Lucid Dreaming

One of the reasons why I got involved in in hypnotherapy and love it so much, and words and suggestion is because there's a phrase I use a lot on my podcast. The brain doesn't know the difference between fact and fiction. And if you can train your brain to think about things and focus on those things, it's like having a genuine rehearsal in real life. Except you can do it lying on your back, staring at the ceiling or with your eyes closed.

And clients will sometimes say, oh, the way you described it, it was like I was there. It felt like I was there. I could almost feel, I genuinely could feel the sun on my face. But it's not the same as an actual dream where you genuinely, your brain is going, yeah, I'm feeling it. I'm actually feeling it and living it. That that has fascinated me from day one. I think everybody should be fascinated with that. Maybe I'm just a bit weird, but it just seems phenomenal.

It is just different parts of the brain, presumably, and that's something I'd like to ask you Luigi, whether you have any schema I guess as to the fact that an ordinary dream, lucid dreaming to one side for a moment, an ordinary dream is created by one part of the mind or brain. Or both which surprises the other part or another part, that that

You experience things in the daytime and then in a hyper associative state, it says, what happened today? How does that compare to what happened yesterday or beyond? So autobiographical memory and how likely is this going to happen tomorrow and what could I do differently perhaps? So it's an exploration of that, but that's your unconscious working that out. And then as a conscious observer, we may go, well, that was weird. and then, and they say, oh, I dreamt about you yesterday, Fiona.

What was I doing? Oh, we were both just flying. Yeah, that's weird. And we another coffee and that's it. So the conscious mind is quite dismissive most of the time of dream content because it speaks another language. And this is where I found dreaming to be really fascinating, because when you start to pay attention to dreams, then they change. And they start to change a little bit when you start to write them down.

So if you keep a Dream journal, writing your dreams down, or recording them into a voice recorder every morning, then dreams take on a slightly different quality because they're designed to be recorded by an observer, a conscious observer. But after a while, even that starts to fizzle out. Because what I've realized is that unless you do something with that dream content, then that part of your mind starts to say, okay, the conscious mind doesn't do anything other than watch, or record.

So it's pointless. And, and so the dream recall can actually struggle then. Where I found that things tick on another level is when the conscious mind becomes an ally to that information and does something in the waking state to feed extra information back into the system that the unconscious couldn't have worked out just by working out guessing things in the dream environment.

So there's always an invitation in a dream that's directed to the conscious mind for the conscious observer to go and do something in waking reality. There's an application aspect to it, and when the application is accomplished, then that can be a new behavior, but it also could be a new mode of thinking or whatever it is. That feeds extra data back into the system and allows whatever that unfinished business is that the unconscious mind was trying to process, it allows more data into that.

And therefore the dream continue. And, and I come across this a lot, especially with recurring dreams and nightmares. And nightmares being the principle dreaming complaint that I get with my clients. Because nightmares tend to repeat. They're very strong in terms of their emotional strength and they're easy to remember. And that's the point. You know, nightmares always have an interruption. That's what differentiates it from a bad dream.

A bad dream, you'll stay in it and probably whimper or something like that if somebody's listening in. But it does tend to lead to some sort of ending. It might not be a satisfactory one, but it does end. A nightmare has an interruption. It's usually coming out of it, sweating, palpitations, all that kinda stuff. And that means that there's something that is interrupted. It's not complete.

And therefore unless you go and do something that helps the total self to gather extra information that can help the resolution of whatever that dream message is, then the nightmare will likely repeat itself again and again. And it's not enough to just know what the dream is about. Say, oh yeah, that's to do with work and the stress that I've got on a project or a relationship that I have with my boss, or something like that, that's not enough.

The enough is doing something different that then updates the system. And you can do that in imaginative play. I help people with nightmares who might have had, say, abuse in childhood and the person who abused them is no longer physically present. They can't, they literally can't do anything about them anymore, whether they've died or something like that. But in their mind, that person still exists very strongly. It's a part of themselves that's kind of attacking them in a way.

Or they're, the aggressor towards that person for instance. So what we do in hypnosis then is we talk people into dreamlike states. Not always, but you know, when, when we're working at that level, we can talk people into dreamlike environments because what is that really doing? It's reducing external sensory awareness. Notice this and relax that part, and then forget about that. Now let's think about this environment and really immerse ourselves in thinking about that environment.

