Impactful Lucid Dreaming

Hey, I'm Ryan Hurd.

I'm a dream researcher and an author.

And I'm really excited to do this, little Ask Me anything us.

And so I've got about, I don't know, it looks like maybe about 10 or so questions.

I've grouped them into categories and I'm just going to run through them real quick.

so let's start.

Let's see.

The first one I wanted to address, the question is, what's a dream that genuinely changed the direction of your life?

That's a great question.

What comes to mind for me is this dream out of body experience I had when I was perhaps 15 years old or so.

So still living, you know, at home with my parents.

In the experience, I felt like I lifted out of my body.

I had that entire, that feeling of moving up and out, and I was in a version of my bedroom.

It seemed realistic.

It seemed like it was nighttime.

I sort of drifted down the hall and went into the living room, and there I saw on the living room couch, our family dog, Sadie.

And she sort of lifted her head and looked up at me kind of like with a little bit of consternation.

And then I went back into my dream bedroom.

I say I went back into that space.

And that's all I remember.

And what made it impactful was when I woke up the next day, I thought about it and I said to myself, there is no way that that could have actually happened because every night my parents actually put folding chairs on the couch, to prevent the dog from sleeping on the couch.

And so what I experienced was probably a dream.

But when I actually went out of my bedroom that morning and went into the living room, I saw that they had forgotten to put those chairs up the night before and that Sadie actually had slept on the couch that night.

And this is not what we would call a slam dunk of that was a veridical, out of body experience.

But what it did is it planted a question in my mind.

It gave me a shift in perspective that, hey, maybe the world's a little weirder and more mysterious than I thought.

And that seed basically has rippled through my life ever since.

And it's probably why I'm still doing this work as a dream researcher today.

Okay, so now we've got a couple of questions that are basically about all about what are the best practices?

Someone's asking, what is the best lucid dream, day practice or night practice for stable long time lucid dreaming?

Someone else is asking, what's the best method and what technique do I personally use?

that works for me.

And then another person is asking, yeah, what's the best daytime dream practices and how often to help induce lucid dreams?

and how can we increase our frequency of lucid dreams using these tactics?

And so this is how I approach this topic of lucid dream induction.

Basically, there is no magic pill.

There's no one particular practice that works for everybody.

And in fact, the way that I practice and what works for me personally and has, for decades is practicing several tactics at a time in a clustered experience that lasts maybe a week or two, and then taking some time off to let the mind rest and then see what happens next.

Sometimes the lucid dreams happen during that incubation period when I'm doing the practices, and sometimes they happen when I'm resting.

And that's a really interesting thing that took me a long time to discover.

And it was actually when I was a field archaeologist, I was working in Nicaragua studying rock art on Ometepe island, where I was also trying to incubate lucid dreams about the rock art.

Because I was thinking, well, what if I had dreams about the rock art?

Maybe it could tell me something about my pers perceptions or my biases, you know, maybe can make me a better scientist, a better archaeologist.

And I was having trouble getting enough lucid dreams.

And then I basically did a few things in a row that created that container that allowed all these lucid dreams to happen right when I needed them to.

And so I was doing reality checks, I was doing journaling before bed, you know, intentional work.

I want to have a lucid dream tonight.

I'm going to have a lucid dream tonight and I want to experience this.

You know, I want to see the rock art.

and then I was also complementing that with middle of the night practices, right?

And so I was disrupting my sleep, staying up for some time.

I was doing journaling, more intentional work.

I would stay up for maybe 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and then go back to sleep.

And this was right in the pre dawn, right?

And so it was like 4 or 5 in the morning, and I would invariably roll into a lucid dream because of the strong intentional work, because of the sleep disruption, because I had been doing reality checks during the day.

And so those three came together.

And so that was a, That was sort of my magic cluster.

And I think everybody has and can find that thing for yourself, because there's some things that won't work for everybody.

And so the trick is we have to figure this out kind of scientifically.

So we don't.

Because if we practice everything all at once, all the time, and don't take data, what happens is we end up with a bunch of myths because we don't know what's working.

Right.

We don't know what's working.

We don't know why this was effective.

