#12 - LUCID DREAMING (how to guide, personal experiences, deeper meaning)

This episode dives into the fascinating world of lucid dreaming—what it is, how it feels, and how you can experience it yourself. It covers practical techniques such as keeping a dream journal, performing reality checks, setting intentions before sleep, and experimenting with different induction methods. The episode also features vivid stories about flying, developing superhero-like abilities, and repeatedly “waking up” inside another dream.

The discussion goes deeper into dream memory, false awakenings, different levels of lucidity, and the mysterious relationship between dreams, consciousness, identity, and reality. It ultimately asks a mind-bending question: if the mind can create an entirely convincing reality during sleep, what can that teach us about the reality we experience while awake?

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What is up everyone? Welcome back to BBTV. Thank you very much for joining me. Today I'm going to be talking about lucid dreaming. It's something that has been periodically in and out of my brain. It is extremely interesting. And if you haven't experienced it yet, if you haven't experienced lucid dreaming yet, you should definitely look into it or just listen to this episode. That'll be the equivalent of looking into it. I'm going to tell basically everything that you need to get started trying to do it, developing the skills or the more like habits or patterns that will enable you to do that eventually. And I'm going to be doing kind of some live research as we do it using my uh Jamie assistant here. So, Jamie, look up how I can start lucid dreaming. I mean, I already know some of the answers here, but I'm going to use my little bot to look it up so I have some concrete evidence as well. Uh basically, the main things you're going to want to do, at least the main thing that I do, is I dream journal consistently. At least this is what I would do. This is what I did when I was able to lucid dream relatively consistency. I would consistently, I would say like every two weeks, I would have like one lucid dream. And lucid dreams are probably the coolest things ever. So anyway, so here's what it says it says to enter a lucid dream, use the wake, the wake back to bed WBTB method combined with mild mnemonic induction. I'm not gonna lie, I have no idea what this is. Maybe I need to try this. Maybe this is the new meta. Set an alarm for four to five hours after falling asleep, stay awake for 20 minutes, then repeat a mantra like I will know I'm dreaming as you fall back to sleep. Okay, don't do this. This blows. Set an alarm for four hours after you fell asleep and then stay awake for 20 minutes and repeat a mantra. This is weird. Do not do this. I've actually never heard of this, to be honest. And the the source that the AI overview is pulling up is Calm, a website called Calm, and then a YouTube video on how to lucid dream. Do not do this. This sounds miserable and horrible. Also, I don't know how anyone who has a job would be able to sustain this. You don't want to wake up after four hours. If I if I set an alarm for myself and then I woke up four hours later into sleep to an alarm that I set by myself, I would be so pissed at myself. This is horrible. Okay, core techniques. Let's go into this. Keep a dream journal. Write down your dreams immediately every morning to train your brain to remember them. This is the key. This one right here is the way. I'm telling you from my experience, this is really all that you need. You know how when you wake up from a dream, you can't really remember what your dream was unless you unless it was an insane dream, right? Unless it was something that was really notable or really impactful or maybe really scary. A lot of times people remember their bad dreams. But if it's kind of just a mundane dream, usually it just gets lost. And then if you think about it, if you'll notice when you wake up and you start thinking about a dream, kind of think about it in detail, that's when all of the details start flooding to you. Like maybe you're like, oh, this was an interesting part of my dream last night. And then once you think about that, it's almost like your brain opens the floodgates to all of the different aspects and details of the dream. That is what you want. Because basically, the idea of trying to start lucid dreaming is you need to train your brain to essentially just put extra processing on dreams, view the importance of dreams. Because your brain is a survival organism, right? Or it's, you know, it's pattern recognition, whatever, but it's your brain's goal is to keep you alive, keep you healthy, and that kind of thing. And obviously, dreams, your brain probably recognized a long time ago that dreams aren't really that important for your day-to-day living, the things that you know keep you fed, keep you moving, all of this stuff. So it blocks them out. Like if you're not like, oh, this seems like this was an important dream, then your brain is just going to get rid of them. So you need to train your brain to not do that. You need to train your brain that these are important. I want to know what's going on here. And then eventually, once your brain is kind of looping back and being like, oh, dreams, dreams, like you start