Saying, super psyched about this program. It's total delight for me, not only to introduce some of you to this extraordinary world of nocturnal practice, but also to Mia Lux, who's going to be our principal teacher during this event. Really a wonderful veteran teacher on lucid dreamers. You'll see so I'm going to just have a few introductory opening comments to situate a few things, and then I'll turn it over to her. But I wanted to start by sharing with you a little bit why I am so passionate about lucid dreaming, and why I have been for so many years, I've spent my life really interested in learning, transformation, growth and how to affect it. How does one really grow and transform? I mean, for me, life is so short. Oh, why not make the most of it? How do we make the most of it? And so there's this popular little jingle you've probably heard. You can't add more years to your life, but you can add more life to your years, and that's exactly what lucid dreaming does. That's what lucidity does. Lucidity is just co language for awareness. Lucid dream is a dream when you know you're aware of the fact that you're dreaming. And so these are not just normal years that you can add to your life, but as we'll see, these are deeper, more transformative years, because when you're working with lucidity, lucid dreams, so many metaphors here, you're working with the roots of your experience. You're working with the tectonic plates of your being, where one small, relatively small underground shift can have massive surface effects right above ground in daily life, so to speak. And actually in the Tantras, where the dream yoga tradition comes from, Dream Yoga transcends, but includes lucid dreaming. We'll say more about that later. But in the Tantras, is proclaimed so much radically that whatever you do in the dream arena is seven to nine times more efficacious, more transformative, precisely because you're working with such foundational dimensions of your being, the stem cells of your being, the DNA of your being, whatever metaphor you want to use. And so one single hyper lucid dream, which is a dream where you're lucid, and it's so lucid, it's so hyper lucid, that you come out of that dream, this so called waking reality appears to be a foggy dream. One hyper lucid dream can change the entirety of your life. It's somebody can't, I think, to a near death experience. I've never had a formal nd, but I know a bunch of people who have and you've heard the accounts, right? You don't need to have more than one near death experience to have it changed you forever. So lucid dreaming, and in particular, these super special, hyper lucid dreams, these are of that ilk. They have that kind of transformative potential, and the literature is replete with outrageous claims of its transformative power. So Lucifer inning itself, as you'll see, is subtle. It's pretty subtle. It's one of the reasons it's been challenging for the gross mind. But here's the kicker, subtle does not mean ineffectual. The entirety of our gross lives are really dictated by subtle mental processes, and even more, these super subtle unconscious processes. And so here's one reason why lucid dreaming is so special and worth the trouble. Because one definition of a lucid dream is the hybrid state, hybrid form of dreaming, where the conscious mind can meet and transform the unconscious mind directly. That's really special hypnosis to some degree, but only 10% of the population is suggestible, hypnotizable. Everybody can have a lucid dream. So in my rendering of this really, I look at Lucid Dreaming as a kind of hyper pedagogical approach, hyper educational approach, a technique for truly rapid psycho spiritual transformation and so playfully for me, this course is your admission to an institute of higher Education. It's truly a unique form of night school, where the ROI the return on investment, is borderline crazy. It's insane how much you can get out of these amazing dreams. So check this out. Here's a few facts. My friend Steven Laberge, arguably, really the father of scientific, academic lucid dreaming in the Western world. He proved lucid dreaming in 77 in 1977 at Stanford. He estimates that we enter the dream arena of the dream world at least 500,000 times during the course of our lives, 1/3 of our lives are spent sleeping. And of that time, well, that 1/3 roughly 25% is when you're in REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, that's mostly when you're dreaming. So that adds up to about a month a year. And during the course of an average life, six to seven years are spent dreaming. We think about this, you can get a PhD in less than six years. So not only are you adding more years, more life, to your years, but you're doing so at a really foundational kind of dimension of transformation. And so also connected to this, and I'm sure Mia is going to be talking about it, this is a super important thing. The brain actually can't tell the difference between something that's dreamt or something that's experienced. This is an extraordinary claim. So for instance, if I, if I play the piano, a pianist, if I had to play the piano, and I've done it a lot in my lucid dreams, and they put me in a scanner, well, guess what, my right hemisphere in the brain is activated precisely as if I was doing it in waking life. Next night, let's say I want to work with some logic mathematical problem? Well, guess what? My left hemisphere is activated exactly as would be activated as if I was doing the same thing in waking life. And so by engaging, and you've heard this term by now, if not, you're going to get familiar with it, because it's important to have these, these kind of bits of information, so that we're inspired to stick with this kind of unique approach using the principles of neuroplasticity, which have been around in the neuroscientific community for 40 plus years now, by changing your mind in a dream, you can literally change your brain. And so this is extraordinary. Don't have time to do something during the day, like meditate. Don't have time to do something during the day, like play the piano or whatever. Well, guess what? You can do it in your dreams, and it will transform you exactly as if you were doing it in waking life. So at a deeper philosophical level, just to show you the spectrum of what's available on the nocturnal arena, if you're lucid to it, you're actually more in contact with the nature of mind and the nature of reality in the dream state. So Thoreau, the great New England transcendentalist, nailed it when he said, In dreams, we are our truest life awake. So we have a lots more traffic with this during the course of this program, especially when I wrap it up at the end with Mia. So I wanted to say, just to share a couple tips, so called trips, tips and tricks of over 40 years of engaging in these unique practices, writing, teaching and basically engaging in them. So this institute of higher learning has its own playbook. This is important. We're going to be entering a kind of liminal dimension. Liminal. The word literally means threshold dimension, or in the term that I've really come to appreciate over the last couple of years, as I've been taking a deep dive into the great wisdom in our western tradition, in our own backyard, amazing, amazing kind of mystical tradition, starting with the pre Socratics, the Plato, the neoplatonin. So I've taken a really big deep dive in here. And so I'm really been struck by this notion. I want just hang with me for a second. You're going to see how this plays out. I've been super interested in this principle of the diamond, D, A, I m, O N, not to be confused with demons. I'll say something about that in just a second. So this term diamond and therefore diamond reality, this is going to be really important to us, because this is a dimension that we're actually going to be entering into. So understanding some of the kind of rules and regulations of a demonic, liminal dream like reality will really help us understand how to work with this nocturnal dimension. So this particular approach of diamonds became famous really with Socrates,
arguably the father of all Western philosophy. He had a very powerful relationship to this diamond, which I'll define shortly. And Carlo Young, I'm a really elite dreamer, you know, really expositor of depth psychology. I'm a huge fan of his work. His life was largely guided by his personal diamond whose name was Philemon. So here's a deal with these things. This is what happened. I'm going to define it in a second, but this is what happened. It's so interesting to me, during the appropriately named Dark Ages, Christians turned diamonds into demons because they didn't understand them. And this is also why in the dark ages, they demonized dreaming, making it fundamentally the work of the devil, and essentially evicted Western civilization from this extraordinary sacred temple of sleep, which only really started to come back into the fore with people like four a Freud, his interpretation of dreams, and then, of course, Carl Jung himself. So it's important for us to understand this, because it offers a basis of our western dismissive relationship to dreams. When somebody says, Ah, it's just a dream. I mean, that's a dismissive, pejorative statement. And so understanding this and the many forces, as I playfully put it, the many forces of the dark side that are working against us in these nocturnal meditations, will help us develop a sense of levity, playfulness and also perseverance in bringing these forces of darkness to light and then transforming them. But here's the real kicker, the Christians unfortunately seem to forget that, that, you know, what's that? What's a synonym for the devil, for the demonic end of it? Well, Lucifer, right? Lucifer literally means the bringer of light, or the bringer of lucidity. So here's how all this ties in. So diamonds themselves, just like the dream arena, right? Diamonds are always ambiguous or downright contradictory. They're both material and immaterial. They're elusive, shape shifting. They're fleeting. Their marginal dimensions on the Edge of Reality, on the edge of mind, just like a dream. So in my opinion, Lucifer is a type of diamond. In other words, he's sometimes devilish and kind of pejorative darkness, and sometimes he brings about luminous light. So here's the thing, diamonds, like dreams, are paradoxical. They're borderline, they're mischievous, they're trickster dimensions. So the point here is that the nocturnal world, the world of lucid dreaming does not play by the same diurnal rules, right? Why should it? I'm saying this because one of the biggest challenges with lucid dreaming is discouragement, disappointment and dropping out. If we understand how the playbook works, if we understand how to play by these rules, not only does it become much more enjoyable playful, but becomes more successful. So in the demonic realm, the realm of the dream, the realm of the liminal, Aristotle and His laws of logic aren't welcome. What's called binary or Boolean thinking isn't allowed. This is the yes, no, black, white, awake, asleep, dead, alive, kind of linear approach to reality. It doesn't really work here. So this is why sometimes you can have great luck using conventional, kind of daytime rules, but then nothing works. Sometimes the conventional works in the dream arena. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. So understanding that you're working with this kind of mercurial dimension will help you relate to it, and I think, a more skillful way. So in terms of thinking itself, not only is it linear thinking that's not allowed, but any form of conventional thinking is really suspended in the dream world. I mean, I love this line from a Nobel Laureate physicist, Brian Josephson, said this, it just really flowed my boats when he said, we think that we think clearly, but it's only because we don't think clearly. And so the point here is that space, time and therefore causality, the powers and the principles of cause and effect, don't apply the same way in the dream world, lucid dreaming is unconventional, right? And therefore conventional effort sometimes applies, but sometimes it doesn't. If we don't understand this, we get discouraged, we drop out. We say, I don't have time for this. My life's too busy. I know I couldn't do it. It doesn't work well, it's principally because you don't know how to play the game. So I'm showing these tips because I've been involved in this stuff for, I hate to say it 40 plus years, and it's taken me a long while to sort out, like, why is this realm so interesting, so tricky? So I've taught it for 30 years to scholars, academic scientists, conventional high achievers who bring their conventional overachieving strategies. So much is promised in the world of lucid dreaming, right, but so little is delivered. Why? Well, because you're not meeting this reality, this domain, on its terms, right? Last year, I taught this is so cool. It was so cool, but it's also super frustrating. I was invited to teach lucid dreaming to a bunch of traders in London. Actually, the program was in Spain, and these people went in there. I kind of took the imitation as the kind of challenge, like, I wonder if I can reach these people. Well, I couldn't.
