Get Booked – Theresa Cheung, How To Catch A Dream 140823

Hi, you're listening to Get Booked with me, Hazel Butterfield, for Women's and Men's Radio Station. Welcome to today's show. Now, Get Booked, it's all about opening discussions and offering support via the incredible writing community out there. Come and join us, get involved. And if you want to catch up on previous shows, you can at womensradiostation.com/shows/getbooked and on our SoundCloud. Now today we have a very interesting guest in store for you. We have Theresa Chung, the Dream Decoder, and she's written a book called How to Catch a Dream: 21 Ways to Dream and Live Bigger and Better. Theresa has been researching and writing about sleep, spirituality, dreams, and the paranormal for the past 25 years, no less. She has a degree from King's College Cambridge in theology and English and several international bestselling books, including two Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers to her cred— cred— credit. Um, her Dream Dictionary from A to Z, published by HarperCollins, is regarded as a classic must-read in its field. Her spiritual books have been translated into over 40 languages. She's had numerous features published online and in leading newspapers and magazines and is fast becoming the known celebrity for dream decoding. The subject of sleeping and dreams and what they mean, it's always been incredibly popular, and Theresa is very much the go-to person. You can regularly see her on ITV's This Morning and the BBC, along with a list of many other media appearances. She brings decades of experience to articles and interviews on dream decoding, spirituality, afterlife, astrology, midlife manifesting, ritual Tools, Consciousness Research, and the Supernormal. And she just, she really knows her stuff. I've thoroughly enjoyed working through How to Capture Dreams: 21 Ways to Dream and Live Bigger and Better. I'm also going to be grilling her a little bit about my own dreams as well, because there is so much that I've learned in this book, and I'm just gonna use her knowledge to try and unpack some of the things that I've experienced in my dreams. And, and I I must say, from following the 21 Ways to Dream and Live Bigger and Better, I've been taking quite a bit of what she's had to say, and I have been dreaming so much more vividly, but I've been able to recall it, and my sleep has been better. It's felt more controlled. So I really can't wait to start our interview with Theresa Chung shortly. Coming up in the next few weeks on Get Booked, we are going to be chatting to Dr. Lauren Cook about her book Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World. Um, I'm halfway through this book so far, and I do actually suffer with anxiety and can actually unfortunately get the odd panic attack as well, and I had a really tough time a couple of weeks ago, and I'd just been sent this book, and I started reading it, and the way she speaks to the reader is brilliant. It's absolutely fantastic. I, I can't wait to finish it, and I most definitely can't wait to have Dr. Lauren Cook on the show. We are also going to have a guest co-presenter coming up in the next week or so because I am releasing my own book. It is going to be published on the 18th of August, and I couldn't interview myself, so I needed to acquire another presenter to interview me on my own book on my own show. So to make sure that you do not miss that one, make sure you follow me on Twitter @nuttybutty or on Instagram @nuttybutty10 so that you definitely don't miss that one. And if you want to get hold of the book, the book is called 20 weeks, and it's published in my own name, funnily enough. So just give it a good old Google and please do let me know what you think. Now, as mentioned earlier in the show, we have the Dream Deco Koda, Teresa Chung, chatting to us about How to Catch a Dream: 21 Ways to Dream and Live Bigger and Better. Now, um, this book covers more than giving you a better understanding of your dreams and how to experience them more positively. It serves as a bit of an overhaul of understanding our health and the importance of good sleep and how to achieve it. The better sleep we have and how refreshed we feel the next day can contribute to so many areas of our life. However, the importance of unleashing and developing our creative side to realize our dreams is not only useful, but it's super fun as well. Uh, welcome to the show, Teresa. Thank you for joining us on Get Booked. Oh, and it's a dream to be here. Thank you. Uh, do you know what? There's so much I want to talk to you about, and I'm thinking, where do I even start. Um, but I think the goal in How to Catch a Dream: 21 Ways to Dream and Live Bigger and Better, it talks about how to achieve lucid dreaming. Can you explain to our listeners what lucid dreaming is? Of course. And it kind of builds up to that because I was very conscious with this book not to focus too much on lucid dreaming because lucid dreaming is the holy grail of dreaming. It's when you're in a dream, and you know that you're dreaming. And that happens to us sporadically during our lives, typically most often when we're children. And the reason it happens when we're children is we are willing to suspend our disbelief when we're children more. We're much more accepting of these inexplicable things that happen. So we just go with the flow. When it happens when you're an adult, you— the typical reaction is panic, and then the dream collapses and you wake up, and you miss out on that opportunity to really sort of like do or be anything in the dream state. And I, I can explain why, why that is so important. But I was conscious with this book to not just make it all about lucid dreaming, because some people, however hard they try, it remains elusive, that state. And what I wanted to do by having the 2 weeks prior— because it's a 3-week program— all about actually falling in love with your dreams first. Because in my humble opinion, every single dream, whether it's lucid you know you're dreaming when you're dreaming, or not, in that you're kind of watching like an observer. That's what, you know, non-lucid dreams— it's a bit like watching a movie. Both are extremely valuable for your personal spiritual mental health and well-being. And that's what I wanted to stress in the book. I, I really wanted to kind of take the emphasis off lucid dreaming in a way, although it does build up to that. Because what I'm saying