Ep. 7 Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) and the Secret Power of Sleep Paralysis

There is so much more to sleep paralysis than fear-based experiences! In Episode 7 of The Dream Axis podcast, we dive deep into sleep paralysis, from encounters with our fears personified to exploring expanded consciousness. 

I have personally experienced over 20 years of recurring sleep paralysis episodes. Eventually, I learned the true purpose for my sleep paralysis experiences, dove into the work, and healed them, leading to my last episode of sleep paralysis in December 2021. 

Since then, I've been exploring and discovering the hidden potential of sleep paralysis as a vehicle for astral travel, deeper self-connection, and expansive spiritual experiences. Conquering fear is only the beginning, opening the door to a revolutionary discovery: the ability to consciously explore beyond the body and venture into the astral realm.

Join me in this episode as we unpack the true purpose of sleep paralysis from facing personal shadows to unlocking out-of-body experiences that can change your life. If you’ve been looking to understand your fears, explore the astral plane, or deepen your awareness, this episode is for you.

#SleepParalysis #TheDreamAxis #AstralProjection #Healing #Consciousness #astraltravel #outofbodyexperience #dream #obe

Transcript

Axis Mundi, the world tree, connects the many layers, worlds, and facets of our universe. The lower world of watery roots provides access points to deep self-knowledge and the realms of those who have come before us. The mid world of earthen form holds humanity and all physical things, a bridge where connections emerge.

And the upper world, billowing in its airy canopy, expands with spirit and the magic of source traveling these roads of the Axis Mundi is you a fiery spark of conscious life. Through this podcast, we meet beyond time and space to explore the information found along the vast arterial pathways of the universal Axis Mundi in each episode, follow your unique compass through this journey of self-knowledge, taking what resonates and leaving the rest.

My name is Meg Bartlett, and this is The Axis Channel.

Hello, and welcome to another episode here on The Axis Channel. My name is Meg Bartlett. And today we're going to be talking about the benefits of sleep paralysis after you conquer the demons. So I myself have experienced over 20 years of nightmares and 

sleep paralysis. I had my last sleep paralysis episode in December of 2021.

And since then, I've kind of been undergoing a weird sort of dream training. This is something that, uh, my team and I have been working on my spirit team. But mostly this is myself. It's guided by me and I've been learning so much about it, and there is so much to sleep paralysis outside of the fear based aspects where people talk about, you know, feeling like they're locked in their body or there's demons and creepy sh*t in the room with them.

There's so much more, and you can actually use this for a really interesting purpose. So we're going to dive into a new definition. For sleep paralysis today. But before we get into that, if you are listening on a podcasting platform to the audio only, I want you to know that I am now on YouTube talking to you with my face.

So if you would like to pause this and head over to YouTube, check out the channel, I'm going to start uploading a lot more content with my face. I'm trying to get out there. This is a very new experience for me. Please, if you're, if you've been following me for a while, you know me, but if you want to give me comments on how you think the lighting is, how you think this looks or feels, or even if you're just like, yeah, I dig this or no, it's not really my thing.

Please let me know. I would love to hear from you. You can respond to me in any of my weekly newsletters, or you can go ahead and just send me a note on my website, megbartlett.com. 

 okay, let's dive into sleep paralysis. I am going to start this episode by just kind of recapping the verbiage that I've used to describe it in the past. This comes from some of the episodes over on The Dream Axis, which was my podcast project for 2023. Thank you to everyone who participated in that.

It's a really great resource for just getting ideas on how to interpret your own dreams and what to do with that information. Uh, but we did talk a lot about sleep paralysis on that show, and I have talked a lot about it in my work before. So we're just going to kind of compile this into a brief excerpt. And then I'm going to tell you the training that I've been undergoing. And then I'm going to give you my new definition for sleep paralysis. And it's not necessarily like.

Sleep paralysis, the definition of it has changed. It's just expanded. There is more to sleep paralysis than just the fear based experience. So let's start at the beginning. When I was a kid, I experienced a lot of nightmares because I was experiencing a lot of nightmarish things in my waking life, lots of trauma, really awful things.

 And I think it's episode seven on The Dream Axis. I kind of talk about that. So with all of these nightmares, I started developing sleep paralysis. For those of you who have never had sleep paralysis, that's great. Keep it up. Try not to have it. It's a really.

