When I talk of spiritual lucid dreams, I mean being awake in the dream state and having this experience inform your spiritual life.
I could share my own experiences of such dreams, but I prefer to offer a system for developing the lucidity muscle. To do so, we’ll cover Tibetan Dream Yoga, one of the fundamental practices of Tibetan Buddhism, or at least one of its schools, and some of the main dream exercises. And no, you don’t need to identify as a Buddhist to try out these techniques!
Elsewhere I’ve called this advanced lucid dreaming because if you master the techniques of Tibetan Dream Yoga you’ll be a confident lucid dreamer, capable of doing whatever you want in your dreams, and you’ll likely start having spiritual lucid dreams.
In Tibetan Buddhism the goal isn’t to become an awesome lucid dreamer per se, but discussing this system is a great way to link this series on dreams looked at from psychological view, to spirituality.
A lot of this information I took from a long, detailed article I found on the web. It has 30,000 words and is packed with info on dreams, Tibetan Buddhism and integral theory: Tibetan Dream Yoga – Dream Yoga.
I highly recommend you check out my YouTube series on Dreams if you want to get the most out of this article. I teach you about the meaning of dreams, dream interpretation, spiritual lucid dreams, and more.
Spiritual Lucid Dreams & TDY
Before we look at the purpose of Tibetan Dream Yoga, we must look at the purpose of Tibetan Buddhism, AKA Vajrayana, as a whole.
The goal of this spiritual system is to awake out the dream of waking life to end suffering. Let’s keep that in mind. Inevitably this is also the goal of Tibetan Dream Yoga, since it’s one of the six yogas or main practices of the Kagyu school of Vajrayana.
This is quite different from the goals I’ve been promoting in my series, which have been psychological. But I see no contradiction between these two purposes; in fact, we can make full use of lucid dreaming by using it to pursue both psychological and spiritual knowledge.
Another key point is that Tibetan Dream Yoga is really for waking life in the end, even though it’s unique among spiritual systems in its emphasis of dreams. In fact, all of Buddhism is kind of dream yoga, because it views the whole of existence, including our subjective identity, and our subjective sense of suffering, as a dream.
In the Tibetan system, lucid dreaming is not an end in itself, but a crucial tool for awakening our consciousness. Usually we are unaware: both while sleeping and waking, and this system addresses that unawareness, including lucid dreaming as a tool.
As I’ve mentioned in my YouTube series on dreams, dreams are your creation. To the extent you’re not aware of this, you’re lost in ignorance and self-delusion. Imagine being an actor in a film and forgetting that you’re an actor, not the character. That’s what happens in dreams, and it creates a lot of problems.
In gaining lucidity, you wake up from the creative loop, the unconscious proliferation of everything around you. Once you wake up from ignorance and self-delusion in your dreams, in theory this will spill over into your waking life, helping you realise the irreality and dream-like nature of mind, body and senses. How very Buddhist!
If we can become aware in dreams and make the dreams an object, something we see and observe rather than buy into, we can do the same in everyday life. The end goal, once consistently lucid, is to dissolve the world of form in dreams and experience enlightened consciousness while asleep, such that we develop our muscles for it in everyday life.
In that way, it contributes to the classical Buddhist path of awakening from the delusion of life and suffering through identification with the five skandas of the mind, body and senses.
How to Do Have Spiritual Lucid Dreams
In Tibetan Buddhism, there are practices we do while dreaming, while waking, and when we wake up in the morning. Let’s begin with the waking practices.
Waking Practices
There’s some crossover between the Tibetan exercises and those I give in my video How to Lucid Dream. In a broad sense, the goal is to view all your experiences as dream-like. Cultivate presence, particularly with your external senses. When you are, life is both fuller and lighter. It’s fuller because you’re more awake to the senses as they are, and lighter because you’re more attuned to their innate paper-thinness.
Meditation and other contemplative practices also help and inform this process, and there’s a lot of crossover between waking-life meditation and waking-life dream yoga.
Dream Practices: The Six Stages
There is not one but a set of dream practices that form levels.
- Lucid Dream: overcome the delusion that the dream is real and intractable. Overcome the delusion that the dream is real and intractable.
- Control: Gain measure of control over the dream and lose fear of it. Fly, visit different places, manifest people and objects, and so on.
- Contemplate the dream as impermanent and illusory, just like the waking world.
- Change objects in the dream: big to small, heavy to light, merge objects together.
- Alter the body, its shape and size, and make it disappear. You realise that you can’t be the dream body.
- Pure being: attempt to contact pure consciousness. If you’re not the dream body, or the dream, who are you? Your meditation will come in handy here. Master this step, and you’re having spiritual lucid dreams.
Once you’ve learned how to lucid dream, you can work on these stages, and you’ll be doing Tibetan Dream Yoga.
Interestingly, these correlate roughly with the stages of dreaming in the book A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming. The authors propose that after enough time spent creating and altering and exploring, we’re finally able to rest in pure consciousness while in the dream state. That is also the broad framework of the Tibetan system.
Transition Practice
When you wake up, exhale deeply; then it up in bed, gazing forward, and do three heavy in and out breaths; then stand up, reach your fingertips upwards, and exhale deeply.
At this point, you reflect on the transition between dreams and waking life, and realise that waking life is a dream in its own way. Try to maintain this awareness throughout the day. It helps if you’ve made progress with the dream practices first!
You might like my video on Tibetan Dream Yoga.
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The post Spiritual Lucid Dreams first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post Spiritual Lucid Dreams appeared first on Deep Psychology.
