Touching the Void: Psychedelics and Death

they couldn't be that much to it. But and to a certain extent, that's that's true. There. It's one of the few things that is certain in any life until we reach some point where we're actually able to cheat death entirely. We're all going to go through this at some point or what it depends how you look at it,

either go through or in there. And we have devoted just countless centuries, just as long as humans have been able to comprehend and ruminate on their more reality, we've been trying to figure out how this works and how best to prepare for death, or you know, we have tried to divert our attention away from it. Right, And when I think about diversions. One of the things that comes to mind is altering our minds right in the

form of drugs. Well, that's that's one certainly one of the major interpretations of the use of things like psychedelics, And that's something we're gonna discuss here, because on one hand, there is definitely the heavy recreational view of psychedelic substances the nineteen sixties, the culture genre culture, the idea of

just hippies staring dreamily into the sky. Or if you go to a concert and you see some young person with giant eyes staring at their hands the entire time, right, and then you may say, well, this person is clearly not getting anything out of this experience. This is just

clearly an escapist experience that they're enjoying. But then the other side of psychedelic experience is rich history that we see in various cultures, the use of them as a ceremonial tool, as a religious tool to have some sort of heightened experience that will gain supposed insight into what

life means, what death means, and all these questions. And then there's science, right, and then there is science, yes, And so what we're talking about here is the intersection of I guess what you could say, hallucinogenic medicine and the idea of end of life care. Recently, there was an article in The New York Times about this, a really great article called how psychedelic drugs can help patients

Face Death. And we're going to talk about this, but before we talk about that, we should probably talk about other therapeutic uses for hallucinogens. Now, I have never founded the doctor and had hallucinogenic prescribed to me, so in what cases this is not something that is actually going to show up at your local drug store. But there have been a number of experiments, a number of clinical studies to see what uses they may have, because clearly they have a powerful effect on our mind and the

way the mind works, and that's at the root of everything. So, needless to say, doctors have looked at that and said, well, there's got to be something here. Perhaps there's something here that we can utilize to treat other conditions. Yeah, they have actually found that ecstasy or m D m A as it's known, and we'll talk about a little bit more for their is an effective treatment for severe PTSD.

They're also studies of people with cluster headaches who took LSD and reported their symptoms were greatly diminished, and psychedelics have been used for alcoholism and other addictions. Now, a lot of this has been off the radar because obviously illegal drugs are sort of persona non grata here in the United States, so it's been very hard for scientists to be able to research these without a lot of

different constraints. So recently, the last thirty forty years, people have been giving a little bit more scientific heft to this idea that we can use these drugs as therapy. So we inevitably have to turn to the character of Timothy Learry here, who I don't know. Do you watch the TV show Madman, Well, yeah, I've caught it before, and I understand that this week there was a foray into LSD, right, and Timothy Leary shows up, well, okay,

alright in the show. Obviously, he actually entered the Great Void himself in the late nineties. But we're talking about a psychologist, a writer, and one of psychedelic drugs most ardent supporters. He conducted experiments at Harvard University with something called Pilo sybin And we'll talk a little bit more about that, and I'm sure you've heard the phrase turn on, tune in, and drop out. That's a guy who uttered it. There's also an album by that name. It's like a

spoken word like psychedelic guidance album. It's actually pretty cool worth checking out if you're into that kind of music. It's been copiously sampled over the years. Learry is a very interesting character. Obviously an educated man, an expert in his field. Prior to his engagement with psychedelic substances, it was around five and his wife committed suicide and left him with a school age son and a school age daughter.

