It could have full color, why everything else is drab. If you write if you just scroll that down, and then later you look at it, it'll all kind of come back. Maybe we'll lose some of the details. We'll definitely some of the details, but we won't lose the emotional piece of it. Because the visual emotional truth, the dreaming, right? I mean, that's that's dreams or visual, emotional metaphors or other kinds of metaphors. too. But primarily, that's what we get from REM sleep. And so focus on those and then let the rest go. Maybe try give that a try.
If there's one more, just real quick kind of comment about you. You're talking about a dream that you had I think last night about the the folio and behind the blue glass. I've had a couple of dreams. It's like this. It's like the same dream character. That's handing me a tarot card that's a blue glass tarot card. I've had that dream twice when you just talked about the blue glass and the folio and I just thought about this really crazy powerful dream that I've had twice in the in the in the deity or the character that's handing me the tarot card is like a tarot card figure. But it's the the thing that was most remarkable about it was that it was a glass card, a blue glass card.
Okay, thanks for that. Do you think is that a from a real set or is this a unique dream image? The actual
image on the tarot card itself I don't recall the details and I would say that it's probably not from an actual deck. It was just it was like the High Priestess handing me a tarot card. So cool. is cool. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. So I think he's good. Yeah. So blue glass energy, right.
Like the Yeah, the healing energy all the blue, blue figures, the blue avatars, the Medicine Buddha, you know, all
Yeah, just such there's such potency to to blue, to blue, the blue skin, the blue clothing that comes through in some spiritual dreams of otherworldly figures. Yeah, nice. Thank you for sharing. And, oh, hey, Linda.
Yeah, so um,
I'm wondering, so I've really only had like three, lucid dreams intentionally, which I began trying to do it last fall. And so you know, last week was a couple weeks ago was another really good one, because I could direct it and I got to try a lot of different things. And one of them was just real short, as soon as as lucid as awake. But, um, when I started reading about it, it seemed like they were recommending to go to to go into your dreaming with an intention to do something or to ask something. And so ultimately, what I want this is for, like, learning spiritual experiences. But in the first two that I've had, I've really concentrated on kind of experimenting with the dream world like, you know, how real does it feel how real does it seem? Can I fly Can I, you know, can I jump and then I kind of float it like we said, you know, and when I said okay, I put my hand through my through the wall. I knew I wouldn't be able to because I knew I was aware. Oh no, Ryan said he couldn't do it in his dreams. Yeah, I knew that. Was gonna. So I said, Well, okay, I'll just, I'll just go through the floor. So I'll jump up and I'll go down through the floor. So I had a series of things like that experimenting, which is fun, but I want to get to the good stuff, you know, and I don't I don't know like once we become lucid. I mean, should we intend what we want to do? Or it's kind of like Lori's question. I mean, should we just sit back and try to let the dream happen so that it can teach us something you know, and still stay awake and understanding it's a dream so that we can ask questions or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, that is the question. Yeah, that's the question. And so it's, it's, it's up to the dreamer about, about what happens next. And so it's helpful to have an intention in your back pocket because it can elongate the time that we spend lucid. Sometimes what happens when we go with the flow is we fall back into you know, non lucidity and the dream. However, sometimes if we go with the flow, something emerges. That's really interesting. And we can the intention can be I would like to see what the dream needs to show me. And so there could be a way to merge kind of those two ways of thinking or being. So there is this nice thing though, about having an intention, even if your intention is to surrender, which is so it's a paradox, but having the intention to surrender is better. Than no intention at all. Because it get keeps it keeps us with that metacognition, for as long as we can ride it. And, you know, there's so many individual differences to this, I have to say, right, and so I don't necessarily think that long lucid dreams are never quote, unquote, lucid dreams. I think we have these lucid moments. And in my own lucid dreams, what happens is that I'll become self aware and then I'll forget and then I'll remember and then I'll forget. Anyway, it's just you know, it's sort of like like a skipping of a stone across a pond sometimes. Sometimes a lucid dream is just 30 seconds long, but it can be very impactful. And so so the quest to be lucid longer, I think is sometimes just you know, I don't know if it's the most important thing, but for for beginning, it's nice to to sort of like feel out the territory. See what's possible. But then if you have that pause, oh, yeah, what did they say? Oh, it's going to do it's interesting to see if you can recall your intention. And notice if you can't, because that's information too, because not all intentions make it through that liminal space. So the strongest of intentions do in what makes a strong intention. It's got to be heart centered, as well as, you know, intellectual basically. And so it has to not be idle, to make it through. And so we learn about what we really care about when we even when we can't remember our intentions. It's all it's all. It's all play, right? And we learned it's still a dream, we wake up and we're like, Well, I had a dream. It's still a dream. And so we can, we can learn from that and then and then plan what happens next time. Thank you. Yeah, you bet. And I'm gonna say that next time you're lucid, you can put your hand through the wall just know it.
Well, friends, looks like we are at the end of questions and it's almost bottom of the hour. So we can that be it for tonight. And I would say you know, we're along on this journey. If you choose to accept it, you haven't yet. Maybe one day this week, you could try a witching hour practice. What would that be look like? Would that be mild? Would that be dream reliving? Or maybe taking your meditation practice into the night? So even if it's just one night, see what happens? And we can report back next next time