And so that's why I always recommend do your induction strategies for a couple of weeks.

Just a few things.

Know when you're going to start, know when you're going to stop.

Take notes along the way, and then rest.

See what happens.

See what comes.

because sometimes there's dream delay.

It's really odd.

It happens with lucidity.

The lucid dreams will come when we're resting too, and then you can reiterate.

And that's how I.

How I do this.

And I call that the lucid immersion stream strategy.

And I've been doing this for about 20 years.

Hey, there's one more induction question here that I missed which is about what is the sweet spot for the time to do these middle of the night awakenings.

And so this person says from my own experience and from other lucid dreamer writers going back as far as Frederick Van Eeden, I've identified between 5 and 8am And so 6:20am is the magic moment.

and so basically asking is there something universal here?

And so my answer to that is number one, that's really awesome scientific work.

And this is a person who's found what works for them, for their own sleep physiology, their own bedtime rituals.

Right?

Like there is a sweet spot that we all can find, but it is variable, right?

There's no magic time that works.

But what I do think, think is that in general it's after five or six hours, it's definitely in the second half of the night because that's when there's more REM sleep patterns that are longer and also more vivid dreams.

And with that the brain is more awake and more interconnected and there's more metacognition, right?

More thinking about our thoughts and our feelings that are possible.

So the dreams in the second half of the night, the tend to be able to be more lucid.

And so whatever it is for you, that five to six hour thing, I call it the witching hour, right?

And the witching hour practices are these sleep interruption methods that we do that are super duper effective.

And so if you practice wild, if you're using Stephen LaBerge's classic techniques, or if you're using middle of the night meditation or intentional practices like I was saying, like I was doing in Nicaragua, find your sweet spot.

You have to just experiment around with it and see what comes.

So now that I wanted to explore some of these deeper questions here, there's one on extraordinary dreams or perhaps even contact.

And so this person asks, have you ever had a dream experience where right after waking up you're convinced you had visited a real place, a different time with conscious entities?

And you know, what do you think about that from a rational perspective?

And so it's a great question.

And I always like to say that from the metaphor of the X Files, that every morning I kind of wake up as Scully and I'm very skeptical and rational.

And then slowly the day kind of wears me down and I become more like Molder.

I become more open to the extraordinary.

And then by the end of the night, basically I'm like, we're all connected at.

And then I fall asleep and I go through it again.

So that's just like, that's me.

I am a very skeptical person.

I like evidence based methods.

Nonetheless, I have had some pretty, incredible encounters.

And one, of the things I think I'll share is I have a dream series that starts off as sleep paralysis and moves into out of body experience where I essentially drift into the ground and into void like spaces and sometimes cave like spaces or tunnels.

And I'll emerge into this, what seems like an underground place where people are gathered and that there's a ceremony about to begin and people are seeing seated.

And I've been in this space quite a few times.

And what I found over the years is I can't incubate these things.

I am invited.

It happens on its own accord.

It's not about I want to go here.

I am brought to these places, literally brought, drifted into these places.

And what has happened over the years is that I invariably wake up before the ceremony begins.

But in the last 10 years I've kind of gotten farther.

It seems like there's something about attention span and perhaps purity of heart and perhaps there's other things that I haven't figured out yet.

There's something about this experience that's demanding more of me.

And when I am not vibing correctly with the space, I'm ejected from the dream or I wake up or something seems to happen.

And the last time I was in this experience, we were all seated and someone was passing a cup around, right?

A drinking cup.

And then, I don't know, I kind of flitted away and woke up.

And so who knows what will happen next.

But this is one of these things, right?

It's not like a slam dunk can convince a skeptic that this is, quote, unquote, real.

But for me, it has a quality of real life that's unlike most dream or visions or even waking life experiences I've had before.

Like the people.

And they're not all people necessarily.

They have.

There's some sort of, like, therianthropic creatures, like half bird, half human figures in the space.

But that wasn't really the point.

What was the point was the interaction.

There was this.

This something communal, something relational happening and something very, very special.

And that is something that I can only describe as feeling in my heart.

Like I said, it wouldn't convince anybody, but for me, I considered that to be something extraordinary, something like an interaction with conscious, entire.