So he has this going on in his life. And then at age thirty eight, he goes on this trip to Spain. He suffers this mysterious illness and just without the aid of any kind of drug or what have you, he has this mind altering experience, this moment that he claims really allowed him to sort of see through the limitations of his perspectives of the world before then. And it's in the years following that that he actually begins

experimenting with psychedelic substances. He begins to incorporate it into his work and explore the possibilities of it and things as they tend to do. As we've discussed with good old Lily the dolphins, right right right, when you bring LSD into a study, especially back in these days, it has a tendency to sort of get out of control a little bit. Yeah, there's a lot of things spiraling

out of control. Mainly this is because the researchers at the time, especially John C. Lily right with the dolphins, are taking the LSD. So this made me changing their perspective a little bit. And certainly it is darkening the doors depths of science in a way that feels like this drug is not being given sort of its due diligence because it's now being associated with counter culture, especially with Leary, because he really kind of took it up, became a celebrity, and you know, there are a lot

of drug raids. Jordan Lyddy arrested him. Did he one of the raids that I did not know that? The Concord prison experiment was one of the big ones with him. Yeah. But but there's this other part of Leary that is really trying to look at this diligently and try to really apply scientific method to this. But then he's got all the craziness of the other part of his life, that sort of I would say, putting a dark cloud

over his efforts well. And also he just becomes increasingly less academic and more spiritual as the day's progress and his the years progress. In his later life, he's making the rounds, he's giving speeches, but he's more concerned with the evolution of human consciousness. And he was a big

advocate of cybernetics. He really thought cybernetics, right, we're going to be the key to our future, and reallys he's right on U. I guess what we should talk about is the Concord prison experiment because that's where you can see his bias really seeping in. Right. They're testing psychedelic substances. Specifically, they're testing psilocybin on the group of thirty two prisoners

to see if they can adjust their recidivism rates. Right, So recidivism rate is that the person is going to be laid out of jail and then they will do something else which will land them back into jail. And as we know, the recivism rate has always been historically high, like at this point in this study, it was recidivism rate. Yeah, so he's interested. Can you Basically the question here is by applying these psychedelic substances to these prisoners, can you

change them? Can you make them a less violent person? Person it's less likely to engage in criminal behavior. I mean, you're talking about taking somebody who is a prisoner, a person with a criminal path and is statistically likely to engage in crime. Again, right, and Key reports that it definitely helps them, that they become less antisocial, etcetera. But the fact of the matter is it did not really affect the prisoners at all. That rate of recidivism was

the same, although he claimed that there was a reduction. Yeah, there was a little squeaking of the The interpretation of the data in the study was made to lean more in favor of the findings. Again, he saw himself in a very specific way that clouded his judgment. I think here's a great quote. He says, we saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty first century, inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the nineteen sixties,

on this space colony. We were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art and that's from the study itself. No, no, that's him as a general No, no, that's sort of one of his general mission statements. But I think it gives a good idea of why he might have gone off the path of scientific method there. Okay, so we we mentioned this guy. We mentioned Leary because he kind of helped to put the kaibash on funding for hallucinogens because obviously

this guy all interwoven with counterculture. Nixon at one point called him the most dangerous personal live. Yeah, clearly that was the case. Funding dried up. We didn't really get to have a good chance to study the effects of hallucinogens as a therapy, as a motive therapy. So let's talk about some of the drugs that are now currently

being researched. And let's also talk about this guy named Stanislav Groff, because he's really important and that he I think was taking up where literally left off in terms

of sort of falling off the map of the scientific method. Okay, Well, first of all, we have psilocybin, and this is the hallucinogen acceubstance that is obtained from certain types of mushrooms that are indigenous to tropical and subtropical regions of South America, Mexico, in the United States, in the sort of Georgia, Tennessee area where I grew up, this is mostly known as something that would grow on cow patties in pastors, I have to say, like a lot of teenagers hanging out

in the dark, Yeah, trying to steal cow pies and see what they can harvest from them. So these are naturally occurring substances. Then you have in d m A, which is synthetic. Okay, this is a psychoactive drug, and it's chemically similar to methamphetamine and hallucinogenic mescaline, and it produces feelings of increased energy, euphoria, emotional warmth and distortions

and time perception and tactile experiences. The last three of those also apply to the psilocybin right rights say, and they they are helpful in reducing anxiety and enhancing self awareness as well as empathy, which is really important, it turns out when you are dealing with end of life care.

So this guy, Stanisloft Graff, much of today's research is actually predicated on some of his work with psychedelic medicine in the early sixties, he began giving the drug psilocybin to cancer patients at the Spring Grove State Hospital near Baltimore and documenting their effects, and he described cancer patients who were completely clenched with fear, who under the influences of l s D or DPT, experienced relief from the

terror of dying. That is really important because this, again is where our current researchers are licking, you know, at in the past. They're not looking at Leary, but they're looking at this guy to say, maybe there is something to this, Maybe there is a different way that we can approach end of life care. Because it's one thing to say that, you know, we all are going to die at one point, but it is certainly another thing to say, you know what, you have six months to

eighteen months to live. So that's an entirely different situation. All Right, we're gonna take a break and when we come back, we're going to talk about how these drugs could be very beneficial. And we're back. So, if one is staring down death, and one knows that it is imminent sometime in the next few months, the next few years, how can substances such as m d M A and psilocybin actually aid the patient and sort of smooth the

transition in to death. Okay, Well, there are a couple of people that in the York Times article they focused on, and in fact there's a documentary out there too that talks about this guy named Charles Grobe and Pam Secuda, who is the patient that the article and some of his studies center around. Pam Secuda, fifty five years old. She learns, or she learned, I should say, that she had stage four a metastatic cancer. She was then given six to twelve months to live, and she actually ended

up living four years. But about two years into it, she sought out help for the anxiety and depression that accompanied her feeling, her constant feeling that the other shoe was about to drop. So she found out about the study being conducted by Charles Grobe. He's a psychiatrist and a researcher at Harbor Harbor u c L, a medical center who at the time is giving solicibon to end stage cancer patients to see if it would allay their fears.

She was given psychological tests who established that she was psychologically sound, but also another test to to kind of see what her level of depression and anxiety was, and she was given a placebo during one session, and in the second session she was giving the psilocybin. Now, that session lasted for about six hours. She wore headphones that piped in different music and nature sounds, and she also had black eye shades on and that was meant to

encourage her to look inward. And I mentioned all of this because in a little while we'll talk about how this setting is really important. At the four hour point, she began to cry because she started to really empathize with her husband but what his feelings would be when she passed on. And then she says that she released all of this well of emotion and all of this energy that she had been putting towards her situation, and

she began to look at it completely differently. And she came out of that session really feeling like she could

approach death in a positive light, which is amazing. And her husband even says that she had a completely remarkable change in her demeanor because I remember that she's been living with this condition for two years now and again, feeling like that other she was going to drop in this one session completely changed her perspective, and a huge component of it seems to be her ability to empathize more with her husband and what he's experiencing and sort

of see the situation outside of herself right which she saw is very specifically, she saw that she was robbing

her present with these thoughts of the future. When you can say that we all do that on some level during the day, Oh yeah, I mean it comes back right back around to some of the things that we've been saying and things that have been said in Buddhist philosophy for for ages, and the idea that so much of our suffering is tied to worrying about the past and fretting over the future and focusing on self, and those are huge obstacles to overcome in the best of circumstances.

If you're facing the end of life, that they can be even more insurmountable. What appears to be happening is that we see that focus on self fade under the substance as well as the worrying over the future, and instead she's putting more focus on what is happening in the present and what other people that are close to her are feeling. Another good example that the article points out as Laurie Reemer, a forty eight year old survivor

of adult onset leukemia, because she's surviving. She knows at this point that she's in remission, but still her life is going to be cut short. She knows she's got like a decade or two decades remaining. Yeah, she said that she was fine when she thought she was near death. It was when she went into remission that she really became obsessed with, Okay, well when is this going to happen, and really having a lot of anxiety about it, intense

fear and anxiety around relapse in death. Maybe that's because she had survived the first bout and so it felt I'm sure there are a lot of psychological factors that made her feel like this, this may happen again, it

