Ep. 47 - Lucid Dreaming with Robert Waggoner

This episode of Synchronicity is brought to you by EatDreamB.com and specifically, a product called the Dream Bar. And let me tell you what the Dream Bar is. The Dream Bar is a delicious and healthy snack bar that promotes calmness and relaxation during the day and also promotes dream activity while you sleep. So if you're sleeping at night, that's what it's to do. If you're sleeping during the day, taking a nap, it'll also promote dream activity there. Hardy and Paul, the founders of EatDreamB, we're kind enough to send me a mix pack of the three types of flavors of the Dream Bar. The flavors are apple chamomile, tart cherry lemon bomb, and banana lavender.

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To dream bar, check out the Apple Camomail flavor, my favorite, tell 'em Noah sent you. All right guys, thanks for listening and here is the episode.

You realize that your thoughts, your beliefs, your expectations, your focus is immensely powerful in that moment and very much more so than in the waking state, this is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity, this is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

Synchronicity.

Synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. (upbeat music)

Welcome to episode 47 of Synchronicity. Welcome back, welcome for the first time. I don't know, I have no idea. My guest this week is Robert Wagner and Robert and I, Robert is a lucid dreaming expert, not only as a lucid dreamer, but also kind of espousing the, is espousing a word, espousing, espousing. It's like, let me ask you a question. Aspousing the gospel of lucid dreaming and how to do it, some of the practical benefits, why you would wanna do it, the scientific validity behind it. He's just kind of like a genius of lucid dreaming. So this conversation was super fun. Side note, it was such a fun conversation and we had more to cover that we've set up a second podcast for a couple weeks down the line.

So stay tuned for that. And for the people who have been asking about Stephen Campman, I'm gonna set something up with him to have him come back. Big fan of the dreams. So I, oh, oh, oh, and let me, a very special thank you to Rian. Rian, Rian, let me know. Email me for suggesting Robert for the podcast. I hadn't heard of Robert, didn't know anything about him and then he tuned me in, sent me a nice email saying, "Hey, I heard this guy. "I think he would be good for your podcast. "Why don't you check it out?" Check him out. So I did, got the audio book, started listening to it. I was like, oh, this is very great.

Set something up and now here are the fruits of those labors. So thank you, Rian, for that, or Rian, Rian. Please, please email me and tell me how to pronounce your name. Big thanks to everyone who is donating to synchronicity. I pointed out a few episodes ago that the book costs alone. We're almost $1,000 for the year. Good news. I am going to start up the book giveaways next week. We're going to do it. So those haven't ended. I just needed to take a little check and see what's going on. OK, let's talk about lucid dreaming and just dreaming a little bit, right? The podcast is called Synchronicity.

It's based on Carl Jung, his concept of synchronicity, primarily. And if you know anything about Carl Jung, you know dreams are a big part of what he did. He analyzed and basically kind of got to the bottom of what he termed the unconscious, which is this, eventually, the collective unconscious. But in individuals, the unconscious, this aspect of consciousness that sits below our threshold of awareness. And it actually, his theory, Freud also discovered the unconscious. They had different theories about what it was and what its function may be. But Jung said, listen, this actually dictates quite a bit of what happens in our life and our experiences and our perceptions.

So we want to kind of get to the bottom of this. How do we investigate the unconscious? Things that are by definition below our level of consciousness. So what Carl Jung was a big fan of is amplification of dreams. So he would listen to people's dreams, he would have them recall them, and then he would know symbols that would exist or happen in the dreams. And because he was basically a genius of all time, he was so well versed in so many different cultures, symbols, and what the meanings and implications of those would be is he would often be able to latch on to one, amplify it, basically bring it to the forefront of consciousness.

And they say, hey, you know, you dreamt of a snake. Well, a snake means this. It also means this. Are you dealing with this type of issue? So there is a whole process of what he's done. I've never done Jungian psychology, but I would totally go to Jungian. Because I think the dream analysis is for someone who's very competent and good at doing it, so cool. If you're interested in that type of stuff, I think one of the best people to check out is Marie-Louis von Franz, who is a disciple of Jung and a brilliant mind in her own right. Post Jungian, probably my favorite. So yeah, she's great. I've mentioned her book, Psyche and Matter, so check that out.

So the reason I like dreams so much is there seems to be a parallel between dreams and psychedelics or meditating heavily, or often, you can kind of tap into what seems like another level of consciousness or reality. I am personally of the belief that this is a tangible, real place. And I think it has enough of what I need to know, what I need to see to determine that it's real. It has an empirical reality. There's enough factors to constitute that I am happy to call that a real place. Yes, it's not a physical world. We don't interact with it in the same way, but it exists in my mind. I will expand on that in a later episode.

But essentially, I do think that there are these places and these realms and these dimensions that we can go to and really either bring back some wisdom integrated into our lives, check into stuff that maybe we can't access consciously through our regular intellect. So that is why I've always been fascinated in dreams. Also, just as a kid, everyone dreams. Like, what is going on there, right? Like, how are we not talking about our dreams all the time? Now, part of the problem is, is when we have a dream, if we're not experienced dream interpreters or we don't have enough access to symbols to know what they mean, when you're trying to relay a dream to someone, it's not always the most interesting thing because it's like, what are you talking about?

That's not really particularly interesting to me. That being said, I find dreams to be fascinating. I always like to hear what people's dreams are. You know what, send me an email at Noah@syncpodcast.com and tell me some of your dreams. Love hearing about people's dreams. But we don't really value them in society, right? We value waking life, this state of consciousness where you're listening to this now, this is what we value. And when I say we, that's the royal way. So, you know, Robert has this very interesting idea that when you can lucid dream, which you'll hear what it is, lucid dreaming is essentially becoming aware of dreams as you're doing it, as you're dreaming.

