Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning.
Hey, how you doing. Come on in.
This is time for Destiny and I'm your host, Cliff Dunning. We're talking about tools for transformation. People ask me, you know, Cliff, why did you start destiny? What's destiny all about? Well, if you really pay attention, and I know most of you do, what we're doing here is providing evidence of enhancements. You know, I use the term biohacking, which is more of a present term for enhancing your brain, your body, your spirit through vitamin's, minerals, foods, in some cases drugs.
And I mentioned that I am on OZIMPI and you know I want to feel better. I want to live long and healthy and vibrant, and so tools for transformation on the physical level are very much into my my perspective. The other side of things is what our ancestors use tools for transformation. They were, you know, developing meditation. And you know I've spoken about this before. When you meditate, whoever figured out the keys to meditation was an alchemist.
When you meditate, you synchronize your left and right brain, your hemispheres, your left and right hemispheres, and when you do that, you sink that. You sink your brain so it's functioning more harmonious, harmoniously, but also you heal your brain, and people don't. We don't have enough people that are meditating. And you know, it's like I don't have time to
sit and close my eyes. I can't sit still. My mother's never been able to meditate, and I've tried to get her to get into some classes because it would help her, but she can't sit still, and some people just can't close their eyes. Well, that's one aspect of tools for transformation. The others are yoga, they're tai chi, their body movement, they're getting massage.
They're eating well.
They are looking for nutritional substances that are radically changing metabolism, because as we age, your body begins to deteriorate. Yourselves are not producing is frequently and you're kind of breaking down. So we want to live into our eighties, into our nineties, into one hundred, being one hundred. My goal is to live to be one hundred and four. Now I don't know if that's possible enough. My grandparents grandfather lived to be ninety three, my mother's currently ninety four. Maybe maybe
my mother's pretty in pretty good shape. My grandfather he was pretty good shape until the last six eight months of his life. So maybe I'm wired for this and maybe with the tweaking it'll help, but not just longevity for me. I think the other thing which is critical is lucidity. Being consciously aware as long as you can, being productive, you know.
Being aware, being.
Impactful, having influence on your younger people, being a spokesperson, being a guide as we get older. Not everybody's cut out for that, but we all have opinions, we all have points of view, and when we get older, people look to you or look to us, and when we get into older ages too, to be a voice, to give a perspective that is unique to that individual. So tools for transformation. And what we're doing today is we're talking about sleep, talking about dreaming, but we're also talking
about sleep. We have a returning guest who is presenting data on the importance of getting not only a good night's sleep, preparing to sleep very deeply and not having restless sleep. A lot of us have problems with sleep. We have sleep deprivation because we can't get six or seven hours of sleep. We're sleeping three or four hours,
and that's just not enough, just not enough. And I discovered a long time ago that if I don't get at least six and a half seven hours of sleep, I'm no good because I'm always thinking, moving, active, body, mind, spirit, and the sleep time for me is sacred time.
So I don't have Currently, I don't have a problem getting to sleep.
But some people are worrying about their job, their relationships. They're paying the bills, they could have physical health problems, their hips are not feeling great, they have pain, they can't get to sleep without drugs. But getting a good
night's sleep is really, really critical. And one of the topics in today's program is how to get good night's sleep, how to get into that ram rapid eye movement level of sleep where you're dreaming, because dreaming, although is an alternative form of awareness and consciousness, also produces very, very beneficial effects. And we'll also talk about today. We're talking about lucid dreaming, where you begin to influence your dreams. You set a dream path and what they call incubate
a dream. You develop a thought, you intend for a good dream to happen. You set the stage, you close your eyes, you go to sleep and at some point you're so deep that you begin to process and you are if you can do it. I'm still working on it. You focus on these lucid dreams years and years ago, I shouldn't be that long ago. Twenty five years ago, I was the program director for Halife Expo here in
San Francisco. We had Stephan or Stephen Leberge on the program who at that time was a professor at Stanford University, and he had coined a book called Lucid Dreaming. Actually
the book was exploring the world of lucid dreaming. And when he by the way, his talks were excellent, is like twenty twenty, twenty five, two thousand and five, two thousand and six, and he was exploring lucid dreaming around the world, How other people cultivate lucid dreaming, the techniques for discerning lucid dreaming, the techniques for intending to have lucid dreamings. Because lucid dreams are so vivid, it's like you're in a reality and then you know you're dreaming.
And that's the other topic that we will present today is is cultivating, incubating, and creating these powerful lucid dreams for healing, for manifesting, for prophecy, prognostication, you know, developing a sense of what's to come. And some of the better lucid dreamers that I've discovered can run a scenario. They can set up a kind of a halo deck hologram dick if you've watched Star Trek, where you go in, you create the setting, and then you experiment with the outcome.
Is this the way I want it to happen? Are these the people I want to interact with? Okay, I want to try it this way. Oh I don't like that. Okay, we'll go back, We'll try it again.
Wow.
I mean, can you imagine having active dreams like that where you run a scenario on something you want or a relationship you want. How how am I going to interact with this person we're going to meet? What's going to be next? I want this to happen. I want that to happen, and you run it, and if you have enough access, you have other influences, then you get a full spectrum example of a lucid dream and the experiment is a success, and then when you actually run
it in the real world, it replicates. Now that's pretty advanced. We're not going to get in that that today, but it's something to consider. So today's program is all about dreams. My guest is doctor Claire Johnson. We had her a couple of years ago. She had a book at that time called The Art of Lucid Dreaming. Today's book is called Elexir of Sleep and it's a great one. Practical
solutions for a good night's rest. And listen closely those of you who have trouble sleeping, because not sleeping at night just adds to the weight of being conscious during the day. So it's very, very important that we get a good night's sleep. So again the program is Alexa of Sleep, and my guest is Claire Johnson. Hey, spring is just around the corner where there's going to be getting better and better as we continue on into the year, and this means it's time to think about getting away
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We all have to sleep. It's important that we get good sleep.
