Oh the Lucid Dreams we Weave ...

you about your lucid dreams, like my last my last one. Well, if not the last one, what what's an example that stands out in your mind? Okay, well, how about one where I've talked about recurring dream of a dog mulling my face while I can't move right, and so eventually got to the point where I knew that I was dreaming and I could tell myself like I'd have a different solution every time it happens to make the dog

stop chewing the skin off my face. So sometimes I'd have to hug the dog, like embrace it back, even though it was malling me and then it would shatter into a thousand pieces, which is an excellent example because because that example of a horrible dream flowing into a lucid dream works nicely with some of the stuff we're going to talk about here. Yeah. Yeah, And actually we've had a lot of request for this topic and we

touched on it before. Yeah, we've certainly talked about in passing, but it seems like when we covered virtual sex and we talked about the possibility of linked dreaming, it came up again. So Dan and Oakland, who also is as an experienced to a lucid dreamer, he wrote us about it, and Joffrey talked about how awful lucid dreaming might be, especially if we linked our dreams. Yes, I believe we read the ladder and I have dands that I'm gonna read at the end of Yeah. Yeah, it should be

a nice insight into this. So anyway, we wanted to talk about it in full for you guys. All right, Well, the term lucid obviously lucid dreaming as a thing has existed for a very long time, but the term the dreaming days back to nineteen and you had Dutch psychiatrist Fedric Wilhelm von Eden. He coined the term. He identified nine different types of dreams, which I granted I don't have to list all nine, but I'm going to because they're pretty awesome. Well, and he spent sixteen years of

his life studying this and coming up with these categories. Yeah, I mean, he's an amazing dude. So number one and I like to think of these as kind of like items at a Chinese restaurant or items at a fast food restaurant where you could order them up and be like like a number one with the side of four, but number one initial dreams. These are the very beginnings of sleep, when the body is in a normal, healthy condition but very tired, and the dreams sort of flew

in right off the back. Second type pathological dreams, in which fever, indigestion, or some poison plays a role. You know, a b bit of undigested potato, that kind of thing, Okay, too much pepperoni, right, or if you know, fever dreams intense situations but it's due to something not being right. Body number three ordinary dreaming, good old vanilla dream number four,

vivid dreaming. All right, it's rich, it's it's the kind of thing you're talking about all week and boring your significant other with like it's a car that does not exist in nature and I cannot explain it. Yeah. Number five the symbolic or mocking dream. Van Eden tells us that this is the kind of dream where we get this intense feeling that circumstances are being arranged or invented by intelligent beings quote of a very low moral order.

And this also ties in erotic dreams. But there's this sense that it's not just you say, like you were encountering something else, like an external force, and that's the feeling. He's not saying that you're actually encountering some sort of entity, but that's the feeling that you get in the dream. Right.

Number six is the realm of dream sensations. All right, there's no vision, there's no image, there's no event, there's not even a word or a name, But you have this long period of deep sleep with the mind is continually occupied by one person, one place, one remarkable event, or even one abstract thought. Have you ever had one of these? This one is outside of my dream experience,

I think no, I don't think so. I dream a lot about the material that we research, so sometimes there's a concept thore, but not just ones with such singularity on topic. Number seven is the lucid dream, which we will of course discussed in more detail. Number eight, and this is where we get around to the Malling Dog is what he called the demon dream, and it's always very near before or after a lucid dream in vad Eden's experience, and it involves something demonic, a horrific attacker,

and it's just really intense. So immediately I'm reminded of your example of the Malling Dog, and Radio Lab recently did an episode that dealt with lucid dreaming in which an individual kept having a recurring dream in which someone was at their door pounding on the door and that they were going to come in and just attack them. And it was like this fierce, confrontational, violent dream and he was able to eventually break through that into a

lucid dreaming experien arians. So those would both the examples of that and number nine the final in this series of dream categories that I needn gay. This is the wrong waking up, and this occurs always near waking. We have the sensation of waking up in our ordinary sleeping room, and then we begin to realize that something isn't right, and there's like some sort of inexplainable movements strange noises,

and then we realized we're still asleep. Those are the worst because you spend a lot of time thinking that you're waking up and getting ready and preparing, and only to realize that you're still sleeping. I remember having them in high school junior high, where I was inevitably I was staying up too late at night because you're in

high school junior high in your sleep patterns are weird. Yeah, and and so I've been up way too late, and then I'm having to get up way too early, and I dream that I have risen, that I have showered, that I'm dressed, and then yes, I have risen. And then and then I realized, crap, I've I haven't even waken up at all. I just did all that work

for nothing. Well see, yeah, it's exhausting work. The waking dream is also something you see a lot in films, especially since like John Carpenter used this several times, where you know the character wakes up, do you think he's woken up from a dream geotypically like a weird dream or a nightmare is something crucible of the plot, and then they look around, Oh, everything's normal, everything's normal. Oh

there's a zombie. And then they wake up for real, and it's a great sort of wham wham, double pal kind of cinematic fool hum here, distract him here and really get him. It's kind of cheap too, but when you used a great effect by a talented director like Carpenter, it really packed the punch. It's a great narrative device. So in literature as well, of those nine, have you had all of those with the exception of maybe that

the dream sensations? Yes, I would say that, and I'm sure everybody has experienced all those to some degree, right, because this is pretty and I think most people usually remember their dreams, and if you don't, later on in the podcast, we'll talk a little bit more about how you can have better recall of them. Yes, but let's talk about this lucid dreaming. Yes, this is the item

we're ordering here today, the number seven. That's right. This is generally thought of as a dream where the dreamer is a where that they're dreaming and being aware of the dream, they are able to manipulate or outright control the circumstances around them, and generally this involves flying or just complete power over their surroundings. I have a friend Elena, who took some classes and Lucid dreaming. I don't know if they were physical classes or if she attended them

through dreams, or how exact they were. I think that's something in New York. But she Lucid dreamed of workshop. Yeah, but but her her lucidreams would be that she should grow to an enormous size like Godzilla and start crushing buildings. So she has a lot of unresolved issues. And I think, well, and that's the beauty of a Lucid dream, right, I mean, the sky is the limit. You can do anything that you want. Um you can shrink yourself to you know,

nano size, or you can become magnificently large. And it's such a beautiful idea because it's through dreaming, through the neural gear that we're born with, we're able to achieve the ends of some of our most outlandish technological dreams, like all these ideas of virtual worlds that we can move around in sandbox worlds in the video game, that we can control in an An immense amount of talent and effort, in time and money goes into the creation

of these things, and he's going into the creation of virtual reality technology in the future. But we already have all of that deer in our head and the idea that with a certain amount of training and a certain amount of forethought and presentness, that we can achieve those same ends. It's just really remarkable. Well, and here's the deal to Bettan Buddhists have been hipped to this long

before Western civilization. Yes, they were looking inward far before most of the rest of the world was really looking that far into the human psyche and into the human mind. Yeah. And while we may use lucid dreaming to fly or for erotic adventures, Tibetan Buddhists actually practice a kind of lucid dreaming called dream yoga, and this is a way of recognizing the world for what it is, free from illusion. So they're using it in a more high minded way.

It's about making discoveries about the way you think, in the obstacles your mind puts in in your way, and achieving better clarity. The ultimate goal is a state of meta lucidity, in which you wake up from reality. I love that, yeah, And I also like the idea that in the same way that you are in a lucid dream, you are realizing, you know, all these rules and all these things that seem like they matter so much in

this dream. These all the confines, howling dog or an attack or at the door, all these things that are pushing in on me. They're not real. And if I just let them go, then I have this immense freedom in my life. You can take that into the waking world and say that if you were actually awake in the waking world and you're hip to these forces that are all around you, aspects of the mind, the ego,

and all these forces. And we've talked about so many of these things before, but all these forces that are dictating the way that we feel the world around us in a mental sense, if we are aware of those, then we can have elucid experience of a different type in the waking world, all right, Because the mind makes these paper tiger ors whether or not you are awake or asleep. Right, And to recognize that the mind is creating so much of your reality, is that the endgame

here for for our friends, the Buddhists. But it's a very interesting way to look at it. Okay, so let's get down to some of the brass talks about how we know it's real, because for a long time it was kind of thought of as maybe sort of made up or magic, you know, because it sounds like magic.

It is magical, and it's it's it's reality. And so for a long time that the really serious scientific minded types, if you brought up the idea of lucid dreaming and controlling your dream they would be like, I don't know,

I think that maybe you're you're making that up. Yeah, But although we have all long suspected that dreaming could help us with these sort of breakthroughs, right, and that there was a possibility that we could control our dreams, were at the very least know that we were dreaming, right. And then there of course individuals along the way who were doing it. And so even if they experts were telling them it wasn't happening, they had a pretty good

idea about what was going on in their head. Only they are a way to test it, right, How could I test this anecdotal evidence? Well, it happens that lucid dreaming occurs during REM sleep, the fifth sleep stage, and the body is basically paralyzed, which we know with the

exception of the eyelids. And this is kind of an AHA moment for a psycho physiologist, Stephen Leberge who monitored subjects with electro and Sophello Grahams e g s, which map electrical brain activity as they slept, and in the experiment, subjects used pre arranged eyelid movements to signal they were lucid dreaming to Lebert's right. So he's looking at them, he's monitoring them, and all of a sudden he sees

their eyelids flutter. He then looks at the e g s and he's able to confirm that they're actually in that REM sleep and that this is all corroborating. So that's one instance we have where we can see that people are outwardly signaling that they're in REM sleep and

we can we can say, yes, you are. According to Scientific Americans John Horrigan, leber showed the activities such as counting numbers or having sex evokes similar neural and physiological responses in both the dreaming and waking states, and if your dream self holds its breath, then your real self does too. And moreover, events take about the same time to unfold in lucid dreams as they wouldn't real life, which is a little bit different than what we've thought before.

We've always thought about dreams being compressed. And then there's also some interesting data from Dr Matthew Walker, who is the director of the Sleep Lab at Berkeley, and that he found that the lateral prefrontal cortex, part of the brain that deals with logic, may be responsible for a

lot of what's going on in lucid dreaming. So during rem sleep, this part of the brain is supposed to be asleep or inactive, but it's possible that it wakes up so that dreaming and logic are both working at the same time, which would then enable the dreamer to suddenly have the mental capacity to say, Hey, this is a dream, and this is what I want to do

with that dream. Now. You and I are talking about this briefly before, and I was sort of saying that that is one of the things that can get in the way when you lucid dream, the fact that you're bringing logic into it. But you can always kind of get over it, because you know you're dreaming. And this is the way that I kind of square this idea of your logic center coming online while you're dreaming. Is that now your logic center is under a set of

different constructs, I guess for the dream logic. So even though what you're doing in a dream might seem absolutely crazy or inconceivable, your logic recognizes you're in a dream and allows it. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, This is kind of a tangent. But there's a fantastic short story by South American author You're a Lewis Borges called The Circular Ruins or or perhaps it is in the Circular Ruins, but keywords Circular Ruins, in which a man,

a dreamer, begins to dream a living being. He dreams the dream child piece by piece and cell by cell and until it eventually achieves reality. And I won't spoil everything, but do check that out. It's a very short story, but just very poetic and shock full of wonder if someone who's definitely concerned with the borders of reality right

and crossing those borders. This is really interesting to the visual cortex and parts of the motor cortex and some motion sensing areas deeper in the brain are really active during dreams. So this is why we have lots of motion and visuals and not so much stuff that you can feel in your dream. Some people may have had that experience, but for the most part, we're much more visual and motion oriented in dreams. Yeah, I can't remember

ever having smelt or eaten anything in a dream before. Yeah, I can ever remember something like stunning in terms of like a pungency of smell, or something that's always usually visual, or some sort of action like flying. These are some interesting looks into the brain here. I also wanted to note that German researchers gave lucid dreamers specific instructions to make a series of left and right hand movements separated

by a series of eye movements. Again that that eye fluttering while asleep, and the researchers were able to perform brain scans knowing what was going on in their heads. The eye movements undertaken in dreams are known to show up on electro oculogram, giving the researchers markers to know what the dreamers were meant to be doing at that point. So this is really interesting in the sense that you can start to map out actions and dreams and begin