There's actually a ton of practical benefits that you can get out of that, both for, you know, psychological states, maybe, you know, emotional healing, even physical healing. We get into that too, which I think is really a fascinating pursuit, because intellectual pursuit, because like if we can heal ourselves in our dreams, our physical bodies, what does that say about what we believe? So, there's a lot of cool stuff that goes on in this episode. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Robert has two excellent, excellent books. I have listened to 80% of one of them, and I've read and scanned the first one.

His first book is called Lucid Dreaming Gateway to the Inner Self. So check that out. And the second book is Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple, Tips and Techniques for Insight, Creativity and Personal Growth. So, that one kind of bridges the gap of, well, Lucid Dreaming is the thing that exists. Here's how you do it, and here's some of the reasons you may want to do it. Okay, that's what this episode is about. I have one little bonus thing to point out. If you stay past the episode, past the music at the very end, you're gonna hear a little clip of one of my favorite speakers, Alan Watts. And if you wanna know why you're gonna hear that at the end of the episode, you'll have to listen to the end of the episode, or you can skip ahead and see what it is.

But there's a reason for it, and I'm happy to announce what that reason is at the end of the episode. So, without, oh, rate and review, whatever. If you wanna rate and review, do it, if not, whatever. Getting better and better at these. Okay, without further ado, here is Robert Wagner. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) How you doing?

Good, good, how are you?

I'm really good, I'm excited for this conversation. Thank you, by the way, for coming on.

Oh, no, I'm happy, and so it sounds like you have a new child, a new little baby, is that right?

Yeah, all right. We just started sleep training last night, so. (laughing) I'm trying to, what's weird is, is I'm actually remembering my dreams pretty consistently, at least one of them, because I have to wake up, basically, every two hours, (laughing) so I have a lot of opportunities to get it done, but yeah, yeah, thanks, it's really, it's quite the little trip.

Oh, good.

All right, yeah, thank you for coming on. I guess we'll get started. I will say, like, so normally, I'm pretty free willing on this podcast, and I expect this one to be somewhat like that, but I am so incredibly interested in lucid dreaming, and dreams in general, that actually wrote down a bunch of questions, because I've been listening to the practical guy to dreaming on Audible, so I've been listening to that. Well, I've been walking around and just jotting things down, and it's wonderful, and it's really pragmatic, which is what I love. So, yeah, just thank you again for coming on.

I'm happy to be on, it's cool, it's a lot of fun.

Oh, great, okay, so I guess a good place to start is, for lucid dreaming, just give, could you give a little brief overview of what lucid dreaming is?

So lucid dreaming is when you realize within a dream that you're dreaming, you consciously know this is a dream, and it's something that's been scientifically validated since about the mid-70s, what some sleep researchers did or some dream researchers did, they realized that lucid dreaming existed, and so they brought people into the sleep lab, they had them, when they became consciously aware within the dream, move their eyes left to right eight times, and signal that they were consciously aware in the dream, and that was picked up by the RIM Polygraph paper, and it was kind of the evidence that God lucid dreaming started.

Okay, awesome, so that was mainly for our listeners' benefit, and I imagine most people listening probably know what lucid dreaming is, I spoke, I'm a huge Carl Jung fan, which is not specifically related to lucid dreaming, but it has to do with dreams, and if you're into dreams, as soon as you some people have experiences where they're like, oh, I was in a dream, so I imagine a lot of people know what it is, but for those who don't, that is a wonderful description, you're aware that you're dreaming, okay. Next question is, how did you get into lucid dreaming?

So if you can imagine this, back in the mid-70s, I was a high school student, and I was reading this book Journey to Excellent by Carlos Castaneda, one of my brothers who is going to the University of Kansas at the time and brought it home, and I just started to read it. And in this book, Castaneda, who's a UCLA graduate student, is informed by his shamanic teacher, Don Juan, that he should try to find his hands in the dream state and become lucidly aware, and so here I am, this junior in high school, and I knew about the power of suggestions, so every night before I'd go to sleep, I'd just look at my hands while telling myself, tonight my dreams, I'll see my hands and realize I'm dreaming.

Tonight my dreams, I'll see my hands and realize I'm dreaming. And on the third night of doing this for about five minutes each night, I'm walking through my high school hallway, and all of a sudden, just like they're spring-loaded, boom, my hands pop right in front of my face, and I realize, oh God, this is a dream. And so I kind of, in a way, kind of conditioned myself to every time I saw my hands to think this is a dream, and my, it was a utterly profound moment though.

I can imagine, and so like, what, what was it, after you do this, like I will say, this is my experience with lucid dreaming. I've experienced it, it's infrequent at best. I know a lot of people, my stepdad is someone who's an active lucid dreamer, he's done the hand technique, he knows everything, he's been doing it for years, as part of a spiritual practice too, which is I definitely want to get into some of the dream yoga stuff. But what, so once you're kind of train yourself to do this, I've never actively trained to lucid dream. The best thing I could say I do is I've started in the past few weeks to ask myself, am I dreaming throughout the day, and really trying to notice, and I've actually, this has been a wonderful mindfulness practice as well, 'cause it kind of sucks you in to the moment, which is, there's so many crossovers for dreaming and being mindful and awareness and consciousness.

