Lucid Dreaming as a Learning Tool

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Go to the Guardian com dot slash stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's the guardian dot com slash stateside Most of us don't take dreams that seriously , or maybe we just don't think about them very much because we have no idea what to make of them . They feel like brain noise . Weird little stories that dissolve the moment we wake up . And even when they linger, we tend to treat them as curiosities at best . But there's a long tradition that goes back to Freud that takes a very different view that dreams are surfacing something real about us . They're a glimpse into our unconscious minds . There's also modern dream science and sleep labs where researchers have learned a lot about what dreams are, why they happen , and what they reveal about the sleeping mind. And yet, despite all that , dreams still retain this mythical status . We understand them better for sure , but there's something unavoidably strange about them . I'm Sean Elling and this is The Grey Area . Today's guest is Michelle Carr. She's a neuroscientist who studies dreams and nightmares . Her argument is that dreams are not random . She thinks they're tied directly to memory, emotion, and mental health in ways we're probably only beginning to understand . But she also goes further than that , suggesting that dreams don't just reflect our lives and our mental health. Dreams also shape our waking life . And she says we can cultivate the ability to interact with our dreams to make them more useful Michelle Carr. Welcome to the show . Thank you. Happy to be here. What is your simplest answer to the question why do we dream? What are dreams for? I don't know, I don't know that there's a simple answer to that question unfortunately . But you know, I tend to think simple. Simple as yeah, okay, simple . It's just to me, dreaming is just it's just our conscious experience while we're sleeping. You know, all throughout the day, we're conscious. We're having experiences, we're feeling things we're perceiving things, we're thinking about things. And that processing it just continues while we're asleep . And it continues in different ways . And I think that has a lot to do with the functions of sleep and helping us to kind of sort through our memories and sort through our experiences in a meaningful way. But to me it's dreaming is just it's like our sleeping form of consciousness. It's how we experience being alive while asleep. That's such a good way to put it. I mean, because I heard you use the word conscious. Do you think we're actually conscious when we're sleeping? I think it's a form of consciousness. It's definitely different from waking consciousness, but even during the day we go through all sorts of different states of consciousness. Sometimes we're really focused on a task, sometimes we're daydreaming, sometimes we're completely oblivious to what's happening around us and we're completely lost in our inner world. And I think during sleep we go through similar experiences which I would say are conscious, some part of us is feeling is living, is experiencing rem,embering, thinking , you know, even though we're asleep. So that's that's consciousness to me. You know, there's this tradition . I guess it goes back to Freud, but it probably goes it's probably much older than that . But it's where we get a lot of these ideas that dreams are symbolic and connected to unconscious emotions. What does modern neuroscience say about that . No, I think there still is kind of a big field of research around how dreaming in dreaming and in sleep states, we do seem to be processing a lot of emotions and maybe a lot of things that we don't necessarily think about while we're awake . And in part it might be because we're suppressing we don't want to think about these things. We're suppressing these thoughts and these emotions while we're awake, which is kind of a more fraud ian idea, but it's also something that does bear out in modern research as well . But in part, it's just that in dreaming the brain is functioning in a different way. You know, our emotions are activated in a different way and our thoughts are connected in a much more loose and fluid way than they are in waking life . And so we do think this is maybe part of the function of REM sleep or of dreaming is in allowing us to draw to the surface like emotional conflicts or stressors and to think about them and engage with them in a way that's adaptive. So it helps us. Some people call it an like overnight therapy during during sleep . That is helping us to adapt and to engage more in a better way the next day. So is that to say you think it's we're dealing with emotions in our dreams that we're repressing or that we don't want to deal with when we're awake . It's not only the emotions we don't want to deal with. I think it's all of our emotions are being processed while we're sleeping, but for sure there are studies that show, for example, if you actively try not to think about a problem before you go to sleep, maybe a personal conflict or an emotional situation, something that's going on in your life. If you try not to think about it, then you're more likely to dream about it. And that dreaming about kind of stressful things or whatever conflicts are going on, it can help you to process them. It can help you to think about them in a new way that's potentially adaptive . And even in the absence of dreaming, Rem sleep seems to