to see what people are doing. Now, this is like pretty rudimentary, right, but can you imagine within ten years being able to look at the brain and start to figure out what specifically people are dreaming about, what sort of stories that they're weaving. This was from Current Biology and the name of that paper is dreamed movement elicits activation in the sense of remorn or cortex. So you know, just a little f y I in case you know,

in ten years you want to get your dreams mapped out. Well, let's take a quick break and when we return, we'll talk more about lucid dreamings and we'll also discuss some of the ways that you might bring lucid dreaming into your life. Alright, we're back, so lucid dreaming. You obviously have done this before. I do not believe I've ever

lucid dreamed. I've had the odd flying dream, I've had the odd attackers coming after me dream lots of what I loosely called movie dreams were something amazing, and I guess they're vivid dreams under the nine point scale that we were discussing earlier, but very vivid dreams for something really imaginative is happening. But I've never had a lucid dreaming experience. Okay, So I will say that in the last couple of years, I haven't had as many lucid dreams.

And I'll tell you why I haven't been getting as much sleep. Get a little rug rat right three years old. So there you go. One of the first things you have to do is get enough sleep, and the reason is because the more rem the better your chances of lucid dreaming and recalling the dream. And we go into RAM every ninety minutes throughout the night, but each RAM period gets much longer and occupies a larger chunk of

that ninety minutes cycle each time. So if you're only sleeping the first part of a normal eight hours of sleep,

you're getting very little of that REM sleep. So if you wake up at three o'clock in the morning and four o'clock in the morning, it's harder to get back to sleep than chances are you're not gonna have that good time REM sleep that will induce our help to induce a lucid dream I should also have in terms of dreaming in general, some sleep ates will also affect your propensity for dream remembering yeah or not remembering right. That's usually the cache that you you have a fogg

you r recall if you're if you're taking stuff. But you can still try some of these things. You could keep a dream diary that seems to be very helpful for people. Um, you can set an intention which sounds kind of yoga s but if you want to fly in your dream, you could look at a picture of a person flying right before you get to bed and tell yourself, I would like to know that I'm dreaming

and I would like to fly in my dream. And that seems pretty simple, but it's you know, the brain, as we know is, is really great about taking suggestions

and acting on them. There's something called the mild technique that Leberge calls mnemonic induction of lucid dreams, and that involves waking up an hour earlier than usual in the morning and recalling your last dream and then going to sleep again while thinking again setting an intention next time I'm dreaming, I want to remember that I'm dreaming, and I'm going to lucid dream. And also you should know

that lucia dreams occur most often in the morning. Just before awakening, which makes sense when we talk about those longer rim periods and then go back to sleep again with purpose. Well, yeah, I mean a lot of it has to do with that waking period, just the millisecond when you're waking up and you begin to have this feeling, this really strong flooding of a dream right coming at you.

Instead of saying, oh, I need to get up and I need to get dressed and so on and so forth, if you try to just really bask and whatever emotions that are evoked at that moment, chances are you going to be able to engage your recall a lot better.

So how do you know when you are actually Luca dreaming? Well, one method that I've read is just simply to look around you and start looking at a little more detail about what's actually in this world, because that's one method that is often used is the idea that let me look around, let me see if I can realize this is a dream, if I can look for something. And I've heard you need to go about this in your

daily life as well, like in your waking life. Make a point of, say, looking at light switches and making sure they're there and that they work. Probably look at text and see if it's readable. The text thing is a big That's been a big clue for me, because a lot of times I'll be reading or I'll be writing something and the text keeps moving, or I can see one sentence and then it all falls away. You look at it, it's text, and you look away, and you look back at it and it's something else to

pict a graham or a smiley face or something. It's not gonna hold. It's not gonna be the same thing, whereas in the waking world, I can look at this and it's still say the same thing it said earlier. Waking status confirmed right, or clocks they don't have scrambled numbers right in reality. But if you're dreaming, you're trying to get a beat on what time it is, a lot of times you'll see the same thing as the text that the numbers run around. So there are definitely

