Ep. 344: Lucid Dreams & OBEs: One Researches. The Other Explores it First Hand.

Do dreams happen in our minds? What can lucid dreaming tell us about the nature of consciousness? 

Dave Green is a London-based artist who creates drawings not FROM his dreams, but IN his dreams, which he re-creates upon waking. He’s the author of Doodles In the Dark: An Artist's Guide to Lucid Dreaming & has participated in lucid & precognitive dream research with my other guest, Damon Abraham, PhD, a parapsychologist & the principal research scientist for the consciousness mobile app Entangled.
 
In this episode, Dave shows us how he uses lucid dreaming to create art WHILE he’s dreaming & Dr. Abraham unpacks the science of the research behind it. You’ll hear about the layers of lucid dreaming, when it becomes an out of body experience & how this may be connected to precognition, the debate about where consciousness lives & why Dave is hesitant to label himself as anything other than a lucid dreaming artist.

If you liked this episode, you’ll also like episode 308: HOW TO THINK IMPOSSIBLY: PRECOGNITION, POLTERGEISTS & TIME

 Guests:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEf56ussbNkUwXYOBjNQIqg 

https://www.instagram.com/davegreen5000/ 

https://x.com/davegreen5000 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/damon-abraham-phd/

https://entangled.org/

Sponsors: 

https://www.jordanharbinger.com/starterpacks/ 

https://www.historicpensacola.org/about-us/ 

0:00 — Dreams as Art: Meet Dave Green & Dr. Damon Abraham

1:06 — Drawing Inside a Lucid Dream

3:02 — Waking Yourself Up On Purpose

3:26 — What Lucid Dreaming Actually Is

5:02 — Control vs. Awareness in the Dream State

7:04 — How Both Guests Discovered Lucid Dreaming

8:56 — Is a Nightmare Origin Story the Norm?

10:10 — Lucid Dreaming vs. Out-of-Body Experiences

12:08 — Why "OBE" Is a Loaded Label

15:03 — Do Dreams Happen Inside Your Head?

18:23 — Researcher Hat vs. Experiencer Hat

19:40 — Damon's OBE: The Bathroom Journal Story

22:26 — The Lottie Dream Portrait Walkthrough

28:22 — Precognition & Verifying What You See

29:41 — Did the Telepathy Tapes Help This Research?

32:14 — Lucid Dreaming Is More Common Than You Think

35:11 — Brainwaves During a Lucid Dream

36:20 — How Dave Navigates Dream Scenery

39:11 — Dave's Portrait Technique

41:23 — The Precognition Experiment Explained

45:18 — The Temptation to Avoid Uncomfortable Conclusions

48:50 — Is the Brain Generating or Receiving Consciousness?

51:21 — Has This Changed How You See Reality?

54:55 — The Real-World Utility of Lucid Dreaming

58:16 — Dave's Dream Yoga Practice

1:00:53 — Third Person Dreams & What They Mean

1:01:44 — Giving a Dream Character a Pen

1:04:57 — Why You Should Start a Dream Journal

1:06:12 — Dave's Book & Dream Portraits

1:07:33 — Damon's Entangled App

Request to join my private Facebook Group, MFR Curious Insiders: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1BAt3bpwJC/

Follow me in all the places:

https://www.meredithforreal.com/  

https://www.instagram.com/the_curiousintrovert/ 

meredith@meredithforreal.com

https://www.youtube.com/meredithforreal 

https://www.facebook.com/curiousintrovert

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Are dreams random firing neurons? Undigested pizza and beer? Messages from deep within our subconscious? Could dreams be art? I'm joined by two guests today. One is a London-based artist who creates drawings not from his dreams, but in his dreams, which he then recreates upon waking. He's the author of Doodles in the Dark, an artist's guide to lucid dreaming, and has participated in lucid and precognitive dream research with my other guest, a parapsychologist and the principal research scientist for the Consciousness Mobile app Entangled. Today we're going to explore the landscape of our subconscious, space-time, and measuring multiple dimensions as we ask the question: Do dreams happen in our minds? This is the Curious Intervert Podcast with me, Meredith. Around here, we explore taboo questions and societal blind spots. Please help me welcome open-minded skeptics exploring the boundaries between the mind and reality, Dr. Damon Abraham and Mr. Dave Green. Welcome, guys.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Thank you. Hello.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

So when you first reached out to me, Dave, I was like, uh, okay. He has dreams and he draws them. I don't, I do not get what the big deal is. But then I watched your one-minute explainer clip and I was like, oh, this is different. So if you don't mind, I thought that's we could play that really quick and then start there.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

The dream begins with me separating from my body. Now this is a lucid dream, so I know what I need to do. I go over to my desk, I grab a dream pen and a dream piece of paper, and I attempt to create a drawing. Now this is nothing like drawing in waking life. The image behaves really strangely. Usually I draw just one or two lines, but then the rest of the image gets filled in by the dream. It's like a live interaction between my conscious and my subconscious mind just playing itself out on the page. When I feel like it's done, I memorize the image, then I wake myself up, and then back in my physical body, I go back to my desk and recreate the drawing and waking life. These are some of the images I've made with this process.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

So, Dave, you said it's a live interaction between your conscious and your subconscious mind. How can your conscious mind do anything if you're asleep?

SPEAKER_02 2:24

Well, it it's because this is lucid dreaming, Meridiff. So you're it's funny, I mean, people use that term in different ways, don't they? But in the context of that explanation, when I say my conscious mind, I mean I guess the bit, the bit that feels like me, that feels like I'm in control of it. So I've drawn a couple of lines there, but then lots of stuff is just appearing on the page on this drawing within the dream, and it feels like it's totally separate from me, but there's an actual fact still part of my mind. So that's why I'm calling it. I said subconscious, but I guess you could say unconscious as well.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Ah, okay. And then how do you wake yourself up in order to create the drawing?

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Uh so there's a few different ways. I just kind of it's gonna sound ridiculous, but I just kind of scrunch my face up like that, and sort of I find exerting that effort kind of just pings me out of the dream. I mean, the thing with lucid dreaming, waking yourself up is quite easy. Stay in the dream is is more of a challenge.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Oh, that's interesting. Damon, as a researcher, how do you define lucid dreaming?

SPEAKER_04 3:31

I think a key component with lucid dreaming is the we'd say like a metacognitive awareness. Being aware of your own awareness to me seems to be like a core constituent of um the lucid dreaming. Whereas when you think about most dream experiences, you are often a more passive recipient of the dream content. But once you become aware of your own awareness in the dream, you know, this is that lucid component where you start to make uh pointed questions, for example, of like questioning your environment or questioning your own thoughts about the environment. And it becomes a lot less passive in that respect and becomes much more active. So I think that level of awareness gives you more agency within the dream. And so oftentimes when people think about lucid dreaming, they think about the controllability aspect. So it's not necessarily just controlling the theater of the dream, but controlling yourself within the dream, as opposed to just kind of like oftentimes dreams you have this perspective of like almost like watching yourself engaging in all these activities, et cetera, as opposed to actually being the active agent or participant. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 4:35

I think so. Let me check for understanding. So um, so when Dave says the conscious and then the subconscious, like conscious could be like the lucid part, the part that's like, oh, I'm in a dream. Am I on track so far? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:50

Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Okay. And so that's the base level of definition for lucid dreaming. And then the next level, like it's a video game, is being able to control the dream. Is that also correct?

