the realm of dreams

0:04You are now experiencing the Nectar of Time. Now, what lucid dreamers, expert lucid dreamers, will tell you: the point of lucid dreaming is to actually alchemize your deepest fears. So what they'll say is, wake up in the dream, figure out what your totem is, if you will, and figure out that you're awake. And then when you're awake, do the scariest possible thing you could ever do, and then realize you don't die, or realize that it's okay, or realize that you're safe, so that when you wake up, all the fear that's been trapped in your body from trying to stop or prevent that thing from happening gets freed up. There's some pretty good evidence available that indicates we're smarter asleep than we are awake. It's a good

0:51idea to form the habit of remembering our dreams when we can upon arising. Dr. Erich Fromm has written that we are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams, but we are also more intelligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we're asleep than when we're awake. Perhaps the best answer to the question "Do dreams predict the future?" is a cautious, limited kind of yes. Dreams express our wishes and feelings, wishes and feelings motivate behavior, and behavior shapes the future. Welcome back to another episode of Nectar of Time. I'm your host, Tamir Barzilai, and today we're doing a deep dive on dreams and what they mean and

1:41how we can use them to our advantage. With us we have Samantha Chung. Samantha is a friend of mine. She has her own podcast. She helps people discover themselves in order to achieve what they want to achieve in life, and that takes a variety of forms, one of which today we'll be speaking about, which is looking deep inside and identifying and discovering how we can use one of the most powerful forces in nature, dreaming and sleep, in order to help achieve our goals and understand ourselves a little bit better. This episode is weird. This one does not have a real beginning, middle and end. You can think of it as trying to find the culprit, the suspect behind one of the

2:34biggest mysteries in life. What is dreaming? Why do we dream? What kind of dreams do we have, and what effects do they have on our life? We don't really have an exact answer. There is no exact focal point except for this mystery, this enigma, that every day we spend about 6 to 8 hours in that realm. And in today's episode we're going into that rabbit hole and trying to decode just a fragment of what this all means. I love this. This is the nectar. This is the Nectar of Time that we're indulging in. Time was involved in producing this nectar. It's

3:22a decaf vanilla chai rooibos with cinnamon. Can I have it now, or—? Yeah, it might be a bit hot, though. Might be a bit hot. Maybe we set the intention and then we cheers. Let's do it. That's the beginning. Let's do it. I'm going to read a passage to start this episode. I'm reading from a book called The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. More on her later. "Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of the ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but near and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses

4:12move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going and its will. But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outer space of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air,

5:01breaking. What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight? What will the mind do, each morning, waking?" Interesting passage that you chose for today. I wonder why. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm here today with Samantha Chung. Thanks so much for being on the Nectar of Time. Yeah, it's a pleasure. I've had so much fun getting to know you over the past year, and I've evolved a lot, actually, since February when we met, which is wild, because I surprise myself as I get older that I can continue to learn about me. But one of the things you mentioned when

5:47you invited me on this podcast was that you wanted to go into the realm of dreams, which is so interesting for me, because no one's ever asked me to go there. And so my intention for today's podcast is to give myself permission to say things I've never said on a podcast. I feel like you're the perfect person to help me co-create conversation that I've never had before, and to share a lot that's been going on in my subconscious. I feel that a lot of my content, my work, reflects what I can already articulate and shape my conscious thought around, but a lot of that has come from the work I've done in my subconscious, whether it's been through body work, through dreams, and I never get to talk about that part. I kind of just talk about what that brings me

6:35in my reality and how it's helped me, but the process through which I uncover that is actually, I'm finding, to be more interesting than the results. Well, I'm really happy that this is a venue that you feel comfortable enough to share all of that. For the audience, can you give a very quick synopsis of what you do outside of what we're going to do here today? Yeah, so I'm essentially a life coach and podcast host. I help people become very clear on what is blocking them from creating the life that they want to be living. Very simply, a lot of people experience resistance in the form of thoughts, old traumas, old patterns and stories and narratives, and I'm there to be a mirror to reflect back to them where they are limiting themselves, where

7:21they are creating blocks. And it's super rewarding work. Oftentimes people say to me after three, even sometimes just four months of working together, that they had no idea that they had it within them all along. It's very much a ruby slippers thing. Like, I am Glinda the Good Witch, and I'm like, "You could have taken yourself home all along," and they're like, "Why didn't you tell me?" and I'm like, "Because you wouldn't have believed me." And so my work is helping people really remember who they are and how powerful they are. But we create very powerful hallucinations in our waking life that we can't do things, just like we do in dreams, right? In dreams we hallucinate that there's a wall there, but there's not really a wall there, right? We're just dreaming that there's a wall there. And we do that in waking life too. And so I'm really just there to illuminate where we're creating

8:10walls and get them to see that they're just envisioning a wall there. There's not actually a physical wall there. And once they break through one or two walls, they begin to see that all the walls are the same. They're like, "Oh, interesting, the wall I had about money, it's kind of the same as the wall I had about friendships or romantic relationships, which means it must be the same with business and my potential." And they start to realize, wow, all these walls are the same, and it was just me imagining them there. So if I were to describe my work in two words, I call it thought work. We do the work of investigating what thoughts and what beliefs drive your behaviors. So we become very investigative. I call myself a zoologist, and I'm studying my client, and we do this work of really studying the internal environment of the

8:59person in such a way that is objective, curious and compassionate. We want to understand what about this internal environment, what thoughts I'm having, what beliefs I have, what feelings I'm feeling, create certain behaviors. And oftentimes what happens is that people want to attack their behavior. They're like, "Why can't I do this?" or "Why do I keep doing this?" without realizing that their behavior is really just an endgame result of their environment. So when we look at the environment, then we start to make tweaks to the environment. Okay, now we're challenging a thought. Okay, now we're feeling differently. Now the behavior naturally begins to shift. So I feel like I get the best results—not the best results in the world, but I get better results than most people, because I don't

9:46really talk about the behavior that much. We talk about everything that is creating the behavior, and then once that is changed, people just start acting differently. They start behaving and engaging with their reality in a different way and creating new experiences for themselves, which affirm a new belief. And then they get that new belief, and then they are like, "Oh, now from this new belief I'm able to create more things." And then they keep playing with their reality. And so by the time we're finished working together, they're not like, "Oh wow, I'm done." It's more like, "Ah, I get to keep doing this. I get to keep realizing what walls I've created, I get to keep breaking them down, and I get to continue creating realities beyond what I thought was possible," like, forevermore. It's like the infinite game of growth, right? And it's super fun. Ladies and gentlemen, as you can tell, Sam is a

10:34black belt in this. Wow. I mean, this is going to be a fun episode for me. I sort of just want to sit here and listen to you, and I know just through listening to you my life will be improved. I think for the audience today, they're in for a treat. So let's toast to that. Thanks for coming on. Yes. Cheers. Nectar of Time. We have to drink our nectar now. Could steep a bit more. Pretty good. I don't like bitter tea, so that's perfect. Great. Fantastic. So yeah, we discussed for today that we would speak about dreams, and this is a topic not for one episode of a podcast. I mean, dreams, you

11:23need a multiplicity of series of dreams. Totally. With a variety of experts from every facet, from every perspective, to dissect it from a neurobiological standpoint, from a psychological standpoint, from a metaphysical standpoint, from a religious standpoint, spiritual standpoint. I mean, you can go on and on with all—you know, even something that you mentioned earlier, these walls that we put up for ourselves. Imagination is a form of dreaming. We call it daydreaming. Yes. Right? And I wonder, in some cases—I mean, I don't want to take us on a tangent right out of the get-go, but in some cases our daydreams are almost more powerful than our night dreams, because we believe the daydreams, but we think the night dreams

12:11are fake. Yeah, and I think that's really interesting, because they're actually almost identical in nature, right? They're forms of disassociating from the body, right? The agency to move your limbs, right? So when we're daydreaming, we're not really actively engaging in the body. We're just kind of letting the mind wander, and we do that in sleep as well. But we give a lot of power to the daydream, and most of the time the daydreams, although that seems like a positive word that we use, it's actually oftentimes the daydreaming where we think of worst-case scenarios and catastrophizing that we give so much power to. And just because we're awake, we're like, "That must be true," right? But I believe that whenever we are daydreaming or hallucinating these horrifying worst-case scenarios, that we can wake up from