is, once you start falling in love with your dreams, get consistent with recalling them and understanding what they mean, because that's a big block for most people. They have a fantastic dream and they think, oh, I have no idea what it means, and then they dismiss it. Once you start really working with the material of your dreams, what tends to naturally happen is that you, you become lucid spontaneously and naturally, and that's the best way for it to happen. Am I making sense there? I'm just trying to say, yes, it's something to work for, but don't get obsessed about it. If it doesn't happen to you, it doesn't matter. It makes complete sense, to be honest. Since I started this book, my dreams have felt more in tune and controlled and kind of easily rememberable as well, using the techniques that you give in the 3-week program. I haven't done lucid dreaming. I haven't achieved that, but I didn't want to. I don't think I'm quite ready for that, but I've loved understanding and unpacking the whole concept of dreaming and our subconscious and how we can kind of harness the control of it a little bit more and things that we can do when we are conscious outside of dreaming to just not wake up exhausted by what's gone on in our subconscious when we're asleep. Because you should never wake up exhausted from a dream because dreams are really your internal therapist and far cheaper than a real one. They are trying to help and heal you from inside out. But they do it in this very weird, symbolic, artistic, visionary way. And that's where most people stumble, as they say. They have rich dreams, but then they don't understand them, and then they dismiss them. And that breaks my heart, because that's when the magic all begins, is when you start brainstorming all the symbolism behind your dreams. And you've just got to approach each dream as if it was a poem or a work of art, right? We all see work of arts that we don't quite understand but they draw us in. You know, there's classic works of art throughout time that just don't seem to make sense when you look at them, but then you can apply artistic analysis to it and all these layers of meaning come out. Similarly, like a poem— let's give the most famous dream poem of all time, Kubla Khan. What does that mean? And books have been written about it, and people have had personal revelations when they connect with that poem on a personal and spiritual level. And that's what you've got to think of every single dream you have is a work of art, a work of poetry, where you have to go through it symbol by symbol, scene by scene, emotion by emotion, and say, okay, what lies beneath? What is the real meaning of this? Because it's not literal. Most of your dreams are not literal. They have to be interpreted symbolically. You have to think like an artist when you do dream work. And it also shows that all of us have that artistic bent within us. Some of us, you know, in our, in our waking lives, you know, people who are novelists, artists, directors, they really can express their gifts in the waking world. But there are other people who are more logical and rational, and they would say, I'm not artistic, I'm not poetic, or whatever. But you, every one of us has that potential within us because we dream. And I think you've provided some incredible ways to help people help manifest what they want to dream about. I mean, I now, if I want to kind of break something down that's happening with me, whether I'm anxious about something or whether there's something that I want to happen in the future, I've started trying to think about it just as I'm about to fall asleep. And I've really found that quite helpful. Um, and also I really liked reading about the— when you covered the elements of PTSD and how dreams have been used to kind of combat that, because, um, PTSD, it's all about worrying about what's happened in the past and worried about what's happening in the future. And if you can kind of break down your dreams and direct them— the more we run away from things, the more it's going to try and keep on catching up to us. We kind of need to face it head on, and that's what you talk about in the book. And I just, I thoroughly enjoy doing it, so much so. And I love my sleep. I, I struggle to fall asleep. I, and I've actually started waking myself up half an hour earlier than what I have to get up so I can just sit there. Yeah. And, and, and— oh yes, because there's gold there. There is gold there for all of us, for our personal growth, um, and for our spiritual and our psychic development, because I think all of these are entwined in our self-belief. But what you were saying before, there's so much I wanted to, to, to to, to dig deeper on. First of all, use that term manifesting, and dream work actually is the most neglected, um, tool for manifesting. And manifesting is attracting the life that you desire. It's having this belief and believing it so much that you end it on an energetic level, you are somehow able to attract it because we live in an energetic universe. That's the thinking behind manifesting. And dream work actually is very important because The world you go into in your dreams is the world of your mindset, your emotional mindset, your belief set. Now, there will be dark and difficult things in there because there's day and night within all of us, but getting comfortable in that world and understanding it better, and then potentially inputting things in there that you want to happen— what you're doing in the dream state is connecting with your unconscious beliefs. Really knowing them. So there's no point, for example, in your waking life doing all these affirmations saying, 'I'm successful, I'm going to do that,' if deep down on an unconscious level you don't believe it. Because manifesting is making that shift on an unconscious level, and that is where dream work comes in. Because if you can actually start dreaming about being happy and successful and doing the things that you want to do in your waking life in the dream state, you are so close to it happening in real life. And there are, you know, I get messaged all the time. There are people who have told me that they've dreamt about their success, and then it has kind of followed on a few weeks later. I even had one lottery winner, actually incredible, Timothy Schultz. I interviewed him, and, um, he was one of the youngest Powerball winners in the United States, and he had a precognitive dream