The Unexpected Place Your Soul Goes While You Sleep

Tonight when you close your eyes, you'll travel somewhere. And by morning, you won't remember a thing. But what if I told you that this place isn't random?

That every human who has ever lived goes there. And most spiritual traditions throughout history have tried to tell us what's really happening. You're about to discover where your consciousness actually goes when your body shuts down.

And once you see it, sleep will never feel the same again. Right now, in a few hours, when you drift off, your body will enter a state of complete paralysis. Your eyes will move rapidly beneath closed lids.

Your brain will light up with electrical storms of activity. But here's what nobody tells you. While all of that is happening in the physical, something else is taking place on a level science can barely touch.

You're crossing a threshold into another realm entirely. Let me show you exactly what happens. Before we talk about where you go, you need to understand the journey that gets you there.

When you first lay down, muscles releasing, breathing slowing, you enter what sleep researchers call the first stage of enrem. This is the borderland, the threshold between waking and sleeping. You felt this countless times, that sensation of drifting off on the couch, then suddenly jerking back awake.

Your body is still responsive here. A sound brings you back easily. This stage lasts only minutes, but it's the doorway opening.

About 15 minutes in, you descend deeper into stage two. Now, your body knows this isn't just rest. It's a journey.

Your temperature drops. Your heartbeat steadies. And if scientists were measuring your brain activity right now, they'd see something curious.

Your brain waves slow into these rhythmic patterns, but then suddenly there are these sharp bursts, sleep spindles, they call them, K complexes. Strange names for something your brain does naturally every single night. And here's what most people don't realize.

You'll spend roughly half your entire night in this stage. Not deep sleep, not dream sleep, but this in between state as if you're acclimating to something. Then comes stage three, deep, restorative, healing sleep.

Your brain waves stretch out into these long, slow delta rhythms. If someone tried to wake you now, it would take serious effort. Shaking you, yelling your name, turning on lights.

You're far away because your body has essentially closed the door to the outside world so it can do internal work. Growth hormones flood your system. Damaged tissue repairs itself.

Your immune system strengthens. And something else happens that neuroscientists have only recently discovered. Your brain literally flushes out toxins accumulated during the day through something called the glimpmphatic system.

It's like street cleaning that only happens when the roads are empty. But here's the thing. Millions of people never actually reach this stage anymore.

Poor sleep hygiene, screens before bed, stress, anxiety. They're missing the preparation their consciousness needs for the deeper journey ahead. Then approximately 90 minutes after you first closed your eyes, you arrive.

REM sleep. Rapid eye movement. This is the moment I described at the beginning.

Your brain becomes almost as active as it is when you're fully awake. Multiple regions lighting up simultaneously. Your heart rate increases.

Your breathing becomes irregular. But your muscles, your muscles are completely locked. You cannot move.

This isn't a malfunction. This is protection. Because in this state, you're experiencing something so vivid, so real that if your body could move, you'd be acting it all out physically.

Running, fighting, flying. The brain paralyzes you on purpose. This first REM cycle lasts only about 10 minutes.

Barely enough time to touch the surface of where you're going. But the night is far from over. You'll cycle back through stage two, drop into stage three again, then return to REM.

Each complete cycle takes about 90 minutes. And here's what changes as the night progresses. That deep sleep stage three, it decreases with each cycle.

But REM, REM gets longer and longer. Second cycle 20 minutes. Third cycle 30 minutes.

Fourth cycle 40 minutes. And by your fifth cycle around dawn, you might spend an entire hour in REM sleep. That's why weekend mornings when you sleep in, you wake up remembering these incredibly vivid, bizarre, emotionally intense dreams.

You spent more time there in that other place. Your body knows these stages aren't optional. If you miss a night of sleep, your body will make you pay it back, but it won't recover everything equally.

It prioritizes deep sleep and REM as if these are debts that must be settled first because they're not luxuries. They're as essential to survival as water or food. Now that you understand the journey, let's talk about what's actually happening in your brain while you're in that paralyzed REM state.

Because knowing you enter REM sleep is one thing. Understanding what your consciousness is doing there is something else entirely. If you could observe your brain through an MRI during REM, you'd see something that looks almost impossible.

The cerebral cortex, the part of you that thinks and reasons, is firing with intense activity. The hippocampus, where memories are stored, is working overtime, processing everything you experienced while awake. The amygdala, that ancient structure that handles emotions and fear, is completely lit up.

But here's what's strange. The preffrontal cortex, your logic center, the part that normally says, "This doesn't make sense," goes quiet. Its activity drops dramatically.