Uh, difficult experience, uh, but it can also be a really healing one. So sleep paralysis is sort of where you wake up before your body comes back online. So you regain consciousness while your body is still asleep and it feels like you're literally being paralyzed. Sometimes people talk about, you know, there's a demon in the room with me, or this is just really scary.

Or, you know, there's a figure standing at the end of the bed, or they have like, you know, this really heavy weight or darkness on their chest. Um, it can appear for different people in many different ways, but it's usually always accompanied with the feeling of fear. 

In my experience, I had a demon that was kind of up in the corner of the ceiling and eventually it got closer and closer to me as the years passed on until it became a humanoid figure that was standing there trying to tell me what its purpose was.

 And for me, I never see sleep paralysis demons as like, Oh, that's an actual demon or a dark entity. I don't believe that. I see sleep paralysis demons as coming into contact with our fears personified.

It is literally the fear that you have built up within yourself, either because you're not looking at the things that you want to see in your waking life, or there's something that's just like been lurking in the background. And it's built up this amount of darkness, this amount of fear, this thing that you just really don't want to look at, and it's coming to you.

And it's catching you in this in between space before waking. And it's saying, Hey, you're not paying attention to me. I need you to look at the fear. I need you to do the work. I need you to step into this. And we really got to like, like it is go time. It is time to get going. That is what sleep paralysis nightmares are to me.

And I have used them for years in my, in my personal life. You know, I used them in conjunction with my psychological therapy journey. So I started looking into the childhood trauma that I experienced, the emotional trauma, the really awful things that happened to me. I also was in the military.

I'm a Marine Corps veteran. So there was a lot of diving into that PTSD as well. Um, and I had just been ignoring it for so long until the sleep paralysis nightmares, you know, at one point they were three to four nights a week for up to six months at a time. That is intense. That is insane for sleep paralysis.

And it got to the point where I just could not ignore it anymore. And I said, all right, fine. I threw my hands up. I said, I get it. I'm going to do the work. I'm going to dive in. We're going to see what's in there because I cannot keep living like this. I was barely sleeping at all. It was really, really difficult.

So our sleep paralysis nightmares can really show us, hey, this is the fear that we're coming into contact with. The key for me was I noticed the specific feeling of fear in those sleep paralysis episodes matched the feelings in my panic attacks. And when I was opening stuff up with my therapist, the emotions were the same.

And that's what tipped me off. I was like, Oh, this sleep paralysis demon, the way that I feel towards this thing, that's how I feel about the sh*t I don't want to look at it's literally just showing me. This is the thing that I need to see. This is the thing that I need to work at. Over time, it ended up being a really great thing for me.

I started gaining more confidence in my sleep paralysis nightmares. I started fighting back. There were times where I would, you know, like fight to scream or say something. Um, there were times where I would try to stand up, but I would just kind of roll off onto the floor. There were other times where I started being able to walk and I started getting up and I started fighting back.

And the last sleep paralysis nightmare that I had, I actually confronted my sleep paralysis demon and I poked it in the chest and this light erupted from my fingertips and it completely blew this thing into oblivion, but I gained control over my sleep paralysis nightmares by healing them.

 I healed my sleep paralysis nightmares by going through the work, by seeing the things that I didn't want to see. And it was not a fun process. I had to relive things that I had never really wanted to live through in the first place. I retrieved memories that I didn't really want to know or acknowledge.

I had to change the people that were, and were not in my life. You know, there were some people where I was like, Hey, this is not working out for me. And they were very close to me and I had to make those decisions. And I, I changed. I that's maybe that's the real lesson is I was afraid to change.

And then I ended up actually accepting the change and moving forward with my life in a way that is very supportive today, but it was very difficult to make some of those decisions. So all of that to say in the very psychological sense, sleep paralysis in the fear based instances is you coming into contact with your fears personified.

It is you trying to get your own attention saying, Hey, there's some stuff that we have not been acknowledging. We need to look at this and we need to deal with it so that we can move forward and live our life in the way that we know we can. 

 Now, there is some science that goes along with sleep paralysis, but I will give you a caveat before this. I am not a scientist.

This is my own research that I've conducted online. I have done my darndest to give you good, accurate resources. Um, but please go do your own research on top of this as well. And I will say that sleep and dream science is in its relative infancy when we compare it to physical sciences. So it's constantly in the works.

