Dreams. Something we discuss a lot with our children and encourage them to pursue, but perhaps something we push to the side as adults. On today's episode, Shea is joined by Allison McCarthy, fellow sleep-lover and creator of The Sleeping Third. We spend a third of our lives asleep and Allison is on a mission to make sure we make the most of it, dreaming and all! Allison and Shea delve into Lucid dreaming, the dreaming state and how you can make the most of the time you spend in the REM state of sleep.
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Keen to learn more from Allison, but haven't had the chance to listen? Read the interview below!
Shea: Alison. The first question I love to ask guests is how did you sleep last night?
Allison: How did I sleep last night? Such a good question to start off with, I felt I slept pretty well last night, I will say, but it has been a little bit of a hectic couple of weeks. We, my family and I, are looking for a house, so that's something that has caused a certain amount of stress which definitely impacts my sleep, but I will say after the sort of highs and lows associated with the looking process, I definitely had a really restful amount of sleep last night, so I'm really happy and feeling like I'm in good spirits and got my rest in.
Shea: Oh, that's fantastic. It is stressful looking for houses and that is something that people need to take into consideration, is that when you are going through a stressful time, are you balancing your sleep?
Allison: Exactly, and it's so hard to get out of balance when you are stressed out and so I, even someone with sort of that really specific intentionality to sleep well definitely can fall right out of place when, when you're overstressed.
Shea: Yeah, and for those, I need to introduce you, you are a fellow person passionate about sleep and you have a really interesting business because, Allison, you're a lucid dreamer and you run a platform called 'The Sleeping Third', so it's a content platform that you can find on instagram and Twitter, so tell us a little bit about what it is that you do.
Allison: Yeah, yeah, so I, like you said, I run a website, I run a website as well which I failed to mention um called The Sleeping Third, and it's more about ways to educate everyone on the power of sleep and dream. I have this tagline that I love to use which is that we spend one third of our lives asleep, so let's make it count. And that's a combination of getting that restful sleep for wellness and just being a productive person in the world and just being a happy person as well as focused on dreaming. I'm particularly interested in dreams and creativity but there's a lot of different ways that you can explore your dreams in all kinds of different interesting ways and nuggets. So basically I run Instagram, Twitter and a website that provides little nuggets of content around how to sleep better, how you can start your own dreaming journey and ways to get into lucid dreaming and why that might be a super valuable exercise for you in depending on where you are in your life.
Shea: Well, I can't wait for you to tell us about more about lucid dreaming, but how did you start this obsession with sleep and dreams?
Allison: Yes, and I will say it's a great word, obsession is a fantastic word in this case. I mean it could have some negative connotations, but it is truly accurate for me and where I am in time. So I will say my lucid dreaming journey if you will started out when I was quite young, which is very true for most people who really get into this space as a child. I had spontaneous lucid dreams. I don't really remember the content, but I know that they were there and having this sort of awe if you will of, oh my goodness, what is this, in a landscape where dreams weren't really talked about. Some families have this experience where, you know, dreams are talked about and it's open, but most families and most people in general don't grow up with a community with dreaming at the forefront. It's not something that most people sit around the breakfast table and talk about their dreams. There's some, there's some kind of innate sort of both fascination, but sort of reluctance or hesitation to talk about that and I find that so fascinating. Uh so when I was a kid, I had these experiences and like most others, I didn't talk about it, I didn't say anything, but I was just fascinated and through my childhood and into my teens and into my, you know, my college years, I had always tried to write down my dreams. I thought they were, they were funny. I thought they were weird. I thought they were inspirational. Many Children have nightmarish experiences as well, especially if there's trauma there and there's ways to heal through that. And some people tend to live their lives afraid of dreaming too. So all of this rich territory for exploring the subconscious whether negative or positive was really fascinating to me. And so I had attempted through the years to catalog my dreams.
Shea: Wow it's so fascinating. So a couple of questions before we go into lucid dreaming. Does everybody dream?
Allison: Everybody dreams! Yes there is some research and I'm not going to quote all, uh so much research in the space that you know there's a small handful of folks who might not dream because of brain injuries and things like that. I don't have statistics. But yes everybody dreams and everybody dreams nearly every night assuming that they've gotten sort of that REM. That REM time period within their sleep cycles. Sometimes REM can be suppressed for different reasons. Alcohol is an REM suppressor or what have you but that doesn't mean that you don't dream. It just might mean that you have fewer REM periods or you don't remember as much or you don't have as much time in that in that state to have as many dreams. But everybody dreams, everybody dreams multiple dreams each night, we have evolved that way. And that's still that's still a mystery actually. There's tons of theories of course that still remains a mystery to us. Yeah it's more about the recall of dreams with trained as opposed to sort of people will say oh you know I don't have dreams, where I don't dream whatever version of that story but it's actually I didn't remember my dreams is the actual sort of accurate way of saying that.
