Well, I actually, I think that that in itself is a brilliant answer because it's

interesting because it reveals perhaps my own unfortunate and winning subscription to the Aristotelian worldview and the need for closure and the need for certainty. And so the very fact that you circumambulated it and have this kind of agnostic relationship, it's actually in line with one thing I wanted to ask you, which is the role of meditation and the contemplative arts in your own life and also your relationship to or generally. But what I was going to say there is my favorite definition, Robert, of meditation is habituation to openness. The ability to just remain agnostic, the power of open question. And so I thought your answer was absolutely just spot on in that regard. But what is your relationship to the wisdom arts with the contemplative practices meditation to to grease the skid so to speak, to create a skill set that allows us to see the world in this symbolic way and shamanic way? Because you do seem to intimate it in your writing, but I'm curious what role if any it has played in your life and how do you relate to meditative arts at this point?

Well, it's perfect timing because I wrote in the margin of your book, when you're talking about meditation, I wrote Get Off The Cushion. That wasn't addressed to you that was summarizing what you were saying at that point in your book, that is not just about sitting on the cushion, and then maybe forgetting what you're doing in the cushion afterwards, it's constant. My two basic forms of meditation, horizontal meditation, and walking meditation. Horizontal meditation includes, in fact, centers on what we were talking about, when we talked about being in that liminal space. You're not awake, you're not asleep, you might actually becomes a yogurt of every day mind, it becomes a way of accessing continuity of consciousness, which I think I do quite often without making any big noise about it. There's something I want to come back to. The walking meditation is also we're talking about walking in the speaking land, recognizing to paraphrase Bodleair that you're walking in a forest of living symbols that are looking at you. So I think you've written about this yourself, so it's mindfulness in all things that you do. I would say without excessive solemnity on my part, because I came to a point in life quite early on where I realized I had to choose tragedy or comedy, Andrew and I chose comedy. I chose comedy actually in Dante since it has something of a happy ending, and it's written in the common language of the people. It's not too esoteric, it's not too uptight. So that's where I am with some of that. I've forgotten what else I was going to say I let it slide, but come back if it's officially interesting.

I love this kind of choice between comedy and tragedy and drama. I heard a wonderful rabbi once say reality is touched through tears and laughter, and to me, the breaking down or the cracking up, it's the breaking and the cracking that's important. I want to share a little personal story here and see how this lands with you. One of the things that's really changed in my life over the last 10 years is because again, I'm kind of educated, trained as a classist. I'm a classical pianist, I'm a little bit of a scholar, I'm a classical kind of to Buddhist guy. But what I really started to explore Robert, and I'm very curious about this, is how things are classicism and traditions, I mean, promise and peril and everything, blind spots everywhere. I'm very, very interested in blind spots these days, things I don't see. And in my own personal life, as a psychonaut or an ironaut, I was trained in the natural limitations very rigidly, very specifically in my three-year retreat. Following a systematic prescription, a classic text, a classic thing, and I did all the stuff and I did it by the textbook and I dotted my eyes and I crossed my T's, it was wonderful. But I want to share with you what's happened to me, Robert, over the last couple of years, it's been very interesting and at first a bit frustrating, was I noticed that my actual onset of traditional lucidity was starting to decrease. And it was like, okay, I know how I know it's not like the stock market is up and down, but it's like, this is not like what's going on here. But what I noticed in direct proportion, inverse proportionality, was that I was my entire dream life, so-called non-lucid dreams, was absolutely exploding. And so originally, you know, I was careful to say, is this like, am I doing something wrong? But then I started to realize that maybe this is in fact some whatever teaching message coming through to open, expand my horizons. And this is why I love you work so much. Beyond the somewhat confines of not merely just lucid dreaming and dream yoga, because I always thought that was the suman of bonam, like, I mean, this is like the most evolved type of dream, right? In fact, I know all names, but I was quite a famous dream yoga person and quite a famous philosopher had a conversation where the dream person was saying, oh, lucid dreams are there the most evolved type of dream. The philosopher was saying, well, you know, I'm not so sure. And I have to say, at that point, align myself with old lucid dreams or the most evolved type of dream. But what I've done recently is actually situate more lucid dreams as a very viable bandwidth in this massive spectrum of an external mind. And so as my lucid dreams per se started to go down, and the rest of my dream world started to explode, it was like, wow, maybe this is even a larger embrace of the doctoral meditations and the nectoral mind. And so then what I return to your work is like, I'm actually rereading your books in an entirely new light. It's like, wow, this is, I mean, Robert has so much to say about this dimension that I'll admit it. I previously said, I'm not so sure he gets it. Well, I don't think I got it. And so

