Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Robert:
We all dream every night. By the time you’re 24 years old, you’ve spent two entire years in the dream state. And by the time you’re 48, you’ve spent four entire years in the dream state. Lucid dream and an out-of-body are like a house cat and a mountain lion. I discuss how people have used lucid dreaming to help heal themselves. If you think something’s gonna be difficult, it becomes difficult. If you think it’s gonna be easy, it becomes easy. If you think it’s possible, breeze right through. Think it’s gonna be impossible, you’ll bounce off the wall and not be able to get through

Guy:
Robert, welcome to the podcast. So nice to have you answer.

Robert:
Uh, thanks guy.

Guy:
I, um, like I was just chatting off air, I’ve, I’ve stumbled across your work, uh, listening to. The way, 1, 2, 6 podcasts many months ago, and I loved what you had to say, and we’ve, I’ve never really discussed the topic of lucid dreaming before, but more importantly, how that can, you know, benefit us and what we can learn from it, uh, in, in our day-to-day life, which, which is what I’m big on as well, but. While we get into that topic, I am always curious to ask this question ’cause I love to hear different people’s answers. But if you were at a intimate dinner party and you sat next to a complete stranger and they asked you what you did for a living, how would you reply?

Robert:
So I write books on lucid dreaming, which is becoming aware within a dream that you’re. And I teach people how to see the potential and the benefits in it.

Guy:
What’s the normal reaction when you get that? Do people, most people must go, oh, I, okay. Lucid dreaming, or are they like, what? You know.

Robert:
You know, uh, about half the people. Oh yeah. I’ve had one of those. Uh oh yeah. That’s, that’s interesting. And the other half is like really you can become aware in the dream state and, uh, actually do something of value and, um. So a lot of, some, for some people it takes a lot of convincing to see the value in it, but for other people, they’ve, they’ve got their toe in the water at least, and so they understand the concept.

Guy:
Yeah, it’s fascinating. Hey, it is funny as you’re sharing this, the stories just come to mind, which I’ve never, um, even thought about before, but an old maid of mine, he was, he was. He’s older than me, but he is very analytical. You know, he is got a corporate job and, and everything like that. I’m not sure what he is doing. I haven’t spoke to him for quite a while, but I remember him always telling me a story about his mother said, oh, one day she woke up lucid and she was outside her body and then just floated down the street and then pop back in and then told. Her son, the family, and it always, and that planted a seed in his mind and it always, it always sat with him because he was so analytical, hadn’t had any experience, if anything like this was even remotely possible. But it was always there, you know? And I feel like that’s where a lot of people are at with this kind of stuff.

Robert:
Right. And, and, and also sometimes it can be a little bit confusing sometimes when I talk about lucid dreaming, uh, there’s, there’s a formal definition when you realize within a dream you’re dreaming when you literally know, Hey, this is a dream. But there’s also outof body experiences, which are. Similar, but not exactly the same. Um, I I, I tell people, uh, lucid Dream and an out of body are like a hou house cat and, and a mountain lion. They’re both in the fe lion family and they share a lot of characteristics that are the same, but one you’d invite into your house and, and the other is would be something you wanna keep outside. So, so they’re not exactly the same. And, and so that’s another issue that oftentimes comes up, uh, when I start talking about lucid dreaming.

Guy:
which, which one’s the house cat and which one’s the mountain lion? Just to clarify.

Robert:
Lucid dreaming is the hell cat. So, so, uh, I’ll, I’ll tell you my very first lucid dream. Uh, and this happened spontaneously when I was about 10 years old. Um, I was at the public library in my hometown looking at the books, and all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see a little baby tyrannosaurus wreckx walking through the book stacks. Even though I was 10 years old, it occurred to me, wait a second, dinosaurs are extinct. How, how can I be seen this? And then it occurred to me, oh crap. I’m, I’m in a dream. This is a dream. I’m dreaming this. And then I thought, well, if this is a dream I can tell myself to wake up. I told myself to wake up and I immediately woke up.

So that was my very first spontaneous lucid dream. And, and, and the reason it’s kind of like a house cat, is you notice something strange in the dream. That makes you question the nature of reality such that you come to the right conclusion, Hey, I’m dreaming this. This is a dream. Now, an out of body could occur when you’re having a heart attack. All of a sudden you’re floating on the ceiling, looking down at your body. The nurses, the doctors, they’re trying to revive you. That’s not realizing within a dream, you’re dreaming. That’s a whole separate thing. Or you might be trying to fall asleep and all of a sudden you start to hear this weird.

Rushing sound around you like someone playing a digger Ado, you know, right by your ear, there’s all this energy and humming and, and all that’s not realizing within a dream, you’re dreaming that’s having some weird things and now all of a sudden you’re seeing your bedroom from six feet above, uh, your bed or where you were in physical reality. So, so again, there’s some similarities, but they’re not exactly the same.

Guy:
No, that’s great. And that’s great to get the clarification early on. So, ’cause we wanna go in this direction of lucid dreaming. I’m curious to ask you as well, or know why. From having that first lucid dream experience to now becoming a writer on the subject, like the, you know, and actually, because it’s, it’s quite a, a unique topic, let’s say, you know, and what, what, what led you down this path after that moment?

Robert:
Right. So, um, um, a few years later, uh, when I was, uh, 16 or 17, 17 years old, I, I taught myself how to become lucidly aware, how to consciously induce lucid dreams. And then when I was at the university, uh, five years later, the scientific evidence for Lucid Dreaming came out. I was blown away because now finally with the scientific evidence emerging, I could talk about it with my friends without them rolling their eyes or telling me, oh, you’re having a dream about a dream, or, you know, whatever. So the reason I got into becoming an author though, was as I went deeper down the path, I saw all the incredible potential of lucid dreaming, and no one was writing about it. People were kind of writing, you know, little bits and pieces, you know, access creativity. Okay. You know, maybe resolve a problem that you have in the waking world, in the lucid dream state, I thought okay, but there was so much more.

