 You create the world of the dream. How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it's reality? Well dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? Let me ask you a question. You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on. I guess, yeah. So how did we end up here? Well, we just came from the... Think about it, Ariadne. How did you get here? Where are you right now? That's from Inception, a movie that explores a lot of the topics we're going to be talking about today in terms of dreaming, lucid dreaming, the extended consciousness realms of dreaming and what those might mean for how we could engineer or explore those with various kinds of technology. Our guest today is lucid dream expert Charlie Morley and I'm also joined by Richard Cox from Deep State Consciousness Podcast. Here's a clip. When he was watching one of these people in the lucid dream trying to prove lucid dreaming, at one point he saw their eyes flicking left, right, left, right, really kind of synchronous and he woke them up and said, what were you dreaming about? He said, oh, oh, I was dreaming about a tennis match and he was like, oh, that's cool. So he made the first discovery, the eyes physically correspond to what you're dreaming about. But then he thought, okay, right, so maybe I can send a signal, a kind of a Morse code signal from the lucid dream state to the waking state saying, hey guys, I'm in here, I'm doing the test, I'm doing the experiment. And he managed to do that. And I said, so how did it work? And he said, oh, I spent eight hours looking at this. He said suddenly on the, on the paper, it went dum-dum, dum-dum. And I said to him like, how did it feel when you saw those eye movements come through? He went, Charlie, one of those movies when they're in the NASA control room and they finally get the thing from Mars and they all give each other high fives. I said, yeah, and he went, it was like that, but I had no one to high five. And I kind of lent over and gave him that we like, actually missed, we had this like awkward missed high five. And he went, oh well, 40 years too late, but thank you. I wanted to say about entities because I realized I gave you the Jungian view on entities. I gave you the Buddhist view on entities. I didn't actually give you my personal view on entities, which is like, yeah, man. Anyone who's had like a DMT experience or like moving into kind of psilocybin therapy or ayahuasca or something. These are, these are not internally generated experiences. Like when people are all having the same experience of mother ayahuasca coming over them and she appears in the same way and often is offering the same guidance. You're thinking, this is existing, dude. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I'm your host Alex Cares. And today we welcome Charlie Morley to Skeptico. Charlie is a lucid dreaming expert, having authored several bestselling books on the topic and conducted, I don't know at this point, probably I'm sure Charlie, hundreds of workshops around the world in which he helps people develop this skill and then apply it to their life. And Charlie, as we're going to find out, is also one of those really interesting guys who has integrated kind of the best of Western understandings of not just spirituality but maybe this science we could say. He has the bona fides in terms of studying Tibetan Buddhism and really immersing himself in it. He's a terrific public speaker. He has a great Ted talk out there, which we'll also kind of want to talk about. So it's great to have him here on Skeptico. I think he's going to be really good. And we also have riding shotgun, but we'll probably drag him into this conversation as well. Richard Cox from the Deep State Consciousness podcast. I was just explaining to Charlie that that's how I ran across Charlie's work, which is really terrific on lucid dreaming. And then Richard's been helping me with this new book, Why Evil Matters. And I said, hey, man, all this stuff is Charlie is talking about is directly syncing up with all these things I'm hearing from people of these other traditions. Of course, that's the way it's supposed to work. So I wanted to talk with Charlie and I just invited Richard along because I'm sure he'll have some interesting insights as well. Charlie and Richard, welcome. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. So I gave people kind of a thumbnail sketch of the background Charlie, please tell us more about who you are and how you came to this work. Yeah, so I started teaching lucid dreaming about 11 years ago. I'd been into it for a lot longer. I started lucid dreaming in my teens. So like when I was 16, 17, so about 20 years ago. And yeah, which is something I got into. I read some books, geeked out about it was into my teen because it seemed like a really cool way to like get access to this virtual reality simulation of your own psychology where you could do whatever you wanted. So at 1617, all I want to do is have loads of sex. So the first like two years of my lucid dream experience, a lucid dream for those who were wondering is the dream way that you're dreaming as you're dreaming. You can direct the dream at will. So at 16, I knew what I wanted to direct it to do, right? I was like, hot girls come to me and then all these hot girls would appear. I'd have all this great sex that I wasn't having in real life because I was like 16, right? And skateboarding. I did a lot of skateboarding. And weirdly, since then in the last 10 years, there's been a whole wealth of studies showing that you can get better at sports by practicing lucid dreaming. And I got really good at skateboarding. I was down to those neural pathways, firing off the other thing. Not so I didn't get very good at that, but still had lots of fun. So I was kind of messing about with lucid dreaming for those first couple of years. And then I get into Buddhism. When I'm about 18, 19, read a couple of books by the Dalai Lama, had a big kind of near death experience. I got into like drugs and psychedelics and had a near death experience from that. That then made me look not just at Buddhism, specifically, Tibetan Buddhism. And then I found out that not only are they into death, but they're into dreams. And they have this thing called dream yoga, which is like this whole collection of practices which have lucid dream training at their base, which use the lucid dream state to explore the nature of reality to prepare for death and dying and to do your spiritual practice in your sleep. So I was like, wow, okay, these dudes sound cool. I started hanging out with these, well, hanging out, taking teachings from these Lamas and teachers. And then I ended up living in a Buddhist center for like eight years, which was kind of quite a massive experience. And then, yeah, got asked by my Buddhist teacher when I was 25 to start giving workshops and stuff. And yeah, then wrote some books about it and been running workshops and retreats ever since. So you have some terrific books out there. And I want to let people know these books are from a major publisher Hay House and you have some recordings out there as well. They're really super accessible. Like price wise, they're accessible. You can get some of these books for nothing or Kindle unlimited. Yeah, at the moment they're on some crazy lockdown sale. They're like 99 cents or something on Kindle. Yeah. I'm telling you folks, go and grab this stuff, scoop it up. And then also check out Charlie's TED Talk recorded here in my hometown of San Diego a few years ago. But just great stuff. What I'm hoping we can do is direct folks to go do that and then find out about this guy. If you have any interest at all in developing this skill, he offers workshops and now with the social distancing thing, a lot of online, one on one coaching, all that is available. So with that, I guess I'm asking for permission to kind of jump past maybe some of that and get into some of the deeper philosophical stuff that you guys talked about, that you and Richard talked about. And in particular, some of these parallels in terms of what this stuff really means. I love the way you start off and talk about the realness of, hey, if you can lose a dream, why can't I do that? Why can't I go have sex? The other thing, why can't I go around and do things or spy on people, all these things that people do