Episode 173 – Lucid Dreaming, Gateways to the inner self w/ Robert Waggoner

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What's up, folks?

My name is Xavier Katana.

You are listening to The Human Experience.

In this episode, we brought on Mr. Robert Wagoner.

He is considered one of the worldwide authorities on lucid dreaming.

CNN, CBS, ABC, and a wide range of other media outlets. This episode covers some of the main

points of the lucid dream experience, but I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Robert's book,

simply titled Lucid Dreaming. Robert was actually requested by many of you guys, so we brought him

on. Very happy with the outcome of this episode. It's a very fun, lighthearted episode that I hope

truly enjoy. Guys, we do this for our passion and because we love helping you. Servers and bandwidth

costs are seriously getting outrageous. I'm covering all of this out of my own pocket,

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Without much further ado, ladies and gentlemen,

this is Mr. Robert Waggoner, where we discuss his book, Lucid Dreams. Enjoy.

the human experience is accessing the gateway to the inner self with my guest, Mr. Robert

Wagoner. Robert, my good sir, welcome to HXP. Hey, thanks for having me. Robert, we're talking

about your book today, Lucid Dreaming. Let's start at the beginning for you. I mean, how did

you get to the point where you decided to write this book? You know, I taught myself how to lucid

dream or become consciously aware of dreaming while in the dream state back in 1975 when I was a

junior in high school. And so after about 30 years of lucid dreaming, I thought there really

wasn't a good book on the lucid dreaming experience and some of the incredible things

when they become consciously aware within the dream.

And so around 2005 or so, I made my first attempt at writing a book

and got about 50 pages and stopped there.

But then in 2007, I went ahead and wrote this first book,

Lucid Dreaming, Gateway to the Inner Self.

And that's been followed up by a second book, Lucid Dreaming, Plain and Simple,

which is all about the tips and techniques.

But it was just out of my desire to kind of share with people the extraordinary depth of lucid dreaming.

Okay. So, I mean, most people, I would say most people don't even remember their dreams at all, right?

Exactly.

with that. And so, and, and I find that there's this sort of period for me anyway, there's this

sort of window where I, when I'm regaining consciousness, where dreams kind of absorb

back in and I have that chance. And if I miss that chance, I just, I lose all track or memory

of whatever I, whatever I was dreaming. You know, that's, that's how many people experience it. If

If they don't make some notes in the middle of the night or they don't make some dream notes immediately upon waking, within two or three or four minutes, the memory of the dream is totally gone.

And so to get into lucid dreaming or to dream recall, you just really have to focus upon waking up.

What was I just dreaming?

And write down some notes and make that the most important thing that you do when you wake up every morning.

Okay, so I mean, lucid dreaming was coined by Frederick Van Eden?

That's right. That's what most people would say. Historically, there's this gentleman in

the Netherlands. He was kind of a scientist. He also coined the term psychotherapist.

But Frederick Van Eden, he was a scientist, but also a little bit of a mystic. And back around the

turn of the century at 1900, he began to realize he was having lucid dreams. And he came up with

this term, I think when he gave a presentation to the Society for Psychical Research in London

in like 1913 or something. But yeah, a lucid dream is any dream in which you realize within

the dream that you're dreaming. And so oftentimes you'll have that moment when you say in the dream,

oh this is a dream i mean that's the only explanation for how you can see a cow flying

you know across the sky right or something like that and so so it's a it's a wonderful

moment because at that moment everything shifts you realize that you're surrounded by dream stuff

and dream figures and and a dream setting and and it's just totally changes the entire

dream experience. It fascinates me that we sleep. I mean, that all humans need sleep. I mean,

most species on the planet sleep at some point or another. I mean, I think it was Terence McKenna

who said something quite profound that because of the way that the earth is moving, there's

always a section of the human population that is asleep and a section that is kind of awake.

I mean, just a kind of side note there, but I mean, within lucid dreaming and dreaming itself,

I mean, how did you get to a point where you were so proficient at this? Because it seems like such

a hard thing to do, to realize you're dreaming, first to even remember your dreams, but then

to actually realize you're dreaming and then take control of the dream.

Yeah. You know what, just to carry on with that line of thinking for a second, if you sit down and think that probably every night we spend about two, two and a half hours in the dream state, every one of us, two and two and a half hours in the dream state.

I mean, by the time you're 11 years old, you will have spent one entire year's worth of time in dreaming, in this state of dreaming.

And it's incredible that, you know, scientifically we know a little bit about it, but there's a lot that hasn't been figured out.

And that's one of the beautiful aspects about lucid dreaming.

When you're consciously aware within the dream state, you have the ability to explore, to experiment, and to do all that kind of thing to kind of get a new understanding of dreaming.

