it's been a slightly eventful week in my neck of the woods if you haven't heard we had a colossal biggest, actually most damaging the fire coil or history took out over close to 1000 homes like a mile in just a little bit over a mile mile and a half from wearing them. pretty creepy stuff I have some friends who lost their homes and and the whole sky was filled with this really eerie kind of glow. We had 100 mile an hour winds burned over 6000 acres a real real deal. You probably heard about it but it was really close to where I am way too close for comfort. So I'm particularly grateful I didn't go up in smoke and nice to see everybody because So Happy New Year to you all was a little less eventful than my end. I posted there I have is Alyssa to post a couple things. One is actually both related to mema. I just did a really sweet event with Bob and the whole Ballard group. And there's a really awesome death and dying event coming up at the end of this month. And then I just got the link for two three day it's the third in my Bardo series that I'll be doing with I think distance of February and then the second weekend in March on the deepest, most complex difficult of all Bardot's the vital data. And this was really gonna be really great to do with Bob because he translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead and more than half of that book is devoted to this bottle. So he's a real wizard when it comes to this particular one. So I'm excited about that. But in case you might be new to what we're doing here, I suspect at this point you're probably not. We are charging through my first book in this dream trilogy, so to speak, the Dream Yoga Book and we left off on page 32. And so what I do is I just read it run some spontaneous commentary. The first part of what I have to read tonight, there's not going to be a ton of commentary because it's a little bit more kind of clinical. So I'll be able to appeal to this material rather quickly and then certainly get to some of the induction stuff. And whatever comes to my mind comes to my mind, I just stopped in riff away, which is why I liked it so much. Great. We'll do this for about an hour. And then for those of you who want to send in questions in the chat column, or raise your hand and ask a question about this or anything related to the nocturnal stuff. Let us know. Welcome to do so. We finished on page 32 If you have it, the types of sleep right. So to most effectively learn lucid dreaming this by the way, I guess I will have some things to say What a surprise. This is where the the western approach really can help with Dream Yoga. Because there's there's obviously strengths and limited limitations both through streaming from the west. Dream Yoga from the so called East with globalization those boundaries are breaking down. But the whole science and the scientific approach to the study of sleep, some of the scientific induction that it's definitely a colossal addition to traditional green yucky stuff. You will not find any of this in a classic yoga book or Manual. To effectively learn lucid dreaming, which again, second in five stages of lateral meditation, which is the platform for all the other nighttime practices. So actually the first of the classic three stages of Dream Yoga, first stages, attending lucidity. It helps to understand and take advantage of our sleep cycles. Sometimes it's not best to disturb other asleep other times we can make use of the sleep cycle to trigger lucid dreams. So there are two main kinds of sleep non REM or quiet sleep and REM and this was discovered the University of Chicago I believe in something like the mid 50s. I don't remember if I had this in a footnote with Urbanski and colleagues. REM sleep is called paradoxical obviously means rapid eye movement. This is what this graduate student in the sleep lab discovered. It's called paradoxical asleep because all the brain becomes more active during the stage muscles become more relaxed. Actually, muscles become paralyzed fundamentally, the bay Tonia non REM sleep is associated with restoration, deep relaxation and eyelink brain.
People who suffer from sleep apnea don't get enough. spend enough time in non REM sleep and therefore don't get the needed restoration. This to work a lot with this in my clinical practice, and it is a big deal if anybody listening has even the slightest hint that they might be suffering from sleep apnea. The vast majority of people don't know the habits. It's a major undiagnosed condition and it's the silent killer. So if you even have the slightest intimation that you might be suffering drowsiness during the day, lethargy, memory loss, that sort of thing. Don't be shy to check with your sleep physician and get a sleep study largely sleep studies now you don't have to go into lab anymore you can do at home so practices REM sleep is the sleep stage used and lucid dreaming and Dream Yoga. Non REM sleep is even the stage associated with sleep yoga. We'll say a little bit more about that much later in the book. REM sleep which accounts for about 25% of sleep. So this adds up to what like a lot the year something like six months over the course of a lifetime. This type of sleep for most people is associated with rapid eye movement muscle twitches sleep paralysis, actually sleeping Tonia is more proper term. Sleep paralysis is kind of inappropriate relationship to sleep a Tonia so that should be slightly corrected. Sleep a Tonja and active brain dreaming. Yeah, there it is sleep paralysis. A Tonio, which is one voluntary muscles become temporarily paralyzed the body turns into like a rag doll. You've probably had this experience before. You don't know what it is it can be a little bit unsettling. Sometimes can be. We sometimes can be aware of this. This is an out of phase REM sleep sequence. Where we're basically we're not supposed to be conscious of our body in REM sleep but in CB Tonia, you are supposed to be sleeping or dreaming but you're semi awake, right? You're in this kind of liminal space. But that's what I see here. So we're supposed to be sleeping and dreaming. But that's what happens during glimpses of sleep paralysis. We're partly conscious when we're not supposed to be. It's a temporary mix of brain states that are normally separate and recognize the sleep paralysis, Rem encroaches into wakefulness in lucid dreaming, wakefulness encroaches into REM. I tend to notice sleep paralysis during naps, I still do. I actually find it pretty interesting. It actually kind of cool when I partly sleep and partly awake feels like I'm in a straitjacket, right. You can't move you can't talk because like somebody's talking out to you. Because I understood what was happening. It was a panicky experience. Sleep paralysis is nature's way of preventing us from acting out our dreams and there was certain disorders such as REM behavioral sleep disorder. Sleep Paralysis doesn't work and people do things like beat up their sleeping partners completely unaware of doing so. People have been arrested and prosecuted for this bizarre form of domestic violence. My dog is dreaming my sweet dog Thai see and even my cat Max, I noticed that both of them I often see him twitching and semi barking and wonder what he might be chasing in his training right. Without a separate paralysis, you would probably leap up and run into a wall. Sleepwalking and sleep talking are different that occur in REM sleep when there is no paralysis. There's all the really cool stuff that we can talk about with Dr. Ed, which will be on next Wednesday, when he does his monthly sleep medicine, sleep physiology with us. So we talked a lot about this sort of stuff with him. Some of the stories around this are just really out there. I mean, there's one many stories but one famous story of a guy who literally literally gets in his car drives and lands like he's completely not just sleepwalking he's sleep driving, drives through stops the stoplights drives all the way over across town to his his mother in law's house. I think it's his mother in law, gets out of the car goes in there, tax her to death. Gets back in his car. He got cut off himself didn't wake him up. drives all the way home wakes up the next morning and then wonders what all the blood is doing on his hands. Like no idea. And actually he was acquitted. Unbelievable. Lots of stories like this and alerter lucid dreaming a dream yoga, we don't engage with non REM sleep because we're generally not dreaming during non REM non REM sleep not exclusively, but mostly mostly dreaming in REM sleep there is occasions when people will be dreaming in non REM sleep but generally not it's a general.