I tried everything but dynamite and LSD on the water system. Maybe next time, I'll give it a better try. But they wanted to go in there and, like, knock it out of the park, right? We can get this lucid dreaming thing done so that we can make more money become better traders. That's really not the best way to approach this domain. Or even better yet, a couple years ago, no kidding, pitching coach for the New York Yankees, right? Reached out to me and said, Hey, man, I want you to teach my pitchers how to become better pitchers in the world of lucid dreaming so we can get an edge on the competition. And while I appreciated his inquiry and request, I told him, I said, you know, I don't think this is going to work. Man, the gods and the goddesses, if you like that kind of nomenclature, the deities in the night, they don't play in these conventional rules. It's just not going to work. Yeah, sometimes you'll have some success, but you're not going to have it consistently with that type of attitude. To be rather blunt, the nocturnal meditations, lucid dreaming, will just flip you off. Sorry, man, we just don't play by these rules. It's like putting your finger on a beat of mercury, press it and what does it do? Squirts out the side. So as we'll see, there are a number of gods, right? And goddesses, deities that rule the playbook of the night, but there are two prominent ones, kind of gatekeepers. One is the trickster, Hermes, and the other is the trickster, mercurious, the weak and Roman gods, respectively. These are the gods that relate, really. They're the gods of translators. They're the messenger gods. They're the gods of commerce, communication and trickery, and so if we learn how to play by those rules, we're going to have some success here. Parenthetically, by the way, Hermes Mercuria, sometimes the hybrid of these two, was the guide in Greek and Roman mythology, who principally escorted people into the underworld. Well, the underworld isn't just what happens when you die. The underworld takes place in a microcosmic form every night when you fall asleep. So the idea here is the invitation, the suggestion, the tip, to be open minded, to approach lucid dreaming with a beginner's mind, as Suzuki Roshi put it, to succeed in this kind of liminal or demonic reality, we have to really replace or augment traditional causality and logic with a type of fuzzy logic, because conventional effort doesn't always work. So what I've discovered over the years is that these nocturnal gods, if you'd like to work with that kind of anthropomorphism, they'll tease you, they'll seduce you, but then they'll spurn you. And so for me, just to reinstate, I've been doing this for so long. I've had, you know, soaring, hyper, lucid dreams, sometimes called theophantic dreams. I've had cognitive dreams, dreams of the future. And there are times when I feel like, man, I've got this down. I have mastered the dream world well, only to be followed by a drought where, like the well goes dry and nothing's happening. I have heard this, I cannot tell you, and I'm sure Mia can share the same 1000s of times. Why does the well go dry? Well? Because this realm doesn't play by the same diurnal rules. So in techno speak, in the world of chaos and complexity theory, lucid dreaming is a non linear, non linear dynamical system, which means it's like the stock market, one day up, one day it's down, one day it's up, what's down. And just like in the stock market, success and lucid dreaming is staying the course, literally, in this regard, staying with this course, and then staying the course even after this thing ends. So one last thing around this that I have found super interesting. This is a relatively recent discovery. This really helped me understand some of that kind of I don't know, just that the mystery of this whole nocturnal world. So I've come to discover for sure that the nocturnal darkness, right, darkness all together. The nocturnal mind is fundamentally feminine in nature. This is represented by the Goddess paramita in Buddhism, in the Eastern world, or in western mythology, next the goddess of the night. And so what I've discovered is that the best way to play this lucid dreaming game, it's like a dating game. You have to romance these subtle feminine dimensions of your mind. Where really the goddess of the night? She's almost a dominatrix in some regards, right? She takes the lead. So the idea, fundamentally for success, is surrendering, letting her lead this dance. So here's where it gets, really, really cool, if you scared you too, directly with these kind of masculine photoreceptor eyes. So and this is so interesting, biologically, in our eyes, we have two sets of photoreceptors, the kind of the photoreceptors that operative, principally in the daytime. These are the the cones and I this is my languaging, that these are kind of more masculine photoreceptors. If you look at the nocturnal arena through this kind of photoreceptor lens, using my languishing, the darkness is going to shy away from you. The lens is just too direct, it's too blunt, It's too gross. So what I've discovered is you have to look at her, so to speak, this feminine quality of your mind. You have to look at Lucid dreams, almost from the edges of your mind, using what are called the photoreceptors of the rod. So this is if you look out tonight. When it gets dark, you want to focus on something in the dark, you will notice that the best way to focus on something in the dark is not by looking at it directly, with these masculine rods, I'm sorry, combs, but more from the edges of your eye with the more feminine rods. So if you go too directly, she'll shy away. She'll shine away. So in order to really have success in this realm, you almost have to look out of the corner of your eye, E, y, E, and the corner of your eye, literally the letter I, the corner of your sense of self. If you look too directly, she'll shy away. So knowing that this is the way to play the game, right when you're entering this kind of Twilight Zone, not too tight, not too loose, is a maxim that really applies conventional approaches. Absolutely, absolutely worth learning. They have some hidden Miss success, but if you want to have consistent success in the world of lucid dreaming, excuse me, excuse me. You have to think outside of the diurnal box. You have to think outside of the perception box of waking consciousness, fundamentally even to fall asleep. Biology represents this yet again. You literally have to stop, stop thinking all together, if you don't stop thinking, you're not going to fall asleep. Literally, that's what results in insomnia. So this is the way to enter this realm, this unconventional, quirky realm of the dream, this Twilight Zone, right? Is by playing with these new sets of rules. You're entering a mythopoetic dimension of reality, a dimension that's more foundational, that the waking state does not always abide by the same rules. So the rules of engagement is, I've come to discover them. Be curious, be patient, be open and be ready to play, ready to dance. You're entering the world of after hours, literally the world of after logic, after rationality, after thought. These are all literally synonyms for meta. Lucid dreams are a type of meta dreaming, and dreaming here. Meta means here, beyond or after so lucid dreaming is literally an afterthought. It's an after hours afterthought where you bring, for sure, you bring your intellect, you bring your logic, you bring your rationality, but then you're also willing to suspend it. You're also willing to leave it at the gate and be open and sensitive to what the nocturnal mind, ie, your own unconscious mind has to teach you. So in this regard, these practices are really empowering. They're challenging in that regard, but they empower you to trust the threat of your experience, to see what works for you, to be fearless, curious, playful in the way relate to this dimension. So we need with with lucid dreaming, it's considered a somewhat advanced practice, partly because it requires a somewhat advanced attitude where surrender replaces conquest. You know, often I go to India and Nepal and other places, Mount Kailash and the like, is so interesting to me that the sacred peaks like Mike Mount Kailash and others, sacred mountains. You don't climb them, you don't conquer them. You circumambulate them. So this is the kind of narrative that works in the realm of the demonic, the liminal, the dream realm, a realm where you circumambulate, where you're willing to play and surrender and open to a new set of rules. If you do that, you'll be embraced by a dimension that is so rewarding, so so magical, so transformative. It will truly wake you up. You have to be willing to be opened in the best sense, defeated by these so called feminine qualities of the mind. And I think if you open your mind and heart this kind of receptive approach, then
languaging speaks to you the gods, the deities, the Goddesses will reward you. So lucid dreaming, altogether is rewarded by playfulness, by lightheartedness, by the liquidity of humor, and of course, by just stick to it, and it's the perseverance that's required for the success so fundamentally, with this course, have fun. I'm going to be hanging around for sure. I'll be back for the last course. I'll be hanging around as much as I can during this course. I'll also be around today for some Q and A at the end of Mia's presentation. But I want to close with this extraordinary quote from, again, Henry David Thoreau, I'm such a fan of these New England Transcendentalists. This Thoreau was amazing. He said this, only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. Wow. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. So let's wake up to this new dawn together. So with this introduction, I want to hand it over to my dear friend, Mia. I'm super excited to invite her into our community. I think you will rapidly see her extraordinary gifts as a teacher, and her experience and kindness and compassion that she brings to this amazing discipline. So Mia, come on board.