But for me, how I became proficient was that, so back in 1975, I was reading this book by Carlos Castaneda called Journey to Ixland.

And in this book, his shamanic teacher, Don Juan, suggests to him that he finds his hands in the dream state and become consciously aware.

And that was a totally radically new idea for me.

And I wondered if that could actually happen.

But there wasn't a technique.

Because I knew a little bit about self-suggestion and hypnosis, this is what I did as a young guy.

Each night before I'd go to sleep, I'd just look at my hands while telling myself over and over in my head,

tonight in my dreams, I'll see my hands and realize I'm dreaming.

Tonight in my dreams, I'll see my hands and realize I'm dreaming.

And I would say that for about five minutes until I became naturally sleepy and went to bed.

And I did this for three nights.

And then on the third night, I was walking through my high school hallway, and suddenly, just like they were spring-loaded, my hands popped right in front of my face.

And I thought, oh, my hands.

This is a dream.

And so that was my first consciously intended or induced lucid dream experience.

And so I continued with that because it was so much fun.

And it's so powerful and almost transcendent when you have this kind of peak experience of realizing within a dream that you're dreaming.

And so I seem to have a kind of a natural facility for it.

And I just continued going deeper and deeper into lucid dreaming.

But what really made me the happiest was when in 1980, 81, when finally the scientific evidence for it came out.

because up until that time, I would tell my friends about it,

and they told me, oh, you can't become conscious in the unconscious of dreaming.

No one can do that.

And I told them, you know, it's easy.

Here's how you do it.

And some of my friends even did it back then.

But it wasn't until 81 the evidence came out.

Interesting. Okay. So you became proficient just by kind of programming psychologically that you were going to see your hands.

And then through that trigger, you realized you were in a dream and then you started controlling it.

Right, right. So it's kind of like Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist.

he would ring a bill every time he presented food to dogs.

And after he did this 10 or 20 times, he could ring a bill and suddenly the dogs would salivate.

So in psychology, that's what you call a conditioned response.

And so basically, I conditioned myself that whenever I saw my hands,

the first idea that would come to my head is, this is a dream.

And so, for example, I might in a dream be climbing up a ladder and see my hands and think,

I remember talking to one person who had read my book, and he said that he was very successful with this technique.

But one time his hands popped in front of his face, and he didn't get it.

And then all of a sudden the hands started slapping him in the face until he realized, oh, this is a dream.

And so you realize that you can just use simple self-suggestion and kind of this behavioral conditioning to achieve it.

But that's how I did it back in 1975 before the scientific evidence emerged.

So, I mean, we're diving into the psyche here.

I mean, a lot of this, because I feel like, I mean, I have been meditating and I've been

solidly meditating for the last, I don't know, 10 or 15 years.

And at the beginning stages of that, I think I was purposely attempting to go out of body.

And I was intrigued by the out of body state.

compare lucid dreaming to out-of-body experiences? Right, right. So normally when I give workshops,

I tell people that a lucid dream in an out-of-body is basically like a house cat and a mountain lion.

They share some similarities, but they're two different animals. And so again, a lucid dream,

the definition is realizing within a dream that you're dreaming. So you see something impossible

happens and you could think, wait a second, oh, this is a dream. But think about out-of-body

experiences, those kinds of reports. Someone has a car accident and they're thrown out the

windshield and they're laying in the middle of the highway and suddenly they're seeing everything

from 20 feet above the accident site. I mean, that's an out-of-body experience. That's an

experience that didn't begin with realizing you're in a dream. So by definition, you know,

Definitely two different experiences.

But where it gets complicated is this.

Around the same time I taught myself how to lucid dream, I would have these other experiences, which I later came to realize were out-of-bodies.

But basically what would happen, I'd be lying in bed, getting ready to fall asleep.

And then I'd start to hear this kind of humming, buzzing noise.

And it sounded like a thousand bumblebees around my head or someone playing a digger or do or something like that.

I'd feel this strange energy, and then I'd realize, well, wait a second.

I'm viewing my bedroom, or what appears to be my bedroom, from five or six feet above the bed.

How did I do this?

I started having these strange experiences like this.

One day, I just happened to ask one of my older brothers if he'd ever had an experience like that.

He told me, oh, you're having out-of-body experiences.

book by Robert Monroe you can read about and see what this is all about. But you begin to realize

that phenomenologically they're different. So that kind of experience, you know, there's buzzing,

there's energy, sometimes you roll out, sometimes you shoot out, sometimes you see these wispy

kind of silver colored arms of light or whatever, you know, your kind of astral arms,

if you want to think of it that way.

And you realize that that's a totally different experience than lucid dreaming.

The beautiful thing about lucid dreaming, though,

is that it is simply almost always joyful fun.

When you have out-of-body experiences,

especially when it begins to happen if you're a teenager,

sometimes these can be utterly frightful events.