SPEAKER_04 5:03

I think those two often go hand in hand. In my personal experience with lucid dreaming, yeah, that once you have that awareness that you are in fact dreaming, it does lend itself to a little bit more agency, but not always ultimate agency, right? So in the sense that like I I may still be perceiving things that I don't have necessarily control of, but I have control of my own thoughts or awareness. It's kind of like the difference between like being a character in a movie versus like watching the movie and passively receiving it.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Dave, does that track for you?

SPEAKER_02 5:34

Yeah, definitely. I think I mean if you want to get really nerdy about it, I think. Oh, and I do. Let's get nerdies. I think strictly speaking, the definition of a lucid dream is just a dream where you know you're dreaming. The the control bit, I don't think there's another word for a dream you can control, but that's the bit that everyone's interested in, right? That's that's the fun part. Although saying that, I think with me personally, and I think a lot of other lucid dreamers I've come across, ironically, given that there's so much focus on controlling the dream, but after a while of you know, fulfilling your different fantasies and doing practicing skills, doing all these different things, I think lots of people come to a point where they actually just don't try to control the dream, they just sit there in the awareness that it's a dream and then just kind of let it unfold. And that they actually become the most sort of rewarding experiences.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Oh, that's interesting. So not only could you play with the imagery, but you can play around with the control. Like, am I just going to be a more active observer or am I gonna actively alter what's happening?

SPEAKER_02 6:46

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it I mean, it it's like, yeah, you you can just sit there knowing it's a dream.

SPEAKER_03 6:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:53

But you don't have to you don't have to control anything. You can just sit there in the knowledge that it's a dream and just kind of watch it unfold. And that that's that's really interesting. And like it leads to very interesting dreams.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Oh, I bet it does. When I lucid dream, I'm just like usually annoyed. And that's the feeling of being irritated, is what brings in the lucidity. My mom taught me how to lucid dream when I was little because I would have repeating nightmares, specifically that someone was chasing me and usually I was protecting my little brother. And she would say, Okay, well, what are you gonna dream about? And then when you have that happen, it I don't know why that worked. I think my childlike state of believing everything my parents said in a literal way caused me to believe that I could lucid dream. And so I probably was like, I don't know, seven. I'm guessing seven or eight. And then to this day, I can still lucid dream where if I'm having an unpleasant dream, I'm like, oh, this is a dream, this is another dream, so annoying. Like the other night, I was like, switch in my dream, and then like it just switched to something that wasn't a lucid dream, and it was more like I was just asleep regular. So when did it start for you? I'm curious. Was it a a similar story or was it something that always just was there?

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Yeah, kind of similar, but without the parental input, I guess. I yeah, I used to have nightmares as a kid, and then at some point I sort of realized that they were nightmares, and I would always wake myself up, like we were talking about before. I just intentionally wake myself up, and I did that for ages, and that kind of saved me from these nightmares. And then at some point, I I guess I sort of realized, well, if I know it's a dream, why wake yourself up? Just stay in the dream, and then I would kind of like control the dream. So that's just kind of been a sort of normal part of my dream life, just for you know, as as long as I can remember. And there's been different like pockets in my life where I've like focused on it more, and other times where I haven't really, but it's always kind of there, sort of ticking over in the background.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Damon, is this typical in your research? You find that this is normally the experience for like the origin story of lucid dreamers.

SPEAKER_04 9:05

Yeah, I think a lot of the anecdotes I've heard of of people, even you know, oftentimes starting in childhood, having this more spontaneously. But I think in terms of cultivation, anytime you're bringing more awareness to the dream state and acknowledging it, I think that that helps aid the let's say the tendency for having more experiences. So one of the key, let's say, tips for growing a practice around this dreaming could be as simple as maintaining a dream journal. You know, by actively engaging with the subconscious in this way, you're kind of programming yourself to say that this is memorable, this is important, uh, this is worth putting our attention towards. And we find often that when people are actively dream journaling and making it part of their practice, that this will help attune the lucidity in the dream to where the people might have more lucid experiences. And the same is true for, you know, I came at this more from an out-of-body experience research perspective. And this is a lot of the techniques are quite similar in that regard.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Well, it's interesting that you say that because when I was watching the clip the first time, I was like, uh, excuse, excuse me. I have a question. This looks a lot like an out-of-body experience and not lucid dreaming. Because I was like, hold on, hold on. I'm lucid dreaming and I don't get to do that. What first of all, I'd like to do that. Second of all, um, why are we not calling this an OBE an out-of-body experience? So from a research standpoint, is it hard to kind of index these experiences that way because they they just sort of have commonalities, or is it just because I'm misunderstanding what we're talking about?

SPEAKER_04 10:50

Yeah, I think it's very difficult to kind of make a categorical boundary between different types of experiences. I think of them as often more of a continuum. I've had many people tell me about their lucid dream experiences, and I and I had the same reaction as you. I say, because it sounds actually quite a bit more like an out-of-body experience if you have the sense of like flying or floating. And sometimes there's even like veridical components, meaning that they would witness something, let's say they, you know, dreamt that they flew into their neighbor's house and saw some activity and then came back and were able to kind of confirm, like, oh, I saw you cooking breakfast or something like that. And so, you know, that's a that's a whole entirely different question about like the veridical aspect, but it does kind of point to this idea that perhaps you are really kind of in this disembodied state as opposed to just like local to your body and in inside of the theater of of the dream, the dream space, right? So where we delineate these is often a tricky, a tricky line to draw. And it I think it also might have a little bit to do with your lucidity as well. So one of the best techniques for provoking an out-of-body experience is to start from the lucid dream. Several of my own OBEs have come from the lucid state, lucid dream state as well. So I can attest to that technique.

unknown 12:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Okay. I want to come back to that. I want to know about your personal OBEs. But, Dave, what do you think about the labels and the stuff? Because I think I remember hearing you say, maybe it was on another interview, that you weren't super comfy with like the out-of-body experiencer label, but you were much more comfortable in just, hey guys, I'm a lucid dreamer.

SPEAKER_02 12:29

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I I have thought about this so much you you wouldn't believe. But I mean, it is quite a difficult one to unwrap. I mean, I would start off by saying that for one, the other sort of out-of-body experience label is a bit of a tricky one because people use that term in two at least two totally different ways. So you've got one way an out-of-body experience is just refers to simply the experience that you're, let's say, viewing the world from a point outside your body, making no claims about whether or not you actually are, and then you've got another way of using it that's more like that people use more casually, I guess. That's more like not only did it feel like I left my body, but I definitely did. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's similar, it's similar to the term like UFO. I know that's had a bit of a rebrand recently, but that that technically that's just an unidentified flying object, right? Yeah. But it's morphed to mean definitely a flying saucer. Do you know what I mean? So OB is a little bit like that. So if you if you used it just in the neutral sense, it felt like I left my body. I would be more than happy to use it that way. And I have tried to use it that way, but the problem is most people, when they hear that term, don't hear it that way. So I pr I prefer just to say lucid dream. Because in in the neutral sense, technically, well, e even both ways, they're not really mutually exclusive anyway. I think the whole the whole debate between lucid dream and out of body experience rests on the assumption that dreams only happen in your in your head. Right. Which for the record, I think, depending on what day you ask me, I think they probably do. But my my opinion on that's not not so important. It's more just that the definitions are muddy. It's like if you look at indigenous societies, many of them have views about dreams that are almost identical to how we would see an out-of-body experience. Like during the night, you leave your body and you you wander, you know, go and visit the next shaman along down the street or whatever. And or look at mutual dreaming. In mutual dreaming, that's another instance where we're talking about dreams in a way that's almost identical to out-of-body experiences as well. Because I'm assuming during a mutual dream that experiences happening outside the heads of the people, or maybe just one of them left and is in the other one's head. I I don't know. But you get what I'm saying, is they're very muddy, they kind of blend into each other.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Yes. I'm still stuck on the like all of this crazy stuff, and then you are convinced that dreams happen in your head. Like I'm stuck there conversationally. Damon, do you agree with that? Dreams, I mean, dreams and all this, you know, we're a big bucket we're talking about. Dreams, OBEs, what some might call astral projection. I think like, is this all within our physical brains to you?

SPEAKER_04 15:30

Well, I think Dave brought up a very important point. And and I think it's actually helpful from approaching this from a research standpoint to start with that premise that, well, what is undeniable is the phenomenology, like there is an experience. People are experiencing these states to go the step beyond and then to question what is the reality of those states is an entirely different line of questioning, right? And if we become too enamored with like the implications of that, that you're actually leaving your body in some, you know, visiting some far-off land or far-off time, if that's your premise, then it oftentimes is met with like skepticism and dismissal. And then we don't get to study the core question of the fact that it's that's happening. So, and I think that's true of the UAP phenomena as well. Like we, we, if we like just jump to the flying saucer extraterrestrial explanation, then it almost kind of like trivializes the fact that this is happening. I mean, people see unidentified craft all the time, and we can be agnostic and we should be agnostic as to what is actually the the core thing that's going on. It could be that you are in a disembodied state, or it could be that it is all inside your head. But if we don't at least give ourselves permission to examine and study these things, then we're we're kind of cutting ourselves short. And oftentimes that's that's where we find ourselves is we start to teeter into the taboo, and then the scientific community doesn't really want to really engage. And I think there's been kind of a renaissance in the last five to ten years, specifically with lucid dreaming, where this is starting to behave to be taken more seriously. There's many more like neuroscience studies and and lab studies involving these states, and I think that that's that's really positive. But to that question, now that's that's the me wearing my scientist hat, me as an experiencer hat, you know, I've I've become thoroughly convinced that there is like this beyond component that it's probably not just in the in the theater of the mind, that there is something happening that might be more of a disembodied component. But I I'm cautious about how to define that because I I find that a lot of the research that we do in like parapsychology, for example, points to this aspect of non-locality, things that are causes that are kind of like displaced from their effects in time and space. So you have this idea of non-locality, like non-local action or non-local perception, and maybe like even like future retrocausal effects on the present. And all of these things point to the fact that our model, our mental model of like 3D time linear model may not be sufficient for understanding this these phenomena. And we have a tendency to try to like constrain our thinking into that model and that framework. So, you know, maybe it is that you're leaving your body, or maybe it is not. Maybe it's that we're just like kind of thinking of it that way because we're we're in this like 3D mindset that really isn't congruent to the experience itself.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Well, this is where I imagine that the research becomes way more interesting, but also way more complex because suddenly you're like a researcher, and as you said, you have your researcher hat on, right? And you're like, okay, we're we're trucking right along. This person is using their subconscious mind. And then all of a sudden you're like, wait, what is consciousness? So you like, I imagine you would slip into these giant questions about what we call reality, and the baseline of every you know, research project and scientific experiment has to be dissected so painfully because you suddenly become a philosopher asking the what is question before every every every word within a project. So it must be equal parts fun and equal parts completely maddening.

SPEAKER_04 19:19

For sure. And when we think about words, big words like consciousness is kind of like trying to define love, right? It's like we all know what it is intuitively, but yet no one seems to have an agreed upon like like uh invariant definition of it. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

I tried to say that to my wife all the time.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

How's that go for you, Dave?

SPEAKER_02 19:36

She she she doesn't like it.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Uh David, tell me about your OBE. What do you have a lucid dreaming backstory that led to that? What's going on there?

SPEAKER_04 19:47

I've had several over the years, many of them provoked through like either a meditation practice or you know, some kind of technique. But, you know, I think at the time where these were happening more frequently for me, I was actively studying this. I worked with a nonprofit organization that was teaching courses on on OBEs. I was diligently maintaining a dream journal. And that was really kind of, I noticed that my tendency to have more lucid dreams that then became OBEs were was increasing. And so one particular experience, we were living in New York, we had a one-bedroom apartment. My mother-in-law was visiting, and so she got the bedroom, and my wife and I stayed on the pullout in the in the uh living room. But I was very committed to my dream journal. So I woke up at like three in the morning and I'm like, well, I gotta write this down, but there's nowhere to like turn a light on. So I ended up having to go to the bathroom and sit on the on the toilet seat and just write my dream there. And I'm like, this is kind of frustrating, but funny, you know. So I put my journal away, go back to sleep, wake up again. And I'm like, ah, are you seriously? Like, I don't want to do this, but okay, fine. So I'm like looking, I can't find my notebook. I finally found my notebook, my pen. I go back to the bathroom, close the door, and try to turn the light on, and the switch just doesn't so I was actually dreaming that whole time. And I realized at that point that because I was in the lucid state, that I could then turn it into an OBE, and I ended up flying through the bathroom wall and found myself like at this big tree. And you know, it was like still maybe not peak lucidity, but I was definitely aware. The vivid thing that stuck out with me was looking at my hand and just seeing every minuscule line and everything was like just pulsating, vibrating energy. I wasn't out for very long. I was I was back in my in my bed before before I knew it, but then I had to wake up for real and then write all that down. So are you sure?

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Yeah, are you sure? Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's so interesting, especially about the details, because Dave, you talk a lot about like how there's like these waves of of detail, and you have these waves of control. You know what? Let's just play the Lottie clip and then we'll pause it throughout, and I'll ask. Questions because I feel like this clip is so interesting in explaining your process.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

This is Lotti. I created a portrait of her in my lucid dream. And now I'm going to tell you about the dream in which this artwork was created. It started with a sensation of me separating from my body.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

So it started with a sensation of you leaving your body. So is that where you begin to be lucid?

SPEAKER_02 22:26

Yeah, so I'm very careful with my wording there. The sensation of me leaving my body. Yeah, so yeah, obviously what's there in the video is a very simplified version. So how it would begin is I essentially kind of meditate as I fall asleep. And then I think for some people it's kind of seamless and leads into a lucid dream, OBE, whatever you want to call it. But for me, I usually there is a point where I kind of black out, lose consciousness, and then there's kind of there's just kind of a sweet spot where I can kind of feel like, oh hang on, that's I'm kind of laying in bed, but that's kind of is that my physical body or is that my dream body? I'm not quite sure which one I'm kind of engaged with. And then I might like just move my arm a bit, and then and then I just kind of step out of bed, like you would in waking life. But after you've done that a lot, you just know that you're in your dream body and you can just step out of bed. And sometimes I look around, sometimes there might be a sleeping Dave in the bed, but a lot of time there isn't. I've done like projects where I actively wanted to see a sleeping Dave in bed, so I expected him to be there, which of course he was there, and uh it all gets very complicated, and um I guess, yeah. Does that answer that bit of the story?

SPEAKER_01 23:45

No, I think it does, because I was curious, like, okay, well, what does that feel like? And how do you know that that feeling is what it is?

SPEAKER_02 23:54

It feels very different, it feels you get like kind of tingly, it's a very pleasant sensation, it's kind of warm, kind of sort of tingly feeling. It feels nice, huh? But occasionally occasionally I will think I'm moving my dream up dream arm, but then it'll be my actual arm. And occasionally you kind of get like it kind of gets sticky, a bit like again, all these things kind of blend into each other. So this is sleep paralysis again, is another thing where this can kind of blend into that, so it can kind of get a bit sticky, and I'm kind of trying to get out, but I can't, and I'm kind of stuck there, and then that feels quite that isn't so pleasant. You can get kind of a sense of foreboding, and that's more like a sleep paralysis type thing. And interestingly, actually, what a lot of people might not realize I don't know, this might be just happened to me, or it might happen to other people, I don't know, but quite often it um the dream doesn't start as a visual for me. Quite often it there's no visuals whatsoever, and it's a hundred percent tactile, so it's all just feeling. I'm feeling my body getting getting out, and quite often it's quite funny. Obviously, your mind is trying to invent a reason why you can't see. So I'll like fumble around the bedroom for a bit, and then quite often, because I sleep in reality wearing a sleep mask, and then often it's like, oh, of course you're wearing a sleep mask, and then I kind of rip it off, and then I can see, but um, and then I kind of walk around my house, and then again, this is all how it sort of interesting, yeah. OBE, lucid dream, is it related? The further away I get from my bedroom, the less it resembles reality, right? Which to me would make sense if it was all based on memory, because I'm very familiar with my room and my house, so that all looks the same. But as I get further away, as I fly out the window and go down the street, then things start looking a bit different, you know?

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Yeah, that is interesting because I've only ever met one person in my life that had was able to astral project as a child, and their experience is completely different than what you're describing. Like he said he would leave and he'd go, and it was like being in the neighbor's house, and he would like literally see in the neighbor's house completely different than what you're describing.

SPEAKER_02 26:14

Oh, I mean, I've done I've done that as well. Don't tell my neighbors, but um Don't tell them.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Okay, hopefully they don't listen to this.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

Yeah, the further you get away, that the yeah, it doesn't look exactly like that. I don't know actually. I haven't this is London, we're not very friends, so I haven't been in Wilson Beth in real in reality, only in my dreams. So I might be the same that might be different other time.

SPEAKER_04 26:35

I find it humorous because this the way you're you're describing this is like canonical textbook OBE as as I've learned it. And I think it's maybe has more to do with the mental model that's being applied than it does like the phenomenological aspect that you're describing is is like like canonical OBE, like everything from the elusive takeoff. And even the, you know, you could think of it, the familiarity of the environment as being a memory cue, but it could also be that, you know, at least as I would describe it, as if people think they get into more of a subtle dimension, that they're not so close to like the tropospheric earth space as you're like leaving your house and stuff. So there are ways, you know, you you might want to think about testing yourself as like having a what it say is a projective target. So it could be a place, like a physical place that this is my my goal. I want to get out of my body and go to the specific place. I want to witness some event or I want to witness some like perceive some thing that's there, and then I'll come back to my body and then go verify. And you that's the veridical aspect that you can actually see it. So one of my friends, Luis Monero, who is the author of Demystifying the OBE, I used to work with him at the same nonprofit. This was one of his earliest experiences. I think he was about 10 years old. He was kind of questioning whether these lucid dreams were more than just dreams or or if he was actually having an experience. And so he went and like, you know, flew out of his house, went down the street, saw a license plate number, uh, came back, woke up, wrote it down, and then took the paper down the street and like compared it. And so, like, okay, that I actually I actually was correct there. So it's kind of interesting. Still, I mean, you know, doesn't necessarily mean that there's not some other weird thing going on, but it's it can kind of change your model a little bit. Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_02 28:23

I think I mean I am aware, I am aware that it is it is sort of identical to how most people describe an OBE. But I guess I think a lot of it is to do with like my first introduction to all this stuff with Steven LeBurge and his in his exploring the world of lucid dreaming book, he he kind of it's quite subtle, but he sort of quite clearly says that he thinks those things are lucid dreams. And if I'd picked up a different book, I might have felt a different way about it. But the problem is, like the the reason how I know Damon is because we did an experiment into precognition. So the problem is that now, even if I were to get some veridical information, because I'm so sold on the idea of precognition now, I would think, well, it's I just saw that number plate in the future. It's only it's only precognition. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

That experiment involved Julia Mossbridge, who is most publicly known for being involved in the telepathy tapes, where people with autism who are non-speaking basically have a slew of abilities that the average person doesn't. And this was originally made known because these kids would be able to know the thoughts of their parents or their caregiver, sometimes their teacher. And then later, as the telepathy tapes go on, they talk about the kids meeting each other on what they call the hill, which is another plane of consciousness where they go and they talk with one another and they hang out and like a mutual dream almost. Damon, has the popularity of the telepathy tapes helped research for lucid dreaming and OBEs at all? Has it helped like open up doors?

SPEAKER_04 30:07

I I would say yes. And in full disclosure, I'm working with Dr. Mossbridge on that same research. So I'm I'm pretty involved in the the formal testing of telepathy and uh what we're calling mind discovery. The popularity has definitely started to like enter like more the let's say the public mind, the public zeitgeist. Is this for better or worse how that actually influences research, right? Because, you know, we don't want to over-pivot and become kind of as we were discussing before the show, if you over-pivot, become like overly, let's say, accepting of anything, any piece of information, if even if it's not really there's no veracity behind it, right? So we have to still be careful and approach these things scientifically. Um but it has started to open up people's mindsets, which I guess makes it more favorable to at least talk about these things. But you know, you know, people are going off the rails and they'll just like have these like fantastical stories in their own lives, and and maybe it's not as grounded as you'd like. And so, you know, you have to be really careful. You still have to, you still have to wear your proper scientist hat, you know, when you study these phenomena. And and so that's like the delicate balance. But yeah, certainly the popularity has really been helpful to the field at large, I think.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

I would also think that, Dave, it would be helpful to removing a little bit of stigma. Like, I mean, as an artist, I'm gonna stigmatize you a little bit. Like I would assume that you would be in a community of like-minded individuals who would be open to things that are strange and unusual, right? Because I think even you said this in your book, like Salvador Dali, who P.S. one of my favorite artists, that he would often draw in use lucid dreaming for his art. And so this isn't that fringe for that community, but I imagine for the rest of people that the popularity of telepathy tapes would allow for maybe more open discussion. And therefore you find more people who, you know, like me, I'm just like somewhat normal person, but I'm like, oh yeah, oh yeah, I can lucid dream. Is that is that special? You know, like, and then it becomes valuable for both the research, but also for the the community building aspect of it.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think any any research into this stuff can only, yeah, can only help get more people into it. Because I mean it's not lucid, like lucid dreaming is not a a rare phenomenon at all. So I think it's like studies show that over half of the population has had a lucid dream at some point in their lives. It's like what Damon was saying before, it's how much you're paying attention to it, you know, how much because the more attention you give it, the more you get back from these experiences. So I think having them isn't that unusual, really, but trying to sort of nurture that ability is is less common, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 32:51

I think that's that's such a key point. So when I used to talk about the OBEs, for example, you know, that's often just dismissed out of hand. But I think it's it's really comes down to data being a thoroughly unconvincing medium. Uh, we'd like to think, as a scientist, that we encounter new data that kind of conflicts with our existing theories, and then we revise and we rethink things and we kind of go back to the drawing board. But often what happens when we have data that comes in that's inconsistent with our worldview or our fundamental understanding, that we tend to either think of it as like like charlatanism or bad study design or bad statistics or all these other alternative hypotheses become more easy for our us to accept than us having to revise our worldview. So scientists and our people too. So even though the ethos of science is like self-correcting, it's a lot harder for people to self-correct. And when we have this like, let's say, material reductionist framework where we think like, hey, we're just objects in space bouncing around, and somehow consciousness is some epiphenomena of that, and it's certainly localized in the brain and it's all brain activity. The idea of any kind of non-local influence or perception or experience is just kind of incongruent with that model, and therefore we dismiss it. Yet lucid dreaming is more acceptable because, you know, hey, we we they have like a lot of people have experiences of it. And let's just say dreaming itself, right? Like virtually everyone, not everyone, but virtually everyone has some dream experience, right? But imagine like we lived in a in a world where nobody remembered their dreams. You just kind of like went to bed at night, you closed your eyes, and you just like flatline blacked out, and then you woke up the next day. And you were the one exception case where you were actually having this conscious experience at night and having memories of it, and you would record these things and you'd show people, and they would just, what do you think they would do? They'd be like, No, that's confabulation, some kind of memory artifact, some hallucination. You're certainly not having conscious experience during the night because that's not our our experience. So it's not the data, it's our kind of our own mental framework, which is updated by our own experience. And so, as more and more people have experiences, and even as people start talking more and more, as we're doing with the telepathy tapes, I think it starts to open up the mental model a little bit to be like at least inquisitive of the possibilities of such things.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

That's so true. So, from a like a neurological standpoint, from a brainwave standpoint, when someone is experiencing a lucid dream, do their brain waves reflect that in a way that's different from regular REM sleep?

SPEAKER_04 35:27

That's a really good question. I think it's I think we might be kind of new in that territory, but I I know there is active work being done to try to see if they can identify when the person's actually achieved that kind of peak lucidity. Um, and I know that there's been some experiments recently of like message passing, like you know, if if you're in the lucid state, you're actually be able to be receptive of like maybe a sound or something that's in that environment that you can report on it. So now that we're actually exploring this, I think we're getting closer and closer to having maybe like neural signatures of these states. The trick is, you know, it's hard to identify because a person can't really self-report when they're dreaming, like when they've actually entered the lucid dream. And I think that's where it's tricky to get like most neuroscience is based on a very tight temporal synchrony. So it can be a little bit hard, but uh, but I think we're getting closer for sure.

SPEAKER_01 36:20

Oh, that's exciting. Okay, let's go back to the Lottie clip.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

This is a lucid dream, so I knew what I needed to do. I started spinning myself around to transport myself.

SPEAKER_01 36:32

You were trying to go somewhere, so you decided to spin around.

SPEAKER_02 36:36

Yeah. That's a classic lucid dreaming trick. Again, that's I can't remember where I heard of it, but I'm pretty sure it's in Stephen LeBurge's uh book. So the the sort of techniques to have lucid dreams, and there's sort of techniques within the experience you can do, for example, to uh change the scenery of the dream, and that's what I'm doing there. And so you spin around and all the visuals go blurry, and then you just kind of think about where you want to go, and then when you stop spinning, hopefully you end up in that place.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

Huh. Okay. Kind of wizard of the thing.

SPEAKER_02 37:11

In the video, it in the video it doesn't um I think I end up somewhere to slightly different, but I do meet the person I'm trying to meet, which is the important part. Okay, you gotta bear in mind this video is like a simplified version of uh it is, but I'm very grateful for it because it really helps to paint a picture.

SPEAKER_01 37:29

So let's let's keep playing.

SPEAKER_02 37:32

To Lottie's house, but it didn't quite work because I ended up in this forest. But it was okay because Lottie was there too. I got a piece of paper, I held it up to her face, I willed the page to become transparent, and after a moment or two, this drawing appeared on the page. Then I memorized the image, woke myself up, and recreated this drawing and waking life. These are a few other examples of portraits I've created using this technique. As you can see, sometimes they look like people, sometimes not so much. I like to think these images have a poetic or metaphorical relationship to the person I'm attempting to draw. You're probably wondering why in Lottie's portrait I held the paper up to her face like this. That's because one of the key features of the dream world or the dreaming mind is the fact that everything's constantly changing, right? Nothing's static for more than a couple of seconds. So that being the case, if you try to draw something in a dream like you would in waking life, it just doesn't work, right? You look at the thing, you draw a bit, you look back, by the time you look back, the drawing's changed, the thing you're drawing is morphed into something else, it just doesn't work. So I developed that technique after a long period of trial and error as a way of drawing things within the dream environment which works with the laws of the dreaming mind.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

This is so fascinating. I don't even know where to start because you talk about how you're holding the paper up to her face and then it becomes clear, you will it to be clear. Is is this like set of steps something that you invented this part? Because I know you said the spinning is you know, air quotes classic lucid dreaming, but this part is this unique to you?

SPEAKER_02 39:27

Yeah, what this video is describing is my process of making portraits of people in my lucid dream. So Lotti is someone I know in in reality, and I've intentionally had a dream about her, and then I'm making a portrait of her in the dream. But if you try to if you try and draw someone in a dream like you would in waking life, it doesn't really work because you like if I was to draw you now, I'd be like looking down and looking at you and looking down. And as soon as you do that, because in a dream everything's changing, as soon as I look back at the paper, it'll look different and it'll just be all odd. So I knew you couldn't do that. So I thought, let's invent my own way to do a portrait of someone in a dream. And it it can be anything, but that's just that's just a way that seemed fun to me. I was like, well, let's I'll pretend the paper's kind of like a camera, and I put the hold the paper up to the person's face, and I will it to become transparent, and then I kind of see the person's face, and then I see a drawing appear on the page. But I should say the drawing looks sometimes it contains elements of a face, but sometimes it doesn't at all. Sometimes it's enough. I mean, I might have one here. This is this is just a photocopy of one, but that's one I did of someone. So I mean that it's still it's still a figure, that one. It's like a weird sort of rabbit dog thing. But anyway, it can be anything, it can be it can be absolutely anything they look like. So um, so yeah, it's a portrait in a very loose sense. But yeah, it's definitely it's more like yeah, I came up with that because I thought that would sound fun. That would sound interesting in a video explaining that if that makes sense. I would I see it as kind of like a story. Well, everything I do is not just the drawings, it's the story around them as well. So I plan what I want to do first, think what would sound interesting, and then go and have the dream, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 41:23

It does. So, Damon, in your research with Dave that was precognitive, how did you take this collection of like protocols, I guess you might call them, and and create a pre-cognitive experiment from that?

SPEAKER_04 41:38

Yeah, so I came a little bit late in the experiment to on the more the analysis phase, but it was a really interesting design. It really kind of hearkened to if you're if you're familiar with the remote viewing uh literature. And like I say, we take more of an experimental approach to remote viewing where you'd have a some kind of target. In this case, it could be an image or a story or something like this. We have some target that's selected, and then the viewer is trying to apprehend information about this in spite of no sensory access to it. And you have these double-blinded protocols, so nobody is actually aware of what the target is until it's revealed. And what makes this pre-cognitive is like when is the target selected. So in in Dave's case, the experimental design was that Dave would have his lucid dream with the intention of reaching the target. He would transcribe his dream into the drawing and a little bit of passage kind of describing the narrative of the dream. And then our uh collaborator skeptic would actually select this target from a database. And this database was a remote viewing database, it was uh Lynn Buchanan's data set. So there's like they're all date affixed targets. So it's kind of randomly selecting a date using a random number generator and then pulling up that target for that that was a sign of that day. So these were usually like some kind of event with like images and text that describe that. And so what I came in with is I have these very rich dream transcripts, and I have these really rich uh descriptive targets, and I need a way to try to say, like, well, what is the similarity between these two things? A method I had been working on for a while is a kind of automated uh using AI tools to evaluate the semantic and visual similarity. And so, you know, without getting too technical, essentially it's the same kind of process that you know, if you type a prompt into Chat GPT, that it has a response to your prompt that seems at least connected semantically to what you said, right? Like you don't ask about baseball and get something about cat sitting, right? Like it's it's contextually aware. The way it develops that context is that that that when you think of like what a prompt is, this body of text that you put into the model has these interrelationships, the meanings of the words as they relate to each other, and how that relates to the broader semantic lexicon. And so by essentially vectorizing these things, we think of like if you had this block of text here. If we were to put it in like, let's just say simply two-dimensional space, you could say, like, well, let's say you're talking about a dog here, and we have another passage about a cat. Well, that that if we were trying to draw a line and imagine this in like a in a two-dimensional volume, the line between dog and cat should be shorter than the line between, let's say, dog and airplane, right? And that's a very, very overly simplified. So now imagine this model in like thousands of dimensions, which we can't even visualize. We can say, like, what is the relationship between what Dave wrote in his transcript and what the target was, and how that, you know, how close are these kind of in proximity to each other? Are is there a relationship? And then we can say, well, that has to be relative to something, right? So we look at the relative to all of the possible targets through all of the dreams. We'd hope that the dream and the target are closer than they are to the other targets that were selected for the other nights, for example. And that's kind of the crux of the analysis. And there was some ambiguity for those that are inclined to think of precognition as a real thing. It was pretty thoroughly convincing. There's some really remarkable hits, but there's always an exit, right? Like you say, well, it didn't work in all cases. And you know, there were some that were clearly not as strongly connected. So there's still an open question, definitely a lot of room for further research.

SPEAKER_01 45:18

This is where that research part becomes interesting, slash, complicated, because I wonder to myself, well, as a researcher, would it be, I don't know, is tempting the right word to want to avoid conclusions which one found upsetting? You know, like ontologically, like I don't want to acknowledge that this was like a one in 500,000 chance success rate that this person achieved, because then I would have to really then logically my next step would be to explore okay, is consciousness non-local? And that makes me uncomfortable because of whatever reason. Yeah. Do you see that happening? Or is that is that kind of like the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about?

SPEAKER_04 46:11

Oh, I think people talk about it. That's the main discussion. It's, you know, oh, okay. It's an important conversation to have. For my part, I'm much more interested in research that's going a little bit deeper. Like if we don't have the underlying model of like, let's say, material reductionism, we this model that consciousness is definitively local, if we just kind of table that, then we can start asking much more interesting questions about the phenomena itself, right? So to me, I'm much less interested in like evidencing the reality of these, but more to really understand these like nuances about it. And so, like one of the interesting nuances, and I'll let Dave tell the story, but like the probably one of the most compelling dreams he had actually was outside of the target set. He dreamt about one of the researchers' houses that were for sale that he, you know, so it was like it failed the statistics, it's like happens outside of the purview of the experiment, but is also like anecdotally one of the more interesting things. And and so these exploring these kind of weird nuances is really interesting to me. Relatedly, I'm working on some OBE research with uh some researchers at the divisions of perceptual studies as part of UVA, and we see very similar stuff where it's like, okay, we have a target, it's in another room. People are trying to have an OBE to get to this target, see what this image is, and come back and report on it. Like virtually zero people got the right answer, but a couple people made it to the researchers' room and could describe where people were sitting and what they were doing at that time. Again, it's outside of the purview of the experiment. It's it's not, you know, we don't have any statistical measure of like this is like evidencing anything. It's just kind of a really interesting anecdote. And many, many people had these really profound subjective experiences. Apparently, some of the participants were weeping after the fact because they had such powerful experiences. And then you're like, Well, but did you see this picture? You know, this little cartoon image.

SPEAKER_00 48:00

Like, you're like, Um, I need to check a box here, ma'am. Could you please stop crying for a moment?

SPEAKER_04 48:05

So I think some of these bring up way more interesting questions to me than like, hey, we need to evidence the core phenomena that that there is this non-locality. I think there's been so many decades of research that have attempted to do that with with greater and lesser degrees of success. I find some of these more things about like how does, let's say, consciousness operate in these different states and how do these phenomena kind of manifest is really interesting to me. I think it's really interesting in a lot of experiments I work in that the most profound effects are always just like at the margins of the experiment, right? They show you, they pick up and show you, like, hey, this is real, but you're not going to be able to apply a p-value to it. And so it's like, you know, your paper looks like you failed, but also you you have these experiences that are just like outrageous, you know.

SPEAKER_01 48:50

And would you mind sharing the um the TV sign filled analogy? Because I found that to be so helpful. I was like, ooh, I'm putting her in my back pocket because next time I'm in a group and and we want to talk about is consciousness local, then I'm gonna use it. So I, if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_04 49:10

Yeah, sure. So to kind of back up a little bit, you know, again, if we think about the material reductionist worldview, we we think of, you know, this interconnectivity of neurons in the brain, and and at some point through sufficient levels of complexity that that consciousness is kind of like self-metacognitive, this experience of what it's like to be you, this qualia, is something that emerges from that activity. So it's kind of almost like a process approach, like through the process of interconnection of neurons and the process of brain activity, we have subjective phenomenology or we have an experience that arises out of that. And we've so far been very unclear as to how that happens and at what stage it happens. Does a single-celled organism have any anything that could be exposed as or explained as qualia or phenomenology? Like, where's that line of demarcation in the complexity of the system that consciousness we as we recognize it as being consciousness arise? And that's a moving target. Like, you know, Descartes famously dissected live dogs because he said the screaming agony of this dog is just the machinations of a beast machine. It's just like a simulcrum of experiences, not really experiencing pain because the dog is not conscious, right? So this is like this floating line that we haven't been able to really draw a line and saying that this is this is a conscious system, this is not. Now, another worldview is more as consciousness is fundamental and primary, and that the brain is like a receiver of the consciousness. So you think of it as like a specially attuned, you could say, like radio or television set that's kind of tuned to your frequency. And so that the brain is actually helping you to kind of constrain and filter and process consciousness, but it's not the the source of the consciousness.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

Hey there. It looks like you're enjoying this episode so far. But you know what's strange? Apple tells me that 19% of you who listen on this app aren't actually following the show. To guarantee that we stay connected in this busy world of podcasts, double check that you've hit the follow button on your podcast listening app. And if you have already, I'd like to invite you to my private Facebook group. Just search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes to request to join. It's free. Okay, back to the show. Dave, has this changed the way that you see reality?

SPEAKER_02 51:26

Do you mean this podcast?

SPEAKER_01 51:28

You know, no, I just mean like the the culmination of your life experiences as a lucid dreamer slash OBE or combined with this research. And now you're kind of whether you like it or not, in this community of people that you know is very fanatical about all of all things psi.

SPEAKER_02 51:47

Sure. Yeah, I mean, I've sort of had two big shifts in my in my worldview since sort of doing this lucid dream art more publicly. One is uh taking precognition seriously. I'm pretty pretty sure that's the real deal. And the other one is um, yeah, these issues of uh yeah, consciousness. I sound like I'm obsessed with the whole lucid dream out of body experience thing, but because I was so convinced what I was doing was uh, you know, sort of uh not an experience of seeing the physical world, I started asking myself, right, these people who do think that, what would need to be true for that to be the case? And I got into all the isms learning about the different philosophies, and before that I was I was totally ignorant. I I would have thought a materialist was someone who just owned a lot of shoes, and uh which that's my only relationship to that word, but I I kind of was I kind of was a materialist without without having really thought about it, just because that's the sort of you know the the view of my culture sort of generally. But then I started looking into it, and the more I looked into it, I was like, as as I think anyone who really seriously looks into it, is like this this kind of doesn't make make sense, you know. And um, I started looking at the other positions, and where I've ended up, I've got really interested in the work of a a philosopher, you guys may have heard of him, called Bernardo Kastrop, who's um like the modern sort of leading figure in defending the position of idealism, which is I mean, it's essentially yeah, the idea that Damon was saying that consciousness is is fundamental. I have the kind of worldview in which a veridical outbody experience would be possible. I just don't necessarily think it is. Because of course, if consciousness is fundamental, that doesn't mean by necessity every single sci phenomenon must be exactly as how we see it. Do you understand what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 53:47

Well now you're sounding like a philosopher.

SPEAKER_02 53:49

I just think it I just think it makes sense. I'm really into I'm really into that stuff. I mean, when when I keep poo-pooing the OBE thing, I'm kind of the only thing I'm really poo-pooing is the idea that because everyone has a different idea of it, and the only the only one that I'm really criticizing is this when it's sort of understood as this sort of cartoon scenario where you leave your body and you're seeing the actual physical world. That's the only idea I I don't buy, to be honest. Everything else, I'm kind of cool with it. But yeah, I'm definitely into the idea that consciousness is the fundamental nature. That I think that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 54:27

I think the average person is entertained by all of it. Like all of it is entertaining, right? It's when we start to pull it into that realm of like actual seriousness that we start to do what you're doing, Dave, where you're like, mm, this can stay, but these go, you know, like where you're not subscribing to some, but some of them you're like, yeah, I'm on board with that.

SPEAKER_02 54:51

But I have a list on my wall up here and updates it every day.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

Like a whiteboard within a white eraser. Yeah. I think where I come in is I'm all about utility. How is this useful? Like, for example, it was useful in for me and and Damon, you say for others who have bad dreams, nightmares, you know, to be able to control that unsettling experience and to turn it around, you know, that there's utility to phenomena. That's that's my whole, it's not a shtick. It's just my whole angle on all of it. Like, are we just trying to be special? You know what I mean? Or are we trying, can we make the world a better place? Can we make our lives better? So, Damon, from your perspective as a researcher, how do you see just the lucid dreaming? Because I know we kind of like branched into these other areas as well, but just from the lucid dreaming perspective, how does lucid dreaming make average people's lives better?

SPEAKER_04 55:50

Oh, that's great. Well, I think we have to be kind of clear what we mean on like the meaning of meaningful or the meaning of utility. So a lot of ways that we tend to think about utility is like, okay, so we have this 3D life that we're living. That's like the material world that we're in, that we're all engaged in. And how can I have like some optimization function to improve that state, right? But another way of looking at it is more like, let's say, transcendental, right? There could be implications of lucid dreaming that have a much larger, let's say, grandiose perspective of like who you are as a spiritual being or who you are as a as a person, how you how you want to live in this world, right? So you could think of utility and optimization. I mean, I think there's many, many stories about even like athletes who use lucid dreaming as a as a training ground, or people that want to like even work on practicing difficult relationships, or you know, just almost like running a simulation. You can think of it as like a you know a fighter pilot simulator in a way, right? You have these this kind of like low stakes theater that's very representative of of how day-to-day life can be. And you can run scenarios and you can like you know get feedback and and see how how you engage in these things. And so it could be useful, have that kind of utility in that respect. However, you could also think of it as like, what are the implications if if this really is pointing to something higher, I guess. Let's say, like that there is this like more of a liminal or transcendental aspect of consciousness, and what does that imply? And so for me, like again, I know we're we're trying to stay close to to lucid dreaming, but you know, lucid dreaming slash OBEs, you know, for me, that was partially overcoming the fear of death and recognizing that not only am I here engaged in this physical life, but that there's some purpose to it. Like I'm here for a reason. Um, and that caused me to want to engage with my life in a more directed and meaningful way, as opposed to just like, how do I optimize the benefit function of like, you know, making whatever success as however you want to measure it in material terms? It's more about like for me, it's kind of a pointer like, how do I actually be a better person and have better relationships and thinking more holistically and thinking more worldly? And so I think you kind of like how you apply that lens and and how it shapes your worldview really depends on the on the individual.

SPEAKER_01 58:15

What about you, Dave?

SPEAKER_02 58:16

Where where do I get meaning from lucid dreams? Is that the question?

SPEAKER_01 58:20

Um, yeah, meaning or I, you know, as Damon pointed out, you know, my first word for that was utility. But then, you know, does utility equal meaning? You know, I guess that's where you can kind of massage it a little bit to whatever. But yeah, like what I think is so interesting about you is that you have something very physical from something that we generally agree is non-physical. And that's why I was like, yes, yes, please come on the show. Because to me, like a bear, it's sort of interesting, a tricycle, whatever, but a bear on a tricycle, okay, now we're talking. And you, my friend, is a bear on a tricycle. So, because you're creating this something that you can share, this physical thing from a state of altered consciousness. And that's pretty special. So, yeah, I guess my question for you is outside of the obvious answer of sharing your art, is does lucid dreaming slash out-of-body experiences give you other utility?

SPEAKER_02 59:25

Sure, yeah. Well, there's kind of two sides to what I do with lucid dreaming. There's the yeah, the art stuff where I make these drawings. And in that sense, so yeah, sort of utility in relation to that. It's funny because I guess there kind of is utility in sort of building a sort of art career around that idea. But it's kind of funny because what one of the ways lots of people use to define art is the fact it doesn't have any utility. So in relation to that, that's a bit of a funny one. Oh, at least not do you do you understand do you understand? I do, yeah, yeah. But in in terms of like what you might call like meaning or or well-being, there's another side to what I do. When I when I'm having a night off the um the lucid dream art, I do um I'm very attracted to like the Buddhist approach to lucid dreaming, where it's known as dream yoga. So, and this is kind of my sort of take on it. What I do is uh meditate in lucid dreams, and for me that always it's a bit like what I was saying before about having a lucid dream where you're not controlling it, but that kind of turn up to 11, you're actually meditating in the dream, and that always leads to very sort of rich and meaningful experiences.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:38

That's really cool. In the first person, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:48

Yes. Okay. Although sometimes sometimes people do have dreams from a yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:53

I ask because most of my dreams Do you have that sometimes? Most of my dreams throughout my life are third person. Really? Yeah, that's interesting. It's like watching a movie that made it difficult, I think, at the beginning to like get control of it because it was like something I was observing, no control over as the observer. And then honestly, I started smoking weed, and then I was like, suddenly I could dream in the first person. But sometimes I still just dream in in third person, but when they are in first person the whole time, because it'll switch back and forth, oftentimes that dream has more meaning. I feel like those dreams I'm supposed to pay attention to. Like they feel visceral, they feel like, hey, dummy, I'm trying to tell you something, and so I I pay attention. So yeah. So that's why I was asking.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:44

Interesting. Related to that, I tell you the one thing that I've become really interested in recently, although it took me a while to like realize that sort of why it was so interesting. Was um I've done these experiments where I give dream characters a pen and paper and ask them to do the drawing. So, like the other people in my dreams. So I've done that's a paper as well with a a scientist called Antonio Zadra. I forget what journal it was in now, anyway. But it's called To Dream Perchance to Draw. But in the process of doing that, I had this strange experience where I gave the dream character a pen and paper, and my I was kind of watching her do the drawing over her shoulder, and my perspective suddenly shifted, and I was no longer Dave, I was this other dream character. And it's almost it's one of those things that's it really is impossible to explain unless you've experienced it. And it's not like I I think it's quite an unusual occurrence, but it's not unheard of. I found a paper about it called Vicarious Dreaming, and I think it might be one of the most interesting things about dreaming that's not really spoken about that much, because it, if you think about it, has all these fascinating philosophical implications about what is identity, because it wasn't like I was Dave in her head looking at the dream. It there was no Dave, I was just this other woman, and I can kind of I was thinking as her with her internal monologue. And other people have talked about these experiences in that paper, and it's it's just so interesting. Like, what's going on there? Like, what does that mean for identity if you can be another person for a little bit? Like, where where was Dave? How how can I even remember that experience if I was in any sense actually her? Maybe I wasn't, but it totally felt like I was.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:39

Whoa, how is it that sometimes you're looking through your own eyes and sometimes you're looking at yourself through uh like a overview effect? And it's it's very fascinating to me that that we can like because that's not how we normally navigate reality waking state, like probably be disconcerting if I'm like walking along the sidewalk, maybe walking to my car, and now I see my car's perspective or I see myself from above. Like that would be very jarring, right? But what some of what you're talking about is also really interesting. I think there's individual differences related to like your tendency to visualize in a first versus third person perspective, has a lot to do with memory as well. More semanticized memory, like older memories. If you think about yourself in grade school, you're more likely to have that overview effect than if you think about yourself eating breakfast this morning, right? And that can be that kind of first person perspective, can be a temporal cue. And it's also a confidence cue. Like I'm more confident in what I did this morning because if I recapitulate that in memory, I have all of these like first person and visceral cues, but over time those start to atrophy and I might know where I was, but I'll have a lot of the details will start to get fuzzy over time. And so that that signature of our confidence or our memory has a lot to do with that perspective.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:56

Sorry to go off on too many tangents there, but no, those are fun tangents that this is interesting. I'm gonna start a dream journal. This has been so much fun because I guess I never really spent the time to think about how much dreaming what we dream, the way we dream, and how this bleeds into these other things that we tend to call phenomena tells us about the reality that we live in. And when I asked you, Damon, about like, well, what utility, and you kind of went into from utility to meaning, it made me think about when you travel and you, you know, and you come back and you feel like more a part of the universe. And maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm speaking out of turn and that is not anybody else here, but like I would see how air quotes traveling in your dreams would make you feel more a part of the universe, like more a part of what what maybe reality really is versus. the lowercase reality that we experience every day when we hit snooze on our alarm and make coffee and drive to work the same way and then come home and you know do it all over again.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:12

That's really beautiful. I why I, you know, I make sure to visit McDonald's in every country I go to. So I have that kind of music.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:19

Good, good, good, good, good, good. Glad to hear.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:23

As we wrap up, Dave, in that clip with Lottie, you were saying like if if people want to work with you, she commissioned like a portrait of herself. Is that still something that you do?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:35

Yeah. So for a long time I wasn't doing that because I've been uh working on my book. But now I'm open for portraits again. Yeah, that's one of the main things I do is do yeah portraits of people in in my dreams.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:48

Shall I plug my website? I guess now yeah so uh well you can get me on Instagram that's Dave Green5000 and my website is dave hyphengreen.co.uk so just contact me on there if you're interested in a portrait.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:04

And your book is available for sale when and where?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:08

Yeah so I've got a book coming out May 14th called Doodles in the Dark An Artist Guide to Lucid Dreaming and it yeah covers lots of the stuff we've been talking about. It's available to you can pre-order it now on Amazon. But uh frustratingly it's only we've only we're still looking for a US publisher so at the moment it's only in the UK and the Commonwealth but you you can still buy it if you're in the States you just gotta get it shipped.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:34

And Damon tell us about the Enigma app.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:37

Entangled Entangled sorry um well uh there's a little history there going back all the way to the 70s and before you know a lot of PSI research on the influence of intention on chaotic systems. And so uh early studies by JB Ryan found that when people were trying to toss dice for example that they could skew the results in line with their intention and then when you put the dice in a cup still the same effect and maybe you get a robotic arm that's tossing the dice and people can still skew these results and um that moved on to random number generators like you know quantum devices that are producing binary and having people sit in front of these systems and try to skew them. And this led to many years of research at the PearLab, Princeton Engineering and Anomalies research. And so I'm working with some alumni of the PearLab and there was one project that kind of came out of that called the Global Consciousness Project which you know looked at a slightly different approach where they set up these random event generators around the world and found that you know you just let these things kind of run continuously that even in lieu of any intention but that when there would be like major world events that seem to captivate the attention and emotion of many you know many people worldwide, you'd find that the behavior of these devices seemed to be perturbed. Specifically they would become less random and they would seem to synchronize with each other. The big big events like um the death of Princess Diana later on 9-11 we say just tremendously huge effects. So there's been many many decades of of uh you know data collection in this area really intriguing results. And so what we did at Entangled was we kind of brought it down to the user level. So we have a quantum random event generator. So it's a purely stochastic device where you know whatever the output is is not predictive of the next bit and we collect a bitstream for every user that joins the platform. So what this allows us to do is kind of have a measure of every individual we can see when their data is trending outside of outside of expected randomness and we can notify them when this happens and we can also look at your city or global effects and kind of aggregate the data in this way. And what we see this is like a essentially an experimental platform. So you know aside from your own personal notifications like there's any number of experiments that we can like you know sit on top of that. So currently we're building out an API to do like let's say you could imagine like a group meditation experiment where we just aggregate those particular users and see if there's any effect on the data during that predefined time period where we're let's say doing a group meditation or doing some other activity. So it's kind of a massive collective conscious experiment. It's been really fun to work on really interesting I think there's a lot of possibilities moving forward with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:30

So absolutely and I love that all of this has so much personal application opportunity. You know this is not just something that we can hear about on the telepathy tapes or read about in a in the research papers but it's something that all of us can kind of have our own experiences with. So thank you so much guys this has been a really cool conversation.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:52

Yeah very fun. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:55

Thanks for listening. Since you've made it this far I'd like to invite you to be a part of my private Facebook group. And there I post content that I don't share anywhere else. You can talk to me directly about past and future episodes and I even do occasional giveaways. Search MFR Curious insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. And if you liked this episode you'll also like the one with the paranormal researcher Dr. Jeff Kreipel on how to think impossibly about precognition, poltergeists and time. That's episode 308. Stay tuned next week for Remastered favorite with former evangelical author Josh Harris asking should sex be saved for marriage? Until then, keep it curious