Dr. Gillian Holloway explores lucid dreaming, where awareness in dreams reveals physiological triggers like floating objects or hand sensations, and its potential ties to telepathy or survival mechanisms. Callers share hyper-vivid OBEs—Bell recounts a Paris experience—precognitive visions (e.g., 2001’s Minneapolis skyscraper dream), and recurring nightmares tied to unresolved stress or trauma. Jung’s "future images" theory and symbolic analysis are key, with Holloway dismissing visitation claims like Wren’s decades-long "It’s All a Mistake" grief dream as personal processing. The episode blends dream science with Bell’s conspiracy-adjacent musings, leaving listeners to ponder whether dreams hold hidden truths or just mirror the mind’s unresolved chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
25 time zones, all covered by this program like a warm blanket.
Which is called Midnight in the Desert.
I am Arthur.
Good evening.
I don't know why I say that.
I just give all three greetings and then I say good evening at the end of it all.
Okay, so two rules for this show, two rules only, and those would be no bad language because little ones listen to this program, and only one call per show.
That's it.
I know I don't look over at the wormhole often enough, but Mark, I don't know, he got my attention tonight.
Such a simple little statement.
He says, Art, why do two UFOs never, why do they never look the same?
They never look the same.
He misspelled a couple things.
Bad, Mark.
And don't use the number two.
Write out TWO.
Nevertheless, what a hell of a good question.
In all my years, now many, I have not seen actually two UFOs that could be said to be identical.
Now, maybe they've got, you know, more than Ford and Chevy in the UFO manufacturing business up there somewhere.
And maybe there are millions of races visiting.
Who knows?
But I thought, what a good question.
Anybody else thought about that?
They never look the same.
They're always different, right?
Even if they're a little foggy or even if they're clear, they're always different.
Why would that be?
Well, okay.
Some good news and mostly bad news.
Good news, I guess, is that the United States claims that we flew a drone in the right place and we killed Jihadi John.
You know, the guy with a British accident cutting off American heads?
So they may be picking up pieces of jihadijan right now or not.
But they think they got him.
Pretty sure.
In other not such good news, Kurdish Iraqi fighters launched a long-awaited offensive to retake the strategic town of Sinjar from the Islamic State group, you know, ISIS.
And it looks like early reports are they're doing well.
They broke supply lines, and so now they've got to push on in.
Twin suicide bombings, a courtesy of ISIS, struck in southern Beirut, killing at least 43 people, wounding scores more.
So again, ISIS.
I will tell you that whole part of the world right now, and I'm afraid I even include Egypt to some degree in it, maybe Italy soon.
This is spreading like a horrible virus.
It's like a bomb went off in that part of the world.
Even Europe in general doesn't seem that safe and may not be unless we stop these fools.
It's like a bomb went off in that whole part of the world.
And I got to tell you, we lit the fuse.
Back with Iraq.
We have ourselves to thank for what's going on over there right now.
For months and months, Marco Rubio's campaign has sort of, well, they've worked out of a garage, for example, right?
Now, all of a sudden, it looks like Rubio might be getting some traction.
I told you I thought he might be the one.
And so they're moving on up.
And they've got actual campaign headquarters now, out of the garage.
It's a ways from there to the presidency, but you never know, right?
Moving on up.
And then the federal government is proposing Thursday.
This is pretty incredible, to ban smoking inside and out of public housing nationwide.
You can imagine what kind of reaction this is getting nationwide.
Probably not so good.
Even non-smokers are saying, my God, the government passing a law against doing something that is legal for citizens to do inside their own home?
Well, all right, coming up is a very, very, very interesting show.
Dr. Jillian Holloway has been on the faculty of Merrillhurst University in Portland, Oregon for 21 years and is dedicated to making dreams more accessible to everyone.
I love these shows.
I really do.
Her research into the meaning of dreams is known internationally, and she is the author of four books on working with dream messages to change our lives.
Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times Help Blog, magazines like Shape, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Self, and Women's World.
She is a veteran of over 500 radio and television interviews.
