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There's a bit of a cult of wakefulness in in the modern world and dreaming is vastly underrated. There's now this sort of psychedelic renaissance happening. But one of the interesting things that's occurring on my retreats is I'm getting a lot of people who are training a psychedelic integration therapists coming on the retreats because they're recognizing that learning how to navigate the dream realm is very similar to making like grounded integrations with psychedelic experience as well as.
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Keep watching to learn more.
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A
Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spiritual. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies go to newthinkingalowed.org. Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring the topic of dream initiation. My guest is Sarah Janes, who has been a lucid dreamer since childhood. She is the author of Initiation into Dream Drinking from the Pool of Nemesine. She runs Explores Egyptology, an online lecture series. And with Carl Hayden Smith, she operates the Seventh Ray, a virtual reality mystery school. She also has been producer and co host for the Anthony Peak Consciousness Hour podcast. Sarah is also currently working with Rupert Sheldrake and the British Pilgrimage Trust to reinvigorate the practice of dream incubation at sacred sites. She lives in the United Kingdom, but today she is in Istanbul, Turkey. And now I'll switch over to the interview video. Welcome, Sarah. It is a pleasure to be with you and to meet you.
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A
Thank you so much, Jeffrey. It's absolutely my pleasure. This is my favorite podcast of all time. So I am delighted that you invited me to come and talk to you.
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B
Well, it's an honor for me to experience your work. It's obviously very deep and very profound and it's based on your, I gather, lifelong experience as a lucid dreamer.
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A
Yeah, I think it might be genetic because a lot of people in my family are into lucid dreaming and I have thought about it possibly being related to the fact that I'm left handed or all sorts of things, but basically, ever since I was a toddler. I've had lucid dreams or really huge dreams. And it's been a massive part of my life.
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B
I can imagine having lucid dreams throughout your whole life would make you extraordinarily open to the inner world.
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A
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, there's never really been a time when I partly got involved in researching and working with dreams. Because when I had my daughter, she's now just about to turn 18, I lost the power of dreaming because I wasn't sleeping very well for probably about a year and a half. I think I had postnatal depression. I wasn't sleeping very well and I felt properly bereft. So once I got dreaming back, I became quite sort of fanatical and a bit of an evangelist for the powers of dreaming and also extremely, extremely appreciative of having my dreams back.
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B
In addition to being an experiencer, lifelong experiencer through lucid dreaming, you're also, I would have to say, a scholar of sorts. You've traveled around the world, you've visited ancient sites throughout the Middle east and Europe and Africa. And it would seem to me that you've done an amazing job combining scholarly research with a heartfelt appreciation for the realities of the inner depths of the psyche.
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A
Yeah, I personally feel like I'm just following my dreams. Like dreams tell me places to go, I go there, things seem to happen and flow. So I feel very much like very lucky that I'm in this position to have discovered this extraordinarily niche career. And it just involves following my dreams, which is amazing for me.
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B
Well, I have to say that I have something of the same. I can't claim to be a lucid dreamer or that I regularly follow my dreams, but I can tell you that about 50 years ago I had a series of dreams that have shaped my entire life. And the work I'm doing today is really the outcome of very explicit dreams that I had in the early 1970s.
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A
I think there's something to be said for following your dreams. I do think that's kind of the purpose of them, that trying to reveal the best possible path for us. And right now I'm in Istanbul. And before I ever came to Istanbul, I realized as soon as I visited that I have been to this place in dreams. I just love it. It feels instantly at home. And the first moment I was in the city, a woman introduced herself to me and she was a past life regression therapist. And I was just thinking, at that exact moment, I'm sure I must have had a past Life in Istanbul, because everything just feels so familiar. Like a drink of Iran tastes like some deep ancestral memory being unlocked. Everything just looks like the places that I dream about all the time. And I've met, I met like this amazing network of friends within a few days. So I think like there is something about dreams calling you and it's one of the things that I love about my work. I live in a little village called Achaea Davros in Greece, which is about two hours south of Athens. And it's very close to the holistic healing sanctuary of Asclepius. And one of the legends about people that were pilgrims to the sanctuary of Asclepius was that Asclepius would visit them in their dreams and tell them to come to the sanctuary. So that's one of my most excited moments, is when someone has a dream about Asclepius and they look Asclepius up or they look to see what they can do in my village and they find me and they just. People are coming to me regularly on kind of pilgrimage to sleep in the temples which I love.
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B
Many, many years ago I was on the island of Kos, where there's a very large Asclepian sleep temple and I felt like I knew the place. It had that same feeling. I walked around behind the temple and I knew I would find a path leading into the woods from the rear end of the temple and I followed it and it all felt so familiar.
