Part 2 of this March 18, 2024 conversation with a university friend dealing with some high strangeness and the Astral realms is on my other YouTube Channel and site innerskilled.com. Here we get into all things lucid dreaming from its importance to dream recall and memory to lucid dreaming techniques like substances, tech, mental constructs like WILD, reality testing, etc. We also approach consciously falling asleep, Tibetan dream yoga, how memory behaves in the dream world and memory’s mysterious elusiveness in general as well as plenty more avenues along these lines
Part 2 on Innerskilled.com:
Resources (mentioned:)
Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams by Eugene T. Gendlin
Journey of Souls by Michael Newton
Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep by https://www.andrewholecek.com
Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements
Audio: A Practicing Psychologist’s Approaches to Lucid Dreaming and Experiential Astral Investigation (Part 1 of 2)
Or listen via Insight Timer (app or website)
The raw unedited YouTube transcription of this podcast:
hey quick introductory note that I split this interview up into two parts the
first part will go on integrating presence the second part will be on iners skill.com that’s i n n r s k i
l and so be sure to check out the second part on inner skilled holess welcome
this is Josh of integrating presiden and now iners skill.com and today I have an
old friend with me and we’re going to talk today about lucid
dreaming and my friend is a psychologist practicing professional psychologist in
the United States um and I want to ask you know just jump right in here right
away and how um how did you get into lucid dreaming and how does it relate to
your work and you can tell people a little bit about yourself and your work and then also give a definition of lucid
dreaming yeah uh so lucid dreaming um a lot of people that don’t do it or
haven’t heard of it um may not it’s it’s it can be kind of difficult to describe
but over the years so I’ve got into dreaming remembering my dreams of writing down recording dreams in my like
late early 20s um and I’m 45 now so it’s been like years of recording dreams and
all this stuff trying to get lucid and what does it really mean is um the best way I could describe it is um if you you
reference your State of Consciousness now like your level of awareness of where you are who you are um and
your uh conscious faculties let’s say like your ability to decide and choose
what to do and what to say and when you’re going to do it just conscious action in your Waking Life you can take
that level of conscious action or those conscious faculties into a dream state where you just sort of become aware
there’s different degrees of awareness but for full Lucidity when you’re in a dream state
and you’re fully aware that it’s a dream and you’re fully aware of yourself as you know it in
Waking Life that’s like kind of the the
epitome of lucid dreaming and I think that’s what everybody kind of aims for when they want to lucid dream is how do I become so clear and so conscious and
so aware that it’s basically like I’m awake inside of a dream and you can and then
there’s all sorts of things that go on from there you people choose to do all sorts of things it’s kind of like a land
of imagination um and so I kind of got into it because the idea became it was a
fascinating idea the reason what got me into it and what I’ve kind of sort of been poking around online and talking to
other people and sort of what gets other people into it is for me particularly there was a lot of creative ideas
happening in a dream state that I couldn’t remember when I woke up I could remember that I had a creative idea I
could remember something creative happening with music or with visual art but I couldn’t really remember the
details and I thought well if I could get lucid and just sort of evoke it I could take it back with me and that’s
what inspired me to start doing it and then when I started doing it I kind of
discovered um it has a it’s not some
people are lucky and they can just decide that they’re going to be conscious in a dream and they can just do it I got a couple friends like that
they just they go to bed at night and they decide they want to become lucid and they they wake up inside of a dream
and they do it um I had to work at it I had to do a
lot of practices around going to bed at the right time like a certain time to get enough sleep and then kind of wake
up early in the morning around 4: 5 in the morning and then meditate my way back into it and that took practice
there’s all sorts of things that people take like supplements like uh Hine a or galantamine things like that I think
another one is like B12 or B6 I think there’s all these things people can do to kind of boost the chemistry to be
awake in a dream or quote unquote awake so there’s like a practice of this and
yeah it it’s essentially you do what you will with it
but to get there you may have to work harder or less hard to achieve that
state and then once you achieve it you can practice becoming more and more and more conscious in the dream state
and then that gets into sort of like um Tibetan dream yoga where they’re