She should be wearing a flat jacket or something.
She leads private dream discussion groups and appears as a trainer and speaker for those interested in dream analysis.
So coming up in a moment, if you will simply stay about where you are, Dr. Gillian Holloway Is going to be here, and I'm sure she's going to get an opportunity to talk to you about your dreams.
And I know she's going to hear about one of mine, and you're probably going to want to hear it too.
I debated and debated about talking about this dream, but it was so genuinely funny that there's just no way I can not do it.
My wife said, Don't do it.
No, I'm going to tell this dream.
Everybody dreams, so everybody's going to be interested tonight.
Stay right where you are.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
unidentified
Listen to the wind blows, watch the sun rise.
Run in the shadows, down your love, down your life.
Run in your eyes, I wonder where you are.
I wonder if you think about me once upon a time.
You're the wildest dream.
Midnight in the Desert doesn't scream calls.
We trust you, but remember, the NSA, well, you know.
Well, we know that most, almost all species of mammals dream art.
And so the speculation is that there's something going on with brain regeneration, you know, that there's a basic biological function that happens.
And also we can see with animals, if those that they have been able to hook up to electrodes and see what's going on in their brains a little bit when they're dreaming, the speculation is that they are rehearsing life strategies for animals.
That is procreation and hunting, nesting, those types of behaviors, because they have a similar brain activity as they do when they're creating a nest, when they're looking for a mate, when they're hunting.
So it looks like they're dreaming about the important things in their life.
And there are very, if you, I mean, everyone has observed that there are very few things in nature that are just throwaways.
And the dreaming activity is pronounced in mammals and in humans.
And so we have to assume, as you said, that there's something productive intended here, that has remained with us for good reason.
So the psychological ideas about dreaming have been a more recent area of inquiry and understanding.
But before that, the phenomenon of dreaming, we assume, is leading us and preparing us for what comes next.
And in fact, in my research and collecting dreams from different age groups of people, it's very clear to me that there's a cluster effect that we dream about things that are coming up in the next couple of years.
When your kids have not yet gone to school, they'll start dreaming about first grade before they go.
And if you're pre-adolescent, you'll start dreaming about your first kiss before you have it.
You know, dreaming about the next big thing that's coming.
So it certainly seems that there's a developmental preparation going on for us.
And that's, you know, what we speculate, we don't have to worry about this dream forcing meaning into it.
But there is a case to be made that the way your mind wraps around the physiological problem or sensation and creates a little storyline, that is partly derived from your personality and partly derived from your current circumstances.
It's kind of a reality sandwich that gets wrapped around that physiological state.
But when we have a really riveting experience of whatever kind, it could be high school, it could be childhood, it could be adulthood, it becomes kind of an imprint.
And then that character or that situation becomes like the poster.
It becomes a picture for a certain constellation of feelings or pressures or what, I mean, it depends on what it is.
But when you dream about Claire, you might not be dreaming about Claire or about that time in your life.
You might be dreaming about a particular kind of pressure that's just like, you know, I'm kind of up against it, but that's where I do my best, but yet I still don't like being up against it.
In fact, the people who are studying it still don't know quite what it is.
But what it seems to be is the phenomenon of being aware that you are asleep and dreaming while it's happening.
Usually when we're asleep and dreaming, we think we're awake.
You know, you're having an adventure and you're talking to Claire and things are going on and you faked yourself out and you think you're awake and you're really asleep.
But when you're lucid, you know that you are asleep and you're dreaming, but you're aware of what's going on and you're fully cognizant of what state you're in.
So that's the difference.
That's the lucidity.
It doesn't mean that you can control everything that's going on.
Sometimes you can, sometimes, more often you can't.
But you are aware that you're in that dream state.
And there are the way I hear about this most is through my research with people Who are having communications, they say, with the dead, where they meet their grandmother and she comes back and they say, Shoot, grandma, I thought you were dead.
Am I dreaming?
Are you here?
And grandma says, Oh, yeah, I'm here.
And yeah, you're dreaming.
