Saturn Returns with Caggie - 9.2 Navigating the Dreamscape: Charlie Morley on Lucid dreaming

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

In this captivating episode of Saturn Returns, Caggie explores the mysterious world of dreams with Charlie Morley, a renowned expert on lucid dreaming, sleep, and the impact of trauma on sleep. With 15 years of experience, authorship, and leading workshops and retreats under his belt, Charlie delves into the depths of our subconscious and the power of dreams. The Lucid Dreaming Gateway: Charlie introduces us to the concept of lucid dreaming, sharing his journey into the 'virtual reality simulation' of his own psychology. He discusses the transformative potential of nightmares when reframed as therapeutic tools, challenging our deepest fears and misconceptions. Neuroplasticity and Healing: The conversation shifts to the remarkable ways lucid dreaming can influence our waking life, from enhancing physical abilities to offering profound relief for panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Charlie presents cutting-edge science highlighting lucid dreaming's role as a potent intervention for trauma recovery. Exploring Dream Practices: Beyond lucid dreaming, Charlie and Caggie discuss various states of consciousness such as meditation, self-hypnosis, Yoga Nidra, and the intriguing realms of dream incubation, the hypnagogic state, astral projection, and the influence of psychedelics on dream exploration. They also consider the concept of prophetic dreams and premonitions. Crafting a Dream Plan: Emphasising dreams as a pathway to healing, Charlie advocates for the practice of journaling dreams and constructing a dream plan. This process allows individuals to confront and integrate their fears, traumas, and anxieties, fostering a profound inner transformation and linking creativity directly with the dream state. Dream Evolution: Reflecting on how our relationship with dreams evolves from childhood to adulthood, Charlie provides insights into the natural ease children have with lucid dreaming and strategies adults can use to rekindle this innate ability. This segment offers hope for reclaiming the magical lucidity often lost in adult life. Charlie Morley's insights offer a revolutionary perspective on dreaming, inviting listeners to engage actively with their dreamscapes as a means of self-discovery, healing, and personal growth. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and the untapped potential of our nightly journeys. This Episode was made possible by our friends at Wild Nutrition. Wild Nutrition create products with purpose, backed by science using natural ingredients of exceptional quality. Use the code SATURNRETURNS for 15% off your first order at www.wildnutrition.com — Subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and receive more empowering insights and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. She just developed this thing, she just couldn't, she's just incredibly nervous to sing in public. So she made this dream plan that in her next lucid dream she wants to basically practice singing in public in the dream. So she becomes lucid, so her next lucid dream she wants to basically practice singing in public in the dream so she becomes lucid so in the lucid dream she starts singing and then she starts to go up to each of the people in the pub and like sing like really close in their face like really joyful with abandon and she had it felt so good and she woke up and she's like buzzing with

excitement and since then has been practicing by singing in public so like 13 years of stage fright she had one big lucid dream and now she can sing in public again. Today I'm joined by Charlie Morley, who has spent the last 15 years writing books and learning about lucid dreaming. It's a subject that I wanted to speak about because I'm really fascinated by dreams, and I feel like we don't give them enough attention because they are actually, if you think about it, completely bizarre and hold so much wisdom. And Charlie in this episode really unpacks how we can use our dreams and work with our dreams as a way of interacting with the subconscious. Lucid dreaming is essentially the experience of

achieving conscious awareness of dreaming whilst you are still asleep and in charlie's practice you can actually actively then go into the dream and participate or manipulate the unfolding of things they are most common during rapid eye movement REM sleep and it's a period of very deep sleep but Charlie gets into it in this episode and it's really interesting because we can actually use this as an amazing tool for healing and especially from his work and research in the realms of trauma so I hope you enjoy this episode I absolutely found it fascinating I loved having Charlie on and I'm so glad that he came on the podcast and I hope you guys take something away from it and it starts your dream journal journey.

Charlie, welcome to the Saturn Returns podcast. I'm super excited to talk to you today about a subject that I'm very fascinated by but I don't know a huge amount about. So for the audience that doesn't know, would you be able to introduce who you are and what you do and how you got into this work? Yeah, so first of all it's a pleasure to be here, thank you for having me and we're going to talk about lucid dreaming. So a lucid dream is a dream where you know that you're dreaming as the dream is happening but you stay asleep. So if you ever had a dream where you're completely sound asleep but in the dream oh wow this is a dream this is a dream and then you can choose what to do you can change the narrative you can fly through the sky in fact a lot of people their

first experience of lucid dreaming might be a nightmare if you've ever had a nightmare where in the nightmare you go i've got to wake up i've got to wake up that was actually a lucid dream too because by saying i've got to wake up you would indirectly acknowledge i'm asleep and actually your first little takeaway is if you ever have that again where you become conscious in a nightmare don't wake up because every time you wake yourself from a nightmare it's like a therapy session cut short and your brain because it loves you not because it's trying to punish you but because it loves you it will give you that nightmare again and again and again until it's integrated like until the therapy session is complete anyway so that's a lucid dream and what i do is i've spent the last 15 years uh writing

books about lucid dreaming and sleep and trauma affected sleep and i go around giving workshops and retreats and talks about lucid dreaming and sleep and how did you get into that sort of because it's quite a niche subject obviously it's not a niche subject in that we all sleep we we know how foundational that is for our health and overall well-being and we all dream and actually when i've been sort of researching you and your work you realize what a weird and fascinating concept just dreaming is in itself yet we just kind of like oh yeah i had that dream about this and don't really know how to interact with the unconscious or the subconscious in that way so what led you into exploring this particular field so from really young I was always into dreams like I remember

telling my mum my dreams from very young like in the car on way to school and stuff like that and sometimes I just make it up I just say stuff that wasn't real. And other times I would say stuff that I had dreamt. So I remember that from an early age. And then the first kind of solid memory I have that's been confirmed by my family is when I was 11 for my 12th birthday, I asked for this thing called a Nova Dreamer, which is like this, you can buy them now, not with the same brand, but an electronic sleep mask that you wear when you sleep. And it's got little sensors that recognize rapid eye movement from your eyelids. And when it sees the rapid eye movement, it flashes these red lights, which are bright enough to permeate your eyelids and go into your dream, but not bright enough to wake you up. And I remember reading about this in

