Stuff You Should Know - Can you control your dreams?

Episode Date: June 23, 2009

In a lucid dream, the sleeper is aware that he or she is in a dream state. Does that mean you can control these dreams? Where did this concept come from? Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to find out more about lucid dreaming. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to wander. Plan your next dining adventure at visitmississippi.org slash dining. Mississippi. Wanderers, welcome. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Chuck. I'm flying. I'm flying. Chuck. Chuck Bryant is sleeping right now. I'm flying. He appears to be having some sort of dream, possibly a lucid dream. I'm flying. It's great. Are you awake, Chuckie? That's so lame. It was. Should we keep it? Sure. Okay. Yeah, how was your sleep? You feeling refreshed? I am. I'm feeling great and awake. And you were flying

just now? I was. Were you aware that you were flying in the dream and that maybe that's a little abnormal? I was. Well, Chuck, my friend, you were having what is called a lucid dream. Wow. We should talk about that. Yeah, we should. I mean, this is podcast gold. You just happen to be having a lucid dream. So weird. And both of us have the How Lucid Dreams Work article in front of us. Right in front of us. Written by Katie Lambert. Yeah. Who's actually an editor by day and apparently a lucid dream writer by night. Right. And we should say that this, we have probably gotten more fan mail requests for lucid dream podcast than any other. I mean, literally dozens and dozens of requests for this. So we can't read down the list of names because I haven't kept them, but this is for all

of you. Yes. Thanks to all of you for writing in and saying do it now. So we are. Yep. This is it. Let's just get this over with, shall we? I think so. We're going to teach you how to lucid dream. So you won't ever have to, you know, you can do it yourself. Which I find interesting. Are you planning on doing this? I'm going to try it for sure. I'm going to try it too if I can remember. I get very tired before I sleep. I've heard that. Yeah. So back to the beginning. Right. All right, Chuck. So while you were flying in your dream. Yes. The fact that you were aware that you were flying and that it was weird. And aware that I was dreaming. Right. Correct. Yeah. Okay. That is what makes it a lucid dream. Yep. That's pretty much it. A lucid dream is a dream

where we realize we're dreaming. Right. That's the hallmark of it. Right. You're still dreaming and you can control what happens in your dream. That, my friend, is up for debate. Oh, is it? Yes. The control part is up for debate. We'll be that way. There's nobody. It's not me, buddy. I would never say that to you if other people hadn't already. You're right. There is a big debate actually over, you know, whether or not lucid dreams exist. That's taken as fact. True. But whether or not we can control what goes on in our dreams. Sure. Which is the other aspect of lucid dreaming. Right. Generally. Like, you know, what did you adjust your yaw at any point in time where you're flying? You have great yaw control. Do you really?

Yes. So, Chuck, let's get, let's kick this puppy off, shall we? Okay. Are you going to kick this puppy off? You know, lucid dreaming has been around for a while, truckers. Yeah. I think they said they traced it back to the 1800s and even though even before, Aristotle, right? You know, what's funny is you just confused your research for body dysmorphic disorder. Oh, did I? Yeah. Which we'll get to in about 20 minutes. Right. Or two or three days for you folks. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Aristotle, much further back than the 1800s, wrote about lucid dreaming. He did. He didn't call it lucid dreaming, but he described it in one of his writings. And apparently, Tibetan Buddhists have been engaged in trying to control

their dreams, lucid dreaming. Not quite as far back as Aristotle, if I'm incorrect, because I think Aristotle came, oh, a thousand or so years before Buddha, but they have something called dream yoga. Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. It does. The name alone sounds pretty cool. Have you ever done yoga? Yeah. It's pretty difficult. I found it difficult. It is. I don't like bending over. Right. Plus, I think being, you know, a slightly overweight 38 year old is not the time to start doing yoga. Well, apparently, there's never a wrong time to start, but you just kind of have to go in and go, I'm going to shoot a duck at some point in time. Yeah. Yeah. It's a young man's sport, if you ask me. It is. It requires more yaw control than either one of us are capable of.

