Announcer (00:00:04) - This is Dream Power Radio, the place where your dreams turn into reality. Here is your host, Debbie Spector Weisman.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:00:13) - Hello, hello, hello and welcome to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Certified Dream-Life Coach Debbie Spector Weisman. This is a place where we talk about dreams, both daytime and nighttime dreams and how you can use them to make the internal shift to a life you love and rediscover the truth of who you really are. I had a dream the other night I'd like to share with you now. In the dream, I'm walking through a forest-like area. The trees are emerald green and there are bright, colorful flowers everywhere. The sky is magically blue and has a rainbow arcing across it. For those of you listening to the podcast, it looks a lot like the background I use on this podcast. As I'm walking, I pass by little tables, each one filled with a different kind of sweet -- candies, cakes, ice cream sundaes, the works. I get to pick and choose anything I want.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:01:09) - I'm filled with total joy and loving this journey, and I wake up feeling a great sense of euphoria. I share this dream with you now for two reasons. One is I believe that one person's dream as everyone's dream. So I hope you're also getting a positive feeling from hearing about the dream. The other reason is to show to you an example of how dreams can affect us, and what happens when you start paying attention to your dreams. In case you haven't figured it out by now, today's episode is all about dreams. And here to discuss them with me is one of my favorite dream educators and researchers Robert Hoss. Among his many, many accomplishments, Bob is as acclaimed author and teacher on dreams, the past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and the director of its annual conference. His books include Dream Language, Dream to Freedom, Dreams That Change Our Lives and Dreams Understanding: Biology, Psychology, and Culture. Welcome back to Dream Power Radio, Bob.
Robert Hoss (00:02:13) - Well, thank you very much. Glad to be here.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:02:16) - I'm glad to have you here. So what do you think of my little dream there?
Robert Hoss (00:02:19) - Oh, I think that was wonderful. Particularly as you were telling it. I was looking at the background and going, well, you're living your dream at another level where what dreams do. They're problem solvers. For one thing, our dreaming brain is sort of a self-healing thing, but when they end like yours did, there's usually a valuable message in there because dreams, they're a learning experience. And if we have learned what we needed to learn in the dream, where they will quite often reward us because that's the way that the learning gets situated in our minds.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:02:57) - Exactly. And when I journaled this dream, after I had it, I had several different things that came to my mind. One was just to embody the dream as it is, just appreciating for its beauty and its joy so I could have it to look back on for those times when maybe I'm not feeling so great.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:03:14) - And I could say, yeah, but you had this wonderful dream, and it tells you that life is sweet and everything you want is there for your taking and all those good things that are there out for you. That's wonderful. So I said, that's great. If that's all I get out of the dream. I'm really happy with it. But like you said, the background did remind me a lot of the background I use on this podcast. I said, well, it's also telling me I'm loving doing the podcast. Well, Bob, one of the things I want to talk to you about and one of the most popular subjects that I'm asked about these days is lucid dreaming. A few weeks ago, I was going back into some files for when I was first studying dreamwork about a dozen years ago. I came across something you wrote at the time where you indicated that lucid dreaming accounted for only about 3% of the type of dreams of people have. Is that still true, or has actually been a growth in lucid dreaming?
Robert Hoss (00:04:09) - Well, I think there's been a growth in awareness of lucid dreaming. So many more people are open to it and are actually practicing it. The statistics depend on who is doing the study. One study will show it's about 2% and the other study will show it as much as 7%. But when researchers who are interested in lucid dreaming start studying it, they have a number of subjects that they work with regularly in laboratory or other ways that are in the 20 or 30% of their dreams that they remember or lucid. So it kind of depends on your interests and how your brain is structured, the ability for you to be able to lucid dream and your intent in life.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:04:48) - I think I read some study somewhere, and this may have been an outlier, that says that up to 70% of people have said they've had a lucid dream.
Robert Hoss (00:04:58) - Yeah. It's yeah 70 to 80%. When you ask somebody have you had a lucid dream and define what it is, which is you know you're dreaming in the dream then. Yeah. You get responses like the 70 and 80% of the time somebody said, oh yeah, I had that once.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:05:16) - Well if you want to have more lucid dreams, can you just have one as this simple as telling yourself that you want to have a lucid dream?
