Lucid Dreaming: How to Learn, Grow, and Heal While You Are Asleep

This is the cool thing about lucid dreaming. It maximizes the third of our life that we spend asleep. By doing that, we optimize the two-thirds that we spend awake.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation is something that's a little unusual, but I think will matter to many of you because it's about becoming healthier in a realm that we often don't talk about, which is our spiritual life. And the guest today we have is an extraordinary young man who is one of the leading teachers of something called lucid dreaming, which we'll get into in depth. But essentially it's being awake while you're dreaming as a way to explore your consciousness and heal and resolve issues in your life and be more awake and have a bigger brain and all kinds of cool stuff that happens as a result of this amazing technique or method that isn't really new. And we'll talk about that. He actually derived a lot of this through his own experience, not knowing actually what he was doing and just kind of figured it out as a little kid, 12 years old, but He then realized that this was an ancient practice of what is called dream yoga in Tibetan Buddhism that has been a very secret practice for thousands of years that now is being taught to Westerners. He actually was authorized to teach dream yoga within the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism by Lama Yeshe Rinpoche in 2008. He has developed this holistic approach to dream work called Mindfulness of Dream and Sleep, He's written three books about it, which have been translated to 13 languages. He's spoken at major universities like Cambridge University. He's spoken at Buddhism and Youth Culture about Buddhism and Youth Culture at the House of Parliament. He's a regular expert panelist for the Guardian. He's been named the next generation of meditation teachers, not likely the kind of guy you think when you meet him, but he actually is pretty cool. And I get why. He was awarded in 2018 the Churchill Fellowship grant to research mindfulness-based PTSD treatment. A lot of veterans have trauma, and they suffer desperately from nightmares and from PTSD. And this method is a way of helping them heal from the trauma. He's run retreats all over the world for the last 10 years, workshops in 20 countries, and teaches internationally. He's lived for seven years in London at the Kagyu Samye Ling Buddhist Center, and now lives down the road with his wife, Jade Shaw. And when he's not teaching, he enjoys practicing martial arts. He's a black belt in kickboxing. So, I'm going to be very nice to him during this podcast. He likes going to the movies and dancing. That sounds good.

Kickboxing, movies and dancing.

All right. Welcome, Charlie. Cool, man. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Okay, so, you know, this is an interesting moment in history. On this podcast, we've had Michael Pollan talking about psychedelic experience and other researchers in the space talking about the way in which we can become more awake, have a more connected experience to our daily life, deal with anxiety, fear, the fear of death, using drugs. People are exploring ayahuasca and iboga and MDMA as various kinds of access points into consciousness that are healing, and not just for party drugs. And Yet there's been this method that's been around for a heck of a long time that allows us to do a lot of the same things without the drugs, without the vomiting, without having to sit in meditation for 10,000 hours. And it's sort of like a shortcut, but we have all the technology hardwired in us. We just didn't know how to use it. It's like Dorothy in the Ruby Red Slippers. She knew how to get home. All she had to do was click her heels three times and she could get home. We have all of it hardwired into us, and yet we sort of lost it from our culture. And sort of this lucid dreaming or conscious dreaming, whatever people want to call it, dream yoga, is this methodology that has allowed people to go into explorations of themselves, of consciousness, that is not just about having a party in your dreams, like flying, which is fun, but about actually living a life that's more connected, that's more awake, that's more conscious, that allows you to fulfill the purpose you have here on Earth. And it's a really interesting thing. And my wife, Mia, she got into this stuff because she was scared of death, because I almost died. And she was freaking out about it. And she started to explore this whole world. And it's really really helped her to sort of sort through that. And I've been kind of been in the passenger seat as she's gone through all this and listened to all of her dreams and all of her stories. And it's just fascinating and I really want to get into it. But I've been writing a book, so as soon as I'm done, I promise I'm going to get into it. So welcome, Charlie.

Thanks, man. It's great to be here.

Okay, so you basically shared a story that was fascinating to me, which was in your 12. you were reading some magazine and you saw this ad for this gizmo that was way too expensive that your dad didn't want to buy you to help induce lucid dreaming. But then you sort of happened upon it yourself. So how did that spontaneous experience happen?

Okay, so yeah, the bit I share in the book, I think, is that it started at 12. What I don't share is actually it was a little bit more scatological. It was when I was like six or seven, I used to still wet the bed. And, like, not in the daytime, but at nighttime, I was, like, wearing nappies. That's urological. Oh, urological.

Okay, not scatological. Scatological is the other part.

Oh, yeah, it wasn't quite that. It was urological then. And I was, like, wearing, you know, still nappies, diapers in bed, till I was, like, five, six years old. And, I remember I would have these dreams. I would really need to pee, and needing to pee would kind of wake me up in the dream, and I'd go, oh, I'm in a dream. I should wake up and go to the toilet. and then I'd be like, oh no, but if I wake up, the sharks under the bed, that was my kind of fear, will bite my heels. So no, I'll just pee in the dream. And of course, as anyone knows, peeing in the dream, it's a trap, don't do it. So I'd wet the bed and wake up.

But so I remember there having these short periods of lucidity, like real young. So then when I was 12 and I was reading that, it was like.

A little- I've had those dreams, by the way. I remember, I remember like being having to go really go pee bad in the dream. And in the dream, you think, I gotta go pee, I gotta go pee, and then you wake up.

Exactly, yeah.

So there's that bit of lucidity. And that Gadget magazine was claiming that if you wore this sleep mask, it would give you more of those dreams. And that's how I reference, Dad, Dad, those dreams I used to have, where you know that you're dreaming, this can give you more. You had a reference point. Yeah, I had a reference point. But then, I don't know, then it goes blurry. I just go back to being a kid. And then, yeah, like 15, 16, I.

Get interested in consciousness and psychedelics and.

Kind of Buddhism sounded cool because of the Shaolin monks and stuff, but it seemed like too much hard work. You think all the Buddhists were Kung Fu Masters. Yeah, I basically thought all Buddhists were Kung Fu Masters. That was super cool. It turns out like, you know, it's a very small sect of Buddhism that do that. And then, yeah, I bought some books. And because I'd been really into dreaming from Yang and I'd had these lucid dreams that, like, you know, when I was wetting the bed and stuff, when I started to practice the things in the lucid dreaming books, I picked it up quite quickly and then started having these, these lucid dreams, which we should look at the definition. It's a dream where you know that you're dreaming as the dream is happening. So it's a phenomenon.

REM dreaming sleep. We know this is real. We've got all the science on it. You're not half.

Awake half asleep. It's not just having a really vivid dream. It's specifically where you're in the dream sound asleep and you go, whoa, this.

Is all a dream. Yeah, because it kind of sounds like woo-woo, you know, like, and, and, oh, this is just this weird thing that a bunch of Tibetan monks figured out.

But it's, maybe it's not. But there's actually a tremendous amount of science behind it. Yeah. So, I mean, it was a proven phenomenon of REM dreaming sleep back in 1975 at Hull University in the UK. Then a few years later, the famous Stephen Leber did similar tests and he got also his stuff was all peer reviewed and stuff. So really back in the 80s, we knew it was for real. But then you had this resurgence around like 2010, 2011, they did the first fMRI scans on lucid dreamers. So they could see like actually what was the brain doing when you became lucid. And once they saw that and they saw specifically that there was activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, you could see, oh wow, they're literally conscious. while they are dreaming. -So, back up a little bit.

So, normally when you are dreaming, the front of your brain, which is your executive function, your ego and all that.

Is kind of shut off.

-Yeah, very little activity. -But, this is a different kind of dreaming where that part lights up and.

You are conscious while you are dreaming.

-Yeah.

So, usually- -But, it is a different physiologic state. -Yeah, yeah. They call it hybrid state of consciousness.

In which the prefrontal cortex is activated at the same time as the dreaming parts of the brain. and it's like- and people were actually in the machines or hooked up to EEGs and they were able to communicate when they were dreaming because of their eye movements.