Downward dog. So tell me a little bit about dream yoga, Chuckers. Josh, dream yoga. As you said, Buddhist, why are you giggling? That's funny. That is your goal there is to probe your consciousness. And basically, it's sort of like enlightenment. Bring yourself to a constant state of awareness. Right. Because, I mean, if you're, which is a tenet of Buddhism, just to see things as they are, but why waste all of your conscious awareness on, I guess, waking life? Why, you know, take time off while you're sleeping? Yeah. So apparently, dream yoga is actually like being cognizant that you're dreaming. Right. And then saying, okay, why am I dreaming about this? Or, you know, why is that dog attacking me rather than, you know, curling up in my feet? Right. So it's a goal for constant

awareness. And they figured, hey, why take the night off? Let's just carry this right into sleep. Right. Because that's what Buddhists do. They have a work ethic, like you would not believe my friend. Yeah. How do you feel about that? About people going up to like the mountains and just meditating for their entire lives? Productive member of society or no? Oh, yeah. Why not? What are they doing? It's like, that's the most egocentric pursuit a human can engage in. You think? Going sequestering yourself from the rest of humanity to achieve nirvana or enlightenment. I love it. And just, you know, probably dying the moment you get it. What's the point? What have you done as a social animal, which humans are? Right. By nature, you have brought nothing to

the table. You probably didn't even bother to reproduce while you're up there. Well, I think there are many paths, my friend, in that you don't have to be a contributing member of society to be validated as a human. You're a hippie. I think I'm just jealous. I would love to spend the rest of my life on a mountain top. Oh my God, I would get so bored. I would drive myself crazy if I had to be alone in a cave with myself. I would go nuts too. All right. So that's dream yoga, which is also called non-dual awareness. Right. Right. It's another name for it. Yeah. Which mystics like to call it, but it's essentially the same thing. It's exploring what's going on in your dreams and trying to figure out why, which actually kind of falls into one, one camp of the explanation

for dreams. Right. It's pretty much split down the middle between physiological and psychological. That would be, that would subscribe to the psychological camp, that when we dream, we're basically our innermost fears, desires. You know how when they say like a drunk person, the words of a drunk man are the thoughts of a sober man? Yeah. Envino Verratis. I think, is that right? Well, I mean, similar concept. My goodness, Chuck. You like that? And why there's truth? Of course, we all know that. Gotcha. Sure. Man, I'm impressed with you right now. Because I spoke a dead language? Yes. It's not dead though. You're going to get us some lists for your mail. I know. So the psychological camp, which was spearheaded by Sigmund Freud,

right, said that our dreams are trying to tell us something essentially. Your mind is telling you something like, Hey, you eat way too many donuts because your mother neglected to breastfeed you, something like that. Sure. Especially along the Freudian lines, because everything was about sex and specifically having sex with your mother Freud. Yeah, a lot of it came back to that for sure. Although he did say sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. That is true as well. But no, to him, anything that was even slightly phallic in nature represented a phallus and anything that was an opening or a hole or something like that was vaginal in nature. He saw the world very much in black and white. He did. And he was the product of his society, the Uber repressed Victorian society.

Right. True. So I mean, his theories were kind of dated. Yeah, I would guess so. And actually, he's a lucid dreamer. Not that I am aware of. I'm curious. You know who did? Sure. A Dutch psychiatrist named Frederick von Aden. He's the guy who came up with the word lucid dreaming. And he was actually very much into his dreams. He kept count of them. And he found that he flew in a lot of them and apparently that he could control them. And this is where the lucid dreaming, the term lucid dreaming came from. Pretty cool. He also said that there were nine different kinds of dreams and only nine. I'd like to see that list. I didn't see that list anywhere. I know. But I could see that. Yeah. My dreams are generally kind of, I could categorize into nine

different groups. I find the number nine daunting. That's a lot of different dreams I have to have at night. I don't want that kind of responsibility. Right. You know? Well, I don't think you always have to have all nine. I think that's just the broad category that would fall under. Okay. Like you may always have dreams that you're naked at work, which means whatever. I'm not sure what that means. I don't either. What do you think that means? I don't know. I mean, when you go to dream books and things like that, there's usually a bunch of different conflicting theories. I used to have a dream that my teeth were either falling out or being or shattering. And I've heard different explanations for that. You were joking me. Have you had that

one too? It's a comment. No. It's just, it's that, that, wow. It's that Jamevue again. No, it's not. It's deja vu. No, it's not. It's you bringing up something that's already been brought up. Have I said this before? Dude, this happens a lot, Chuck. Eggs Benedict. All right. Mo better. Okay. I mean, come on, Chuck. Sorry. I have no, no explanation for this. So I think if you are having a lucid dream where you're in control and you still show up to work naked, does that make you a sicko? Yes. Okay. For sure. Well, Chuck, lucid dreaming and the fact that it's even a concept that's being discussed right now. The only reason we schlubs are talking about it is because of a guy named Stephen LaBeige. Yeah. He's, he's kind of the leading researcher

for this. He's a Stanford guy, Stanford man. Yeah. A psycho, a psychophysiologist. Yeah, which I imagine you get, you get some schooling to get that title. Yeah. Probably some dark days in that man's life with that kind of title. Yeah. And he got one from Stanford, which legitimizes him to a certain extent, in my opinion. Right. He calls himself a dream sailor, which delegitimizes him to a certain extent, in my opinion. I would call myself a psychophysiologist. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. He's, he's the, he's the leading man in this category and he runs workshops actually where he will teach you how to lose a dream and apparently they ain't cheap. No, a few thousand dollars, right? Yeah. And he'll also say that, and I'm not saying this guy's a

scammer, of course, it might, might be completely valid, but he says, oh, sometimes it'll take you several months of this to several workshops, right? Several paychecks to learn how to lose a dream. You can either go to Dr. LaBeige's lucid dreaming workshop, or you can just read this article, because there's some actual methods of teaching how, how to lose a dream. Right. We're not going to do that right now though, right? No, I think we should talk a little bit about dreaming part of the brain. Remember, I said that there's two camps, psychological. Yeah. Right. And then the physiological. Sure. The physiological kind of came onto the scene in 1977, I believe, came on, like gangbusters. Well, Josh, I think before we can talk about how to lose a dream, we should talk

about what lucid dreaming actually is on the, or not biological, but the physiological side. Yeah, that's the other camp. There's a psychological, and then there's the physiological as well. So we know, we do know that lucid dreaming occurs during REM sleep, right? Which is the fifth sleep stage, right? When your body is just basically motionless. Your, your body's literally paralyzed, right? Figured if we're, and you don't have any sensory input as far as anybody knows. Right. And you can't move except for your eyelids. Yeah, your eyelids. And they, this Steven character has researched a set of studies where they would have a pre-planned eye movement, correct? Yeah. We feel yourself falling into a lucid dream. Right. You would signal the researcher,

hey, I'm having a lucid dream now. Right. So LaBeersen, some of his crew hooked up some people who, I guess, reportedly had lucid dreams to an electroencephalogram and measured their brain activity, the electrical activity in their brains. And then, yeah, pre-arranged a signal. I didn't, did you get the impression what the signal was, but like fluttered or something like that? I don't know. Maybe a certain pattern of eye fluttered or something. I don't know. Basically, it was somebody communicating from their dream stage. Yeah. Pretty creepy. They were saying, I'm having a lucid dream right now. That is super creepy and super cool. Yeah. But that's the closest, that's the only evidence that we have, the only physical evidence that we have,

that there is such a thing as lucid dreams. Right. But it actually worked, right? It did. For food lovers, there's no place on earth like Mississippi where sweet, spicy, and smoky flavors satisfy your spirits. Wherever you wander. Plan today at visitmississippi.org slash dining. Mississippi. Wanderers, welcome. I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild present Bridgewater Season 2. A lot of people now actually believe that there is some kind of mystical force in this region that attracts monsters and paranormal activity. The Bridgewater Triangle. And that sounds about right. You're still denying that there's something beyond our understanding going on here? Starring Supernatural's Misha Collins, The Walking Dead's Melissa Panzio, and Rogue One's