Amazing Thank you. Thank you, Andrew, so much for that incredible view, beautiful, deep dive in I'm always amazed at how in a short period of time, you can take us from being in front of a computer after a busy day into the awe and into the magic of what these practices offer. So thank you for not just opening but also for all of your contributions to the space and to this work, for building such a beautiful community of people. What an extraordinary gift to have so many souls, curious, dedicated, showing up to do these practices. And that's testament to the really, the pathway you've you've laid for all of us. So thank you so much. Welcome.
Glad to have you with us.
Ah, beautiful and a really big welcome to all of you, and for those of you who I'm meeting for the first time, as Andrew said, my name is Mia, and I'm a very dedicated or narrow note and trainer. And before we get into the into like the meet up tonight, which is going to be really the practical side of the reflections Andrew shared, I just want to acknowledge each of you for being here, because in a world of infinite possibilities and amazing Netflix shows and take away pizza and all the pleasures of the Western world choosing to be here and to commit to the six week container. It says so much about you and where you are in this moment. And I just want to reflect my immense gratitude and respect back to you. I do not take your attention lightly and my intention with this program over the next six weeks is to give you the practical tools that you need within the correct context, so that you can start having these experiences for yourself, so that, like Andrew was saying, you can begin this dance with your own unconscious mind and really start to explore for yourself beyond just the intellect and saying that, I would love to just take a second to digest some of what Andrew said. Every time I hear Andrew speak, I end up with a whole list of notes. And part of this course will be digesting and applying what we're learning. So I'm going to start that right now. So if you have a pen and paper, or if you're taking notes in your computer, I just want to invite you to take 30 seconds to write down one thing that really hits you from what Andrew shared. It could be an insight, it could be a statistic, it could be a question. It raised for you. But I just want to give you sort of 2030, seconds to actually reflect and digest a little bit one thing that really hit you, that he said,
For those who'd like to share, remembering that for one of the blessings of this, course, is we're really going to work to make this as participatory as possible. It's a big group, but there's ways we can do it. So when you have moments to share, please take them. Do you want to share in the chat what the Insight was for you, what the question was, or what inspired you, so we can, kind of all dream, pull from that together. Let's see beautiful, yes, play by different rules. Be fun. Look at it from the corner of your eye. The eye, one of the ones that hit me was just the vast amount of opportunity we have just, you know, dreaming, 500,000 entries into dream, six to seven years spent in RAM. You know, dreaming isn't a insignificant, unimportant part of our life. It is a profound opportunity that we can work with skillfully. Yes, Romancing the feminine with lightness, yes, relief, hearing about the dry spells. Oh, my goodness, we're in solidarity, all of us part of the part of the path, isn't it? Sacred? Peaks are not climbed, but secure. Ambulated, exactly, beautiful. And I encourage you guys, as we go through this together, you know how you interact with the content is going to determine how much you get out of this. So take notes, draw pictures, whatever it is, however you like to process information, I've built a bunch of different worksheets and diagrams. I want to try give you as many resources as I can, but be creative with how you engage with this class. It'll definitely help in the application, you know. And so just for those who aren't so familiar with me. I know that this is, it's kind of a nice first date. You know, my experience of lucid dreaming dates back sort of seven or eight years when I really took it on as a opportunity to deal with my fear of death. And for those of you who study the Tibetan Buddhist sort of lineage, you'll know that you know lucid dreaming, Dream Yoga and Bardo yoga, they had these parallels. They working in the dream space in order to be able to wake up in the Bardo. And so I was really curious about seeing if lucid dreaming could help me with what I had developed as a crippling fear of death. And since then, it has been such a fruitful path for me. And I think both in terms of its the psychological integration, being able to work in my dream space, to directly interact with parts of myself and bring them into the fold for greater wholeness and peace, and then also in terms of spiritual deepening and expansion. One of the most beautiful opportunities, I think, is offered in lucid dreaming is that beyond intellect, beyond reading a book, you can go into these spaces and explore for yourself and experiment for yourself the nature of the reality, the nature of consciousness, the nature of your mind, and it lands in your body because it's an experience like Andrew said, no different from waking state. You could have these experiences personally and viscerally. And so incredibly grateful for the benefit I've been given, and really excited, and I really love sharing with those who are on the path. Now, traditionally, I've always taught one to one, and so I'm excited to do this as a more of a group adventure, and take this on as a team, and as part of that, to be kind of collaborative support of sangha. At the end of this call, I'm going to give you guys instructions of how we can connect in smaller WhatsApp groups. So I'd love for us to be able to have a little bit more intimacy. This group is really big, so on these calls, it's going to be a little bit more unidirectional, but to be able to have more sort of daily, weekly support in these in these group chats. So we'll get to that at the end. But first of all, I'm really curious. In this big group we have, I know we have brand new lucid dreamers, and I know we have some people who are experienced, and so I'm just curious. We're going to gage it from a scale of one to 10. One is you haven't had a lucid dream yet. 10 is you're you've been practicing for years. You have regular acidity. You've had good experience working in the dream space. Where on the scale are you one to 10? Just curious. All right, we got some beginners, some midway. Oh, got a 10 in there. Oh, eights, ones, two. Wow, yep. Okay, so a real spectrum, wow. And I'm also curious. I've seen it. Some people are joining us from Europe. Thank you for staying up late. Just so you know, for the future we will, we are sending out the replays. So you're welcome to join if this is part of your nighttime practices, but you can also do this class in replay once we send those out, beautiful thank you guys. So we have a real stretch of dreamers here, and I just want to reaffirm, firstly, for the first time practitioners, I'm really honored to be your first guide in this realm. And for those of you who are experienced and who already have a practice. I want to honor you for committing to strengthening and deepening your practice by coming to this course, even if you know everything I'm going to teach you, being here, being sort of invigorated by relearning it, it really juices the practice. So honoring you for that, and then really grateful that actually following on from Andrew's thoughts today is really going to be a focus on setting up the correct perspective for this practice, as you will have intimated from like everything he said, how we approach lucid dreaming is as important as what we do in the approach. And in the next, sort of like four weeks after this, I'm going to teach you very practical steps and tools. Me very focused on that, but there's no point me teaching you these practical tools if you don't have the correct perspective and the correct motivation, it'd be like me handing you a power drill with no power. So I'll be giving you some powerful things with with really nothing to to fuel it. And so today, we're really going to look at this from the perspective of, first of all, a learning journey. And I just encourage you to think about a skill like, what's a skill that you've learned that you are you consider yourself to be proficient in? So something you can do well, and it doesn't take too much energy, but something that you learned after the age of 15. So it could be a language, an instrument, particularly a skill set sport. Just think back to a skill like that that you actually learned meditation. That's a good one, meditation, meditation, but even a practical thing, cooking. I just want you to think about that learning process. Take yourself back to when you first started. I know for me, I learned tennis for a couple years, and when I first started, the first like, two weeks of learning, even though I intellectually understood what my coach was saying, Put your foot here, rotate your hips, I couldn't get it. I just absolutely couldn't get it. And then one day, it just clicked, right? There was this growth, and there was an integration, and then I plateaued again. And if you think back to what you've learned, like, think of what the learning process is, even with a linear waking state skill, having a respect for the non linearity of the learning process is really helpful, because, as Andrew says, we approach this with a kind of like openness and curiosity. And I think really, really taking faith in the fact that someone once explained this to me. As you can see it not as a maze, but a labyrinth. Like in a maze, you go in, but you could reach a dead end and get stuck. Oh, to had to turn around. Oh, no, I got stuck again. Versus a labyrinth, those of you who've walked those labyrinths, there really is only one path, and if you keep walking, if you keep focused, if you keep committed, it will take you into the center of the labyrinth. If you keep walking, it will take you out of the center, out to the end, and you'll be walking towards the center, and suddenly it'll feel like you're walking away from it. You might have a moment where you're doing this training, where you're like, I was getting such good dream recall, I started to have pre lucid moments, and then, boom, I didn't have dream recall for three, three days. If you understand and anticipate these twists and turns, it puts you in a really healthy position to be in relationship with these teachings. So we're going to go into a practical piece around this, when it comes to motivation today. But you being the Explorer. You are the explorer of your own mind. I can't go there for you. My job is to give you what what pieces of the map that I have, and to equip you with the tools that I think would be most effective and appropriate for this moment in training. And so what I noticed with my clients, when they, a lot of them, would come to me, they've read books and studied lucid dreaming, but they're so overwhelmed by the conflicting experiences and the amount of practices, and they're like, I don't you know, there's like, 62 things they're trying to do one day, and they're not sure how they relate together. I'm a visual person, so I've built a map, but I'm going to share this with you guys, and we're going to use this map just to kind of understand how the practices we're going to learn are bucketed together, and how they support each other. So everything I share, by the way, in these classes, after the class, I'll send everything out. So any resources, any images, they'll all be sent to you so that you can use them in the future. And you're also welcome to take screenshots, if you'd like to All right,