Shea: Yeah because sometimes, I mean I I feel like I dream a lot, I don't actually interesting, I don't remember my dreams like from last night. But often I have some really vivid long dreams and um but I find that if I don't write them down straight away then I forget them.
Allison: Absolutely. That is 100% true. And that's where when we talk about, I talk about a lot with with folks who are really interested in learning about this. The importance of writing it down right away, not only writing it down right away in the morning, but writing it down throughout the night. So if you wake up, everybody has these micro awakenings each time you go through a sleep cycle. So most of the time it's imperceptible to us, we wake up and get right back to sleep without even our cognitive awareness of that. However, I am a middle of the night bathroom user. So I'm often up and every time I get up to use the restroom I will write down any dream that I'm experiencing in that state because I've come out about sleep cycle at that moment and oftentimes right where you are coming out of a sleep cycles when your REM periods are and you can remember a dream which is why when you wake up even in the end of the morning, that's when they that's when they're the most, so you have to immediately when you have them and sometimes your brain is very tricky. So sometimes you'll wake up in the middle of the night if that's applicable to you and um you'll say oh I'll remember I had this dream. It's pretty vivid for me right now. It's so vivid. I don't feel like writing anything down in the middle of the night. Um so I'm going to wait until morning and then of course, inevitably by morning there's nothing there. So I use what I use what I call or several people call the keyword method. So I have a pen and the paper just rough paper, by my bed and I just write down a couple of things. So for example, if this were a dream I was having I'd write, Shea, Allison, The Goodnight Co, we're talking about dreams. That's all I would write just quickly. Regardless of how much detail I could remember about this moment. Then I could look at those notes in the morning and be like, oh yeah, I remember the whole rest of it even if it wasn't there at all when I had woken up. So people tend to have this feeling that they need to have this elaborate dream journal right when they wake up and I have an elaborate dream Journalists digital. But I wait until you know, I haven't even written mine from last night down yet. I just have my key words and I'll do it, I'll do it later tonight for myself or when I have time or even a couple of days later because scheduling in life right? So I really have this approach of path of least disruption to my day to day so that I can maintain these practices over the long haul. As soon as you're spending too much time on stuff that feels like busywork, it becomes, it becomes a habit that's going to fall fall away pretty quickly.
Shea: Yeah, so diving a bit more into lucid dreaming. So can you tell us what is the definition or what is lucid dreaming?
Allison: Yeah, lucid dreaming, it's so fun. The basic definition of lucid dreaming is to be consciously aware that you are dreaming while a dream is underway while you're currently dreaming about this experience of lucid dreaming is and having looking around and I say oh wait I'm in a dream right now and then you that sort of that moment of being aware that what you're experiencing is in the dream state is the basic definition of lucid dreaming. Now there are different ways to guess categorise, might be the best word, or to think about lucid dreams. Some lucid dreams can just be that simple awareness that says, oh uh this is a dream and then that's it, you just know that it's a dream it carries out, like it would normally do if you weren't aware it's kind of a passive watching experience, you just know that you're dreaming. And people tend to call this you know there are different levels or criteria for how the quality of a lucid dream, so you can experience the 'aha' moment and just do nothing. People talk about lucid dreams like controlling a dream, I prefer to use the word influence because you're not really controlling, you do have more influence, you can influence you know the colour of objects or if you if you're really strong you can intend on where to go or what to do. A lot of people fly because it's exhilarating, it's quite fun, or have encounters with people with loved ones or celebrities or people who have passed on even um, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're controlling the sort of the extent of the narrative necessarily or everything that happens. It's I think, I like to think of it as co-creation in many ways.
Shea: So what's the difference, what's the difference between lucid dreaming and just dreaming?