or flying and all that stuff. And I think that immediately, once you get passed out, just like you said, it launches us into a bunch of deeper questions about the nature of reality, about the nature of evil, which is something you explore in your book. One of the books I had up there on the website is dreaming through darkness, which is something I guess we could talk about. So with your permission, let's kind of jump into the deep waters of what this stuff really is telling us about the larger nature of reality. And in particular, what it's telling us about darkness, evil shadow, I guess we have to start by defining what those mean to you. Yeah, so okay, well, let's look at that term, the shadow, which is what my latest book, Dreaming Through Darkness, is about. So Carl Jung popularized the term shadow, of course he didn't invent the concept, the concept of a shadow side to the psyche, to the soul, to the mind has been around since humans started talking about this stuff or writing about this stuff at least. But Carl Jung defined the shadow as the parts of the unconscious mind that we have rejected, denied or disowned. He described it as the dark side of the human psyche, and this is the crucial bit, the dark side of the human psyche, coma, but not dark meaning bad, evil or malign, dark meaning yet to be illuminated. And that's crucial to understand here, the shadow is not bad, it's not some sort of untapped source of evil or harm, it's simply that which we hide from ourselves and others. So if we think what do we hide from ourselves and others, okay, that may well contain aspects which are harmful for ourselves. We might hide our greed, our hatred, our prejudice, our racism, our internet search history, whatever, we hide this stuff from others, our shame, our fear. But there's also an aspect called the golden shadow. I mean Jung never referred to this concept, the golden shadow, but there's a famous quote from his teachings where he says, the shadow is 90% pure gold, and from that the post-Jungians took this idea of the golden shadow. And the golden shadow is actually exactly the same definition, that which we repressed, denied or disowned, but it's the parts we repressed, denied and disowned, which are more overtly beneficial. For example, our hidden talents, our sexuality, our spiritual side. I mean, there may well be your listeners listening now, I would ask them this question. Do you ever hide your esoteric side from your friends or family for fear of being labeled too woo-woo? If the answer is yes, that's golden shadow. Your spiritual side is something that couldn't be more healthy if you tried. The aspect of yourself that wants to grow, that wants to explore your psychospiritual growth, and yet we hide it from others, why? Exactly the same reason we hide the dark shadow, fear of rejection from the tribe, which back in the day was tantamount to death, this kind of rejection trauma that we have. This transhumanistic rejection trauma that permeates all of our minds plays out when we hide our shadow, our golden shadow from others. And even the dark shadow isn't necessarily bad, it's just parts of us which are repressed. But if we can be aware of the shadow, what we don't know about controls us. So by being aware of the shadow, simply by knowing that it exists, by learning about our personal shadow, we remove a lot of the control that unconscious shadow material has over us. So shadow work is inherently healthy, it's a good thing to do. And another kind of famous thing you said was those who claim to have no shadow are the most dangerous people on earth. Because they're the people without this awareness, right? Well, you know, that creeps into some different territory though, doesn't it? Which in kind of classic Jungian fashion where you're kind of marching along with him and then he says something like that and we go, well, what the hell would that mean? What would we have to fear and would be dangerous unless there's something external beyond the shadow? And I think that plays into something that I did want to get into and it comes up in your TED Talk and it invariably comes up whenever we talk about these topics. And that is the integration between the Western understanding of consciousness and the obviously limited understanding, which we have to dance around. So I get it, you're up there doing a TED Talk and I've talked to a bunch of people, Caltech physicist who says, yeah, I got up there to do the TED Talk and they coached me beforehand, kind of don't go into this, we don't like this. We love everything you say, just can you kind of say it kind of like this? Yeah. And at one point in your TED Talk you go, and up here as if this stuff is in our brain physically, I know you probably don't think that's true, scientifically it isn't true. Buddhist wise we know it's, we're past that. But we have to kind of play that, play that game and in the same way Young is kind of playing that game and it's all our shadow, it's our internal work, but there's some dangerous shit out there if you go outside of it as well. So do you want to speak to that at all in terms of how we navigate that in the scientific community and then how we navigate this evil as it maybe is existing in an external form? Yes, I mean straight off the bat, I don't believe in any objectively existing external evil. I don't even believe in evil as a concept. I believe in traumatized people acting out unintegrated trauma, which manifests as seeming human evil. But as far as like an objectively existing evil or kind of satanic archetype. Yeah, I don't really believe in that. I believe that there is probably in the collective unconscious an archetypal energy of Satan because so many people have believed and projected this belief out of the collective that this thing exists, that it probably does just as so many as enough people have believed that there's a God concept that that probably exists too. But because something seems to exist doesn't mean that it's real. But then what is real here? It's something can be real and not true. It's like the Buddhist ideas of these like six realms of existence. But I talked to Richard about these hell realms and they have all the descriptions of these like hell like a 16 hell realms. But actually if you and they've each got descriptions of how they feel and stuff. But if you look at them, they're all psychological corollates. They're descriptions of depression. I mean one of the brilliant discreet, the hell realm says you have molten lead poured through your mouth till your limbs are too heavy to move. Now anyone who's been in that deep depression of grief when you've lost someone you love and you're in bed and you literally your arms are so heavy with the pressure and you can't even move them, that's the hell realm. You're in that hell realm or the hell realm of trauma or the hell realm of anger. These aren't kind of places objectively existing. They're shades of suffering, which we can experience in the mind. But then as a caveat to that, they also say the hell realms don't exist out there. But then neither does this, this waking life. So from a Buddhist point of view, the hell realms are as real as this waking life, but it also as unreal as this waking life. And then I get way out of my depth now. Then you need to speak to some Buddhist Lama or something. I don't think, I know, I can understand what they're getting out there. But I don't fucking know. I'm trying. Right. To a certain extent that's the dilemma because this is where we all live. We all live in this reality and whether it's a constructed reality or not, this is where we reside. And this is where we have to kind of try and navigate, whether it's taking lucid dreaming classes to further our spiritual development, whatever the hell that would mean, or whether it means saying the making the sign of a cross over your chest or burning sage in your room to clear out spirits. All these things are part of our reality that I guess I'm trying to, if not kind of wrestle to the ground to at least draw attention to the fact that there are enough people from different traditions talking about these that we maybe ought to at least look at the extent to which science has completely abdicated its responsibility for exploring this. So we do not have a scientific understanding of where we would even begin to talk about what evil