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A
Yeah, I think that this is a real thing and I, I sort of. Well, I, I now encounter and meet a lot of people that have the same sorts of experiences. Istanbul has been the most powerful feeling of like some sort of dream memory or recognition. 1 I have this recurring dream. It's not the same dream, but it's like a recurring motif or a recurring kind of story. You've interviewed Stanley Krippner a lot and he was the one who inspired me about personal mythology and dreams. And one of my main dreams is searching for the water of life. And Istanbul is a city of springs and there are these absolutely gorgeous like marble Ottoman fountains on every street corner. There's this amazing Greek monastery for the Zudokos Pigi, the, the life giving source version of the Virgin Mary that has this spring with seven golden fishes in it. And to me I've been there before in a dream. Like I recognize it so much. So for me, like Istanbul is the strongest feeling I've ever had of having visited somewhere in a dream. Everything seems really familiar. It's so fantastic.
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B
It's an amazing city, I have to say. It's like no other city in the world. Spanning two continents, among other things.
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A
Sitting on the ferry with a glass of chai, going from Europe to Asia, I'm in absolute heaven. I love it so much more than that.
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B
You're near some of the oldest archaeological sites on the planet. The thing that amazed me most about your new book is how you go through the early, early history of humanity and point out that we've lost something. We've become so very, very civilized. It's almost impossible to remember what it must have been like for the earliest humans.
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A
A lot of the stuff from places like the Tashtepla culture in Anatolia, for example, or Gobekli Tepe or Catalhoyac, we, we, we have to make certain or we don't have to, but we can only really make guesses or have ideas about what they were doing because it's like a. There's no language or script that we can refer to. We can perhaps compare it to later cultures where we can see some kind of thread running through the iconography or the symbolism. But for me, I've always enjoyed reading non fiction more than non fiction. And I always preferred writing fiction rather than non fiction as well. So in my book I kind of did a blend of fiction and nonfiction. So every section that I wrote where I'd done the research into the history of the place, the things that we do know, the archaeological findings, I did my own dream incubation practice where I imagined myself there. And I had a dream that related to the things that I'd read about or learn about. And then I wrote that down as a story. Because I think that the thing that's very important to remember about dreams is they work by memory and emotion. So unless you have some sort of emotional feeling, type of response to information, you don't really get like very good dream content. So I wanted to create something that engaged the imaginal senses. And interestingly enough, there's been a recent discovery that's just gone on display of a face that looks exactly like the face that I had in my dream from Catalhoyek, which is this kind of withered, dry stone head with sewn up lips and tiny eyes. And it was, that was interesting. That was like a flash from the dream because that's so similar to the face that I saw in my dream. So for example, at Catalhoyek, that's one of the examples that I give in the book for evidence that there were dream Rituals or an understanding of dream realms in ancient times that hint at, I think dreaming inspired ideas of the soul persisting after death. Because a dream that nearly everyone will have in their lifetime is having an interaction with someone who's deceased. And I think for ancient people that would be quite strong evidence that the soul perpetuates after bodily death and actually is makes a lot of sense. I think there's a bit of a cult of wakefulness in, in the modern world and dreaming is vastly underrated. There's now this sort of psychedelic renaissance happening. But one of the interesting things that's occurring on my retreats is I'm getting a lot of people who are training a psychedelic integration therapists coming on the retreats because they're recognizing that learning how to navig the dream realm is very similar to making grounded integrations with psychedelic experience as well.
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B
One of the things you point out, if we want to understand what the earliest Paleolithic humans or even pre Homo sapien humanoids or hominids, how they dreamt, would be to look at people like the Aboriginal people of Australia who talk extensively about their dreams.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite people I've ever interviewed is a researcher called Vasilis Idratus, who's at a university in Australia. He's Greek, as you can tell from the name. And he researches indigenous Australian beliefs around the dreaming or alteringa. And it is fascinating because there you get this sense of there's a continuum of consciousness there. The world itself is speaking to us all the time and we are part of a kind of cosmic fabric that we are woven into the fabric of reality all the time. And I think a big part of altered states is, has to do with time perception or the obliteration of time perception. And I think it's the same in sort of bliss states, in meditation, in lucid dreaming. Something peculiar happens with time. And I think that dreaming is a underestimated and like fecund area of research for things like time perception and memory. Because memory is, is so interesting when it comes to dreaming, because lucid dreams, you don't forget them that they, they are as rememberable as something that's happened in waking life, if not more memorable. But non lucid dreams tend to evaporate upon waking. And yet sometimes when you're in a dream you can remember a dream that you've had and forgotten because it seems like there's this other sort of shadow memory network happening in our, in our bodies that is only accessible during dream states. So I think that Something that seems to be like a key theme in dreaming is you're trying to remember, you're trying to find something else, you're on a journey and you're trying to find something. So I think that there's so much to learn from dreaming, and it's a real shame if we don't kind of practice it or value it.
