Last week’s post introduced lucid dreaming (LD) and its long association with spiritual practice – particularly with Tibetan Buddhism. A 2020 study was reported which found an association between meditating and frequency of lucid dreams.
Click here for a watchable 30-minute video summary (and 30-minute Q&A) of the topic by lucid dreaming expert Robert Waggoner. It’s on the Institute of Noetic Science’s website until the end of next week.
This week, we’ll look at dream yoga, which is basically LD with spiritual direction. As the University of Malaya’s Raymond Lee explains in his paper, “The Tibetan practice of dream yoga is not only meant to develop mindfulness in dreaming but also to rehearse for the moment of death. In Tibetan Buddhist teachings, there is a correspondence between sleeping, dreaming and dying. Thus, knowing how to dream provides the basis for knowing how to die. Manipulation of dreams is secondary to the higher goal of directing consciousness toward the clear light of death.”
This might sound downbeat, but the clear light – the dharmakaya – is the “all encompassing space of truth that is beyond birth or death”, as Lee writes, the “ultimate reality” and one of the highest spiritual goals.
Non-dualism ftw!
Lee writes that in Tibetan Buddhism, there are four stages in falling asleep, the final one of which is the clear light of sleep. “The main purpose of dream yoga in the context of tantric practice is to recognise the dream state as dream state,” he quotes the Dalai Lama as saying. “Then, in the next stage of the practice you focus your attention on the heart centre of your dream body and try to withdraw the vital energy into that centre. That leads to an experience of the clear light of sleep, which arises when the dream state ceases.”
Andrew Holocek runs through steps that people can try to induce directed LD and dream yoga in the following engaging video.
Holocek says to begin by sleeping on the right side – sleeping lion posture – which blocks channels in your subtle body that hinder the recognition of luminosity, close off the right nostril, and bring attention to your throat, visualising a four-petalled lotus there. (This should be the left side and left nostril for women.)
Echoing the Dalai Lama’s comments, he says that in deep sleep we come to rest at the centre of the heart – in the pure light of “formless awareness”. He details six stages of dream yoga:
Becoming lucid.
Overcoming the fear that dreams can hurt you. (Has he not seen Nightmare on Elm Street?)
Realising that phenomena in dreams and waking are similar as they constantly change. Objects in both are empty and have no substantive nature.
Take control of the dream by changing objects.
Realising the dream body is also insubstantial. His pro tip for those finding it hard to pass through walls: walk backwards.
Visualise deities as symbolic doorways to the clear light.
Ian Ford-Terry provides a little more detail in his 2005 paper on the topic, dividing practice into daytime, nighttime, and absorption of unification stages.
He quotes Lochen Dharma Shri for the first step:
“During the daytime, sustaining mindfulness without distraction
Apart from the power of mental imprints, (phenomena) do not exist.
All avenues of appearances, negative and affirmative,
Are dream-like, though they are apprehended as external phenomena.
Without distraction, earnestly and continually sustain your mindfulness and attention (to this truth).”
Reflect on the body, mind and world as illusion.
At night, follow a set of rituals and ‘meditate’ yourself to sleep (in similar fashion to Holocek’s advice) but hold awareness through those early, confused hypnagogic states and stay lucid. Consciousness never stops, but its nature changes once it no longer has a physical body to work with.
“In this way a lucid dream is incubated and the virtual bardo training program is engaged,” he writes. (A bardo is an intermediate state.)
That’s followed by three stages of absorption of unification, which can be likened to the path taken by consciousness from pure awareness to physical manifestation.
Next week: neural correlates of lucid dreaming, with many colourful brain scans.