The Viall Files - E357 Ian Wallace - Dreams: The Ultimate Self-Portrait

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

Today on the Viall Files we are decoding your dreams with dream psychologist, Ian Wallace. Ian is a best-selling author and popular broadcaster who is widely acclaimed in the media for his live dream analysis. Nick and Ian dive right in, starting with analyzing dreams about infidelity (and sex in general), what they mean and how we can translate our dreams into actions. Ian explains why it is more common for men to have vivid dreams and walks us through the top 5 most common dreams. Ian then breaks down the symbolism behind our very own Viall Files teams’ recurring dreams, dreams of being pigeon holed, sleep paralysis vs. lucid dreaming, and dreams about death. He’ll show us how our dreams are the ultimate self portrait and how we can process and remember dreams by using “will, still, and fill.” “People used to think dreams happen to them, when really, you happen to the dream.” Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode and as always send in your relationship questions to [e-mail] to be a part of our Monday episodes.  Check out our new "Introvert" merch at www.viallfiles.com today! THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: Noom: Sign up for your trial at http://www.noom.com/VIALL Athena Club: Get 20% off your first order at http://www.AthenaClub.com and use promo code VIALL Tommy John: Get $25 off sitewide + free shipping at http://www.tommyjohn.com/VIALL. Mrs. Fields: Get 20% off at http://mrsfields.com/FILES. Episode Socials:  @viallfiles @nickviall @ianwallace https://ianwallacedreams.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

hi uh welcome to the vile files we're using this oh oh i just okay yeah how's everyone doing Oh, okay. Yeah. How's everyone doing? I'm like crying. New intro. I'm crying. It's Allie laughing. Amanda, how are you?

I'm doing very well. I went to a, I was proud of myself. I went to a networking event that I didn't know anyone at. And I showed up to a holiday party by myself. And it went super well. What was it for? Just like this organization called Young Entertainment Activists. And so it's

a kind of collective that's working on entertainment making entertainment a little more ethical both in like they do stuff like climate justice did you have to come in with like a a passion like a pit like i mean that's how i come into most parties you have to come in like how so how are you changing the world the party went super well i was really proud of myself for like putting myself out there met some really interesting people had some great conversations why didn't what did uh can we call your girlfriend now no we haven't defined it she's still new girl she actually speaking of her she was like my therapist said we should maybe it's worth a check-in about feelings so how are you feeling i was like you're gonna make me start that was her starting yeah

i mean she was blaming a therapist i don't think that counts though how does that not count to say let's talk about feelings like you gotta give me something okay fair i had to go in like completely completely blind which i didn't i apologize her asking about your feelings or not talking about okay fair uh i was gonna tell a story about this party yeah that maybe nobody wants to hear. But it was, so at the beginning, everyone's sort of off having their conversations. And then people migrated over to this big sort of living room seated area. And people were doing decoration and whatnot.

I decided to head out. It was getting late. I go, I am putting on my shoes kind of like in front of everyone. And I realized that they're tighter than usual. And I looked down and I realized that I've put on another person's Doc Martens, like at the party while facing everyone. So then I had to do this really awkward, like sort of- Wait, wait, hold on, time out.

Why were you at a party that you had to take your shoes off? Was that someone's home? Yes, it was hosted at someone's home. It was gorgeous. They welcomed us into their apartment. But then I had to, I put on my shoes and then had to in front of everyone sort of like casually take off shoes again i suppose an activist party wouldn't be like a a massive yeah you know and so an activist party probably not like going it's not like sticky with beer on

the floor like people are knocking on the doors trying to get in. There's not a wait list. If you want to show up, they'll probably let you in. Anyway, so what'd you do? No, it was just awkward as shit having to take off. Did you get caught? I don't. If so, nobody said anything about it, which God bless them for. Do you ever try getting in the wrong car, like a parking lot? My grandma does it frequently.

And a lot of the times the cars are open, so she'll get in them but i've never gone that far but i've definitely like i've uh like a white audi yeah in la yeah it's like oh my god that's not my car yeah um although i feel like ali's grandma is probably like you know obviously an honest mistake do people have has anybody ever caught you doing it no yeah that's like it's like locked so like i've never got it i've never got this is not northern minnesota we're good well you didn't get caught i wanted i kind of wanted you to get caught you want to be there you wanted there to be like a public shaming of me for putting on a stranger's shoes at a party i wanted to know how that person reacted would there be a public shaming?

Because that would be ridiculous. To quote TikTok, I guess we'll never know. We have a great episode for you talking about dreams today. Lovely man. Sir Ian Wallace. I don't know if he's a sir. We should knight him. He's great.

I feel like to you, every British person is a sir. What makes you say that? I feel like, have we met other british people i feel like it's a real passive aggressive way of calling me ignorant yeah nick you're ignorant against british people and it's gone on for too long it's like you think everyone who's british must be a knight because you're stupid i feel like you've called other british people like sir before we don't know if we don't think he's a knight. And also, is he British or is he Scottish?

Is that British? He's Scottish. Yeah, that's on me. That's actually, that's a great point, Nick. That's a big oopsie on me because different. I feel like you think everyone from across the pond is from England. Let's break that down. Either way, somebody, I think there's a lot of opinions and thoughts and misconceptions about

dreams and Ian was kind enough to join us all the way from across the pond and dissect some dreams and make us understand what we're really dreaming about and various ways to interpret them and how they can be useful what's true

about dreams what's not true about dreams all your questions are answered in this riveting, exciting episode with the wonderful, insightful Ian Wallace. Don't forget to send your questions at asknickatcastme.com, cast with a K, especially if you have any holiday questions. We're curious about your holiday pains. We want your holiday pains to be our holiday pleasure. So please write us at asknickatcastme.com so we can benefit from your crisis. Thank you. On to Ian.

Ian, thanks so much for joining us. It's my pleasure, Nick. Really looking forward to it. Yeah, I mean, it's such a fascinating topic talking about dreams and what they mean. And can we do anything with it? Can we learn about ourselves? Are they just something that we can just ignore? What makes a person dream versus not dream?

What makes us remember certain dreams versus not? I think these are all these questions that we have. And I get asked a lot of questions. I think one of the most common questions, and I'm sure we'll get into it, is what does it mean if I find myself in a dream cheating on my partner or dream about my partner cheating on me? I remember I had a few years ago in a relationship. My girlfriend at the time, coincidentally, ended up cheating on me in real life. But in my dream, she would tell me that I cheated on her

and she'd wake up and say, well, I was mad at Dream Nick again tonight. And we'd wake up and say, well, I was mad at Dream Nick again tonight. And we'd wake up, and somehow she would be mad at me for something I did in her dreams. And I just always kind of dismissed it as whatever. And so, so many questions about dreams. Before we kind of get into all that, Ian, I'd love to hear a little bit more about you and your background, and how long you've been studying dreams and I guess take it away from there.

Yeah, thanks Nick. So I have been doing this for about 40 years now. So I have always been fascinated by dreams ever since I was a tiny child. And as a result of that, I went to university to study psychology, became a qualified psychologist, and since then I have been working with dreams in all sorts of different circumstances and aspects. awareness and understanding what I'm far more concerned about is actually putting dreams into practice to take these incredible phenomena that we generate every night and actually doing something with them in waking life and that's why my approach tends to be quite different from other people's approaches tend to be two main approaches to working the dreams. One is the pointy hat, woo, one where if you dream of this thing then something terrible will happen to you a week next Tuesday.

And there's also the scientific one with the lab coats and clipboards where we're just looking at outputs from an electroencephalograph trying to understand what on earth is going on inside someone's head. So the way that I work with dreams, and it is becoming more common now since I've introduced it, is to really work with the images in the dream, and particularly linguistic imagery. So for example, in the cheating dream, it's actually the 21st most common dream from all around the world. So about 10 years ago, I wrote a book called The Top 100 Dreams which is the 100 most common dreams that all human beings have and that is from all 7 billion of us. So when we dream that someone is cheating, we dream that a partner is having an

affair and it is one of the major causes of upper arm bruising amongst men when they wake up. Because their partner wakes up and starts screaming at them they were having an affair, but they weren't. If we actually go with the language, when we think about what happens in the dream, we hear the words cheating, and you've been unfaithful, and you've betrayed me. And what happens when we dream people used to think that dreams happened to them but the reality is that you happen to the dream and you create everything you experience in the dream including all the characters so when you dream that your partner is cheating you are actually placing an aspect of your character into your partner and And it's not them that's cheating. It's you that's cheating because you're cheating yourself.

You're letting yourself down in some way. You're betraying yourself in some way. You're losing faith in yourself. You're losing confidence in yourself. So it suggests that in waking life, you need to be more confident in a particular situation and have more faith in yourself. And as we know, one of the most attractive things

in any human being, particularly as a sexual partner, is confidence. So if you're losing confidence in waking life and appear a bit needy, and you don't have that faith that you can do something, then other people, sometimes people close to you, tend to find you a bit less attractive. Interesting.

So I'm assuming the same would apply, like even if you have a dream that maybe they're not being unfaithful, maybe you just have a dream that you guys broke up, like they broke up with you, they broke your heart. I'm assuming the same kind of logic would apply in terms of your lack of confidence in yourself about a situation.

And also, I guess my question is, if I were to have a dream about my partner breaking up with me or my partner being unfaithful, is my lack of confidence and insecurity specific to that relationship? Or could it be about many other things that are going on in my life? It's usually nothing to do with the relationship. It may reflect on the relationship. It's usually what we do in dreams is we use lots of analogies and metaphors. So we'll take some situation in our waking life and the best way we can express that is through some fundamental emotional imagery, like being in a relationship with someone so very often that

losing faith and losing confidence in yourself is probably something to do professionally or creatively that you've been trying to do something so if you dream that your partner is breaking up with you rather than cheating on you it suggests that there's something in waking life that you are very emotionally engaged in usually creative or professional and you're giving up on that you're giving up on yourself in that so that feeling of breaking up and again we hear it in language but you get to the stage that you have to divorce yourself from something or you have to split away from something or you have to to break up and when that happens, it's nothing usually

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so they think about maybe I'm doing something creative or like what can you do with that dream to help a situation other than say, oh yeah, I guess I am insecure about my job or I am worried about my promotion. What is it? Is there an actionable thing we can do once we like, okay, now I'm hearing Ian talk about this dream. I've been dreaming about my partner breaking up with me and it's like, okay, yeah, I guess so.

I guess I've been insecure. What else can we do with that from there? One of my catchphrases is a dream is just a dream until you put it into action. So it's great that you've entertained yourself or scared yourself or made yourself a bit more aware when you've been dreaming. But to put that into action, then there's a process I use called the called the dream connection process and in that the first thing you have to do is name what was happening in your dream so for example say you name you identify in the dream that you have that betrayal dream and you think right there's something in my waking life where I'm betraying myself and usually in any sort of therapeutic or psychological or coaching situation you always

need to name the thing and that can be really hard to do for some people and particularly men quite often I'll be working with a client and I'll say to him right so can you can you tell me a bit more about this can you tell me about how you felt about it and he'll just say well you know it sucked i'll go yeah can you give me a bit more than that and go yeah it really sucked so yeah you have that thing of it's really really good to work with the image so um this idea of working with the image is a really powerful therapeutic tool and the reason for that is the reason we work with images is that dreams are not just flows of imagery. They're also streams of emotion. So the main way in waking life, how we express our emotions is through imagery. So, for example, Nick, if you're angry with me and you say, you know, I'm angry with you.