is because science can't even talk about extended consciousness. So I'm always keen to finding people who are talking about the way that you're talking about it is great. So let me do this. Let me juxtapose what you're saying with a guest that I just had on the show who I think is really a pretty interesting guy. And I think they'll offer a springboard into talking about a lot of this stuff. This guy's name is Tom Zinser. And Tom is a clinical psychologist. He's been a clinical psychologist for like 30 years, thousands of patients. And he got into doing some of this spirit work, some of this darkness work with his clients in the form of ego separation. I think it has direct parallels to what you're talking about. Let's listen to what he has to say. Distinction that you make between darkness and evil. Well, I have to go back again and emphasize the clinical nature because all of these start with the client's own story. My work is basically identifying those things within a person that blocks the light. So the protocol developed for the ego states this, make the contact, communicate with them, make it safe for them to receive this light, love, energy. Once they receive it, as I said, 99% say whippy, I love this, I don't want to be without it. And then they will move through the sharing and release of what happened to them. For spirit attachment outside entities, it's a different protocol. They don't belong with the person. They need to leave. And in the worst cases, protocols designed to get to a point where they could be removed. Okay, so here's the point. And so young is also a clinician, right? It's interesting to look at that history. He's meeting with people. And at one point, I think young says, whether these spirit entities are real or not, I've found it most effective to assume and act as if they are. And now I think what Tom is saying from as a clinician, here's a guy who reached a point in his practice where he was ready to give up his hypnotherapy work because people weren't getting better. But when he connected with the spirit guide who said, here's how you have to work with these people. And they really do, so in some cases have spirit possession or spirit interference. And that that's really what's going on, that these people started getting better in a lot more ways. So again, I'd kind of throw it out there, Charlie. Where do we kind of get into that blurry zone of what is real, real, and what is real in terms of this creation that we have in this plane of existence? Yeah, great question. I mean, if you look at some of the research on exorcisms, they work really well. If the client believes that they have a spirit within them, and if you do like an exorcism and you really go for it and you enter into that, what I would say entering into the psychosis of the client, then the exorcism could work, right? It doesn't necessarily mean, though, that there was an externally existing objective entity there in the first place, though. Does it mean there wasn't an external spirit? Yeah, I don't think it matters if there was. I think if it is like an internal psychosis that's manifesting as some, I mean, if an element of the shadow becomes so split off, it will kind of take on its own consciousness. I mean, Jung was saying this, right? And that will seem like an external entity. Just like in your lucid dream, you can meet the shadow, and it will, people say, no, no, that wasn't my shadow. That was an external demon that entered him. I say, that's the calling card of the shadow. It won't seem like it's part of you. That's the point, because it has been split off. So again, you kind of loop around here and well, where do we go here? I mean, the Buddhist point of view is, if you look at the Buddhist view on demons, right, I love this stuff. Machig Labdran, who's a famous female practitioner of the 10th century, she was called the mistress of demons. And she's asked by her son, mother, what is this demon you talk of? He says, oh, my son, when I talk of demons, I do not mean some small black creature who terrifies all who look upon it. When I talk of demons, I talk of anything that prevents your experience of freedom. I think, wow, so when we use the term like the demon of my addiction, the demon of my grief, the demon of my hatred, we're kind of using Buddhist terminology there very correctly. It's not that it's an external entity. It's anything within us that prevents our experience of freedom. And yet, if you look at the practice for exercising those demons within us in Buddhism, it is a very dualistic practice where you allow that demon of an addiction, perhaps, to be personified. And you imagine offering yourself to that demon. Actually, it's very kind of esoteric. Then you offer parts of your body and so you kind of dine with demons. You break bread with the enemy as it were. So there is this external personification of the demon, but simply as a way for you to interact with it in dialogue. At no point is it ever said we should believe those demons actually exist. And again, you look at like Milarepa, one of the most famous saints. Again, he says, there are no demons. There is only the demon that prevents freedom existing in one's mind. So the Buddhist view, this kind of non-dualistic view is there is no, that there are no external demons, but it can be a very good idea sometimes to externalize or personify an element of our own trauma so that we can dialogue with it. And that's why chair therapy works so well. That's why the feeding your demons practice of sultra maleoni works so well. That's why this chup practice within Tibetan Buddhism seems to work so well. But the view is there isn't any external entity there. Oh, but one more thing that that guy said that was really cool where he talked about what was blocking the light. And I love this idea with shadow work, both in the Buddhist view of shadow work, although you can't really say that because there isn't a concept of the shadow and Buddhism, but the Buddhist view of working with harmful, possibly harmful energies within us. A shadow is an epiphenomena caused by an object blocking the light. So we've got a source of light. We've got an object blocking the light and then we have a shadow and that shadow will often be in the shape of the object that is blocking the light. So with shadow work, we're looking at the shadow, but we can sometimes get so tied up in the shape of the shadow, we forget that it's not about the shadow, it's about the thing blocking the light. So the most important thing to do is to see the shadow, see the shape, and with that say, oh, that shape of the shadow looks a bit like. So then I can start looking for those blocks within my psychophysical system, remove the block and there's no shadow. There's only light. So again, it's not that the shadow was something, it was form emptiness. It was something unreal appearing in form, but it never truly existed. It was simply an epiphenomena caused by something blocking the light. I don't have to make sense. Well, it makes sense. I just don't know if it stands up to the different data that we see out there. So I'm totally okay with what you're saying. I'm more than okay with what you're saying. I'm glad you're bringing it forward. I look at data then because I'll tell you this. Let me make sure we look at the same data. I'd throw some data on the table. So I'd throw, first of all, there's a guy in the University of Arizona, Gary Schwartz, super PhD head of the department of psychology and psychiatry at Harvard and Yale and all these places. One of the work that he did, and we've all heard about this work. We just don't know the source of it is a guy goes out, he gets a heart transplant. And before he was vegan, super healthy and he comes out of it. And now he likes pizza and drinking beer and watching sports. And it turns out they go and meet the donor. And that's what he liked to do. And then we go to the University of Virginia and we do Ian Stevenson's was famous for pioneering this work on reincarnation. And they go and they have all this very well carefully done research where they go and they track down these people and the reincarnation data fits. And there's no way of knowing that again, suggesting that there is an extended consciousness entity that is real and has the ability to influence enter into in a way not much different than a spirit