serve this function, that it reactivates emotional events, emotional memories in a state a brain state, a mental state that helps us to process these things. It's easier than thinking about them while awake in a way. Is there something to the idea that maybe dreams are just the brain running simulations? Yeah, while we're sleeping. Yeah, there's something definitely entire theory is written about the simulation model of dreaming that dreaming is a simulation of and that can be framed in different ways. It's kind of a simulation in the sense that it's really allowing us to re experience things memories that we've had from the past . But there is also kind of a predictive ele ment to it that it's presenting us all sorts of new versions dreaming doesn't just replay memories, right? It creates new scenarios that we've never experienced before. And so part of the simulation view is that it's allowing us to experience all sorts of variations on things that we might be likely to experience in the future. So many dreams have this dual quality of being both reco llection and imagination . And so what's going on there ? Like how do you think about that relationship between dreams and memories? Yeah, I mean, I think you described it pretty spot on for what we think is happening that there is kind of a reactivation of a lot of memories. You're drawing from pieces of memory, not like entire episodes or entire even characters or people like often you'll dream about say someone we dream very often about people who are in our lives, friends and family members, but even in the dream that visual representation of the person is often an amalgam ation of other things, like I dream of my mother, but for some reason she looks like my friend and also this stranger that I saw the other day, right? This is also we think part of just how the brain is working during REM sleep, especially that it's there's a lot of kind of excessive activation in cortical areas of the brain where memories are stored in a lot of association between different things, connections between things that aren't necessarily the same when we're awake. That when we're awake we have kind of a more restricted activation of memory networks. And in REM sleep is just like broadly spreading throughout the brain and allowing us to associate all sorts of new ideas and new concepts. So rim sleep, rapid eye movement, is that yeah. That's like deep sleep, right? Is that where the majority or all of dreaming occur s, or can we also dream in different phases of sleep We dream in every phase of sleep, but REM sleep it feels people subjectively feel like they're very deeply asleep during REM sleep, but it's actually a much more active phase of sleep. Your brain looks almost like it's awake and there's a lot of kind of twitches in the body and that's when yeah your eyes are moving rapidly and your heart rate and your respiration rate might change . And so Rem sleep occurs a lot at the end of the night and in the morning and it is associated with the most vivid dreams, the most a lot more like sensory motor activity and perceptual vividness and emotional intensity. And that all has to do with kind of the activation in the brain and the body that's going on at the time . But we do dream in every other stage of sleep, you know, from the moment you first start to fall asleep, which is called stage one . Already, you start to have really bizarre images that can pop into your mind . And in nonreM sleep as well, which occurs more predominant ly early in the night. People have dreams, but they can be maybe more thought like. So there's more of a feeling of like I'm thinking about something rather than I'm like fully immersed within a dream . And sometimes people just they have the feeling that they were conscious but didn't really have a dream at all. Like, you know, you can wake someone up out of a deep slow wave sleep and they might say, well, I feel like I was asleep, but I don't there was no immersive dream to speak of, just kind of consciousness. If the brain is processing memories while you're dreaming, is it also reorganizing them in some way, almost like changing the shape of the memories themselves so that like the construction of the memories are different as a result of the dreams or dreaming. Yeah, I think there's kind of multiple steps in the process. In one phase, you know, maybe more in non REM sleep, it seems like there is a role of the brain in just reactivating and strengthening a specific memory. Like if you learn something during the day then during the night during nonrom sleep, it seems like it's like that memory is like reactivated just to make sure that you hold on to it essentially . But then there's also like I was mentioning kind of an association between other memories. So one thing we've noticed is that in dreams we'll see recent memories from the past day. They'll often be associated with other memories from a week ago or from , you know, years ago . And we think this is kind of reflecting a broader function sleep in helping us to integrate memory into our entire like autobiographical memory network, you know, like whatever I experience today, I don't want to just hold on to that memory. I want to associate it to everything similar that I've experienced in the past. What are all of my related memories? So that's a type of reorganization. I think that's happening in placing the memory in the context of other similar things that have happened in the past. If dreams do serve some function for