I'm in your dream.
And the person's completely aware they're dreaming, and then they have their little visit.
Well, that's, you know, as funny as that is, that's exactly how you train yourself to begin lucid dreaming, not by sticking your hand under your rear hand, but rather to blend the states of consciousness, that awareness and the dream state.
So you can teach yourself to recognize a trigger.
That's the way that's most often taught, to look at your hands or to look at the mirror or to try to read and see if you can read something.
There are all kinds of different triggers.
You can set up sort of like hypnotic programming where you tell yourself you're going to become aware in a dream.
Or you can do what I call dream walking or dream sliding, where you relax and lie down and go off in search of your dreams, maintaining your awareness while you go.
And that's the approach that I like best because that gives you a greater blending of your consciousness.
That is a little sample of what I call dream walking or dream sliding, which is kind of a meditation where you can go into a relaxed state.
You can sit down or lie down.
Do this little rehearsal that you can then use when you fall asleep at night to try and ignite that blend of consciousness so that you can maintain your awareness as you slip into sleep.
Well, I do teach little classes on this and give people techniques.
I think it's something that, you know, it's pretty controversial, lucid dreaming, and some people think it's quite dangerous, you know, kind of don't try this at home sort of thing.
Why?
Well, it has a reputation kind of like out-of-body experiences where people feel that you can go off and meet some dastardly characters in other realms.
But I've had really cool people lately on talking about OBEs.
And one of them said something that I thought was really cool.
He said he can walk right through buildings.
He can walk through walls.
He can walk through doors.
And he added something that when he walks through solid objects in an OBE state, you can kind of feel a little bit more resistant or resistance as you move through them.
And you can kind of feel the texture of them as you move through them.
But sometimes you have a dream, and then later it comes true.
The problem with this is you can't, there's no little label that flashes as you're having the dream saying precognitive, precognitive, warning, precognitive.
You can't know when you're having that dream until it actually happens.
The more you know about your dreams, the more you pay attention in general, the more likely you are to have some kind of a gut reaction to the dream when you wake up that you can take forward that quickens your sense of recognition.
But you're right.
In very few instances do we know that we're having a precognitive dream unless it's a lucid dream and then people have had the experience of being told or hearing a voice or saying, be sure to remember this tomorrow.
So the more lucid, that's an argument for learning a little bit about how to be more lucid in your dreams because you have a lot better shot at recognizing, especially any kind of a warning that you have in a dream.
Well, you know, I have a theory that all of us have these kinds of blended consciousness dream experiences, but they are so, as you say, they are so far away from what we think about things that we are not likely to remember them when we wake up.
But I don't think this is a sign that some are more evolved than others or smarter than others.
I think this is the nature of our consciousness, that it is blended.
And we're having these experiences whether we remember them or not.
In other words, if you get adept at it and you want to, I don't know, solve something in your life, improve something in your life, work out something in your life, can you sort of order up a dream?
Well, you know, you can ask for an aerial view physically or metaphorically, kind of the big picture.
A lot of times, what's going on when we're stumping ourselves with something fairly simple in life, it's because we're not really taking the big picture.
No, I think, in fact, in Robert Monroe's book, which I later read after I went flying out the window, he had a story where he was wrestling with some kind of heavy-duty rubber-bodied fellow, and it took him a long time to figure out it was his own body.
And one thing you can do is set up a signal, whether it's a lot of people are looking at their hands or looking at their feet or trying to read something because often you can't read very well in dreams.
So if you pick up something to read and you can't read it, you know you're dreaming.
Set up a trigger that's likely to be pretty easy for you or something that you frequently dream about, especially if you have a recurring dream.
The next time I dream about the radio or producing a show, I'm going to become lucid and know that I'm dreaming.
Well, then that can be a clue that if you ask yourself, does this make any kind of sense at all when you wake up?
And the answer is no, then you've got a symbolic dream on your hands, thankfully.
And you can Start to look at, you know, why Carol Burnett, why Carol Burnett, really.
Yeah, whatever.