There's all this energy and humming, and you don't know what's going on.

I mean, no one's prepared you for it.

And so the sad thing, though, is now these two experiences are being intermixed.

And there's some people like Stephen LaBerge who say that out-of-bodies are actually probably a variant lucid, a type of lucid dream.

Right.

But again, if you get shot out of your windshield on the highway and you're laying there and seeing everything from 30 feet above you, your physical body, that's obviously not realizing within a dream that you're dreaming.

So they're two definitely different experiences and there's a lot of phenomenological differences too.

Yeah, it seems like they're completely different experiences.

Robert Monroe, hugely recommend any of his material.

a big hero of mine. So let's, I mean, let's talk about some tools that, I mean, because we can use

this state as a form of learning, right? Exactly, exactly. It's a wonderful way first to kind of

realize that dreaming itself is not random, like some scientists say it is, that actually in a

lucid dream, you begin to realize that there's certain principles and rules. And so just to give

your listeners a kind of a rough idea, here would be some rules that you learn very quickly in

lucid dreaming. One rule is don't get too excited. Because if you get too excited, normally what

happens, and I mean really excited, if you get too excited, then normally you pop out of the lucid

dream. And so around the world, universally it seems, lucid dreamers report that if they get

too excited, you know, upon becoming lucid, they'll immediately pop out of the lucid dream.

So that's kind of one of the basic rules. Another rule was one that Kastaneda brought up in that

book Journey to Excellence. His shamanic teacher told him, don't stare at things when you become

consciously aware in a lucid dream. And I remember in my very first intended lucid dream,

I did that. I stepped outside of the high school and I was looking at the bricks on the

administration building and I began to notice the detail. And then it was like the dream started

shaking, like this lucid dream started shaking. And I realized, oh, it's going to collapse.

And I remember that Don Juan told Carlos to look back at his hands to renew the power of dreaming if that ever occurred.

And so I did that and managed to prolong the lucid dream.

But that's just another aspect of it.

In regular dreams, we have rapid eye movement.

Our eyes are moving all over the place.

But in lucid dreams, your eyes should still continue to move a little bit.

something there's something about that that within four or five seconds will make the lucid dream want

to collapse it's so interesting i feel like eventually technology will get to a point where

we will be able to induce this state using uh just gear like that we hook up to our brains i mean i

know that they have different tools like like glasses that you can wear that kind of flash

a red light to end and that way it kind of reminds you that you're dreaming you can wear those

I mean, so you mentioned around the world.

Do you notice that people, different people, have different proclivities to lucid dreaming around the world?

Well, they've done some research surveys of college students and asked them, have you ever become consciously aware of dreaming while in the dream state?

And when they surveyed students in the U.S., about 72% said that, yes, they'd had that experience at least once.

And about 25% say they have that experience at least once a month.

And the results were roughly the same in the Netherlands and Germany and Western Europe.

In Japan, though, the response was 42%.

So only 42% of the Japanese students said they'd had that experience.

And so it makes you wonder if the interpretation or the way it was translated didn't get across very thoughtfully so that students understood.

But altogether, when you look at the total population, a little over half the population is having or has had the lucid dream experience.

Now, there are some people, though, who lucid dream virtually every night.

And at first I began to explore this a little bit because I co-edited a magazine called The Lucid Dreaming Experience.

And I wanted to find out what's behind this becoming lucid every night.

And my theory was that these people had had childhood nightmares.

And so they taught themselves how to differentiate waking from dreaming.

Because if you're going to have a childhood nightmare every night, you

want to be ready and vigilant and know when you're in the dream state so you're prepared for the witches or the monsters or the zombies or whatever.

And so when I began to talk to people who said they had lucid dreams every night, the majority, that was their situation.

They had childhood nightmares that were really severe and to kind of deal with that, they taught themselves how to become lucidly aware.

because when you realize it's a dream, then you can fly away from the witches or you can

make some accommodation. But then I began to meet people who that wasn't their case. And one woman

told me that she had a neurotic habit. And I asked her what that was. And she said she had a neurotic

habit of 20 or 30 times throughout the day asking herself, what was I just doing? What was I just

doing. And so if she is folding the clothes in the laundry room, you know, what was I just doing?

Oh, yeah, I was making tea for myself. And so she would do that in her dreams. She would ask

herself, what was I just doing? And then she would remember that she was putting on her pajamas.

And then she realized, oh, this must be a dream. And so I began to see that people could develop

a lucid mindset. So this is kind of a state of examining their perceived environment very closely

or have some recurring habit like examining what you were just doing, something that made you more

mindful about your space. And in that way, you could develop a lucid mindset. But you're right,

around the world, basically half the people report lucid dreaming, and about 25% of the people

kind of a natural talent to lucid dream. Interesting. So it seems that a human is a

human and we all basically can't have the ability to lucid dream. I really think so. And a lot of it,

like we began talking about, is dreaming as a basic experience is devalued in society.