may not be so lucky. She participated in a study at Johns Hopkins University where rolling Griffith's was administering silas have been at a higher level than grobe was to see if he could elicit any mystical insights to help patients with their conditions, and Remer said when she underwent that, she said that her mind became like a series of rooms and she could go in and out of these

rooms with remarkable ease. In one room there was the grief her father experienced when Remor got leukemia, and another her mother's grief, and in another her children's and yet another room was her father's perspective on raising her. She says, quote, I was able to see things through his eyes, and through my mother's eyes, and through my children's eyes. I was able to see what it had been like for them when I was so sick. And this is someone

who went into this as an agnostic. She came out of it saying, I now have the distinct sense that there's so much more, so many different states of being. I have the sense that death is not the end, but just part of a process, a way of moving into a different sphere, a different way of being. That in and of itself is pretty amazing that she had

that perspective change. But Griffith's, the person who administered the substance, has said that for fourteen months after participating in a solicitin study that was published in the Journal of psycho Pharmacology, believes last year of subjects said that it was one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives and

thirty said it was the most meaningful experience. Yeah, so it kind of makes me wonder, well, what exactly is happening in the brain when this is going on, because obviously this has a lot to do with how these people are perceiving life now. Well, luckily, as we've discussed another podcast, we are able to look inside the brain

and get an idea of what's going on. There's a psychiatrist at Imperial College London by the name of David J. Nutt, and Penis team used an m r I to scan healthy volunteers dosed on psilocide and in order to capture this transition from a normal, waking consciousness to the psychedelic state, they found it during these states of quote unquote understrad in consciousness that there was a deactivation of regions of the brain that interface our senses and our perception of self,

which false ride in line with what we were talking about with her description of the way it felt, and with the idea that our obsession with self, our ego, our need to place ourselves at the center of this story are tied in with our suffering, especially as we approached that. Yeah, and I did see that One of the regions that was dimmed was the anterior singular cortex,

and we've actually talked about that quite a bit. I think most recently we were talking about envy, and we were talking about one study in which they saw that people who were experiencing envy were actually what we were. You were seeing these parts of the brain, the anterior singular cortex where pain is processed, lighting up, so that we know that this part of the brain perceives pain, even if it's emotional pain, it's the same place that

also processes physical pain. So it's interesting to see that that would go offline here as well. But another part of is that is also very intriguing, and that researchers wanted to try to get at, was why patients were able to hold onto this feeling, this memory for so long after having just one experience with these drugs. And it turns out that encoding the experience is really really

important here, and that's what the researchers are doing. They're following up with the patients for weeks and weeks afterward, and they're dissecting what happened, and they're talking about the memories and just like you would do that in would say a trip that you took, um it begins to really form these long term associations. So trip yes, yes, she,

I should say. Let's say you, yes, he took a trip to Paris, and you kept talking about it with, say, your significant other, and you've got the blueprint of that memory. And the same thing is happening with with the the psychological trip that these patients are taking. Really, the whole experiment here reminds me a lot of travel and how the memory is encoded. I think about any trip that I take a trip to another city. Let's say I'm going to Paris, France and I've never been to Paris,

France before. I would ideally want to put some research in beforehand, figure out where I'm going to go, what I hope to get out of this trip, what I hope to gain from the experience, then go on the trip, and then when I get back process it. Be its scrapbooking, writing some blogs about it, talking about it with people. But I go into this trip with a certain expectation and I leave it with this aim of processing and

learning from it. Okay, so I hear a little bit of priming going on, right, and that's what they're talking about here that it's not just a let's do some up and see what happens. They're talking about, Let's prepare them for this. Let's set the room up right, Let's make sure they're items to remind them of people they love, that we have the music and the ambiance is appropriate. And then after the experience, let's discuss and let's see what we can learn from this and then move forward