I'll think, well, you know, you're just a bit disappointed. If you say, Ian, I'm absolutely fuming at you. I think, oh, Nick's on fire. Or if you say, if you'm absolutely fuming at you i think oh nick's on fire or if you say if you do that again ian i will positively erupt i think well you know there's something tension building up here so we use images in waking life to express emotion and that's what we do in our dreams what we're doing our dreams is we're processing emotions and we use images to visualize and portray those emotions so you take the image from a dream so your partner is betraying you so you have to think right so if we're in waking life am i betraying

myself and then what that goes back so you have to step back a bit and just keep connecting all these images together you think right so when you are with someone in a relationship you make commitments to be in that relationship with them. So you think, right, so what have I committed to do that I am letting myself down from now? So you can see we're just doing something quite simple here. It's like, right, I've made a commitment in waking life, maybe a professional or creative commitment to say, by this time in my life, by the end of 2021, I will have this massively successful podcast. And what you might have done, Nick, was at the end of 2019 or whatever,

it's just like, oh, podcast, I can never do that. So that would be betraying yourself and letting yourself down. But because you made that commitment, then you stick with it. So that's the first part, just naming something. And then, so there are three steps here. The next stage is reflecting on what you've named and reflecting on that it's kind of doing the opposite of it and it's thinking right so what is stopping me from making this commitment what is preventing me from doing the thing i want to do and having

confidence in myself and having faith so in doing that you've got now got two things you can work with one is you know what the problem is and knowing what the problem is is really most of the deal if you can get that done that's the main thing and then you're just trying to understand what might be preventing you from doing that and by naming that then you can start to work through those issues so it might be a time commitment very often with creative processes it upsets other people because they have a particular view of you and they don't want you to get above your station so you might think in a social group you don't want to upset your peers and upset your friends and then the third stage after naming and

reflecting is just expanding on that thinking right once I've made this commitment once I stop betraying myself once I stop letting myself down and having faith in myself, how can I open up to other areas? So all we've done there is take that image from the dream and then we've identified it, we've seen what's stopping us doing it, and then looking at the options, the choices we have to expand upon that and open up. Would you say, you know, you're talking about how, you talking about how when you're working with male clients

and they're not necessarily, I think a stereotype would be men aren't often as in touch with their emotions. They have a hard time opening up and expressing themselves, I think, relatively compared to women. As a result, because it almost sounds like sometimes if we repress our repress our emotions when we're awake is it is it more common for men to have more more vivid or some of these dreams as a result of them being less emotive while awake does that makes am i making sense like because men are maybe more subjective to kind of ignoring themselves yeah yeah you're making perfect sense there so again it is very stereotypical and it depends uh where someone is located across the gender spectrum but the idea

whether you're a man or a woman and you're showing what are traditionally masculine traits of trying to be appear invulnerable and being passively defensive around that and doing all those things there are so many theories and ideas about why we dream and you know ranging from the one the woo-woo psychic ones where you're just lying there like some kind of psychic receiver tuning into the ether and getting messages from the gods, which is nonsense. Or the one where the activation synthesis idea where dreaming is just noise from the pontine brain stem. Both of those are nonsense. The fundamental function of dreaming is to process your emotions. A lot of work was done in the late 90s, early 2000s

around how aware we are and how consciously aware we are and various experiments and research showed that when we're awake we're only consciously aware of about two percent of what's actually going on around us and what we're actually experiencing. And the other 98% is happening emotionally and creatively. And we just absorb that. And what we do when we dream is we take that 98% of emotional and creative experience and we process it by working through those emotions by using imagery. So if people repress their emotions, if they actively repress their emotions in waking life and do all those things of keeping their chin up

and a stiff upper lip and all that nonsense, then what happens is they try and process those emotions in their dreams. And what happens with that, two things will happen. Sometimes switch work together. One is the dream will recur so this is why we have recurring dreams if you don't process the dream and do something with it if you don't put it yeah if you don't put it into action then because it's what happens in the dream that is no one else is creating the dream apart from you so you're making the dream

happen and you are sending some messages to yourself. And if you don't pay attention to those messages, it's like somebody shouting your name in the street to try and attract you as you're walking away. It will get louder and louder and louder until your attention is finally connected with. So a recurring dream is just a dream where it's often a situation you find yourself in an awakened life and what recurs is you're not taking action to do anything with the dream the other part of that the kind of shouty part is where it becomes a bit more nightmarish so people tend to think that dreams and nightmares are two separate entities but they're actually all a nightmare is it's a dream

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The first one is, coincidentally, and it's interesting I'm talking to you, that when I was a young man, when I was eight or nine, my grandparents lived on a lake house that my grandfather built, and my mom grew up there. And my grandfather passed away, and they had to sell it, and it was devastating for me. This was like my paradise, so to speak. And I've had this recurring dream my whole life that I find myself back at the lake house,

but we're not there. We don't own it. It's the combination of we're sneaking in and the owners still own it. But my grandmother, who's now passed, weirdly has this relationship. I'm on the lake sometimes, and I just found out it's up for sale. I'm trying to buy it back and give it to my mom. Yeah, I found out that. Right.

Yeah, it's a whole process. I don't know if I'll... I'm really working hard on doing it, but I've had this dream my whole life. I have a tattoo of the lake house on my chest and now I'm trying to bring it back in the family. I'm just dreaming that we have this house back in the family and I'll have it two or three times a year. And it will be so vivid, like I'm back on the house. And I haven't been there in 30 years. Yeah, so there's a lot of things going on there, Nick. So thanks for sharing that dream.

So again, it's quite a common dream and actually we spoke about common dream themes but the most common dream symbol, the number one dream symbol is the house and the reason that we use the house as the number one dream symbol is the house represents the self it represents your identity and the reason for that is houses have got insides and outsides, and so do we, we've got inner lives and outer lives. So when you dream about a house, then you are dreaming about

some part of your identity or your whole identity. And the different rooms in the house represent different parts of who you are. So for example, the kitchen is how you look after yourself and other people. The lounge is where you connect and meet with other people. The bedroom is where you are most at home with yourself. The bathroom is where you go to get rid of stuff you don't need and to renew and refresh yourself. So when you dream of a childhood house when you're eight or nine it sounds like you're really really happy there you've described it as paradise and you also have the two of it on your chest close to your heart so that part of it is when

you dream about when you create that house in your dream you're dreaming about your purest happiest person that you can be so apart from it being an aspiration a dream in waking life it's also realizing that no matter what challenges and obstacles you meet in your waking life there's part of you inside that is that part that is fulfilled and happy and feels like they're living in paradise. So it's a wonderful special thing to have inside you and because it's beside a lake anytime we dream about water we're dreaming about feelings and emotions. So I described that the way to work with dreams is through language and through imagery. So we have idioms and metaphors like floods of tears, pouring my

heart out, I'm at a low ebb. So anytime you dream about a lake, you're thinking about some very, very natural, powerful store, a big reservoir of emotions that you have that can help make you happy. So the whole dream about going back in that recurring dream is realizing that you have a really happy fulfilled person inside you and sometimes you have to connect with them what you're doing in real life now by trying to buy it back you need to possess that person and maybe show it a bit more rather than letting yourself down sometimes. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that. Another reoccurring dream I have, there's like variations of it,

but I'm back in school. I don't know if it's high school or college. It changes sometimes. And I'm at the end of my semester and I have to take my final exam, but I haven't been to class. Like I have no, I'm at the end of my semester and I have to take my final exam, but I haven't been to class. Like I have no, I'm not prepared.

I'm like, it's the day of the exam and I'm just like, I haven't been to one class. In fact, like I haven't showed up like, and I'm trying to like, so I like, I know I'm going to fail the class and,

and I, you know, and it kind of, it's, I don't know how it ends, but it's always like this anxiousness of feeling like I'm not prepared. There's been a variation of this where I was in athletics when I was younger and I'm on the, like I used to run track and I'm about to start a race, but I haven't worked out in a year. Like I'm in the shape that I am now,

but I'm competing at a level that I used to when I'd work out twice a day. And what do those dreams tend to be about? So we said that the cheating, the affair dream, is the 21st most common dream. This one is even more popular. This is the fifth most common dream that people have and again working with language it works in the same way as the affair dream is that it's not about you actually failing in real life because people tend to think that that they have the exam dream or the unprepared dream and they think that there's something in real life

where they have forgotten to prepare for it. But the reverse is true, because usually people who have this dream are real hard workers and real perfectionists, and they really make things happen. And what is actually happening in the dream, because you create the dream, and you create all the things that happen in it, the events is you're not being judged you're actually judging yourself and in the dream because you're late for the exam or unprepared for the exam you're examining yourself so you're spending a lot of time in waking life being introspective maybe examining what you do thinking should i've done this should i've done that being very

self-critical and, just to put the dream into action, the action from this dream is to celebrate your achievements and what you've done so far and what you can do instead of giving yourself a really hard time about not being good enough. That makes a lot of sense. I can probably work on that. It's probably why I have that dream over and over. I guess I'm curious, you're talking about the fifth and the 21st most common dreams. What are the top four other ones? So the top four other ones, we can do them in reverse order.

So the fourth most common one is being naked in public. And people often have this dream when they go into a new situation in their waking life, like a new job or a new relationship. And again, just working with the imagery is when we are naked, we feel really vulnerable and we feel like everyone can see the real us. And so anytime we dream about clothing, then what we do with our clothes in waking life is we choose them consciously or unconsciously to present a self-image to the people around us. That's what the whole

fashion industry is based on. So when we dream that we are naked, or sometimes we might be clothed in one half and not the other, or we are inappropriately clothed, like turning up in a clown's outfit to a funeral. So all of those things, there's something in waking life where we are trying to cover ourselves up. And usually what we're trying to cover up are our talents. And the action from that dream is sometimes you just have to open up to other people and show them who you really are and display your magnificence to them. The third most common dream, it sounds quite odd that it's so high up in the list. Very often when I go to doing a lecture or I'm at a party or some dinner or something, someone will sidle up to me and say, Ian, I have this really weird dream and it's really embarrassing

and I'm sure no one else has it. And I'll say, is that the toilet dream? And they'll say, how did you know that? You must be psychic. There's no such thing as a psychic and so on. So the toilet dream, again, working with language, we have this phrase in our language, needing the toilet. And this one's all about needs. And it kind of goes back to when we get toilet trained when we were very young children.

But anything to do with a toilet and us getting rid of stuff we don't need anymore, we tend to feel guilty or ashamed about. And the same thing happens as adults, is we feel guilty or ashamed if we express our needs to other people. And as a result, people who have this dream tend to spend their whole life looking after the needs of others and not attending to their own needs and in the dream there are common variations of it where you're trying to go to the toilet

the bathroom but the door is broken or there's no door there are no walls so it's really all about boundaries in that dream it's just it's a very simple word you can use to set a personal boundary and that word is no. So if someone is being very needy with you and keeping asking you to do stuff sometimes you just need to be kind to them say no I can't help you with that right now set that boundary. The second most common dream is problems with your teeth so your teeth falling out or your teeth crumbling and there are lots of misconceptions and old wives tales about this one uh it's meant to do that you know you're worried about getting old or in some cultures it means that a relative is about to pass away so all sorts of quite scary things about that but again

when we think about what teeth actually mean and what they symbolize what they represent is we tend to show our teeth on two main occasions in waking life one is when we're happy and smiling and the other one is when we're angry and assertive and we're kind of snarling at someone so what teeth symbolize is they're all about power and confidence so if you dream that your teeth are falling out there's a situation in waking life where you feel that your levels of confidence are falling. And again, we hear this in the idioms that are associated with teeth, like, I really want to get my teeth into something, like a new project. That's showing you what the power and confidence to do it. People often describe their dream that their teeth are crumbling.