The title apply our efforts is during REM sleep when I call primetime dream time when dreams are mostly happening this is why we remember most of our dreams when we first wake up. Understand the following stages helps us determine when to apply our dream induction techniques. stages of sleep we go through five stages when we sleep well they're truncating one and two to one stage. So now they're reducing them to four. It's one of those but I was doing my research on this it was still principally five stages. Each stage is a show sociated with a brainwave frequency which is correlated with obviously with brain activity. We tend to view sleep as a simple matter of turning off but sleep is actually a very active state. Our brainwave activity is more varied during the night than it is during the day. Until recent improvements technology refined our understanding scientists most are for principle brainwave states Beta Alpha Theta Delta, is determined by EEG waves wakey consciousness where we are now hopefully most of us are associated with beta and alpha and sleep with beta and delta beta waves pulsator frequency of 30 to 40 cycles per second per hertz and associated with stress or concentration. And what I don't talk about here I don't believe I don't see here as gamma, which is an even higher cycle of brain activity 40 hertz or above. Alpha waves have a frequency of 18 to 13 hertz and associated with more relaxed waking states. When we go to sleep, the brain downshift from waking beta and alpha to theta and then eventually to neutral or the deep sleep of delta zero to four. And so somebody can maintain what's called Turia, which is resting. Let's see, I don't speak about this in this book, but it's connected to sleep yoga. For really advanced nocturnal meditators or just advanced meditators period, they can rest in a state of Turia which is beyond even with deep dreamless state called forth. And from that stage, they can witness they can watch all the other states of consciousness not only the other states have stages of sleep here that we're talking about a dream, but from that deep fundamental, non dual stance, they can actually witness all states of consciousness. And they there's there's some data and other scientists, I've involved with advising some labs on this. There's some scientists that we've been studying individuals who actually could do that. So they they're hovering in the zero Hertz range, and they're able to actually monitor what's happening. From that stance, pretty cool. His brainwaves down from beta into alpha, we enter a pre sleep stage called the hypnagogic space. So this is where some of you know this hypnagogic HIPAA public thing. This is now under my rubric under the terminology of a liminal phase a threshold dreaming, pre and post sleep, which is the kind of gap or Bardo between waking and sleeping, from the Greek roots Hypnos actually sleep God asleep in a Goji a leading to during the stage is common have feelings of falling hearing someone call your name and experience this called hypnagogic hallucinations so for those of you interested in exploring this by interview and nightclub obviously with Jennifer do pair she wrote this book on liminal dreaming. We get into this in some detail my my conversation with her cookout boundaries between inside and outside cellphone blur. hypnagogic phenomena are interesting for meditators, especially during long, hard meditation sessions, right? When you're dipping in and out of sleep on the cushion and therefore in and out of these hypnagogic spaces. We'll have more to say about hypnagogic experiences later and how to use them for the airway to practice lucid sleep onset. It's a really interesting place. This is one arena in the liminal hypnagogic space that you can't have even in Dream Yoga. Because when you're usually even a Dream Yoga, unless you're doing really invest in yoga, the narrative structure that goes back online there's still a dream you have a sense of your dream or having the dream so ego still operative. In the level of space, you can actually watch the ego and its structure come on done. You can you can see this as you're falling asleep, that's the narrative itself starts to kind of tear apart. So it's a very interesting way to view the kind of deconstruction of this narrative structure, which if it didn't happen, you wouldn't fall you literally would not fall through sleep, you would not fall into sleep. you'd stay hovering above that. Threshold. That of course we know is insomnia number one sleep disorder.
Another common event during this pre sleep state is called a hitmaker. myoclonic jerk, which is when you suddenly jerked awake for no obvious reasons. Yeah, this is cool. This little sidebar Salvador Dali, who I love this guy may in fact my show you my little mouse pad is a solidor dali painting. I love this guy. I've been to his museum in Florida. She's amazing. real dream artists and stories. So anyway, he had Edison not just dolly by SN as well. So the surrealist Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison take advantage of hypnagogic state to tap into creative power of their unconscious minds, giving rise to many of Dolly's creative insights, I mean, are dreamlike paintings and Edison's inventions. Dali in a surreal his colleagues our dreams are central to their work to stay in the pre and post dream state for as long as possible. Dolly and Edison very similar type of approach, devised a system where he held a spoon cradle over his chest that he would would fall onto a plate when he goes off waking him up. He then reset the arrangement over and over which allowed him to drift between waking and dreaming for extended periods. And so therefore he was kind of trolling his unconscious mind. super interesting. Das he extracted images from his unconscious dreaming mind and use them to see his conscious surrealist art. Dolly paint Dolly's paintings are a form of Bardo our with my nomenclature drawn from that magical gap between waking up training. Okay, so a little bit of clinical stuff here right. Stage one usually lasts about five or 10 minutes for light sleep. This is what it's still pretty darn easy to wake somebody up the difference between deep relaxation and sleeping on stage one occurs gradually and suddenly if you wake someone up during the stage, they often report they weren't really asleep. brainwaves during this stage decrease from Alpha Theta. We spend about four to 5% of sleep here. meditators also drift into the space a lot or maybe I should just confessing my inability to stay away when I meditate. Stage two is a slightly deeper, slightly deeper and characterized by a decrease in breathing, heart rate and body temperature. The brain is still mostly a beta but intersperse a two way functions that are the defining characteristics of stage two sleep spindles are a sudden increase in wave frequency and K complexes or a sudden increase in wave amplitude. I wish Dr. Ed was here. He could run with this. This is his turf. The stage lasts about 20 minutes. It as with any stage of times variable we spend about 45 to 55 Isn't that amazing? Almost half our dream and sleep space here. stages one and two are considered like stages of sleep. Stage three is beginning of deep sleep we're brainwaves dropped into the lower, slower Delta range. It's a transitional stage between light sleep and the deep sleep of stage four. There's no clear articulate crisp distinction between stages three and four. Except that stage three is one less than 50% of brainwaves are delta. In stage four is when more than 50% of ways are delta. Yeah, so I made a slight mistake by at the beginning I said one and two are the ones that are actually being joined. It's actually three and four. So my dad we spend our 6% of sleep in stage three that I talked about how they're collapsing these two stages. Stage four is our deepest sleep or last about 30 minutes in the first cycle. That's what we get all this deeper story. So in the first phase of the night, we go through these 90 minute cycles. Four or five times. And the first phase, maybe 10 minutes in REM which is why we rarely remember dreams early in the night because we're not dreaming. So as long, short RAM long non REM as the night progresses. That flips long around, shorter non REM. Stage four is characterized by profound muscle relaxation and rhythmic breathing. This is where we're fully offline. This is deep restorative sleep on the body releases Human Growth Hormone undergoes cellular biological repair, and gets the rest we need. We spend about 12 to 15% of total sleep, that's the chore but this is really interesting this next statement, but that percentage decreases dramatically as we age from up to 20% as young adult to 3% or less
by midlife.
By the age of 65 this slow wave sleep can disappear altogether. So therefore super interesting. Aging is therefore inversely proportional to the amount of slow wave sleep because the release of growth hormone also decreases lack of deep sleep can account for many aspects of aging, including decrease fatigue, increased body fat loss of muscle tone and strengthening and strengthening of the skin memory loss and diminished immune function. So this is why you know when they say oh Grandpa Grandpa they're not they don't need as much sleep. No, no that's not true. They're just not getting enough. Especially stage four. Stage three and four is when it's most difficult to wake someone. If someone does wake up from the state I'm sure you've had this kind of sleep inertia thing. They usually groggy grumpy and disoriented. That wedding and sleepwalking also tend to occur at the other stage for so now this is where it gets interesting for us after resting a deep dreamless sleep for about 30 minutes on the first phase. We briefly come back up to stage two but instead of coming all the way up to stage one, what do we do we enter this new stage RAM stage five. In other words, stage one is replaced with Brem. After read we go back down through the stages again, REM sleep is where we dream bubbles. brain waves come back from delta alpha, which means your brain returned to as usual the daytime frequencies heart rate heartbreaking respiration Quicken voluntary muscles are paralyzed. That's the sleepy Tonia you actually consume more oxygen during REM sleep than you do when awake unless you're doing something aerobic people often worry that lucid dreaming and Dream Yoga would could make them less rested. But since most of our restorative sleep occurs and delta that deep wave sleep and dreams mostly occur during REM on the blame brain isn't resting anyway. This worry is largely unfounded. So if you're really doing this right it doesn't really interrupt. Sleep yoga, that's a different story. Waking up interrupting non REM sleep that can affect your rest. We don't have a whole lot of traffic with that. Sleep architecture like if you have the look at the diagram represents the cyclical pattern. of sleep as we move between the different stages. Gives us a picture of what sleep looks like during the night is represented in a graph called the histogram. So this is what they do when you get a sleep study to determine the degree of your sleep apnea your your AGI your index how often you have episodes during the night created from moderate, mild moderate to really severe apnea. We go through these five stages four to five times a night. In about 90 minutes cycles after each run period. We have brief moments of waking up up to 15 times a night when we toss and turn this creates an opportunity to bring awareness to our dreams before cycling back into stage to sleep. So I play with this a lot every oil and say every single time but when I'm fiddling and tops and tossing and turning. Just because I've done it for so long. I just go into this automatic okay like okay what was I just dreaming? Dreaming? Where was I? And then if I am awake enough that I'll do something like but the demonic induction to lucid dream which I described I think in the next chapter. And while technique which is one of the most effective ways actually during volatility to kind of step back into the dream and so, you can take advantage once you understand the cycles. You can take advantage of these periods actually bring about lucidity. First time period is short five to 10 minutes. This is why we rarely remember dreams like I mentioned. If we have a non REM dream, it tends to be less intense and emotional during this time. Often just a recollection events from the day. as the night progresses, Rem periods increase and see the Dream Yoga techniques of teachings have zero on any of this stuff. So this is a great contribution from the rest. The first half of the night is mostly non rem and the second half transitions to the mostly REM just before waking we can be in REM sleep for 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why we mostly remember our morning streams. This is prime time drain time. And so this is interesting because every once in a while as someone who will ping me with a report that they had a two hour lucid dream. I question I just wonder because generally I mean you're not in RAM that law. I mean, I suppose you could transition from non REM into RAM maintained a two hour lucid dream. I get a little interested when I get when I hear those sorts of reports.