can everyone see this? There we go. So this map here is is really a simplified, high level map of how a lucid dreaming practice could look, bearing in mind like Andrew said, this is such a mercurial space how a map that you might build might build might look a little different, but I have found this works really well with all of my clients and with myself. I've synthesized what I've seen, and we're going to be working here this pyramid that you see up to the green triangle. This is going to be our focus over the next six weeks, because what this is are all the skills and the perspectives needed in order to cultivate lucidity, to stabilize it and then to effectively work within the dream. Now you may get lucid during this time. You might get lucid tonight, but even if you don't, you will have all the skills you need to keep walking that path and keeping responsive and adapting in your own time. So you'll see here, this, this block here, correct motivation, dream recall, day practice, night practice. This is what we're going to work on for the first three weeks. And this is going to be really to set you up with the concrete practices that are going to help build the habit of mind that supports this experience to naturally arise. Once we've got those dialed in, we're going to work on what are called the internal and the external sort of stimulations. So internal stimulation is purpose, so building beautiful dream missions that excite you, that motivate you, get you connected and touching on the amplification, which is, you know, external stimulations like wake back to bed, or even supplements, or ways of, sort of working with the dream space externally, those things all over time lead to lucidity in your dreams. And then once that's happening, I'm gonna teach you in the class five how to stabilize that lucidity. So once lucidity starts popping in, you're able to work skillfully with the dream and start doing these incredible, successful dream missions. And once you've got this triangle down, this whole world of the more advanced practices opens up to you. It's like Andrew always says, No lucid dreaming, no Dream Yoga. And stage one of Dream Yoga is lucid dreaming. This here it's this is all stage one, and stage one is the gateway to everything else. And once you've got that, once you've you know the dials, you understand how it works, you've set it up correctly, then the world will open to you beautifully. So we'll come back and refer to this. But for today, we're starting here which is the most important piece, which is the correct motivation. So approaching these practices with the right perspective and with the correct motivation. So like I said, without that. It's kind of like having a electric drill with no electricity. And it's really this balance, because, like Andrew was sharing, you think, okay, motivation that means I'm going to pump myself up. I'm going to be really strict in my discipline. I'm going to be, you know, we think of what a traditional sense of motivation is, not so much with this. So this is a more there's a more nuanced sense of motivation. And the way we can kind of look at it here is, I like to think of it in terms of two types of motivation. And as I describe these two types, I'd love for you to feel into which type you feel is more you by default. We tend towards, I think one type of habit just depends, I think, on your personal training and your temperament, and these two types of motivation, I feel like work beautifully when they're in balance together and when you understand them, you can feel into your practice. Since they are maybe I need to dial this one up, maybe I need to dial this one down. So I wanted to teach you guys the dials for these and really, first thinking towards fire motivation. You think about what Fire, fire, it's like, hot and fire motivation is, I think what I've noticed most lucid dreamers come in with, they're intense, they're excited. There's a lot of a type personalities, kind of like what Andrew said, we come in, we're like, I'm gonna lucid dream, I'm going to control my dream world, or we have these big ambitions or or sort of strong intentions for our dream practice. And this can be really helpful, because a lot of the practice we do require discipline, like this kind of fire allows us to stay committed to our practice. When we do our intentions at night, we do it with full feeling. So the fire can be really, really good and really, really strong. Its weakness is that, you know, I people who have a lot of fire that's out of balance, they will tend to have very strict, very committed practices that just run dry, like they just kind of, we, just like, I, and I'm a fire. I can kind of squeeze the love out of my practice. So for me, even though I'm, like, committed, undisciplined, this can definitely be something that is I have to be aware of. And the balance to this is heart motivation. You think about like, the heart motivation. This is really being moved by something that feels important to you. This is a sense of of like, deep inspiration. Of a sense of like, this is powerful. This is profound. And so people with strong heart motivation tend to do things fully with all their feeling. They're more adaptive, more kind of creative in the way they do it. The downside is there can be like an inconsistency. So I know people with a lot of heart motivation, they get into lucid dreaming. I'll be in for a week, then off, and then in for two days, and then off. And so heart can use a little bit of fire, and fire can use a lot of heart. And so I'm curious, as you listen to this, do you feel like you're more heart by default, or more fire by default? I've definitely seen, oh, we got some hearts. I'd say like 80% of my clients are fire, you know, heart. Oh, wow. We've got a lot of hearts in here, right? So the hearts, we can use a little more backbone fire. We can use a little bit more opening, a little more softness, beautiful, a fire heart. That's yeah, and here's the point. We want a fire heart. We want in this practice, we're wanting to have the balance, so that we're bringing intention, we're bringing discipline, we're bringing commitment, but we're also in that beautiful, adaptive flow and relationship that Andrew was talking about, that we're listening, that we're playful, that we're not imposing our will on right? This is the balance, beautiful heart of fire, excellent. And I think, you know, when we think about, like, the way that I like to merge these is what I call a heartfelt commitment, which is what we're going to work on today. And what a heartfelt commitment feels like is like the heart is the deep caring, the open mindedness, the curiosity, the compassion, and then, you know the commitment is the sticking the course. And pairing these two things together is such a powerful way to begin this practice. So as you learn the tools, as you begin to experiment, as you come up against obstacles, you have that foundation holding you the whole way through. We're going to work with a motto every week a motto. I don't know what you call it slogan. Maybe we'll use slogan. We're going to work with the slogan every week to help us anchor in what we're learning. And this week, we're going to work with the slogan this moment matters. This moment matters, and we're going to crank up our connection to why these practices are important. It's so easy in this day where we're kind of, we can be we can kind of dabble in spiritual entertainment, right? Like take a lucid dreaming course for six weeks, and, you know, it's really interesting and some cool ideas. But I would really want you to get the most out of this. And in order for these practices and this information to create something for you in your life, it needs to feel like it's important, and to really understand why you're here, what the implications of these practices are and just how powerful they can be for you. So our motto this week, we're going to work with it the whole way through, is this moment matters, because it really does. So with that in mind, I would love to take us through just a closed eyes, reflection together. And what we're going to do is just do a I'll do a very basic just a setup to get us connected and then to help us tap into our heartfelt motivation. I'm going to use something that I find really supportive in my practice, which is the the four preliminaries in Buddhism. If you're not Buddhist or you're not familiar with these, don't worry. I'm going to share them in a very kind of universalized way, but I just find them are they're an incredible structuring to tap us back into our hearts and back into what matters. So we'll do some reflection on that, and then move into specific reflections about your lucid dreaming practice. And so my goal will be, by the end of this class, we're we're going to stop at about sort of just past the hour for Q, A is for you to really connect to and walk away from this with a very clear, heartfelt commitment about why you're here, what, why this matters to you, so you can carry that through the next six weeks, as we do more and more kind of like technical, practical work together. Okay, to see any Yes, exactly, John tied to precious human life, beautiful. Alright, so why don't we just, yeah, I think let's, let's do this is a close eyed if that feels good for you.