12:58those just in the same way we can from a dream, right? When we wake up from a dream, you can be heart pumping, like, you know, your blood pulsating. You can feel literally terror, cold sweats. Yeah. You wake up and you're like—and then you're like, "Oh, that was just a dream." And within minutes, sometimes even seconds, you can move on from that emotional disturbance. But we have trouble doing that in our daily life. So we can kind of choose and tune into what parts of our night dreams or daydreams we want to give power to. But I find that the default is to give a lot of power to the catastrophizing in the daytime. But there are many ways that we can harness the power of our dreams. Yeah, it's a very, very interesting topic to me. Something that—this will be new for

13:48our listeners, but the way that we met was through the fact that I basically run a podcast studio, which this podcast is hosted in, and Sam came for an episode that she booked to record in here. And after the episode we got on and, you know, spoke to each other, and I just got the impression that you would care about some of the same things that I cared about. Totally. And as everyone on this show knows, I'm a huge fan of Haruki Murakami, and there was a short story collection. Yes. There's a short story collection called Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, where—emphasis on "sleeping woman"—there's a story called "Sleep" in there. And I just thought that Sam would get a lot out of that story, and I was more curious, because I had a hypothesis. Of course, I only knew you at that point

14:34for like an hour, a couple hours. Yeah, it's very difficult to say for sure, 'cause most of that couple hours you were in the room recording. It wasn't actually us talking. But when you have a hunch, you have a hunch. And I gave you the story, and I wasn't expecting anything. I said, as homework, "You need to let me know what you think of it by next week," and you actually did that. I mean, my biggest pet peeve is you give people a book or a story and then they don't read it, and then you never get that book back either. But you did this. You know, you got your stuff together. Well, I'm a very good student, and I'm a Gemini rising. I don't know if that means anything to you. But I love reading. I love researching. Books and words are my lifeblood. So when you offered that, I remember thinking, like, hm, I don't get

15:22these kinds of suggestions very often. I don't know, I hadn't been in a situation recently where someone was like, "You should read this." And so whenever that happens, I take it as a sign from the universe, like, I'm going to get something out of it. I believe that you were put in my life at that time for a divine reason. I didn't know what the reason was yet, but if someone is in front of me saying "Read this," mhm, I assume it's not necessarily you telling me that, but that the universe is telling me that. Like, in a way, you're almost a symbol, a conduit. You're a symbol in my daydream, right, that's coming to me with information. So I was like, okay, I'm going to read this book. And it was really creepy, because the main character in the short story was my age and struggling to sleep in the story, and I was reading it when I was struggling

16:08to sleep. So that was really strange. But I remember reading it and being reminded that you can consume things that will completely and totally shake up the way you're experiencing your present reality. I mean, that's what happens when you go to the movie theater, right? You go to the movie theater, and you're living your life, then you go in and then you come out and you're like, "I'm a different person now," right? What happened, though? The world didn't actually shift, and there wasn't an earthquake or something. Your internal world was shaken up inside. So I read that, and it was really good for me at the time, because I was really stuck back in February when I met you. I was very self-absorbed. I think that the work that I do is very positive but can become a bit neurotic, right? We're always studying the

16:57self, right? What am I thinking? What am I feeling? How am I acting? How am I behaving? I think there's absolutely value in that. My entire life and business is based on it, and it's very helpful, but it can become very neurotic very fast and actually serve the opposite purpose: not be as helpful, but become very hurtful. So at the time I was kind of thinking a lot about myself. I was reading a lot of non-fiction, and I think I remember even saying to you that I wasn't that interested in fiction, and you were like, "Oh, that's interesting, because I learned so much more through storytelling than I would reading a psychology book." And I was like, "Oh, okay, I'm going to read." So when I read that, it just reminded me that there was a world beyond what I'm thinking and feeling, and so it just kind of shook me

17:45up. And I remember reaching out to you and being like, "Why did you recommend that story?" It really read me for filth. It just brought me out of my—I feel like the snow globe had been shaken, and I was like, oh yeah, there's a life beyond what I'm thinking and feeling all the time. Yeah, I remember you sending me a voice note of how— Like, I was like, "You probably think this is so weird, but I actually read the story, and it was really weird and what I needed." Yeah, I mean, it was very telling. It was very telling that it resonated with you, and it was something that surprised you, that you didn't really expect from a suggestion. And that's the beauty between non-fiction and fiction, is that non-fiction will hit you with the facts.

18:32It'll be like, "80% of people, da," and you're like, "Okay, yeah." But this transports you to another world, and in many cases it can actually deliver the same payload. It can deliver the same lesson, even bigger, I would say. Yeah, you kind of changed me in that moment, because I realized, up until that point, I'd only been reading things for my brain. I was like, oh, how much more information can I accumulate about myself? How can I improve and better myself? But we improve and better ourselves by being impacted emotionally, right? That's what happens when you watch the movie. You watch the movie and you're like, "Wow, I want to lead with more kindness," or whatever, because you felt that in your body. And so that's why storytelling is the medium that we've been teaching people with for eons, right? Like, by the fire, right? The elder

19:20is passing down the wisdom in the form of a story. It's the way we memorize and feel into lessons and wisdom. And so I realized I was kind of missing out on this whole other reality that could be helpful, that could serve me in some way, 'cause I was like, oh, fiction, what's the value in that? And then I felt so deeply impacted by this very short work of fiction that I was like, I think I'm missing out here. Yeah, yeah. And it happened to me too, four years ago. That's when—maybe four and a half years ago, during COVID, is when I joined a book club, and I sort of put my non-fiction books aside, and I was like, all right, let's try fiction out. And obviously that changed my life, and specifically it was Murakami that did it for me, 'cause we did have a couple books in that book club that were

20:08good but didn't really make any internal shift in me. It was just like, oh yeah, it's fiction. Yeah, it's pretty cool, pretty cool story. But then when I got to Murakami, that's when something shifted. And I think this is the reason why: because his books are essentially drafted as dreamscapes. When you read his book, it's actually very similar to dreaming. They don't always have an ending. They don't always make a lot of logical sense. There's something eerie about it. That's why a lot of his books are magical realism, because, you know, the laws of physics and the laws of nature are not bound in those stories, and it's the same as a dream. And so I feel like novels—basically, the best fiction-making machine that we have is our mind when we go to sleep at night.

20:57Yes. You're building worlds and stories every single night, and a novel is just that same thing in a pill format. Yeah, 100%. And I love how you described Haruki's work as this dreamscape, and how there's no beginning and end. It's not linear. And that's actually my experience of reading the short story you offered, was that it didn't fit into my paradigm of thinking linearly. I was like, where is the story beginning and ending, and why did it even end like that? I remember feeling as if it was very incomplete. And maybe I think that's why I like non-fiction books, because there's kind of a beginning and an end to what's being taught. But it really threw me. And it's so true, it really does mirror this incredible imagination that we have at night, this

21:45world builder, as you said. And just as I was beginning to really value fiction and this dreamscape sort of writing, I started to really learn to value my dream state too, and what was happening in my subconscious world. And that's been happening now for, I would say, 3 to 4 years. I met someone four years ago who was like, "Do you write down your dreams?" And I was like, "Why would I write them down?" And she was like, "Well, you spend half of your life asleep." Yeah. "There's a lot of important information in there about who you are and what you desire." And it was interesting, because I think I told you before we hit record that when I was a child, I remember thinking that my dreams were extremely valuable. I'd wake up feeling very impacted by them, and that they were important, and

22:32then I would go tell my mom I had this wild dream, and sometimes I'd be overcome with emotion, and she'd be like, "It's just a dream. Don't worry about it. It's just a dream." So we're always getting this sort of trivialized response to our dreams from childhood. No one's ever saying, "Wow, you should really journal about that," or "What's the symbolism behind that?" or "What do you think that means?" I was just told many times that it meant nothing, so I didn't see any value in them. And then this woman was like, "No, your dreams tell you who you are and what you want." And so starting four years ago, which is kind of parallel to me valuing fiction more, I started actually keeping a dream journal and writing down all of these symbols. I actually have some of them on my notes here. But I had a lot of weather symbols,

23:19like tsunami, fire, tornado, and then there'd be broken glass, car crash, and then certain people would show up. And I realized that everything that was happening in my subconscious, especially if other people were showing up—obviously those people weren't really showing up, right? It's me dreaming it, but they represented something. And I could actually tune into my dreams to understand how I wanted to create my waking life to be supportive of what I wanted. Because I think in our waking life we have a hard time knowing consciously what we want. We think we know, but what we truly want competes with what we're taught to want. But in the dream world, we don't have as much access to what the conscious mind has been taught to want. We just get to want what we really want. And so it was this really weird exploration of my true desires only through the

