Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: what is the last lucid dream that you had and
Speaker 1: what happened to it? Because I know you're you're a
Speaker 1: lucid dreamer of old. It was like this weird. I
Speaker 1: don't know how to even explain it. But um, I
Speaker 1: didn't expect that you were going to ask me this,
Speaker 1: so I'm not completely prepared. You didn't think i'd ask
Speaker 1: you about your lucid dreams, like my last my last one. Well,
Speaker 1: if not the last one, what what's an example that
Speaker 1: stands out in your mind? Okay, well, how about one
Speaker 1: where I've talked about recurring dream of a dog mulling
Speaker 1: my face while I can't move right, and so eventually
Speaker 1: got to the point where I knew that I was
Speaker 1: dreaming and I could tell myself like I'd have a
Speaker 1: different solution every time it happens to make the dog
Speaker 1: stop chewing the skin off my face. So sometimes I'd
Speaker 1: have to hug the dog, like embrace it back, even
Speaker 1: though it was malling me and then it would shatter
Speaker 1: into a thousand pieces, which is an excellent example because
Speaker 1: because that example of a horrible dream flowing into a
Speaker 1: lucid dream works nicely with some of the stuff we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about here. Yeah. Yeah, And actually we've
Speaker 1: had a lot of request for this topic and we
Speaker 1: touched on it before. Yeah, we've certainly talked about in passing,
Speaker 1: but it seems like when we covered virtual sex and
Speaker 1: we talked about the possibility of linked dreaming, it came
Speaker 1: up again. So Dan and Oakland, who also is as
Speaker 1: an experienced to a lucid dreamer, he wrote us about it,
Speaker 1: and Joffrey talked about how awful lucid dreaming might be,
Speaker 1: especially if we linked our dreams. Yes, I believe we
Speaker 1: read the ladder and I have dands that I'm gonna
Speaker 1: read at the end of Yeah. Yeah, it should be
Speaker 1: a nice insight into this. So anyway, we wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about it in full for you guys. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: the term lucid obviously lucid dreaming as a thing has
Speaker 1: existed for a very long time, but the term the
Speaker 1: dreaming days back to nineteen and you had Dutch psychiatrist
Speaker 1: Fedric Wilhelm von Eden. He coined the term. He identified
Speaker 1: nine different types of dreams, which I granted I don't
Speaker 1: have to list all nine, but I'm going to because
Speaker 1: they're pretty awesome. Well, and he spent sixteen years of
Speaker 1: his life studying this and coming up with these categories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, he's an amazing dude. So number one and
Speaker 1: I like to think of these as kind of like
Speaker 1: items at a Chinese restaurant or items at a fast
Speaker 1: food restaurant where you could order them up and be
Speaker 1: like like a number one with the side of four,
Speaker 1: but number one initial dreams. These are the very beginnings
Speaker 1: of sleep, when the body is in a normal, healthy
Speaker 1: condition but very tired, and the dreams sort of flew
Speaker 1: in right off the back. Second type pathological dreams, in
Speaker 1: which fever, indigestion, or some poison plays a role. You know,
Speaker 1: a b bit of undigested potato, that kind of thing, Okay,
Speaker 1: too much pepperoni, right, or if you know, fever dreams
Speaker 1: intense situations but it's due to something not being right.
Speaker 1: Body number three ordinary dreaming, good old vanilla dream number four,
Speaker 1: vivid dreaming. All right, it's rich, it's it's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you're talking about all week and boring your
Speaker 1: significant other with like it's a car that does not
Speaker 1: exist in nature and I cannot explain it. Yeah. Number
Speaker 1: five the symbolic or mocking dream. Van Eden tells us
Speaker 1: that this is the kind of dream where we get
Speaker 1: this intense feeling that circumstances are being arranged or invented
Speaker 1: by intelligent beings quote of a very low moral order.
Speaker 1: And this also ties in erotic dreams. But there's this
Speaker 1: sense that it's not just you say, like you were
Speaker 1: encountering something else, like an external force, and that's the feeling.
Speaker 1: He's not saying that you're actually encountering some sort of entity,
Speaker 1: but that's the feeling that you get in the dream. Right.
Speaker 1: Number six is the realm of dream sensations. All right,
Speaker 1: there's no vision, there's no image, there's no event, there's
Speaker 1: not even a word or a name, But you have
Speaker 1: this long period of deep sleep with the mind is
Speaker 1: continually occupied by one person, one place, one remarkable event,
Speaker 1: or even one abstract thought. Have you ever had one
Speaker 1: of these? This one is outside of my dream experience,
Speaker 1: I think no, I don't think so. I dream a
Speaker 1: lot about the material that we research, so sometimes there's
Speaker 1: a concept thore, but not just ones with such singularity
Speaker 1: on topic. Number seven is the lucid dream, which we
Speaker 1: will of course discussed in more detail. Number eight, and
Speaker 1: this is where we get around to the Malling Dog
Speaker 1: is what he called the demon dream, and it's always
Speaker 1: very near before or after a lucid dream in vad
Speaker 1: Eden's experience, and it involves something demonic, a horrific attacker,
Speaker 1: and it's just really intense. So immediately I'm reminded of
Speaker 1: your example of the Malling Dog, and Radio Lab recently
Speaker 1: did an episode that dealt with lucid dreaming in which
Speaker 1: an individual kept having a recurring dream in which someone
Speaker 1: was at their door pounding on the door and that
Speaker 1: they were going to come in and just attack them.
Speaker 1: And it was like this fierce, confrontational, violent dream and
Speaker 1: he was able to eventually break through that into a
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming experien arians. So those would both the examples
Speaker 1: of that and number nine the final in this series
Speaker 1: of dream categories that I needn gay. This is the
Speaker 1: wrong waking up, and this occurs always near waking. We
Speaker 1: have the sensation of waking up in our ordinary sleeping room,
Speaker 1: and then we begin to realize that something isn't right,
Speaker 1: and there's like some sort of inexplainable movements strange noises,
Speaker 1: and then we realized we're still asleep. Those are the
Speaker 1: worst because you spend a lot of time thinking that
Speaker 1: you're waking up and getting ready and preparing, and only
Speaker 1: to realize that you're still sleeping. I remember having them
Speaker 1: in high school junior high, where I was inevitably I
Speaker 1: was staying up too late at night because you're in
Speaker 1: high school junior high in your sleep patterns are weird. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and so I've been up way too late, and
Speaker 1: then I'm having to get up way too early, and
Speaker 1: I dream that I have risen, that I have showered,
Speaker 1: that I'm dressed, and then yes, I have risen. And
Speaker 1: then and then I realized, crap, I've I haven't even
Speaker 1: waken up at all. I just did all that work
Speaker 1: for nothing. Well see, yeah, it's exhausting work. The waking
Speaker 1: dream is also something you see a lot in films,
Speaker 1: especially since like John Carpenter used this several times, where
Speaker 1: you know the character wakes up, do you think he's
Speaker 1: woken up from a dream geotypically like a weird dream
Speaker 1: or a nightmare is something crucible of the plot, and
Speaker 1: then they look around, Oh, everything's normal, everything's normal. Oh
Speaker 1: there's a zombie. And then they wake up for real,
Speaker 1: and it's a great sort of wham wham, double pal
Speaker 1: kind of cinematic fool hum here, distract him here and
Speaker 1: really get him. It's kind of cheap too, but when
Speaker 1: you used a great effect by a talented director like Carpenter,
Speaker 1: it really packed the punch. It's a great narrative device.
Speaker 1: So in literature as well, of those nine, have you
Speaker 1: had all of those with the exception of maybe that
Speaker 1: the dream sensations? Yes, I would say that, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure everybody has experienced all those to some degree, right,
Speaker 1: because this is pretty and I think most people usually
Speaker 1: remember their dreams, and if you don't, later on in
Speaker 1: the podcast, we'll talk a little bit more about how
Speaker 1: you can have better recall of them. Yes, but let's
Speaker 1: talk about this lucid dreaming. Yes, this is the item
Speaker 1: we're ordering here today, the number seven. That's right. This
Speaker 1: is generally thought of as a dream where the dreamer
Speaker 1: is a where that they're dreaming and being aware of
Speaker 1: the dream, they are able to manipulate or outright control
Speaker 1: the circumstances around them, and generally this involves flying or
Speaker 1: just complete power over their surroundings. I have a friend Elena,
Speaker 1: who took some classes and Lucid dreaming. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they were physical classes or if she attended them
Speaker 1: through dreams, or how exact they were. I think that's
Speaker 1: something in New York. But she Lucid dreamed of workshop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but her her lucidreams would be that she should
Speaker 1: grow to an enormous size like Godzilla and start crushing buildings.
Speaker 1: So she has a lot of unresolved issues. And I think, well,
Speaker 1: and that's the beauty of a Lucid dream, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: the sky is the limit. You can do anything that
Speaker 1: you want. Um you can shrink yourself to you know,
Speaker 1: nano size, or you can become magnificently large. And it's
Speaker 1: such a beautiful idea because it's through dreaming, through the
Speaker 1: neural gear that we're born with, we're able to achieve
Speaker 1: the ends of some of our most outlandish technological dreams,
Speaker 1: like all these ideas of virtual worlds that we can
Speaker 1: move around in sandbox worlds in the video game, that
Speaker 1: we can control in an An immense amount of talent
Speaker 1: and effort, in time and money goes into the creation
Speaker 1: of these things, and he's going into the creation of
Speaker 1: virtual reality technology in the future. But we already have
Speaker 1: all of that deer in our head and the idea
Speaker 1: that with a certain amount of training and a certain
Speaker 1: amount of forethought and presentness, that we can achieve those
Speaker 1: same ends. It's just really remarkable. Well, and here's the
Speaker 1: deal to Bettan Buddhists have been hipped to this long
Speaker 1: before Western civilization. Yes, they were looking inward far before
Speaker 1: most of the rest of the world was really looking
Speaker 1: that far into the human psyche and into the human mind. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And while we may use lucid dreaming to fly or
Speaker 1: for erotic adventures, Tibetan Buddhists actually practice a kind of
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming called dream yoga, and this is a way
Speaker 1: of recognizing the world for what it is, free from illusion.
Speaker 1: So they're using it in a more high minded way.
Speaker 1: It's about making discoveries about the way you think, in
Speaker 1: the obstacles your mind puts in in your way, and
Speaker 1: achieving better clarity. The ultimate goal is a state of
Speaker 1: meta lucidity, in which you wake up from reality. I
Speaker 1: love that, yeah, And I also like the idea that
Speaker 1: in the same way that you are in a lucid dream,
Speaker 1: you are realizing, you know, all these rules and all
Speaker 1: these things that seem like they matter so much in
Speaker 1: this dream. These all the confines, howling dog or an
Speaker 1: attack or at the door, all these things that are
Speaker 1: pushing in on me. They're not real. And if I
Speaker 1: just let them go, then I have this immense freedom
Speaker 1: in my life. You can take that into the waking
Speaker 1: world and say that if you were actually awake in
Speaker 1: the waking world and you're hip to these forces that
Speaker 1: are all around you, aspects of the mind, the ego,
Speaker 1: and all these forces. And we've talked about so many
Speaker 1: of these things before, but all these forces that are
Speaker 1: dictating the way that we feel the world around us
Speaker 1: in a mental sense, if we are aware of those,
Speaker 1: then we can have elucid experience of a different type
Speaker 1: in the waking world, all right, Because the mind makes
Speaker 1: these paper tiger ors whether or not you are awake
Speaker 1: or asleep. Right, And to recognize that the mind is
Speaker 1: creating so much of your reality, is that the endgame
Speaker 1: here for for our friends, the Buddhists. But it's a
Speaker 1: very interesting way to look at it. Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: get down to some of the brass talks about how
Speaker 1: we know it's real, because for a long time it
Speaker 1: was kind of thought of as maybe sort of made
Speaker 1: up or magic, you know, because it sounds like magic.
Speaker 1: It is magical, and it's it's it's reality. And so
Speaker 1: for a long time that the really serious scientific minded types,
Speaker 1: if you brought up the idea of lucid dreaming and
Speaker 1: controlling your dream they would be like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think that maybe you're you're making that up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But although we have all long suspected that dreaming could
Speaker 1: help us with these sort of breakthroughs, right, and that
Speaker 1: there was a possibility that we could control our dreams,
Speaker 1: were at the very least know that we were dreaming, right.
Speaker 1: And then there of course individuals along the way who
Speaker 1: were doing it. And so even if they experts were
Speaker 1: telling them it wasn't happening, they had a pretty good
Speaker 1: idea about what was going on in their head. Only
Speaker 1: they are a way to test it, right, How could
Speaker 1: I test this anecdotal evidence? Well, it happens that lucid
Speaker 1: dreaming occurs during REM sleep, the fifth sleep stage, and
Speaker 1: the body is basically paralyzed, which we know with the
Speaker 1: exception of the eyelids. And this is kind of an
Speaker 1: AHA moment for a psycho physiologist, Stephen Leberge who monitored
Speaker 1: subjects with electro and Sophello Grahams e g s, which
Speaker 1: map electrical brain activity as they slept, and in the experiment,
Speaker 1: subjects used pre arranged eyelid movements to signal they were
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming to Lebert's right. So he's looking at them,
Speaker 1: he's monitoring them, and all of a sudden he sees
Speaker 1: their eyelids flutter. He then looks at the e g
Speaker 1: s and he's able to confirm that they're actually in
Speaker 1: that REM sleep and that this is all corroborating. So
Speaker 1: that's one instance we have where we can see that
Speaker 1: people are outwardly signaling that they're in REM sleep and
Speaker 1: we can we can say, yes, you are. According to
Speaker 1: Scientific Americans John Horrigan, leber showed the activities such as
Speaker 1: counting numbers or having sex evokes similar neural and physiological
Speaker 1: responses in both the dreaming and waking states, and if
Speaker 1: your dream self holds its breath, then your real self
Speaker 1: does too. And moreover, events take about the same time
Speaker 1: to unfold in lucid dreams as they wouldn't real life,
Speaker 1: which is a little bit different than what we've thought before.
Speaker 1: We've always thought about dreams being compressed. And then there's
Speaker 1: also some interesting data from Dr Matthew Walker, who is
Speaker 1: the director of the Sleep Lab at Berkeley, and that
Speaker 1: he found that the lateral prefrontal cortex, part of the
Speaker 1: brain that deals with logic, may be responsible for a
Speaker 1: lot of what's going on in lucid dreaming. So during
Speaker 1: rem sleep, this part of the brain is supposed to
Speaker 1: be asleep or inactive, but it's possible that it wakes
Speaker 1: up so that dreaming and logic are both working at
Speaker 1: the same time, which would then enable the dreamer to
Speaker 1: suddenly have the mental capacity to say, Hey, this is
Speaker 1: a dream, and this is what I want to do
Speaker 1: with that dream. Now. You and I are talking about
Speaker 1: this briefly before, and I was sort of saying that
Speaker 1: that is one of the things that can get in
Speaker 1: the way when you lucid dream, the fact that you're
Speaker 1: bringing logic into it. But you can always kind of
Speaker 1: get over it, because you know you're dreaming. And this
Speaker 1: is the way that I kind of square this idea
Speaker 1: of your logic center coming online while you're dreaming. Is
Speaker 1: that now your logic center is under a set of
Speaker 1: different constructs, I guess for the dream logic. So even
Speaker 1: though what you're doing in a dream might seem absolutely
Speaker 1: crazy or inconceivable, your logic recognizes you're in a dream
Speaker 1: and allows it. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: This is kind of a tangent. But there's a fantastic
Speaker 1: short story by South American author You're a Lewis Borges
Speaker 1: called The Circular Ruins or or perhaps it is in
Speaker 1: the Circular Ruins, but keywords Circular Ruins, in which a man,
Speaker 1: a dreamer, begins to dream a living being. He dreams
Speaker 1: the dream child piece by piece and cell by cell
Speaker 1: and until it eventually achieves reality. And I won't spoil everything,
Speaker 1: but do check that out. It's a very short story,
Speaker 1: but just very poetic and shock full of wonder if
Speaker 1: someone who's definitely concerned with the borders of reality right
Speaker 1: and crossing those borders. This is really interesting to the
Speaker 1: visual cortex and parts of the motor cortex and some
Speaker 1: motion sensing areas deeper in the brain are really active
Speaker 1: during dreams. So this is why we have lots of
Speaker 1: motion and visuals and not so much stuff that you
Speaker 1: can feel in your dream. Some people may have had
Speaker 1: that experience, but for the most part, we're much more
Speaker 1: visual and motion oriented in dreams. Yeah, I can't remember
Speaker 1: ever having smelt or eaten anything in a dream before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can ever remember something like stunning in terms of
Speaker 1: like a pungency of smell, or something that's always usually visual,
Speaker 1: or some sort of action like flying. These are some
Speaker 1: interesting looks into the brain here. I also wanted to
Speaker 1: note that German researchers gave lucid dreamers specific instructions to
Speaker 1: make a series of left and right hand movements separated
Speaker 1: by a series of eye movements. Again that that eye
Speaker 1: fluttering while asleep, and the researchers were able to perform
Speaker 1: brain scans knowing what was going on in their heads.
Speaker 1: The eye movements undertaken in dreams are known to show
Speaker 1: up on electro oculogram, giving the researchers markers to know
Speaker 1: what the dreamers were meant to be doing at that point.
Speaker 1: So this is really interesting in the sense that you
Speaker 1: can start to map out actions and dreams and begin
Speaker 1: to see what people are doing. Now, this is like
Speaker 1: pretty rudimentary, right, but can you imagine within ten years
Speaker 1: being able to look at the brain and start to
Speaker 1: figure out what specifically people are dreaming about, what sort
Speaker 1: of stories that they're weaving. This was from Current Biology
Speaker 1: and the name of that paper is dreamed movement elicits
Speaker 1: activation in the sense of remorn or cortex. So you know,
Speaker 1: just a little f y I in case you know,
Speaker 1: in ten years you want to get your dreams mapped out. Well,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break and when we return, we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about lucid dreamings and we'll also discuss some
Speaker 1: of the ways that you might bring lucid dreaming into
Speaker 1: your life. Alright, we're back, so lucid dreaming. You obviously
Speaker 1: have done this before. I do not believe I've ever
Speaker 1: lucid dreamed. I've had the odd flying dream, I've had
Speaker 1: the odd attackers coming after me dream lots of what
Speaker 1: I loosely called movie dreams were something amazing, and I
Speaker 1: guess they're vivid dreams under the nine point scale that
Speaker 1: we were discussing earlier, but very vivid dreams for something
Speaker 1: really imaginative is happening. But I've never had a lucid
Speaker 1: dreaming experience. Okay, So I will say that in the
Speaker 1: last couple of years, I haven't had as many lucid dreams.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you why I haven't been getting as
Speaker 1: much sleep. Get a little rug rat right three years old.
Speaker 1: So there you go. One of the first things you
Speaker 1: have to do is get enough sleep, and the reason
Speaker 1: is because the more rem the better your chances of
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming and recalling the dream. And we go into
Speaker 1: RAM every ninety minutes throughout the night, but each RAM
Speaker 1: period gets much longer and occupies a larger chunk of
Speaker 1: that ninety minutes cycle each time. So if you're only
Speaker 1: sleeping the first part of a normal eight hours of sleep,
Speaker 1: you're getting very little of that REM sleep. So if
Speaker 1: you wake up at three o'clock in the morning and
Speaker 1: four o'clock in the morning, it's harder to get back
Speaker 1: to sleep than chances are you're not gonna have that
Speaker 1: good time REM sleep that will induce our help to
Speaker 1: induce a lucid dream I should also have in terms
Speaker 1: of dreaming in general, some sleep ates will also affect
Speaker 1: your propensity for dream remembering yeah or not remembering right.
Speaker 1: That's usually the cache that you you have a fogg
Speaker 1: you r recall if you're if you're taking stuff. But
Speaker 1: you can still try some of these things. You could
Speaker 1: keep a dream diary that seems to be very helpful
Speaker 1: for people. Um, you can set an intention which sounds
Speaker 1: kind of yoga s but if you want to fly
Speaker 1: in your dream, you could look at a picture of
Speaker 1: a person flying right before you get to bed and
Speaker 1: tell yourself, I would like to know that I'm dreaming
Speaker 1: and I would like to fly in my dream. And
Speaker 1: that seems pretty simple, but it's you know, the brain,
Speaker 1: as we know is, is really great about taking suggestions
Speaker 1: and acting on them. There's something called the mild technique
Speaker 1: that Leberge calls mnemonic induction of lucid dreams, and that
Speaker 1: involves waking up an hour earlier than usual in the
Speaker 1: morning and recalling your last dream and then going to
Speaker 1: sleep again while thinking again setting an intention next time
Speaker 1: I'm dreaming, I want to remember that I'm dreaming, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to lucid dream. And also you should know
Speaker 1: that lucia dreams occur most often in the morning. Just
Speaker 1: before awakening, which makes sense when we talk about those
Speaker 1: longer rim periods and then go back to sleep again
Speaker 1: with purpose. Well, yeah, I mean a lot of it
Speaker 1: has to do with that waking period, just the millisecond
Speaker 1: when you're waking up and you begin to have this feeling,
Speaker 1: this really strong flooding of a dream right coming at you.
Speaker 1: Instead of saying, oh, I need to get up and
Speaker 1: I need to get dressed and so on and so forth,
Speaker 1: if you try to just really bask and whatever emotions
Speaker 1: that are evoked at that moment, chances are you going
Speaker 1: to be able to engage your recall a lot better.
Speaker 1: So how do you know when you are actually Luca dreaming? Well,
Speaker 1: one method that I've read is just simply to look
Speaker 1: around you and start looking at a little more detail
Speaker 1: about what's actually in this world, because that's one method
Speaker 1: that is often used is the idea that let me
Speaker 1: look around, let me see if I can realize this
Speaker 1: is a dream, if I can look for something. And
Speaker 1: I've heard you need to go about this in your
Speaker 1: daily life as well, like in your waking life. Make
Speaker 1: a point of, say, looking at light switches and making
Speaker 1: sure they're there and that they work. Probably look at
Speaker 1: text and see if it's readable. The text thing is
Speaker 1: a big That's been a big clue for me, because
Speaker 1: a lot of times I'll be reading or I'll be
Speaker 1: writing something and the text keeps moving, or I can
Speaker 1: see one sentence and then it all falls away. You
Speaker 1: look at it, it's text, and you look away, and
Speaker 1: you look back at it and it's something else to
Speaker 1: pict a graham or a smiley face or something. It's
Speaker 1: not gonna hold. It's not gonna be the same thing,
Speaker 1: whereas in the waking world, I can look at this
Speaker 1: and it's still say the same thing it said earlier.