Oh, that was the first study back in the 70s. Now, I interviewed the dude for my second book, his name is Keith Hearn. He's still working as a hypnotherapist and lucid dreaming teacher and stuff. And he knew that the only way to prove to the skeptical scientific community that lucid dreaming was for real and not what they thought it was, which is either people were lying or the only other option was straight up faking it. Or they were having what's called micro awakenings, which is where you have a very brief awakening from a really vivid dream and then you drop back into it, leading to the illusion that you were awake in the dream.

So he knew he needed to disprove that. And the other- It's a whole different level of consciousness.

It's like a doorway that we never go through. Totally. They just thought it's impostor. They said it was a- paradoxical impossibility to be both conscious and dreaming at the same time. That was like mainstream science's view up till 1975. And actually for years afterwards, 'cause even though he got the studies and they were like, oh, you know, we, it took a while for the scientific establishment to admit it. Anyway, he needed to somehow show that the person was asleep, but were conscious while they were asleep and were acknowledging the outside world. So he thought, well, how the hell do you send a signal from the dream? You're in muscular paralysis and REM dreaming sleep. The only things that aren't paralyzed, the respiratory system and the eyes, right? So first of all, he tried to, that's what REM is, is rapid eye movement. Rapid eye movement, yeah, exactly. That's what it stands for. So he tried to do it with a breath. He was like, look, we'll hook you up to EEGs, eye scanners, all this kind of stuff. When you are lucid, do a certain breathing rhythm. Better. And we'll see if we can pick that up in the lab. And it kind of worked, but not very well. Then he tried, he made these little sensors to go on your pinky. When you're lucid, move your pinky, 'cause maybe that wouldn't so paralyzed that didn't work. And then he was thinking, okay, well, look, we've seen how when people are in the lucid dream state, if they're like watching a tennis match, you see their eyes go left, right, left, right as they watch the ball go over the net. Because in a lucid dream, the eyes will physically correspond to what you're seeing in the lucid dreams. They thought, okay, cool. Well, rapid eye movement. What I want you to do is we'll hook you up to the EG, we'll hook you up to eye monitors and all this kind of stuff. And when you're lucid, engage a kind of a Morse code. of eye movements, like two to the left, two to the right, one up, one down, something like that, which will then pick up on the eye movement records. We've got the EEG to prove you're still asleep, and there we'll have the communication that you were fully lucid in the dream. And the first time they did it, he missed it. They had been recording the whole night, this old-school EEG where it comes in ink on paper. And I think it's something like he'd stopped recording at eight o'clock in the morning, he's packing up the stuff, and then downstairs where Alan, Wolseley was the name of the dreamer. Keith Hearn was the scientist. And Alan yells up at 20 past 8, Did you get it? Did you get it? I was lucid. And he stopped the recording. So the first one, they missed it. Couple of weeks later, they did the same thing and they got it. And I said to him, that the recording machine that they use is in the Science Museum in London. So I met him at the Science Museum. I thought, what a cool place to interview him for the book, right? And he's telling me this whole story and I said, well, dude, like, so you're sitting there watching these eye movements coming through and they're super scattered. and then suddenly you see it go.

Pause.

And it's like, that's the dude doing the eye movement. How did it feel? And he said, you know, in those sci fi movies where everyone at the NASA headquarters are there and they receive, you know, a communication from the other world. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, it was like that. But it was from the inner world. And then he said something quite sweet. He said, it's pretty amazing. He said, but you know, in those movies, everyone give each other high fives. Yeah. And he went, there was no one to high five. And I was quite moved by this, right? And I lean over to him and I give him this awkward high five. And he goes, oh, 40 years too late, but thanks for that.

So then the fMRI actually shows.

Yeah.

So, I mean, there's a big stuff in between that.

They're doing lots of studies on lucid dreaming and athletics and stuff like that. But then the big breakthrough came with those studies at Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute, where they were doing fMRI.

Because then it was like, you can see it. So functional MRI, you can see the Dynamic action of the brain, what it's doing, which parts are lighting up, which parts aren't lighting up. And you can see that it's different.

Than a normal sleep or dream pattern. And the EEG could do that, too. But the cool thing about the fMRI was that you saw it live and you can see the kind of video of it. And you got the front part of the brain, hardly any activity, and suddenly.

It blows up red and it's like the dude just became lucid. And the guy is sound asleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn't that cool? It's amazing. So in, in studies, it also seems to mirror the kinds of brain changes that happen with meditation, right? So, can you speak to that and what happens that is similar in meditation? Okay, well, first of all, the brain.

Mirrors what happens in the waking state once you are lucid. Once you are lucid, the brain does not think you are having a lucid dream. It thinks you are awake, which is how the whole neuroplasticity through lucid dreaming things works. It is not that- We will come back to that.

Yeah.

Okay, so that is the meditation thing. They've found that some people, when they become lucid, the brain seems to go into gamma, which is a brain wave that they once associated with kind of high level meditators, more than like 10,000 hours meditation stuff. The Olympic level meditators. Isn't it interesting that when these people get lucid, they go into gamma and the Buddhists are going, yeah, of course they go into gamma. It's a state of meditation. If we define one aspect of mindfulness meditation as knowing what's happening as it's happening, present state awareness, lucid dreaming is knowing that you're dreaming as you're dreaming, aware of the present state moment of being dreaming. So no wonder no wonder it shows up as a meditation mind state. And no wonder this is why most people's first few lucid dreams last about five seconds. Because we go, I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming, it's so cool. Then you wake up, just like our first meditation session might be, okay, and breathe. What am I having for lunch? You know, we go on the tightrope, we step off. But with practice, just like meditation, we can stay in that state of mindful awareness for longer and longer. And with practice, you can have a lucid dream as long as a REM period, which is an hour. Imagine spending an hour inside a huge three-dimensional virtual reality simulation of your own psychology. Like conception. It's like inception and it's super psychedelic. You know, in the intro when you talked about psychedelics, like, I mean, I did a lot of psychedelics when I was younger, then I took too much and that led me to Buddhism, 'cause how do I fix my mind? So I know the psychedelic experience reasonably well. And all I can say is the experiences I've had through lucid dreaming make a lot of the psychedelic experiences seem like kindergarten. It's like in the lucid dream, you know you're asleep in bed, so you can be- yeah, there's no hangover. There's no Dorit field to meet on the street. You don't have to go to Peru to do it. You're in the dream and you're like, okay, I know my body's asleep in bed right now. And you can even think like, oh, it's probably about four o'clock in the morning because I woke up to pee at 3 30. Then I dropped back to sleep doing my lucid dreaming techniques. Now I'm in the dream, no full waking state access. But you know it's all a hallucination. So you can walk around, like, tapping on table. And this is, this sounds so frivolous, but just in the lucid dreams, I got to a table and go, and you're like, oh, it made the sound of the knock. And you can feel the grain on the wood. You're like, How does my brain put in the exact feeling of the game? It's the ultimate virtual reality machine. And, you know, people are listening to this thinking it sounds like the Matrix. It should. Like, yeah, I mean, this is like the bit where the baddie in the Matrix is eating the steak. And he says to the other baddie, I know this steak is a neurological program, but wow, it tastes good. That's the same as a lucid dream. You can eat and it tastes of.

Stuff like it does in the waking state. So, so what's fascinating to me that I listen to this, it connects the dots because, you know, talking to Michael Pollan about the effect of hallucinogens on the brain and brain imaging, it increases the same pathways and the same state of the brain as people who've been meditating for thousands of hours, like gamma waves, right? And in lucid dreaming, I wonder if the same thing is happening because There's this part of the brain called the default mode network, which is where the ego lies, which gets in our way of becoming literally awake from a consciousness point of view, right? It's our ego that thinks we're separate and not connected. And the drugs do that. They shut off this default mode network. Meditation does that. And I bet you lucid dreaming does the same thing, because if it's inducing the same brain pattern as meditation, And it allows you then to access a learning that you can't access when you're awake in your normal state. That sounds about right. I mean, I haven't seen any research.

With lucid dreaming specifically mention that default network, but yeah, putting the dots together, it sounds like it. You know, the Buddhists would have a very easy answer to this question. They say that once you have lucidity in a dream, you have seven times the power of consciousness. So, your consciousness is boosted Seven times. Seven times.

I'm in trouble, 'cause my wife's been doing this for a while, and I'm.

Like, you know... And your wife's getting good at it, dude. Seriously, Mia is one of the most talented lucid dreamers I've ever worked with.