24:08dream world. And then through the dream world, I was able to find out, oh, this is how I want to lead my life when I'm awake, right? And I think that if people could be curious about their dream life, they would have much more positive waking lives. But we ignore them. We discount them completely. And so, once you started tracking your dreams, did you find that you were able to influence your dreams in any way, or was that still a black box? Yeah, so what actually got me into dreaming, besides what this woman mentioned, the first book I read—I forget exactly—I think it was by a guy named Charlie, big, big guy on lucid dreaming. Okay. I had a dream where I—this is the wildest dream, actually. I can't

24:54believe we're going to get into this. But I had a dream that I was in a grocery store, and at this point in time, with respect to my dreams, I had come up with a few symbols to tell me that I was in a dream. And one of my symbols is a clock or a watch. If anyone's ever tried to find a clock or a watch in their dream, they don't behave the way they do in normal life. So I knew already that when I see a clock or a watch and it's not working, I'm in a dream. So I was in this grocery store and I saw a clock, and it wasn't working, and I was like, "Oh shoot, I'm in a dream." So I'm in this grocery store, and I realized I can just do whatever the F I want, 'cause it's a dream. So I start knocking over all of the things on the shelves. I'm just fucking around. Until someone comes and gets me. But I'm like, it's my dream, it's fine. Suddenly someone comes up behind me and basically puts

25:41this black sheet over my head, and I'm kicking and screaming. I literally think—I'm not sure if it's a dream anymore. This is so scary, right? And I'm being escorted out of the grocery store and thrown into a van. And a character that I can only describe as almost Dumbledore-esque, I'm assuming someone who represents higher wisdom and authority— Old Father Time. Yes, exactly—was there and was like, "You can't do that here." And I was like, "What? I can't fuck around in my own dream?" And he was like, "No, you can't do that, because other people don't know it's a dream yet." And then this person took me to this—I don't want to call it a resort, but I guess it kind of resembled that. But it was a bunch of people who are

26:28really famous. So all the celebrities that I guess I think of as really famous in my mind: Brad Pitt was there, George Clooney was there, Catherine Zeta-Jones was there. All of these famous people were there, and they were like, "Oh my gosh, welcome." And they were welcoming me and basically saying, "You got it. You woke up. You woke up from the dream inside the dream. Congratulations." And they were explaining to me that they were able to create such incredible realities for themselves because they had realized it was all a dream, and that none of it was real, that none of it really mattered, and that there was nothing to fear, but that you couldn't go around waking everyone up from their dream, because the game is to wake up on your own. And so they came and got me because I was trying to basically be the whistleblower and be like, "Guys, this is a dream. Who cares? You can just knock shit off the walls." And they were like, "You can't do that here." And so then

27:16I spent the rest of the dream talking to all of these people who had woken up from their dream, and learning their secrets and figuring out how they were able to create these awesome careers. And then when I woke up, I remember thinking, oh my gosh, that was me realizing that you need to wake up in the dream of being human, right? Like, I'm waking up inside of the dream where I'm asleep, but there's another layer of this dream when I'm awake that I have to wake up to as well. You had homework when you woke up. Yeah, it was like, you have to wake up here. And then also it was like, you can help support people in waking up, but you can't be the one to wake them up, right? They have to wake up, right? You can't shake them awake. They have to come awake. And so it also reduced a lot of pressure I felt to

28:04help people wake up. I had a lot of egoic pressure on that, I think, four years ago. I was like, "I have to help people realize that they're sleepwalking, oh my gosh." And then I was like, no, they have to run into a wall and realize they're sleepwalking. I can't do that. Yeah, it's difficult, 'cause then you almost do more damage. Yes. Like trying to save a fish from drowning. Yes, yes. But yeah, I've had many dreams like that, where I've woken up and controlled my dream, and then usually when that happens, something tells me that I'm not supposed to be doing it, which is really gnarly. Like, the fact that I'm even awake and aware and controlling things, there's something that becomes aware that I've become aware, and it's like, "You're not supposed to be doing that." Yeah, that's a weird

28:51phenomenon. I felt that phenomenon as well. It's like some sort of guard rails exist. Now the question is—I mean, the person that is bound to science that we're aware of would say, "Well, you're putting that up. You know, you're the guard rails. You're doing it." I mean, that would be the rational approach in this case. However, you know, life is not that simple. You know, there's things that we have not discovered yet, and dreams are really low on the list of things we understand. Yeah, yeah. And it's mostly just conjecture and hypotheses, and it's very difficult to disprove anything. So it lives somewhere in the middle, between—you know, at the Lagrangian point between

29:39science and God. And it just kind of sits there, and no one can really pull it. You can't pull it to science fully, because there's too much weird there, too many weird anecdotes. And then you can't pull it to God fully, because we do have some understanding of the brain. So it's just sort of sitting there, and no one's winning that battle right now. Yeah, but I also think it's because we can't technically observe a dream, much like we can't technically observe mind activity. Yeah. Right? Like, brain and mind are different. We can observe the brain and see neurons firing and what the content is—yeah—but we can't see the content. So we can't literally study and observe it. And so it is very person-to-person, super unique, for you to just want to be curious about your own dream experience. But I think, given that

30:27you are asleep 50% of the time or whatever—I don't know the exact percentage of the time, but a lot of your life—it would be wise, I think, to be curious about it and try to use it to your advantage. So oftentimes— Well, what I realized about myself is that there are certain emotions that my conscious mind won't allow me to feel, and one of them, actually, is fear. I am not someone who regularly feels fear in my daily life, or at least is conscious of it. But I know I have fears, right? But I don't maybe walk as closely toward them in my waking life in order for me to get close to them and alchemize them and free them. But in my dreams, I don't have conscious mechanisms that block me from my fear, so I can just walk towards what I'm afraid of. Now, what lucid dreamers, expert lucid dreamers, will tell you: the

31:15point of lucid dreaming is to actually alchemize your deepest fears. So what they'll say is, wake up in the dream, figure out what your totem is, if you will, and figure out that you're awake. And then when you're awake, do the scariest possible thing you could ever do, and then realize you don't die, or realize that it's okay, or realize that you're safe, so that when you wake up, all the fear that's been trapped in your body from trying to stop or prevent that thing from happening gets freed up. That's very cool. And you know, I've only dabbled with lucid dreaming, but not to the degree of creating and assigning a totem. And these are the steps. Yeah, yeah. Well, without that, it's very difficult to know what's real and what's not. But I mean, you've been able to establish a totem in a dream. Yeah, the clock. Right, but, like, reliably? Like, you're able, or—

32:05There's—I have two signs. So the clock is one. Seems like a difficult task. The clock is one, but I don't always see it, right? So I can't always recognize that I'm in a dream. But the second one is that my range of motion is limited in some way. Have you ever had that experience of, like, you're running in the dream, but you're not actually—you're not winning any race? Yeah. You're struggling to do it. That's a cue for me. So I wake up in the dream. I'm like, "Wait, why am I like this?" And then I'm like, "Oh shit." And then I start operating within my dream. And so I use this process by—I think it's Charlie Morley, actually. Charlie Morley. He had a near-death experience and then became the dream expert, and he's teaching everyone how to lucid dream and alchemize their fears. But he taught us how to create the totem and then basically face the worst possible thing that you could ever think is going to happen to you, and then alchemize and free yourself. And so I've never said

32:53this anywhere, ever, but my deep fear—and I think the reason why I was afraid to say it was 'cause I didn't want people to think that I was being judgmental of anyone that this had happened to, but clearly this is just what my brain projected could be a negative experience—but my worst fear was that I was going to be taken into the mental hospital, for either speaking my truth or losing my mind, and then I'd get trapped there, and then I would try to explain to people, "No, I'm actually fine," and they'd be like, "See, that's what a crazy person would say," and keep me locked up in this place. So I had this really insane fear. It's actually called dementophobia. It's the fear of going insane. I had this fear of going insane and being locked up, and it made it really hard for me to experience any negative emotions, because I believed that if I did experience a

33:41negative emotion, that it would be perceived as, "You're losing it. You need to go to the mental hospital." Which is obviously just an insane phobia, right? It's not actually rooted in reality. But the problem with my waking life was that I couldn't go to a mental hospital and alchemize that fear, right? Like, I could create—I could manufacture that experience— You can't really do cognitive behavioral therapy. Exactly. So what I realized through this process was that the fear of hell was creating hell. So my fear of hell, which in my mind was going to the mental hospital, was actually creating a living hell for me in the present. I didn't even have to go to the mental hospital. I was already there mentally. I was living in this insane fear. And so in my dream, I created that experience where I go, and it's against my will, and I'm