Allison: Yeah lucid dreaming, you know you have a full unawareness that you're in a dream and there is a quality of understanding, there's just something that you know like oh yeah I'm in a dream. You're really in it, you can feel it really, you know it, you understand that you think oh my gosh I'm dreaming, you may be recognised as a dinosaur or something that you think that there are no whatever in a non-lucid dream or a regular dream. Um it's just following a narrative, you just have no conscious of where when you wake up, you had thought prior to that, that that was objective reality for you in that moment. So there was no, there's no difference of like it's imagining us having a dream right now, we're having this dialogue together, it's really engaging, we're talking about all this stuff, but if I woke up I would have had no idea that this moment was a dream, I wouldn't know right, it's kind of like this abstract disattachment if you will to what's going on the narrative. You know, I was, I was having a dream last night that was pretty mundane, just using the restroom at a rest stop and when I woke up I was like oh that was, that was strange, but I had no moment in that reality that I was experiencing in the dream that I didn't know that it was a dream, just living about the narrative regardless of some things that were like, oh that's strange, you tend to sort of give yourself a reason for why things are weird or you know that kind of thing. In the lucid dreaming, that sort of, you know often when you feel things as well, so yeah, there's a knowing, there's not only like, there's something you have that 'aha' moment usually requires that moment. There's a moment in time that you say, oh my gosh, this is a dream and that's why it basically switches to, you're in control mode if you will get influence. So it could be a narrative, non-elusive, non-lucid dream and then potentially something is so weird or so emotional or so crazy or so off, you're like wait a minute, this is definitely a dream and you can train yourself to look for those cues and to understand when those cues are happening. But then after that moment that 'aha' that I'm lucid moment, then it feels differently, you kind of know it there's an excitement. Many people, early lucid dreamers get too excited and wake themselves up because they're like oh my gosh this is real, it's crazy.
Shea: Is it something that we should be doing? What are the benefits of the health benefits related to it? How is it connected with sleep?
Allison: Absolutely! So this question is one of the biggest questions and I think all lucid dreamers get in general and I don't think there's a perfectly neat answer to it. Um, I think you can use lucid dreaming for lots of different applications, not only lucid dreams but just non lucid dreams as well, regular dreaming. So I'm really interested in lucid dreams and dreaming for creativity. So active problem solving or like creation, I love to write and I love to write fiction. Um I love to draw things like that. So I can use the lucid dreaming space as a sort of incubation area to sort of imagine pieces of art or imagine things that I want to make or imagine, sort of like just creative ideas. So you can go into a lucid dream and you can you can look around and maybe things will appear like if you look on there was a story, I can't remember who it was. And so I hope for your listeners we can, they can do the research on this. But someone who would always go into a lucid dream, imagine being in a museum. So they would sort of influence the space to turn wherever they are into a museum. And then they would look at whatever art was on the museum walls and then create that art in real life. And it was a long story. So you can, you know, you can really hone a craft, your craft in that way. I have a fellow comrade in the lucid dreaming space his name is is Dave Green and he goes in and he draws, he basically incubates this drawing space and he creates these little illustrations from his lucid dreams. He asks for art, they show up and then he draws them and wakes up and shows them and it's just a really cool way to create. Really, really creative, not everyone has that itch for them. So a lot of lucid dreaming can be around and what's really handy and helpful, especially under the support and guidance of people who really experience and lucid dreaming, you know, therapists, but lucid dreaming can be an incredible healing experience for people who have dealt with trauma, post traumatic stress disorders. Um to face really deep seated issues within their lives and heal them and face them addressed to them. A lot of this is called Shadow Work, where um whatever trauma might be expressing itself in a dream can be, can come up as a monster or darkness or just anger and it feels scary, frightening images, but you can learn to speak to those shadow figures and say, you know, become lucid and say um project love onto that shadow figure that might be represented somewhere in your deep subconscious that you might not even be aware of and project love to that entity or say that you love them and I like to hug them and they often transform into sort of beautiful creatures or I've had one experience where a monster that I hug turned into beautiful horses and I felt that energy of change happened and I don't necessarily have the language or ability to articulate what was transformed what trauma was addressed, but I know that there's catharsis because I wake up and I feel it sometimes so powerful and sometimes just because I feel better. Something has passed and that is really a helpful tool for people that really do want to focus on healing. And there's many other ways to do it. A lot of emotional healing really is a fantastic way, creativity. But also I don't like to underscore the amount of joy associated with lucid dreaming. I mean it's just really fun to fly around like the sort of like human nature to want to be able to fly through the heavens. I mean that is possible in lucid dreaming and there is an innate sense of like just happiness and joy that can be explored there in ways that are obviously impossible in regular waking life if you will.
Shea: Do you have a practice, is it necessary to really focus on this and bring it into your consciousness before you go to sleep or?