Like, I can't believe she hasn't been.

Doing it for, like, 10 years. That's like... She's kind of an overachiever in pretty much everything she does, so...

Yeah, but she's got really good at lucid dreaming super quick.

Like, yeah, she'll be running workshops on this within the year, I'm sure. I know I don't get to, like, snug with her in the morning anymore. She's like, I'm dreaming. That's the same with my wife, right? Don't bother. My wife's a way better lucid dreamer than me, which is super embarrassing, right? And she's a natural lucid dreamer, so I'm not. If I don't do the techniques, I don't have lucid dreams. It makes me quite a good teacher, 'cause I know about drought, I know when it's not cooking, I know what techniques work, what don't. Whereas Jade, she'll have like two or three lucid dreams a week doing nothing. She's the only person who seems to.

Be able to have lucid dreams, even if she's had some wine the night before. She's great lucid dreamer. It's also a place of exploration. There's a scientist that I'm good friends with, Rudy Tanzi, who's One of the leading Alzheimer's research in the world. He discovered the presenilin genes, which are the Alzheimer's genes. And one night we were at a medical conference and it was late at night. We're in the bar having a tequila and I'm so, so Rudy, like, how the heck do you figure this stuff out? Like, you know, you're like heading for a Nobel Prize. Like, how do you think about this stuff? He's like, you want to know?

And I'm like, yeah.

I said, he said, well, lucid dreaming. No way. I do lucid dreaming regularly. I've been doing it for 30 years. And it's how I, work through figuring out my scientific discoveries. I can ask questions and I can, it's just fascinating. And so, what's his name?

Rudy Tanzi.

Dude, I love him.

He's at Harvard. He's amazing.

So obviously the Tibetans didn't work on developing dream yoga as a party trick, right? What's the purpose of dream yoga within the Tibetan tradition?

Okay, so this gets pretty Harry Potter style pretty quick, but you asked questions.

Let's do it.

Let's go there. the primary goal of dream yoga. By the way, dream yoga isn't just Tibetan Buddhist lucid dreaming. Dream yoga or Milam naljor is the term given to a series of practices found within Tibetan Buddhism that have lucidity training as their foundation. These include lucid dreaming, but as well as what in the West we call.

Astral projection or out-of-body experience work and conscious sleeping.

But as far as the lucid dreaming stuff, the primary- Conscious sleeping is different than lucid dreaming. Yeah, so lucid dreaming is consciousness within REM dreaming sleep. You could also be conscious within the hypnagogic which is kind of like yoga nidra, people have done that. But also you can be lucid in light sleep stage two, where you're asleep, you're not dreaming, but you're conscious of that. And you can even be lucid in deep sleep. Now, science, that one's there out on that. They say there's no way you can be lucid within delta wave. Man, the brain's got such low activity, how could you be conscious within it? The Buddhist would say that's the highest achievement. Lucid dreaming is even a stepping stone to that, and it's called the clear light of sleep. and it's consciousness within deep delta wave sleep, which is awareness beyond projection. So that's had to be the highest thing. But anyway, for lucid dreaming, the main reason for its preparation for death and dying. So straight off the bat, this goes way deeper than like working with your nightmares. And I mean, working with apps is a brilliant way to use lucid dreaming, but straight off the bat, it goes way deeper than that because they believe that when you die, sorry, when you fall asleep at night, you get a trial run for death and dying. and the same dissolution of the elements that happen when you fall asleep at night and the same way that the mind goes from external data gathering, flips inwardly and creates an internal world based on your experience of waking state, which we call dream, right? The same thing happens at death, but at a much larger plane. So the mind, the mind stream separates from what they'd refer to as the gross corporeal form, separates just like in a classic NDE experience. The mind then flips inwardly and experiences the totality of its own projection. This experience can last up to 49 days. It's called the kind of 49-day Bardo journey, which is what the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the liberation upon hearing in the Bardo is called. And it's said to be, or a large chunk of that Bardo experience, is said to be dreamlike and hallucinatory. So basically, here's the kicker. They say, if by the time you die, you have trained the mind to regularly recognize your dreams, the dreams go, oh wait, this is hallucination. I'm dreaming right now and become conscious. Then at death, When the dreamlike hallucinatory apparitions that appear in the dying process, when that occurs, you'll be able to recognize them. And rather than go, Aha, I'm dreaming, you'll go, Aha, I'm dead. And I know it sounds scary, right? But they would say, to be able to go, Aha, I'm dead, as in I am conscious of the fact I.

Am dying now, I'm conscious of the.

Fact I am dead, is one of the highest spiritual achievements. Because- I'll wait a while for that.

I'm good.

Yeah, I mean, I have no idea what that- I'm good for now. Maybe- If it works, I come back as a little kid and be like, Dude, it worked! Keep doing it! But it's great for death anxiety, you know? I mean, if someone comes in here, puts a gun to my head, okay, yeah, 80% of me is going, no, don't kill me. But honestly, I could say a good 20% of me would be going, okay, well, does 20 years of lucid dreaming work? Showtime. So maybe it helps us die with.

A little less anxiety and a little bit more sense of adventure. Right, when that's what the psychedelics are being used for very effectively. And they seem to have the same. So there's many doorways into this state of consciousness, but lucid dreaming seems to be one of the best because it's something that is relatively easy to learn. It's something that's accessible to everybody. It's free. There's no side effects. And it has so many benefits.

And crucially, you can't get more unconscious than asleep. So imagine these other modalities such as a hypnosis, shamanic journeying, psychedelics, meditation. You're taking a strand of the conscious mind and bring it down into the unconscious. In lucid dreaming, you're taking a strand of the consciousness and dropping it right to the bottom of the iceberg simply because you can't get more unconscious than asleep. So, I'm not saying that lucid dreaming is better than any of those aforementioned modalities. What I am saying is the depth into the unconscious to which you can go is unparalleled in lucid dreaming. However, here's the kicker. We could be doing hypnosis, psychedelics, meditation, all this stuff, and we could work every single day. Could I get lucid every single night? No. So it's less accessible than those others, but seems to go very, very deep in comparison.

Yeah, it seems interesting. And it's also, if you're not interested in enlightenment or making friends with death, there's other benefits, right? I mean, if I want to improve my tennis serve, it seems like a really cool technique without a lot of sweat or throwing up my shoulder, right? And you mentioned some studies that talk about the neuroplasticity, which is the connections between brain cells that allow you to learn new things and develop new skills. So, can you talk about the science of the neuroplasticity and how it connects to sports performance?

Absolutely. So, these sports studies go back right back to the 80s, when the first thing since they proved lucid dreaming was like, okay, well, if this is true, then maybe we can use it to practice sport and stuff. Essentially, once the prefrontal cortex switches on again with lucidity, like I said before, the brain doesn't think you're having a lucid dream. The brain thinks you're awake. So it will lay down neural pathways in exactly the same way as when you're awake. So if you go into the lucid dream and start practicing squats or start practicing martial arts, or in your case, your tennis serve, your brain thinks you're actually practicing your tennis serve. But in the lucid dream, you're beyond the confines of gravity. You're beyond the confines of speed. So you could do like 100 tennis serves. in like 30 seconds, it loses you. But the brain doesn't know that. It thinks you've actually done 100 tennis serves. So when you wake up, those neural pathways towards the act of serving a tennis set, to the act of doing a tennis serve, have been kind of ingrained. Can I get it in every time? I don't know. It's your dream, definitely. Yeah. And in fact, the last one of those studies I was part of, it came out in 2000, they released it 2019, beginning of this year, I think, but not big, like 25 to 30 martial artists involved. They need martial artists who are good at lucid dreams. Okay, I'll do that. And we had to go into the lucid dream state and practice a kick sequence. And then in the waking state, they test whether you get better or worse. 80.3% of the martial artists in that study got better at martial arts through lucid dream training.

That's incredible. I was embarrassing when the 20% that did not get better.

And one of the other studies that came out was that it actually makes you have a bigger brain. So structurally, how does it affect your brain? I don't actually, that study's on my website. So if you've got it, because I can't actually remember what part of the brain It changes, but they've shown that people who have regular lucid dreams, there's a certain networking in the brain that actually gets more dense. It gets thicker. So basically, you're making a certain part of the brain big. I think it's the part of the.