And that's why in dreams you can fly, talk to people who are dead, be in three places at once, and you don't question any of it. Your rational mind has stepped aside. The paralysis we mentioned that's controlled by a specific mechanism in your brain stem.

For most people, it works perfectly every night. But there are some who have a condition called REM behavior disorder. The paralysis doesn't engage properly, so they physically act out their dreams.

Punching walls, kicking, shouting. It's dangerous for them and anyone sleeping nearby. This tells us something crucial.

The dreams aren't just happening in your head. Your body believes they're real. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who transformed psychology, looked at REM sleep and saw something deeper than just brain chemistry.

He believed that when your logical mind shuts down, you access what he called the collective unconscious, not just your personal memories or experiences, but archetypal patterns and symbols that all of humanity shares across cultures and time. That's why people who've never met, who live on opposite sides of the world, dream about the same things. Water symbolizing emotion.

Flying representing freedom. Being chased meaning fear or avoidance. These aren't learned.

They're built into the human psyche itself. Robert Moss, a scholar who studied both modern sleep science and ancient shamanic traditions, goes even further. He suggests that REM sleep isn't just symbolic or psychological.

It's an actual doorway, a state where your consciousness can move beyond the physical body. Moss spent years researching indigenous cultures from around the world, and he found something remarkable. Shamans from tribes who never had any contact with each other describe sleep the exact same way as a journey as leaving the body as traveling to other realms where you meet entities receive wisdom communicate with ancestors.

Is that coincidence or is it that when the rational brain quiets down something real opens up? If this is resonating with you, go ahead and hit that like button and subscribe to stay connected to this frequency of consciousness exploration. Here's an experience almost everyone has had at some point.

You dream about someone you haven't thought about in years. Maybe a childhood friend, a former colleague, someone completely out of your conscious awareness. Then the very next day that person calls you or you run into them unexpectedly and you wonder was that just coincidence?

Or during those hours in REM sleep, did your consciousness somehow access information your waking mind couldn't? Neuroscience explains one layer of this. how the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, reorganizes neural pathways, but mystical traditions explain the experience, the subjective reality of what you're actually going through.

And here's what I'm suggesting. Maybe both are true at the same time. Maybe the brain is the hardware, the physical mechanism, and consciousness is the software, the experience itself.

Scientists can measure the hardware with their instruments, but the software, what you're actually experiencing, that's different territory entirely. Rudolfph Steiner, the Austrian philosopher who founded anthroposophy in the early 1900s, had a very specific understanding of sleep. He said that humans have multiple bodies.

The physical body, yes, but also the atheric body, a field of vital energy, the astral body, a vehicle of consciousness, and the higher self, your deepest spiritual essence. During waking hours, all these bodies function together as one integrated unit. But when you fall asleep, a separation occurs.

The physical body remains in bed. Obviously, the atheric body stays as well, maintaining basic life functions like breathing and circulation. But the astral body, that's what detaches.

Not completely, because if it did, you would die. But it gains mobility. And according to Steiner, it's in this astral body that you actually travel during dreams.

Now, before you dismiss this as mysticism with no foundation, understand that Steiner wasn't some fringe spiritualist. He had deep training in science and philosophy. He founded schools that still operate successfully today.

the Waldorf education system. And he was very clear, sleep is when the soul journeys. Modern neuroscience looks at all this and says it's neural activity, chemical processes, electrical impulses, and they're right.

That is what shows up on the scans. But does that explanation cancel out the other? Because here's the thing.

Your brain can be generating electrical activity and you can simultaneously be having a real experience on another plane of existence. Both can be true. In fact, scientists have discovered something remarkable.

During REM sleep, especially in those long cycles near morning, the visual cortex in your brain, the part that processes what you see is just as active or more active than when you're awake looking at the physical world. Neurologically, you're seeing with the same intensity. Your brain doesn't distinguish between dream vision and waking vision.

It's processing both as equally real. So when you dream you're flying over mountains or meeting a being of light or standing in a place you've never been. Your brain is having that experience as if it's actually happening.

The realness isn't diminished just because your physical body is asleep. Now here's where it gets uncomfortable for strict materialists and exciting for spiritual seekers. Neuroscience says dreams are essentially your brain doing maintenance.

filing memories, processing unresolved emotions, reorganizing information, and research supports this. If you learn something new during the day and then get quality REM sleep, you retain that information far better. Your brain is literally transferring data from short-term to long-term storage while you sleep.

People who experience trauma and then sleep poorly are significantly more likely to develop PTSD. Why? Because REM sleep never had the chance to properly process and integrate that intense emotional experience.