possession enter into people's real consciousness, whatever that is and affect it. So what about that data? So Alex, I would agree with everything you said there, apart from one word, which is entity, you said consciousness entity that can enter into. I would just remove that term that the Buddhist view of mind is that is mind stream, which is brilliant. Mind stream is a non personal continually flowing stream of our, our kind of consciousness, in fact beyond consciousness, because consciousness requires a self to be conscious of. But so this, that's the term that he translated mind stream and the mind stream manifests into personalities in different inclinations and the reincarnation data. I mean, it's amazing. Some of the stuff that Alan Wallace is bringing out who is a again, then there's a lot of the mind life Institute stuff. They bring the scientists talking to that alarm and stuff. It's totally valid data kind of proving in many cases or seemingly to prove elements of reincarnation. So I'm totally down with that, but we can believe in reincarnation. We can believe in consciousness from somebody's heart being kind of imprinted and entering into another one. Absolutely. But I don't see how that links to externally existing evil entities. Well, I don't understand the distinction to a certain point. We get to a matter of semantics. If we say there's this consciousness stream that can break off and enter into this other individual and become part of their consciousness stream. And that's what I like about it. It's not personal entity. By definition would be a personal, a kind of objective entity, right? Maybe, maybe not. Again, words, words get in the way and all's we're talking about. I mean, all's I'm advocating for here is more serious discussions about this topic, the kind that we're having here. I don't have any firm beliefs. But me too. But here's what Tom Zinser, this conversation, right? Here's what Tom Zinser was his takeaway from his clinical work. And again, this is really strange for a lot of people, but to give you a little bit more background on Tom's story is again, he's got this practice like he's a people helper and people come in. They're doing clinical work. They're sitting on the couch. I have this fear of spiders. I have this debilitating fear of going outside and Tom works with them through traditional hypnotherapy. And one day he's in the coffee room, the break room, and this woman walks up to him and says, I can't help but tell you that I overheard your conversation about out of body travel and Robert Monroe. And I've been talking to this spirit entity and what this spirit entity wants to talk to you. And he says, Hey, fine. I'm game. I can handle it. I have a PhD in psychology. I know where to draw the line. I have discernment. He starts communicating with Jared, the spirit entity. And pretty quickly he's offer reservation psychology and he's taking Jared's insights and he's integrating them hand in glove with all his practice and training in terms of clinical therapy. And Jared is saying, Oh, this person has a problem with the past life that may be getting in the way. Oh, this person has an entity that has entered them. That is their mother and their mother needs to move on to the light. And then Tom, as you heard him at the end, he's actually developed a protocol and the protocol is a pre-scientific protocol, but it's bordering lot borderline scientific where he says, here's how we bring in the light. And we ask these entities to release into the light. And there is this stage of confusion where they're at. And then he said that other part where, and then some entities have no interest in going into the light. So this is kind of stands a little bit in contrast to what you're saying. I'm not saying he's right or he's wrong, but I'm saying, I think we have to fully consider the possibility that in this realm that we're in, things do work in a way that, that is best understood as these entities being real. And I throw that on the table and say, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of sound like I've kind of, well, I'm not contradicting myself, but also the Buddhist view is that this is not the only realm of existence. There are like six realms of existence, which can actually be all contacted through the human realm if how to do it. And these include like hell beings, heaven realms, hungry ghost realms, of course, animal realm and the animal realm or the human realm are the only kind of ones that we can see with these eyes and this kind of spectrum that we see. But have with the eyes to see it, we could see these other beings, right? And if some people do, so if they have psychic capacity or perhaps the use of psychedelics that opens up our kind of sphere of vision a little bit, then it seems like we can communicate with these. But again, this idea of kind of, these aren't entities, these are beings. These are like sentient beings. So it's not that they're, it's not like an entity, like a spirit, that these things are as real as humans. So from that point of view, God, we're absolutely not alone. There are trillions, because apparently humans are like the rarest. We're the rarest of these beings. There are way more hungry ghost beings and hell beings and all this kind of stuff. But these are sentient beings, not entities. They're not kind of, they're not other things. They're not spirits. They're real, but they're as real as we are. We just can't see them. Charlie, let me digress her for a second, because one of the things you said in the TED Talk kind of blew me away and was almost like a throwaway point for you because you're so immersed in lucid dreaming and in helping people develop that skill and use that skill in their life. But you said lucid dreaming is something that western science has only acknowledged for the last 40 years, but Buddhist tradition, Buddhist wisdom, has talked about extensively for a thousand years. So do you want to speak to that at all? Yeah, I mean, I can draw the wisdom, but I don't know a lot of it. I mean, it's like, I'm like kindergarten level as far as Buddhism goes. And that's someone who lived in a Buddhist center for eight years, and I still say I'm absolutely kindergarten level. But yeah, I mean, there is a huge wealth of wisdom. If you look at kind of Western psychology, it began about 100 years ago. Eastern psychology began about two and a half thousand years ago. It's like the kind of mind mapping that these eastern traditions have done, like 85,000 different aspects of mind that they've mapped, labelled, and showed how you can experience makes a lot of kind of Western psychology seem to use the term I've said kind of kindergarten level. And yet what it doesn't have is the amazing strides in neuroscience that we've had in the West. And what's really exciting at the moment is neuroscientists working with this ancient two and a half thousand year old psychological system and kind of proving each other. And that's where it gets really cool because I wasn't brought up a Buddhist. I kind of worship at the shrine of materialistic science as much as the next Western whether we know we're doing it or not. This is the kind of religion we grew up in, right? So I'm always really excited when you get kind of brain stuff, proving the Buddhist stuff. Not that we should need proof, but it's kind of cool when it does. So with lucid dreaming, when in the 70s, they first proved lucid dreaming, which apparently when I spoke to the guy who proved it, this doctor called Ketan, I said, well, what was the kind of equivalent of you proving it? He said it would be kind of like us proving telekinesis right now, where there are some people who say they can do it. There's actually a lot of evidence that it could be possible, but it's still completely out there. He said it was like that. It was like we proved telekinesis. And it had that same effect on the scientific community. It took about 10 years, even though it'd been proved in 1975. It took another 10 years before anyone taken it seriously because it was just no one would touch it, right? Then you had Stephen LaBerge, a few years later, over at Stanford who did similar tests and he managed to get some stuff peer reviewed and published and stuff. You were probably much more familiar with that research, but I think it helps ground people, and I love the way you said