Hello dear readers, after a quick survey I decided to write no more than two emails per week here, both for free and paid subscribers.
Many posts will have a longer paid subscribers only section but I always try to make the first part interesting and a good read too. Same with the podcast, a shorter free but interesting hopefully version and a longer for paid subscribers. I write for paid subscribers stories that are more difficult to share for me. I am more comfortable writing them with a small audience.
"Let's Dream it Together"
This is an expression I heard from Putanny Yawanawà many times. I love it.
Every night, I go to bed looking forward to it not because I am tired but because I am curious to see what I am going to live in my dreams. We share dreams in our community (ask me for an invite if you want to join) and had fascinating experiences of dreaming similar things, or seeing in dreams facts about someone else that are sometimes true.
The basics I know about remembering your dreams (experts can skip to next point!)
-Stopping alcohol entirely (if you can’t reduce it, this is the most dramatic change for me since I stopped two years ago - more dreams and more and more lucid).
-Focus on “I am going to remember my dreams” before going to bed
-Prepare your sleep with the same intention in mind, even 5 or 10 minutes only before going to bed
-Try to empty your mind from the day, tasks, stress, preoccupations
-Keep a notebook and a pen next to your bed and focus on it so you remember to write when you wake up
-Another good technique if you prefer is to leave your phone with voice recorder one tap away, like adding it on the locked screen. You will be surprised of the things you can record just saying what you were just dreaming about.
-Convince yourself there is something in your dreams. It’s just your mind convinced there isn’t so you don’t see them. Generally you think there was nothing but there was, you are just not used to it. At one point I went through a stage where my mind was telling me while I was dreaming “you are aware you are dreaming this, but it is not important, do NOT remember it”. It took me weeks to go beyond that mind block and train it to tell my mind I wanted to remember everything, even what that part of me said wasn’t important.
Remembering and lucid dreaming is just like training a muscle,
the more you do it the more it comes. Do it as you brush your teeth.
-When you wake-up, stay in bed and do not open your eyes. I often stay in that space for 30 mins. Just be aware that you just became “lucid” rather than awake. For me it just feels like a different brain frequency. I sometimes go right back to sleeping and continue the dream, even after writing what it was about (I needed to open my eyes for that, I can’t manage to write well eyes closed, maybe one day). Stay still, do not move. If you feel like you need to go to the bathroom, hold it a bit if you can as you might lose the dream just by going there…
-Write anything, even just one word. Write three words. Draw something. Anything. The more you do this and if you try every day the more it will come. I now write two to five full size A4 pages every morning but it took a while to get there.
-Naps too. I noticed that I do not need a full night sleep to start dreaming or having a dream life, just a nap is enough, I sometimes go there in a matter of minutes and live a full story in a 30 mins nap, again it took me a while.
-Meditate daily. It will get you used to being aware of your thoughts and visuals you might see while you’re awake. My experience shows that the more I meditate the more I become lucid in my dreams. It feels like the “door” between awake and sleeping is thinner and thinner even though of course I do not remember or dream all the time when I sleep (as shown in sleep phase analysis)
-When you write the dreams, use “free writing”, just write anything that comes out of your mind. I try to write every single idea and it slows my mind. If something from the “real” world shows up on your mind (like a todo list item today or noticing a dog barking) it’s okay I write it too then quickly go back writing the next idea. Sometimes I have a flow of five todo list items but then my brain throws again some dream bits and pieces. I then re-read what I wrote and isolate the dream.
-Reconstruct “stories” from my dreams, I very often can write 3-5 stories that happened. It doesn’t matter if they don’t make sense or feel crazy, I accept anything, even if I turned into a dragon in my dream. I just write it. Remember how Tom Cruise learns to fly a helicopter in a few minutes in the Matrix? Everything is possible in dreams. Instead of telling myself “it’s bullshit it’s a dream” I enjoy the “fantasy movie” that I live and just embody that new character. It’s fascinating as it changes every night.
Here is a dream I wrote in a secret base under water as an example. It doesn’t make any sense in real life (or doesn’t seem like) and it’s okay!
-Plants, rapé etc. I tried Mugwort and a mix in Dreamleaf years ago (all legal and easy to find), I did not like it much and stopped fast, now I don’t need that. You were probably expecting it, the consciousness tools I have used (also see the plants section in my about page) in the Amazon, vision quests and Sundance dry fasting for 4 days created a huge growth in my dream life too.
Before I move to the paid subscribers section, a short “break” with a few notes since my last newsletter:
Community call next tuesday 18h CET (as always) will be about… you guessed it… Dreams.
Updated books, movies and tools, adding dream entries (top sections of this newsletter)
Graham Hancock released his new Netflix Series “Ancient Apocalypse”, watched all episodes in 3 days, very inspiring.
Ashaninka leader and friend Benki Piyako in Paris next week
Loved this quote “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
“There is another place that can be summoned through practice that is not the imagination, but more a secondary positioning of your mind with regard to spiritual matters… It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice.” In The Marginalian.
Could not help tweeting about Elon Musk’s new “hardcore” employee policy asking for only “exceptional performance and long hours at high intensity”. I asked what the French thought about that…
What to do with the dreams & interpretation
What do dreams mean?
Let's dream it together
Comments on this episode are for paid subscribers