that this was going to happen. So it can happen, you know. But obviously our dreaming mind is more concerned about inner wealth than outer wealth. But what I'm saying is that if you can actually dream for example, say if you want to be a great novelist, um, or hit the sun, you know, New York Times or whatever, dreaming it happens shows that on an unconscious level you truly believe it's possible. And when you believe something is possible unconsciously, you are far more likely to make it happen in your real life. That's what I'm saying. So start paying attention to those dreams and start noticing when you have wonderful relaxing dreams or happy dreams, because that shows that on an unconscious level you're getting there, you're evolving. So to tune into that— so that's what I wanted to say about manifesting. Dream work, dreaming what you want to happen in the dream state is a powerful, powerful manifesting tool because you're working on an unconscious level and what your unconscious beliefs are. But also you talked about PTSD and lucid dreaming, and yes, Charlie Morley and, and Garrett Yount from the Institute of Noetic both of whom I've interviewed and worked with and spoken to because they're dream experts, have done this amazing study that was recently published on PTSD veterans and how lucid dreaming can help heal some of these traumas and stresses. In fact, lucid dreaming is the most studied aspect of dream work, you know, because it has been shown to be incredibly powerful for dealing with stress and anxiety. And, and rewriting a past, kind of revisiting a past and healing it. And if you can do that in the dream state, again, what I said about the unconscious, it means that the healing is taking place on a very deep inner level. And that really is the only way forward if you are suffering from stress and pain and grief, as we all do in life. Life is a journey where we have to learn and grow through these things. Dreamwork can really help you understand that, face it learn the lessons from it and, and kind of heal and move on to the next challenge. Now, similarly though, I think a lot of times in, in reality, in our life, when we're not achieving who we want to be and we're not doing what we really desire, it's always down to fear and anxiety. And I think in this book, what it helps you to do, it helps you control what is happening a little bit more, how you sleep and how, what happens in your subconscious. And a lot of us are scared of our unconscious. And if we can feel like we have more control over that, then it's a lot harder to be anxious and fearful of it. You know, a lot of depression and anxiety is based around fear. But if we— and losing control, not having control of what we're doing and what we're thinking. So the more we— more control we can give to ourselves. The healthier we can be. Absolutely. I mean, we have an innate fear of the, of the dark, of night, of the unknown. And really, when you go to sleep every night, you know, to risk quoting a song from Frozen, we are going into the unknown, which is within us. And within us, there are going to be aspects of ourselves that are fearful, anxious, toxic, angry, spiteful. We all have that. We only need to look at the universe. There is night and there is day. Both need each other. And what dream dreamwork is trying to help you do is to simply not run away from it. That's why chasing dreams is so common— when you're being chased by something and you're running and running. And what you have to do in the dream state is stop and turn around and just see what is trying to devour you and enter a dialogue. Because so often all our fears want is they want to be noticed. They don't want to be denied. They want a dialogue. And most of the time, when you start dialing dialoguing with them and understanding that they are a part of you that just wants to be acknowledged. Then when you're awake in your waking life, you know that you have that part of you there. You know you have your fear, you know you have your negative side, but you choose not to express it in the waking life because you've dealt with it in an unconscious dream level. You've met it in your dreams, you've understood it. And then real strength of character is when you wake up the next day and you know you have this potential for you know, self-sabotage. You know they have this potential to be toxic or negative, but you don't choose to act on it. You understand that you have choice. You are not your thoughts, you are not your feelings, you aren't even your dreams. You are what you choose to invest your energy in. You are what you choose to focus on. And, and really, dream work really is, is saying that, you know, we attract into our lives and our dreams what we are rather than what we think, feel, and do. There is a distinction. We have to— it's trying to help you understand the power of choice. And that's why I say people have nightmares. Never fear your nightmares. In fact, I actually celebrate when I have a nightmare now because I know what a powerfully transformative gift it is. I think of it as an act of love from my dreaming mind. It's sending me these really shocking images because my dreaming mind wants me to wake up and remember them. We tend to remember our nightmares because that's That's all our dreaming mind really wants. It wants us to remember our dreams. So it may— you may well have sent me this message it wants to send me in a gentler way before, but I haven't remembered it or recalled it. So it says, okay, gonna resort to a nightmare now, time for some tough love. So I celebrate that. And a nightmare is also a sign that you need to let go, shed some old skins. Sometimes that's painful because you're going through a period of growth and growth. Get excited about it rather than dread it. Because I just— for example, if you're sitting on a chair and you're not comfortable, you move, right? You don't stay in the same position continuing the discomfort. A nightmare is encouraging you to move forward. So if you think of it, it's like a prod saying, this is going on, you need to do something different in your waking life now. You need to think something different, you need to choose a different emotional response You need to choose a different way because if you carry on like this, you're heading in a direction which is toxic for your personal development. So a nightmare is saying, look, you have a chance to course correct. I'm showing you that it's