It stays stuck, raw, unresolved. Rudolfph Steiner saw the same process but described it in layers. He said during sleep the physical body rests in bed.

The aetheric body maintains life, but the astral body separates, staying connected by what many traditions call the silver cord. This isn't metaphor to Steiner. He described it as an actual energetic connection that keeps you tethered to your physical form.

When you die, that cord severs completely. But during sleep it stretches allowing your astral body to move while ensuring you can return. Tibetan Buddhism has an entire practice dedicated to this called milm or dream yoga.

The teaching is that during sleep you pass through different bardos. Bardos are intermediate states of consciousness, transitional realms. And the Tibetan masters teach that what you experience in these bardos is just as real and meaningful as anything you experience while awake.

That's why advanced practitioners train themselves to maintain full awareness during sleep. Not for entertainment, but because they believe the dream state is fundamentally similar to the death state. If you can remain conscious while dreaming, you can remain conscious when you die.

The training is the same. Recognizing signs that you're in an altered state, setting clear intentions before crossing the threshold. Maintaining awareness as you transition between worlds.

Then there's Robert Monroe, an American businessman in the 1970s who wasn't interested in spirituality at all until he started spontaneously leaving his body during sleep. The experiences terrified him at first. He thought he was losing his mind.

So he went to scientists, underwent testing trying to understand if he was experiencing some kind of mental breakdown. Instead of finding pathology, he ended up dedicating the rest of his life to researching altered states of consciousness. He founded the Monroe Institute, which still exists today.

Monroe described the astral plane in very specific terms. He called different regions focus 10, focus 12, focus 15, each with distinct characteristics. And here's what's striking.

Other people who practiced out-of- body experiences described the same locations using the same terminology without ever having read Monroe's work or attended his programs. If this was all just imagination, how do multiple people independently map the same territory? Or look at Edgar Casey, known as the sleeping prophet.

He would put himself into a trance state, similar to deep sleep, but self-induced and controlled. And while in that state, he could access information he had absolutely no way of knowing consciously. He gave detailed medical diagnosis for people he'd never met living in cities he'd never visited.

Over 14,000 documented readings spanning 40 years and many were later verified by doctors and confirmed as accurate. Where was he getting this information? Casey said he was accessing what he called the Akashic records, a kind of cosmic library where everything that has ever happened, is happening, or will happen is recorded.

He wasn't talking about regular REM sleep. He was describing a specific altered state he learned to enter intentionally. But the principle is the same.

Consciousness can access knowledge the physical brain doesn't possess. Now before you think this is all just mysticism without evidence, consider the research on precognitive dreams. Dean Ren, a scientist who's worked at Stanford and Princeton, has compiled decades of data on PSI phenomena.

And one of the most well doumented occurrences is people dreaming of future events that later come true with striking accuracy. The most famous case before September 11th, several research laboratories monitoring collective consciousness registered significant anomalies and dozens of people reported dreaming of planes crashing into buildings in the nights leading up to the attacks. You could argue coincidence, confirmation bias, pattern recognition after the fact, fair criticisms.

But when hundreds of reports converge on a specific event that no one consciously expected, dismissal becomes harder to justify. Neuroscience has no framework for this. How could random electrical firing in your brain show you something that hasn't happened yet?

Unless the dream isn't just electrical activity. Unless during those 90minute cycles of REM, you're actually going somewhere else. A place where time functions differently.

Where past, present, and future aren't as separate and linear as they appear in waking consciousness. Ancient Egyptians understood this intuitively. They had temples specifically designed for dream incubation.

People would travel to these sacred sites to sleep, to receive prophetic dreams or healing. They had trained priests whose entire role was interpreting dreams. They wrote entire papyrie on the subject.

To them, dreaming was direct communication with the divine. Jung discovered this same pattern when working with his patients. One woman who had no background in mythology or alchemy dreamed of a serpent eating its own tail.

The Uraboros, a symbol that appears independently in dozens of ancient cultures across continents and centuries. How did she access that if she'd never studied it? Yung's answer was the collective unconscious, a shared layer of human psyche deeper than personal memory.

I'm curious. Have you ever had a dream that later came true or showed you something you had no way of knowing? Drp your experience in the comments below.

Helena Blavatski, the Russian mystic who founded the Theosophical Society, spent decades studying Eastern sacred texts, European esoteric traditions, and ancient philosophy. She synthesized all of it into a complex map of reality. According to Blavadski and her successor Ani Basant, existence consists of seven primary planes.