And so that’s why I just decided, uh, I’m gonna write a book on this and, uh, work with my friends, get all the best stories out there, and really make it very clear to people how you can use lucid dreaming, uh, for your own personal growth and transformation.

Guy:
Yeah. Before we get into the potential of it then like, like you mentioned, what I’m curious to ask you as well is, as that 16 or 17-year-old boy, what was the lure into teaching yourself how to lucid dream? Like, you know, there must have been something I go, wow.

Robert:
You know when you become aware within a dream and you know it’s a dream. And you know that now potentially at least you can fly. You can go through a wall, you can walk on the ceiling, you can walk on water. You can have so much fun. So, so here I am, you know, a 17-year-old kid having my first lucid dreams and I am having so much fun. But as I went along, I realized also simultaneously. I was being taught things about the nature of dreaming, about how the dream reality works, about the nature of mental energy and, and so I was learning things as I went along, but at first, what, what hooks you is just how much fun it is.

Guy:
You, you go in there. Yeah. What is, I mean. How, how do you look at then dreams like, like if we start to break this down, you know, from A to B2C, like first of all, you say there’s a dream and what do you see? Dreams. ’cause there’s a lot of information out there and then dream interpretation and they encourage you to write dream journals and what does this all mean? And this is before we even got lucid and we’re awake inside a dream.

Robert:
Yeah, so, so, uh, you know, each night, uh, all of us spend about 23% of our sleep time in the dream state. And, and normally, uh, when we’re having dreams, we’re having also rapid eye movement. And so, so that’s one of the way they scientifically validated lucid dreaming, that they brought Lucid Dreamers into the sleep lab and they told ’em, okay, when you become consciously aware, move your eyes left to right eight times and that’ll get recorded on the rapid eye movement readout. And that’ll show that, oh yeah, they did what we ask them to do before they went to sleep. They moved their eyes left to right eight times. So, so that’s how the scientific evidence came along. But, but, um, um, I, I’m losing your question. Uh, GG the heart of your question |

Guy:
So ultimately, why do we dream and what are dreams before we get into Lucid? Yeah.

Robert:
So, so, so if you, if you met with folks scientifically, what they would say is that, uh, part of dreaming is information and memory processing. Part of it is emotional processing. They, they can see that we, uh, process emotions. Uh, some of it has to do with, uh, uh, there’s some sort of, uh, accessing creativity. But because, uh, we put together disjointed ideas in the dream state and come up with a new, clever solution. So, so those would normally be the things, you know, memory processing, emotional processing. Uh, creative resolution of issues. Normally, that’s what they would say that dreaming is involved with. But what they would literally say though is they honestly don’t know.

Uh, because the thing is, uh, all mammals dream. And, uh, oftentimes you’ll see your dog or your cat, uh, over there sleeping and all of a sudden they’re moving their paws. Or you’ll see your cat moving his arms like it’s ready to pounce on a mouse. But, you know, they’re in the dream state and, and you know that that’s why that’s occurring. But we all dream every night when you think about it. By the time you’re 24 years old, you’ve spent two entire years in the dream state. And by the time you’re 48, you’ve spent four entire years in the dream state. And, and so when you think about something that we don’t know anything about, but we do a lot, that’s, that’s the world dreaming and that’s why El lucid dreaming is so important,

Guy:
Wow. That really puts into perspective when you say it like that. Four years,

Robert:
right?

Guy:
the time you’re 48 years old.

Robert:
yeah. So imagine if you were, uh. Two years in Japan, you’d know the culture, the language, the foods and, and all that. You, you’d be kind of a mini expert on Japan, but by the time we’re 24, you’ve spent two years in dreaming. What do you know? And for most people, it’s virtually nothing. And so that’s why dreaming is that kind of blue ocean and lucid dreaming opens it up. So you can explore, you can experiment, you can do your own scientific experiments, and you can do your own, uh, personal experiments with friends.

Guy:
Wow. So are you saying that then essentially those four, let’s say for your, those four years? You know, I’m 50, right? So I’m just past 48, so there’s four years. I could have blown of my life so far, like some of my other years when I’m awake, but. Those four years, I could actually be nurturing, uh, uh, almost like a self-development process for my, for my own, uh, sense of growth, even in that would then appear into my day-to-day life.

Robert:
Right. And, and so, uh, one, one of the beautiful things in and of itself is just dreaming. Some of my most profound experiences have been dreams. You know, sometimes you have precognitive dreams, you’ll have visitation dreams where deceased loved ones appear. You’ll have all that. Plus you’ll have a lot of normal dreams that just show you, oh yeah, I have some fear or anxiety about. Something that’s coming up in my life, you know, that’s, that’s all great. But when you add lucid dreaming into the mix, when you become consciously aware and now you can begin to relate with dream figures, you can begin to relate to these issues with your own conscious awareness intact. Now all of a sudden it takes it to a whole new level.

Guy:
Yeah. So let’s talk about that potential then. What, what that potential is. ’cause how do we get it from being a novel thing? ’cause I’ve definitely had lucid dreams and I’ve had outof body experiences I’ve kind of experienced too. And they do kind of merge like you, like you say, you know, in some ways and, and, but, um, with the lucid dream, how do it. How do we get it then from being a novel thing, like you say, fun thing to do to actually harnessing its potential

Robert:
Right.

Guy:
it can do to, for you?

Robert:
So, so, so I’ve been on this path, uh, for, for more than 40 years. And, and so, so I’ll just tell you. How it worked for me. And so again, again, at the beginning just had fun. But along the way I began to notice things and, and probably the first thing I began to notice is how our beliefs and expectations are projected out there into the lucid dream. And, and so, so like a classic example for me, um, one time I found myself in the theater. I was looking around and I was thinking, wait a second. What am I doing here? I don’t remember getting here. Oh, this is a dream. And suddenly I realized, okay, this is a dream. I decided to fly out of the theater, so I flew right through the wall to go exploring to see, you know, where, where is this place?