time for growth now. And yeah, growth is going to be a bit uncomfortable, but you don't learn and grow inside your comfort zone. You don't. I think— Sorry, I was just going to say— I was just gonna say that very simply, dreams are basically— dreams and nightmares are just signposting something you need to address. Yeah, that's all. Think of it like that. It's just— and also a wonderful opportunity that if you don't like how a dream makes you feel, if you wake up in the morning and you've had a dream and you go, ah, didn't like that, felt uncomfortable, it's wonderful because you have a brand new day, an opportunity to choose a mindset, choose actions, to choose thoughts and feelings which can change that potential future, that dream may be showcasing. Because I do believe there's a kind of like a forward flash-forward precognitive glimpse in dreams as well, showing if you carry on like this, you're heading in the wrong direction. Change. Choose a different way. So it's a wonderful kind of like red— you're right, it's, it's saying this is a red flag. Something needs to give in your waking life, right? Sit down, reflect. What have you said? What have you done? What have you thought? What have you felt? Are these things that you're choosing for yourself positive for you and others? If they're not, change. And we need to give ourselves that time as well, because I'm sure there's people listening saying, I don't have time to sit there for half an hour on a morning mulling over my dream. And it doesn't need to be half an hour, it could be 5 minutes, 10 minutes. But also sometimes you can't afford not to, because we need to address what's going on. You can't just speculate to accumulate, I guess, than your own inner harmony and peace, because that's what dreams are trying to— and that really is what we all want in life. We think we want all these external successes, great career, great relationship, great body, all that. That's external. But without inner peace— and you can see that played out in the media— we see people who have all these things, get great career, great relationship, great looks, great popularity, But if they haven't got the inner peace, if they haven't done the inner work, you can see how it's played out in the media sometimes, how their lives are in pieces. Yes, completely. Dreadfully unhappy. And you're scratching your head thinking, well, look, if I just starred in a blockbuster movie, or if I'd won this amount of money, or if I had 12 million followers, I would be on top of the world. You know, we think like that. Why? They've got everything we think we want. But what they haven't got, they haven't done the inner work. Work. So we prioritize getting all these things outside of us which we think are going to complete us. They never ever will. It's a mirage. It's, it's a, it's, um, an illusion. Yeah, you know, you know, you need to wake up from it. Like in The Matrix, it's a simulation. It's not real. All these things in our lives are to help us learn and grow. That's what they are. What we do with our lives The external stuff is all to help us learn and grow and experience. Now, talking of The Matrix, actually, for me, I have gone all in on my research when I was reading this book and preparing for this interview because pretty much— if only all my readers were like this! I love this, I love this. Well, so I started right at the beginning of the book, you talk about Inception, and I didn't even know what Inception was about. I've never watched it, and I thought, oh, okay, right, this is about manufacturing dreams. I'm going to do this. And I also watched another movie called Awake, which is about people who can't sleep and it sends them absolutely crazy. So I started watching Inception and I was like, I'm awake, the world is a dream. And it was just, I mean, it is mental that the whole idea that sometimes you can't even know when you're dreaming or, you know, if you're in somebody else's dream or whatnot. And I started thinking back back to how I would know if I was dreaming. And I love it how in, in, in Inception they have like tiny little things that only they're allowed to know about so nobody else could create it and fabricate it into a dream. It's like little thimbles and things like that. And I was thinking, okay, if I manage lucid dreaming, what am I going to do? And then yes, And, and so I was thinking about all these different things, and then I thought back to— I mean, we've all had those dreams where our teeth are falling out and we can just feel all the brittle shattering of our teeth when we're stressed about something. And I know I've had dreams when I'm thinking, oh, my teeth are falling out, I must be in a dream, but I won't be able to feel it if I was in a dream. And I was feeling around for it, and I could feel it in my dream. Yes. So I was getting confused, and then I'd wake up and go It was a dream. Why could I, why could I feel it? And I, I want to differentiate between the two. I'm telling you, our inner space, the world within us, you know, which scientists and neuroscientists are actually studying more and more, and I think that's really positive because science is always traditionally focused on the external, what you can see, what is tangible. There's much more research now into this inner space, and it's exact— you're exactly right. Sometimes it's hard to know what's a dream and, and what isn't. And the reason is because you're still you. We don't become a different person in the dream You're still you, right? You know, we— you're, you're you 24/7. You just go into a different state of reality, and that state of reality is filled with infinite potential. And just go and explore it. Go and understand who you are in that world. And honestly, the knock-on effect in your waking life is second to none. The confidence levels it will give you. Because also, when things don't work out in your waking life, you know that it doesn't matter as much because it's that inner journey, that inner understanding, that inner brainstorming that you do, that you truly meet yourself and what's authentic and real. And I know this sounds a bit far out, but, you know, it truly does work. And, and I'm glad you mentioned Inception. There's again, there's so much I wanted to say because Christopher Nolan, of course, he directed Oppenheimer recently as well, isn't he? He's fabulous director. Most of his amazing movies, blockbuster successes, were inspired by visions