April 24, 2012 • 38 mins
Whether awake or dreaming, our neocortex is always shuffling about data and creating stories. But what if you could enter your dream and become the master of your fate? Join Julie and Robert as they weave a tale about how and why we lucid dream.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what is the last lucid dream that you had and
what happened to it? Because I know you're you're a
lucid dreamer of old. It was like this weird. I
(00:24):
don't know how to even explain it. But um, I
didn't expect that you were going to ask me this,
so I'm not completely prepared. You didn't think i'd ask
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
(00:47):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:31):
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,
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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
(02:37):
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.
(03:00):
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
(03:22):
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,
(03:44):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:10):
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
(05:31):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:57):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:03):
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
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:27):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:32):
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
(10:55):
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
(11:20):
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
(11:42):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:47):
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
(13:09):
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,
(13:31):
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,
(13:54):
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
(14:15):
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,
(14:38):
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
(14:59):
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
(15:21):
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,
(15:42):
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
(16:05):
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
(16:26):
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
(16:47):
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
(17:08):
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
(17:29):
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,
(17:50):
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
(18:12):
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
(18:32):
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.
(18:52):
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
(19:14):
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
(19:35):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:19):
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
(20:42):
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
(21:04):
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
(21:26):
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
(21:46):
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.
(22:08):
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
(22:29):
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,
(22:51):
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
(23:13):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:55):
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
(24:16):
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
(24:37):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:21):
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
(25:41):
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.
(26:03):
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,
(26:25):
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
(26:46):
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,
(27:11):
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
(27:31):
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
(27:53):
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
(28:15):
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,
(28:39):
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
(29:00):
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
(29:21):
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
(29:41):
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
(30:03):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:44):
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
(31:06):
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
(31:27):
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
(31:48):
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
(32:08):
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,
(32:31):
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.
(32:53):
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.
(33:13):
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
(33:35):
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
(33:56):
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.
(34:18):
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
(34:39):
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
(35:00):
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
(35:21):
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
(35:41):
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.
(36:01):
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
(36:23):
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
(36:44):
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
(37:05):
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
(37:26):
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
(37:46):
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
(38:08):
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
(38:29):
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(38:51):
Work staff as we explore them as promising and perplexing possibilities.
Up tomorrow
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what is the last lucid dream that you had and
what happened to it? Because I know you're you're a
lucid dreamer of old. It was like this weird. I
(00:24):
don't know how to even explain it. But um, I
didn't expect that you were going to ask me this,
so I'm not completely prepared. You didn't think i'd ask
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
(00:47):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:31):
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,
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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
(02:37):
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.
(03:00):
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
(03:22):
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,
(03:44):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:10):
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
(05:31):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:34):
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
(06:57):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:03):
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
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:27):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:32):
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
(10:55):
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
(11:20):
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
(11:42):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:47):
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
(13:09):
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,
(13:31):
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,
(13:54):
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
(14:15):
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,
(14:38):
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
(14:59):
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
(15:21):
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,
(15:42):
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
(16:05):
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
(16:26):
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
(16:47):
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
(17:08):
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
(17:29):
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,
(17:50):
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
(18:12):
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
(18:32):
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.
(18:52):
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
(19:14):
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
(19:35):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:19):
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
(20:42):
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
(21:04):
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
(21:26):
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
(21:46):
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.
(22:08):
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
(22:29):
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,
(22:51):
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
(23:13):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:55):
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
(24:16):
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
(24:37):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:21):
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
(25:41):
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.
(26:03):
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,
(26:25):
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
(26:46):
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,
(27:11):
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
(27:31):
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
(27:53):
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
(28:15):
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,
(28:39):
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
(29:00):
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
(29:21):
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
(29:41):
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
(30:03):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:44):
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
(31:06):
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
(31:27):
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
(31:48):
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
(32:08):
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,
(32:31):
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.
(32:53):
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.
(33:13):
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
(33:35):
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
(33:56):
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.
(34:18):
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
(34:39):
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
(35:00):
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
(35:21):
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
(35:41):
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.
(36:01):
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
(36:23):
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
(36:44):
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
(37:05):
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
(37:26):
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
(37:46):
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
(38:08):
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
(38:29):
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
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
(38:51):
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