Robert Hoss (00:05:25) - Well, yeah, there's a number of different approaches and they're not easy. But to some people who practice it regularly, they become quite easy. But with mine, I have a number of them. Most of them are spontaneous and I'm just too lazy to incubate them. But the simplest thing is just incubation, you know, tell yourself you're going to have a dream tonight, and you're going to remember that it is a dream within the dream, and that you're going to wake up and recall it. And you have to sort of visualize yourself doing so, and that'll work. Sometimes it's worked for me a few times, but there's a number of other tricks. One's called Wake Back to Bed, which I found works where if you wake up, say, a few hours before you normally do, you stay awake for about an hour and do something -- just relaxing, not working on a computer. That's something relaxing.
Robert Hoss (00:06:11) - And then go back to bed. And quite often what happens is the circadian rhythms and also the REM cycle and your sleep get a little bit distorted when you do that. And so it will often trigger a lucid dream when you're in it. The third approach, which really seems to work quite a bit, is to practice in your waking life as you're walking around in the day and every so often say, hey, is this a dream? Well, of course it's not. But what it does is, it gets your mind triggered to when you're asleep, asking the same question. You can do crazy things like you hold up your hand, try to push your finger through it during the day. Well, that's good practice for the evening when you push your finger through and it actually goes through and you say, well, that must be a dream. So there's a number of different techniques you can use, and they work differently for different people.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:07:07) - I see that for sure. Many years ago when I was just starting out learning about this, because, you know, I discovered dream work later in my life, I was talking with a woman who has lucid dreams all the time and was kind of surprised that everybody didn't. And she'd been a dreamer her whole life and was encouraged to dream by her parents, and it was just a natural part of her life. Are there any studies that show that people who have been lifelong dreamers are more likely to have lucid dreams?
Robert Hoss (00:07:40) - There probably are among some of the lucid studies, but there's so many factors associated with lucid dreaming that I can't put my name on one particular study that showed that answered that particular question. But if you have begun your early life with the understanding and the experience of lucid dreaming, quite often that will continue to follow you through life. And the more you do lucid dream, the more you tend to have another lucid dream. So I find with myself that comes at times when I have a need, either an emotional need or quite often when I'm putting together a presentation, all of a sudden, they'll trigger a number of lucid dreams that I needed for the presentation.
Robert Hoss (00:08:22) - But I think one of the things to remember about lucid dreaming is it's not controlling your dream. Those who lucid dream often will find that when they get into a dream, if they don't like something happening, they'll try to change it. Well, you have a little slight influence over the dream, but the dream is bigger than you. The dream represents your entire self, your unconscious self, and perhaps even beyond your own physical reality. And that's much greater than the ego which is having this lucid dream. so the experience is, your lucid dream can go anywhere from just realizing you're dreaming and not doing much about it, to playing and flying around, to talking to dream characters, trying to understand who they are. And you'll find that you're exploring consciousness because mainly, quite often, there are parts of yourself that you've alienated because you didn't like to deal with that part of self. And quite often they seem to be just higher levels of consciousness and at the greater levels. I think the most valuable thing about lucid dreaming is realizing that there is a wisdom behind the dream.
Robert Hoss (00:09:28) - Now, this wisdom is behind our daily dreams as well, because our dreams tend to try to guide us. But in the lucid state, you, the ego, now have a chance to actually touch and dialogue with that internal wisdom. And it can be quite astounding at times. Just give you one simple example. In my dream. I was running after a bunch of people that were ahead of me. I was trying to catch up with this group and all of a sudden, I said, oh, I'm dreaming. I can now fly. And so I would get up there and fly and I'd almost catch up with them. But at that point they went around a corner. It was this big wall that was to one side. I went around the corner and so when I got to the corner, there was nothing there but a wall. And I said, oh, they must be on the other side. And basically, I said, well, I'm lucid, I can fly right through that wall.
Robert Hoss (00:10:24) - And when I tried to. I went splat right up against the wall. And all of a sudden, this voice comes. That booming voice said, you know, if you want to move through a barrier, you need to look beyond it. I mean, talk about the philosophy that would never have come up with that in my own waking state. But at that moment, I had decided, okay, I would kind of peer beyond the wall, and I could see the figures over there. And at that point I was able to actually move through it. But this wisdom is just so philosophical. You can ask yourself, Where does this come from? And it goes from that simple, simple dream to actually turning around and talking to the wisdom and asking a question like, show me something I need to know, or how do I or show me, show me what I need to know in this situation. I think I may have talked in one of the past shows about the big heart dream. Yes, and that was a case where the wisdom was almost a divine type of wisdom, where I was asking basically, in the dream, I asked, what do I need to know to deal with my wife who has dementia? And basically the answer came.
Robert Hoss (00:11:35) - I was sucked up into a beautiful blue universe where I became part of it all and this intense bliss, and I was basically told, all you need is love. And so that changed me. In this instance, I'm dealing now, with my wife's dementia, with love. It doesn't bother me, and I feel good about helping her. And so it's not pretty much like me. So this wisdom is dramatic. And I think that's one of the things that's the most valuable understanding that people need to realize when they have a lucid dream, instead of just flying around, getting splatted up against a wall, is to turn around at the wisdom and ask it an open-ended question. I mean, it can be as dynamic as: What is the meaning of life? What is my role?
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:12:25) - Okay, so where do you think this wisdom is actually coming from? Is it things like the Akashic Records or some divine being or from ourselves even?
Robert Hoss (00:12:36) - It comes from many levels. It comes from all levels. Actually.
Robert Hoss (00:12:39) - The basic wisdom you get in your nightly dreams is somewhat of a function of your dreaming brain trying to resolve problems of the day and things of that sort. But when you get into these levels of wisdom that come through in lucid dreaming, I like to think of it as when souls dream. You can go anywhere throughout all creation. So at that level it is. It is like our soul dreaming. It's no longer just the brain and brain related dream. And when our souls dream, we can touch all creation. Whether you want to call it Akashic Records, whatever you want to call it, it's all creations limited to one sort of thing is that at least that's what I've discovered.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:13:25) - Well, with that we are going to take a short break. We are speaking with Robert Haas all about dreams, and we'll be right back.
Announcer (00:14:10) - Welcome back to Dream Power Radio with your host, Debbie Spector. Weisman.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:14:16) - Yes, welcome back to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Debbie Spector Weisman. And we're talking all about dreams with Robert Hoss. Well, Bob, you were talking about in your dream that you were trying to go through a wall, and you couldn't go through it, and then you could go through it. Since one of the more popular lucid dreams is flying, how is it that we can go through walls or spaces that in real life we couldn't do?
Robert Hoss (00:14:48) - Because it's a dream for one thing. But actually the dream, if you think about it, the dream is really trying to show you something, okay? And it's you're right.
Robert Hoss (00:14:58) - When many times when we find ourselves in a lucid dream, oh, it's fun to fly because we can't do that in waking life, right? So it's fun and we play around. But understanding that there is as much a purpose to the lucid dream as there is to your normal nightly dream where you're trying to resolve emotional problems of the day. I think that's important, because even that silly dream of me trying to fly through the wall, it was teaching me something. It was saying, look, you are, you are the ego. You're just a little piece of this dream. You can't necessarily control all aspects of it. There's something greater than that to learn. So basically what it was teaching me is, if you have barriers in life, which I had at that point in time, in order to make it through the barriers, you have to look beyond them. You know, the beautiful piece of wisdom that I needed to know at that moment in time. So and I think that's important when in lucid dream we're running around having fun.
Robert Hoss (00:16:01) - But it's important to know that there's as much a lesson in that dream is there is in some of your nightly dreams that your problem solving. And once you understand that and can turn to the wisdom behind the dream, it's amazing. There was a point in time when, when I was younger that I wanted to have a specific career in life, and it had to do with dream work and helping people in psychology and whatnot. And I found myself in a lucid dream, and I realized that there was this divine sort of intelligence around me, or at least a higher intelligence. And I was pushed up into this white space. And I began to talk to this higher intelligence, basically saying, could you fix it so that I can have this particular career in life because I think that would be rewarding, etc., etc. And the voice turned around and told me, Well. It's not so much what you do in life, it's how you do it.
Robert Hoss (00:17:05) - And so once again, this wisdom is counter to the ego. It basically shows you something that you as an ego entity really didn't understand. And it's healthful. It's there for health and wholeness. And just realizing it's there, it gives you a different sense of what reality in life is all about. It's kind of like having an angel watching over you in a sense that there is this wisdom there that if you turn to it and get out of your ego state, it will guide you through life.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:17:36) - I know that's something that I found amazing when I first realized what dreams were all about. Even just your regular nighttime dream can be a source of such great wisdom.
Robert Hoss (00:17:48) - And oh yes.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:17:49) - So I want to ask, in a lucid dream are all of our senses activated and heightened more than they would be in a regular dream?
Robert Hoss (00:18:00) - That's the experience that most people have. What happens in a lucid dream, it's not, you know, neurologically, it's not that mysterious. It's the conscious part of your brain which is normally asleep, activating in sleep, but along with it, parts of the brain that are responsible for processing your senses.
Robert Hoss (00:18:20) - Your senses also activate on the back part of the associative cortex, and as a result, your senses are heightened. And that's just a neurological aspect. But when you're in a lucid dream, the first sense that really tends to heighten is the brilliant colors and all. But some of the dreams, you'll be touching a wall, and you go, oh my God, that feels like a real wall even though I'm dreaming. So yes, your senses do heighten in in a lucid dream from that aspect.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:18:54) - And something else that some people experience in lucid dreams is actually going to different universes. Is this something that you've experienced?
Robert Hoss (00:19:02) - Yes. I'm almost afraid to tell this story because it's a little sad, but it's helped me through this situation with my wife. It all started with that dream about asking the wisdom, what brought you to get through the situation? And the answer came back is love. Well, as it turns out that that that started a series of events which I never expected to occur.
Robert Hoss (00:19:26) - All of a sudden, at the end of one new lucid dream, I woke up and there was my wife. She's got later stages of dementia. But there she was, standing in the window, 30 years younger and smiling at me and saying, let's go. And I'm going, What? And the next time I had a lucid dream, I asked in the dream, take me to Lynn, because there's a philosophy or a theory that people, when they have dementia, will begin to-- the soul will begin to leave the body and live in the two dimensions, the other side. And I said, take me to Lynn. And I appeared in this room with her, and she was packing a suitcase and said, What are you doing? She says, I'm packing for us to go see God and go with him. And I said, Wait a minute. I'm not ready.
Robert Hoss (00:20:25) - And then the next one, I asked to see Lynn, and we met, and we were talking and chatting, and I said, Let's go see Mom. My mom had died, too. And all of a sudden, my mom comes around the corner and she goes, We're waiting for you. So it's like. This other side was anticipating that I would part of the part of moving on as well. And I wasn't. Well, finally I told Lynn and I said, no, you know, I'm not going, I can't go, I'm not in the state that I need to be to go. And basically in that dream, she was all dressed up, had a suitcase and was going out the door. And I said, Where are you going? She says, I've decided I can leave on my own. And I said, No, you can't. You have dementia. I was thinking about waking life. And she says, No, I'm going to leave on my own and was all happy about it.
Robert Hoss (00:21:17) - And so then the next time I had this lucid dream, and these were separated by some months. But next time, I asked again, Please take me to Lynn. And we met in this beautiful heavenly-like setting, and we were talking, and we played games. It was a half hour or 45-minute dream and we were playing and just having a great time. She was younger and we sat down on a bench, and as I was looking at her and talking and looking into her eyes, I started crying. She goes, Why are you crying? And I said, Because in my world you can't talk, you can't speak. We can't talk. She says, What do you mean? She said, I'm talking to you now, and I'll be talking to you for the next million years. And so that was enlightening and joyful. It was one of the most joyful experiences I had ever had.
Robert Hoss (00:22:13) - But then the next one got a little sadder. I had another lucid dream where I asked, and I the way I ask is sort of like a little prayer. Then in the dream, I get pushed into another dream. I said, Take me to Lynn. And I was walking through this scrubby neighborhood, but there was this beautiful little store on the corner, and I went in, and it was a store that was selling these little ceramic birds. And the only words that Lynn can say freely, without prompting, is birds. She says, Ten birds, 12 birds. And so I associated with this sort of her physical shop. And basically, I said, Well, where's Lynn? And then swooshed through the ceiling, and she said, I just can't deal with this. She was trying to deal with managing this shop. And so I think she was realizing where she was and was trying to deal with managing her physical body. And then she said with great pain, she says, I just can't do it. I just can't do it. And I said, What can't you do? She says, I can't leave without you.
Robert Hoss (00:23:12) - And that just killed me. Then I turned to her, and I said, Well, I can't leave. I can't go now, you know. And she had this horrified look on her face, like, why not? Because I think it was like in that state, she saw me as another spirit and didn't understand why I couldn't go with her. And that would create a panic. But I woke up from that and I said, I've got to have another lucid dream. That's when I started incubating every night. It took about two nights. But I finally, finally had another dream. I said, Take me to Lynn. And I ended up in this place called the Halfway House, and there was this woman there that was managing it. And there were probably 100 people around. And I said, Is Lynn here? And she said, Yes, she is. She's down that hallway. So I went down the hallway and Lynn was sitting on a couch, and I recognized her instantly.