Here's a fun.

Are precognitive dreams or dream telepathy real?

And my short answer is that there's something there.

There's a there there.

And I don't know what it is.

But when you look at the research around dream telepathy that was done in the 1970s and the 1980s, that was replicated that there's meta studies on it, it's very well established above statistical significance that people seem to be able to influence each other's dreams through intentionality, through dream telepathy.

Sender and receiver, right.

However, you know, the question is, is that the only paradigm to see this phenomena?

And there's for instance, there's another way of looking at this stuff.

And I think that the researcher who is really best going into this right now is anthropologist Eric Wargo.

You should check out his book on time loops or, Precognition in the Long Self.

Precognitive, Dreams in the Long Self.

I believe, in this work he talks about how he basically collapses all of telepathy and remote viewing into precognition, meaning that it's not like a special skill involving senders and receivers, but rather that sometimes time is warbly, it's wonky and we experience things out of order.

And so you can't control for this, right, in dream telepathy because later the people are going to find out what the sender sent and what they didn't send.

And that information could have gone back in time.

We can't control for time in this way.

And so Eric Wargo basically has this perspective that it's not that we're seeing the future, like all the information is out there, but rather we're experiencing perhaps even our own emotional reactions rippling back through time after we learned about that experience.

And so these are, I would say, contrasting paradigms.

And I really am on the fence about it.

I personally hold to this idea.

I want to hold to this idea that the world is communicating with us in ways that we don't understand, that it's not just the block universe and time being wonky.

And I think that when we look at indigenous practices on this matter, like shamanic practices where folks use out of body experiences, say to do animal shifting and then learn about plants in their biosphere, or they learn about what's happening at a distance and they bring that information back.

You know, this is again kind of moving into, like how is remote viewing used in a, in an eco social setting, like perhaps in a, in an evolutionary environment?

This leaves me open to the question.

I don't know what's going on, but there's a.

There, there.

This question that we just talked about about indigenous practices and how do we see dreams and work with dreams and extraordinary experiences brings up this new topic.

It, has to do with dream interpretation because a question came through that says, is dream interpretation similar across the world or across people?

Or does it vary?

You know, like if someone's dreaming that they're falling or waking up for the test they didn't study for, does it mean more or less the same thing for different people?

And so I want to make a cut here to talk about how there's dream interpretation and then there's dream work, and they can be a little different.

And dream interpretation is about extracting meaning from a dream as if it is a text.

And so this is sort of the ancient Egyptian, the Greek way about it, you know, where it's hermeneutic, essentially where the reader is drawing out something from a text to be analyzed.

And that is on a level of information that's different from the text itself.

Dream work includes dream interpretation, but also can be open to other ways of working with dreams, like keeping dreams energetically alive, dipping into, say, creative states of consciousness, lucid dreaming.

Right.

You know, this sort of like being open to encounter, being open to strong, emotionality or even non dual spaces.

Like we're not interpreting our non dual dreams, right?

we're, we're saying, that was an extraordinary experience.

How can I honor that?

And so there's a cut there.

Do you see the cut?

And so when it comes to dream interpretation, we all try to make meaning.

I think it's impossible to not try to make meaning.

And I think that when you go to a dream dictionary, I think they can be very useful, especially for cultural levels of interpretation.

So kind of what we've already been enculturated to see meaning for in this world based on the way that our parents and our socioeconomics in our, you know, our nation state and the time of the world and the ecological state of the world and all this stuff, how, it filters through culture and we get these sort of cultural archetypes.

And so, yeah, like when we're like late for the test that we didn't study for, you know, it's anxiety.

But is it just anxiety?

And what does that tell us when we say, that's just anxiety, right?

You know, so we have to be careful within dream interpretation because sometimes what happens is that we say, this equals this, and then we put that dream on a shelf as if we don't need to listen to it.

Anymore.

And so work with dreams in a way that keeps the dream alive, that keeps your tether to that energy alive.

I think that's a more effective way of looking at it.

And the other side of that, of course, is that we have to become more comfortable with ambiguity if we're going to do dream work and if we're going to really get the most out of lucid dreaming, which is a kind of dreaming, Right, we have to become more comfortable with that.

What we do not know.

And I think that in itself is a test.

Okay, we're going to go a little bit into the dark side now because there's a couple of questions clustered around nightmares and other kinds of things that go bump in the night.

And so I'll start with this question about is there a way to stop sleep paralysis from happening?

And what are shadow figures in sleep paralysis?

And what do they mean?

What is that about?

And so I'll start with the basics, with the sleep paralysis.

And, because, you know, if you are trying to have lucid dreams, you're probably going to run into the same sleep mechanisms that trip sleep paralysis.

and it can be super creepy if you don't know what's happening.

Even if you do know what's happening is super creepy.

I wrote a whole book about this.

people who know what's going on are still creeped out about this.

It's just universally creepy when you can't move and you sometimes feel an ominous energy in the room.

and it can feel like someone's holding you down.

And then, of course, there's this sort of divisionary aspects where we see or hear or feel shadow figures.

And so there's this other element to it.

The main thing about if you're trying to prevent sleep paralysis from happening is you want to disrupt the things that are disturbing your sleep in the first place.

Because sleep paralysis in its isolated form is a symptom of disturbed sleep.

Some people get sleep paralysis, because of other conditions like sleep apnea or narcolepsy, And those are harder cases that might involve medical intervention.

And there are medical interventions for those ways of approaching sleep paralysis.

For everyone else, it's isolated sleep paralysis.

And it tends to come when our sleep is disrupted, when we're anxious, when our circadian rhythms have been disrupted in some way.

And this is why students and nurses tend to have sleep paralysis more than any other demographic.

because they're disrupting their sleep more than the general population.

Right?

And it probably involves caffeine at weird times or sleeping during the day and sleeping at night.

And all these disruptions cause the sleep stages to get fumbled.

And so we have REM sleep activating during wakefulness.

And that's what sleep paralysis is, basically, in a nutshell.

It's the mechanisms of REM dreaming, sleep happening with wakefulness.

So the mind is awake, the body is asleep, then all hell breaks loose.

Right?

And so find out what's stealing your sleep.

How can you regulate your sleep?

How can you get better rest?

How can you make more space for rest?

In your life.

That is the way to disrupt sleep paralysis.

Now, shadow figures, it's a trickier topic, right?

And I don't have all the answers.

Again, I would, suggests this is my perspective on things, like dream figures.

I treat shadow figures with respect, with curiosity, and with boundaries.

And so if I feel like my boundaries are being compromised in a shadow person experience, I eject out of the sleep paralysis dream.

I open and close my eyes rapidly.

I, I scrunch my face.

I basically do whatever I need to do to disrupt the REM paralysis so I can wake up.

It's very effective if you can find a tactic like that that works.

But when I'm in an interaction with this, this, this entity, this, this non self, other, right.

and it's palpable.

It's palpable.

I think that the encounter itself, the relationship is key.

And so respect, curiosity, a bit of patience, right?

I think that it's about looking for positive expectation.

Like, what can I learn from this experience?

What information or wisdom can be brought into this exchange?

I think that when we do this, sometimes the figures actually can transform.

I've seen this.

There's lots of, lots of narratives about sleep paralysis.

Entities that start off looking one way and then they transform.

They become, more manageable, more human, more communicative.

This is sort of what we want to see.

And the same kind of thing happens in dreams as well.

But there is this sort of otherworldly component to it.

I, think that sleep paralysis shadow figures are, related to what's going on in the UAP encounter movement.

I'm not saying sleep paralysis and UFO encounters are the same.

I think there's overlapping visionary experiences happening here.

I think near death experiences, very similar vision quest experiences in indigenous contexts.

Very similar.

You have a visionary experience of an encounter, that's uncanny.

And sometimes information comes out of it.

Right?

And so the most important thing that we can do if we want more encounters with helpful figures, that aren't trying to supernaturally assault us, right?

it's about cleansing, it's about preparing.

It's about positive expectation, like having curiosity about being brave and curious at the same time.

Then if all else fails, then you bail, you bail out and know that, well, I'll have maybe another chance to try later down the road.

So I love these experiences.

they're creepy and yet they also always bring more questions than answers.

And then relatedly, there's a question about lucid nightmares, right?

So that's when you're Lucid, but you're in an uncontrollable experience with a lot of fear.

so the question says, I fall into a group that only manages to dream every few weeks or have a lucid dream every few weeks.

And sometimes I have a lucid nightmare about an evil cloud that follows me.

I'm fully aware of being asleep, but unlike the lucid dreams, I can't seem to control it.

So I just want to say, for the person who wrote this question, only manages to lucid dream every few weeks.

That's actually a lot of lucid dreams.

That's like you're in the top 10% of lucid dreamers right there.

That's a consistent practice.

but honestly, like, congratulations, that's really cool.

So consistent practices allow us to go deeper and further into these extraordinary experiences.

So here's the thing, folks who have more lucid dreams, frequent lucid dreams also, tend to have more frequent lucid nightmares.

this has been shown in the last few years, through some of the research.

So basically, lucid nightmares goes with the territory of frequent lucid dreaming.

So if you want to have more lucid dreams, you have to sort of learn these boundary skills and how to work with when things are creepy and uncontrollable.

And so perhaps the best way to approach this is to consider moving beyond a paradigm of control to one of dream co creation.

Right?

Think of the dream as a meeting ground.

You know, this is, you know, it's a hill where we both come to treat battle.

And what is, being exchanged?

What is the deal?

What's being revealed and then what wants to emerge?

And so, yeah, I'm thinking about this, this cloud experience, right?

an evil cloud, a cloud, it's something, right, that hasn't fully formed yet.

It's, it's, there's there's something perhaps that's being hidden, but I would also say something that hasn't quite materialized.

And so I mean, think about the mists that emerge in the story of Bram Stoker's Dracula, who by the way was a sleep paralysis sufferer, right?

Absolutely.

Had sleep paralysis nightmares.

And Dracula comes through as an example of that.

The mists come into the room first and then Dracula emerges.

But mists also arrive.

There's the mists of Avalon, right?

The mists that arrive before we enter into sacred places or the places beyond.

And so mists and clouds, are ambiguous.

And so there are these times, I would say these still points where we can focus on our positive expectation, you know, ground ourselves with compassion, with courage, with curiosity to proceed to.

To see.

I wonder what's going to come through the mist.

I wonder what's going to come out of the cloud.

And with that attitude, I don't know what happens next.

Okay, this one's a fun one.

Someone's asking what's the key to having better lucid dream sex?

Try as I might, I just get too excited and poof, I wake up.

I wake up smiling, of course, because at least I was lucid and I got a chance to try.

So you shot your shot.

So that's interesting.

So here's what I found about lucid dream sex.

it's absolutely possible.

Orgasm, pleasure, all this stuff is absolutely possible.

In fact, we've got physiological proof of people having orgasms in lucid dreams.

It was one of the first things that was proved in the lab, actually, in the 1980s.

so lots, of evidence for this.

It's a real phenomena.

for men.

It can involve ejaculation or without ejaculation.

And so what we know about REM asleep in general is, is that it is, an activated state of mind in terms of the erogenous zones.

The blood is already moving to the genitalia in REM sleep.

it's just part of the physiology of REM sleep.

And so this is an aside, but from an archaeological perspective, like there's ancient rock art in Paleolithic France of these like shaman figures who are like half human, half bull and they have erect phalluses as they, as they drift through the cosmos.

They're in a trance state and they have erections while they're in a trance state.

So there's something about that, you know, that vitality of REM dreaming that is essentially erotically charged from the get go.

And so with lucid dreaming, we are able to work with that energy.

And so what I found in general is the best approach is, again, think about this attitude of co creation.

You know, the dream figure is an equal here.

Be interested in the dream figure and I would say be interested in giving pleasure to the dream figure that you want to interact with.

Right.

When we shift our focus to the dream figure, it rebounds.

Like basically the circle widens and then we also experience pleasure simultaneously.

We enter into this energetic sexual exchange, this, you know, sensual exchange.

It's, it's a two way connection, it's intimacy.

And by the way, this is also a good approach for waking life too.

Okay, this is our last section of questions here.

There's a couple of myths that we want to look, into.