So we flesh out all the VAKOG of it and so on. So we're really becoming multi-sensory in that environment. And the more you pay attention to that, the less attention you pay to your physical sensory input, the more real then that feels to you. And all the while you are taking over as the therapist, you're kind of the inner dialogue so that, that's been delegated to you. In a dream, you can still have obviously that inner dialogue because you think appropriately for that environment.

But what you don't have is that meta-awareness of knowing that you are in the dream so that ability is, sadly lacking. Because our frontal lobes are usually a little bit offline.

Predominantly one area, which if you kind of drill through your right temporal. Don't do this at home kids or adults. You, you'll get to what's called the right dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. And when we have that kind of awareness of the self, I know that I'm here talking and I know that I'm having thoughts in my head.

I know now that I'm waving my hand because you know, I've got italian genetics and we talk with the hand, you know, that awareness of awareness, that bit usually lights up a little bit more. And that's offline. For the most part during dreaming. So that self-reflective awareness specifically is offline. And what we know with Lucid Dreamers is that that bit switches back on. You, you literally have like an aha moment.

And it that, that's the bit that tends to flash up when people do have aha moments. So moments of revelation and so on and, and feelings of awe and inspiration. We see that light up and also spikes in the gamma frequencies. So around about 40 cycles per second, you'll start to see that light up as well, which you know, a bunch of other studies are showing that when people are in flow states, for instance, the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi you start seeing gamma spiking in the brain.

So, that real conscious presence, that deep awake state that sometimes people get into even with their eyes open, that coincides with. And there's a cause and effect issue of course, but it, it correlates very heavily with, with spikes of gamma. So, this is something that we know we can start to train as well because you start seeing those gamma spikes when people are well trained in, in meditation specifically mindfulness.

And long-term mindfulness practitioners tend to have more lucid dreams than the general population. So, it seems to be a, a natural overspill of self-reflective awareness practices that then carry over into the nighttime.

But maybe it's not necessarily the hypnotic suggestions we're giving. It's the act of being in hypnosis, in flow state. If we want to use the same terms for it or that meditative state. People often group those three together, flow state, meditation, hypnosis, they go oh, it's the same thing. It's just, we just call it different things and maybe, maybe not more research needs to be done, but it's just language, isn't it? Does it matter what we

But it feels like there's an element of creating a good relationship between the conscious and unconscious and if they will work together. I mean, I know that sometimes I've tried to analyze no, maybe that's not the right word, but to work out what, what on earth's been going on in my dreams, cuz I do often remember my dreams and they are often very, very odd. But my unconscious mind usually tells me, Not as pleasant language as this, but to go away.

I know one was Freud thought if you dreamt about the house, you would dreaming about yourself. And every room was a part of the self. Do you, do you believe that there are universal symbols? Is the symbology within dreaming or is it personal?

You know, the, and. Nearly mauled by a shark or whatever, then my experience of a beach is gonna be very different to that description or to somebody else's experience of a beach. And so you, you can't exclude the dreamer and, and that's going to be important. But I, I've taught lucid dreaming and, Meditation all, all over the place, you know, in the different continents. And, and what I've found is that dreams seem to be culturally loaded. They have motifs of a particular culture.

In Turkey, for instance. Lots of people dreaming about eyes. Um, Which was like really cool. lots of repetitive symbols. Whereas, you know, in different parts of the world, you, you're gonna get different motifs. So I, I think there is something, I, I don't think it's innate so much. Maybe I'm wrong, you know, I mean, Jung was certainly of the camp that there were certain archetypes and so on that, that were, were in the unconscious and there could be evidence of that.

But I also think that we're kind of raised in particular climates where symbols do repeat themselves often. Like even the, the symbol of the house, I mean, I've often found that to be the case in agreement with Freud, that it is you, but then you, you could say that about absolutely every element of the dream as well. You know, because when I say, okay, I've dreamt about Fiona. I've not really dreamt about Fiona. I've dreamt about a part of myself playing the role of Fiona.

So what is Fiona to me and represented in that moment, and why am I taking this character, the the one that I, I start with? Well, that's a habit. So the habit of being Luigi, observing a world of objects, is carried over into the dream state, but there's no real reason why I need to be Luigi anymore than I can be Fiona or the whole house, or the sun or whatever else in the dream, because it's all me.