And now I’m flying around this kind of futuristic college campus, and I decided to fly back to the original spot. So now I’m flying back the other way, and I’m coming up to the building, which I flew out of. And now the bricks seem really thick and rugged and tough. And as I’m flying through it, I suddenly have this kinda sense of doubt, like, oh, this is gonna be hard. And what happens? I get stuck halfway through the dream wall, the one that I flew through earlier. And what it showed me was how my, my fear, my concern, that this was gonna be tough. Made it so, so that’s what you begin to see is. If you think something’s gonna be difficult, it becomes difficult. If you think it’s gonna be easy, it becomes easy.

If you think it’s possible, breeze right through, think it’s gonna be impossible. You’ll bounce off the wall and and not be able to get through. So that’s what I began to learn at first, and this is what my dreams were showing me that my beliefs and expectations had to be aligned with my intent. In a positive or at least a neutral fashion in order for me to achieve what I wanted to achieve. And that was probably the very first lesson, uh, that, that I learned the importance of belief and expectation.

Guy:
Wow. And think about how much we do that in our everyday life because we’ve experienced it before, or you know, we, we, we we’re in an autopilot. 95% of the day and we just, oh, this is gonna be hard today. And then, and then we take that in. That intent, that expectation into anything,

Robert:
Right. You, you know what a, a a lot of people talk about how we create our own reality or, or we help co-create our reality. And that’s what you begin to see in lucid dreaming, that, oh yeah, if I think and believe and expect X, I’m gonna get X. And so if I want to change the dynamic. The outside thing out there doesn’t need to change. What needs to change is my thinking is my relating to it is my believing and expecting.

Guy:
Yeah. And that’s very challenging to do. And did you find that then altering in your day to day life once you started to get the, get that.

Robert:
Right. You know, uh, it, it showed me how important this kind of thing was that that beliefs and expectations matter. Um, you know, if you, if you don’t mind, uh, a story, uh, uh, so after I wrote my first book, uh, I have a chapter on there and, and using Lucid Dreams. For physical healing. But you can also do something we call lucid living, which is you take the ideas from lucid dreaming on how the unconscious works, how the mind works, and you transfer it to the waking world. So, so at that time I had hay fever every August and September here in the States. Uh, I would. You know, my nose would, uh, run constantly. My throat would choke up. My sinuses were all clogged. It was just really a mess for like two months out of the year. So what I decided to do was lucid living without even doing anything in a lucid dream.

I just began to tell myself every time that I feared or thought about hay fever, that, no, not anymore. From now on, I breathe easily and naturally and I’ll, I’ll tell you by. Following my thoughts, being mindfully aware of that fear and concern, stopping it, and then telling myself from now on, I breathe easily and naturally. The first year I had a 70% percent reduction in symptoms. The next year, a 90% reduction. The next year, a 95% reduction. And, and now I, I don’t even think about hay fever anymore because I don’t have it. I breathe easily and naturally, so, so that’s why all of a sudden this issue of belief and expectations, you think, oh, you know, well, sure, you know, that’s just your mind.

It’s not gonna have any I immediate effect. If you learn how to use your mind, it will have an immediate effect. It, it’ll have a, a very, uh, definite effect. But if you just go along with the program, just kinda sleep, walk through things, um, don’t be surprised that you just get the same old stuff, because if you want things to change, you’ve gotta change the mind, the mind.

Guy:
And you did nothing else with the hay fever except change that, that o observation patterns of how you’re behaving.

Robert:
yep, mindfully observed. Whenever I was thinking about it or fearing it, told myself, Nope, not anymore. Third part, you gotta tell yourself where you want to go. And so my intent became from now on, I breathe easily and naturally and that’s, that became. Evident that became the new paradigm in my life.

Guy:
Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating. ’cause we, we are always hammering that home in our events. As well. ’cause there’s a, there’s a vast difference between expectation and intention and we are always trying to remind people about that. You know, because intention is present moment is what are we bringing into this moment versus expectation, which is normally based on a past experience that we’re imposing on a future event that hasn’t happened and we we’re never present. I’m actually here right now at a retreat space in Topo, New Zealand, and it’s beautiful. And it really brings home the difference between understanding this work and actually living it, because that’s what retreats can do and why we’re so passionate about it. They give you the space to slow down, to reconnect, and truly let something deeper land.

So it’s not just an idea, but it’s a lived experience. That’s why we created Living Flow. So if you’ve been feeling this shift in your own life and you know you’re ready to go deeper, then come back to livingflow.co to find out more. Anyway, back to the episode.

Robert:
Right. And, and also sometimes what, when I interact with people, uh, at, at my workshops and stuff, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll find that some of ’em confuse, uh, belief, which is kind of a habitual idea with a wish, you know, if, if you wish for something, well, that, that’s just kind of a momentary fixation or a momentary hope or desire. But a belief is something that you, you habitually think about. You know, from now on I breathe easily and naturally. That’s what I told myself, probably five or six times a day, uh, whenever that fear of hay fever came up and soon it became my habitual belief. And what do we experience? Oftentimes, we experience our beliefs. And so, so beliefs are in my thinking, uh, a habitual idea that, that, uh, we tell ourselves over and over and come to believe is true or is some part of the nature of reality.

Guy:
Yeah, interesting. And all that came from Lucid Dreaming first too. It’s, I guess, really challenge your own belief systems and then you could take that into the day to day, right, which is, I think is the, the,

Robert:
Right. Lucid Dreaming helped me see the truth of it, you know, the truth of it because there’s a lot of, uh, psychological studies, uh. Uh, like there’s some psychological studies done here in the US so long ago, in the fifties and sixties, uh, where, where they told these, uh, teachers, oh, this next group of students you’re getting, uh, for the coming year are the top performers. They’re the absolute best. And, and whatever, even though. The researchers knew that they were just an average randomly assorted group of students. Now that group got special attention from the teacher and whatever, and, and they increased their performance way beyond what they should have. The other group, uh, that they told another teacher, oh, you’re getting all the difficult children, and what happened?