I mean, nothing against Carol Burnett, but if she's not your idea of an erotic night out, then there's a reason why she's there and a reason why it was wonderful with her.
Yeah, things can be remarkably problematic and fraught with the most ludicrous interruptions and exposures and things going wrong and relatives wandering through the room.
Now, it can either trigger the scene to unfold in a certain way, but the content of the adventure is based upon your own psychology and your own stressors of that day, week, or month.
I forget the mechanism that they're using to record them.
It seemed like it was an MRI and something else, and they're not able to record them pictorially.
They're able to sort of map out the areas of the brain that are involved when we're dreaming about certain types of things or certain type of actions, flying or sitting in a chair or wrestling or making love.
Got it.
And then they can see how the brain lights up during the dream state, and they can speculate the series of images that were going through that person's mind based on the way their brain was lighting up.
Well, yeah, once you can record one, then I would imagine you could classify it like you would a movie, put it away, and then hook up to somebody else's brain and play it back.
I wonder if science is probably moving in these directions.
Oh, well, you know, it's just, I mean, the presumption in the dream is that when we die, we pop out of our body anyway.
And you're kind of your spirit self going through the next part of the dream and talking to people about, well, I died, but it really wasn't that big of a deal.
Well, I mean, okay, another thing about dreams, of course, is that generally, yeah, you have a dream and you go that with something in the morning when you wake up.
And then, even though it was something, unless you, I don't know, have a discussion with somebody about it or write it down or in some way memorialize it almost on the spot, it fades into oblivion and is gone.
Well, the memory, the state of dreaming is so different from waking consciousness when we're busy that as soon as we start getting busy, that dream fades away.
Unless you're able to kind of remember it or go through it once, trace it back like a movie before you get up.
If you can do that, then you're more likely to retain the whole thing.
The more you remember them, for one thing, the more you remember them, that is the quickest way to become lucid in your dreams.
If you remember them and you're so familiar with your landscape that you can start to recognize it's dreamlike.
And then you kind of catch on and have a lot more freedom that way.
But also, when you remember your dreams frequently, you have access to all the other half of your own intellect.
And it can give you an edge just in making decisions and trusting your intuition and in having that sense of what's about to happen, that deja vu moment.
Well, visitation dreams or after-death communication dreams are qualitatively very different from grief dreams.
And so I believe that, yes, those people who feel that they are connecting and having a conversation with the dead, I've come to believe that they are.
Well, when I talk to people who speak of the afterlife, they do say that you regain your youth when you were at your best, whatever that was, and you regain that in the next life.
So I guess that would make sense.
But, and really what you've said adds to the validity of your story, because why would you dream of grandma being young and actually have trouble probably even recognizing her until you realize, oh my God, that's grandma, and you look great, young.
So that sort of adds to the validity of the whole thing about the afterlife.
This will help people to practice just a real quick skill that they can use as they're drifting off to sleep to help them retain their awareness as they enter a dream.
So if you're lying down or sitting or wherever you are, you can imagine floating out the side of the wall, through the wall, and up onto the rooftop of the building that you're in.
And just imagine your consciousness there.
Look around.
Notice what you notice on the rooftop, whether it's easy to stand or difficult.
Slide over to the edge of the rooftop and imagine yourself jumping over to the next roof that you can see.
And you just jump from roof to roof to roof in your imagination.
And it's just a little meditation.
And pretty soon, if you fall asleep doing that, you're going to fall asleep flying.
And you'll be on your way.
But if you don't, you'll just do this meditation and prepare and fall asleep into your natural dreams.
But by repeating it, you're inviting that lucid flying experience to begin.
I had recently visited the Empire State Building in New York, and I had a dream that I was up there with somebody, and they sprinkled me with this multicolored glitter.
And let me tell you, from that point, I could fly, and I took off, and I was soaring over New York City and all the buildings.
It was so cool.
Now, I don't think I was lucid during it, but boy, I sure was enjoying it.
That's one of probably the best flying dream I've ever had.
I was going to ask, for example, if you took a class of people and tried to lead them into lucid dreaming, because that would be such a breakthrough for me.
I'm wondering how many in that class you would typically have success with.
A lot of people report that the first few times they become lucid, they wake up because they get all excited and they're like, wow, and then they bam, they're awake.
And that's a problem for people who are trying to learn.
But it need not be such a shock.
What happens more naturally, more organically, if you will, is as people pay attention to their dreams, they read about them, they talk about them with other folks, they begin to notice that they're dreaming while they're in the movie, so to speak.
And that is not such a big shock.
For example, years ago when I started to become lucid, I would find myself telling somebody about the dream I just had and saying something like, a couple of dreams back I had this great thing that happened.
And then the other person would say, well, we're dreaming now.
You know that, right?
And so it was a more subtle effect.
And so I never awakened from that.
And in talking with other students and other dream enthusiasts, I find that that's pretty common.
So when it's more gradual, you actually retain more control and you don't pop out and become awake.
Well, assuming you don't pop out out of shock and become awake, and that I get, can you describe to us using words, and I know it's tough to describe, but it's, in other words, I know what a dream is like for me, and it's just a dream.
I haven't managed the lucid part yet.
So I'm trying to understand if I were to pop into a lucid state, how I would sort of know that.
Would I still see the dream unfolding in front of me?
A dream that, I mean, you're almost always part of your own dream, right, in some way.
And it's kind of like you'd have to be standing back from it and watch it unfold like a movie as opposed to suddenly being or being part of it.
So can you wake up in the morning, and now I'm talking just about the average dream, and say, oh, that was an important dream, or that was a precognitive dream.
I, in my life, have had one precognitive absolute experience, which I will save everybody from hearing, because I'm not going to repeat it.
But this was while I was very much awake.
It's possible to have precognitive dreams while you're asleep.
We talked about it a while ago, but how would you know it's precognitive unless it was saying something like, buy Apple stock now, quickly, buy, buy, buy, or whatever.
How would you know unless it was suggesting something in the future?
And I'm not sure I've ever had a suggestion about the future.
Sometimes there's a sensation, you know, an intuition or a wave of feeling or knowing that comes over you in the morning when you think about a dream.
And a lot of people have reported to me that they've dreamt about someone on the other side of the world that they were connected to and thought, you know what, I'm just going to give them a call today.
And sure enough, something was happening that day.
And they were able to provide a warning or one woman stopped a friend who had the pills all out on his bedside table.
I mean, people do suddenly, you don't even have to have a dream to suddenly have a feeling about somebody on the other side of the continent or the world and find out that something actually was going on, right?
So telepathy, if it really works, and I'm saying I think it really works, it seems like if somebody studied it carefully, they could figure out a way to enhance it and really make it work for us.
I mean, if you can get some kind of communication from somebody halfway around the world, that's great stuff.
So the answer may lie in quantum physics somewhere.
I don't know.
All right.
I would like to take calls, and I know that I have to take calls, and they're going to string me up shortly if I don't take calls because it all filled up.
Nothing I can do about it.
It just keeps ringing.
Everything.
So when you talk to people, I guess you should expect an onrush of please interpret the following dream.
I could take a few deep breaths and start hallucinating art, so I just it's kept me clean.
But there are people who say that the vitamins that one would take to take care of your nervous system, you know, the B vitamins and so forth, will help you with your dreaming process.
I've never experienced that, but that's what I hear from people.
But it's like this one that really stands out was I was walking along, looked like this concrete sidewalk, kind of like a walkway.
And it had this roof over top of it, and it looked like it was being supported by these I-beams.
And I was just walking along, just like a walk in the park, and I could tell there was these other people there, and they were just, looked to me like they were there doing the same thing, just visiting.
And I look over to my right, and I see like this puddle, and it has kind of like this effect of like soap and water, kind of like that shiny kind of rainbow type of effect.
And I asked the question, what exactly am I looking at?
I wasn't asking anybody in particular, and it was like there was somebody there that was with me that said, I can't remember the exact words she said, but it was something about like the souls of the dead.
Oh, my.
You get a lot of people that have these dreams about going to weird places because I've had about two or three of these my whole life.
And they're always the same.
There's always other people there just like me that just look like, just like they're visiting.
And they answer your questions.
Well, they didn't answer my question.
It was somebody else that was there, but I couldn't see this person.
I do hear some dreams like that, where there's an invisible narrator or there's an amorphous kind of guide who is helping to explain what's going on sometimes.
I always err on the side of looking for personal material if there's something to learn from it, if there's a takeaway for you.
I also suspect that there are people in realms that we go to that are almost like an educational field trip.
And we visit, and it's kind of a documentary, and it's interesting, but you come back and you scratch your head and don't know quite why you were there.
And I hear more and more of that.
I think we're remembering what some people call non-ordinary dreams where perhaps we are visiting another wavelength.
Another thing, too, I wanted to ask your guest, I tend to, my dreams are so realistic that I actually have to go to bed with headphones on at night.
Otherwise, I would just totally have a dream that is just so vivid, so real, and I have to kind of tone it down with headphones and listen to either music or a podcast every single night.
Well, Dino, are your dreams that are hyper-vivid, do they seem like they're really happening?
I mean, does it kind of feel like they're real?
unidentified
Yes, they seem very real, which is why I started wearing headphones just to stop, because I found out that, hey, if I'm listening to something all night long and keeping the podcast and stuff listening to going, I don't dream.
I know everybody is hitting me on the wormhole about, yeah, yeah, yeah, you had an OBE in Paris, and of course I did, but as amazing and wonderful as it was, I don't consider it that in other words, it was so instantaneous, so fast.
I know it was an OBE, but I have never been able, A, to replicate it.
And B, I've never been able to stay in the state at all.
I mean, that was the one time.
So what I would like to do is to be able to stay in that state.
And that's kind of the point of this morning's program.
To learn how to do something you don't know how to do.
So once again, Dr. Jillian Holloway and our caller.
Caller?
unidentified
Yeah, Jillian.
Yeah, I guess just one more thing to talk about is is there any way to control your dreams?
It's not like I've really attempted to do any controlling of what I actually dream of.
But I've taken the easy way out and put headphones on and just put it aside.
Well, you might want to expose yourself to some scary movies right before bed or scary, you know, read some Stephen King, that kind of thing, right before bed.
Jillian, or I mean, Dr. Jillian, dreams that repeat, as he just suggested, could be, or perhaps they're not precognitive, but it would suggest, wouldn't it, if you keep having it, that it's some recurring cause?
Yeah, most recurring dreams are actually personal material.
Something that we haven't solved, or something that we're working out, or some kind of silly thing we keep doing over and over again, or things like that.
But there are precognitive, I mean, a lot of people have a once-in-a-lifetime experience, like he said, with a precognitive scene that keeps playing over and over again.
And usually if it's something really off the wall, like a plane going into a skyscraper that has nothing to do with you, those are more commonly, I shouldn't say they're common because they're uncommon, but they can be associated with a precognitive echo comes back.
You were talking about wondering if people survived impact when they hit the bottom of falling dreams.
I've actually had a semi-reoccurring dream or sequence of dreams that have happened over a pretty good span of my life where I'm the passenger in a car, different car every time, different driver every time, different road every time.
And it always goes off the cliff, straight down and swams in the ground.
And I wake up upon impact, but I actually do make the impact and then wake up.
And I've had this kind of dream a couple of times, but I put them in the trunk of a car and I got rid of the car.
And I was really nervous about that.
Or I buried something, wrapped them in plastic and dug a hole and hid them somewhere so they couldn't be found.
And I was always worried in my dream that somebody would find it.
Wow.
And sometimes I have smells in my dream, which isn't that great.
And, you know, I can smell, you know, like, you know, one time when I dreamt I was dead, not the one I just told you about, but I could, I don't know what formaldehyde tastes like, but I woke up and I could taste this weird taste in my mouth.