the brain . Is there some reason why our brain seem almost designed to forget them ? Like why do they have to be so incoherent? Why do we forget the vast mood? You know what I mean? Like it seems like our brains if there is a reason for this, our brains could have done us a solid and just make them coherent and memorable so we could sort them out. Like why are why are they both useful and necessary but, also like almost impenetrable to the dreamer. I think that's a huge question. And I think it's actually part of the reason that dreams have not been taken seriously and that the assumption has been that they're not useful, they're not functional is because we all go through our lives forgetting almost all of our dreams, right? Even if you remember your dreams, you remember like thirty seconds in the morning, three times a week. So it's normal that you would assume, oh that's insignificant. Nothing is happening. But if we do a research study and we wake someone up twenty times during the night, every single time they're dreaming , not every, but let's say like seventy percent of the time they're dreaming something, right? So that activity is happening all through the night. We just we forget it . And so it's the assumption is that nothing is going on there and that it's not useful. But I don't know, to me it's the fact that we forget it doesn't mean that it's not useful . And there's some theories that like maybe we forget it because it's so bizarre and incoherent that it would be confusing to the mind to hold on to all of these memories. Like it's a way of keeping our waking life separate from our inner life. That's kind of one theory about why we forget it. It could just be purely a biological explanation. You know, we're in a state a brain state where memory encoding is just not possible in the same way that is possible in waking life . But nevertheless, you know, just because I don't remember something even in waking life doesn't mean it didn't do something like every conscious that I experience that I have in waking life is probably connected to my emotions, it's connected to my memories. It's consciousness is having an impact . Even if I don't remember everything that I've thought about or experienced today if I was if I did it, if I experienced it, if I was conscious , there was some impact there, you know? And I think dreaming is the same thing. It's just we don't we don't have the recollection, so it's we kind of dismiss it. I know several people who treat their dreams like they are urgent messages. Like it is their subconscious mind trying to tell their conscious mind something, important and they have to figure it out. Is there any way to play that game with yourself without essentially just projecting whatever story you want to project onto your dreams? There's definitely ways of working with your dreams in order to get insight. And there's, you know, research studies on this process showing that yes, you know, having discussions about dreams or going through other processes of working with dreams, you can get personal insight, you can get creativity, you can get knowledge about maybe , you know, problem solving, for example . But your question , I think you're implying like is the message really from the dream or are you just kind of through thinking about it and talking about it and waking life, you just come up with a response anyways that's a bit harder to get at, but there are some research studies showing that for example if you discuss your dream in a certain method versus discussing a waking life memory, you're going to get more insight out of the dream discussion. Or if you know , if you dream about a certain problem or dream about a certain creative topic, you're going to draw more creativity and more insight out of that than if you just think about it or talk about it. There's a lot of confounds in there scientifically, but the short answer is I think there are ways of working with dreams and using dreams and at the end of the day , where precisely the insight came from , it might be hard to pinpoint. And a lot of dreaming is completely random, I think . It's not all like big messages to decipher Support for the show comes from Quince . Summer presents a set of fashion problems. You want to wear upscale clothes, things that look nice, but are also light and airy. Enter Quints, they focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. Think breathable linen and soft organic cotton. Well made basics, but without the luxury markup. Quintz European linen pants and shirts are the perfect warm weather up grade to add to your rotation, starting at just thirty four dollars. Their tees are soft and easy to wear and their lightweight cotton sweaters are perfect for cooler summer nights. 