That class was full of difficult things and, and the educational outcomes were, were very much lower. So that, that’s kinda what they called the Pygmalion effect. That. That, that if you believe that something’s going to be the case, then you, you manipulate your thinking and approach and everything in order to live up or down, uh, to that belief. And so, so, you know, you, you really see the importance of belief and expectation that there’s a lot of, uh, studies out there that confirm how this

Guy:
Yeah. Fascinating while we, on the topic of this, then, with the belief and, and health as well, have you like with running events and people and teaching, have you heard of any other cases around healing? Because I, I feel. As, you know, like hay fever, it’s probably painful enough for you to wanna resolve it, but it’s not life threatening where there’s, there’s a big fear that’s kicking in that we’re coming up against,  and especially in our, in our reality, like let’s say you’ve got a diagnosis of a terminal illness or, or something, but more severe.

Robert:
Yeah.

Guy:
When our reality of the systems, let’s say that’s all they see, and that’s all you know there. There’s never anything else outside of that. It becomes much more challenging to be that present and mindful of the thoughts without getting pulled into that fear pattern.

Robert:
Yeah. So, uh, um, so, so this is how this works in the lucid dreaming state. Uh, so, so in my first book, I have an entire chapter on, on Lucid Dream Healing. Uh, healing the physical body. And normally what happens is, just like you say, people have situations, physical situations that they can’t resolve. And often they go to the doctor, they take all the medicine, nothing’s happening, there’s no improvement, and that’s when they start looking around for alternatives. Like, how can I escape this? And so like, there’s one gentleman, uh, his name was Ray Brannan, who, who sent a story into, um, to me about how he got over his gastroesophageal esophageal reflex disorder. People call it GERD here, here in the States. But, but basically. He went to the doctors, doctor’s couldn’t help him.

They gave him all types of medicines. None of the medicines were basically, it got so bad that this guy had to sleep, uh, basically leaning up against the wall at night because if he laid down flat, his GERD would be so bad. It, it was just totally painful. So this was going on for a while. He, he reads my first book. He comes to this chapter on healing and so. You know, I discuss how people have used lucid dreaming to help heal themselves. He sees the example, he becomes lucidly aware, and the first time he wasn’t quite ready. He, he really hadn’t thought out a plan. And that’s what I always encourage people to do. You gotta think out your plan, because sometimes in the lucid dream state, you can’t really work through the steps of how you should go about it.

But anyway, he tries to heal himself. In his first lucid dream that he had, nah, he said he woke up maybe is 10% better, 20% better, but he realized he hadn’t enacted a plan. So the next time he becomes lucidly aware, he has a whole plan figured out. He enacts the plan in his lucid dream. He said when he woke up, he just felt like a changed person. He said he knew that a healing had taken place and after that he didn’t have to lay. Uh, against the wall at night to, uh, fall asleep and sleep upright. He could, uh, lay on his, his back and, uh, sleep like a normal person. Um, there, there’s another example I, I heard from my friend, ed Kellogg. Um, he had a friend who had painful planter warts on her feet.

These were really painful and so she’d been trying, she had tried all the typical things, I believe to make ’em go away, but she started using, um. Uh, imagination or visualization to visualize ’em to go away. She had been doing that for months and it still hadn’t worked. Finally, uh, she talked to Ed and Ed said, well, why don’t you try to heal yourself in a lucid dream? And so they talked about it. The next time she became lucidly aware, she created a ball of healing light between her hands and she put it over each of her feet in the lucine, Dr in the lucid Dream, while intending for the planter warts to be healed. She said that when she woke up hours later. Uh, overnight her planner, warts had turned black and, and within 10 days they fell off and they never returned.

So, so that, that’s a little bit more of a kind of dramatic, you know, use, you actually see something in the morning has changed and, and now there’s a difference, but there’s lots of examples of people who use lucid dreaming and reported. Very quick healings or just sudden transformations. There’s been some that are just so fantastic that, that I even, I’m blown away when, when I get reports of people sending me their healing lucid dreams.

Guy:
It’s amazing, isn’t it? Yeah, no, I’m, I’m fully on board with that. You know, we see it at our retreats, especially when we spend five days together. Like I’m convinced now after working with thousands and thousands of people, there’s like, you could say, energy block or light block or emotional charge where there’s a trauma or something has occurred. But we get so entwined with the story and the behavior and the belief system and, and, how we then perceive our reality in any given moment. It’s so muddied to what is actually happening, to what’s going on in our, in our minds. And it’s, it’s crazy. Uh, we literally just had a lady, um, who had a 40 reduction in cancer. She retested coming outta the retreat where we did. Because we, she got outta the way and it allowed the body to heal. We did like a large intention of healing and a, a being came in and told her to let the light in and she surrendered into it, and

Robert:
Oh

Guy:
a different human being now. You know what I mean?

Robert:
I, I, I recall one woman, um, had out of control menstrual bleeding, and the doctor said, you know, if this doesn’t get fixed in naturally in the next week, we’re gonna have a hysterectomy. So she decided that she’s gonna try to have a lucid dream to heal it. She had devised a plan and she became lucidly aware. She remembered she wanted to heal her body. She began to put energy into her dream hand, and then she was going to put that healing energy, stick it into her uterus and, and heal everything. But right as she’s getting ready to do that, there’s kind of an inner voice who told her first Heal your heart. And she realized, oh, okay.

So now she sticks the handful of healing energy into her heart, heals it first, and then she goes ahead with her plan and, and, uh, heals her uterus and all. And she woke up and the, the bleeding had stopped and the doctor said, oh, no bleeding. Um, no hysterectomy. Uh, you know, call, call me back if you ever have troubles. So, so you’re right. Sometimes, uh, sometimes there’s inner issues and, and this woman mentioned that, uh, when she was a teenager, her father passed away unexpectedly. And, and she’d always kinda carried this kind of whatever, you know, guilt, shame, unhappiness, whatever, uh, misgiving. Whatever it was. And, uh, first I think by healing her heart, then it connected with all the other issues and she can move forward from there.

So, so again, you’re right, so sometimes there’s beliefs, ideas that have to be moved out of the way to let the, let the energy through. And that’s one, that’s one of the beautiful things about lucid dreaming. Sometimes my lucid dreams have shown me my limiting beliefs that need to be resolved. Or the fear that’s keeping me contained in my comfort zone that needs to be resolved if I’m going to continue to grow. And so that’s another beautiful thing about lucid dreaming, those kinda psychological or emotional barriers that keep you from becoming your more, uh, true self.

Guy:
That’s amazing. And what do you think that’s teaching? Because I, I’ll still plug away at the lucid dreaming part in a sec, but, uh, just going off on a tangent slightly, is the question is what is that then leading to, of who we really are? If you are having these lucid dream experiences that are, are potentially showing you for greater growth, who’s doing the showing right? Like.

Robert:
Yeah, that, that, that, that’s, that’s the, uh, $60 million question right there. Um, uh, I’ll tell you what happened to me. So, um, um, I’ve been lucid dreaming for about 10 years and, and I. scientific evidence had come along about five years into my lucid dreaming. So now people were talking about it and thinking about it. I got involved in this, uh, lucid Dream Explorers group where every month we had a goal to achieve. And, and this went on for three years. And, and the great thing about that is having goals to achieve. You really learn how you work, you know, and how to, how to achieve things. But the goal of this one month in, uh, 1985 was.

Um, find out what the dream figures represent. And so I thought, oh, that’s easy. I can do that. I became lucidly aware, followed this woman into an office. Now, now I see three women there and this guy in a three piece suit. And I walk up to him and I ask him, uh, excuse me, what do you represent? And instead of the dream figure responding, which is what I thought would happen, all of a sudden a voice from above him boomed out a partial response. And so it didn’t really make total sense. So I looked up into space and I, and I repeated what I’d heard and said, now what? And suddenly it was like that voice had to think about it and it boomed out the full response of what this figure represented. And I thought, okay, I’ve achieved the goal. I’m gonna wake up and write that down in the morning.

I thought, why didn’t the dream figure respond? Why did this non-visible voice respond? And so then that’s when I began to think. Is there an awareness behind the dream? In lucid dreaming, can you interact with your unconscious mind or your inner self? And from then on, I began this whole experimental program in my lucid dreams. I would ignore the dream figures, ignore the dream setting, and I would just ask questions and all began to receive responses. Sometimes it would be a verbal response. Sometimes the entire lucid dream would change in response to what I had requested, giving me a symbolic answer in all these symbols out here.

And that’s when I realized, you know what? I think Lucid dreaming shows us that we have an inner self. That there’s really an inner program going on where we’re being educated and kind of helped along the path, uh, especially when we’re smart enough to, uh, realize that and, and on occasion reach out and ask for help.

Guy:
Hmm. There’s like a larger part of ourselves that we, that’s a running under the surface.

Robert:
Right. Right. And, and it’s always there. And I, I mean, I think a lot of us kind of understand that. ’cause occasionally we’ll get intuitions that are kinda like, whoa, where did that come from? And if you follow through, oftentimes you, you’re blown away. You know, you’ll, uh. You’ll get a sense that you need to call your sister and all of a sudden you dial the phone, you call her, and she goes, oh, I can’t believe you’re calling me. I was just thinking about you and I need you to help me with this issue. And, and whatever You get this kinda confirmation that this, this inner world sometimes has information and ideas that if you follow through, uh, uh, you can see the truth of ’em or see them come to fight.

Guy:
Have you, have you had any experiences where you’ve lucid dream and an event or something occurred and then it’s occurred in your day-to-day life? Like, oh, I just dreamt that or.

Robert:
Yeah. You know, that’s how I, I got so interested in dreaming to begin with. Uh, when I was a little kid, uh, sometimes in the dream state, I’d hear somebody say something, you know, just like a really strange phrase. And then five hours later I’d be on the playground with my little friends. You know, I’d be eight years old running around, and someone would say that exact same phrase, and I’d remember I heard that in my dream, you know, uh, hours earlier. So, so I, I think that’s, that’s what really, uh, got me to see that, you know, that there’s something to the dream state. There’s something actually kinda magical or special about it. But in lucid dreaming, sometimes you’ll, you’ll see that as well where you’ll. Do something, uh, something will happen in the lucid Dream and then you’ll wake up.

Um, I’ll tell you here, here’s a funny story. Um, so my wife and I had gotten a small cat. You know, the, the cat was like six weeks old, is an Abyssinian cat. She is a really beautiful cat. Here was the thing, uh, about this cat. Um, I worked outta my home office and so I’d be there on my phone with clients or I’d be typing away on my computer. And what would the cat do when I was on the phone? Well, it would start the meow, you know? And, and so after a while I, I got used to throwing my cat out of the office in the morning and I’d just shut the door. And, and then at noon when I’d go down for lunch, there would be the cat and I’d go down anyway.

One night I see my cat in a dream and suddenly it begins to speak to me and it says in a little cat voice, would you play with me? All of a sudden I was just blown away. I thought, okay, now I realize this is a dream because I’m talking with our cat and, and, uh, and so in the morning I thought that was so strange and I began to talk to the cat. I said, look, I’m really busy today, but here in an hour I’m gonna come out and, and we’ll play. And so when I came out, I told her, we’re gonna play this game called Tag, and here’s how it works. I touch you. You’re it. And now you have to chase me and once you touch me then I’m it. Then I’ll chase you for the next 10 minutes.

We were running around the house playing tag. The little cat would actually just touch me on, on the foot and run and turn around. Run the opposite way. It was, it was the wildest thing. Another time the appeared to me in a dream and it told me. How it wanted to be held. This was a cat for the first two years. You, you couldn’t pick it up ’cause it would scratch you and, and you’d have to drop it to the floor. So it showed me, it wanted me to put out my arm like this and then it would put its haunches here and its front legs up there. That’s how it wanted to be held. I woke up from the lucid dream and I stepped outside and the cat was exactly where it had been in my lucid dream, you know, just 30 seconds earlier.