I have friends and family that have trouble sleeping because their minds are busy, or they have had consumed some food or a beverage that kind of keeps them awake. But our focus today is on the importance of sleep and what happens when we sleep. My guest, my returning guest, is Clara Johnson. We had her a couple of years
ago talking about the art of lucid dreaming. This is a brand new book that she's releasing called Alexor of Sleep, Practical Solutions for a Good Night's Rest, and I had a good opportunity to take a look at it, and she has some highlights in here and some of the important keys to why a good sleep, a good night's rest is very very important. So Claire, welcome back to Destiny. Great to have you.
Hi.
Cliff, it's lovely to be back. Great to speak to you again.
Yeah.
Hey, you know I was fascinated in the introduction of your book. You talk about your childhood and the actual fact that you began lucid dreaming at a very young age. Talk about how you discovered that you were lucid dreaming, but not only that, you know, what were the keys to getting a good sleep and what you discovered as a child, which you took into your adulthood, and this unique work on sleep that you do.
Yeah, so I mean for me, it was very very early on in life that I realized there were two distinct worlds. One was the world of sleep and dreams, and the other was the waking world. But my parents, like most parents in those days, only paid attention to one of those worlds. They only paid attention to the waking world. But my dreams would not let me forget
about the other world. So I would have many nightmares when I was a little kid, and in one nightmare when I was three, I dreamed that I was drowning in a swimming pool. And at that moment, I had my first ever flash of lucidity, which is when you recognize that you're dreaming while you're actually in the dream state. So I realized, wow, I have a choice. I can stay in this nightmare and drown in this pool, or
I can wake myself up. And so I rolled over and over and over in this swimming pool to get out of the dream, and I ended up rolling right out of bed and landing on the floor with a bump. And that's when my mother came running up, and she told me that was just a dream that wasn't real. And so for me, it was like a very very strange thing to hear because I knew how real that dream had been. The colors were there, that the color of the water was turquoise. I had felt that water
going into my lungs. I had felt the panic and it was also vivid, and said to be told that that world or that experience was not real was just so bizarre for me. I started to realize, Okay, you know, my parents won't talk about this other world with me, but this other world is not leaving me alone. It's going to keep pulling and pulling at me, so I
need to find out more about it. And so as I grew up, I continue to have very interesting sleep experiences, you know, like sleepwalking and also lucid nightmares, which is when you know that you're dreaming, but you can't necessarily wake yourself up from the dream or control the dream in any way. You're just kind of the victim of whatever's happening in that nightmare. And that was really terrifying.
You know, as a child, you're pretty powerless anyway, because your whole life is under the control of all these adults, and then to have that going on in your dreams as well. You know, it's a pretty big thing for me. But I managed to figure out that dreams reacted to my state of mind. I understood that if I calmed down my fear, no matter how scary the dream was, when I calmed down, the dream calmed down, it became more friendly. The monsters would stop being so scary and
start wanting to be my friends. Or I wouldn't die when I fell off the edge of the cliff. I would just float down and land in a lovely meadow of flowers. You know that sort of thing. So I started to grasp the all important nature, the thought responsive nature of dreams, and I was then able to guide my lucid dreams. I mean this took a long time, Cliff. You know, this wasn't from one day to the next.
You use the term intention, and this is something that everyone talks about now intention. But when you were a child, obviously that's many years ago. To kind of consciously be aware of your dreams or in ten is fairly advanced. I can see why you became a dream expert.
Yeah.
I mean, I do think though that a lot more children than we may think have these kind of intentional dream experiences, and that they do learn to guide their dreams. Because what I found when I started speaking about lucid dreaming at international conferences, and you know, you get the audience questions at the end, people would put their hands up and say, wow. I never knew until I heard this presentation that there was a name for the kind of dreaming I did as a child, and that it's
called lucid dreaming. But I remember those dreams and how I love for them, and how I enjoyed guiding them and deciding to fly. So for a lot of people, you know, at least in those days, I mean this was pre internet times, we just we didn't really, we had to figure it out for ourselves. I mean, the whole of the world has changed so much now with the Internet and all of the information that's there at the touch of a a phone screen for young people who are growing up and want to check out what
experience am I having? We never had that. I only found my first ever book that I discovered on lucid dreaming was by Patricia Garfield. It was called Creative Dreaming. I didn't find that until I was like, I think I was nineteen or twenty or something, So that's really late, right, We.
Should let people know that you were one of the only people that has a PhD or a doctorate in lucid dreaming. And I don't know, you don't describe what school you went to, but how did you get that your professors to agree to that?