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That's BOM BAS dot com slash gray area, code gray area and check out What do you make of nightmares, right? Because you said earlier and you say this in the book that you think of dreams as a kind of overnight therapy, right? Like if the brain is processing, reprocessing, emotional experiences, maybe stressful ones. What do you make of nightmares which seem, like the opposite of therapy? But the epigraph quote in the book is about how the nightmare is the most important and useful kind of dream. So tell me more about that . Yeah, nightmares do they do still seem to be related to the process I was talking about earlier. Nightmares tend to occur in people who have experienced adversity or severe emotional events or trauma . They're very strongly correlated to some type of adversity, adverse experience . And they often also have very recurring themes . So and the themes are often related in some way to the diversity, even if it's not, it might not be literal, but you might say , you know, ever since I went through this breakup, I've started having these dreams of falling into empty space. It's not a literal relationship, but something about that stressful experience led to this recurring dream theme. And actually the person I quote, Ernest Hartman, he studied tidal wave dreams. He found that people started to experience these tidal wave nightmares, dreams of being overwhelmed by a tidal wave after experiencing trauma. And obviously it's not because they went through a trauma of being in a tidal wave, it's just that that dream kind of embodies the emotion of being completely overwhelmed and helpless . So yeah, so the dreams nightmares, they do seem related to adverse memories. They do seem to be related to this process of trying to work through some difficult emotion . It's just that they're so intense, they're so emotional, they're so stressful that you're woken up out of sleep before any sort of adaptation can take place. So you just keep having this kind of nightmare on a loop and it builds to a point and often even physiologically builds to a point that someone their sleep is disrupted. And we suspect that that just means the function is not fully happening, you know? So in order for the therapy and the regulation to take place , the nightmares need to kind of become less intense so that the dream can resolve and can evolve over time and allow this kind of process to take place. Those patients you were talking about having the tidal wave are Th peopleose that experience similar traumas, but these are disconnected people that were having the same recurring dream of the tidal wave. Yeah, it's what he called central images of dreams , which are yeah, these kind of symbolic images where yeah, he saw people from different he was a clinician so he saw patients and people with different types of traumatic experiences would report this tidal wave dream . And you know, we see it still in research. Of course, it's a very common dream theme, but it's not related to experiencing any sort of tidal wave in waking life. It's related to the emotion, the feeling of helplessness, the feeling of being overwhelmed. One of other common I don't know if I guess this is a nightmare, but maybe for some people it's a dream , but these common things of like teeth falling out , flying, like these seem to be like very common dream experiences. What is the right? What is the thinking around that? Like what is that a metaphor for or a symptom of like certain kind of anxiety or yeah do you have any idea what that might be about? Yeah, so those are they're called typical dream themes that people all around the world and all different ages and genders and cultures will have these same dream themes that again are they don't seem directly tied to waking life. They're more symbolic or metaphoric maybe . So the tidal wave theme is one or dreams of falling and is a very common dream theme as well . The one the teeth falling out that is a very typical dream theme, but I'm not sure if it is metaphorical or symbolic or if it's actually there was one study that suggested that it's just related to the actual sensation of grinding your teeth during the night that people who grind their teeth and well that takes some of the mystery out of it . Yeah. That's I mean 's true. Because it's a weird theme, right? And yeah, it's a very , I don't know. So there's some suggestion that some themes and even the dream of falling or flying like is it symbolic or is it more related to physical sensation , the fact that you are horizontal in your bed. So maybe in your dream you're trying to perform all of these activities, but on some level, your brain is also processing your physical sensations, your physical reality . So like in dreams often you try to use your arms or like use your body and you feel like you can't move or you feel like you don't have control in the same way that you do in waking life . And it's hard to say is that like a psychological theme or is it just the brain's like, no, I literally can't move my body, you know? So there's some physical incorporation of that that's adding to the bizarre reness of dams in a way that's actually it's physical and it's not psychological. have people in your sleep lab that you can monitor while they're dreaming physiologically what's going on during a nightmare with our bodies . Well there's definitely research suggesting that in the kind of in the last minutes of nightm a are, you can see increases in heart rate and respiration rate and some other kind of maybe increases in muscle twitches or more rapid eye movements occurring . But the, you know, there's there's also instances where people can have nightmares and you don't see anything . Like it looks like they're perfectly calm in a REM sleep period. There's no changes in their physiolog y and they still might wake up and say I just had really intense nightmares. So it's not a perfect one to one link, but I think globally there does seem to be more physiolog ical arousal, more kind of micro awakenings, more disruptions to sleep occurring in people who have frequent nightmares, that they are a bit more physiologically aroused during the night and also during the day usually. So