I put out my arm just exactly like it showed me. It jumped right there, put its haunches there, put its sink there. I walked down to the breakfast table. My wife flipped out. She said, how did you get it to allow you to hold it? I said, it came in a dream and told me how it wants to be held and, and so you know, when you have those kinda moments, that’s when you realize. There’s more going on here in the world. Uh, there’s more going on in dreaming than we normally think about. And, and that even when it comes to, uh, communication, we, we’ve come, I believe, to understand that we have a inner awareness and inner self, but, but we also realize that we can interact with other selves, uh, even animal selves in the dream state.

Guy:
That’s, that’s amazing. So. How do we, how do we evoke a lucid dream? Because I, I, it’s funny, I always remember as a kid eating a, like somebody telling me to eat lots of cheese or something like that. And you’ll get wild dreams when you go to bed. Do you know what I mean? And then you’d, you’d try eating a block and see what was happening. I did anyway. But, um, yeah. W how do we start to consciously do this?

Robert:
Right, so, so, um, the first thing it helps is to have good dream recall, just because a lot of us have kind of given up on, you know, dreams and we kind of ignored ’em. So, so it, it helps to have some pretty good dream recalls. So, I, I ask people, you know, if you could start a dream journal or, or start a process of just. You know, remembering at least one dream a night, uh, something like that. But then when it comes to it, if you’re a total rank beginner, um, I’ll tell you how I taught myself, um, before the scientific evidence how to lucid dream. So I’d been reading a book by Carlos Castaneda, who was this UCLA graduate student, uh, in anthropology, who is studying psychoactive plants.

And he meets this shamanic teacher who Don Juan, who tells him. That he can become aware in his dreams by finding his hands. And, and I, I, I’m reading this book and I think, what, how, where, where’s the technique? I don’t get it. So there wasn’t a technique, so I just invented one. So here’s what I did, because I knew about the power of suggestion. Um, each night before I’d go to sleep, I’d look at the palms of my hands and I would just repeat over and over as I looked at them. Tonight, in my dreams, I’ll see my hands and realize I’m dreaming. Tonight in my dreams, I’ll see my hands and realize I’m dreaming. Tonight my dreams, I’ll see my hands and realize I’m dreaming.

So I do that for about five minutes. Make it my intent. Before I went to sleep, um, the first night nothing happened. So the second night I do the process, nothing happened. The third night I do the process and now I’m walking through my high school hallway ’cause I was in high school at the time. And boom, my hands popped right in front of my face and I go, oh crap, my hands. This is a dream. And suddenly those students up there, I knew they were dream figures, and I reached over and touched the nearby wall and it was cool and nubby just, just like it should be. But I went out of the, uh, hallway into another area and just had a fantastic, uh, lucid dream. So that’s how I taught myself.

Uh, it’s kind of like a conditioned response when you see your hands. The first thing, this is a dream. Climb a ladder. See your hands. This is a dream. Open a door. See your hands. This is a dream. I just taught myself that. The side of my hands meant I should ask myself, am I dreaming or I should just confirm? This is a dream so anyone can use this kind of technique. It’s kind of based on that Pavlovian idea where he’d ring a bell and present food and he’d ring a bell and present food. He could ring a bell and the dogs would salivate. They’d come to expect it. They came to believe that they’d have food. So now it’s you just, the sight of your hands is the stimulus.

The response is this is a dream. So, uh, a lot of people have used this technique to have their very first lucid dream. And the thing I like about it, for a beginner, it’s something you can focus on before you go to sleep and it can help you, uh, have that very first lucid dream.

Guy:
How do you stop yourself from waking up? Because I’ve had many of those moments been, oh shit, I’m in a dream, and then po you know, you’re awake.

Robert:
Yeah. You know, in, in my, in my workshops, that’s kind of, uh, complaint number one, uh, for, for a lot of folks is the lucid dreams are way too short. And so here’s what I learned, uh, especially in that first, uh, five to 10 years, is that, is that. When you become loosely aware, you have to not get overexcited or too, too, too emotional. You have to keep it within a certain range because if you get too excited, oh my God, this is a lucid dream, boom, you’ll wake up. So if you get too excited, so. Let’s say, uh, if I became excited, things I could do is tell myself immediately, stay calm, calm down. Because almost any vocalized intent in the lucid dream will immediately be acted on, or any thought about intent will be immediately acted on.

Or if I, I become lucid because I see something exciting, then I just look down at the floor, something boring, just to reduce that emotion. So that, that’s the first thing I realized is you had to. Keep your emotions in a certain level. It’s not that you can’t get happy or whatever, but it’s just, if you get excessive, it’s kind of like a circuit breaker. You’ll pop out.

Guy:
So once you’re, once you’re in there that lucid state and you realize that you’re awake, you’re consciously awake in a dream. So you, you, you’re cognitively there. Uh, do you then, how do you explore that landscape? Could you actually think like, oh, I wanna see the pyramids, and then, and then you go to the pyramids? Or do you let the information present itself to you? Or like you said, you started talking to your inner self, like how do we then navigate that, that

Robert:
Right. So, so, yeah, that, that’s a great question. So, uh, um, one thing, especially for beginners too, is, uh, you have to be a little bit careful that you don’t just return to regular dreaming, because oftentimes you become lucid, you don’t get too excited. So you stay in there and now you’re exploring, but you get so captivated by what you see that you return to regular dreaming. So, so it helps to remind yourself if you’re a beginner every 30 seconds or so. This is a dream. I’m dreaming this, or that’s a dream car. Here comes a dream, uh, you know, uh, truck, you know, whatever. Just to keep your minding yourself of that. But here’s what I’d say when it comes to space is that at the beginning, this might not be an easy thing to do, but there’s things that you can do if you learn how to do ’em.