Yeah, it wasn't that easy. Well, this was at the University of Leeds and I started it or when did I start? I think I started it in two thousand
and three. So basically I sent them a portfolio of work that I'd done about lucid dreaming and also my creative writing that I was working on, because this pH d was a practice based PhD where I did research into lucid dreaming as a creative tool, and so I interviewed people who were artists and writers, and I also wrote a lucid dream inspired novel called Breathing in Color as part of the PhD. So part of the PhD was me doing experiments in my lucid dreams to meet
my novel characters or to try and get inspiration for the plot or yeah, sort of get unusual imagery from my lucid dreams and weave it into the novel. So just sort of showing how this can be done, how lucid dreams can inspire us so deeply on the creative level that we that we can actually bring an original work of art or an original novel out into the world. And then you know, alongside all that was all the
more academic formal research. So it's kind of almost like doing two PhDs because I had the research part and then I also had the creative writing part. But in yeah, there was a lot of resistance around lucid dreaming in those days because there was still this idea that many Freudians believed. So many psychotherapists and psychiatrists believed that dreams were the domain of the unconscious mind and that it was actually not possible to bring conscious awareness and logical
thought into the dream state. They actually did not believe that it was possible. So when I was presenting my research at conferences, I would get people in the audience getting really quite furious because it was going against their worldview and everything that they'd learned in their own university degrees. So they would be saying, how can you say this, How can you say that you're doing your PhD research while you sleep. This is absolutely preposterous and I would
say no, but this has been scientifically proved. It was first scientifically proved back in nineteen seventy five by Dr Keith Hearn at the University of Hull in the UK, and in fact we're coming up to the fiftieth anniversary of that on the twelfth of April in this year. So I had to explain all this to these people at the conferences. Here's the proof, this is the experiment,
this is how it happened. A lucid dreamer was wired up to toeg and how to make these eye signals when they became lucid so that it could be visible. And this is how it is all proved. So I had to go through all of this explaining and then they'd be like, oh, maybe this is possible, and I'd say to them, it's possible. You can go and have a lucid dream tonight. All it is is a thought away. Lucid dreaming is a thought away. All you have to do is think during a dream, Oh, i'm dreaming right now,
I'm a sleeper dreaming. That's all lucidity is. It's just a thought, an awareness, that's all it is. So it's not hard. Anyone can do it. It's also learnable or relearnable, because many of us had this naturally when we were kids growing up, So there's no big mystique around it. It's just something that naturally occurs in consciousness.
Let's work on the foundation. Let's talk a little bit about sleep itself, which is the title of Elixir of Sleep, and we'll catch up with Lucid Jimmian in a second. Why is good sleep so vital to our health?
Yeah, so we cannot survive without sleep, So it's always been part of the evolutionary picture for humans, right, we have to do this, we have to recharge. I sometimes think, wouldn't it be interesting as an alien coming to this planet and observing human behavior and seeing how we constantly have to lie down and recharge our batteries. We must seem like kind of weak battery operated toys that kind of run out of steam and then have to have
to plug themselves into the source. Because that's what sleep is. It's this, it's this incredibly important source, a vital source for us. If we don't sleep, we immediately just after one bad night of sleep. We've all experienced this, you know, when we've been traveling, for example, and you just can't sleep and you have to stay awake all night. The next day you feel terrible. You can't think straight, you can't get a simple sentence out of your mouth, you
can't drive properly. It's very, very dangerous to drive when you're sleep deprived. It's like being drunk when you're driving a car. And so all of our cognitive abilities decrease incredibly rapidly if we don't get a good night's sleep. So just on that level of human survival, it's absolutely essential to get a good night's sleep. And there and we need to consider the fact that sleep is a healing elixia. It actually, you know, recharges our entire body.
There are these killer cancer cells you know, that are produced when we sleep in the deeper stages of sleep that will stop us from getting cancer or help us to heal if cancer appears in our body. Our immune system is fortified while we sleep, our hormones are balanced. And yeah, there's also the dreaming, which we've already spoken about a bit, but dreams also have that incredibly important
function of acting as sort of nighttime therapy. They take our concerns, our problems, and they turn them into stories. They give us solutions, they show us possible futures, and they're also an incredibly creative source and they help us with memory Consolidation's interesting.
Yeah, because you have the five main benefits of sleep, and I was really interested.
I'd like to go through those.
We've just covered number one, which is boosts the ability to heal, and you're talking about hormone development and other healing. I guess you could call it metabolism gets put in the motion when you're quiet and or relaxed. But you also talk number two, which is support mental health and this is something that and this is in the form of dreams. Talk about how that.
Is a mental health elix or.
Yes, so well, basically, I mean we all have problems and issues, we all have relationship difficulties things like that. So let's say we come home, we've had a really bad day, we've had an argument with a co worker or our boss, and we get home and then we have a terrible blow up argument with our spouse. We go to sleep feeling absolutely exhausted, fed up with life, and then the dreams will come. The dreams will come and help us to rejuvenate, help us to recover from that.
They may at first run through a scenario with our with our spouse, or with our boss. They may come in the form of nightmares at first, perhaps earlier on in that night we have a bad dream, but what dreams do. All dreams come to help and heal us. So even the worst nightmare is simply flagging up the fact that we have an issue that we need to
work on. And what often happens in the course of a night of sleep that if we've had all these horrible daytime experiences we process them with there's a big level of emotional processing that goes on while we sleep. So having those nightmares is actually helping us to understand what happened and sort of settle down and calm down on the level of those disputes that we've had. And as the night of sleep goes on, very often our dreams will then transform and they'll start showing us, oh,
something really lovely. They'll give us gifts, beautiful dreams. I mean, this is what happens to me. If I've had a stressful day, I tend to have gorgeous dreams that take me into somewhere beautiful light. For example, I go on a boat trip, or I'm in the jungle and there's a gorgeous animal and I engage with this animal. Something lovely like that happens, like the dream pepping me up.
Or people often record dreams of light, so dreams where perhaps the scenery floats away and then we end up in a state of light, immersed in a beautiful healing light. And these kinds of dreams as well, they help us to heal on so many levels. They give us resilience
and when we bring lucidity into our night of sleep. If, for example, we had a bad dream about the argument with the boss or the coworker or the spouse, and we know that we're dreaming, then we can directly ask for healing in that particular dream scenario, asked to change something or replay the scenario in different ways so that we have a different reaction. Yeah, yeah, we can change things.