People don't pay attention to their dreams anymore. But you can think back 2,000 years

before Netflix and before TV and before all that, I mean, dreams probably were the most exciting

things that were happening in people's lives if they were living in some, you know, small village

along the Nile. I mean, you know, in your dreams, you could interact with the deceased, you can fly,

you can do all sorts of amazing things and have all kinds of interesting experiences.

So, but in this current culture, dreaming is really devalued. People don't talk about it,

kind of psychologically therapeutic terms. And that's all the more they think about it.

I mean, I would say that television probably sucks the ability to lucid dream out of you.

All the flashing images, your brain just can't handle it. So really, there's a chapter in your

book called The Varieties of Dream Figures. I find this fascinating. And you say that these can

be anywhere from symbols to different archetypes. I mean, what generates this? Is it just the psyche

that's kind of generating this dream figure that comes to you? Or how does that work?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. So when you become consciously aware in a dream,

I mean, we're just kind of, as social beings, we're kind of socialized to interact with

other figures in the dream. And what's interesting is that oftentimes lucid dreamers would

go up to a dream figure and they would say, hey, do you know this is a dream?

And almost again, universally, the dream figures would frown at them or just look upset.

And there's been a number of examples of lucid dreamers going up to a dream figure saying,

hey do you know I do you know that I'm dreaming you and then the dream figure responding how do

you know I'm not dreaming you wow and then the lucid dreamer would say well look I can fly and

then the dream figure would say well look I can fly too and they would keep trying to one-up each

other to see who had the most abilities there in the dream state but but what it shows you

is this. Dream figures vary. Sometimes you'll ask a dream figure a question and you'll get

gobbledygook for an answer. Or sometimes it'll just turn away. But other times you'll interact

with dream figures who seem very aware and conscious and alert. And sometimes they'll give

you incredible explanations. Like, for example, I remember one of my first experiments as an early

lucid dreamer back in the early 80s was asking a dream figure that happened to be a friend of mine

to explain a dream symbol to me. And so within the lucid dream, I picked up a dream symbol and I said,

hey, Andrea, what does this represent? So I was holding a jewel, a gem in my hand, and she says,

unconsciousness. And I woke up thinking, wow, a dream figure analyzed a symbol within a lucid dream

and did a pretty good job of it. But what happens then as a lucid dreamer, as you go deeper into

this, you think, well, wait a second. Is it just telling me what I already know? Or is it just

giving me an acceptable answer, you know, something that's subconsciously in the back of my mind?

And so to play around with that, if you want to, you can take this much deeper.

For example, various people on becoming lucidly aware, oftentimes people become lucidly aware when they see a deceased relative.

Because they say, wait a second, Uncle John, he's been dead for 10 years.

Oh, this must be a dream.

And then they become lucidly aware.

I remember one time in one of my workshops, a woman reported that her uncle appeared in a dream.

She became lucidly aware.

And then he came up to her and said, if you want to understand the family secret, because this woman reported there was a family secret in her family.

He goes, to understand the family secret, you have to go to the county courthouse, go up to this particular room on the second floor, and then ask for this specific file.

file from the clerk. And so the woman, you know, she's a good lucid dreamer. She paid attention to,

you know, the exact instructions. She woke up and wrote it down. A few days later, she went to the

county courthouse and she asked for that specific file in that specific room. And then it came to

her, this file that was of the family battle about the sale of some land, you know, 10 years before

And so when that happens, that kind of takes it to a different level because now a dream figure has given you information outside of your knowing.

Right.

And so that's why I try to get across this idea of dream figures varying.

And normally you can see it in their eyes, just like if you're talking to a human.

if they don't seem to be very alert or if they're not looking you in the eye or whatever

I would just ignore them altogether but some dream figures seem very conscious and alive

and in fact I've had a number of lucid dreams where it's obvious that the dream figure was

trying to get me to be lucidly aware because when I become lucidly aware suddenly it congratulates

me on becoming lucidly aware. And then I'll realize, oh, this same dream figure tried to

get me to become lucidly aware the night before, and I failed. And so you begin to see that there

truly is varieties of dream figures. All dream figures are not created equal.

It's very, very intriguing because we're bouncing into the sort of esoteric and the metaphysical

and like precognition determining kind of things and finding information that we wouldn't otherwise

have. I find it, I find it interesting that, um, that the only real difference that we have,

the only difference that, that we have between knowing that we're dreaming or sleep is that

every night I, I laid down to go to sleep. I closed my eyes and that process of waking up.

But if that process was erased, I mean, how would I know the difference between this being the, quote, real world and that being the dream world?

