Dream Studies Portal

Sleep Paralysis and the Weird side of Spiritual Experience

Ryan Hurd — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 17:06:35 +0000

Astral projection and lucid dreaming are having a moment! Thanks to cult classic films like Inception and Waking Life, and to popular educators such as Jade Shaw (check out her documentary Insight Out if you haven’t yet), we have entered into the Age of Aquarius with our eyes wide open to the multidimensional realms beyond. Yet […]

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What makes a big dream BIG?

Ryan Hurd — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 17:12:24 +0000

All cultures that pay attention to dreams make a cut between what’s a Big dream and what’s an ordinary dream. The cut is not always the same. Different cultures play with different ideas and elevate them or stomp them out, depending on the culture and their particular stressors. But here in the west, Carl Jung […]

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Tucker Carlson says he was attacked by a demon—and as a dream researcher I believe him

Ryan Hurd — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 16:33:12 +0000

Journalist and TV personality Tucker Carlson recently shared that he was attacked by an unseen force while sleeping in his bed. I encourage you watch the video clip, because I think it convincingly shows that Carlson truly believes he had this experience. He says he still does not understand to this day what happened to […]

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Doom dreaming: Dreams in the Age of Apocalypse

Ryan Hurd — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 22:24:15 +0000

It’s been a week now since the waters have mostly receded from the twin hurricanes of Helene and Milton. A lot of my family live in Florida: they escaped with some water damage and a few hours of power outage. My peoples in the mountains of North Carolina, however, lost entire communities of people. […]

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Tombstones beyond time: A precognitive encounter in the pines

Ryan Hurd — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 21:50:17 +0000

One winter morning in rural Alabama, our crew was surveying a pinewoods for a proposed highway. The weather was frosty and I was wearing my usual archaeologist’s uniform of several clashing flannel shirts layered with camouflage pants. We walked in transects, about 30 meters (100ft) apart, testing the soil every so often for cultural artifacts. […]

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Healing our Cognitive Domestication with Lucid Living

Ryan Hurd — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 21:34:52 +0000

Are you interested in lucid dreaming but frustrated about not having them often, or at all? I’ve got good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: as the continuity hypothesis of dreaming predicts, our nighttime dreaming mirrors our daily scheming. We can’t expect fantastic self-aware adventures and peak experiences in our dreams […]

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Abduction encounters, sleep paralysis and the extraordinary

Ryan Hurd — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 21:16:27 +0000

As I was recently cited in D.W. Pasulka’s book Encounters: Experiences with nonhuman intelligences for my work with sleep paralysis, it’s time for me to clarify my current position on the overlap between altered states of consciousness and UAP/abduction encounters. Pasulka’s book is brilliant (although best read after her first work on the topic, American Cosmic) and as a […]

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The Blessing of the Groundhog

Ryan Hurd — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 15:13:03 +0000

This is a story about a magical, shapeshifting Goddess currently embodying an overgrown squirrel, and how you can harness her celestial powers for your dreamlife. Today, February 2, is Groundhog Day. I live in Pennsylvania, and Groundhog Day is big deal here. This morning, all eyes were on the little town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where an […]

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Dickens’ Christmas Ghosts and Lucid Encounters

Ryan Hurd — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 22:45:59 +0000

This morning, Christmas Eve day, I noticed a holiday card on the coffee table. It was slightly crumpled and curled around the bottom as if it has been discarded for a while. I opened the card and gasped – it was signed by my grandmother, who died four years ago this month. The card must […]

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From the Journals: Thoughts about Dream Interpretation

Ryan Hurd — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 18:29:28 +0000

Recently I have been inspired by the work of writer Matt Cardin—who you should be reading if you’re interested in creativity, horror and the divine. Matt also has lifted up the importance of personal journals in tracking the evolution of a writer’s life, as a snapshot of how our creative minds evolve over time, and […]

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