34:29being taken there. And the most incredible thing happened. I went there, and what I realized was that this was the only place in the entire world where I wouldn't have to be supporting other people. I would be purely supported through what I was going through. Now, I'm someone who coaches other people. I'm a supportive friend and offer advice and companionship to so many people in my life. I'm an eldest daughter. I've done that for my siblings. So I realized that the fear was actually being the one that needs help. I'd never been in that place before. I was always the helper, right? So I needed to create this dream scenario where I go and I'm the one that gets help, and actually I end up coming out better than I ever thought. So then in the dream I create this experience, and I go in, and I'm actually finding that I'm being deeply supported. It's not

35:17a scary thing. It's not a thing that people judge me for or that I'm ashamed of. I actually get supported and loved, and I actually feel community when I'm there, which is a really surprising outcome that I never expected. And then I come out and I write a book about being in the psych ward, and it's this experience that helps millions of people. And so when I woke up, I was like, "I'm not afraid of that anymore." Yeah. And I felt—I literally felt so free. I cannot— I woke up and I felt like I didn't even realize how heavy my body had felt until it was gone. And I think we just get used to what the heaviness of fear feels like, right? But I just woke up and I was like, "Holy shit, I'm not in hell anymore, and I'm not scared." Yeah, that's

36:07very instructive and very interesting, that you were able to defeat a ghoul, a demon inside of you— Yeah. —by facing it, but using the arena of the dreams to go to battle with it. The safest place to experience it. Wow. This is—you know, in an age of virtual reality, where we have the Meta Quest and we have, you know, the whatchamacallit, what's the Apple one? Vision Pro. Yeah. We're building this virtual reality environment, in many cases for training, where we have our own virtual reality. The best virtual reality headset: just by closing our eyes. I mean, that just occurred to me right now, that

36:55kind of—that's a bit of a— Got to take a sip of the tea for that one. Yeah, sip of the tea. Take a sip. Yeah, I realized that my dreams could be places where I challenge myself, but ultimately find out what's important to me and what's holding me back. I think in our waking life we are obviously a lot more risk-averse, but when you start to lucid dream, you realize that you're in the dream, so you're protected. Now imagine you had that perspective in your waking life. Yeah, well, that's tough. That's very, very tough. Yeah, because we don't know what happens when we die. Yeah. Right? But imagine if the experience or relationship we had to death was like

37:41waking up. Yeah, well, that's—I mean, I was just speaking with someone about having a death practice and looking at that. It's tough. I would say it's later in the journey to get to that. It's not something you start out with. It's really deep into the game, and sometimes you never get around to it. But if you are able to get around to— I mean, we know that the— I mean, take Gautama Buddha. I mean, he's perfectly happy to leave his body behind, 'cause he was looking for that full oneness, right? For that full union. But I mean, that's definitely something to look forward to, that perhaps we could attain that level of power, for those that are willing to

38:27begin that expedition, that journey. But a good first step to getting there is using the safe playground, the safe battlefield, which is the dream battlefield. One thing I wanted to connect this to is—so we started the podcast with an excerpt from The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. So The Lathe of Heaven is actually a book about this exact topic. It's about a guy who suffers from effective dreaming. So what effective dreaming is, is that he goes to sleep, he'll think of something—he'll think of reality that has it change. Let's say he'll think that Texas is actually located in Africa. Okay, okay. And just something random like that. It could be any number of details, but let's just say something at that

39:15macro level. He will wake up and Texas—and he lives, he's based in Portland, the protagonist—he will wake up and Texas is no longer on the map. It's in Africa. There will be some new story about it. That example I just made up, but there's equivalent examples all through the story. Like, there's a mountain that should exist that no longer exists in the state after he wakes up. He doesn't like this. He's realizing he's having these dreams. He hates it. So he tries to deprive himself of sleep or put himself into an extremely deep sleep that bypasses that dream state. So for that he needs drugs, and long story short, he has to go to get a refill of these drugs, or to basically finally get some sort of a cure from this psychiatrist who has

40:06some level of expertise in dreaming. So he's assigned to the psychiatrist, and he's talking with the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has his own dream analyzer, just like what we discussed earlier about, you can check the brain waves and you can see that the person's dreaming, to see what state of dreaming they're in. And this is sci-fi, so it sort of goes through some level of technical detail on how they would do that. But he can't read, as you said, he can't read the dream, right? That's physically impossible, to read the dream. But he can make suggestions for what the protagonist should dream about. So what happens is the psychiatrist realizes that this person is actually having what's called effective dreams, and effective dreams are changing the reality. He has this big mural, this big painting behind him in his office, and

40:56the mural changes from a field to a mountain or something. And slowly it escalates, and before you know it, the psychiatrist catches on to it, and he starts using it for his advantage, because he wants to start changing things by using this guy as a conduit to change the reality. Holy crap. So it's a very, very apt book, an interesting book on this matter, that I think you would definitely love. Yeah, I don't know—I would love that. But I think essentially why you're suggesting this book is to kind of further this idea that what happens when you're asleep can impact what happens when you're awake. Yeah. And that there's a connection, not necessarily to the degree

41:42of disappearing Texas, right? But I think that if we were to give some credit to our subconscious and our dreams, we can use them. We can use them in our waking life. And that would start by, of course, valuing what happens when we're asleep. And I have realized that my subconscious is everything that creates my current living reality. Whatever feels safe and normal to my subconscious is what I will experience. And so every single night, when I close my eyes, I can ask my subconscious—I can ask the dreamer version of me a question. I can set an intention, right? And it doesn't necessarily always turn out to be in alignment with that. I mean, dreams are so strange, right? But oftentimes when I ask my dream self before I go to sleep—I might even describe a

42:31problem I have in detail, like, "My problem with my business is this," or "My problem with my partner is this. Help me see this in another way." And my dreams will reveal such interesting things to me that completely inform the way I want to relate to that situation when I wake up. Yeah, there's a lot of utility in using dreams and practicing that, and it's been around for thousands of years. Hundreds of years ago they started writing about it in more modern texts. Even the book that's very popular in business, I'm sure you're well aware, called Think and Grow Rich, has an entire chapter dedicated to dreaming, and he talks about how he would have dreams of some of his mentors, and one of his mentors was Thomas Edison, the other mentor was President Roosevelt, one of the presidents of the United States. And

43:20he went to Edison and he talked about this dream where they both were there, and he was saying, "Does this have any merit?" He's like, "It has more merit than you can imagine," or something, something sort of eerie like that. Like, this is actually realer than you think it is. Very Dumbledore, when Harry Potter dreams he's—he thinks he's almost died, and he's gone to the train station. I'm really bad with Harry Potter. I watched it. Well, everyone else, 98%— Continue. 90%. Everyone else knows. There's a scene where Harry has died, effectively, and he goes to a train station, but it's in this dreamlike state, and he sees Dumbledore there, who's dead, obviously. And he's like, "Is this a dream?" And he's basically like, "Just because it's a dream doesn't mean that it's—real, doesn't mean

44:07that it's not real." Yeah. And then he comes back and he's like, "Whoa." So yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the part of— So I'm trying to take us somewhere here, where we're talking about having some sort of autonomy, if we can, as much as we can, to practice, because we can use that as a tool, and there is some level of realness to it. It has a real-world utility, and it may even be part of the real world in some sort of an alternate dimension that we're not aware of. Don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole. But there is— And by the way, just in that light, one more book here: Creative Dreaming. I picked this up in California at a random used bookstore, and I'll always

44:53pick up books that are on these types of subjects, 'cause you never know what kind of a cute little anecdote you're going to find. I actually have not fully read this yet, but the promises that it makes are sort of incredible. On the back of it, it says, "When you fall asleep tonight, would you like to experience sexual union and even orgasm with the partner of your choice? Have revealing conversations with the most important people in your present and your past? Engage in direct struggle with the images of your greatest fears and emerge triumphant? Tackle your most perplexing daytime dilemmas and wake with those problems solved?" This is basically saying what you were saying. "Tap the vast storehouse of creativity within you? Remember things you believe are long forgotten? Engage in exciting mind trips and

45:41adventures?" Like, these are some big promises in this book. I mean, essentially what it's suggesting is you can live life when you're awake and when you're asleep. Yeah. Because you even said, is the dream the real world? Well, the dream is inside of you. It's all happening inside the real world. Exactly. I mean, most of the real world is a projection of what's going on inside. At least that's how I experience the real world. The real world is really just me mapping my subconscious onto the world, right? And so whatever is happening in our dreams, it is happening inside of us, inside of what we conceive as the world, right? So I think we're essentially saying: blur the line between asleep and awake. It's all your life. Yeah. So