I love it. It's charming, charming, charming personal statement. The only thing that troubled me really in dream yoga was it's some degree of disrespect for dreams other than lucid dreams that that is in the book. And that's what you're talking about right now. And I

thought there's actually Andrew actually get what is going on in dreaming in

another place in the book, you made it clear that you do get it. This might be the foundation of what you're now saying. At some point you say that what really matters, you're listing that you use a lucid dream according to Patricia Garfield. And so on suddenly you say, this is where I gave you lots of ticks and asterisks in the margin. You say it's really about choice. It's choice that matters. See, this is what is central for me. Whatever order of reality I'm in, whatever kind of consciousness I think I'm in, whether I think I'm lucid or not, what matters to me is that I recognize and exercise the ability to choose. In any reality, that's what it's all about. That's why I didn't call my first book anything like lucid dreaming because I thought they don't get it. Most traditional cultures don't get lucid dreaming in the way the term was being used in the west at that time. The discussion is mature. There's some very good books about lucid dreaming by people who use the phrase in a more sophisticated way. But they still often tend to mess the fact that at the end of the day, it's about choice. It's about choosing, choosing your options, testing the limits of your reality, whether you think you're in a physical body or whether you're in a subtle body, whether you're in Atlantis or whether you're in the astral realm of lunar or whether you're going to the corner grocery store, exercise choice and don't give up that choice. And also don't tell yourself you have no responsibility of absolute freedom. That's another thing that ticked me off. I'm not a prude. I'm not prepared to endorse what consenting adults think they can do. But the early lucid dreaming discussion I'm asked for the universe, I can do with anything I like and have sex with anybody. I thought nonsense, don't you understand the dreams or real experiences and their responsibilities involved?

Well, very briefly, isn't this one reason Jung didn't endorse lucid dreaming as a practice because he saw the potentials for egoic self-aggrandizement and emegalomania sorts of things? I

don't know that I've looked at that aspect of Jung's thinking, though I thought I'd covered most. I don't I can't answer that. But it sounds like something that Jung might have said and thought suddenly. In ancient and indigenous cultures, recognize what goes on in dreaming is real. It could have consequences. You can be punished for it in ordinary physical reality. If you've done things that are discovered that you should not have done moral codes and standards of the of the unit, applying dreams as they do in regular life. I mean, that's one of the but that's one of the restrictions placed on what goes on in dreaming and dreaming cultures that understand all that it can mean. But that's not the main thing that I wanted to home in. And I simply wanted to home in on the idea that in any reality, we have the ability to choose, as Victor Frankl said, whatever situation you're in, you can choose your attitude and that can change everything. So this is more fundamental to me than anything else associated with the term lucid or lucid dreaming. And I've noticed in my life, in addition to those hypnagogic experiences I talked about, many of the greatest gifts of dreams of nocturnal dreams have come in dreams that have shocked me awake, made me laugh, told me something I didn't recognize, sometimes embarrassed or even humiliated, my waking ego and educated me and put me on the right path. So there is that magic mirror function of dreams. And there is that night movie making that goes on in dreams to bringing yet another way of looking at things where you feel you've got a film crew who's producing a movie for you, maybe to shock or to shock your wake or make you laugh yourself awake. I've had many dreams of that kind. They were not lucid, were not asked for, and they have been incredibly helpful in life as a corrective from the night to the delusions of the day.

Beautiful. And so since we're on this topic, I want to throw a little dart on it because you talk about it very beautifully in this book that you deliberately don't use. I just want to put a little exclamation point on this because I do think this is really important, especially for my listeners who are principally lucid dreamers or they attempt to do so and then dream yogis per se. You don't use the term lucid dreaming. You use the term conscious dreaming. And so you're circumambulating this reason. Maybe throw a dart a little bit more specifically about why you don't, why you like the word conscious dreaming versus lucid