I remember the smell from elementary school, and I'm like, why would I, you know, that was, that was odd.
You know, this guy who called a little while ago and wanted nightmares, you need to get together with me.
We can get together.
unidentified
I have dreams like, I don't understand why I'm somebody else.
Like, I was in the Marines.
I don't know anything about being in the Marines or the Army, but I had a dream.
I was, they dug a hole.
There's like a, like a ditch, and they made the CIA would scream, get in that hole, get in there.
And you had to swim because it was still at water to the other side to come out.
I don't know if that's a Real thing, but I wouldn't doubt it if there's such a thing, you know, to train somebody to swim underwater in the dark and stuff like that.
Yeah, that's not a common request, but I think that you could just ask for your dreams to have more of an edge, and that would be a place to start if you wanted to look at some of your edgy material.
But I used to, when I was in my 20s, I used to have a fair number of lucid dreams, and they came about from keeping a dream diary.
And I could get conscious control over my actions within a dream setting.
But if I wanted to go practice doing something like skiing or whatever, I could never change to a different dream setting or get into the situation that I would like to have practiced, like rehearsal for real life type of thing.
Can you get good enough with enough practice to where you can do stuff like that?
And how would you manipulate your way into a different setting?
It's a lot easier to dream walk into the sport that you want to practice or the landscape that you want to be in than it is to already be in a movie that's halfway through and you want to change from the gangster scene in Chicago to practicing downhill skiing somewhere.
That is really tricky to do and people don't have much luck with it.
What you want to do is either after you awaken from a dream, in the middle of the night, you have to go to the bathroom and get a drink of water or anything like that.
If you awaken and get into a new position, start thinking about the setting in which you want to have the lucid dream and travel towards it.
Some people will ride a horse towards their dreams, take a walk towards their dream as if your dream is located in a place and you are moving towards it.
And when you get there, your dream will begin.
And that's one way to program that.
unidentified
Really?
So are you consciously entering the dream as you're falling asleep then?
And you may even feel as though you are pushing through a little bit of a membrane or a little bit of a force field or as though you're, you know, when Art was talking about that sensation of walking through a wall in an UBI, you might feel a little bit of resistance.
That's often described as you push into the dream realm.
But if you don't feel it, just imagine it.
Just go with it as if you were visualizing it and you'll get there.
unidentified
Okay.
And is it, I mean, I found keeping a dream diary was for me really the key to getting to where I could become lucid in my dreams.
Is there anything like that to do?
You know, like if you wake up and, you know, want to go back into it, should you track that sort of thing too?
I would actually love to get your interpretation of probably the most profound experience that I've had in my life with regards to dreaming.
And yeah, just see what your thoughts are.
The interesting part is it's actually manifested physical like a phantom sensation in real life every time I even describe or talk about the experience.
And it happened roughly about 10 years ago and I was overseas at the time and I was in a courtyard and my back was up against a large concrete pillar.
And if I look to my left, my family was all sort of there, roughly about maybe 10 feet away.
And they all sort of had this look of horror on their faces.
And then as I start to turn my head to look what's in front of me, I notice the Hatman.
And to make things even more spooky, he was actually holding a revolver and pointing it directly at my head.
Before I knew it, everything just went black.
And I felt this tremendous pain of like a shuddering sense of electricity just going from my head to every single nerve that I have.
And then everything was just silence and black.
Then I slowly started to hear a whistling of the wind, which started turning into howling.
And then these kind of like spotlights were floating around everywhere, but you couldn't tell what they were coming from.
Then a giant flash happened, and I'm in this wormhole-looking thing, traveling up faster and faster.
And it sounds just like when you go to the air show and you hear the jets screaming past you, just roaring.
And I'm getting, I feel like I'm traveling to the end, and I notice another flash of light.
And as I look around me, there's blackness, but below my feet, I can see the world, and it's slowly shrinking.
And I can see, from what I later find out, the continent of Hawaii.