Allison: Yes, lucid dreaming is definitely a practice. It's similar to a spiritual practice or meditation practice that you might have where you have to dedicate that intentionality to it on a regular basis. But I like to think of it as something that can be not very disruptive to your life, you can take lucid dream practices and I'll get into that in a moment really far, but then you're you tend to, when you go too far on sort of like these practices, some of them happened in the middle of the night, for example, you are doing it that at the expense of great sleep and to me the number one priority, regardless of elucidating practice is health and wellness related to sort of really quality sleep. So for me my practice is built around sleeping the first and foremost and then removing the secondary part of it, they work in tandem and you can't have one without the other and some people will go pretty far on their side. Now that being said the lucid dreaming practices are really a 24 hour affair if you will, how you I talked about earlier, how you can practice sort of these questions of understanding whether you're in a dream or not. So that when you get into a dream you have a cue or a trigger that helps you say, 'oh am I dreaming or not?'. And basically what that can look like from a daytime practice if you will is any time that you see anything unusual. I have this um methodology where I think about things that are quote 'off' or rather what I mean by that is if someone is behaving out of character, I'll go into my dream, you know, try to really ask myself that in daily life. So someone's asking if some of the out of character, I'll say wait is this a dream? Look around and I'll check and I'll say, okay it is not a dream, okay great. And then if something is out of place, it's something where it shouldn't be something small or we're like wait a minute is this a dream? If something's out of the extraordinary that's happening in the day- we have in San Francisco, we have something called Fleet Week where these crazy military jets fly around and that's unusual in my day. So I was like wait a minute is this scary? It's a bit scary. They're very loud but it's a celebration nonetheless. You find these little moments like that and you say 'am I dreaming, is this a dream?' And you really need to sort of think about that with your full mind and body. And really even though you know you're not in a dream but you have to ask yourself that. And so the more you do that, the more you find those moments during the day you'll just naturally carry them over into your dreams and eventually you'll just do it more and more in your dreams because you're doing it more and more in your day and that will become a habit for you. And you'll begin to start asking those questions of yourself while you're in a dream state. Another big part of the practice and this lends itself. Well if you're a frequent bathroom go-er in the middle of the night like me is you you need to wake up basically intercept your longest REM period. So effectively as you go through about five or six sleep cycles at night. They're roughly around 19 minutes you can try to figure out your own if you want to wake yourself up. And the earlier sleep cycles in the beginning of the night have, you know, 5 10 minutes of REM, where most of your dreams are. I won't get into the fact that some dreams can be outside of REM. But let's just for ease assume that most of your dreams are in REM. And so in the beginning of the night, so early you're getting 5 10 minutes, you know, and as it progresses through the night, you're getting more and more and you can have up to, you know, half an hour, 45 minutes of REM later in the evening. So your final sleep cycles, you know, right when you're gonna wake up so effectively, you know, what is a really fantastic practice for folks to do is to intercept the last two, which is usually about 2, 2.5 hours before you'd wake up for the day. Um set an alarm for that. I kind of do all this and actually, you know, I'm a frequent bathroom go-er in the middle of the night, but you can set an alarm for that and um depending on how this works for you, I always recommend people experiment and try. But you know, stay up for about five minutes, 10 minutes. Some people like to stay up for a full 20 minutes or half an hour. Even meditate and read lightly. No bright lights or anything and no phones just to get into the headspace of like I'm a little bit more awake than I normally would be to go into my next REM state. Which will then help me recognise the dreams just a little bit more than earlier earlier dreams. And because there's more REM time and the next cycles that you'll get your intercepting that longer period of dreaming time.
Shea: Because I yeah I feel like I definitely remember more of my dreams, the dream in my last sleep cycle. So closest to waking up.
Allison: Yeah and you can even fall into you know maybe you've experienced this. I certainly have where I've snoozed a little bit and even in that 10 minutes will have a dream. And it's probably because you've just come out of a REM State and you just go right back into it. There's a technique where actually you can practice to learn what's called waking and exclusive dreaming. It's a bit advanced but effectively you can go from a waking state so you just lay back in bed right into a dream without ever losing that conscious awareness. So you don't even perceive that you're falling asleep you just are awake and then in a dream lucid already and there's ways to practice that that's a bit advanced. But yeah you can do that as well, it's a bit hard and there's a lot of strange things that happened and that sort of in between state. But it's definitely a practice that people do quite regularly.
