Mike and Wendy venture back into the land of lucid dreams on this #ParanormalTuesday, this time asking a deeper question: can our nighttime adventures actually help us heal?
After a quick check-in on the mysterious monoliths popping up around the world (Mike suspects a marketing stunt, and admits he's a touch disappointed it wasn't aliens), the hosts compare notes on their own dream journaling experiments. Remembering dreams gets easier with practice, and one viewer shared that after two months of keeping a dream diary she was having lucid dreams fairly consistently.
They talk through reality checks, like checking money in a dream to see if it changes, and the strange sensation of drifting between waking and sleeping. Then they turn to the research. A 2011 study from the University of California, Berkeley suggested that REM sleep is when the brain processes emotional experiences, taking the painful edge off difficult memories.
The conversation travels across cultures too: the Aboriginal Dreamtime, where time in the dream world is considered just as real as waking life; Freud and Jung; and Buddhist dream yoga, which teaches that dream life and waking life share the same constant state of change. As the hosts put it, you have to realize the dream can't hurt you before you can put out the fire.
Grab your dream journal and keep it by the bed. You never know where tonight's journey will take you.