Brain to do with self-reflective awareness.

-Yeah. -Is that right? -Right. -Okay, go ahead. -It helps you be more self-aware. -Yeah, because it makes sense. If you're spending all night, usually when we go to sleep, we start hallucinating. And we believe those hallucinations to be real. that's what dreaming is. Like every night we hallucinate such realistic experiences we think we're awake. That's the thing. Most of our dreams, we don't know we're dreaming. We think it's reality. Yes. Then we wake up in the morning, prefrontal cortex switches on and we go, oh, I'm Charlie.

That was a dream I was having.

About being back at school.

Maybe this is a dream.

Yeah, man, let's reality check to be sure. So apparently if you have enough of those experiences, waking life is actually the dream. Well, that's the Buddhist view. I mean, that's the other thing apart from death and dying. It's practicing for lucid living. said that every time you have a lucid dream, you get a tiny taste of enlightenment. Because once you become lucid in the dream, you see that what you thought was externally existing is an internal projection. What you thought had dualistic objective reality is a non-dual part of the mind. And the people who you thought were separate to you are, in fact, non-separate aspects of your own psychology. So they say every time you have a lucid dream, you get a teeny, teeny, teeny taste of full spiritual awakening. and that if you have enough lucid dreams in this life, you might get that experience of lucidity while you are awake. And that full lucidity in the waking state would be Buddhahood.

-And that is really a powerful thing. I think it makes you more self-reflective, which then tends to make people happier if it is true, not just narcissistic or obsessive about your own ego and self. But from a real deep consciousness point of view, it helps you become a better human being. I think so.

And here's the cool thing about lucid dreaming. There's nothing to believe. Like if anyone's listening to this podcast and thinking, I don't believe that about the tennis serve. I don't believe that about the martial arts. I don't believe that about the nightmares. Try it. Yeah. There's no guru to worship here unless you want to. There's no cult to be part of. There's no religion you have to be part of. Yeah. It's like, try this stuff. And when people say, how will I know if the lucid dream healing works? How will I know if the nightmares have been integrated? Because you'll stop having the nightmares or because your tennis serve will improve. Like you'll be able to- Or you'll be able to- PTSD will go away. Yeah. It's like you won't need to ask. This is the cool thing about lucid dreaming. It maximizes the third of our life that we spend asleep, but it actually optimizes by doing that we optimize the two-thirds that we spend awake.

You think about it. -People often feel like sleep is a waste of time and why sleep so much? You can't live life as much. But what you're saying in a way is if you learn how to use your sleep and not be a passive sleeper, Being an active sleeper, you can actually achieve a lot of things, which is happiness and better tennis serve. Better tennis serve.

Bigger brains.

Bigger brain, why not?

Let's go for it. And that's the cool thing about lucid dreaming. Again, it's happening in REM, which is not restful. So people are listening, oh, but it'll make me less rested in the morning. It's happening in REM. And we know that when you look at someone's brain in REM, I mean, you burn calories in REM. The brain's using so much blood flow and there's so much neural activity. So you're not resting in dreams anyway. So you might as well make use of that non-rest sleep state to get lucid. And even if you get lucid every night of your life, based on five dream periods a night, still 95% of your dream experience will be non-lucid. So another thing people worry about, if I have too many lucid dreams, my unconscious won't have space to do its things. Like even if you get lucid every night of your life, firstly come and teach me because I can't do it. And secondly, still 95% will be non-lucid. So let's say you get to the stage where you're having one lucid dream a week, about 98% of your dream experience is non-lucid. So, do not worry about impacting your unconscious process or that the dreamer will not like you being in there. It is like you are a guest once a week or something.

-And there was also an interesting study that was published in a journal, medical journal called Dreaming, believe it or not, entitled Spontaneous Lucid Dreaming Frequency and Waking Insight. And they found that people who did lucid dreaming had more problem solving abilities when they're awake and they had more insight about life.

Yeah, they became less field dependent, which apparently means like you think outside the box more. And that's super cool. And they used to think that it was that creative people who thought outside the box more had more lucid dreams. But then this study proved actually it works the other way too. Once you start having loads of lucid dreams, they can then test to show that you're actually becoming more insightful, you're becoming more creative, which is super cool. Again, a waking state benefit to this. This isn't woo-woo. You can do this and see if it works.

This is hardcore science in medical journals that's actually studying the effects of lucid dreaming on.

Isn't that cool, man?

So many different things. But that's not why most people are probably interested. It's cool and it's great. But for me, it's an interesting exploration because especially as I get older, I'm thinking, okay, well what's on the other side? And how do I meditate twice a day? I try to do the things I can to be conscious. I journal. I am self-reflective, I do yoga, I try to do the things that I think are going to help me be more present, conscious, and in a way lucid. But it feels like I'm missing the boat. And I feel that there's this opportunity that we all have that nobody's talking about, I mean, except for you and your book, Dreams of Awakening, which I encourage everybody to get a copy of. which is a great title because we have dreams, but we don't have necessarily dreams that help us be awake. So, it's like a very paradoxical idea, which is you dream to become awake. Isn't it weird?

Yeah. So, dude, for one, it sounds like you're doing loads already during your meditation, yoga, all that stuff. So, brilliant. And here's an interesting fact for you guys who might be watching, is that Mark actually did his meditation before the podcast. Now, I lived in a Buddhist center for almost eight years, right? So, I know a lot of people talk about meditation, including myself, this dude actually does. He was like, before the podcast, I'm going to need to sit and went and did like 20 minutes meditation. So he's for real, guys. You could, like, trust his stuff. But, yeah, if you were to add lucid dreaming to your already, you know, great lucidity practice in the day, man, yeah, for a lot of people, that.

Can be the missing piece of the puzzle. It can really, really start things cooking even more. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And I think the the benefits around trauma are fascinating. So tell us about your work with the veterans and PTSD and the science here, because A lot of these veterans, I have a friend who was in Africa and he was in war zones and civil war and bombs going off and highly threatening situations. He's just an extraordinary guy, very sensitive guy, but he just suffers every night with nightmares and PTSD and trauma. How would this help somebody like that?

Okay. I'm not saying it can help everybody, but for some people, lucid dreaming and the mindfulness of dream and sleep stuff seems to help people and veterans who have PTSD and the nightmares that come with it. So this started for me about six or seven years ago when a veteran of the parachute regiment called Keith McKenzie came to one of my lucid dreaming retreats. So he turns up in this retreat. He's got some serious nightmares, not only from his time as a para, but actually from his 20 years in the fire service. He made a very good point to me. He said, wow, actually it's the Blue Light Services, man. He's like, yeah, the army, of course, very intense and very traumatic things happen, but he said actually 20 years of being a fireman, where every day you're seeing death, you're saving life, he's like, that's what really gave me the PTSD nightmares. Anyways, he came on retreat, really bad PTSD nightmares. By the end of the four-day retreat, his nightmares had stopped. So I thought, okay, well, he's the first veteran I've ever met apart from family members. It seemed to work for him. And a couple of years later, he emails me and says, I've now become a mindfulness teacher. I've done my teacher training, and I'm running mindfulness retreats for veterans, taught by veterans to veterans. Do you want to come and do some of the lucid dreaming stuff? And initially I was like, ah, dude, I know it worked really well for you, but I have no experience with this. I don't even know whether it will work. I don't know whether veterans will like me. I just felt really unsure. He said, Come along and do it. So I came along and just did, I think, a day on the five-day retreat, first of all. And that night we had, like, one guy, he hadn't slept for more than four hours since a night, since he could remember, and he slept all the way through the night. And we did the dream circle, the sharing the next morning. And this guy's in tears going, I did it. I freaking did it. I did it. And he's crying. And I was like, I didn't quite get what he meant. I thought he meant he'd had a lucid dream or something, but actually it was simply he'd slept through the night. and I was like, wow, man. That's it. It's not actually about lucid dreaming and having these big things back. Can I help these people sleep? So then for the next couple of years, I developed this thing that I now refer to as Mindfulness of Dream and Sleep.

