Sense of Soul - Psychic Dreamer Dr. Michael Lennox

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Today on Sense of Soul Podcast we have Spiritual Teacher, Dr. Michael Lennox he is a psychologist, astrologer, expert in dreams and dream interpretation, podcast host, and the author of several books, including his newest book, Psychic Dreamer: Exploring the Connection Between Dreams and Intuition. He conducts classes on shadow work, self investigation, spiritual practice, and of course, astrology, in a worldwide practice based in Southern California.  He is the host of Conscious Embodiment where he talks about the astrology of the week and helps listeners decipher their dreams. You can also tune in on to his YouTube channel like I do where he shares his expertise and has attracted a global audience, regularly sharing his insights including his daily astrological reading segment “Red Robe Astrology”. Dr. Michael has been seen internationally on many television shows, beginning with the Sci Fi Network’s The Dream Team and has also been featured on numerous network and cable television venues including NBC’s Emmy award-winning Starting Over, Soap Talk, The Wayne Brady show and many others. His radio appearances talking about the power of dreams number in the hundreds. For astrology classes, dream circles, daily astrology and more visit his website:  https://michaellennox.com

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we have spiritual teacher, Dr. Michael Lennox. He is a psychologist, astrologer, expert in dreams and dream interpretation.

He's the podcast host of Conscious Embodiment, and he has a pretty amazing presence on YouTube with his Red Robe Astrology, which I watch every chance I get, and the author of several books, including his newest book, Psychic Dreamer, Exploring the Connection Between Dreams and Intuition. This is one of my favorite topics. So I am super excited to share dreams with Dr. Michael Lennox. Hi, how are you? Good, good, good. I'm excited to share dreams with Dr. Michael Lennox. Hi, how are you? Good, good, good. I'm excited to talk to you.

You have such great energy. I was listening to you. When people start talking about the way they receive, right? Everyone receives so differently. Dreams is one of my big ones. Ooh, yay. Yeah, me too, obviously. Or I wouldn't be sitting where I am.

I know. This is like my favorite topic to talk about. So tell me, how did you fall into dream work? I love being in a podcast situation where I feel comfortable to tell the whole story because it's kind of kooky. Because it starts with the Broadway show album of Fiddler on the Roof. My mother had two Broadway shows in her collections, mostly classical music that I grew up on. So I love Beethoven and Mahler. I'm a classical music fan. But she had Man of La Mancha and Fiddler on the Roof. Okay. Fiddler on the Roof has a dream sequence in it. It's a huge musical number. It's like 12 minutes long. It's crazy musical theater. And it's on the album with a scene from the show where he, the lead, is going to tell a dream to his wife.

She says to him in that scene that starts off this big musical number, tell me what you dreamed and I'll tell you what it meant. Now, I heard that phrase a thousand times from the time I was, you know, two years old till, you know, whatever. So that idea lived in me from that phrase. When I was 15 years old, my mother's bookshelf was always a source of fascination to me. I was always looking for interesting things there. And she was getting a master's in social work and Freud's interpretation of dreams showed up on her shelf when I was 15. So I read it because I was captivated by my dreams from the time I was three years old. I have vivid dream memory from early dreams at like three years old. So I read it. Now, I don't know what I got from Freud at 15, but I certainly understood that dreams were valuable. They were elevated in the world of psychology and they were thought to be interpretable. He used the word analysis. I now prefer the word interpretation. So when I was in high school, as kids and adults like to do, it's a common social interaction. I had a crazy dream last night. I just remembered Golda and I was like, tell me what you dreamed

and I'll tell you what it meant. And I don't know what sort of chutzpah led me to do that, but I did it. And I immediately began to get this fabulous feedback from what my intuitive mind would have to offer. And people would widen their eyes and go, wow, that's so fascinating. And that experience was so yummy to me that I followed that breadcrumb my whole life, which eventually led to a doctorate in psychology and four books on dreams. Right. But it started with just hearing a story. That's just a story. The language that the story is told in though is symbol. And each symbol has a universal meaning based on what it is what

its use is what its essence is you know an animal as a symbol is what its qualities out in the world are right the animal totem medicine well you just gotta look at the animal to see what that is it's what they do how they act so similarly anything that shows up in a dream can carry this universal meaning. My mind hears those stories and can feel and grab the universal meaning behind them really, really fast. It's the speed that allows me to hear the dream and be doing that while I'm hearing the dream. There's no time differentiation. Whereas if I didn't have this gift, I might type out the dream and be able to look at, well, this means that a cup of water means bringing something near me that I need.