the gadget section of the Sunday, whatever, Sunday Times newspaper. It's like one of those Sunday afternoons and they have this little gadget book full of stuff like mail order stuff and that was in there and I remember taking it to my dad and going dad dad there's this mask that gives you those dreams that I have I didn't know they were called lucid dreams but I knew from the description that that was what I was having uh and you know it was like 300 so I never got it but that was the first time that I knew I acknowledged lucid dreaming and I wanted more of them and then when I was 15 then I know for sure I just started getting interested in consciousness and the mind and buddhism looked quite cool but there were all these rules I wasn't quite into that psychedelics looked easier so that became something I was

interested in and then these books about lucid dreaming so I started reading them and then being able to consciously induce the lucid dream state and the the lucid dream is so real. You know, it's like you gain access to this huge virtual reality simulation of your own psychology. And at a 15, 16 year old, when you gain access to this huge virtual reality world where there are no rules of society to live by, I got up to, you know, all all sorts of mischief mainly skateboarding and sex which as a 15 year old were my two kind of major priorities one of which I was doing a lot of the other not so much I don't need to delve much further to guess which one was which I got really good at skateboarding though and now there's all these studies on neuroplasticity by practicing

sports and lucid dreams so maybe I got good at that because i have heard about this and i think it was from you and i heard it somewhere else that actually people that were practicing fitness or something in their lucid dreams it actually increased their physical fitness whilst they weren't actually doing it yeah there's actually loads of studies on that it's one of the most uh well researched uh scientific aspects of lucid dreaming because it's very easy to quantify. You basically see how many squats someone can do in the waking state, like what's their personal best on squats or press-ups. And then you get them to have lucid dreams and you put them into the lab and you make sure that they're in the lucid dream state. In the lucid

dream, they practice the athletic discipline, whether it's squats or press-ups, or I was part of a study where you had to practice this certain martial arts kick sequence. And then in the waking state, they test you again. And you can see very clearly, do you get better at squats or do you get better at martial arts? In the study I was in, 81.3% of the practitioners got better at martial arts by training in the lucid dream,

which is nuts. That's nuts. Like if that was 18%, I'd still be sharing that as a cool fact. But 81.3%, that's insane. So that was 18 i'd still be sharing that as a cool fact but 81.3 that's insane so you you touched on at the beginning what lucid dreaming is but how do you actively firstly know beyond knowing that you're in a lucid dream then kind of control or get involved with what's happening in the unconscious so the first thing to know is

lucid dreaming comes factory installed so we've got two studies from harvard one from lincoln university in the uk actually that has confirmed that children ages 6 to 16 have lucid dreams frequently not every child every night but it seems to be an inbuilt capacity more than adults oh way more than. Lucid dream frequency in adults drops off the radar. In fact it drops off pretty much when people go into long to full-time education. You know there's a quote from Picasso he said every child is born an artist. The adult's job is to remember how. And I think the same with lucid dreaming. This comes factory installed. Now some I'd say about like one in a hundred adults. this is very unscientific but just from 15 years

of doing this I think about one in a hundred people I meet are natural lucid dreamers for some reason they carried that capacity from childhood into adulthood but for most people the other 99 out of 100 they need to relearn how to do it and that's my job and it is a learnable skill so basically children are more inclined to have lucid dreams but does that mean that they're just having dreams where they're aware that they're dreaming or they're able to change the outcome of those nightmares so it seems to be that by harnessing that inbuilt faculty of lucid dreaming if you have nightmares that kind of expedites the process and leads it to be kind of more hardwired into the brain I think. Well you touched on it being connected with trauma and a form of therapy. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah. So, I mean, lucid dreams

in and of themselves are neutral events. They are simply any dream where you know that you're dreaming as the dream is happening. However, one of the most powerful benefits of lucid dreaming is for treatment of nightmares and more recently post traumatic stress disorder so using lucid dreaming to treat nightmares has been scientifically studied about as much as the sports stuff the two big things around lucid dreaming are sports science and nightmare integration when you say nightmare integration do you mean as in if someone's having horrific nightmares all the time that you use lucid dreaming to stop those nightmares from happening yeah so you train people to become lucid a lot of people actually having nightmares will

naturally become lucid because fear boosts our awareness so about a third of all spontaneous lucid dreams begin as nightmares because nightmares kind of boost our fear so we're more likely to go oh wait zombies don't exist damn i'm dreaming yeah well it i guess it kind of makes you get those feelings as if it's happening and then you're like is this actually happening or is this a dream because i often get that when i don't know whether it's a dream or not and i'm sort of wanting to wake up and then i think i wake up but then i'm also still in a dream false awakening yeah yeah and that's called the pre-lucid state where you're starting to like critically question the dream like wait this might be a dream but you're not you're just one step away

from being fully lucid well whoa this is a dream my body's asleep in bed i'm in a huge three dimensional projection of my mind and i'm safe and that's the first thing that happens with nightmare sufferers is the first thing to do is teach them lucid dreaming but how how do you teach them to know that it is actually a dream i mean mean, that's my job. It's a learnable skill. So meditation before bed, self-hypnosis techniques as you fall asleep, yoga nidra during the day, state checking, waking up at certain points of the night, then dropping back into periods where you're most likely to have certain REM. Oh, wow. So it's very specific. Yeah, very specific. Auto-suggestion techniques done in the last two hours of the sleep cycle. What's that mean basically a posh word for self-hypnosis techniques um like all this stuff like lucid dreaming is an old craft right you find it in tibetan buddhism at least a thousand years

they've been practicing it um in the toltet mexica tradition of ancient mexico again it goes back about a thousand years but it's only recently been in the last 40 or 50 years that western science has caught up and they've developed a series of techniques which they've given different names to. But actually you find them in all the ancient traditions and their ways of inducing lucid dreams at will. So it is a learnable skill. Because you talked about, is it dream yoga? Yeah. Funny name, isn't it? What does that actually entail?