And this, this is something that I like to work with, especially when it comes to nightmare resolution because you have an aggressor, you know, so you've definitely got the drama triangle going on in, in, in or at least the top dog underdog kind of situation. in every nightmare. There's always a part that's, that's defended itself against another. And you could be the aggressor, you could be the, the defender. So, there's, there's either a victim or a persecutor dynamic.

And, and, and that can be inverted as well. But what you can do with imaginative play with hypnosis is to go in and play the other role, or maybe to take on a neutral role, and then it's like, well, if this part is chasing that part down, what's that part trying to tell that one? This one feels really weak. So can you step into the powerful part? What does that feel like?

And then, and by playing around like this then, and then allowing the dream to continue itself, which is another aspect that I, I like to work with dreaming the dream on, because nightmares have the interruption. So where would it like to go now that you've got more of a, a conscious awareness of what the dream was doing, and you're not as self-identified in that scene, then if you pull back, where would the dream like to go? Where would the resolution like to take you?

What options are available to you, let's explore that. And normally I do that in a very dissociated way because obviously they can reassociate and, experience distress. So, you know, you dial it down, mental theater kind of thing. Make it black and white, tiny, pixelate, you know, all, all the kind of stuff that we can play around in, in, in hypnosis and, and give them a, a remote control or whatever they want to be able to. Freeze frame, go back forward, change camera angle, whatever it is.

So then you go back into the dream and you can play around with perspectives. And I, I think when people are lucid dreaming from that perspective, the one of total flexibility. Then lucid dreaming also changes. So rather than trying to control the dream and say, oh, I'd love to be at the beach, or I'd love to be at the pyramids of Giza and whatever, and you have the amazing experience and that's lovely. You say, well, actually, I've started in this dream. Why am I here in the first place?

And I think most of the time when people train in lucid dreaming, what they do is they say Regular dreams are pointless and weird, and therefore, I need to go in as a conscious mind and have a play and change the narrative and go to something that's constructive rather than trying to learn the language of the dream that you started in. That for me is building a relationship. So I wouldn't say this is a standard way of lucid dreaming.

I think this is something that I've cultivated over 20 years of practice. And I've really drilled into it. It's not just, I could have done the same thing for 20 years, and I know people who have but I, I like the idea of, of building that relationship and saying, you know, this is your realm. I say to my unconscious. I'm in the lamp with the genie. The genie knows that world. I know this one a little bit better, and, and I have my filters here. That one is, is unfiltered.

It doesn't have verbal language in the same way that I have it in this reality. I don't have to translate everything into verbal linear language as well. So for me it's more like, okay, can you, can you show me that in a different way because I'm not getting it. The dreams are presented metaphor in, in multi-sensory ways, and this is coming back to that dream dictionary type of interpretation. You are never gonna capture that.

Because that array of symbols put together, constructed in that way was so well selected by your unconscious that you can't reduce it down to something that was in a book. If it's a symbol of the self and it said you're going someplace, so the symbol is now a vehicle and you're in a car versus a bike versus walking it versus being in a plane. All of those have totally different meanings for you.

And your unconscious chose the one that it chose very specifically because it had all of those meanings. So it might be that the plane, unless you're a pilot it's something that you're more of a passenger of. And actually there are other parts of yourself that are coming along and et cetera, et cetera, whatever that might mean. And your relationship to flying. If you're in a car, are you the driver of the car? Are are you the passenger in the back seat who's driving? What color is the car?

Is it a fast car, a slow car? You know, where are you located? All of those things need to be included in the interpretation and, and that some of that is feeling as well. You know, it's not just a, a cognitive exercise, which is what we try to do with our left brains when we come back online.

I think it's something like 96% of narcoleptics are lucid dreamers because they're just dropping from wakefulness straight into the dream and, and that conscious mind follows them immediately. Like, what the heck? Unfortunately, they can't often do very much with them because they're short-lived and, and so on. But when I work with somebody who's a lucid dreamer and has nightmares, it is very possible to have lucid nightmares.

And this is something that in the lucid dreaming communities, you won't hear much discussion about because it's, it's usually touted as, oh, you can play and you can fly into the sun and become it, and go breathe underwater and all this kind of cool stuff. Which is, which is true. You could do all of that. But the reason why they've cultivated lucid dreaming is as a strategy to break the nightmare. it is still a fight or flight response, right? But the lucid dreaming becomes a flight response.