dreaming. Well, at the time I wrote conscious dreaming, there's a lot of stuff coming out using the phrase lucid dreaming, which was about controlling and manipulating your dreams. Those words were common. In fact, even in the subtitle of some of the lucid dream, learn to control and manipulate your dreams, learn to be master of the universe. That wasn't of a subtitle, but it was in some of the texts. I have sex with anybody, go anywhere you like, etc. You can control the dreams control the dream space. It's like, can you try to control the ocean? I don't want to control the dream space. However, we look at it, it is a space wiser and wider than my ordinary mind. I want to learn to navigate, to sail, to swim in those waters, not to control them. This seemed to be like a cognitive delusion, like you talked about the lies of the ego, the lies of the psyche. In your book Dream Yoga, this was a big one. We're going to control the dream space. Guess what? We'll build whatever we like. We'll have sex with anyone. I found all of this Jejun, naive, arrogant and dangerous, actually. Calmically dangerous. Yeah. Dangerous. I mean, one thing not to listen to the night at all, which many people in our culture are doing, and this is the root of many of our problems. They're not getting a corrective to the delusions of the day because they're not listening to their inner side, because dreams of the voice of conscience, as well as all else, the voice of conscience. But it's even worse. Instead of listening to the voice of conscience, we're going to try and gag it and make it stumble around like a zombie in pursuit of our wakeful, egoistic desires. That's not what the lucid dreaming debate is like today. The very good books on lucid dreaming have been written. I praise some of them, some of the authors of people I greatly admire. But back in the time that conscious dreaming was published, 1996, the literature was still a bit chaotic. There were these elements that we're talking about. Today, I'm happy to use a word lucid dreaming for some aspects of what I do. I might expand it and say shamanic lucid dreaming because we're doing a lot of journeying by traditional shamanic methods, not with entheogens, but with drumming in pursuit of dreaming. I would say that the two core techniques, the three core techniques of my approach, which in general I call active dreaming, meant to be a provocation, get active with your dreaming, learn you can enter the dream space volitionally, and get active with what the dreams give you in terms of bringing embodied energy and guidance into the world. The three core techniques of active dreaming that could be called ways of approaching lucid dreaming are first of all the dream reentry technique. You take a dream or image and you travel with it. You might do that in the privacy of your own bed. Without any assistance, you might do it with drumming or other sonic effects. That's up to you. When I'm at home, I do it on my own. I don't use drumming. I just make it my intention to follow the energy and the imagery. The second is spending more time in the hypnagogic space. That's an approach to lucid dreaming. Of course, you can have many different ways of handling that liminal state of consciousness. You can practice one pointed meditation and let everything try to fall away, except the one thing you're focused on. You can just watch the rise and fall of passing thoughts and calm again, fluences and so on. You can see a juicy scene that suddenly emerges and stay with them. Go on a lucid dream adventure. You can just practice going into what you call the dreamless sleep, that deeper stage of things. Dreamless sleep is for me an awkward phrase. I know it's a standard, awkward phrase for me coming from where I'm coming from. But nonetheless, you can use this hypnagogic state, this liminal state, as access to a seamless continuity of mind of consciousness, a wakefulness if you liked during the night. I spend nights like that without being particularly serious about what I'm doing. They just evolve from lying there in a certain way. And I guess I suppose the third thing is the practice of chiromancy of learning to look at everything around you as part of a waking dream and as part of a seamless pattern of interaction with the dreams of the night. So I guess the answer to your question about space that I didn't give you earlier is in the in the Amnold tablet as within so without, as above so below, as within, so without as above so below. That's

fantastic. And a little bit more slightly more personal question. To what extent do you do you actively nurture cultivate things like like lucidity? You know, like, do you do you have specific intentions when you go to sleep every night to target a particular goal? Again, from my own experience, let me share you with with you how I've changed there. When I was practicing kind of hardcore dream yoga, very specific in pens, you know, very I'm going to practice stage three, I'm going to practice stage four. But somewhat in line with what I was sharing earlier, Robert, I've noticed more and more that yes, every now and again, I'll continue to do that. But more and more, there's more a sense of fearless, joyful exploration. It's almost like dying. It's like, okay, what is it going to be like tonight? And so I go in with an intention of exploration and intention of curiosity and wonder. And I have been rewarded with the most astounding sets of dreams over the last two years that it was like, Oh my God, I thought I had some sense of the of what my mind could do in the dream. And and I could share dozens of stories like this. It's like, I had no idea that this could happen in the dream. I had none of the dream yoga texts told me that this could happen in the dream. So I'm actually I've replaced a little bit more. Maybe there's a middle way that that'll come to fruition for me. A little bit more of this kind of really targeted, maybe too tight. Oh, I got to do stage five. I got to do stage six with this more open, playful exploratory. I'm just going to fire into inner space or whatever and just see what happens with delight and childlike wonder. I'm curious how you play with this in your own experience and how this may or may not have changed over your own life.

Bless you, Andrew. You're really loosening up. This is very good. I many years ago, when I first started getting public programs on this kind of thing, someone said to me, bottom line it for me. What's all this about? I said, remember to play and he's writing it down. Remember to play. I don't think you've got it yet. I don't set I don't set very specific intentions very often. I don't want to turn my nights into a job of work. Last night, did I set an intention? If I did, it was like a new story, I'd like a picture. I didn't get a picture for my dreams last night. I'll give you one nugget. I wrote down three very brief free reports from last night. No fixed intent, no firm intention. If I set any intention, it was simply I'm open to a new story. So here's a tiny snippet. I'm at a gathering. Oh, by the way, I'm leading workshops and giving lectures in my dreams several nights a week. And the detail is immense. Sometimes I wake up satisfied but tired. The way I would be after leading a multi day program. So it's another gathering. It's a conference more than a workshop. And there's a German therapist who wants us to understand the power of words. He describes working with a French patient who had exhausted him. He thought the case could never be closed. It was hopeless. Then he uses the French word, a genial, which we translate as genial, but it's got a different spin. Everything opens up. The case is solved. This is breakthrough. Genial. We're talking about the magic of the word as he used it and whether we have similar words in other languages. And I thought about it coming out of the dream. We have different styles of dream. I get lots of works because I like to play with words. I like to do my research. I'm in lazy linguists like most anglers, but I love to research. And thinking how the French people I know when I teaching in France several times a year loved it when I said genial. In French, it doesn't just mean friendly or warm like genial. It means super fantastic. Awesome. And it's got your closer to the genie, the genius, the diamond. You feel the genius coming closer. So I'm thinking when he used the word that way, maybe the word magic was bringing that greater power, that healing and creative spirit closer. So that's a snippet. I always write down my, I almost always write down my dreams, whether they're large or small fragments or long. And it got me thinking about all sorts of things. Got me thinking about the magic of words. It got me thinking about that word. It got me thinking not for the first time about who the genius or diamond really is, about how simple it can be to transfer power to somebody. With a word soul. That's a phrase from the Guarini of South America. They talk about word souls, which the true shaman can implant, can transfer. A word soul is coming to you, and you'll be different. So that was a result of not setting any solemn or earnest agenda, Andrew. And you know, I've been doing this for some time, actually, I've been doing it all my life. So I'm not going to make my nights a job of work. Often I'll say, because I'm homebound most of the time, now happily, but I'm home to say, oh, I'd like to go in a new adventure. I'd like to travel somewhere, I travel immensely in my dreams. And sometimes there are places in this world that I know more often there are places in this world. I don't know more often there are places in other worlds, in other times, in other realities. I also back in Edwardian England last night, with a social troop trying to expose the crimes of done to poor ladies that led them to prostitution, signed with a group of social reformers in England in the 1920s. Very real experience. So, wow.

So since you intimated this, if you don't mind share a little bit more, and this is the other thing we talked a little bit before we came online, this is also really dramatically changed for me over the last decades, because I was I was chained in my tradition. Like I shared with you the Taoist adage, he who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know. Well, if that's true, I'm really screwed. And I never, I never used to share it was like, no, no, no, no. And now, I mean, one reason I'm doing this is, is I'm sharing, I'm never, I never used to do this sort of thing.

And so,

if it's comfortable for you, how has your, I mean, such a colossal topic for someone of your stature and experience, how is your relationship to dreams changed over your life over a dozen books and a tremendous amount of experience and research? How is your relationship to dreams changed? How is it changed your relationship to your mind and to your world? I mean, this is like, oh, I like this right here is a two hour conversation. But I'm very, because I look at my own experience. And, and, and, very interesting to see how things are evolving, changing, opening, and some of what I'm sharing with you here. I mean, these are things that I get, I generally don't do. So I'm very interested to talk to others who have devoted themselves to these nocturnal explorations to see how their own, so to speak, yeah, I just life experience and whatever has, has, a mature changed alternate or played out.