Exactly. One thing that I would say about lucid dreaming is if you're good at lucid dreaming, you're going to question many basic assumptions that you've just collected over the course of your life.

you know, what constitutes reality? Is it just a matter of consensus? You know, what is the minimal

definition of reality? What would that be? Because when you become consciously aware in a lucid dream

and you realize that it's a principled environment, it has certain rules, you begin to think that,

oh, I'm learning here in my subconscious or unconscious level of my mind. And then when you

further and begin to interact with these dream figures who seem more aware than you do or have

information outside of your knowing that then it really is like an alternate reality but it's a

alternate reality that occurs in the lucid dream space yeah it's fascinating really intriguing

have you

seen a movie called Waking Life?

Yes, I have. You know, I think that's one of the better movies that have to do with Lucid Dreaming,

because it brings up so many philosophical questions and also has that kind of dreamy spirit to it in the way the figures change throughout the movie.

Yeah, that's Richard Linklater, the director of that. Phenomenal movie, highly recommend it. I mean, let's move into some of your own personal experiences with lucid dreaming. What would be one of your top lucid dreams?

Wow. You know, what happened to me, so I taught myself in 1975 how to lucid dream, and I continued on with the practice and all.

But one of the first things that happened to me was 1985, I was part of a three-year lucid dreaming group, exploration group, founded by a woman, Linda Lane Maguillon.

And each month we had a goal to achieve.

And one month the goal was become lucidly aware and find out what the dream figures in your lucid dream represent.

And so I thought, that's pretty easy.

I've done that before.

But what happened, it was really interesting.

I think it was March of 85.

I was on a business trip out to Chicago.

I remember I had to submit my lucid dream for that month.

And so that night I became lucidly aware and followed a woman into an office.

And so now I'm inside this office.

I know it's a lucid dream.

There's a receptionist, two women sitting there, and a man in a three-piece suit, an older man with kind of a gold chain in his pocket and all that.

So in my very nice Midwestern way, I just walked up to him and I said, excuse me, what do you represent?

And the most incredible thing happened at that moment.

the dream figure replying, all of a sudden, a voice boomed out a partial response from high

above him. This voice just boomed out this response. And the response didn't make complete

sense. And so I looked up into the sky and just asked, you know, like, now what? And then it

boomed out a full response that this gentleman represented the acquired characteristics,

of the happy giver. And so I thought, okay, I've done the assignment. I've figured out what this

guy represents. And so I'm going to wake up and write this down before I forget. And so I woke

up and wrote it down. And as I was writing it down, I remembered the day before I'd been in

Chicago and met a woman who was the head of a nonprofit. And she told me, oh, the only reason

people give to my organization is to get their name in the annual report. And I thought, boy,

she is such an unhappy receiver. And as I walked away from her, I thought in my head, oh, the Lord

loves a happy giver, but because she was such an unhappy receiver. And so I realized this was a

little bit of day residue. But the important element of this was after that, I began to wonder,

because his voice had boomed out the response and not the dream figure, was there an awareness

behind the dream. So, could you in a lucid dream stopped relating to the dream figures and the

dream environment and just shout out questions to your subconscious mind or this non-visible

awareness behind the dream? And so, starting in 1985, I began to do that. I would become

consciously aware, and I would shout out questions like, hey, dream, show me something important for

me to see. And then the incredible thing is the entire lucid dream would change, and I'd be

looking at something incredible. And so suddenly, I felt like I found the most creative aspect of

the lucid dream. You know, in political shows, sometimes they'll say, follow the money, or,

or they'll have kind of a basic premise.

If you want to understand the truth of something, follow the money.

But in lucid dreaming and in the subconscious or unconscious mind,

if you want to understand something, I say follow the creativity.

If you follow the creativity and find the most creative thing,

then you're really on to something.

And it was interesting.

That year, 1985, Stephen LaBerge's first book on lucid dreaming came out.

he did something very similar, but not exactly the same. In that first book of his, he suggests

that lucid dreamers become aware and then announce that they surrender to the highest

and see what happens. And so you become lucidly aware, you ignore the dream figures, and you

announce, now I surrender to the highest. And normally, he said some of his most profound lucid

dreams occurred when he surrendered. But when I read that, I thought, okay, who are you surrendering

And it's interesting in that book, he just refused to say, he said, oh, it's not important to think about what or who we're surrendering to.