Again, it involves belief and expect. So for some people. They might, uh, go in search of a mirror and if they find a mirror, they’ll announce. When I jump in this mirror, I’ll find myself outside of the pyramids. They jump into the mirror and boom, there they are at the pyramids. But you can see kind of a little bit of a hypnotic suggestion there. If I do this, then that’ll happen. So if I jump through the mirror, the mirror will be a portal and I’ll find myself in the pyramid. So you, you see how they’re kind of using their belief and expectation and intent actively in that process. ’cause if you believe it’s impossible, nothing’s gonna happen. But if you believe it’s possible, oh yeah, when I jump through this portal, this mirror, I’m gonna get there.

That’s how I can do it. Or you could do something like this. When I turn around, I’ll find myself in Paris, and as you’re sitting there thinking, okay, I’m gonna turn around. You can imagine the Eiffel Tower and the, you know, Sean De, and I’ll just turn around. Boom, there you are. But you can, you begin to see that your mind is kind of connected to all of this. Sometimes it’s fun just to walk through a hall and open up closed doors just to see what’s behind them. You know, be because you know that on some deeper level, your unconscious. Is having to create something on the other side of the door. And so sometimes it’s fun just to open up all the doors just to see, uh, you know what, what, what you can, uh, have it cook up.

Guy:
Fascinating. And this is from my own curiosity as well, have you had experiences where you’ve been lucid and then ended up out of body And so from the domestic cat to the mountain lion and uh, how do you tell the difference?

Robert:
Right. So, um, um. I started thinking about this because I, I, I, uh, I think maybe some other friends had told me that they thought it was definitely possible. And, and I remember reading, um, in one of the Carlos Castane books, so something kind of similar. So, so this is what I did. Um, I became lucidly aware and, and, uh, what I did be, I announced. Now take me to the next form. Now take me to the next form or the, I, I either said the next form or the next level. And boom, suddenly I was in what apparently was an exact replica of, um, our kitchen, which was like six feet below where I was sleeping. And, and I was really stunned because now I’m in a b, e state. I know enough about BS to know that I’m in a different state and I look outside and, you know, it’s, it’s early morning. The, the, the branches are moving, the wind’s flowing and I think I’ve gotta go exploring. So I zop out of the window and I’m flying around the neighborhood. Um, I, I fly through the neighbor’s houses.

It was really hilarious. OBE just applied through the neighbor’s houses. Then I, then I come back to outside of our house and I saw this one house and I remember the people who lived there and, uh, how the husband had just passed away. And so I decided to explore. So I shot up into it. You know, I kinda created a window where there wasn’t a window in waking reality, but, but that’s where I went in. And got the sense of the, uh, second floor. And it was funny, when I was up there, all of a sudden I turned one corner into a room and, and I saw the homeowner kinda pull the covers, uh, down and look and then pull the covers over her eyes like she had seen me. And, and I said, oh, Mrs. Holtz, I’m so sorry. I know your husband just passed away, but, but I just wanna let you know that, you know, we continue on, uh, after, after death.

And, and so there’s nothing really to be, uh. Worried about anyways, so I, I eventually decided, you know, I, I should, uh, wake up and get out of this. About six months later, Mrs. Holt sold the house and I was able to go there when they were opening up the house for, uh, uh, for possible sales. And, uh, I could confirm all the details of, uh, how it was laid out and, and how it was all structured. So, so that was how I moved from a lucid dream. I just announced now take me to the next form, or now let me go to the next level. And it was a sudden, instantaneous change. I was in a dream and then boom, I was in the virtual, um, reality of our kitchen.

Guy:
Yeah. That’s fascinating. No, I have had similar experiences from that to that. That’s why I wanted to hear your perspective. You know, one thing that I wanna mention, and I’m interested to know if you’ve explored this or not, or speak to it a little bit, is around, uh, unresolved wounds or trauma. Then, so what I’ve found in my own journey was that I would spontaneously have go outta bodies, say, or, or, or have these experiences and they weren’t very pleasant. Right? You know, or you could have a nightmare or something and you know, dreams and a bit. But what I realized when I flipped the script was that I’m actually seeing it through a lens of trauma that’s unresolved or isn’t healed, and I’m projecting it into my. This state of being like I would project it into my day-to-day life.

Like they were mirroring exactly the same. Like if I, if I carry anxiety and fear inside of me, ’cause I, I don’t even know. I’ve got an unresolved wound that needs to be released. I’m actually gonna see the world as a fearful place. I’m gonna watch the news more. I’m gonna be doing all these things that’s gonna continue to perpetuate that fear in me so I don’t have to change my state of being. And it was fascinating that it was actually. Bringing that into this state, and the moment I, I got it and was healing those wounds more and more, everything just changed,

Robert:
right,

Guy:
you know? And I just wanted to know your thoughts on that. Have you experienced that? Is that something you’ve looked at and.

Robert:
right. Um, you know, um, I, I remember one time I was giving a talk in, uh, Bogota, Columbia, a, a weekend workshop, and, and in the front row there was a woman who asked. Excellent questions. So I knew that she was already a talented lucid dreamer because you, you wouldn’t ask the kind of questions she was asking unless you were already in the space anyway, but there was one thing that was really strange about her. She had all this pain in her face. You know, when you meet someone for the first time and you see this pain in their face, you don’t know what the issue is, but you can just see that they’ve been through some heavy stuff because they have all this pain in their face. Anyway. So the event comes to an end.

Six months later, they have me come back to Bogota. I come back, this woman walks through the door now, like 70 or 80% of the pain is gone from her face. She looks taller, younger, more attractive, everything. I, and, and I ran up to her and, and I asked through the translator what happened to you? And she said. She had never conceptually thought of emotional healing in a lucid dream until she heard my, uh, first weekend workshop, and as soon as I explained the process and everything, she realized that that’s what she was going to do. She said, uh, later that month, she had a lucid dream. She had developed a plan. She enacted her plan in the lucid dream. She said the healing energy that came to her was just. Off the charts just utterly profound. She said she, she woke up and she was an, a brand new person, and, and before she left, she said, but there’s one funny thing, Robert, I want you to know. And I, I said, what’s that?

She said, I still remember the traumatic incidents, but now there’s no pain. There’s no pain, there’s no shame. There’s no guilt, there’s no anxiety, there’s no nothing. They’re just, they’re just. Yeah, it happened just like, you know, eating a banana or something. Yeah. It happened nothing to it. So, so I’ve seen people have just profound transformations after one, uh, uh, one time. But I do wanna say that in the world of psychology now, they teach people to have lucid dreams in order to resolve recurring nightmares from post-traumatic stress disorder. Be because they’ve found, uh, you know, that. Just becoming aware within the dream one time and changing one little thing ends the nightmares that they just basically cease.

And now that the nightmares of cease, now you don’t have to, you know, drink, uh, uh, half a bottle of whiskey to fall asleep or something, you know, you can fall asleep naturally and you don’t have to do all these other uh, things. So, so there’s, there’s a lot of healing potential here, especially for emotional and psychological healing.

Guy:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. The, um, my trail of thoughts ’cause I, I, with. I’m trying to think where I was going. It’s gone. I was like, oh, I gotta, I gotta get in there for a sec. It’s just completely gone. Maybe it’s too early in the morning for me. That’s, but um, do you, do you find that, oh, that’s right. What I was gonna ask you as well, there’s two things. One is, do you find it affects your sleep? Do you wake up tired or energized the next day?

Robert:
You know that normally after a lucid dream, uh, I wake up kind of energized, you know, I mean, it’s like, you know, I wrote a great poem, or I, I did something incredible. I, I feel energized. So, so, uh. Rarely do I hear people wake up and feel exhausted or something. Uh, for me it’s all fun. Uh, there’s no work involved.

Guy:
Yeah. No, that’s beautiful. And what I was gonna ask you, when you run your events or workshops, are you actually getting people to fall asleep and have a lucid dream? Or are you just teaching the technique? So how do you do it? Like do you have a pajama party and you’re all up till yeah. You know, that, that would be fun. Uh, uh, n normally the people, uh, just practice the techniques before they go to sleep or, or during the day and, and, and, and then they report their lucid dreaming. You know, one, one thing I do wanna say, to be a frequent lucid dreamer, uh, scientifically you just have to have one lucid dream a month.

Robert:
And, and so just the fact that you’ve had a lucid dream doesn’t mean that now all your dreams are gonna be lucid. That’s, that’s not how it works. Most people would be happy to have three or four lucid dreams a month.

Guy:
gotcha. Yeah. And what, um, if people wanna get into it, what book would you recommend, mate, like you’ve done or where? Where to start.

Robert:
Yeah. You know, if you wanna get into the techniques about how to become lucid and how to stabilize it and then go on and explore, uh, my second book, Lucid Dreaming: Plain and Simple, is for you. If you’re already deep into lucid dreaming and, and wanna have your mind blown, uh, read my first book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self

Guy:
Yeah. Okay. The mind blowing sounds good to me. Is it? Um, uh, it’s just fascinating mate. It’s fascinating. Um, before we wrap up, is there any question you wish I’d asked you that I haven’t yet? Just to make. Sure we’ve covered it.

Robert:
You know, we- we- we’ve, we’ve covered the basic topics. But, but again, uh, I- I- I do wanna say when it comes to potentials, you can use lucid dreaming to access creativity, to resolve emotional issues, to resolve physical issues, to inter- engage with an inner self, a- and also you can do spiritual practices in a lucid dream. You can meditate in a lucid dream a- and you’ll have your, your mind blown. So the, the list is endless, but, but it helps to read about people who have gone through the process, so you see, okay, that’s the method they use. There, there’s kind of an approach that you have to take here

Guy:
You can meditate in a lucid dream.

Robert:
You can meditate. You’ll, you’ll, you’ll have your mind blown. You, you’ll go so deep so quick. It’s incredible. And the people who have meditated consistently in lucid dreams, after five or six times, they report that during their waking state, now their meditation practice is different. What used to take them 20 minutes to get to a certain level, now in five minutes they’re there. It’s like in the lucid dream, they cleared out all the brush and they just made the path there

Guy:
I’ll try. I’ll try that. I’ll let you know if I get there. So in your first book, do you, does it come up with like all these different ideas that you could try and do and that kind of thing? Yeah. Wow. Is where your imagination limits you to really Sounds like at the end of the day.

Robert:
It’s really something because also, uh, like I had mentioned earlier, s- sometimes the issue is our limiting beliefs. As I went deeper into lucid dreaming, I’d hear my inner awareness say, “Trust, nothing to fear.” Or I’d look up in the sky and there’d be a giant banner that said, “Trust, nothing to fear.” Because as you keep going deeper and deeper, that’s when you have to allow in and kind of surrender, uh, to some interesting experiences. But if you do so, uh, y- you’ll be the beneficiary

Guy:
And how beautiful is that when you getting those messages about trust and the fear and how that’s gonna show up in your day-to-day life when you have to make these decisions and follow your heart more and, and start applying it right?

Robert:
Yeah. You, you begin to realize that, that, that oftentimes that’s the issue, uh, by, by kind of adopting a sense of trust a- and fearlessness, uh, th- then you can really access things that before were impossible.

Guy:
Mate, Robert, you’re a good man. I, I, I love this podcast today chatting to you. Honestly, I’m, I’m just so intrigued, um, by what you had to share. Where can people find out more, uh, about your work if they wanna, you know, jump on board?

Robert:
Yeah, you can check out my, uh, website at lucidadvice.com. Uh, you can check that out. Also, I do a free online magazine, The Lucid Dreaming Experience, so luciddreamingmagazine.com is another place where you can learn more about me

Guy:
That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Is that, is that all you do full time, write books and teach people how to lucid dream?

Robert:
Yeah. Yeah. You know, that’s, that’s, that’s my life.

Guy:
You’re living the dream, mate. That’s awesome.

Robert:
Yeah. I, I have a dream job. Yeah, I have a dream job, yeah.

Guy:
I love it. Robert, thank you so much, mate. That was awesome. Really appreciate you. Okay. Thanks.

Robert:
Thanks.