You night breezes seem to whisper, I love you. Birds singing in the sycamore tree dream, a little dream of me,
said, night and night and kiss me, just hold me tight and tell me you miss me while I'm alone and blue as can be, dream, a Little Dream of Me.
Stars fading, but I linger on this. Linger still craving your kids.
How you paid my kids now,
I am longing to linger till down dear, just send this. Give me a little kiss.
Dreams, find you sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you flood in your dreams, whatever they dream, a little dream of me when I
linger on deep I'm dead, still graving your kid. Yeah, I'm longing to finger till dumb, dear, just saying this, baby, Dreaming. Gotta keep dreaming.
But in your dreams, you've got to make me a promise to me, I
who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakens. What a beautiful quote, and we are going to be working on that tonight. We're going to be working on reorienting our default gaze and our default perspective, from seeking outside to really turning that back into our inner landscape, turning the gaze back into our dream state, and learning how to create a effective and luscious and abundant container for our dreams, so that as we're doing our lucid dream practices, it's within a really rich, vibrant relationship with your dream state. Today, we're going to be working on two aspects. I'm just going to jump up here. We're going to be working on strengthening your relationship with your dream state, whether you are someone who's just beginning to recall dreams, or if you're an experienced lucid dreamer who recalls lots of dreams. This is the most important aspect of this practice, really having a strong relationship. We're going to do that piece, and we'll do a Q, a about that, and then we'll do a bound really understanding and optimizing your sleep to support this. And then we'll do a Q, a after that. But before we get into the nitty gritty, I just want to say first of all, just a big thank you for all the incredible shares this week, for those of you who are in the WhatsApp groups, getting to read your heartfelt motivations that you created, the beautiful pictures you've shared, the experiences you've been sharing. It was incredibly I think it just really restored my faith in humanity. Because think about it. I mean, I put we have 500 people, strangers from the internet, in eight different WhatsApp groups, and everyone has just been so kind and so brilliant, so thoughtful and the same in this group here. So just really acknowledging the community here and the quality. So thank you for your beautiful participation the last week. And you know, before we jump into what is going to be quite a practical session, I would love to encourage us, especially me, to get back into our bodies. I tend to be a bit of a brain on a stick. You know, I work very much in the virtual space. We're here connecting virtually. It can be so easy to be locked into our brain. So before we engage intellectually in today's content, just just encourage you to take a couple moments to find your way back into your body. You can do it like we do in the dreaming space. You can kind of rub your hands and remember, I have a human fleshy body. You could find your feet, find your feet beneath the desk or on the couch and just rub your feet on the floor. Just take a moment to, like, look around the space you're in to bring a little bit of noticing and presence to this moment, turning your gaze of awareness, maybe just a little bit into your body, even put your hand on your heart for a second. I'm coming off a hot day of work. I'm sure a lot of you guys are too or waking up or at one o'clock in the morning. So just before we jump in with our brains, I would love for us to get just a little connected to our hearts and our bodies, and maybe, yeah, put a putting your hand over your heart, just thinking for a second again, tapping into that heartfelt commitment you have for being here, your heartfelt commitment to being an evolving, growing, loving, expressed human being on this planet, and just tapping into just the gratitude we have for these practices, the gratitude for the teachers who have passed these practices down. Some of these have been passed down for 1000s of years. Some of these have been passed down for decades from science labs. They're equally helpful to us, but just recognizing wow, like what an incredible privilege we get to learn lucid dreaming, dream, yoga, meditation, any of these practices that help our lives liberate us and, of course, in turn, help us to support others too, and then also just a little bit of gratitude for each other. Now we have how many people in here? We have 300 people in here, and it can be easy, when we're in a virtual space, to dehumanize each other. We see these like little tiny squares on the screen, and we're like, I don't know what that is. Is that a person, and some of them are just like, listening in, I said, just taking a moment to go, wow, if we were sitting in an amphitheater, a 300 person amphitheater, learning lucid dreaming. I mean, that's a lucid dreaming revolution. That's a that is a movement. And so just taking a moment ago. Gosh, I'm so grateful for all the other souls who are here tonight, practicing with me, practicing in community, building a better world together. Yes, so with that said, little bit connected to our hearts. This last week, we were working with the motto this moment matters, and I'm curious, maybe you can share in the chat. Just quickly, you can share maybe, like, on a, how about this on a one to 10, one being, I completely forgot, and I never worked with a motto. Once, 10 being, you worked with that motto. You know, every hour you able to recall that often, five being like, yeah, I worked with it reasonably often. How did you find your practice working with that, with that slogan, this moment matters. We had some forgotten there. I get it. Some excellent mid range up there, amazing. Good job, beautiful. Moira yami, too, right? It's a beautiful one. Jennifer, good job, nice. John, you've got a six plus. Plus is that a almost a seven? David, sorry, it's been a rough week. I get it. We have those moments too. We have we have weeks where it can be hard to sit in the perspective beautiful. So that was the that was the what we were working with last week. This week, I wanted to take it up a little notch. So this week, we're going to work with the slogan, I awaken to this moment, if this moment matters, was about really returning a sense of like, I'm not going to waste my life, I'm not going to waste my time. I'm going to seize this precious opportunity. I'm going to really like make this moment important. I awaken to this moment is about the quality of that. Yes, this moment is important. So what are you going to do with it? And awakening to this moment could mean different things for different people, but think about this as a quality of lucidity, because we are lucid dream training, and because lucid dream training requires us to train in daytime too, thinking about when you awaken to a moment, bringing more presence, turning on those meta cognitive capacities, broadening your your sort of sensory awareness, deepening your attunement to anyone who's with You. So really like ringing lucidity into your life, and again, when you're working with this one, I encourage you to work in moments that are just super boring or annoying or like in moments we would consider non moments waiting for someone for five minutes on a boring work call. Let's see if we can bring these incredible moments of lucidity into even those kind of patches of our lives. The more you practice this, the more you start to wake into the moment in your day to day life, you're going to find it naturally flowing over to your lucidity and your dreams. We'll work with day practice specifically next week, but for this week, this is what we're going to be working with. Now let's jump right into the strengthening of the dream relationship, because this is, this is such a beautiful opportunity we have to connect to the super conscious, unconscious mind. And we're going to start by looking at what I like to call the bookends. So you can see here just I'm a visual person, so I love to be able to work with some images, if you think about your dream practice as two bookends and in the middle, like the swirling galaxies, here is your rich, beautiful dream space. How we enter into sleep and how we exit sleep determines so much of our relationship to it, especially to our dreaming. And for most of us, we have cultural habits. I mean, gosh, I did for the longest time, and I still have to fight against them some nights, which is the habit of wanting to zonk out so just coming to that first book end and wanting to just pass out from the busy day, not think about anything, not deal with dreaming, not meditate and just pass out. And this is the unconscious habit that has us just go into a deep, dreamless sleep and to not remember our dreams on the other end. Now the flip side is on this side, as you're coming out of sleep, if we don't intentionally choose how we're going to approach this, most people, they just wake up. Their eyes open and they focus immediately to the outside world. Grab the phone, check the emails, check the calendar, and off they go. And that entire night of dreaming, that entire kind of knock tree of your experience with sleep and dream is gone. And so we're going to work with these two bookends in an intentional and powerful way and understanding how each works specifically to cultivate lucidity.
