[37] Exploring the Depths of Sleep: From Lucid Dreaming to Sleep Terrors
11:04PM Jun 11, 2024
Speakers:
Andrew Holecek
Ed O'Malley
Myra
Karen Roper
Dennis - Colorado
Francois Paradis
Keywords:
sleep
dreams
people
lucid dreams
wake
study
lucidity
question
naps
asleep
good
stages
rem sleep
light
night
rem
find
fall
eric
francois
going to hear a little bit about continued health on your end. Good, Karen, good to see you. And Myra, our new yoga teacher, yoga nidra, I've been keeping keeping an eye on these things. How's that going? Can we unmute Mayra, Karen's giving you a thumbs up. I guess she's taking it, yeah.
Well, thank you, Karen, because I do not know I am enjoying myself, but I wonder how everybody else is doing, but I think it's good. Well, my my ring records me while I'm directing the knee grab sleeping for half of direction. So that's kind of interesting. So, but while I've been talking to them, I've been sleeping according to my range. Wow.
Okay, I guess your resilience goes up and your heart rate goes down, your heart variability goes up. You know, it's like a semi sweep state. It's cool, but
it's actually, it's consistent. And I know it's about half of the time when I'm there, kinda so it's about 22 minutes from 45
interesting. You know, you gotta figure out what stage you're at when that's happening. You know, somewhere in the middle.
How do I do that?
Well, I mean, you know, like you go, there's no yoga, Nidra, you go through the various states, but levels, let's say, whatever. So where in that, where is that dividing line? Roughly, you know, like you're, like, going from, I don't know, or you're well past Earth, you're fired, or water, water to fire, or wherever you are, yeah.
Well, we take different routes. I like to take different routes because otherwise they get used to the same things and they begin to create expectation. So I like to change it a little bit so they do not know what's coming.
Truly a non dual teacher. Thank you. All right, great. I'm looking forward to listening to a couple Dennis Good to see you. Things going well, you're getting checked out and all that. Can Dennis be unmuted? There he goes.
Yes. Contacted my doctor, but not too happy with what's going on. I need to contact him again. He was referred. I would refer to someone to do the CBT. And he turns around, tells me, Oh, you need a sleep study. And so we're dead in the water. So I need to start pushing on that again.
Yeah, yeah, definitely pushing on it, yeah. Keep me posted. Back channel will be fine to happen to see you here. So thought I was going to get some great news, but
I would love to give you some great news next
time. Next time. Alright, good, alright, um, Andrew's on his way. He'll be here shortly. We had him on the phone in the car, and he's heading to his house to get on the computer, but we'll just kind of Mosey on into this. I have a couple of questions that came in. Eric actually gave one. I was going to answer him. He said he can answer me directly or do it for the Ask the sleep doc. So I said, I do it tonight. Okay, let me get my screen up for you.
Oh, wrong one.
I just changed my image. Wait a minute.
There it is,
okay, let me
here it is. There we go. And my new sleepy people picture up. All right, so without further ado, let us go to question one. I love weird sleep patterns, good questions. Okay, actually, you know, I'm not going to that. I remember this one. I'm not going to name any names. I not even sure who this came in from. But so I have question about my weird sleep pattern. Namely, for the last couple of years, I've started having vivid dreams only one hour after I go to bed. And so my first question to the questioner would be, what else has changed in the past few years? What's what's coincident with these changes? So I'm sure something has been going on, as you'll see when I get deeper into the question. So for instance, if I fall asleep at 1130 then I already have vivid dreams at 1230 I know that because I often wake up after them and see the clock, the reason I wake up is because usually those dreams are quite unpleasant, or sometimes it's a spontaneous out of body experience which is also disturbing and finds her, finds their cells somewhere where they feel attacked. So these are not, not, not very pleasant. And I would call them nightmares. And I would want to know, you know, what's the nightmare frequency in general? Is this happening every night? You know, it's often, but let's, let's get some kind of frequency to this. It seems weird to me, this, the question going on, because I know that this is not the time for dreaming, but for deep sleep. Also, those dreams and out of body experiences are always of some nightmarish scenario, while the dreams that I have towards the morning are normal. So that's interesting. For example, mixed dreams that can be pleasant or unpleasant, like all dreams are. So do you have any explanation for that early start of REM stage in my case? Anyway, what is going on and why is it always an unpleasant experience? Well, for the first part, unfortunately, depression, trauma, stress, all are associated with early REM sleep periods and almost always nightmares, at least in the people who we call the experiences. And for the most part, they are nightmarish. And so for the second part of the question, or maybe dreams can play take place even during the stage of deep sleep. And actually, that's true, dreams can and do take place during all stages of sleep, and that's because I depending on when you wake someone up. Like we know that, for instance, when you wake someone up during dream sleep, during REM sleep, 80% of the time, you'll get dreams but if you wake people up during other stages of sleep, you will also get dream reports. And I'll put those terms and quotes, because there is a qualitative difference between dreams and REM sleep and dreams and non REM sleep in general and deep sleep, they really are devoid of much detail, specific imagery or narrative stories. So you know, when you have a dream, you know, the red car, and with the guy who had the bow and arrow was chasing me down and shooting arrows at me as I ran down the street, which is a REM, maybe nightmarish type dream story, whereas in non REM sleep, the dream story is More like, I don't know. It was really dark. It felt a little cold. Not sure who was there. Yeah, it wasn't great. So