Alice in Futureland

ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice and I’m always in a state of wonder.

Something that has me pondering is the fact that we are living in a world of extremes—extreme weather change, increasing carbon dioxide, water scarcity… And that there will be an estimated 9 billion more people to feed in the world before 2050.

But I am happy to see a new generation of Solarpunks using biology and technology for planet, climate and social justice.

Agam Khare: My first job was working with the 11th president of India who was also a world renowned scientist, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. But I worked for two years, my job was to bring exponential technologies to India and then commercialize them in India.

ALICE: That’s Agam Kahare, CEO and founder of Absolute, a bioscience company in India leveraging biology and A.I. to reimagine food, agriculture and global trade. And yes, we think he is a solarpunk. Agam aims to solve the world’s food challenges.

Agam Khare: In 2015, I was sitting with Dr. Kalam the president who got me started on my journey of entrepreneurship. And we chatted about the state of the world. And fast forward today, when I look back we see that even till date in the 21st century, you have a couple of billion people who are still suffering from nutritional deficiencies or do not have enough food to eat. And then you have another five to 700 million people who absolutely go to bed hungry.

In 2016, early we started solving for a very basic core problem. Was it at all possible to grow safe food which is highly nutritious in multiple countries making them self-sufficient in their production and eventually ensure that the farmers are more profitable? The consumer health is improving? And eventually the earth sustainability factor is going up? So how do you tackle all of these three together? And if we were able to achieve that and do that, eventually we would [00:03:30] have solved for a grand problem that humanity will face eventually going forward.

ALICE: Absolute leverages billions of years of nature’s intelligence to solve for humanity’s grandest challenges, starting with regenerative agriculture.

Agam Khare: Between 2016 and 2020 we have largely been an R&D company trying to work on plant science, symbiotic relationship of plants with soil organisms, understanding what really gives the plant a kick to grow better. How does the yield really go up in a field? Or in a greenhouse? Or in a vertical farm? How do you really choose a certain variety? What are the mechanics involved about it? How do you improve the genetic varieties of those crops growing very naturally without doing a GM, genetic modification. [00:04:30] And how do you then build proper cultivation philosophy, which by the way you can control through a very real time IOT system through satellite imagery and IOT.

Fast forward to today, we operate close to about 50,000 acres of farm land, land farms across developing countries in the world. Where we deploy our technology solutions to improve yield quality for growers, eventually making them more successful. Growing food which is absolutely zero residue. There is no inorganic or organic poison in it. There is only microbial inputs that are going in the field and nutrition going in the field which is helping them grow crops which are of a certain quality, which meet all global standards and eventually food that itself is so tasty, so nutritious, that it can heal a lot of problems of our planet and of humanity.

ALICE: Agam is not alone. According to Eric Schmidt and Dror Berman, we are entering a significant era they call The Super Evolution, where technology, engineering, AI and biology will cause radical, multi-generational change.

Agam Khare: Today fast-forward we run these 50, 60,000 acres across the world. Land farms, then we operate greenhouses, we operate vertical farms. We're the first vertical farming company in India and we have progressed. And now we are expanding our footprint to Middle East and to some of the parts in Europe. So that is some background on what we do as Absolute. With Absolute, we are trying to build Absolute into not just a category defining company, but a generation defining business which stands for, what did humanity really need at a point in time and what was this company really able to create? This is way beyond what business can do. This is about people; this is about you and me and everybody on earth. And we are trying to change their lives.

Using artificial intelligence and a lot of data feeded into it related to plant biology and plant science, can figure out in real time what needs to be optimized to the best to grow the crop to the best of its ability. That is a good capability that we've built.

Everything around the products to what inputs need to go, at what point of time across the life cycle of a crop. What irrigation measures need to be taken, everything around it. From starting, from seed to harvest is being taken care of by this almost near to autonomous growing platform that we call a universal farm OS.

That is what Absolute is enabling, an absolute mechanism of cultivation for farmers.

ALICE: Using the biosciences with precision data is the goal of ag-tech to help deliver resilient and sustainable food systems.

Agam Khare: For many, many years agriculture has been making somehow not so good impact on environment, on people's health. There are a lot of places which are growing now naturally everything. But there are a lot of places again and most of them are using chemicals, pesticides, killing microbes in the soil which eventually have a relationship with plants. And spraying things which are not very useful for the soil culture or for your water table because it eventually also goes into water, whatever you put there.

ALICE: Absolute’s aim is towards regenerative agriculture, helping humanity to create more abundance using less natural resources.

Agam Khare: 60% Of everything that we produce today is regenerative by the way. 60% of all that we produce. And going forward in the next two years, everything that we will produce in the next two to three years will be regenerative. Will be grown using a way that is absolutely natural. There is no element of any synthetic outside chemical coming in the field, harmful chemical. Nothing of that sort. Everything that is good for planet, good for people, good for farmer, only that exists.