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B
For the most ancient people, the idea of life, death, and I suppose ancestors become an important part of their dream world. We may be at a period even before the development of formal religions, gods and goddesses and specific rituals and practice, but there was, I guess Woden would have to say, a more immediate sense of connection to the cosmos.
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A
Yeah, I think so. And a more immediate connection to your community and to nature around you. But also, I think one of the things that I've kind of been meditating a lot on recently is this ide idea of life and death not being separate entities or separate phases. They're actually like constantly intertwined and oscillating all the time. I think it sort of is well represented in something like the Rod of Asclepius, where you've got this living serpent wrapped around a branch. And they talk about when you visit the. The temple you go to sleep in, the Ankymatarion at the sanctuary of Asclepius, and how the sacred sleep that you have there serves as a kind of pseudo death. Because Ipnos and Thanatos are twins. Death and sleep are twins. And in Egyptian myth as well, you have something similar where death is considered to be this eternal sleep, and you have a headrest amongst your funeral gear so that your neck is protected in the afterlife. So I think that this is sort of. This modern sickness is taking us out of our environment and trying to see us as just kind of meat machines somehow, you know, Whereas I think the rest of the animal kingdom are well meshed into the interactions and the interrelationships and kind of part of them just flowing with them, but we are kind of sticking out and not quite sure what to do with ourselves. And the more seriously we take ourselves and the more separate we feel, the more we suffer and the sicker we become. Because I think that we are only as strong or only as happy as our environment and our community.
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B
The sleep temples and the rituals around the Asclepian traditions and probably earlier traditions, even in Egypt, for example, are still light developments. As I read your book, humanity had been around for tens of thousands of years. I presume before even the oldest temples, say Gobleki Tepe, were Ever developed. But before the development of temples, I'm under the impression that the caves where there's cave art were used as chambers for initiation. I'm under the impression that people would go into those caves for the purpose of dreaming. Yeah.
- [18:51]
A
Peter Kingsley talks about incubation happening in caves and relates it to how if an animal is wounded, it will go back to its lair and just lie very still until healing occurs. Because most illnesses, most conditions, most wounds will heal themselves given rest and darkness and the right amount of time. So I think that incubation may be born out of that may be born out of sleeping in caves for long periods of. It's hard to know whether there's some theories that human beings used to hibernate. In fact, before we became modern human beings, the pre human beings went through this phase of hibernation like a lot of animals do. And so dreaming may have been happening there. But I think the earliest rituals around incubation may have involved sleeping near to people that have been buried, sleeping near or on top of graves. So at Catalhoyek there's very intentional sleeping platform building on top of the intramural burials. So skeletons of people are found very intentionally placed underneath where people would have slept. And so I think that it makes sense to me that this was some way of keeping people in the family by sleeping and dreaming with people in the family. And that everyone has experienced dreaming with somebody that has passed away, like having a very real interaction with them. And they, they are often very healing experiences as well. So I think it's a way of keeping ancestral memory alive. And then you have developments of things like necromancy. So the deceased are thought to know the future because they are existing in an underworld. And the underworld, according to some cosmologies, is where the sun goes at the end of every day. The new day, the future day, is being decided and generated from the underground. So anyone who is dead has special access to secrets about things that are going to happen. So that seems to be like a recurrent theme, that the dead know the future. And if you can dream with the dead, then you can learn the future from them.
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B
You use the word initiation very specifically in the title of your book. And I am under the impression that the most fundamental initiation that occurs in dreams is a direct awareness of the world beyond this three dimensional physical plane of our waking existence, that there's a whole other world. You could call it the realm of the dead or the Bardo planes, or the astral plane, but there's this vast reality beyond our normal waking sensory experience.
