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When I was a little kid I had a lot of nightmares, which was weird,
because I had a very happy and healthy and safe childhood, and I had a loving family.
So it was just weird.
>> [LAUGH] >> Being a kid is weird.
Brains are weird.
Life is weird.
Whatever, I had a lot of nightmares.
And some of the bad ones rank among my most vivid childhood memories.
I had dreams about evil trees.
I had dreams about giant eels, dreams about shape-shifting grandmas.
>> [LAUGH] >> Yeah, those stay with you, over time.
>> [LAUGH] >> Not being able to fall
asleep because you're afraid when you're a kid is a very dark thing.
But the strange thing is I really wouldn't change any of that,
I actually kind of treasure it.
That's because having nightmares as a kid and spending time with that
gave me two massive blessings and I'll share one now and one at the end.
The first is that I became very,
very good at figuring out whether I was in a dream or in real life.
And knowing the difference is everything.
Nightmares really tend to lose their edge when you know they're not real.
Things chase you a little bit slower and scary things become smaller and
the world just gets a little more pliable.
And weird things start to happen.
You can do strange things when you know it's not real.
There's this kind of overwhelming euphoria and a feeling of empowerment.
When I figured out that I could fly in my dreams as a kid,
it was profoundly cathartic.
It was healing.
because it allowed me to take something which terrified me about my brain and
being alive and turned into something creative and joyful.
And I actually welcomed my nightmares,
because they would help me figure out that I was in a dream.
And it wasn't until I turned 18 that I realized this wasn't my private mental
invention to beat nightmares but a phenomenon called lucid dreaming.
And lucid dreaming is where you figure out that you're in a dream and
you start to control it.
And you can do whatever you want.
You can fly, you can breathe underwater.
You can move things with your mind.
You can shoot ice out of your hands.
There's really no known limits to what you can do in a lucid dream.
And when I got to university, I stumbled on the work of Stephen Liberge,
who's a psychophysiology PhD from Stanford who, in the 80's,
did all the foundational literature on what lucid dreaming is and how to do it.
And I just fell all the way down this rabbit hole.
I just devoured his work.
And there was this online corpus of lucid dreaming techniques put together by a very
eccentric community of lucid dreamers on how to do it.
And I wasn't the only one setting this, there were other students on campus,
who had mastered the art of lucid dreaming.
Flying was nothing to them.
They were having out of body experiences and composing music in their dreams and
raising landscapes with a swipe of their hand.
And the craziest thing that I learned falling down that rabbit hole was that
the techniques on how to lucid dream can be learned, practiced, and
mastered by anyone willing to try.
So I'm just going to walk you through some of those techniques that I found
incredibly useful over the past few years.
But there's three fundamental gates to lucid dreaming.
And every night that you don't have a lucid dream,
you have failed to pass through one of these three gates.
>> [LAUGH] >> They are, in order,
realize, did you realize that you were in a dream?
That's step one.
Remain, once you realized that you were in a dream,
were you able to stay there without waking up?
And then most importantly, did you remember that that dream happened at all?
So let's start by talking about the first one, which is also my favorite.
How do you have that epiphany where you realize that you're in a dream?
It's this electric moment.
And the only way to create that moment is to ask as often as possible,
in reality, am I dreaming right now?
And expert lucid dreamers are checking many times a day whether they're in
a dream or reality.
So I'm just going to walk you through some of those reality checks that you can use
to distinguish.
Number one, and I hope people will do this with me.
This is your North Star for figuring out if your in dream,
shut your nose with your hand, and then try and breathe through it.
This should not be working.
>> [LAUGH] >> But if it is working,
congratulations, you are almost definitely dreaming right now.
>> [LAUGH].
>> This talk is about to get way more interesting for you.
>> [LAUGH] >> But for the rest of us,
it's just important to remember that breathing is always regulated by what
you're doing in reality.
If your sleeping body is breathing, you're always going to be able to breathe in
a dream, so this is a great way to distinguish.
Another easy one is that you can take out your phone and look at the home screen and
look at the time, and put it away and then look back at it again.
If the numbers change significantly, or if they don't look like numbers at all,
you're very likely to be in a dream.
That's just because brains have a hard time holding alphanumeric symbols in
place while you're in a dream, they shift around a lot.
Then there's this other one, which is kind of frightening, honestly.
>> [LAUGH] >> Look at your hands and
just count the fingers.
If you have about 10.