Writing implements it. It helps me express, you know, the refrigerator keeps things fresh longer. So I can tell the story about the story based on the items, universal meaning based on its use in essence. You could do that too. If I held up a pencil, we wouldn't have somebody in the group saying, no, it doesn't write. Everybody would agree that this pencil writes, but it's temporary because it's erasable. There's the meaning of pencil that would be different if it were a pen. Permanent. You're nodding your head. You're like, oh, that makes sense. My gift is the speed at which I can do that so that I can present an idea of what a dream might be,

meaning without interfering by projecting. Meaning if you have a dream about your mother i'm not going to interpret your dream through the lens of my mother issues i'm going to be objective which is very hard to do which is why therapists are trained not to do this and never to interpret somebody's dream wow are they oh god yes when i was in grad school, the conversations I would have, I remember having a conversation with a fellow student in the hallway about it. Well, we're trained never to interpret people's dreams. I just very snottily said, yes, you shouldn't. But I trust the gift that I have. It's a powerful God-given gift, and it transcends the idea of, oh, don't do that.

I also believe this, and this is my last thing I'll say about this. I respect the dreamer's consciousness drawing to them what their soul is calling for. So if a person has a dream and they find themselves in front of me two days later, then my coming towards them is a function of the sacred unfolding of consciousness itself. And therefore I'm the right and perfect person to be interpreting that dream for their soul's journey. You become part of it. That's right. I've had listeners call me and say, hey, can you help me interpret this dream? Just because I have so many. Because they know of your ongoing relationship. Have you

found those conversations juicy and satisfying? I do. Absolutely. And I'm the same. I'm not going to try to relate it to anything I've ever had. There's almost like this inquiry that slowly lets them really understand what it means for them. What I want to ask you about is there are some, I would say, collective ideas, right, that the pencil can erase and the pen can't. And I would also say there's archetypes that may collectively mean something. But then you have these more unique, more specific to one's journey for myself seem to be giving me messages or leading me into a direction that maybe when I'm unconscious, I'm not able to connect the dots. You're talking about is what's possible when the rational mind

isn't interfering with our intuitive connection to other realms that we connect to through what the psychologists would call the unconscious, where the shaman might call universal mind, right? It's our thinking mind that keeps us safe. It keeps us from bumping into the furniture and from, you know, like, you know, killing each other. But we identify with that mind as if that's who we are and it's not. But when we go to sleep, that rational thinking mind is also asleep. So it doesn't interfere with the other ways that we experience information that transcends these realms that are different from our conscious awareness realm. That's why in dreams, we get to have things like visitations from loved ones who have passed away or attend events that are about to come.

Dreams that are shared between people who are close. And if they wind up having a conversation in the morning, they can find out, oh my God, we both had the same dream last night. And all of these things are possible because the rational mind that would judge or negate or question or not believe is also asleep. Right. And I think I came to that because it's not like something you can look into. I actually do have a few dream dictionaries next to my bed. So it's not something you can look up in a dream dictionary. It's those kind of dreams. Right. And I think that it's one of the things that's so juicy about diving into your dream life for getting more acquainted with the pedestrian dreams that you're having, writing them down, just having a juicy ongoing

conversation between waking consciousness and what is delivered to us at night. Once we've initiated ourself into this open conversation between conscious mind and unconscious mind, now we're putting ourselves in the right place to be opened up to mystical and download experiences where we do, in fact, as you described, receive information from other realms that is transcending the psychologically driven chaotic dream where we're working out fears and anxieties so that we can wake up the next day and do life on life's terms. We're also connected to much greater places that are, I think, assisting us, but that we can't see or touch while we're awake. So I think I was speaking on some dreams of mine that came unconsciously. Absolutely. Like I had

no idea some of the messages that were coming through until later when they started to be part of the puzzle. However, there are times where you can, well, I have. I mean, just the other night I did it, there was this night that I was missing my dad and I was like agonizing almost. I remember like the grief had come and it's been like eight years, but the grief came on so strong and I was tossing and turning and it was almost like an anxiety that I couldn't shake. And so I just said, well, you know, I just really miss you, dad. Can you visit me in my dream? And sure enough, he did. I don't remember like a lot of details, but I just remember seeing him really good. I mean, it wasn't like a big dream, you know, but it just,

it happened. And I felt like I really called it on, but because I'm so used to this dream world and I've been including it in my life for so long, I almost have a little control. I mean, it doesn't always work, but it seems like if I want to have an answer to something, I can often get it. I think this is why people are attracted to learning more about how to have lucid dreams. Because this is a thing out there. I've never chased this as an idea. I've never gone to a workshop to increase my lucid dreaming. But when I'm asked about this or to talk about like, why are people so interested in what's the value of like trying to get more lucid in your dream life is exactly what you just described. That when we do, we get opened up to way more than just a dream experience. This waking life is a form of a dream. It's a layer of dreaming. Maybe when we sleep, we're at a deeper level of the same thing. And then when we pass out of our bodies, we go into yet another dream. We just keep waking up to level after level after level. think that just by opening the door to having a relationship with your dreams,