Shea: So for the basic, for the people that are new to dreaming because they don't maybe necessarily remember their dreams or they've never heard of lucid dreaming, what are a couple of the basic things that people can do prior to going to bed? That maybe maybe there's something they can incorporate in their sleep routine to set them on their path of this dream journey.
Allison: This is a bit counterintuitive. But the biggest thing that anyone can do in starting is to just ignore lucid dreams entirely because what happens, you get so worked up and focused on like, oh I'm not getting lucid or I'm not becoming lucid, you're actually ignoring the basic practices to lead up to that. So first I will say that well for anyone starting out in general, the best thing to do is to start with the intention to just remember dreams right and write them down. So right, write in that notebook and write down those keywords is a great idea because then you don't have to turn your light on, you know, come out of that sleepy stage and break that sleep cycle. And there's actually pens with a light, they're brilliant. I love I write them in the dark. So sometimes I can't read it um there's lots of ways to do that. But yeah, so the first thing when you're starting on a dreaming journey in general, it's just to focus on dream recall remembering your dreams, make sure you're set up for, you know, you have, you have your sleep hygiene really set. So you're, you're going to bed at a decent time. You're not looking at screens. You're not super stressed out. All the typical sleep hygiene applies here. So continue your routine, you separate between a half an hour to an hour before you're going to sleep. All that place.
Shea: Meditation is also super helpful and you can do basic mindful meditation that's 5-10 minutes. Not anything too stressful. People tend to put this like, oh I'm not a spiritual person or what have you, but that little bit of mindfulness, 5-10 minutes or just a beautiful, we often talk about even finding a great site that's got a five minute guided meditation. If you've never practiced meditation, you don't know how to do it. Listening to a guided meditation, you know, will set you on your journey.
Allison: Precisely. So I very much encourage that to be not only part of the routine for sleep, but also as part of the dream of practice as well. And so usually what I, what I encourage people to do in their early stages, to have the note pad next to you. Don't worry about the perfect writing or whatever if you can deal with that later. There's a state in between sleeping and being awake. And it basically just means transitioning into sleep. And it's that time in between feeling awake and feeling really sleepy. You might see colours, you might have really abstract, nonsensical, non linear ideas. You might be thinking about a quacking duck and then work and then something completely bizarre. And then a colour will appear and then either you kind of fall into sleep or you wake up. And so I I encourage people to practice just playing in that space. Um just because it gets you in this idea of transitional states of there's a difference between that state of being awake. It's very subtle. I've recorded myself in that stage actually just like nonsense talking, which I've never actually fully been able to understand, but it's a liminal space in between. And I tend to just focus on that for a little bit. Um, and just see how that just work that out. There are lots of people in history who have used that state to just come up with ideas. Tesla being one of them who would drop would be holding a waited a very heavy key and would fall asleep and drop it once they reached the state, but they had ideas and anyway, that's one other thing. But I often um have people really pay attention can they can they sort of ride the wave, if you will, surf into dreaming and that just helps set up the mind to know that you're looking at different states of consciousness that are not just normal and useful. Everyone just usually flies by that in addition before bed and even in that state, you know as you're drifting further. You know, I often use just a little bit of a mantra that's tonight, I will remember my dreams tonight. And you just say that as you're drifting tonight, I'll remember my dreams tonight. I'll become lucid if you want to focus on loose and a little bit. But tonight, I'll remember, I'll have great dreams, I'll learn something just a little mantra, I just think simple and uh you know, I call forth my best dreams tonight is what I say uh and you can do some version of that that feels right for you and natural for you to say every night as you're drifting. And I do that too when I go back to sleep from using the restroom or what have you all continue that process of both, paying attention to that liminal stage and repeating this mantra of tonight, I'll remember my dreams um and that's really it and then you'll start to remember your dreams way more often will just naturally you're setting the intentionality I will say when I first started my journey with, with rigour like I'm doing now, which was about three years ago, I was having, you know, I was remembering rather, you know, one dream a week I would say. Um and now it's you know, between three and 10 at night, so it's just really about, it's a practice really. Doing it every day and doing it every day, doing it every day and not disrupting your life to a point where it's too much work for you and finding those avenues to get out of it. If you're getting out of it, you're not feeling motivated or it's too much work because you're writing too much in the morning, you have to use it up, you have to use to find that that one.