in a dream. He is a lucid dreamer, and Inception was— he wanted to try and understand what was going on. And a lot in Inception, he gets it right. And interestingly enough, he also said people haven't got time if they just stop scrolling their social media. And I'll tell you, Christopher Nolan refuses to use a mobile phone or be on social media. I think I've heard that somewhere as well. Yes, it just drains your time and it puts lots of thoughts in there. Yeah, just switch a bit of mindless passive, because you think when you're on, on your, your phone scrolling, you're passively consuming other people's content. And in the dream state, it is all yours. You are creator, you are director, you are the live wire, right? You are the influencer of your dreams, and that is where you're going to get your best ideas. Some of the world's greatest innovations worked of art, works of technology, works of literature have been inspired by a vision in a dream. Just Einstein's theory of relativity is one of many examples I could run through. Dreams have literally changed the world. Never discount your dreams. You don't know when you wake up, your dream could trigger a series of connections and brainstorming connections that could lead to something incredible. But even if it doesn't lead to an incredible invention or work of art or a movie, if it leads you to a personal revelation and a, you know, that Eureka moment, you say, I understand why I made that mistake in the past, I understand why I had to have that difficult relationship, I understand right now why I'm feeling fear— if you just have a personal revelation, it's just as powerful. But Teresa, what if that thought that we have and that realization that we have in our dreams, what if it's planted there by some mad scientist, Inception-wise, just to, uh, you know, well, I think Elon Musk, he's trying to sort of do, um, neuro implants, isn't he? Yeah, I mean, you know, yes, we are, but we are, we are everything in our lives, you know. That's why we have to be careful what we absorb, what we read. Who we interact with, what we watch, everything. We are kind of like being, you know, we are very impressionable and suggestible. Yes, always. That's always happening. But the more you do dream work, the more you begin to understand your own power. So if there's anything in the dream state or anything, you, you try to understand it, you face off with it, you deal with it. You, you— dream work does actually boost your self-confidence greatly. You understand that you can actually cope with anything because you've got control of it as well. Yeah, you can never fully control the dream state because it's, as I say, it's like the ocean. You can't— anything, anything more than what we currently have, any increase in our, in how we feel we are in control of what's happening to us, is only going to be a positive element. Yeah. And if you, as I say, if people listening and thinking, well, my dreams are always pessimistic, anxious, difficult, or boring, you know, I'm like trudging to work or, you know, going round and round a roundabout in dreams, that's okay. Really celebrate those because your dreaming mind is trying to talk to you and send you a message. Because as soon as you start, you know, communicating with your dreaming mind, when you wake up in the morning— I get so excited now when I have dream images on my mind. I can't wait to write them down. So what have I got to say to myself today? Um, it's a real breakthrough then, because what will happen is your dreams will get— will change when your attitude towards them changes. You have to change your attitude towards your dreams first. You've got to love them, even if they're awfully difficult and grisly, or you meet your worst fears like a loved one dying. You still have to love these images that are coming through. Once you do that, because you understand that they— it's your dreaming mind using symbolism, powerful symbolism, that it knows is going to have a reaction in you to give you a message that is going to help you deal with a problem in your waking life, grow personally, feel more content, face something, heal a past wound. All— if you, if you have that attitude towards your dream— dreams, you will find that your dreams start shifting and they start revealing more and more and more. Yes. Well, actually, paradoxically, when you were talking about how we should do less social media and kind of just consuming other people's lives, um, right at the beginning of the book you're talking about methods about how to induce creativity, and it talks about gaming. Now I know you've got children, um, I've got children, I'm constantly saying, why do you have to be on your Xbox so much? And then there's this great big chapter on game, game on, do all of these. The reason I put gaming in is because there are many, studies to show that gamers are highly creative dreamers, vivid dreamers, and they're more likely to lucid dream. There is actually a whole body of research on the relationship between gaming and lucid dreaming. There is a strong connection between the two, and I believe Xbox even did a series powered by dreams where they got the dreams of gamers to inspire dream content. And if you look at a video game, it does feel very dreamy often, these— the video game content. But there is a caveat. Like everything in life, balance is key. I would suggest no more than an hour tops a day. Anything more than that, and it— you're balancing towards the other side. Because like everything in life, you've got to balance the, the rational, the reasonable, the sensible, the logical, your ego, your consciousness, with the intuitive, the highly creative, the fantastical, which is the game state. You need balance. You need your, your feet in both worlds, 50/50. It's when one aspect of your life tilts, you know, say you're too much with your head in the clouds, that's no good either because you lose touch with the reality, or you're too rational and logical when you deny and repress, that the scales tip again. What you need to do is always pay attention to both aspects of yourself. We have both left and right brain, and balance is something we've constantly got to try and work towards, isn't it? Yes. Yes, because especially when life is stressful and busy and the demands of daily life, and if you're a parent, you have so much practical stuff to deal with that it's going to tip towards the overly practical, the overly