in those cases, the brain is behaving, reacting as though it is real physiologically . The same way it is responding the same way it would in your waking life if you were scared. Right, yeah, yes. Definitely in some cases somebody's having a nightmare and when they wake up their body is in a state of serious stress . Then are there cases where maybe dreaming is not a safe space as you put it, right? Like if can you actually do psychological harm to yourself, right? If you're experiencing really traumatic nightmares or traum atic dreams and your body is responding physiologically the same way it would if it was actually stressed out . Can you actually do harm to your body during dreams even though you're asleep ? Well Well , I think that yeah, having really having frequent nightmares, having distressing nightmares, it is harmful. And I think that's becoming more and more evident in the research on post traumatic stress disorder , of course, but just more generally, there's links between having really frequent nightmares and having a lot of different psychiatric symptoms or even links to high er higher suicide risk. But there's also physical links like recent research suggesting there's more self reported cardiovascular disease and more spikes in cortisol hormone like stress hormone in the morning and earlier mortality rates for people who have frequent and distressing nightmares. So I think there is there's a real toll on the body and we don't know the specific source. Is it the psychological element of the nightmares? Is it just the fact that you're really disrupting sleep so repeatedly and it just becomes such a source of stress rather than rest, which we need sleep to recover, we need sleep to function well . But in general, yeah, I think severe nightmares they are harmful for people. I've always been interested in lucid dreaming. I do not think I've ever actually done it, but I'm very intrigued by it. So just can you just say what Lucid Dreaming actually is and what you find interesting about it because you do find it very interesting. Yes . Yeah. So lucid dreaming is just when you become aware of the fact that you're dreaming while you're still in the dream . And so that opens up a lot of possibilities because you have kind of an increased level of agency or control or consciousness in the dream . And you can kind of in the moment decide how you want to act in the dream, react in the dream , what you want to do . So in the context of nightmares and nightmare therapy, it can be very useful because if you're having a bad dream and then in the dream you, realize, oh, this is just a dream. It's almost like when you wake up from a bad dream and you had that sense of relief like, oh my goodness, that was just a dream. You know, you realize, okay , this isn't real, this threat that I'm experiencing is not it's not really going to , you know, kill me or anything. So you can feel more like less less distressed and you can feel more in control and you can decide to change the dream however you want really . So it kind of opens a doorway to engaging with dreams in a new way and it can be really powerful for people who have experienced nightmares to suddenly have more agency and have more control in how they how they dream. All the obvious question is, how the hell do you do that? I mean my that's what I mean, it sounds amazing, right? My experience and I assume this is common is when I wake up , it is abundantly clear to me that oh that was a dream. Yeah. And it becomes clear to me that and not clear , but what is baffling to me is looking back, reflecting on the dream , it's so obviously bizarre, right? Like it is so obviously not real life because there are things that are happening that just make no sense in the physical world as we understand it, right? And you think how did I notice that something was off here, right? So like how is it that you can become aware of the fact that you're dreaming while you're dreaming. Learning how to become lucid, I think you already started the process. I mean, part of it is you know, first steps you keep a dream journal and start to notice what are the recurring elements of bizarreness in your dreams. So usually our dreams aren't just completely randomly bizarre every night. There are kind of these recurring things that happen that are bizarre in our dreams . Like maybe we often dream about a pet who passed away years ago. That's bizarre, but it's something that we can use as a clue into the fact that we're dreaming or maybe we fly a lot in our dreams. Obviously we never fly in waking life . So over time you can start to kind of collect these dream signs. These are signs in your dreams that recur frequently that could clue you into the fact that you're dreaming . And from there you can do different practices like wake up early in the morning and spend maybe twenty minutes really setting an intention and visualizing yourself having a lucid dream . You can like think about the dream that you just remembered or think about any dream that you have and think to yourself, okay, if I notice that I'm flying or if I notice that I'm interacting with my pet who passed away, then I will remember that I'm dreaming and just really visualize yourself becoming lucid in a dream . And if you do this for like twenty minutes, then when you fall back asleep, you're much more likely the next time you dream to remember, to remember something, something will clue you in some element of bizarreness . Yeah. And you'll have that aha