And we hear this phrase, my confidence just crumbled at that moment so teeth are all about power and confidence it depends on what teeth that that are crumbling the dream if it's your molars you might need to choose something over and really get your teeth into it if it's your front teeth your incisors you might need to be really incisive and decisive about something in waking life so teeth are all about power and confidence and the number one dream and it has been for about 30 000 years according to to various cave paintings is being chased and it might be an animal pursuing in the dream it might be a monster it might be a gang of men it might be someone faceless It might be something just some kind of alien thing. And again, working with language, another word for chase is a pursuit.

So if you dream that you are being pursued in a dream, there's something in waking life that you are pursuing, some pursuit or ambition that you have, and you're encountering some challenges or obstacles around that. And the nature of your pursuer in the dream gives you some clues to working with that dream to resolve how you can move beyond those obstacles to continue to pursue your ambition. Interesting. That's all really fascinating.

What about sexual dreams? Not necessarily like infidelity or things like that, but God, man, when I was younger, I remember I'd have like, and sometimes you don't have a sexual dream about someone or I've had people tell me, oh, I had a dream about you. And it's always implies

that there's a sexual nature to it. And I honestly remember as a young man, it would be like a woman in my life, right? Uh, maybe a friend or something. And the next time I saw them in person, I would be like,

I'd, I'd feel like a little nervous. Like I would, I would feel like almost like excited to see them or like, I don't know, maybe I like them, you know? But before that,

it was the dream that kind of made me feel a certain way about them. What is that about? How common is that? And what does that mean? Yeah, sex dreams are very common and they can seem quite strange. They might be the fair dream. They might be a friend, someone who's quite platonic, someone who becomes a sexual partner. There are lots of things you might dream. A common one, particularly amongst women, is that you're having sex with your boss,

who you are not attracted at all to in waking life. You might be having sex with an alien or a robot. So there are all these things associated with the different partners. So again, going back to language, the psychological word for sex is procreation. So we think about that creation part in that word. So pro means before. So before creation.

So that's the whole idea is that you're going to create something. So usually when you create a sex dream, there's something in your waking life where you're trying to create something. And when I say creative, it doesn't mean you're going to become a sculptor or do some site-specific installation. What it means is you might solve a problem

in a really inventive way, or you might innovate with something, or you might come up with an idea that makes some part of your life easier. So humans are very creative creatures. So anything to do with a sex dream is something about you are becoming more aware of the creative process. The other thing about sex is it's intimate so you're becoming intimately aware you're realizing that you have something inside you that you can use to create something in your waking life so it's that intimate awareness of your own creativity and your ability to create.

And then we hear it as it goes on, we hear people talking about things like having a labour of love, or the fruits of your labour, because people have pregnancy dreams, men have pregnancy dreams as well, associated with that. So anything to do with sex is becoming really intimately aware of some creative process in your waking life. Now if you dream, if you create in your dream, if you use the character of someone who you're not attracted to, say your boss or say some politician, then it's nothing at all about actually having a sexual liaison with them. What it's actually about is you have to identify the equality that you associate with that person. So it may be that your boss seems really powerful, or he's really good at putting people to ease, or he's really ambitious, or he is just very analytical.

So what it's suggesting is that to create the thing that you need to create in your waking life, then you have to use that quality. So you might have to be a bit more ambitious, or a bit more objective, or a bit more analytical to do that in waking life. Wow. I sometimes have had dreams where it feels like I either can speak another language,

or I'm smarter than I am in life where you know I can like solve a problem or or I'm extraordinarily talented uh in ways that when I wake up and I'm like you know it's like it almost like not that it's a superpower but but yeah, I'm a lot more talented sometimes in my dreams than I am in life. If I remember that dream, it almost feels so real that how could I tap into that? I wonder to myself, am I capable of doing this, but I just don't know how to do it? What is that about? Is that a common dream of like having like these talents in your dream?

And like, it's so vivid that like you're speaking the language, you know, but I don't know how to speak a lick of another language. Yes. So this one is up in the high 70s someplace, having a superpower. But again, in that, so remember we're saying that we're only consciously aware of 2% of what's going on, and 98% of what's happening is just going straight into unconscious awareness. So what you're saying to yourself there is, because you might be a bit self-critical, and you might judge yourself a bit too harshly in waking life,

you might think you can always do something a bit better. It's realizing you always have the potential to do something much better in some way that you'd like to do or to perform something in some way or just to have more talent and more skill. So humans, as well as being very creative, they're absolutely wonderful at learning, to be able to just gather things together and work on it.

The challenge that a lot of people have just now, particularly when you look at people's Insta feeds or you look at stuff on TV, it seems that people just become talented overnight. They suddenly have all these amazing gifts and talents, but the reality is that anyone will tell you there's no such thing as an overnight success. So if you want to be able to do something, then sometimes you just have to make that commitment to it and start working on it.

So if you really want to speak another language, Nick, you just start off by doing it in just quite a small way. You're just picking up an odd phrase here and there, things that you like, things that you like talking about. If you want to learn to play an instrument or to do anything like that or to say you know do art, anything at all, if you want to become good at it then you just have to make a commitment to it and sometimes it'll take a bit of time to do that but what you've actually done

is connected with that superpower inside yourself and that's kind of the ultimate superpower just realizing that you have the capacity to pretty well do anything you want but it does take a bit of work to do that and a bit of commitment to do that. But what you're really talking about, what happens in the dream, is you being inspired to do something. And you have that feeling because dreams are so emotional, and that's where inspiration comes from. And you have that feeling inside you, inside your chest, and you're like, yeah, I can do this.

And usually what happens is that you try doing the thing and you fail, and a lot of people just give up at that point. They think, well, I'll never do this. But the playwright Samuel Beckett, he had this wonderful epithet, which was ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better. And that's the way you learn things

is by constantly by failing better, trying to do something just out of your reach that you don't quite have the power to do, not quite making it, but then learning how to do it next time. And that's how you get into your superpowers by doing that rather than just stepping into a phone box and putting on a cape. Yeah. Ali and Amanda, have you had any dreams recently that you want to ask Ian about? I had one that wasn't super long, and I don't remember a lot of it because it was

post COVID booster meeting melatonin in my bloodstream. Um, but it was like me putting my own self into like almost like a chest of drawers and it was like three smaller drawers side by side. And I was like trying to put like myself in thirds like shoving it in a drawer and it just like would not go and in my like haze of a fever it was like stop trying to suppress yourself but I don't know if that's actually what it was about thanks for that so anytime you dream about furniture then we are dreaming about our habitual behaviors in waking life. And these often tend to be almost quite invisible to us. Then when we become accustomed to furniture in our room or in our house,

we don't really notice it, but it's kind of supporting us. It's always around us. So we were speaking about the naked dream, the fourth most common dream. And a chest of drawers is usually a place where you store clothes so when you're trying to push yourself into a chest of drawers there's a couple of things going on there one is that there's something where you're trying to it's almost you feel like you're being pigeonholed and you have to have a particular really quite specific image that you need to have a particular, really quite specific image that you need to have and you need to present to people. And because there are three drawers in the chest of drawers,

then it suggests that you really have three choices in waking life or around that time when you were feeling quite feverish, that you had those three choices and that you could follow. But in doing that, it's a dream about suppressing yourself and suppressing your creativity and your ideas, that you're feeling you had to fit into a very particular tight definition. And that was the image that you felt you had to share with people instead of perhaps opening up to them and letting them realize some more of the deeper talents that you have um hi ian i have a question my i since i was a kid i have this reoccurring nightmare that i'm at a train station like often in the tracks or sort of like underground and trying not to get

hit by trains and like sort of like scrambling through like the inner tunnels but I never leave the station and I was wondering what that means. Anytime we dream about a vehicle then we are dreaming about how we might get to where we want to go in life and one of the most common dream vehicles is an automobile a car, and that's how we personally get from where we are just now. We can actually drive ourselves forward. We can have the ambition and drive to get somewhere else. When we dream about public transport, particularly trains, trains run to timetables. So they will show up in specific places at specific times and take you somewhere else. And you arrive there at a specific time. And they don't deviate from that.

They run on rails. So when you dream about a train, it suggests that there's something in your waking life where you are trying to embark, as you would on a train, you're trying to embark upon an opportunity to take you someplace in waking life. And because it's underground that underground is kind of like that 98% of unconscious awareness there's something in your waking life where you have something that you maybe haven't brought out into the light yet you maybe haven't

surfaced yet taken out from underground it's about how you get someplace you want to when waking life and it's about how you step onto that it's very often something to do with your career that you want to achieve something professionally you want to get to the next stage professionally and you're wondering how to actually step into that and move forward with it so when you're standing on the platform they are not quite actually getting on the train it's quite often about making that commitment it's not that the train is not going to stop it's that you have to take that first step to actually get on the train to take you where you want to get to what about flying dreams flying dreams so that's the sixth most common dream just outside the top five. I just missed it. Yeah.

I'm like floating and I'm just like, I'm flying, like not on a plane. I'm just literally like in the sky. So we associate gravity with responsibility. So it's like people say, oh, I've got a big weight on my shoulders or this is really burdensome, this task. So in waking life where you feel that you have released yourself from something that has maybe been weighing you down maybe some emotional thing and maybe some professional productive thing you have that feeling of walking on air

and floating at your being above it all so anything do with flying, it's very common amongst creative people because sometimes it can seem that all their ideas are up in the air. But once you actually put the idea into practice, once you actually launch a project, then you feel like you're flying. So that's what the flying dream is all about. It's about being able to rise above it all

using your creativity and again, having that creative freedom to do something. Just our editor, Derek, asked about sleep paralysis. Yeah, thanks, Derek. Yeah, sleep paralysis. So this starts to get into an even more interesting area, which is kind of between dreaming and waking. So what happens in sleep paralysis? It's a very

common phenomenon with people who have quite poor sleep quality. So it may be that they're often disturbed during the night. It may be that they work strange hours and they can't get into a high quality sleep pattern. So what happens in sleep paralysis is when you go to sleep, and particularly when you're dreaming, your body, your brainstem, secretes a substance called glycine into your body, which effectively paralyzes your large anti-gravity muscles. It's like your arms and your legs and your core and your back. And the main reason to do that is to stop you

acting out your dreams and thrashing around but when you wake up if your body is really fatigued because you're having poor quality sleep your mind will wake up before your body and your mind will probably still we tend to wake up from a dream because the dream is the lightest sleep cycle. When you wake up, when your body's really fatigued, then your mind will wake first and it will probably still be producing some dream imagery. And what you do is you start overlaying dream imagery on your physical surroundings and waking life. And the usual way it goes is that you will feel like there's some sort of presence in the room. And then you might see a shadow in the room. And then that shadow becomes an intruder.