And when we change them on the level of our dreams and our unconscious that has a lasting effect on our waking life as well.
Let's talk about number three, which I'd like to learn more about, which is you call it a sleep is critical for learning.
What does that mean?
I mean, is it because you're relaxed and your brain's kind of being healed or talk about that as fascinating, Yeah.
I mean the brain state during sleep or during all of the stages of sleep. It's just so fascinating to realize all of these different states of consciousness that we traverse during a night of sleep. And studies have shown that, for example, when we sleep before we learn something, like have a nap, and then we get up and we learn something, and then we go back to sleep again,
then we really we consolidate everything that we've learned. We learn it far more thoroughly than if we just learn it and then go about our day without having that other sleep. So sleep is kind of like this way of really laying down skills and memories and getting them into our head so that they become second nature to us.
There have been studies done on mazes as well. So for example, I think it was one hundred people that were given a maze to try out on a computer game, so they had to try and find their way through the maze, and then half of them were allowed to take a ninety minute nap and then they all had another ago at the maze, and the nappers were much
better at navigating the may the Maze. But even more astonishingly, the nappers who had dreamed about navigating the maze, they were ten times better at navigating it than the people who hadn't had a sleep at all.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guests today, Claire Johnson speaking on her new book on sleep called Elixir of Sleep. We'll be right back, yea, hun, Brad, though I guess it is doctor Claire Johnson who has written a new book on sleep called Elixir of Sleep. This is a book that just came out on the benefits of good sleep and how to cultivate the best sleep possible. Hey, you know, I want to ask you
real quickly, Claire, why are naps so great? I mean, I have certain days where I have to take it, like a nap at three pm for maybe an hour.
But why are naps little boosters?
Favorite freshers on every level? And I mean, NAP's one of my favorite things, Cliff, I mean it's one of the most you know, that's where you'll find me if you don't know where I am, I'll be on the sofa having a nap. But the way I nap is also more like a yoga nidra type of nap. I don't know if you've heard of yoga nidra. It's when you lie down, you close your eyes, relax very deeply, so that your body falls asleep, but your mind rests in awareness. So it's like it's like a lucid nap.
Oh my gosh, it's so refreshing. It's amazing. You can follow the hypnogogic imagery and sensations, so the pre sleep bizarre images that pop up, and all the buzzing noises or the falling noises. You just observe all of that and you float, you rest in awareness. It's deeply refreshing. When I come out of these yoga nidra naps, I'm on fire with energy. I mean, that's how I managed
to get so much done. All the books and the video courses and the Lucid Dream retreats and the conference presentations, you know, everything I do. It's like so much work, and people say, how do you do it? And how do you manage to stay so joyful and energized. And that is my secret. It's the nap. It's the yoga nitra nap.
Is that nap in the book?
Oh yeah, yeah.
So you lay down but you don't sleep. Your mind is clear, but your body goes asleep. I mean that's like a deep meditation.
I guess you could say, oh, yeah, exactly. Well, Yoga nidra comes from the Tantric tradition, so it's been around for like thousands of years. I think it's probably been
around since humans first came into existence. Because it's such a natural state of consciousness, you would have definitely experienced it before, Cliff in my view, you know, like when you just like you don't go into bed for your nap, that you lie on the sofa and perhaps you you know, the sun's shining through the windows, so you're not in a deep deep state. That you float in this bliss and you're just you feel so good. And that's the kind of yoga nittra type state the boys used to
falling asleep. It can fall it, you know, it falls asleep every night. So you just basically kind of let your body relax and relax and relax until you can't really feel it anymore. And that is a golden moment. That's the moment when you can really start drifting and moving forward through all of this imagery or just experiencing whatever there is to experience. So your mind's alert, but it's deeply relaxed as well. There's nothing hyper about it. It's just like floating, you know, half.
An hour or an hour that you do every bai.
I mean for most people it's shorter. You can do it for a whole hour. I mean, I have a lot of guided meditations on my website that help people to stay in that state for an hour or so. But when I do it, I do it for about twenty five minutes, thirty minutes something like that. Yeah, it's extremely beneficial. And like, yeah, you wake up from that nap and you feel just amazing. It's so refreshing for the brain.
Amazing. I had to look that up.
Let's get into the next benefit, which is and I'm really curious about this one, you say, and this is number four. The benefits of sleep boosts gut health. Now, why is this a critical factor in our health?
Yeah, well, you know, the gut is often referred to these days as the second brain, because it's so crucial to our health, and it's so intuitive, you know, Like I mean, we will talk about you've got to follow your gut and all of this, but it's very very intelligent in fact, the guts and it's doing all sorts of work for us without us even realizing it. You know, it's detoxing, and during sleep, all of our body goes through this detoxification. The liver, for example, does a detox
during deep sleep. Gut health is very important for our organism because it helps us to absorb vitamins, nutrients, it helps us to eliminate toxins. So it's really wonderful to know that without us really having to do anything apart from prioritize our night of sleep, all of this wonderful work is taking place in our bodies. And you'll know, if you know anyone who's got any kind of gut health issue, which I think we probably all do, they
have less energy. I mean, you feel way more energized when your gut is in good shape and everything's working properly in that area of your body, because it's very very exhausting and it drains your energy. If your gut is working hard to try and eliminate things, but not managing it. So it's very important to carve out space in our lives for sleep. It really is like magic to create this space in our lives to heal and rejuvenate and recover. And you know that's all just all
the physical stuff. We haven't even got into the spiritual stuff yet that comes with sleep.