hall marks of this happening in Lucid dreaming. Here's something that's just totally random, but I thought it was interesting. There is a theory of why there are so many

flying dreams, especially in Lucid dreaming. And there's a guy named Alan Hobson he's a psychidras and dream researcher at Harvard, and he says that flying is the brain trying to reconcile the fact that we're under the illusion that we're moving and yet the body is giving the brain data that it's immobile, and so in flying, we're moving, that

our limbs aren't bending or moving. And I would be curious to know from from listeners to if they've ever had the flying dream and if they have like the typical reports of your hands being outstretched like Superman, because that's that idea of like your stiff that you're not really moving but you're flying. I definitely have that experience.

This was the summer that The Rocketeer came out. While I don't think The Rocket Here is a movie that I would necessarily seek out to watch again, at that point in my life, I was pretty obsessed with it. I like read the novel that was based on the screenplay, and I had at least one dream air I was the Rocketeer, or was in The Rocketeers get up flying stiffly over like a coastal area and it was really really beautiful. Okay, so you've had the stiffarmed dream. Yeah,

and it was definitely stiff. I wasn't just flopping around around. The other side of that is every vision that we have, every fiction involving a flying character, they tend to be kind of stiff. They're Superman or there's a rocket their Commando Cody or some other character, and they're they're very stiff with their rocket suit because nobody wants to watch Superman just flop around in the air and looked like

he was just valet in the air. Well, beautiful. Well, I'll tell you one example that comes and I didn't have this growing up. In that movie that I mentioned before, Hanuman versus seven Ultraman, the tie Ultraman movie in which Hant m Han, the Hindu monkey god, shows up. He flies through the air. Well, he flies through the air very stiffly, but he flies through the air with a

dance pose, a very artistic pose to him. Now, so he doesn't he is stiff, and then he has no motion other than he is flying through the air, but his body language is very fluid looking. I'm gonna challenge myself to fly and do like the robot like ants moves. Next time I'm lucid dreaming, I am going to Work versus Ultraman the Seven Ultraman every night for a week and see if I start dreaming like that movie, because even if I don't fly, the results are gonna be amazing.

Speaking of another movie, Real Quick Waking Life. If you've never seen this movie before, it's very interesting and actually talks about a lot of these concepts, a lucid dreaming and also what is reality and what is illusion? I need to see it again because I think I fell asleep i saw It's a it's a talking movie, but nonetheless very interesting. Alright, So let's talk about whether or not we can harness lucid dreaming and dreaming in general

to help ourselves. And I'm thinking about nightmares PTSD, and it's, you know, general problems that we have in life. Right in the same way that you were able to defeat that dog that was mulling your face, and in the same way that in that episode of Radio Lab that the individual was able to eventually deal with that troublesome nightmare that he kept having, that reoccurring nightmare in which

someone was at his door. It has been proposed that by commanding the power of lucid dreams, chronic nightmare sufferers could actually deal with their problems. Yes, it's true. And I was actually thinking to you about Elias how we've talked about him before, when we talked about real science that came from dreams. And this was a guy who figured out how to use a needle in a sewing

machine that would puncture the cloth. Right. He dreamed about a tribe that was dancing around him holding spears, and the spears had holes near their tips, and boom, he realized the solution to making that happen. So that's just a good example, I think in general, of how your mind can work on these problems. Did I tell you about this? I um this. This came up of a week of playing a lot of board and card games, and I think I had recently seen an episode of

Mystery Science Theater that had some magic in it. But I dreamt of a card slash board game that didn't exist in real life, and I mean still doesn't. But I woke up remembering the mechanics of the game and how the game more or less work with some certain blank spots regarding the shoots and ladder. No, it wasn't shoots and ladder, and I can't reveal it exactly how it works, because maybe I'll do something with it at

some point. But it was one of those dreams where I woke up and I'm like, wow, I have this idea. And it was interesting for me because I get a lot of sort of visual ideas, like there's a particular kind of monster that shows up in my dreams. I could write a story about that or something. This is one of the few times where I had a dream in which there was like a system in play, where I woke up not as much inspired by just the imagery and magic of the dream world, but there was

a more or less a concrete idea there. Yeah, And again, the prefrontal cortex usually is it gets a little bit dim when you're dreaming, not LUSA dream, but just dreaming. And we've talked about this before with jazz musicians. We've seen this part of the brain kind of dial it down a little bit because again, your logic center sometimes can impede creative thought. So it's really interesting that that this is the realm that we can get in there and there are no rules and you can start to

to work out. So lucians are really cool creative ideas and board games that are not shooting. There are no rules yet. But if tenure is in the future when we can monitor dreams, who's to say, right, dream police? Okay, so I'm going to talk about this article in Scientific

American is called how Can You Control Your Dreams? And according to Didre Barrett, she's the assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard, something called image rehearsal is a way to overcome the nightmares as you talk about or PTSD events.

Therapist or researchers have the person work out in an alternate scenario they want the dream to take, and they ask them to close their eyes and they imagine this and they generally talk them through a kind of really vivid enactment of it so that they're they're starting to

pin those details in the person's mind. And we've talked about this before with memory too, about really penning that information into memory palace, right the memory palace, and making sure that that person is really attaching meaning to these objects. So that's what these therapists are doing. And usually the person incorporates some degree of the rehearse scenario at bedtime or listens to a tape where the therapist or researcher is recounting the alternate scenario and they've had some really

good results with us cool. And then there are various devices that have come along that may aid us in lucid dreaming. Oh, yes, are you referring to the Liverages goggles. Yes, the Nova Dreamer And this is an invention of the Lucidity Institute. And it looks like a cross between like sleep mass and goggles. And the idea here is that if you condition yourself that red light, flashing red light means that you're having a dream, as opposed to oh,

my goodness, something pulled over for speeding. If you can, if you can reprogram your mind to think flashing red lights mean hey, it's a dream. Start doing whatever you want to do in the dream. Then you can wear these goggles and they would be able to measure when you're experiencing rem sue and then flash in that light, and then you would be able to perceive that through your eyelids and you would know that that was your cue. Yeah, that's your cue to start dreaming it up big time. Yeah.

Instead of having to look specifically for examples of say, dream writing or or something else weird in the dream that doesn't match up and would be your clue. This is like an outside force saying, hey, signal Red, You've got a lucid dream opportunity. Here, go for it. And some of this starts to go into the territory of inception, right,

like planting dreams or planting these cues. Yeah. John Horgan hated that movie, or at least he enjoyed it, but he did not enjoy the science of it, which makes sense, right. I mean, he's this tried and true science journalist and he found that the water should be murky and they are sometimes the pop points where but still I enjoyed it. Here's something about that movie which I enjoyed as well.

When these characters are lucid dreaming, they create some of the most boring things I've ever seen in a cinematic dream portrayal. At one level, I used to think, I don't really care for this movie, because if they're lucid dreaming, they should really be wowing. There was just a lot of crazy stuff. But if you bringing your logic into play, then I can see where that could potentially null the powers of just pure imagination. What part was boring to know that, like the big city they had, like the

city and it's a building. I don't want to get into spoilers too much, but there's there's a scene where there's like a big city around them, and it's just kind of it's creative in its own sense, but it's not I feel like I could dream a better dream city. It's what well I know. But the thing is, the whole point of that movie is you're stuck in whomever streams that is right. Yeah, they were in their own

dream at this point. Yeah, but she was dreaming, and the whole point where she was creating the architecture for like a realistic architecture. Okay, into realistic architecture, my dream, I can have realistic architecture. Because he was putting her through the paces, wanting to see if Grasshopper had learned well, because that part of the movie, you know, show me what you have learned, Grasshopper. But that's not what Leonardo