like I’ve read I don’t know I don’t know anybody that does this but I’ve read that they practice becoming fully
conscious both day and night through waking and dream states it’s a continued
Consciousness we’ve talked about that before and how to enter the that it’s supposed toly possible to enter the
dream state completely conscious and let’s let’s rewind here and go back kind
of to the beginning the only thing I’ve really done on dreams before was someone asked a question what are thoughts are
thoughts like dreams so I’ll link that to the show notes the basic fundamental question
is um besides how this plays into reality and general you know about like
dream time and Waking Life things like this and dreamless sleep is why bother
doing this you know you mentioned creativity but what are some of the other reasons you and other people uh
like to do lucid dreaming so yeah it can range like you said everything from creativity to just
having fun some people just like having fun in the dream world uh there can be creativity it’s
also for spiritual growth um you know I did get pretty interested in like
sort of a more yungi and carlong kind of Y and bend on things for a while where it can also be seen as sort
of an interplay like a conscious interplay with your unconscious mind with all of
the world of unconsciousness and um you can according to him kind of
theoretically interact with archetypes or the relationships that your
unconscious mind has to these archetypes and you can explore those relationships for personal growth so that’s one way to
take it um another interesting way to take it is it is possible to go from a
lucid dream into the astral plane and then the astroplane becomes
its own kind of uh exploration you could say um I It
generally speaking the dream world and the astroplane are thought of as two different States Of Consciousness or two different
dimensions or however you want to word it and you can enter astroplane from
lucid dreaming so some people do that um and then on the astroplane they have other aspirations um that we could get
into because that’s part of the experience that I had with some clients in my practice but um so there’s that
um yeah it’s almost kind of Limitless as what you can really as to what you can do in a dream world or what you do with
it and what it means to you but I would say those are the most common things spiritual personal growth or you know
creativity cool let’s let’s start with some kind of the basics too
um like you already mentioned some techniques and things for doing this I’ve heard of um now now you keep a
dream journal and you’re talking about the technique of um kind of waking up in the middle of the night and meditating
back there’s a technique called mild I think um might as well just go through the the
techniques and then you can go into the technology and the reason I want to ask about the technology because I have a meditation Q&A coming up about augmented
meditation methods and uh so this G to be some research for that so there’s
that and then U once we just kind of go through the list there and you can if you anything worth mentioning about pros
and cons and your experience to these I also heard about trans cranial stimulation and I you know um there’s L
anyway you know way more about this than than I do then I want to go into some of the um how to work with this at an
archetypal level in a yungan sense but let’s do the techniques yeah techniques
wise there’s a pleora of them um if you kind of Google or YouTube you know lucid dream T tons of them um the more common
ones I would say like what you mentioned mild which is like a pneumonic induction
um uh there’s wild which was what I kind of practiced which is like wake induced
um or wake initiated lucid dreaming um there is this there’s I guess you
could say chemical like using H or galantamine or some combination of there’s a book written I I don’t know
the author’s name off the top of my head but it’s like something like Advanced lucid dreaming with supplements the
title we could put it in the you know information of the podcast or a book that you can buy that he talks about
combinations of things using like nicotine and galantamine and uh Alpha
GPC and there’s all these types of combinations you can try in cocktails um
pneumonic induction that’s kind of where you you basically develop what’s called
your perspective memory so you develop your ability to remember
something you to remember a future event so like uh a lot of people think of
memory as the past like I’m remembering what happened or a set of circumstances or I’m recalling something that I
already have experience perspective memory is more of a mindfulness practice of when something happens or when I
notice something I’m going to remember to do something so uh and that obviously fits into the
dreaming lucid dreaming realm where when you practice building up your memory enough you can say keep a dream journal
so you can increase your recall of dreams and then after enough dreams you
find kind of kind of like common themes so common theme in my dream for example is I’m always talking to people I’m
always engaged with people they’re always around so that would be what would be called a dream symbol for
example or a like a recurring dream them and then I might use that for mild for