it because we have this, we're swimming in this pool of Western rationalism in a way that we don't even understand we are, but we are. So I think it helps when we lock down what this science is like. So they're doing sleep science, right? So they're hooking people up to EEGs and they're looking at their eye movement and they're doing all the stuff that you would expect in order to understand this, right? It's real science, if you will. Yeah, I mean like back in the day, the way they had to prove it in the mid-70s was or the kind of challenge, the gauntlet that was laid down was the only way you can prove lucid dreaming is real is to send a signal from the lucid dream state to the waking state saying, hey, I'm conscious in here. I mean, that's a ridiculous gauntlet to lay down. Most people would have given up, right? But this guy Keith Helm was like, okay, I know it's real. We've got all these testimonials from Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, Toltec Mexica, even some of the early mystic, Gnostic Christian traditions. So we know this is real, right? So we've got to send the signal. So he started trying to send signals through the pinky because like the body is paralyzed during REM sleep, so you can't really move, but you can sometimes get little muscle twitches. So first thing he did was he tried to get his subject to go into a lucid dream, hook him up to the brain scan as to show they are in a lucid dream and that the eyes are moving rapidly, for rapid eye movement, blah, blah, blah. But anyway, the pinky thing didn't work. So he was watching one of these people in the lucid dream, trying to prove lucid dreaming. At one point he saw their eyes flicking left, right, left, right, really kind of synchronous, and he woke them up and said, what were you dreaming about? He said, oh, oh, I was dreaming about a tennis match. And he was like, oh, that's cool. So he made the first discovery. The eyes physically correspond to what you're dreaming about. But then he thought, okay, right, so maybe I can send a signal, a kind of a Morse code signal from the lucid dream state to the waking state saying, hey guys, I'm in here, I'm doing the test. I'm doing the experiment. And he managed to do that. And I interviewed him actually at the Science Museum in London where they got the dream machine, the original kind of EEG thing that he used to prove it. It's behind the kind of cabinet thing. I thought, cool place to interview him. And I said, so how did it work? And he said, oh, I spent eight hours looking at this, it was done on paper back there, paper readout, kind of like a lie detector test, right, of the ink going tick, tick, tick, tick across the screen of all these like random eye movements. And after eight hours, he said suddenly on the paper, he went dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum. Which was the kind of Morse code thing, the eye movement. He said two to the left, one right, one to the left when you're dreaming. And it turns out the lucid dream, he had hooked up to the scanners, had become lucid, had remembered the task. He said, oh, right, I've got to send the signal to the outside world. So in the lucid dream, he looked left, left, right, left. That was picked up on the eye monitors, thus proving a signal could be sent from that world. And I said to him like, how did it feel when you saw those eye movements come through? And he was really sweet. He went, Charlie, one of those movies when they're in the NASA control room and they finally get the thing from Mars and they all give each other high fives. I said, yeah, and he went, it was like that, but I had no one to high five. And I kind of lent over and gave him that we like, actually missed, we had this like awkward missed high five. And he went, oh well, 40 years too late, but thank you. I was like, dude, he'd be waiting for that high five for so long. But anyway, so they proved it in the 70s. So it was real stuff. But then slightly more contemporary in, I think, my 2010, they did the first fMRI scan on a lucid dream. Now I've been in fMRI scanner before when they wanted to see if I'd changed my brain through meditation. I'm sure I had no changes, but they wanted to check. And it's like a techno ray. When they put on the magnet that goes around, it goes, dum, dum, dum, dum. I was like, how the hell could anyone sleep in this? Let alone medicine. But anyway, this guy in Germany managed to fall asleep in one of these things, have a lucid dream, and they got live footage of what happens to the brain when you become lucid. And they had theorized that when you become lucid in a dream, the sensors had to do with self-perception and self-reflective awareness. So I know that I am having experience with light up. And they were proved exactly right. The right door slatter or prefrontal cortex just lights up like a Christmas tree as soon as this guy gets lucid. And they all got that. And then suddenly once they had that, all this funding came through. And now all these cool lucid dream research things. And one of the cool things they did after that was on sports. They wanted to see, they were like, oh, wait, once you get lucid, your brain doesn't think you're dreaming. It thinks you're awake. So we wonder, would the brain lay down neural pathways in the same way that it does when we're awake? Wouldn't that be cool? They were like, yeah, and they proved it. They get people to go in their lucid dream and practice athletic disciplines, like doing squats or press-ups, stuff like this, and control conditions, obviously. The next day they check them, essentially they got better at doing squats, better at doing press-ups. They improved their physical sporting performance by training in the lucid dream because of these neural pathways, neural networks being stimulated while they sleep. If this sounds like sci-fi, I kind of should. I mean, this is nuts, but this is science now. I wanted to say about entities. Because I realized I gave you the Jungian view on entities. I gave you the Buddhist view on entities. I didn't actually give you my personal view on entities. Which is like, yeah, man. Anyone who's had like a DMT experience or like moving into kind of psilocybin therapy or ayahuasca or something, these are not internally generated experiences. Like when people are all having the same experience of Mother Ayahuasca coming over them and she appears in the same way and often is offering the same guidance. You're thinking, this is existing, dude. And Rick Strassman does a clinical work with DMT and the patients don't know each other and they say, did you see the purple jaguar? Yeah, I saw the purple jaguar, too. I got a bit lost in the language on that part and I was just saying about entities don't exist but like disinconnate, granny might exist or beings might exist. Like how are you defining entities? Because I totally, it seems to be the nature of consciousness to disassociate, right? And I think there's like, there's two biases that can go on here. So people who are very much into mediumistic stuff and can maybe miss that about consciousness. And when I've interviewed people who work with hearing voices into their accounts, it does seem to be like you say, the traumatized parts of ourselves can separate up and start to act seemingly independently. And anyone who's ever had a dream just knows that's the case. Like we talk about it as if it's really far out thing, like voices in my head, but like, yeah, we're just fall asleep and you'll have voices in your head and it seems like we separate from you. So that seems to be like the nature of consciousness. And at the same time, I think people looking from that perspective can miss the point that sometimes they just deliver information that the recipient has no earthly right to have. And I've met, I've had experiences that myself and I've met like way way too many people who have had it. There's also research in labs like Gary Swartz and Julie Byshell and so on. So that's what I'm thinking, like the word entity, I'm thinking of like, the entity could be like granny from the astral plane or it could be a pirate from the 17th century on the astral plane or something else. But are you using the word entity differently there to disagree with anything I've just said that there seems to be a, like as best I can see a coexistence of two different phenomena that