Tim Ferriss

That opened the door to me asking like, okay, let's just assume for the time being that people cannot turn into animals, but like... the idea that you could ingest a plant or put on a salve that would so fundamentally change your consciousness that you would come back with complete belief that you had done it was also interesting to me.

And so I then became this sort of intrepid, very amateur,

biochemist looking at how that might happen, right?

And so you combine that then with the fear of Alzheimer's in my family.

And it just led me to really want to focus on brain function.

And...

a few things happened around the same time.

Towards the end of high school, I read a book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Steven LaBerge.

And still to this day, I think it is one of the most impressive books

I have found for teaching a skill in a systematic way.

And it teaches you how to induce lucidity in your dreams.

And it's nothing mysterious.

I shouldn't say that.

It is provable within the confines of laboratory.

that you can cultivate the ability to control your dreams and become conscious in your dreams.

And the way they demonstrate this is like an EEG or other means of confirming that someone is in a sleep state and you devise in advance, for instance, eye movement.

Like when you're asleep, what happens?

Rapid eye movement, right?

your eye movement still correlates to what you're doing in a dream.

So you determine in advance a sequence between experimenter and subject, where it's like Morse code, basically.