The physical plane is just the densest, the slowest vibrational frequency. Above it, the atheric plane, then the astral, then the mental, and so on. The astral plane is where human consciousness goes during sleep.

And they didn't describe it as some vague mystical concept. They mapped it out in extraordinary detail. Structure, inhabitants, regions, laws.

The lower astral, they said, is dense, close to the physical. This is where chaotic, confusing dreams occur. Drams heavily influenced by personal desires, fears, unconscious material.

But as you rise through the layers of the astral, things change. The experience becomes clearer, more lucid, less dominated by ego, more connected to universal truth. Bessant wrote entire books explaining this.

She taught that most people during sleep remain in the lower astral regions, dazed and unaware. That's why so many dreams feel disjointed and meaningless. But people who train through meditation, conscious intention, spiritual practice, they can navigate to the higher regions and there the experiences are completely different, vivid, coherent, profoundly meaningful.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, one of Buddhism's most sacred texts, teaches that death and sleep are parallel processes. In both consciousness separates from the physical body and moves through other realms. The only difference is in death the cord is cut permanently.

In sleep it remains pulling you back each morning. But while you're there you're genuinely in another dimension. You can encounter other beings.

Some are the consciousness of other sleeping humans. Others are entities who exist permanently in those plains. And some are enlightened teachers who can transmit wisdom directly to you.

Advanced dream yoga practitioners have very specific techniques they use before sleeping. Visualizations, mantras, clear intentions about where they want to go and what they want to learn. And they report strikingly consistent experiences, meeting the same masters repeatedly, visiting the same locations, receiving teachings that they later find word for word in ancient texts they'd never read before.

How is that possible if each person's dreams are just random neural noise? Now, what we're exploring here today barely scratches the surface of what's possible when you understand consciousness as frequency transmission. The astral journey during sleep is just one of nine master frequencies you can learn to consciously navigate and embody.

If you're feeling called to go deeper into the complete system, into understanding how to move from unconscious transmission to becoming the conscious broadcast itself, I've written a comprehensive guide called Beyond the Frequencies, a quantum guide to consciousness mastery. It maps out the entire journey from seeking to being with step-by-step practices for each frequency layer. It's linked in the pinned comment below.

Alan Card, a French educator in the 1800s, interviewed hundreds of mediums and compiled their testimonies about the spiritual world. And across all of them, he found the same descriptions, different dimensions of existence, spiritual communities, cities in the astral plane where souls who've passed on reside. And here's what's relevant to sleep.

The mediums consistently said that living humans visit these places every night while asleep. There are documented cases of people dreaming of deceased relatives who showed them where they were now living. And when the dreamer woke up and described the place to a medium who'd never met them, the medium said, "Yes, I know that location.

I've been there, too. How does that work if each brain is supposedly generating its own private hallucination with no connection to anyone else's? Look at the pattern here.

Theosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, shamanic traditions, ancient Egyptian religion, spiritism, five completely different systems separated by geography, culture, and centuries. And they all say essentially the same thing. There is a non-physical plane of existence that you visit during sleep.

This plane has structure. It has inhabitants. It has its own natural laws.

And you can learn to navigate it consciously if you develop the skill. Science can't prove this. But science also can't disprove it.

And there are phenomena that make strict materialists very uncomfortable. cases of people in deep comas who later wake up and accurately describe conversations that happened in the room while they were unconscious. Conversations they should have had no way of knowing about because their brain activity was minimal or flatlined.

But they say, "I left my body. I floated near the ceiling. I saw and heard everything.

" If consciousness is purely a product of brain activity, then when the brain shuts down, there should be no experience at all. But there is. Steiner taught that you don't just visit the astral plane passively.

You work there. During sleep, your higher self, the most evolved aspect of your being, meets with spiritual guides and beings to plan your soul's evolution. The choices you make while awake, the lessons you're learning, the karma you're working through.

All of this is reviewed and guided from the astral plane while your physical body sleeps. The hermetic tradition, which traces back to ancient Egypt and influenced western mysticism for centuries, speaks of a fundamental principle. As above, so below.

As below, so above. The plains of existence mirror each other. What happens on the physical plane reflects in the astral and vice versa.

And during sleep, you're literally crossing between these mirrors, stepping out of the physical reflection and into the astral one. Hermetic practitioners developed very specific techniques for conscious astral projection. Medieval grimoirs contain detailed instructions, visualizations, body postures, sounds to vocalize, all designed to help separate the astral body from the physical intentionally.

And they kept journals of their journeys, written records describing what they found, the beings they met, the knowledge they received. There's even a quantum physics interpretation that could bridge the gap between science and spirituality here. The many worlds theory suggests that infinite parallel realities exist simultaneously.

Every possibility generates a different universe. What if the astral plane is like an intermediate dimension where all those possibilities exist at once and during sleep your consciousness can perceive beyond the single timeline you experience while awake? It's not supernatural.

It's just different frequencies of the same multi-dimensional reality. During sleep, you tune your awareness to a different frequency. That's it.

Now, you might not believe any of this. That's completely fine. You might think it's all just neurons firing randomly in patterns that create the illusion of meaning.

But you can't deny that billions of people throughout human history across every continent and culture, describe nearly identical experiences, and many of those experiences have tangible consequences, healings that can't be explained. Insights that prove accurate, predictions that come true, encounters that change lives permanently. So now that you know this place exists, whether you call it the astral plane, the uh dream realm, the Bardos, the spiritual world, the quantum field or something else entirely, the question becomes, can you control it?

Can you go there consciously knowing you're there and remember afterward? Steven Leurge, a neuroscientist at Stanford, spent decades proving scientifically that lucid dreaming is real and measurable. He trained people to become aware during REM sleep and set up signals with them beforehand.

When you realize you're dreaming, move your eyes left to right three times in sequence. And it worked. The person asleep in deep REM with their body completely paralyzed moved their eyes in the exact agreed pattern.

It showed up clearly on the polyomnograph recording. The first solid scientific proof that you can be fully conscious and fully asleep at the same time. Leurge called this phenomenon lucid dreaming.

and he proved anyone can learn to do it. It's not a rare gift. It's a trainable skill.

He developed specific methods. Reality testing during waking hours, dream journaling, intention setting before sleep, and people began having transformative experiences. Leurge published his findings in the early 1980s, gave lectures, revolutionized sleep science.

But Tibetan Buddhists have been teaching this for over a thousand years. Dram yoga milumm in Tibetan is an advanced spiritual practice with exactly the same goal. Staying conscious during dreams.

But for Tibetan practitioners, the purpose isn't entertainment or exploration. It's training for death. They believe the dream state and the death state are fundamentally similar.

If you can maintain awareness while dreaming, you can maintain awareness when you die. And the techniques are remarkably similar to what Leurge developed independently through scientific research. Recognizing dream signs, setting intentions, maintaining awareness during the transition from waking to sleeping.

The Tibetans have just been doing it for centuries. There's an old Tibetan text that lays out the path clearly. Recognize that you are dreaming.

Transform the dream. Practice in the dream. Understand the illusory nature of all phenomena.

Now, let me show you how to actually do this. The practical steps from beginner to advanced. The foundation of everything is the dream journal.

It sounds simple, almost too simple. But before you can become conscious in dreams, you need to remember them. And most people don't.

You dream every single night. You spend hours in dreams, but within 5 minutes of waking, it's gone. Why?

Because your brain doesn't consider dreams important enough to encode into long-term memory. But when you start writing them down every day, you're sending a signal. This matters.

I want to remember. And your brain responds. After one to two weeks of consistent journaling, you start remembering more dreams with greater detail and clarity.

Here's how. Keep a physical notebook and pen next to your bed, not your phone. The screen light disrupts sleep patterns and makes recall harder.

The moment you wake up, before you move, before you check anything, before you go to the bathroom, right? Even if it's just fragments. I was in a house I didn't recognize.

There was a dog that looked wrong. I felt anxious. Anything.

Some mornings you'll wake with no memory at all. Write that, too. No dream recall today because the act of recording is what builds the habit, not the content.

After a week or two, you'll notice patterns emerging, certain locations recurring, specific people showing up, situations that repeat with variations. The second practice is reality testing. This is where most people feel silly, but it works incredibly well.

The technique is building a habit of questioning whether you're awake or dreaming multiple times throughout the day. Because if you do this consistently while awake, you'll eventually do it in the dream, too. And that's when recognition happens.

Choose specific triggers. Every time you walk through a doorway, pause and ask, "Am I dreaming right now? " Every time you look at your phone, ask the question.

Every time you see your hands, question your state. And don't just ask on autopilot. Really investigate.

Look around for anything unusual. Try to remember how you arrived where you are. Do a physical test.

Try pushing the index finger of one hand through the palm of the other. While awake, obviously, it won't go through. But in a dream it will.

You're training your awareness to have this reflex. So when you're in a dream and perform the reality check and your finger passes through your hand like water, you'll realize instantly that you're dreaming. The third practice is setting intention before sleep.