whatever level mystical abilities is in their nation league becomes developable. You know, I'm just not that person that can just like sit here and bring in some mediumship, you know, for your grandma or whoever. I'm just not that person. Like my spiritual gifts are all kind of subtle like this, their dreams are real big synchronicity, you know, synchronicity is another huge one. So I always feel like something's going on. I think maybe I'm onto it too. It's my rational mind that that gets in the way. And so I have to be shown in a different way because, you know, I do have ADHD. Maybe that has something to it. But certainly as we get more sort of conscious of these gifts, we do get to do what you talked about, guide and direct what's occurring or what's immediately coming over the horizon. When we're in our dream state, we would never question the idea that something magical appearing just happened or that we created anything because that's the nature of

dreams. But waking life is just as magical and we are co-creating powerfully. And when we know that and we operate in co-creation, I think life is more graceful, if nothing else, it's gentler in some ways. Maybe gentle is a bad word because life ain't gentle. But I think the brutality of life is easier when we feel like we're not alone, that we're connected to something much greater than us, which I think dream work delivers. Yeah. And there definitely is this level of awareness in the dream world and outside of the dream world that, of course, if you're not in that awareness, then you'll never, ever see it. And I love when people who don't dream a lot, like my partner doesn't dream. He hardly ever dreams, he says. And so then he'll have a dream. The other day he had this most amazing dream.

And I just sat there and listened. And I feel like you, how you were like, tell me more. Wow. You know, it was so vivid to him and it just was exciting. And I'd love to hear my kids' dreams as well. I have four children. With one of them, my daughter, who's about to be 25 on 2-22, she was born 2-22, 99 at 555. Okay, love. Right?

Yeah. Hello, Pisces. Your miracle's in courtesy there. Yeah, so I have recurring dreams all the time, but this one was for years. And I'm telling her about this dream. And then she starts finishing my sentence. And she's like, what? I have, I have, but what was crazy in her dream, she's hiding. And in my dream, I'm looking for something and I don't know what I'm looking for. Well, clearly her.

So cool. Well, this is another one of the mystical dreams that dream experiences that happen because of this, you know, dive into the connected universal mind and the lightness of the limiting mind is the idea that we do share dreams. And I have never had that experience that I'm aware of. Of course, the way you find out is you talk about your dreams, right? And like you and your daughter did. So it's certainly possible that I've shared dreams with people and haven't spoken about them. But it was surprising to me when I was writing the book that I just put out on psychic dream phenomenon, how many people have had wild, crazy shared dream experiences. And this is not the first time I've heard that in the shared experience dream, it wasn't like having the mirror of dream, but like the connectedness interaction, he's hiding,

you're looking, this is not the first time I've heard such a thing where what one person was doing was being invertedly received by the other dreamer in a bookend like thing like this. She's hiding. You're looking. Yeah. Isn't that so cool? Well, it's evidence that we are really more connected than we are separate. And the separate feeling is what causes all of the consternation on the planet, is this idea that we feel like we're not one. Right, but we are. But we are. And so all of that enmity that's out in the world is coming from a world that doesn't understand that we are all one. Yeah. Yeah. And the more you accept that, the more experiences like this, I feel like you have. Absolutely. So that same daughter, so I took some classes on hypnosis, past life regressions. And so my kids are always my guinea pigs. I mean, since they were young ages. And I had known about this

recurring dream that she would have where she would be naked in her dream and she would wake up and have a funny taste in her mouth. And she had told me about it over the years. But so I bring her into this past life regression and I'm going to take her through the womb, which is my womb. Never actually gotten to the past life because when I brought her to the womb, all of a sudden, she remembered this dream. Because when I first had her, she was taken away from me. And when she came out the womb, she was choking on amniotic fluid. And she remembered the taste in that past life regression. And so what was beautiful though, is I could lead her through, you are safe now. And she never had that dream again. The dream again, of course. Well, this is how we heal trauma. That is part of her was still there.

There's a little energetic part of her from that moment of choking, even though she was a newborn. That's what happens. Energy split off and stays where the injury occurs. And what we have to do is we have to go back to the source of the injury, re-experience it, and that's how healing happens this is why ptsd is such a brutal experience because the body knows this the body is trying to re-experience the injury because it knows that that's how the healing happens the mind says do not do that and that pull is ptsd right so just by giving your daughter the environment in which she could re-experience the trauma, it went away because she re-experienced it. And you added the love, the safety,

so that that infant who was terrified is then re-experiencing that terror less terrified. Can you believe that? i can't no idea you know i know you can you've heard all the eyes of dreams they're wild right right but you know she was taken away from me for hours i mean i didn't see her again for like four hours which that's unusual isn't it very scary you know because she had to be on oxygen and you know 25 years ago too but you know she also connected to how many times she feels alone and she's in a house i mean i you know we have a lot of kids oh but she has in her little body an experience that this place in a body is isolating separate alone and disconnected. Isn't that crazy?

No, it's crazy. And it just like neither one of us, you know, knew that that was affecting her. It just was really beautiful. So I also have had past life regressions where my dreams came up. Interesting. You know, I'm asked often, how do you know a dream is reflecting a past life? And unfortunately, the answer is very unsatisfying because the answer is like, it just feels like it. Yeah.

Then I think a little bit more, it's like past life dreams tend to be very sort of environmentally cogent, meaning it looks and feels like you're in an environment as opposed to the way dreams can chaotically move you from environment to environment to environment so radically that you know you're just you're just tripping around places. But there are dreams that have a feeling of cohesion. And when I've heard them, I always know, like my impulse would be, this feels or sounds like a past life dream. But I'll tell you, I've never had one. Wow. And been like, this feels like a past life dream because I'm in the experience. but it does sound like your dream vocabulary is letting you connect to some of those things like past lives, which I do believe is available to us much more powerfully in the dream state than in the waking state or the hypnotic state. Right. Right. Either way,

you got to alter how the mind is working. Even hypnosis is what I described of the dream state where the rational mind is asleep. The hypnotic trance suggestions is designed to get the rational mind to simply be quieter, hypnotized. That's why hypnosis and sleep are similar. Or meditation. I think I've also had, so I had this, and maybe you've heard this a lot too, but I would have this character come into my dream often. And one time he showed up in my meditation and I literally in my meditation was like, holy cow, what are you doing here? Whoa, dude. Wow. Yeah. yeah when you're open at the top like you are all of the potential mystical experience i think that the human body is capable of happen and i you know you're clearly well wired well in i don't know about that i don't hear things i don't you know i don't experience that kind of mediumship some i

have a few times but my strength my strength is just a very visual person. There are some people say, I'm not a visual person. I can't do the guided meditations and see what people see. I mean, do people always dream in visual? Well, that's a great question. And certainly, there's so much similitude in how people describe dreams. And there's just tons of data. It would lead us to believe that there is a way in which all people are experiencing the visual nature of dreams. But outside of that, we are all very different in how we contextualize energy and move about the space, like really radically different, right?

So just like as you described, the perception inside the brain, some people are very visual and some people are very auditory and some people can't picture things at all because they have a kind of an aphasia that doesn't allow them to. So I think that even just intuitively hearing you say how profoundly visual you are oriented just as a person in a body and that dreams take us into places that are visually experienced might, there might be some correlation there, though it might not be scientifically describable. It's certainly interesting to me that I'm talking to somebody who clearly organically and naturally has a lot of mystical experiences in the dream world and then the visual way that you orient and that experience might be one of the reasons

I don't know if it's a reason why but I think there's a correlation right yeah that makes sense okay so you know in my um in my journey there's been a lot of dreams, like I mentioned, that have helped me dream and he, he wears, and this is that, that character. He always wears like this, this cloak. Okay. And he covers his head and it's down. And I always,

always, and I used to write down my dreams, but now I digitally create them or I do art. Beautiful. Because I have, that's the only way I could process it. I process it that way so he comes in and we're sitting by a lake or a river and he holds his hand out and he has this like oyster

shell and he tells me this is the yolk and a drop of water comes down i told this a million times comes down hits the substance goes into the water, and there's life. And I don't get to ask him who he is. And that bothered me because I was like, he just went away. One would want to know. Right. I know. But that same night, I was having stomach issues.

So if you're up a lot in the night, this is a great time for you to remember your dreams. That's right. This woman comes in my room, same night, puts her hand on my stomach and she's healing it. And I'm like, oh, thank you so much. And then she starts to leave out of my bedroom because I'm in my bedroom in this dream. And I said, wait, wait, wait, who are you? And she turns around and she says, oh, I'm the hunter's wife. Oh, my God. What? The hunter. What the frick is the hunter's wife? Took me.

I mean, oh, honey, you didn't. It took you a minute. Of course. No, it took me a minute. Ah, it's obvious to me. Well, I got some fabulous masculine, feminine, integrated guidance system. It was the beginning of my journey with all of that. Makes me want to share sort of my story that's similar.

Share it, Chad. So let me start with this, that I've been on an intuitive path since I'm 15 years old. I am 60 now, so it's like I'm well into the journey. But the idea of having a connection with my inner guides that I knew and understood and had relationships with, that came very late for me. And I was even told intuitively by people over the years, it's like, oh, you know how to listen to your guides. You are absolutely in their arms. So the fact that you can't tangibly connect, you don't need to really worry about that. I accepted that because I could feel that.