thinking, it's kind of entered in the one of the loops that goes through your mind. You know, we all have loops like things that cross in and out of your mind periodically. Once you can get dreams in that loop, then when you're dreaming and you're having those loops in your dream, the dream comes up and then it kind of like folds in on itself where you're thinking of a dream while you're in a dream, and that's how they become lucid. So, okay, and next step, it says this one, okay, this one is weird, and this one kind of makes me think that this one has some theories associated with it, at least personally, it does. So do reality checks. So core techniques, keep a dream journal. Second one, do reality checks. Check if you are awake several times a day by trying to push a finger through your palm or holding your nose and breathing. This is okay. First of all, the same thing with this with this mnemonic induction BS. Some of these, like like lucid dreaming, has such a woo-woo connotation because of stuff like this. Like, no way people are going through their day and periodically pushing on their palm or holding your nose and breathing as a reality check so that they can lucid dream. That's absurd. I would never do this. But I will say, this does kind of it so that it's just it's taking a very stupid and woo-woo approach towards something that I think is legit. Because you'll notice that when you do keep a dream journal pretty consistently and you start thinking about dreaming, you'll think about dreams more throughout your day. And so, you know, you'll be walking, and then you know, something that you see will kind of parallel with a dream that you had, which already happens normally, right? You'll see something in your environment, you're like, oh, this reminds me of a dream that I had. But it starts to happen more because, like I said, you forget most of most of your dreams. I would say you probably forget on average, you probably forget like over 90% of the dreams that you have. And those are the ones that you know you have a possibility of remembering when you do wake up. Because most of your dreams actually you don't remember at all. Actually, Jamie, look up what percent of your dreams you actually remember. Because I'm pretty sure that most of the dreams that you have at night, like you go on these crazy adventures, and your brain literally isn't even capable of processing them. So, okay, up to 95% of dream content is forgotten upon waking. I was I was spot on with this. Man, I know myself. And the general general survey general surveys show that about six to sixteen percent of people report never or almost never remembering their dreams, while studies on chronic low recallers indicate that roughly active that roughly active dream forgetting affects a large portion of their day. I don't really know what this means. Rapid fate, why dreams are forgotten, rapid fading, neurotransmitter activity shifts abruptly when waking up, making memory traces hard to hold. Yeah, I mean you get thrown into reality, your brain has to lock in. Obviously, it's not going to remember like some some BS that happened the night before. Sleep stages, waking up directly for REM. Okay, this is not kind of what I was getting at. What I was getting at is this idea that when you're dreaming, a lot of your dreams, like you only really can remember when you're coming out of REM sleep, or maybe it's when you're in REM sleep. There's something where a lot of your dreams and a lot of the experiences that your subconscious has at night are just completely lost. Like you don't recall them, which is crazy to think about because that means that like every night when you're about to go to sleep, you're closing your eyes and about to be sent into adventures, horrors potentially that you literally have that part of you, the part of you that you think is you, will literally never process and never comprehend or never interact with, which is wild. But anyway, so when you start thinking about this, the reality check thing kind of does happen naturally because if you have a really realistic, lucid dream and then something happens in your life and you remember like when you were lucid, that's when you know you again you just start to think about it more. And I think thinking about it essentially is a reality check. It's not you pressing on your palm to like see if you're in reality. But but the idea, I mean, you can do that. No, you know, if you st if you do this, like great for you. I mean, that's super cool. I'm sure you probably have way better results than people who don't do this. So it's just I'm sure that you know you don't need to be doing it. But kind of the idea here is that if you go throughout your day and again you're thinking, like, oh, am I in a dream right now? Then when you're having a dream, you're in the habit, your brain runs over that same loop, that same habit again. And then in your dream, you'll be like, Oh, am I in a dream right now? And then you'll be right, and then you can kind of hone in on what's really going on. I will say that this is yeah, that that makes sense. Okay, next up is wake back to bed. This is the same thing that it said in the in the initial overview. Wake up mid-sleep during peak REM, stay quiet, or read about lucid dreaming for a short duration and then return