logical, the overly reasonable, because that's, you know, where you are in your waking life. So that's why dream work is important, because it can shift again and give you that nice gentle balance. If dream work's not for you, another way to get that balance is walking in nature. Reading fiction, things like that. Um, but you know, you need to get that balance. But don't go the other way too. I mean, I have to speak to people who get so into their dream work that they do lose touch with reality, and that's just as damaging. It's that balance, you know, moderation in everything, the middle way. So no more than 3/4 of an hour to an hour a day. Children, of course they're going to love it because, you know, my, my son was exactly the same. He was such an avid gamer. But I'm telling you, it just passes. They suddenly sort of like get to an age, usually the 20s or whatever, early 20s, and they say that they don't want it anymore because they realize that real world is actually more interesting to them. But it's just a phase that a lot of young boys especially, although a lot of girls too, do go through. Because in— it's pure fantasy, it's pure, it's pure magic or symbolism, metaphor. It's the world that children who are— have this ability to suspend disbelief naturally reside anyway. So don't lose touch with that. I wouldn't, you know, squash their gaming completely because they are— I wouldn't. But I mean, the thing is, my children, they know that I'm reading all the time. And whenever I'm reading a book for a show, you know, occasionally, incredibly, they'll actually ask me, I'll say, right, what are you reading this time? And what's it about? And as soon as I read in the first couple of chapters, gaming's good for you, it's like, right, like, none of your business about what I'm reading. In moderation, I'm sure they missed that. Yeah, but they wouldn't, they wouldn't care. They'd just go, no, Theresa Chung says we should be allowed to game because it increases our creativity. That is all it would take for them. I did have to battle to make that my first, my first thing, but it was really to do kind of almost like the shock value, because dreams, a dream always surprises, you know. Your dreams And they will always want to bring surprises into your life. So I wanted the book to kind of mirror the dream state, that there's— you wake up every morning with a wonderful surprise. Nothing's predictable in the dream state, and that's their magic. Because, you know, all a lot of us sometimes get into a bit of a routine. We have Groundhog Days. And what our dreaming mind is saying, you don't have to live like that. Life should be an endless series of revelations and surprises. And it can be if you just write down your dreams. Dreams, brainstorm their meaning, and then apply that to your waking life. Have this dialogue between your dreaming mind and your waking self. And if you do keep a dream journal, as I have done for decades, going back in time and actually not reading your waking life journal— because I keep one of those as well— but reading your dream journal is brilliant read, because what you see is how it's commented on your waking life. It's been like a poetic voiceover. Yeah, you know, it's any kind of warning you. It's been warning you, you know, when I've gone into disastrous relationships or work issues, I can see the months before my dreaming mind is kind of like prepping me and it's trying to warn me. And I find that's déjà vu, isn't it? Déjà rêvé, which is actually a dream remembered where you have a dream and then a few days later it plays out. But I've seen actually time and time again, very good, the Matrix. No, no, no, this is more common than you believe. You know, where your dream is playing out, but not— it's not often an event, it's an emotional response that you have a couple of days later that your dream has kind of foreshadowed it in a way. And when you, when you, when you tune into that, it's an amazing PowerPoint in your life. You think, my goodness, there is so much more to me than meets the eye. I'm so mysterious. What is going on here? Yeah, I'm really starting to, to understand this. I mean, I've thoroughly been enjoying devouring this book. Now, unsurprisingly, we've only got a couple of minutes left, um, so I haven't even had a chance to ask you about moon phases and the theory relating to its transitions and how it affects us, um, but, but there's something I really want to ask you, I really want to squeeze in there, is the 3 Top tip: full moon, full moon, best time to dream decode. Do the lead up, lead up to, lead up to the full moon is the best time to just write them down. Actually, don't— I mean, when you write down a dream, give it a couple of weeks because you need about 20 or 30 dreams to really get a picture of your dream life and your dream symbols. Just get into the habit of writing them down. Forget the decoding for later. Get at least 20, 20 or so dreams down because dreams are like a series that's running like Netflix series. You've got to tune in for the next installment. And dreams will often comment on each other as well, which is fascinating. We all get hung up on one dream. So just in the lead-up to the full moon, just write down your dreams. Then start the work of dream decoding when the moon is full, because, you know, you're more likely to have lucid dreams around that time as well, you know, because your sleep is lighter because the moon is full and we have lighter sleep. We tend to wake more when the moon is full and have more REM sleep, rapid eye movement, the dreaming stage of sleep. And then in the stages after that, just carry on that dream decoding pay attention to what you can do during the day to feed your dreams. Because if you don't like the dream content, it means you need to change what you're doing in your waking life. If your dreams are boring you, or if your dreams are distressing you, it's a sign you need to change what— because you— your dreams reflect your waking life, just as your waking life is shown in your dreams. The two are one. Work on one, it will impact the Wow, that's absolutely fantastic. I mean, I'm not surprised in any way, shape, or form that I've thoroughly enjoyed chatting to you today, Teresa, and I must urge people to go and check out all of the many, many, many other books that you have at teresachung.com. Yeah, I've written so many now, I think I must get up in the night and sort of sleep-write them. I