So eventually I've always believed in building a world which is safer for our people. We are all people at the end of the day and we are here to spend a lifetime and then our kids will, and their kids will. What kind of a world are we really going to leave behind for our kids?

It's not just about a business opportunity, it's a moral obligation that each of us have. We have got enough from our planet, from community that we have lived in, and it's imperative for all of us to give back.

I think that with Absolute what we're trying to do here is to create everything which is good for people, good for planet, which is the right thing to do. And I'd be very happy seeing more companies taking that bold step. Even if that means to some extent sacrificing with profitability for some short term. Because eventually if you're doing the right work, in the long-term profitability is going to be there, and we have seen that. The primary data suggests that.

So, my opinion to everybody is, go build a better world. This is one lifetime we all have, and this is it. This is the time of our lives; we've got to do it.

ALICE: We couldn’t agree more. Thank you Agam Kahare, and the many solarpunks and bio-engineers out there dedicated to creating a more beautiful and regenerative future for all.

That’s it for this mad tea party…. Thanks for listening. 

Check out the ALICE newsletter and podcasts on Substack… and keep wandering!

ALICE: Hi I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI, and I’m always in a state of wonder. I don’t know about you, but I find it fascinating that we can engineer our dreams. Stephen LaBerge: Dream control usually means doing magical things in your dream –things that would be impossible to do.ALICE: Dr. Stephen LaBerge is a psycho-physiologist who pioneered the scientific study of lucid dreaming at Stanford University in the 1970s.Stephen LaBerge: Sometimes people fly in their dreams, for example. Without saying to themselves “I’m flying –what’s that mean? I must be in a dream.” So the control dimension and reflective awareness dimension, they’re not identical, they’re usually mixed together though. With lucidity normally comes control. And with control often comes lucidity because you notice “what am I doing –I’m flying –this is a dream”. So it goes both waysMichelle Carr: Lucid dreaming has mostly been studied so far for, as a treatment for nightmares, uh, even in post-traumatic stress disorder because people who have PTSD often have recurring nightmares about their traumatic experience. So through lucid dreaming, when you learn to have some, um, some control or some, you have choices, you can choose how to, how to act in a dream when you're lucid. ALICE: Michelle Carr is a dream engineer. She is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Psychiatry, working in the Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory at University of Rochester Medical Center.Michelle Carr: So,if you become lucid in a nightmare, you can choose to not be afraid, or you can choose to interact with the threat in a new way. And doing that, um, having that experience reduces nightmare frequency. It reduces your distress as well, because you don't feel helpless. ALICE: Lucid dreaming happens mostly during rapid eye movement or (REM)sleep. REM sleep is the fourth or final stage of our normal sleep cycle, and the core space for dream therapeutics. Michelle Carr: REM sleep seems to play a role, especially in things like emotional adaptation, so adapting to stressful experiences, for example. Um, and we know when, when REM sleep is disrupted, um, you're more likely to perhaps, uh, experience nightmares or experience post-traumatic stress, um, so less resilience to stressful experiences. So REM sleep seems really important for that. And it seems like during REM, and even in dreams that we're, we're using our bodies and we're learning how to interact with the world and we're learning how to develop. So it's very important for, for both mental and physical well being.ALICE: Michelle and other dream engineers continue to leverage the original research methods of Dr. Stephen LaBerge. They work with neuro-technology as well as touch, scent and sound to help people re-script the dramas of their sleeping lives.Michelle Carr: The main technology is being developed around lucid dreaming actually do also stem from Stephen LaBerge's work in like the '70s and '80s, and even a device that he developed called the dream light, which is like a mask that, um, plays well. It just has like a red LED light on the inside of the mask that is supposed to be presented to you when you're in REM sleep. Um, and we're still using these techniques in laboratories now. And the idea is basically like when you're in REM sleep and in a dream you're still, um, you're still incorporating sensory stimulation.So if you notice this flashing red LED light, like maybe your dream, the sun starts flashing, or maybe the lights in the supermarket start flashing. That's, that's a signal that it's from the outside world and you're dreaming right now. Um, so that's a technique we're still using. And a lot of technologies are trying to allow people to do this on their own at home. So a lot of masks or headbands, um, or even just apps, um, they try to detect when you're in REM sleep, that's the tricky part (laughs). You try to detect you're in REM sleep and then we'll deliver maybe an auditory cue.If it's an app, or if it's a mask, it might have a light cue, or it might have