Are You Actually Awake?

Most people are awake all day, but not fully present.

In this episode of Night Shift, Justin explores a powerful idea from a conversation on lucid dreaming with Emily Fletcher and Mia Lux: the more awareness you practice during the day, the more vivid and conscious your dream life may become at night.

This episode goes beyond lucid dreaming and into something deeper—learning how to stop sleepwalking through your life. Drawing on ideas around presence, observation, and living in the moment, Justin talks about how being more aware of your thoughts, body, and surroundings can sharpen your days and make your nights more alive.

If you want to feel more present, more observant, and more awake to your own life, this episode is for you.

Transcript

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Welcome back to Night Shift with Justin S. King, How to Transform Your Life One Night at a Time. Tonight I'm going to circle back to yesterday's episode where I discussed notes from the podcast with Emily Fletcher and Mia Lux about lucid dreaming. And there was one exercise that Mia gave during that episode was to during the day check your hands, examine your hands front and back, and be aware of the fine details. So when you are in your dream and you begin to become lucid, you can look at your hand and front and back and see as a way to check if you're dreaming or not. But I wanted to take that a bit further because I was doing this exercise yesterday and it occurred to me or expanded on the episode was that a lot of us are going through our daily lives in a non-lucid state. We're walking around like zombies. We don't know what is happening. We're half distracted, rushing, acting, scrolling, and then our dreams are the same way. So the more aware and the more we notice during the day, the more vivid our waking experience is can directly translate to a more vivid dream at night. And I've experienced that myself, particularly when I'm traveling, where I have the most vivid dreams because I am in completely new locations. So the practice of awareness during the day is you become more observant and more conscious. You can notice your body, your thoughts. If you feel like you're gotten taken away from a moment, you could check out a book called Inside Out Revolution. It's one of my favorite books. And that gives you exercises that can put you back into a state of presence. And what you can do is you can notice your five senses smell, sight, touch, taste, and hearing. I feel like the more awake we are and the more present we are during the day, the better we will relax in the evening. That's one of the core principles of the evening routines which I teach are to be fully present in the evening. One of the other things from that episode that Emily mentioned was that she's trying to approach the waking state more like a dream, more like a game. And so if you are playing while you're awake, that will translate to your dreams as well. So tonight's shift is simple. Just pick three moments tomorrow or tonight. A very simple moment where you fully experience the moment. You can grab a glass of water and experience all five senses while you take a drink of that water. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? What do you smell? What thoughts are passing through your mind? That's really one of the benefits of a good evening routine and a good night's sleep is so that you can be fully awake and present. That's it for tonight's episode of Night Shift. Thank you for listening. My name is Justin S. King, and I help entrepreneurs find peace tonight, tomorrow, and for the rest of their lives through sleep optimization, motion regulation, and discovering their purpose. Good night.