Charlie Morley presents lucid dreaming ("lucid living") as a powerful state in which consciousness becomes active within the unconscious, allowing access to a deeper, "hyper-reality" beyond ordinary sensory limits. He argues lucid dreaming can be used for deep healing (trauma integration, phobia treatment) similarly to hypnotherapy but reaching deeper into the unconscious; he also cites neuroscience evidence (1975 Hull verification; 1980 Stanford EEG; 2009 Frankfurt; 2012 Max Planck fMRI) and neuroplasticity research to explain why lucid-practice can change waking skills and habits.
Questions this video answers
1975 at Hull University (UK).
Stanford University, 1980.
Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, 2012.
The speaker claims that only one lucid dream is required.
Chapters
When I talk about lucid living here, I'm talking about waking up in the same way that the Buddha talked about it. Waking up from what to what? Waking up from the illusion of separateness. Waking up to the reality of oneness. Right now, your experience of reality is being mediated and limited by the five sense organs being filtered through the sixth, the mind. So we know that our experience of reality right now is limited. It is not full reality. But in a lucid dream, those limits are removed. People often say, in the lucid dream, wow, I could see every tiny blade of grass in that dream. I could smell everything as I walked through that garden. I could taste everything when I bit into that apple. Why? Because you're not seeing through your eyes in a lucid dream. You're seeing through your mind. You're not tasting through your olfactory senses, you're tasting through your mind. You're not touching through the touch pads, you're touching through your mind. It is an experience of hyper reality. And this is why when we engage healing, trauma integration or work with phobias in the lucid dream, the healing is so deep because it is such a profound reality into which we're engaging that healing. In a lucid dream, you are conscious within the unconscious, conscious within the unconscious. Now, if that sounds a little bit like hypnotherapy, it should. And if I only had 30 seconds left with you, if I had the elevator pitch to give, I would say this. Anything you can treat through hypnotherapy, you can also treat through lucid dreaming in the same way as a hypnotherapist will take a strand of the conscious mind down into the subconscious and plant a seed of healing intent. So too, in the lucid dream, do you take a strand of the conscious mind, but not just into the subconscious, but into the depths of the unconscious, right to the bottom of the iceberg, simply because you can't get more unconscious than asleep. So the depth to which you go in a lucid dream is far deeper than any other modality. It does not mean that things like hypnotherapy, shamanic journey and yoga, nidra, psychedelics, dance work aren't great. They're brilliant and way more accessible than lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming takes a bit of effort, but once you do have a lucid dream and you engage lucid dream healing, it seems to be very, very powerful and only one lucid dream is required. Every night when we go to sleep, we are lost in illusion. We have a very strong habit of believing Our internally generated hallucinations to be real. When you start lucid dreaming, you engage a powerful deconditioning process that says, ah, no more am I duped by the illusory hallucinations of my mind. Now I have woken up to them and gone, oh, it looks like reality, but it's not. I'm dreaming. This is all a hallucination. This is all my mind. If you have enough of those experiences, it starts to affect your waking state. If you have enough lucid dreams, you start to become lucid in the waking state and full lucidity would be enlightenment. In 1975, lucid dreaming was first scientifically verified at Hull University in the uk. Before that, lucid dreaming was known to be a subjective phenomena, but there had never been objective scientific study of lucid dreaming. But 1975, we got it. Then 1980, Stanford University did the first EEG study. So looking at the brain waves of people, and they were like, yeah, lucid dreaming is for real. You can see the brainwaves change. Frankfurt University in 2009, and then finally 2012, Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, they did the first lucid dreaming study using fmri, which is like a live image of the brain. And what they managed to do was get to someone to fall asleep inside a brain scanner. And they were a profound lucid dreamer, a proficient lucid dreamer. They fell asleep inside the brain scan and had a lucid dream. So for the first time ever, you could see exactly what brain networks light up when you become lucid. And it was amazing what they found when you are in a non lucid dream. So your average everyday dreams, the back part of the brain, the brain stem, the occipital lobe, the visual cortex, highly active. The front part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, where the scientists say your sense of self, your sense of agency, your sense of I am having an experience, lives, is almost entirely switched off. Now that explains why we can have such crazy dreams. You know, we dream we're a child, if we're an adult, or we dream like we're friends with celebrities and stuff like that, because your sense of self is almost entirely switched off or at least very flexible in the dream state. Once this person became lucid, they saw the prefrontal cortex, boom, light up like a Christmas tree. And they said, well, that makes complete sense. Because now the person knows that they are dreaming, their sense of self is back online, their sense of volition, their sense of agency is back online. So that was the first amazing finding they found. But the real kicker was this neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity describes the phenomena of the brain that can rewire itself in favor of a newly learned skill or repeated action. The classic thing from Joe Dispenza is neurons that fire together, wire together, right? So the more you use certain brain networks, the deeper the grooves become in the gray and white matter of the brain and the easier it is then to engage that practice and to learn. It's like the kind of neurobiological basis of learning and habit, the physical neurology of your brain. If you have a lucid dream. Sorry, if you have a non lucid dream that you're practicing your martial arts all night, the next day you might wake up and feel, oh, I really want to practice martial arts because I dreamt about it all night. But you're not actually going to be any better at martial arts. Doesn't work that way. However, if you become lucid in your dream, oh, I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming. What do I want to do? I'm going to practice my martial arts. And then you spend the lucid dream practicing your martial arts. Scientific studies have shown you will get better at your martial arts in the waking state. The next day they can test you and you will have improved.