Well, let's complete the benefits by saying the last item is portal to the sacred? What does that mean? Is that kind of the spiritual side?
Absolutely, that's the spiritual side of sleep. Sleep. Sleep is incredible.
It can teach us about oneness and death and enlightenment, and it can take us into incredibly spiritual states of consciousness, such as deep lucid dreaming, which is my term for the kinds of dreams, the kind of lucid dreams where you're not just running around having loads of fun or having sex with movie stars or whatever, that you actually start to explore the nature of the dream world, the nature of the dream reality, and you end up going
very deep into some incredible places. One of those places I've kind of touched on a little bit already is what I call the lucid light which is when you find yourself floating in oneness in this incredible light, which I mean and I've experienced it many thousands of times, and for me, I believe that this light is the source light, that's the light from which we all emerged at birth and that we all return to when we die. That it's always there, It's always always there. It's there
right now. But we're in our waking state of consciousness and we're all bright and alert because we're having this conversation. So it's harder to access the lucid light and have this immersive oneness experience in the waking state, but in sleep states it's way easier. We've already touched on yoga nidra naps where you float in radiance. Well, that's the lucid light. That's like this return to the source. That's where you come out of that experience feeling so incredibly amazing.
And we can ask to have that kind of experience of the light in deep lucid dreams and we can find out all sorts of things about the nature of the universe and how consciousness works, and we can explore out of body experiences or the lucid void when you find yourself floating in black light. Because I need to say as well, the light doesn't have to be like
white light or golden light. It can be black light, it can be orange light, it can be deep green light, purple light, so it can appear as any kind of color. But it has that same, oh, that same feeling of like homecoming. This is who I really am, this is
what I really am. And what happens in these experiences of lucid light is that after a while of floating in the light as a kind of point of conscious awareness, we lose our sense of self and we become entirely at one with the light, and you have this amazing, timeless experience of oneness, which is incredible on every level because not only do you feel like you wake up feeling amazing and feeling ready to face life, because you realize life is kind of like a dream and it's
not as serious as everybody seems to take it, but also because it helps you to understand that we are all deeply interconnected, we are all one. So you know, like you're over there in the US and you're col Cliff, and I'm over here in Europe and I'm call Claire, and we kind of view ourselves as very separate entities but most of the time, but in fact, we are all one. We are all part of this oneness, and it's beautiful to be individual and play out our individuality
in our waking lives. But it's also super important to remember our deep interconnection because I mean that really helps with empathy. For one thing. I mean, all these wars and all the conflict that goes on in the world, it's pointless because actually, at the end of the day, we are all one. So these deep lucid dreaming experiences and the other spiritual experiences we can have during sleep actually remind us of the dance of life and death and the fact that we are all one.
Claire, talk a little bit about leaving the body when we sleep and connecting with the soul. I've always wondered, and maybe you can address this. When we are out of our body, we can connect with other consciousness, we can connect with our higher self, but more to the point, the soul.
Talk about that.
Yeah, So, I mean, in my view, we all leave our body every single night, right, because we fall asleep and we forget about our physical body and we take on a dream body, and if we become lucid, we change the term and we say now we're in our lucid dream body. And if we have an outer body experience, we say now we're in our astra. But it's basically
we're not as tied to the physical body during these experiences. Ah, and this gives us so much freedom, it really does freedom, as you say, to explore our own higher selves or to meet other higher beings, higher entities, and connect with our soul, I mean basically our soul. We are always in connection with our soul. It doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't disappear anywhere. It's always there. It's like this lucid
light that I've just talked about. It's always there. But most of the time, you know, when we're awake, we're in a bright, waking state of consciousness. We may feel more separated from our soul, or we may feel like, oh, I don't have all that soul knowledge that I want to connect with them. We start viewing ourselves as separate
from our soul, which is simply impossible. But it's true that it's easier to have these connections, these deep soulful connections, or to gain wisdom or advice from our higher self or our soul when we enter the states of consciousness that are available to us during a night of sleep.
Why is it so difficult to remember our dreams? Because I know I dream, but I just can't remember them. You know, it's so funny. I think sometimes for me it's maybe I'm being chielded because maybe they're too traumatic or they're too scary or something, and I just rather not remember them.
Yeah, well, maybe that's the reason for you. Then if there's a kind of block there because you're thinking, oh, actually, I don't really want to know, then those dreams will stay away. You know. Dreams are a bit like shy animals, So we need to give them a set, like a kind of a warm welcome, let's say, and be ready to listen to them because they have so much wisdom
within them. But yeah, a lot of people don't remember that dreams because of the lifestyle we have, because of the culture that many of us in the West grew up in of like dreams are not important. Just wake up and get on with your real, your really important work, which is your day job. And we just we get trammeled into thinking like that The best way to remember your dreams is not to use any kind of annoying, stressful alarm clock, because they are terrible for dreams. They'll
make all the dreams disappear in a second. Wait, but awful, those beeping ones. They're terrible, So we get rid of the beeping alarm clock. What you can do if you have to wake up to an alarm clock, then you can create a musical alarm clock with your favorite tune or tunes, and set your alarm maybe five minutes earlier than usual, and just as soon as the music kicks in and you start to wake up, don't move, don't open your eyes, Just stay there and think what was
I just doing? Who was I with? What did I just see? And something will come back. You know, you'll remember someone's face, or you remember an emotion I was really angry about something, or you remember, well, for some reason, I was standing on a chair. That might be the only thing you can remember, but that's okay. You write that down, and gradually, as you continue to listen to the songs, try and keep the same songs on the alarm on the alarm clock, because that sets off this
automatic response in you. It's like it trains you to start thinking about and connecting with your dreams when you hear those particular songs, And gradually you'll find that when you have that, you know, a dream image like oh I was standing on a chair, you'll be able to just wait and rest with that dream image, and suddenly you'll remember what happened before you stood on the chair. Oh yeah, there was a weird little dinosaur that came into my room and I thought I'd better stand on
my chair. And then you know, and then you're full of the dream back before you know what happened before the dinosaur came in. And so all of a sudden you'll have these streams of dreams that you can write down. And it's just so much fun to engage with with your dreams, you know, like we spend so much time. We spend a third of our life asleep and about six years solid of our lives dreaming, and it's just
why waste that time? You know, Cliff, I'm going to send you a challenge now to see if you can remember your dreams, make a concerted effort to do so for seven nights, Like, just try it, just see how it goes, Okay.