to bed. I will say I have heard actually good things about this, about this method. I would personally absolutely never do this, especially because you can just keep a dream journal and have you know good results. But apparently, I mean, mantras and stuff, if you want to get into like some not even woo-woo stuff, but some things that seem to work for people is repeating something over and over, like, I will know that I'm dreaming. I'm going to lucid dream. That intention, you know, your brain processes your intention. Your brain pretty much, I mean, probably most of what you do is a result of intention. But anyway, so you set the intention to do that. You wake up, you start reading about lucid dreaming, you tell your brain basically you want to do it, and then your brain will kind of lean in that direction. You do that for long enough, and then suddenly you're there on that path. Next is the mild method, M-I-L-D method. Visualize a previous dream while falling back to sleep. Ooh, I kind of like this one. Visualize a previous dream while falling back to sleep, repeating a firm intent that you will realize that you're dreaming. Okay, this is this the mantra thing. I thought they were cooking on something with the visualize a previous dream while falling back to sleep, but I don't really think so. The point is just keep a dream journal. Just keep a dream journal. You should be people should be keeping journals normally because it's so good for your brain, especially now with doom scrolling and all of this stuff completely scattering your thoughts, like being able to funnel your ideas, thoughts, emotions into something that's concrete and not just this ethereal scattered loop that so many people's heads are in is super good. But obviously, dream journal is kind of it'll probably help you bridge into that. But yeah, if you're trying to lose a dream, dream journaling is gonna be the great thing. Okay. So with that being said, I might go over a couple more details with things later. But first of all, the Jamie system that I made is great. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not gonna delve too deep into this. I made a tool where basically it'll listen to me as I'm doing the podcast, and then I can just say, you know, Jamie, look up what the average podcaster does or something like that. And then basically it'll pull up a Google page and look it up for me automatically. That way I'm not having to type and stuff. If you're interested, you can uh you can shoot me an email right now. It's it's just an extension you can put on Chrome. But regardless, my okay, so my experience, that's like a little ad break low-key, but so now my experience with lucid dreaming. My experience with lucid dreaming is crazy, it's not that crazy, actually, but it's pretty crazy because you can get so the first time I ever had like a really distinct lucid dream where I could control things was I don't even know, it was a couple years ago. But I'd been dream journaling for a while. I had wanted to lucid dream for a minute, and probably after like a month of dream journaling, I would say maybe maybe three or four times, maybe four or five times a week consistently, probably a month of that, then I had a lucid dream. And the best time to do this is probably honestly when you're in college, because I would just I would have my notebook out during class and I would be so bored. And so I would just write, I would just write a little bit, a couple notes about my dream. That's another thing. Your dream journals don't have to be like insanely elaborate. Like I said earlier, most of the time, if you just have, if you kind of get the gist of what the dream was, that's when the details start flooding back to you. So if you just write down what the gist was, two, three sentences about what your dream is, that is gonna trigger your brain to think about the rest of it. That it's just about getting the process right. So, same with so many things, it's more about consistency and less about you know going crazy. It's like the fear a person more who kicks, who throws a thousand kicks in a day, or fear the person who throws one kick every day for a thousand days, like you fear the guy who's consistent. So, anyway, so the first time that I had a lucid dream really where I could control things was I was I had just gotten out of a car in my dream and I was gonna go into a building, and I kind of realized I was like, this something doesn't seem right here, and I realized I was in a lucid dream. And so I reached out to touch this bush. I was aware that I was dreaming, I reached out to touch a bush that was outside of the building, and the bush felt exactly like a real bush. Like I remember in the dream, I was like, okay, I know I'm dreaming. This is gonna be, this bush isn't gonna feel really like a bush. It's gonna, you know, my hand is gonna flow right through it. That's kind of what I was expecting. It's kind of why I did it. It's kind of why I put my hand out in the first place. But I felt it and I was like, wow, this feels like a bush. Crazy. And so then I was like, I don't really remember. Lucid dreaming is weird because it doesn't flow like reality, but it kind of feels like it does. You don't, it's not like every detail of what you do from one moment to the next is filled in. And once you get deep into lucid dreaming, you low key see a lot of parallels between the way that you operate in lucid dreaming versus the way you operate in reality. Because a lot of the times, you know, if you touch a bush and then you do something else that you think is kind of significant, you don't really remember or recall any of that intermediate period. It's kind of just a blur, you kind of just flow into the next thing. That's kind of part of the reason why they say, you know, time goes by a lot faster once you start doing mundane things because a lot more of your life gets categorized in that just getting from one place to another, things you don't really think are that important. So I don't know, you start drawing parallels between how lucid dreaming works and how reality works, it gets kind of weird because then you can be like, maybe reality is some sort of dream, maybe it's like a different type of dream, maybe it's again lots of different things. You can go down a whole rabbit hole, and maybe I'll go down some of that in this as well. I probably will, honestly. But anyway, so I touched the bush, feels exactly like a real bush. And so then I just remember the next thing I remember doing is I just jumped because I was like, wow, I can do anything. So I jumped like as high as I could, and I jumped above the building. The building was probably maybe like a 12-story building or something, maybe a little bit less, maybe like seven, eight stories. And I jumped up and I was like floating above the building as if I had just jumped. And it it I'm telling you, the way that it feels realistic is crazy. It was like I could feel the wind on me as I jumped up as if I were to actually jump. Like it's not like it's not like you enter like a VR world and you're seeing this stuff happen, but you know, there's no really sensory, there's no sensory cues that this is actually happening. It's literally just feels like it's happening. If you're if you're deep in a lucid dream, there's kind of levels to it, which I'll go into a little bit too. But anyway, so I jump up and I get like, you know, I'm 10 stories up in the air, just like floating. My momentum is shifting from going up to going back down. And as I'm going back down, I like get super frightened because I'm like, oh my gosh, this feels exactly like real life. I'm gonna hit this ground and it's gonna hurt super bad. Like, I actually genuinely was experiencing fear in the dream because I was like, wow, I just jumped up, everything has been feeling super real. I'm gonna like, I'm gonna like die falling into this. I don't know what dying in a lucid dream is gonna be like. It's gonna be weird. I hit the ground, nothing happens. I'm like totally fine. I don't remember, I don't remember what the it didn't really feel, it didn't feel like hitting the ground. It didn't, so that kind of weird. Kind of weird that I didn't feel that. Maybe it was because my dream was my fear almost protected me in some sense from the impact or something. I have no idea. But then basically right after that, what I did is I and this is kind of an underlying theme in a lot of my lucid dreams, and I'd be interested to hear if you guys have themes in your lucid dreams too. Kind of how you have themes in your normal lucid dreams or in your normal dreams. My consistent theme of what experience I have is where I'm basically Spider-Man, specifically where I can jump really high, I can shoot webs and swing around and all this stuff. I've had so many awesome lucid dreams where I'm basically Spider-Man. So anyway, I jump up in the air, I land back down on the ground, and then I'm like, wow, I'm in a lucid dream. And so I start doing like Spider-Man things. I shoot a web at the building and I'm like swinging around. And to be honest, I don't even again, this is it kind of goes into a blur from there. Like maybe I just had a moment of lucidity or whatever the word would be where I could be in control fully and like do all the emotions, and then maybe I've I kind of settled into a normal dream where I couldn't, because I remember doing some Spider-Man stuff, but not really any details after that. I just remember that moment being really crazy, and I'm telling you, the way in lucid dreams that you flow in and out of dream versus wakefulness versus or I should say dream versus lucid dream versus wakefulness. Like the interaction between those three things that happen is absolutely crazy. And I'll I'll use this as a as another example. Well, first, let me tell you the example of the first time I ever remember lucid dreaming. I I ever remember be coming into a dream and being like, oh wow, like I I'm definitely dreaming right now. The first time that ever happened is in the dream, I like threw a tennis ball at someone from like a porch, and they were way down in in a yard. So they were they were probably like you know 50 to 70 yards away, and I beamed them in a head in their head with a tennis ball. And I was like, there is no way I I would have done that in real life so effortlessly. And that's kind of what my cue was when they talk about these reality checks. That was kind of reality check for me because I was like, wait, that was weird, what just happened? Anyway, so I became lucid, I became aware that I was dreaming, but I couldn't control anything. Like I went to an amusement park in the dream, and it was like the whole time I knew that I was in a dream, but the second I would try to control something or try to make me go somewhere different, it was almost like I could feel myself lifting out of the dream. Like the dream faded out of being my experience, and my experience started turning more into something else or like wakefulness, like I was gonna wake up. And that happens a lot with lucid dreams. And sometimes when you have a lucid dream and you try to control too much, because you can get honestly, lucid dreaming is a skill. And by the way, they've been doing lucid dreaming forever. They actually used to call it dream yoga. Actually, uh, Jamie, look up the origins of lucid dreaming, like how old it is. They've been doing this for I believe it's like thousands of years. Okay, origins of so lucid dreaming is thousands of years old. The earliest known written mentions date back to over 3,000 years to the Hindu Upanishads around a thousand BC, a thousand years before Christ, they were doing this. Spiritual traditions like Tibetan dream yoga. So exercising, stretching your mind in the dreaming sense, and ancient and ancient Eastern philosophies have practiced waking up in dreams for millennia. So ancient early origins, Hindu text, the Upanishads, and the Vijyan Byarav Tantra contain some of the first written accounts of directing awareness. Okay, if it's in the Upanishads, that's crazy. Jamie, look up the Upanishads. What are the Upanishads about? I don't really know what what they are, to be honest. But anyway, so going back to what I was saying about wait, here it is. The Upanishads are ancient Sanskrit philosophical texts that form the final section of the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism composed between 800 and 500 BCE. They shift focus from external rituals to inner spiritual knowledge, exploring the nature of reality and the true self and the path to freedom. This is crazy, and it's crazy that lucid dreaming is mentioned in here. Okay. Uh, Jamie, look up what the association between lucid dreaming and the Upanishads is, and specifically, what do the Upanishads say about lucid dreaming? Okay, it cut me off a little bit. The Upanishads contain some of the earliest recorded philosophical frameworks discussing conscious awareness during sleep. While modern lucid dreaming is a psychological term for knowing you are dreaming, the ancient Vedic texts mapped the dream state, aka swampna. Oh, my bad. Swapna, swapna, like swapna, as a vital tier of human consciousness and self-realization. Interesting. So they they the Upanishads break it down into four states of consciousness. The Mandukya Upanishad outlines human awareness through four distinct conditions Jagrat, which is the waking state of external perception, swapna, the dreaming state, where the minds its builds its own internal reality, sushupti, deep dreamless sleep, and then turya, the pure transcendent baseline of consciousness that witnesses all other states. That is crazy. And when you think about meditation and how there's like your true consciousness is sort of this almost like background, like mysterious character that is just observing all of your other states, that is wild. I remember in college I took a Buddhism class, and the TA for that class was a super yogi guy, like super into meditation, meditated for tons of time, was like a monk for a while, all this stuff, and he said that the craziest time that he had meditating was he meditated for like two or three hours or something, and he became aware for a moment of the this this transcendent baseline of consciousness. It was an awareness of the consciousness that was observing all of the thoughts that he identified as himself, right? Because like you go through your day and you're like, oh, I'm thinking about making money, I'm thinking about what car I want to buy, I'm thinking about the people. People I love. I'm thinking about friends, I'm thinking about my hobbies, I'm thinking about all this. And then those thoughts kind of become your that becomes your identity, right? But really those thoughts aren't what you are. You are this transitent baseline, this consciousness that is observing those thoughts. And there's a lot of arguments that that base consciousness is actually what we all are. So that base consciousness is actually common among everyone. And then all of your individual thoughts and behaviors and all of this stuff are just things that that observes and create the identity that is you. And I'm telling you, like low-key, like when you get into lucid dreaming a decent bit, those are the kind of things that you that your brain starts to go to. Because again, it's more for me at least personally, it's more about the parallels that you see between what what happens when you're lucid dreaming and then what happens in reality, because they they mirror each other in some very interesting ways that kind of make you think about things deeper. So let me let me tell you another story about a lucid dream that I have. So another lucid dream that I had was I kind of became lucid in a dream, and the way that my brain represented that was I woke up from I was like I was sitting in the chair in my desk and I woke up sitting in the chair. And I was in, you know, an old apartment that I lived in, and it was like