might be reduced to one phenomenon at some higher level, but on the level where kind of looking over here it seems to be like there are two categories of things that overlap. It's funny that term entity is often used to, it's like kind of spirit possession and entities and kind of these things that attach to us. And the Buddhist view on it is actually the sentient beings, these aren't kind of entities, almost like entities almost like a little bit of a pejorative term here. And actually it's not that they're beings, they're sentient beings as sentient as you and I, but they're existing in different dimensions of reality. It's not that there's like an objective entity kind of clinging on to us in this reality that perhaps that we're experiencing like an interdimensional communication with these other beings in other realities. But again, I mean, I get out my depth very quickly with this because as Buddha said, take nothing I tell you is true until you find it's true yourself. So like I can talk about the Buddhist view on things, but really like my own view is that I'm yet to find any proof of external entities entering people's lucid dreams or anything like that. However, in the outer body state I have a lot of proof that you can absolutely contact things which are not you. But this is because you have left the scope of your own personal consciousness and are now in a space where you can absolutely meet beings just like I can meet you. But because you're in a disembodied form your kind of spectrum of who you can meet is much, much wider. Let me take a run at this in a slightly different way because you're being super humble because you sound like a super humble, cool spiritually enlightened guy, but you have a lot to offer and you've done a lot of this work and you've also worked with so many people. So you have the kind of advantage of having that kind of collective experience of so many people who you've taken through this. Let me try and see if I can lay out another parallel that I've found between you and what Tom Zinser is saying and then we're going to look at one other person I've talked to who is a medium there in the UK, Claire Broad and both Richard and I have both spoken to her and she has a different perspective on this as well. But at some point, Charlie, I heard you say that it is understood through the Buddhist tradition our ability to create the separation in these ego states can lead to those states actually becoming real in some sense and I might not be saying that exactly the way that you said it but that was the gist. I don't think I totally understand that question. Yes, so maybe I'm not getting it. I'll tell you what Tom Zinser says. So Tom Zinser, like when he first started doing this work he was working with people that had Dissociative Identity Disorder, right? Split personality kind of stuff which 20, 30 years ago was like highly controversial and now it's accepted. People have all sorts of disassociation with parts of themselves and sometimes it's very mild and it just causes anxiety that seems to come out of nowhere and sometimes it's like really extreme where people can forget the other part of themselves while they're occupying this other space and I thought I heard either, and if I didn't, we'll just scratch all this but I thought I heard either in your TED Talk or your interview with Richard you talking about that the Buddhists understood that you could, if you kind of put your energy into it break off a side of, break off a part of yourself in that consciousness space that we all have and that that can become, and in your lucid dreams you can dream in that and that you can kind of, tolp a thing where it kind of actually becomes real in the same way that... Tulpas, okay. Oh wow, yeah, tulpas. Tulpas gets into very, very esoteric. It's esoteric, but isn't it also just kind of an ordinary way too? So whenever we hear about tulpa, we think about this weird big ghost that's there but don't we have just like little tulpas in us? Okay, let's look at that. That we can talk about. Tulpa as a metaphor for kind of psychological integration or psychological parts, absolutely. Although it should be said that apparently tulpa's practice was real and the ability to kind of manifest corpse where you would take some of your consciousness and kind of project it into a corpse and that corpse would be manifest but because it was only an aspect of your consciousness it would be a bit like a zombie. You couldn't play poker with this thing but it would kind of follow you around and something to carry your bags and stuff like the utilitarian Tibet was a big country to carry your bags if you're going to walk like five weeks. That's crazy stuff. People can Google that. It seems to have some existence. But yes, let's look at kind of that internal aspect of a split off part. In the lucid dream, absolutely, you can meet personifications of elements of your own psyche and that's cool man. You can kind of do work like that through shamanic journey and maybe through some yoga ninja work and through some psychedelic work but a cool thing about lucid dreaming is you can actually meet a personification of your fear. You can meet a personification of your sexual trauma. You can meet your greed. I met once the personification of my capacity for violence and now it's crazy man. And of course the lucid dream feels as real as this. This is the strange thing about lucid dreaming and of course that feeds into the view of the hell realms too. The lucid dream feels absolutely as real as the lucid dream state. I mean you can taste, you can touch that that old thing about pinch yourself to see if you're dreaming. That doesn't work in a lucid dream. You pinch yourself in a lucid dream, you just feel pain and that's cool because you're like pain but I'm asleep in bed. I'm not really pinching myself. My dream fingers are pinching my dream arm and dream pain is being evoked in my mind. I mean that's super cool anyway. But so in the lucid dream state you can kind of meet these split off parts of yourself or you can meet these personifications that seem to exist but they don't really. It's form and emptiness. It's what's not real. It's a projection of your mind but you can touch it. You can taste it. You can interact with it. So the lucid dream state, yeah we can meet these aspects of ourselves. And what I'd always ask people to do or always advise people to do is to hug them. That could really, the whole teaching I've been doing for the last 11 years could be summed up in that hug everything in your lucid dream. Because if everything in the lucid dream or at least 99% of everything in lucid dream is you then it's a manifestation of your anger or your fear or your sexual trauma. Hug it because what could be more symbolic of love, of acceptance, of integration and hug. So I'd often say hug first, talk later. I love that. Hey Charlie, would you tell folks your story about entering the hell realm and the hugging? Okay, there are actually two different ones but the hell realm I can talk about. And I think actually my Buddhist teacher Lamisha Rinpoche, his book comes out, next month, and I think I get a mention. He says about one of his students visiting the hell realm through the lucid dream state. So because of this idea that the realms of existence are dreamlike, including this one, it's said that you can use the lucid dream state and the outer body state which in Tibetan Buddhism is referred to as the special dream body state. You can use those states to visit these hell realms because they don't exist outside of the mind but they're neither does this. You can visit a hell realm as realistically through the lucid dream state as you would if you actually entered a hell realm, right? Apparently. So anyway, I got this instruction to visit a hell realm. Now, I wouldn't advise anyone going to a hell realm unless their Buddhist lama tells them to. Park Mendingelles, you've got no kind of safety backup. I was like, visit a hell realm, will I be all right? And he was like, yes, yes. Okay, right, so I'm going to die or go mad or something. So I become lucid, I don't know what, oh no, I was in a car, that was it. I was in a car and I realized no one was driving the car, something like that and I went, hang on, that's weird. Oh my god, I'm dreaming. So I noticed the weird thing, I became lucid. I'm