neonic where I might go all right every day in my daily life when I find myself
talking to someone or when I’m in a situation where I’m talking to someone I’ll ask myself if I’m Dreaming I’ll
heighten my conscious awareness around whether this is reality and I’m awake or whether I’m dreaming and you can make a habit of
that every day and you build up your memory around that so much that in a
dream state you kind of maybe like automatically
just pose that level of awareness it just becomes automatic
that technique also includes this sort of wake back to bed technique where you sleep maybe four or five hours you wake
up and then as you’re going back to sleep you recite in your mind the next
time I’m talking to someone or with people I’ll know that I’ll be dreaming and you kind of do this sort of Mantra
as you fall asleep well after having built up your memory every day around talking to people and heightening your
Consciousness about wake vers dream the idea is that going to sleep sleep with that Mantra early in the morning and
meditating on it will be enough to consciously kind of cross over that awareness into a dream state where
you’re in front of some me for example I’m in front of some people and it’s so fresh in my mind and the memory’s been
so built up that it triggers this awareness that I’m Dreaming so that’s like a very rough like overview of the
mild technique and you mentioned reality testing in there too right in then also
this is kind of like a trigger or a marker as well and then take it to the next level with medit
and having built that muscle okay continue yeah the reality testing thing yeah there’s a lot of ways to reality
test like uh in my dreams for example my hands are always kind of distorted most people’s are their fingers are they have
more than five fingers or they’re kind of crooked or whatever so checking your hands in daily life a few times is a
good reality test or some people will try to push their finger through their hand or they’ll plug their nose and try to breathe or all these things
that or look at like um something written like fine print or a stop sign or something and then kind of look back
light switch these types of things that you know you can do to test whether you’re dreaming or not I have found that
the actual reality test itself doesn’t really trigger my awareness of whether I’m Dreaming or not
what really does it is just the subtle shift in Awareness this subtle kind of
posing the question is enough to kind of kick up in a awareness of like this sort of wait a minute moment this light bulb
goes off like wait I’m in a dream I have used the reality testing things like my hands and stuff
to uh sort of reassure myself that I’m still dreaming I’ve been in vivid enough
dreams before where I was going to like let’s say fly out of a window but it was such a vivid
dream I took pause a couple of times and had to recheck my reality on this
because um I didn’t want to jump out of the window it was kind of this sort of vivid
quality to the dream so I’ll use Reality Checking like that to kind of um keep
myself aware that I’m Dreaming but the actual event of shifting into a conscious awareness is a very subtle
moment just an awareness shift it kind of so that’s a reality testing thing
yeah definitely start flying before you go out the window so if you fly in the room yeah just float in the
room so this is uh oh it before we get into the technological stuff I want to backtrack
here and talk about uh recall and so and then for me A lot of times I’ve
had fully controllable lucid dreams it seems that way right yeah not not that many but I do have even more of it hey
I’m Dreaming oh I’m in a dream now but what happens now or what happens you
know I don’t know when exactly is when I realize that I wake up oh I’m Dreaming
this isn’t real I wake up so that’s what’s happened more now and I I find I dream less with a meditation practice
and need less sleep as well the other thing is um I some days I’ll just I know
that I’m dreaming of course but I just cannot remember it I think one of the things that I uh would be helpful is to
train my mind when I wake up is not to discard it as just a dream and to actually have value of it and of course
journaling it and so I i’ I’ve gotten into this habit now of just writing it off oh that’s just kind of a nonsense
dream or really you know or actually I’ll remember it and then I’ll even tell
my fiance about it but then if I don’t write it down it just it’s it’s just like anything out yeah exactly what
about it’s an interesting neurochemistry around dreaming that I don’t think people fully understand the one thing I
think that there is a pretty good solid consensus on is dream
recall and awareness of the dreaming state has a lot to do or has or at least
there’s a major player in it which is called acetylcholine and acetylcholine has been
a neurochemical that’s been linked to it’s a catac Coline that’s been linked to like short-term memory specific so
like uh this this you can’t get it anymore I think like last week I think galantamine was taken off of the
over-the-counter Market and it was made prescription so you used to be able to get this on Amazon and you
