 Years ago, I was having a dream and in the dream, I was standing in this kitchen and it was a very homey, warm country kind of kitchen. There was wooden shelves and little herbs and cooking and spices and I was feeling cared for and loved. And there was this woman standing in front of me and she was an older lesbian woman and she had short white hair and I was looking into her eyes and I felt deeply connected, deeply at home, cared for, supported. Everything was just right with the world. There was a back door behind her that looked out over some nature. We walked outside, looked to the left and there was this big mud bath like slash hot tub thing with my boyfriend at the time was in the tub with some women and they were all healing women and he was getting healed. I remember shouting over, be careful of his back. He had a bad back at the time. That was very mature for me to have that thought in my dream with all these naked women. But I was feeling so good so we'd go back in the house and I'm standing there and I'm taking it all in and I'm looking at her and all of a sudden I become aware that this is a dream and the heartbreak that I felt in that moment was so... I just looked at her and I said, oh my God, this is a dream, this is a dream, this is my dream and she looked at me like, what are you talking about, like what? I said, no, no, this is a dream, it's a dream, I'll prove it to you, I'll prove it to you and I said, I'll take you back with me. So I put my hand on her left plaid arm shirt, I remember it was plaid and I hung on to her and I said, you know, I'm going to bring you back with me, I'm bringing you back with me. So I pulled her and it was that, you go through that tunnel when you're trying to not wake up but you're waking up and then you're trying to wake up and you can't, so I'm going through this tunnel and we get to the other side and I'm like, I'll show you, I'll bring you back, I'll bring you back, I'll bring you back and I wake up and I honestly was holding a pillow and I remember thinking, wow, that really happens people wake up holding pillows like in the movies because I really didn't know that happened and then I was thinking, of course, wow, a lucid dream was very moving to me because I went through such an emotional experience and I was so heartbroken to find out it was just a dream. So later that day I was washing dishes in the kitchen and I heard a voice off to the left of me behind me that said, we're still here and I turned around and I went, what? And I thought, what does that mean? First of all, that's weird, okay, I heard a voice, which has happened to me many times so it's not that weird for me but what does it mean? Does that mean it coexists on another plane? Does it mean it's an alternate universe that's there and there's many alternate universes? Is it the future? I didn't know, I really didn't know, but I'll guarantee you that for many years I kept looking for those older lesbians in my life that were somehow going to be there because her partner was in the pool with my boyfriend and she was my friend and I was like, oh, I know I will meet some older mentors, right? And I kept, nothing ever happened, years went by, years, many, many years and I was standing in the kitchen of my acupuncturist who is also my herbologist and she is an older lesbian woman with short white hair and I'm standing in the kitchen, holding onto the carved wooden table looking around at the herbs and the cooking and the kitchen was a mess but it was warm and it smelled like cooking food and I was so bad I dreamed this years ago and she said, yeah, yeah, yeah just like the dream so it meant more to me than her but in that moment I thought, okay there are different things in this world that I don't understand and I'm going to stay open to them, you know I don't understand this and what it means but I know there's stuff going on that I just don't know and I bet there's a lot of other people that are thinking the same thing a few years later I was with Zoe Galvez who's over there and we went to see the movie What the Bleed Do We Know and, you know, it struck me, it inspired me because here were all these scientists and smart people saying things that really resonated with the experiences I had had throughout my life and some of the theories that I had that I thought were a little nutty and now I have really important scientists tell me that, you know, we're doing studies and we've found that this is true and this is true and the quantum physics part of it that I want to focus on because I don't want to go over the part of quantum physics that I want to focus on is that there is a quantum field all around us and people who are just with Brent we got into the neuroscience part of this but there's a quantum field that's all around us right now and that we create, this is the theory, we create reality as we go there's all these different realities going on coexisting at the same time and when we, the observer, the observer collapse upon one reality that becomes true for us they're saying that thoughts create and even pull into the existence the matter that becomes our reality that to me is really exciting and for many years just that was good enough I was like, ooh that's cool, okay let's see what can we do with it recently this last year Rebecca told you that she made me do this and Rebecca has made me do almost every important thing I've done in my life for some reason, that's why quantumly she is in my life for some reason and it's true, it's very true she said to me backstage, why don't you share what you're doing I'm like oh no I couldn't do that I'll get to that later because I want to stick to the topic so if this is true, if the quantum field is there the observer, we collapse upon one reality for ourselves that means if we change our mind, if we change our perspective then we should be able to change our reality period, if we can create moment to moment and change our mind, change our perspective then we can change, should be able to change our reality so boom boom boom, got it so how do I combine this with improv, I'm going to teach a class called Your Brain on Impro, on improv, Your Brain on Impro and I taught it two sessions of it in Berkeley Rep and the thing that we bumped up against was people have great intentions, yes I see this, I see this new reality I'm going to get there, what do we bump up against the 95% of our behavior that is our subconscious learned behavior from our experiences our memories, the stories we tell ourselves every day and so the difficulty is you have many good intentions about how you want to move into the future and how do you want to change things and how you want your life to be different and how do you get there and you bump up against your own behavioral neural net so we talked, Brent, he was talking about the connections in our brain and that what I've read about and what I've come up with is what needs to happen is we identify the change we want to make the neural net connection of the thing that we don't want we have to let that die off, just die off and then we have to create new pathways new neural pathways and so what better tools to do that than improvisation and so we started having real success when we started creating games around how do we interrupt the connection and allow for something different to happen Brent, if you were in his workshop, talked about repetition I'm going to, after I burst this bug away I'm going to talk about that just for a moment because we run off of instincts in improvisation a lot and if our instincts are telling us that something feels bad then sometimes we think we shouldn't do it but when we're talking about behavioral change it's going to feel not good sometimes so this came up in our class it doesn't mean that it's not good for us if it feels not good so there's the repetition of practicing the new behavior which doesn't feel right which feels wrong until it feels right in an atmosphere that's playful and buoyant and safe so I'm interested in dreaming of course because I had that dream and also there's a lot of you know I know there's so many experts and I've listened so much up to this point of everyone yes that's true, yes I love it because it resonates with us we're all on this journey together I believe we're all on this trajectory a lot of you know that the lucid dreaming training that goes on to teach children to be able to fight their monsters and their nightmares and I was loving what Gary was talking about yesterday and I thought you know one of the ways they train lucid dreaming is to say throughout the day am I dreaming? am I dreaming? am I dreaming? am I dreaming? am I dreaming? am I dreaming? you know thank you and then when you're dreaming you'll be sleeping and you'll be having a dream and you'll ask the question am I dreaming? and you will say yes I'm dreaming woohoo I can fly yeah and so you have choices and the children who figure out their dreaming they can pull out a magic sword and fight the monster or join the monster to kill other people I don't know but just have a good time so I thought what if we turn that around because one of the problems is when we get in our heads and go through life I had a this guy who was my mentor he died but he he was a hypnotherapist but he called it dehypnotherapy because he said people don't need to be hypnotized they need to wake up so I came up with this called lucid living where we actually practice waking up so whenever throughout the day you're having a problem you're in this behavior mold that you don't like about yourself you have the opportunity to wake up so at this point for to end this I would like to do a quick couple things first I would like you to get up on your feet and breathe and ask yourself going around getting into different positions maybe looking at a table differently or looking at the ceiling things you haven't noticed yet and say to yourself am I awake over and over again in different positions you might look under a chair lie on the floor look at someone's butt look out the window it doesn't matter say am I awake over and over say it with excitement am I awake alright you guys thank you sit down I'm going to end with one more thing I have one more minute which is exactly enough time I don't know if this is possible but I'm going to try it I would like to get everyone breathing in sync with me and give you a little bit of a little bit of a perspective shift maybe so breathe in and breathe out oh it's good sound it's helpful to everyone breathe in breathe out don't hyperventilate make it nice and easy close your eyes breathe in now as you keep breathing keep breathing I'm going to talk imagine that everything in this room the space that is not you and not people but it's the space around us when you breathe in that is breathing into you and when you breathe out that space is breathing in see if you can get in sync with that vision with that perspective space is breathing now this is the last thing I want to say is we are all already doing this in fact we've already done it quantumly we have already done it and I have felt that with you guys this trip so thank you we can stop there thank you so much thank you one more quick thing Rebecca I'm sorry you guys just when I'm cheating I just want to say this one more thing about a half a year ago someone asked me what did I want to do and I said I want to get in front of a conference and talk and they said what were you talking about I said I have no idea I just want to do it and when I signed up for this I thought it was going to be one of the little workshops and two days before this session I found out I was going to be talking in front of the conference so thank you