Dream yoga is a direct translation of a Tibetan term, Milam Naljor. So Milam means dream and Naljor is translated as yoga, but actually it means natural state, which I think is kind of a cool definition of yoga as well. But anyway, so Milam Naljor is dream yoga and dream yoga is a series of practices found in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that have lucid dream training at their foundation. They also include what in the West would refer to as conscious sleeping, a little bit similar to like the yoga nidra practices in the Hindu tradition, and something called special dream body practice, which in the West we call astral projection. You know, like an out-of-body experience.

Would you be able to expand on that a little bit? Yeah. So for this, my ex-wife actually is the expert on this, Jade Shaw. She teaches astral projection. A lucid dream is you're inside your own psychology, right? You're inside your own mind. A genuine out-of-body experience, part of your consciousness is dislocating from the physical body and experiencing either an energy duplicate of reality, or in some cases, actual reality. Now, lucid dreaming is like hard science science it's been like scientifically verified for almost 50 years now out-of-body experiences astral projection science still hasn't caught up with that i thought they were bullshit to be honest what astrals yeah i thought you know if i have a lucid dream tonight and because this has been my daytime experience i might be have a lucid

dream i'm in this room and then because i'm lucid oh cool i'm gonna fly down the high street to elaborate grove that doesn't mean i'm mastery projectioning it means i'm having a lucid dream I'm in this room and then because I'm lucid oh cool I'm gonna fly down the high street to Labrador Grove that doesn't mean I'm astral projectioning it means I'm having a lucid dream about flying down Labrador Grove so I'd always thought that oh these people they're just kind of misinterpreting what the lucid dream is so when I was writing my first book which is like 10 years ago I went to a astral projection workshop mainly to kind of basically prove I was right you know and I was kind of sparring with the guy online before over email. You know, I think it's probably just a misinterpretation of the lucidity state, blah, blah, blah. So I had like zero faith going in.

And I go to this workshop and at midday, so the middle of the day before lunchtime, I wasn't tired. I wasn't in a dream state. I wasn't in a hypnosis state. I definitely hadn't fallen for some sort of like group hypnosis that this teacher could bring me into this state I thought it was bullshit but we sat around in a circle in his house actually not dissimilar to a setup here in a kind of an l-shaped sofa like that and he did a technique and he said

this technique won't give you an out-of-body experience we're just practicing for what you'll do tonight as you fall asleep to allow you to exit your body and we're sitting there and we do this technique and at the end of the technique where you eject allow you to exit your body. And we're sitting there and we do this technique. And at the end of the technique where you eject your consciousness out of your body, everything that is me left my body by about two inches. Like not a lot, but it just had a ripping sound. And we were sitting in a circle and even my eyesight, because I could now see over the guy's head

who was in front of me, my vision went up by two inches too and then came back in with a jolt and i freak i genuinely thought he'd put something in my tea i thought oh shit it's because i've been a bit rude to him online he wants to like give teach him a lesson so i'm in his kitchen and i'm like whoa i need to get out of here this is nuts man this is nuts and he comes in he asked me i'm like dude I don't know I don't know what's happening here this isn't cool I said I was like really panicking and then I just had to accept like it wasn't anything in the tea I'd had an out-of-body experience with my eyes open and also you went into it quite critically

completely skeptical yeah and so I stayed for the rest of the workshop yeah and had another one at night because if that was in the day if you do it in the hypnagogic state as you're falling asleep where your consciousness is already you know that you're kind of your eyes are closed you get the nodding yeah yeah you're on the boundary sort of like halfway point yeah so that boundary state is a state where like almost the glue that sticks your energy body it's your physical body becomes a bit looser so that's the state where you'll do the technique you taught me in the day which was what it's basically uh you you kind of move energy up and down your body up and down your body up you know faster faster faster faster faster faster sort of launching it yes and you kind of launch out the top of your head or you imagine launching out the top of your head

but when i first did it it worked uh do you think the fact that you've done all this work around lucid dreaming helped maybe and maybe some of some of the Buddhist practices around the energy body and stuff like that. Maybe I had like kind of a looseness in my subtle body or an awareness of the subtle body that helps. But anyway, long story short, I then had to go back and rewrite the chapter on out-of-body experiences in my first book. Referencing this and going like, look guys, I don't know how this works. And science hasn't backed it up. referencing this and going like look guys I don't know how this works and science hasn't backed it up but I've had like at that time I'd had I don't know like 500 intentional lucid dreams so I knew what a lucid dream was and those experiences were not lucid dreams don't know what they were but

they were not lucid dreams and how does sort of psychedelics play into this stuff because is that a way that people can access those sort of realms or that separation in a different capacity or yeah i think the site there's a lot of crossover between the uh kind of movement in psychedelic therapy and lucid dreaming a lot of the same benefits working with post-traumatic stress disorder actually we didn't we didn't kind of go into that but yeah working with post-traumatic stress disorder uh healing of childhood trauma and working with depression all of the things that you know ketamine assisted therapy and psilocybin assisted therapy are now working with lucid dreaming is brilliant for that too and actually i've done a few workshops for the psychedelic society

to help prepare people for the psychedelic journey because no one knows the difference between hallucination and reality better than the lucid dreamer our entire craft is based on knowing the difference so if you're about to take something that's going to make you have big hallucinations training and lucid dreaming is a really grounding practice if you hear about people having bad trips whatever that means just that they don't know it's often that they think it's real yeah i think there's actually a demon there rather than ah no the psychedelic is creating a projection of my own trauma into this form of a what seems very much like a demon and that externalization is what leads to these bad trips so lucid dream is a great preparation for that and i would say quite

important for because it's obviously become quite a popular thing psychedelics yeah and for people to actually have the preparation because i do fear that people are just going into it without any kind of grounding or doing any form of therapy and it it's no joke yeah and of course I prefer lucid dreaming I think you know it's free it's non-addictive it's non-invasive you can't overdose on it but it does take a while yeah you know if you give me an hour with a hundred people to teach them lucid dreaming that night I don't know maybe 30 of them might have a lucid dream experience or 10 of them that night and 30 of them within the next week might have a lucid dream experience that's pretty good pretty good but if you give me 100 people and i give all 100 people a dose of psilocybin within one hour 100 people will have an experience yeah yeah that's