-Yeah, we were just going to ask you about this. -Yeah. -So, a holistic approach that takes people through that process of how do you do it? Tell us about what are the three.

Practices of Mindfulness of Dream and Sleep. -So, Mindfulness of Dream and Sleep, it does have lucid dreaming in it. So we just did a veterans retreat two weeks ago, so this is now three years into the process. and on the last day we have a module of lucid dreaming. But on the first day we have normalization. So we basically do a big class on how sleep works, what happens in each stage, and how trauma affects each stage of sleep. So we say, okay, this is the hypnagogic state. When you're in this state, trauma may appear in this way, and this way, and this way. Then we move into light sleep. Light sleep happens at this time of night, the traumatized brain might affect it in this way, this way, this way. So we did a long session just normalizing it. talking about how the role of nightmares, how they're here, the mind trying to heal itself. You know, nightmares are a sign that there's an active healing process occurring. So, destigmatization of nightmares, normalization of the sleep process, being okay with nighttime wakefulness. So, if they wake up, think, okay, that's cool. Get out of bed. I want you to do something. What? I thought I just had to wait there till I fell asleep. No, don't associate your bed with failure. You wake up, get up, read a book, go back later. And that night, I mean, this is just a couple of weeks ago, so this one's fresh. There were four guys on the retreat out of 20 who had really serious kind of sleep issues. Three of them slept through the night, seven or eight hours, two nights in a row. One of them slept so long that he missed breakfast. And when you're in a trauma sensitive retreat, someone doesn't turn up for breakfast. There was some concern, let's put it like that. And Keith, the guy who runs the retreat, Keith McKenzie, he's the boss guy. He said, have you seen this guy? I said, no. And he went, oh, well, you know, let's check his room. He went in there and he had slept all the way through. He came out taking an earplug out and goes, what time is it? And he goes, dude, it's like 10 o'clock in the morning. You've missed the meditation. You missed breakfast. Breakfast, my eggs. And then he's all he can say about his eggs and go and get his eggs.

But he hadn't slept. He was one of the guys who.

Hadn'T slept more than five hours in like years. He slept for, I don't know, 10, 11 hours. Through the practices you taught, it wasn't because they necessarily got lucid at that moment? No, by that day, that was the first night. All we're done is normalization. and we've done the breath work practice. So then I teach also something called coherent breathing or I offer something called coherent breathing. I'm still yet to do the teacher training. Brilliant organization, Body Breath Mind, run by Patricia Gerbarg and Richard Brown. They are a couple New York based psychiatrists and they do brilliant work with veterans. And I've done some training with them. I want to do a lot more. And their coherent breath work, we offered that to the veterans. So a certain breathing system they can do before bed. Things like creating a safe space around the bed, yoga nidra that they can do in the daytime, nap practices they can do, breathing practices they can do, especially for if you wake up in the second half of the night, this breathing is perfect. When you first go to sleep at night, this breath works perfect. So we give a lot of tools and then the final day we look at lucid dreaming. But actually the mindfulness of dream and sleep stuff is not about giving people lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences and all this kind of sexy stuff. It's really ground level stuff saying, can I help people to sleep, to not be terrified of that third of our life we spend asleep? And that makes me feel really good.

That's pretty awesome.

Two weeks ago, I was actually thinking to myself, why do I do anything? I know this is a weird thing to say, but I don't really believe it. But I was asking myself, why am I doing anything else? Because in that retreat with the veterans, I helped. I was of more benefit as a person in those five days than I was in the last, like, five months of teaching kind of the civilian population. It did make me think, like, yeah, if we're here on this Earth to serve, then lucid dream is great. And that the books about it. And I like teaching people it. But when I work with the veterans, like, that makes me. Yeah, that makes me sleep well. I'm like, people really need.

Yeah, they really need. You know, there's so much trauma. Oh, so much trauma. I mean, you know, one in four Americans, probably around the world, who knows what the number is, but. have suffered sexual abuse. And adverse childhood experiences are so predictive of later problems in life, whether it's relationship problems, health problems, financial problems. So, if there's a methodology for working with that, it's so powerful because people get stuck in that. It's such a gift, right? So, the lucid dreaming seems to have powerful biological effects, effects on your brain, learning, insight, memory, problem solving, all sounds great. But how the heck do you do it?

Right?

What are the steps? Because it's not some airy fairy weird thing that you just kind of have to hope happens in the middle of the night. The Tibetans have had this secret practice for thousands of years, and it's been broken down into methodology that you can follow that I see my wife do and that works. So, tell me about what is the process of learning lucid dreaming? What are the steps and what do you do?

I always think it's interesting when you find a set of practices that several ancient traditions do lead to the same result. I'm like, okay, well, they can't all be crazy, right? So, the thing about lucid dreaming is you find it's got at least 1,000 years of tradition in Tibetan Buddhism. So at least a thousand years also in the Toltec Mexica tradition, with the Mexica were a group of spiritual practitioners in the place that is now called Mexico. So Mexica means people of the navel of the moon. And they were these shamanic practitioners from Mexico, and they had a whole set of lucid dreaming practices using breath work, using a lot of the same techniques.

That we use today and techniques similar to the Tibetans to do the same thing.

Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot.

Of people grew up in the 70s probably heard of Carlos Castaneda.

Exactly, yeah. stuff. Yeah.

The teachings of Don Juan. And he wrote books about dream.

Exactly. So we've got the Mexicans rocking it, we've got the Tibetans rocking it, and we've got the Sufis rocking it. There's a whole lucid dream tradition in Sufi Islam. You're like, okay, well, these three big traditions, there's probably something to it. Right? And if you look at the techniques, they all are based on the same kind of functionality. I mean, different names and different aspects, but the same thing. So death. There are things you can do while you're falling asleep. So as you're falling asleep and you pass through that hypnagogic state, which is that natural state. What is that? What is that hypnagogic state? So this is a natural, it's like stage one of sleep. So your eyes are closed, you're super drowsy, you might have that feeling of.

Heaviness in your body.

You might get the jerks you ever get as you're falling asleep. They're called myoclonic jerks, which are super fun. Myoclonic jerks. Myoclonic jerks. Oh, sorry, I'm here with a doctor. Please check any of my my terrors. It's terrible medical. So we've got the hypnagogic state. You look at the brain waves like deep alpha and theta, which is like exactly the same brain waves as hypnotherapists would put you in. So essentially you're getting this natural state of hypnosis when you fall asleep. So the first aspect is kind of essentially self-hypnotic induction. So as you're passing through the hypnagogic, as you're falling asleep, you'll be reciting things like, next time I'm dreaming, I know that I'm dreaming. Next time I'm dreaming, I know that I'm dreaming. Or the Mexican one's super cool. It's like, I am a warrior of the dream state. I stay lucid and conscious while dreaming. I'm a warrior of the dream state. I stay lucid and conscious while dreaming. Now, that's super cool. So you respond is that the way I do? Because I'm into martial arts and warriors.

My wife's like, ah, the warrior one?

Nah, that doesn't do it for me. You're going with my sword. Yeah, exactly. So there's a technique for everyone. But I'd say these kind of self-hypnotic techniques, that's kind of one aspect you find in all the traditions. The others are daytime practice. Essentially, we dream about what we do in the daytime often. So, if we spend our whole day in this kind of blinkered view of reality, where we're on autopilot the whole time, we're not kind of fully experiencing, we're definitely not lucid in our daytime, we're going to dream the same way.

So, a lot of the practices are-.

So, if we're asleep and we're awake, we're going to be asleep and we're asleep. Basically, exactly that, yeah. So, a lot of practices you do in the daytime, like waking state meditation. Mindfulness practice, reality checking. So through the day, asking yourself, could this be a dream now? And the classic Castanedian hand check thing, where you ask yourself if you're dreaming. You look at your hand, you flip your hand, you check how many fingers you've got. Then eventually you start dreaming about that, but in the dream often your hands do weird things. You might have an extra finger or something like that. Now, the Tibetans have exactly the same technique, but they don't use the hand. They would be every time you experience the dreamlike nature of phenomena while you're awake. Do not ignore it. Stop, pause, and ask oneself, Am I truly awake? So you find the same things. And there's another one in the Mexican tradition, same thing. So then you have waking state practices, mindfulness, meditation, energy work, Chi Gong, stuff to boost your awareness in the waking.