when they take these reports and even compare them objectively using different different programs, the depth of description, the descriptive imagery, all of those are much decreased when you compare the two types of dreams and and also in non REM sleep, night terrors, you know, those wake ups that kids have a lot and they're totally, like, discombobulated. They're not even, you can't reach them. They're they can wake up, they can have screams, or they can just be frightened or but they really have no verbal report of what's happening, and they really are difficult to awaken, and you're much safer to not even try to awaken them. Just sit with them, comfort them, until they fall back asleep, and he'll fall back asleep and not have any memory of it. And so that's why it's really hard to get any kind of deep descriptions from these stages. Most of the frontal lobes are offline. Most of the brain that those the cognition is offline, comes back online during dream sleep, but is essentially off during the non dream or non REM periods, okay? And if any questions are popping up as we go along, certainly raise your hand or let Alyssa know. Oh, these statements came from Eric. So Eric sperko has been on this many times, and he sent these to me and asked if I did want to, I could use them on and ask the sleep doc or not. And I thought, nice that this had to do with REM sleep and dream sleep. And so I figured I'd throw him in here. So he found, and this is the second part of the first question, but because of the way they were asked, him presenting this one first, so he found these two statements to be contradictory. This is, by the way, an interview with Huberman and Matthew Walker. And Matthew Walker's replying here that not remembering dreams does not indicate problems with your sleep quality or REM sleep, nor does it affect the quality of your waking day. So that part was, you know, it's okay. It stands on its own, but it's contradicted by the second statement, which we'll get to in a second. But my take is that he's just referring to the not remembering part, right? Just because you don't remember your dreams doesn't mean that they're going to particularly impact your day or not. So they can impact your day, but they don't necessarily mean they won't impact your day just because you're not remembering them. Okay? So we know everybody goes through REM sleep, not everybody remembers their dreams. No big deal. So that's kind of what he's referring to here. But then he makes this statement, which is, even if we can't consciously remember our dreams, they could still implicitly influence our behavior. So that's implicitly, right. Important term is using here not explicitly, but implicitly, these Forgotten Dreams might still exist in our minds, impacting us without our conscious awareness or accessibility. And I can see where it could see these two statements as being contradictory, but in some respects they're not. So one, he's referring to just this idea that you may or may not remember your dreams and they may or may not impact your day, but they can impact your day because the psychological processes that are involved in generating those dreams are the same processes that undergird our lives that we're not consciously aware of half the time. So we're not it's not available to our waking or our conscious minds, but they can and do govern, or at least contribute to our behavior. Right? 90% of the stuff we do is habit. You know, Andrew talks about habit all the time, right? That it's our habits that are going to bring us back. It's our habits that create karma. It's our habits that we do without conscious thinking. And so part of the spiritual path is to make these conscious so that we can do something about them. And know, you know, what's contributing and what's not? Oh, no. Question from Andrew saying, can we say, can I say more about night terrors? What brings them about when they get outgrown? Well, sure. And in fact, it's consistent with this question too relevant.
So in children, they can be really they can just be physical responses to their world, their environment. So if they're very stressed out about whatever's going on in their lives, you know, as kids get stressed out about things, they could feel like they're being abandoned when mom goes to the store and, you know, that kind of thing, or they can be having trouble if they're younger kids, but they're in school, you know, getting bullied, having traumatic experiences in school by being yelled at by the teacher, or being ignored by their playmates, or not being included in games on the playground. And you know, things that would bother a child, but the child has doesn't necessarily have a way to express these, these emotional disturbances, or doesn't want to, or doesn't have the personality to want to bring these to light. And so when they go to bed at night, their brains are trying to process this information. And because they don't have that verbal storytelling quality as well as we do as we grow when we grow up and our adults and have a lot more verbal capacities, these can manifest and disturb sleep because they're unprocessed information that doesn't even make it to REM sleep, to have a dream about it, and maybe even have a nightmare. This would precede that. And some of these emotions are below their psychological awareness as well. And so it's the brain bringing these up, but not during a processing way. It's not. They're not developmentally processed. They're not developmentally processed well enough so that they have, you know, these separate processes of REM sleep for emotional stuff and non REM sleep to do most of the physiological reparations that are needed. So instead, it's emotional and powerful enough that it breaks through even in their deep sleep, and because a good part of the brain is still asleep, right? It is deep sleep where most of the brain is doing housekeeping, and you're having these deep waves where the brain isn't processing and that frontal lobe is offline. Then when they do wake up, they can have this terror because they knew they were afraid of something, and it could have been what spilled over from the day or not. But they don't have any verbal capacity, and they don't have frontal lobes to even bring up some way of describing. So they're kind of half asleep and half awake, but the part that's half awake has no verbal capacity, so they're just stuck in this sort of limbo. And it's a frightening Limbo in some respects. Maybe that's why the screams coming out not so clear about that, because we don't get good reports, but we do know that once they return to sleep, 99 out of 100 times, there is no memory, no recall whatsoever, especially in young children. As they get a little bit older, there might be some recollection of disturbance, not too far removed from enuresis or bedwetting. Not that. I mean, they can have the same potential causes, but that can be a different expression of it, because they're unable to awaken fully, but part of their brains wake up enough to carry out an automatic behavior like wetting the bed, for instance, or sleepwalking or some of those others. Hopefully that's helpful. And what is there? Yeah, yeah, okay,