Dicapito said at all, Just so everybody knows. Okay, So there are limitations to this, right, You can't exactly just jump into this. It's not just clicker heels three times and you're gonna be an a lucid dream You've gotta really want it. Even with fancy gadgetry involved. There's not just an on off switch or a magic pill you can take. Though they have experience with the use of Alzheimer's drugs that a cognitive processes and memory, so there

are some experiments involving the use of a pill. But still all of these things still require the dreamer to really want lucid dreaming to happen. Yeah, and I keep thinking about this travel Lodge study that came out but by the futurist Stean Pearson, who tried to imagine travel lodge of the future and and all the technology that we have at our disposal and what that might look

like his idea. And again, this is someone who is um He's got a lot of information and experience under his belt, so he's not just dreaming that's out of nothing, right, And he's, as we discussed before, he's a great futurist. And then he's taking all of this information and he's extrapolating a future reality that is for the most part

unmoored from our attachment to the way things are today. Right, And he says that developments and fabric technology and synthetic materials means sleepware of the future will feature electronically controllable properties such as touch sensitivity, shape changing, thermal properties, and light emission. So his idea is that sleepers could get gently massaged in their sleep or uncomfortably groped by strange,

faithless demons. Right, and then you know, red lights beamed into their eyes and then they have to start loose dreaming boop. Right then, But there is this idea that you could enhance your dreaming, that there may be some point in the future where we can enter into this state much more effectively and get groped. As you say, well, it's it's interesting that we're talking about the future and

we're talking about the nine different types of dreams. It was one of the books in the futuristic Altered Carbon series that Richard K. Morgan did, where he has he has a future in which individuals are able to move their consciousness from body to body. You're only allowed to have one body at a time, but it means that one can practically forever if one can afford new bodies. So you have individuals that don't have to deal with

much in the way of physical illness. You'll have individuals who end up voluntarily catching the flu just for the fever dreams or just you know, just for some of the intense bodily experiences of the illness. I gonna say, that's not that's not a dream that I would want to inhabit. No, But I guess the thing is they're so jaded. They've tried everything else, They've had everything else in their multiple lives, so they're at the point where, well,

what's left for me? I guess fever dreams. That's extreme, man. I gotta say, all of this information sort of points back to this idea that we talked about this before. How much of our time we've spend dreaming even while we're awake. We've talked about daydreaming rights. By one account, at least half of our waking hours daydreaming, right, And you can, you know, cultivate awareness on that level there too.

And I love the idea of thevet and Buddhists that we were talking about to where let's not be afraid then to take this concept into the waking world and think long and hard about the various aspects of our thought processes that are dictating the way we experience waking reality. There's a great quote, and I may have read this one before, but it's it bears repeating from Grant Morrison,

and this is from the Invisible Volume one. He says, your head's like mine, like all our heads, big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was big enough to hold the weight of oceans, and the turning stars, hold universes fit in there. But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken thing, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key, and we play the same little tune again and again, and we think that tunes all we are,

that's keep coming back to. And then here's an older one. Here's one from seventy four from author O'shanessy, from the ode to his book Music and Moonlight. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, wandering by lone sea breakers and sitting by desolate streams, world losers and world forsakers on whom the pale moon gleams. Yet we are the movers and shakers of the world forever,

it seems. And you've probably heard everyone from Willy Wonka to a f X twin site that poem, but it's a it's another sort of beautiful line that that I wanted to lead out with here. Very nice. Let's bring that dreamy robot by. Yes, we have some listener mail to get to and one of them is dream related.

As we mentioned, we heard from listener Dan, and I'm not gonna read all of Dan's email, but he he raised a number of really cool points and hopefully he'll chime in with more after this podcast to get his lucid dreaming feedback on this episode that he says Robert Julie, on one of your recent podcasts, you talked about how most people never utilize lucid dreamings for sexual experiences because they'd rather fly or be a giant. I wanted to

let you know this isn't the case. He goes on to say, once you realize you're dreaming, the hardest part is to remember that you're dreaming. It's very easy to slip back into standard dreaming out of lucy dreaming. Conversely, it can also be very easy to wake yourself up and waste a perfectly go to lucid dreams, So it's important to keep reminding yourself that you're dreaming. Looking at your hands helps for some reason. And whatever you do, don't open your eyes because you'll snap up right out

of it. I got to the point where I was having a vivid, lucid dream every couple of months, so I started experimenting with the possibilities. First I learned how to fly, which took a little practice. Eventually I could do it quite easily. It's kind of like the story of Peter Pan, because you actually have to believe you can fly. Later, I started learning how to conjure objects. The first thing I conjured was a sword that formed