So when you realize that you can lucid dream, you can somewhat bring it on for yourself, what do you do next? (laughing)

You know, you have to realize that just because you can jump into the lake doesn't mean you can swim. (laughing) And so just the fact that you become lucid, I mean that's the first stage, a very important stage, you step through the door, you're consciously aware within the dream, but then you need to know how to respond to the dream environment. And for a lot of people, it takes a little bit of doing to get there. And so I always tell people in my workshops and my lectures that the first thing you gotta realize when you become lucidly aware is don't get too excited, because if you get too excited, normally you'll immediately wake up.

And so you have to be sure you modify your emotions, modulate them. And then the next thing, I really encourage people to enhance their awareness, because if you can increase your awareness and kind of get settled in that dream space, lucidly, then you're much more likely to make some progress forward. And then the third thing is you have to maintain your focus because just the fact that you become lucid doesn't mean you're gonna stay lucid for the next 20 minutes. If you get too engaged by what you see in the dream state, then suddenly you might start to think of it as reality again and get lost in it and forget that this is a dream.

And so you have to do all these kind of three things if you're going to make it the first base and lucid dreaming.

So what I love about when I hear you describe about the things you need to do to kind of stabilize the lucid state while you're dreaming is, is it immediately makes me think of the Tibetan basic, where dreams fit into that, which is considered a bardo state within the state of living. And one of the things I absolutely love about that, I've spoken about this briefly is the, they refer to when we go to sleep and the dreams we have is example dreams. And then they refer to our waking life as the actual dream. And then they refer to when we die is, that's the dream at the end of time. And I think it's just a wonderful, it's a reminder that all of those things you just mentioned about how to stabilize yourself in a lucid dream state, they actually also applied a waking life too.

Like if you are in a very difficult emotional situation and you lose your cool, it's harder to react with that. Even if you have the focus, it's just hard because you're kind of, you're shaking it, right? It can collapse as you put it when you're talking about dreams.

Right, and for a lot of us lucid dreamers, we call it living lucidly, or lucid living. When we begin to transfer what we've discovered and learned about the nature of the mind in the lucid dreaming state, into our waking state. Because for example, in a lucid dream, you see how important expectations are. So like if I've become lucidly aware and decide that I'm gonna fly through the wall because I know it's composed of dream stuff, if I expect to fly through it easily, then I will. But I remember once I did that, I was the lucid dream started out in a big auditorium and I flew through the wall and went exploring this big campus, and then I decided to come back to the original starting point of the lucid dream.

And so I was flying back to that hall, but on the other side, the bricks looked more solid. (laughing) And even though one part of me knows it's a lucid dream and that this is dream stuff, another part of me is perceiving, oh yeah, it looks more solid on this side. And what was funny is that then I got stuck halfway in. And I started to laugh because it was such a preposterous thing to be half in and out of a wall. And I pushed myself through. But it just shows that when you expect trouble in a lucid dream state, it immediately materializes. And so that's what you realize that in the waking state, you have to think about your expectations too.

If you go to the boss, planning to ask for a raise, but you expect not to get it, don't even bother.

Right, right, right.

You're already in a negative--

You're creating it, yeah.

You're creating it. And so that's how I think it connects with Buddhism and many respects is it shows how the things that we're attached to, the things that we're afraid of, that we're averse to, all of that figure into the mental creations, whether it's dreaming, whether it's waking life, whether it's the afterlife, whatever, it's all a mental creation.

It is, and it seems like it's more like a matter of degree. So in physical reality, it's a gross reality. Things are, you know, slowly, it's a big, see everything seems solid. We know it at the atomic and subatomic level, it's not that at all. Like we know that this stuff is mainly space and emptiness and we barely are beginning to understand how quantum mechanics even impacts our world around us, let alone our consciousness, whatever that is. But in dream worlds what you're describing is, and everyone has experienced this who remembers their dreams and you remember your dreams, even if not frequently, when you think of something, it happens.

Or you think of this and oh, suddenly you're there. And this is also described in Tibetan Buddhism, especially as what happens after death. This is why they say be aware and stabilize your mind in life because when you die, you don't have a body anymore. So things can just manifest out of nothingness and if you're filled with things and confusing thoughts, that's what's gonna appear in front of you. So let's talk about the dream world or environment and maybe the subtle body that exists there. So your experience in this stuff, what are your observations? What's going on there? And then also follow up to that is how does that practically, how can we integrate that into our waking lives?

Okay, so first, the beautiful thing about lucid dreaming is when you become consciously aware that you're in a dream, now all of a sudden, instead of having to just naturally and reactively follow the dream script, all of a sudden you realize you have choices. You can decide what you want to do, where you want to go. If you want to explore, you can explore. If you can remember a waking experiment, you can do a waking experiment. You can learn about this area, whether you wanna call it the subconscious mind or the alternate dimension of dreams or whatever it is. And so quickly, what I think is very important that people understand is you don't control it.

Oftentimes, people talk about lucid dreaming, "Oh, you mean you control the dream?" And that's something you really have to realize is that case because you quickly see that now that you're aware, you're relating to all the things with greater awareness. You're relating to the dream figure with greater awareness, the environment, and also the potential, the unexpressed potential that exists there because you could go fine, you could just ignore all the dream figures and ask a question of the larger awareness. But as you start to do this, it's like you were saying a moment ago, "It is a matter of degree."