State so you're more likely to have boost awareness at night.

And then- It's sort of like training wheels during the day. Exactly. Get the grease. And then there's working with the actual sleep cycle itself. So like the Mexicans have got this great thing where before bed, they would, the Mexica, sorry, before bed, they'd drink some fig wine. which is like a diuretic, makes them pee, right? So they'd take, I think they'd take a shot and they'd throw one to the moon, one to the earth, and then you were allowed two shots yourself, three, and it was disrespectful, but you could have two. And they knew that they would make you need to pee about four hours later. And they were aware, as we now know from medical science, that after the first three sleep cycles, roughly 90 minutes per cycle, so about four and a half hours into sleep, we moved from long periods of delta deep sleep into, with little bits of dreaming, to long periods of dreaming with much less delta. So they knew it. They knew that we had more dreams in the second half of the night. That's true.

I've got an aura ring. Oh, cool. And I can see, you know, I go into deep sleep early on.

I want to get one of those.

Almost all the REM you can see happens really before you wake up, you know, in the two or three hours of dreaming.

Exactly. Yeah. Those last two hours are like the golden hour for REM. So the third main group of techniques is working with the sleep cycle. So as lucid dreamers, like when I run the lucid dreaming intensive retreats, during the day, you're learning lucid dreaming and meditation, all this kind of stuff. But then at night, the real kind of the thing that people come for, some of them, is let's say you bed down at 10:30, 10:30 to 3:30, you sleep in your room, get a good five hours of deep delta wave sleep under your belt, don't mess with it. But then if you want, and about two thirds of the group will choose to do this, like a group of 50, like maybe 30 of them will do it, they will set their alarm for 3:30 in the morning, they will wake up, they will move into the shrine room, where they'll have bed number two set up. So they'll have, like, a camping bed thing. And then I will then guide them into sleep for another hour and a half, and then wake them up 90 minutes later with the Tibetan bowls. Everyone's sitting up, writing down their dreams. I give them another lucid dreaming technique. They drop in 90 minutes later, wake them right down.

Your dreams drop in.

So you have, like, four wake-ups a night. Now, you don't. Sounds like you're gonna be exhausted after that, because you're gonna be up the whole night. Sometimes the first, like, the first session, 3 30 to 5, I never sleep. I'm like, mother hen. I'm, oh, okay. Oh, he's snoring. What do I do? What do I do? But then, yeah, I soon chill out.

We remove the snores.

We make sure everyone's comfortable. Remove the snores. Yeah, we got strict rules, loving strict rules on snores. And essentially, that's about- Pillow over their head. Yeah, just do that. If you fall asleep once and wake up once in the morning, you got one chance. One chance to remember your dreams, one chance to have a lucid dream, or to, you know, perhaps to have a lucid dream. Whereas if some crazy guy wakes you four times a night, you just quadrupled your chances. of success. So I'm not saying you do this every night, but maybe once a week you can have these lucid dreaming date nights where you intentionally do multiple wakeups.

To allow yourself multiple chances for lucidity.

And I wake up in the middle of the night, my wife's gone, I'm like, where'd you go?

Oh yeah, she does all of those things. What's going on here?

Yeah, Amir's pretty badass about waking up in the middle of the night. You didn't have a fight, why is she out of bed? So the point is, this is a learnable skill, whether it's self-hypnosis, induction techniques.

Meditation techniques, working with your sleep cycle.

You can learn how to lucid dream. People listening to this can learn.

Yeah, I've learned it by osmosis from my wife because she does all the reality check stuff with her hands. And I was dreaming the other night and I dreamt that my father, who had just died, was sitting in front of me in a lecture hall. And I went up to him and I said, Dad, what's going on? I thought you died and did you come back and did you learn anything? And of course, he said you didn't really learn anything, which was sort of disappointing. Oh, interesting. But that was just who he was.

Oh, right.

And then I saw my sister in law, I'm like, what is going on? This is so weird. Dad's alive. And I'm like, oh, crap. Am I dreaming? And then I did the hand check in my dream. And then my hands got all distorted and weird and my fingers misshaped. That's it, man. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm dreaming. Yes. And then I had a little fun and jumped on the side of a car and while I was driving, just flew along with it. But, you know, it was so amazing. And I was like, wow, this is.

Like... Dude, that's it. That is a textbook lucid dream, right? So you went and you spotted a dream sign, which would be any aspect of the dream that can reliably indicate you're dreaming, as in dead relatives. Like my dad. Your brain then went into confabulation, where we start to explain away the dream. We try and make sense of it, right? But because of your lucid dream training.

In the day, checking your hands, doing those reality, boosting your awareness, you remember to do that in the dream and you became lucid. Well, I didn't do any lucid dream training. My wife was doing it, but I was just... Getting it rubbed off on me from her.

You got it, man.

And I remember one time I was after my sister died as well, which was about seven years ago. It was very traumatic. She had cancer and it was very difficult death and she was really resisting death because she was relatively young and she had two kids and she didn't want to leave them and she was a single parent. It was just a really tough situation. And after I took a trip with my daughter to Bhutan, which we planned a long time ago and it just timing worked out. Literally she died, you know, on the 9th and the 19th we were in Bhutan and we went trekking every day at 14,000 feet. There's no EMFs, there's no cell phones, there's nothing. And you're sleeping in a tent and every night I would have these incredibly lucid dreams of her coming back saying, you know, that she wanted to have one more chance.

Wow.

You know, and it was a repetitive dream and it was different each time. But they were so, I mean, I remember them to this day because they were so lucid. And I knew I was dreaming and I knew she was dead and I knew this was all strange. And I then went to the, after Bhutan, I went into India to a Tibetan monastery with this man who was the abbot of the Bon, which is the pre- Buddhist religion of Tibet. So it's ancient. The Dalai Lama is like the 14th Dalai Lama. This is like the 33rd Abbott. And this dude was a shaman. He was incredibly skilled. He was the Dalai Lama's meditation teacher. And I mentioned this story to him. He's like, oh, when did she die? And he calculated the dates. And he's like, oh, she's in this state of transition and she's stuck. And we can help her. So they got nine reincarnated lamas. and him. And they did this three or four hour ritual. And I was there the whole time. And he was flipping his robe over his head and talking to her. It was strange. I mean, as a Western trained doctor scientist, it was strange. But it was so powerful. And then after that, all the dreams stopped. And I felt like she was free. And then I started having dreams of her being grateful and happy and thanking me for helping her kids. It was just this wild set and I, those were all lucid dreams and it was all in this state of really deep, like emotional, you know, raw state that I was in because of my sister died. You know, it was just so it's really fascinating. And I think, you know, we, yeah, man.

I mean, that's, yeah, that's like a suit. Yeah. I get told a lot of stories about lucid dreaming.

That's a big one, man. Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah, it was and it was very healing for me then to go through that.

Yeah.

But it was, I was like, wow, there's a whole other universe out there that we are just not exploring. And what's so beautiful about what you're teaching, what's so beautiful about this practice is that it's, you know, it's not just a fun thing to do because you can go flying or have sex in your dream, but it actually is a way to sort of build a relationship with your unconscious, which is very hard for us to access. And it's very hard for us to be awake and the whole purpose of wakefulness in the sense of, you know, being literally awake to your experience is to be happy. You know, like happiness is sort of the, you know, it's not only Thomas Jefferson who was talking about happiness. It was Buddhists and the Dalai Lama. It's how do you be in a state of love, of compassion, of kindness, of unreactivity, of understanding that you're not your ego, that you're not your identity that you kind of have as a sort of daily living being, but that you have this other state of consciousness that you can play with and explore and ask questions of and get answers to. So that's that whole realm we haven't even talked about. But like, what is the way that you interact with your dreams if you're exploring your mind? Because that's a whole another realm we haven't talked about. We've talked about PTSD, we've talked about nightmares, we've talked about improving your tennis serve. This all sounds great. We've talked about actually experiencing more wakefulness in a sense when you're awake or mindfulness. But there's a whole another level here that is not really something we talk about much. So what is that?

Okay. So I think, first of all, a unique aspect of lucid dreaming is the fact that psychological concepts become personified in the lucid dream. Simply because everything is your psychology in the lucid dream, or 99% of everything in the lucid dream is your psychology. So, in the lucid dream, you can meet fear. You can become lucid and call out, Fear, come to me. And some sort of representation or personification of fear will appear. It might be a cloud of red smoke. It might be the bully from school. It might be, you know, I've- Harold Robbins. It's so interesting from third grade.

I can see him now.

There you go. So, you see, so psychological concepts become personified. You can meet with them, you can interact with them. And because everything's symbolic, because everything's representative, you can engage a type of healing within the lucid dream through, I would say, the most obvious kind of representation of unity, which is the hug. So, I'd say if someone gets lucid tonight, right? And they're like, oh, what do I do on my lucid dream? If you forget everything else, run around and hug everything. Because if you acknowledge that everything in the lucid dream is you, it's all a kind of three-dimensional representation of your own psyche, then show love to your own psyche and you are going to.

Wake up feeling really freaking good.

So hug everything. If you see a zombie, hug the zombies. Because what's a zombie? A symbol of a part of your. Well, what is a zombie? This is cool. Zombies, right? Zombies are things that used to be alive, are now dead, but are still animated. That sounds like an old habit to me. Yeah. So if you get lucid and you ever see a zombie in your lucid dream, that's probably a representation of an old habit, an old program from childhood that's dead, but still animated by our lack of self-worth whatever it is, and is walking through our dream. So definitely hug zombies, hug scary things, and call out to meet it. I mean, I had this kickboxing competition a couple of months ago.

I had quite a lot of fear around it. And- yeah, me too. I'd be scared to death to go.

Into a kickboxing ring. Well, I love it. But there was still some fear around it because of who I was fighting. I knew he was a very good martial artist, blah, blah, blah. So I thought, okay, I've done a lot of work of kind of meeting fear, meeting the shadow, meeting sexuality in the lucid dream. I wanted to see, could you be so specific that you could meet an actual aspect of fear linked to part of your everyday life? So I became lucid and I call out in the lucid dream, fear of the kickboxing fight. Very specific fear of the kickboxing fight. And this dude appears, he's this big Japanese guy, like, which is not what my partner looked like. He's big Japanese guy. I guess represent a. I did. I couldn't tell. He was in kind of a long clothes. He was big, right? And scary. And suddenly he appears. on a sofa. And I'm like, oh, are you it? Are you the fear of the fight? And he just scowls at me. And I was like, okay, I'll take that as a yes. And I think, okay, what do I do? I hug him. He's a representation of my fear. He's split off as all things that we fear are. I need to bring him into unity through love and compassion. So I go over and I hug him and he's big, man, and my arms around him and he's tense. And I'm like, I love you, man. I love you, man. I love you, man. And then he releases. And I go back and he's smiling. And I'm like, this is so cool. The lucid dreaming is a biofeedback mechanism I'm seeing. that I've just integrated and aspect of that fear. And then I hadn't really thought what to do next. And I thought, oh, the martial arts training study thing that I failed in. So I'll try that again. So, dude, so if you're my representation of the fear, can we train together? And he goes, Yes. And then he stands up and he's massive. And I go, okay, let's stretch. So he gets my foot and he puts on his shoulder. And then I go, wait, it's a dream.

You can go higher.

And he goes, and stretches my leg right up into splits. And of course, I'm thinking, the neural pathways, I want to be able to do splits in the waking state. no, that didn't work. But anyway, and then we start training together. We're doing shadow boxing together. And then I wake up. The main thing wasn't what happened in the dream. It was the fact that even after 20 years of doing this, I found this other level. I was like, whoa. You can literally meet specific fears, real life fears, and integrate them. And when I went to that kickboxing fight, I mean, there was anxiety, of course, but the fear. No, it was much, much less. And I'm almost certain it was to do with that dream. I can't tell you my changing my neural Pathways or that I have no.

Did you win the fight?

I was kind of hoping you wouldn't ask that. The fight ended up being a no contest because I broke my nose and had to stop.

Oh no.

So final round, you broke your own.

Nose or he broke your nose?

He ducks, he comes up, an accidental headbutt breaks my nose. I then go over to the ref then stops it. I go over to the medical person comes in and she looks and goes, you,'ve broken your nose. And then goes, and she crunches it and I hear it and it was like wet wood. Oh, God. And so you would think you just give up at that point. But in the state of mind I was in, which is not very mindful, obviously, I then turned to the ref and go, How long left? And he goes, 30 seconds. And I looked to my corner. I was about to say, I'll carry on. And then luckily, my brother was in the corner with my coach, and he just went, he did the sign of like, Kill it. And I was like, okay, no, we're gonna stop. Oh, my God. So it ended up being a no contest.

But it was a friend who I, an acquaintance I was fighting. He was very sorry, and it was, oh, that's so funny.

Whatever. But, but yeah.

You know, it's interesting you talk about, you know, these dark forces that we have in our consciousness that can show.

Up fears and traumas.

And I was speaking to somebody who does lucid dreaming and he said that, you know, you have to be careful that it's not necessarily okay always to interact with some of the dark forces in your dreams. Can you explain that? Because it's a little different than what you're saying, which is go up and hug the zombie.

Well, the thing is, the lucid, every time you have a lucid dream, you're having a lucid dream because the unconscious has let you in. It's like to think that our itsy-bitsy, egoic sense of self can in any way control that awesome power of the unconscious is like a sailor thinking they can control the sea. It's like an arrogant sailor who thinks they can control the sea. What the sailor can do is get to know the ocean so well, get to know the tides, the currents, the where the sea monsters lie, that they can sail as if they were in control. so first of all, when we get lucid, to think that we could call up a trauma that didn't want to be called up is to underestimate the intelligence we're working with. You know, Carl Jung talked about there.

Being.

An inherent safety mechanism within the psychic apparatus that strives for a balance between dark and light. And that quotes from his work on the shadow. He was basically saying the shadow will only give you what you're ready for. Now, I've got some great examples of this in play. For example, a woman, she had a dream plan. She wanted to meet her seven-year-old self. I asked her why, and she said, when I was seven, there was some kind of abuse that happened. And I thought, like you say, you can meet representations. I could meet the representation of the little girl and hug her and say it's not her fault and to show her love. So my initial reaction, oh, okay, that's a brilliant dream plan. How long have you been lucid dreaming for? I've never had a lucid dream before. Whoa, so your first lucid dream, you.

Want to do this?

Yeah, you said anything's possible in the lucid dream. So I'm on closed retreat with this woman and several other people in Wales, and I want to ring my teacher to go, this is beyond my pay grade. What would my teacher say? So I went back to these quotes, and I have two teachers, Lama Yeshe Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist Lama, and a guy called Rob Nen, who's a Jungian psychologist and actually a criminologist at Cape Town University for many decades. who specialize in work with the shadow and Buddhist teaching too. And I remember that quote. And I remember also in my experience once I got lucid and tried to visit Buddhist heaven, the kind of Dewachen, this heavenly realm. And I got lucid and I called out, Dewachen, take me to Dewachen. You know, kind of take me to Nirvana. Nothing happened. Second time, nothing happened. Third time, I call it out, a woman with a clipboard walks into the dream, walks up to me and goes, you,'re not on the list. Yeah, she literally looked down and went, Dewachen, you're not ready for that. And I wake up. I was like, whoa, that's so cool. So I was pretty sure that if she wasn't ready to meet the seven-year-old self, number one, she wouldn't get lucid. It's her first night anyway, who gets lucid on their first night? And number two, if she did, the dream would know what to offer her. You know, the intelligence of the lucid dream is higher than waking state intelligence, not less. We're dealing with more of the intelligence in the mind. So that night she did become lucid. She called out for her seven-year-old self and the dream blocked it. she called out three times. On the third one she called that seven-year-old sell come for me. Dream blocks it again. But in front of her in the lucid dream, a door appears. And on the door is a sign that says caution. I mean, how cool is that? The symbolism. And she was so sweet. She said, I was in the lucid dream.

I thought, you know, what do I do?

It's a door that says caution. Don't go there. No, she thought, if it's locked, I'll take that as a symbol. If it's open, I will proceed. caution. So she pushed the door, it opened, and as soon as she stepped through the door, this three-story building appeared. And on each floor of the building was a different symbolic representation of the abuse. And in one of the rooms, it was full of vomit. There's something to do. She was forced to eat till she's sick, I think. Well, I know, actually, sorry. And she walked into this room full of vomit. And again, she's so sweet, she, you know, how do I hug a room full of vomit? You know? But she walked into an, I set you free. You know, I set you. She kind of hugged it with her mind and through affirmations, and she had a A big healing release. Amazing. And I had to speak to her about a year or so ago because I wanted to include that in my new book, Dreaming Through Darkness, because the case study of hers in the book. And she said, yeah, yeah, include it in the case study. But please know that that lucid dream didn't heal me. It began my healing. She said, after that lucid dream, the possibility of entering into therapy and talking about what happened opened up. The possibility of talking to family members who were involved opened up. She was like, the lucid dream Cracked the door open. Yeah, it cracked, oh wow, like the dream. That's so cool, yes, it cracked the door open.

So emotional healing, psychological healing, nightmares, trauma, abuse. What about physical healing? Is that possible in a dream? Can you heal others?

Can you heal yourself? Now we're way out of kind of science fact here, but we have anecdotal reports that it seems that lucid dreaming can lead to some sort of physical healing for minor ailments. I've never heard of anyone kind of using lucid dreaming to cure cancer or anything like that, but there are a lot of anecdotal reports that people have used lucid dreaming to engage healing on minor ailments. Now, whether that's working as the placebo effect or whether it's some kind of powerful type of visualized healing, like the Simon method, you know, you kind of visualize colored lights surrounding the point of inflammation. And if you've got really strong visualization, the waking some people that really helps. It makes them feel more relaxed, stuff like that. The lucid dream is a 100% visualization. You can't get more of a visual space than that. No, it's true. So it sounds like if you do visualize healing within the lucid dream and add to that that huge placebo effect of the mind within the mind, you know, if it's the mind effect in the body, and if the lucid dream is a three-dimensional representation of the mind, okay, that seemed like it could work very powerfully. I mean, the story I'll share is a good one because it It shows both sides. My friend Bruno, he had kidney problems, heard about potential of lucid dream healing, became lucid. In the lucid dream, he puts his dream hands on his dream kidneys. I think he called that an affirmation, some like immune system boost. But the main thing was he felt electricity coming out of his hands into his kidneys. That's so much so he fell on the floor. It's a very short lucid dream. He said that after that dream, his creatine levels, which you tell me as a doctor, but something to do, oh is that something to do with the kidneys? Creatinine levels stabilized for like six six months after the Lucid Dream. Now, six months later, the disease returned and he had to have a kidney removed. Now, I found out about that like a year later after the book was published and stuff. And I was like, dude, why didn't you tell me? And he said, well, because I. I. It failed. It didn't work. Dude, for six months, those levels stabilize after Lucid Dream.

Yeah, Lucid dreaming.

It isn't like a silver bullet. We got to do it again.

Boost immunity. You might need another dose. Yeah. So I don't think it's a silver.

Bullet, but I think it can help.

I mean, from the scientific point of view, the greatest pharmacy in the world is between your ears. Ah, cool. And there's people who know how to access that in ways that are really crazy but have been scientifically proven. One of them is by a guy named Wim Hof who uses breath techniques, Tibetan techniques to regulate his autonomic nervous system, his automatic nervous system to regulate his immune system. He's had toxic bacteria injected into his blood that would normally cause a severe septic infection that would kill people. And he literally can switch on his immune system to fight that infection and have no reaction. He can go out and climb Mount Everest in his shorts and bare feet, simply using these techniques to control his biology. So, I imagine with lucid dreaming that's also possible.

That's nice. And he can teach it to others. When I read that, I found the most amazing thing was it wasn't only him in the research. He had five people with him who had taught things to. They couldn't do it quite as well as him, but they also had immune response. Yeah. I mean, if that's in the waking state through breath, then okay, lucid dream. You know, if I wasn't talking to Dr. Nath, it was kind of a Buddhist podcast. I'd go into the whole Buddhist thing.

Seven times the power of mind.

We have the healing potentially in us. I'm just being, I'd rather be super. Okay, you can say that. You can say that. I mean, I worked on my eyes like my eyesight has actually got worse now. In about a year ago, it started to go for an hour short sight, whatever it's things close to me, but maybe that's old age. But for a good six years, I didn't have to wear glasses. I used to wear glasses, you check my early YouTube videos, I'm in glasses. And I was talking at a music festival once about how I worked with an ear infection through lucid dream healing. And all this earwax started pouring out. I actually woke up with the earwax pouring out. So a physical response, Lucid Dream Healing. And I kind of got like heckled basically. This dude on stage said, like this festival, oh, why don't you heal your eyes then? And I was so embarrassed. I went bright red and I was, oh, well, you know, some things are unhealed. Right, right, right. And then I thought, well, what's the likelihood of this dude turning up at this talk and challenging me? I should try it. So I tried it and I took about two or three lucid dreams. I tried and do hands-on healing in the lucid dream. calling out these Buddhist mantras and stuff. And then I think the third or fourth one, I was about to do the hands on healing harness the placebo effect, really go for it. And then a voice, my voice over an intercom in the lucid dream went, Charlie, there is a conflict in your eyes. The reason you can't see long distances is there's a conflict in your eyes. And I almost turned around to see, like, who said it? And I was like, there's a conflict.

Wow.

Yeah, I guess most illness or disease is based on a conflict of some sort. So in the lucid dream, I yell out, my eyes are free of conflict. My eyes are free of conflict, and the dream starts shaking like an earthquake. And even in the dream, I was like, oh, I think this is actually doing something. And I woke up and I didn't wear my glasses again. That's unbelievable. Now, it is unbelievable.

And whether it is just-- I mean.

My brother made-- I believe it, but it's unbelievable. I know what you mean.

Yeah.

My brother made a good point. He said, oh, but just because you.

Believe in lucid dreaming so much, it's just a massive dose of the placebo effect.

It's just this. Well, the placebo effect is actually real.

It's not nothing, it's the power of the pharmacy in your hand.

Please keep going.

Yes, exactly what it is.

So I was like, yeah, just the placebo, just my belief in lucid dreaming. But dude, I can see long distances again.

What the F is that about? So this sounds like extraordinary practice. You teach workshops on it. You have an online course. People want to learn more. So tell us about the courses and the retreats and how people can learn more about it.

Yeah, so I just taught in the US, Omega. I'll be back in the US next year twice at Joshua Tree Retreat Center in the West Coast and at Omega probably again on the East Coast. But online courses, I've got this course with Awake Academy, awakeacademy.org, it's like a six hour lucid dreaming course. It's really well made. The guys who made it were at, they're actually documentary filmmakers who made an online course, not tech geeks trying to make an online course. And there's a big difference there. So they were shooting it's like really HD quality. And you're in it.

Oh yeah, yeah. It's me talking to camera for like six hours, like teaching you to lucid.

I'm going to dream.

Okay, that's my summer vacation homework.

I'm going to take that course. And then I've got a YouTube channel. Can I get a discount on videos? Sure. Free. And then there's my books and workshops. I guess I teach primarily around Europe, but I'm often in the States and Mexico next year, too, I think.

And I'm all over Facebook and Instagram and stuff. Charlie Morley, Lucid Dreaming, you'll find me. I mean, you're hearing about ayahuasca, you're hearing about psychedelics, you're hearing about meditation all the time. seems just like a whole next level to me and something that people aren't aware of. And I super encourage people to check it out because, one, it's a way for you to get to know yourself.

Yes.

And two, it's a way for you to work on things that you can't work on necessarily when your ego is in the way. And if you're interested in actually being awake, awake as, as opposed to just Dream Awake? I would go to the website, AwakeAcademy.org and check out Charlie's stuff, because this is profound and he's the real deal and this is not some goofy thing. It's for real. So check out Dreams of Awakening, check out AwakeAcademy.org and CharlieMolly.com and CharlieMolly.com, yes please. And it's been so great having you, Charlie. Thank you. You've been listening to the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Sign up wherever you get your podcasts and we'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.