As a teenager, HBM host Jeff Emtman fell asleep most nights listening to Coast To Coast AM, a long running talk show about the world’s weirdnesses. One of the guests stuck out though; one who spoke on his experiences with lucid dreaming. He’d learned how to conjure supernatural entities and converse with his subconscious.

Lucid dreams are dreams where the dreamer knows they’re asleep. Some sleepers become lucid completely at random, but lucid dream training can drastically increase the frequency of their occurrence.

Months ago, Jeff put out a call for dream prompts on social media. He asked if anyone had questions for an all-knowing being to be conjured in a forthcoming lucid dream. Some of the questions are heard in this episode.

While training for this episode, Jeff used two approaches to trigger lucid dreams. The first was an audio recorder by the bedside. Each morning, Jeff recorded his dreams (lucid or not). The second method was a series of “wakefulness checks” throughout each day, stopping at random times to test reality, and to make a determination on whether he’s currently awake or asleep. This tactic is useful as it may eventually trigger the same behaviour in a dream.

In this episode, Jeff attempts to lucid dream to answer listener questions, but finds the progress slower than he hoped.

Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast that is funded entirely by individual sponsors and donors. You can become a donor at patreon.com/HBMpodcast

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna, and Serocell.

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Jeff wearing his favorite Sleep With Me shirt. This shirt elicits compliments whenever its worn 🐏💖

The wake up stick. Photo by Lisa Cantrell. — *The* wake up stick. Photo by Lisa Cantrell.

When Dylan Wright placed his first Craigslist ad back in 2006, he called himself a “nice and genuine person with waking up problems.” He was looking for someone to help him in the mornings. First it was phone calls, but those didn’t work, so he moved on to something more personal.

Content Note: Language

Dylan’s problem is that, left to his own devices, he sleeps and doesn’t stop sleeping: “Seventeen hours was the longest I ever slept...that’s like four times as much as some people get daily.” And he’s tried to fix it in a lot of ways—bright lights suspended over his bed hooked to a timer, multiple alarms—nothing worked. He lost jobs, missed flights, messed up personal relationships, all because he couldn’t wake up.

So for most of the last decade, Dylan’s hired someone to come to his house, and physically wake him up. “Nothing weird or inappropriate about this, it’s just a job.” he says. Dylan estimates he’s had ten people fill this job. Most of them quit abruptly, or just stopped showing up. But he likes his current guy, who doesn’t even come into the house. Instead, he’s taken to knocking on Dylan’s bedroom window with a long stick (that way he doesn’t have to stand in the flowerbeds). He knocks until Dylan gets out of bed puts on clothes and makes himself some coffee.

It’s $10 per day, five days per week, sometimes six.

Lisa Cantrell produced this piece. She’s the host of An Inexact Science, which is a podcast about human psychology.

Music: The Black Spot

Here Be Monsters

HBM148: Early Attempts at Summoning Dream Beings

HBM068: The Wake Up Stick

Content Note: Language