46:31now I look at— In some respects, you could argue that the iceberg of you as a sentient being, as a consciousness: you have your conscious level and you have your subconscious level. I would argue, and I'm sure there's some evidence potentially to back up my side, at least, that we're looking at an iceberg model, where the conscious is really just what you see above the water. The subconscious is everything underneath. And because of that, we have the phenomenon of premonition, mhm, where it could happen during the daytime, but it could also happen when you're dreaming, where you dream something. Now, I know it's slightly different than a premonition, but when you dream something and then it actually happens—not so far as to suggest effective

47:19dreaming like this fellow, but something in between—where I've had, personally, in my life, situations where, pixel for pixel, the exact thing happens. And it's not necessarily the next day, but you have the dream, and then 3 months later that event happens. And there is no— I mean, the probability of that happening is the probability of the Big Bang, right? It's like— So I guess, throwing it to you, should we be paying— Well, first of all, journaling, I know, can help. But I mean, first of all, have you had this happen to you? And second of all, what do you think that is? That's pure magic when that happens to you. Yeah, so, a thousand percent. That's

48:06happened to me multiple times. Like, I will wake up from a dream and know that someone's going to reach out to me, right? Just know. And it could happen within the same day or up to a couple months in the future, but by the time that person reaches out to me, I'm like, "See, I knew it." And I think it's because we never disconnect from the field of information that is this universe. It's always there, but just like a radio, we can kind of tune in and tap into whatever is available. And in our dreamlike state, we tune to different stations than we can tune into or have access to when we're awake, right? And if we are really just this one— Let's say we all exist in the cloud, like we're a simulation, right? Then we're just accessing what's in the cloud through different states of

48:54consciousness. And so maybe what exists in the cloud is that someone wants to talk to me or reach out to me. And it's always really strange, too, when they do reach out, because they'll be like, "That's so funny. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I just finally got the hit today to text you," or just to call you. And it's like we're both kind of syncing up to that at the same time, but it's information that was already there. We just couldn't see it. And I think that life is like that. There's so much information there that we can't see at the time. Like, think about being a child and not being able to understand the sex jokes in a movie. It's there. You just can't tune into it, because your faculty is not able to perceive that information yet. Then you watch the movie 20 years later and you're like, "Wait, all that went over my head when I was seven years old." But it was the same movie. Yeah. Right? So all the information exists, but what we can tune into changes

49:43based on our state. So absolutely, that's happened. And then what was your other question? Well, I guess it's less of a question and more of just— First of all, knowing that you've had that experience is useful. Well, I just find it so— It's equally comforting and troubling. It's comforting because you know that there's some stuff out there that you don't know about, and then it's uncomfortable for the exact same reason. It's sort of like what we discussed about the story and the enigma. Yeah. Yeah, your story, actually, and the feelings it brought up. So actually, Tamir wrote a story, and he

50:30let me read it, and it was such an incredible piece of writing that left me feeling deeply confused and comfortable at the same time. I didn't feel unsettled by it. I didn't feel anxious. But it was definitely confusing, and in a deeply comforting way. And I think what you're talking about relates to that, because you said the iceberg model, which I think is really wise. But I think if we were to actually understand that we're so much more than what's above the water, that would feel really overwhelming for us as humans: to know that we are not just this 10% of our conscious mind, which we can control and monitor and observe in our waking life, but that we're so much greater than that, that we have information that is available throughout this universe to us. That's a lot.

51:20And so I think we unconsciously limit ourselves into thinking that this is all that matters, what's happening in my waking life. To actually give value and credit to your unconscious life is so overwhelming, and so we just don't look at that. But there are people who do look at that and think, oh, I may not have an intellectual understanding about that, but I accept it as part of me, and that makes me feel more taken care of, perhaps more faithful. And that's kind of the feeling that your story invoked, or evoked, which is that there's more than what I'm experiencing and know myself to be experiencing. And I need to experience it to know it to be true, right? It's okay. Even if you never interpreted a dream in your life, that's fine. But does it make you feel more supported in your waking life to know

52:08that you are more than just Tamir— Tamir, 30 years old, who owns a podcast? You're more than that, right? There's so much more to your life and your existence and your consciousness, and your sleeping life reveals that to you. Well, it gives you a really interesting window into a realm, if you're interested to go and, you know, jump into the rabbit hole and see what's there. If you don't, that's also perfectly fine, and your brain is going to process information in the background either way. Yes. Whether you like it or not, it's just that you can potentially tinker with the machine. How deep can you tinker with the machine? We don't know, right? Some people have become— That's the thing, though. It's all hearsay. Like, who knows?

52:55People could be lying to me about how talented they are at lucid dreaming. I have experienced it myself. But perhaps some of the stranger experiences I've had have been through sleep paralysis. Have you ever experienced this? Yeah, I've experienced it mildly, never to the point where I thought I was really in danger, but definitely those times were pretty sketchy. Yeah, and what's so sketchy about them is that you're experiencing both awakeness and asleep at the same time. And it is one of the most terrifying experiences I've ever had, but also one of the experiences that makes me really question what's going on all the time, because it felt like I was surfing two planes at the same time. Like, when we're asleep, that's one plane of existence, and

53:42then we wake up and we're like, oh, now I'm in reality, or I'm in my life. And with sleep paralysis—if no one's ever experienced it—it's essentially where your body is still asleep, as it is when you are sleeping, because you don't want to be acting out all your dreams when you're sleepwalking. There's a mismatch going on. But your limbs are asleep. You can't speak. Sometimes people try to scream. But you are—I don't want to say awake, because technically your body's not, but your mind is able to be where your body is. Like, I can know that I'm in this room right now, even though I can't speak, talk, lift my limbs or anything like that. And perhaps one of the scariest experiences recently was one where I fell asleep in my living room. This is actually very recent. I fell

54:29asleep in my living room, and I, quote unquote, woke up, but I was aware that I couldn't move my limbs. And all of my limbs and my face and my neck were on fire. I could feel crackling, almost like fireworks, as if everything in my body was— I could feel almost as if the cells were popping and renewing. It was the wildest sensation. I felt literally almost electrocuted, in a sense. And I knew that I couldn't move, but I could hear voices. I could hear voices, people talking about me, people talking about me. And it was this weird thing where I was surfing in my room, the reality of my room. I was

55:15like, I know I'm in my living room. I understood where I was, but I also wasn't there at the same time, and there were other beings. And I did some research on this experience after I woke up fully and was able to gain my voice back, and a lot of people have described this as an alien abduction, which I find really interesting, because as soon as those words were used to label the experience, I was like, oh, I could totally see where people get that, because there is this sense of, you're in your room, but you're also not. I also felt like I was in another place at the same time, with these beings that were speaking. And I'm— I know I sound fucking crazy right now, but I started to understand that there's multiple realities going on at the same time, and through my sleep paralysis

56:03I was just able to tune into them at the same time, which I normally can't. And so in my waking life, what that's offered me is just this sense of, there's more than what meets the eye. Yeah. I suppose I don't take everything I'm experiencing on this plane of reality that seriously. I understand that there's other things going on, and I don't know, there's something about that that brings me peace. You mentioned alien abduction. Do you think that phenomenon is responsible for a lot of these alien abduction stories? Yeah, that's what researchers say: that most of them are just experiencing sleep paralysis, and essentially their brains are kind of filling in information that they may have seen in movies and television. But the part

56:51that I think is hard for those people to get over and accept as just a phenomenon like sleep paralysis is that because you are, quote unquote, awake, it feels extreme. It is as real as this conversation that we're having, and it's very hard to deny the reality of an experience like that. And even myself, as I'm talking about it, I know I sound freaking bonkers, but it really happened. And that's the thing: what's the difference between what really happened and what didn't really happen? Yeah, well, I mean, from an empiricist perspective, when you want to know if something's true or not, it's based off of observation. Well, we can't find the actual thing. Like, we know we dream, as we said earlier,

57:38because we can see the waves changing and whatnot. But the level of—and then the sheer volume of anecdotes and personal experiences that you talk to—many people have a lot of— Not everyone has ghost experiences, but a lot of people have weird dream experiences. And one phenomenon that we haven't quite touched on yet is, when you're talking about how it's a different plane, there may even be a different set of rules in that plane. And the reason why I think so is because we know that time dilation is a real scientific phenomenon of physics. And we've all had the experience where we go for that nap, and I've gone for a nap, a 3-hour nap,