with it. And the priming thing is really important here because they are talking to these patients about seeking relief from anxiety and depression, and they are saying that you want to administer this drug, and what we're hoping for you to do is to be able to conquer your fears, I'll lay your years and so already, and we've already seen this from the Placebo podcast that we did that even when you sometimes talked to a doctor, your symptoms will be reduced just by the very act of making

an appointment or talking to someone. So already they are primed to have this experience. And this is really important because there are limitations to this, to this sort of drug therapy, right, And I was thinking about this. There's a book called Rational Mysticism by John Horrigan. It's really great and he talks really about inducing these various states

of being. And we've talked about him married of times, but anyway, he is talking about one experiment, and this is a Leary experiment, by the way, and it's at the Miracle of marsh Chapel and it's in nineteen sixty two. It's a double blind study, which is a good thing, right.

It's called the Good Friday Study. They have ten Divinity students who are given the solicibbon and another ten were given a placebo and the Good Friday Service they're actually in the basement of the church, is piped to them while they're in the base. Okay, so these are Divinity students. They are primed to have some sort of experience where they feel closer to God. That's where they're hoping the

outcome is. But what they find is that eight of those ten Divinity students who got the solicition and have not great trips here, Like they have some enjoyable moments, but they're kind of having some problems with reality. And part of this reason is because again the setting and the priming, they're not quite there because they have another ten students that they are looking at them like they're complete animals, or wondering what's going on, or because they

really don't know what's happening. They don't know these other people are being dosed, so they just think they're being crazy and they start kind of poking fun at them. So you're not in a room where you're by yourself,

you have headphones on, you're looking inward. That's really important and I think that's why we should probably note that so far the very new research about this, at least of late, has been successful because it is in these conditions that are carefully created and you can't just go out I guess my point is and go into a you know, pick out a cow patty and it hoped to have this experience that's going to reduce your fears. Yeah. Buddhist and at one point psychedelic experiment or Alan Watts

has a really fascinating quote on the matter. He said, psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various methods of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful if you get the message hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with I permanently

glued to the microscope. He goes away and works on what he has seen, which I think is a wonderful quote that it's nicely with these research approaches, because if you just pick up a telescope and you know nothing about the cosmos and you just look into the sky, it's gonna be pretty yeah, but you're not gonna learn anything. There's not gonna be anything to really grasp other than WHOA, that was kind of neat. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope.

But ideally you would want to know what you're looking at, and you would want to process it towards and that's

what lots of talking about. Yeah. In Rational Mysticism also talked about a guy named David Nichols who's the chairman at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at Purdue University, and he's conducted a number of experiments with MSDM that's ecstasy, but he has concerns about its toxic effects in cases of repeated doses, because we know that there are animal studies that bear out evidence that repeat doses can damage

their tonein receptors. So again, it's not just something that you, I guess what I'm trying to say is kids don't feel like this is something that you need to go out into and explore. Um. Yeah, we're not advocating the use of the substances at all, certainly recreationally. Yeah. Yeah. So again, the research is in its very early stages, and the article does bring up a very good point. It wonders whether this type of therapy is ever going to really come to fruition, given that drug companies could

give two times about it. There's no money really in something that can be obtained from nature. Yeah, so certainly, I mean, as far as I mean, it's concerned because it's the kind of thing that you can cultivate on your own, and if it was legalized and everyone, well not everyone, but certain portions of the population would simply cultivate it and you would probably I guess, buy it at your local farmers market, and then where's the cut

for big farm right. Well, although as we have seen with herbal remedies, that does have a bit of a market too, so maybe there's a chance for that to be marketed to people. But then there's also the problem that there's a legal drug use and all that. Okay, so let's say that in the future there is the possibility of this. This completely changes that the face of end of care giving or or even hospice. Right, you could have this administer to you by hospice worker, or

go into a clinic and have an administered to you. Yeah, we should also know not pretend that individuals and hospice care are not you know, you don't have people dying up to their gills and painkillers. I mean, it's not like that. We we're hesitant to administer powerful drugs two

individuals who are dying, and nor should we. I think it's important to stress that I don't know what to sort of say, like, yes, we are administering well, you know, morphine, right, So in other words, you could administer another drug that would be beneficial to someone, right, because if you're talking especially the very end of life care, not used to I'm staring down my last few years of life, but