This comes from both Tibetan yoga and Leia's research. Before you turn off the light, make a clear statement. Tonight, I will recognize that I'm dreaming.

Repeat this phrase mentally as you're falling asleep. I will recognize that I'm dreaming. I will recognize that I'm dreaming.

Your programming, your subconscious, and your subconscious listens. Some people use variations. I will see my hands in my dream.

I will fly in my dream. Whatever works as a recognition trigger. The key is to set the intention without grasping at results.

Don't force it. State it clearly, then let it go. The fourth technique is wake back to bed.

This is more advanced, but dramatically increases your chances. Here's the method. Set an alarm for 5 hours after you fall asleep.

When it goes off, get up and stay awake for 20 to 30 minutes. Read about lucid dreaming. Write in your journal anything that activates your mind gently.

Then return to bed with strong intention. Now I will become conscious in my next dream. Why does this work?

Because after 5 hours, you've completed most of your deep sleep cycles. The remaining cycles will be REMheavy. And since you just woke your mind up, your awareness is more active.

It's easier to carry that awareness across the threshold into the dream state. Is it disruptive to wake up in the middle of the night? Yes, but the effectiveness is remarkable.

The fifth technique is called pneummonic induction of lucid dreams. This was Leurgge's personal favorite, the one he researched most extensively. You combine multiple elements.

Wake naturally from a dream or use the wake back to bed method. Recall as much of the dream as possible and identify a moment where something strange happened. Something that could have been a sign you were dreaming.

Then mentally replay that dream, but this time you recognize the sign. You become lucid. Tell yourself clearly, "Next time I'm dreaming, I will recognize I'm dreaming.

" Repeat this visualization until you fall back asleep. You're training pattern recognition, teaching your brain to spot the signs. Leurge reported a success rate above 50% with this technique.

Half the time he used it, he achieved lucidity. The sixth practice comes from Carlos Castanada. The hand gazing technique.

During the day, look at your hands multiple times. Really observe them. Count your fingers.

Notice the lines and creases. Pay close attention to details. And while you do this, affirm internally, "I will see my hands in my dream.

" Why hands specifically? because they're a body part you can easily observe in a dream and when you manage to focus on them your attention anchors lucidity stabilizes. The key is that in dreams when you look at your hands they appear distorted extra fingers missing fingers.

Fingers that move independently hands that shift and morph. The moment you notice this strangeness, you know you're dreaming. Castana taught that the first milestone in the art of dreaming is successfully viewing your hands while asleep.

The seventh method is pre-sleep meditation. Eastern traditions emphasize this strongly. Meditate for 15 to 20 minutes before bed.

Nothing elaborate required. Just sit, breathe, observe your mind without attachment. What does this accomplish?

It increases mental clarity. It quiets the constant internal dialogue. And when you enter sleep from a state of calm awareness, carrying that awareness into the dream becomes easier.

There's a specific Tibetan variation where you visualize a glowing lotus at your throat chakra and hold that image as you fall asleep. The idea is that maintaining conscious visualization helps you cross from waking to sleeping without losing awareness. It's advanced.

Most people lose the image and drift off, but it's worth practicing. The eighth consideration is natural supplements. I'm not a medical professional, so I won't prescribe anything.

But it's worth knowing that certain substances enhance dream vividness and recall. Vitamin B6, for example. Research shows it improves dream memory significantly.

Galantamine, a supplement used for cognitive enhancement, increases the likelihood of lucid dreams when combined with wake back to bed. But approach this carefully. Research thoroughly.

Make sure anything you take is safe for you. Don't exceed recommended doses. And understand that supplements are facilitators, not substitutes for the mental training itself.

After learning all these techniques, people always ask, "How long until it works? " The answer varies. Some people achieve their first lucid dream within days.

Others take months. It depends on your consistency, your natural dream recall ability, and how much you practice. But what helps tremendously is maintaining positive expectation without attachment to results.

If you go to sleep thinking, "This will work. I trust the process. But without desperately needing it to happen tonight, your chances increase significantly.

Because anxiety blocks the process, it creates tension that prevents the gentle awareness lucidity requires. Cultivate calm curiosity instead. I'll practice.

If it happens, wonderful. If not, that's fine, too. I'll try again tomorrow.

And when it finally does happen, and it will if you persist, you'll understand why spiritual traditions across millennia have considered this important. Once you achieve lucidity, the possibilities expand dramatically. You might explore accessing memories from past lives if that's part of your belief system.