>> [LAUGH] >> And they look like hands,
you're probably in reality.
But if not, you're almost definitely in a dream and this is very consistent.
I just have to warn you, once you realize you've never had normal hands in your
dreams your entire life and didn't notice, it can kind of blow you away.
This one's also a bit more discreet than the nose thing, so
that's a personal preference, I'll let you decide there.
And then finally, I had to include this one because it's just too weird.
Light switches don't work in dreams, they just don't.
>> [LAUGH] >> Brains can't handle changing the visual
landscape of a space that quickly.
And let's just admit that plenty of light switches don't work in real life, so
you can get some false positive with this.
>> [LAUGH] >> So just be careful with that.
>> [LAUGH] >> Okay, so once you've achieved lucidity
and you're having that moment, how do you avoid waking up immediately?
This is actually a lot harder than it sounds, people underappreciate this.
because most lucid dreams will last only five or ten seconds, which is a bummer.
Okay, so this is a bit more art than science, but really important.
You have to act super nonchalant as soon as you realize you're in a dream.
You just have to act like you don't care at all.
And you're going to get a rush of adrenaline and your heartbeat will go up.
So you actually have to pretend like someone's watching you.
I have to do this every time.
And the point is that if you can get through this five or
ten second window of over excitement,
then you're probably going to have the whole dream, which is great.
And then more concretely, you have to focus on your body in the dream,
not your body in real life.
So the way I do that is, in the dream I just rotate my hands in little circles and
I just look at my body.
And the point is that you can't become aware of your sleeping body in your bed.
If you do that, you're going to get ejected out of your dream and
thrown back into that body, so that'll end it immediately.
Okay, so you've had a lucid dream, how do you actually remember that it happened?
And this is so important and so difficult, because if you don't remember it,
it's really as if it didn't happen at all.
And this is hard, 95 to 99% of dreams are totally forgotten.
And many people report not having dreams at all,
which to me is as tragic as it is totally misinformed,
because they've shown in labs over and over that everyone dreams every night.
It's just a matter of remembering it.
So many people know that dream journals really help with this.
And you can train that muscle using a dream journal.
But they just don't seem to work for a lot of people.
And the reason is that they're missing a key aspect, which is that the dream
journal has to be at arm's length from where you're sleeping.
It has to be under your pillow or under your mattress or on your bed side table.
And the reason for that is that standing up and
moving around is what wipes your dream memory completely.
You have to practice remembering everything from a lying down position.
And if you don't have a dream journal handy, you can just use a smartphone and
take a voice memo too.
Any bullets or fragments you remember help with this, and
it is a muscle that you can train over time.
And then much more bizarrely, and this has been shown to
work by the National Sleep Foundation in empirical studies, just say out loud,
I want to remember my dreams, before you go to bed.
This actually works.
And the basis for
this is in the psychology dark magic of cognitive dissonance.
And we definitely don't have time to talk about that.
But suffice to say, this is easy and we should all be doing it.
>> [LAUGH] >> Okay, so
those are some of the important techniques.
But why does this matter?
Why am I even talking about this?
Flying is cool, we like flying.
It's a proven nightmare therapy, we like that.
Nightmares are bad.
But I think it's worth admitting that no one really knows why this is valuable or
even why it's possible.
There's no scientific consensus on why humans need to sleep,
much less why they dream, and
lucid dreaming's thought to be more a bug than a feature of human development.
So why is this worth our time and attention?
The second blessing that having nightmares as a kid gave me was a truth that I've
always taken to be self-evident,
which is that having a healthy relationship with your mind is everything.
That's everything.
That's what life is.
Life is whatever happens in your brain before you die.
And on one hand, that's terrifying, because brains aren't always good,
they'll sometimes do stuff like give kids nightmares, which is weird.
And living life in the cage of your mind is kind of a bummer.
But over time, in the process of lucid dreaming,
which I can only describe as spiritual, I've come to realize that
turning your mind into a creative space where you can experiment and
witness yourself and have that moment of awakening where you're like,
these colors, and these faces, and these landscapes.
That's all me.
And just witness the mystery of your mind.
That's among the greatest joys there is in life.
And people wake up from lucid dreams excited to listen to what their mind is
telling them, and then witness that mystery throughout their life and
understand their mind better.
So I encourage all of you, just try it.
Just play with it.
It may change for you as it did for me how you experience life in your own mind.
Thank you.
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