But that's why I called my first book Lucid Dreaming Gateway to the Inner Self.

as you begin to interact with this awareness behind the dream it it seems to have the qualities

and characteristics of what a person would call an inner self and what what even Carl Jung kind

of gave as a characteristics of a second psychic system within our unconscious mind yeah wow quite

intriguing. You know, I really want to bring up the aspect of drugs and dreaming. I mean,

it seems like just DMT, DMT is produced naturally in the brain. So, I mean, if DMT is producing

these dream states, then could we say that either ingesting DMT, taking DMT,

ayahuasca are those forms i mean could we relate this to lucid dreaming well it's interesting um

i don't have any firsthand experience with dmt or ayahuasca i have read ayahuasca experiences though

in and anthropological reports and and firsthand personal anecdotal reports and and they do seem

very similar to a lucid dream because the person is consciously aware within the experience they

they know they're having the experience but but the one thing about it in the ayahuasca experience

you can tell that it's kind of being chemically mediated because the person is kind of following

the the flow of chemicals and then once the chemicals you know finally degrade within them

the other side. But during the experience, they seem very lucid. Sometimes they have conversations

with the figures that they meet. Also, it's interesting that in some of these ayahuasca

experiences, people report the same thing of serpents or this, that, and the other nature

aspects that come to meet them or talk to them and all. Now, when it comes to DMT, I've had some

experiences and all, they seem a little bit more like what I would call what an experienced

lucid dreamer might have.

As you go deeper and deeper into lucid dreaming, sometimes you have some very abstract experiences.

For example, instead of meeting a dream figure, you meet a ball of light or you meet a geometric

form of light that communicates something to you.

And so that's, you know, especially for someone like myself, when you're not expecting to meet a geometric form of light, it's kind of a wild thing.

You're consciously aware.

You interact with it.

But sometimes when you hear about the DMT experiences, sometimes it makes you feel like they've gotten to that level.

But what I do want to say, though, about lucid dreaming is lucid dreaming is kind of a natural progression through oneself, through your belief system, through your fears, because you realize that your fears kind of inhibit your exploration within the lucid dream state.

So until you resolve those fears, you can't go any deeper.

But in some of these chemically induced states, a lot of times the people are just, you know, the chemicals are pushing them into some really heavy-duty stuff.

And how much they're really learning from the experience or how much they're really growing from the experience is a little bit hard to tell.

but in lucid dreaming where it's kind of a natural progression you realize that

you know you naturally have to conquer your fears you naturally have to work through limiting

beliefs in order to grow this experience and go deeper and deeper and deeper yeah i definitely

get what you're saying a friend of mine made an interesting analogy he said that um that using

drugs to reach this type of state is kind of like being a tourist or getting a ticket to an

amusement park and kind of getting on the ride. And you take the ride, but when it's over,

your memory of it is not the same. And you're simply a tourist in these states. Whereas when

you're actually

meditating and doing the work to reach this state. Because I do believe that reaching a state of lucid dreaming and dreaming consciously, it does take this sort of mental exercise, it does take this mental work. So, I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

It's exactly the case.

In lucid dreaming, you realize that it's not really about control.

Because how can you say you control the lucid dream when you ask a dream figure, oh, do you know I'm dreaming you?

And then it gives you an unexpected response like, how do you know I'm not dreaming you?

So after a while, you realize a lucid dream isn't about control.

Sure, the lucid dreamer influences things, but fundamentally what lucid dreaming is about is aware relating.

You begin to relate to the contents of your subconscious or unconscious mind with greater awareness.

This aware relating begins to show you limiting beliefs you have, fears that you have, issues about focus, fixations that you might have.

And as you work through them, you begin to grow and grow and grow.

And you realize you're growing because you go more deeply into lucid dreaming.

I remember I was going so deeply into lucid dreaming that at one point, I began to see in the sky above me a banner flying saying,

Trust, nothing to fear.

And sometimes I'd hear a voice behind me say, Trust, nothing to fear.

because as you go deeper and deeper and deeper,

and this is something that Tenzin Nguyen Yuen Rinpoche,

who wrote the Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, said,

he said really the dream yoga path, the lucid dreaming path,

is of increasing fearlessness.

You know, you face your fears and you resolve them.

You work through them.

But so lucid dreaming is a very natural process.

It's one where you begin to see yourself and just not this ego waking self, but this larger awareness that you're part and parcel of.

Interesting.

I mean, you know, when we get into the science of dreaming and rapid eye movement, and we're talking about different neurotransmitters that are happening inside the brain.

I mean, do you think that perhaps in the future that there could be a sort of pill that?

that when I take melatonin, I tend to have deeper and more clear and even sometimes lucid dreams.

And do you think that there it's, I mean, do you think it's possible that we could invent something

that, that would allow us to lucid dream? Right, right. No, I definitely think, you know, there's,

there's basically three gateways into lucid dreaming. First is this kind of mental gateway

of learning practices, of being more aware, of suggesting before you sleep that you'll be aware

in the dream state and become lucid. But there's also this biochemical path. And, you know, for

some people, you know, melatonin might help. Some people take one of the B vitamins that helps to

enhance their memory right before they go to sleep. But there has been some work by Stephen

on a specific active ingredient in galantamine,

which is a drug used for people with Alzheimer's

to make them more aware and alert in waking physical reality.

But he realized that this galantamine also seemed to help people become lucidly aware.

Now, I do want to say that this is an herb that in the U.S. is legal that people can purchase.

But it's really a heavy-duty substance.

So I don't want people to take it just thinking that it's like B6 or something like that.

It's really a heavy-duty thing.

And it's also something that you take after you've been asleep for five hours or so.

You don't take it when you fall asleep.

You take it after you wake up after about five hours, and then you take it.

But for some people, it appears to help them become lucidly aware.

Now, one thing I do want to say, though, is I had a good friend, Ed Kellogg, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Duke.

And so he decided to investigate whether the placebo aspect plays a role here.

And so what he did, he got 20 capsules, and in half of them, he put this active ingredient, galantamine, and in half of them, he put something cornstarch or sugar or something.

I can't remember which.

But he numbered them all and gave them to a friend.

And then on particular days, he'd ask his friend for one of the pills, but telling his friend to keep the number so he'd know whether it's one of the galantamine pills or one of the placebo pills.

And Ed said that after he went through his study, he said that he actually had more lucid dreams on the night that he took the placebo.

And he said he couldn't believe it because on some of those nights, he had all the side effects of galantamine-induced lucid dreams.

You know, they're much longer.

They're more stable.

Sometimes they're a little bit more fantastical.

but sometimes you have bodily feelings of kind of feeling very hot and in the morning you're kind of drugged out like you've had –

Too much to drink.

Too much to drink, exactly.

And so what's interesting about this is that even though there might be a biochemical doorway, and even though someday we might have the perfect thing that gets us all into lucid dreaming just by pumping a pill, that still there's this placebo aspect that can't be avoided.

I mean, it's really fascinating because, I mean, the placebo trick is really interesting. It just shows you how powerful the mind is and how powerful our brains are that we're somehow able to produce this state by just taking like a sugar pill.

You know, it's interesting. When my first book came out, a fan of the book sent me his device as kind of a dream mask that you'd put on your eyes before you go to sleep.

And it would flash lights in your eyes when it realized you were dreaming.

And so he sent me this thing he had created, and it had all these strange instructions.

And the first night I set it up, but I woke up in the middle of the night and I realized the silly thing wasn't working.

And so then the next night, I set it up again and got it all configured.

And I thought, okay, this time it's really going to work.

And that night, I'm driving down 13th Street.

All of a sudden, I see there's a car in the ditch, and its lights are flashing red, red, red.

And then I think, oh, red lights.

This is a dream.

And I became lucidly aware and had a wonderful lucid dream.

But you know what?

When I woke up and looked at this little machine device, I realized once again it hadn't worked.

and that my mind, just by expecting red lights flashing, had created red lights flashing.

So you're right, this placebo aspect, the incredible creativity of belief and expectation in our mind often results in experience.

Yeah, yeah, it's intriguing to me.

I find this whole aspect of, you know, just that we go to sleep and that, you know, dreams represent these different structures where we're either resolving like some conflict or just kind of dumping information out that we experience through the day.

And then eventually getting to a point where we're able to control these states to find new information, to reach sort of these esoteric states where we're gaining, I don't know, just information that there's no way for us to know.

and perhaps even getting to a point where we are reaching states of encountering godlike images or archetypes.

Exactly.

When you get into lucid dreaming, you know, at first there's the kind of fun and play aspect that can be very distracting.

But after you've been a lucid dreamer for a few years, you realize you want to go further.

And one of the first things that people do is they begin to access creativity.

So like an artist might ask, show me a painting, the most incredible painting that I can create when I turn around.

And when they turn around, here's an incredible painting.

Or I remember a novelist told me that whenever he got stuck writing a novel, he would call out in a lucid dream, hey, novel figures, come here and tell me what's wrong with our novel.

And all of a sudden the novel characters would appear and they would tell him how to improve the novel or how to resolve it.

And so you can access creativity, but then you realize, well, wait a second, you can take this even further. You can begin to resolve emotional problems like phobias and anxiety and recurring nightmares.

Then there's a lot of people who have had experiences with improving their health, apparently, in lucid dreams.

You know, they become lucidly aware and they focus on healing something.

And in the morning they wake up and, you know, their back is better or their knees better or the fever has gone away.

And so it seems, you know, when you're at this really deep state, you can really influence things.

And then beyond that,

there's just learning about the nature of the unconscious mind. And finally, it's like you say, you can also do spiritual practices in a lucid dream. And oftentimes you realize that they're very powerful.

In fact, Buddhists would often say that an action performed at the level of a lucid dream is seven times more powerful than one performed at the waking state.

And I think they say that because you're at this deep level of the unconscious mind already.