- [21:52]
A
For me, this is the thing that connects me to this idea of the dreaming or like there being this tapestry of everything. Sometimes we wake up, you know, when we become lucid, because lucidity is like this sort of tsunami of remembering. And sometimes that level of remembering causes arousal. So you wake up because it's too much to kind of consciously be aware of in the dream state. So I think that dreams have always been considered as this portal to. Knowledge and that historically, if you look at ancient Egyptian, ancient Mesopotamian dream interpretation, they're all completely preoccupied with how dreaming just normally is recognized as it predicts the future. Dreaming tells us the future all the time. So it hints at this version of reality that's oracular, that the world is revealing itself and its next moves in everything all the time. And dreaming is just another area where that oracular worldview makes sense. And so all dream interpretation in Egypt pretty much is based on future predictions. And I think that lucidity. My book is called, Remember what it's called now. Dream Mysteries Drinking from the Pool of Minimosini. And Minimosini is the Greek goddess of. She's called the Greek goddess of memory or the Greek goddess of remembrance. But she's also the goddess of sense making, eloquence and eruditeness. She was the goddess that poets or orators would invoke before they had to give a good speak or perform a speech or performance. But she's also the mother of all of the muses by Zeus. So she is in that respect the source of all inspiration in the world. And I think she is actually the 10th muse because she is the ultimate inspirer. Because in dreams, when one becomes lucid, you suddenly remember who and where you are and you have this flood of ecstasy or bliss that feels like inspiration or is inspiration is like proper pure inspiration and it makes sense, makes perfect sense to me that she therefore is the mother of all inspiration, of all artists, of all divinely inspired ideas in the world. Because she is that bridge that connects the divine unconscious underworld and the conscious day waking world, you know, and one of the things that works best for remembering more of your dreams, becoming lucid more often is, is creating art or creating ideas or stories out of things that you've dreamt. You're then creating this feedback system between the dream and your waking reality.
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B
Well, I understand she was. Even prior to the gods of Olympus, she was one of the Titans, a very, very ancient deity.
- [24:57]
A
And she's the daughter of heaven and earth. So when Heaven and earth come together. And I think that this really represents this idea of language and thought, consciousness being a gift from the gods, because she is like consciousness in a way, the divine aspects of consciousness. And I think lucidity. I was talking to a Sufi mystic here in Istanbul recently and he talks about Sufi techniques for what they call true dreaming. And the ancients don't necessarily write about lucidity, but they do talk about these true dreams or these dreams that are divine and that you don't question them. You know exactly that you've had this interaction with a God or a goddess and people talk about them in the same way that I would experience a lucid dream. Like, there's a really nice example from a man called Ipwi in ancient Egypt, recorded on a Stevie, where he talks about having an interaction with Hathor at the festival of drunkenness. And when he sees her, his heart is like a pot filled with beer. He's like so ecstatic, it's like overflowing with ecstasy and joy. And he's bathing in her beauty. And for me, like, that's quite a nice description of what it feels like to be lucid. And you can imagine as well, like one of the things I talk to people about as being a really good way or a natural way to become lucid is if you've got a crush on someone or if you really fancy someone, when you see them in your dream, you get excited. It brings about this arousal. And I imagine for ancient. In ancient times, when people were adoring and worshiping the gods and they were praying to the gods and they were sleeping in their temple, they would have a similar state of arousal when that God or goddess then appears in their dream. And that level of arousal would make them become lucid in the dream because they would get so excited to be, you know, in, in the presence of this God or goddess. So I think that, I think dreaming is, is ever present when we look at ancient culture. And it's really underestimated in terms of how much it's influenced ancient culture, ancient storytelling, ancient art, ancient ideas about religion and spirituality.
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B
One of the puzzling things to me in your book is you talked about how in Western culture some sort of terrible event occurred during the Bronze Age where many high cultures from the ancient world were basically destroyed and their knowledge was lost to us.
- [27:35]
A
Yeah, I think the sort of Bronze Age collapse just fragmented really well known existing connections and routes and meant that knowledge wasn't being taught in the same way you look at India or you look at these Countries, especially more eastwards for the Tibetans or in China or in India, where there's been this continuation of teaching of these sacred texts, of understanding of their meditative practices. For us, it's been fragmented, and a lot of pagan rituals were kind of woven into Christian rituals or other Abrahamic religion rituals. But the essence is sort of somehow lost. And the everyday practice that enables you to become sensitive to dreaming, for example, or meditation, for example, has kind of been lost. It's something that people are becoming more and more interested in, though, because I don't think there's a culture on Earth that doesn't have some belief in afterlife or spiritual dimensions or the existence of a soul. And a lot of people in the west have been seeking these ideas out in the east or have been going to South America. But actually every country has their own indigenous cultural understandings of the nature of. The nature of reality and the nature of the soul.