Again, in my way, to begin to understand, "Oh, these are the rules, if I do this, the dreams are gonna end." Or if I think like this, then I can make this materialize. And if I think like that, then I can make that go away. And all of a sudden, you start to realize the power of the mind in creating the experience, the reality that you face. But the beautiful thing was, so in 1981, I remember I was a university student and I happened to be in the library, looked at the psychology today because I was a psychology student, and there was Stephen LeBurg's first article in Popular Press about the scientific evidence for lucid dreaming.

And I was just totally stunned and blown away because finally, somebody had provided the evidence for it because I've been telling friends, "Oh, yeah, yeah." You can't become conscious and unconscious, are you crazy?

Right, right.

But finally, someone came through with the evidence. And from then, I just kept exploring deeper and deeper.

Yeah, I mean, it seems, and I wanna delve into some of those experiences too, but another thing that I, as I was listening to this book, you touch on this concept that I think has massive implications, not just for lucid dreaming, but also just for our waking consciousness, which is this projected mental overlay, right? These layers of beliefs and complexes or whatever it is that typically are completely unnoticed to us. Like we like to think as the relatively small ego that we know what's going on. We've got a good handle on everything around us, this is what it is, but you're actually talking about in the dream states how it becomes even more clear that these projected mental overlays impact the landscape around you.

So could you talk a little bit about that?

Right, so in a dream, in a lucid dream, you quickly realize that there's no escaping yourself. There's no escaping your mind. You know, it's like a buckaroo bonsai I used to say and the adventures of buckaroo bonsai is that, no matter where you go, there you are. I mean, you really have this sense of, okay, I'm lucid in a dream. I see a guy in a black leather coat. Now with that moment, I think, wait a second, he looks dangerous, then normally he'll turn around in the lucid dream and he'll have a knife or a gun or whatever, you know, seems likely. But if I take the same guy and think, oh, he looks like a pastor, then all of a sudden he'll turn around and have a clerical collar and all that.

And so you realize that your mind on a subtle level is projecting out your beliefs about what's possible, about your expectations, about what's going to happen next. And it's about your focus and your intent. All of that is being expressed kind of basically without your conscious awareness. But in a lucid dream, once you begin to see how important that is, then you can begin to play with your beliefs and play with your focus. For example, I was on a Iowa Public Radio show and I suggested to people that if they wanted to play around in a lucid dream, just announce, hey, in a lucid dream, there's no gravity, because it's a mental space, there's obviously no gravity, you know, why does a lucid dream or fall in a lucid dream?

I mean, it doesn't make any sense because there's fundamentally no gravity. And so the next time they had me on the show, a woman called up and said, oh, I did that in a lucid dream. I announced, hey, there's no gravity here. And then all of a sudden, I floated to the top of the ceiling and I couldn't get down. (laughing) So it shows the impact, when you start to change your mind, when you change your beliefs in the lucid dream, then suddenly things become possible. But again, like this woman, she needed to understand how you focus and use your mind to manipulate within the lucid dream.

So the question is, for me, I am a big believer of the interplay between psyche and matter. This is something I've explored a lot. On this podcast, it's something I read about a lot. I personally believe that what goes on internally with us actually impacts our physical reality, not obviously not in the exact same way it would in a dream. What you're talking about is this instantaneous mental, since you're in a space that your mental consciousness is interacting with and there's no body or physical or like you're saying laws of nature that really are imposed on it, it's almost an instantaneous thing.

Which this is talked about in wisdom traditions for thousands and thousands of years, this ability and these subtle bodies and when there's no physical body, things happen. So it's something that's obviously been going on for a while. I am always interested in, well, how do we take that? Like you said, there's a lag, right? There's a lag, it seems, in regular reality between when we think of something. Now, one of the reasons this podcast is called synchronicity is these events do happen in waking life that seemingly pierce the veil of what's going on. So a coincidence, some people call it, can be so profound that it creates like a peak state like oh my God, like this is clearly something, it's a transcendent element.

So I do think these landscapes exist below the threshold of our normal consciousness. What has been your experience in terms of exploring the dream world and has it had an impact on your waking life in a substantial way?

Definitely, so when I give talks and lectures like the university students, oftentimes I'll talk about why someone would want to lose a dream. I mean, obviously on the face of it, it's a lot of fun. You can fly around, you can go through walls, you can have lucid dream sex and all that kind of stuff. But when you start to get into it more deeply, you realize that as you explore the dream world, you can use it to access creativity. We oftentimes people will talk about the subconscious mind as this source of creativity and all. Well, if you're consciously aware within a lucid dream, why not try to access that creativity?

And so a lucid dreamer might do that by becoming consciously aware and then shouting out to the dream, hey, when I go into that next room, I'm going to see art that I can create. And they open up the door and there in the room is some incredible art they can create. Or a lucid dreamer told me about he writes novels for a living. He became lucidily aware and he shouted out for his novel characters to come to him. And when they came, he asked them, what's wrong with this novel? And so you can imagine the dream figures telling him what's wrong with a novel. But there's also examples of people using lucid dreams to work on programming code and that kind of thing.

Because when you're at this deep level, you have that possibility. But when you get to this area of psyche and matter interacting, so first you can wake with that creativity and do it. Like the guy, I talk in my book about Dustin Lucas, he's a wonderful artist in Montreal. When he sought out art in the lucid dream state and he found this incredible subject to paint, he said that the process of painting it, it was like it went up 50% faster than normal. He said it was like it already existed in his head. And so it was to put it into the material world was that much easier. But the other area where exploring the dream world is helpful and it also gets to this issue of psyche and matter is lucid dreamers have realized that within a lucid dream, you can begin to work on emotional healing.