Well, here's a scene from my boyhood. As we mentioned, I was pronounced clinically dead twice as a child at age three and age nine. I spent eight years mostly in sick rooms with double pneumonia 12 times. One of my invisible visitors, one that nobody else could see was a big man with a lot of white hair and a pink face. And you'd sit on my bed and you'd say, back up, Robert, you're going to make it you and survive. You find it hard to talk to people now, but the day will come when the whole world will be interested in your dreams. That was me talking to my younger self at that age. So I didn't talk much about this stuff. I used it. I used it all my life. I didn't talk about for two reasons. First of all, I grew up in a conservative era in a military family. Very hard to talk about dreams and visions in my environment. And moving from school to school, I didn't have consistent friends. The first person I met, it would validate my experiences as an Aboriginal boy who said when I talked about believing I'd lived a whole life somewhere else when I was out of the body under emergency surgery, he said, Oh, yeah, we do that. We get sick. We go and live with the spirits, don't we? When we get where we come back, sometimes we're the same, sometimes we're not hard to talk about this stuff. The doctors say, Oh, it's a medication, isn't it? He's hallucinating. So I was quiet about my stuff, apart from one or two people like Jack over the Aboriginal. I was also quiet because you talk about lineages and traditions. I felt connected to Western mystery order, a Western mystery tradition, the same tradition that Yates knew very well, going back a very long time, who's of course a magical order? They helped their secrets tight. I mean, they're into higher offense and psychic security and all this stuff. So that was part of my inheritance, part of my far life inheritance, if you like, part of what lived in me, maybe in my genes, as well as in my psychic history. So between the history of the sort of high priesthood and the history of a sick boy who couldn't find something to talk to, I was quiet until midlife when I moved to the farm. And I started dreaming of a native woman, mother of the wolf clan of the Mohawk people that Kenya Khaka. In the early 18th century, who knew an Irishman to whom I'm connected, who lived in the colonies at that time, that changed my life, had to study her language. And it led me deep into the conscious recognition of what dreaming is, by the way, in North America, the dominant word for dreamer in native languages, its red zedsatz in Mohawk means means one who dreams. It's also the word for shaman healer. That is the word for shaman or healer in North America. The dreamer is the shaman. You're not a dreamer. You're not a shaman. Forget it. So then when I started learning this stuff, and I learned that from their point of view, dream shows the secret wishes of the soul. And it's very important in a decent society of people to gather around the dreamer, help them recognize the secret wishes of the soul is revealed in a dream and act to serve those wishes. So they don't go soul gone, soul missing, walking dead. And the dreams rehearse for the future. So we and our people can survive. When all of this fell upon me, bringing alive memories of different traditions, different people across time and space, I found that I wanted to get ready to teach it. So I got ready to teach it. And I wasn't part of any school. I mean, I learned from good people who are out there. I learned from many of the luminaries of the American dream work movement, his greatest contribution was to give us the effort or my dream protocol to say you won't be a rabbi, you won't be a guru, you won't be the expert or the shrink laying down the interpretation. Decent people with some good intention can offer something to each other to help each other unfold their dreams and act upon them. So learning from that, that I learned from, not from one teacher, but from several who were good at that, I became a dream teacher. And then of course, my relationship changed because I realized that from my point of view, one of the most urgent things we need to do for the survival of our kind and for our relationship with the environment we are in is to revive the dreaming and bring back a dreaming society in our world and our time. And that's what I've given my life to. I have my own school of active dream. We've graduated about 1000 people now teaching in more than 30 countries. I was teaching a lot in the Czech Republic and drew before the pandemic four times a year. We have a very large Czech dream school. I just thought you'd like to know that. Absolutely.

Wow. And so, oh goodness, there's so much to say here. How has your in relation to this, how has your dream access? How has your dream, if that's even the appropriate word, how has your dream practice changed over these many years and decades? Your relationship to your own inner manifestation of the dream arena? Well,

there've been turning point dreams. There are dreams which literally changed my life and there are dreams which led me to make radical decisions in the external world. There are dreams that greatly expanded my understanding of what other worlds are like. My dreams continue to grow, my understanding of places of higher education, of learning, of rehabilitation, of reeducation, of choices about what life you inhabit after you've left this life. All of that understanding grows. But on a daily basis, I'm now extremely relaxed with myself. I mean, I'm teaching all the time. I'm teaching online courses all the time. So I'm interacting with people having most wonderful experiences. And it is just so joyful. Sometimes with absolute beginners to see that light that comes on in the eyes when somebody taps into a source of self understanding, a way of connecting with a witness self, with a greater self, a way of just having some fun of going to the movies, not missing the movies anymore, but having night entertainment. So that continues to be a source of constant delight. And it's the reason probably why I keep teaching to the extent that I do. In my end practice, well, I'm enjoying, as I said to you, starting my day with a sketch or painting or several. I'm not concerned about the artistic quality of these on the push to produce two books now of my dream drawings, one of my dream inspired drawings and one of my cat cat dreams, my dreams and waking life and in other ways of cats. So that is probably the thing that's recently emerged. I'm allowing more time for the boy artist in me who love to do this kind of stuff. And I'm doing these things for their own sake. And there's great pleasure, as you know, in doing something you love simply because you love doing it. Yeah.