I woke up from the chair and then I was lucid. So I could go out, I could do kind of the same Spider-Man thing that I told you about. Every almost every lucid dream I have, I'm like Spider-Man, which is you know, it's cool. It's so sick. Lucid dreaming is so sick. If you've never lucid dreamed, I mean they're they're writing about it in the Uponish, like like ancient philosophical stuff. Like, you gotta tap into this, not just because it's deep and whatever. It's literally the coolest thing ever because you're feeling what it's like to do basically anything you want. And if you get good at it, you can do, I mean, literally like anything. Literally anything. But anyway, so well, I would say, I mean, you're you are kind of limited to like what stays in your more conscious mind, at least in mine, because I'm not like super, super experienced. I haven't done it more than probably like 10 times. But you know, you can do you can do pretty much anything, and your control is kind of limited because if you try to control too much, you'll kind of lift out of it because your wakefulness mind is taking over your sleep mind too much, I guess. But anyway, so I wake up from this from this chair, and keep in mind I'm actually sleeping in my bed at night. But I wake up from the chair and all of a sudden my dream is lucid, and I'm like, whoa, this is like crazy, whatever. I go around, I'm swinging from the trees, I'm being Spider-Man, I'm doing stuff, and then the second that I try to control too much, I'm like, okay, I like I want to be in New York now. I don't know if that was exactly it, but you know, like I want to go do something else, something more crazy. You know, something, something, something, you know, something you can't do like when you're when you're normally awake. And I pushed the bit the limits too much. So I tried to either change the scenery too much, I tried to change what I was doing too much, and so I could feel myself lifting out of this lucid dream state. And while in previous times, what's happened with that is I kind of wake up, I like half wake up, and then I gotta like fall back asleep a little bit, or you know, like part of the part of me that's dreaming has to fall back asleep. It's it's weird. But so I wake up, so I I you know, so picture this, you know, I wake up from the chair, I go through, I'm doing cool stuff, I'm Spider-Man, blah, blah, blah. I try to move to New York, I try to shift things up, and then I feel myself lifting out of the dream. I've pushed it too far, and then boom, I wake up in the chair again. I wake up in the chair again, and I go through this cycle where I I'm lucid, I'm going around, I'm doing stuff, I'm doing cool stuff, I'm swinging from the trees, I try to change too much, I try to go too crazy in the lucid dream, and then I wake up again in this chair. And this happened probably like four or five times in the dream. Where I'm waking up in this chair, it happened so many times that I literally thought that I was actually asleep in this chair. So that'd be it was like in some Inception stuff where that became my new baseline reality. Like I literally thought that when I was waking up from the chair, that that was like I was sleeping in the chair, and that was like how I was becoming lucid. And then I don't I don't even know how to describe it, to be honest. Like I wish I could, I wish I could like put you in the mind state that I was in there, but it was ridiculous because it was all of me was convinced that my reality was in that chair, that the real me, even when I was lucid, that the real awake me was sleeping in that chair and was waking up into these lucid dreams. When reality I was in the bed. Because another crazy thing that you'll realize when you're lucid dreaming is you're not actually you're not aware like you are when you're awake. Like it's not like you're, oh, I'm having, you know, thoughts about practice and thoughts about, you know, going on a drive and thoughts about, you know, like your family or whatever. Like you're limited in the parts of your conscious mind that you have access to. So it's you're not thinking like you are when you're normally conscious. I mean, sometimes you are, depending on the degree to which you are lucid, but sometimes you only have access to like certain thoughts. Like there will be there have been lucid dreams where you know a person that I know in like imagine you know your best friend, they live, you know, in the same town as you. But you know how you'll have a dream and it's like, oh, like my best friend, he's you know, he lives in in in the town away. He lives, you know, across the country, whatever it might be. And in your dream, that becomes the baseline reality, right? It's like you're you know that your buddy lives across the country, and that's kind of just how the reality of the dream is until you wake up and you're like, oh, like obviously that that isn't real. But when you're lucid dreaming, there will be fictitious circumstances like that, like things that aren't real, but you're you are convinced that they are because you're still half dreaming. You know what I mean? So, like, if I was lucid dreaming and I had that, I would I would think that I'm fully aware and fully conscious, like I am when I'm, you know, awake normally. But these little factoids, these circumstances