could get 4 milligrams or 8 milligrams um they just found some variance in like the dosing the um the
amount you’re getting uh some researchers kind of bought some off of Amazon and found that the dosing was off
and wasn’t accurate marketing so they just pulled the plug on it now it’s prescription but um for many years you
could get this over the counter and it’s an it’s what’s called an acetyl colon esterase inhibitor so it it blocks the
enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine so Hine a does the same thing and that’s still over the counter um and they
operate they act as slightly different but generally the same the same effect
and it helps not just s memory recall or memory
recall in general so glamin is like an Alzheimer’s drug basically um that’s
prescribed in doses much higher than You’ use for lucid dreaming but it’s a Memory drug per se I guess and what’s
happening when you take something like that is you’re remembering you’re not going unconscious
for whatever reason you’re just remembering the process of falling asleep which is interesting because in meditative practices particularly like
Eastern practices falling asleep consciously or keeping an awareness through the sleep cycle and into the
next day is um it’s a part of some practices and
you’d probably know more about that than I would that part of things um but I know that it is and
so one thing I can say about recall generally if you don’t have like a drug to do it for you meditation mindfulness
meditation will increase memory function in general but then
also when you do something in your daily life over and over again your brain
starts to kind of molinate all the connections to doing that thing and your
brain starts to get the message that that’s a priority that it’s something important and to dedicate resources to
doing whether it’s practicing an instrument or whatever it is that you’re doing mathematics problems um or memory
like perspective memory the more you do it the more over and over your brain
goes okay this must be important dedicate more resources to doing it molinate more Pathways to doing it and
so like keeping a dream journal if you’re waking up every day and you’re
thinking about your dream and you’re thinking about what happened and you’re writing it down every detail you can
remember over and over every morning that becomes really important to your brain and it will start to make
adaptations to start remembering more and more of your dreams and I’ve gotten to the point now where I can remember
maybe like five to seven different dreams throughout the night and write them all down or whatever because it
just made it important into my brain do that um so with
recall dream journal is pretty a dream journal itself won’t make you Lucid or
increase your awareness in the dream state but it will enrich your memory of those experiences which is essential in
eventually becoming Lucid because you have to remember the dreams to be Lucid to begin with so recall is important in
that step at least so habit patterns right and what’s important in life and I
think the Buddha put it this way something like you know whatever one frequently thinks and Ponders upon
becomes the inclination of the mind yes right and exactly so this um notion of
what you’re talking about in meditation practices and some traditions the practice I’ve been told about and it’s a
really fascinating one very simple is paying attention see if you can be conscious of the last breath before you
go into dream stage you told me that yeah yes and I’ve never been able to do it but I have been able to to upon
Awakening know if it’s an in or an out breath so that’s that’s a little bit easier um especially for me that’s and
that’s closer to what the technique of wild would be which is a wake initiated where you’re paying such conscious
attention to the those final moments before falling asleep that some people
build up an ability to retain their awareness all the way through that that sleep phase sleep paralysis and into the
dream state or REM cycle awesome and I think the importance
is really huge here because anything we really value and find important in life
and that we’re going to go out of our way to put energy into and have a dedication and a training and a practice
of course is going to uh have an effect on this now yeah this um the other thing
is uh um you said a certain amount of dreams you can remember a night I could
remember times when had some very interesting dreams well everybody says that though right
um like where do you draw the line sometimes are you I don’t even know how the Cycles traditionally work will there
be a set amount of time where you go into dreamless sleep before another dream starts or do you just draw the
line where it changes so much and it’s seemingly completely it just transition
maybe too uh very quickly and then you consider that a new dream or yeah how do
you draw the line and delineate here between okay start of one dream end of one dream then start of another dream
end of another dream is it always cut and dry or you just it just subjective
or it’s very hard to say so usually what
dreams dreams happen in typically sequences so like when you have
and I I may go on a little bit of a ramble here so stop me if it gets a little but I’m talking about
