On Lucid Dreams and Dreaming: Least Romantic Love-Letter Ever.

I'm sort of careful about what I say in
relation to my own my own eccentricities because the truth is I am a conventionally mentally healthy person I don't have any problems I don't have any learning disabilities I don't have any emotional problems I don't have any psychological problems but I very carefully examine I really very thoroughly reflect on the things that set me apart from shall we say my own brothers and sisters because I come from a large family and it is interesting if you have many brothers and sisters people who are genetically similar to you then the psychological differences the intellectual differences may stand out you know to a greater extent it may be easier for you to see hey this is a neither nurture in our nature but just a difference between people when you got brothers or sisters to compare yourself to um you know one I think you've all heard me talk about quite a bit is the fact that I don't feel jealousy believe me my brothers and sisters feel jealousy like I'm aware this is a very very unusual element of my character whether that psychological intellectual or what but I've said many many times that's not ethical that's not like a decision I made I didn't choose to not feel jealousy and I've also said you know I think you guys have heard me talk about the role of sympathy in life I talked about sympathy being an analytical tool jealousy also you know draws people into understanding one another and thinking about their relations with one another in a pretty dynamic way but I can see how in terms of evolutionary time human beings have benefited from jealousy like you know over millions of years at least the way it draws one person's attention to the other makes one person examine and try to understand another and understand a group dynamic and hierarchy and there are a lot of behaviors over over the scale of hundreds of thousands of years and millions of years that come out of come out of jealousy which you can see of see as being positive in relation to survival of the species em but I don't feel jealousy so look I really examine very thoroughly the things that psychologically make me both people and one that was mentioned a long time ago and some people were freaked out about is the fact that in my adult life I do not have dreams I do not dream in the conventional sense of the term and I stopped having normal dreams many many years ago so you know why is that well at a very early age I became in the minority of people who have what's called lucid dreaming so when I was young not all of the time but very often if I had a dream I would become aware that it was a dream and then from my position within the dream as a lucid dreamer as someone who was aware that they're dreaming I could manipulate the reality of the dream I could change it to be anything so you know once you know it's a dream if you are a lucid dreamer you can just choose to be at the ocean and suddenly you're at the ocean you can choose to do anything see anything talk to anybody you have a comic book like super power to recreate the false reality around you but of course it's meaningless because you know it's false now when I first was coming into this behavior you know i can remember testing how detailed was the reality of the world of dreams you know something that really surprised me for example i can remember in a dream this is when i was figuring out how to lucid dream at work i took a book off of the bookshelf and as rapidly as possible was reading the pages in the book while flipping through them in the dream and your mind is generating the text in the book and so for me at least this may not be true if you also can control your dreams you also if lucid dreaming if I did it slowly you know if it is read at a normal pace then my imagination could generate as much text as I wanted in the book and on any topic your imagination is racing ahead of you all the time to fill in the blanks in reality as you perceive it when you're awake and your mind is doing that when you're dreaming also but if I went through very very quickly the book I could not you know i would i would be able to catch myself so to speak I'd be able to perceive my mind generating it I'd be able to perceive that you know the false reality the illusion of the dream was racing to to fill up the pages as fast as I was glancing through them yeah now of course a lot of creative artists are fascinated by this once you get into lucid dreaming if you're something like a songwriter many many people who compose music you know pop music or something they try to use dreams in this way to generate song lyrics or poetry or new ideas and you can but you know the quality of your creative output is much better when you're awake um you know I could do that also but if I was if I was rigorously you know writing down new ideas that came out of my dreams whether ideas for you know creative arts stories or songs or you know ideas of other kinds look maybe one percent of them are good ideas like maybe five percent are like useful ideas not even good maybe five percent of it is useful but no if you sit down when you're awake and and write a song that's going to be a song that you know reflects rational things and it's interesting to your audience as some kind of quality and if you rely on your dreams then you know you could do hundreds and hundreds and out of the hundreds you create a few probably would be would be good but it's it's going to be a sifting process like that anyway so I'm somebody who both is acutely aware of dreams and you know when a sense disregards them oh right so another example of that with lucid dreaming back when it was kind of new to me I remember I I was interested in testing how detailed this reality was and so I went around and was looking at a lot of things that you're not you're not intentionally visualizing in the dream so I looked down at the dirt on the ground and you know moved the dirt with my foot and went around and looked at you know this kind of completely boring detail of the dream to see how much this was being filled in in my mind's eye and one of the details that really surprised me was that I went up to a window I imagined myself at a real-life location in the dream you know a window of reinforced glass so it's glass that has chicken wire in it and I walked up to the window and looked and I could see the reflection of my own face you know in the in the glass you know I was really surprised that wow you know just the the extent to which those types of details are filled in in the illusion of the room and then when I was surprised I could also see the reflection of my own face I could see how surprised that was but of course there are other limits I mean you know my my ability to to speak German is limited you know I I do still understand some German so if I try to push myself in the dream to speak German or to have a conversation with somebody else in German my mind can't really do that right so you know because I only know so much German so you know which is also i mean again when you're first having this kind of dream you know it's uh you know it's interesting to push those limits and you know obviously if you have a conversation with someone else you can you know you can in lucid room you can conjure up any historical character but what they're actually gonna say to you is just you talking to yourself obviously you figure that out pretty quick with lucid dreaming and you know if it's if it's an historical person you've done a lot of research on you know they're going to save the things that reflect your opinion of them or the researcher Dunham but that's it absolutely for me that's absolutely no interest and I have had some some interesting philosophical conversations in