In other words, I know it's a dream. Let me get outta here. So they, they'll either try to change it and if they can't change it, they'll get out and they'll wake themselves up. And that's normally what they say to me. They say, oh, I recognize that I was a dreaming. And I said, wake up. Wake up and get out. That's better than getting assaulted. Fair enough.

But the next step there is to help that lucid dreamer to recognize that all of the aspects of the dream were aspects of themselves, and therefore there was actually no need to wake up.

Stay in the dream, observe it, strip the emotion out if you need to, or fly up to a vantage point where you're no longer being attacked or whatever it is, so that you can stay in and watch it resolve or take on a different perspective, or how would you like to guide this or just say to the dream show me what I need to know to resolve this, and then it changes.

I'm back in the office doing the same stuff and, and it was just helping me be a little bit more efficient at the job. I was thinking, gosh, you know, I'm doing this training at night and, and we know that the first half of the night relates to what you've been doing in the daytime. So a lot of the dreaming in the first half of the night is about your day-to-day. It can be mundane as your day-to-day is,

Nightmare messages are usually presented in a very, very gentle way, repeatedly if you pay attention to your dreams. I haven't had a nightmare for maybe about 15 years. And that's unusual. Right. You know, people have nightmares, but I haven't had one for about 15 years because I notice things throughout my journaling and, and so on. I start to notice patterns. And that's the main reason why I journal, because I start to notice patterns over time.

There'll be clusters of specific types of dreams that are coming up, and then I'll take that information and do something with it, combined with other approaches as well. You know, because I, I meditate, I do mindfulness practices, I do lucid dreaming practices, but all, all the kinds of meditation I have my own personal therapist that I can talk things through and so on. So it, it's, it's all part of an ecosystem that includes that dream content. So the nightmare doesn't need to arise.

It doesn't need to be as dramatic to get my attention because I'm, I'm just working on things as I'm going along. So there's a term which roughly translates to psycho hygiene that they use in Germany for this reason. And there's a, a particular institute in Germany where a colleague of mine teaches psychotherapists to become lucid dreams and to work with lucid dreams for psycho hygiene purposes.

Before I started using it with my clients, I started using them myself because I was working with clients. And, there were a few reasons for that.

One of them was because sometimes I'd hear something that was pretty harrowing and it would impact me in some personal way, and I would bracket it off so that I could stay with my client in the session, but then my dreams would say, You know, this has triggered you in some way, and of course you can take it to your personal therapy and supervision and so on, but we can resolve this in the dream space as well. So that, that was one aspect.

The other way that I use Lucid Dreaming was to develop greater empathy for the client. I did this accidentally and then I started to do it deliberately where I would be sitting with my clients in the dream. And then we would be having the therapy session, and then I would find myself becoming the client, and, and so telling Luigi what the issue was. And for some, somehow the dream always knew how to play the client better than I could in my, in my uh, rational mind, right?

And, and I'd get some insights from that. And I say, oh, okay, so when, when my client's saying this and this. How this is, and then I'm responding. This is how they're receiving my response potentially. And so it would, it would be a nice environment to be testing out different possibilities. And I would usually find that then if I, if I took a, a particular approach and attitude with that client, that, that the same sorts of developments that I would find in the dream would occur.

And, and you know, some might see that as a little bit precognitive. I don't see it as like, as woo as that. it's, my unconscious can process data at a far greater rate. You know, we know the unconscious again Csikszentmihalyi, 11 million bits of data coming in at every second that, that is processed by your senses. And, and, and your unconscious and our conscious mind can process depending on the study. 110 to 130 bits. Out of that. Right? So it's 11 million versus 110.

You know, that's a massive gulf. And so I don't need to know and work out everything consciously. I trust that the unconscious knows how to process stuff, much like I delegate breathing and digestion and everything else like that. So if there is something that is flagged up in a nightmare. Then I also say I trust the unconscious, that it's not trying to punish me at all. It's just waving a red flag to get my attention to say, go and do something in the waking state.

And as I said before, it's not only about interpretation, it's about, it's about application and integration that then follows. And that can be a ritual. It can be just doing something slightly different just to test out a new possibility that maybe you haven't explored before that will feed data back into the system. And, and the nightmare will usually resolve at that point, or it will change its nature. So you'll say, oh, thank you for that. I'll try a different approach.

And maybe there's just something else further down the line that we need to look at again. So there's a feedback system, but anybody who's listening to this who has nightmares, you know, don't think it's your unconscious trying to punish you and hurt you in some way and give you insomnia, that's totally not what's going on. But it is after your attention.

If you just keep ignoring it and popping pills and doing alcohol and, and the caffeine combinations, then, you, you're basically ignoring parts of

Having that experience through distorting it, maybe separating ourself from it, looking at it as if we were sitting in a cinema and up on a screen just observing it we're not gonna have that R E M rebound effect the following night, so we're gonna have a better night's sleep, which means the dream is likely to be less intense, still there, still telling us whatever it is we needed to be told, but without so much emotion.

And then it's better the following night and the following night, and so on.

It's, it's not part of our everyday existence to recognise and I would say need strong need for the two halves of the mind to work together well.

The sixth of that is in dreaming, right? So it's a significant amount of time and it's got an evolutionary function, otherwise we wouldn't have it. It's a time when you would be completely vulnerable because you're asleep. So nature has favored dreaming and we see it in different species. obviously we can only infur the subjective experience, but octopi for instance, they changing colors, camouflaging with different environments in their sleep.

dogs running and you know, you'll see the, the limbs going and barking at things. So we can, we can comfortably infer that this is in other animals as well. That has a, an evolutionary function. And, and I think that it is that practice function that, that prediction function as well.

Different societies that value dreaming, different cultures that value dreaming you know, aboriginal dream time or the shamanic practices Tibet, dream yogas, all, all of these were they, they encourage the children to keep an active dream life. And talk about them and what was going on, and then invite them to do something with that rather than, Oh, it was just a dream, go back to sleep.

And then what happens is the kid just closes down and stops talking to the parent about them, and then is brushed off. What you find in those cultures is that they keep that rich dream life and then they do stuff with that information. Whereas in the west, we're kind of taught dismis dreams. They're not real. And therefore it also becomes a little bit taboo if you've got any sort of sleep issue related to dreaming, because you should be able to deal with that because it's really silly.

It's just dreaming. Why, why can't you handle that? So you don't go to a specialist for it? You know, it's, it's, it's this really frivolous kind of thing. And, and it shouldn't be a problem. And they sound silly talking about, oh, dreams are bullying me, you know, I think there, there needs to be a lot of psychoeducation in our culture about the importance of dreaming and how much they impact our lives. And we know this through.

Sayings like, oh, you know, it sounds like you're a bit grumpy this morning. Did you get out the wrong side of bed? we know that the nighttime has an impact on us. We also know that we can use dreams very creatively. You know, if you've got a problem sleep on, it has a variant in every single language.

And, and so we know that those hyper associative states of the night, which mean that rather than trying to work everything out through the frontal lobes, everything else in the brain is, is active. You know, when you go into deep sleep, the, the delta pulse from the frontal lobe ripples information backwards through the cortex. It's the kind of the first time that all of your brain gets the information of the day. So, it's the most whole brain state we can ever get into.

And you only see that same sort of activation when people are, are on L S D. Right. So, you know, that's why, and now there's loads of studies going on with, with microdosing it and you know, and then they're going, oh wow. You know, people are getting lots of therapeutic benefits from this.

if you look at things like you know, I mentioned shamanism and, and some of these ancient practices and more esoteric practices where they do a lot of drumming and chanting and so on. They're getting you into brainwave states that facilitate the release of these substances. I mean, that's literally what's going on in the brain. So we, we know we can trigger these things using natural mechanisms.

Another natural mechanism is to go to someplace where there's an expanded view and you're staying more in your peripheral field in the right brain. if you've read any of the work of Ian McGilchrist, you'll know that you can start to trigger right brain functioning just by staying in the periphery as you're walking around. And so the sensations of awe and wonder, gamma is naturally spiking in your brain. When that happens.

That's releasing certain endorphins and all kinds of neurotransmitters and and so on that are really beneficial to us. So you can do this completely naturally. And, and I think that in hypnosis we can also facilitate that process.

But it is something really with a, a little bit of psychoeducation can actually change a, a third of your life. You know that you spend with your eyes shut.