Shea: And one of the things that I saw on your website which I love is that is it's so important to prioritise sleep, which we talk about over here at The Goodnight Co. all the time. Um and to make it non negotiable. So I guess that all of this, everything that we've talked about today around dreaming is just another key element to really look at why sleep is so important and dreaming is an important state for us. And if you're somebody who's wanting to tap into some more creativity, um you know, if you may be wanting to go down that path of healing or the trauma side of things is some benefits there. But you know, I think that everything that you're doing really helps to facilitate the routine that we encourage people get into and make sleep non negotiable. What would you say, Allison, would be your top three sleep tips or things that you can't live without for sleep?
Allison: My biggest one is making my bedroom my sanctuary. Um I don't have TV or any distractions in there. It's just sort of a bed with a cozy comforter and black out shades and all that. So I really think of my sleep space as sanctuary where I know that not only by using it to sort of better myself as a human being with great sleep but also as a dreaming practice and sort of like this is my little laboratory. And so it's really important for me to have that space be really um beautiful and it's not always possible for people to do that. You know, some people, especially with working from home and their offices or their bedrooms and you know, challenge, but as much as you can separate that or create that space for yourself, whether it's leave the debt like during the day, put the desk in another room if your separation but try to really separate all of that. And I tried very hard not to have screens in at all in bed. So no working in bed, no phones in bed, you know, just use the bedroom or sleep and you know, fun stuff with your partner, that's the two key things. So that's big for me and then another one for me related, it really is giving that consistent routine, you know, whatever, going to bed at the same time or near the same time every day, including weekends waking up at the same time or near the same time every weekend. And then giving yourself that half an hour to an hour before you actually go to sleep to separate. I love this notion of you know, when you come back from the gym, you don't just get it bad, it's the same thing like the day is like your gym and so you have to take a shower, relax, try to process any sort of stress or energy from the work or day or whatever whatever you have, trying to sort of clean it if you will, the gym analogy, before you're sort of going to sit down for the night and then the last one, number three, I would say that you know, you use tools, use things, so I have a sleep mask, I have, you know, a sound meditation. I sleep in earplugs so I really, I try to create a space that I have actively produced for myself to ensure that I get the most of my sleep that I want to get and that's actually different from my partner. So my partner goes to bed at a different time than I do. He doesn't always sleep in here with earplugs and we've created a space that just because he goes to bed at a different time um doesn't mean that we don't have love, I feel like there's a lot of times people were like, oh if you're not this to have any other than your relationship with flawed or whatever, and I think that's just such terrible thinking. You can have different schedules and still have the same experience.
Shea: Some people just need to sleep in separate beds and that's okay too. Like if you're not getting good sleep and you're getting restless sleep it's probably because of your partner, and so, you know, so important that you get the right sleep.
Allison: Exactly, and I keep, you know, he's obviously well with me on the dreaming journey, but he's not a dreamer, it's not his focus. Yeah, I set him up for just be aware that I'm going to be doing this and now it's second nature to him as well, but I do think it's important as a partnership to communicate that this is happening and that you need this and that you're prioritising this and you're going to go to bed really early and you're not going to watch that show together, so you're going to deal with it. Yeah, I think those are really big and I think people undervalue the fact that it is a collaboration with a partner and you need to be really communicative about those things when whether you're prioritising sleep or dreams, it's people on different journeys even if they're you know married or in a partnership.
Shea: Absolutely. Well Alison, thank you so much for sharing all this wonderful knowledge about dreaming. It's something that I think that people are either doing a lot of or can't quite tap into. So I'm sure that there's a lot of gold nuggets in here and particularly one of them that I love was around the mantra. So, a way to really start this practices to just encourage the dreaming state as as you're drifting off to sleep and see where it takes you.
Allison: Exactly. That is absolutely right. That's all you need to get started. Nothing more than the ability to write it down and just the intention. So without mantra and I'll give you one last parting advice which is just not to give up, people. If you're not remembering your dreams, it will come. Don't force it, keep doing that intention and it will naturally start to evolve for you and you'll be so surprised within a month or two months of how many dreams you are remembering and even at that point you might have some lucid dreams, you might not, they might come, they might not but be patient on this journey. It's a lifetime journey and I wish everyone the best in getting started or continuing if that's where you are.
Shea: Thank you so much. And if anybody wants some more information about Allison and what she's doing, head on over to The Sleeping Third on Instagram and Twitter and also check out her website as well - thesleepingthird.com
Thank you so much. And I wish you a beautiful night sleep tonight. I'd love to know if you have any amazing lucid dreams.