You're, you're welcome to lie down if you want, if you're if you're not
likely to go to the sleep. Some people can actually do that. And one of the things actually, I love about Andrew's retreats is doing the lie down meditations and really learning how to keep awareness while in a posture that encourages sleepiness. So we're in the nocturnal practices. If that suits you, fine, but for the rest of us, just getting comfortable, right?
Just taking a comfortable seat. We're just going to start with three breaths together, some cyclical sighing, which is a scientifically backed is the most relaxing type of breath work. And how it's going to work is we're going to breathe in for four counts. We're just going to hold at the top for three and then we're going to sigh with an audible release out of the mouth. And we're going to do that five times together. Now, on the side, what I want to do is to feel your body actually releasing, relaxing. And one way to do this, to help is as you breathe in and you hold you can kind of squeeze some of your body, create a little bit of tension, release the tension. So do it together, four in, holding for three, sighing out, breathing in for one, holding for three, and sighing out, ah, letting go into the ground, breathing into four, four, hold and squeeze for three.
Big ah,
letting go the day, laying on his trace and breathing in for four, hold and squeeze for three.
Two more, breaths in for four, hold and squeeze for 321. Sighing it all out. Final one, the deepest breath and the most relaxed, sighing out breathing for four,
hold and squeeze for three and letting it all go. You can close eyes, or you can just keep your eyes gently, gazing downwards, just finding the floor beneath you, finding the seat beneath you, feeling wherever your body comes into contact with the ground, exploring the sensation of that ground against your body, your feet on the floor, your body on the seat.
Not noticing that the ground is stable, you can relax into a little bit more feeling that sensation of stability beneath you, just noticing that in the sensation of stability. It's a quality of safety, the stable and safe ground beneath you,
just letting go into that safe, stable ground, just releasing any points of tension, any holding in your body, your jaw, between your eyebrows, just letting your body rest into the safety and stability of the ground and
and then on the next breath in just feeling your spine rising up, just lifting up into a sense of Inspiration, rising up into a sense of sovereignty, gently rolling your shoulders back, breathing up into a sense of sovereignty and just breathing down, releasing into the ground, up into inspiration, down into humility, and
then just being curious about where these two qualities meet in the center of your heart, sovereignty, humility, inspiration and grounding, this beautiful balance of these qualities right in the center of your heart. And if you're a little more fire, like me, you can place your hand on your heart, connect to the physical sensation of that part of your body, and then just gently dropping your awareness into the space we're going to learn from our hearts. We're going to practice from our hearts. The mind is going to be useful. It's going to be helpful, but there'll be some places where the mind can't help us when it comes to lucid dreaming, the heart is a more intelligent way through and staying connected to your heart. Invite you to reflect on the extraordinary good luck of being born as who you are in this moment, in this specific human manifestation, in the specific time in the place in the world that safety and access to resources that allows you to be here tonight, the extraordinary blessing of having access to these teachings, teachings that were only made available to us in the last decades. What extraordinary good luck that you are alive in a moment where these teachings are available with the technology to connect. You have the time and the safety to be here. You are the exception in the human experience where so much of what we've experienced is just survival, what an incredible opportunity, What a precious human life you have, and just resolving, wow, this moment matters, this lifetime matters.
We could have been born a time without freedom. Could be born in a time of great challenge, I think, as a woman of the times, I could have been born where I wouldn't be able to be here teaching with you today. We all have struggles, we all have challenges, but we have so many blessings too. This moment matters,
and layering into that that this precious human life you've been given is not forever. And no matter how old we are, we have a range of ages here, sitting together, practicing together. We all have a finite amount of years ahead of us in this particular form, me, as Mia, you, as you and so we have a particular opportunity to use this lifetime as we have it now, with its safety and stability and possibility and so resolve. While this moment matters, this moment matters me here as myself, in this time, with these opportunities, this matters, adding to this the recognition that in This time, as with all times, there are cycles so much momentum of intergenerational cycles of habit and trauma, patterns of pain and suffering in this particular realm that we're in. It's not hard to look around the world and just see, well, look at the momentum, the momentum of human habit over millennia, and to let this recognition further strengthen your commitment and your resolve to do the work that offers us a way through and out to do whatever is in your power, working with yourself, shifting the momentum of your own mind to spin the wheel in the opposite direction through consistent choices,
and then finally, really recognizing that these patterns we see in ourselves in the world are not random. What we're seeing are effects of previous causes, trees and fruit of seeds that were planted long ago with a good or bad and the same in our lives, and really just letting it land. Wow, this moment I have right now, I'm planting more seeds, and I'm either planting seeds of unconscious replication, or I am choosing to plant seeds of intentionality and of awareness and of beauty, and knowing that these seeds that you plant may take months or years or lifetimes to come to fruition, but a dedication in the context of the preciousness of your life, the impermanence of your life, the suffering in the world, acknowledging taking accountability for being empowered by the pocket of agency we have, which is to plant new causes, moment to moment to moment to moment. And by being here tonight, by taking up and training and lucid dreaming, what a beautiful seed to plant, what a beautiful way to begin. So just making sure you're connected in your heart, get your hand back over it if you want just breathing back into that space, heart like a beautiful, brilliant sun. If you're someone who's more heart, motivation at this point, you might want to just make sure you're you bring a little backbone. Sit up a little straighter, bring a little more fire. We're going to need both. If you're more fire, make sure you're softening, opening the heart. Strong back, open connected heart. I'm going to ask you some questions, and I just want you to listen to yourself for the answers. Whatever pops up. Why are you here? I Why did you come to this training tonight?
Is it curiosity? Is it a deep desire to cultivate spiritual wisdom. Is it the awe and wonder of the dream realm?
Is it a hope for
deeper peace, psychological integration, just feeling, if you're brand new, you've never had a lucid dream. What is it about lucid dreaming that excites you? And if you're an experienced lucid dreamer, what is it about this moment that brought you to deepen your practice?
Now imagine that tonight when you go to bed, because you might imagine you get lucid, you're full asleep, and some point during the night, you're in a dream, and something about the dream clues you in, and you start to realize, wait a second, this is a dream. I'm dreaming, and you become conscious in your dream. You become lucid in your dream, and now you are fully lucid in your own mind, able to create a collaborative experience anything you want. What does your heart want to do when you get lucid in the dream? You what does your heart want to do?
Does it want to ask for creative inspiration? Does it want to fly? Does it want to see mythical animals? Does it want to speak with a past loved one? Does it want to integrate some profound spiritual practices that you've been working on? Do you want to explore the nature of reality, of the dream space, face, and integrate aspects of yourself that are disintegrated and causing you suffering in the waking state. There's so much we can do in our dreams. Drop the shoulds and just really connect to what you want to do.
Andrew talked about how it's sort of like seducing a lover, and part of it is this deep love devotion, and part of that is the feeling of, like, I just I'm so excited to go to bed tonight and to lead my dream and to have this experience. So whatever you're imagining, let it have the quality of, can't wait, like you're going on a date with someone you are so excited about now beyond what you want to do in the dream. Why do you want to do that? If you want to fly and explore different spaces, is it because you're craving more joy and more awe and more wonder in your life. Are you working on a creative project, and you want to get some creative direction? Are you curious about non ordinary states of consciousness, and you don't really believe lucid dreaming is real, but you just got to try it for yourself. Why? Why do you want to do these things? Be honest and go a layer deeper,
and finally, connecting to if you were to do this, which you will these next six weeks, to dedicate to this practice, to do those things in a lucid dream for the reasons you said, just exploring how this could not just benefit you, but the overflow of benefit to the people around you, whether that's your spouse, your kids, your team at work, your clients, or just generally, a dedication to all the sentient beings we're connected with that by being responsible for and accountable for our own inner state, we're sending out ripples into the field. How could this practice be of benefit, not just to yourself, but to others? How might it ripple out? I
and just taking one last breath in, and as you release, finding your way back down to the ground, just gently opening your eyes as you're ready.
Beautiful.
Now we're going to take that momentum, and I'm going to give you five minutes to write out what came up for you and give you three prompts that you can work off here, just to make it a little bit easier, these are three questions that can help kind of tap you back into what you just explored. It's a way of, kind of writing this out together, which is the first prompt is I train in lucid dreaming so that I can, and this is the what you want to do. Examples here, fly, explore the dream, dance, meet mythical animals, summon aspects of my mind and talk to them, explore the nature of dream and reality. So I train in lucid dreaming so that I can, then your next sentence will be as I train, may I, and this here is how do you want to feel or become as a result? So may I integrate aspects of my psyche for more wholeness and peace, access my highest creative expression, experience real joy and awe, cultivate deeper wisdom and understanding. And then the third is, if it feels right to do a dedication of benefit, which could be something like, may my practice help me show up fully in my life and relationship for others. May my practice empower me to create music that inspires and supports others as I free myself from suffering. May others also benefit my practice, or just you can use a simple may all beings benefit from my dedicated practice, just working with supercharging our motivation by connecting it into really spreading that benefit to other people. So I'm gonna give you five minutes put a little music on for us to just write out what you explored. And over time, this is going to become your heartfelt commitment. This is going to be your commitment to Why and how you practice lucid dreaming you
see,
you guys hear the music. Some chick that's working. Someone give me a thumbs up if that's working.
We're going to come back here at 13 past the hour, so Just take this time to work with these prompts. Oh,
here, hey, go with the props back up for you guys, Sorry about that. You
just do one more minute, but don't rush. This will be part of our homework this week is to finesse and finish these, and I'll make sure I send out the full worksheet so you guys can work through that, just to see if You can capture the main feeling, the main ideas you
even if that's just a start. Don't worry about it. I said I'm going to send this out for you guys to continue, but just to just to start to get us connected to our real reasons. And I promise you, this is helpful, because, as Andrew mentioned, this path is epic. You are going into the frontier of your own unconscious mind, and you need to bring the correct motivation with you to do that as you face both the or, but also the challenges of that path so beautiful. So as we're going to I'm going to move into the Q and A, but just before that, I want to make sure we're set up for the coming week. As I mentioned, what we're going to work with is the motto of this moment matters. And the way to do that is we're going to finish our heartfelt commitments and write them out so that you kind of have it on a piece of paper. If you, if you're typing it, see if you can print it out. You want it on a piece of paper so you can work with it. And then each night, before you go to bed, put it somewhere near, near where you sleep. And just spend a minute, two minutes, connecting with this motivation. So let it become something that you re familiarize yourself with every single night. So just working with that to kind of really start to juice up your heartfelt connection to these practices. And then the next piece is that in the morning, for those of you who already have a dream journal practice, continue. Please. If you're new and you don't have a dream journal, just to start, we're gonna go into in depth detail about how to do this next week, but it's useful to start now. So either get a book that you have next to your bed, or just like I have a note on my phone, it's not ideal, but it's still the best way for me personally, and just first thing in the morning, roll over and just write down anything you can remember. At this stage, you're really just building the habit of doing it, so don't worry too much about it, but just working with that heartfelt motivation at night, dream journal in the morning, and then throughout the day, seeing if you can bring this motto and this attitude of this moment is important. This moment matters to the things in your life, especially things that are challenging, or moments that you're bored. And just see if we can infuse this attitude of correct motivation, not just into our meditation practice and lucid viewing practice, but into every aspect of our lives. So that's what you're gonna be working on this week. In the meantime, you would have received an email and we'll receive an email very shortly about the WhatsApp group. So it's pretty simple. I really want us to have more intimacy, so it's divided up by surname. So you'll see in the email that if you are surname A to B, your group 1c, to D, you're group two. Now WhatsApp is a free messaging service, so if you don't have it, you don't have it, you can just download it in the app store. Otherwise, for those who have it, open that email in your on your phone is easiest, and it'll connect you straight into the WhatsApp group. I will have to approve. You. Just want to make sure that our groups are safe, and according to people who registered, so give me a day or two disgrace in that. But these are the places where we can share our experiences accountability, just have a bit more personalized support. I'll be in all of those groups, giving prompts, but also monitoring. Yes, the email was sent already, so you guys will have that. We will send out the replays for this as well. So don't worry, this will all come the days after. Now, in the meantime, I would love to get to some of the question and answer period. I know we've kind of rocked right into it. For today, the Q and A is very open. Andrew has very beautifully stuck with us this session. So if you have a question to ask Andrew, when you raise your hand, just let me know, and I'll make sure I bring Andrew up. Otherwise, like for this moment, we will be very open. From next week, we'll kind of stick to questions about exactly what we've been practicing in each practicing in each session, just to kind of get the most out of it. But this is kind of your chance to explore. So if you'd like to answer question, I can see Yes, Philippe and Angel have already done it, just hands up, and we'll see how many we can get through in the next 20 minutes. So beautiful. Okay, Philippe, I'm going to bring you up one second, and thank you guys for your patience with my skills with Zoom, apparently, sharing audio and screen more complicated than I anticipated. Hi, Philippe,
I can you hear me? Okay, yeah,
I can hear you. Great,
excellent. So I'm joining you from India at the moment. My question is about, I mean, I had a long history of practice, for like, 40 plus years, with various levels of with various traditions and various levels of success. This has made me realize, I would say, sometimes, the extent of the damage from from my youth and from my childhood. I'm not sure whether this has, this always translates into joy, but I'm, I'm very hopeful about those practices, from what I read Andrew's books and courses, I'm very hopeful. I also realized that I just reached, I just turned 70, and I realized the magnitude of the task. It seems sometimes very technical, and I'm a bit, I'm a bit, I would, I wouldn't say scared, but I'm a bit not too sure about whether I have enough time left to really engage in those practices Seriously, and also whether Dream Yoga can can even help with a deep, ingrained trauma and bring true level of joy. Well,
thank you so much for sharing. I mean, what I'm hearing from that is a maybe a some some concern or skepticism or worry that you know you've reached the point of like, Can I really get the juice out of this in time, and you know I'd reflect back to you. Two different things, which is that Andrew shared beautifully about you know that quote, the classic of, not the not getting more years in your life and more life out of your years. And I do think that.
You have a really good, strong day practice. You've got a good meditation practice, and you've got, you know, enough safety in your own mind. It can be incredibly impactful. So
be hopeful. I think you absolutely can. Okay, thank you, Mia,
we got you. We got
you. Philippe, beautiful. Touch. Sure. All right, Angel. One moment, hi,
hello, hi, where are you?
Where are you dialing in from? I'm
seeing a big mix of people here, Portland,
Oregon. Oh, beautiful, welcome. Yeah, and I started lucid dreaming because my childhood trauma, overcoming my night terrors, I learned how to lucid dream and shift that. But the curious thing is, is I've died like three times in my dream, and I don't know if it's because, like lucid dreaming for so long, I've also had, like, I had an inception dream that I thought I was going to go insane from because I woke up six times, right? And just like, I'm just going to stay awake. So I actually started lucid dreaming when my day and night got really blurry, and I've just, like, was concerned about my mental health, so I'm just wondering how all that, the inception dreams and like, dying three times in my dreams and all that like, what it represents and like,
is there really anything to be concerned about, or just, well, let me ask you, because our psyches are all. We have patterns that are similar, but we're also different, right? So, for instance, I know what dying in a dream means for me, because I have the felt sense of it, like when I'm dying in a dream, there's if it's a non lucid dream, you know, it's usually just around patterns of my fear, where my fears clumping. But for other people, it could be more symbolic, and so I'll just reflect it back to you. Like, do you have a feeling when
you feel into what those experiences feel like? What
do they mean to you? Yes, yeah. The first one was really a culmination of my childhood and I died, and the other one was, well, that one was interesting. Because I actually got wrapped up in a blanket. Was actually suffocating.
I was drowning. I can see that, you know, and this, and this is what I want you guys to really get, you know yourself so much more than you realize. We want to, like, find the answer. Like, you are you have it. So what I would do, if I were you, I would sit down, and I would sit with each of those dreams, and I would tap into, like, what did it feel like when I was in that dream? It was dying. What did it feel like I was dying to what were the associations of the things around it? I'd explore that, and, more importantly, realizing that, like lucid dreams and non lucid dreams, they're just, they're different, right? And
these were non lucid dreams,
so the first one was kind of mixed,
but you weren't like, lucid, lucid, yeah, yeah, I wasn't lucid, lucid, because sometimes, you know, it's like the peripheral, so I have to go super peripheral, and I'll slip back into the dream,
and sometimes I can come out and gain lucidity again. So if you have a lucid dream practice, get lucid and ask, What do my dreams about death mean, right? So knowing that, like our non lucid dreams, yeah, like this is, this is like the content of our psychology, churning itself around, you have a direct line, pick up the phone, ask
to yourself, because you already know you really do thank you. Thank you again,
and we have typical Tom one moment you
Trungpa Rinpoche, Hi, Tom,
Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Hey, awesome. First of all, just thanks for the intro. That was great. My question is, I have had chronic fatigue for most of my life, I pretty much cannot meditate without falling asleep, and so that during the day and at night, the quality of my sleep is like, not good at all. I'm wondering if that puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to, you know, who's dreaming.
Ah, I as I have a former recoverer of lead poisoning, which created chronic fatigue. I really empathize. Yes, of course, the quality of our sleep is part of what helps lucid dreaming. I wouldn't say it's a sole determinant. Do you? Do you have you extract some of your sleep just to see, like, where the interruptions are coming? Like, do you have an idea of where, like, what that's doing to you? I haven't done much tracking, though. Okay? I mean, if I were you, you know, I would emphasize as you begin, this a curious exploration into your actual sleep. So trying to, like, you know, I'm guessing we'll go, we'll go into the sleep cycles. I'll teach you about some sleep hygiene, basic sleep stuff, but getting curious. I mean, if I had a chronic fatigue and I felt my sleep was being really impacted, I would look at the cause, which I'm sure you're doing. But then also just get curious about your sleep, because you might find that, okay, yeah, my deep sleep's being hammered, which you want to fix, but that you're still having actually good REM periods. But if you're finding, for instance, that, well, like, my REM periods are really challenged, then you want to pay attention when we talk about the amplification of, like, the difference of supplements and herbs and things you can take to really strengthen and boost your rim, right? But just see it as like we all have challenges. Some of us have challenges that are psychological, are fear based, or laziness. You're working with a physical challenge, but it doesn't block you from it. It just means it's something
that you will want to be aware of and pay attention to.
Okay, fair enough. Yeah, thank you, of course. And I sincerely wish you luck. And if you haven't worked for the functional medicine doctor, I highly recommend it. It's what helped me fix my lead poisoning, which nearly killed me. So,
yeah, thanks for the advice. All right. Okay, and Maria,
Hi, Maria, where are you calling it? From there we go. It was like not
allowing me to unmute Florida. Oh, Florida. I
hope you've been safe and hunkered Yeah, just some tornadoes around. But thankfully, we're safe. So I have a question, and another question. I'm very curious as to why you both have chosen to offer so much value for no like no investment, in a way, because I I shared this on my social media. And people, you know that typical thing where you're expecting it to be, not in depth. And I felt from the first time I saw your post on Instagram, I was like, Okay, there's something like proper here, like this is good stuff. So there is
that curiosity in me, if you feel called to share, yeah, let me I'll just address that straight up, which is that both Andrew and I find ourselves in the talk about precious human life, the incredibly privileged position where, by virtue of the support we've been given, the access to the teachings, we've had, the prosperity we've been able to generate in our lives. Our primary care is, how do we share this with people? How do we share this with people? And this is an introductory course. This is something that is so easy to give and so fun to give, and I will do this for the rest of my life. And then for those who want to work with me more in depth, I know I have a full one to one client roster. So and Andrew was booked all fully with retreats. So this really comes from a place I think I can speak for both Andrew and I of sitting together going, how can we engage the
beautiful communities we have the privilege of working with thanks. So that's it. It was my way of also saying your soul in this document. Yeah, I just, I'm so grateful, because especially that you said that lucid dreaming helped you over or it seems like it helped you overcome a lot of the fear of death that's been my hardest, like you said, crippling fear at times, greatest gifts, most crippling fears. So when I start to be lucid, or like, be aware that I'm in a dream, but then I feel no control, I like, almost start to fear going to sleep again, because I
don't want to be that lucid but that out of control. No, but this is excellent. This is excellent. You're in a that means you're in an excellent moment. And this is and this is why I'm so grateful for the eight years of trial and error and practice of my life. Because this is why I have I teach my clients something called an emergency compassion response, and it's something we learn during the day, something we practice so that in those moments, you have a easy go to that transforms the experience so and we'll be learning that during this course as well.
Thank you. Yeah,
I really need that,
so I got you perfect. Thank you.
So just, I know, gosh, I wish I could stay here and answer everybody's questions. To be respectful for time. I'm going to say Lisa is the last one. So I think John Theo, Joey, Lisa,
I will answer your questions. Let's jump into that. I Yeah.
Great. And reminder for you,
if you have a question for Andrew, just let me know. Hi John. Hi Amir. Um,
first of all, Liverpool, Liverpool,
you're up late. My gosh, are you up late? I'm a night owl. So this is perfect timing for me. It was, if it was a midday, I'd have problems. I'd still be in my sleep. So but thank you for doing this. Been a wonderful course, and I'm really looking forward to working with both you and the group via the WhatsApp and stuff. Got a quick question, and I don't know if it can be answered, and it may be a bit trivial, it was curious to me. So I've had about two or three dozen lucid dreams since I started actually practicing and evolving a practice within it. And the vast majority of them, I spent doing the typical things, flying around, going into space, you know, seeing wonderful VISTAs, meeting people I wanted to see, and all that sort of thing. But I always wanted to meditate within a lucid dream, because I have a very consistent, stable meditation practice in waking life. So the very last lucid dream I had, which was about a month ago, I the time came, and I thought, right, I'm going to use this opportunity to meditate. So first of all, I couldn't I was hovering around the floor. I couldn't stay still. Eventually I stayed still. I closed my eyes and I started to meditate. And it was beautiful. It was wonderful. And the thing that caught me out was when I was ready to finish my meditation, I couldn't work out which eyes to open, whether the eyes in the dream or the eyes because I kind of wanted to continue the lucid dream. But I got stuck and just went, I don't know how to do this. I I opened my eyes and I woke up, and that, that's why I could remember it.
I just wondered if there's any tips or tricks as to So, just so I understand you were doing,
were you doing a closed eye meditation in the dream? Yes.