in my hands. I tried to conjure people in places with much difficulty until I figured out a wonderful little trick. Just find a door, walk to any door, and convince yourself before you open it, and whoever or whatever you want is behind it. I want to use this trick to conjure a lustful, scantily clad woman, and proceeded to have some great lucid dreaming sex. Let me tell you,

it's right up there with flying. So there you go, because we had to because a lot of people when they did talk about their lucid dreamings, they discussed flying and growing huge, and even Frederic Vilhem von Eden, who coined the term. In his descriptions of lucid dreaming, he tends to focus more and more on the fabulous aspects of it and kind of discounts the erotic side of lucid dreaming and his experience. So well, it's not really t talk, you know. All right, Well, let's move onto

another listener mail. This one is from Maria Mary all Right, Senses High, Robert, and Julie. I've been listening to your show for a long time now and really enjoy it, especially the more philosophical topics. I wanted to write in about your episode on the lust because there is something you didn't quite touch on, and that is the societal pressure that exists now to be lustful in the sexual sense, almost like the opposite of the prudence pressure that existed

before when we freed ourselves from those shackles. I feel like we went running too far in the other direction, and now the pressure is more on being lustful. I don't think people notice too much, but it is very apparent to me, being a sexual myself, that there is a lot of pressure both from my peers and the multimedia. Now people see it as an expression of freedom and a pleasure that everyone should enjoy, regardless of whether they want it or not, and often attempt to cure a

sexuality or advise me to go to the doctor. I don't have anything against love and the free expression of sexuality, but I think people need to tone it down a little. So there there, you know, I think that's some valid commentary there, because as we've discussed before, I mean, we live in this lust economy. We live in this world.

It is just so into our and so open with our physical desires, and not everyone is really gonna I mean, some people are going to have a very over sexed mind and they're gonna definitely flow in that direction a lot easier. But then there are individuals who are, for the most part a sexual that pressure is gonna come on them on one right, And as you say, it's

the last full commercial aspect of it. So there's this idea that you want to lust after something, that you have to have that deodorant because there's a lusty woman smelling your armpit or something not you specifically. That is an interesting bit of commentary and it made me recall and I feel like it's called the Science of Lust. It's a discovery show, and they actually talked about usexuality, which is not something that is studied a lot or

talked about a lot. So if anybody is interested in learning more about a sexuality, how it's hardwired or not hardwired, you should check that out. One of my favorite characters basically a sexual that would be Carlock Holmes basically in a sexual character, and I have problems with adaptations to try and sex him out too much, but yeah, you can't sex up the hounds too, that's not what that's

about now. So he was always a great hero to me, especially in my junior high in high school years, because I'm like, like, you know, all the multimedia pressures on me to even then, even as you're a team, there's all you you watch the like the Wonder Years and stuff, and there's like sexual pressure in that. But then you can turn to Charlotte Holmes and you're like, Sherlock comes is amazing, and he doesn't he doesn't need any of this.

There you go. Well, if you would like to share anything with us, be at Sherlock Holmes related or a sexuality related or more importantly, write to us about your lucid dreaming experiences. Are you a lucid dreamer? Have you attempted it and failed? Are you still trying? Let us know and let us know what your experience as a lucid dreamer is like. Yeah, and you can also check out an article about lucid dreaming on house to forks dot com and it's written by Katie Lambert. Really interesting.

But do drop us a line first of all Facebook that you can find us there Stuff to Blow your Mind Twitter or Blow the Mind and it's a really cool feature right now called the Stuff to Blow Your Mind photo upload contest. If you're listening to this particular episode around the time it publishes, you can find this link on the how stuff Works dot com home page. You can find it on the how stuff Works Facebook account, and we'll also link to it on the Stuff to

Blow your Mind Facebook account. It's a really cool upload to you take a cool photo if you think it's mind blowing and like a scary, gross, amazing. There are several categories. You have an image that you think is really awesome and you took it, inner it there you might be able to win an iPad. Yeah you heard that iPad alright, so and do you drop in it? You do, drop in Email us at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out our

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