dreaming, right? And then I remembered the dream plan as we'll call it from La Mieshe, go to a hell realm. So I thought, how do you do this? So I don't know. So I just yelled out in the car, hell realm now. I want to experience the hell realm now. And then everything went and it was it's so hard to describe. It was complete stuckness. Imagine the dream pausing like short pause, but now imagine that everything that was movement, anything that had ever moved did not exist. The concept of flexibility or movement or unstuckness did not exist in that state. There had only ever been stuckness in that point in time and then time disappeared. So it was like infinite stuckness. And I can't explain how terrifying the experience of infinite stuckness is. I literally can't explain it. It is beyond words, but it was the most terrifying experience I've ever had because time didn't exist. So it would go on forever. I would never not be in it and it was a place where movement didn't exist. And then I panicked and I was like wake up, wake up, wake up. And I tried all the trick in the book and I was stuck there for what seemed like in terminal amount of time, probably two seconds and I woke up. When I spoke to La Mieshebada I thought the hell realms would be like the Buddhist descriptions or like fire and brimstone and stuff and he says hell is in the mind for you hell is stuckness. And I thought about it and I was like oh wow that is true. I think for many people hell is stuckness. Complete inability to move. Complete being frozen in time, a place of no movement forever was my experience of hell. So yeah, that was a hell realm. Who knows, if you did the same lucid dream plan and of course you could it would be totally different like a Christian listening to this if they called out to go to hell it would probably be a totally different experience and whether that would be a good thing to do or an advisable thing to do or not I don't know but that was a hell realm one as far as the hugging the demons thing oh I know what I'll tell you one that really crossed the boundary if you get lucid, if ever you meet anything scary in the lucid dream it's you everything in the lucid dream is you so you meet something scary, you meet a monster you meet a vampire, whatever it is go zombie, go and hug them, show them love because they are an external they are a personification of some zombified part of yourself or some monstrous part of yourself or some fearful part of yourself terrifying part of yourself so you go and hug them, you show them love and then often they dissolve into white light or you hug them and actually they then you release the embrace and they're not angry you kind of pacify them really obvious psychological work here so I had this dream about I don't know, four years ago or something, maybe five I became lucid, I was at Liverpool street station which is a big station in London and I looked over the barriers down into the kind of forecourt of the train station and I saw these people in black robes standing in a circle around a pentacle or pentagram I always forget that symbol pentagram, right? and I think, okay shadow elements, scary stuff and literally the blasé I flew down off the thing, went to them and I thought, okay they're representations of what, a fear of satanic ritual yeah, my christian upbringing, whatever it is okay, it's just shadow stuff so I see the main one, the main one looked like Charles Dance who's a character, who's an actor who's been many things he was in Game of Thrones before I know him and he was the main ringleader of this satanic cult thing so I just fly over to him, ground level flying and I hug him and I go, my shadow, and I hug him and then I felt this incredible force I mean it was like being hit by like a sonic boom and I went boom and I literally flew off onto the floor and then he levitated up into the sky like feet down to the ground and I went straight up and went, I am not your shadow I am the devil and just for a minute I was like, oh she's I really hope I'm in a lucid dream now I'm not in an outer body or in some sort of thin state where you can cross over through the lucid dream states or other dimensions I was like, I really hope I'm in a lucid dream and then I just thought, I thought on my feet I thought, okay well look whether you're in a lucid dream or the outer body state if you show this dude fear you're a devil which feeds upon fear you're a gonna mate so you've got to stay fearless so I flew up to him and I grabbed him again and I went, there is no devil there is only energy and it was so hard to keep my embrace but I was bare hugging this dude going energy and then suddenly boom he exploded into white light and then the whole dream exploded into white light then I found myself in my bed like I mean that was a close one I mean I'm still pretty sure it was a lucid dream and not an outer body whatever because of course what is my shadow what is my worst fear is a lucid dreaming teacher my worst fear is that one day I actually will meet the externalized devil but it turns out love is the most powerful force in the universe it does not matter whether it is internal or external if you show the thing fear you feed it and it will have power over you if you are fearless and attack it with love with love with compassion that which makes the universe whole there is nothing to fear that's totally awesome and it's actually a great kind of lead into this last clip I'm going to play even super generous with your time let me cue up this last one somebody said to me the other day do you believe God is evil then because I was saying the same thing there's light and dark in all of us I know evil exists I've experienced it but do I have to get stuck in it do I have to be identified with it do I have to fear it no I don't the way one of my spiritual teachers tell me is the secret of the ascent is to always look up beautiful what you brought home clearly in your readings and in your work because you talk about your work with the clients and the people that come see you is that what if it's about raising the moment that's in front of you and transforming that moment to a higher state I find that when you look at the dark side it disappears because it no longer holds power over then you can then start to reach up to something more joyful some of my darkest moments have led to my most empowered choices well talk about parallels with what you just said but that is Claire broad she has some excellent books she's been on Richard's show and on my show and she's a psychic medium there in the UK Charlie what did you think I thought it was great and it reminded me of reminded me of this idea of our belief systems right what Buddha said he said with our minds we make the world so if that's true then if I have to choose a belief system I'm going to choose the one says this is a passionate universe there is no externalize evil you are a fully enlightened Buddha who just hasn't woken up to it yet and are the kind of raison d'etre of our life is to wake up to our inherent wakefulness to wake up to our enlightened nature now I know it's a belief system but if I have to choose one I choose that one because that one lets me go to sleep fearlessly that one lets me see the best in people that one lets me see the best in others I'm not saying it's true it's simply a belief system but if it's true that with our minds we make the world why not choose a belief system that is empowering and it says that we are these fully enlightened Buddhas that we have this fullest potential within us and that love is the most powerful force in the universe when I had that lucid dream of the devil I was very thankful for that belief system because if I had not had that belief system I don't know man if I had truly believed that was a devil I could have woken up with some sort of psychotic break or something so who knows but yeah I totally agree with her that once you face evil once you face the shadow again what is the shadow it is an epiphenomena caused by an object blocking the light the shadow is not the problem here it's the thing that's blocking the light remove the block and there's only light maybe evil too is an epiphenomena caused by something blocking our light it's not that evil has objective existence it is that is a shadow cast by the blocks in our in our love maybe I don't know Richard