memory when your memory is compromised for whatever reason whether it’s from like age related or whether too much
time has passed or you experienced a really like heavy trauma when memory is compromised in
some way it becomes sort of like choppy or episodic or like you know you
remember a moment are you member 10 minutes um things like that there’s
there a whole like magnitude of like how that can manifest but generally speaking
memory gets less continuous as it gets impaired um to the point where you just
don’t remember it at all um and so with
dreaming stuff and dreaming sequences because there’s some form of and I don’t
know why this is there’s some form of memory impairing around that state generally you like we were talking
about you can build it up with dream journals and you can remember longer sequences but typically what happens in
my experience anyway is I’ll remember one continuous sequence I
remember each moment after the next after the next after the next like I was walking here I was doing this then I
turned and talked to this person then we went we went over here and I found then we walked up into a building and then
it’s sort of ends there’s no more memory after that last moment and then I’m in a
completely different scene completely different people or completely different setup or circumstance so there just
these like chunks of memory and I’ll wake up having remembered a few of those um several
maybe of these separate sort of like you could think of them as like movie scenes these movie sequences where it’s like a
five or six different story boards and each one seems kind of unrelated to the
next even though in the moment if you were to kind of like let’s say go back and relive the whole dreaming cycle the
whole real cycle you may find links between them if
you could remember it or and there’s another interesting thing I want to say about that but you might find links or
what also kind of tends to be the case is that you I was listening to a a sleep
researcher on a podcast talk about how he believes I think whatever research
he’s doing that we have memory of every single moment of every single dream but
you just don’t remember that much of it because of the changes in the neurochemistry um why that is nobody
really knows why that would be suppressed or why it would be kind of like impaired or whatever but um and maybe somebody does but I don’t and so
like there’s just you kind of remember these chunks and you can get better at remembering those chunks and and then
over time I guess According to some of these like sort people that are doing like you
know really deeply into Eastern meditation Tibetan dream yoga they can
carry Consciousness through the whole cycle through the whole sleep cycle and
it’s incredible really to think about but they dedicate so much of their life to doing this that they can just sort of remember the whole sequence all the way
up into Waking Life again this remarkable to me but um it’s it’s really it’s an interesting
question you pose about like how do you know the difference between each sequence or when one starts and the next
stops it’s really about how episodic your memory is and where you can find
the links or commonalities between the scenes happening the other thing that
kind of I think could confuse people or maybe kind of sort of to cast another
angle on that question of like Words a sequence sort of begin and end dream uh environments are very unstable
so that’s something that you can use to your advantage in lucid dreaming is if I’m sitting if this is a dream and we’re
talking on this podcast and I’m this is kind of a dream world I may just look behind me and it’s a desert or I’ll turn
around I’ll look behind me it’s kind of a wall locates my room but then I’ll look back again and you’re completely somebody else there’s not even the
computer in front of me it’s such an unstable environment that sometimes I wonder if these changes in sequences are
just changes in the environment as you change your perspective on things things
um that’s something I’ve actually learned really interestingly that the the main difference I’ve experienced
with the dream world and the astroplane is the astrop plane is kind of like a
double of our reality and it doesn’t change much I it’s a pretty stable
environment I’ve been in the astroplane pretty clearly where I was in my bedroom and I was walking up and down the
hallway and checking out my bedroom and going back and forth and nothing was changing nothing was evolving my hands
were very they looked like my waking hands it was a very stable almost hyperreal environment there were some
minor differences like maybe my window was shifted over a little bit than where it used to be or something or where it is in Waking Life but it was a pretty
accurate double and it was stable I think in in a dream world it’s very
unstable you can spawn people spawn objects you can change scenes quickly and so that is kind of I think
responsible for maybe why it’s difficult to tell or why have so many different narratives and I wake up with like seven
different dreams are they different dreams I’m not sure they’re just seven different sequences however long I
remember them that kind of seem unrelated to each other good comprehensive um dive into