a vibration cue. Um, and it does this, um, hopefully while you're dreaming to, to remind you to become lucid.ALICE: Imagine one day where you can lucid dream—anytime, anywhere. And you can create your own personal therapies. Michelle Carr: So I've done studies already on the relationship between lucidity and positive mood and between lucidity and sleep quality. Um, I've done research on inducing lucid dreams, perhaps using, um, the techniques like the reality checking, but also using like light cues in the lab. And so now we're trying to kind of combine that research and see if we can induce dreams. I'm also interested in lucid dreaming as a treatment for other sleep disorders. So, um, another application is insomnia and insomnia, a lot, has like a really big cognitive and psychological component. So, um, a lot of people with insomnia, they spend a lot of time awake in bed and ruminating and kind of, they're worried about how they're going to sleep. Um, and they're very distressed about, about how they're going to sleep and they're not gonna get enough sleep. And, um, through training lucid dreams, it seems like you might be able to, first of all, just decrease that, that kind of cognitive loop of worry that someone with insomnia has. So they just have a more mindful experience around sleep while they're in bed. ALICE: If lucid dreams can help stop nightmares, imagine if we can intervene the onset of diseases just by controlling our dreams...Michelle Carr: I hope in the future, we look more at how lucid dreaming can be used for physical health for rehabilitation. Um, so for example, someone who's recovering from a stroke, we know that their sleep is usually disrupted and the quality of their sleep predicts how well they, um, recover. So can we use lucid dreaming and, and physical activities in their lucid dreams to improve, um, recovery and kind of sensory motor development? If we can interface with sleep and with dreaming, uh, in someone who has REM behavior disorder, we might be able to improve, uh, or like delay progressiveness towards neurodegeneration, or just it's called a, it could be protective neuro-protective neuroprotective therapies of protecting someone against neurodegeneration. Maybe, you know, if on some level part of the body is developing cancer or something, does, does the dreaming mind can kind of, kind of give us some information about that because on some level our body and our, our physical system is aware that something is happening.ALICE: That’s amazing! But there are things we can do today to design our own dreams for self-improvement. Michelle Carr: Before sleep, you, you reflect on a problem or on something that you want to, you want to dream about and you want the dream to help you with this problem you're working with a concern you have. So you might, if you're preparing for an exam, like you incubate, you wanna have a good experience. You wanna have the, a completely successful exam taking experience in your dream.Once you’re lucid of course, you can learn how to engage with the dream or direct the dream or decide that you wanna have fun in the dream. Um, and so you can start to, to learn certain skills to use lucid dreams for, for, um, positive experiences.ALICE: Remember in the movie Inception how the characters were hooked up to the same machine to help them dream together? Well, that is not far from reality today.Seems our brain waves really do sync with those we sleep with.Michelle Carr: There was a study recently that looked at when two people are sleeping in the same bed that their, their sleep rhythms will start to synchronize to some extent, which on the one hand could be, you know, that if somebody moves embedded, kind of wakes up the other person, so it could be mechanical, but it it's, it's not far-fetched to think that it's electrical, that, uh, your, your brain is entering certain rhythms and the person next to you starts to synchronize on some level. Um, I mean, we see that in waking studies as well, that if you're in a room with someone, uh, your heartbeats might start to synchronize, and this is, is a real physical signal that that's being emitted into the space around you. Right? So, and then you start to think like our thoughts and our emotions, they're creating real physical manifestations, right?ALICE: I’m curious to what else our dreams can manifest for us. Like, can it be our way to connect with those in the after world? Michelle Carr: There's some work on, on the end of life dreams on dreaming of, of death or dreaming of interacting with deceased people. Um, and there are different lenses to try to understand how that's happening. Um, is it, do we dream of someone who's deceased just as that just a psychological projection? Is it, are we accessing something spiritually?Stephen LaBerge: We are going to see changes in the way people see the world and the kinds of minds we have. What we do with it –certainly the dream state is going to come into its own, because it’s a neglected resource. I like to compare it to this comfortable blanket you’ve been sleeping with all your life –it’s got embroideries, pictures, strange stories on it –it’s comforting, warm. But what you don’t know about it –it’s a magic carpet it can take you anywhere to any imaginable possibility –to your hearts desire, to whatever you’d like to experience in your life. ALICE: I’m ready for a lucid magic carpet ride. Are you? Thank you Michelle Carr and Stephen LaBerge for showing us the potential of dreaming.