moment like us. It's a dream. Yeah, well , I keep waiting for that. But I've heard the thing about doing the dream journal. The problem is I don't want to write in a journal in the middle of the night or even when I first wake up, I just want some freaking coffee , but my recollection of the dream seems to vaporize pretty quickly if you don't , if you don't write it down immediately fifteen minutes later, it's it's poof. It's gone. Is that a common thing? Is there a reason for that? Why it seems to fade so fast, even if it's incredibly vivid and you wake up horrified or whatever. I don't know what the reason for it is, but it's definitely a thing. I mean, even in dream labs, we're very careful about waking people up really gently. And we tell them when you wake up, like don't even open your eyes, don't move, just lie there and just allow yourself to remember as much as you can and just keep your eyes closed and just report , just beak out loud, whatever, whatever you can remember . Because otherwise, you know, even if we tell them , I mean in the past, we might ask them to write their dream down, but even the process of like turning on a light and opening a notebook and it can lead to some of the dream kind of disappearing. So they're very fragile memories . I mean, one thing that you can do is you can try to when you get into bed at night, you can try to remember your dreams from the prior night. There seems to be a lot of like kind of dreams are very fragile. The memory of them is very fragile, but they're also very it's almost like you know when you smell something specific and suddenly a memory comes into your mind , dreams seem to have this like associative component. Like if you something in the day might suddenly remind you, oh, I dreamt about that last night. Like the memory seems like it's still there in some way. It's just hard to access. And for some people, like when you get back into bed at night and you kind of close your eyes and imagine yourself like try to recall what you dreamt the night before. When you have people in the lab and they're dreaming physiologically, do you know when they're lucid dreaming? Is there any sign that that's happening? Does it look any different than non lucid dreaming, which I assume it's the vast majority of dreaming. Generally, it looks like Ram Sleep , but we ask people when they're lucid to give us signals because when you're lucid, you can control your body basically So if somebody becomes lucid during REM sleep, we ask them to look left and right three times really quickly with their eyes. Left right, left right, left right. And they respond to that. You can communicate with people while they're dreaming. Yeah. So then we wow that's tripping. That's how we can tell that they're lucid is if they give us that clear signal . And they could do other things too, like there's experiments where they communicate with people asking them to smile or to frown and they'll do that in the dream, but their actual face will smile or frown so there will be signals of that. So in that case, what actually is the difference between being awake and being in a state of lucid dreaming, right? I mean, it seems like they're awake, but their eyes are closed. If you're responsive, if you can communicate, in what sense are you not awake ? I mean, the brain is definitely still in a different state. It looks like RESLE and they're still like a completely immersive dream experience that they're in. But if someone's an elusive dream and I present I could speak to them and they might hear it in the dream, but maybe in the dream , rather than it being me speaking to them, it's some stuffed animal in their dream that's talking . So it's like the dream is still occurring and it's incorporating these real physical sensations into it. So the body is still pretty much completely immobile. It's just these little twitches that can occur when they're in REM sleep. What about Lucy Dreaming as a learning to ol? If you're tinkering with your memories, can you also implant new knowledge, right? Like this is a thing I have heard people that are part of like super high performing organizations like elite athletes or special operator types . I've heard them talk about intentionally using Lucid Dreaming as a way to train and practice while they're sleeping. Is that a thing?? Can you do that Can you learn while you're sleeping in that way? That is a thing. Yeah, definitely it's reported a lot anecdotally. You know, like you said, like elite athletes or musicians report it as well that dream ing offers a way to practice certain skills and you can do cool things in the dream, right? Like I think I give an example in my book but there's one like swimmer who in the dream would swim in a pool, but the water, instead of being water, it would be more like jello or gelatin. So there's a bit more resistance. So it felt like a more physical training. Or some people say they 're you know, they can feel the muscle memory differently in a dream that's that's forming or I don't know, I don't know how it functions, but experimentally there's there's some evidence too that asking people to practice even simple learning tasks that we designed in a lab like throwing darts or what are some recent ones playing harmonica, I think some simple lab learning tasks that we ask people to do. If they practice it within the Lucid Dreaming environment, it does seem to have some benefit to actual memory consolidation and performance after sleep. Other than dream