have actually, you know, my dream dictionary. Oh my God, you actually write your books in your sleep. I'm thinking I must do, because I'm looking— I've over about 100 now. It's getting like— it's, it's, it's worrying. And I have 2 more coming out next year as well. I'm very, very blessed. Um, HarperCollins is doing another dream book with me next year. I've got my dream dictionary with HarperCollins, and inner psychic, you know, um, birthdays, moon— it goes because I've been, I've been going since about the year I started writing in 1999. And literally have been blessed with about 2 books a year since, plus collaborating with other people. Um, so yeah, I'm not surprised. Serial, serial writer, really. Well, you must come back on the show then, because we're definitely— I'd love to— more time with you. Thank you so much for joining us on Get Booked for Women's and Men's Radio Station. Thank you from my heart, Hazel, and wishing you sweet dreams. Thank you. Theresa Chun, today's guest and author of How to Catch a Dream: 21 Ways to Dream and Live Bigger and Better, has allowed me to read an extract from her book to whet your appetite. Now, Um, I hope you enjoy the section that I've chosen, and it is actually the introduction. I think it's a great starting point to help to understand what it is that— the aim of what is trying to be achieved in this book. And, um, let's do this. Behind Your Eyes. You do not sleep. You believe you do because your body sleeps. Sleeps, but a deeply alert part of you never sleeps. While your body slumbers, you remain wide awake in the extraordinary world of your dreams. As dreams rarely make sense, you may believe they are your brain simply reprocessing and consolidating the events and lessons of your waking life. But dreams are anything but meaningless. Dreams. Not only are they the key to a more fulfilling life, but you can wake up in them and gain truly life-changing insights with your eyes wide shut. If you use the 21 proven and practical nightly dreaming practices in this book, you will learn how to dream and live bigger and better. You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. This delicious line from Eames, the character played by Tom Hardy in the science fiction movie thriller Inception, never fails to motivate me when my waking life feels diminished. Inception marked a radical turning point for me as an established dream decoding author. It wasn't just because its mesmerizing cinematic depiction of the dream world made dreaming cool. Everything about it ignited within me an intense desire to dream bigger and better myself. From then onwards, I promised myself I would fully commit to better dream recall, deeper dream decoding, and learning how to trigger the lucid dreaming state. And this book is the result of that commitment and the techniques and approaches that actually worked for me. I've experienced firsthand their benefits for personal growth and seen how effective they can be for others. Today I'm on a mission to bring dreams, in particular lucid ones, right out of the shadows so they're no longer dismissed as nonsense or something to be feared. I want the whole world to catch their dreams and fall in love with them, and by extension, themselves. So what is a lucid dream? Dream recall and decoding is a potent self-help tool this book will explore, but it will also introduce you to the art of lucid dreaming, which is the most vivid lucid and creative way to dream. Lucid dreaming happens when the parts of your brain associated with cognitive functions, memory, and self-awareness— the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the bilateral frontopolar prefrontal cortex, the precuneus, the inferior parietal lobules, and the supramarginal gyros, to be precise, activate, and you know you are dreaming while you are dreaming. A lucid dream originates from a non-lucid dream. In non-lucid dreams, the self-perception areas in the prefrontal cortex of your brain aren't as switched on, so you aren't aware you're dreaming.. But when they are and you become lucid, you become aware of your dream unfolding behind your very eyes. You can recognize thoughts and feel emotions, and sometimes you can change what you experience, which opens up infinite creative possibilities. That's a reading from the beginning of today's book, How to Catch a Dream: 21 Ways to Dream And Live Bigger and Better by today's guest, Theresa Chung. You can find out more about Theresa at theresachung.com. Now, as we like to do here on the show,. We have a little bit of a sneaky peek of a previous show, and please do feel free to pop on to Women's Radio Station and Men's Radio Station SoundCloud to catch up on previous Get Butch shows, or have a good old scroll through at all the many other incredible shows that we air on Women's and Men's Radio Station. Right now, time on Get Booked to discuss moths with today's author, Jane Hennigan. And I really don't know where to start with this one. It's such a clever and introspective fictional look at a world in which men had to be contained and sedated for their own safety, leaving women in charge, following on from a plague of moths carrying an infection that attacks the male central nervous system, rendering them a blue where they die pretty quickly, or affecting their whole psyche that turns them into prolifically violent and murderous manics. However, we still need to procreate to keep humanity alive. The men need to be cared for, both those infected and those from being infected. 