A pad of paper and a pin by the bed.
And yeah, but that's another thing. Some people hate writings. If you hate writing these days, you know, you can just use your phone to record your your voice or some sort of other. It's even better to have a voice activated recorder so you don't have to get up and start pressing buttons and open your eyes. You know, it's best to be able to just like mumble your dreams into this voice activated recording device. But some people like to write, and they can write their dreams down.
Other people say, oh, I can't write my dreams down because my bed partner wants to stay asleep longer. That you can get pens which have little lights on them so you can write them down without waking anyone up. Yeah, and it's just good to see what comes out, because this is all part of you. I mean, you are a whole other person in your dreams, right, You're not the regular Cliff Dunning who goes around it it goes
about his business during the day. You're going to be doing all sorts of crazy things in your dreams, and perhaps some really truly amazingly beautiful things. But if you don't remember them, you're missing out. You know, so I think it's lovely just to welcome your dream making me.
Feel guilty clear seven days challenge. You know, I really appreciate that. Let's talk about this Elixir of sleep, this new book. You have a number of wonderful benefits for people that are problem sleepers. Let's talk about a couple. You have what they call a worry journal. Why is this important and how does it work?
Oh?
Yeah, okay, so well, basically people have done studies into this and they've found that if you write down your worries or your troubles or your problems before you go to bed, it provides you with a way of offloading them from your consciousness. So it's just a very beneficial
practice just to get them out of the way. And some people say it's also good to write down your to do list for the next day and just get that offloaded from your consciousness as well, because otherwise we end up going into sleep feeling agitated, ruminating on our worries, and it's just that can really set the tone for the whole night of sleep. And if we're unlucky, then we have a lot of restless dreams, or we wake
up in the night feeling anxious. So many people reach out to me like for private sessions, and the reason for it is either nightmares or waking up with this nameless feeling of dread in the night, and they don't understand why or where it's from. And I mean, basically, it's all to do with the worries in people's lives and the fact that they are not dealing with them while awake, and then when they go to sleep, they're
so anxious. They have such a high level anxious of anxiety that they end up not getting a proper night sleep and it's breaking into their sleep. So you have to basically go back to to techniques for how to calm down and meditate and release these worries before you sleep.
I created a guided meditation which is on my website for free, and one of the things it does, which is really beautiful, is you sit down by this stream and on the stream there are these leaves going by, and you just take a worry and you put it on one of these leaves and the stream carries it away. And then the next leaf comes along and you take one of your troubles or problems and you put it
on that leaf and it carries it away. So it's just like a really beautiful, very gentle visualization to help us release those worries. And it really feels so real to do this. I don't know if you've ever tried doing that as an imaginative exercise, but it's beautiful. You just allow this stream to take your worries away, and it sends you into a very deeply relaxed state. You start to feel very blissed out, and then you enter
sleep already feeling so much better. But very beneficial for people's mental health to do this kind of exercise.
I love that idea.
We're going to take another short break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return with doctor Claire Johnson speaking on her new book Elixir of Sleep.
Will rejoin you shortly.
Follow machine and kiddos have better luck than I. I hope he needs the teddy he deserves.
I shall have the dream, but never.
Play, because I can see doing any other ways.
I know you can see.
The twinkle in my eyes.
I'm looking for it desperately.
Doctor Claire Johnson is my guest today. She has written a number of books on sleep and lucid dreaming. Dreaming is a very big part of our sleep process, and we're talking today on how to get a good night's sleep as well as dreaming and cultivating good dreams that we can use to enhance our cognition. Let's talk about it's number eight practice number eight, which is candlelight bath ritual. Now, I know, if I've had a really stressful day, if I take a bath, that's going to be a precursor
to a good sleep. But talk about why a bath is really a critical element in getting a good sleep.
Yeah. Well, for a start, if you relax in a hot tub, I mean, it's just beautiful for your body. You float, It's so lovely to leave the weight of the physical body behind just you know, and just allow yourself to float a little in the water. It's a
very healing element to be in. And also there's a practical function of a hot bath as well, because what it actually does is once you're out of the bath, your body temperature drops to even cooler than it was before you went into the bar, and you need to be cool. Your brain needs to be cool for you to go to sleep, so it helps you to fall asleep more quickly. But one of the things that One of the practices in Elixir of Sleep that is a very personal practice where I kind of add to this
bathtub ritual is oming in the bathtub. So when you chant omb in the bathtub, I don't know if you've ever tried it, Try it next time after a stressful day. It's Oh, it's so amazing because you really feel the vibration of the omb because it goes all the way through the bath water, and the human body is like over sixty percent water anyway, So you can basically turn
your body into this vibrating portal and it's gorgeous. And you can add a healing or a relaxing intention to your humming or to your oming in the bathtub and just allow that to be directed through every cell in your body. And it is just absolutely incredible to do this. So it's one of the most beautiful practices in the book for me. I really love it fantastic. Now, one of the key elements in this book that you've incorporated, Claire is the Sleep Quiz, which is all of chapter five.