journaling , like where else would you recommend people start if they want to go down this road and try to hone this skill? Because it is a skill, right? Is that fair to? Yeah, I think so . So the Lucid Dreaming techniques is one part of it, but another is just using visualization and especially maybe in the presleep period. I mean, most of us spend , you know, our last minutes before falling asleep just like worrying about things or thinking about the day or thinking about everything we have to do tomorrow. And it's you could instead spend that twenty minutes really visualizing different types of dream experiences . You know, there's a really strong link between what's going through our mind in that last period before we fall asleep and what we dream about at night . So if you want to practice a skill , visualize and set the intention to have a dream about that or if you want to, if there's a creative problem you're working through, reflect on that before sleep, or if you have a nightmare then you know visualize a more adaptive version of the dream, a more positive version of the dream before you fall asleep . There's I mean, you could do anything really, but I think people just assume that they have no influence over what they dream. So we don't even try . But I think simple techniques like that actually having some intentional visualization and doing it a few nights a week I think would be impactful Support for the gray area comes from HINS. You may not realize it but ED is more common than most people think and often more manageable than expected. With HINS, you can connect online with a licensed provider to explore treatment options tailored to you all in a way that's private and on your schedule. 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Viagra is a registered trademark of Vatrius, specialty LLC HIMS is not affiliated with Bornors Ded by Vatrice Support for this show comes from Shopify. Whenever you're taking on something new, it's easy to focus on what could go wrong. That's especially true when you're starting a business where so much feels uncertain. But there's another possibility worth considering. What if it works? What if your idea really connects with people and grows into something real? Shopify can help you take that chance. They're the commerce platform powering millions of businesses worldwide in nearly ten percent of all e commerce in the US from established brands like All Birds and Converse to entrepreneurs just getting started. Their design tools make it easy to build the exact online presence you're imagining with hundreds of ready to use templates to choose from. And with built in marketing features, you can create full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks, so you can reach your customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what if s into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your one dollar per month trial period at Shopify dot com slash box. You can go to shopify. com slash box that's shopify. com slash box . We're not saying a visit to Bloomington, Indiana will turn you into a forest bathing, sandalwaring, dissertation defending, straight cat rescuing nonprofit starting Monroe Lake Paddling guitar, strumming, march organiz ing vinyl listening, leaf watching, zen finding coffee roasting, yoga practicing, beer drinking bread, baking co op joining pottery throwing, vintage thrifting, bike everywhere, art appreciating farmers market shopping, bizinking football fan , but we're not saying it won't . Visit Bloomington . See how it inspires you Is there any danger in maybe trying to control your dreams too much? Is it possible that lucid dreaming might interrupt whatever purpose dreams are supposed to serve, right? You should maybe get out of the way and let the brain do its thing because there's some reason for whatever you're experiencing or dreaming. Yeah, that's definitely a question that comes up. I mean , largely the control that we have is very minimal. So when I say like visualize something , you're not going to like incept the exact it's not like inception you are you construct the exact dream that you want. It's still a very spontaneous and creative process . But for sure that there are some reports of people who feel like they're having too many lucid dreams. They're lucid all the time and they feel tired when they wake up in the morning. Some people report that . And in those cases, it seems like actually becoming more passive , like just letting the dream occur as a would not trying to control it too much can actually help them . But I think the vast majority of people will not run into that problem. I mean, most people try really hard to have lucid dreams, they'll have one a week , you know, and that's like five minutes of their entire sleep time for the whole week. So I don't think it's interrupting with any natural processes for the average person. Well, I just think it's crazy that we can we have the ability to wake up inside of a dream , right? Like I guess you could think of that as some kind of edge case , but to me the, fact that that is a thing that we can do says something about the nature of consciousness . I don't know what that is , but it's surely something says about it, right? Yeah, yeah, I do think dreams they reveal in a way , I think are more revealing of what consciousness is really is really like I think in waking life we kind of we have this idea that consciousness is pretty straightforward like we experience what's around us visually