58:28a deep one, and I thought I'd lived maybe 3 months of my life. Yeah, I've had naps that are only 30 minutes. Yeah. And I feel like it's 3 days later. Yeah, something about that is very weird, because, yeah, we don't have a timer or a watch on in the dream, but we can feel— We generally can feel. We have a temporal sense. We know how much time has elapsed, unless we're on—you know, this is a very weird tangent, but if you go for any procedure at the hospital and they hit you up with a little dose of whatever—sometimes they put a drop of fentanyl in there or something, just to keep you up but knock you out at the same time—an hour feels like 5 minutes. I know people who go through surgeries. I've never actually gone

59:15through a surgery, knock on wood. But people who have gone through surgeries feel like they're in the surgery and then they wake up a minute later, even though the surgery is hours long. So there's something in our brains that's related to time that turns off. Have you ever— Have you done hypnosis? Hypnosis is a weird one. I haven't done it. I don't even know if it's possible on me. Oh my God, it definitely is. It definitely is. So I have to send you to my lady, Marilyn. Marilyn's a level three QHHT practitioner who studied under Dolores Cannon, who I'm a huge fan of. Do you know Dolores? Oh, you would— She's the GOAT? Is she the GOAT? You would love her. Yeah, she's the GOAT, for sure. And she trained a bunch of people before she passed. But one

1:00:04of the ladies that is a level three actually lives out in, I think, Maple Ridge, so she's not too far. And she has almost a two-, three-year waiting list. She's huge. Oh, wow. So I put my name on her list in 2020, and then I moved up the list and got to see her in 2021. So you go out to her house. She spends an entire day with you. She doesn't know how long your session is going to be, so she doesn't book more than one session, 'cause it can go for a long time. And we started off by just talking about basically the story of your life, and this is so that she can know certain anchors or certain significant people to ask questions about, depending on what you're sharing in this dream, hypnotized state. But yeah, I'll just shorten my story. She puts me under and asks me about where I am, and really crazy stuff. I'm like— Wait, but can you say what you mean by

1:00:52"put you under"? So basically, lead you into a hypnosis. So you go into a very deep state, where she is asking a different part of your mind questions than the one that you and I are using to speak in this conversation. And there were some points at which I remember responding, and then other points I don't remember at all being there and responding, but I know that I was. I come out of it, and she asked me, how long do I think I was under? I said 45 minutes, an hour. She was like, "You were under 6 and a half hours." Huh? Six? I have the recording to prove it. Wow. I'm speechless. I don't— I have the recording to prove it. And I thought that I remembered everything that I said, but I think I just

1:01:39remembered the 45 minutes that I perceived in time. This recording is 6 hours—five and a half, maybe, because maybe the first hour's just her leading me into it—about 5 and a half hours. And the shit I said, I was like, "Who the fuck is that?" And it really made me question my idea of who I am. I was like— Let's say your brain is divided into different quadrants, right? And you're like, "This is me," like this. But that's just the one part you keep using. There's all of these other parts that you don't identify as me, and those were the parts that she talked to in this hypnosis, right? And we talked about past lives. We talked about the meaning of certain people in my life, and things that I could not have

1:02:29possibly made up. I didn't even remember saying them. But hypnosis is one of those other things, like dreams, that really makes me question what I know to be true about myself. You should try it. Yeah, I'll have to look into that. Yeah, I know that it does exist, and people like you are telling me right now, firsthand experience with it. And I'm a skeptic. I know it sounds like I'm crazy, but I'm a natural skeptic. Like, I'm skeptical of alien abduction, which is why I'm enjoying having this conversation with you, 'cause it's coming through a filter that I trust, that is not just like, "Oh, this person will believe anything." No, I don't believe anything. Like, I wouldn't believe in lucid dreaming until I woke up in my own dream and fucked shit up. I would not believe in sleep paralysis and alien abduction

1:03:16unless I'd woken up on my couch and heard voices and sensed beings around me. These are such strange experiences that I'm having a hard time even sharing, because I'm like, I know a version of me is like, "What are you talking about?" But even with the hypnosis that I had several years ago, I don't tell many people about that experience either, because it's just strange. It's odd. Even me now, sitting here, I don't have perfect words for the experience. But what it has granted me is a sense of, I'm not just this little old me. And I think when we have that perspective of ourselves in our life, we feel very alone. We feel very limited. We lead very fearful lives. And tapping into hypnosis, having these strange dream experiences, has just made me feel like there's more at play than me and my

1:04:06little actions. There's more at play. I think there's definitely more at play. And from the ancient stories that we know, whether they're from the Bible or they're from Vedic scriptures or whatever it might be, wherever you choose your source from, from Greek mythology, dreams are rampant. Yeah, they're everywhere, and they're important, significantly important. Joseph's dreams, and then his interpretation of the pharaoh's dreams in Egypt, saved his ass from, you know, being killed, and that brought him up to the second— Imagine becoming second in command, the

1:04:52vizier in Egypt, by basically your skill of interpreting dreams. And whether that happened in base reality or not, the value culturally that we put on dreams is immense. And I feel like in the modern age we've fallen away from the significance of it, whereas you see it more in ancient cultures, and some other cultures as well, where there's more of an emphasis on the importance of dreams and premonition. We were talking earlier about the— This is slightly different, but back in the day there used to be, in Greece, before the Roman Empire, the Oracle. The Oracle, yeah. The Oracle of Delphi. And I've just been randomly studying about the Oracle lately, and, you

1:05:40know, there's a lot of argument as to the veracity of her, where her knowledge came from. Was she high on drugs? Was she this or that? But basically the goal was she was supposed to channel— In Greek mythology, Delphi is the center of the world. It's where Apollo, I don't know, did something or other, or Apollo lives. And so Apollo would live in that temple in Delphi, and you can still go there today and see it. I didn't have a chance this summer when I went, but it's really neat, actually. It's definitely on the list to go. But there was an Oracle, and the Oracle used to be some woman, and they would change, I think, over time. But she would somehow channel Apollo to answer questions. So people would come

1:06:28up to her with questions. And are you familiar with Ryan Holiday at all? Stoicism guy? Yeah, yeah. But this is very like modern-day Abraham-Hicks. Do you know who that is? I've heard of him. Who's—? Yeah, well, Abraham is actually the— Do I know him from—? Council of, you could say, gods, aliens, whatever, that Esther Hicks channels. And people go to these conferences all the time, and they're like, "Esther," or "Abraham—" Is he a conspiracy guy? It's not a conspiracy. It's more like this woman who is channeling a being that she has called Abraham, right? And then people go to her to ask Abraham questions, but it's her. It's her speaking. I'm sure there's a Netflix documentary. Yeah, she's channeling this whole thing. So it's very similar. So yeah, and obviously we know that, you know, there's a lot of sort of— There is conspiracy

1:07:18around the Oracle, where she got the information. Did she get it from priests that were hidden in a certain area, or was she high, and she got high in that certain area where certain fumes were coming out? But she did have some pretty bangers, as they call it nowadays. Yeah. And I think, with respect to books, Ryan Holiday was here in Vancouver, actually, just a couple weeks ago, and I went to go see him, and he had a small anecdote on the Oracle of Delphi. Just happened to be at the same time as I was studying more information about the Oracle, and I was like, oh, that's cool. And he was talking about how— Oh gosh, I forget which— It may have been— It was one of the— I don't know if it was Socrates. I'm not sure. Socrates may have predated that. But it was one of those guys, one of the main,

1:08:05main characters. He went to go visit the Oracle, and he was asking, "What's the best source of wisdom?" or something. And she's like, "The best source of wisdom is from the dead." And at face value it seems like kind of a non-answer. But the dead are, at least in the past—and even, I mean, even to this day, but we have a lot of modern books—but the way people live on, the way people become immortal, is through books. Yeah. Right? And so you're speaking to the dead every time you open a book. If you open up Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, you're talking to the dead. And so the Oracle's answer was essentially, "Speak to the dead," aka the most wisdom you're going to find are in books. So I thought that was

1:08:53just a cool thing. But the value in conduits, yeah, for information, tapping into sources that we're not fully aware of, I think is a very cool phenomenon that gets lost, because people write it off as pseudoscience. Where some— For sure there's a huge portion of grifters. There's a huge portion of pseudoscience. No one wants to give, you know, credit to those folks. But if we look at science, science is always working at the frontier of what we know and what we don't know. And everything that we don't know that you believe in, until it becomes a science, is going to be a pseudoscience, or is going to be some sort of weird woo-woo thing. Doesn't