Speaker 1: Waking status confirmed right, or clocks they don't have scrambled
Speaker 1: numbers right in reality. But if you're dreaming, you're trying
Speaker 1: to get a beat on what time it is, a
Speaker 1: lot of times you'll see the same thing as the
Speaker 1: text that the numbers run around. So there are definitely
Speaker 1: hall marks of this happening in Lucid dreaming. Here's something
Speaker 1: that's just totally random, but I thought it was interesting.
Speaker 1: There is a theory of why there are so many
Speaker 1: flying dreams, especially in Lucid dreaming. And there's a guy
Speaker 1: named Alan Hobson he's a psychidras and dream researcher at Harvard,
Speaker 1: and he says that flying is the brain trying to
Speaker 1: reconcile the fact that we're under the illusion that we're
Speaker 1: moving and yet the body is giving the brain data
Speaker 1: that it's immobile, and so in flying, we're moving, that
Speaker 1: our limbs aren't bending or moving. And I would be
Speaker 1: curious to know from from listeners to if they've ever
Speaker 1: had the flying dream and if they have like the
Speaker 1: typical reports of your hands being outstretched like Superman, because
Speaker 1: that's that idea of like your stiff that you're not
Speaker 1: really moving but you're flying. I definitely have that experience.
Speaker 1: This was the summer that The Rocketeer came out. While
Speaker 1: I don't think The Rocket Here is a movie that
Speaker 1: I would necessarily seek out to watch again, at that
Speaker 1: point in my life, I was pretty obsessed with it.
Speaker 1: I like read the novel that was based on the screenplay,
Speaker 1: and I had at least one dream air I was
Speaker 1: the Rocketeer, or was in The Rocketeers get up flying
Speaker 1: stiffly over like a coastal area and it was really
Speaker 1: really beautiful. Okay, so you've had the stiffarmed dream. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was definitely stiff. I wasn't just flopping around around.
Speaker 1: The other side of that is every vision that we have,
Speaker 1: every fiction involving a flying character, they tend to be
Speaker 1: kind of stiff. They're Superman or there's a rocket their
Speaker 1: Commando Cody or some other character, and they're they're very
Speaker 1: stiff with their rocket suit because nobody wants to watch
Speaker 1: Superman just flop around in the air and looked like
Speaker 1: he was just valet in the air. Well, beautiful. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you one example that comes and I didn't
Speaker 1: have this growing up. In that movie that I mentioned before,
Speaker 1: Hanuman versus seven Ultraman, the tie Ultraman movie in which
Speaker 1: Hant m Han, the Hindu monkey god, shows up. He
Speaker 1: flies through the air. Well, he flies through the air
Speaker 1: very stiffly, but he flies through the air with a
Speaker 1: dance pose, a very artistic pose to him. Now, so
Speaker 1: he doesn't he is stiff, and then he has no
Speaker 1: motion other than he is flying through the air, but
Speaker 1: his body language is very fluid looking. I'm gonna challenge
Speaker 1: myself to fly and do like the robot like ants moves.
Speaker 1: Next time I'm lucid dreaming, I am going to Work
Speaker 1: versus Ultraman the Seven Ultraman every night for a week
Speaker 1: and see if I start dreaming like that movie, because
Speaker 1: even if I don't fly, the results are gonna be amazing.
Speaker 1: Speaking of another movie, Real Quick Waking Life. If you've
Speaker 1: never seen this movie before, it's very interesting and actually
Speaker 1: talks about a lot of these concepts, a lucid dreaming
Speaker 1: and also what is reality and what is illusion? I
Speaker 1: need to see it again because I think I fell
Speaker 1: asleep i saw It's a it's a talking movie, but
Speaker 1: nonetheless very interesting. Alright, So let's talk about whether or
Speaker 1: not we can harness lucid dreaming and dreaming in general
Speaker 1: to help ourselves. And I'm thinking about nightmares PTSD, and it's,
Speaker 1: you know, general problems that we have in life. Right
Speaker 1: in the same way that you were able to defeat
Speaker 1: that dog that was mulling your face, and in the
Speaker 1: same way that in that episode of Radio Lab that
Speaker 1: the individual was able to eventually deal with that troublesome
Speaker 1: nightmare that he kept having, that reoccurring nightmare in which
Speaker 1: someone was at his door. It has been proposed that
Speaker 1: by commanding the power of lucid dreams, chronic nightmare sufferers
Speaker 1: could actually deal with their problems. Yes, it's true. And
Speaker 1: I was actually thinking to you about Elias how we've
Speaker 1: talked about him before, when we talked about real science
Speaker 1: that came from dreams. And this was a guy who
Speaker 1: figured out how to use a needle in a sewing
Speaker 1: machine that would puncture the cloth. Right. He dreamed about
Speaker 1: a tribe that was dancing around him holding spears, and
Speaker 1: the spears had holes near their tips, and boom, he
Speaker 1: realized the solution to making that happen. So that's just
Speaker 1: a good example, I think in general, of how your
Speaker 1: mind can work on these problems. Did I tell you
Speaker 1: about this? I um this. This came up of a
Speaker 1: week of playing a lot of board and card games,
Speaker 1: and I think I had recently seen an episode of
Speaker 1: Mystery Science Theater that had some magic in it. But
Speaker 1: I dreamt of a card slash board game that didn't
Speaker 1: exist in real life, and I mean still doesn't. But
Speaker 1: I woke up remembering the mechanics of the game and
Speaker 1: how the game more or less work with some certain
Speaker 1: blank spots regarding the shoots and ladder. No, it wasn't
Speaker 1: shoots and ladder, and I can't reveal it exactly how
Speaker 1: it works, because maybe I'll do something with it at
Speaker 1: some point. But it was one of those dreams where
Speaker 1: I woke up and I'm like, wow, I have this idea.
Speaker 1: And it was interesting for me because I get a
Speaker 1: lot of sort of visual ideas, like there's a particular
Speaker 1: kind of monster that shows up in my dreams. I
Speaker 1: could write a story about that or something. This is
Speaker 1: one of the few times where I had a dream
Speaker 1: in which there was like a system in play, where
Speaker 1: I woke up not as much inspired by just the
Speaker 1: imagery and magic of the dream world, but there was
Speaker 1: a more or less a concrete idea there. Yeah, And again,
Speaker 1: the prefrontal cortex usually is it gets a little bit
Speaker 1: dim when you're dreaming, not LUSA dream, but just dreaming.
Speaker 1: And we've talked about this before with jazz musicians. We've
Speaker 1: seen this part of the brain kind of dial it
Speaker 1: down a little bit because again, your logic center sometimes
Speaker 1: can impede creative thought. So it's really interesting that that
Speaker 1: this is the realm that we can get in there
Speaker 1: and there are no rules and you can start to
Speaker 1: to work out. So lucians are really cool creative ideas
Speaker 1: and board games that are not shooting. There are no
Speaker 1: rules yet. But if tenure is in the future when
Speaker 1: we can monitor dreams, who's to say, right, dream police? Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to talk about this article in Scientific
Speaker 1: American is called how Can You Control Your Dreams? And
Speaker 1: according to Didre Barrett, she's the assistant clinical professor of
Speaker 1: psychology at Harvard, something called image rehearsal is a way
Speaker 1: to overcome the nightmares as you talk about or PTSD events.
Speaker 1: Therapist or researchers have the person work out in an
Speaker 1: alternate scenario they want the dream to take, and they
Speaker 1: ask them to close their eyes and they imagine this
Speaker 1: and they generally talk them through a kind of really
Speaker 1: vivid enactment of it so that they're they're starting to
Speaker 1: pin those details in the person's mind. And we've talked
Speaker 1: about this before with memory too, about really penning that
Speaker 1: information into memory palace, right the memory palace, and making
Speaker 1: sure that that person is really attaching meaning to these objects.
Speaker 1: So that's what these therapists are doing. And usually the
Speaker 1: person incorporates some degree of the rehearse scenario at bedtime
Speaker 1: or listens to a tape where the therapist or researcher
Speaker 1: is recounting the alternate scenario and they've had some really
Speaker 1: good results with us cool. And then there are various
Speaker 1: devices that have come along that may aid us in
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming. Oh, yes, are you referring to the Liverages goggles. Yes,
Speaker 1: the Nova Dreamer And this is an invention of the
Speaker 1: Lucidity Institute. And it looks like a cross between like
Speaker 1: sleep mass and goggles. And the idea here is that
Speaker 1: if you condition yourself that red light, flashing red light
Speaker 1: means that you're having a dream, as opposed to oh,
Speaker 1: my goodness, something pulled over for speeding. If you can,
Speaker 1: if you can reprogram your mind to think flashing red
Speaker 1: lights mean hey, it's a dream. Start doing whatever you
Speaker 1: want to do in the dream. Then you can wear
Speaker 1: these goggles and they would be able to measure when
Speaker 1: you're experiencing rem sue and then flash in that light,
Speaker 1: and then you would be able to perceive that through
Speaker 1: your eyelids and you would know that that was your cue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's your cue to start dreaming it up big time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Instead of having to look specifically for examples of say,
Speaker 1: dream writing or or something else weird in the dream
Speaker 1: that doesn't match up and would be your clue. This
Speaker 1: is like an outside force saying, hey, signal Red, You've
Speaker 1: got a lucid dream opportunity. Here, go for it. And
Speaker 1: some of this starts to go into the territory of inception, right,
Speaker 1: like planting dreams or planting these cues. Yeah. John Horgan
Speaker 1: hated that movie, or at least he enjoyed it, but
Speaker 1: he did not enjoy the science of it, which makes sense, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's this tried and true science journalist and
Speaker 1: he found that the water should be murky and they
Speaker 1: are sometimes the pop points where but still I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: Here's something about that movie which I enjoyed as well.
Speaker 1: When these characters are lucid dreaming, they create some of
Speaker 1: the most boring things I've ever seen in a cinematic
Speaker 1: dream portrayal. At one level, I used to think, I
Speaker 1: don't really care for this movie, because if they're lucid dreaming,
Speaker 1: they should really be wowing. There was just a lot
Speaker 1: of crazy stuff. But if you bringing your logic into play,
Speaker 1: then I can see where that could potentially null the
Speaker 1: powers of just pure imagination. What part was boring to
Speaker 1: know that, like the big city they had, like the
Speaker 1: city and it's a building. I don't want to get
Speaker 1: into spoilers too much, but there's there's a scene where
Speaker 1: there's like a big city around them, and it's just
Speaker 1: kind of it's creative in its own sense, but it's
Speaker 1: not I feel like I could dream a better dream city.
Speaker 1: It's what well I know. But the thing is, the
Speaker 1: whole point of that movie is you're stuck in whomever
Speaker 1: streams that is right. Yeah, they were in their own
Speaker 1: dream at this point. Yeah, but she was dreaming, and
Speaker 1: the whole point where she was creating the architecture for
Speaker 1: like a realistic architecture. Okay, into realistic architecture, my dream,
Speaker 1: I can have realistic architecture. Because he was putting her
Speaker 1: through the paces, wanting to see if Grasshopper had learned well,
Speaker 1: because that part of the movie, you know, show me
Speaker 1: what you have learned, Grasshopper. But that's not what Leonardo
Speaker 1: Dicapito said at all, Just so everybody knows. Okay, So
Speaker 1: there are limitations to this, right, You can't exactly just
Speaker 1: jump into this. It's not just clicker heels three times
Speaker 1: and you're gonna be an a lucid dream You've gotta
Speaker 1: really want it. Even with fancy gadgetry involved. There's not
Speaker 1: just an on off switch or a magic pill you
Speaker 1: can take. Though they have experience with the use of
Speaker 1: Alzheimer's drugs that a cognitive processes and memory, so there
Speaker 1: are some experiments involving the use of a pill. But
Speaker 1: still all of these things still require the dreamer to
Speaker 1: really want lucid dreaming to happen. Yeah, and I keep
Speaker 1: thinking about this travel Lodge study that came out but
Speaker 1: by the futurist Stean Pearson, who tried to imagine travel
Speaker 1: lodge of the future and and all the technology that
Speaker 1: we have at our disposal and what that might look
Speaker 1: like his idea. And again, this is someone who is
Speaker 1: um He's got a lot of information and experience under
Speaker 1: his belt, so he's not just dreaming that's out of nothing, right,
Speaker 1: And he's, as we discussed before, he's a great futurist.