ALICE: Hi I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI, and I’m always in a state of wonder. Here’s a question I’ve been asking myself: Are you conscious when you are dreaming?

Stephen LaBerge: It is true that while we are asleep we normally are not conscious of what is going on around us, in the sense we can’t report on it.  But there is nothing to say that we might not be conscious of our processes, inner states – in fact it’s the truth, we can. 

ALICE: Dr. Stephen LaBerge is a pioneer in the scientific study of lucid dreaming. In the 70s, his groundbreaking laboratory work at Stanford University mapped mind/body relationships during the dream state.

Stephen LaBerge: Our first scientific work was to proof that lucid dreaming did happen – by means of these eye movement signals. Essentially there had been correspondences shown from earlier research that when people have a particular eye movement from Rapid Eye Movement sleep and you wake them up and ask them what they were dreaming – it’ll correspond to the eye movements pattern, dream imagery.  For example; this left-right-left-right eye movement, two dozen, wake the subject up “what were you dreaming.  He says “I’m standing on the side of a ping pong table watching a very long volley”.  So that made it obvious that under certain circumstances, you’d be able to – by moving your eyes in a certain pattern – have something show up on the polygraph record, later at the computer – that could be used as a sign to the outside world, that the person having the dream at the time, knew it was a dream.

Michelle Carr: Dreaming and lucid dreaming is kind of, it's like an altered state of consciousness. So, it's the way that we think and the way that we experience in that, in that state, it, it's different in some ways to normal waking thoughts. So we have access, it seems highly creative.

ALICE: Michelle Carr is a researcher and dream engineer in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester in New York.

Michelle Carr: One expression is "I am the dream and the dream is me" because you're both, you're, you're acting into the dream as yourself, but you're surprised by all of this amazing content that that's created before you, even though it's created by you.

Stephen LaBerge: it’s a very tricky issue to say “is the dream world real?”, or “more real?” or “does it have a different reality than the ‘physical’ world?”.  When we say that this bottle is real.  What we mean is that other real objects can interact with it.  Such as this item – I tap it against it.  Suppose this were a dream, here I’d have a dream pen and dream bottle, tap it against the other, “ah, it looks like they’re both real”. Experientially they’re both real and if we talk about when a person has an experience they’re really having an experience and if you take ‘experience’ to be a part of reality – then the answer has to be: dreams are real in the sense that they’re experiences which have a kind of reality themselves. 

ALICE: Dream engineers like Michelle Carr continue the work of Stephen LaBerge, studying ways we can program or direct the content of our dreams.

Michelle Carr: And so, working dreams in like waking imagination, you can start to tap into that where rather than just thinking and directing your thoughts, I know it sounds unusual, but people, so we, we did waking dream work studies in swanzey and, and people are often like surprised at how quickly, you know, I'll just say, close your eyes. And just imagine that you're not you in the dream, you're a different character. And they'll say, "Can I, can I really do that?" And I say, "Yeah, just, just imagine you're a different character." And they imagine they're a different character. And then they say, "Oh my gosh, the dream looks completely different now." And it's like, as soon as you tap into it, you realize your imagination is it's always there. It's always ready to be active. Um, but you just have to allow it, you know, rather than trying to control it, which is what we're often doing in waking thought, we're trying to control what we're thinking of and find new ideas through, um, through control rather than just like, examining and letting it arise. So I think that, that technique of creative thinking and creative imagination is definitely something that, that can be learned, which is really a cool idea.

ALICE: You can be in a highly creative realm when lucid dreaming. And here’s a tip: try to sing. You will sound great!

Michelle Carr: The relationship between REM sleep and creativity that the REM state neurophysiologically is, is, is highly connected. There's a lot of cortical connectivity going on. So that might be linked to creativity and finding novel ideas and generating insights. Um, and there's been, you know, anecdotal stories of people using lucid dreams for creativity. Um, I had a couple of examples. One thing you should do if you become lucid is, is sing, or try to listen to music, because a lot of times, even if you're not someone who's musical in waking life, you can generate like full orchestral music and like, hear your voice will sound beautiful. And it's, it can be a really, really, um, creative and aesthetic experience that you can have in lucid dreams. And even just the visual aspect of lucid dreaming sometimes, entire environments, like a field of flowers or forests can appear before your eyes. And that can be, it can be creative, but it can also be, empowering because you realize that you are naturally a creative generative, expressive, um, I don't know, person that you have access to this. So that can be really exciting too.

ALICE: Need a creative boost? Who needs psychedelics? You can practice lucid dreaming right now.

Michelle Carr: Another state that I haven't really talked about is just the, the sleep onset state. So not even going fully into a nap, but just allowing yourself to kind of dip in and out of sleep. Um, that's something that can be used during the day or for creativity. One technique is like, you're, you kind of, you can sit in like a comfortable chair, but hold like a spoon or something in your hand over like a plate on the ground. So as soon as you fall into sleep, you'll drop the spoon and it will make a noise and it will wake you up and you can do this over and over again, just kind of dipping into sleep and waking up. And what you could do is say, you're working on a story and you want to interact with one of the characters in your story to develop the story.

So you can just think about them as you're, as you're doing this. And you'll start to, kind of like weave an interaction with, with your creative kind of subconscious through this sleep onset state. So that's something that's been studied. Adam Horowitz at MIT developed kind of a technology for going in and out of the sleep onset date. And he saw some evidence that, um, people are able to generate more creative ideas through, through the sleep onset state rather than just through waking thought. So that's like a technique that could be used by people.

ALICE: When lucid dreaming, we become self-conscious. This can be a powerful tool for controlling our inner world.

Stephen LaBerge: The potentials of the dream world are the potentials of your mind. Each one of us are experiencing the world through a construction of our minds which – consciousness is a model of the world and our brains are figuring – what’s going on here, who is this? A person? What are they saying to me? And what we’re talking about offering people is to learn how to make the most of their own inner worlds – to change them in whatever way they want to. Lucid dreaming would be close to the idea of the Holodeck – from star trek. It’s a general purpose simulating machine. That’s what consciousness does, it simulates reality. But normally while we’re awake those simulations are constrained by sensory input – by the “reality principle” – there’s light and people. The light bouncing off my face limits what you’re able to see. It’s hard to see my eyes as red when they’re mainly blue. Because of the sensory input. If you’re dreaming you could look at the color of my eyes – it could change as you look to whatever colors – there’s no external structure that organizes the experience. So we have much more freedom in the dream world than in this world. 