Maybe I'm wrong. By understanding the cycles we can tune into the times for ramping up our efforts. Absolutely don't waste your time trying to have lucid dreams. Not really part of the night. Get your restorative sleep. When until REM sleep is at its peak. When I do dream yoga retreats and have the luxury of taking naps during the day. I often practice lucid dreaming and duction techniques throughout the night. I did this in my retreat where I had the the goggles that I'm asking I'll talk about coming up. I had that thing I had it set to go off about every 70 minutes throughout the entire night. And so I just kept waking myself up over and over and over with this thing and it really worked. It really, really helped but then because I was a little bit I wouldn't say fanatical, I was in retreat, I had the opportunity to really dive into it. The only way I could really do that and not be exhausted was in fact to catch up with naps throughout the day. That was a really very, very fruitful time because it was like I was completely mixing. Sleeping dreaming and waking spaces are super, super interesting. I do not recommend you do this during the work week. We have a chance to do it in a retreat or on the weekend. It's worth playing with. Also sleeping sitting up is what I also did. That's also really interesting. It's even more effective than lying down on the right side which I talked about later. Sleeping sitting up is even more conducive. But you have to have the opportunity to the luxury to really recover from this get definitely sleep deprived if you do this. Yeah, so this means I set my alarm to go off every 90 minutes. Yeah, 70 to 90 minutes, you can start to kind of work your own sleep asleep architecture and see what your own patterns are. Which is what I'm most likely to be in REM sleep. I don't recommend this as a regular practice unless you can take naps during the day. During daily life, the time to concentrate your efforts. The few hours that before waking up and roll up so much more to say but that's pretty much all we need to know that can help us launch into these practices. Okay. So chapter four. Western lucid dream induction techniques. Yeah, this is from my teacher Campbell remember to the epigraph lead headcode Milarepa does not suffer some Milarepa right he was this amazing. Individual who famous in Tibet for attaining complete awakening in the course of one life after going through some pretty heavy karma. I feel like 37 people endure tremendous hardship and then basically through his tenacity, his personal perseverance and endurance, attained full lucidity in one life and so this is my teacher riffing on him. Capital by the way, Temple Rinpoche I heard later was considered to be if you believe in the sort of stuff or reincarnation or emanation of Milarepa Milarepa does not suffer because he knows that this this life is like a dream and an illusion. The same time he sees the sentient being suffer precisely. Because they take this life to be truly existed. Well, I mean, this is an incredibly sustained, pithy statement that the essence of the whole samsaric nightmare is solidity and lucidity. Taking things to be non lucidly solid, lasting and imperative are real and this is what in a certain sense, this this little quote, became like a seed syllable, the seed comment for the entire second book in the series of dreams a light bulb. Okay, so in the next few chapters, we will explore the techniques that allow us to wake up in our dreams. I do this a fair amount and the other book I published a year ago December, The Harbinger Press book The Art of lucid dreaming workbook. This present chapter focuses on Western deduction techniques on the following chapter looks at Eastern approaches, providing a broad I think, integral approach that joins the knowledge about our knowledge of the west of the ancient wisdom of the East. In my own training, I spent my first decade practicing Eastern techniques with hit and miss results. When I supplemented these meditative techniques with the methods for the West my lucid dreaming really took off so totally true. Dream Yoga isn't itself hasn't changed much in the hundreds of years who was designed by being so awake.
This is just my interpretation, that perhaps they didn't realize that mere mortals like ourselves might need baby steps when you read the actual text THE LITURGY OF THE practice texts. They are incredibly sustained, and when they're really pithy, they don't say much at all. And so when I learned this in the traditional way, it was like, Well, this is this is just a little bit too steep and there's there's not enough breadcrumbs here, there's not enough baby steps. So this is why I so appreciate what the West has to offer the work of Stephen Barish, and all the other scientists, scholars, researchers, who have really made an enormous contribution here. The great contribution of modern lucid dreaming is to provide a gradual onramp was the dreaming has much to offer for practitioners of Dream Yoga. And doing yoga has a great deal to do to contribute to lucid dreaming together. They make fantastic sleeping partners. So in these two chapters, I will introduce a variety of induction techniques. There is no need to master them all. Triggering lucidity is the point, not the technique that gets you there. This is actually important, otherwise it can be a little intimidating. There's just so many different varieties of approaches here. So unless you actually want to teach on this stuff, and really become basyl acquainted with each and every one of them don't have to do them all. Just find your ticket and find your sweet spot and use that. I've done this even though I'm relatively familiar with all these techniques. I have 123 that are my go twos. And I'll share those as I go through here. One technique may work well for one person and then all for another. The point is in presenting these techniques is that you will eventually find one that works for you. For most people anyway. When you do a stick with that no need to do others unless you work to explore more possibilities. The only danger of presenting so many others is that you might try one for a nighter to give up and then skip to the next I hear this a lot people just skim. They're afraid of the discipline, the perseverance, the tenacity to really dig deeper. I recommend staying with the technique for at least several weeks, give it a chance it's not working bad, then try another. Feel free to start with whichever particular method makes the most sense to you or the one that speaks to you, right. Yeah, here's a classic story about a farmer who wanted to dig a deep well. He tried to find water by digging six feet in one spot, which point he get discouraged and move to another. You don't know that another six feet nothing move. To another nothing is lack of perseverance, guaranteed failure. They get to the center of yourself with these nocturnal meditations, you have to dig deep potholes create shells create potholes. This is absolutely true and it's an unfortunate tendency in the west where because of our relative impatience or haste. We don't have many not everybody but we tend to be somewhat superficial approaches and just skimming skimming. Therefore wondering why things aren't working. We were trying to reverse a tremendous almost tsunami level collection of habits patterns, karma. And that is not by turning the Titanic around you're not going to do it on the diet. You have to exhaust some of those bad habits, slowly replacing them with good habits. And that just takes time. What makes Dream Yoga unique is that you become your own instructor. You're the one who knows your mind better than anyone. You're the one that knows your sleep patterns, Dream quirks and idiosyncrasies. We have to be honest with yourself in this practice, which is another reason and I tend practices are to tellers and also another reason they're just a tad bit advanced. You have to become your own guide your own meditation instructors point nobody can follow you back. Nobody knows your sleep patterns, your quirks better than you. You have to rely on your own wisdom and take responsibility for your success. Now this doesn't mean of course you have to do it obviously completely by yourself. That's why we have this nice look club platform. That's why I write these silly books. That's why we have the webinars and whatnot. So the weekend paying to greater or lesser extent our insights, our successes, our failures off of each other, to learn. See what works for you not only in the techniques, but in the way you employ them. If you find it's too disruptive to practices during during the week, just do it on weekends. I know a lot of people that do this. It's great well, let's have a look first to do a technique.