It's constantly in motion. Go ahead and look this up and, uh, keep me posted on if this changes in the future. What I've found in looking this up is that sleep paralysis is a combination of factors.

So first it's two chemicals that enter the nervous system as we're going into the sleep state. And those are gamma amino butyric acid. The acronym is GABA, G A B A and glycine. And they work together to turn your body into a limp noodle. And this is for an evolutionary purpose to keep you from acting out your dreams.

So if you're interested on more of that, go ahead and look it up, but there is an actual purpose to the sleep paralysis, right? It's, it's an evolutionary response to try and keep us safe.

 Okay. Now we're going to move on. We're going to talk about my training that I've been kind of undergoing since I conquered my sleep paralysis demons. So I no longer see demons and have like the super fear based experience in my sleep paralysis dream space.

But I do have elements of sleep paralysis that have persisted after this, but it's not fear based and it's not creepy demon sh*t, right? So, so, so let me try to explain this. Um, about two years ago in January, I think of 2023, I went to the Wisconsin Dells with my husband and a couple of friends and we were just on a vacation.

We just needed to get out because here in Minnesota, it gets really, winters are hard. Winters are dreary. They kind of suck and you just, you just need to go somewhere at some point in time. While I was there, I had my first out of body experience. You, some people might call it astral experience. Some people say there's a difference between them.

I don't really honestly care. I think it's just a really interesting experience. To me, it felt like an out of body experience. And so. In this experience, I pulled out of my body and I turned around and I felt almost like I was levitating at first, like levitating up to the ceiling.

It kind of freaked me out. I was really afraid. I was like, Oh, okay, what are we doing here? This is definitely different than what I'm used to. I turned around and I looked down at myself and I, I was like, Oh my God, that is my body and that is my husband and I need to get back in. Like I kind of really got afraid, but I wasn't afraid because of anything in the room with me.

I was afraid because I had never experienced that before and it was very, very new and it was very interesting and unexpected. Since then I've been having more of those experiences. And this kind of all leads up to October of last year, October of 2023, where there's an episode on my 2023 podcast, The Dream Axis, there's an episode on there with my friend, Amanda, where I talk about that, and then I talk about the training that I started.

So my training really kicked off about a year ago and it started with this dream that I needed to experience being in two bodies at once. So I'd had a couple of the out of body experiences, astral travel, whatever that was. And then I started getting into this. This is what it is to be in two bodies at once.

And for several months, I would find myself falling asleep. I was very conscious of my body moving into the sleep process. So I was feeling that, um, you know, the paralysis entering my limbs. I was feeling my body. Turning into the sleep state and starting to shut down some of the processes.

But I was consciously aware of the whole thing. I did not dream. I was not falling into the dream state. I had conscious awareness and my soul would pull itself out of my body and lay next to me in the bed. Now this was guided by my team of guides. I just call them my team, but you might call them spirit guides.

My team was helping me with this and they were just like, Nope, this is, this is your training. This is what it feels like to be in two bodies at once. This is what it feels like to be in two bodies at once. And I would sit there and I would feel this like light, airy, not really in a body sensation of my soul, um, really unbound.

It was very interesting. And then I would also feel my body at the same time. And the purpose of this has been to teach me that I can feel two different experiences at the same time, I, it, I don't have to have my soul in my body all the time. I don't have to only have one awareness, you know, um, when sometimes when I astral travel, when I actually am going out into, you know, the cosmos and experiencing other galaxies or what have you, um, I'm only, Aware of my soul.

I don't really feel the physical body. Now it's getting to the point where I'm starting to be aware of both at the same time, but most often I haven't really heard that before. So I had the out of body experience in the Dells. Then I'm experiencing being in two bodies at once.

Then I started having these levitation dreams. The levitation dreams were me working on the residual fear of sleep paralysis that I had.

Now, this was not the fear that I encountered in my sleep paralysis, you know, during my healing journey, I had healed that part and the healing process is always continuous, right? We're always working on it. Um, but I had pretty much packaged that up. This was fear of sleep paralysis itself because I had had over 20 years of nightmares and sleep paralysis episodes.

I had built up a fear just of the experience in general, not even the fear that I was trying to get myself to look at and come into contact with. So at this point I needed to heal that innate fear of the sleep paralysis itself. And the levitation dreams were an exploration of this. I would feel like I would be levitating towards the ceiling.

Um, when you were a kid, did you ever do this thing at sleepovers or like with Girl Scouts or whatever, where you're like light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board. And all of your friends are like putting their hands under you. If you're like Meg, this is bonkers. There are people that do that.

I did that as a kid. It was a whole thing. If you understand, you understand. So I hope that makes sense to somebody out there. Um, but we used to do this thing and, and the goal was you wanted to levitate. And Ooh, wouldn't that be cool? Well, I was actually doing this in my dreams and it was terrifying at the time.

So, so we're in this process of training. I start to feel my body sometimes levitating up towards the ceiling and I get really scared. And I'm like, you know what? I am terrified. I feel like I am not in control of my body. I feel like I am being pulled by something. And in some of these dreams, I talked about having a ghost with me in the experience.

Now, what was really happening that I know now is my soul was trying to out of body experience or astral travel. I was trying to pull out, but I was getting caught up in my brain. There was a part of that fear based narrative that was lingering. That was saying, wait a minute, sleep paralysis. We don't like this historically.

This is a learned thing that I have come across over time and I'm going to throw a wrench in things. I want to not do this. And so it was almost like I was battling myself. The ghost in the room in these experiences, I now see that as an echo of my own fear. So I conquered the fear. 

I am so much happier today, so much lighter. I rarely have nightmares. I really am doing well, but there's still this residual fear that exists there. And this ghost was a representation of that. And so it's nice to know though, that like it had moved from demon of the fear, right, like my fear personified to ghost, which really is an echo of something.

And I thought that was so fascinating. The imagery that I was using for myself in the dream space. Um, so there was this ghost of me and it got to the point where I was becoming more conscious and lucid in the levitation experiences, I was experiencing them over and over and over again, but it got to the point where I would be able to speak to myself.

And I was like, wait a minute, this is a levitation dream. I don't have to fear. I surrender. I trust. I trust that this experience is okay. I know that I have looked at my fear. I trust myself, right? That at the end of the day is the big thing. I trust myself. I have done so much work at this point that I trust myself to not show myself any more fear, because I know that I now look at my fears in my waking life.

I don't need to wait for them to build up. I handle them, right? I have learned how to do that. So we're going through this experience and the levitation dreams start lessening. I start being able to move from, you know, in the same experience. Let's say. My soul is pulling out, starts as a levitation dream.

Ooh, there's the fear. Ooh, there's the ghost. Then I would acknowledge to myself in the same experience. I recognize that this is an echo of my own fear. Okay. What am I going to do about it? I'm going to walk myself into that safe space. It is safe. I surrender. Sometimes I'd be like, Hey, I have a team of beings here with me.

I would remember that. And then I'd be like, can you come in and help me? And I would feel lighter and then I would be able to actually walk myself into an out of body experience. And then I would be able to take off, but I had to get through that fear in the first place. 

So over this whole last year, I have been conquering the residual fear that has lingered as a result of my 20 years of sleep paralysis in general. And this all kind of has been bringing me to, okay, now I've started recognizing that when I enter sleep paralysis, I then usually go somewhere. When I consciously experience that tingling or that feeling of being locked inside my body.

It usually means that my soul is about to exit because my bodily processes are on autopilot and it doesn't take as much effort for me to, you know, sit in this body and, and really concentrate on it. I can take my concentration. I can take my thoughts and my awareness and I can move it somewhere else. So this is where the purpose is all kind of coming to where sleep paralysis, when you become fully conscious and aware of being that, that locked in feeling, it can actually be incredibly expansive.

This is what can allow you to start to consciously and with awareness, step outside of yourself and experience the full process of out of body experiences or astral travel. It's not just having a dream that seems like it was astral travel anymore. It's not just waking up and being like, Ooh, I feel like I had an out of body experience.

This is being consciously aware of the full process of leaving your body. Going off into an experience and coming back into your body. It is phenomenally intense. I, I, but, but like in a really great way, I don't know how quite to, to, I don't know, convey that. It's just, it's been absolutely fascinating. I absolutely love doing this.

It feels so expansive. It is just so exciting. It it's a whole lot of things. It's a whole lot of things. So recently I got to the point where I have a pretty good idea of where this is taking me. And then I had The Experience, but there's two dreams that led up to The Experience, the culmination of my training, what has been the purpose of actually. You know, training me for this.

It's not just to go astral travel and see other spaces. There was something that I was working up towards. Now, the two experiences that led up to this, the first was on September 25th. So this was just a couple of weeks ago. I had a nap dream. So I went and laid down in the middle of the day, just felt called to do it.

And as I'm entering the sleep paralysis space, right, I can feel my body. I can, you know, just feel my limbs getting heavy. I can feel the tingling start and I just sit there and it's very meditative. You know, sometimes I'll be in this, you know, two bodies at once experience for hours and, and it's, it's really asking me to just be okay being in my own mind.

Overtime, you know, it's really just getting comfortable with myself, but I felt a being enter the room and this felt like almost like I know it's a member of my team. I would not say it's a spirit guide. It feels very E. T. alien kind of energy, extraterrestrial, whatever you want to think about that. Um, I know, and I didn't see her, but I know that she had a heart shaped face and she just had this beautiful pink energy with like, she was wearing green, maybe, I don't know.

She was very, very beautiful and she felt so supportive. That's the biggest thing. She felt so supportive, but I'm in the sleep paralysis and now I feel supportive beings in the room with me. So this is a great difference. So she enters the room with me and she instructs me and she says, we're going to give you a test today. This is not a pass or fail test. This is just a test to see where you are at. What does your capacity look like? What are your capabilities look like? We just want to see where you are.

And I said, okay, I'm prepared. I know that my soul wants this. It's interesting because I don't know the purpose yet. Although I have a pretty good idea of that now. But my soul has a particular purpose and I'm getting ready to step into that. And so I just, and I could feel the purpose without knowing what it is.

It's okay for me to feel the purpose without knowing exactly what it is. So I said, okay, I'm ready. And I sit within my body and I'm just sitting there, you know, getting comfortable, and then I feel my body really shutting down and I get really aware of it. And this is no longer, this is what it feels like to be in two bodies at once.

I'm not meant to pull out of my body today. I'm meant to see how small my soul can become within my human vessel and how long I can maintain that. And it's just hyper awareness of my body, like on a whole other level than I, than I had been experiencing. And so it got to the point where my breathing went on autopilot and I consciously allowed it to go on autopilot and it got to the point where I was no longer able to breathe in through my chest.

So like, you know, like breathing expansively in the upper part of your body, I was no longer able to do that at all. It was as if my chest was incapable of moving period. But what I could do is I could extend my stomach outwards. I could just relax my stomach and, you know, like almost push it out and then my lungs would fill the space.

My lungs would expand into the space that my stomach had created and that was what, how I would pull air into my body instead of consciously breathing. Let me know if that even makes sense. I don't know, but it was fascinating. And I just stayed like that for a very long time. I just stayed like that. And we just kept, and she was there with me the whole time.

And it was almost like a, you know, just meditative experience again, I'm just sitting within myself and I can think about things or I can just be present in the moment, mindfulness, whatever you want to call it. I was just there. And I did this for about an hour and a half. And finally she was like, wow, you did that much longer than we thought you could.

And I was like, me too. Like, this is great. Like, wow, I didn't even know I was capable of this. Like, I'm really proud of myself. And she was like, we're so proud of you, you know, just like so much love. And she was like, okay, we'll be back soon. And she left and I woke up and that was it. I just sat within myself in the sleep state, but consciously.

For like an hour and a half. It was really interesting. So that happened on September 25th. And then on October 1st, I had this really crazy dream. I was all over the place in parallel lifetimes, you know, exploring other existences. And yeah, I was in the military in this one and I was doing this with this one.

And Ooh, this person from my past, actually, I'm married to them in this one. You know, just like. Crazy things like that until I found myself in Nona's house. And that was just a sense of knowing whose house it was. I do not have a Nona. Um, I have a, a grandma and I have an Oma. Uh, both of them have since passed though, but I was in Nona's house in this dream.

And, uh, this might get weird for a second. Uh, to you, it's not weird to me, but, you know, um, sometimes our dreams try to catch us off guard on purpose. And so they'll show us a lot of really intense, um, very, very, very much topics that we would not bring up with people in waking life. So. In this dream, I was trying to masturbate and I was completely naked.

And this is a facet of life, right? So this is just, you're dreaming about your life and hey, this is part of my life I was trying to get my attention with and all of the windows were open. And I was really embarrassed in the dream and it was very convoluted. And, you know, the, the window, you know, there were cars outside and people looking in.

And I was like, Oh my God, like I'm so embarrassed, but you know, I was in my grandma's house, super uncomfortable. I am on purpose making myself uncomfortable with this dream imagery. And then I got to the point where I looked in a mirror in the dream and I saw that I had this lower back tattoo. I'm naked, by the way.

So, so I see this lower back tattoo. And it is, so being a Marine Corps veteran, right, there are people who get tattoos that are what we would call moto as f*&$. And, and those are just like your moto tattoos. I don't have one, but in this dream I did. And it was the most ridiculous tattoo I could ever have come up with in, in my life.

It was absolutely obscene. It was on my lower back and it was huge. It was like halfway up my back. And then it extended onto my butt cheeks. And it was like a tank with an Eagle on top. And it was, I don't know, just like, it was like 'Murica, right? And it was like the most moto lower back tattoo. It was so ridiculous.

I remember looking in the mirror in the dream and being like, Oh my God, what is that? Like, this is absolutely ridiculous. And I was like, why hasn't Brandon, my husband, why hasn't he ever told me this before? Like I must've gotten this when I was drunk. I would never actually get this. And then it clicked.

And I became lucid and I understood that all of that ridiculousness had been trying to get me to become lucid. I had been trying to get myself lucid because I was being called up. I was being called up on duty. And it was one of those things where, you know, the masturbation, the windows, the people, the being in your grandma's house, all of this was asking me to wake up.

Of course, this would not happen in waking life. We're trying to get your attention. We're trying to get you to snap out of this dream and into a lucid experience so that you can become aware so that you can enter that space of out of body paralysis, you know, training experience. So finally I'm like, Oh, of course I would never get this tattoo.

All of this is just me trying to wake myself up. So I wake up in the dream and you know, now I'm fully lucid and I stand up in the middle of the room and I take off and I shoot out of my body and my soul is just up, up, up, up, up. I'm just going up and up. And I get to the space where I actually open one of my eyes, which it's, it's my interpretation.

Cause I'm still getting used to, I don't have a body. What, what does the soul feel like when you don't have a body? Right. It's a very interesting feeling. And I just, you know, I, I ask pretty much to become visually aware of the house that I'm leaving. And I look down and I see it, but I'm like two miles up and I get, I panic a little bit and I'm like, Nope, that's too much.

And so I like, I shut off the vision and I'm just like, I can't, I can't see anything. And I just closed my eyes and I feel myself ascending and I'm going very, very fast and I get to a starship. And there's a starship above me. And I just briefly touch on it and it's like, check in the box, check. She did it.

She made it up here. Boom. I start going down and I, I plummet towards the earth incredibly fast. I can't even verbally give you words for how fast I was moving. And then I plunge Into the earth. And I start moving into what I now know as the Earth Tube System. Now I've talked about the Light Tube System in a previous episode.

Go back and listen to that one. Cause there's a lot in there. That one's more for expanding and exploring, you know, other galaxies, places outside of earth, we'll just say places and dimensions outside of earth. The Earth Tube System is for exploring dimensions within the earth. So this I would see as my parallel lifetimes, um, you know, alternative timelines that I might have for my person.

I can access those through the Earth Tube System because they're specific to this planet. So I plunged into the earth and I'm in those tube systems. They're like, she did it. And it's almost like I've done it. I feel this cheering, you know, like I have this knowing of like, I did it. And then I panic because I'm like, Oh wait, I feel like I need to breathe.

And then I snap out of the experience, but I did it. So, so all of this to say the training is progressing to the point where I have awareness of the whole process. I can even. Become lucid and wake myself up from a dream to step into the sleep paralysis space to then step into the out of body experience.

 Um, anybody can get started with doing this.

Anybody can learn how to do this. And I mean, this, this is a tool for you. I am sharing this because it is something that you are capable of. Even if you are one of those people out there who says, Meg, I never remember my dreams, you can get started with this. First of all. To get started recalling your dreams, go listen to The Dream Axis or read a blog post on my website, or just start writing down your dreams every day.

Literally, it is just the habit building process that you need to get started. So when you start writing down something every day, even if you don't remember a dream, just write down how you feel when you wake up in the morning. I feel like I slept well. I feel like I was tossing and turning all night.

Just doing that simple action of writing something down says to your brain, Hey, we're trying to do something here. What are we trying to do? Oh, we're trying to record our dreams. If you do that every single day for weeks on end, eventually your brain is going to try and actually give you the content that you are putting your effort and intention into.

It's just, you know, this is habit building at its, at its core, uh, your brain wants to perform the actions that you want to put emphasis on, so it will put more effort over time into bringing back that recall from your dreams and you will start to get more content. So if you're not having dreams at all.

Just start writing something down, even if it's just how you feel every morning, when you wake up, eventually you will start to get bits and pieces of dreams and just keep working at it. This is something that can take a long time. I mean, my whole dream and nightmare journey has been pretty much my whole life.

I have been learning how to listen to my dreams, how to work with my dreams, how to understand nightmares and sleep paralysis. I mean, I've been spending over 20 years doing this, you know, since I was a little kid, I've been working on this. So it can take time, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth it.

So first of all, get your dreams, start having some recall, right, start having those experiences. Then with the sleep paralysis, we just want to be aware if you have had fear based sleep paralysis in the past, you need to work on the things that you have the fear around conquer that first, before you start trying this, I don't know if you'd even be able to do this if you haven't quite, um, you know, closed the loop on that fear that it is that you need to look at. So dive into that fear, dive into working with a psychological therapist, or, you know, working with an emotional coach or whatever your avenue is meditation. You know, there's tons of different tools available to you out there to start your own work, but do your own work, conquer that fear.

Get into a good space in your life and then maybe start to see, okay, how can I walk myself into sleep? How can I try and maintain awareness? And it really is just kind of your own willpower that goes into this. It's just, you know, there's lucid dreaming techniques out there. Just do a quick Google search, try them out, see what fits.

I have tried almost every technique in the book. There are too many to talk about in this episode. So what works for me, um, I'll just share. Yeah. I'll just share briefly what worked for me. The biggest thing was I would set a time on my alarm, um, to wake me up after, you know, let's say two or three sleep cycles.

I would just measure out, you know, Oh, I think this is how long each of my sleep cycles is, I'll just wake myself up at the end of one of those. I would get up, turn on the light and I would actually read something or engage my brain. And I would do that for about 20 minutes. Uh, and then I would fall back asleep.

And because I had brought a little bit more awareness into the middle of the evening, sometimes I would carry that awareness into my dream space and I would become lucid. Walking yourself consciously and with awareness and just sitting through the process.

When you feel the tingles start in your arms, just let yourself feel the tingles. It might be uncomfortable. That's okay. Just let yourself feel it. If you're on your side or in a really, you know, pretzel kind of sleep position, then you should probably move. Cause you probably shouldn't be falling asleep like that anyways.

But, you know, if you're just like laying flat on your back, that's how I sleep. I know that that's not a common one, but I do kind of do the mummy pose. So, so I sleep flat on my back. Um, but if you're in that position, you're probably going to be okay. Just sit with the tingles and feel into it. Listen to your body, but see how far you can go, you know, um, and just see how you can carry that awareness, give more attention to your dreams, make this an intention before you fall asleep.

You can call on your team and say, Hey, I want to try this out. If you don't get it the first night, cause you might not, that's okay. Keep going with it. Sometimes it can take weeks or months until you start to see progress in this area. I've been spending the whole last year, 365 days plus learning how to do this.

So it can take time, but the time is worth it to me. Always remember if you find yourself in a levitation dream, if you find yourself feeling fear, remind yourself, I AM SAFE. You are the only fear that you will ever encounter in the dream space. You are the only fear you will ever encounter in the dream space.

If there is anything else, you have the power to banish it. If there's anything else that you do not feel comfortable with, you can talk yourself into a space of not experiencing that. Um, the nightmares. I mean, I had nightmares for 20 years and I have eventually walked myself out of that. It took me 20 years to do it, but I no longer have nightmares.

I have talked to myself. I have done the work and you can do it too. Thank you so much for listening. Hit subscribe, follow me for more content, uh, subscribe to my weekly newsletter. That's like the big, consistent thing that I have going on right now. I would love if you reviewed this podcast. Um, if you're on YouTube or, you know, Spotify, Apple, wherever it is, if you can give me a review, that would be awesome. Thank you so much. I hope you have a good one.

Goodbye.