that now before we get into the high strangeness um a few more things now we
you haven’t mentioned any the technical I keep backtracking looping back for I guess I’m too much of a completionist
here isn’t there some kind of device you put on your your your your eyes and it blinks but since actually that’s too
much of a transition um the Nova dreamer is that what it’s called yeah I think so
yeah it is there there’s you do you use any of these devices or anything I tried
there was something called the REM dreamer and then there was like the Nova dreamer that was made by um Steven laar at the Lucidity Institute he came up
with this thing uh supposedly was supposed to come up with a second one or a third or second one but it hasn’t I
don’t know what happened to it um there is an idea that you can wear a
mask and so like this kind of ties into the mild technique where um the light so
there’s a motion sensor in the mask and when it when it detects your eyes going
back and forth in REM cycle it sets the motion sensor off and it flashes this red light and you can of course set the
duration and the intensity or whatever the brightness and you could pair it with sound I think and it flashes behind
your eyelids and that creates a red or whatever light kind of flashing in your
dream so what you would have to do in your Waking Life theoretically is you’d have to condition your perspective
memory ask yourself if you’re dreaming when you see flashing lights stop lights
break lights room lights strobe lights whatever it is when there’s lights flashing signs it triggers a reality
test a shift in your awareness of of that conscious question am I dreaming
and you may be remarkably surprised how little you think about that when you’re going through your daily life on automatic pilot when you start becoming
aware of that question when those flashing lights occur you put this mask on you to start
dreaming and you see these flashing lights and you dream the idea is that it triggers that awareness I’ve tried that those and it’s
no different it would be no different than let’s say if I always have people
in my dream and I’m testing my reality and people are always around it’s a similar concept I think it’s
just it’s a way of creating a dream sign for you to test your ality good point
yeah depends on how much you want to train that sign I guess too now what what is this um I also heard some
practitioners that um can even Advanced meditators that are aware of the
dreamless State too so that that blows my mind too that just continuously aware
of this dreamless state right and then and then transitioning into a dream state and then out of a dream state
pretty wild um I think uh I think a Buddha I remember something about the
Buddha I heard a yog some yoga practitioner it may have even been
saguru who was talking about the Buddha making mention of this of something
about encountering entities on the astral plane through his awareness in
meditation um I don’t know how deeply he written about it but it’s something he mentioned well there’s all kinds of
stories in the sutas and the terab tradition about dvas and you know hell
Realms and you know even Brahma Realms there’s 31 different Realms in the Buddhist cosmology and even Mara you
know his like Arch Enemy that he had to kind of defeat through uh his final Enlightenment of course you know people
are really um a lot of people are really kind of they don’t go where that’s a a
literal thing of of a different realm a lot of people take it as a a psychological but I’m open to you know
all different types of interpretations of what that is yeah um so before we get into the the astral stuff more deeply
here I wanted to to see about the memory aspect in general I know I could ask uh
well what does this say about what does the memory in the dream state say about memory in general but I mean this is a
huge another podcast and of itself probably a huge series because memory to
me it seems pretty Elusive and we don’t know uh I don’t think there’s any like definitive you know evidence of what it
is but in your opinion like really you know where is it even stored I’ve heard things like it’s it’s in the body
there’s cellular memory I’ve heard you know some people say the brain some people say it’s actually non-local you
know you throw in Quantum it just goes it just gets really weird you have people that can you know these Savant
you could say like three years ago two months a week and three days at five
o’clock you know what were you doing and they just instant recall of exactly down to the detail and it’s just so what’s
worth saying in this context there practices in eastern there’s Eastern practices I’m
sure you would know that people remember their past lives they regress all the way through memory to past life well
absolutely that’s one of the techniques I hear Too is you just start going back as far as you can remember in this life
and then their their memory is so good they can trace themselves back into the womb to the moment of conception and
then it’s the moment right before that would then start to the death moment of the past life and they can trace it all
the way back that life you know and just keep going back and back and back tracing it back mind blowing yeah yeah