Why did you design this and talk about the benefits of using the sleep quiz? Yeah, So I've had so many private sessions with people who ask me about all of these different sleep issues that they have, from not being able to fall asleep, to having anxiety dreams, or to as I said earlier, waking up feeling anxious in the night, or having extremely vivid dreams where they feel the dreams are too vivid and they're too busy and
they're not getting proper night's rest. I mean, there are so many different different potential issues to interrupt a good night's sleep, and a lot of people have multiple issues, so it's not just one thing as a combination of factors. And I just realized that basically we are all individual sleepers and dreamers, and so this quiz is extremely comprehensive. It probably takes about twenty minutes twenty five minutes to actually go through it and write down all your responses
because it's deep. But it will get you thinking about who you are when you sleep, the kind of dreamer that you are, what you need to improve in terms of your night of sleep. And then what it does is it takes you to the best practices for you to fast track you to a wonderful night of sleep. So that's why the book has so many practices. Well, it has like sixty four practices, I think something like that. But yeah, so that's how the sleep quiz came about.
Yeah, fantastic.
This is a combination of your years of work and I really like it. But I want to talk just real briefly about some of the dynamics or the portions of good sleep. And I want to talk about ramsleep. What is ram sleep? And when we're in ramsleep, I think this is where we begin the deeper parts or what you would call lucid dreaming.
Yeah, so REM sleep is rapid eye movement sleep, and this is a stage of sleep where we become our brain becomes incredibly active. It becomes thirty percent more active than it is in the waking state. So it's a very kind of aroused state of sleep. Also physiologically, because everybody is genitally aroused during REM sleep. So that's why a lot of dreams are erotic, or particularly when people become lucid in their dreams, they might instantly go into
an erotic lucid dream scenario. So the body is like yeah, and the respiration is much faster, the heart rate increases, The whole body is in this state of like hyper arousal and this is when the most vivid dreams occur, and that's why it's linked in many ways to lucid dreaming.
Although lucid dreams can happen at any stage of sleep, you know, they've also been noted in the sleep lab to happen in stage one sleep, for example, But basically they're much more likely to happen during REM sleep because these vivid dreams are so weird that we're much more likely to notice something very weird and strange has happened and then understand that we must be dreaming. So it gives us that little kick of consciousness that raised awareness.
But REM sleep, I mean, it's just an incredible state for creativity as well. There was so much rampant creativity in the REM dreaming phase. And the thing to know about REMS sleep is it happens cyclically, and the beginning of the night you only have maybe about ten minutes of REM sleep at the end of each ninety minute
sleep cycle. But as those sleep cycles continue, the REM period lengthens, so you end up with a really long period of REM sleep in the morning, maybe fifty minutes or an hour, and that's an optimal moment for connecting with your dreams, becoming lucid in your dreams and having better dream recall. So it's just a good moment to
focus your efforts for lucidity. If you want to have lucid dreams, focus them on the morning, lie in hours, if you manage to sleep in, or also during nap time when for example, we you know, during naptimes we often wake up with some really vivid, bright dreams because we're catching up on some of the rems sleep we may have missed during the night.
So you can actually get rem sleep when you're doing your afternoons, your nap.
Oh yeah, I really often if I actually, if I don't just do the yoga ninja where I float on the edge of the hypnogogic state, if I fall asleep during an time, then I always remember dreams. Oh I love those. I love those dreams. So yeah, it's another precious moment to catch a dream. Okay, Cliff, that's what you're going to be doing for the next seven days. I'll be checking up on you exactly.
The book's called Elixir of Sleep. My guest today has been Claire Johnson. Claire, let's talk a little bit about lucid dreaming. I'd like you to include, just real briefly, the art of dream incubation. What does that mean?
Yeah, so dream incubation is oh sorry.
Yeah go ahead, Yeah, let's see.
Yeah, dream incubation just means inviting a dream. And I mean this is an age old practice as well. In ancient Greece, they used to have these dream incubation temples where people would go to to become healed, to invite healing, to invite a dream with the gods. But these days it's really very simple to incubate a dream. If you want to have a particular kind of dream, like a problem solving dream or a healing dream, then it's a good idea to write your intention down on a piece
of paper. Write it down really clearly, like not a really long sentence, just something very short and simple, like heal my knee or which house to move to or
something like that. You know, whatever the dilemma is in your life or which job to take, write it down on a piece of paper and put it under your pillow, and before you fall asleep, just really imagine yourself having the dream that you need that's going to help you to answer this question or to bring you healing and really imagine how good it feels like, get involved emotionally with the idea of having this answer or having the healing come to you. And what I often do to
invite a dream is I shout out in my mind. Yeah, something like, for example, if I want to heal live, shout out healing dream, healing dream. I just shout it in my mind as if I'm shouting to someone on the other side of a forest. And that really really works well for me. It's one of the best techniques for inviting or incubating a dream. And then, of course the next step is to remember your dreams and write
them down. And it may take a couple of nights for the dream that you're looking for to come, but you just stay tuned, don't give up, and keep thinking about it also during the day, thinking oh, I'll have that dream tonight. So yeah, just keep engaged with the process.