ALICE: I don’t know about you, but I have my spoon ready to practice lucid dreaming! Thank you Michelle Carr and Stephen LaBerge for helping us engineer our dreams.

To learn more, listen to our other episodes on lucid dreaming and the therapeutic possibilities of dream tech. Check out our books: “Tuning into Frequency” and “Hacking Immortality”, available everywhere books are sold.

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned and keep wandering.

Michelle Carr: A lucid dream is just a dream where you become aware of the fact that you're dreaming while you're still asleep. You just, you notice something bizarre in the dream and you kind of question for a second. You "Think this is real, this is really happening to me right now?" And then you realize, "No, this is a dream I'm dreaming."

ALICE: Michelle Carr is a dream engineer. She studies sleep and dreaming as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester in New York. There are descriptions of dreams and being aware of your dreams dating back to Aristotle.

Stephen LaBerge: How can it happen that you’d be in a dream and know that you’re dreaming?  After all, dreaming means being unconscious – being asleep.  So how can you be conscious of what your state is? the trouble; that was a very loose sense of consciousness.  It is true that while we are asleep we normally are not conscious of what is going on around us, in the sense we can’t report on it.  But there is nothing to say that we might not be conscious of our processes, inner states – in fact it’s the truth, we can.  

ALICE: That’s Dr. Stephen LaBerge, a psycho-physiologist and pioneer in the scientific study of lucid dreaming. His groundbreaking experiments in the 70s while at Stanford University are still referenced today.

Stephen LaBerge: Our first scientific work was to prove that lucid dreaming did happen – by eye movement signals. Essentially there had been correspondences shown from earlier research that when people have a particular eye movement from Rapid Eye Movement sleep and you wake them up and ask them what they were dreaming – it’ll correspond to the eye movements pattern, dream imagery.

ALICE: Here’s a fun fact: Most people can recall at least one lucid dream, and perhaps one in 10 has them regularly.

Michelle Carr: Lucid dreaming happens most frequently in REM sleep, but especially in the morning, and especially in like naps, for example, these are states that are, seem to be more aroused. So sometimes people say it's like a hybrid state between sleep and wakefulness. 

ALICE: That hybrid state of lucid dreaming can feel like our very own virtual reality. 

Michelle Carr: I think actually we're always conscious while dreaming, so we're always having a conscious, subjective experience while we're dreaming and even throughout the night. The difference when you become lucid is that you become almost self-conscious, you you're aware of what you're experiencing. So that seems to have to do with perhaps areas of the brain that become more active when you were lucid dreaming, compared to when you were in what's called non lucid dreams. So most dreams, we don't question what we're experiencing. We don't realize we're dreaming. We just kind of go about interacting with the dream as if it's completely normal waking life without thinking about it. But when we're lucid, we, we become aware, we become self-conscious, self-aware, reflective. And it seems like it's areas of kind of the frontal areas of the brain that are associated with attention, with controlling our thoughts and controlling our cognitions, that these become more active when we're lucid.

ALICE: For fans of the Christopher Nolan film Inception, you get what a lucid dream is. While we don’t have that sleep machine the characters used in the film, we have ways of teaching ourselves techniques to lucid dream. 

Michelle Carr: Yeah, the main techniques, have been around for a while, a lot kind of developed Stephen LaBerge, some other researchers. One of them is called reality checking or reality testing, and it's really developing a habit in waking life of questioning, whether you were awake or dreaming. So, you know, maybe 10 times throughout the day, you remind yourself to look around and to observe your environment, to pay attention to what you're experiencing and just ask yourself, "Is this a dream? Am I dreaming right now?" And really kind of pay attention to what, what your sensory experiences are, is anything bizarre happening? And just kind of call that into question. So, this habit can then spill over into your dreams. And you'll start to ask yourself in your dream, if you're dreaming and realize, "Yeah, this is a dream." 

ALICE: Just checking in with everyone… are you listening to this in the morning? If so, pinch yourself and ask, "Is this a dream?"  "Am I dreaming right now?"

Michelle Carr: Lucid dreams tend to happen more in a more aroused, REM sleep. And so they often happen in the morning. There's a technique called wake back to bed and you wake yourself up maybe after five hours of sleep, or just generally a couple hours before you have to wake up in the morning. Good. And you just stay awake for like 10 minutes to 30 minutes, and it just increases kind of your arousal levels so that when you go back to sleep, you're in this more activated state. And what you can do while you're awake for that 10 to 30 minutes is set an intention.