isn’t it super Advanced practitioners who have a lot of them have Mastery of
all eight genas and lots of insight knowledge and all this stuff but I’ve I’ve heard this and of course monastics
that are at this level they’re they can’t share their attainments so them talking about this would probably um
break U monastic rules because yeah they’re not allowed to share attainments but some lay Super Advanced lay
practitioners have have mentioned things like this but yeah what’s worth saying about memory in this context of
dreaming yeah uh like you said it’s really really
elusive I think is a good word for it it’s really elusive we have like a maybe a primitive understanding of the fact
that memory has something to do with the hippoc cample region and the Brain you know the midbrain the lyic system or
limic area region now and how the uh uh the hippocampus plays a role in the
memory and I I I used to be partners with a neuroscience a neuroscientist a
neuros pychology um and I was doing neuro feedback at the time with him and
uh one thing I learned from him was that um when someone suffers from let’s say
like a depressive state or if they’ve been suffering from like a chronic post-traumatic
stress their hippocampus starts to shrink from
atrophy like neuronal atrophy and it actually grows in size as
they get less depressed or less post-traumatic symptoms so something to
do with the hippocampus has to do with memory and there’s another author that I really enjoy reading a lot I like his
work a lot Dan seagull uh he wrote a book the one of his books that wrote that’s like my
favorite is called the neurobiology of we and he talks a lot about the development of the nervous system and
memory and one thing that he mentions in the book is that um when someone is in a traumatic state
or or a high stress response which might lead to like a post-traumatic State
um they don’t know where like Neuroscience quote unquote air quotes
they don’t know where um the memory is stored because the the amydala kind of
jump uh they kind of bypass the hippoc campus so and go right into like a
stress response so the person’s not really coding the momentto moment memory
and a really terrifying situation but once they get let’s say
treatment for post trauma all of a sudden those memories that were like suppressed or
repressed come back again um and that always I found fascinating to me was that the memory
gets stored still kind of like the the Sleep researcher about dreams we remember every single dream I’ve ever had every moment it’s just not where is
it stored who knows so I yeah memory is a really tricky topic and so is
consciousness in general like what that is and the two are probably linked greatly but um because you you kind of
remember what you’re conscious of and even in in like high stress
States when you’re really stressed out just even like neurologically things start to shift in
a high stress State and Consciousness becomes limited conscious awareness and
memory becomes limited but it can be recovered and that’s the really like interesting part to me and kind of going
into what you were talking about past life memory all the all the memory I think
all the moments of of awaking life can probably I would assume be
remembered and our Consciousness is just a sliver of this or maybe if I would say
not conscious maybe our mind is a certain degree of Consciousness what we’re aware of where
our attentional centers are what we’re processing but like everything on the peripheral is allegedly I guess still
coded it’s still taken in it’s still I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it but there’s something there’s
something that that’s still absorbed as part of your experience that you’re not even conscious or aware of that can be
recovered so it’s it’s interesting it is really fascinating in these books like the body keeps the score you know
I’ve had I had this one experience where I went into you know I had some degree of meditation maybe a couple years and I
went into like this metaphysical place and I was like oh yeah you know I’m G to you know show off and I you know got
this big spiritual ego going right and this this healer healer comes right up to me and he says oh hey you have uh
resentment towards your father in your in your shoulder and I’m just like uh uh
uh uh thank you and so I I knew there was something to it by the tone of my voice and how I responded but it turned
out in my yoga practice I couldn’t get my shoulder or my arm all the way up you know all the way and so I took a look at
this in meditation and he was absolutely right and there was there was a a lot of weeping and then after that it’s like
something released in my shoulder loosened up and I was able to then go up
uh you know raise it all the way up and I I I hear these things in yoga people have these releases um certain things in
the body you know Peter lavine’s work and things like this then we have this thing called um the K the kic records
where people can go into this and get re a lot of memories that they really wouldn’t be able to say otherwise and
you know certain materials they say like crystals some people say they they re they store and uh transmit memory and