Speaker 1: And then he's taking all of this information and he's
Speaker 1: extrapolating a future reality that is for the most part
Speaker 1: unmoored from our attachment to the way things are today. Right,
Speaker 1: And he says that developments and fabric technology and synthetic
Speaker 1: materials means sleepware of the future will feature electronically controllable
Speaker 1: properties such as touch sensitivity, shape changing, thermal properties, and
Speaker 1: light emission. So his idea is that sleepers could get
Speaker 1: gently massaged in their sleep or uncomfortably groped by strange,
Speaker 1: faithless demons. Right, and then you know, red lights beamed
Speaker 1: into their eyes and then they have to start loose
Speaker 1: dreaming boop. Right then, But there is this idea that
Speaker 1: you could enhance your dreaming, that there may be some
Speaker 1: point in the future where we can enter into this
Speaker 1: state much more effectively and get groped. As you say, well,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting that we're talking about the future and
Speaker 1: we're talking about the nine different types of dreams. It
Speaker 1: was one of the books in the futuristic Altered Carbon
Speaker 1: series that Richard K. Morgan did, where he has he
Speaker 1: has a future in which individuals are able to move
Speaker 1: their consciousness from body to body. You're only allowed to
Speaker 1: have one body at a time, but it means that
Speaker 1: one can practically forever if one can afford new bodies.
Speaker 1: So you have individuals that don't have to deal with
Speaker 1: much in the way of physical illness. You'll have individuals
Speaker 1: who end up voluntarily catching the flu just for the
Speaker 1: fever dreams or just you know, just for some of
Speaker 1: the intense bodily experiences of the illness. I gonna say,
Speaker 1: that's not that's not a dream that I would want
Speaker 1: to inhabit. No, But I guess the thing is they're
Speaker 1: so jaded. They've tried everything else, They've had everything else
Speaker 1: in their multiple lives, so they're at the point where, well,
Speaker 1: what's left for me? I guess fever dreams. That's extreme, man.
Speaker 1: I gotta say, all of this information sort of points
Speaker 1: back to this idea that we talked about this before.
Speaker 1: How much of our time we've spend dreaming even while
Speaker 1: we're awake. We've talked about daydreaming rights. By one account,
Speaker 1: at least half of our waking hours daydreaming, right, And
Speaker 1: you can, you know, cultivate awareness on that level there too.
Speaker 1: And I love the idea of thevet and Buddhists that
Speaker 1: we were talking about to where let's not be afraid
Speaker 1: then to take this concept into the waking world and
Speaker 1: think long and hard about the various aspects of our
Speaker 1: thought processes that are dictating the way we experience waking reality.
Speaker 1: There's a great quote, and I may have read this
Speaker 1: one before, but it's it bears repeating from Grant Morrison,
Speaker 1: and this is from the Invisible Volume one. He says,
Speaker 1: your head's like mine, like all our heads, big enough
Speaker 1: to contain every god and devil there ever was big
Speaker 1: enough to hold the weight of oceans, and the turning stars,
Speaker 1: hold universes fit in there. But what do we choose
Speaker 1: to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken thing, sad
Speaker 1: trinkets that we play with over and over. The world
Speaker 1: turns our key, and we play the same little tune
Speaker 1: again and again, and we think that tunes all we are,
Speaker 1: that's keep coming back to. And then here's an older one.
Speaker 1: Here's one from seventy four from author O'shanessy, from the
Speaker 1: ode to his book Music and Moonlight. We are the
Speaker 1: music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, wandering
Speaker 1: by lone sea breakers and sitting by desolate streams, world
Speaker 1: losers and world forsakers on whom the pale moon gleams.
Speaker 1: Yet we are the movers and shakers of the world forever,
Speaker 1: it seems. And you've probably heard everyone from Willy Wonka
Speaker 1: to a f X twin site that poem, but it's
Speaker 1: a it's another sort of beautiful line that that I
Speaker 1: wanted to lead out with here. Very nice. Let's bring
Speaker 1: that dreamy robot by. Yes, we have some listener mail
Speaker 1: to get to and one of them is dream related.
Speaker 1: As we mentioned, we heard from listener Dan, and I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna read all of Dan's email, but he he
Speaker 1: raised a number of really cool points and hopefully he'll
Speaker 1: chime in with more after this podcast to get his
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming feedback on this episode that he says Robert Julie,
Speaker 1: on one of your recent podcasts, you talked about how
Speaker 1: most people never utilize lucid dreamings for sexual experiences because
Speaker 1: they'd rather fly or be a giant. I wanted to
Speaker 1: let you know this isn't the case. He goes on
Speaker 1: to say, once you realize you're dreaming, the hardest part
Speaker 1: is to remember that you're dreaming. It's very easy to
Speaker 1: slip back into standard dreaming out of lucy dreaming. Conversely,
Speaker 1: it can also be very easy to wake yourself up
Speaker 1: and waste a perfectly go to lucid dreams, So it's
Speaker 1: important to keep reminding yourself that you're dreaming. Looking at
Speaker 1: your hands helps for some reason. And whatever you do,
Speaker 1: don't open your eyes because you'll snap up right out
Speaker 1: of it. I got to the point where I was
Speaker 1: having a vivid, lucid dream every couple of months, so
Speaker 1: I started experimenting with the possibilities. First I learned how
Speaker 1: to fly, which took a little practice. Eventually I could
Speaker 1: do it quite easily. It's kind of like the story
Speaker 1: of Peter Pan, because you actually have to believe you
Speaker 1: can fly. Later, I started learning how to conjure objects.