true so i absolutely see the great benefit of working with psychedelics with a qualified therapist but i think for kind of a long-term use lucid dreaming is great because you do it by yourself it's free you can do every night and we didn't really get into the sort of trauma elements so could we kind of touch on that sure yeah so loads of studies on using lucid dreaming to treat nightmares you train people to become lucid in the nightmares and then either they can first of all wake up which is okay but it's not long term secondly you teach them to become lucid and to stay in the nightmare to know i'm not really back in the car crash i'm simply dreaming i'm back in the car crash this is all internal therapy session in the same way as my therapist might ask me tell me what happened in the car crash my mind is showing me what happened as a way to integrate and if i can

stay in this dream and witness it, the integration will be complete. However, there had never been a trial to see could lucid dreaming treat not only nightmares, but the waking state symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms such as panic attacks, anxiety, depression, flashbacks. And also you've talked about how, you you know the nightmares are the ones that are the ones that are usually not only repeated but also lucid dreams they can be yeah what is the nightmare a demonstration of that we aren't acknowledging in the sort of western world enough if that makes sense nightmare is a dream that's shouting a nightmare is a dream that's shouting. A nightmare is a dream that is drawing

your attention to a wounded part of the psyche. Exactly the same as pain works. You know when I walk past something and I hit my elbow the pain is sending a message to my brain saying you've wounded your elbow and now I can apply healing techniques like rubbing it or you know applying a plaster or something. The nightmare is doing the same thing. It's drawing our attention to a wounded part of the psyche and the nightmare itself is a manifestation of healing. So let's say I cut my elbow. What would happen? Blood would coagulate and a scab would form.

What is a scab? It's a protective layer that forms over the wound to allow healing to occur beneath the surface. That is exactly the definition of a nightmare. It's a manifestation of healing that creates a protective barrier over the wounded psyche to allow healing to occur beneath the surface and yet we try and get rid of them we use nightmares a pejorative term you know my journey here today i could have walked in and go oh bloody nightmare journey you know yeah and yet nightmares are so good so first of all we need to completely reframe what nightmares are that nightmares are healing

are so healing almost all cases nightmares are trying to help. But I think because we don't have the language or understanding of them, and also they're usually metaphorical, that it is hard to kind of create that dialogue, so to speak, between your waking state and the nightmare. Yes. Because I have recurring dreams or nightmares that I know are trying to tell me

something but i haven't got the tools to unpack them and they've kind of gone on for years and they're almost like identical and i have them every week such a good lead-in for lucid dreaming the tool you need is lucid dreaming and i do know like i have that thing where i'm on the precipice of lucid dreaming and i'm like i think this a dream. If you can get lucid in those nightmares, especially if they're occurring one lucid dream, the nightmares will stop. I mean, it's very, very direct. We have hard science on this. You talked about the, you know, dialoguing or being able to communicate. The lucid dream is a direct dialogue with your unconscious mind. If every dream or nightmare we have is like a letter written by the unconscious mind to us, trying to give us information or inform us of stuff.

Sometimes the letter is actually just like, oh, this happened today. No, it's not always greatly meaningful. If we can get lucid in our dream, it's like meeting the letter writer. It's as if we walk into the office when the dreaming mind's writing the letter and they're like, dude, I was just writing to you. But now you're here. I've written to you 50,000 times. Exactly. But now you're here

let's talk you know imagine that but we're also like you say it's like oh that was horrible yeah you wake up because i often and to kind of just share because i you know i don't have any problem with being honest about this stuff but my one is always around drinking so i used to drink a lot when i was in my early 20s and then I guess struggled with it a bit and then stopped drinking and went sober for a while. And now I kind of use the term sober curious like I can drink a little bit every so often. But generally speaking, it doesn't agree with me. But I get these dreams that I always I kind of communicate it that it's my subconscious just giving me a bit of a warning and the repeating thing will be that I'm in a situation where I suddenly wake up but I'm in

the dream and I've don't know what's happened and I've basically made a choice to drink and it's gone really wrong and I've like ruined my whole life and maybe I've woken up in a different country and it's it's quite traumatizing to be honest because when I wake up I call it like a phantom hangover like I'm like did I do that did those things happen and for at least hot like the morning I will feel a bit like oh my god oh my god did that happen and I have them probably every week and it's basically the same obviously the details are different but it's exactly the same kind of formula and I've had them for years and years and years and whilst it's useful to a degree because I'm like okay I get it like I don't want to do that anymore I don't want

to kind of have that feeling of being out of control I want to be able to work with those nightmares to have a deeper understanding of what's trying to heal or come through can i offer some unsolicited advice 100 just checking okay so first thing i'd say is write those nightmares down so we got really good study from i think it was swansea university they found that every time you have a dream, even if you don't remember it, you wake up with the corresponding neurochemicals of that dream still in the body. So let's say you've been having a really anxious dream. You know, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you just feel a bit off.

Yeah. And you don't even necessarily know why. It's probably you've had an anxiety dream, which you've forgotten or haven't remembered. But the anxiety chemicals are still in the bloodstream. They're still floating through the body. So did a study where first of all they train people to remember their dreams which is the first step of lucid dreaming then they got them to either keep a dream diary write down their dreams or speak their dreams out loud to their partner and they found that people who did that the act of writing down the dream or speaking the dream

out loud in their words discharged the underlying emotional energy of the dream from the body leading to increased levels of mental well-being so basically writing down your dreams is good for you because it kind of flushes out that stuff especially writing down your nightmares because i know that feeling where the nightmare hangs around till like lunchtime you are still here that memory writing it down drawing a picture of it speaking it out loud to a trusted friend or or um you know therapist that's a really good first step yeah and then the second thing is lucid dreaming like if you can get lucid in one of those nightmares and actually you could become lucid and say what do you represent or what do i need to integrate this

nightmare it sounds so simple that you could do that, but you literally can. And if you do that, it's so crazy how the dream responds. Sometimes like a voice from God, it's like an intercom system in your voice and it'll say like, you need to do this or like there's a problem from your childhood. You're like, who said that?