1:09:44make it not true. It just means it still needs to be proven. So it's very possible that we could have these incredible experiences interfacing with this world within us that may be connected to a world without us that we're not aware of, but we just don't have the evidence yet to exactly detail it. Yeah, and I think it's extremely modern to discount things like dreams, right? Because even my grandmother—that's only two generations ago—she was quite the dream interpreter. She would interpret dreams for my mom, for me. Even now my mom remembers so many different symbols. I'll be like, "Mom, I dreamt about an egg. What does that mean?" She knows these things, because my grandma knew. So it's only really recent, I feel like, that we have discounted them. But yeah, this idea of the channel, the Oracle, that's

1:10:34been around for ages. I mean, even now— You're not even aware, right? But Abraham-Hicks, this is like a New Age channel, someone who is there to answer questions, and it's not necessarily the lady who's talking who's answering, it's the being coming through. But do you think that's a— That to me sounds like more of a grift than real. I'm— Hard to tell. I am very one foot in, one foot out. Yeah, yeah. On the whole experience, because— So I've gone to one of the conferences. I went in— You got to try it. You got to try it. I went in 2022, and what I will say is that if I were to, let's say, use some sort of scale to measure the vibrational resonance of what the person was saying, everything is at a very high frequency. It just is.

1:11:22Everything is coming from the lens of love. Everything is truly through the paradigm of acceptance. There is nothing that the human can get wrong or do wrong. Everything is a misguided perception, right? And so I feel that the words that Esther, or Abraham, offers are— Yeah, they're very helpful. Is it some being that is non-physical coming through? I mean, that's also been tracked from ancient Greek times as well. The idea of the genius was not that you were a genius, but that your genius came to you, right? And then it changed over time, and then they were like, "Oh, he's a genius." It used to be like, "Oh, his genius came." And it was like, you had this insight because

1:12:11your genius came to you. And even now, when you ask musicians, "Oh, where did you get the inspiration for your album?" they're like, "I don't know. I feel like I didn't even write it. I feel like it just kind of came through me. I feel like someone gave it to me, and I was just the medium." So if that's true, then I guess we're all conduits. Then either we all are or we all aren't. We're certainly conduits from another source, whether that source is the bottom of our own iceberg that lives within us, or that iceberg is in some quantum entangled state in Alpha Centauri that they're running a simulation from. It's more likely the former. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's funny that people are like, "Oh my God, Abraham," and that's why I'm foot out, because I think we all have an inner Abraham.

1:12:58Yeah. Right? But just because Esther Hicks has branded and named hers and decided to host conferences, right, it doesn't make hers more valuable or more omniscient than your own sense of knowing. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, even the creator of the monotheistic religions of today was Abraham, who you could argue had an inner Abraham to channel the idea of one God. But on this podcast I don't want to go too deep. I think at some point I'll do a series on religion, where I'm going to bring priests, imams, rabbis, swamis, all sorts of folks, 'cause I want to grill them all, basically, on aliens. Yeah. That's going to be dope. I can't wait for that series. But no, I think for our purposes

1:13:48today, I think the iceberg model makes the most sense. Now, one phenomenon that I've faced, which is weird— I don't know if this has happened to you, but no one's really been able to explain it. I've had some therapists in the past that have been really good about being open to these ideas, but none have actually given me any answers, 'cause they don't really— I mean, there aren't really any objective answers, right? And from a subjective point of view, you either like their answer or you don't, and I haven't really liked their answers. But I will randomly, without any lie whatsoever, remember a dream from 20 years ago that I haven't thought about for 20 years. Okay. It's not like a recurring thing, like, "Oh yeah, I remember

1:14:35that dream when you got heartbroken" or something. No, no, it's not like that. It'll be like a dream that— I had a dream once about a 6-foot-tall fly, house fly, that was chasing me around Yaletown. That was the dream. That was the dream. It was scary. And it's a— 20? I was a kid. No, I was a kid, right? I'm 30 now, so I was quite young. Was maybe even younger than 10 years old. But I'll be washing the dishes, okay, or doing something, and all of a sudden the dream's there, with no stimuli whatsoever. And it happens across dozens and dozens of different dreams. They're not recent dreams, like, "I had this dream last week." It's always from a long, long time ago. Yeah. And they just appear, and then I'm like, why? And my mind doesn't

1:15:23deliver any answer, and then I just move on to the dishes again. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the way I want to respond to that is, well, there probably isn't a why. There isn't a reason. But ultimately, what do you think knowing why would offer you? It's something about— To me, it's something about the mechanism, about where are these dreams living in my brain? Because it's like they come out like a water spout or something, just out of nowhere, as opposed to a memory, where sometimes you'll have a scent and you'll be like, "Oh yeah, I remember that scent from this camp that I went to, campfire," whatever. And whatever memory you have, it's usually based off of

1:16:11stimuli or emotional stimuli. I just find that these are very sterile, and they come out of nowhere. And so the mechanism is interesting for me. Like, why is that occurring, as opposed to the meaning? Probably doesn't have much meaning. But the only reason why we would want to know why is so that we could derive or assign some sort of meaning. Yeah, well, I do want to have a mapping of some sort, right? Like, to have a GPS of how does this part of my brain work. If anything, it just creates curiosity to look deeper into it and study it. But there's just a lot of unexplained phenomena. I'm sure if this was a show where we could take callers, we would hear some crazy dreams. Yeah, we would be inundated with that stuff. One thing I want to share with you, which I'm curious to get your thoughts on, is the negative side of

1:16:58dreams, and how dreams sometimes can torture us. They can torment us, in cases of, let's say, people passing away and then showing up, in cases of heartbreak, and you're back together again, or something like that, where people really sometimes don't want a dream. Almost like the protagonist of The Lathe of Heaven, although his is for a different reason. But they dread going to sleep. They dread dreaming, because their dreams haunt them. And one anecdote, just to tie it together, is from a trilogy that a lot of people may be aware of at this point. It's called The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, or how do you say, Cixin Liu. He's a Chinese sci-fi writer. I guess you watched the series? I'm obsessed. Yeah, so the series is great, and the next season, I

1:17:48think, has been renewed for a new season, so that'll be book two. So each book will be, I think, a series. And then there's a book four. And the book four— Most people who've even read the books, which I highly recommend people to read—the books are phenomenal, or even the audiobooks, the narrators are incredible, so pick your poison on that. But there's a fourth book that is fan fiction that was given the blessing by the author to become part of the series. It's like Wicked and The Wizard of Oz? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly like that. So this book is essentially— It's giving you some answers that you may have

1:18:34wanted in the trilogy. Okay. Answers that fans wanted, I guess. Yeah, basically answers the fans wanted, and the author approved them. Okay. But the book is called The Redemption of Time, and this is a big spoiler, so I don't even know if I should be telling you this. I know. But I'm going to. You are aware that they sent— Because of the first season, they sent a brain to space. Yes. Yeah, okay. So that's really all that we need to focus on right now. But you're aware that they sent a brain to space, correct? I'm like, yes. I'm worried that if I tell you, it might spoil something. Okay. Why does this feel important to share right now? What does this help us get to? It feels important to share because there's an idea that—and this is—

1:19:24so let's leave Three-Body. I honestly don't want to spoil it. But if you had the choice to torture someone— We've heard of waterboarding and terrorism and all that stuff, right? And we know that that's illegal to do, 'cause it's a very severe form of torture. Yeah. Right? If you could imagine the most severe form of torture, you would almost want to waterboard someone's mind. You'd almost want to— Like, if I knew your fear, right, that you told me today on the show, that you've overcome. But let's say I met you before you overcame it, and I had the ability to put some sensors on you and drown you repeatedly with— Let's say I could— Let's say I could

1:20:12I could control your dreams, and I could get you to always dream that dream. Yeah. And that is how I would punish you. In my mind, that would be the most severe form of torture. Yeah. And it has power for as long as you refuse to face the fear. No one can torture you, though, if you face the fear. Yeah, but I guess you have to face it consciously. You have to do the work in order to face it. Yes. It doesn't happen by accident. Yeah. So the worst hell is basically the fear of your hell. So yes, if you have a torture device that allows me to envision the illusion of my fear over and over again, but I don't feel that I have the agency or the power to face that fear, then I'm totally in hell forever. Yeah. And the interesting thing about bad dreams, much like good