It's so wonderful to hear your enthusiasm for dreaming. I I don't think we take our dreams serious enough and how important they are in health benefit.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's a wonderful world to explore, you know, and we can all do it. Will do it every night anyway, so we well, we may as well bring our attention to it and expand our life experience so we're not wasting all those years sleeping and dreaming, but we're actually learning and evolving.
This book just came out in January, so it's been around. You can get it on I think it's on Oh yes, here, it's on Amazon and wherever you get your book. So it's through Llewellyn Publishing House, which is a good, good publisher. Give us your website and how people can learn more about you clear.
Oh, thank you. Yeah. So my website is deep Lucid Dreaming dot com and you can go there for loads of information about sleep, dreams, nightmares, out of body experiences, the lucid void, the lucid light, telepathy and dreams, unconscious intelligence, all of that sort of stuff. And you can also click on courses or class I think it's called classes there to go to all of my video classes and workshops.
I also give Lucid Dreaming Ocean Retreat in person. The next ones on Hawaii on the Big Island in October. I think it starts around October the twenty fifth. All that information is on my website. You can also sign up there and download some free meditations and oh, I don't know, there's all sorts of stuff. There's all my books and everything. I mean, this is like, this is my life's work, all of this, all of these topics
with sleep and dreams and lucid dreams. And what I'm going to do as well is launch a podcast next month. I'm going to start it with interviews various people. I know, it's exciting, you know the cliff. I mean, I've been putting it off for so long because and I don't know how you do it, because you've been doing it for so long. It's amazing, But you've got to be
consistent about podcasting. I'm trying to. Yeah, So I'm trying to build up a load of podcast interviews and also kind of like solo podcasts where I talk about different aspects of sleep and deep lucid dreaming.
Clear, you have a wonderful podcast because.
There's I mean, you know that you know the industry.
Yeah, you know everybody.
Yeah, that's true, I know everybody. I've probably got some great people who I've interviewed for it. It's so lovely And that's actually one of the parts. I'm really enjoying about preparing all this podcast stuff is chatting to my friends, my dream colleagues, all these gorgeous people who explore consciousness. So it is really exciting. And I'm going to launch
it in basically a couple of weeks. Yeah. Oh and one more thing as well, Cliff, I'm also doing I'll be teaching a twenty one day transformative sleep class in May as well with a mystery man whose name I can't reveal right now, but so that's going to be pretty cool as well. And that's got loads of live workshops and daily videos and allsorts, so so much exciting stuff in the pipeline and I love it.
I'm so jealous, Claire. You have so much energy. You're making me want to look closer at the this afternoon nap.
That's oh yeah, Oh I hope you will, Cliff. Yeah.
Pleasure as always. The book again is Elixir of Sleep. It just came out. Always a pleasure to have you on the program, Claire, and continued success.
Oh, thank you so much, Cliff. It's always a delight to talk to you. And I'll be in touch about those dreams.
Fantastic, Thank you.
I want to mention that the sleep quiz in this book is worth the price by itself because she gives a number of suggestions for getting over problems with sleep. And sometimes we might be on medication, we might have an an illness that deprives us of sleep, and there's techniques for relieving those issues and getting the sleep we need.
Everybody is different, you know. I do know people that are comfortable with four hours of sleep, but they're not going to necessarily have great, great dream abilities with four hours because you're not going to be able to get into the RAM sleep Rapidi movement sleep, which is vital for lucid dreaming, and that was part of our discussion today,
is lucid dreaming. I you know, I've followed different dream experts over the years and having a little notepad by the side of your bed with a pin, and I like her idea of finding a pin that's got a light on so you don't have to wake up anybody who's next to you or shock yourself into being awake. That's the big problem I also believe is that people don't want to wake up.
I want to keep sleeping.
I don't want to, you know, wake up after my dream and it was a profound dream. You probably should get a right part of it down because you might be getting premonition, you might be getting the answers to questions, you might get solutions to problems. You can do a lot with dreaming. If you're a person who remembers their dreams, it can really be a big benefit. So Elixir of Sleep, Claire Johnson. That was fun and the book just came out, so check it out. If you're thinking about summertime now,
perhaps you're thinking about vacation. We have a tour coming up in Turkey. It's our second annual Turkey tour. It is June twenty second to July second. It is we all meet in is Temple. Great tour because the tour itinerary includes places like Gopeckley Teppe, which keeps becoming mind boggling. They keep finding new stuff there, Carahan Teppe, Underground City of darren Kuru, Cappadocia, some of the world's most amazing museums Roman Greek and things like that, and the food,
the beverages getting around. It's just a real real pleasure. For more information and all the details go to earthacients dot com, Forward slash tours.
And check it out.
We got another tour coming up. It's just being formulated as we speak. It's our first Daniel Guatemalan Sacred Pyramid Tour. It's December first to the twelfth, is what we believe it's going to be. We'll have more details on it. If you want to be considered for that, send me an email. Send it to Earth Ancients the number four of the letter you at gmail dot com and we will put you on the list. I'm going to be talking more about that. It's with doctor Lydia di Leon
and her husband Arturo, who are in Mexico. This will be focused on Guatemala. We've just added another portion, which is El Miador, which is the one of the oldest and most well designed Mayan cities of the ancient past. It includes the largest known pyramids in the Americas, a place called Lydonte, so we'll be able to chance check that out as well. All the details will be coming out soon. If you're interested in joining us, to me an email Earth Agents for you at gmail dot com
and well I'll get back to you. All right, that's it for this program. I want to think my guest today, Claire Johnson, coming to us from England her new book Elixir of Sleep. As always, the team of Gil tour Mark Foster and everyone who makes this thing happen. You guys rock all right, take care of you well and we will talk to you next time.
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