So you might work on a recurring nightmare or you might work on a phobia in the very safe realm of lucid dreaming. And after you do that a few times all of a sudden the phobia is gone or the recurring nightmares have ceased. And even some psychotherapists and psychiatrists have used this with their patients who have recurring nightmares from PTSD. But also there's the issue of physical health. In my books, I talk about people becoming lucidly aware and intending for their physical body to change, to be healed. And some of these people wake up with profound changes in their physical, so this kind of shows you that interesting, when you're consciously aware in a lucid dream, you can actually apparently influence the physical matter of your body.

Yes.

And also issues and areas where you might need creativity or the resolution of problems. And so that's a really a beautiful part of lucid dreaming. And I think why it's so fascinating and inspiring to just, you know, millions of people.

Yeah, and I don't find that surprising at all. I had a very intense, really hyper focused example of how the unconscious can actually impact physical health. And I had neck pain and back pain, like a couple of years ago. And I went to the doctor, oh yeah, herniated disc. You have a little bit, take the steroid level, did this for a while. Then three people at once, out of the blue, three people told me, take out this book by Dr. Sarno. It's this thing, this Freudian principle. It's not a huge Freud fan. So I was like, I'll check it out, okay, I read it. So as I'm reading it, he's talking about how essentially the premise is that unconscious rage basically fuels this.

He has a name for it. It basically can oxidizes the muscles and it fires off these pain signals. And it's actually confirmed by belief. So when you go to the doctor and say, hey doctor, my neck hurts, my back hurts. And the doctor says, oh yeah, look at this structural damage. It's locked in. And he says, it's also clever enough to realize that if you make a weird movement or something, your mental can actually make, your brain can make that connection and even further solidify it. So I'm reading this, I'm like, yeah, this makes sense. And I'm a pretty woo-woo person at times and I believe in mind over matter and all of this stuff.

But I am convinced that this is like some physical problem with me. So I'm getting to the point in the book where it talks about for some people, this pain won't move around the body as you start to explore it. And it's really just about a lot of the techniques are just knowing that it's psychically developed, that it's emanating from there, thinking about things that could be stressing you out whether positive or negative, writing them down, being aware of them, doing some late meditation or breathing exercises. So I'm doing this stuff and lo and behold, as I'm reading this, the pain shoots to my leg.

Then it shoots over to my pelvis, then it shoots over to the other side of my neck and I'm like, okay, this is now, now I'm freaked out, right? This is like getting dropped into like the void and having no idea. Much I'm sure like a dream landscape that you have no control over. So I read the book, I finished it. Within a week and a half, pain is gone completely. And as I'm reading the book, it basically goes into this theory. His theory is that even immune diseases are also caused by these unconscious, unresolved either aggression, rage, emotions that are there and able to be explored. And if you can actually work through those, it can have like an actual healing effect on the body.

And I do believe that's why I think that what you're talking about is incredibly powerful because, and I wanna get to what you actually think dreams are, but I mean, if we take it as some emanation or manifestation of the unconscious, that's where this stuff is actually happening, right? Us thinking about it and consciously, we can shine some light of awareness on it, but like this is actually rooted down below our threshold of perception. This is an amazing thing you're talking about.

Right, and so the beautiful thing about lucid dreaming is that it's a tool. It's a tool you can use to access creativity. It's a tool you can use to have fun. It's a tool that you can use for emotional healing, a tool you can use for physical healing. Even a tool that you can use for spiritual exploration and discovery of the nature of the mind. And so I think the beautiful thing about lucid dreaming relative to what you're saying is, is that in psychology, we throw around these terms like subconscious and unconscious, but what the hell are they? I mean, what does it mean? How do they function?

What's the reality of the unconscious mind? Now there's some theoretical ideas out there and Freud had his and Jung had his and the various followers through in their two cents. But what I'm saying, the beautiful thing about lucid dreaming is that when you're consciously aware at that level in the dream state, whether you wanna call that the subconscious mind or the unconscious mind, you can explore, you can experiment. And by virtue of your experiments, you can compare them with other lucid dreamers. And that's the fascinating thing. Well, when I go around and talk to lucid dreamers from around the world, they're all basically discovering the same principles that the dream reality functions like this has this basic structure and so on and so forth.

And so that's the beautiful thing about it. It allows you to explore all that. In my book, there's a wonderful example kind of like what you read with Dr. Sarno is a woman had a really bad tenonitis of the ear and she tried everything out there. She changed her diet, she did this, she did all these things. And finally, she decided maybe she should try and a lucid dream to resolve it because she had read somewhere that some guy had some idea that tenonitis was related to repressed pain, I think was the gentleman's theory. But anyway, in a lucid dream, she announced that all of her pain now be expressed.

So it could be expressed in the lucid dream. And all of a sudden she found herself just totally frozen and everything totally frozen and then something insider willed up and she acknowledged and broke through all the repressed pain and when she woke up, the tenonitis was gone. And we're talking to someone who had it for like two years or something like that. She said she was jumping on the couch calling all of her friends, my God, the tenonitis is gone. But it just shows that when we get down to this deep level, we may begin to learn about how the psyche can influence the physical body to make a coordinated dispain, basically disappear or make tenonitis or some of these things that oftentimes resist common medical work.

Yeah, and I think the real benefit there is that you can have this direct experience. So I think a lot of times people can have, using often overuse words, spiritual path, spirituality, like that, like you said, it can be a very nebulous term. But when you have an experience, it doesn't matter if it's what the words are using to describe it are nebulous, you know what it's like and you can actually consciously be aware of some of these landscapes. Okay, so now I wanna get to some of the big questions and your personal take on some of these things. What do you think dreams are?