1:21:01dreams: they just show you what you're not willing to look at. Mhm. That's what they show you. You can avoid looking at things in your conscious waking life. We lie to ourselves all the time. Like, if I ask someone, "How are you doing?" they could totally lie to me and themselves, that they feel totally fine. Their dreams will tell them how they really feel. Do you think that the real person exists in their— Like, someone— What am I trying to say? Is that the most real version of themselves? There is no themselves. There's no identity, right? We lose that in the dream, right? We hallucinate the identity when we wake up, but in the dream we lose that. What is real, or what is happening, is what we're feeling. That's all that's real. Yeah. Like,

1:21:49you being Tamir, that's made up, and I just agree to it, and everyone else, you know, agrees to it. That's not real. But what you're feeling right now is real. We can measure that. We feel more at night. I think we're less distracted at night, and therefore people will allow themselves to feel more. We distract ourselves all day long with our phones, our cars, all those things. But we're feeling. We're just less aware of what we're feeling. Is there an influence of— 'Cause there's an idea of a witching hour. I think it's somewhere between midnight to 3:00 a.m. This is a phenomenon, a concept, yes, that does exist. Is that real, or is that just the lack of distraction getting people to live as you—? I think it's the lack of

1:22:37distraction, but also I think there is something to be said about the hours in which most people are sleeping. There's just less energetic disturbance in the air. You can feel it. Like, if you wake up at 3:00 in the morning, there's just less going on. I mean, not only just visually on the streets, but think about everyone thinking all the time and being in beta brain wave mode, right? I think we feel that, in a sense. So if most people are in a delta wave, we can feel that too. Yeah, interesting. Do you think— I'm rapid-firing questions at you right now. These are things that I want to get. What do you think about that? What do you think about the witching hour? I think there's definitely a— I think distractions is a very

1:23:25rational answer. Mhm. That's definitely a rational answer: the fact that your body is shifting, just physiologically, and the chemistry inside you is shifting as well, preparing for sleep. Yeah. But I do think there is something about the night. There is something about the night. There's a poem by Hermann Hesse where he loathes the night. He said, "I'm scared of the night." And when it's nighttime, he just wishes— Because at night he has to face that. Maybe because of the lack of distractions, you have to face that. Things are quiet. You have to face those fears that are going on, those bad feelings, those— Maybe you're not looking forward to

1:24:11dreaming, whatever it is. A lot of times it comes out of the night, and Hermann Hesse discussed this in his poem. And then he goes on to say, "I wish I could just be in a field with the sun shining on me, laying on the grass." Then he can dream of the night. Then he's ready to go to sleep. Well, it's interesting. People who have a bad relationship to sleep oftentimes have a really strong relationship to control and fear, because sleep is the ultimate surrender. Yeah. Right? People who can't go to sleep have hyperactive nervous systems that are afraid all the time. If you can't go to bed and close your eyes and fall asleep within 5 to 15 minutes, you're in fear, right? Because think about it from a physiological standpoint: you can only fall asleep if your body is safe.

1:25:00Otherwise you have to be the one to protect yourself. So when we are hopped up on adrenaline and fear, our body's like, "I guess we got to protect ourselves. Why would you fall asleep?" Yeah. Falling asleep easily is a sign of feeling safe in your body. So when people feel like, "I don't want to go to sleep. I hate the night," they oftentimes are feeling very afraid. And you have to almost give in and go through it in order to come out of it. Yeah. You have to give in to fear every night, and the right to do— Yeah, you have to lose control every night. Yeah. Like, when you're asleep, you cannot control, you cannot manage, you cannot protect. You are so vulnerable in sleep. Like, look at a person sleeping. Even a Hitler is innocent in sleep, right? You're so vulnerable. And so to release yourself

1:25:50into sleep is to trust. So people who have really bad relationships to sleep do not trust themselves. They do not trust life. Like the protagonist of the story "Sleep." I mean, it's very, very apt, that story, because it's about dreaming, it's about sleeping. It's about someone who can't sleep for weeks. She stays up, she does all sorts of stuff, and eventually it gets to her, and you don't really know what happens in the end, but she sort of succumbs to it, and these entities just come and basically take her. Yeah, it's terrifying. Yeah, yeah. It's very reflective of a relationship to not wanting to go to sleep. Yeah. So I mean, we've talked so much about sleep and so much about dreams, but perhaps the most helpful thing, if you're not someone who feels comfortable exploring your dreams or the symbols in your subconscious, just

1:26:38evaluate what your relationship to sleep is. Yeah. I have a very positive relationship to sleep. I can close my eyes and fall asleep within 30 seconds. It's my superpower. I can fall asleep in any position, any place: train, car, anywhere. Because I feel genuinely pretty trusting of life. I don't feel like I'm in danger. I don't experience the world as a hostile place. I choose not to. But if we do experience the world as a hostile place, as opposed to friendly, and we don't trust ourselves, then someone has to be a watcher. Yeah. At all times. We can never relax. We can never become fully vulnerable in sleep. Yeah. Wow, this has been a fantastic conversation, and one that has— I mean, it's just, frankly, a kaleidoscope. There's so many

1:27:25places you can go with it. I feel today that we've touched on a lot. We've given our listeners a lot to think about and take home. If you had to leave them with one bit of homework to help improve— You obviously have a great relationship with sleep, but you didn't always have a great relationship with sleep. So how, or what, could maybe our listeners implement to help improve that and get them closer to— I mean, we're going to start with, if you have a bad relationship with sleep, then we're going to get you to a neutral, and then maybe a good, and then eventually you might even want to control your sleep and your dreams and have the one superpower that we might actually all have inside of us. Yeah, what a question. I think

1:28:16ultimately the point of any of the suggestions I have, or the work that I do, is to create more self-trust, right? Even what I'm offering—hypnosis, alien abduction, dreams—all of these things have just given me a little bit more self-trust than what I had to begin with. So in order to develop more self-trust, we have to give ourselves little moments where we build a trusting relationship with ourselves. And so you need to learn how to keep promises to yourself. And so whether it's to do with sleep or your own personal habits, start just keeping your own promises, and make them really small. Like, if the habit is, "I want to go to sleep earlier tonight," go

1:29:04to sleep 5 minutes earlier, and learn that you can trust yourself to be able to create that result. I think that we don't feel good in life because we don't trust that we have our own backs. I think most of us are afraid that something's going to happen and then ultimately we're going to be mean to ourselves about it, and that we're going to be like, "See, I didn't do it again." So we have to create self-trust. And then with respect to dreams, just start requesting that you receive an answer. And I think just requesting it actually creates a solution. Just asking for it presupposes that it's there. That's enough, right? Just to go to sleep and be like, "Help me figure out how I'm going to solve this issue." Just by you doing that,

1:29:53you birth an answer. You may not know what the answer is, but you birth the existence of one. And so that's why I think prayer is so powerful. I'm not even religious, but I think when you pray to a god, you basically hallucinate that there is one, and then you feel more faith and you feel more trust. And so everything is about feeling safer in your body, which is to feel safer in the world. So build little self-trust building blocks, and yeah, in your dreams, ask for what you want, because making the request naturally presupposes that it's there. I think Tesla— Or it was either Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison who said to never go to sleep without making a request to your subconscious. To your subconscious, yeah, exactly. 'Cause your subconscious will figure it out for you. You don't have to know how it's going to

1:30:40work out. Your conscious mind can only know what it's already seen, so how could it know all the infinite ways in which you could experience a solution or a better way? That gets me to think: we have a conscious IQ that we could measure. I wonder if we would ever be able to measure the IQ of our subconscious, because it's got to be significantly high. Significantly higher. It knows infinite— It has infinite access to information, and our dreams are showing us that, right? But our consciousness is such a small sliver of what's available. Yeah. Subconscious IQ versus conscious IQ. Yeah, well, we might have to dive into that in a later show. Well, thanks for coming on, Sam. Thanks for having me. This was so fun, and I got to say a lot of things I've never said before,

1:31:27including my worst fear. It's crazy now, talking about it, because, oh my God, I cried for months and months and months, feeling so afraid this was going to happen to me. And now I'm just like, come on, bring it. If it happens, it happens. But what's really interesting is that it's the fear of it happening that creates those types of dysfunctional patterns that could actually lead to it happening. When you don't have the fear that it's going to happen, it's very unlikely that it happens. Yeah, well said. I love how you articulated all of your thoughts today. It's a pleasure, and I'm sure we'll chat again at some point in the future on another very interesting topic. Let's go there. Yeah. Thank you for having me on Nectar of Time. This was super fun. And for, yeah, just creating a space that feels so

1:32:14fun and, yeah, so curious. It was awesome. We're going to stay curious, and we'll see you on the next one.