You might ask to meet spiritual guides. You might consciously navigate the astral plane instead of wandering through it in a daysaze like most people do. But there's something the traditions warn about that I need to mention.

Don't try to dominate the experience. There's a crucial difference between receptive lucidity and egoic lucidity. Egoic lucidity is when you become conscious and immediately try to control everything.

I want this. do that. Obey my will.

You treat the dream like a video game where you're God. There's nothing inherently wrong with that at first. It's fun.

It's liberating. Flying, manifesting objects, changing the environment at will, but if you get stuck in that mode, you miss the deeper purpose. Receptive lucidity is different.

You're conscious. Yes. But you're also open.

You ask questions more than you issue commands. You explore more than you manipulate. And when you approach it this way, surprising things happen.

Dram characters you assumed were just projections start acting autonomously. They tell you things you didn't consciously know. They show you places you never imagined.

And you start wondering, are these just aspects of my subconscious or are they something more? Because if the astral plane is real, then you're not alone there. There are other consciousnesses, other souls traveling while their bodies sleep, entities who live permanently in those realms.

And in advanced lucid dreams, you can encounter them. Robert Moss writes about dream companions. beings you meet repeatedly in lucid dreams who have continuity, personality, knowledge, who teach you things.

Are they guides, aspects of your higher self, souls you've known in other lifetimes? The interpretation depends on your framework, but the experience is consistent among practitioners and sometimes the encounters are more intense because not everything in the astral plane is benevolent. There are shadow aspects, entities that feed on fear energy, gatekeepers in certain regions who challenge you.

That's when a lucid dream can become frightening. But here's the critical point. If you're conscious, you have power.

Fear only dominates when you're unaware. When you're lucid and you encounter something terrifying, you have two options. You can choose to wake up.

Simply decide to return to your body, and you will. Or you can face it consciously, and when you do, it usually transforms. The monster reveals its true nature.

Almost always, it's a personified fear from within yourself. And when you embrace it in a lucid dream, when you integrate what scares you, something in you changes permanently. You wake up more integrated, more whole.

I can guarantee you this. The day you succeed for the first time, the moment you have that sudden recognition, I'm dreaming and I know I'm dreaming, you'll understand why this matters. Because you won't have just learned a technique.

You'll have discovered that consciousness is vastly more than you thought. That you can exist without a physical body and still be you. still be aware, still be alive in a very real sense.

Now, let's talk about what happens when you can't sleep at all, working too late, screens glowing in your face before bed, anxiety coursing through your system, too much caffeine, noise from the city. Most people aren't getting the 7 to 8 hours their body requires, and the body always collects what's owed. One night of poor sleep, you're irritable, distracted, reflexes slowed.

It seems minor, but it's already your brain sending distress signals. Two, three nights in a row, memory starts failing. You forget conversations, lose track of things, can't focus.

Why? Because without sufficient REM sleep, the hippocampus can't transfer information from short-term to long-term storage. You're trying to save files when the hard drive is full.

A week of inadequate sleep. Your immune system begins collapsing. You get sick more easily.

Inflammation rises throughout your body. risk factors for diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, all increase significantly because deep sleep, stage three, is when your body performs cellular maintenance. Without it, metabolic waste accumulates.

Recent research has shown that the brain's glimpmphatic system, which flushes out toxins, only functions properly during deep sleep. When you don't sleep well, those toxins build up. But the worst damage isn't even physical.

It's mental. Chronic sleep deprivation doesn't just make you tired. It causes depression, anxiety.

In severe cases, even psychotic symptoms. There's a birectional relationship at work here. Depression disrupts sleep and disrupted sleep worsens depression.

It becomes a vicious cycle that's incredibly difficult to break. People with anxiety disorders almost universally sleep poorly. And when sleep quality deteriorates, the amygdala, your brain's fear processing center, becomes hyperactive.

You start reacting to minor stressors as if they're life-threatening situations. Post-traumatic stress disorder makes this even worse. The person reles traumatic experiences in nightmares, wakes in terror, begins avoiding sleep entirely, and without adequate REM sleep, the brain never gets the chance to process and integrate the traumatic memory properly.

It remains stuck in an active loop. Veterans who struggle with sleep have dramatically higher rates of persistent PTSD symptoms. This isn't coincidental.

That's why every legitimate mental health treatment protocol includes sleep hygiene as a foundational element. Therapy and medication alone won't create healing if the person isn't sleeping. Because without those hours in darkness and silence, without the journey through the baros, without time to process emotional wounds, true healing cannot occur.