This is nuts. Or in other terms, a dream character will come up to you and they'll literally give you advice. They will tell you what you need to do. And whatever appears, I say, hug them. You know, what could be more symbolic of love and acceptance than the hug?

So if ever you're in a nightmare or a scary dream, you do become lucid, yes, you could ask what you represent, but probably even before you ask that, just hug everything. Because what is a nightmare? It's a wounded part of our psyche and where the wounds come from, lack of love.

The best way to heal our internal wounds is love. So if we can like hug everything in the psyche yeah because i think if they do induce a feeling of shame or guilt naturally as we do we want to kind of suppress that and bury it down not open it up more so i have heard that technique that also you know writing a sort of dream journal that it's a way as well as opening up the dialogue even if you haven't haven't mastered lucid dreaming you're still going to the subconscious i'm ready for the next part the next chapter yeah so like i did script writing right at uni that was my like thing like

writing plays and i think there's an internal part of my mind the dreamer i call it with a big d that every night's writing these amazing plays, these amazing Hollywood movies. Right. And when we don't write down the movie, it's as if there's no one in the audience. And that scriptwriter, think how like demoralizing that must be for the internal scriptwriter. When you start writing down your dreams, it's at least like someone's reviewing the play. It's like someone was in the audience last night. They were they were listening. And a lucid dream is like that audience member getting up on stage it then becomes like an interactive dance here so it's such a good step

if you can do that and also just a great a great window into your mind people myself included spend a lot of money each week going to a therapist and saying what's going on in here doc yeah you want to know what's going on there look at your dreams you know every night your dreaming mind is reflecting the internal environment of your psyche you want to know what's going on in there look at your mind you know who are you secretly in love with uh what childhood traumas are still getting you down what conversation that you had two weeks ago which you thought was totally cool do you keep coming up in your dreams because it wasn't cool there was something there that actually was really triggering all of that information is in in the dreams but we do need to remember them and write them down because we can't hide from ourselves you can't hide from

your dreams they're very very honest yeah and the other thing i wanted to talk to you about was premonitions in dreams so that's something that i've had my whole life, but then nothing very exciting so that I'll have like a dream about something. And then the next day, someone will say the exact thing that they said in my dream. And then suddenly I'm like, oh, my God, or just little things will kind of happen. But it's nothing that's like, like I said, it's not big world events or anything like that what's your understanding of that because obviously that that ties into the sort of astral travel and the sort of concept of of time because it's like okay it feels like in our dreams we have the capacity to pierce through time um i think there are way more people who are having prophetic dreams dreams of the future than know it because they're

not writing down the dreams and not remembering their dreams. I've seen so many people, trusted, trusted people, no way they're trying to impress me, no way they're trying to get anything from it who have shown me valid prophetic dreams. And on these lucid dreaming retreats we run, I'm with them for four days. So I've seen it written down and then it happens. I'm like, whoa, that one was for real. So how they happen, I don't know. I'm like, whoa, that one was for real. So how they happen, I don't know. Why they happen, I don't know. But I know they do happen.

You know, Carl Jung was asked about this. He had a really interesting theory on this. He said it's less premonition and more preparation. He described the unconscious mind taking in so much data that the unconscious mind isn't taking in, that it it has he didn't use this term but i'll use on his behalf it can create almost an algorithm a future possibility based on these huge amounts of data which most of the time it gets wrong but some of the time it does get right and he used an example of let's say uh tonight you have a dream that two close

friends of yours get married in one year from now. And then six months from now, you hear they're getting engaged and one year later they get married. Oh, that's a prophetic dream. That's amazing. Was I like connected to their mind streams? What was it? He would say, although your conscious mind didn't notice it, your unconscious mind noticed that there was a shared touch between those two friends. That maybe on the WhatsApp group, they were connecting more than usual. All these little details that your unconscious mind is picking up,

your conscious mind isn't, put together into a possibility of, they'd actually be quite a good couple. They're both similar age. They both just have a relationship. They both want to get married. Maybe. So the dream will present you with this maybe.

And sometimes that maybe comes true. So he would say that it's less about psychic capacity and more about the huge capacity of the unconscious mind to make predictions about future events. And that's pretty cool because we know from like hypnosis studies in fMRI scanners, you get people in hypnosis in a brain scanner. By the way, hypnosis is real now. That old thing in the 80s, like stage hypnosis, they're all making it up. No, no. Hypnosis has now been neuroscientifically demonstrated. And the studies they did, I mean, they did one where they put someone into a brain scanner and they basically hurt them.

They applied pain to the arm, but they had been hypnotized to feel that there was no, the arm was completely numb. And not only did they not respond to the pain, but their brain wasn't registering the pain. So we know hypnosis is is real now that's like the cards are in for that um and we also know through hypnosis that if in a few months time i was put in a hypnotic trance i would be able to tell you exactly the position of all of these paintings on your wall exactly what you're wearing or my friend here is wearing even though consciously i would have forgotten right because the unconscious is this huge it's picking up hard drive yeah yeah so that's one thing uh one possibility prophetic dreams I mean I asked a buddhist lama about this once and I thought he didn't understand the question so I went I was asking about like deja vu and prophetic dreams and stuff and I went you know like where

time where it feels like you've been in one time and he just looked at me and went time like as if you still think time works dude i don't know where to begin and i thought wow yeah i'm really out of my depth here so who knows i love that oh sorry i keep on wanting to mention the trauma study so loads of science on the nightmare stuff that's been done but could we use it to treat waking state ptsd kind of a crazy idea but this uh science organization in america who the institute of noetic sciences wanted to see if we could do it so part of this study we get a group of 55 people all of whom have chronic ptsd to get onto the study you have to have chronic or treatment resistant post-traumatic

stress disorder i've had done a lot of work with british military veterans and the ministry of defense actually on helping people with traumatized sleep patterns through lucid dreaming but also through breath work and deep relaxation and stuff like that but i've never worked with a group where we got 100 ptsd so the night before the study the funder sent me a whatsapp message saying you know how many lucid dreams you think we're going to get on this study and i was like maybe none maybe we'll just spend the week helping people relax maybe they won't be able to sleep at all the nightmares will be so bad anyway in the end it was quite the opposite I realized that when you get a group together all of whom are not in the

same boat no one's in the same boat but we can be in the same storm and those who know trauma know that storm and there was something about that group being together in the same storm many of them were veterans many of them were people with childhood sexual abuse. Many people had complex post-traumatic stress disorder, not just single event PTSD. So I had a week with them to teach them lucid dreaming. But everyone had the same dream plan, which is your intention where you decide what to do in your first or next lucid dream. And it was to face and embrace an aspect of their fear, trauma or anxiety. So some people were becoming lucid and calling out anxiety, come to me.

And then whatever appeared, they were embracing and showing love. Other people were becoming lucid in recurring nightmares about being back in war zones. But in their lucid state, then you wait. I'm not really back in Iraq. I'm just dreaming I'm back in Iraq. Nothing can hurt me. And they could either turn the bullets into flowers, as one person once did when they're in a gunfight, or another person, even more kind of beneficial, was they just let the bullets come. They knew, wait, this is just a dream. Nothing

can hurt me. And at the beginning of the week, we were checking their PTSD score using the DSM-5 self-report model for any medical people listening. It's basically the standard where you check people's PTSD levels. And the score was high. the average was way above the threshold by the end of the week we took their ptsd score again and the nightmare experience scale again and nightmares were had completely dropped off but also the average ptsd score was so low at the end of the seven day study it was beneath the threshold and then they checked the data again and they were like wait we were over 80 percent of people who are beneath the threshold and what does that mean and they went means i don't have ptsd anymore wow and i was i was actually the first one to go you need to check it again like

almost almost incredible almost unbelievable so they they double checked it then they triple checked it so we think this is amazing well this is like a breakthrough study everyone's going to want to publish this and we couldn't get it published. They didn't dispute the results, but they just said, yeah, it's not for us. Why? Because the study had never been done before. It's kind of insane. There's no medicine that can reduce PTSD scores the way lucid dreaming did. So no wonder they didn't touch it. But the scientific establishment did hear about the results, even though we weren't published. So we got funding to do the same study again, but this time, a hundred person randomized control study, which is like the gold standard, right? Because the

first one was just a pilot. And once we completed the hundred person randomized control and crucially got similar results, then suddenly people wanted to publish it. So we did manage to get it published in the Journal of Traumatology in June 2023. So people can Google that. They can see the study. Oh, wow. That's incredible. Yeah. So we can say without doubt now lucid dreaming is one of the most powerful interventions

for post-traumatic stress disorder currently available. It's non-invasive. It's non-medical. It's non-addictive. It's free. You do it in your sleep. It's fun. It almost sounds too good to be true.

There is a lot of effort. You need to let you know all those things I said, the self-hy-hypnosis the meditations the waking up at certain points in the night but it's well worth it how many times do you have to wake up in the night so on the lucid dreaming retreats i do people have an option to kind of sleep in their room let's say we go to bed at 10 30 or something like that you can either just sleep all the way through in your room or from 10 30 to 3 30 you sleep in your room then at 3 30 you wake up and you enter the sacred sleeping area where people are bed number two and there's me as your human alarm clock and i drop you back into sleep and then 90 minutes later i wake you drop you back

into sleep we do that four times a night now i'm not saying we do that for four nights straight for four times a night i'd be very grumpy yeah so we don't do but you get loads of sleep because the next day we have napping time although i'm now thinking like because my boyfriend snores i'm like can i use that as my way so i wouldn't advise that that's just what we do on these retreats they're like lucid dreaming boot camp you just do it for a short period to kind of taste the chocolate and then you maybe do that once a week or something like that so that's not a long-term thing it's just when we're teaching the practice because if you fall asleep once and wake up once in the morning you've got one chance to get lucid some crazy guy wakes you up four times a night you've just

quadrupled your chances of success right and for people that you know are kind of fascinated about because i know some people say that they don't dream yeah i get that a lot which i find absolutely bizarre but what's that about? And it's just totally untrue. There's no way to stop the human brain from dreaming other than a heavy head injury or a stroke. Or can it be prescription drugs interfere? Interfere with REM cycle, but won't stop you dreaming. If you stop someone dreaming, they move into psychosis.

It was actually used as one of the tortures in Guantanamo Bay. They call it sleep torture it wasn't actually sleep torture they were allowing them to sleep but they were timing their REM periods and when they're about to go into dream they were waking them up famously playing the like really loud heavy metal music and the stuff that was in that movie many stare at goats because if you take someone's dreams from them they move into psychosis very quickly and of course they will sign anything yes i did do this or yes i am this um so no you're definitely dreaming everyone dreams every night as long as you're asleep there's no way to stop the human brain from dreaming the only thing is people don't

remember it and the thing is if they've told themselves i don't dream that creates an internal memory block so they won't remember their dreams so often people just hearing this and then googling it to check oh yeah guy's. You really do dream every night. Suddenly they start remembering their dreams because it wasn't that they weren't dreaming. It was that they created a mental block that prevented them from remembering their dreams. That's interesting. And the other thing before we kind of wrap up, we touched on this or you did at the beginning. And I wanted to circle back to it was about the education system and how that plays a role in stopping people from

lucid dreaming if you look at a child who's playing all day they're constantly in a right brain dominance yes you know they're they're creating they're also kind of hallucinating with their eyes open oh there's my yeah they have no they have no awareness that that's it's not actually happening yeah so no So no wonder when they dream, they have the same access to be aware of the fact that they're playing these these characters. Yeah. How can I back that up with any evidence? Video gamers like hardcore video gamers who are playing between four and six hours of video gaming a day have loads of spontaneous lucid dreams because they're spending a large amount of their day inhabiting an avatar knowing that they're really here but they're inhabiting an avatar just like lucid dreaming you see yourself in the dream

but you know that you're dreaming yourself in the dream so unfortunately for any parents watching or adults uh video gaming is actually really good for lucid dreaming however they also did another other consequences they did another study though on children they found uh not just video gaming increased levels of lucidity in both kids and adults but in children especially reading fiction increased levels of lucid dreaming because if the child is spending you know three hours a day reading harry potter and embodying the character doing their voices immersed in that world they're more likely to dream in a similar way kids are imagining all the time what happens when we put them into full-time education we move from the right brain dominance of childhood