The way is presented don't be afraid to play around with it. And this is also where where my approach is a little bit different from the standard my way or the highway approach. So traditional instruction and techniques are somewhat regimented, somewhat, like going to school, you know, you're not going to really go on there and alter the curriculum. But my approach is a little bit more loosey around this sort of thing. Maybe a blending of techniques works for you or your own method, experiment. Have fun. If you don't enjoy lucid dreaming, you won't do it. Let me say this again, if you don't enjoy the journey, they're not going to do it. And usually or often what happens. Sometimes people actually go the other way they're too tight. They try too hard and that also backfires. So, this classic maximum of the Middle Way not too tight or too loose, bouncing off of extremes of laxity excitation too tight, too loose, until you finally hover in your sweet spot. While motivation and ambition are important, don't be hard on yourself. Go slow and easy. Yeah, the single biggest thing here is just constancy. Just never giving up. The idea of the nighttime practices as truth tellers applies to another issue. Yeah, this is so true if you haven't noticed it yet, right? Sooner or later. These practices will reveal your passion for ignorance. Your passion for sleep. There will may come up there may or will come a point when you may say, Screw it. I'd rather go to sleep. Many times I don't want to practice that's totally true. Sometimes it's just like yeah, I'm not into it. I'm just gonna let it go. But because I've done this for so long for so many years, even if I don't intentionally do my induction methods, which is pretty rare. There's still this kind of perfume, this momentum that carries from night to night. This effort is cumulative for sure. Sometimes I get lazy or just don't care. That's true. Not so much anymore, but still a little bit. That's when I noticed my passion for ignorance. This is where sends a while you'll have something really interesting to say about this where this is where ego goes remember this is ego sanctuary ignorance darkness sleep. This is where he bill goes to recharge his batteries. By the way parenthetically, we do this every time we're distracted during the day. It's the same kind of thing. That's a type of microcosmic sleeping cat napping that takes place every moment when we get lost and distraction. That's actually recharging ego. Distraction is the lifeblood of samsara distraction was like my ego. Like I remember he said the two end distraction is to end samsara. Deeper rendering of that is the end sleep is the essence of it sleeping this kind of multi valence sort of way. So this is a big deal. It's another reason why this practice is hard to to penetrate because your egoic dimension of your being and the spectrum of your identity does not want to go up here doesn't want anything to do with this. And so like I mentioned, often we have this internal conflict of interest. Yes, consciously you want to wake up you want to take acidity, bravo, fantastic. But unconsciously, you have this 95% driven of what you do is driven by these unconscious processes. And so you have this internal conflict of interest and so sometimes when people have like no luck Well, there could be so many different reasons for it. One is this unconscious, kind of forces of the dark side please we use working against you. You go does not want to go here. Puts up the massive Do Not Disturb sign. Right That's when I noticed my passion for ignorance distraction and smile at it right lighten up. This is a natural expression of our passion or you can say my passion for mindlessness, distraction, forgetfulness.
Yeah, here we go. There may be part of us that wants to wake up. There's a big part that still does not. For the ego, ignorance really is bliss. We've been spiritually asleep for a long time and waking up isn't always easy. This is why there's so few people that do this stuff. I mean, there's you know, if we think about it, how many people are really on a spiritual path? Not that many. How many people have the tenacity, the perseverance to stick with it fewer. How many people are interested in that in nocturnal meditations, even fewer than that? How many have the perseverance and tenacity to stick with that even fewer you get the idea? It's a pretty kind of, I wouldn't say select because that can be an elitist kind of thing. But it's certainly a small population of people who are interested in penetrating, going right to the essence. See, the reason that's worth it, of course, is you know if you had these dreams, especially the big hyper lucid dreams, these are game changers right? It's worth the effort. Because you you have this unique ability to work with the unconscious mind directly to actually rapidly increase accelerate your psycho spiritual evolution. I don't know any other arena honestly, that has this type of capacity and that's why it's worth it. That's why it's worth the trouble. Life is short, take advantage of it. Essential teaching in any meditation is the meditative maximum not too tight, not too loose. If you're too tight or try too hard, you tie yourself into knots and you'll fall asleep. If you don't try enough you chew loose and you're not really practicing premia go. The middle way approach is always best like tuning a guitar or violin tuner to tighten the string step to to loosen it makes the saggy sound, the balance, perseverance and humor. You will learn how to tune your mind to make beautiful music. Find your own sweet spot, find what works for you. And the only way you do that is by trial and error. You just keep going Oh that thing that that technique doesn't work. For me. That approach doesn't work for me give it a couple of weeks. It's not clicking fine. Set it aside. returned to this one. We turn to a different one. The three key ingredients Hold on just to get my water
okay the three essential ingredients I would probably add a fourth year. I'll tell you what. The fourth one is strong motivation or intention. Good dream recall practicing induction techniques 123 And number four just added sense of humor a sense of levity, a sense of playfulness. That's no small thing. If you already possess the first two you can skip to the induction techniques below. The first ingredient and boy this is this is the big one. Motivations critical motivation or intention creates momentum carries into the dream world. I think I see this here right yeah, I did a I mentioned this before with you all. I did a Dream Yoga training with with Sonny Rinpoche and the only technique number one only one was intention. That was it. Intention intention The only thing it says if you're seeding to lucid dream with your intention to technique that is basic to any level of dream induction. The word intent comes from the roots that mean to stretch towards your interesting lucid dreaming a dream yoga begins by stretching the mind with intention. Like they say in the Pali canon, right the mind leads all things intention leads all things. As we've seen stretching is common to both mental and physical yoga. This is a Dream Yoga right? So yoga in order your wrap to wrap your mind around the dark you have to stretch towards it. You eventually want to stretch your awareness into previously unconscious states of mind like this dream hacking, consciousness hacking right and the warm up for that begins with your intense stretching this attention away therefore begins to expand your mind. So really, with all the programs I do, right if you've done the deep dive thing sensitize yourself throughout the day, as often as you can, especially when you're going to sleep at night. Not I'm going to have a lucid dream. And I'm going to have many dreams so that I'm going to have good dreams and just over and over and over stuffing the ballot box
Yeah, I'm sure you've had this experience. Have you ever had to get up early and not had an alarm? Clock by setting a strong intention to get up at a certain time. We often wake up at that time despite not having an alarm. In the same way we can set an internal alarm to wake us up within a dream by sending a strong attention. I'm sure many of you've had this kind of experience. If you're reading this book, you've already probably started to set your intent. Studying the view philosophy behind lucid dreaming and Dream Yoga strengthens it right. reading other books taking courses, attending platforms like this to actually practice intention say to yourself throughout the day almost like a mantra Durrani. Say to yourself conservatively, intentionally with certitude tonight I will remember my dreams. I will have many dreams will have good dreams I will accompany my dreams. Don't just mouthed the words mean it you know karma takes more takes on more force when it goes from mental to verbal to physical. So actually saying it has more impact writing it down has more impact. You also strengthen the intention by saying it out loud and writing it down. Taking it from mental to verbal to physical Yeah, that's basic classic karmic law. As you're lying down in bed, ramp up your intense like sprint to the finish line. This is something I do every single night or not because it's just so automatic. I've done it for so long. Instead of doing our little prayers or whatever, which I did when I was a kid they never worked was such a bummer, right? I remember so clearly. I was such a good little Catholic not to criticize Catholicism. I really loved it. I was a good little Catholic board. And I remember so clearly just, you know, praying and asking you for these things over and over and over and they never came to fruition. They just didn't happen. And of course, it's probably because I was a lousy prayer and both senses of that and so eventually maybe with you know developing skepticism and scientific mind, I just dropped the whole thing I said this isn't working. Probably wasn't working because I wasn't doing it right. Other expressions of intent come from reading books, taking courses basically spending as much time as you can with this material. I remember my friend Steven Barish, told me this when Steven was doing his PhD dissertation. On lucid dreaming he was soaking in this material and had lucid dreams almost every night. By all work and writing this book has been similar, absolutely positively. What I'm reading and doing research and soaking in the stuff what is found that was fun, though. It's just a natural consequence. When I did my long retreat, I'm practicing this stuff all day long. Lucid dreams every single light, no surprise. It's just pure mechanics, pure physics. Plant lots of seeds and you'll harvest lots of plants. Do not underestimate the power of intent. During researchers price and Cohen write lucid dreaming appears to be an experience widely available to the highly motivated. One way to sustain motivation is to have a clear goal once you do become lucid. In lucid dreaming workshops, people often say my goal is to become lucid in my dreams. When they do they often immediately wake up and feel disappointed because a lucid dream didn't last. Why should they be disappointed when they got what they asked for so really, the key here is no kidding. Ask for more right? It's therefore important to set a goal beyond mere lucidity. I want to attain lucidity for X, Y and Z. And this is why when we get to the two chapters are so later on this book on the stages of Dream Yoga. It's so important to understand those stages and to actually set the intention not just to become the super second order intentionality to achieve X Y or Z Patricia Keelin oh she's such a sweetheart. This is one of Stephens major or main assistance. I worked with her a number of times she's just a wonderful person, and a terrific lucid dreamer. Keelin says that the more emotionally imbued the goal is and stronger than motivational charge the greater the reach, totally to for example, if you go to sleep with a passion excitement in anticipation that I will wake up in my dreams because I want to fly. I want to feel the freedom of soaring through states to see from a bird's eye view to feel the wind blowing through my hair. You've added octane to your intent.
This also why another secret ingredient here and I talked about this in the magic ingredients is the intentionality of compassion. I'll talk more about this later. This is this is Dream Yoga. This is now lucid dreaming. Lucid Dreaming doesn't have this where you have that level of emotionality that you're doing this practice not just for yourself, but you're going to attain lucidity for the benefit of others. This is a real secret ingredient from the east. This one's really worked for me. The key is to add the magical element of feeling or emotional charge. So extend your intent even further into the dream world stretch towards more by infusing your motivation with passion. It's amazing how often you'll get what you really ask for anybody do any fundraising who's listening here. It's amazing. Isn't that what you can get just by asking. Second essential ingredient for lucid dreaming is good dream recall even though we have at least six dreams each night. Many people don't remember any of them. So all the all the people that are extremely rare organic brain disorders where people don't dream. So when people say they don't have dreams 99.999% of time it's just because they don't remember that. This is something you can cultivate. The Barish says he softened this since then libera says that until you can remember at least two dreams at night it's better not to try lucidity techniques. Good dream recall begins with your attitude and attention yet, which follows from motivation and setting the intent to remember your dreams. This next part is so important. Value your dreams and then plant the seeds for better recall. If you make your dreams important, they will come to you more frequently. I mean for me, I can only tell you from my experience dreams are a really big part of my life. Some of my greatest experiences have happened and continue to happen in my dream world. Because I have such an honored relationship to this dimension of my mind, in my experience. It's responds in kind, it's like it's almost as if there's this fantastic conversationalist waiting for you in the darkness of the night. If you open up lines of communication, and really believe in the power of the dream and really treasure it this power of belief thing is massive. It's amazing how your your subconscious mind will actually respond in kind. heady, Garfield says in your book creative dreaming. Those who do not believe in dreams or who believe them to be nonsense. Do not remember the dreams are only have nonsensical ones. Dreams are what you make of them. dream states respond to waking attitudes. So they see all these different factors. When the single those of you who are nightclub members right in all the platform, the q&a stuff that we do. How many times do we get a question about I'm frustrated? I'm not getting lucid dreams. I'm not having any success. Like it's just like the number one question by a factor of 10. Well, it's because of all these reasons. And it's because the impatient Westerner generally wants to get the silver bullet wants to paying go right to the goodies. Doesn't work that way, by lucidity comes about in a kind of systemic way. lucidity comes about in a systemic way and our integral way and that's why my approach is in fact to cast a very wide net to create the causes and conditions. The dependent causative factors that actually then when you bring those about a natural consequence of those is just simply the solidity just happens. So that's why there's all this blah, blah blah from all these different vectors coming in. Because all these vectors conspire to create or not, lucidity. Tell yourself resolutely that you will remember your dreams, put your heart into it. Get plenty of sleep and allow yourself to sleep in take advantage. Of primetime dream time. A fun part of lucid dreaming is giving yourself permission to languish in bed dependent other people's dream journaling or dream diary really helps. This is a this is also I'm preaching to the choir you notice if you don't have a dream journal yet get one I have a hardcopy dream journal. I don't write anything but my dreams in there, and I don't write all my dreams now because if I did, I'd be writing for hours every morning. I just write down the kind of big ones. Things that are just naturally feels so much more important to me. But until that point, having a dream journal, put your money where your mouth is set that intention to get the dream journal, it can really really help. Starting a journal highlights the intention that you're taking this seriously. You're also progressing from mental the intent to the verbal
repeating the intention to remember dreams to the physical actually getting the journal Garfield quality anthropologist Tanya Lorman Yeah, she's the gal I was supposed to be an excellent and a couple of weeks to do a Stanford program with her. She's a really cool gal. wrote this book on why God is real or something like that how God becomes real really cool lady. So anyway, Garfield record cozy. Tanya who says many years ago I joined a group that decided that we would write down our dreams. After my dream life changed I seem to remember more. I'm sorry and my dream life changed. I seem to dream more remembered more detail. By sometime he had dreams of mythic intensity and quotes super common report. People who do this sort of thing. If you have a hard time remembering dreams, it helps to write down any snippet of any dream you can remember when you wake up ask yourself was I just dreaming so this is the thing to do. In the 15 times or so the night when you wake up? Do this little retrospective thing pause for a second. Okay, wait a second. Was I just dreaming? Was I just dreaming? Oh yeah, there's a snippet. And then like I mentioned earlier, then you can engage the mile technique which we'll probably get to at this point next week. Close your eyes and try to return to recapture any part of the dream and don't move. Moving engages waking consciousness suppose you out of the dream world. If you've already moved and think you did have a dream returned to the position you were in when you first woke up memories was lodged in our bodies. I have often recaptured a dream by returning to the position I was in when I had it. Okay, a few more. Here's a daytime practice the support this this is this is a good one. Set a timer to go off at random intervals throughout the day when signals take a moment to recall your thoughts or actions from the past few minutes. You can also adapt this type of mental backtracking to occasions when you have been daydreaming. This isn't a family of reciprocating practices or this kind of bi directional narrative. Which means that the practice you do during the day will help you with your practice at night and the practice you do at night will help you during it with your practice during the day. This type of back and forth bi directional practice is common in Dream Yoga. You're opening a two way street between the day and the night you know playfully Interstate between two different states of consciousness, interstate traffic interstate commerce commerce. Finally take advantage of primetime dreaming by waking up about two hours. This is the one you have to play with a little bit. There's this one has I think the most variability anywhere from 1.5 to three hours before you normally wake up this is when is we see later. This is the time to take land to be and this is the time to work with the weekend back to bed. Excuse me, but everybody's different here. This is where you have to just kind of work see what works for you. Take advantage of primetime dream time by waking up anywhere I would say at this point from 1.5 to three hours before you normally would stay up for 15 minutes. So the literature actually says up to 45. If I do that I'm not going back to bed. But that's just me. With these tips, it's easy to start remembering your dreams, strong motivation and good dream call. You're ready to explore the third ingredient induction techniques which I'll divide into the daytime and nighttime methods. Yeah, okay, one last little thing and then we'll stop and have some discussion if you'd like so waking up in the reassembly of the cells. I still work with this one, especially when I'm traveling waking up in the middle of the night can also be illuminating in terms of how we create or reconstitute our very sense of self. I often find that when I first wake up, especially if it's from deep dreamless sleep in the middle of the night that I can't immediately locate myself right you've had this experience right where am I? Where am I what's going on? She's this big gap. very fruitful space actually. Sometimes literally as not knowing where I am, but most importantly ontologically and not knowing who I am. If you had this one as well you wake up not only like where am i but like who am I? Right? Slight might be a little uneasiness, a little panicky. Little contraction, very panic and contraction gets the narrative back online.
I'm obviously aware when I'm jolted awake, but I'm sometimes not aware of my personal identity or history, you probably have this unsettling experience. That takes a few revelatory seconds to reconstitute the running narrative, the storyline that ends up being you may my friend David Lloyd wrote with this wonderful short little book it's mostly a collection of incredible statements quotations called you know the world is made of stories the Good Book my experience sometimes the feelings groundless, panicky, and I scrambled to recreate who I am. That in itself is very revealing, right? It's like, I don't like not knowing where I am. I don't like having this rug pulled out from under my narrative. I don't like having the pages torn out. And so there's a slightly uneasy feeling that until I get it together, it's just like Whoo, that's a Bardo experience is actually a glimpse, but hanging out and groundlessness. scrambled to recreate Who I Am My storyline kicks back in right? Oh, yeah, here I am. I'm in Kansas. I made this convention. Oh, yeah, here it is. Oh, good. Everything's good. Oh, yeah. Everything's back to normal life. And other times it's fascinating not to look at my sense of self. And I delight in this gap of not knowing delight. Now, when I first started doing this, it was not a lot of delight. It was more just panicky right. During these most pleasant awakenings or more positive awakenings I watch my mind bustle about is it puts together the jigsaw puzzle. All the separate pieces of my history and the entity. The result isn't inevitable feeling called me. This is a glimpse of egolessness on my ego sometimes and how my ego sometimes doesn't like it when I first wake up, there's no reference point no me. Just awareness theory of any narrative. I can stay open to that groundlessness and relate to it properly without any reference to anyone. Having this experience is liberating and spacious feeling I mean for the deeper divers here to Lopa, the great father of Karma Kagyu tradition as a very famous statement, when the mind is free of reference points. This is Maha Mudra nature via what has become accustomed to this the very definition of meditation movement, the unsurpassable is achieved when the mind is free of reference points of contracting onto the sense of self right. That's a glimpse of the awakened space. But due to the Power of Habit karma, he goes defensive and self generating strategies race and to coalesce this open awareness into a contracted point that I then recognize as historical me, actually felt sense of contraction. That's what the self is contraction itself. I can literally feel this contraction in my guts. What I don't feel because it's been happening for so long that I've gotten a customer even anesthetized to it is that this contraction doesn't stop happening right now. I'm operating from this contracted and painful point all the time. It's a point of pinched awareness called me. Defensiveness, self contraction against open space or pure egoless awareness. It was born from my fear of egolessness. This is such a big deal. I'm actually writing I think some of you know this already. I'm reading an entire book, probably a 25% of it is based on exactly this power of attraction to super contractors, both overt and covert, to basically run the entirety of our lives and that contraction is all born from our unwillingness. or inability to stay in this radical free open space. We contract an ultimate self defense, generative impulse to create the very sense of self more from this interaction, big deal. The next time you wake up in the dead of night or otherwise jolted awake, try to relate to this jarring transition and unconscious new consciousness in a new way. Feel the initial openness, the rapidly ensuing bewilderment and the scramble to reassemble yourself. This kind of exploration is part of the nighttime yogas which is a family practices or ways to relate to any nighttime experience with a meditative and inquisitive attitude. You can learn a great deal about yourself as you fall apart into sleep and come back online or come back together in waking consciousness. Cool. Okay. So we'll stop there for today. We want to limit these things at about the hour. And so, we write my notes where I know where to start next time.
If we have some questions or comments, it looks like we have a couple more than welcome and also paying through the chat calm to see if anything came up but more than welcome to make a contribution or ask a question at this time, so I'll fire away.
Awesome. I will get you a muted Katie. Thanks, Melissa. And Kenny,
how are you?
Very well. Thank you. Um, I have two questions. One is more experiential and then one more conceptual.
Okay, are we?
Yeah, so the first is kind of just trying to map an experience that I have from time to time, which is where I'm having a hyper lucid dream. And I think I'm also aware of the waking environment in the room where I'm sleeping, but I'm not sure if I'm actually aware of it or if I'm just projecting it like a false awakening layered on top of a hyper lucid dream. Okay. And I'm just curious, from your perspective, is it possible to be having a hyper lucid dream and then also aware of the waking environment? Or is it more likely that it's just a projection and a false awakening there?
Well, that's hard to say for sure. But, you know, this is one thing that's really interesting, Katie, and there's there's also more data about this now, the original teaching on this that I came across was from a non dual Shiva Tantra text, and I can't remember who wrote it. But basically, it was this notion of you take the you take the three states, the principle states of consciousness, waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and you can actually subdivide each one of those three states into three further states. So we have nine total states, I think we might have talked about this before where you have the waking of waking, the dreaming of waking the deep sleep or waking, yeah, dreaming of dreaming, the waking of dreaming, the DC programming. And so what this does is it creates a more nuanced and granular approach to our states of consciousness and neuro imaging these days, it's actually sewn that even parts of the brain so this isn't just like rhetoric from the from the wisdom traditions. Imaging now has shown that the brain can actually be different parts of the brain can be awake, asleep, and dreaming all at the same time. And so this constitutes like daydreaming, right? You're kind of awake but you're kind of dreaming. And so it's hard to say for sure, Katie, but it's not. It's not impossible for you actually, to have that type of dream and then perhaps a flicker of awareness into the so called waking state. Sometimes we feel this when we're sleeping in a really cold room for instance, right? And you happen to just wait what a surprise I'm dreaming about snow and skiing and ice skating that whole night, right? There's something being communicated from the waking state into the dream state. So I can't do say with total authority, that is in fact what you've experienced in my own hyper lucid dreams. In my experience, they've all been pretty exclusively in the dream state. That's part of what makes them hyper lucid. I'm just so into that space. I've never had a kind of lead through until waking consciousness. But that's just me. So I can't really answer that with any authority. It's certainly possible that you can be flickering in and out of that space. But firstly, my own experience. I haven't had that.
Okay, okay. Yeah. And it's typically sound.
Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. So that would make more sense, right? Yeah. That would make more sense. So therefore, something could be coming out auditorially from your environment. That is them kind of feeding into the dream space. Is it somehow affecting and informing your hyper lucid dream? Is it actually somehow coloring what you're experiencing? Or is it more just you're noticing that flicker into the waking space? It's more
just I'm noticing, I think the times when it's coming into the space, it's more of a projection like a like a layer of a dream on top of a dream. But when I'm jet right, but when but when I'm just sometimes it's just like, I can just hear my partner breathing next to me in the bed or I can hear the heater clicking or something like that. But it'll happen simultaneously. To the Yeah.
So yeah, I think you could be either one of those.
Okay. Okay. Cool. I just didn't know if it was possible to have that. So thank you. And then yeah, and then my second question is, um, so you've spoken about how 95 to 99% of our lives are dictated by unconscious processes. Yeah, that's
what the neuroscientists say is that isn't that frightening.
Yeah, but that the awakened ones have no unconscious mind. Correct. kind of curious about the in between like, that's a big gap between majority of us and the weak, awakened ones and is there like a gradual shift that we go through as we're on the spiritual path from that, from having it mostly unconscious to mostly conscious
on the person depends on the person there there. are three general classifications of practitioner along these lines. By far, the vast majority are the gradual approach. Yeah, it's a very rare limited and of course, often people in the West think that they're part of this extremely selectively group. They're called a sudden realizers where they'll just pop pretty quickly into the into the graduate school into weakened states that's exceedingly rare. And then there are much interesting ones are the call. I don't know if it's the actual name of the call the leapers or something like that, where they're just a hybrid. They're just kind of pinging all over the place. And so it's hard as a general rule, we have this kind of gradual approach. In the literature, even the way they they classify stages of awakening, they do that, you know, they talk about the 10 buoys, the 12 yogas, all these particular stages that that are not hard, cold and fast, but they are there are metrics there are markers and so the more asleep you are, the more your unconscious mind is in control. That's a completely rock solid, utterly confused and team game where there's basically they're, they're living their entire life off of symptoms in reactive, inappropriate relationships to this vast array of the conscious mind. And then through again, you know, Carl Jung talked about it. That's that was his process of individuation, bringing conscious unconscious processes into Light of Consciousness. Then slowly, slowly, throat slowly when we're working with meditation, that's doing it when you're working with therapy that's doing it to a certain extent hypnosis to a certain extent. And then the lateral meditations to a real degree. Now you're starting to bring these processes more and more into your awareness and then that really depends on a lot of factors right it'll depend on your the intensity of your conviction, your your intentionality, your motivation, your body stopped by aspirations, how much you really want to do it, but the vast is
kind of purification process. This is this really what constitutes the PAP and it's a wonderful way to bring Eastern spiritual principles in resonance with Western psychological principles. Where that really is in you're talking about it more than anybody but he inherited the power of the unconscious mind from his main teacher, Freud, of course, right? This iceberg model where you fundamentally you want to bring all these processes into light of consciousness. When that's done completely, that's called the awakened state, then you no longer have an unconscious mind. And the consequence of that is pretty profound. You no longer sleep, dream or even die. And even deeper, you no longer even have a body. But somewhere in the middle between complete rock solid, sent confused Santi and being to the Buddha hood, we have all the stages of the aspiring bodhisattvas the actual real bodhisattvas that are somewhere in this place, and so it works a little bit like one image I've heard is like the tide. You know, it advances but then it doesn't come in unless it's a tsunami. That's not a tide. Do you ever seen a tide command? It advances we see the advances we see these advances recedes the dimensionally slowly, slowly, slowly. It's progressing. And that's the good news. That's kind of the karmic or mechanistic causality of it this is really basic kind of physics. But eventually, yeah, through the process of purification, that's what purification means. Eventually, all these processes are brought into light of consciousness and then you literally no longer have an unconscious mind. Everything is about that's what it means to be awake. There's there's no distraction, there's no sleep, there's no dream, there's no death. There's no body. So yeah, that's where we want to get right. But in the meantime, we're patient we just we we plug away we pay attention to what actually creates the unconscious mind, which is usually the rejection of of conscious experience. We're more willing to deal with the release of unconscious residue. I mean, most of not all because the unconscious mind is stratified. There number of different types of unconscious mind but a large part of the unconscious mind that repressed conscious elements or whatever these are born from rejected experience. And so therefore, making these processes bringing them into the Light of Consciousness is not always a day at the beach, right? Because there's a reason you rejected it threw it into your conscious mind to begin with. So I'm riffing on this just a little bit because it really can help people understand that like medic, like, again, Trump he said so beautifully. Meditation isn't a sedative, right? It's a laxative. All this crap that you thrown into your unconscious mind has to come up. And if you don't understand that when it comes up, you're gonna run from it again. But if you understand that, it's really the absolute mandatory aspect of waking up you'll be more willing to accept that as it comes up. When things can absolutely positively so to speak, get worse before they get better. Right. Capital Carter has this image of you have this heap of clothes, dirty clothes, you've had him in the corner of your room or whatever for months or years, whatever. One day you decide to clean them. You put them into water, and oh my gosh, it's just like the water goes pitch black. You had no idea the clothes was so dirty the waters like filthy and so it takes a while can be discouraging at first because it's like Holy, holy crap. Look at all this junk. But eventually you just you continue and eventually you purify you clean, you get lighter and you can start to see this rare in your dreams. And that's why the monitor for Dream Yoga is the measure of the path you can see where you are. You can see what's really going on in your unconscious mind. By paying attention to what happens in your dreams. That's why dreams are powerful truth tellers are mediated by the executive functions of the brain, which is literally offline. So anyway, I'll pause there because there's a lot to part of this tree but that's what comes to mind around it. Okay. Yeah, nice to see you. Right. Let's see. Okay, last Oh, sorry, disappeared. I think so. Oh, no, back into the demo. Maybe they'll come back. All right, Christopher. I'll
get you unmuted. Oh, no, people keep disappearing. And I don't hear oh, no, you're wiping them out. What are you doing? Oh, here we go. She's waving me down. Let's see.
Just there we go.
Hi. I entered. I have a question about your reference to the two way street between waking and dreaming. Okay. I have an ongoing curious and somewhat startling experience of, if I'll dream a certain somatic refrain for the next few days it will appear in the external world in all kinds of places like, I'm not looking for the I'm not, you know, just bizarre recurrences of that theme. And it's all I'm not sure what that phenomena is. I think it's like psyche and matter. You like one wave flowing into another or something. They seem to be impacting each other. But it's very startling and a little unsettling sometimes because they kind of go like what's happening here.
Oh, so what makes it unsettling? Is it just just not knowing what's going on or what makes it a little bit?
Well, so recently I dreamt of that route theme Radek refrain about these dark woods, and then the next day there is a reference to Dante. You know, Dante allegories thing in the dark woods part and then it'll just be so many times and the next few minutes, then the next hour, and it'll just keep coming, the references and references and so It unsettles my worldview, I guess a little bossy,
that's great. You should celebrate that. Anything, anything over the applecart is
good, right. Alison Wonderland D. Yeah.
actly. Exactly. This is this is not at all uncommon. I've had these experiences and I actually find them really interesting. And there are a number of ways to posit what might be going on. Again, it's always difficult for me to say with complete authority, this is exactly what's happening. How do I know? But I can tell you based on what I've studied my experience, what could be happening. One is a little bit of this kind of porosity. That's in boundary dissolution that's taking place between these two states of consciousness. It's like, like I was alluding to this kind of interstate traffic is actually increasing. And you're in commerce, you're ferrying insights back and forth between two states in this kind of bi directional way. That's one thing. The other thing that's really interesting, Jung talked about this the, from a psychological arena. The spiritual religions talk about this a lot as well and it's incredibly interesting is that when karma is coming to fruition, and this is where when we get into the A consciousnesses of the younger child, or later in this book, this is where that template comes in really helpful. Is that at the very base of the relative unconscious mind, that of samsara is that the eight consciousness the storehouse consciousness, which is full of all these laden propensities are called BGS karmic seeds, the visual patterns on the light and very often if you have a sensitive relationship to your dreams, you will notice that karma coming to fruition starting to germinate in the dream state before it starts to to be constructed in physical reality. And the implications around this are really quite staggering, because literally a very sensitive relationship parenthetically to this phenomena can quite literally save your life. This is where dreams or premonition can come into play. They can really be literally literally lifesavers, but in more colloquial ways, what often happens is exactly what you're talking about. But you may have a particular be just seed whatever ripening because of what's happening in terms of external circumstances, what actually brings the seeds into fruition when the proper environmental circumstances of your life are there. These seeds will be brought into fruition. They'll start to germinate in the dream state through particular dreams, narratives or whatever, even what you're referring to. And then therefore, depending on certain factors that I really can't speak with authority on here, that germination, fruition will will then start to make more manifest construct in your so called waking state. But so I think somewhere in there is what's going on the the dissolution of boundaries, the kind of deconstruction of these false fences that we put between these states of consciousness when you become more translucent to yourself more porous to your own deeper identity, then you have not only this bi directional, but even even deeper into the deep dreamless space. We have this kind of traffic flowing between all three. And that to me is super interesting. And it could be you know, it's really I would see it as good news. It's indicative, in fact of some kind of distribution strategy taking place. Increase translucent transparency, that's really great. So somewhere in there is probably what's going up. And I think it's awesome. I mean, high five for you. That's really pretty cool. So what I what I would do is, this is your journal material, I would track this write it down data, see if you can start to notice some patterns. Because very often you will detect certain patterns and you can start to learn a little bit more about yourself. This this stuff is actually coming to fruition from these unconscious domains and flowering and so called waking states. You know, until you finally get to the point where you will notice there's no distinction between any of these. And that's what makes it a little bit perhaps unsettling is because it's like, Hey, what's going on what's really real? Well, at the highest levels, there's no difference between what you're experiencing in the dream state and what you're experiencing here. None. There's no difference. There's only just a ton of stuff that we really don't have time to talk about here that creates this illusion that they are different, but they're fundamentally are really democratic. They're all of one taste. So you're just getting a glimpse of that kind of one taste flavor that can from an ego perspective that works with weight centricity. In sight centricity, photo centricity. It's a little bit like the darkness the the unconscious impulses are somehow threatening the supremacy of the waking space. And that's probably why it feels a little bit unsettling to you, because it's like, hey, wait a second, what's happening to my world, but if you have this right view or what I am asserting, as a writer view, that these things become really interesting. You know, they just open you up to the magic mystery of your mind and what's actually taking place in this world when you start to melt a little bit. Okay.
Yeah, it's kind of exciting and like I said, start early. Like, I was staring at a symbol like working with a symbol. And then my friend said, Oh, can you meet me somewhere and I met her somewhere and the sign where we met on was the symbol that I had been staring at which Michael so strange.
Yeah, it's beautifully strange. So something's happening and you should celebrate it. Okay, thanks for welcome. All right, Christopher, pop back out.
Let's see if we can get him a muted, lost him earlier.
Okay. No. Oh, can it okay. Hey. Hello. Hi, Mike. You're on. Oh, okay. All right. Really? Good to see you. Nice. To see you.
Yeah. I had the same experiences as you did last week. I live in Arvada. Just a little way south of you. And so I totally I identify with what you went through and I went through the same take myself
was heading you know, actually, it was heading south. I was literally starting to pick up when I noticed the wind started to settle and then the wind changed directions. It was blowing north to me. And then it stopped and it started going south and east. Remember that's when the evacuation orders changed as well. Remember that's what I went from from where I was to to Broomfield and where you are so Yeah, glad to see you didn't turn into toes. So yeah, to hear we
were we were on three evacuation and we got off at about I think between 10 and 11pm that night.
No, I was pretty pretty harrowing evening. I drove around that that evening, just to see how close the fire was. And I don't know if you did that. But because the winds were blowing so fiercely. They were setting up spot house fires all over the place. So it was like a war zone. There were there was this massive plays over here. And then over the spot house fires like 567 different other locations because the embers were blowing miles away from the original source and that's where all the damage came from. Is this stuff just
my my sister and brother in law live in Lewisville. In their home in their neighborhood was spared. But over on Davidson's Mesa and Harper lake, there was some serious damage. It's pretty so my sister. Well, my wife and I walk there plenty of time. So are you so but anyway? Wow.
Yeah, pretty sobering. So anyway, how can I help you today, my friend?
Oh, I want to get your perspective on this thing because I'll try to condense this as much as possible but we read dreams of lights last year. And we talked about we talked about emptiness and light. And that particular you know, reality equals equal portions of luminosity and emptiness. Correct. Yeah. Okay. And it anyway, taking off from dreams of life. I also I read several other books, one by Tsar Chen palabras Rinpoche called mine, Bianca.
Yep. I know that book very well. Yeah. I read that.
And I think you consulted on that book.
Yeah, I helped. I helped to turn out with that book. Yeah, was great. Great fun. Yeah. Yeah.
And then I read, being here. I read two books by Mingyur Rinpoche one was in love with the world. And another was, was this one. It's turning confusion into clarity. excellent book, by the way. But it gave me the unusual experience I have is on about August, in the summertime. I had one of those experiences that we were discussing tonight. I mean, I was literally going in and out of the awakened dream state into the waking state and it really felt like I had control of that. So I put it down my dream journal. I took note of that and wrote it in detail what I had, but the unusual experience that I have is about 30 years ago, believe it or not, I had my first exceedingly lucid dream. And at the same time, I was reading Stephen Lapera urges and Howard Rheingold book. So I, I think my mind was more flexible when I was younger. So I, I had this, it was this sign that I could not make heads or tails up at the time, but having read this book, I discovered that it was the Beecher mantra, calm, the heart mantra. Going through the central channel using Tibetan Buddhist meditation technique. But it was also it had the Bosphorus, zampa mantra, circle again, in a counterclockwise direction. That was the dream I had 30 years ago.
Oh, cool. I
I discovered that and I guess I'm just asking you, How did that happen?
Yeah, you know, this is I just finished reading a book for the deeper divers and I know Stephen who who is a nightclub member, he posted something about it. It's a third in a really massive trilogy for deeper divers. I highly recommend it. First book is called irreducible mind second book Beyond physicalism. Third one I just finished called consciousness unbound. It's a good read. It's not easy. 500 pages of pretty thick academic stuff. But over and over and over and over in this book. They talk about it's a it's a fantastically rigorous assault on the tyranny of physicalism and materialism. And one of the things that is hammered in over and over in this book, and I'm going to just mention it within that context because I just finished it. But you'll see the same thing in a lot of other arenas is that when closely connected to the previous questions that when, when through either serendipitous events or through meditation or through psychedelics or through trauma or through any of so many different factors and sometimes really just utterly spontaneously the the, the membrane of the of the cell structure it's a little bit like I was talking about earlier when you wake up in the middle of the night, when this can't when is contraction this narrative structure is is a baited, arrested, temporary, temporarily relaxed, all kinds of unbelievably magical, so called psychic, mystical, whatever, whatever term you want to label it comes up. And so these are all these experiences are natural consequences of opening and opening can take place in so many different ways. And so probably with some karmic predispositions probably through what you were studying, whatever else was happening in your life, and sometimes none of this has to happen and you'll still have these kinds of breakthroughs or openings. You will still you're simply contact you'll have a glimpse of reality at various different levels. And one consequence of that is, in fact, are all these completely otherwise utterly inexplicable events from a materialistic paradigm that are absolutely completely explainable from an idealistic or spiritual point of view that when when the mind opens, relax, all kinds of astounding events can take place and they're actually not really astounding. They're fundamentally actually very ordinary. They can appear astounding only because of the contrast and the contraction that precedes it. And so one kind of carte blanche explanation for all these experiences is this type of opening that takes place. And I think that itself is super helpful to understand because first of all, it's indicative that something's happening. It can be actually quite a nice sign, it can be a good sign. If you relate to it properly, it can be an opportunity. If you don't relate to it properly. Of course it can, it can become an obstacle because then you think you're special and you think whatever and all that crap show starts to corrupt, but really, I've heard this it's been my own experience. I wrote about it. I've experienced it with people I've worked with for decades. And that's one of the really magical, beautiful things about this business. Is that when you simply just start to open, relax, and the boundaries start to dissolve. All kinds of marvelous things can take place do incredibly hyper lucid dreams, you name it, you know, you've seen the varieties. So if you want to explore this in a really rigorous academic way, go through the consciousness unbound book. It's there's some chapters in there that are really quite brilliant, but exactly this type of phenomena. So
So consciousness Unbound, and the author is edited
by Marshall. Marshall and Kelly can remember that there's two guys, but if you if you Google it, you'll definitely come up with something like overthrowing the tyranny of materialism or something. I listed a link for you to in the chat. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's definitely but yeah, there it is. Thanks, Barry. It's again, it's it. It's a bit of a slog. Some chapters are better than another. Bernie Castro's book Bernardo. Castro, chapter I shouldn't say a contribution is absolutely staggering. It's really brilliant. But there's a lot of stuff in there Chris about this sort of thing. And that's one of the reasons the first two books in particular, just put, event after event after event. You know, near death experiences past life regression, recognition, recognition, sigh phenomena, one thing after another dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of really rigorous approaches to this stuff. That can all be kind of explained in a certain sense by this process of dissolution and opening, so that to a greater or lesser degree. That's what's going on when you have these sorts of things. So continue to open right continued open.
Yes. Thank you so much.
Yeah. Nice to see you, my friend. Glad you're safe to see
you as well.
Thank you. Okay. Hey, Wendy.
Hi. I just have something really brief an offering of ways that I've learned to record my dream. So I've just been doing this for about a year and a half. Okay. And what I'm doing now is having my phone by my bed and sitting it on my Gmail account, and I email myself and I hit the microphone button and just talk into it. And it pretty much gets whatever I say in the middle of the night. There might be some little things that are wrong. Yeah, yeah. But then I copy it, and I put it into a document. That's all my dream. And then I ended up going over it in the morning to make corrections. But that seems like a way of another way of valuing the dream to actually go over it again and have a record there. I have almost 900 greens in the last year and a half.
Oh my god, that's so fantastic. Good for ya.
So it's just an offering as a way because as you say, now I'm happy. Sometimes remember four or five greens in a night. There's no way I would sit down and write them off. Right, right.
Yeah, this is not the recorder. It's really pretty quick. Absolutely. And that's the way it has been for me and that's the way it's been for other people. I've talked to that. The more you do this, the more you believe in it, the more you treasure and respected for more it. It just manifests for you where I mean, I mean, it is just ridiculous. And it's not. I mean, yes. But on another level, it's it's annex. It's just that I have such an allegiance and respect for this domain of my experience. I treasure really what takes place that that because whatever they say you'll see it when you believe it, right? So the more you believe it, the more you engage in it, the more you open up to these dimensions. So that's a great idea. Thank you for sharing that. That's awesome.
That's it, and had a lucid dream in a month. But the last one I had was fantastic. Looking forward to the next one.
Just keep going. Yeah. You just keep Yeah, we thank you so much.
I really appreciate everybody and all the time and
I see everybody again. It's great to be together at all. So I'm just pinging see if there's any questions at the checkout, but otherwise, we're probably done for today. Oh yeah. Nice thing from Canada. And hypnosis research has been shown that part of the brain is completely conscious of how much pain they are in. While the hypnotized part will literally say they have no pain at all. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, hypnosis is super interesting. Is that okay, everybody? Hey, great to see everybody. We do this totally geeky thing, right? You know this everybody briefly. If you want, turn on your camera real quick, and turn off your mute so we can all say this little love fest. Goodbye. Bye
next time Pleasant, Pleasant, lucid dreams. Okay, good night, everybody. Good night.