Maybe that's why every spiritual tradition throughout history has respected sleep so deeply. Your body can go days without food, but without sleep, within a week, you're experiencing hallucinations. Within 2 weeks, you could die.

That place your soul visits each night isn't optional. It's not a luxury. It's necessary.

You have to go there. Do what needs to be done, receive what needs to be received, and return renewed each morning. So now you know where you go every night.

Five 90inut cycles, body paralyzed, brain illuminated with electrical activity, soul traveling somewhere beyond. Science explains the mechanism, the physical how. Spiritual traditions explain the experience, the subjective what.

And maybe both are describing the same reality from different angles. But here's what actually matters. You.

You who will lie down in a few hours. You who will close your eyes and begin this journey again as you've done every night since birth. So the question I want to leave you with is this.

Will you keep doing it unconsciously, remembering nothing, learning nothing, or will you bring awareness to it? Will you try something different? And there's something else I haven't told you yet.

Something you'll notice once you start consciously exploring the dream realm. Not everyone has the same experience there. Some people encounter beautiful landscapes every night, helpful guides appearing consistently.

Everything flows with ease and grace. But others, they meet resistance, shadow figures, heavy challenges, tests that feel almost impossibly difficult. And doesn't that mirror something about waking life, too?

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have easier lives than others? Why certain souls carry heavier burdens? Why you specifically face the challenges you face?

Is it random, bad luck, cosmic injustice? Or is there a reason? A reason your soul understands, but you forgot the moment you were born.

Agreements made before you descended into physical form. Karmic debts from previous lifetimes. choices you made in the space between lives.

What if nothing about your life's difficulty is actually random? What if it's all part of a design you helped create? But that's a conversation for another time.

For now, before you close this and go about your day, I want to ask you something. Take a moment right now and comment below with this exact phrase. I choose to remember not as a casual interaction, but as a declaration, as a signal to the field of consciousness itself that you're no longer willing to sleep, walk through life, or through your dreams, that you're choosing awareness.

Go ahead and do that now. And if what you've heard here today is resonating with something deep inside you, if it's touching a part of you that's been waiting for this information, then I invite you to subscribe, not just to this channel, but to this frequency, to this movement of people who are waking up, not just from sleep, but from the trance of unconscious existence. Subscribe to stay connected to this community of seekers, of explorers, of souls who are learning to navigate both the waking world and the dreaming world with conscious intent.

Because here's what's true. The more of us who learn to navigate these realms consciously, the more humanity as a whole begins to shift. Every person who wakes up in their dreams is a person who's practicing waking up in life.

Every person who learns to recognize illusion in sleep is a person who's learning to see through illusion while awake. This isn't just about having interesting nighttime experiences. This is about fundamental transformation of consciousness.

And the more of us engaged in this work, the more the collective field shifts to reflect that elevated awareness. So as you prepare to sleep tonight, I want you to set an intention. Not desperate, not grasping, just clear.

Tonight I travel consciously. Tonight I remember and then let it go. Trust the process.

Trust your own consciousness. Trust that the place you go each night is exactly where you need to be and that you're learning to navigate it with greater and greater skill. And here's something worth considering.

You might want to come back to this video tomorrow morning before you start your day. Let these concepts settle deeper into your awareness or share it with someone who's been searching for answers about consciousness and dreams. When you share this understanding with others, you're not just passing along information.

You're creating an energetic ripple that expands collective awareness. And in doing so, you reinforce your own understanding of these principles. That act of sharing becomes part of your own awakening.

Before you go, drop one word in the comments. one word that captures the energy or intention you're choosing to bring to your sleep practice from this moment forward. It could be awareness, lucidity, courage, openness, remembering.

Whatever word resonates with you, drop it as your energetic signature, your declaration to the quantum field that you're ready for this shift. And if you haven't already, subscribe. Not just to stay connected, but to stay coherent, to stay aligned with this frequency of awakening consciousness.

Because the more of us who embody this understanding, the more the world around us begins to reflect that truth back to us. Tonight, when you close your eyes, you're not just going to sleep. You're embarking on a journey.

And now you know where that journey leads. Sleep well. Pay close attention to what you find there.

And remember, always remember. Now, if you're starting to understand that consciousness extends beyond the physical and that you're navigating multiple dimensions, even while you sleep, then you need to understand something else. There are specific frequencies that ancient wisdom keepers tried to hide from humanity.

frequencies that unlock even deeper levels of awareness. The th frequency is one of them. And what it reveals about your multi-dimensional nature will fundamentally change how you perceive reality itself.

That's exactly what we explore in the next video.