any final thoughts before we wrap it up here with our very good friend Charlie yeah so I'll say something you can quote it if you want like so a couple of curiosities I actually wonder Alex what you make of what Charlie's saying about evil and the shadow and they're not being an external evil given that you're writing a book with the word evil in the title and just to state my own perspective where I'm coming from is that ultimately I think I have the same position as Charlie in seeing evil as a manifestation of or what we call evil as a manifestation of trauma and I actually think that we might look back on the 20th century and say like the greatest leap forward in human understanding wasn't the stuff that let us put a man on the moon or anything like that it was Carl Jung and a therapist like Alice Miller who looked at the great dictators and showed how who they were arose out of child abuse and the role that trauma particularly trauma in early life has an effect on later to me the precursor doesn't explain the act so the reason I'm drawn to like Tom Zinser is at least he has a complete theory like I really respect what Charlie said there but to me it's somewhat incomplete it doesn't close the loop Tom Zinser does, Tom says look there's a force out there it's darkness it's like gravity right which is totally consistent with what the Buddhists are saying it's just there it's not good it's not bad it's not evil but then there are people that are attracted to the darkness and do evil things and he even contemplates and I've heard other of my spiritual teachers say the reason they're attracted to the darkness is because they have blockages the light the love wants to move through them but they have some scaras they have other blockages that prevent that so that then energy gets redirected and often it gets redirected in any way that feels comfortable at the time either addiction or attraction to things that get that shit out of us in an evil way but then at that point they really are doing evil in the way that Charlie defined it that's not different to what Charlie said that's not different to me Charlie, if you think it's different Charlie that sounds like well hold on because I think it's different when we then say that these people are now engaged actively engaged in doing evil things that prevent the free will of other people being exercised and then here is the kicker to me that I think everyone kind of likes the gloss over because they're uncomfortable with it is that in that process of redirecting with energy that is outside of them that is recharging and energizing that energy so the reason they do the satanic ritual abuse like this is my objection like when I talk to you about the guy Richard the inside baseball here the guy from Ohio State University who says hell yeah Elron Hubbard and Jack Parsons were in the desert and they were working with Alistair Crowley to bring about the antichrist and the Ohio State University professor says well whatever people believe that's what's most important no bullshit what's important first and foremost is is it possible to direct your energy to beings entities real things that are in these extended realm and have them manifest in a way that interacts with this realm because if that's real that is a different reality that we have to deal with so I don't think that depending on philosophy right because I can connect let's say I'm connecting with what could be traumatized spirits in some way like people who either had a bad life here or a bad life there or whatever they're traumatized spirits and they want to do harm in the way damaged people here want to do harm that's not fundamentally different on some level from me connecting with all the damaged people here in a cult or something like the Madison family and going out to do harm so it's not about whether there's a fundamental evil it's getting together with it's traumatized people getting together with traumatized people hold on if we can't get there to talk about that then we're lost right if we always have to talk about it in metaphor then we're lost if we if we are willing to contemplate the potential reality of that that just like people can go to a crack house and connect with a bunch of very negative energy and wind up in a worse place well that they can connect with the crack house in the spirit realm and wind up with some very dark forces there as soon as we say okay that's on the table then I'm with you let's start that discussion but right now we have to recognize that we're not having that discussion science will not allow us to enter into that realm and religion as we know it will not allow us to contemplate those things that's the great thing about what Charlie is bringing to the table he says hey I'm part of a spiritual tradition a long wisdom tradition they're not only open to it but they'll tell you they have a pretty complete explanation of how that stuff might work Charlie you're like listening in on that inside base of the conversation I mean I just such a cool conversation my interviews are not usually like this man they usually just tell you about lucid dreaming and stuff this is brilliant it's all about the nature of reality objective evil and subjective and objective evil and subjective evil this is brilliant I mean yeah I listen to both of you speak I agree on both counts I'm like oh yeah I really agree with that it's like yeah I got anyone who's making like hard and fast claims about this stuff I think probably need to check themselves right but let's at least have conversations about it let's at least talk about these possibilities and then explore I mean what could be more fascinating than this right agreed hey I tell you what we've used up a lot of your time Charlie tell folks a little bit more about the work that you do with individuals I know we're in kind of a strange state where workshops are probably not are kind of in flex but you have a perfect way of integrating in technology and consulting sessions along with the books tell people how they can learn more about what you're up to yes I mean I would advertise a whole world tour I had that finished at the end of November but most of that's going to happen it seems like the world tour is going to be right here in the zoom screen in my living room but yeah I've truly embraced that so I've got like I've got loads of online courses like two lucid dream online courses one oh the shadow work online course is particularly good actually people have been interested in shadow integration stuff and then I'm now doing a lot of live stuff so live five week online courses do my first ever lucid dreaming retreat through zoom where I'll be like waking people up four times a night just as we would do on the lucid dream retreat but you'll have like a recording of my voice that you will set so that's kind of fun trying to use this technology to make this happen but yeah everyone can find stuff on my website Charlie come loads of online stuff and Skype sessions and oh I've got this big online lucid dreaming online summit that's mid July you'll find online when it goes up but you can Google it and it's me interviewing like 15 or 20 experts I'm trying to have some really big conversations about just how far lucid dream can go so lucid dreaming online summit you'll find it Charlie it's been absolutely fantastic having you on Richard thanks so much for being a part of this and helping connect me to Charlie so thanks to you both and goodbye thank you so much it's been a pleasure Charlie thanks again to Charlie for joining me and Richard for writing shotgun the one question I tee up from this interview is what do you make of Charlie's take on entities that seem to be kind of one of the central points of this interview as we enter this dreamscape are we creating everything well of course we're creating everything but it seems like when we're really impressed we come back to this idea that there are these external entities not just in this minute by minute thing we call reality but somehow beyond that so that would be the question pop on over to the skeptical forum if you wouldn't let me know your thoughts or drop me a note and tell me what you think I got some good ones coming up I got some not so good ones too but that's part of the process anyways stay with me for all of that until next time take care and bye for now