Robert Hoss (00:24:03) - And I went over and ran up to her and started kissing her and hugging her and said, I'm sorry, but I can't go right now. And I said, The time is different there than it is here, so it won't be very long. And she looked at me and she says, I'll be okay, I'll be okay. But sort of in that fashion that I woke up in that. Unbelievable experience. It was all related to the love dream because that's what triggered the lucid dreams. But it was something I never experienced. I never had expected to be able to visit somebody regularly on the other side who was halfway there. And that's that.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:24:43) - It is amazing. But it just again shows the power of our dreams and what we can do with them. And I would think that even though it's sad and it's such a sad experience that you're going through right now, that perhaps you're getting a little bit of comfort from the dreams, because of knowing or a little preparation for the inevitable that will happen.
Robert Hoss (00:25:05) - Yeah. Well, it was wonderful because now I could still talk to her. We could communicate. We could have fun. But also the sadness that came with her realization that I just can't go with her right now.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:25:19) - Indeed, Bob, you're one of the people actually in charge of putting together the conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and this year's conference is coming up in June. So can you give us a preview of what's expect?
Robert Hoss (00:25:34) - Yeah, this one's going to be fun. We're going back to the 12th century Oak Abbey in the Netherlands. And it's still an abbey. There's still priests living there at all, but they turned it into a massive conference center. And it's on the 8th of June. 8th to 12th of June is a five-day conference. And right now I have over 130 presenters. So it's like a fire hose of dream information. But we have a lot of fun too. We have this dream art exhibit, usually with about 40 or 50 artists exhibiting dream-based artwork.
Robert Hoss (00:26:09) - We have a Psy dreaming contest where we try to guess what somebody's dreaming about. Who's the target? We're having a dream hike along the Dutch-German border and ending up the whole event with a Dream Ball, where we all dress up as our favorite dream characters and just actually have a great time.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:26:32) - Yeah, some of those costumes have been so elaborate. And you could tell that they they've originated from the people's dreams.
Robert Hoss (00:26:41) - Yeah. That's exactly. And if you're curious about the program, you go to the Asdreams.org site and just click on the link to the conference. It's for everyone actually, it's a multidisciplinary conference. And most of the papers and folks who present are all peer reviewed. So it's quite a serious conference from that standpoint. But we have many tracks. We have basically research and theory tracks, clinical tracks, as you might expect, but also dreams in the Arts tracks, dreams and ethnicity, education, dreams and education, spirituality, religion, philosophy track, extraordinary Psy and lucid dreaming track. And dreams and health and culture and history.
Robert Hoss (00:27:24) - So we cover the whole gamut of how one might look at dreams and have some pretty interesting keynotes as well. The opening keynote is going to be Peter Pina Guzman, and he is going to be talking about non-human dreams. That's animal dreams and things of that sort. We have a couple of researchers that are going to be talking too. One's a neuroscientist named Francesca McClary, who's done some tremendous work in understanding the neurological aspects of dreams. In one of the famous best studies I can recall that she had done, she shows our brain when we sleep and dream about certain different subjects acts just like much like it does when we're awake. Certain parts light up when we're thinking, certain parts light up when we're perceiving, etc. and that was pretty exciting. Also, we've got Marjorie Moore talking about how dreams support us during a disease. There's a couple from India who founded the Quantum Life University in India, and they're speaking on Who is dreaming.
Robert Hoss (00:28:36) - So I'm sure that's going to be quite exciting because I'm sure that who is dreaming is going to be this wisdom behind the dream. So this could be a pretty exciting conference.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:28:46) - And could you repeat the website for those who are interested?
Robert Hoss (00:28:51) - The simplest thing is just go to our website asdreams, asdreams.org, or you can go to the ISD conferences.org website and you go right to that. Or you can go to my website which is Dreamscience.org. And I've got a link there where you can get to it.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:29:14) - Wonderful. Bob, thank you so much for being on Dream Power Radio today.
Robert Hoss (00:29:18) - Thank you Debbie.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:29:20) - We've been speaking about dreams with Robert Hoss. I hope you've enjoyed today's program. If so, please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Until next time, this is Debbie Spector Weisman say sweet dreams everybody.
Announcer (00:29:35) - You've been listening to Dream Power Radio with your host, Debbie Spector Weisman. For more information on Debbie or to sign up for her newsletter, go to DreamPowerRadio.com.
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