And finally, the intruder becomes an assailant. And that can be really, really scary. And what also happens is, as that's happening, because you wake up and your mind's alert, but you feel you can't move your body your body's paralyzed so your breathing becomes quite shallow because you're anxious and because your breathing is quite shallow it can feel like someone is sitting on your chest or it can feel like someone is hugging you and squeezing your chest so sleep paralysis is that it's called the hypnagogic state it's just floating in that liminal state between dreaming and waking and ways out of sleep paralysis the first one just try and

get good quality sleep make your bedroom a haven try not to drink coffee in the evening try not to drink too much alcohol in the evening make your bedroom nice and cool and as dark as possible. The other side of it is, of hypnagogia, there's a phenomenon called lucid dreaming, which is kind of the other side of that. And the misconception is it's about controlling your dreams. You can't actually control your dreams, but you can influence them and make choices in them. So that is what happens in that hypnagogic state. And so sleep paralysis along

with nightmares is one of the best ways to learn how to lucid dream and the action if you're experiencing sleep paralysis so you do the setup of making your bedroom a haven but when you're lying there feeling you can't move and there's something hovering over you just try and wiggle your toes just move any part of your body, even flutter your eyelids. And as soon as you start moving one part of your body and realize you can do that, then you can start moving larger parts of your body and start to wake from it. What does it mean to have a dream about a loved one dying? And I've had this, and this is a somewhat reoccurring dream.

It's like a loved one is in danger or they died. And often that's the type of dream, and I'm sure I have other dreams, but I'll have this kind of, like you mentioned, this in-between where I'm hoping it's a dream. Like I don't, I'm like my consciousness, like something terrible happened. And I'm like, wait, like something terrible happened.

And I'm like, wait, is this a dream? Am I dreaming? I hope I'm dreaming because, and then I'll wake up with such relief and joy knowing it was a dream, but I'm foggy. And there's like, it's what seems like a long period of time, but maybe it's only a few seconds of just realizing that the terrible thing I dream about didn't happen. Yeah. So this is the 20th most common dream of having. So a loved one being in jeopardy or dying in some way.

There's a very similar feeling. There's a dream of being guilty of a crime, often of a murder. And the police are pursuing you. It's like the fugitive with harrison ford you're running away from it you're trying to do all these things and uh then when you wake up you think oh my god i've i've killed someone what will i do and then after a few seconds you realize you haven't this is massive relief so again uh we don't happen the dream doesn't happen to us we happen to the dream so we create everything us, we happen to the dream.

So we create everything in it. So when you dream of a loved one who's in jeopardy, you are dreaming of the quality that you associate with them. Sometimes it can be a loved one who's passed away. And what you're really trying to do there, Nick, is to reconnect with the quality you associated with them. So say, for example, your grandma was really caring and nurturing. And if she shows up in your dream, then there's a situation in waking life where you can embody that quality and be really caring and nurturing to someone.

Or if your grandpa was really clever or really funny, then you have the opportunity to use that and by doing that they kind of live on inside you you embody that quality that they have to do that so the other really common dream um around loved ones being in jeopardy uh is children in jeopardy so if you have children it's very common to dream that they are in some form of danger. And it's a really, really terrifying dream because when you wake up, you think, oh, I've got to save my kids, I've got to save my kids. But then you think, right, so what do children represent? And this kind of goes back to the whole idea of the creative process,

is children are ultimately a labor of love and the fruits of your labor so and it's something really close to your heart so when you have that child dream child in jeopardy there's something happening in your waking life where you have something that's very close to your heart not a child it's usually some project or plan or idea that you think is in some form of jeopardy. And it can be really common when someone is trying to juggle a few different projects and they're putting all their attention to one project and kind of ignoring the other ones. Then what you're saying to yourself in your dream is these things are really precious to you. These projects, ideas or plans, ambitions are really precious and you're ignoring them and if you keep ignoring them you'll lose them so that's the idea of the loved one in

jeopardy dream um i took a i don't even know like qualified for a film credit but it was very much like about like psychology and dreams so unclear why i took it but we talked about the fact that sometimes in dreams you'll be interacting with someone you know, and then out of nowhere, it'll switch to a different person. But like, you're still in that situation, you're still in that dream. And the professor was saying that at that point, your brain might know that you're about to wake up, but it's not like ready to like not tell you the full story or get the message across. So it switches it to a person you feel more comfortable with

in order for you to stay asleep and not be so jarred that you wake up. And I was wondering if you knew anything about that or if that was true. Yeah, so that's an interesting theory, which is my very polite way of saying, I don't agree with that. So yeah, so once a psychologist, a psychologist so um so the characters and dreams

people tend to think that they actually represent the actual person in waking life but what we're actually doing is we are just using them to symbolize qualities as we're talking about with loved ones so you might be talking to one person in your dream because they have particular qualities that you associate with them. So again, it might be that they are very good at putting people at ease in social situations. They're the center of every party and they are just really nice to be around. So you might be chatting to them in your dream. And then as you become aware in the dream

that you have the opportunity in waking life to do that, to put someone or put a group of people at their ease, then the emotional processing of the dream shifts because then you've gone, right, I've got this, I've identified the opportunity to make people feel at their ease. Now what can I do with that? How do I assert a particular ambition I have with this group of people? So you might move from someone who's very good at social interaction

to someone who's a very good leader in the dream. And often what happens in a dream is you'll have someone, so for example, it might be your sister in the dream and in the dream you think well in waking life you might not have a sister but you know your sister and you're talking to your sister in the dream who you don't have but your sister is symbolizing some quality something that you have that might be your more feminine side and then as you're talking to your sister in the dream who you don't have, you realize that your sister is Britney Spears. And now you're talking to Britney Spears in your dream. So what you do is you are blending the qualities that you associate with these people.

There's also an evolutionary process. As you become aware of the quality you're connecting with represented by one person, then that naturally evolves to the next person in the dream. Yeah, that makes sense. Is that why sometimes the people we dream about are faceless? I've had dreams where it's like I know they represent someone and I have an idea in my head of who they are, but it wasn't that person. For example, it was Britney Spears,

but it was my sister or my girlfriend. But it was like, I'll say I'll have a dream about my girlfriend and she'll do something like but you were you were britney spears but i knew it was you kind of thing yeah yeah so that's a wonderful that's how creative the brain is and that's what those 100 billion neurons are doing is that you can blend things so creativity is not just coming up with something new something different or separate it's about combining things so your brain is continually combining these images in the dream these emotions in the dream to get you to something new and beyond that so when you dream of someone faceless we use the face to symbolize identity

that's how we recognize someone and if someone in your dream usually it's in the chase dream it's the pursuer is faceless you still need to identify what that pursuit is you need to identify what quality is in that person so when you create a dream like that it's really good to just think you know take a bit of time during the day when you create a dream like that, it's really good to just think, take a bit of time during the day, whenever you can have time to think about it in the morning, just say to yourself, what is the one quality I would associate with that person?

And then do that naming, reflecting, expanding thing of what other qualities are in there? What choices do I have to perhaps use those qualities myself in waking life? Which might be a little bit scary for me to do that it might not be something I habitually do but that's a really good thing because what you're doing is what happens in the dream it's all about identity the dream is the ultimate self-portrait it's the ultimate selfie it's far better than anything you can do on insta

or anything like that you're actually getting this amazing self-portrait of who you are, of what you need and what you believe, and most importantly, who you can become. People often recommend, if you wake up and you have a vivid dream, of writing it down. Is that something you also recommend, in terms of if your goal is to understand your dream better? Because I think one of my biggest takeaways from talking to you is,

like you said, if we're having these vivid dreams or reoccurring dreams, and especially if they're reoccurring, it's like a signal to ourselves that we are trying to process an emotion or emotions that we're having. It's almost like the more we dream, the more of a signal that we maybe want to talk to, like get therapy, Almost like the more we dream, the more of a signal that we maybe want to talk to, like get therapy. In a sense of we're struggling with figuring out these emotions awake, so we dream about them. And maybe working with a therapist might help us break this down.

And maybe not every therapist is a dream expert, but I wonder, do you subscribe to that writing it down? Or did you just listen to the overall signal of of hey i need to figure this out yeah there's a number of things you can do nick so uh the first thing one of the so the best person to analyze the dream to work with it is actually yourself because you're closest to it and you made it and that's one of the reasons that I work with dreams a lot. I think it's just the most natural, the most organic way to develop yourself for personal development. It's just a really, really powerful emotional way to do that. So it used to be that people kept dream journals,

and some of my clients still do, and they're really beautiful things, just really, really extensive notes um the dreams i've been having and particular aspects of the dream and drawings about the dream now that can be quite labor intensive but the really interesting thing about it is we tend to think of dreams as being just individual events things that happen once but like with recurring dreams dreams are actually episodic. It's like this massive box set of your life. And so when you start to work through it, when you start to look through your journal, you can see patterns emerging. So these bigger plot arcs and story arcs, rather than just the individual episodes that you might

be creating every night. So it's really good to do that but one of the challenges of working with dreams is that it's easy to forget them so within five minutes of waking you've usually lost 50% of your dream imagery and within 10 minutes it's pretty well all gone and the challenge with that is when you start writing stuff down that can be quite a slow process even if you're a fast writer so you can start to lose dream imagery. It's quite nice just to use a voice app on your phone. Yeah, like Dictate. Yeah, just speak into it.

And quite a lot of these voice apps will actually transcribe as you speak. So you do get a transcription of it that you can save into a journal. So that's a really good thing to do. that you can save into a journal. So that's a really good thing to do. The thing I recommend to my clients is, if you want to remember your dreams, then all you have to do is remember three words. And those three words are will, still, and fill.

So when you go to sleep, when you go to sleep tonight, when you lay your head on the pillow, just say to yourself, tonight I will remember a dream or part of a dream so you set the intention and then when you wake up whenever that is in the morning the middle of the night you lay completely still as soon as you start to move you will lose dream imagery so don't look at the time don't chat to anyone don't even wiggle your toes just lie completely still and as you lie completely still you'll get some

dream images coming back to you and when you start filling in the gaps between them you've got a dream narrative emerging and that kind of anchors it in your mind long enough for you to write it down or speak it into a voice app so will still and fill it's a really good way to help you remember your dreams. That's great. Ian, I feel like we could talk about this forever with you, but I know we're running out of time. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been super fascinating. Can you please let our audience know, if they want to get more information about this,

if they want to find your book, where could they go to follow you, consume the information you're putting out there and learn more about the dreams that they're having? Yeah, thanks, Nick. It's an absolute pleasure. As I said, I could just spend all my time talking about this with you as well. That'd be great. So the best place to start off is on my website, which is ianwallacedreams.com. And there's lots and lots of information on there about dreams, working with dreams. A lot of the media stuff I do because in interviews and podcasts and conversations like this, it's just a really rich way of opening up experience, connecting with that.

I currently have two books out just now. The first one is called The Top 100 Dreams, the dreams we all have and what they really mean, and it's those 100 dreams from around the world. There's also a complete A to Z dictionary of dreams, which describes that dream connection process I spoke about and has over 12,000 dream images in there and the descriptions of each image is quite a short statement but the idea of that statement is you can turn it into questions

very easily and coming out in the US at the end of December, December the 28th is my latest book which is called Decode Your Dreams and it's just got a really beautifully put together book. It's the sort of book you'd have on a coffee table and it just really nicely and quite poetically talks about the most common dreams, things like love and sex, relationships and family, work and career, all those sorts of things. A brief description of the dream, what the dream means and most importantly, how you put that dream into action and some other things you can do

about working with your dreams and waking life. So those are my three books. But if you go to the website, there's something like 500 pages worth of information there about dreaming and lots of media interviews.

That's amazing. Ian, we can't thank you enough for taking the time and share your expertise. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and be sure to check out Ian's website because clearly there's so much more to learn about dreams. Don't forget to

send in your questions at asknickatcastme.com cast with a K for our Ask Nick episodes. Until next time, sweet dreams. next time sweet dreams