Speaker 1: The first thing I conjured was a sword that formed
Speaker 1: in my hands. I tried to conjure people in places
Speaker 1: with much difficulty until I figured out a wonderful little trick.
Speaker 1: Just find a door, walk to any door, and convince
Speaker 1: yourself before you open it, and whoever or whatever you
Speaker 1: want is behind it. I want to use this trick
Speaker 1: to conjure a lustful, scantily clad woman, and proceeded to
Speaker 1: have some great lucid dreaming sex. Let me tell you,
Speaker 1: it's right up there with flying. So there you go,
Speaker 1: because we had to because a lot of people when
Speaker 1: they did talk about their lucid dreamings, they discussed flying
Speaker 1: and growing huge, and even Frederic Vilhem von Eden, who
Speaker 1: coined the term. In his descriptions of lucid dreaming, he
Speaker 1: tends to focus more and more on the fabulous aspects
Speaker 1: of it and kind of discounts the erotic side of
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming and his experience. So well, it's not really
Speaker 1: t talk, you know. All right, Well, let's move onto
Speaker 1: another listener mail. This one is from Maria Mary all Right,
Speaker 1: Senses High, Robert, and Julie. I've been listening to your
Speaker 1: show for a long time now and really enjoy it,
Speaker 1: especially the more philosophical topics. I wanted to write in
Speaker 1: about your episode on the lust because there is something
Speaker 1: you didn't quite touch on, and that is the societal
Speaker 1: pressure that exists now to be lustful in the sexual sense,
Speaker 1: almost like the opposite of the prudence pressure that existed
Speaker 1: before when we freed ourselves from those shackles. I feel
Speaker 1: like we went running too far in the other direction,
Speaker 1: and now the pressure is more on being lustful. I
Speaker 1: don't think people notice too much, but it is very
Speaker 1: apparent to me, being a sexual myself, that there is
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure both from my peers and the multimedia.
Speaker 1: Now people see it as an expression of freedom and
Speaker 1: a pleasure that everyone should enjoy, regardless of whether they
Speaker 1: want it or not, and often attempt to cure a
Speaker 1: sexuality or advise me to go to the doctor. I
Speaker 1: don't have anything against love and the free expression of sexuality,
Speaker 1: but I think people need to tone it down a little.
Speaker 1: So there there, you know, I think that's some valid
Speaker 1: commentary there, because as we've discussed before, I mean, we
Speaker 1: live in this lust economy. We live in this world.
Speaker 1: It is just so into our and so open with
Speaker 1: our physical desires, and not everyone is really gonna I mean,
Speaker 1: some people are going to have a very over sexed
Speaker 1: mind and they're gonna definitely flow in that direction a
Speaker 1: lot easier. But then there are individuals who are, for
Speaker 1: the most part a sexual that pressure is gonna come
Speaker 1: on them on one right, And as you say, it's
Speaker 1: the last full commercial aspect of it. So there's this
Speaker 1: idea that you want to lust after something, that you
Speaker 1: have to have that deodorant because there's a lusty woman
Speaker 1: smelling your armpit or something not you specifically. That is
Speaker 1: an interesting bit of commentary and it made me recall
Speaker 1: and I feel like it's called the Science of Lust.
Speaker 1: It's a discovery show, and they actually talked about usexuality,
Speaker 1: which is not something that is studied a lot or
Speaker 1: talked about a lot. So if anybody is interested in
Speaker 1: learning more about a sexuality, how it's hardwired or not hardwired,
Speaker 1: you should check that out. One of my favorite characters
Speaker 1: basically a sexual that would be Carlock Holmes basically in
Speaker 1: a sexual character, and I have problems with adaptations to
Speaker 1: try and sex him out too much, but yeah, you
Speaker 1: can't sex up the hounds too, that's not what that's
Speaker 1: about now. So he was always a great hero to me,
Speaker 1: especially in my junior high in high school years, because
Speaker 1: I'm like, like, you know, all the multimedia pressures on
Speaker 1: me to even then, even as you're a team, there's
Speaker 1: all you you watch the like the Wonder Years and stuff,
Speaker 1: and there's like sexual pressure in that. But then you
Speaker 1: can turn to Charlotte Holmes and you're like, Sherlock comes
Speaker 1: is amazing, and he doesn't he doesn't need any of this.
Speaker 1: There you go. Well, if you would like to share
Speaker 1: anything with us, be at Sherlock Holmes related or a
Speaker 1: sexuality related or more importantly, write to us about your
Speaker 1: lucid dreaming experiences. Are you a lucid dreamer? Have you
Speaker 1: attempted it and failed? Are you still trying? Let us
Speaker 1: know and let us know what your experience as a
Speaker 1: lucid dreamer is like. Yeah, and you can also check
Speaker 1: out an article about lucid dreaming on house to forks
Speaker 1: dot com and it's written by Katie Lambert. Really interesting.
Speaker 1: But do drop us a line first of all Facebook
Speaker 1: that you can find us there Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind Twitter or Blow the Mind and it's a really
Speaker 1: cool feature right now called the Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind photo upload contest. If you're listening to this particular
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Speaker 1: You can find it on the how stuff Works Facebook account,
Speaker 1: and we'll also link to it on the Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind Facebook account. It's a really cool upload
Speaker 1: to you take a cool photo if you think it's
Speaker 1: mind blowing and like a scary, gross, amazing. There are
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Speaker 1: really awesome and you took it, inner it there you
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Speaker 1: Up tomorrow