I am on my deathbed. Different rules that apply, you know. Well, and here's where the gray area starts to come in UM. You know, who can have it? Who can't? Do you have to undergo psychological evaluation if you're really ill patients seeking comfort? What about chronic pain? You know what if you're not to really ill, but you have horrible chronic pain. These are the sort of questions that start to arise

when you talk about UM using something that is illegal. Well, in the New York Times article, they mentioned one of the possibilities, what does it mean that everyone over the age seventy to use it? Right? Right right? Which which reminds me of a Patton oswal about different rules that apply after each birthday. And it was something like, after

ninety you were legally allowed to kill a person. Because if you're ninety and you can kill somebody with your bare hands, I think with the rule, yeah, yeah, but yeah, I can see the reasoning there. I mean, it's like, you reach ninety years old, you've accomplished a lot, you've suffered through a lot. Maybe you get to have one free strangulation, maybe you get to experiment a little with

these substances now that you're in the clear. Well, and this always point really, this always points back to cannabis too, and all the debates about that about whether or not we should legalize drugs. You know, are we hamstringing ourselves by making them illegal? Will things really turn into a crazy maelstrom of drug laden activity if we were to do that. I don't know anyway, but it does bring

that up, that debate up once again. But in any case, it does kind of remind me that in order to get to these altered states, that doesn't necessarily have to be through drugs. As you talked about, there are other ways to enter into this, And we talked about lucid dreaming as a way to gain perspective. Even traveling we've talked about as being a completely dissentering experience that can change the way that you frame reality for you yourself,

and even the overview effect. We talked about that, and about astronauts glimpsing the earth as they were returning and having these epiphanies that we were all one big humanity role. Yeah, I mean, and then you know, roll into that meditation, various forms of meditation that are practiced in various traditions, even fiction. I'm a big supporter of mixed stuff up if necessary, pick and choose from the cosmic buffets which you like, fill in the gaps with your own creations

and try applaying that. I'm not saying at all cure everything in your approach to death, but it couldn't hurt. As we're discussing though, the use of psychedelic substances on the death bed, it's interesting to you point out that, first of all, I'll just suxilate. The author on his deathbed asked his wife to inject a hundred micrograms of L S D into his muscle tissue, and she obliged, and that was in the n died in his home

that way. And of course Leary was probably the biggest fan of psychedelic experiences and knew that he was dying. He was doing a prostate cancer. So here's a quote from him on the matter. He says, I'm looking forward to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying. I've been writing about self directed dying for twenty years. You've got to approach your dying the way you live your life, with curiosity, with hope, with fascination, with courage,

and with the help of your friends. So there you have it. It's a fascinating area of discussion. A lot of gray area there as well. It's frightening to think about because we're talking about death. Yeah, it's not to feel good sort of thing, right, but again it does you know, we all are going to approach it at some point too. But it does really change the stakes when you know what your death sentences. And certainly nobody likes to suffer or see others suffer. So it's an

interesting topic to cook into. And I think it's important to look at these psychedelic substances in a frame of reference that is a little departed from the criminal legal fun not fun, uh, you know, mess up your life, stay normal sort of dichotomy is that that are so often referenced. All right, shall we look at some psychedelic male from our Psychedelic Robot? Yes, let's bring it over

all right. First of all, and this is a response to our plant communication episode, but it ties in loosely with us because we mentioned at the think the start of the podcast, if we were to die and become re incarnated as a plant, what would we choose? And Chris writes in and says, hey, Robert and Juli, I just listened to two of your podcasts for the plant communication one. I was surprised you wanted to be the