Okay, so here's my idea and I've never heard anyone else express this idea. So I'll just say this as a first. So think of the self, you have the emotional self and the physical self, the intellectual self, the spiritual self, the social self, you have all these levels of self and then there's the nervous system and the respiratory system and all this. Somehow, all of these segments, all of these aspects need to communicate. And when the ego body is focused and the 18 hours of being aware, so focused on just manipulating through physical reality, it's like I think what's happening is all this communication needs to get resolved somehow.

And so every night, all of us have about two, two and a half hours of dream during the sleep state. And oftentimes what's interesting is once I feel, so dream serve as a platform for communication, all these various levels of the self are able to communicate. And sometimes they communicate in visual dream symbols that have no connection to our waking ego self or waking ego self says, you know, what the F was that like? (laughing) And so the reason I say that is oftentimes during the dream process or immediately thereafter, all of a sudden all these neurological things just begin to happen. So all these neurological communications are beginning to happen by virtue of what happened in that dream.

And so as we go throughout the night, the dreams get longer and then in these longer dreams, the ones that we have right before waking normally, oftentimes we'll have our ego self is more involved. So all of a sudden it'll respond to things. So, you know, if Frankenstein appears, it'll, if it's in a habitual mode, it'll run in fear.

Right, right.

Or maybe it'll fight it. Or maybe if it's more lucid, it'll think, whoa, wait a second, Frankenstein, you know, he's a fictional character. You know, this must be a dream.

Yeah.

And so, so here in this state, communication is exchanged, energy is exchanged. And so that's why dreaming is absolutely a fundamental importance. I recall there was some study, I think, from back in the '60s where they had these poor lab rats and they kept them from dreaming.

So they- (laughing)

That's so mean.

They fed them well, they allowed them to sleep, but as soon as they got the dreams. (laughing) And I think within seven days, all the lab rats died.

Yeah, I'm not surprised.

So they were getting some sleep time and all that, but there's something about the functionality of dreaming that made it incredibly important. So, dreams serve as a platform for communication, of information amongst these various aspects of the self. And also, I would say, the larger awareness or the self with a capital S must be. And the Jungian thought. And it also allows for an exchange of energy as well, because sometimes energy is exchanged in dreams and you wake up. So that's what I'd say dreams are all about.

So, and I wanna get to some of the precog stuff that dreams can do and somehow time and the linearity of it doesn't really seem to exist there. Do you think, though, before that, do you think dreams have, like, do you identify with the conception that it's another level of reality? That it is a self-existing place or is it a function that is kind of this integrative communicative tool? What do you think?

You know, as you get deeper into lucid dreaming, most people begin to think, what constitutes reality? How many people do you need to--

Yeah. (laughing)

I mean, you get down to some very basic, you know, basic questions. You know, the thing we call reality. So, you know, phenomenologists would talk about experienced experience, you know, in a dream. I had an experience or a wake. I had an experience. - Right.

And after death, you know, maybe I'll have an experience and eat grandma and grandpa and the whole thing. And so, you know, you're just basically dealing with experience. And so, lucid dreaming calls all that into question.

Right.

And that's the beautiful thing about it. I don't think it's something that we can really figure out here, you know, or plan out, you know, what constitutes reality. (laughing) But it does help to look at experience and take it from there. Because whether you're having a hallucination or a dream or a lucid dream or an after death or whatever, you know, it's still an experience. It has validity as an experience. And so, let's take a look at that there. And then, if we want to qualify a certain group as real, you know, then we have to qualify the certain other group as experience, but not physical.

Yeah, yeah. (laughing)

And then, okay, well, it's not physical. Okay, well, if I imagine this, okay, imagine something. Well, then I'm in non-physical. And if I, you know, anyway, it gets very comfortable.

Yeah, yeah. The malleability, especially when we're used to this kind of how things work in this world and it doesn't hold up, it can get a little bit tricky for people.

Okay, so what about the experience of, I've had this happen a couple of times where I will have the same dream or the same characteristics of someone who recently, either in the past week or so, or, you know, that night, had basically the same dream. And then you communicate it later. This is also something that people can experience again on psychedelics, not strong, too heavy or parallel, that they can have a shared trip, so to speak, that is independently verifiable and not just like, you know, some cues that's going on and people can pick up onto it. What do you think is happening there in that type of dream scenario?

Yeah, you know, so there's a number of ways you could talk about this, you know, like, let's say a husband and wife have a similar dream. You know, it might be that they're both facing similar circumstances and their minds in the same spot. And so we could explain that one away as kind of, you know, oh, their head is just in the same place, you know, they're sharing the same waking experience.

But then you have these other experiences like people separately wake up knowing something.

Right.

And then they communicate to each other and they go, whoa, you dreamt that too? And they go, yeah.

And so that is when you move into this kind of area of mutual dreams, you know, where you almost have to posit that either in dreams functions as some sort of alternate dimension where most of the time we're in our own dream bubble, but some of the time we actually merge bubbles with other dreamers and pass on information and communication. In my first book, Lucid Dreaming Gateway to the Inner Self, I have a whole chapter on mutual lucid dreaming and trying to do some experiments with some friends. Normally what happens though is one person becomes lucid and the others aren't lucid. And so the one person, like my friend, Ed, he called me up one morning and he asked me to tell him my dreams from the night before and then he focused in on one and he goes, okay, in that dream, the guy you're sitting across from, is he wearing a blue suit with a little white handkerchief?

And I go, oh yeah, yeah. And he goes, okay, and the woman sitting to your right, was she wearing, you know, this dress with these flowers and had glasses on here? And I go, yeah, yeah, how did you know that? And he goes, well, tell me about the guy sitting to your left and I go, I know it was a guy, but I just can't remember what he looked like. And he goes, well, I was in your dream last night and checking that out and that's how I can explain all of this. And so when you have these moments, it really makes you wonder about the nature of thing. You know, is there some sort of telepathic communication?

Is there some sort of kind of new age, collective unconscious where things passed on? So anyway, same dream, shared dreams. It's one of those areas that deserves some exploration. (laughing) That's all I can say, it deserves exploration.

Well, what I love about those experiences, shared dreams, precognitive dreams, and this is something that Jung explored a lot in his synchronicity, you know, 'cause he was examining every, he was asked, he was basically, for people who are unfamiliar with what Jung primarily did, is he would amplify people's dream imagery. So to get to archetypal layers and really things that maybe would go unnoticed to the conscious mind. And so he was always talking about dreams with people and he would notice these trends and like they would be precognitive. And he would have, he basically was in the position of knowing a lot about other people's dreams, which is a fascinating place to be in.

What I love about the mutual dream stuff and all of this is it loosens the hold on our conceptual reality of how we like to think the world works. And I think that's a very, very valuable place to be because that's when you can actually start to explore, gain insight, you drop kind of your presumptions and your assumptions. And it's really, really great. The other thing I wanna point out with this just in talking with you is there's a playfulness and there's a levity that seems to go along with any type of consciousness exploration, whether it's dreams, whether it's like a delis, whether it's a meditate.

And I think that is a quality that seems to emerge from deep inner exploration. It's not this, yes, see, we could say it's a serious endeavor. A lot of people get in, like, you know, the Tibetan Buddhists, what they're basically saying dream yoga is is, hey, this is a bardo state, go in there and start meditating. Start meditating away for the benefit of all sentient beings. You can do it while you're sleeping. Don't be lazy on the job. There's a lot of different ways to use this stuff, but there's an approach and something that kind of manifests from it that seems to be not serious. Don't hold rigidly to concepts and things.

And this loosening is something that I noticed spread across a lot of these different pursuits. It's fascinating.

Well, one thing I'll say is lucid dreaming, if you begin to explore it, it'll make you become less loose about hard and fast, subjective reality. I mean, all of a sudden, you'll realize that even though throughout the day, it all seems linear, sometimes there's non-linear moments that occur, and you just get looser about, you know, the nature of time, the nature of space, you get information and all that kind of stuff. Because this interview is happening a couple of days after 9-1-1, I just want to tell you that about five months before 9-1-1 actually occurred, I began to have these horrific dreams.

And the first one was, I think I wrote it down, it was either March 13th that year or May 13th, I wrote down the two of us in France, meaning my wife and I, the start of a war event. And the war event was the collapsing of skyscrapers. And I remember I woke up from the dream thinking, you know, what does this mean? But then I began to have stranger dreams, the closer it got to 9-1-1. By the time August came around of that year, I was telling my wife that something's coming, it's either like Pearl Harbor or the start of the Great Depression. And my wife goes, well, what do we do? And I go, well, that's a strange thing.

My dreams show me that it doesn't directly affect us. And so here's the two crazy things that happened in the waking world during that time. About a month before 9-1-1, and I have the page evidence to show this, I went into my stock account and sold my United Airlines stock. I just knew I had to dump that.

Yeah, yeah.

The other thing I did, my wife and I were going to France and visit a friend, I booked a ticket. And so I'm sitting there in my room, in the living room, in the middle of the day, I'm totally awake and I go, okay, we're gonna leave on such and such a date and we'll come back from Paris on September 13th. And my body started shaking in the chair. Like someone was actually physically shaking. And so being a lucid dreamer, I kind of took that as a lucid moment and thought, okay, September 14th, we'll come back. And my body's just shaking again, I thought, son of a gun. Okay, we'll come back September 15th.

And my body did nothing. I said, okay, we're booking it for the 15th. We were on the very first flight, leaving Charles De Gaulle on American Airlines from there to Chicago. If I had chosen any of those days earlier, we would have been part of the three or 4,000 standby passengers and God, we would have spent another week in a messed up situation. But what I'm trying to say here is that when you go to a dream yoga monastery, apparently the first lesson they teach these youngsters who go there is all of this exists as a dream. And so what they're saying, they're not saying that this is an important--

Right, right.

Is all fantasy or--

Hugely important distinction, hugely, yes, yes.

What they're trying to say is that all of this is a collective mental creation. It's a collective mental creation. And if you get your mind to the right place eventually, you can begin to get informed, you can get preview of coming attractions. Whether it's in the dream state, whether it's in intuitions or impulses, you just suddenly know, oh, I shouldn't do this. And then things happen.

So that's the beautiful thing about it is, it'll restructure your viewpoint and begin to show you a waking experience in a different framework.

Yes, I love that. It really does it. You can drop into an intuitive and flow state a lot easier when you're not, really, I don't even want to talk too much more about that because I think people should experience it and see how it happens rather than trying to color the perspective. So I have four questions to end with, three relatively quick ones and then one relatively normal size question. So first question, what's your favorite color?

You know, probably blue.

Love it, love blue. What's your favorite number?

You know, seven popped into mind, but 13 is one of these curious numbers that keeps showing up in my lucid dream.

Oh, very interesting. So just to let you know, my mom tells me my first favorite number was seven. 13 is my favorite number by far, my favorite number. Okay, and what is your favorite animal?