Alan Tudyk. Written by Lauren Shippen and created by me, Erin Mankey. Something about all of this doesn't feel right. Hello? Is someone there? Something went wrong here. Olivia, we should hurry. We have a much bigger problem. What is that? Olivia, run! Listen to Bridgewater now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more over at grimandmild.com slash Bridgewater. Good work. And that's that's not really supposed to happen, Chuck. Like we're basically our brain supposed to be shut down, or at least the part of the brain that is capable of, you know, sending a message from the dream world, right, you know, to the waking life world where a bunch of people

are standing around you in white lab coats like watching your eyelids. Good point. Thanks. Very astute. Thanks. So Chuck, what was that? I don't know. Um, what's going on in the actual brain that could explain lucid dreaming? Because you know, we shouldn't, we should be basically slaves to our dream states. Well, there's a doctor at Berkeley, you know, this Matthew Walker character, Dr. Matthew Walker. He's a New York cardiologist. Is he really? No. He's a director of a sleep lab in California at Berkeley. And he, and I think this theory kind of makes sense to me, the lateral prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that deals with logic. And what he thinks is during REM sleep,

this part of the brain is supposed to be asleep, but he thinks it's possible that it actually wakes up. So your dream state and logic are both firing at the same time. So the dreamer is able to kind of recognize that you're actually dreaming. Right. Because, you know, if the logical part of your brain is working, you'd be like, I don't really fly. Right. Of course. I must be dreaming. Or I'm falling now and I'm going to die. Yes. Or another common dream. How about a, apparently lucid dreams are often sexy, sexy dreams. True. That's right. That level of control. Erotic in nature. Yeah. I have a lot of celebrity dreams where I'm friends with some of my celebrity heroes. I have them all the time. Well, not all the time. I have like five or six really detailed

good ones a year that I'm like, buddying around with Larry David or Gene Ween. Bo and Luke Duke. Yeah. Bo and Luke Duke. Yeah. The three of us. Yeah. I'm riding shotgun. I'll bet. Yeehaw. I do though. My wife Emily always cracks up. She thinks it's funny. So Chuck, let's undermine Stephen LaBeurre's thousands of dollars per workshop. Come on and teach people how to have lucid dreams. Okay. Let's do it. At the very least, we're going to give you a few techniques that you could try. We make absolutely no claims that this will work. So don't even try to sue us if it doesn't. But it's worth a shot. I think it makes sense. The first thing you have to be good at is dream recall. Yeah. That's kind of like the setup you should do is keep a dream diary. They say a dream

journal and, you know, keep some paper and a pen next to your bed. And when you wake up, write down what you're dreaming, even if it's in the middle of the night. And as you do that, you'll become more attuned to the process and you'll kind of train yourself to remember your dreams. Yeah. So that's a good start. Yeah. And another, another good technique, I guess, is a mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming. You heard of this one? M-I-L-D, mild. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lame. This is one of LaBeurre's techniques. Yeah. So apparently he's given it away. Sure. Basically, what you do is when you wake up from a dream, you try to recall it. Important. And then as you're going back to sleep, this apparently would work

best in the middle of the night. Right. When you go back to sleep, you are, you, you keep reminding yourself that you're about to start dreaming. Pretty soon you're gonna, you're going to dream again and you actually want to go back to the last dream you had. Right. So you're, you're controlling things from the outset. And then once you get to that dream again, you're gonna start, you want to actively look for what LaBeurre's calls dream signs. The dream sailor calls these dream signs. Deep detail, right? Right. Well, like if you have wings or you're flying. Right. So you're looking for these kind of things and you remind yourself that you're dreaming. And that apparently puts you in the driver's seat of your dreams and can give you lucid dreams