plants you were. If I were given the choice, I would want to be a Californian red oak I think that is their name, the ones that grow hundreds of feet tall, uh and are really big so you can drive cars through them. Not only would you have a nice long life, you would be protected by humans and have a nice view. Well you couldn't see anything, but it would be cool anyway. So that's Chris's thoughts on it. I don't know. I wouldn't want to be a tree in the next life that someone drives a car through

and destroys my roots system, but that's just me. I'm still sticking with Moss on that one, alright. We also did an episode on lucid dreaming, which we referenced in this podcast, and I have a few responses to that. Don Old rights and says, hey, guys, I just finished listening to your lucid dreaming episode and wanted to add to it. I've been interested in lucid dreaming for years

now and have on numerous occasions lucid dreams myself. You mentioned briefly various medications that could affect dreams, but failed to touch on one in particular. Kalia zaka takchi is an herbal supplement used by shaman's to induce lucid and or prophetic dreams, commonly intended to help find answers that that may be plaguing an individual or their tribe. It is often smoked in a cigarette with equal parts callia and tobacco. In fact, lucid dreaming in general seems to

be very common shamanistic ritual practice around the world. Love the show. Thanks. We also heard from Brian Brian and writes and says, Hi, Robert and Julie really enjoying your podcast. Keep up with great work on the subject of flying and dreams. You mentioned that most people fly in a stiff superman pose while dreaming. I've never had it that easy. To get off the ground required vigorous flapping of my wide stretched arms and where it's much better if I

start off running downhill. Take off feels as if I'm swimming in molasses and seems to take all of my strength to pull off. Once I'm off the ground, I can pick up speed and fly very easily, but still always using my arms as if they were wings. Just thought you might be interested in a different flying technique. Thanks for the great show, and uh so there you go a different method of flying about. And then we

also heard from Max. Max writes in and says, dear Robert and Julie and the Lucid Dreaming episode, you discussed flying in dreams to be stiff. Although I've also experienced flying stiff and dreams, I'm usually able to steer the flying by moving my arms and legs. When I'm able to steer, I seem to fly much longer, probably because when flying stiff, I seem to crash as soon as I realize I'm flying. I think that when I realized I'm flying, my logic takes over and tells me that

I cannot fly, resulting in the crash. Thanks for the great podcast and the hours of thoughts inspired by them, Max, those are really cool. I was just thinking about how we were talking about how logic is somehow there's the idea that logic is still somehow online, um when you're lucid dreaming, which is not usually the case in dreams, but we do see logic and the methods well. And I was just thinking too in my own experiences of flying.

There are times that I plummet to the ground and I have to tell myself like no, no, you can do this, and it's um and so I was just thinking like, yeah, maybe there was other times when you see the logic centers really coming online and you have to kind of stay back off a little bit. You know, I'm gonna fly here. So let us know what you think. We would love to hear about your dreaming or lucid dreaming experiences. We would love to hear your thoughts on

psychedelic substances and our journey into death. Like I said, there's a lot of gray area in there, and we'll be interested to hear people's different takes on it. And we're not opposed to hearing from people who have really dealt firsthand with preparations for death and staring down into life. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook we are Stuff to Blow Your Mind and on Twitter

we are Blow the Mind. And I should also point out that currently there is a really cool video series that we did and it is called Stuff to Blow Your Kid's Mind. Ten episodes. Short videos are about six minutes each. Check them out, watch them with your child, or watch them, steal all the information, and then present the ideas as your own your child. Both uses are valid. We put a lot of work into that and we're really proud of it. Also, there is a photo contest

called stuff to Blow Your Mind. You can reach it on the House Stuff Works homepage. You can reach it on the House Stuff Works or stuff to Blow your Mind Facebook pages into really cool photos that you've taken, vote on other photos, possibly win an iPad? What an iPad? Yeah? I can't do it. I know, I've already checked into this, but you guys can, so check it out. Drop us a line if you will at blow the Mind at

discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com