my dreams but it's normally because it's something I've been thinking about a lot doing a lot of work on when I was awake and even though those dreams some of them were interesting where I had a kind of debate about philosophy or politics while was dreaming um it's never going to be as good or useful or productive as the kind of debate you can have when you're awake so I just say there are obvious limits to to lucid dreaming but a lot of people I mean not a lot of people some people creative artists you get fascinated with lucid dream because they hope it can be a kind of factory for them to generate new ideas a new perspective of the world and maybe it can be maybe it can be for some but very very rarely is the perspective generated by lucid dreaming useful however I've got to tell you the final outcome of those years of lucid dreaming was an end to dreaming itself in my adult life you know as i got older i can say i just stopped dreaming entirely and i can remember the timeline of that and like you know until very recently if i had a dream at all just for a couple of seconds i would not realize it was a dream you know i might have a couple of seconds of kind of normal dream experience and then every rose oh it's a dream and just forget it cuz i before the plights not interesting to me anymore it's not there's no there's no fascination I just want to get a good night's sleep or also it was only when I was really advanced in lucid dreaming that I could be in the state I think relatively few people experience this where I am asleep I am aware that I'm asleep and dreaming and I can simultaneously perceive the false reality of dreaming and the real reality of the world outside me so for example if there were strange noises in my apartment I can remain asleep but I can use my senses I can hear perceive the real world they go is that a problem then return asleep where I can I can also you know sense you know my body lying in the bed without waking up that's very very strange when you first have that experience of simultaneously perceiving the real world and the world of your dreams um it's quite disturbing when you first do it but you get used to it um and again I think most people don't don't perceive those types of states or not not often but look for me I mean obviously I've just been describing what was interesting or fascinating to me about lucid dream when I was first discovering it it does for someone like me that does not stay interesting for long I'm not interested in dreams and not interested in fantasy I'm interested in reality the whole emphasis is my channel whether I'm talking about politics or history or anything else is kind of real real real and so you know dreaming itself really disappeared from my life now you know I mean again it's many many years ago the last time I can remember having a kind of normal dream was when i was living in Cambodia and I don't even know is that six years ago seven years ago I've had a long long period again even then one was living in Cambodia I didn't regularly have normal dreams was once in a long while and I can remember it may be just two points during my marriage which ended in divorce case you don't know kiss you at nerd I remember maybe used two points discussing with my wife dream I had I think she didn't get it because for me to have a normal dream in the sense of a dream that I'm not in control of where I'm not having I'm not lucid dreaming or I'm not you know that's very rare and very unusual for me and I don't put any kind of spiritual you know importance on it but a does normally very very clearly reflect something I've been worried about look something I've been thinking about so just in that sense it's like well gee you know had this dream if it was a normal dream a non non non lucid dream and this dream shows me that I'm really a lot more concerned about this topic then I thought I was it's just on that level that i would i would want to talk about some of the way obviously i feel more strongly about this subject but i gotta say since cambodia since i left cambodia i don't know if i had a single normal dream in that sense so just lately I'm you know I didn't want to put too fine a point on it but just lately I've started a new relationship you know with the new girlfriend and I'm very optimistic about it and very optimistic about her I'm really hopeful about that relationship short-term and long-term and I'm hopeful that in the best way which is you know even if we don't work as a couple we're gonna work as friends which to me means a lot I don't you guys have noticed that about a lot of videos lately like the rich piana video reflecting on how difficult it is to make friends once you're a fully-grown adult I mean you know if that relationship ends not in love but in friendship I'd be happy about that too for me that's a big win anyway but you know I'm very optimistic about that and you know I was hesitant because I didn't want her to ascribe too much meaning to it but just now these last few days these last few weeks I'd have to figure out exactly when it started I've been having normal dreams again first time in so many years and you know that also okay why is that I do think that mean right now my whole life not just my relationship with this woman I think there is really a kind of optimism and hope in my life that I haven't had for many many many years that's that's probably one element of it but the other element keeping it all the way real is just that the start of this relationship has really disturbed my sleep I've been sleeping very very unusually in the lead of this relationship partly used to do you know anticipation and you know positive emotional connections and partly due to you know worrying about airplane tickets and hotel reservations and a lot of details like that and we've had you know we've had a little bit of drama where I had to get to know her parents which is fine it's a little bit strange but you know I talked to her parents on skype and there was a lot of a lot of indirect communication to me and her parents you know reassuring them lindo situation is so there are a lot of things that could just disturb your sleep and it's totally possible that you know what's the relationship gets in their way or whatever a meal relationship may not last I don't have any you know as I say could end in friendship can go in one direction or another it's fine i'm i'm happy with it no matter what direction it goes in how it ends up but yeah for me that's a striking contrast and is why i made this video talking the hit the history of sleep in my life was that for me it was very unexpected to now suddenly for the first time in so many years be having normal dreams and I said this in the conversation with tofu goddess but I don't I don't think I don't think you see it in the edited podcast maybe just because it was too boring but I mean one of these I said you were kind of the beginning the middle and the end of the conversation is you know right now this is a really positive time in my life in my whole adult life um you know without even getting into the new girlfriend I don't know if there's ever been another period of even one month that I could say was happy most of my adult life has been misery it's been meaningful misery a lot of it not all of it you know I've been miserable for good reasons but um sure you know moving to Hong starting this new shaft of my life sure compared to the situation I was in in victoria bc in taiwan in kunming in cambodia in laos in saskatchewan sure right now whether or not it's linked to my return to you know childlike dreaming that's what it is for me it's a type of dreaming that's been strange to me since childhood just having a normal dream look anyone else has maybe that signals the rekindling of some optimism my life