of my life are completely different. So, like, people will live in different places, people will fill different roles in my life, people will do different things, people, you know, someone's job will be to like go to the moon and collect space rocks or something, or someone will be a steward on a space cruise. And when I'm lucid dreaming, there's no part of me in my brain that is like, oh, that's weird. That's clearly not something that happens in reality. But then there are other things that are, and maybe this is why those kind of reality checks that I was talking earlier are important because you it's like half of your brain is aware and knows what reality is and is using that as your baseline, and the other half is using the baseline of whatever your brain has conjured up in this dream. And so you're you're m wandering in this liminal space where part of the facts that you know about reality are true to reality, and then parts of the facts that you know are only true to what your subconscious has created in this moment. It's really crazy. And I will say, like that one where I kept waking up in the chair was wild because it was almost like every time I woke up, it was different facts, fictitious things and fictitious events that for some reason my subconscious had created in the circumstance of that dream were so believable. And they were, they kept being reinforced because I was like, oh, like, you know, my life is whatever life led me to wake up in this chair rather than the life that led me to wake up in my bed where I actually was sleeping. And so it almost reinforced that everything that I was experiencing around that chair and the circumstance that brought me there were real. So the lucid dream felt so immersive and like I knew what was going on, but in reality, I was being completely fooled the whole time, and I didn't realize it until I really woke up. So it was like I felt like I was outsmarting myself and I had like all of these cool lucid things. When in reality, I like an entire probably half of my brain, half of the experience was completely fake. It was unreal. It was unreal. And again, you have a dream like that, and you wake up in reality and you're like, whoa, what percent of this reality that I'm experiencing is actually real as well? You know what I mean? It's kind of talking about this Turiya mentioned in the Upanishads, the pure transcendent baseline of consciousness. Like, no one really gets in touch with that. You know what I mean? Monks and stuff, like their whole life goal is to get in touch with that. You might get catch like a glimmer of where you feel like you are the thing that is observing your thoughts rather than your thoughts. But even just to get to that point where you can even understand what that means, you need to be pretty deep in this stuff, I feel like. So but you know, you get again, there's a lot of very interesting, very interesting parallels. So let's read The Witness and Illusion. I'm kind of interested in what the Upanishads say about lucid dreaming more. So separation of self, the teaching emphasizes that the true observing self, the Atman, remains distinct from the physical body and shifting dream scenes. Yeah, this is kind of like what I'm saying. Like it almost feels like in lucid dreams you're detached from what your quote unquote baseline true self is, which is obviously the person that is sleeping, but you go through so many details and so many facts and so many circumstances that you know you kind of, you know, you you remove, like you're not really in touch with that version of yourself. You're in touch with this kind of subconscious thing that's been created. Kind of like what I was just talking about. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna rehash that, but okay, and then next up recognizing illusion, viewing the waking world and dream worlds alike as constructs of Maya help practitioners realize the fluid nature of reality. Wow, paving the way for conscious control and heightening awareness within sleep. Recognizing illusion. This view wow, this is literally exactly what I was talking about. I swear I've never read this. Recognizing illusion, viewing the waking world and dream worlds alike as constructs of Maya, aka illusion, helps practitioners realize the fluid state of reality paving the way for conscious control. I'm telling you, this is this is what I'm talking about right here. Like, you don't realize how kind of fluid your experience is until you have a truly, like fully fluid experience that's you know being impacted by all of these different things that you're not really aware of. And then you wake up and you're like, whoa, this seems really similar to how my day-to-day life is. Again, again, it's what the it's what these Upanishads are are saying here. You know, I don't I don't need to keep beating this bed hor this dead horse. All I'm saying is that this is crazy. And yeah, if you haven't tried lucid dreaming, do it. Just keep a dream journal. Just literally just keep a dream journal. Every morning, two to three sentences. What are you thinking about? If you're if you're at work, you know, just make a couple notes in your notebook. If you're in school, make a couple notes in your notebook. If you're whatever, just make a few notes, you know, jot them down in your phone. I think that writing them out is is better, but I'm telling you, lucid dreaming is nuts. There's honestly some other things I kind of wanted to talk about. Maybe I'll make a part two on this episode, but for right now, that's pretty much all I got. So thank you very much for joining here. If you have any questions or have any lucid dream experiences, please let me know. This is such an interesting world, and it can delve into so many things that get to, I feel like, the root of what our conscious experience is. If you're interested in consciousness, if you're interested in frequency, wavelength, all this stuff, this is a good place to start because it's so cool. Like it is so sick. Like when you're in a dream and you're swinging from place to place, it is it's it's unreal. Or when you're in a dream and oh my gosh, let me actually let me tell you guys one more story. So this other dream that I had, and I was actually reading about kind of different ways dreams are impacted by like fear and these sorts of things. Have you ever had a dream where you kind of you know that something bad is gonna happen in the dream? Like you're in a dream that's been kind of scary, and you almost can feel like you know that there's like a jump scare around the corner. And so you kind of somehow are able to fade that in the dream. You know what I mean? Like you're able to kind of withdraw from it a little bit or or or change course and you're not even really aware of it, but you're you know, we're you're having a fearful dream and you kind of withdraw from parts of it. So I had a dream like that where I was gonna go into a place and I was like, oh, I feel like if I go in here, something, something, you know, something bad is gonna happen. And so I turned around and walked away. And the second that I made the decision to no, I'm not gonna do where this dream, this extensive dream that I've had, has been leading me to this moment, I'm gonna turn around and go away from it. That is the moment that my dream became lucid. And I was like, oh shoot, I'm lucid. I'm gonna be Iron Man, dude. I was literally I well, I wasn't really Iron Man because I didn't have the suit and stuff, but I could use like his repulsor beam things to like float like I was Iron Man. And I'm telling you, like, you gotta do it, you have to do it. Like the sensations are crazy because it wasn't just like, oh, I'm floating, like I'm in VR, right? I'm holding these controls down. It was literally I could feel the pressure of the repulsor beam meet my palm, and that pressure culminating in me being propelled upwards into the air. Like I could feel all of the physics that were allowing me to fly in this moment. And there were no there was no metal gloves or anything like that. It was like it was coming out of my hands and my feet, and I was able to float and fly upwards. And when I flew up and upwards over the place that I was about to enter and over the road that went to it, over just beyond this building that I was gonna go into, it was it was just a gray, blank thing. It was like in it was like if you enter creative mode in a video game, or if you create, like, you know, make a new scene. I don't picture like Minecraft, but the whole map is just blank gray. It's like blank gray, and then the sky is like blank blue above above it. It was like I raised above this building this street that was very highly detailed, looked real, and I wanted to fly off to go somewhere else. But the sense the moment that I went above the building, it was all just like this blank canvas. It was like it was a video game, like a simulation. And I think that part of it was because my brain wasn't able to just conjure up an entire, you know, however much RAM essentially my brain would need to create on the fly these this extra terrain. And so it just defaulted to to kind of like this blank slate that maybe I'd seen before and was inspired by video games. I'm not really sure. But all that. And so, like moments like that, when something like that happens, you're like, whoa, this is this is crazy. Because one moment it's so real, it's so transcendent, and then the next moment you're like, whoa, what is what is going on here? Because again, you're you're like conscious during it. You're conscious and you're not conscious. It is so unreal. You have to try lucid dream. Like, please, please try lucid dream. If you've never had a lucid dream, trust, trust you are missing out. Because I mean, I love Spider-Man, I love Iron Man, but you might love, like, I don't know, some other character, or you might love some other thing that's completely unrelated to superheroes or completely unrelated to anything that I've been talking about. And so your lucid dream series will be so unique, but guaranteed similarly introspective and mind-blowing. Yeah, so try it out. Let me know how it goes. Thank you very much for joining me. If you have any questions and stuff, you can reach out to my email, bbtvhq at gmail.com. If you want to try out Jamie, again, this is what I've been using to just look up stuff, listening to my words throughout this. Uh, right now, honestly, it's not live. I just use it personally, but the Google extension is about to come out. So if you have questions about that, you can also email me on that. Thank you very much for joining here. Have a good one. Bye.