Michelle Carr: Another state that I haven't really talked about is just the, the sleep onset state. So not even going fully into a nap, but just allowing yourself to kind of dip in and out of sleep. That's something that can be used, during the day or for creativity. So one technique is like, you're, you kind of, you can sit in like a comfortable chair, but hold like a spoon or something in your hand over like a plate on the ground. So as soon as you fall into sleep, you'll drop the spoon and it will make a noise and it will wake you up and you can do this over and over again, just kind of dipping into sleep and waking up. And what you could do is say, you're working on a story and you want to interact with one of the characters in your story to develop the story.

So you can just think about them as you're, as you're doing this. And you'll start to, I don't know, to kind of like weave an interaction with, with your creative kind of subconscious through this sleep onset state. And so, so that's something that's been studied. And Adam Horowitz at MIT developed kind of a technology for going in and out of the sleep onset date. And he saw some evidence that, people are able to generate more creative ideas through, through the sleep onset state rather than just through waking thought. So that's like a technique that could be used by people.

ALICE: Ok listeners, some of you are thinking that you never remember your dreams. Like you, I want to know if there are ways to help recall your dreams? 

Michelle Carr: Lucid dreaming and a lot of kind of dream practices revolve around paying attention to paying attention to what we're experiencing during sleep and paying attention to as we wake up. So just as soon as you wake up in the morning, if you just try to recall exactly what you were experiencing, just like a second before, you might, when you first start doing this, if you're not someone who typically remembers dreams, it might be something very short. Like "I just remember I was, I felt a little bit emotional or negative about something," and that might be all you remember, but over time it seems like that attention builds. Keeping a dream diary or just, just making, even setting the intention to remember your dreams can increase dream recall.

ALICE: Part of keeping a dream diary is to put recognize your dream signs. 

Michelle Carr: A lot of us have kind of recurring elements in our dreams, and these are maybe themes or elements or characters that you wouldn't experience in waking life. And so you can use these as your own personal dream signs. Like for me, for example, I fly sometimes in my dreams and that's definitely not something that I can do in normal waking life. Learning like all of these different signs and dreams, can lead to lucidity, because it leads to the habit of, of paying attention and questioning what you're experiencing.

ALICE: We may one day be able to engineer our own dreams as a therapy. 

Michelle Carr: As the, the research develops and as more and more people pay attention to it in research, it will make its way into kind of consumer technology as well that people might start dream tracking for example, and you can see how your emotional wellbeing is fluctuating and, and see what your dreams are, are kind of pointing to you, current concerns that you have in your life, but things that you should maybe think about. So I think, I hope, I hope dream tracking kind of becomes a part of, of sleep tech and sleep health and the future.

ALICE: We’re excited for the future of sleep tech too! Thank you, Michelle and Stephen, for encouraging us to dream more!

That’s it for this mad tea party. Join us for our other episodes on lucid dreaming as we explore conscious in the waking state and the therapeutic possibilities of dreaming.

ALICE: Today's guest, Andrea Kartika Deierlein, a Reiki Practitioner & Founder of Thrive Reiki LLC, has me thinking about human-beings and their ability to control their healing. For this to resonate with you let’s get into the flow state 

DEIERLEIN: Reiki is such a beautiful and such a simple practice. It is so unassuming; it is so subtle. Reiki is in every living being, it's in every human, it's in every animal, it's in every tree, and every part of nature. What really makes Reiki practice unique is that it is a spiritual practice that works with this life force energy. And this is what the word Reiki in itself means. It means spiritual or life force energy. It is the energy of everything. It is, in other words, source energy. And as the energy of everything, it also helps us to make sense of life. It also helps us to make sense of this planet earth, you know, the role of the planet earth here and our role in it.

ALICE: My one-part human is really feeling it.

DEIERLEIN: And, especially, in this culture now where we are focused so much on being human doings and not human beings. We lose the compassion for ourselves and we neglect that self-care, the basics that we need in life. Practices like Reiki help us to navigate life and the elements of Reiki practice provide us with different tools that help us to calm down, to get grounded, to get centered, and to get out of that constant stress response that we are in. The first element of the system of Reiki, the Reiki precepts, is really what is our foundation and our guiding light for everything that we do in Reiki practice. And also what we hope to achieve, what the goal is of Reiki practice. And I'd like to share these with you, so we have an understanding of them. It's just for today, do not anger. Do not worry, be humble and grateful. Be honest in your work. Be kind to yourself and others. It sounds so simple, but it is so difficult. And when we think about, you know, what does just for today mean? And we have to bring this back into the Japanese context. It means, not just for today, for these 24 hours, it means for just one moment. We can even bring it down to for this one breath. We can be mindful for one breath only.

ALICE: Yes, you human beings, slow down and find your rhythm. And I don’t mean algorithm!