that you're in control of. I would have called myself the dream weaver. I would never call you that. Okay. They say, and this was a little extra research, Josh. I'm going to lay on you. There's some old Mexican and Indian techniques in their cultures where you can look at your hands during a dream. Have you heard that one? No. Apparently if you look at your hands during a dream, that's a signal that you can take control of it from that point on. But I guess you would have to be in control to look at your hands in the dream. So I don't know about that one. Yeah. But I'd be more willing to trust them like ancient culture practice than, than this crackpot out in California. Well, they have, they have more staying power. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. So I mean, I'm going to try that one. I'm going to try and see if I can look at my hands because I don't notice if I even see my hands in my dreams. Well, my all time favorite lucid dreaming technique is called reality testing. Yeah. Lay it on me. And it actually falls in line with the Buddhist dream yoga where basically you walk around all day going, I'm in my waking state. I'm in conscious reality. Like when I open, when I turn this door knob, this door is going to open and it's just going to be a regular room behind it because I can predict things because this world is based on rationality and logic. Right. So you basically just remind yourself that you're not dreaming all day in the hopes that when you start to dream, you will be aware of the separation,

the border between our dream state and waking life. And you can carry this over and say, now I'm dreaming. Right. When I open this door, there's going to be like an eight headed dog on the other side. Do you have to speak like that in your dreams? I've heard it helps. Okay. Yeah. It's good. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's how I talk when I'm dreaming or when I'm reminding myself of anything like, no, I've got to take the garbage out tonight. Yeah. I should really not drink this evening. That kind of thing. Yeah. I know that's a dream. Nova Dreamer, you want to talk about this thing, but this is an actual contraption that the same doctor in California, LaBaris has built, I guess. And it is, Katie describes it as a cross between a sleep mask and goggles.

So you wear this puppy when you go to sleep. And what it does is when it when it knows you're in REM sleep, sensors track your eye movements to let it know. And then it shines a light in your eye. Right. It's kind of like looking at your hands. Yeah. That ancient technique, but you have a reliable reminder. Right. So it shines a light in your eye. And then your dream, I mean, I guess you stay asleep. I personally would wake up if someone's shining a line in my eye. Like what the? Yeah, exactly. And so that's the signal, you know, you're dreaming at the time. And you just take it from there. Yeah. Can we be done with this now? Well, I think the dream weaver, the $25,000 question, Josh, have you ever had a lucid dream? I don't, you know what, Chuck, I don't remember my dreams

very often. I have, yes, I have once. Let's hear it. Do you really want to hear it? Well, a truncated version, sure. The 22 minute version. Yeah. I was basically, I had a theme song. Okay. I wasn't actually a pimp, but like kind of like in the very slangy version of the word pimp, like it just kind of walking along like, what's up? You're sure my dog ran past me, but it was a, she was a balloon dog, like a balloon animal. Cool. And that was about it. That was about all I remember, but it was one of the very few times where I was ever like, this is cool. And that to me is about the same as I'm dreaming. Right. Like I was, I was enjoying like this dream while I was in the dream. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think that's probably the closest I've had to a lucid

dream. Ask me. Well, Chuck, is it time for listener mail? No. Chuck, tell me about your lucid dream, buddy. Well, I don't have one specifically, but it does happen to me from time to time. Okay. Where I'll be aware that I'm dreaming and really dig in the dream and manipulating where I'm going in the dream. And where do you go? Well, wherever. Disney World? Wherever I feel like at the time. So where? Provence? I'm a dream sailor. So you can't box me in wherever the high seas take me. So yeah, I've lucid dreamt and I also am pretty good at waking up from a dream that I was really enjoying and falling back asleep and going back into that dream. So you just love to tease yourself, huh? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm a light sleeper. So have you ever heard

that if you tell people about your dreams, like if you have a nightmare and you tell somebody the nightmare in detail, like you won't have it again? I have not. What's up with that? And I've had plenty of recurring dreams too. Oh, well, if you ever have a dream that you're saddled with, a nightmare or something like that, the sooner you tell somebody about it, the more likely you are to not have it the next time you go to sleep. Dr. Clark speaks. Yeah, that's it for me. We're going to do a big dream podcast at some point. Yeah, fear not. How dreams work article is thick and voluminous and filled with stats and numbers and Chuck and I are drilling over it. So look for how dreaming works in the future. Absolutely. Until then, Chuck, let's do a listener mail.

Josh, I'm going to call this stuff we should know. And I also have a special little shout out at the end of it. Oh, really? There's nothing to do with the mail. Okay. So this is from Mason and Ames, Iowa. And remember when we talked about the carbon dioxide pipelines and how there's never been any accident deaths and that kind of thing? Right. Or there's been accidents but no fatalities. Wait, hold on. How did it go? Let's listen. We're talking between 1986 and 2006. There's only been 12 CO2 pipeline leaks with no injuries and none. Oh, yeah, none. Zip. And over the same period, more than 5,000 accidents with 107 fatalities with liquid petroleum pipelines. Right. So whoop, whoop. It sounds like CO2 pipelines are way safer, but again,

there's a lot fewer. Yeah. Oh, that was a good one. That was awesome. Whoop, whoop, indeed. So Mason says, greetings, Josh, you're in Chuck Arena. Which was a little casual, I thought. I thought so, too. Mason. That's what Mr. Chuck, to you, Mason. He says he just listened to the CCS carbon capture podcast. Oh, he's using CCS to impress his friends. Yeah. And he actually wrote down abbreviation, which I thought was kind of funny. I wonder if he's, I can't say. He grew up in a small town called Mule Shoe, Texas. Sweet. And he says that should make my listener male read worthy already and he's right. But he said he grew up 13 miles west of Mule Shoe and about five miles from our house, there was a station on a carbon dioxide pipeline that tapped the CO2

and stored it in those huge cylindrical tanks. And it was shipped on big semi-trucks from that plant. Yeah. So he says way back in 2002, there was a catastrophic failure in one of the tanks and it actually killed a worker and injured three others. So the explosion shook all the dishes in our house from five miles away. That's pretty hardcore. Yeah. And his father, who was an Air Force pilot, said he initially thought the noise was a sonic boom from a jet. So he said it didn't exit a result from a leaking pipeline, but if there would have been no pipeline, there would have been no accident. Yeah. Well, sorry about that, Mason. Sorry we overlooked the local tragedy there in Mule Shoe. I'm surprised we didn't hear about that. Yeah. And now Josh for our special

little shout out. What is it Chuck? This is to Sully, who was sounds like one of your pals. Yeah, it's a little kid. His mom wrote in, his mom, Kristen wrote in from Southern California. And I know Jerry, he was a big fan of this email as well. And if you read them, you would be as well. Uh-huh. And Sully is Sullivan. He just sounds like a really cool little kid. He's about my nephew's age, 11 years old I think. Yeah, my cousin, my nephew Noah. He was a very cool smart kid. And they are both big fans of Mythbusters and they're really smart and into school and stuff. Sure. And Kristen just wrote us in to thank us and I'm not going to read her email, but we just wanted to say hi to Sully. And thanks for listening, little buddy. Stay in school. Keep studying.

Drink your milk. Keep up what you're doing because your mom says you're a really cool, groovy kid. He loves modest mouths. Right on Sully. At 11, I mean come on. And they might be giants. Nice. And I believe my nephew Noah is a big, they might be giants fan as well. So sweet. So we just want to say hi and thanks for the support and keep listening. Yeah. Thank you Sully and thank you Mason. Thank you to everybody who listens to us. If you want to send us an email describing how you built the birdhouse in your soul, you can send that to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. The cartels, they just killed everybody that was home.

Setting an aspiring private investigator on a collision course with corruption and multiple murders. The detective agency would turn out to be a front for a drug pilot. Would claim he did it all for this CIA. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Talk about walking into the devil's den. Listen to Murder in Miami on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.