to the left brain dominance of learning and adulthood and more linear ways of thinking and again kids i've seen who go to like steiner schools and stuff like that they seem to keep that lucid dream ability way more there are a lot more of the one in a hundreds who went to steiner schools and who go to mainstream schools so again that supports this theory that i have yeah and dreams obviously are just very creative so creative how can we use dreams to access more of our creativity there's a there's a lovely moment that i sometimes have where people go like they might say they're not creative to me we're having a conversation i'm not creative not artistic I say tell me a dream literally tell me any dream you had the most boring one oh I had a really boring dream I was walking down the street in London okay you designed the costumes

for that you did the lighting you were playing every person on the street you were the concrete you were the person walking down you tell me you're not creative you know any dream reveals the infinite creativity of the human mind and a great way to access our creativity is to look at our dreams because it's like a biofeedback mechanism it's a two-way form of communication people often say and this happens a lot this happens about once a month uh oh i don't write down my dreams they're really boring and i'm like dude your dreams are so boring because you don't write them down like again, again, think of that internal script writer. If no one's in the audience, if no one's reviewing the play. He's not going to write another play.

Yeah, he's going to play really boring plays. But if suddenly you're in there in the audience, the script writer is going to be like, oh, wow, okay, I've got an audience, showtime, daddy issues, sexuality stuff, you know, stuff from jail, all this stuff. So if you want big themes in your dreams, if you want to have like really kind of these big creative dreams that maybe your friends hear that you have and they think, oh, I wish I had dreams like Kagi has,

then you start writing down your dreams. Let the dreamer know you're listening. If you let your dreamer know that, your dreams will respond. And also there's interesting studies. They show that people who ingest more complex narratives have more complex dreams. So basically, if you watch, if you go to a theater a lot or you watch a lot of cinema or you read a lot of fiction novels your dreamer kind of learns narrative devices you ever had it where right at the end of the dream you like find out who the murderer is and you think wow my dream was so cool it kind of timed it just before the alarm clock oh i found out who the murderer was you want more dreams like that ingest more narratives like that

yeah so be aware of the sort of content that you're consuming. Yeah, same with horror movies, dude. Yeah, I wanted to also share, last night, I think, because I knew I was having this interview, I was like quite aware of what I was going to dream, or trying to be.

And I had something that I never had before, which was that I often, when I'm struggling to make a decision about something I ask my dream so I'm like okay please tell me what I need to do like help me with the decision and often it tells me something that I don't want to hear and I don't listen to it but last night I was like okay I wanted it to tell me something and I've never had this but it was right like I could see someone trying to write wow and it was like writing like a name and then numbers. And I was like, okay, I think I can read.

But it was like a child trying to write. And I was like, I can't really understand what you're saying, but I remember bits of it. And I'm like, wow, that was wild. You are so primed for lucid dreaming. Like if you start doing some of the like direct techniques, you're going to get lucid dreaming. I'm all over this. After this, I i'm definitely gonna be taking you off on like okay

what is my practice gonna be so the technique you did yesterday is called dream incubation this is where you kind of use the the creativity of the dream mind to answer a question and you can use either the dream or you can use the hypnagogic state you know that kind of dozy state i talked about you know famous the two most famous people dali dali used that kind of dozy state I talked about, you know, famous, the two most famous people, Dali. Dali used to kind of have these afternoon naps where he would lie on the chaise lounge and he would hold a spoon, a silver spoon in his hand, balancing on the edge of a champagne glass. And when he moved from that drowsy hypnagogic into the sleep paralysis of dream, he would drop the spoon, smash the glass and wake him up. And he would then draw what he was seeing in that in-between state and that led to his paintings of course the dude like had quite a lot of opium as well so i think that is so fascinating and the other person's edison

the guy who invented the commercially available light yeah he claimed that well he claimed that he found that in the hypnagogic but what he would do was he would sit on an armchair holding metal ball bearings. And he'd be in the armchair like that and then drift into the hypnagogic, where it's all these creative things, seeing the blueprints for his ideas. And then when he slipped into full sleep, which he wasn't interested in, weirdly, he wasn't a lucid dreamer, he would drop the ball bearings and wake him up. And he'd jot down his things.

I love this. Yeah. So even if it's not full dream, you can work with the hypnagogagogic you can work with non-lucid dreams you're working with last night and you can work with lucid dreams and i wouldn't say lucid dream is better than any other form of dreaming you know even if you get lucid every night of the week still 95 of your dream experience will be non-lucid even if you're lucid every night because that's based on eight hour cycle five dream periods a night multiple dreams each each dream period so we don't want to think that like oh lucid dreams are the best and non-lucid dreams are a waste of time because then we're like rejecting 95%

of our experience we want to use all aspects of sleep and dream for our spiritual development and the final thing i wanted to ask you about is dreams that are very common dreams that people have that are that they're flying or that they're i mean i have one where i'm like almost flying and often i have i have a plastic like a parachute thing amazing and then what what happens is it's like i realize i'm flying but then when i stop believing that I can fly, I start dropping. And then I'm like, believe me. That's such a good example.

So I hear people's flying dreams a lot. And usually in workshops, you might see me on other videos say this. I say, oh, there's three main types of flyer. There's the Superman flyer. There's the swim flyer. People kind of swim through the air. And there's the jumpers. People kind of get gravity and jump.

I'm now going to add a fourth category, which is the Sainsbury's shopping bag parachute flyer. It's not specifically Sainsbury's, but it is a plastic bag. Oh, there are other supermarkets available. Okay, I see. Guys, you can use whatever. In the Buddhist tradition, there isn't actually a lot of dream interpretation in Buddhism. It's mainly about becoming lucid and then you can interpret the dream while you're in it right but there are there is a little bit of dream interpretation and one the main thing they say is flying dreams are

indicative of someone with a lot of chi like your prana your chi your inner life force is going up so flying dreams are said to be very positive and so that's one amazing thing the other thing is isn't it cool how when you had a moment of doubt, you stopped flying? What a metaphor for life. What a metaphor. Where we're flying and we have a moment of doubt and it's like, believe, believe, believe, right? Yeah. Have you ever had the teeth falling out one?