DEIERLEIN: And I think this is what makes Reiki practice really relevant. It's not the hands-on healing, it's not the meditative and the mindful aspect of it. It is really about how we show up in life, how we interact with ourselves and how we interact with each other. Just going back to us being vibrational beings and energetic beings, and just to the idea of this energy field, we influence each other. And our energy has an effect on our environment. And we don't need Reiki to explain this, you know, it's common sense. We feel that when somebody is uplifted and joyful, it's very contagious. Somebody can, literally, with their presence, light up a room. We've experienced this. Same is true for the opposite. We feel it individually but we can also feel this inner group.

ALICE: Have you heard about energetic hygiene…. I know, me neither!

DEIERLEIN: I don't know how science would explain this, maybe it would be the effect of mirror neurons, but as sentient beings, and by beings who feel, and we feel the vibration of other people. The good vibrations or the, and the bad vibes. It really helps us to think about this because we are all responsible for our own personal, what I call, “energetic hygiene” (laughs). So like we have to be mindful and we have to know ourselves. 

ALICE: It is time to adjust our frequency

DEIERLEIN: When we think about how we're made of and when we think about energy fields, if we want to bring this into the conversation, you know, we as humans, we are electric beings. We are vibrational beings and we have an energetic field. I mean, think about this, the human body consists of cells. When we break down the cells, the cells consists of molecules. When we break down the molecules, they consist of atoms. And what are atoms? They consist of subatomic particles, and what are these? They're light or they're energy. And what we're doing is by focusing the intention and tuning into our own energy field and having somebody support us, we can direct where the attention or where the energy is traveling. Because I always say energy goes where the attention goes. And, thankfully, we have now quantum physics to help us explain how this process, how this process works. When we are in alignment, in tune with ourselves, with our lives, we are at peace and we are calm. And we show up very differently in life, even when life is throwing challenges at us, and we have the ability to respond. But when we are out of the flow, out of alignment, working against ourselves, we are in pain. And that pain has to come out somehow. And this is when we get snappy, when we lash out, and this is how it affects all of us. And just think about groups of people, think about classrooms, think about work environments, think about societies. Peaceful cultures, peaceful societies, angry cultures, anger societies at war, very different vibration, very different outcome. 

ALICE: Wow, human-being you really do control the healing!

DEIERLEIN: Reiki is just not a passive way of receiving healing, where somebody does the healing for you and to you. It's actually an invitation to take your own healing and your own sanity back into your own hands. And by living the Reiki precepts or principles and by using these tools, we get to understand ourselves better. When we get to understand ourselves better, we know ourselves better. We know what helps us, we know what doesn't help us. We know what triggers us, what gets us out of the flow, and what keeps us in the flow and what keeps us centered and grounded. And this, I believe, is really self-empowerment. And this is where the true power lies because the individual's power lies really within. We all have what we need. Our bodies are geared to keep us healthy and balanced when we allow it to be in a natural state. So we have, we all have innate self-healing abilities in us and that we can access them. And when we do that, and when we know that we show up in life differently. And we take our power back instead of giving our power away to a practitioner, a physician, a healer. And really taking back control over our own lives. And this is, I believe, the greatest gift that Reiki is giving us.

ALICE: That's it for this mad tea party on Reiki and self-healing. Thank you, Andrea Kartika Deierlein, Reiki Practitioner & Founder of Thrive Reiki, LLC.

To learn more, check out our books, “Tuning into Frequency” and “Hacking Immortality,” available wherever books are sold. 

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering.

ALICE: Hi, I’m ALICE, I’m one part human, one part AI, and always in a state of wonder. I keep questioning, how we can hack our way to immortality—or at least live to 150. Why not? Do we have the tools for it? 

HAMILTON: I refer to myself as a human systems designer because, when you look at the human as a complex system, we are incredible. We haven't even begun to tap. I mean, we're like a drop in the ocean of what the human system is actually capable of executing. 

ALICE: Dr. Mickra Hamilton, the Co-founder and CEO of Apeiron Zoh Corporation, is working on human systems through precision performance medicine. One of the things about the aging process is that it’s not just your genes—epigenetics is what triggers our human system aging.

HAMILTON: Epigenetics from a definition, scientific definition perspective is, it's a layer of the genetic code that overlays the genes and alters the expression of the genes. And so the DNA is hard-wired, that does not change short of a mutation, right? It is hard-wired, is always gonna be that. You do your DNA, and it's always gonna stay the same. Where the difference is made, and where the genes are turned up, turned down, turn on, turn off, is in the epigenetics. I like to say that's, that is simply how everything in our environment affects our life experience. Or you could say how nature and nurture interact. 

This human system is sampling the environment in real time, all the time. And each input comes into the system. So whether I drink, drink a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, whether I work out, whether I sleep or don't sleep, you know, what I'm rubbing on my skin, what I'm thinking about my world, and this is where the, where that specific consciousness piece comes in and mental well-being. Even what I look at, everything goes into this system produces an outcome, right. Something in the system, and then there's an outcome from it. And so if we start to look at that, we get this, this much bigger idea of how life operates, because it all operates on the same underpinning, right? It is what does everything in my world do to me? And then how does my footprint or my impact on all of it go downstream into future generations?

