The Dream Boat

Who will you see as you approach the final exit? Dreams and visions at the end of life are significant and unique, according to research done at Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo , USA. These end-of-life experiences (ELE'S) include images and experiences of those we loved who have died before us, be they parents, partners or pets. They may also be opportunities to confront and release old trauma...

How can your nightmare be your friend? Dr Leslie Ellis explains why nightmares might be shouting for your attention, showing what is unmetabolised in your psyche and maybe even telling you what is needed to help that process. "The antidote is often within the dream itself," she says. She tells us about her embodied dreamwork method for "imagining the dream forward" to discover a new way through th...

"We are engines with millions of feedback loops… And dreams are a balancing process" We are joined by well-known U.K. Jungian analyst Dr Roderick Peters who's been working in the field of dreams for more than 40 years. We look at the Jungian perspective on dreaming and its symbolic world of archetypes, opposites and individual and collective consciousness. Roderick recalls a powerful dream that he...

"Am I dreaming?" is the question you need to answer to become lucid in your dreams, and that question will also make you question what it really means to be awake. In this episode, Dave and Laura speak with educator, author and dream researcher Ryan Hurd, who teaches graduate level courses at the University for Peace in Costa Rica and National University in California, and is the driving force beh...

We're taking a little break this week, so here's a recurrance of an episode from April 2023: Series 1, Episode 3 - Symbols in Dreams with Dr Nigel Hamilton. See you in the New Year! ___ The questions we most often get asked usually come down to "What does it mean if I dream about ____?" We all want to know more about what our dreams are saying to us and how to interpret them, and people have been...

Beyond lucidity:  For experienced lucid dreamers, at least some of them, the ability to live out endless fantasies gets tired pretty quickly, and they start to use their lucid dreams to explore the nature of their minds, their dreams, consciousness, and existence itself.   In this episode, Laura and Dave talk to someone who has done exactly that, and written about it, and who teaches people who wa...

What can you do when you wake up screaming, having revisited the harrowing scenes of a trauma which still haunts your nightmares?  Linda Yael Schiller from Boston in the USA has developed the GAIA (Guided Active Imagination Approach) method to stop the endless cycle of nightmares for war trauma survivors and for anyone who suffers disturbing nightmares. We have talked about parasomnias - the offic...

**TRIGGER WARNING** This episode contains references to sexual assault and sexual abuse. It's the end of the second series already! It's our twentieth episode and time to answer some more of your questions (and in one case, have a second go at a previous question). In this episode: I think I'm having nightmares but I don't remember them. Can people with aphantasia (who don't see mental images) dre...

...By popular demand! As Dave and Laura come towards the end of the second series, they consider two listeners' dreams through the lenses of different interpretations. Trainee psychotherapist Kit presents her fascinating maid of honour dream, in which the most beautiful silk dress she is going to wear to the wedding of a childhood friend is stolen and worn by her father. How dare he! Dave and Laur...

Pets or predators, spirit guides or instinctual drives: there are many ways to interpret and relate to the images and experiences of animals we may encounter in our dreams. This week, Christian Gerike of Sonoma University in California talks to Dave and Laura about the animals in our dreams and all the ways that we can look at them. Christian Gerike, MA,   teaches The Psychology of Dreams and rese...

In our world of rapidly advancing AI, we are being forced to ask ourselves, "What is consciousness?" Science fiction author Philip K Dick's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", which inspired the Bladerunner films, invites us to consider what it is to have – or to  be – an artificial consciousness, and the role that dreams have in shaping that consciousness. Instead of cogito ergo sum – I...

This week co-host Laura Payne swaps chair and becomes Dave's guest to discuss the fascinating ancient technique of dream incubation. They take a journey through the ancient worlds of Greece and Egypt to look at how the Asclepion dream temples which spread throughout the Mediterranean for hundreds of years became the prototype hospitals of today. As Laura says they were a mashup of modern-day hospi...

*Trigger Warning - Suicidal thoughts and childhood abuse are briefly referred to in this episode* You've flown, you've travelled, you've had all the sex you can imagine in your lucid dreams. What now? Dr Nigel Hamilton joins us aboard the Dream Boat again, to talk about the experiments he and Robert Waggoner (heard in Season 1, Episode 1) have been asking lucid dreamers to do in their sleep.  Star...

Let the dream roll begin! Dave and Laura welcome UK based shaman Evelyn McDonald on board the Dream Boat with her drum, rattle and incense, and drift off into the shamanic dream space.  Eve talks about her work as a medicine woman, an ancient spiritual healing practice at the heart of many indigenous cultures since the beginning of time. She had the gift as a child growing up in Grenada and was fi...

Waking in a cold sweat, waking yourself up as you cry out in fear to find yourself in your own bed but still filled with feelings of horror or dread from a disturbing dream – we've all had nightmares, and for people who experience them frequently, they can be disruptive and distressing. Enter Prof Michael Schredl of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who has been spent 30...

Fire, floods, sex and death. Flying and falling. Coming apart and putting the pieces back together to be more of yourself than you ever were before. Finding the gold within. Welcome to your dreams of personal transformation, and the symbolic system that can guide you through them: Alchemy. If you've heard of it, it might be from Harry Potter or maybe as the mystical antecedent to modern chemistry....

Did you see this one coming? It's the first episode of our second season, and Dave and Laura welcome on board acclaimed channel, psychic medium, and writer Natalie Miles, author of  You Are Intuitive. Trust Your Truth. Take Back Your Power and host of popular podcasts So You Think You're Intuitive and Things That Die . She is also Laura's daughter! Natalie talks about her experience of psychic, pr...

It's the final episode of the first series! But don't worry, we'll be back in 2 weeks. In this episode, Laura and Dave look back on the journey so far and answer the questions you have sent in. Questions like: Can you work with dream fragments if you can't remember big narrative dreams? And how can you improve recall? Why do dream workers ask the dreamer how they felt after they woke up? Why do I...

Dave and Laura invite their old teacher Dr Nigel Hamilton back on board to talk about his Waking Dream Process, a therapeutic method for re-imagining a dream and revisiting it as a visualisation. It is used to expand, deepen and embody the experience of the dream and get to its essence.  Nigel is a highly experienced therapist, teacher, researcher and one of the world's leading pioneers in dream i...

Series 1, Episode 8: Dream Lab! The Rat Daughter and Sleeping in the Sea   It's straight into the dream material in this episode! We've heard from many of you that you enjoy our "Dream of the Week" segment in each episode, when we talk about a dream that someone has sent in. This week, we are giving more time to the dreams, as Dave and Laura invite two dreamers aboard the Dream Boat to share a dre...

Why do we dream? It's one of the biggest questions about dreaming. One theory is that dream sharing is essential to the social development of our species because it helps create empathy. In this episode, Laura and Dave talk to Professors Mark Blagrove and Julia Lockheart about their new book, The Science and Art of Dreaming , in which they share the development of their theory of dream sharing and...

Are dreams and the sleep state random? Are dreams just brain junk or does a deeper wisdom lie in the unconscious world of dreams? The notion of the Eureka function!   In this episode Dave and Laura look at famous dreams which have shaped our lives or changed the course of the world. This is the notion of the dream state as inspiration and how creativity in our dream life can make exciting and uniq...

The questions we most often get asked usually come down to "What does it mean if I dream about ____?" We all want to know more about what our dreams are saying to us and how to interpret them, and people have been compiling manuals on dream symbolism since the advent of the written word. Even today there are hundreds of books on the subject online. But should we be attached to specific meanings? D...

Take a flight through dreams from the dawn of recorded history to the present day!  Dave and Laura guide you from ancient Sumer, India, China and Tibet, touch on African, Arabic, Jewish, and Christian traditions via Egypt, Greece and Rome, finally bringing you up to the modern day via Descartes, Freud and Jung. It turns out that dream sharing and interpretation have been an intrinsic part of being...

Dave and Laura enter the strange and frightening world of night terrors as they are joined by Dr Alice Vernon, Lecturer in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, who has written the acclaimed book, Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It . During the interview she outlines her own history of troubled sleep since childhood and how she has explored this through academic r...