You're, you know, when you're meditating during the day, you know, there's still maybe a part of you that's thinking, oh, yeah, I got to pick up my son at four o'clock.

And, oh, yeah, tomorrow I'm getting a haircut.

And you got all these little distractions occurring and, you know, your back hurts or whatever, your knee, this, that, or the other.

But when you're consciously aware in a lucid dream, oftentimes you have an enormous clarity of thought.

I mean, you're very focused.

the clarity is much more.

And so then when you intend to do something like meditate in a lucid dream,

the first time I meditated in a lucid dream, it just totally blew my mind.

I couldn't believe that you could achieve such a profound state within a minute or so.

And that was spending one minute meditating within a lucid dream.

There's a friend of mine, Claire Johnson, who says that she's repeatedly meditated within a lucid dream.

And she says now in her waking practice, what used to take her 20 minutes to get to a certain level, now, she says, because of these lucid dreams where she's meditated, she says it's like within five or six minutes she's at this incredible level that used to take her 20 minutes to get to.

So you see that lucid dreaming is really a revolutionary psychological tool because it can be used for anything, for creativity, for healing, for spiritual growth, for inner transformation.

But of course, you have to know how to go about it and kind of what the rules are.

Definitely. And Robert, we're approaching the end here, but when I was doing the research for the show, I tried to find the origins of dream analysis, like which cultures were studying the dreams the most.

And I found the Egyptians were really big on dreaming.

They thought that it was a technological force.

And there are these old hieroglyphs of this sort of winged bird with a human head coming to the person sleeping and kind of relaying this information.

So, I mean, it spans through human history that dreams are highly valued. And the work that you're doing and kind of making people aware of the power of their own minds and how to lucid dream is intriguing.

the depth of it is what's fascinating

when you become consciously aware within the unconscious

I mean if you know how to go about it

you've opened up a whole new vast field

oftentimes in those intro to psychology courses

you know they'll show the conscious mind

as kind of an iceberg

and everything above the water you know is consciousness

and then immediately below the water

well that's the subconscious

And then the bulk of things is the unconscious.

And when you get into lucid dreaming, you're consciously aware and able to explore the unconscious.

And for the other experienced lucid dreamers out there that they know, like I do, that it's utterly profound and also totally underappreciated by psychology and science.

But hopefully we're in the early innings and someday people will really see the revolutionary psychological tool that lucid dreaming is.

I truly hope so.

I mean, so, okay, so to kind of finish up here, I mean, what would be one kind of tactic?

I mean, I know you mentioned looking at your hands.

Is that the primary way of kind of reminding yourself that you're within a lucid dream?

You know, I think for beginners, that's a good way to start.

sleep, look at your hands, tell yourself, tonight my dreams, when I see my hands, I'll realize I'm

dreaming. And just focus on your hands, let your eyes cross or do whatever, but just keep focused

on them. But you have to do it every night, just like Ivan Pavlov rang the bell every time he fed

the dogs. But eventually, your hands are going to pop up in front of you. Also, you can do it during

the day. Just look at your hands briefly. Tonight my dreams, I'll see my hands, I'll realize I'm

dreaming, you know, just as a reminder. But what you do during the day, oftentimes through what

they call continuity theory, continues in the dream state. And so if you do this enough, this

kind of reality checking during the day, it'll appear in your lucid dreams. And also there's

just the power of suggestion. Tonight in my dreams, I'll be more critically aware. And when I see

something odd, I'll realize I'm dreaming. Just some suggestion like that also kind of primes a pump

and creates the proper atmosphere for lucid dreaming.

Yeah, and like you said, I mean, we spend a third of our lives dreaming,

so it's a big part of it.

I mean, Robert, where can people, you know, get your book, find you?

I mean, what are you up to?

Are you teaching any workshops anytime soon?

Yeah, yeah.

Halloween weekend, I'll be in Ireland doing a dream yoga, lucid dreaming workshop.

And so you can find out about what I'm up to at lucidadvice.com or you can, of course, find my books at major bookstores, independent bookstores or at amazon.com.

But the magazine that I co-edit is at luciddreammagazine.com.

And so all those places are ways that you can find out what I'm up to and kind of see what's happening in the lucid dream space.

Very cool.

And I found your book to be a huge resource.

covers all the aspects of lucid dreaming. It was a good read. Oh, thanks. Thanks. It's really

something that I'm totally passionate about. And also, I would just want to remind people, you know,

that by now I've been lucid dreaming for 40 years. And so my books are written with a lot of

experience. It's not something that I picked up three years ago and now I've written a book about

it. It's something I've spent decades working on. But I want to thank you so much for having me.

This has been a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for your presence here. This

We will see you guys next week or within a lucid dream if you're having one.

Thank you guys so much for listening.