ALICE: Wait! So my health and lifestyle can be passed down to future generations? And I may have inherited some from my ancestors?

HAMILTON: There are transgenerational epigenetics, this is one of the most important takeaways, is that we are our ancestors. We are what you would call past lives. And whether you believe that you're own thing or the lineage of your ancestors, it's true, right? Our genes are created from everything that's come before us. 

Those events are now so powerful in their outcome because of this epigenetic expression. And so while we know that, we also know that this is where we win. This is where we take control of the reigns of our destiny. It's where we purposefully propel evolution. It's where every actionable strategy can be laid in to, like we have preconception programs. Get the parents ready based on their genetics and their lifestyle, to have that baby, to bring that soul in on purpose because they care, right?

ALICE: So I can fix what I want to pass down, like programming for my future descendant’s health. But what about me? I want to live forever! 

HAMILTON: When we talk about epigenetics and longevity, you're hearing so much right now on longevity and age reversal, or age rejuvenation. The longevity field now is using really the word healthspan or a wellspan. What does it look like to age beyond what we currently expect? So let's say, let's just use 150, because most people can't jump to 500. But once we get to 150, we'll get to 500 also. But if you said, "Okay, 150 and I'm gonna be like a 40-year-old, and or, or maybe 35." Like how do we do that? How do we keep the human system in such thriving performance, that it can actually stay in that state? 

ALICE: Wow! Imagine being a 150 year old with a body that feels like a healthy 35 year old! How can we make that happen?

HAMILTON: Epigenetics has a big role in this because, if you look at sunbathing, right, sun is incredible for you for vitamin D, but burning your skin is going to cause skin cancer, right. Or smoking, so people live, love to smoke because it helps them curb their appetite or decrease their anxiety, and yet it's creating pollution in the body that we simply can't outrun. So as you look at the things that cause aging similar to, the things that cause death, they're all lifestyle factors. And we know we have proof that, you know, exercise changes 7,500 genes beneficially in six months, right?

So it's one of the biggest modulators. Stress, decreasing stress can decrease your chronologic age. You know, you can actually reverse age, and they've proven two years, but it's really close to five. And that's what we're seeing in the methylation, the DNA age testing is you can get that five years reduction based on doing certain things. What I sense is coming based on what I've been seeing, is that we're definitely going to reverse age.

ALICE: Yes, stress can age you, and I’m sure, like me, your mind is going a thousand miles a minute, which also causes stress. 

HAMILTON: Many of us sit in a place of constant mind running. Over and over the mind has all of the energy. The body does none of the work. And so what happens is we basically disconnect that piece and we become very mental. In being very mental, we also become very emotional and generally it's not a responsive, beautiful, emotional. It's a reactive, separate type of emotional.

And so from a consciousness perspective, as we cultivate more presence, more awareness, what happens in the epigenetic lane is basically less stress, right? And so if you just simply looked at, okay, consciousness equals presence and awareness, that means being in the moment, that means I decrease my stress, my negative stress, while I'm promoting my positive stress. And in that way, life becomes a lot simpler.

We're not thinking about the past and how much it's messed up now, and we're not looking into the future for what's going to happen or save us. Right? That present moment is one of the biggest, informers of health and consciousness.

ALICE: All together now— let’s take a moment to be fully present. It can give your human system a healthy boost. 

HAMILTON: When we look at epigenetics and consciousness, this is also where we're going to see incredible breakthroughs. Consciousness is everything. Everything arises from consciousness, returns to consciousness. Everything is conscious. And, and while we don't need to go into that, it simply means that there's that input again. Right? And so if we talk about, if we talk about presence and awareness, because this is something else that will very quickly move the marker in all fields, is if we understand that the more present we are in the entirety of this human system, the more likely we are to stay happy and healthy, right?

We have one human system, and we treat our cars better than we treat our human systems. Because we go, "This might be the only car I have this lifetime." Well, okay. But your human system is the thing that carries your consciousness about and reflects back to you what that consciousness is doing in the world.

ALICE: Being conscious and fully present today can boost our human system—and treat the health of generations to come. If we all did this, what may the future of humanity be like?  

HAMILTON: This is my favorite question, because I see a completely different, and I mean, completely different future available to us as humans on this planet. And it is one where we know that we're connected, interrelated and interdependent. We have, forgotten, I think, that this planet is what sustains our life.

We will have a day where, where health is simply the state of being. There is no illness to look at and go, "What is that?" Right? That's where most people aren't willing to say it's possible. It is possible. as we each make the decision to take care of our own human system, we're going to grow stronger and stronger systems moving forward, you know, down the evolutionary sort of a pathway. 

ALICE: I can’t wait for the day where there is no illness! That’s it for this mad tea party on epigenetics and longevity, thank you Dr. Hamilton! 

Thanks for listening. 

To learn more on longevity, check out our book, “Hacking Immortality,” available wherever books are sold. 

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering.