"Dream practice is not just for personal growth or to generate interesting experiences.

It is part of the spiritual path

and its results should affect all aspects of life by changing the practitioner's identify

and the relationship between the practitioner and the world."

Tenzin Wangyal

"Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?"

Havelock Ellis

Lucid dreaming is the peanut butter to the jelly that is my yoga practice. I've been a dedicated oneironaut for years, exploring consciousness during my REM cycles, sharing some of my most interesting experiences here. Check out my blog for a peak into my dreams. If you're new to lucid dreaming, read below for an overview first.

What is lucid dreaming?

Have you ever realized, mid dream, that you were dreaming? If so, did you then attempt to control your dream in any way? A dream is considered a “lucid” one so long as the dreamer is aware, while still in the dream, that they are dreaming. The Tibetan people have been practicing lucid dreaming (or “dream yoga”) for thousands of years. Today there’s an active Western lucid dreamer community, made of people passionate about exploring the dreamscape - and I’m one of them! I study and practice lucid dreaming to try to answer questions like the following:

• What are dreams?
• How can we practice self-transformation through dreams?
• Can dreams be used for healing?
• Do dreams exist independently of dreaming?
• Can we telepathically communicate through dreams?
• Can we predict the future using dreams?

Tibetan Dream Yoga

Why do we dream?

We dream because we’re in samsaric existence, characterized by ignorance, driven by karma, living under the illusion that each one of us is a single, separate being.

When we sleep, our karmic prana remains active and moves through our bodies to the various chakras. Our karmic prama provides the energy behind dreams and the mind uses the light, emotions and energy that correspond with our specific karmic traces to make meaning from the energy, resulting in an experienced story, colored by our learned desires and aversions.

As long as we remain unenlightened, we will dream. But enlightenment brings an end to karma and thus to the stories we tell ourselves. Instead, with enlightenment comes awareness that is so strong and clear that it lasts even as we sleep, manifesting in the REM sleep as “clear light” dreams.

How can lucid dreams be induced?

“May I have a clear dream. May I have a lucid dream. May I understand myself through dream.” Both Western and Eastern approaches to lucid dreaming recommend setting intentions such as this one. But Tibetan methods focus on spiritual and energy work, beyond this, instead of psychological work.

Guru yoga and alternate nostril breathing are two practices that can help with lucid dream induction.

Wake up four times, every two hours, during the night. Different breathing techniques and things to imagine with each awakening. Different kinds of dreams correspond to each stage of sleep.

What to do once lucid?

Lucid dreaming can help us break through the limitation of ego which comes from the illusion that each of us is a separate being. The Mother Tantra lists 11 categories of experience in which the mind is usually bound by appearances. Lucid dreaming can be used to challenge and transform these categories to help free ourselves of appearances and thus the ego that is born of them.

The categories are:

• Size
• Quantity
• Quality (change emotions from negative to positive)
• Speed (time)
• Accomplishments (do practices, write a book, swim across the ocean, finish what needs finishing)
• Transformation (into things, animals, colors, human identities)
• Emanation (make more of yourself, in number)
• Journey (consciously guide yourself somewhere physically)
• Seeing (see something you’ve never seen before)
• Encounter (spiritual teachers, guiding figures - remember to always ask them to meet a second time!)
• Experience (being rain, being the opposite gender, etc.)

The principle of developing flexibility is more important than the particulars of the dream.

Goal of lucid dreaming?

Western dream scientists and psychologists: To explore the conscious, subconscious and potentially even unconscious and then to perhaps improve our lives through interacting with these in the dreamscape.

Tibetan: Even broader. The ultimate goal of lucid dream practice is liberation from our cyclic existence. The dreaming state is similar to the bardo. How can we expect to be aware through bardo, the state between lives, if we cannot hold awareness in dreams? We cannot liberate ourselves from a cyclic existence if we’re not aware, if we aren’t conscious, in the bardo.

But before enlightenment: “First we develop lucidity and flexibility. And then we apply this flexibility of mind to all of our life. Then we are less inhibited by our habitual identities when we have the experience of transforming them and letting them go. We are less inhibited by our habitual perceptions when we have experience of their relativity and malleability."

In other words, before we’re free of the samsaric cycle, we can be free from the tendencies that cause us suffering day to day.

Lucid Dreaming: The Western Point of View

Why do we dream?

• Physiological perspective:

  • Some researchers - dreams serve no purpose - by-product of nerves firing during sleep. “Merely the senseless, random accompaniment of the autonomous electrical activity of the sleeping Central Nervous System”
  • The forebrain makes the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream imagery from the noisy signals sent up to it from the brain stem

• Psychological perspective:

  • All dreams contain info and “an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter”
  • Others - dreams serve to consolidate and process all the info we’ve collected in the previous day in an adaptive way
  • Could also be evolutionary - practice for real life
• Most likely both!

How can lucid dreams be induced?

• Keep a dream journal. Step One to be able to have lucid dreams is to be strengthen general dream recall.

  • Ton of apps that make this easier (Shadow, Awoken, Lucid Dreamer)
  • First thing in morning (first lie very still and remember + reinforce the details)
  • Keep right next to bed
  • Record dreams first thing in morning (first lie very still and remember + reinforce the details)
  • At bare minimum, record place, people, what you were doing
  • If you're not a paper person, there are tons of apps that make this easier (Shadow, Awoken, Lucid Dreamer)

• Do "reality checks" throughout the day
  • Pull a finger, look at a digital watch look away look back, read, try to fly, try to push your hands through solid surfaces!
  • Ask yourself what you were doing 15 minutes ago (if you can't remember, you're probably dreaming!)
  • Do a reality check 10-15 times a day, including each time something odd happens and each time you come across a "dream sign," some object, place, person or situation you frequently encounter in your dreams
  • Idea is to do reality checks on your dream signs during the day when they come up to train yourself to do them in your dreams

• Lucid dream "types" by induction method
  • DILD: dream-induced lucid dreams
    • Do a reality check in a dream and determine you're in fact dreaming
  • MILD: mneumonicly-induced of lucid dreams
    • Set your intention to become lucid before falling asleep and concentrate vividly on this intention until you fall asleep
  • WILD: wake-induced lucid dreams
    • Fall asleep consciously, without moving, and go straight into a lucid dream. Works great with naps! Involves often-uncomfortable sleep paralysis.
  • WBTB: wake-back-to-bed-induced lucid dreams
    • Wake up after 4.5 - 6 hours of sleep and staying awake doing something active for at least an hour. Go back to bed practicing MILD or WILD. The goal is to increase awareness before going into the REM-rich stage of your sleep (which is during the last few hours of your sleep cycle).

What to do once lucid?

Adventure, play, meditate, explore consciousness, explore the subconscious, explore the dreamscape, problem solve, invent, practice self healing, seek out the Divine...anything you can imagine!

Goal of lucid dreaming?

“In dreams Cinderella can be with her prince and prisonerss can conjure sweet freedom;

the crippled can walk and the aged can be as young as they like --

everyone can feel fulfilled, no matter how impossible their wishes may seem in waking life.”

Stephen LaBerge

Through lucid dreams we can experience the fulfillment of our greatest desires. But on a more practical level, lucid dreaming can also be useful for overcoming nightmares, healing traumas, resolving psychological conflicts, solving complex problems, and more. Your goals, your dreams.