And so the first one is, I saw that you shouldn't look at mirrors in a lucid dream.

Is this true?

and my answer is no, it's not true.

Mirrors are awesome.

look in a mirror in your lucid dream and, and do it with courage and compassion and curiosity.

Right?

There's that blend again that we need to have for successful lucid dreams, right?

Like, who's going to show up?

What am I going to see?

Because sometimes it'll reflect back a personage that is not the waking ego, but a different figure or perhaps a different age.

You can be a different gender, you can be a different race.

You can be, non human, right?

And so there's a lot of, I would say, self and egoic exploration that comes just from that.

And more so than that, what makes mirrors and lucid dreams amazing is that they are portals, right?

So you can bypass the hole reflection stage and just use the mirror as a portal.

Put your hand up to the glass.

your hand will sink through, your body will follow.

You'll enter into a new space.

And you can use that space to set an intention or to just see what comes.

And what I found is that the dream will recrystallize.

It'll take you someplace.

And what you find in this place, I promise you that it'll be extraordinary.

And here was the last question, which was, if you could erase one piece of lucid dreaming, quote unquote, common wisdom from the Internet, what would that be?

And so talking about basically myths here, like untruths, and what I would do if I could do anything, I could just like send it through, in a way so people stop talking about this is I would love to correct the attitude that lucidity is the same thing as dream control, because they're actually two separate measures.

And when you look at the scholarship of lucid dreaming, you can have dreams where the dreamer has a lot of control over the dream, but low levels of lucidity.

And then you can have the opposite, where a dreamer has lots of lucidity but not a lot of control.

And in some of those cases, those are lucid nightmares.

But not always, right?

Because sometimes lucidity without control can be very profound.

when we essentially turn our self control to surrender, right, and to just sort of let unfold where the dream wants to go, where we listen or we merge with what's happening, into sensation, perhaps into some electric field.

Those are the most potent lucid dreams I've ever had when I'm not in control.

And I mean, honestly, this is what I think what we really want with dreams is to learn something that we didn't know or to be taken someplace we haven't been before, right?

A new experience to push the boundaries, to have a wider field of vision.

We can't get there with dream control.

And so why do we keep going back to dream control?

And It's literally in the waters of our culture.

It's in the waters of marketing culture.

It sells books, it's selling to people's low self esteem.

And deeper than that, I have a whole, I have a whole historical perspective that dream control is, is kind of integrated with or comes out of cultures of colonization, cultures of manifest destiny in the United States.

That there is something unhealthy about this focus on dream control.

When the dream itself is a place that wants us to join in, wants us to go deeper, wants us to learn, wants us to be present for something new to reveal itself.

And so we have to find those places where we can be courageous and compassionate and curious and find them in ourselves.

And that's what opens up the spirit of lucid dreaming.

Hey, thanks.

This was really fun for me.

We're going to have to do this again sometime.

because I really loved answering your questions.

I wanted to let you know that, Next week on Tuesday, June 9th, I'm starting a month long immersion into lucid dreaming.

It's a live training and it's called Lucid Ignition, the Archaeological Edition.

So if you've been struggling with lucid dreaming, you know, at any level, this online course is basically built for you.

Whether you've never had a lucid dream or you're working through fear responses when you go lucid, or if you're just basically in a dry spell, the Lucid Ignition experience is about supporting you as we go through a step by step process for inviting impactful lucid dreams.

and it's based on these ancient practices that we've discussed as well as scientifically validated tactics.

And so I love that as a dream researcher.

Right.

It's the meeting of the world's wisdom with the peer reviewed literature.

I call that the best of the old and the new.

And yeah, this year the theme is archaeological.

I'm going to be really be telling stories about my work as an archaeologist and we'll be exploring the stratification of the dream world.

We'll be using the metaphor of the three tiered cosmos going into this ancient model of, of exploring altered states of consciousness.

I have a, coupon for you that'll take 25% off the cost of enrollment for the class and you can even break up the course fee into two months.

And so there's a coupon code or this video that you can use: SUBSTACK25 again.

This was really fun doing an ama.

Let's do it again sometime.

And until then, may you sleep well and dream strong.