- [29:02]
B
To jump around a little bit, I want to come back to a point you raised earlier about ecstasy and how lucid dreaming, when you become lucid itself, there's something ecstatic about that. But when you're in a dream experience and experiencing ecstasy and the many stories that are woven throughout your book, you describe ecstatic states in which the dreamer is also transformed in different ways. I think, for example, you talk about having a sexual experience with a snake and how that could be considered a form of ecstasy.
- [29:44]
A
Yeah, that's quite a common theme in the Asclepian, actually, sex with snakes. And I think one of the things that's really interested me is how things like sex or orgasm, certain eating food or drinking drinks, act as kind of agents of transformation in the dream space because you anticipate that some sort of transformation is going to take place. So one of the things that. That I'm super interested in because my main area of research is in the history and culture of dreaming and dreaming for healing and divinatory purposes. So I'm part of a board that is organizing the Delphic Dream Symposium in Delphi next year, where the whole theme is. Is precognitive oracular dreaming. But one of the things that's well documented from the Asclepian tradition is that a dream itself can. Can offer a spontaneous healing event. And that's one of the things I've been super fascinated by because I've had dreams where I feel like I've had a spontaneous healing event. Hard to prove because there's never been anything massively wrong with me. Touchwood. So. But I. It's felt like a personal, in, you know, fantastic healing event. I had a dream where I met her, a Mazda, the Zoroastrian God of light. And he walked into my body and twirled open my DNA spirals and walked down them like a ladder. And this and having a lucid experience of that, and having a experience of your body being irradiated with light. I can well understand how people in ancient sleep temples in the Asclepia having a dream interaction with the God Asclepius, healing them, would have a profound effect on them in real life. So, for example, in the Asclepia, we have stories of Asclepius appearing to patients in their dreams. These establishments were running for hundreds and hundreds of years as well, so they must have been quite effective. We know that the physicians and the therapists there were practicing real medicine and they were performing operations. But there are still also accounts of Asclepia spontaneously healing people. And one of the things I've considered is that when you are sleeping and lucid dreaming is recognized as being this kind of blended state of wakefulness or alertness of consciousness and an REM state. But when we're asleep, we do have certain genes that are switched on that are only ever switched on during sleep that are implicated in homeostasis. And homeostasis is the balancing detoxification process that we go through every night to kind of restore, rebalance and repair cellular damage and these kinds of processes. So I've often thought that combination, that sort of great foundational state of having these genes switched on that can heal the body, and also having the direct experience of being healed by a God in a dream simultaneously. That's got to be like the best conditions ever for a faith healing response, because you're absolutely there and the God is working on you. We know they were using things like opium fumigation. They had a kind of root, not rudimentary, but a natural concoction to anesthetize patients. And some of the descriptions of the patients, or I know of at least one description of a patient, sounds a lot like he woke up halfway through being operated upon and tried to fight his way off the table and then was anesthetized again. So Dioscorides talks about bruised mandrake steeped in wine. Hippocrates, you mentioned Cos. Before Hippocrates, the father of medicine, there were this whole class of healers, of herbalists called root cutters, who knew absolutely everything you could ever know about the pharmacological properties of roots and herbs and plants in ancient Greece. And it wasn't exclusive to ancient Greece either. Like, we know there were temples for healing in the ancient near east. We have the temples of Gula, where they had various types of healers. You had an asu and a shipu, and the asu is the physical doctor who would perform operations, maybe the application of leeches or something like that. But you also have the Yeshipu, who's a spirit doctor, and it's his job to find out what you've done to annoy your personal gods and what you can do to get in their good books again. And often the punishment from your personal gods is sent in dreams. And in Mesopotamia and in ancient Anatolia, there's this idea that nightmares shorten your life. It's really not good to have nightmares. And I think from a modern psychotherapy perspective, you can also say if you're having a lot of nightmares, then you're trying to tell yourself something, you're trying to resolve something. It's not an ideal situation.
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B
You mentioned Gula, if I recall correctly, the ancient dog goddess and the rituals at the sleep temples you also mentioned in your book often involved dogs licking the wounds of people. The saliva of dogs seemed to have a healing property that was known. Known to the ancients.
- [35:19]
A
Yeah. Dog saliva is actually antiseptic and antibacterial. And it is good to have your wounds licked by dogs. I mean, I'm not saying go out and get any wounds licked by dogs, but they did know that dog saliva was good for wounds.
- [35:35]
B
When it comes to dreaming, the pinnacle would have been the ancient Asclepian sleep temples. After that, assuming that, correct me if you think I'm wrong, that with the rise of Christianity, sleeping and dreaming became to some degree associated with the demonic. The ancient gods became associated with the demonic. People became, one might say, as we move from polytheism to monotheism, people became more or less afraid of their own unconscious.
- [36:11]
A
Well, I think there was an idea in ancient times. I mean, I don't even. This goes back. It's impossible to know how far it goes back, but it certainly was the case in Mesopotamia, in ancient Anatolia, in ancient Egypt and in ancient Greece, that dreams were personified demons or forces. So I think kind of the opposites happened, where we think everything comes from within, within us, nothing comes from outside of us. So people used to believe that a nightmare was like a demonic entity coming upon you at night. And there's a lot of descriptions from ancient Egypt. There's an Egyptologist I've worked with several times called Cassius of Pakowska and Cassius, Bakowska talks about how the Egyptians seem to have a lot of sleep paralysis episodes because probably partly because they believed that nightmares were coming from outside. And you have the same kind of thing in Egypt, people would make little clay cobra models and put them in the corners of their room. Kash has done a whole study on this. And these clay cobra models, there was perhaps candles behind them, so it would make a sort of serpent shape on the wall as the flame was moving around, and that these serpents would protect a sleeper from any demon that may come on them during the night. In Mesopotamia, there's this tradition of certain, like Pazuzu, like demons that I think Pazuzu's in the Exorcist is a proper Mesopotamian demon that would. Would appear at night. So you could imagine people were more terrified. And in Christianity, certainly early Christianity in Greece, one of the earliest basilicas in Greece is actually built inside of the sanctuary of Asclepius because they wanted to take some of that power. And if you look at Asclepius as this bearded, humble, nice, friendly God, which he was, he wasn't like a cruel, punishing God like a lot of the others, who is a miracle worker and a healer, he actually is, to me, the prototype of Jesus. And the basilica in the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidavros became very famous for dream healing miracles. So a lot of that was transferred into, especially Greek Orthodoxy and Eastern Orthodoxy and just transferred onto saints. So the Virgin Mary often becomes the one who heals people in dreams. And every 15th of August, 30,000 pilgrims go to the little Cycladic island of Tinos to incubate for a dream where the Virgin will come and visit them and bless them and heal them and give them their heart's desire.
- [38:58]
B
In other words, I was wrong, that dream initiation within Christianity is still alive and well. Yeah, that's good to hear. But you do write about the figure of Lilith, which is a figure that comes out of the Judeo Christian tradition and is in your writing associated with sleep paralysis.
- [39:22]
A
Well, Lilith is the one who a lot of it's borrowed from Lamashtu or from the sort of demons of Mesopotamia. And then Lilith in the Talmud becomes the. This figure who. She is like a debauched, highly sexed, demonic type figure who basically causes arousal and siphons off semen from unsuspecting sleepers at night to have her brood of demon children. So. And even there are things like if a child giggles while they're sleeping at Night that Lilith is playing with them. So in that sense, yeah, there was, like, this idea that especially erotic dreams or anything fun, basically was demonic.
- [40:12]
B
Incidentally, this is a little off topic, off the topic of your book, but worth sharing with you. I recently interviewed a young scholar, just got her doctoral degree in Britain, Sheila Price Brooks, who's writing about dream paralysis. And she's decided to rename it. She calls it Threshold Contact Experience. She's a woman who was plagued all her life with these terrible nightmares. But at one point she said, I'm tired of being pushed around. And she decided to no longer be afraid of what was happening. She discovered that the entities that were once terrifying her now became guides and teachers and introduced her to, you know, this whole realm.
- [41:04]
A
Do you know the Lucia number three, a hypnagogic light machine? Have you heard about this, Dania? Oh, well, I'm friends with the inventors of that. Is this hypnagogic light machine that gives you kind of like a psychedelic visual journey?
- [41:23]
B
I have experienced something like that. I didn't know the name of it, but, yes, amazing experiences.
- [41:31]
A
So the inventors of the Lucia one are called Dirk Prokel and Engelbert Winkler, and they are really good fun. And Engelbert Winkler told me that he invented this way to reliably have lucid dreams. And it's basically pretending that you've got sleep paralysis until you have a lucid dream. And it sounds too simple to work, but I think a huge part of sleep paralysis is fear. And as soon as you start to become fearful, the sensation of oppression builds and builds and builds. But you can use sleep paralysis as a springboard if you're not scared to go off into lucid dreaming quite easily. The same thing happens in nightmares, like when we. You know, a lot of the reason why children become good at lucid dreaming is because they have nightmares. And they learn how to either wake up from them or stop them from being scary. And a lot of kids will fight a demon or a scary thing, but the best thing is always to, like, really love it and not be scared of it and think it's funny or think it's silly. And then you transform it. And when you learn that as a child, I think quite often you can end up having a lifetime of lucid dreams because you understand and you've had an embodied experience of how your feeling directly interacts with the environment and the other entities within that environment that then come to. To come to meet you.
- [42:55]
B
What you're describing is a technique I seem to recall back in the 1970s, when Charlie Tartt's book Altered States of Consciousness was published, there was a chapter about what was at the time called Senoi Dream Culture, about a tribal group, I think, somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia, where every. Every morning they would all get together and share their dreams. And children were being taught, if something scary happens, embrace it, don't run away from it. Then I think it was Kilton Stewart was the anthropologist who wrote that article. And then later people debunked it and said, no, the Senoi don't do that or they don't even exist. I was never quite clear about it.
- [43:45]
A
Yeah, no, I can't remember whether they existed or not. Not. But there was a. You know, there was a lot of writing in the. In the 80s when I was growing up about lucid dreaming. And I remember the first thing I ever read was Stephen LaBerge's books. And I remember being fascinated by him doing retreats to Hawaii and thinking that would be, like, the most exciting thing ever. So now I'm running my own retreats, but in Greece. And I think in Greece, in Turkey, in Egypt. And something really fun happens when you get groups of people all dreaming together and talking about their dreams, and you start to really feel like you're actually living in a dream or your waking life is a dream. And one thing that's happened to me recently is it does seem a little bit like my dream life and my real life have kind of turned inside out because I'm now living my dream of searching for the water of life. Because the last two retreats that I've done have all been about finding the water of life in dreams. And so the more dreamlike life feels, the more exciting, and the more exciting dreams you have.
- [44:57]
B
I think, as I mentioned earlier, I can attest there's a very thin boundary between the waking and dreaming life. And you can't. You can live a dream if you're open to it. I know in my case, I guess I incubated this dream that changed my life, but it took months. I was in agony searching for a solution to a particular problem I've talked about elsewhere, but it only after about two or three months of real focus trying to solve this problem, did the dream come.
- [45:35]
A
One of the things I say about lucid dreams, actually, is they tend to be good at problem solving. And I can see that. I think, a bit like, I've got a lot of friends who are psychedelic researchers and they talk about one of the positive aspects of psychedelics is that they give you this overview or the overview effect. The same effect that astronauts have when they travel into space and they look back and they see the earth. And I had a dream once that I was standing on the moon moon and I was looking at the earth and I saw the earth turn on its axis. And I, I had this experience the next day when I woke up because I got really into waking up in time to see the sunrise. And this dream gave me that direct experience. It was a lucid dream. It gave me this same direct experience that an astronaut would have so that every time I see the sunset I feel myself in space turning on the earth. And it's a completely different feeling. And so I think dreams are brilliant. Also providing the overview effect is one of the one or I think it's a good tool for getting over trauma or personal tragedy of finding closure in relationships. I've had good dreams when relationships have ended, for example, like dreams that help me find closure and self satisfy or a kind of self therapy. I think they're extremely useful.
- [46:56]
B
On the COVID of your book is the Egyptian symbol for the ka. In your introduction you talk about the importance of the ka. In fact, even more than that, I had a very strange experience when I sent you an email yesterday because you responded the way my email program works. It gave me a summary of your response and in it it said may your ka be strong. I thought, oh, she's sending me a very interesting person message and I wonder what that's all about. And then I discovered that's part of your email signature. It wasn't directed explicitly to me, but I didn't know that at first. But let's talk about the ka. It's obviously very important to you.
- [47:46]
A
The ka for me, I guess for me it's the creative force. So it's like the creative animating force that propels us or directs us through life. And the Egyptians conceived of these various different dimensions of the human organism and entity. And there are about eight. They're depending on kind of which books you're reading. You have the ba, the Ka, the Shat, the Ak. There's all these different components, but I think for me like the bar and the car are the most significant. So they are the soul as the bar, the human headed bird that flies off after death. And the car is this creative life force, this kind of energy, this like lust for life, I think. And one of the things that I find really interesting so in my book it's a combination of he and car. So heka, which is the Egyptian word for magic. And that word therefore means something like eternal creative force, because he is the twisted flax from a temple lamp. So it represents the. The eternal flame that's kept in a temple. And that, to me, is like a brilliant illustration of the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptian psyche, how they viewed, like, life force and magic and the ability to manifest things that they desire. They talk often about. About how the meduneja, the hieroglyphs, the words, the script, are magical tools. You write, you draw to create and manifest the things that you want. You speak utterances like Isis, and that brings things into the world. So. So one of the, you know, lots of people develop lots of different hobbies during lockdown. My hobby was learning hieroglyphs. And I found that hieroglyphs really affected my dreams because the hieroglyphic writing system of images, pictorial images that have phonetic values, are very sympathetic to the kinds of novel associations that you make, the rapid novel associations you make whilst you're dreaming. So I found that hieroglyphs instantly entered my dream space because they just make sense to dreams because they're images. They also have phonetic values, and you can't help but make novel associations based upon pictorial and phonetic values. So to get to your point about the car, the car is, I guess it's your, like, energy body in some way, you might say, you know, it's that animated force that keeps you alive. And it's something that we need to consider with dreaming because our dreaming body is as sensitive to outside stimuli as our waking body. So. So one of the things that really impacts and influences dreams is your environment. The sounds, the temperature, the smells, even, all affect your dreams. One of a really good technique for lucid dreaming is introducing certain scents into your environment. One of the things I do sometimes is I'm living in a hotel room at the moment in Istanbul, and I have fresh coffee on my bedside table, like in a little pouch, and I can smell it in my dream. And it promotes this sort of alertness without actually being like a stimulant. But something like rosemary as well has been found to really enhance your memory. And any supplement, any food type that enhances your memory tends to be quite good for dreaming. But I think olfaction is one of the aspects of. One of the aspects that gets forgotten about a lot in terms of how that affects our consciousness.
- [51:29]
B
Your book is so rich. I learned so many things from it. I realized even in having this very detailed conversation with you, we're just scratching the surface. One of the points you raised in your Book, it was just a passing remark, but it really stuck with me is that there's a new discipline coming up with all sorts of data about how human beings are. It's called geopsychology. We're so influenced by our environment in ways that we hardly can begin to appreciate.
- [52:03]
A
I think that's one of the things that really strikes me about the Asclepia and why I think the Asclepia is so incredibly sophisticated, because it's more than a sleep temple. It's an holistic healing sanctuary. So the whole place is conceived to heal the person that enters it. It's a sacred precinct. So the whole place. And it feels like when you visit the one in Epidavros, for example, the one down the road from me, it feels like a divine city. So it's buffered from reality by this sacred grove all the way around it. So you pass through that sacred grove, and you're then in divine time, in divine space, and your body becomes divine, your humor's balance. You go to the theater, you experience catharsis by watching plays. You. You cleanse your body.
- [52:50]
B
You.
- [52:51]
A
You become part of your environment. You become a reflection of the environment that you find yourself in. You look at studies of things like famous study of if you put rats in an enriched environment, in a pleasant environment, they don't develop addictions, and then the ones that are in horrible, gnarly places do. And you look at rich people. Rich people all look so well put together because they don't ever have to struggle. They live in beautiful places, they can afford to do lovely things. And so environment is really a huge part of healing. I look at modern hospitals, at least in England these days, and I think this is where I would go when I'm just about ready to die, because. Because it's miserable, and I would feel ill if I was in a hospital. And you're fed horrible food, and there's no nature, and there's no trickling water, and there's no fresh air. And, you know, people even in the 1940s would travel to Switzerland to just take the air. And I think we've forgotten about these very basic things, that the harmonious qualities of nature, they have a harmonizing effect on our. Our body, mind and soul. And we need to remember that we're part of it. Because actually, you know, a very important God in healing is Apollo. And Apollo is also the God of prophecy and truth. And I think that prophecy and truth, as a kind of apocalypsis, as a sort of revelatory moment, can be one of the most healing things ever. Because wherever you are in life, like, even if you've got the worst disease you've had, like a terminal diagnosis, you're still part of an amazing pulsing living cosmos. And that revelation of your part, your thread in the tapestry of life is healing and death is inevitable. We're all going to die, but we're still all part of this fantastic cosmic play.
- [54:44]
B
Well, Sarah Janes, what a pleasure to meet you, to be with you, to partake of your vast knowledge of these things and most especially your appreciation of the sacredness of life and of our inner world, of reality itself. I think that's something that the ancient people had, that you have rediscovered and are bringing back to our modern world.
- [55:11]
A
Oh, thanks, Jeffrey. I certainly hope so. It was a pleasure to meet you as well.
- [55:16]
B
Thank you so much for being with me today. I hope we have more conversations. I hope you write more books.
- [55:23]
A
Oh, thank you so much.
- [55:25]
B
It's been a real pleasure. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [55:56]
A
Book four in the new Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
- [56:10]
B
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingalowed.org for early access to our videos and livestream events. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinkingallowed.org. Sam.