And my life has reflected that. I've lived a life that has felt well-guided in this way. But in the last five, eight years, I have come to a very specific and visceral understanding of my inner guidance system. And while there are several, I'm going to talk about two. There's a main one whom I call mother, and there's a side one that I call teacher. Teacher is wildly powerful, humongous vibration. Mother, not so much, very little oomph, but she's at the top. She's the lead. Teacher speaks through me every time I'm asked a question, whether it's on a podcast, in a session, in a class,

or on the street. If somebody says, what way is Sunset Boulevard? I can feel my inner guidance turn on. And teacher says, go up three blocks, make a left, right? That's how powerful teacher is in my experience. But mother keeps me safe. Mother tells me when to rest. Mother knows how this little body of mine that explodes with energy works. So it's mother that keeps all of the spin in line, but she doesn't have a lot of power. I know this to be so.

Now let's go back a lot of years. I had never forget this. It was the night or the morning that Princess Diana was killed. So we got to start with that. I remember that day too. It was a rip in the force, in the fabric of consciousness, because this huge event that happened that night in Paris. So the next morning in the States at 5, 6, 7 in the morning, it had happened.

The world was ripped apart. What was going on? I was with a man I was seeing. He was actually up early watching TV. I was still sleeping in bed and I had a night terror. So I'm in the room. I'm paralyzed. I can't move. I have that terrorizing experience and I know what to do with this. I don't just like, I know to use my skill to lean in, to get past the fear and just breathe into the state so that it's not just about, ah, I can't move.

It's like there's something possible. Yes. Okay. And I segue out of the night terror into the most vivid like lagoon in nature sitting in like a canoe and there's this beautiful sort of feminine female seeming presence she's very pretty it's idyllic and she says to me oh i've got gonna get emotional she says this is the only time i'm ever gonna get to connect with you this is it but i'm here goosebumps all. But now I do. It was mother. She doesn't have enough power to make herself known to me in that way. In fact, she only really has sort of two words to me. And one is rest.

She's always like, I'm like, I'll be in a twisty, breathy sort of phenomenon in a moving meditation, because I do a lot of moving meditation. And she'll say, rest. But that's like all she has. She's like, she helps me. Oh, she has another phrase, the body knows what to do, which it does, right? So, and all of this moving the body. So I just, I am flabbergasted at this moment in my journey to be able to put together numinous experience. I never forgot that I knew was powerful. And now to have an understanding today that that's my guide. That was mother. She's not fake. I didn't make it up. Yeah, right. That's how I feel all the time with those kind of dreams. When they start to connect to your world, you're like, I can't believe that. That same hooded dude one time, and this was probably eight years ago.

One time he told me I needed to take a sabbatical. Did you listen? Well, it was so funny. I sat there and thought about sabbatical. I'm like, isn't that like a Catholic word? That's all I can connect to. I called my friend and she goes, well, my husband, I know in his, you know, because he works corporate, he said, you could take a sabbatical. I still have never really put that one together.

Actually, I never did. Sabbatical, certainly in academia, means a kind of respite for study. Oh, for study. Yeah, you don't take a sabbatical to like like you know relax it's not a vacation then in the world of academia if you go on sabbatical you're doing something you're being given permission to leave the rigors of your academic demands to pursue another academic demand oh my gosh maybe it was about going deeper. That is pretty much when I started the podcast, you know, and started to shift my entire. Well, that's interesting to me. See now there, that's an experience of like, I happen to know

about academia a little bit, right. And what a sabbatical is, because I know people have taken them, right? But that's how it works, where you have an experience where you say, sabbatical, what is that? And then I happen to know a little something about that. And so I just present it to you, not telling you that that's what it is necessarily, although I happen to speak authoritative, I have authoritative tone. I have to be very careful about that because it sounds like I know what I'm talking about all the time. So I've learned how to, this is what I do now as a responsible man today as an adult.

I'd be like, oh yeah, I'm speaking very authoritatively, but I don't really know any more than I just said. I present to you sabbatical just as an idea based on sabbatical's meaning, sabbatical's essence from a world that you might not dwell in but that's the essence of the word sabbatical in academia and then suddenly you go like ah

that's an interesting context to put in it's that it landed on you as a point of curiosity and not a point of negation is something I have experienced countless thousands of times by doing what I do by tapping into my gift and saying, here's what I see. Wow. So interesting. Of course, you know, most people, you mentioned it earlier, have dreams of these animals and stuff that represent things. I had taken some shaman classes, learned how to journey. And really, I only did it because I was trying to connect with my ancestor, who was a First Nation. And he was known as a great sorcerer. And then later, converting to Christianity through the Jesuits. I had already read a bunch of Sandra Ingerman stuff and was fascinated by, you know,

just these ancient practices that are coming back into our consciousness today, which dreams is such a big part of them. In fact, I would say it created it. We created the idea of what became, eventually, unfortunately, religion starts with gathering around the fire. What would we talk about? There'd be two things we would talk about, the hunt and our dreams.

Wow. And because First Nations people were living so close to relationship so they're not dreaming of zombie apocalypses. Right. They're going to dream of buffalo stampedes and hawks. And animals, yeah. Right. So that then the inner world becomes storytelling. Storytelling becomes one of the most important civilization-inducing cohesion mechanisms, drawing a group of people together.

It creates group identity. You keep following that up over thousands of years, now you get stories that become myths, or myths that become beliefs, and beliefs that become religions. And today we're sort of in a world where we have to correct for 2,000 years of one religion sort of taking over the world and sort of, you know, eradicating the mystery and the beauty of what is here on Earth. And I think that we're in a crisis moment on the planet. And one could argue that we are going from a world created through polarization of 2000 years of patriarchy. And what will save us is somehow ushering in a more holistic,

humanized experience of the collective in, you know, a spiritual sort of container that isn't about divide and I'm right. And you're wrong. It's that we're all right. There's only one place to get to and all roads lead to the divine. All roads lead to the divine. Yes. You know, in my dreams, oftentimes I see people I've never seen in my life. Yeah. Right. Or maybe I have. No, I think that we do have this profound connection to things that are not us that might actually exist on the planet. Like, so having dreams of people that you know, you don't know, but that you feel like you don't, they may exist in three-dimensional form. So I've had two fully lucid dream experiences

in my life. So the most innocuous form of lucid dreaming is just you have a dream and you're like, oh, I think I'm dreaming. Like that's lucid dreaming. But it is possible to develop the ability to have a lucid experience of your dreaming more, which I've never done. I've never wanted to chase that. But because I've spent my entire life in a meditative practice and expanding my own capacity to experience the mystical. One night I had a dream that I was sitting on my living room couch. This is fairly recently to this within the last 10 years. That was it. I'm sitting on my couch, but I'm telling you, honey, I'm as awake as I am right now.

And I don't mean close to feeling like I'm awake. I mean, I felt awake and I'm sitting on the couch. I'm going, oh, my God, I'm sleeping. I'm sleeping right in there. That's the bedroom. I'm asleep. But oh, my God, I'm sitting on this couch. And it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life in a life with a lot of extraordinary experiences.

And just sitting on a couch. Just sitting on a couch. But having this full, oh my God, look what's possible. So about a year later, I had another one. This one wasn't 100% vividly awake. There was a sepia tone. So I was fully alive and awake and alert only it wasn't bright light. Everything was dimmed with some Brown. Okay. Okay. Still a lucid dream. Still like I'm, and I'm in a park and I see over there a park bench and there's some men

sitting around the park bench and that's my destination so i walk up to the park bench other than the sepia as awake as i am right now and i say to that group there's five of them i'm the six i say you know that we're all dreaming this right and they all just sort of looked up and nodded they're like yep yep the sensation was six men who live alive on the planet at this time in bodies separately who do not know each other. All six of us had a lucid dream of being at a park bench that night. You could not deconvince me of that with nothing. If you were torturing me, I might pretend to not believe it anymore.

But outside of that, you could not extricate the idea that that was a bona fide thing. Right. And you may have had dreams of that before, but that one was absolutely right. So back to the question that at hand, which I sometimes get asked is if i have the authoritative answer like i've been asked this sort of there must be some like urban myth that you can only dream of faces that you have seen before i was like how the frick would i know that like i don't that's not a knowable answerable question it's not scientific it's it's you know but the the real question to ask is do you now believe something that you didn't believe the day before you had that dream?

Oh. And the answer to that is absolutely. Wow. Like, I will never forget standing, talking to a young man. I even remember his name. His name was John. That's all I remember. I remember where I connected with him as well, but he found out what I did and he came up to tell me the dream of visiting his,

of being visited by his grandmother after she passed. He was driving down to San Diego. He was falling asleep at the wheel. He had to pull over to the side of the road to sleep for a moment, just to save, you know, his ass from not crashing on the freeway. And he falls into a dream that's really a visitation. And it's so profoundly vivid. And it's a visitation. It's not a chaotic storyline dream. Visitation dreams are singular in setting. They usually take place somewhere in nature or a park bench or sometimes in the room that you're sleeping in. The person comes. There's no chaotic scene changes. There's one conveyed message. It's not even always verbal

and the message is always something like i love you are all as well but they feel very different than a dream right to talk to this young man and have his eyes fill filled with tears not because he misses his grandma but because he now knows he's not disconnected from her because there is no death the connection transcends death and now he is transformed by that dream experience and while i haven't seen him since that day we talked i know what happens when we are transformed by mystical experiences, the rest of our lives are led, including the possibility that mystical experiences are guiding us every step of the way.

And you're not going to forget that dream. That's right. He will not forget it. And he'll tell it. And it'll be the evidence of this is where I changed how I believe we are separate, connected, et cetera. Right. I wish people would trust that because I think that that's what I started to do. And the more I trusted it, the more clear they came. Because I mean, I have dreams all the time.

They're irrelevant, right? And I still remember them. I write them down. Sometimes I'm like, oh, you know, it's not very relevant. I shouldn't say that. Maybe they're just, they're more simple. They're not a big part of my journey. They're not like demanding your attention.

They're not a visitation, right? But I'll have a dream about my dad. But it's different than what I had just the other day. That's right. Absolutely. They'll show. And then when someone tells me that, I say, that's a process dream. It includes your dad.

And your job there isn't to think that it's dad but uh like a reflection of the part of part of you the father in you the guide in you that was created by your relationship with him in waking life so he'll show up but he's representing an aspect of the dreamer but in visitation dreams man all right no doubt there's a different vibe very different feeling trust that vibe yep i tell you once the funny one of the most this is this is a dream that i don't really remember all the details but i had it twice in one night those are the weird ones right where you're like you're having this dream forever

and it keeps coming back so i had a dream that I was in this auditorium. I was in like college and I'm sitting there and I can actually, I actually remember there was a person who had a striped shirt on like down a few rows. I do remember that part. Don't remember what we were learning. And I'd have to go look at more details of my journal, but it was interesting. So I wake up and I had this sense that I was on a break, that I actually wasn't to wake up. I had to go back, but I was on a break. Isn't that so weird? So I go back and I am back.

And when I woke up the very next morning, I remembered all of this. My brain felt like I had been sitting in school all day long. You know, that feeling when you're in like a class or something and you're just like having to take all this information in and I have no idea what it was. But when I first woke up, i wasn't sure which one was real yeah yeah you had a mystical download okay you know the idea that we are downloaded with information from these other dimensional experiences that we are connected to i mean this is just all so woo woo like this is the woo-wee-est woo of the i'm half scientist right so it's like it's not always easy for me to step off the scientific perspective and talk about the yeah make no mistake about it i'm half scientist right so it's like it's not always easy for me to step off the

scientific perspective and talk about the yeah make no mistake about it i'm as great as they get but i also like to know what's provable yeah you know so but the idea in the woo woo sort of equation of things that this place these other dimensions that we're always connected to that we are more connected to in the dream state has information you know we are i just wish i knew what it was well but that's the that's the thing the idea would be you don't need to know it was like putting in a new like operating program like a like a software that you would in the you know i'm aging myself now you just stream them in but once upon a time you needed like a disc you you would in the, you know, I'm aging myself now, you just stream them in. But once upon a time, you needed like a disk, you would stick it to your computer

as a download. You download the new software and you can do new things. So you don't need to know what was being downloaded. We can just trust that your humanity is functioning better, more gracefully, more powerfully because some upgrade was downloaded into you in that experience, which is why your brain was so tired because on some other dimensional level, you were working. All right.

I mean, I wish I would have had you all these years ago. That is human, universal, and everyone has the potential to tap into it. But just kind of like singing, everybody who can speak can sing. But that doesn't mean we want to listen to everybody. Well, I would say I'm a perfect example of that all the time. But I don't think I should. So that's a function of the ear. A person has a good ear to replicate tone that we want to hear

them sing. It's called talent. And so intuitive perception follows a similar sort of model of everyone is intuitive. Everyone can increase their ability to be intuitive. And I think focusing on your dreams and meditating during your waking life is the best way to be intuitive. And I think focusing on your dreams and meditating during your waking life is the best way to nurture that. And then you become an example of what is actually possible when you value increasing your Merkaba's ability to transmute and move multidimensionality in your body and you get the gift of the upgrade. Some people say, I can't dream. I try.

I can't do it. And so I've challenged those people, you know, and I say, well, let me just show you what I do. And I said, and from my experience, maybe nothing comes right away. But even when you wake up, if you just write down like what you felt. And then after you do, I said, it's almost like your brain begins to remember that this is what you're doing. So then all of a sudden you catch on. You are killing me right now.

What did I do? You spoke the thing that is the game changer to open the window of sleeping memory and waking availability to that memory. So here's how I describe it. Yeah. I say, all right, you got it. Set the intention the night before and you could do that formally, make it a ritual, write it down. Dear self, dear higher self, dear whatever. I want to remember my dreams last night. Set the intention. You got to have the journal next to your bed, right?