40 years on and the world is evolving. Anyone younger than 40 has no real understanding of how it was before. It is inconceivable that these terrified men protected in confinement with limited knowledge and uses, how they could ever rule the world. Could a potential vaccine be the answer? Decisions need to be made about what is best for everyone's futures. Those originally infected are dying off. The only men left are those born since the pandemic that no longer have inherent ideas of superiority or expectation, quite importantly. So many complex ideas, opinions, and basic human rights issues to be addressed. And quite frankly, this book is brilliantly written. Jane, thank you for joining us on Get Booked to discuss Moths. I can't wait to get started. Well, thank you very much for having me. Yes, that's a pretty comprehensive description you've just done there. Thank you. Yeah, I was so absorbed in the book, and as I said a little bit off air, I kind of spent a couple of weeks just getting really angry with men. Uh, which it's not the aim, but it's just that whole— we get angry when we've got complex feelings about, well, anything and everything. Um, the book is fantastic. Why don't you kick off by telling us a little bit about yourself? Oh, okay. Uh, so I am— so I've been writing probably about 10 to 15 years. Yeah. Um, before that I was in marketing, and then I went from marketing— I worked in marketing for about 15 years, and then I was a teacher for 6 years, an English teacher for 6 years, and, um, and then I went and did a master's in creative writing at University of Surrey. And then kind of the pandemic hit, and I was, I was toying with the idea of giving up teaching at that point anyway, um, and I had, during my master's, started to write a number of novels. I had written a couple of novels before that as well, and I was writing Moths during the pandemic, although I had started writing Moths before the pandemic hit. And yeah, I decided to give it a go. I decided to stop teaching. There were other things happening in my life at the time as well. There were sort of relatives that needed looking after and such like, which didn't work with kind of, um, with being a teacher. Life gets in the way. Exactly. And, um, it kind of gave me the confidence actually to, uh, to come out of teaching and to, uh, to start writing, um, in earnest. And, uh, yeah, then, um, yeah, so that's, that's basically, uh, uh, where I got to. And then I, I started writing Moths as, as part of my master's Master's MA in creative writing, and it went down well. It went down really well at the kind of in the workshops. I got a lot of encouragement. I met some fantastic writing friends whilst I was on the Master's as well, and they were a huge encouragement to me, and we would swap work quite often, and it just kept the focus on writing. And yeah, so I ended up, ended up writing Moths. I can imagine if you started before COVID-19 and then continued afterwards, I guess that changed your tack a little bit because you actually had real-time knowledge of how certain pandemics affect how we live. I mean, these dystopian novels, they're getting increasingly scarier due to how pandemic research is going. They're not completely inconceivable. We've seen the effects of COVID-19, and The Last of Us on Sky Atlantic or Sky something or other is based on factual evidence of a disaster that could actually happen. So these novels, we kind of, as I said before, when I was getting a little bit kind of stressed but so engrossed when I was reading it because it just stirs so much inside of you. You really kind of get into the psyche and you cover so many different viewpoints so well. I mean, the hugest congratulations on writing the book. And I know you released it— was it last year? And then it's got picked up again and you've been, you've been taken on by an agent and it's getting re-released with slight changes and I've just been released, am I Yes, so, well, your first point, when— so writing a pandemic before a pandemic and writing a pandemic during a pandemic are very, very different things. And I actually had to take 6 months away from writing it in the actual pandemic because there's something ghoulish about writing a pandemic when you're surrounded by the effects of, you know, of that, of a disease that is, you know, that is making people ill and killing people. So I could, so for a long time, I just couldn't. I mean, I imagine it's the same for a lot of people in the pandemic as well. For a long time, I couldn't really concentrate on very much except just getting through the next day and not thinking too deeply about anything. And I definitely wasn't going to think too deeply about a story I was writing about a pandemic. So, as And actually, as it happened, I'd written most of the story by the time the pandemic hit. Later on in the pandemic, when it— weird to say— it kind of normalised a bit, then I went back to editing and changing some of the parts of the novel in line with what I now know— knew— how the government might react, how other countries might react, what the fear was like. There's a— there is a lot of fear in the book, and that fear comes from the actual fear that I was feeling. During the pandemic. So yeah, there is a big difference between the fantasy of a pandemic and the reality of a pandemic. One you can write excitedly into the, you know, and just carry on with it. The other one you think very carefully about the reality of it. So yeah, it did change the novel. And yeah. Well, I think also moths, it is not like COVID-19. We will look back on COVID-19 in 40 years and it's, you know, it's a bit like SARS. We get over it, we'll probably slightly change the way we do things, but we're not locking up people and changing the whole way that life is kind of run. It is very different to COVID-19, but it still is kind of helping us understand, you know, what could happen with these slightly more dangerous pandemics. I mean, have you watched The Last of Us? I guess that's something that's— I absolutely loved The Last of Us. I consumed every episode. It is the exact sort of thing I love. So yeah, I thought it was brilliant. I loved it. I mean, obviously terrifying, but yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed, and I will watch any, I will watch any disaster movie. I will watch any pandemic kind of TV series. I was a big fan of The Walking Dead right up, you know, I stuck with it right up to the end. I, yeah, So I guess also the book is a kind of reaction to many of the kind of dystopian stories and apocalyptic stories that I've read, you know, throughout my life. So if I was going to write a story, it was, you know, it was probably going to be in that area, right? Yeah, no, fair enough. And of course, the two timelines as well. So the second timeline was quite easy to write in the pandemic because it, as you say, it's not a reaction, it's not a reflection of reality, it's a a different world. I wrote about a very different world, but the first timeline, i.e., the past when the pandemic actually hits, then that story was very difficult to write. Thank you so much for joining me today here on Get Booked. I've been your host, Hazel Butterfield, and please do join me for next week's show. Get Booked is on every day of the week at Women's Radio Station at 5 PM and every Tuesday at 4 PM on Men's Radio Station. Thank you for listening.