I'm gonna bargain that this is so great. So why are they outgrown? What? Because that, you know, in the college, uh, night terrorism, usually, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, almost exclusively with kids, right? Yeah, you know,
yeah, almost exclusively with kids, but we'll get to that there are exceptions, and the reason it's outgrown is because they either find better ways of dealing with their daytime issues, whatever happens their lives settle down. A lot of these can be associated with changes in their schedules. For instance, they're not having that standard, regular protocol to get the bed. They were up late one night, down another night. They're visiting the in laws, they're traveling time zones. They're doing all kinds of things that are out of the ordinary once you disturb their schedule. This can happen. Their brain is more deeply asleep on those like sort of rebound nights, and so then this stuff gets processed in deep sleep, because they, they just part of their brain is still trying to wake up, and it can, when they're in deeper sleep, it just disturbs, yeah,
that's basically, that's great, because, I mean, that's kind of what I was thinking. Because, to me, it was like, it's also possible that, in fact, it was just thrown deeper into the unconscious mind, and therefore doesn't have,
yeah, it doesn't move into REM sleep and getting that emotional process, yeah, so as the kids get older, and as you reach puberty and all that, then you have your words. You can use your words, and you've, you know, you can deal with your emotions better, and then they'll come out as a story in REM sleep. But in adults, they can reoccur, particularly if you had them as a child, especially if you're an adult who keeps things inside, right? That's why we have this explosion of therapy. I mean, if we could talk this stuff out, not an issue, but if we're keeping it inside, or if we, you know, experience some heavy duty traumas or stressors that we don't find a way to deal with. They can reemerge as sleep terrors in adults, not as common, but definitely, definitely happens.
And then, how do they? How do you then work with it with an adult? Because obviously you're not going to have, I mean, maybe you tell me someone holding them and they just wears off is there? Is there a way that it's treated related to differently than with the child,
not at night? The same thing, it's almost like a sleepwalking event. You can't you don't want to try to stop them from doing whatever they're doing automatically, but you gently guide them back. You can sit with them. The spouse will wake up with them, and, you know, sit with them in bed until they resolve it, and then they go right back to sleep. In their case, they sometimes remember because there's a little more frontal lobe action, just because it's more of an adult brain, but they are either recognizing them themselves or the spouse is recognizing and then they get to therapy, and it's the daytime therapy that resolves the nighttime events.
So how often do you how often do they come into your practice? I mean, do you see this with increasing regularity? Is this something that's that's changed statistically over your practice?
You know, people don't come in for for that particular for insomnia. They don't complain about not being able to sleep. Although occasionally I do see that, you know, maybe a couple of cases a year, not frequent, not frequent at all. They'll generally get to a therapist before they get to me, and once they because, you know, these are really frightening experiences. And generally, they'll go to their primary care doc, who will recognize it and send them on to therapy before they come to a sleep center, because they know the sleep we're not going to be able to do much about it except confirm it, you know, and get a sleep study. So, and although you know that this, this can really expand, right? Because you've heard of all of the cases of, you know, sleep, killing sleep, driving somebody, driving and killing somebody and all this stuff. Well, they do have sleep studies done on those people, because they're being charged with something. Excuse me. And even when sleep specialists, and I know of a couple of cases, and I've known the sleep specialists who've testified, they've studied them in the lab, and they have deeper sleep than the normal person. They have disturbed deeper sleep, all of the features that would confirm a sleep disorder issue, yet they still get convicted of whatever they did. Oh, yeah,
yeah, I guess that that that acquittal thing way back when. Only, only, like, with the red behavior sleep disorder. I mean that only maybe work once or twice. You can't really use that to get yourself out of
right, right, right. And the problem is, usually there's some daytime you know, like, I don't like that person, you know, somebody finds that a good lawyer will find that for the for the prosecutor, and then, you know
exactly, yeah, I also wanted to put an emphasis on this ties in beautifully to the first question, and it's so important about the incapacity to silo the mind. I mean, you know you, you may think you have capacities to shrink, wrap, Silo conscious and unconscious processes. But just like with the first question, it's the same sort of thing that we're all in the office of consciousness, so to speak. And so the siloing breaks down, and then you have these kind of cross infection, cross pollination. And I guess maybe the issue would be to make it more cross pollination instead of cross infection. That would be the whole lucidity thing, bringing awareness to that process, right? So because it's happened, you know or not, so why not bring it into awareness and make it positive instead of negative? Yeah, yeah,
you know. And I don't know if the data that we refers to with the frequency of people who have, well, let me, let me go back, so the people who I know, who don't recall their dreams, are fairly well balanced in a lot of ways. They're not necessarily really spiritual or seekers or really wanting to get into stuff. They basically go about life, you know, and they get up and they go to work and they come home and they're nice to their wives and take care of the dog and raise their children well. And, you know, they don't, they're not like pushing the boat. They're not rocking the boat at all. And it's interesting, but I don't know any hard data to say whether you know what the emotional or the psychological personalities of people who don't have dream recall. But I, you know, then again, then again. I do know one person. I know one person who, she was a, she's a therapist, and has tried her damnedest to recall her dreams. And I was giving these suggestions, you know, put this on, try when you're drifting to sleep, you know, drop the thing, drop your keys. Like, what's his name? He said he drop your keys into a tin pen, right? Yeah, you know, those kinds of things just in but, you know, he wasn't able to. So
here's, here's another exercise you can suggest. I thought this would to be quite helpful, is throughout the day, periodically, just stop, turn the lens of your mind back in and inquire, what was I just thinking for the last minute? That's a way to help the RE looping process, where you can start to dip the mind back in. And I find that that helps with dream with dream recall as well. So that may be something to put in your database. Yeah, she
was someone who didn't even, you know, I tried her setting the alarm early, and, you know, being sure she got up during a run period, but nothing, nada. But maybe, maybe she does have to, have to bring more of the waking mind into it, which actually is a great segue to the next couple of questions here. Yeah, let me just see Francois. Okay, we'll get back to you, Francois. Let me go back to this, because I
Okay. So the next question was, oh, yeah, so this is the second half of Eric's question. So this is the Huberman newsletter and blah, blah, blah the So in particular, the data referenced on lucid dreaming potentially not being conducive to quality restorative sleep. They did not reference a study, or are you aware of any on the topic? So basically, they were saying that, you know, there is the possibility that lucid dreamers can have more disturbed sleep and, you know, leaning towards maybe not. It's not a good thing. So, and that came out of, I did find some studies. So there were a couple of studies done in 2018 there seemed to be a negative relation between lucid dreams and sleep quality, but when they controlled for nightmare frequency, then it drifted away. So most of what they were becoming aware of were sort of emotionally unstable states. During the dream state, there is some connection between fragmentation and lucidity that goes beyond, you know, the Stephen LaBerge wake back to sleep business, but I found this really interesting study that that I'm really digging into here. So this study was done in 2020 and they had done they had five parts to it, lots of different portions. They started with an n of 200 people, two thirds, men, 1/3 women, and they asked them out into different ways, but essentially, they were referring to this data referenced on lucid dreaming, potentially not being conducive. So that was the rest of Eric's question. So they their their final conclusion is that indicate that the presence of a relatively specific sleep architectural phenomenon might be what causes the dream lucidity. So it may manifest as a consequence of poor sleep, but does not require it. So some people are more aware all the time, and so when they're aware, they're awake, they're more aware when they fall back asleep and and have a lucid dream, but or the people who are trying to wake up and have and then back to sleep and doing that practice to have a lucid dream, but it doesn't require it. There's a dissociation between the two features of people who are having lucid dreams. So the recent concerns, and this is again, what they were citing, those there were studies in 2018 there were studies in 2019 and 2020 This distinction is an important one that sleep fragmentation does not require, is not required for lucid dreaming. Another study done in 2018 showed no correlation between poor sleep and lucidity once nightmare content was controlled for. So these all speak to the fact that depends on who you ask and what you're asking about, but people who are people who are more aware of their dreams are more likely going to be aware of their Lucid dreams and may actually be trying to just disrupt their sleep to become more aware. And in people who already have more disturbed sleep or more disrupted sleep, they may be more likely to have lucid dream as well, because they're waking up, frontal lobes are coming back online, just like the practice, only there. It's an inadvertent practice, and then they go back to sleep. And so they're more likely to have a lucid dream because they were where or they awoke from sleep. But if they dig a little deeper, they looked at a subgroup who they had practice monophasic sleep, which is basically sleeping the whole night, or polyphasic sleep, which is really not having an extended period at night, but basically being awake for a few hours and then taking a 20 to 30 minute nap, being awake for a few hours, taking a 20 to 30 minute nap, doing this throughout the day for about seven naps per 24 hours, so no extended period. And not surprisingly, the polyphasic sleepers had a ton more lucid dreams. So here's something, if you want to try and get more lucid dreams. I don't know if we have this one in the book Andrew, but let's just carry a little bit further. And if you look at the proportion of lucid dreams to normal dreams, it also holds that those who are practicing polyphasic sleep would have more uh, lucid dreams, more dreams overall, but more of those dreams are lucid. Isn't that interesting? Totally.
I have to put a comment on this one. I did my three year retreat, which is when I had the extraordinary luxury of practicing a loose reform all day, which means I could take as many naps as I wanted. I set my alarm to go off every 90 minutes to just take a target gunshot at it REM it was, it was unbelievably effective, um, but obviously that is disruptive, and it required this, you know, this kind of capacity, and also then luxury of just catching up during the day. And there was something really quite magnificent about bleeding in and out of waking, dreaming sleep. I mean, like 24 hours a day, it was truly a unique situation. So study just completely resonates with my experience in retreat, which makes a lot of sense. Did
you feel, would you say, follow up on that? Were you feeling sleep deprived? Like, did you have periods where you didn't hit the 90 minute, like you slept through one or two a little
bit, a little bit, yeah, and that's one reason why I did have to catch up on some naps during the day. So in a certain way, it forced me into these liminal spaces that I normally would have never had the luxury to do because I had to operate in full functionality. But because I was doing this, I had complete artistic license just hang out in these liminal spaces almost 24/7 and short of dark retreat, it was, it was the most fantastic experience of just cascading through, you know, the kind of the Democratic nature of the mind. So I just wanted to throw that in, um, because I don't think that study probably worked with people doing that kind of thing. Would it be really interesting to get a bunch of scientists together to do a month long assessment analysis. In fact, we should, we should explore that. We should design a study, bring some lucid dreamers to a retreat center, work them in exactly this type of protocol, and I bet you could collect a ton of novel research data that has actually not been gathered. So we should get our heads together, yeah, like
that. We have to, of course, control for, at least explain away the fact that, okay, well, these were special because, you know, they had all this fragments, but
you can have it. Well, you can, yeah. So how would you control for, I mean, I don't want to get too far straight here, but yeah,
well, I probably look at the lucid dreams before and after, like, not in the protocol. Like, how many listed dreams do they typically have? What are the features of those lucid dreams? And then bring them in and, you know, mess with their sleep for days and days, yeah, you know, because then, at least, you know, you have some baseline. Here's what they look like usually, and here's what changes, if it's just the frequency, then you may get some deeper information.
Yeah, yeah. Well, we should talk about it. Maybe we can work with Ken powers lab, you know, and Gabby and whatnot. And actually, because he, you met him. Oh, no, you met Gabby. You did. No, I met Gabby. Yeah, yeah. Daniella, yeah, we could talk to them about doing something like this. They probably, anyway, don't mean to hog the airtime here.
No, no, it's all good stuff, well, relevant to actually, and that was, that was the end of Eric's question. So I think we, we pretty much, at least as far as as science knows right now. You know, there haven't been really definitive studies, except that, I think their study, when they looked at these different people in different ways. And they basically found you could have a ton of lucid dreams with disturbed sleep with no negative impact. I forgot to mention one of them, which they used the Pittsburgh sleep quality index. And they compared people you know, and the Pittsburgh sleep quality index basically looks at your sleep over the past month. It's subjective, but people, it's been validated against people with sleep disorders and disturbed sleep and versus those with normal sleep. And so as your numbers go up, it means there's more disturbance. And there was no relation between the level of disturbance reported on that a validated instrument and the number of lucid dreams so I see Eric is here cool. Want to comment on answers to the questions the things resolve for you. Or can we get Eric unmuted before we take a couple of questions, Erica, we're not you're still muted. There you go. Yeah,
I just joined. I just missed it. I have to catch the recording. I had baby, baby duties, and it's like I'm just catching the tail end of it, so I'll I appreciate you answering, and I'll have to circle back, and once I get a chance to listen to what you
said, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought I didn't know if you were lurking in the background, and then finally came on to ask, but yeah, we said, You'll be covered it pretty well, but you'll so, so there is some data I found, and it's in the presentation, on the slides and the links so you can, you can track it down. Beautiful. Yeah, thanks for tackling that. Sure, sure. I know always interested. Myra's hand is raised.
Can we get my Okay, there we go. Okay.
I have so many questions today, beginning, let's begin from the end. I think I have found, and I have read, that sometimes when you get too tight trying to do the lucid dreaming, maybe that by itself brings a lot of stress in terms of what the things that you have to do, and the stress by itself can disturb the sleep. Because when you are really lucid, it could be so exhilarating. And people are, you know, wake up with so much more energy and feeling refreshed and connected and all that. But I think some people that try to the techniques, sometimes they get so, so so tight into the what to DOS and not to do's and the times and other times and the 90 minutes that I think can disturb the sleep. Is that a proper assessment? Yeah.
I mean, I think that's a reasonable variable that would need to be looked at. They can certainly have, although, at least in some of these studies, they weren't looking at people. They weren't asking them to have lucid dreams. They were just taking them off the street saying, you know, we're doing a study on dreaming, and would you like to be participate in a study on dreaming like they didn't have any particular reason to be lucid dreamers. And some of the other studies, the one with the monophasic and biphasic, they definitely picked people who had at least recall three dreams a week, and were familiar with lucid dreaming. So even there, you know, again, I guess the stress level would be much lower with that group, because they're already familiar with it. But the other group, they weren't really trying to have lucid dreams. They were just giving them. They were asking them what their frequency was and if they had it, were they more fragmented? Were they? Were they more associated with fragmented sleep when they had them? I don't know if they controlled for the effort to have them, which they may not have. But yeah, no, it's reasonable. Yeah. Go ahead.
I'm very curious about these dreams in states that are non traditional, the REM sleep, because, like, naps are so good for that liminal state. Or I like to travel when I travel, or when I'm sitting in an airplane, or when there is a little bit change in environments to try to get into a meditative state where I take, you know, it's so, so transparent, the way that you can feel the sensations, and they're pretty effective, but you do not get it's like, more like a nap. You don't get it medial into a REM sleep, but the liminal state is very
powerful. Yeah, yeah. Well, so your question embedded in that, or
no, I'm saying that that so you can have so many dreams in states, like in naps and in ramps, I mean, when you're traveling or things like that, that are not associated at all with the dark stages that you described at the beginning. Yeah?
Well, those are more related with the deeper levels of sleep, right? Those when you're really out to lunch, and if you awaken from that state, you know, again, the frontal lobes aren't online, and you don't even know your name, so that could be very disorienting. But what you're talking about too, is even if you're drifting into sleep, and those are naps you're probably in, like light sleep, stage one, stage two, you're not really getting that deep. So even though you haven't hit REM you're probably bringing in some of that hypnagogia happening, some of those little dreamlets happening. And then you have enough still frontal lobe ready to be awake, and you just were awake. So it's easier to sort of make a story. Let's say okay,
but basically my main question when I joined today was that I've been trying to convince people to not get into the computers and the blue lights. And I know the different kind of blue lights, but I heard one of them saying that there was a report regarding that blue light is not really that bad. That is not true. Have you heard that? Is there some validity? I think there was reading Apple news like it
was, it was, yeah, yeah. You know, it's so unfortunate. That's the science news that we get, right. There have been 50 reports that say blue light is bad. One report comes out says, nah. Now you know, not so fast. And then you know some disgruntled researcher, or somebody who has, you know, nitpicked some data and said, No, look. And then, yeah, no, I don't believe that at all. So I did hear, I did look at the study or what they were saying, and it's not, there's not a lot of validity to it. The blue light intensity is definitely the blocker of melatonin, without question, and the more intense it is, the worse it is. There are. There are. Now as they dig in a little deeper, what they're finding is that the more sunlight, the more daylight we get exposed to during our days, the more resilient our brains seem to be to the blue light. Okay, and that may be a completely different mechanism that's happening. You know, like the you're like, having more sunlight down regulates the melanopsin that responds after sunset, you know, to blue light so that it's less, it's kind of like charged so that it's stronger and it doesn't need to respond. The people who are in in indoors, all day long, we have very low light levels, then that blue light and a little bit of blue light is enough to turn their melatonin off. So there is that. Yeah, yeah, but no, stay off the blue light. You're absolutely right. And Dennis is that. Dennis is still here during Eric was here during a sleep course I taught, right? I mean, that first night I taught, it was from seven, seven to nine, right? It was seven to nine, and I was up till like 1112, almost that first night after the first because I hadn't done that in a while, right? Tip for these things once a month, you know, eight o'clock is still not that bad, but being in front of this thing up until 11 o'clock, and, I mean, up until nine o'clock at night and teaching, and it was earlier, right? It was in the early part of the spring, so it was still, Oh man, that was horrible. So for the rest of the classes I would present for the first hour, like, up until about eight o'clock, and then I'd put on my blue block or sunglasses, and I look like the coolest presenter, like, Hey, you guys have any questions now? And they all got used to me doing it. And then Denise, who was on in the class too, said she started having trouble falling asleep. You know, those same kinds of things, because he was up in front of the computer listening to me talk all of you guys. They were watching me with my blue glasses. Nobody put on blue glasses, and they were sorry they didn't. Eric's gotta get get a whole nother variability with the newborn, so he doesn't count for that. He can't sleep no matter when he wants to sleep. But, yeah, no, it's, it's a it's a real thing. It's a real thing. So, yeah, even, you know, like on during the day, I have my clear but have these have a blue blocker component to reduce eye strain during the day, because I'm on computers so often during the day, but these do nothing after sunset. It's just not you need those sunglasses. Yeah? So cool. Good questions. Yeah, lot of juice in the questions. I see in the question box here in the chat. Okay, Francois regarding my RLS. So Francois had reported that you may have to come on and remind me. Reported that What did you do for the RLS? Oh, probiotics. Yeah, and SIBO type, you know, treating SIBO type things, right? Digest, what was probiotics and fermented beverages and so forth, right? That, that you would use for digestive issues seem to also relieve the Restless Leg syndromes. And what you're seeing here is, then it seems a little more complicated. So, yeah, I suspect you've had a little bit of a return of some of the symptoms. That's right. Okay, okay, all right, we'll keep
I know it's kind of a roller coaster thing. Sometimes you think you found a solution, and then, whoops, you're okay for a while, and then it comes back. Yeah,
yeah. Well, you know, and it may mean, may mean that what you were doing, whatever you did for your body that was improving your body, was helpful. But now what you do if your body is probably not as helpful, like you've done something else that changed the microbiome, or, you know, something else is kicking in. And then again, you know, these systems aren't, you know, we're used to the taking the pill and the pain goes away that night, you know? And so some of these longer term consequences, like we never used to realize that sleep debt, even small sleep losses, can build up over time. So when the when the first data came out about sleep deprivation and all the bad things it did, nobody worried about missing an hour a night. That's not a big deal. It's just, you know, I'm getting most of my sleep right, and I'm getting most of my sleep most days right. But no, we found out over time that even that short loss, maybe 15 minutes a night, a half an hour a night adds up and it shows up in performance. So yeah, it just could be that, you know, you fixed one part of the issue, but our bodies are pretty adaptable, too, yeah. And I and as humans, we're pretty good at finding what the limits are and trying to exceed them, right? We're trying to hack our bodies and hack our brains. But the more read about circadian, circadian clocks and circadian This is that was the live webinar I did with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. We did a live webinar on spiritual aspects of sleep, but also the impact of light. And certainly in in a lot of the ancient texts, they talk about the different colors of light and the different impacts of light and and the clear light and the internal light, and, you know, and so we were having this great back and forth about the biological light that we get exposed to and its impact on sleep, and then sleep yoga and Dream Yoga and all of that. So there is, you know, there is a relationship. But I was, I was surprised when I dug into the circadian research and the circadian data, circadian studies, how much light regulates everything from the bacteria in a microbiome and what part of The macronut nutrients that they break down at what time of day, and then they shift to another group and they break down other things at a different time of day. We're learning that medications have different impacts during the day, that surgery that's done in the morning versus the afternoon has a better outcome if you do it in the afternoon, so don't get scheduled for morning surgeries going forward, they did, they did a study with the cancer agents chemotherapy, the two major chemotherapeutic agents they use, and they just did it, one of them in the morning, One of them in the afternoon, and the other group had it switched, and the group that had it in one orientation had a much better outcome and needed much less and had much less side effect than the group that had it reversed. So there's a lot going to be coming down the pike, but it still falls in with my my underlying and what I always go back to is, what did we what did we evolve with in nature and man, the more sunlight we can get, even for blue light, probably for all of our microbiomes, probably for any medications we're taking, the exercise we do. It all has some relationship to the more natural exposure we can get, both light, I think to different weather, I think to the dark. We got to have the dark too, you know, like that. It's all important.
I keep track of how often it happens throughout the year, I could check if it is a correlation with seasonal light.
Yeah, yeah.
I have an unrelated question. Since I'm on I noticed that when I fall asleep after my thoughts become irrational or disorganized, and I'm wondering if that corresponds, or if it's a manifestation of the rational mind shutting down.
Well, you're saying that as you fall asleep, you notice your ability to maintain thoughts or cognitions change.
I'm drifting away. I like the thoughts start to become, like, more irrational or disorganized, and I'm thinking, sometimes I start waking up again, and I thought, Oh, I was falling asleep, yeah. But then I maybe it's a manifestation of the the rational mind shutting down. Maybe not.
Well, it's not just, not just the right, it's not just the rational mind that's shutting down. I mean, that's definitely part of it. It's basically the constructive capacities of the ego that are shutting down. The very self sense is actually disintegrating. And so this is one of the most fantastic things to explore, and this is why, I guess so jazz the number of years ago about liminal dreaming, because this is hardly ever, ever emphasized. They talked about it hypnagogic, hypnopompic. But I mean, with the exception of Jennifer duper's work, there's nothing out there. And so I just found that state to be extraordinarily unique for for discovering the constructive nature of the self sense, how we come online in the morning, how we go offline at night. And so it's not just the rational mind that's just part of the aspect of the demolition derby, the deconstruction that takes place. If it didn't take place, you wouldn't fall asleep. And so the invitation is not merely to watch that process, which is already great, that's actually a type of lucid sleep onset. So this greases the skids for lucidity, because you know you're aware of it. But then they pay even more attention, and you'll start to notice not only that, that rational mind comes apart, but your thoughts become less linking thinking. They become more discontinuous in nature. And then they make this super interesting transition from thought to thought image, and then thought image into micro dreamlet. And so if you can watch that, it turns into not only a form of loose, liminal dreaming, but wake initiated lucid dreaming. You know you're actually bringing a sense of lucidity and awareness as you're dropping from the waking state into these subtle manwits. And so I would just say, I'm sure I'd love to hear what Ed says, but I would just say, carry on and develop an even more acute observational intent, and you'll start to notice even more and more really compelling things. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that into the mix, because I it's super interesting. No,
that is great. And, you know, I did present a little bit ago, and we still have some. We have that somewhere. Corey's nine stages of sleep onset, you know. And so he actually looked at the individual EEG changes that are occurring during these different components of the brain, coming apart, in a sense. But then and then to go full circle. So the current work right now is looking at the default mode network, and the default mode network breaks apart as we're falling asleep. And you know, that is our basically ego state, that is the way we internalize who we are and all that kind of stuff, or where we go when we don't have anywhere else to go. And that, that is definitely all those connections begin breaking out, and they move into different locations. Actually, if I think about it, I'm going to take a note on it too. And there, there's some nice images that show the change in the connectivity of the D Default Mode Network, moving to a different network as you fall into sleep. Yeah. That's fantastic.
You know, this would be super for next month. Ed is maybe bring the nine stages model, if you have it. I think I personally would be super interested in this increased granularity with what's happening in the LUMO phase. And so if you, if you could actually bring that data up, and we could have that a little bit of the emphasis of that session, I think Francois just seated a really cool exploration.
Yeah, and we were going to do napping, which can actually fall nicely into this room really. So we'll, we'll put, we'll make a nice package for the next time.
Fantastic, good, cool,
great. Karen, did you have a quick question? You were semi raising you were raising some fingers. Can we get Karen unmuted?
There we go. I fall asleep real quickly, so I don't have all that stuff at the beginning, but when I'm waking up, I have all these little dreamwoods, and which one's hypnopompic and hypnagogic, but the the one on waking up,
hypnopompic? Yeah, it
feels more authentic. It feels like my ego didn't plan it. Yeah. It feels really, um, more authentic, and I like, so, yes, yesterday, I dreamed I was like Rachel Maddow, and I was sitting behind a desk and I was giving the news or something, and then I I thought to myself, Oh, is this? Is this lucid dreaming? Does this count? Is like, Like.
Well, so, so, in essence, that, to me, that is the, the, the fundamental difference between hypnagogia hypnopompic is that hypnagogia, things are falling apart, hitting the pompic, they're coming back together. It's like there's more awareness that's ready to make the you know, to, oh, this is, this is something you know. And just like you asked the question, is this lucid dream? Does it count? I love that.
The beginning falling asleep, I just go out and I, I don't have any of that stages and stuff. Are they ever waking up? I love it. I love little things that pass through.
Yeah, well, so, and that's a great time, you know, like the wake and return to sleep. That's a good time to be doing that too, right? Because, you know, you've had most of your sleep so you there's something on board now you can sort of really keep some awareness going and then allow yourself to drift back in, then you're sort of doing hypnagogia, but not really, but because you're carrying awareness with you. The one time I had that experience of of sleep yoga or sleep awareness, knowing I was asleep and not dreaming and not having any images and still holding awareness was in the morning doing that, like realizing I had gotten sleep, and I started waking up, and I'm like, Hey, I know. I know what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna be away. And I was drifting back in and drifting in. A little while later, I'm snoring. I'm like, Oh yeah, right, oh yeah. I was there the whole time. This is cool. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, excellent.
Okay, all right. Well,
great, great to be on track with you again. And I mean, every single time I learn so much, it's just the best. So we'll, we'll pick it up again with naps and nine stages. I think that would be super interesting to the more you understand the granularity, then the more the map can inform the territory, the more the more you can actually be invited in. It's like, oh my gosh. This. This describes what I've been experiencing. And so, you know, this is part of that, replacing the binary light switch model with the more granular dimmer model. You know, you actually find stages. You're able to watch the Glissando down into, yeah, yeah,
before I grab Myra, I know we get all juiced up here the neural feedback on you remember you were trying the neurofeedback at it, wherever we were. The developer of that, I had asked him way back when, when I was doing sleep stuff, and I was saying, you know, we're having a hard time pinpointing, pinpointing sleep onset, and that'd be really important for like the truck drivers and all. So we get some signals, and we keep them awake. And also, people are working on this all over the place. And I said, you've done all this non linear work, you know, can Can't you come up with something that, like gives us that information? And he said, he goes, Yeah, I could, if it was a linear process, but it's not. And I was like, You're right. It's not a linear process. So, you know you're in and out anyway. So that that that that basically tells that project Mayra
Lorenzana was, I felt very proud. He's like, No, that guy, I mean, he came out very crisp, a lot of information. And I like the chemistry of you too. I mean, I was, I get, I don't get tired of listening to you, obviously. But I think that was a very good interview.
Did you share the link with that? Well, how can we, I think Barbie Harry
for us in nightclub. But yes, we should. It was, it was, it was so precise and so clear, and information came through very, very crisp.
Did it? You know, the problem we always have with that is, I'm on zoom with Rinpoche, so I don't see any of the but I know it was on Facebook. I thought it was on the cyber sangha.net to their website. Very,
very posted a link in nightclub. Maybe he can do it again. But yes, I saw it when Facebook, but then I saw the link also posted by Barry.
Okay, great. All right. So yeah, Barry, hopefully we can find it again, and then I'll wait who's in chat. Somebody says I'm in chat. Okay, thanks for your kind words. We'll get it, actually, if you can wait two seconds here, I think I can get it real quick from the if they finally got it posted here, the past events, hold it, hold it, hold it.
I think if you go into Tencent and they have all the different interviews, but I do not know, yeah,
may 29 that was it, right, yeah, where is he? Yeah, I can't find the link. I just think to it, and I'll be here forever trying to do that. Okay? We'll find it, and Barry will post it, or I'll post it again, or I'll have it for next time. Thank you.
Thank you. All right, pleasure, yeah,
more questions than I come in with anyway, so it's great