You kind of have the least interruption between dream state and recording ability. Have it right near your bed. And then I say this, I say, the thing you've never heard before is go to the journal, write something. Anything. Even if it's, I don't remember anything. And then you just said, if it even is a color, that's hysterical because I used to use this as an example. Sometimes that's all I get. And write something down, even if it's just like, Oh, I saw a fuzzy orange

ball. Right. Right. You said it like, right. What the, what you feel like, even if you have no memory, you could write what you feel like right there in the morning. The point is just as setting the intention is powerful and without it, you're unlikely to have as much success with anything, right. Setting intention. By going to the journal and writing something, even when you don't have an overt dream memory, you're setting the intention to your unconscious to hold that window of available memory open longer. The dream imagery is being perceived by the brain in a different structure than the way the eyes perceive visual image, right? Because the eyes are closed.

So our visual cortex is not generating the imagery of the dreams. In fact, what's really happening, and I'm not really that much of an expert on brain structure, what's really happening in dreams is the visual experience we're having is many, many, many, many, many parts of the brain working together. And the whole neopreneur cortex is lit up in dreams, but it's not the eyes. So the minute you open your eyes, you're like diminishing the quietude of the inner brain's experience of holding those images,

which is why you can have a dream in the middle of the night thinking, I will never forget this dream. Oh, I get so mad at myself. Right, right, right. Because then you wake up in the morning of the night thinking, I will never forget this dream. Oh, I get so mad at myself. Right, right, right. Because then you wake up in the morning and it's like, no, you don't remember. You might not even remember that you were wanting to remember it. Oh, I hate those.

I'm like, I will never. This was so amazing. But you're the first person I have ever heard in like 30, 40 years of talking about this that actually had the notion that the secret sauce is going to the journal no matter what. I usually, I go to my dreams before I go to any book, before any book, any internet. And this is just because they have really supported this journey. This is what I do. I said, even if I haven't dreamed in a while and I want to start again, I said, I'll just start that.

And I said, sometimes it looks like this. It's just a scribble. Right, right. But it is a moment where your conscious mind is saying to your unconscious that you're interested. And the unconscious I sometimes will describe as an eight year old child at the pool, jumping in, wanting mommy to watch. Mom, look.

But when we remember our dreams, it's like paying attention to the most sacred, intimate, vulnerable and rich places inside of us. It's so intimate. And that state connects us to universal wisdom that we get through the collective connection, not only to each other, but to the divine. And that's what's available in the dream state. It's amazing. It is so amazing. How long do we sleep? We sleep most of our lives. That's true. Quite a bit of it. You know, we go through about three to five REM cycles a night.

Yeah. We spend more time in REM the later it is. So the first time you go into REM, you're probably not going to stay there for more than two or three minutes. And by the time you're in your final pre-waking REM cycle, you'll probably spend six, seven, eight minutes in REM. So dreams are richer, longer, and much more memorable. And we're certainly dreaming every time we go to sleep and move through the whole cycle. It's not possible to not dream. So people will say, oh, you just don't remember. Well, there's so much going on in the brain with dreams that includes cleaning out metabolic waste and forming short-term memory.

If you didn't dream, you'd be dead within a week or two. Oh, that's interesting. So funny. Sometimes I'll be like, I'll drink a lot of water before bed. And I was like, what are you doing? I said, I'm going to dream tonight. That's right. I'm going to wake up a few times and remember my dreams.

You know what? You are the man of my dreams. I'm telling you. Thank you, honey. I just love this conversation. You're amazing. Every minute of it. Tell everybody where they can find you.

Tell them about your website and your book and your podcast. MichaelLennox.com is sort of, you know, the central hub to find out everything that I do. Michael Lennox, M-I-C-H-A-E-L-L-E-N-N-O-X. My podcast that comes out every Sunday night at midnight is called Conscious Embodiment, Astrology and Dreams with Dr. Michael Lennox. So I do the week's astrology and then I always interpret one dream at the end. And it's kind of like, do dreams in astrology go that well together? It's like, nah, I don't know,

but they do with me because I'm both a dream interpreter and an astrologer. So that's, you know, why that is. And the new book that is coming out actually came out on January 8th, which is why we met and connected, is called Psychic Dreamer,

Exploring the Connection Between Dreams and Intuition. And it's really just a collection of stories of many people's incredible mystical dream experiences presented to you with an idea that if you pay attention to your dreams, focus on a meditation practice and really surrender to what's possible, your dreams will increase your intuition. Awesome. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure getting to know you. I'd love to have you on in the future again. Anytime, honey. I would do this again with you.

This was so much fun. This was so easy and casual and relaxed and yummy. So thank you. Thanks for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. And thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.