So yes, you can see here the way I like to think about this is your first book end is your entry into sleep. And this is where we're going to do our pre sleep inductions. This is where you're going to learn how to work with that hypnagogic state to make sure that you are priming yourself and priming your first experiences of sleep, into dreaming, into into even into the non, non REM sleep. And I love Andrew has a great term for this. He calls it proximate karma, and this idea that with these transitional states, going from waking to sleeping, going from life to death, the last thoughts, the last kind of things going on in your mind and in your system, they have a disproportionate impact on what comes next. So maybe, if you're watching, you know, like some kind of very intense sci fi TV show, you close your laptop, you go to sleep, and you have dreams all night about being in space, right? We have this ability to prime our sleep, and so using that intentionally is a way to sort of shape and work cooperatively with our minds as we enter now on the other side, we have dream journaling. And you can see here these faces, facing towards each other. I love that the idea of a dream journal is to instead of habitually turning to the outside world as soon as you wake up, is to retrain yourself to stay with and turn back into the dream space and to capture and to be able to draw and remember as many dreams as you can, having that relationship, having that recall so that it becomes, for many of us, as Rich a life as our waking life is. I've heard some beautiful dreams that you guys shared in the WhatsApp groups. I know a lot of you have very strong dream recall, so I know you'll relate when you say, wow, like my dream world is so rich I live entire lives in between sleeping and waking and so by turning our attention like this, we're going to create a really beautiful container that respects and honors and cultivates our dream world. Now here dream tagging, this is a technique that I love to use, and actually a few questions about this this week as well around how do you improve your dream recall for dreams that are in the middle of your sleep cycles, so maybe a dream you're having at like four in the morning instead of your kind of early, later morning dreams. So this is a technique I'll teach you where you can kind of capture those middle of the night dreams without having to get up and write. So let's dive into that first with the induction, which is really, I think, a a personal, a really personalized approach. I'm going to give you some suggestions, and I've also created two meditation tracks that you can use to structure, but you're going to see yourself as an kind of like a scientist experimenting with your own inductions. What's important to know is you can think of that entry into sleep as almost like a hypnotic state. Well, I think some, some of us will notice, but like for some who are maybe a little newer to dreaming, I want you to think about when you're falling asleep. Sometimes you will be just on that cusp of being awake, starting to drop into sleep, and you'll start to notice all kinds of images coming up, right? You'll see like maybe faces or patterns or pictures, and you're kind of in the semi dreamy liminal space. We call that the hypnagogic, and that space when your brain literally goes into a state that's really similar to hypnosis. And so these kind of entry points, the hypnagogic into sleep, the hypnopompic out of sleep. These are incredibly powerful, fertile mental states that we can plant these seeds in. So if you plant an induction intention like tonight, I choose to remember my dreams. Tonight. I get lucid in my dreams. Planting a really strong intention into that space, can have wonders for what happens in your night of dreaming. And so whatever you end up working with, it's understanding that you're working with that kind of beautiful liminal entry point. So when you're doing an induction statement, you're going to be in bed, you're ideally going to be relaxed, and then you're going to do repetitions. But some of you, I think, you like to do mantras. If you're someone who uses, like, seed syllable mantras, that's awesome, but I would encourage you to, like, use those to settle the mind and then use, like, a really strong intention statement. Now, what intention statement Do you want to use? It just depends where you are in your practice. So if you're someone who's working on really activating your dream recall, let's say you only remember dreams a few times a week. If you're not remembering like, let's say three to four dreams most nights. I would really advise working with dream recall first. So this is really sitting in attention tonight. I choose to remember my dreams. Tonight, I choose to remember my dreams. And you're going to say that 15 times tonight, I choose to remember my dreams, and this is something you want to kind of saturate your body with a strong intention planted as you go into sleep. If you're someone who has great dream recall, and you want to really be activating your lucidity, you can use an induction statement that feels like lucidity activation. The one that I personally use, and I love this one is I know that I'm dreaming as I am dreaming. I know that I'm dreaming as I am dreaming. But you could use something like tonight I get lucid, or I recognize the dream as a dream again, thinking of language that is going to be personally activating to you, where you feel that sense of like I'm going to get lucid, all of the stuff requires again, back to the heart, more of a felt sense than just like an empty mental repetition. If I lie in bed and I'm like, tonight, I choose to remember my dreams tonight. I choose to remember my dreams tonight. I choose to remember my dreams. But I'm kind of like thinking of my dinner or what I'm meant to do tomorrow, it's not going to have the same effect. So with all of these, we treat them as like for what they are, which is like strong, intentional suggestions. So that's the in the inducing statement. And so you guys know, I'm going to give you a chance today to choose and map this all out for yourself. So we'll, we'll have a practical piece to this. I just want to make sure you all understand and have context for that. And so then when it comes to the the other side, the other book end, you've planted the strong attention, you've gone into your sleep, you've had all these beautiful dreams, and now you're coming out, you're waking up. And the idea is here we want to be excellent dream catchers, and the way we use dream journaling, I'm going to teach it very much in the context of lucidity. So really about using dream journaling to get lucid, there's a whole world of dream journaling for non lucid dreams. But in the interests of focusing on our teaching point here, we're going to go lucidity. So here, when you're catching dreams, we're going to use a dream journal for two things. We're going to use it to make sure that our RAs, our reticular activating system, is paying attention, tracking, finding and reporting dreams. And the second thing is, we're going to use our dream journals to help identify any patterns with dream signs, with Dream tones. It's going to help us to use that to leverage into lucidity. Now, if you don't have a dream journal, actually, I'm curious, does anyone in here not have a dream journal yet, someone who's just starting, and there's nothing wrong with that, I just want to know if there's anyone out here who is like, what am I doing? Or are you guys all completely set with your dream journals, you can let me know in the chat. Okay? Catherine, excellent. Okay, good. Got some new people. Brilliant. Okay, so when it comes to a dream journal, the key here is just having something that you can write in first thing in the morning. So my advice here is, like the practice that we use, which I think is for me, has been the most effective is to imagine, like, you waking up, and the very, very first thing you're going to do is stay still, like, do not move when you move often. We like, lose the dream. And so if you can just stay still for like, 10 breaths and ask yourself, where, where was I? What Was I feeling? Who was I with doing what we're talking about, turning the gaze back inward right, turning it back towards the dream state, and just give yourself some time to marinate. And even if you woke up at first, you don't remember anything. If you give yourself some time and you inquire, you'll usually catch the thread of something. And so spend some time catching the threads of your dream and kind of like, marinate in them, like let them become a little bit stronger, a little bit stronger, a little bit stronger. And then when you have a stronger sense or feeling of the dreams you've been having, then you're going to roll over and you're going to grab your dream journal. For some of you, it's going to be a notebook. I mean, I tried writing, but my handwriting is is is disturbing. And so I use, I'll show you what I use here. I simply just use an apple note. This is it. See if I can show you.
Yeah, it's just simple like this. And I record all my dreams there. And this is for me that the key here is something you're actually going to have close to you. First thing in the morning, I used to use beautiful journals, but then I found, you know, like I couldn't find where it was. My pen didn't work. I could read my handwriting. Some of you, that's the most tangible way. So experiment, you can use the apple notes. You can use these lucid dreaming apps that do it. You might want to play with what works for you. The key is to have it somewhere, set up right next to your bed. You want to know exactly where it is. You want to know exactly what you're going to use. So when you have that moment in the morning, you're not trying to, like, sort of faff around with that. Now, for those of you who use voice recording, you can for sure, I would add as a caveat to that, anyone who's had the the joy of false awakenings, or, as we were discussing nested awakenings, we're figuring out language for it. One of the tricks with voice notes, I've had this happen where I think I've woken up from a dream, I grab my phone and I'm I give this beautiful voice note explaining the dream I just had, especially a lucid dream. And then, of course, I wake up in real life and I realize there is no voice note, and I've completely forgotten. So it's easy to have a false awakening and record a dream because there's no text involved. It's very difficult to write things in a dream, so it's, it's very unlikely you'll ever make the mistake of writing your dream journal in a dream, so that's just a consideration. But if that's not a problem for you. Then, you know, go ahead. Yeah. I know, even with journaling, it can be a thing. It's Yeah, it's true. Now, the trick with the dream journaling in terms of, again, activating lucidity. So for those who don't have super strong dream recall yet, I'd like you to consider something, if you think about why we don't remember our dreams, I often think about the cultural myths and narratives that we were immersed in around dreaming. I think, like most of us, certainly I know anyone kind of coming from a traditional Christian Western culture, dreams were not emphasized much. And in fact, dreams were kind of considered silly or trivial or not important. And thinking about when you were a child, you know, what were the things you heard about dreams if you woke up from a nightmare where your parents, like, don't worry about it, it's not real. And we're so dismissive. And I'm really grateful that my mother, who's actually doing this course, she's attending these calls, which is, what a gift, right? Like, what a gift to have family learning together. But my mother was always, I think, the most actively interested in my dreams. She's an incredible artist, so she was always painting things that she saw in her dreams, or asking me or just listening to my dreams. And so for me, I think I had a little bit of a seed of like, oh, dreams are magical. Dreams are interesting. But for a lot of us, we didn't have that cultivated. And so over time, our brain was just like, not important. And you think about all the stuff our brains have to deal with, that little part of our brain, the reticular activating system, which is responsible for literally filtering in and filtering out what it thinks you think is important, just filters them out. And, you know, that's the same part of your brain, it's the classic red car. Example. You want to start buying a red car. You start looking at red cars. Suddenly, everywhere you go, you see the same red car. It's because that's filtering it in, because it's like, Ah, it's important to you, right? Okay, cool. Look, look, look. We want to leverage that to tell it your dreams are important. And one of the ways we tell your brain Your dreams are important is by writing your dream journal every single day. If you wake up and the first thing you do is, what was I dreaming? Where was I? Come on brain, where was I? And then you take something and you write it down, even if you simply write today, I have no recall, but I know that I dreamed. And if you do that every single morning for seven mornings, your brain is going to go, Oh, these dream things are important. I've got to start mapping for them. So having a think about that. So that's one of the first ways we use a dream journal, and