Wow, I saw something in my mind's eye, but then a crocodile became more realistic. So I'm going to say crocodile.

Cool.

Those things are huge.

They are big, they are really big. All right, so the last question, and thank you so much for doing this, it's really been such a pleasure. I love hearing about this stuff and your wisdom on this subject is immeasurable. So a practical tip that you could offer listeners that has helped you in your life in any facet, what's a practical tip?

You know, a practical tip, if you're more mindfully aware during the day, you'll be more mindfully aware at night and more mindfully aware in your dreams and more likely to become lucidly aware. So mindfulness in and of itself is a value and it's not just being, having your eyes wider open or constantly looking left or right. It's been mindful of what's going on in the physical realm as it is and possibly as it is symbolically, but also what's going on interior, innerly. Because oftentimes, if you begin to pay attention and become more mindful, you'll realize that you're getting insights, impressions, feelings, and sometimes interesting commentary that's occurring at subconscious levels.

But it takes a while to get there, but mindfulness is where it's at. Be more mindful during the day, then you'll be much more mindful in the dream state and more likely to become lucidly aware.

I love it, I love it. This has been so much fun for me. We'll have to do it again. Maybe we can talk about some specific dreams. There's some other stuff I didn't even get to, but this has been really awesome. Thank you so much for coming on.

Oh, thanks Noah, it's been great.

All right, cool. Bye-bye.

Cheers. (upbeat music)

I'm going to talk to you this evening on the subject of the spectrum of love. We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat. We would like to be like that and by and large, man's religions are attempts to cultivate that same power in ordinary people. But unfortunately, they normally go about this task as one would attempt to make the tail wag the dog. I remember when I was a small boy in school I was enormously interested in being able to do my school work properly. And everybody told me that I didn't work hard enough and that I ought to work.

I had an intense desire to do this, but when I asked how do you work, everybody shut up like a clam. So I was extremely puzzled, but there were teachers who apparently knew how to work in a detained considerable heights of scholarship and I admired them very much for their attainments. And so I thought that maybe I could learn the secret by copying their mannerisms. I would imitate the style of handwriting that they used. I would use the same kind of pen. I would affect the same mannerisms of speech and gesture and insofar as I could get around the school uniform even of clothing. I must assure you with this, of course, was a private school in England, not a public school in America.

But none of this revealed the secret because I was, as it were, copying the outward symptoms and knew nothing of the inner fountain of being able to work. And exactly the same thing is true in the case of people who love. When we study the behavior of people who have the power of love within them, we can catalog how they behave in various situations and out of this catalog formulate some rules. One of the peculiar things we notice about people who have this astonishing universal love is that they are apt, but not always so, but they are apt very often to play it rather cool on sexual love. The reason for this is generally speaking unknown to preachers, but it is because an erotic relationship with the external world operates so far as they're concerned between that world and every single nerve ending.

Their whole organism, in all its aspects, physical, psychological and spiritual, is an erogenous zone. And therefore, their flow of love is not specialized or canonized so exclusively in the genital system as it is with most other people, especially in a culture such as ours, where for so many centuries, that particular expression of erotic love has been so marvelously repressed as to make it seem the most desirable kind of love that there is, and so we have as a result of 2000 years of Christianity, sex on the brain. It isn't always the right place for it. (audience laughing)

Good episode, right? I enjoyed Robert. Like I said, we're gonna be recording another one in a few weeks, so stay tuned for that one. Part two, so do you speak, after that you're down watts, right? I love Alan Watts, one of my favorite speakers. I've been working with his son Mark for the past year and a half about trying to figure out some ways to get out some of the talks and some of the stuff that Mark has in a way that makes sense for the digital age. That's a thing, we're in it. I'm a millennial, I guess, technically. So, what I have for you inside of this podcast note, so if you go to the podcast page on syncpodcast.com, if you go to minepodnetwork.com, if you're using this through an app and you check the show notes which are there, you just go through the app, click a little picture, it'll flip over, there's a link to the new Alan Watts online shop, which is there's dozens, maybe even a hundred.

I'm not specifically sure, but there's a lot of talks from Alan Watts, stuff on psychedelics, stuff on zins, stuff on Buddhism, stuff on spirituality, stuff on being present, stuff on future, stuff on technology, just like he had a lot of stuff, cool stuff to say about a lot of things. So, because you're a listener of this podcast, you can get a discount if you wanna order something from that store, you can get a 20, whip 20, you can get a 30% discount if you use the code sync at checkout, S-Y-N-C. So, this helps me, I get a little cut if you do that, this is our first flagship kind of affiliate thing we're doing for the Alan Watts Foundation.

So, this is a cool way to do a lot of things. One, you get a cool Alan Watts talk because all the talks are cool, I guarantee it. Two, you are supporting Alan Watts Foundation. So, that's the people you wanna be benefiting are Mark Watts and the family of Alan Watts. So, that's two, three, it actually helps support this podcast 'cause I get a little cut. So, if you're interested in doing that, go to the Alan Watts shop. The link is in the show notes, in the places I mentioned, and use the code sync, S-Y-N-C at checkout and you get a discount, 30% discount. So, that's it. Thank you for everyone who's donated, everyone who's rating and reviewing, it really does mean a lot.

I don't even think it means that much for the getting more popular in iTunes. It just means a lot when I see that someone has something nice to say, that they're enjoying the podcast, they've enjoyed a guest. It's great. So, that's it, and I will see you next week.

Apple, can we move you? Target, can we drive you? But man, oh, wow, oh, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

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