they’ve they’ve been able to store you don’t just think of a computer device or mag mag magnetism so yeah I’m really
above my pay grade on how that it’s it’s course a fascinating subject and then the last thing around this U little
thread here is it really depends on how we Define consciousness and awareness in
mind these are all important things to Define because I know a lot of people there’s they’re similar but a lot of people have different definitions of
what these things are but yeah sure oh yeah and uh I have a friend good friend Roger he does Trager work and he does
it’s its body work and he has many experiences of
of um intuiting memory from the body when he works with people and he gets
flashes of this type of awareness or Consciousness about their experiences in the body and then one last thing about
this I read uh Ida Rolf uh with the Rolfing technique or Rolfing method yes
yes uh and Stannis grav worked with her at one point to some capacity and they
talked about a concept called armoring I think is what they called it uh which is
the body holding trauma memory or just memories in general I guess uh in in
there so it’s really a broad it’s a whole like kind of like you said a whole another podcast on like how the body
holds memory and holds experiences and how it’s like mind and body is no separation kind of idea so does to tie
this back to Dreaming does this uh the way memory Works in dreaming and way life does it does either shed light on
any of the other I know you shed kind of talked about how the memory Works tends to work in the dream world does that say
anything about uh memory in general I mean it’s just it’s so I don’t know it’s
so mysterious uh I don’t know it is I don’t really know I know that like I don’t know
why Waking Life would be so much more like our our brains or the way that our
central nervous system functions I don’t know why it’d be so much more amable to Waking Life in terms of like building
more placing more importance on that memory or or or experience and in dream
life it isn’t uh sometimes people say that I don’t have dreams I’ve heard that a lot from people I don’t have dreams
but everybody does it’s just that they’re not remembering them and I don’t know why the body wouldn’t prioritize
that I I hear both of that too and you know there I think there’s some theories
like you uh it’s like a discharge of I don’t know Distortion during the day or
or something where the brain gets a break or a different mode or something where it gets a chance to heal or
process information these old classical ideas and going back to to the the
valtion about having control in a dream this is another fascinating thing because some people they say well we
don’t have free will you know and uh you know so at times it seems like I have a
sense of agency and sometimes it doesn’t you know it seems like some people have a greater sense of agency than others so
this is another fascinating topic too the one thing it do seem to have some say in is what I pay attention to and
how I pay attention to it but not so much in the dream world unless it’s a TR
a training towards this yeah yeah it’s uh that’s uh almost could be considered
Under the Umbrella of mindfulness where like the more mindful you are of your sensory experience and your
momentto moment experience and how much of your daily momentto moment life you
can take in and how much awareness you can build up has a lot to do with that I would
imagine you know Al because we’re talking about dreaming and lucid dreaming ultimately whatever technique
you use however you approach it the bottom line is your maintaining an
awareness you’re maintaining a level of awareness from sleeping to dreaming and
it’s whatever whatever you might try to do to increase that
awareness I think at the end of it all it’s just a mindfulness technique it’s just whether you’re trying to stay
conscious or or aware while you’re falling asleep whether you’re building up your memory what is perspective
memory really it’s really just a mindfulness around your momentto moment life and monitoring when something
happens you’re going to be triggered to an awareness it’s really about so a lot of meditators
um I both in person I’ve met people that meditate a lot you being one of them and other people there it’s not uncommon
that people that practice meditation and mindfulness have and even through research you know
you can look it up have kind of like this sort of like pensent for lucid dreaming or they have kind of this
ability to sort of cross into it easier than someone you know that doesn’t
meditate or doesn’t practice that level of awareness so yeah definitely say it
is about awareness the more aware we are the the more likely it is to just be
aware of anything no matter what state we’re in right I mean we can be in really difficult States and it just
seems like there is a little bit more choice of what to pay attention to and how to pay attention to it um yeah in
general because we’re it’s it’s just like anything else it’s training to to be mindful to know what’s happening in
the moment as it’s happening and then the next level is maybe without a lot of judgment or storytelling and and and
commenting on it just this bare awareness yeah yeah
Integrating Presence 