That's a really common one. Yes, but not that common. But yeah, I have had it. Okay. I'm glad it's not that common for you because it's often, I mean, these dream workshops, I was recently counting up how many countries I had taught in. It's just under, it's like 29 countries. And I realized everywhere from like Monaco to Mexico to Zimbabwe to Canada, all these places. Same dreams.

Same, same themes. Same themes. Yeah, same themes, not same dreams. And the teeth falling out one is pretty universal. What is it you shoot about? The teeth falling out, again, you can never interpret someone's dream. It's so personal to them. But there are certain dreams where the themes are so universal, they become almost archetypal.

So you're tapping into some kind of archetypal energy, transpersonal, not just personal. If I were to take your teeth from you, many things would be limited. Your ability to eat, to feed yourself, to to gain nourishment and your ability to fight now we don't think this but when we were monkeys monkeys don't punch they bite so losing your dreams of losing your teeth are losing your ability to protect yourself and losing your ability to feed yourself so i was going through something that absolutely was challenging my ability to protect myself emotionally and I had this dream that my teeth were falling out um so I was like oh god well I've had the like classic dream this is so cool so again I wrote it down to discharge it from my system I then made a dream plan to deal with that situation that I'm still kind of going through in

life and what is the third most common if there is a third um flying ones teeth falling out oh naked in public probably the classic one of like people being naked in public which is about exposure i've never had that but i do have it about before and this is a i um i used to do music and i would perform yeah i had really bad performance anxiety and i still have these dreams that I'm supposed to perform and I'm not prepared. Kind of, I guess, like when people and I often have it when I'm at university or something and I realize. Oh, yeah. Before the exam. Yeah, that I've never gone to a single class of like one of my subjects and there's no way that I'm going to pass it. That's pretty common. Yeah.

In fact, in my new book, one of the case studies is a woman who worked specifically with stage fright through her lucid dreams so she used to be a singer and then about 13 years ago she just developed this thing she just couldn't she's incredibly nervous to sing in public so she made this dream plan that in her next lucid dream she wants to basically practice singing in public in the dream knowing that what you do in the lucid dream creates these neural pathways that affect your waking state so she becomes lucid and she's in a pub and she thinks actually this is a perfect place so in the lucid dream she starts singing and then she starts to go up to each of the people in the pub and like sing like really close in their face like really joyful with abandon and she had it felt so good and she woke up and she's like buzzing with excitement

and then a couple of weeks later one of the like whatsapp group things from her school put out this call would any of the parents be willing to sing in the christmas um thing that was coming up um and she signed up to do it and she said there's just no residual nerves like she feels totally prepared to do it she's totally ready to do and is excited to do it and since then has been practicing by singing in public so like 13 years of stage fright she had one big lucid dream and now she can sing in public again so you can really use this for anything yeah i mean people use it for nicotine addiction oh amazing again in the new book it's actually a second edition of my first book dreams of awakening that comes out in

in summer and this guy matt humphries did amazing work with depression he had like 15 years of treatment resistant depression and he became lucid and in the loose dream he asked show me the source of my depression which any therapist know is really the core if you can find what's called the core wound or the original wound you're you've got a very good job unraveling the trauma there so he called out what's the source of my depression and his grandmother appeared and he was like what's my grandma got to do with my depression and then in the dream he had the the light bulb moment he was like oh my god the guilt so his grandma died when he was 10 years old of alzheimer's and he said he just never wanted to visit her the care home was smelly and he didn't know what to say to her and it's kind of scary that she couldn't remember who he was

so he just never went and after she died he remembered feeling really guilty and not being able to grieve properly not being able to let it go and he'd never really connected that that was the source of it all but he realized yeah it was actually a few months a few years later that everything started happening so in the dream he has this light bulb moment then he confirms it in the dream says wait is this the source of my depression is it about the guilt about his grandma's name and then as he did that his grandma who in the lucid dream was all like with alzheimer's all like shaking went and became healthy again which he thought and i totally agree was like the dream saying yes like you've got it so then in the dream he hugs her and then everything dissolves into light and he wakes up. And within a couple of weeks, he was off his meds. He was out of therapy. And then two

years later, he emailed me because on a podcast, he had heard me say, oh, we shouldn't jump to any conclusions about lucid dream healing. So he said, I wanted to wait two years. So you can put it in your next book and say two years he's been without depression. That's amazing. And yeah, two years. So he had like 15 years of depression and then one lucid dream. He was able to then move off his meds and out of therapy. That's fantastic. So amazing stuff you can do with this.

Oh, I love this so much. I think this is going to be so helpful for our listeners. Yeah, I think it is. Thank you. It's helpful. It's free. You do it yourself. There's no guru to worship.

There's no cult to be part of there's no medicine you take you learn these techniques whether from me or someone else or free off the internet you do them and you gain access to the most powerful healing modality one of the most powerful healing modalities in existence and you do it in bed that's cool that is cool charlie thank you so so much thank you what a fun chat what a fun chat i could talk to you all day but thank you for joining thank you so much you know it's interesting after listening back to this conversation because i have just started doing hypnosis and when you are being hypnotized you fall into this sort of slight dreamlike state when you're in between and I almost find myself kind of semi nodding off sometimes and I guess what Charlie's talking about is the power of that sort of transitional period and how we can

use it and how it's a really potent time for you know intentions of what we want our dreams to answer or what we want them to tell us and so yeah I just found this really really quite a funny conversation I hope you enjoyed my my story about my dreams and the flying plastic bag um sounds so ridiculous but yeah if you did enjoy this I would love it if you could share it with a friend you think might find it useful or share it on social media because I always love seeing that and it helps us get discovered by more like-minded people and if you don't follow the show already please please please hit the follow button because that helps us get more amazing guests like charlie

and allows us to expand and reach new people so as always i hope you enjoyed this episode thank you for listening and remember you are not alone goodbye