I did know that for the next few days, I wanted to go back to that sense of freedom, but it was, you almost feel like, in a way, sort of sad that you can't get back there.
It's like a push-pull sensation, almost like when you have two magnets that are opposing each other, and the sensation is directly where I felt like the bullet had entered into my head.
I know that's a lot maybe to take in, and probably you might not be able to give a detailed answer, but any sort of interpretation that you'd be able to gather from any of that?
I mean, what you're bringing up is one of the secrets to dream re-entry, which is going back into the same dream or dream avoidance, or you want to go into a completely other one.
So a reoccurring dream that I have about two or three, every couple of three months, I discover a Secret passage in my house that leads to a ladder, which ultimately leads to my attic.
The attic space is much larger than the actual attic in my house.
It's composed of a lot of deteriorating lath and plaster.
There's holes in the ceiling.
There's holes in the roof where the rain's getting in.
I had a few dreams where it is a reoccurring or stacking up dream where I'm in one dream and it leads into the next and the next, but it's by traumatic endings.
Like, say I had the one where, like, you're in a car with somebody and they crash and then you go flying and then you hit something, but instead of waking up, you wake up in the dream into another dream.
And then it falls into, like, I'm drowning or I'm underwater and I am navigating and it's like my family's there and it's like my friends and all this stuff, but it goes into like five dreams in one dream.
Well, one of the things that'll help you is if you can keep a dream journal.
That's going to calm down the chaos effect.
And we do know that a lot of times when your mind is trying to address a stress or solve a puzzle or get you prepared for something, it will focus in different dramas, different little movie vignettes, but you're working out the same problem over and over again.
Whether you're falling off a cliff or drowning or the elevator doesn't stop and you crash, it doesn't matter what the drama is, you're working on the same problem.
So I wouldn't be too disturbed about that collapsing drama movie that you find yourself in, but try to look at the symbolism and whether there's just too much going on or whether there's a lot of chaos or things feel out of control or whether you're the lone ranger heroic person in your family or group.
unidentified
What was that?
That's what it was.
I mean, it got to a point where like some, we were sitting in a restaurant and I was sitting with my sister and my mom and these guys came in and they, one of them, like smacked my sister and it turned into like this heroic kind of, I don't know what to say, like a Superman kind of thing, but it was weird.
I mean, I remember every part of this whole dream and that's the weird thing.
And, you know, we go through certain phases in our lifespan where we tend to have these hyper-dramatic, hyper-violent dreams.
And they aren't really something to worry about.
But again, the more you work with your dreams, read about them, talk to people about their dreams, the more they'll kind of calm down and become more overtly meaningful and less melodramatic.
All right, well, I've got my finger close to the button, so go ahead.
unidentified
A few minutes ago, you had a call from a man who's claimed that he had a recurring dream over the course of 20 years, and that really seemed to surprise your guest.
Well, I'm 62 now, and ever since my 18th year, I've had off and on a recurring dream, which I often feel has become its own, might be its own particular category of dream.
When I was 18, my father died, which is the threshold there.
And the dream, as I'm sure is very, very common for a lot of people, is that my father was still alive, which surprised us.
You know, the hospital made a mistake.
He was still there.
He separated from the family and moved to someplace else.
And there was a certain yearning to have him back.
But I really, over the course of apparently at least two or three decades, I was having this dream consistently.
And it almost created its own reality in my sleeping.
That's a really interesting one, and I'm glad you brought it up.
It's called It's All a Mistake.
And that's a very common grief dream that's not considered a visitation, but rather a process, a personal process dream.
And because it's taken place over so many years, it has become a part of your psychic, and I'm sure it's emblematic for a combination of things for you.
It's a real marker, and I think you sense that from the tone of your voice as you describe it.
I've been listening to you since the early 90s, man.
You're my hero.
Just put that out there.
And, Doctor, what a great show.
I've never called before, and I built up the nerve to finally call.
But I wanted to share a few quick dreams.
One night time traveled where I hadn't even been born in this dream, but I was speaking to friends and told them I'm not alive, but write down this phone number.