I closed my eyes and you were, you
were in like a dark, bright space, and that kind of a space, yeah, just in my usual it was my meditation practice in waking life, closed eyes, using a
mantra, and concentrating on my breath and but there was no, there was no there was no imagery
forming when you were in the meditation space. Oh, it was a black space. That's when I thought, Oh, I'll open my eyes back into the environment I was in and I got, I don't know which eyes to
open. I don't know how you do that. I think so something you could try and just see how this feels for you, see if it works. Something that's worked for me. If I've when I was first doing the meditation practices, I'd often end up in that sort of dark, bright space, sort of instead of, like opening your eyes, which can kind of trigger the bodily response, leaning into the darkness and pulling forward a dream. So bring a dream out of the formless into form, kind of like you would if you were dream surfing. So if your lucid dream collapsed and you were in that space, you'd like intend and dream surf, bring in another dream, let form around you, do that. So treat that as a fertile void, instead of trying to like. You know, you can be focusing and imagining kittens, kittens, beautiful kittens. Here come the kittens, and you'll see them forming like and then to a dream. So
have a play with a with using that technique. I think it didn't
occur to me she was my playground. And thank you very much. Okay, thanks. John, all right, Joey, here we go. No,
Theo, Theo, hi there. First of all, thank you. Hi and Andrew for such a wonderful course. Introduction today I was a participant in Andrew's course just preparing to die. The last cohort, maybe this is where Andrew but I'm happy to
ask you, probably for Andrew let me bring Andrew who is Andrew. Alyssa Dino where Andrews, could you spotlight, Andrew, death and dying around, I will definitely defer.
Sleep and wanted, and it set an intention to dream. And I'm curious how one, I think it was on one of your podcasts, Andrew, you had mentioned that you were, you're very deep in your Manjushri practice. And I'm just wondering other than what I'm doing, which is practicing the mantra over and over and over again
and creating a relationship with Manjushri deity and Chenrezig. I'm wondering if there's something else that will I can travel with that will encourage my lucid dreaming. Yeah, great question at Theo. Nice to see you. Thank you. Yeah, you know the mantras are pretty cool, right? So they, they kind of perfume the nocturnal mind, right? So it's a nice way to send yourself off using the kind of the acoustic form of the Deity you might consider playing with, starting to visualize Manjushri. There are several stages of doing this. At a certain point, if you're doing it in the full bowl and Tibetan approach, you know, you may want to look for what's called an empowerment kind of thing. But you can do this without that empowerment where simply bring up a nice photograph of Manjushri, I would recommend it comes in different versions, either a white or orange. Doesn't really matter, a blue, just whatever it kind of resonates with you, and then actually work to supplement or conjoin your mantra recitation with a visualization of Manjushri. Because then what happens in the dream state. That's pretty cool is, you know, your mind is always birthing your mind is going to take a form in the dream arena. And so if, if you can actually arise in the form of the deity or or see Manjushri in front of you, that's a pretty cool thing. That's kind of stage five Dream Yoga. But there's no reason you can't kind of jump up and start to play with that sort of thing. It has profound implications, since you're connecting it to the Bardo, because this is precisely what's going to take place, allegedly, in the Tibetan view, the dream at the end of time, when your habits are going to shape you into your very next life. So in this case, what you're doing with these practices is you're literally little esoteric, but you took the course. You're literally purifying birth. That's it's a way to take the mind, shape it voluntarily, because if you don't shape it, what's going to shape it? Your habits, your karma. So that's what I would do. There's so much to say here, but I'll leave it at that. Just look online for a cool Manjushri, you know, with the store and the whole thing, become familiar with it. You can use that as a type of visualization to concentrate the mind, and then you might surprise yourself in a really delightful way when you can actually do this, and it takes on a lot more power and quite literally, life when you do it in the dream, because then it's not a visualization, it becomes your reality. So good for you, yeah, play for Thank you. Thank you both. See you next
week. Thank you,
beautiful. Thank you. Gee, thanks, Angie, that's really special. Welcome. All right, couple more, and for those who hit jump off, we'll see you next week. But for now, Joey, Hi, oh, great. You go. Can
you hear me? Yeah, there we go. Gotcha, okay,
okay, Hi. Thanks so much for the amazing class and material. My question isn't specifically about myself, but about my six year old son, who, when I was putting him to bed tonight, asked me if I can help him learn lucid dreaming. And I realized that is perhaps beyond the scope of this course, but I would certainly love to meet him there and have felt different kinds of, I suppose you might say, pre cognitive connections to him before in the sleep realm. So any thoughts you might have around that I would certainly appreciate, because, like I said, it's something I'd love to share with him in any capacity that I can.
Oh, yeah. I mean, and kids are great because they're such natural lucid dreamers, and they're so open, right? They're like, for children, that is this hard distinction between dreaming and waking hasn't been formed yet. So there's still this real relationship with their dream world. So, I mean, what I would say is, I mean, are you, are you an experienced lucid dreamer, or you just beginning with us, I
called myself a two I've probably had 20 to 30 lucid dreams over the course of my life. I think the only dream that even remotely approached hyper lucidity was actually with him in the dream probably a year and a half ago or so. But yeah, I put myself on a two or three scale. So no, I don't consider myself experienced, but not a complete novice, because I have experienced lucid dreaming. Sure.
Yeah, what I would say is, like, do this six weeks, because this six weeks is going to be a practical framework. So like we said here, we're sitting with correct motivation. Next week, we're going to look into reactivation of your dream recall and making sure your sleep is set up right in any of the external boosters. Then we'll move on. And like you as a parent, will Intuit which of these practices feel appropriate for your child. And so you might go, ah, like a dream journal maybe, I'm not sure it's six if that, if he's going to write down, but write down, but maybe every morning you have a dream circle together. Maybe every time before you go to bed at night, you have a dream song you sing together. So take the learning of this and then translate it with your parents eye into the things you think could really support them in that. And then it's a beautiful co exploration together. I can't wait to have kids to be able to do this with them. So tell me how it goes. I There's, I've got some wonderful reports of parents working with their kids lucidly, but also helping with nightmares. There's so many beautiful opportunities for young people. Yeah,
that's great. Thank you. I look forward to sharing
course. Okay, thank you. And last and not least is Lisa, hi.
Hi, hello, boy.
I'm coming to this as a as a big time beginner. I am interested from coming to it with interest related to my practice, and bringing dreaming into helping with the those, those aspects of the practice for understanding, you know, experiencing, rather than intellectually understanding, things like, you know, reality and emptiness and that kind of stuff. So, but I, I have a hard time even recalling dreams, let alone, let alone lucid dreaming. So I'm a I'm a little concerned if I that one needs to, you know, I like, can I? Can I really develop the capacity for this? I don't know if there are like limitations. So I'm really asking that beginner question. Great
question, your great question. I just like, I'd say 80% of the clients that come to me have no dream recall. When they start their training, they're just, they're like, excited to lose a dream, but they have no dream recall. What I would say is this, there's a reason you have no dream recall, and it's just habit. We just, we've grown up in a society that doesn't value dreams. We're busy our Reticular Activating systems have learned to focus and filter other things out. Next week's class is going to be primarily or half of it will be about how to reactivate your dream recall so that you have the tools you need to really reestablish that relationship. And that's something that can happen incredibly quickly. You start those practices that can happen within two days, three days, and in the more you do that, the more blown away you're going to be. Like my dreams were always there. They are. They were always there every night. Tonight, you're going to go to bed, have these rich, complex dreams and other spaces with people, and you'd awaken and forget it, just like you know the habit of it. But we're going to help make sure anyone, anyone who's on this call, who has a patchy dream, recall that's gonna be one of the foundational things we start next week. So great.
Okay, great. Thanks, of
course. Thank you so much. All right. Well, thank you all for your time. Thank you for being here. Thank you for turning up open heartedly, for letting us into your living room, into your lives, and remind us. I'll send out the replay, the access to the worksheet, the lucid dreaming map, everything that we did today. I'll send out a link so you can access all of that. Also you have the email with the WhatsApp groups that you can request to join if you're feeling like you'd like to be part of something a little bit more intimate, completely optional. Please don't stress about it. And again, thank you. And so next week, we'll see you same time, same place, and we'll be looking at reactivating your dream recall and how to understand and optimize your sleep cycles so you're really set up for success. Thank you all so much. And just a big thank you to Andrew again for opening this for being such an incredible support for all the beautiful work that he's done. So I'm going to bring Andrew up here. We all say goodbye. Good night. You.