that's why consistency is key. I'm going to ask you guys to make a seven out of seven commitment for this week, which means seven out of seven you actually write something in your dream journal, even if it's just an acknowledgement that you couldn't remember the dreams. So seven out seven for that consistency to retrain the brain. Now the second way we use dream journals to get lucid is by mapping the dream signs and dropping mapping the dream tones. We'll talk about this more next week when we talk about doing state checks and illusion reform. But what can be really helpful this week is when you're writing your notes about your dreams, just notice, are there any common places, any common scenarios, any common dramas, any common people. But most importantly, is there any common emotional tone, for instance, do you notice that your dreams have situations with a bit of anxiety or problem solving or partying or adventure or sadness, and just noticing, you know, dream signs of like external things, but but also paying attention to the emotional quality of your dreams. And if you can make a little note next to each dream, around what was the tone, you can go back and start to see the patterns. And that's gonna be really, really helpful when we start leveraging our state checks and using that to get lucid. So those are our two bookends. We have our pre Sleep Induction, something that you're gonna plant the seed. And then your practice of turning your mind back towards your dreams and capturing them and then writing them out, so really making sure that your brain understands this is important we want to engage with our dream space. Now, Dream tagging is super fun. This is one I love. I started doing this because, you know, you can have lucid dreams, and even if they're amazing, sometimes I would have a lucid dream, let's say, three in the morning, and then I would go back to sleep. I'd have so many more dreams that by the morning time I'd lost the detail, or I'd lost some of the memory of that initial dream. And so I was like, ah, when you start dreaming a lot, you can lose dreams. And so. And I'm not very good at getting up to the middle of night and writing my dreams down. I find that really challenging. If you have a red pen. Oh, super cool. The red pen there was like a was it? Joe, you sent it in the chat. I think it was like a pen with a red light on it. So if you wake up in the middle of night, you can, you can write without disrupting putting blue light in your eyes. But for a lot of us, we don't like to get up at three in the morning and write. So I'm gonna teach you this dream tagging technique, which you can use any point. And it goes like this, let's say you have an amazing dream, any kind of dream, and you wake up to go to the bathroom, and you wake up out of the stream, and you're like, Wow, that was an amazing dream. What I want you to do is same thing, stay still. So lie in the bed for five or 10 seconds and really feel the dream. Remember all the details, remember what it felt like, like marinating in the dream, even if it's a scary dream, but it's important, and you want to remember just letting yourself stay with it for a little bit longer. Then you're going to create a tag which is one word which captures the essence. So let's say you were in a beautiful palace in Vienna, having this incredible conversation with some kind of, you know, enlightened entity. I don't know. You might go, ah, Palace, Palace, palace. And once you've got a word that captures it, you're going to stay with the feeling of the dream and just repeat the word, Palace, Palace, palace. So you're tagging that word with the dream. Almost imagine that you're taking that whole dream and you're packing it into the word so that that word carries the whole dream. Now that's that's good on its own, but what can be more helpful is then to take another word, which is a trigger word, so something that you see first thing in the morning, something that you do first thing in the morning. I'll often choose a name of one of my cats. So I'll choose like Yoda or Bodhi or Morpheus, and I'll tag the dream to the name of my cat. So I'll go Palace, Morpheus Palace, Morpheus Palace, Morpheus Palace, Morpheus. Palace Morpheus. And then once I know I've got it, Palace Morpheus, I can release it. Then what happens is, I get up in the morning, and the first thing I also ask myself, Okay, were there any tags last night? Ah, yes, palace. And if I don't remember, what happens, of course, I get up Morpheus starts meowing. And I'm like, Morpheus, Morpheus, palace, and then as they have that word, the whole dream unpacks. And so sometimes I can remember three or four extra dreams at night by using this tagging method, especially dreams that you would have normally forgotten because they're midway through. So that's another way for kind of, like, increasing your dream recall, especially in that kind of, like, middle intermediate tree bit. It's it's a it's really cool. It's really rewarding too, because it's that beautiful feeling of having gained something extra.
So those are the kind of like technical aspects to connecting to your dream state. But there's, there's another really important piece to this, which is, as Andrew said, this is a relationship. And so considering the playful, relational, curious, kind of more open minded approach to how we might strengthen our relationship with our dream state. And this comes down to things like thinking about what, what is that I could do that would communicate to my unconscious, dreaming mind that I'm really interested, that I'm really here, that I'm I'm really wanting to have more dreams. Understand my dreams. Have lucid dreams. And there's different ways to do this, depending, you know, on your style and your temperament. But you know, for some people, it's making art, like if you paint your dreams, or sing your dreams, or kind of make devotional creative acts. That's a beautiful way of showing your unconscious mind how much this matters to you. Whenever I have, like a life changing lucid dream, I always make a painting to memorialize it and in gratitude, you know, in a kind of, like a devotional like thank you. And I find the more I do those practices, the more I get. It could be as simple as well as just sort of saying, Well, I'm gonna do more research. I'm going to before bed, instead of just kind of watching Netflix, I'm going to listen to one of Andrew's amazing interviews for 15 minutes. I'm going to learn and research. And again, you're putting into your mind, like, I'm interested, I'm learning, I'm curious. So that could be a way to do it. You could also just connect it to a meditation practice. If you do any kinds of gratitude practices, or anything like that, start giving thanks for your dreams. Start asking questions of your unconscious. The relationship to your dream state can happen outside of your dream state. For any experienced lucid dreamer. I mean, I think one of the things we that blows me away about this practice is you learn very quickly that your dreaming mind knows so much more about you than you do as a conscious mind. I can go into my dreaming mind and some of my lucid dreams, I can ask it to play a song, and it will replicate that song perfectly, like it's just stored it. I can ask about experiences in my childhood, it can recall them perfectly. And so just realizing that this dreaming mind is with us all the time, and so you can talk to it, communicate to it outside of the dream space too, and that's one of the ways you can strengthen the relationship. So different ways to do it, but playful or curiosity, that's kind of the trick with this. So we are going to, I mean, if you guys, I think, like five minutes here to to make your decisions around this. So if you can grab a pen and paper, or you're welcome to do it on your computer or your sheet. I emailed out the worksheet, so if you have that, you can work directly on that. I'm also going to upload it here in the chat, in case you want to work on a Microsoft Word document one moment. It's called week two worksheet. And this is just, it's just a basic structure so that you can fill out your own dreaming and sleeping plan. As we go through these points, it's a lot of information, and it's no use unless you're able to synthesize it into something you can take action on. So these moments are designed to give you that opportunity. All right, so the first part we're going to work on is, let me bring it up here. Okay, cool. And if you don't have the worksheet, that's fine, too. You can just work off the screen. It's really simple. The first section is on your dream journal. And what are you going to use? Notebook, Apple, not dream app. If you have something already great, just fill these out. If you're new, choose your first best guess. Where are you going to put it? I know this sounds so stupid, but the amount of times I've woken up and I had this beautiful dream journal with a pen, but I put it like on the other side of the room, and so I didn't do my dream journal. So thinking, where is it going to be accessible easy, so you roll over and grab it, and then I would love for you guys to make a commitment of seven out of seven. If that's not realistic, because you have something you know is going to be incredibly difficult, then make your realistic commitment. How many days out of this week do you commit to writing something in your dream journal? Again, even if you remember nothing simply writing. I didn't recall any dreams last night, but I know I had dreams, building that habit, training your brain, and then choosing your pre Sleep Induction. So the what is, are you working on dream recall tonight? I remember my dreams or lucidity. I know that I'm dreaming as I'm dreaming. And remember, you can put this in your own language, but writing it out. So again, you're really clear what you're going to use as your induction statement. And again, a commitment. It's the book end, right? There's so much more powerful if they're together, entering sleep and capturing sleep and so committing to as many nights as you can. And then lastly, is three connecting to your dream state. Is there one other way that you can commit this week to connecting with your dream state, whether that's including it in your meditation, that's making some art, if that's watching a documentary on lucid dreaming, just another way to bring it into your life. And so I'm going to give you guys sort of, let's say four minutes, just to kind of go through that and and write your answers down. This is the first part of your your dreaming and sleeping plan. Do
see if I can put some music on for you guys at same time. Let's try this again. Can you hear the music as well as see The screen? I
Hey, just one More minute on that. And again, don't worry, we'll send all of these out. So whatever you don't get to finish in The session, you can always complete afterwards. You
music,
Beautiful, so we are going to do a quick Q A about this section. So before we move on to how to understand optimize sleep, I'd love to open I think we, we probably have time for like, maybe three to five questions. I'd love to set a little frame for how we do questions. I wish we had longer together. It's it's a it's a tough thing squeezing this much content into six weeks, but I want to make sure you guys have everything you need. The compromise of that is that our sessions together are, unfortunately not as spacious as I would do if I was in a smaller group or one to one clients. So for questions, what could be really helpful is I'd like to invite questions that are about the topics we just taught, and that way the whole group can benefit from those questions and when you ask them, just to be mindful that if there is some context you need to share, that's fine. But instead of launching into maybe a whole story about a dream, to try to get to the question as quickly as possible, so that other participants can also ask questions. I can talk about this forever, because I'm such a nerd for it, and I have to be mindful. So try and think of the parameters. But if there are, you know, take maybe three or five questions about this, which is, you know, how to connect with your dream space, dream recall, Dream journaling, inductions, tagging anything that we just covered, starting with Gerard, hi, hi, hello,
you can hear Hello,
yes, I can hear you. Okay, so
lovely. Course, so far, I'm enjoying it a lot. I would like to go straight to you're talking about hypnagogia. When I started, it's I started my lucid dreaming practice about eight, nine years ago, and when I was looking at this, I could, I could really see lots of that shades and little clicks of colors and images and half images coming in front of me before I'd pop off to sleep. But it has really in that time, it has faded, and I almost never see it, at least when I'm going to sleep, early in the evening, sometimes in the middle of the night, if I wake up and I don't have to go to the loo and like then I can get a real blast of a movie in front of me, you know, so, so I just wondering, is there a way to encourage that again, you know, because a lot of you can use it quite a bit to pop into a dream if you have a strong version of it, yes, absolutely. It's not that. It's not that I fall asleep instantly. I can be lying awake nice and easy for a while, you know? So I'd be sort of hoping for them to come along. Anyway, that's my question.
Beautiful. Okay, gorgeous. Okay. I mean, you know, it's interesting. The hypnagogia, hypnagogia hypnagogia, it's such a beautiful, interesting space. It can it can be one of those, like the liminal dreaming practices can be just as powerful and interesting sometimes as the lucid dreaming practices. So understanding that, I think with this, the trick it's like with all of the entry into sleep practices is mindfulness. And so I don't show if you've meditation practice, but the more you can cultivate, whether it's through yoga, Nidra, or through, you know, basic mindfulness, scanning meditations, stuff you can practice during the day to just cultivate again that mindset when you're going into sleep. Because there is a point you probably you're probably kind of like in that kind of wakefulness, wakefulness, wakefulness, even light sleep, which is not as fun as hypnagogic, and then you're dropping right into deep sleep. And so just again, maybe just learning some practices to to tap more mindfully into the window that's there. And then, usually, if we can catch the window, we can extend it through observation. So as the hypnagogic imagery comes up, if we're present to it, we can make it grow by appreciating it with our attention. But sometimes we just miss the window. So and also, also going to speak to when we get into the sleep stuff around some of the ways we can support the sort of physiological aspects of sleep. So especially as we older, the chemistry of our sleep changes, and we often have less REM periods and the quality changes. So we can also talk about things you can do that might be able to increase the the vividness of both your REM sleep and the liminal sleep. Amazing. Okay, so of course, Jane, let me just add you here. Hi. Jane, can you hear me? Oh yes.
Can you hear me? I didn't know whether me or whether I did it. Sorry, a little bit of both. Yeah, okay, I've been interested in dreams all my life. I'm in my early 80s now. But what my question is about, how to record your dreams. I was involved with a therapist who loved dreams. That's one reason why I chose her. And so I, rather than turning the light on to write, you know, in a journal, I would just have this small they're obsolete now, digital recorders to to, you know, to kind of bypass the interference of light and and and generating the mind activity and so forth, and just trying to be as immediate as possible. And I knew where to press the button and all that. So I, but I didn't, I didn't get, you had a drawback to that method, and I didn't catch what it was. And anyway,
and it's a sure. And so this is, this is an audio recorder, right? Like, just press the button. It's catching it, yeah, yeah. So I think, like this. So the drawback to this is not for, like, it's not for everybody. So you can tell me, like, oh, maybe this has happened. Maybe it's not. But because with voice it can be easy to record a voice note while you're actually in a dream. So let's say you have an amazing dream, and you think you've woken up, like, I've just woken up out of this amazing dream. You grab the voice note and you're like, telling the voice note all about the dream, and you put it down, you go back to sleep, you wake up and you realize that it was a dream, that you were recording it, and you never actually recorded it. So because it's easy to use your voice in a dream, we can have these false awakenings and lose the dreams. Because when you're when you're dreaming, you're the left side of your brain is kind of going to sleep, which is a side that processes text and digits and complicated patterns, it's more difficult for the brain to write letters, so it's harder to fake doing a written journal entry. So the only drawback is, if is, if you have these false awakenings, sometimes you can be dreaming that you're recording it. But for a lot of people and you, and you might be the same, where you're like, oh, that's might not be something you struggle with, in which case, using the voice recorder is great.
Yeah, I found that to be more effective, because otherwise you turning the light on and getting a pen and a paper, it just, it's more work, and so it's less immediate. It's it's less for
sure, and it can keep you up for another night's sleep. Okay,
yeah, okay, thank you for that feeling,
of course. Thank you. Thank you. All right, and sorry I did the wrong one. Hang on, Mari, sorry, Adrian, actually, I did accidentally press your button. You're next, Mari. Is it Mari? Mari? Mari, Mari, hi,
hi. Just thank you very much again for doing this. I appreciate it. My question is, it's more about sleep hygiene. I don't know if you're going to talk about it a little bit more, but what are some of the things that one can do? Yes, being present. I understood that, that being present throughout the day, we talked about it, but more like a physical things, that there's something that we can do, we're gonna, we're
gonna rock and roll into that in the second half of this, we're gonna go through physical and emotion. Yeah, I got you, yeah, I'm,
I'm really addicted, addicted to coffee. Is that? Say,
tell me, is there a specific question around that, if you ask it for me now, I'll make sure I answer it when we okay,
just substances like coffee, is there going to be an issue with lucidity, just because it's a stimulus? And just Yes, more, like physical things of during the day, what to do, and like, before the night, because there, I like to do certain things. I try not to watch TV, but I'm trying to read something, is that something that's going to interfere like, I'd like to read something like Mr. Null, yeah.
I will, I will. I will put a pin in there, and I'll make sure we cover that. Thank you so much, of course.
And
Adrien, there we go.
Hi, how are you? You hear me? Good. Yes, I
can hear you. I have
a question about the journaling and just the amount of detail, because sometimes I have a long, vivid dream, and I get up and I start to write, and I'm like, I want to write, like the scene and what happened and like and then this happened, this happened, and it looked like this, and there were clouds and all that kind of stuff. And it's like you can spend half an hour describing a five minute dream. So my question to the point is, what's important to capture in the dream journaling, and what is, what do you use a journal for? Do you review it and do you review recent dreams? Or do you just, I find it hilarious to go back sometimes a year.
That's an excellent question.
Yeah, just browse dreams. Because some of them you're like, Oh yeah, that was just that, right?
Absolutely great question. I mean, this is I mean, as your dreams become richer, as you have more dreams, you might find yourself going, Wow, Dream journaling has taken up a lot of my time. And so the question you have to ask yourself is, why are you dream journaling? Because remember, there is a whole world of dream work where people examine their non lucid dreams, and you know, working with the symbology and their what do the dreams mean as a mirror of their psyche, which is all interesting, valid work. For lucid dreaming, it's super clear. So for lucid dreaming, I don't spend a lot of time describing my non lucid dreams, only my lucid dreams. And so for not for my non lucid dreams, I'm looking at, most importantly, the dream tone, what was the emotional tone of the dream, and then for circumstances, so places, peoples and kind of, if you imagine a movie plot, plot points, right? And so for me, it's really like hitting, even if it was quite a complex dream, I'll tend to only write like a paragraph. Because for me, when I'm using this as for lucidity, which means that I'm writing something down to tell my brain dreams are important. Dreams are important, and I'm writing down enough that I can track the patterns. What are the patterns of my mind? So that when we start to do state checks, I'm going to marry the two. I'm going to marry my patterns with my state checks. So that as I'm doing state checks during the day, they're much more likely to be used at night, because I know the patterns of what I'm dreaming. And so when
you're trying to, you're trying to mine dream signs,
yes, okay, okay,
because, yeah, because I have a
lot of which the tone, yeah, which the tone is actually the most helpful one? Yeah, right,
okay. Because, because I have a lot of vivid, non lucid dreams. But I, you know, if I recognize what's happening there, then that's kind of, if I mine out what's happening there, right? Then you can recognize when you're not, stayed a little bit better and
listen. Like, again, this is all personal preference. Like, on the weekends, for instance, I take more time because I love my dreams. Even my non lucid dreams can be so helpful, so interesting. But during the weekday, I'm I don't have that much time, so I'm more to the point, yeah, thank you, beautiful. I can take only I'm going to take one more question because I know I have to move on. So sorry the rest. I again. I wish I had time to luxuriate in this, but we will have another opportunity for question answer at the end. So if you want to have your question answered, you can leave your hand up. But Joel, you will be my last for Jon. Jon, for this moment. Jon, hi. Jon, hi.
So I was struck when you said how you create painting, sometimes out of your dreams, and that that creating something from your dreams is a way of connecting to them and feeling important. And my primary form of creativity was, maybe still is, was music. So I played a lot of music in my 20s, but I have, like now, like a complicated relationship with music, like I don't I have a deaf brother. I just lets you know, life takes over, you know, and I'm I still do creative things. I draw. I'm a therapist, which is creative work in a way, but I'm one. I did have like, two very brief memories of dreams this week, of like, some music happening. And I guess I'm wondering, like, is should I be working on the block I might be having in my waking life towards music and creativity, like, even, like I would describe when I play music, it feels like I'm dreaming as I'm doing it. And so I'm, like, a little worried that if I'm not engaging in music, I'm kind of unconsciously telling myself, Oh, my dreams aren't important or, you know, and so I don't know, I I just maybe this is too personal a question. No,
no, no, I think no. This is one of the things I love about lucid dreaming. We're all of us are. We're all being willing to look very closely at the unique construction of our own psyches in all their glory and all their goriness as well, right? And as I hear you talk, I think what's interesting is I'm like, I feel you have your answer like, I feel like we all know our answers to our questions, right? Like we have the but I think what we're what might be useful as we talk about this approach of curiosity and play. I mean, I know for myself as well, having experienced many creative blocks, perhaps this is a beautiful entry point in because there is a relationship, especially if you're unconscious in your dreams, you're playing music. Maybe, if there was a low stakes way, like, I'm not making important music to play to put on Spotify, or to, like, personal, like, am I, if I, am I playing music that I'm creating music, or even just, like, what do you play? Or what do you do? You sing, what's your what's your media? Sing, yes, like, what if it's like, before you go to bed at night, you get the guitar out and you just play, even if it's just the most basic chords, and just hum to yourself and then go to sleep like these. These things can be so gentle. They don't have to be. I composed a symphony, a dedication of myself. Like my paintings are not great. I paint. They're not great. They're my paintings for me and for my dream. And so start like small. Start, like gentle. Start, playful. Start, like, Sing a sing a little song to your little sing a little bedtime song for yourself, right? And just play with it. And then, and then, just see, because I think we're as we start to work with, for instance, we're gonna create construction of dream plans. What you might do with your dream mission, your dream plan might be to summon the block of music, and so that, your goal would be that as you're working with your dream space, you're going to work with whatever is challenging you in that area and integrate that in the dream space. But part of your daytime practice might be this, like, gentle, playful picking up of the guitar every day.
I like that. I'm going to try that. Yeah, so much beautiful.
And if you and if any song has come out of you, you can always send them to us. I think music is magical. When people play me, I below I have no I have no music bone in my body. So when someone like just strums something and sings it to me, it's it might as well be magic. Yeah, beautiful. Thank you so much. Jon. All right, so we'll return to questions at the end, but I want to make sure we get into our sleep optimization and our sleep hygiene, because, you know, the bookends and the dream tagging and the dream recall, in some ways, is the behavioral, psychological components of this, like, how do we use our minds and use our habits and how we behave to increase and strengthen our dream relationship, but we are also in fleshy human meat suits, you know, and sleep is a biological neurological process, and so having a basic understanding of our sleep cycles, but also some of the kind of possibilities in terms of what we should listen and then also things that we can use to boost both our rem and our sleep can be really useful. I will caveat all of this with saying, again, each of us is different psychologically, physically. We have different needs. We have different challenges. I'm going to share the high level of what is important, but you're going to need to be discerning in how you apply it for yourself. And again, seeing this like a bit of a lab, you might want to try something, see if it works, adjust it, and just be curious in your approach with this and and personalize it for yourself. You are your your own scientific journey. So I'd love to just start by giving us a high level of how our sleep cycles work. When you understand the sleep cycles, you are so much more sort of empowered to make decisions about the kinds of practices you want to use when you do lucid dreaming, and to understand how they all fit. So I'm going to bring up a very boring looking graph. But I love this too, and I know some of you will be familiar with this, so let this just be a strengthening of what you know. And for those who you are looking at this, going, what on earth? Do not worry. We're going to walk through it. But basically, the high level with our sleep is that this idea that you go to sleep and you simply sleep for eight hours is just not how it works. We sleep in cycles, and we go through different phases of sleep during this time. And so for our purposes, the key things we want to know are, obviously, there's wakefulness, then when we enter into sleep, we go through what we call the hypnagogic, which are very crudely drawn in here because they never include it in these graphs. You go through the hypnagogic, which is that kind of liminal space with the imagery popping up. Then you have light sleep, you have deep sleep. Those are considered the non REM sleep. So REM rapid eye movement. REM sleep is where we have most of our dreams. And light sleep and deep sleep have different functions, and you can think of each of these stages of sleep really serve a purpose to keeping us healthy and keeping us psychologically well, and we need the right balance of these different sleeps in order to feel great Of which room is a part. So each cycle is about 90 minutes, so one and a half hours. So when we from when you go to sleep to when you kind of come back up, it's 90 minutes going back down again, like you see here, it's about 90 minutes. And so this here maps out like roughly what maybe an eight hour cycle might look like. Now, what's really important to notice is that not every cycle is identical. You don't just like go to sleep kind of a kind of, you'll see here that where we spend our time changes over the night. So the first half of the night, the first three cycles, the first 4.5, hours, you'll sleep. You'll see this is where we get our deep sleep. And deep sleep is about physical restoration. This is where you know, if you wake up out of deep sleep, you're like, you're completely out of it, and you feel super heavy, and it's because you've been like, in a very, very, very deep state, very slow wave sleep, where your body has been restoring your the sort of fluids been pumping through your brain to clean it all out. So this is really important for physical rest. And what tends to happen is you'll get most of your deep sleep in the first half of the night, and then you'll start to see that you start to have REM cycles. So you should usually have like, some REM going on, like, after a couple hours. But then towards the morning time, your REM cycles, your dreaming, gets longer and longer and longer, and you stop going so deep you kind of start going more like, Rem, light sleep. Rem, waking. Rem lights it like, and this is where you kind of like, you know, the feeling where you're like, kind of starting to dip in and out of dreams. As you go towards the morning, we're kind of lightening up. And so knowing this and understanding that, okay, that first half a night is really for body rest. When we do any kinds of lucid dreaming practices like wake back to bed, we don't mess with that. A good rule is just leave that alone. Let your body get its rest, and we do the sleep optimization, like helping your body really rest is going to help your rim cycles be really strong. So when we're working with our dreams, what we really want to do is start working in the part of the night where you're having longer REM cycles. And so when you're having these kind of like wake up periods towards the morning, you're likely to go straight from waking into a dream. Just super cool, if you see the beginning here, right at the beginning of the night, you go from Wake and you drop all the way down to deep sleep pretty quick. You skip RAM just or a book. So the chances of at the beginning of the night going right into a dream are pretty low. But after like four or five hours, you can kind of be dream surfing. And so this is where, if you are doing kind of like midway induction points, like, let's say you go to the bathroom and it's like, oh gosh, it's like, four in the morning. I've been up for I've been sleeping for five or six hours. As you go back to sleep, you might want to do your induction statement again, because chances are, as you get back into bed, you're going to drop right back into a dream. And this is where we start to work more skillfully so and then as you come out on the side here, just like you went in with the hypnagogic, you can kind of come out with the hypnopompic. And the really beautiful thing about this state is that if you're really gentle, so you're not jumping out of bed, you're like lying there in that liminal space, is you can learn how to back up, back into a dream. And so like with the hypnagogic, you can kind of go into a dream. The hypnopompic, you can kind of go back into a dream. And so these are the skills we can learn as we become more experienced, which allow us to kind of keep accessing dreams and often staying conscious through that process. So you're now having lots of lucid dreams. It's a really, really fun process.
So that's kind of a high level in terms of the actual cycles themselves. But then the question is like, Well, how do we have these healthy cycles? Because, again, not all of us have perfect sleep. I'm curious. Does anyone have either an aura ring or an Apple watch or anything that tracks their sleep? I know there's so many of these now. Anyone do sleep tracking? I had I had it for a while, but I had to get rid of it. I didn't like waking up every morning being told like, this is what you did. I'm like, You don't know me, but it can be really useful if you're if you don't know your own sleep cycles, if you're like, Ah, I don't feel like I sleep well, but I don't know why. It can be useful to do some sleep tracking for a while and just see, like, ah, like, Where, where are you struggling? Because then you'll know how to address it a little bit more skillfully. But just in general, like when we talk about sleep hygiene, there are, of course, really strong physical elements to this. And you know, the key things you'll be looking at here are timing. So do you have a good, consistent, rhythmic cycle? You know, we live in the age of artificial light, and so we no longer kind of live in the circadian rhythms we did. And because of that, we have to be grown ups and set our own bedtime, which can be challenging. And you know, whether you go to bed late and wake up late, it's more about the consistency of your rhythm, and, of course, the length. Now that you know that rem and dreaming happens mostly at the end. If you only sleep for six hours, you don't have a lot of dreaming time, right? You're going to get that good, deep rest up front, but then you're only going to have one or one and a half cycles, which emphasize dreaming. And so one of the best ways to help you have more dreams, to help you have more lucid dreams, is to go to bed earlier and to make sure that you have a longer period where you're sleeping in in the morning. So timing, but then things like light and sound. I mean, I sleep with earplugs and eye mask. I'm just, I like to be in total solitary confinement, but just check if you're waking up during the night. Experiment go. Could I be open to doing that? I know there's an adjustment process with it, but the quality of your sleep is so much better. So even just like having light, kind of like little lights on the room, your skin picks up the light, you know, you watch as a great podcast, and you Huberman doing this, even just like the senses of your skin, picking up the light changes the quality of your sleep. So being aware of that also the coolness of your room, right? Hot room, cold room. We tend to sleep better in colder temperatures. Electronics. I mean, this is, I love what Andrew says about how the the age of artificial light created like a dark ages, because we're so focused on Lux screens and on the external world. And I think our devices are tricky. I mean, I find it. It's one of the hardest things for me is to be disciplined about turning off my computer and turning off my phone. I mean, the recommendation is something like two hours before bedtime. But even if you can do an hour or half an hour and just make a commitment to not having your eyes be flooded with blue light, which is suppressing melatonin, which suppresses your ability to go to sleep, creating some parameters around that food. I mean, who's like, done the thing where you over ate massively, went to sleep and then just had the worst night's sleep, had the worst nightmares. So thinking about, you know, the timing of food, having maybe an earlier dinner, going for a walk, creating so there's not such a digestive load on your system. You sleep better as well. And then actually had a great email from Mitch, who's a participant who very kindly shared his story around, like marijuana, you know. Now there's, you know, marijuana, especially medical marijuana. It's legal throughout the states and through a lot of states. And this, you know, for Mitch, he had a very challenging health situation, which led him to have to use it to sleep at all, you know. And for a lot of people, they're being prescribed this to be able to get some kind of sleep, some kind of relief. And it does work for that. The problem is, of course, it's, it's a, it's a REM suppressant. So for Mitch, he started to use this for sleep on recommendation and prescription. And of course, he slept, but he had no dreams for years, and then when he came off it, all of his dreams returned. So just being mindful of like, what do you use as a sleeping aid? Some of the things we use for sleeping aids, sleeping pills, marijuana, these suppress our dreams. Alcohol suppresses REM, you know, messes with our sleep terribly. So if you ask someone who likes to have a glass of wine, like on the earlier side of the night, if you, if you do, and I really encourage you when you're doing your dream work, if you're like, oh, tonight, I'm going to really focus on my dreaming. Take nothing, no drinking, no substances, you know, except for what we can talk about next and then stress. We'll talk about how to manage this too, but often we just, we get into bed and we're just like, a little stressful from the week, and we're lying there going, why can't I fall asleep? Why can't I fall asleep? Or we wake up in the middle of the night, and our brains like, here are 16 things that you haven't thought about for tomorrow, and these are very normal, predictable things that we have to deal with, but just having the tools and building systems and to manage stress. And the last one I just call zonking, which is more psychological, but for so many of us, we are. You know, we have, we have busy lives and responsibilities. Sometimes being a conscious human being in this world feels exhausting, and it can be so seductive at the end of a night, like I just, I just want to be unconscious. I don't want to do my dream work. I don't want to do my induction work. And we just, we just want to zonk out. And while, of course, I mean every now and then we're all going to do that, to take care of ourselves, we must be diligent. We must make the moment matter. We must become awake to the moment and make it so that 80% of the time, even if we're tempted to zonk out, and we're we're really prepared to enter more intentionally, which is more of a habit. So those are the kinds of things you want to manage in terms of stuff, yeah, melatonin, you know, look, I it's, yeah, melatonin is a funny one. Yes, if you take melatonin, you will go and have these sort of, like deeper sleeps. It's a hormone, and one of the things I used to take it a lot, and I had to say, when I did my research on it, personally, just its potential impact on other hormone imbalances is a little tricky. There are other things you can take which are more like precursors for things that can naturally stimulate versus like just shoving the melatonin in, or, for instance, building pre bedtime rituals that allow for your natural melatonin to come online. In the end, I gave up melatonin, but I mean again, figure out what works for you, but just be mindful that it is, it is actually a hormone. So it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't, doesn't interfere with lucidity. It doesn't. It's more just like a long term General, General question mark, and then the in terms of things that can help. So we live in this really cool time now where obviously so much is available to us in terms of understanding how our brains and how our bodies work. And I'm going to break these up into kind of like, let's say, natural things that focus on more, like GABA enhances, which is around just allowing you to have, like, good proper sleep. And when you do that, you tend to have better rem and then working with things that focus more on dreams, again, with anything that I share here, do your own research. If you are taking any kinds of medications or anything like that, you always need to be really mindful if you have interactions. So please don't take anything I say tonight as a blind recommendation. See it more as just a possibility for exploration, but starting kind of with the more safer general stuff, things like, you know, chamomile tea or peppermint tea, Valerian Root, ashwagandha, passion flower, all of these things sort of support the gabber in your mind, brain, and they they're gabber enhancers. And this, this just allows you to have a deeper sleep. This tends to focus more on your actual deep rest, but if you have really great deep rest, you'll tend to have better room. So even though they're not so much, they're not REM targeting, they're still really great. And if you're someone who doesn't have a really good night's sleep. Starting with something gentle like that is a great way to do it, especially when we combine it with what we're going to do at the end. Theanine is also similar, or even just taking GABA the supplement itself. So you can use those in terms of actually impacting the vividness of dreams, the length of dreams. Blue Lotus tea is amazing. Mugwort is amazing. And they're more like working with the neurotransmitters. So I think they target kind of like the serotonin, the dopamogenic centers, that's that's kind of what they're targeting. So they tend to impact the dreams themselves. So if you don't have strong dreams, working with either blue lotus or mugwort can be really helpful. Also b6 and five HTP. B6 is a cofactor for neurotransmitters. So it just, it just kind of like helps all of the process of sleep go well, including vividness of dreams, similar with five HTP. Now on the kind of harder end of things are the cholinergic, cholinergic drugs, I think, cholinergic and these, these target the acetylcholine. And acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that is strongly correlated with REM. So the more acetylcholine you have, the longer, stronger your REM tends to be. Bearing in mind that these, a lot of these, these three supplements here, they're all kind of like anti Alzheimer's memory loss drugs. So these tend to target similar things, and they have these impacts with dreaming. So again here like they're safe, but do your own research, please. So
Huperzine A, Huperzine huprazine A, and this one is it inhibits the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine, so it allows it to stay for longer. Alpha GPC, I think, increases it, and then Galantamine, which also prevents the breakdown of acetylcholine. And so those ones are, like, a little bit more, like, cranking it up. Like, if I mean, Andrew uses Galantamine. If you take Galantamine, it's a trip, but you can wake yourself up, right? So, like, just like, you're gonna have to, like, dig into it and try it for yourself. But I would really advise, like, first of all, start with your sleep hygiene. Work with things like the more gentle sleep supporters, the blue.is T's. Like, start there and then. As you become more confident and more experienced, you can use the other stuff. Don't use that as a as a plaster for having a bad sleep or having low REM, it's so much better to build your sleep properly inside out, just for yourself, but also the quality and longevity of your practice. Awesome. So then, oh, supplies for blue dose tea animal Mundi is great, is that they've got a really great tea, Adam and Monty. And I think about a couple options, actually. So that's just, there's some things that can help with the physiological sides. And then what I do is, like, how do we combine all this? Like, what do we how do we turn this into anything useful? Is creating a pre sleep routine. The idea here is, like, if you okay, you know, morning routines. Everyone's always like, you gotta have a morning routine. Your entire day is based on your morning routine. And there's actually great research on this, which is just showing that, like spending 2030 minutes setting up your day can radically change the quality of your day. Doing a little bit of practice, meditation practice, or yoga or breathing or journaling can just put you in such a different state that you approach your whole day differently. If you are a dreamer, you are a lucid dreamer, like we are, your night routine is as important, right? So creating the same thing a night routine that is your off boarding from the day and your entry into sleep. And I use this with the, what I call the five R's, I can probably bring them up, actually might be helpful. And the 5r are resolve, and resolve is closing out your day. So this means, like, if you're like me, where, like, you know, I work from home, my husband works from home. It is so easy for every moment of our day to just be work. So we have to, like, close our day out, which might mean, if there's a text message, you have to send, send it, get it out the way. If there's something looping in your head, I've got to do this tomorrow. I've got to do this tomorrow. Write it down. One of the best ways to close your day out and resolve it is to just write a list of everything that's kind of like looping and put it out, and then you can say to your brain, okay, it's cool. It's there. We'll pick it up again tomorrow. But closing that part of your day, so just creating a break from whatever kind of like mental stream, and just somehow ritualistically or practically closing out that part of your day and then doing release practice. So as you're now heading into bed, so let's say this is five minutes before you're about to go to sleep. Doing a physical release practice is so helpful. And for those of you who work with the Tibetan Buddhist sort of techniques, you can do different breathing exercises. This is where you'd really do the dispelling of the winds. For me, honestly, I love the Chi Gong shakes, which is just really simply, like, just standing and like, just shaking and sighing, ah, doing that for like a minute. And as I'm doing that, like, I'm just dispelling any health tension, anything that's in my body. So doing a physical release, or a meditation event, if you feel that, something that's going to kind of get you into a more receptive, rested state, then you're going to reconnect. And this is where you're going to connect your intentions for lucid dreaming. Right now, it would be working with your heartfelt commitment statement, so maybe sitting in bed, bringing up your statement, and just like connecting to why this matters to you, when you create a dream mission, it'll be bringing up your dream mission and rehearsing in your head, oh yeah, that's right. Tonight, when I get lucid, I'm going to do this, but like, really, just like reconnecting it, and then you're going to refocus, which is using your induction statement. So now that you've rested, you've kind of recommitted, you're reconnected, just lying in bed and using one of those induction statements to enter into sleep and then reopen. What we want to do is we want to focus by being like, tonight I get lucid, or tonight I remember my dreams. But then a certain point, once you feel it strongly, you want to just let it go. We don't want to be like, like, pinching so tightly that we don't fall asleep. So it's this balance of like, like planting a seed firmly and then letting it grow. And so resolve, release, reconnect, refocus, reopen, and that's just a structure I like to use. And I know if I've done all of those things, I have a beautiful entry to the sleep and all of that can take five minutes. It doesn't have to be a long thing. It could take half an hour. It's really up to you. So I'm going to give you guys quickly five minutes here, just to to do those last two pieces of of today's worksheet, which is number four with everything we just learned about sleep. What's one thing you can commit to this week to improve your sleep timing? Getting off screens, no interfering, substances, lighter food. Eye plugs, air mask, eye plug, ear plug, eye mask, stress reduction. Just think of that so like I commit to and then thinking of a sleep routine. And next to each of these, resolve, release, reconnect, refocus, reopen, just thinking how you might want to do that, picking your favorite practice. So I will put a little music on for us again. Thank you, and we'll just take three minutes here. I
Okay, so even if you haven't finished that, don't worry again, something you can work on this week. It's part of what we'll be finishing and working on together. But just before we jump into Q A just to go over the practice for this week. So finish your pre sleep plan. Just go through that the worksheet again. If you don't, if you haven't got the worksheet, I'll resend it out. You have it already sent to you, but it'll be resent out with the replay and everything like that. So don't worry and and really choose your commitments. So especially with you know, whatever your night routine is, and the dream journaling, committing to having a really strong book end and be creative with it like, what would feel fun before you go to bed? What would be like? Oh, I'm excited to go to bed. Oh, it really kicked me out. And then tracking, so commit and track. If you do your practices no judgment, you're not in trouble. But it's helpful. Like, if at the end of the week you're like, Oh, I noticed that I did, I did my dream journal every morning, but I never did my nighttime practice. You need to figure out, okay, why, and then make the adjustment. So just tracking to see if you were able to stick with your commitments or what was in the way, and then working with the slogan I awakened to this moment and really letting that be your daytime practice for this week, making this moment matter by awakening to this moment. Beautiful. Alright, so we are now. We have five minutes. We can run over a little bit if you guys, I know some of you have to leave, and some of you, it's super late at night, so please jump off as you need to, but I'm going to, let's see if we can get through like five questions about, ideally, around the sleep practices. But if there was a, I think there was someone still waiting from last time. So let's give it a go. All right, is it? Michaela, you've
got to press the unmute button. Nope. Okay, some jobs. Okay. Hamish, I'm gonna jump to, oh yeah, Hamish, I'm gonna jump to you one second. Hi, Hamish,
hi. I was at Blue spirit. Yes,
I was just gonna say, I was like, I recognize that face. Hi again,
hi. So I've been at this for for a few years, I have like, two journals full of all my dreams, and they're usually very vivid, and they actually the dreams speak to me and and I know where I am, psychologically, spiritually, mentally, since writing my dreams down more regularly, I get up at three usually, and write a dream then go back to bed. But it's interesting and also slightly frustrating that it's not until I write the dream down that I notice, oh, that's a dream sign. It should have awoken me. It didn't,
I know,
so I'm being as patient as I possibly can. But it's quite funny sometimes, because the dream signs are, you know, they, they go on the edge of ridiculously.
You're like, oh, being in outer space with a troop of purple elephants didn't give it away.
Yeah, yeah. Or, but this is good. But what
their what their points to is, it sounds to me like you have, like, an excellent relationship with remembering your dreams, understand, like you've got that really going, what you'll need to sharpen is what we're going to work on next week, which is your daytime practices. It's gonna be really like activating your meta cognitive capacities so that when you're in these incredible dreams, you're not going, Wow, such a nice dream. I'm loving this guy. Hey, elephant. What's up? You're like. You have the capacity and the habit of mind through your daytime practice to go. Wait a second. I know where I am right now. I can feel this isn't quite right. I can sense, ah, this is a dream. So this is the daytime practices that are going to really help with this piece. And your dream signs will be useful, because we'll use your dream signs as like clues to know what we can tether those states to. We'll talk about this next week, but that's, I think that'll be the piece that's going to really help with this super Thank you beautiful. Thank you. Second reason my view is being a bit funky. I
Okay, so Joel,
hi, hi, hi, yeah, thanks for doing this. This is great, really grateful for this. My question is around like, frequency of dream plans or mission statements and stuff like, how frequently are you changing those out? At one point, I feel like I was doing a dream parent, different dream plan every night when I do, like, my preparation for sleep, and it was kind of like I was doing that, like, intuitively, of like, oh, what felt right for you know, tonight's practice. And then one time a couple of months ago, when you did that one day workshop, I think you told me to kind of lighten up, or, I can't remember the language you used, but just relax a little in my dream plans like, have a lighter funner one. And, yeah, so I'm just wondering about that stuff. Yeah,
for sure, and we'll cover this in more detail when we do dream missions in, I think, week four. But for now, think of a dream mission as serving two purposes. It is a motivation piece. If you have a if you are planning to do something in a lucid dream that your heart is so excited about it's going to help you get lucid. And of course, it gives you the clarity. When you get lucid, you can do it successfully. But choosing the right dream mission, pitching in the right place is going to matter. And then once you've pitched it correctly, like, sticking with it, like, I don't change my dream missions until I've successfully concluded them, unless I'm seeing, like, ah, like something about what I've picked is inappropriate for this moment. But the the trick is, like, not to be too loosey goosey with it, because we want to design and choose them really skillfully up front, so they work for us versus being like flights of fancy. And work for us can be like, joyful work for us could be like, when I get lucid, I'm going to, you know, like, like, finger paint rainbow colors. It doesn't have to be serious. It's just pitching it correctly and then working with it consistently. But we'll go over that like, week four. We're going to work on Dream missions and stabilization so that you guys can can really nail into this. I think it may be lost cheap, but I hope you were still there somewhere. Okay, thumbs up. Okay, great, thanks. All right. Todd, how you doing? I'm
well. I anyone else comment? So quick. Oh, I have two questions. I'm not sure which one I'm gonna answer first. I'll do this one first. So one of the things I like to do I actually I'll just ask the question before you give context, how do I bring my journaling practice into a dream?
In what way? What do you mean by that? So
one of the things I often find is that when I'm in the waking space, if I'm nervous or something comes up, I like to write it down. And so it allows me to helps me sort of relax and calm down, and then it allows me to give some awareness. And so what I'd love to do is I'd like check to do the same thing in the mirrors, in the dream space as well, because oftentimes, one, I don't remember them, and two, sometimes it gets so overwhelming that I kind of jump out. And so I'd love to be able to work kind of use the same principles that I'm doing in the wake space, dream space.
So we translate it. And this is cool, like we're gonna again, this is where what I call an emergency compassion response is really useful at ECR, I teach these. I love these, because what we do is we create these kind of shortcuts of behavior which are exactly this. They're touchstones of calm, connection space to create, like extra lucidity and calm. So what you might do, if you know, like, Ah, my dream journal, or my journaling is really helpful, maybe in a dream, it's not actually getting out a book and writing that's probably going to be challenging in a dream, but it might be summoning a book, and like holding the book, or like having working with the book as a totem, for instance, and knowing that, or even just like a symbol of your hands. I like to keep it super simple, so you don't have to summon anything. I might go, Okay, I'm going to do a symbol, which is my I'm going to open my hands like a book, and this is going to be my journal, and I'm going to close it again. And this is like me tapping into that energy of what it feels like to journal. I'm creating space, I'm creating order. And I would do this during the day. You practice this during the day, and you sort of tag that same feeling of how you feel when you're journaling. Okay, cool. It's all good. I'm good. I'm safe. I can got this like, whatever it is, and then, and you can just create a motion like this. And something simple is that when you're in a dream, and if you get lucid, or even if you're non lucid, and you you've got the habit, you can do this very simply and create that same level of calm, but whatever it is for you, right? Invent it for yourself, but translate it into something that could be dream friendly, would be the trick. Thank you, yeah, of course. Thank you so much. All right, last question for tonight, let's try again. Mihaela, yes, yeah, there we go.
Thank you so much. Thank you. It's such a such an amazing, powerful, beautiful and transformative course, and you're so generous with your heart, generous heart. And I have a just very good question about going to sleep with oming before doing a meditation and sounding to vibrate the whole body and the brain and also listening. I don't know if it would help listen all night to 40 hertz. I don't know how I call buying buying
binaural beats beats. Yes,
if that would help to go into that,
well, first of all, with the arming, I'll just yeah for you as an experience, when you do these, like the arming or the sacred syllable practices, how does it make what is your response? How do you feel? Oh,
it's, it's, it's such an amazing experience, very an expanse and a state of being in love, beautiful.
Okay, so So for anybody out there who has any practice that makes them feel that way, this is perfect. What we want to do with these entries into sleep is tap into beauty or peacefulness like this is what we want to do. So for you, if practicing arming helps to create that in your body, in your system, absolutely, I would encourage you to still do the lucidity or the dream induction statement. So imagine that, like the arming or the meditating or whatever, almost like, creates the fertile ground, like you're now in this, like, open, receptive, beautiful state, and planting the seed of intention. So that's the that's the way to do it. As for the 30 hertz, I've recorded two meditations for you guys that will be there in the resource folder. I'll actually let me just send you guys the link to the resource folder right now. This is where all the replays, all the resources are. It's in this Google Drive here. There's two meditations there, one for dream recall and one for lucidity, induction. For lucidity. Induction, I use the 40 hertz sound for anyone who doesn't know. There was a interesting research study where they they took people and during the night, they used external stimulation at different frequencies to see if it would impact lucidity. And when people were stimulated with a 40 hertz frequency, their lucidity jumped. So there's something. And when people are in a lucid dream, their brain has this frequency, so there's something related. So I use the 40 hertz behind that. I mean having it on all night probably not necessary. But let's say you are entering like let's say you wake up during the night and you're about to enter back into sleep. Maybe you listen to it for a few minutes. Beautiful to relax, let your mind kind of sink to it, and then turn it off again. Because what can happen is we have stuff going all night. It can actually sometimes end up distracting us or waking us up so it can, yeah, that's great, yes. So use it. Use it as like an entry point for thinking, yeah, yeah. I
had a short term lucid dream. I was holding something in my hand, and I knew that I needed that and but also changing the dream, changing the changing the action in the dream, knowing that you're dreaming and changing into a better outcome. That that's what happens sometimes to me, in in in a dream, in lucid dreaming, changing
Absolutely I mean, listen when we learn like we're laying the foundations. And once you learn how to activate your lucidity, how to stabilize your lucidity? Then the whole world opens up where, when you get lucid, you are such an active collaborator. If you are in a nightmare, it changes from a nightmare to correctly perceiving it to like, wow. And then you're asking your nightmare figures, what do you represent? You're hugging them. You're integrating them. You're able to completely transform the landscape. You can summon different landscapes, different figures, different aspects of yourself, like this. Is why it's so powerful, is that once you've got these skills down, we're no longer kind of like in this unconscious, compulsive, passive dreamscape. It's like when you're meditating, there's just like a compulsive mind stream. Those compulsive minds are what turn into dreams at night. Our non lucid dreams are just like our compulsive thoughts put into virtual reality, right? But when we get lucid, that's our awareness coming online. And now, now we're interacting with our psyches, with ourselves from like such a different place, and those dreams and those the potentials and those experiences are, I mean, they're limitless, and that's helpful.
Do you think we can awaken during the waking time that we're still dreaming when we are awake? Because, right?
I mean, this is why we do this work, isn't it? I mean, the nested realities. I mean, I often think, for anyone who's had a lucid dream this first time, or first few times, you get lucid, sometimes you have this awakening moment where you go, Whoa. This is all me. It's all an illusion. It's all love. I can forgive and love everything. I think maybe that's how Buddha and Jesus felt. They woke up in this reality, they got fully lucid in waking state. And so we practice in the dream. The dream gives us the opportunity to practice these profound spiritual insights and these profound spiritual practices and get some momentum and some some memory with it, so that, ideally, yeah, like we're doing this, so that we can be better in the waking state. We can love better, we can be kinder, we can be braver, we can be more fully expressed. That's what we're doing. This for you. Thank you. Thank you so much, beautiful. All right, guys, thank you so much. What a beautiful time together and again. Thanks for all of you, for your time, your energy, you're sharing. I look forward to hearing more about how your sleep routines go this week and a little bit more how your dreaming goes next week. We're going to be really focusing on the daytime practices. So how do we we've got these nighttime practices down now we're familiar with our sleep next week is, how do we bring lucidity into our daily lives? How do we use what we know about the neuroscience of lucid dreaming to trigger and activate lucidity in the night time? So it's going to be great. So much love to you all. Have a beautiful night, and I look forward to seeing you guys next week.
