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- [Matt] Dreams.

You know, the place where your punches

are only half as effective, (air whooshing)

all your teeth fall out,

you can only run away from bad guys in slow motion,

and the source of the biggest fights in my relationship.

- Who is she?

- What are you talking about?

- You cheated on me in my dream.

- It was your dream.

- Ugh.

- Out of all the things

that can be said about dreams,

one of the wildest claims that's ever been made

is that you can control them.

And I should know, I've done it.

All right, I get it, I know what you're thinking.

Matt has officially lost his goddamned mind,

but really I think there is something to this.

Just stick with me for a second.

So this whole dream experiment got started

when I received a message from someone

asking me to look into lucid dreaming.

And the very next thought that I had was

I'm pretty sure I've done that before.

Lucid dreaming is what happens

when the dreamer becomes aware that they're dreaming.

That awareness is all it takes to become lucid.

It's a pretty trippy phenomenon

that's been documented since ancient Greek times,

but it's also been formally researched since the 1960s.

And that research has proven

that people can have some level of awareness while sleeping.

Dream researchers were able to determine this

by agreeing upon pre-arranged eye movements

with dream subjects,

and then measuring eye movement

while these subjects were fast asleep.

Most people get interested in lucid dreaming

to fulfill their fantasies,

but some say that it's a gateway into your subconscious.

So you know, the further that I went down this rabbit hole

the more research that I did,

the more I realized

that I really should be speaking with an expert.

So Jared, when did you first start

getting interested in dreams?

- So I've been thinking about dreams

ever since I was a kid.

- Do you wanna do this interview somewhere else?

- Okay.

(playful music)

- [Matt] That guy is Jared,

the co-author of "A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming".

- Usually when we're dreaming,

we're very much on autopilot,

we just sort of accept it.

It's a roller coaster at times,

but we are locked in on that track.

And a lucid dream,

you could still be locked in on the track

but you're like, "Oh, I'm enjoying this"

or maybe if it's a nightmare,

"I'm not enjoying this",

but you are aware that you are not in the waking world

but in the dream state.

- So it starts with that awareness,

and then from there, though,

we could also start to begin

to figure out ways to control our dreams, right?

- Yeah, so the awareness is kinda like the base camp,

and if someone just becomes aware,

they can be fully engaged and just ride along with the dream

or they can actually decide to interact with the dream,

talk with dream characters, kinda direct the dream,

or just change it completely.

- This is silly (laughs), it seems really weird, right?

Okay, so just as I was about to get started

with this whole thing,

I decided that I wanted to set the stakes really high.

I didn't wanna just become aware

that I was dreaming in my dreams,

I didn't wanna just control my dreams,

I wanted to manifest something in the real world

and bring it into my dream.

So (laughs) this is silly,

it came spontaneously,

but I was like, "I wanna smash a cake",

like a chocolate cake, a carrot cake,

I don't care what kinda cake.

I just wanna smash a cake in my dream,

throw my fist through it,

smash it with a hammer, whatever.

If I can do that in my dream,

I will prove that anything is possible

when it comes to lucid dreaming.

And so equipped with advice from my new BFF,

I got started.

The first tactic he suggested I use,

set an intention to remember my dreams.

- You know, same way if, like,

you're always forgetting

to take out the trash on trash day,

but you say to yourself,

"All right, every day I'm just gonna say,

"'Don't forget to take out the trash,

"'don't forget to take out the trash.'"

And most likely, when trash day comes,

if you've been saying that over and over and over,

you're not gonna forget.

- I spent my days and nights repeating the phrase,

"I'm going to remember my dreams."

I wrote it down in my journal over and over and over again.

So another night,

another night without a lucid dream.

One night, Nat and I started dancing around the kitchen

like a couple lunatics chanting it out loud.

- [Both] I'm gonna remember my dreams, two, three, four.

- And then I began to make progress.

I woke up remembering my dreams for the first time.

I quickly pulled out my journal

and wrote down everything I could recall.

I would probably say a month ago,

I didn't remember any dreams.

I feel like I haven't remembered my dreams for years.

It's very easy

for the details of your dreams to slip away.

By keeping a dream journal close to your bed

and writing them down immediately upon waking up,

you're starting to tell your brain

that dreams are important

and that you wanna remember them.

Another thing Jared says you can do

is give yourself a reality check.

Just like the spinning top in "Inception",

if you continue to check in with yourself

throughout the day,

asking the question, "Am I in a dream?"

and combine that with a physical action

like poking your finger into your hand,

it can help you to ask that same question

while you're dreaming.

- You just try to see if your finger goes through your palm.

And it's not, so I'm gonna go with the assumption

that we are not in a dream right now.

- This is freaking me out, man.

I'm sorry, dude, I should not have taken edibles

before this interview.

So I went throughout my day

checking to see if I was dreaming.

I wasn't. (car horn honks)

Each night for the next two nights,

I remembered more and more of my dreams.

Their contents weren't that interesting,

but I was excited to be making progress.

And then finally, I did it.

I remember tossing and turning in bed a bit

in the early morning,

probably just before sunrise.

When I sunk into my next REM stage,

I woke up

(water crashing)

in my dream.

It was only just for a moment,

but I was aware that I was dreaming

while I was dreaming.

- Hey Matt, it's Jared,

the guy from the interview.

I'm an elephant eating purple peanuts.

You know, it's delicious,

and I wanna stay in the dream with you,

don't let me leave.

You know, keep your lucidity.

- And then I lost it.

I'd had this feeling before, this wasn't new.

Like I said, I've had lucid dreams in the past,

but it was really exciting to know

that I could actually intentionally create a lucid dream

just by thinking about it, just by talking about it,

I realize that I could potentially have more lucid dreams.

That said, I still felt like

I was a really long ways off from smashing a cake.

(sheets rustling) Hey guys, by the way,

this video is brought to you by Squarespace,

because dreams are cool,

but bringing your dreams to life is even cooler.

- Can you not right now?

- Oh, sorry.

(playful music)

Sorry about that.

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Okay, I'm gonna go back to bed now.

(sheets rustling) (Matt exhaling)

(Matt sighing)

- Who the (beep) is Squarespace?

- Most people when they enter their first lucid dream,

they're not gonna have sort of an omnipotence,

kinda God-like power.

And so in the same way

we need to learn skills in the waking world,

sometimes we also need to learn dream skills.

- And so I got back to work,

this time repeating the mantra,

"I'm going to control my dreams,

"I'm going to control my dreams."

I continued to remember dreams on most nights

and wrote them down in my dream journal each morning.

I kinda had a lucid dream.

I had like something where I was in this

black void of fogginess of sleep,

and I thought to myself, I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming.

And then I didn't, like, have a dream, it's weird.

It was like purgatory for dreaming.

So that feels like something.

And then I had another lucid dream,

this one about 10 times more intense

and way more vivid than the first.

I walked into my parents' bedroom

back home in New Jersey

and felt like something was off.

It was exactly as I'd remembered it as a kid.

I asked my mom what year it was,

and she said, "It's 1999." - It's 1999.

As I walked closer to my parents,

I noticed that there were two of my dad,

and that's when I realized I was dreaming.

- Hi, Matt, it's me, your dad.

- It was vivid, just as vivid as real life.

And then I remembered the cake.

I turned around

to try to bring it into my dream and smash it,

but it wasn't there.

At that moment I began to run into the kitchen

to try to open the fridge

to see if there was a cake inside

but then my dream started to get echoey and faint

and I started to lose it.

Once I woke up, the dream memory

started to slip away from me as well,

and I realized just how easy it would've been

to just forget about this whole experience entirely.

So I grabbed my phone, ran to the bathroom,

and wrote down everything I could remember.

It got oddly emotional for me.

I think it was because I was,

I really felt like I was there.

I felt like I was at my home back in Jersey

at a time and a place that will no longer exist.

The only place it exists is in my memory,

and now my dreams.

And to be there,

to really feel like I was there, was super crazy (laughs).

You know, I'm just kind of

on the brink now of lucid dreaming

and learning what's possible.

This was a huge milestone

in learning how to actually control my dreams.

One essential part

of learning how to lucid dream

is understanding when we dream.

And through the various stages of sleep,

the most likely time to have them

is during rapid eye movement, or REM.

- What's interesting and what kinda pertains

to lucid dreaming

is that the period of REM over the course of a night

gets longer and longer after multiple sleep cycles.

You wanna focus on that long period of REM

because you get lucid,

you can actually explore the dream

for a longer period of time.

If it's earlier, you might become lucid,

and then it ends before you can actually do any exploration.

(peaceful music)

So to better help me track my sleep,

I'm gonna be using one of these Oura rings.

It's actually got sensors on the inside

that tracks your sleep.

My hope is that by tracking my sleep

I'll get a better idea

of how much time I'm spending in REM.

The time in REM,

it varies from 15 minutes to an hour and a half.

So if I can improve my sleep throughout the night

and if I can get enough restfulness throughout the night,

hopefully I'll be able to have more lucid dreams.

By tracking my sleep,

I was able to experiment

with one of the more extreme lucid dreaming techniques

called wake back to sleep,

the process of setting an alarm

before you dip into the longest period of REM.

With this technique,

the idea is to wake up for 20 to 40 minutes before REM,

raising your awareness but staying on the edge of sleep.

Then when you dip into REM,

you'll be more likely to have a lucid dream.

Hey, guess what time I'm setting the alarm for tomorrow?

- Don't.

Don't. - Like three a.m.

- Are you joking? (air whooshes)

(alarm beeping)

(Matt breathing)

(switch clicks)

(Matt groans)

- I'm gonna head back to bed now,

try to get a dream going.

But this was a dumb idea.

(air whooshes)

(birds chirping) It didn't work,

I couldn't get back to sleep.

Woke Natalie up, she couldn't get back to sleep.

So we were both just awake for,

let's see how long.

I had a total

of six hours and 23 minutes of sleep last night.

I think I'm done

with this little strategy, this technique.

And as I continued on with this experiment,

I found that lucid dreaming

was pretty much a roll of the dice.

Most nights I didn't have them,

but I broke through two more times during this experiment.

I'm not really sure if there's any correlation

between how hard I try

and how often I have a lucid dream.

I feel like so much of it is just a luck of the draw.

What are you doing, Nat?

You're popping your head (laughs) in the background.

And while I can control

various aspects of what I do in my dream,

I'm often at the whim of my subconscious,

floating from one location to another,

one thought to the next,

far from the mastery that I've heard is possible.

- Keep your lucidity, I'm a maid of (laughs).

- (laughing) I did not see that coming.

All right, guys, I'm gonna level with you here.

I was not able to manifest a cake

and smash it in my dream.

I know, I think maybe it was a bit ambitious

to assume that I could master that level of lucid dreaming

in only three weeks,

but it is what it is.

At this point, I have other experiments

and other videos and other things that I wanna work on,

so I've gotta kind of tie this one up.

So unfortunately,

I would say that this is kinda the end of chapter one.

I do wanna continue to try to do it,

so who knows, maybe I will be able to do it

in the coming weeks.

Maybe tonight's my night, I don't know.

I just can't wait around for it to happen.

But then I started to think, you know,

I wasn't able to make it happen in a lucid dream,

but then there are other ways

to make your dreams become a reality.

(air swooshing) (fist pounding)

(Matt laughs)

So that did not at all work out

like I thought it was going to.

(crowd screaming) (announcers shouting)

- [Announcer] No!

Oh no!

- I in my head thought, hey, I'm gonna smash this cake,

my hand's gonna go right through it.

I hit it once and it hurt.

It's fine, it's fine.

Thanks for watching guys.

Really appreciate you sticking around

to watch me eat this cake.

If you yourself have had a lucid dream before,

let me know.

This is a dense cake.

Shoulda got the carrot cake.

Please choose the correct answer for each question below: