Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge.. Today my guest is Andrew Holecek. Andrew Holecek is an author, spiritual teacher, and humanitarian. As a longtime student of Buddhism, he frequently presents this tradition from a contemporary perspective, blending the ancient wisdom of the East with modern knowledge from the West. Known as an expert on death and dying, in 2013 he released the book, Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Perspective. With Sounds True, he has created an audio learning course on Dream Yoga, as well as a new book, Dream Yoga: [Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep].
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Andrew and I continue our conversation on dream yoga. We talk about, beyond lucid dreaming, what it’s like to start working with illusory form yoga—a type of daytime investigation into the dreamlike nature of things. We also explore various dream yoga practices, including flying in our dreams, creating fearful situations in order to explore the cultivation of fearlessness, and how to actually meditate in the dream state. Here’s part two of my conversation on dream yoga with Andrew Holecek:
Andrew, thank you for your willingness to have a part two of our conversation on dream yoga. I’m so interested in this topic, as I think you can feel and as you know by now. Partially because you’re teaching practices that in my experience are—they feel a little out of reach to me. So, I’m really here as a learner, wanting to learn more.
In our first session, you talked quite a lot about the view of dream yoga as a whole, and we started really looking at lucid dreaming as the foundation of all of the practices in “night school,” as you referred to it, that are to come. I realize that getting proficient at lucid dreaming as the foundation—there’s going to be a lot more to come, but just as the foundation—is probably not that easy for people.
So, let’s just start there. Somebody says, “OK, I want to get proficient at lucid dreaming. I listened to part one of your conversation, and I feel a little discouraged. I’m not even really sure exactly if I’m in a lucid dream, when I’m in a lucid dream. How can you help that person before we take this conversation even further?
Andrew Holecek: Yes. Well, the first thing I want to say in relation to your preparatory comments is that I really want to encourage and nurture that sense of enthusiasm and excitement that you expressed, because even though you or anybody may not yet feel they’re up to it, just that sense of anticipation and excitement, to me, is indicative of your level of nascent recognition of the potentiality. In other words—and this certainly was the case for me—it was like, “I may not know a whole lot about this nocturnal meditation stuff yet, but there’s something resonating with me that says, ‘Whew, I had no idea that this was even possible. I’m into it.’”
So, I think right off the bat that should be encouraged, because what’s happening there is there is some inner recognition. The inner guru or the inner teacher is somehow shaking his or her head, saying, “There’s some potentiality here.”
TS: Yes. Yes.
AH: And that’s manifesting as this excitement—wow. It’s like when you know—when you read something profound, you may not be able to wrap your mind around it, but you know there’s profundity there. You just feel it. And that alone helps develop the tenacity, the humor which is really important—the determination to say, “I’m going to work with this, because I feel the potential. I may not know exactly what it is, I don’t quite know the whole thing yet, but boy, there’s something deep here that’s tickling and talking to me.
So, right off the bat, that’s a voice that should be listened to. And then from there, it really becomes one of baby steps: understanding the principles as we’re referring to them, understanding the view, where it is that you’re going, what it is that you’re potentially trying to accomplish. Then as I lay out in the book—and that’s one reason [that] two-thirds of the book is preparatory to the actual dream yoga section—is that if you lay the groundwork properly through understanding sleep cycles; through understanding the structures and stages of the mind that we descend to and ascend out of—in and out of sleep—as we understand some of the daytime induction practices, the nighttime induction practices—we start to take these baby steps and we start to celebrate the gradual transformation that comes about as we start to tiptoe into the dark. Then from that, it’s like we’re equipping ourselves with a formidable flashlight here, and that flashlight will eventually allow us (hence the subtitle) to illuminate aspects of our mind and heart that we previously had completely buried in the darkness of the night.
That’s why so much of this book is about the baby steps; acknowledging the difficulty, working with things which we didn’t really talk about in session one and which we could unfold now if you like. This formidable practice of what’s called the daytime practice of illusory form—this is one of the central aspects of dream yoga that really separates it from lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming does not have this kind of daytime component.
TS: Yes, let’s talk about it: illusory form yoga.
AH: Yes.
TS: A daytime practice that’s going to help me with my lucid dreaming, build on my lucid dreaming, on the way to dream yoga.
AH: Exactly.
TS: OK.
AH: Exactly. What we’re doing, of course—we did talk about [it] a bit earlier—is we’re developing this kind of two-way street between the day and the night. That’s really what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to open new levels of communication where insights can flow down from—downloading from the waking state into the dream state. This of course is the basis of classical things like dream incubation, which has been practiced by many traditions for thousands of years.
So, you’re working with waking-state consciousness to download information into the subconscious arena of the mind, which is of course where most of our dreams take place. And this—as I’ll return to in a second—this is where illusory form works. And then of course what we do with dream yoga, we’re then going to upload insights we have in the dream state back into waking consciousness.
So, we start to develop, first of all, by understanding that the potentiality is even there. We start to open this two-way street. It’s what’s called bi-directionality (though it’s the way the scientists talk about it) or reciprocity; where you’re working with the daytime practice to help you with your nighttime experience, [and] your nighttime experience then feeds back into a positive, virtuous feedback loop into the daytime. Then you bootstrap, you lift up your awareness by engaging in meditations that help you bring about lucidity in both states. I say that as an overarching view, once again, because that’s basically how illusory form works in relationship to dream yoga. In a very deep way, the practice of illusory form is the fruition. So, as we’ll see, it’s simultaneously one of the principle preparatory practices for dream yoga, and then it feeds back in and when it’s brought to its fruition, it becomes also the apex of dream yoga.
So, let’s come back to daily life. The way illusory form practice works—and again, one reason I preface it this way is that the practice itself couldn’t be simpler. It’s really about running around as often as you can during the course of the day and there are certain mnemonics that you can do that I will introduce to you—some type of what are called prospective memory exercises—where you simply say to yourself, again, not just flapping your lips, but with real conviction.
For instance, right now—for the listeners, this is a marvelous exercise to do by the way. For the next two or three minutes, simply sit—and it’s helpful to do it vocally, where you’re saying it almost like a slogan or even a mantra. You look at your world, and with as much conviction as you can muster, you say to yourself—try this for a couple minutes and just see how it starts to change your reality—you say to yourself, “This is a dream. This is a dream. This is a dream. This is a dream.” Try it for a couple of minutes and just simply see what starts to happen. You might find that your perception of the world starts to shapeshift a little bit.
We might ask ourselves, “Well, why do we want to do this?” Well, a large part of it is because when we are in the dream state, one of the principle reasons we don’t recognize the dream to be a dream is because we take the habitual patterns that we have brought in during the day—in other words, right now, when we look out across the world, we just assume that this is reality. It’s called axiomatic—it’s just a given. How could it be anything other than that?
So, what we do is we take this habit—again, it’s this habit, this bad habit of reification, of making things solid, lasting, and independent, materializing, concretizing. We take this bad habit, a bad spiritual habit, and we unwittingly transpose it into the dream state. It’s like I said earlier, from Kabir: “What is found then is found now.” We don’t recognize the dream state to be the dream state because we take this bad habit we’ve cultivated during the day, which is, “Yes, this is real, this is real, this is real,” and we just transpose it. Again, this bi-directional process is already happening. You see? It’s just happening unconsciously; we’re already doing it.
So, we take this bad habit, we bring it into the dream state, and when the dream arises, we don’t question that it’s a dream. We just say—just like we do during the day—“This is real.” That’s the definition of non-lucidity. Again, it’s no wonder—this is like pure physics. There’s no wonder that we don’t recognize the dream to be the dream because we take the bad habit of assuming everything to be real during the day and we naturally transpose it into the night.
What we’re doing with the practice of illusory form is we’re going to change this habitual pattern—again, [in] Buddhist terms, this karma—of seeing the world as solid, lasting, and independent—what I call the “unholy trinity of the reified external world.” We’re going to replace that unconscious bad habit with a conscious good habit. Which is to say during the day, “This is a dream. This is a dream. This is a dream.”
And because we’re reciting a mantra or repeating a maxim—an aphorism—that is in fact resonant with reality; in other words, if a buddha was to tell you how they see the world, one of the ways they would tell you is they would say, “This world is not solid, lasting, and independent,” which is another way to paraphrase duality. “This world is like a dream.”
This is really a fake-it-till-you-make-it practice. This is the way the awakened ones actually see the world. So what we want to do is emulate that perception, take this bad habit of reifying the world—unconscious bad habit—which we automatically, unwittingly transpose into the dream state. We want to replace it with a good habit, which is basically [that] this reality is like a dream. You start to do this during the day and I assure you, just through the pure process of—you could say—mind physics,” causality, you’re starting to see this habit so that when you enter the dream state, the same type of practice you had during the day of seeing the world as illusory or as dreamlike will bring about lucidity in the dream state. That’s one major reason we do it. Again, it happens faster than you think because we’re creating a template—this kind of illusory template, this fake-it template that is in fact in resonance with the way things are.
This world—let me backpedal a bit to show you how deep this goes. When we talked earlier about what it is that a buddha awakens from and what they awaken to, they awaken from the nightmare of reification. A buddha awakens from what we consider to be reality. Seeing the world as solid, lasting, and independent—i.e. dualistic—that’s what a buddha awakens from. What do they awaken to? They awaken to a world that is fluid, malleable, porous, permeable, illusory—i.e. dreamlike.
This in itself—you’re starting to see—you’re faking it, but you’re starting to see the world the way the Buddhists see the world. And as one develops increased proficiency with this, the world becomes more illusory just because—it’s like they say in the Pali Canon—one of the central tenets in the Pali Canon—the core teachings of the Theravadan tradition. That says, “The mind leads all things.” See it with your mind’s eye first, and eventually you will see it in reality. This particular practice of illusory form has monumental applications and implications.
TS: OK, so this is one technique I could use. I can mumble to myself and hopefully a lot of other people wouldn’t hear me saying, “This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream.” Meaning, I could see someone starting to feel a little kooky.
AH: Yes! [Laughs.]
TS: OK, but you have other illusory form yoga daytime counterpart practices to suggest. Go ahead.
AH: Exactly. So, there are three aspects to illusory form practice. One is called illusory body, which is, you could say illusory form altogether—seeing the forms of this world as more dreamlike. Parenthetically, what this literally means on a deep philosophical level is perhaps a little bit outside of our scope right now, but I do want to suggest that pursuing this practice goes extraordinarily deep. In other words, it starts to get at the guts of what it means to be awake. What exactly is reality? How do you know for sure that you’re not dreaming right now? I mean, these are some of the deep philosophical questions that surface.
TS: At this point, I don’t know if I’m not dreaming right now, Andrew. Not after talking to you for this long!
AH: Well, that’s good! And you may notice, interestingly enough, that there could be fleeting moments both of exhilaration in that—when you let it be as it is, there’s a sense of levity. There’s a sense of, “Wow, things are a little bit more playful.”
TS: Well, you suggest this practice, and I want to make sure we don’t forget the—
AH: I’m going to come back. I definitely won’t forget it.
TS: OK. You suggest this practice where you jump up and down, and you jump up and down to see if you’re in a dream or not. So, I’m reading this in the book, and I think to myself, “Am I going to get up off the couch and jump up and down to see if I’m awake or not?” And I did it. I did it, Andrew, just because I wanted to be able to tell you in the conversation that I got up off the couch. And of course I jumped up and I felt my feet touch the ground, and I thought, “I’m not dreaming! I’m not dreaming. I am going a little kooky though.”
AH: That’s great. You’re actually not going kooky; you’re slowly starting to wake up. Kookiness is always defined in contrast. What does going crazy really mean? Again, parenthetically, this starts to go after questions about—when you’re talking about questions of the nature of reality, parenthetically you’re also talking about questions like, “What is psychosis? What is sanity?” So, you’re starting to talk about some very, very deep issues here.
But on a more playful note, let’s come back to the jumping down thing, because this is a great way to conduct—this is a classic Western technique which I find extremely skillful. Anyone can do it, it’s very easy. It’s part of a battery of practices that are all about what are called conducting states checks. In other words, like I mentioned before, one of the main reasons we don’t recognize we’re dreaming when we’re dreaming is we just assume the dream to be real. That’s what makes a non-lucid dream. It’s just like, “Oh yes, that’s just the way it is. There’s this thing that I’m experiencing”—and this is all retrospectively discovered—“I’m just taking it to be solid, lasting, and independent, just like my external world, right?” That’s what defines a non-lucid dream.
So, when we engage in state checks, what we’re going to do is we’re going to question the status of our reality. In other words, am I in fact dreaming right now? So what jumping up does, and there are other state checks that I’ll mention, but I like jumping up because it is so easy to do—is that you practice this little skip during the day; it’s like you’re skipping your way to lucidity. As many times as you can remember during the day, simply jump up and then see what happens. If you’re in the so-called waking state like we are now, chances are pretty good you’re going to come back down. But what you’re doing is you’re seeding a type of habit, and what happens is that habit will then carry over into the dream state.
This has happened to me, Tami, hundreds of times, so that’s why I’m so passionate about [how] this stuff works. You will find yourself jumping in your dream. Because why? You’re doing it during the day. It’s like Tenzin Wangyal says—the photographs we take during the day (our experiences) are developed in the dark room of the night. So what we want to do now is take types of photographs that we can develop in the night that will in fact bring about lucidity. The ways this works, and it’s so much fun, is you will find yourself someday in a dream and you will jump up, and very often what happens is you’re going to keep going. You’re going to jump up in your dream—
TS: I like the sound of that!
AH: Yes, you’re just going to keep going! And you’re going to go, “Holy moly, I can’t do this during the day. I must be dreaming.” And bang, you’re in. this is the other thing that’s so cool about lucid dreaming—even though, yes, because it’s so subtle, it may take time to develop stability and constancy in practice. But the really encouraging thing about lucid dreaming is that one moment of recognition is all it takes. Recognition and liberation are simultaneous. One moment of recognition and you’re in.
So for me, what has happened literally hundreds of times is—and again, just to substantiate the trigger point for when to do the job during the day, there’s one other thing that you can really anchor this with. This is conjoining—and these are all these terms I unpack with real authority, I think, in the book. You want to conduct this state check whenever something unusual happens during the day. That’s where the practice of what’s called prospective memory comes in. In other words, you want to remember—“prospective” means “remember in the future.” You want to remember to jump up, to conduct a state check, whenever anything bizarre happens. Like a bird hits the window, or a book falls off the shelf. Something that’s incongruous, something that’s strange, bizarre—i.e., dreamlike. So whenever anything bizarre happens—and I’ve done this for so long and I’ve taught it for so long that it’s such a habit of mine, that any time anything weird happens, even if I’m sitting, I’ll actually jump up off the chair—
TS: I think the people at Sounds True are going to start to think that I’ve lost it, because a lot of weird things happen around here, and in the middle of a meeting, Tami’s getting up and jumping up and down.
AH: Perfect! There’s another way to do it that’s a little bit less obtrusive, and I’ll come back to that. I just like the jumping one.
TS: OK.
AH: So, for the listener, whenever anything bizarre happens—which again, once you start to sensitize yourself to it, what are you doing? You’re sensitizing yourself to incongruities, to inconsistencies—to strange, bizarre things that happen in your day. Why? Because this is in fact one of the chief characteristics of the dream state. One of the things that happens in dreams is just bizarre stuff. Completely incongruous events like elephants walking in. Look at your dreams: weird stuff happens in your dreams. If you don’t challenge the weirdness—you just accept it at face value—that’s not lucidity. You are practicing non-lucidity.
So, during the day [if] something weird happens, sensitize yourself. Anything bizarre. It happens all the time. At that point, conduct a state check. What you will find, and I promise you this is the case—just pure physics, cause and effect—that habit will start to transpose into the night, and whenever something happens in your dream state, which of course happens all the time, you may in fact now start to find yourself jumping up in your dream to conduct the state check. Why? Because you’ve been doing it during the day.
Now, lo and behold, you do it in the dream and instead of coming back down, you’ll either come back down and go through the dream ground, or you’ll just keep going and there will be a recognition that says, “Wait a second here. I can’t do this if I’m awake. I must be dreaming.” And bang, you’re in.
The other ones that are great so people don’t think you’re totally crazy [are] if you have a digital watch, another way to conduct a state check—or even a regular watch—is you look at your watch, pull out of your line of vision, and bring it back into your line of vision.
Why do you want to do that? Well—and again, I’ve done this hundreds of times—if you do this in a dream, when you bring your watch back the second time, something will have changed. Either the colors, the numbers, the frame—something will change. It doesn’t change in the waking reality unless I’m tripping on some hallucinogenic, but in the dream state something will change. Again, there’s this incongruous quality and recognition of that that you’re trying to cultivate. You bring it back, a color changes, a smile appears or something, and you go, “Wait a second. This doesn’t happen in waking reality. I must be dreaming.” Bang, you’re in.
These techniques are extraordinarily effective. They’re really easy to do. I use them all the time. Conducting state checks is a very effective way to start to work with lucidity. It’s actually quite entertaining, it’s quite fun. And as I alluded to earlier, one of the things that you’re doing with this practice is you’re strengthening your memory muscle. Prospective memory means remembering to do something in the future, and the way it applies here is you want to remember to wake up in the dream, which is in the future.
So by sensitizing yourself to conduct state checks, either serendipitously when odd things happen, or another way to do it—which I do in my programs—is you can select—for instance, during the day, you can say “Every time I hear a siren, I’ll conduct a state check.” So, you’re working with prospective memory and conducting a state check there. Every time I look in the mirror today, I’m going to conduct a state check. This is a way of exercising this memory muscle—of remembering to do things in the future.
As we said in the outset, these practices may be somewhat intimidating, somewhat foreign, somewhat daunting simply because they’re unfamiliar to us. We don’t realize that while there are systematic, progressive, deliberate, trainable ways that we can in fact cultivate lucidity—and that’s what I try so hard to do in this book is to provide this vast battery of techniques, both theoretical (so to speak) and practical that arm the practitioner with this armamentarium—this arsenal of really potent skillful means. When they are actually brought to bear, [they] have been proven—many of these scientifically proven—to be really effective in bringing about lucidity. It doesn’t have to be this shot-in-the-dark-type thing. It’s something that literally one can practice. Hence, it becomes the yoga.
So what we’re working with now, of course, are the daytime yoga practices: prospective memory, conducting state checks, and as we alluded to earlier which we didn’t come back to complete, the practice of illusory form, of which there are two other aspects that we can get to.
TS: Yes. So, these state checks and all of these daytime counterparts to develop lucidity, these are all part of illusory form yoga? Is that correct?
AH: Not necessarily. They can be subsumed under that. What we did here, Tami, is we juxtaposed the state checks and the prospective memory—we just kind of inserted those. Those are classic daytime induction practices.
TS: OK.
AH: Illusory form, obviously, as you will see, can be connected to those, but illusory form practice as a daytime practice actually covers a much wider scope of things. The first, as I alluded to—now we’re switching gears again—the first I alluded to was the practice of illusory body, or illusory form proper.
In other words, looking at the forms that you perceive—your own body—and just asking yourself, “Is this in fact a solid, lasting, and independent entity?” In other words, trying to fake seeing what you’re perceiving as dreamlike. Granted, it seems almost patronizing, gratuitous—what am I really doing here? You’re starting to cultivate this more, you could say, insightful perception. You’re starting to see the world in a different way. Especially in what’s called the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, this illusory form practice—the greatest masters have said that it’s the single greatest preparatory practice for dream yoga in the Nyingma approach. [It’s] also the principle remedy or antidote for many of the obstacles to dream yoga.
The first aspect, like I mentioned, is working with illusory form, seeing the forms of your life as illusory or dreamlike. The second one is working with illusory speech or illusory sound—seeing that the words, the sounds that you hear during this life—they’re not as solid as they seem. And again, this comes back to what we talked about in the first session, about how much we suffer when we take the things of our life to be so real. So, in terms of illusory sound, we are hurt when people insult us because we take those words to be real. We’re elated when words of praise are delivered to us. Our lives are like a piece of cork bobbing on the ocean. We’re tossed up and down by the way we solidify and reify these sounds.
[For] illusory sound practice, there’s a number of different practices you can do here; [it’s] to basically see the illusory nature of, in fact, sound. There are a number of ways to do that. One is to practice trying to hear your native language—like right now you’re hearing my voice. There is an immediate, instantaneous translation that takes place where you bring meaning to these simple sounds. One practice with illusory speech is to try to hear your voice as if it was a foreign language, just to show how quickly it is that we impute meaning—how quickly we reify and take these sounds and the sense of my voice to be real.
When I did this in my three-year retreat, I have to say there were two practices that we did that conjoined both illusory form or illusory body and illusory speech that I do want to share. They may seem outrageously stupid and silly when I first share them with you, but they come from the tradition.
TS: You’ve already got me jumping up at any time anything strange happens, so . . .
AH: [Laughs.] Yes! This one is really particularly strange, and when I did it in retreat—this was actually in the third year of my three-year retreat, when we’re supposedly more advanced practitioners. When we were first instructed to do this practice, I said, “Are you kidding me? This is like—really?” The practice here—and I just invite you to play with it. First of all, notice the instantaneous [thought], “This is ridiculous,” and perhaps just try it and see what happens, and I’ll share what happened to me.
The practice is conjoining illusory form and illusory speech: go in front of a mirror, look at your mirror—look at you in the mirror. And then in terms of the illusory form practice, it’s to realize that what I’m perceiving in the mirror—how substantially different is that perception of my form to my actual literal form? I leave that as an open question. Obviously, it’s not the same, but it’s not that terribly different in terms of how we perceive. The illusory form aspect there is to see if in fact, is not this entire world like a reflection? Does it not have as much substantiality when you really look at it—and here physicists can help us, the cognitive scientists can help us. Is not, in fact, when you look closely at the nature of physical form, how much more substance does it in fact have than the reflection in the mirror?
So, that’s the body part. Then where it really gets crazy is you look at the mirror and you praise yourself. You look at the mirror and you go, “Wow, you’re just the most,”—not you—“I’m the most amazing being.” Lavish praise upon yourself and then perhaps notice how that may feel—once you get past the silliness aspect of it. Then conversely, you flip it and then you start to flip yourself off, throw four-letter words, curse the reflection, curse yourself, and see in fact how that may change you.
And I tell you Tami, when I first did this, after the first couple of days of resistance and saying, “This is so stupid, I’m not even going to do it.” But, I figured, “I’ve got two weeks on this stuff, I might as well get into it.” What I found when I finally got into it [was] that when I started to leave my meditation room—we did a three-year retreat in a group environment, which is very potent when you have to practice with other people—I promise you, it started to change the way I related to both praise and blame as it was coming from the so-called external world.
I would flash back on this ridiculous practice I was doing in my meditation room with my mirrors, and realizing, [that] the so-called “real world” insult—how much power do I impute upon that insult? That praise that lifts me up that I strive for, that I long for—how much unnecessary weight do I give to that? And what it did for me is I obviously still continued to hear words, I still feel the praise, feel the blame—but in a very real way from this almost patronizingly silly practice, it doesn’t have a place to land anymore. Praise and blame becomes more equanimous. One doesn’t take me down, one doesn’t lift me up as much as it did before. This practice was instrumental in starting to shapeshift the way I related to sound.
So, it’s remedial school, for sure. It’s kindergarten. But I invite people to just try it and simply see how it may effect to see the words that come at us as more dreamlike. They’re still there, the appearance is still there, but the reality that we impute to it has been softened so it doesn’t have that much impact anymore. What comes of these practices, therefore, is a type of indestructibility of one’s heart and mind, where you still see things, you still feel things—in fact, as you become more aware, you see, feel, taste, touch more because you’re more alive, you’re more awake. But they don’t hurt you as much because they don’t really have a place to land, so to speak.
That’s a real seat of liberation. I’m always reminded when I think about this of the incredibly powerful teaching that Krishnamurti, the great theosophist, gave at the end of his life. This great sage was teaching, I don’t know, for 70 years, and reputably somewhere toward the end of his life he was asked about his incredible calmness. “What’s the secret to your happiness?” And what he said is really disarming in its simplicity and it completely applies here. He simply said, “I don’t mind what happens. I don’t mind what happens.”
So, that type of equanimity—that type of stability—can be brought about through practices like this where you start to see that things take us up where we don’t relate with equanimity—when we impute, when we project, when we solidify our world in a way that then reflects back upon us. It comes back upon us and it hurts us in direct proportion to the level of reification we imbue upon our phenomena.
So, by engaging in these practices of illusory form [even though] that can seem almost ridiculous at the outset—again, this is why you have to understand the view, the framework. Then all of the sudden, you go, “Wow, I can start to see why these great wisdom masters have brought about these types of practices.” It’s a way for me to cultivate this equanimity, this stability, this peace so that when my world falls apart you can take this to extraordinary conditions. When you get a diagnosis of cancer or a loved one dies, and you have the capacity, the wherewithal, to say, “I don’t mind what happens.” The near enemy of that, of course, would be, “I don’t care what happens.” That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about: I still perceive, I still feel. In fact, I feel more than before, but I hurt a heck of a lot less simply because I’m not taking this world, these sounds, these forms to be so bloody real.
And again, this is the way the buddhas see the world. So, we are emulating their perceptions. It’s the fake-it-till-you-make-it practice.
TS: Now, there’s a third part. Just briefly, Andrew, because there’s still so much I want to cover with you!
AH: Yes. So briefly, this one of course is illusory mind. So we work with body, speech, and mind because these are the three principle gates that we relate to the world: through thoughts, through deeds, and through speech. So, illusory mind is very much what we do in standard meditation, which is where we work—and the context of illusory mind practice is we simply work with acknowledging that whatever arises in our mind fundamentally has no more substance than a dream. And in fact, is it any different? Is a thought any thicker? Is an emotion any more real than a dream? It’s the same level of expression.
So, by working with illusory mind, when a thought arises that you would normally react to in some crazy way, you start to see that, “Oh, it’s just like snowflakes falling on a hot rock.” It’s just this mental energy that fundamentally doesn’t have any substance. Again, it still appears—you don’t challenge the appearance. You challenge the status of the appearance. And you say to yourself, “Oh, this is just illusory thought.” An emotion arises: “Oh, I can see through it.”
So, really the fruition of illusory body, speech, and mind, is developing (as I talk about in the book) what the Taoists refer to as “the superior vision, the superior man, the superior woman.” I translate this into Western terms as the—in a playful way—is the kind of X-ray vision that Superman had—the ability to see through things. Even colloquially, when you see through appearance and into reality, it’s profoundly curative. It’s profoundly transformative because you’re no longer being swept away by mere appearance.
And again, how does this tie into lucid dreams? We get lost in a dream because we get swept away by mere appearance. We don’t take it to be a dream; we take it to be real. That’s not lucidity. So, in lucid mind practice, thoughts arise, emotions arise, we see them, and we see them as no more real than a dream. And then of course, you really develop stability and indestructible quality of mind there because then it doesn’t matter what happens in this mind. This mind is big enough. This mind can see through whatever arises within it. It no longer has the power it once had because I am now lucid to the contents of my mind.
TS: OK, Andrew. So, in your approach to training people in dream yoga, we start with lucid dreaming. We start there.
AH: Yes. We start there in terms of—that’s the first nighttime practice.
TS: Right. And then we have these daytime practices that you’ve been describing—of illusory form yoga and doing state checks.
AH: And meditation.
TS: And meditation. OK. And then—let’s go: meditation, state checks, illusory form yoga practice, and then we get to dream yoga proper.
AH: Yes, bingo!
TS: OK. So help me understand, first of all, the difference between lucid dreaming and the actual practice of dream yoga.
AH: Yes. Exactly. Obviously, there’s some bleed-through here; the higher levels of lucid dreaming certainly enter the domain of dream yoga. But again, for purposes of classification, you could say [with] classic lucid dreaming, there’s no particular yoga involved. You’re not really working with your mind. It’s really, honestly more a sense of indulging your mind. Initially, [it’s] like celebrating the power of your mind as it’s released in the dream state without sensory distraction.
So, lucid dreaming, as I mentioned earlier—usually people engage in it for tremendous sensual pleasure, for satisfaction. You can do anything—you can do a whole lot more in the lucid dream state than you can in waking reality. But at a certain point, especially for those who want to explore their mind in this arena, you realize the limitations of that. Like, “OK, how many times have I seen this movie? How many orgies can I conjure up?” Fill in the blank—how many times can I watch this? So as I mentioned earlier, lucid dreaming [equals] self-fulfillment.
At a certain point, for those who are a little more interested in taking advantage of this precious time instead of just going to the movies, then we start to engage the mind. That’s where it becomes a yoga. That’s where the effort is. We start to work with transforming the mind as it expresses itself in the medium of the dream. So, instead of your mind becoming the ultimate home entertainment center, like lucid dreaming—you’re the director, you’re the producer, you’re the main actor, you run this whole show. In dream yoga, it transforms into a laboratory of the mind. The yoga is that now instead of just indulging your mind, letting it run wild like it does in a crazy daydream, you start to work with it.
In other words, you start to intentionally change the content of your dream as a way—and this again, this is why the view is so important here—because when you start to go through, and in my book I believe I have 10 stages of dream yoga practices. We can go through a couple of those stages to give people some sense of just how far this goes. We need to understand right at the outset this importance of view [so] that when we work, for instance, with changing objects in the dream—that sort of thing; that’s a classic entry-level practice—what are we really transforming?
In stage two, I believe, in my listing, I talk about transforming—you’re in the lucid dream, you’re aware that you’re dreaming, you look across at the dream chair, and the practice is to transform the dream chair into a flower. Or you see a pink elephant, transform it into a lizard—it doesn’t matter.
So,, why are you doing this? Well, what are you doing when you’re changing objects in the dream you’re simply learning how to change your mind. You’re working with your mind as its contents are revealed in the medium of the dream. So, you work with that as a way to then—you know, you’re working in the dream state and you see the dream chair, it seems to be pretty solid initially. Because even though you’re lucid, it seems to be pretty solid—why? Because you’re bringing your bad habits of reification from the day into the dream. But eventually if you work with it, just like changing a thought, you look at the chair and eventually bingo, it transforms into a flower.
Or, what I often do is—this is kind of riffing on a Carlos Castaneda thing where I juxtapose two things. As many listeners know, one of Carlos Castaneda’s tricks was to look at your hand in the dream—I still do that a lot. So, I’ll look at my hand in the dream and I’ll say, for instance, “OK, I want five of these things.” I’ll look at it, and initially I can’t do it because I still think my hand is real. But eventually, one, two, three, four, five dream hands start to appear.
How is that a yoga? What are you really doing here? Well, you’re learning quite literally, you’re learning how to change your mind. So ,what that means, therefore, is in daily life, you extrapolate this kind of proficiency. Let’s say all of the sudden you’re in the midst of a real heated exchange with your partner. That energy is coming up—that energy of anger that seems pretty damn solid, seems pretty damn real. And remember, the more real you make it, the more you suffer. All of the sudden, something will flash and you’ll go, “Wow, I can transform this feeling, this mind state of anger, just like I transform that silly chair in my dream.” Then all of the sudden, that energy is still there, but that reified quality has been lessened. It’s been [inaudible]; it’s more dreamlike.
This is profoundly transformative because then the energy is still there—you still have that energy, but instead of the habitual pattern of taking it [as] solid, that drops away and what you’re left with is this tremendous, incisive clarity. That clarity is what remains, but the reified thing that would eventually cause you to lash out at that partner, that’s dissolved because you see the illusory nature of it. You’re not taking it so seriously.
TS: So, in the book, you suggest several different practices that people can try to explore dream yoga. We can fly in our dreams. When we wake up, we’re lucid in the dream, we can jump and we can fly.
AH: That’s an excellent first step.
TS: Yay! Now, here’s an interesting one you suggest: create frightful situations and then work with your fear. This is one of those things that I thought, “I don’t know if this practice is for me.” Why do I want to do that exactly?
AH: Yes, yes. Right, well this is more intermediate level. I believe I have this at like level four or something. As we progress through these stages, and we’ll see how many we discuss, they become increasingly more yogic, so to speak—increasingly more transformative and increasingly more difficult. The reason we do this—there’s several reasons we want to do this. One is that when we have a fearful situation in the dream—and this also bleeds into one of the highest levels of the psychological aspects of lucid dreaming.
For instance, Stephen LaBerge talks a little bit about this—it’s completely confluent with this aspect of dream yoga. That is: what is it that constitutes a nightmare? We’ve never really thought about it. You’re sleeping, and all of the sudden, these horrific nightmarish images—some monster, some demon, some whatever manifests. It creates this context of nightmare. What exactly is that?
Well, it’s a number of things. One thing from a psychological point of view that is very compelling to work with is that these nightmarish aspects are largely rejected, disowned aspects of our own being arising in an imagistic, dreamlike external form. Truly, in my experience—and many other dream practitioners talk about this, especially dream yoga practitioners—very often what happens in a dream and what a lucid nightmare allows you to work with is actually working to reintegrate—to reestablish a sane relationship with these nightmarish disowned aspects of ourselves. So, on one level, you could say what’s really manifesting in a nightmare is this rejected, disowned, nightmarish aspect of yourself [that] in a certain way is coming back—I don’t want to get too literal here, but [it’s] asking for reintegration, asking for incorporation.
The practice, then, becomes (and then this is where it becomes more challenging) is that our general reflex around nightmares is to what? To run from them. Which of course, just keeps the nightmare alive. So, some demon is chasing us, [and] our usual response especially if you take that nightmarish figure to be real—[it] generates fear and you run from it, it runs after you. The practice becomes—and again, a little bit more advanced, but profoundly transformative—the practice is to stop dead in your tracks. You realize, “OK, wait a second here. This is a lucid dream. I have a chance to work with my fear as it’s manifesting in this frightening form.”
So, you do the opposite of what you would normally do. You stop in your tracks, you turn around, and you face the demon. Which is what? Facing your fear. Facing this disowned, rejected aspect of yourself that’s simply longing on one level to be reintegrated. It’s the practice of wholeness, the practice of reintegration.
Many, many dream yoga practitioners have proclaimed that when they turn around, they look at the demon or whatever it is, they sometimes even open their arms to embrace the demon, and several different things can happen. Again, it’s different for different people, but in my own experience, what happened originally—and I have to say, I haven’t had a nightmare in 20-some years because I’ve done this practice so much. As fearful as it may be originally, I open my arms toward it, I look at it directly in the eye, and very often, it will just melt and dissolve into my heart.
It gives me a tremendous sense of internal confidence—a tremendous sense of, “Wow, this thing was only scary because, first of all, I took it to be real and it was an aspect of myself that I threw away.” Like a boomerang, it’s always going to come back. It’s going to be sublimating our experience whether we know it or not. In the dream state, that sublimation becomes activated and you can relate to it. So, that’s one way to work with it.
Even deeper than that—just again, to show you how far this goes. If you look very closely at the nature of your experience, especially your emotional experience—and this takes real insight meditation. This is something that may not be available to everybody. But this is what the stage of practice can lead you towards. I invite you to take a very, very close look at your experience and you will find that fear is what I refer to as “the primordial emotion of samsara.” In many ways, it sublimates; it’s like this tectonic plate of emotionality that percolates almost under everything we do.
Really look very deeply into your life, and you will find that almost everything you do is born out of avoiding this fear. A type of active laziness is born from it. Almost everything we do is keeping away from this fear. This fear, again, goes very, very deep—perhaps beyond the scope of what we want to talk about right now. But, fundamentally, this fear is the fear of the truth of our own dreamlike nature. The fear of the truth of our own egolessness—or in really blunt terms, the fear of the truth of our own inherent nonexistence. You can see, “Well, wait a second here, I’m not so sure I want to go here.” And that’s fine, and then you don’t!
TS: I wanted to talk to you about this, so I’m glad you’re bringing it up. I pulled out a quote from the book Dream Yoga, and the quote is, “Through these practices, we’re going to uproot the basis of samsara, which involves transcending fear.”
AH: Yes, exactly right. Yes. And that’s the potentiality here. Again, I just want to reinstate this. There are two principle ways that we work with this fear. One is, again, you start to see the difference between and the bleed into between psychology and spirituality. The first is this kind of psychological reintegration approach—that nightmares thing.
TS: Yes.
AH: But even more foundational than that—and this is what happens: if you’re not having a nightmare, you actually create nightmarish situations. So, instead of creating a chair, you create a really [scary] situation in the dream to really work with this kind of fear. Now you’re starting to get somewhere; now you’re starting to get someplace really deep. Now it’s not just psychological fear that you’re working with; now you’re talking about fear that is the basis of the entire structure of this confused, conditioned existence.
Let me just say something quickly here and then we can talk about it just to show you how deep this goes. What we’re getting at here is—as they say so famously in the Upanishads, the great Indian infrastructure texts—they say, “Where there is other, there is fear.” Where there is other, there is fear. Where there is duality, there is fear. So they are virtually synonymous: fear and duality. Fear and other are virtually synonymous. So when you’re starting to work with this deep, deep nature of fear—as you can start to approach it in these more advanced stages of dream yoga—you’re starting to work with the very fabric upon which this entire samsaric, frightful, conditioned existence realm is based. It is based on this.
We’ve constructed our entire lives on a kind of an avoidance strategy—to stay away from the illusory nature of our being—the illusory nature of reality, the dreamlike nature of things. Because from an egoic perspective, there is in fact part of us that doesn’t want to hear these teachings. There is a part of us that doesn’t want to hear about egolessness, the inherent lack of nonexistence. Part of us doesn’t want to go there, because you’re starting to get too personal here. You’re starting to get too close. But you’re also starting to get to the very bedrock of what creates all our conditioned suffering.
TS: You know, I don’t mind hearing about it, Andrew, but I don’t know if I want to get into bed tonight and ask that I generate on my own something really terrifying so I can work with my fear. I don’t know about that.
AH: Yes, exactly. And the reason I stress in this book with real rigor—I think there are three chapters where I really drive this point home—is what I call “the spiders and snakes of the relative unconscious mind.” That stuff is like, “Whoa, who wants to crawl into a bed full of spiders and snakes?” I don’t want to do that. That is in fact largely what awaits us when we explore the relative levels of our unconscious mind.
What I take great pains to portray in this book is that there is a deeper part of your being that is below that, that is truer than that, that is the absolute level of your unconscious mind—that is beneficent, kind, loving, perfectly pure, awake, divine. This is where the buddhas reside. This is where the deities reside. This is the true nature of who you are.
So once again, the reason one may be interested and in fact encouraged to work with the spiders and snakes levels of the relative mind is because you realize, “Hey, wait a second. This isn’t who I really am. This is all this relative level of debris that is exceedingly effective to keep me away from truth because there’s no more effective ingredient to keep you away from truth than fear.” And all these relative levels, they’re there; they’re there anyway, as any psychologist—it was the great gift of Freud. I have to say. As any depth psychologist will tell you, what we do on the surface of our lives is dictated by what happens backstage. Onstage is dictated by backstage.
At this relative level, it’s like, “Whoa, I’m not going to crawl into a bed of spiders and snakes.” But you’re going to do that because you realize even at the level of the view that you can see right through this stuff. This fear is not who you are. You understand what that fear really represents. It actually represents a really good thing. It means you’re starting to get close to the truth. Without that understanding, without that view, without that map—when that fear comes up, what’s your usual defensive reflex? Contract and run. And “contract and run” defines the entire samsaric M.O. That’s what it is: our entire lives are based on contract and run.
But if you realize, “Wait a second here, I’m getting to fear. I’m starting to approach the truth. That’s why the spiders and snakes, the barbed wire, the flames—that’s why this crap is starting to come up, because I’m getting down to it.” If you can get down to it, your view—again, the power of your view. Your view is so strong. You realize, “This is pretty formidable.” It’s like The Wizard of Oz. This is Toto pulling back the curtain. I realize that is not who I am. Very effective to keep me away from who I am. In fact it’s done it for millennia.
But now I’m saying, “Wait a second, I know this now. I know what this fear is protecting me from. It’s protecting me from the truth. I know that behind this fear, below this fear, is really what I’m looking for. This is the Holy Grail. This is what I’m really after.” And if I have that view, then I have the fortitude, the humor, the perseverance, the endurance to say, “Wow, look how amazingly effective this fear is.”
TS: OK, let me ask you a personal question. When you were practicing this stage—this step in dream yoga—create frightful situations and then work with your fear—what kind of situations did you create?
AH: I actually ended up doing the kind of classic ones. Again, we’re not talking 100 percent about this archetypal fear yet. That takes place really more at stages nine and ten, which I may not get to. We’re working here at the upper-band levels of this bandwidth. What I did is similar to what the classic texts actually point out. I would step up to a precipice, a cliff. I would create the Grand Canyon or something. I do have a little bit of acrophobia. I’m afraid of heights. So, I would create a situation where I would stand on the edge of this and then work with that fear that was brought about.
Or, sometimes [I’d] literally conjure up a fire, a huge bonfire. Again, it’s just my mind, it’s not any different from right now saying, “I’m going to visualize a really big blazing bonfire.” It’s not that different. You’re just doing it in the medium of the dream, where it’s not just a though—it becomes your so-called reality. Then I would work with stepping into the fire.
TS: OK. I get the picture.
AH: So, it’s contrived, it’s artificial, yes—but it’s a way to start to relate to the most unwanted emotion that we have in this life. Then as we go further to the higher stages of dream yoga practice, that’s when you start getting into this archetypal level of fear, which sublimates even this. And that’s of course where it gets exceedingly profound and therefore exceedingly transformative. If you can cut through the façade of this deep infrastructure of fear, then you really have become indestructible. You’ve discovered this deepest aspect of yourself that is unfazed, untouched. That’s why it’s called the Changeless Nature. It’s not affected or changed or touched by any of these surface machinations.
TS: Well, we’ll just touch on it briefly, which is the last two steps in Dream Yoga. The second-to-last one—you suggest that people meditate in the lucid dream state and attain self-liberation. And then the final step—rest in the clear light mind.
AH: Yes. That’s the fruition. That’s the fruition. So you want to talk about the very last one first?
TS: I want to give people a sense—you keep mentioning the view. Why are we doing dream yoga? What’s the ultimate goal? What’s the ultimate fruition? So I want to get to these final steps and touch on them; if we can actually develop this capacity for lucid dreaming and recognizing illusory form in our waking life, and we can go through these various steps—I’m flying in my dreams like Supergirl! OK!
AH: Right. And by the way, this is important: of these ten steps, just like with induction techniques, some people may find one—I do lay them out in a somewhat classic order, even though the steps themselves are mine. They do follow a classic level of progression.
What’s important to understand—just like with the induction techniques themselves—is you don’t have to systematically plow through all 10 steps. You might find yourself one day really lucid, really clear, and then you’ll say, “Oh wow, today I might want to try stage eight.” Or, “I really like stage two, I love this!” For me, that’s one of my favorites still—walking through walls and stuff. I love that. You can make that the entirety of your dream yoga thing. But you will find, as you develop more stability, more clarity, more proficiency, these over levels become increasingly available to you. So that’s why I really have these 10 baby-step levels, where people can say, “I can do this. I can fly in my dream. I can put my hand through a dream wall. I can transform a chair into whatever.” That’s no small thing. You’re starting to work with some pretty cool stuff.
So, in terms of these latter stages, just to complete the picture, this again is kind of graduate-school dream yoga. In order to really do these levels, there has to be—again, it’s not any different if you want to study quantum mechanics; you have to first do arithmetic, then algebra, then calculus. It’s not any different. You have to first do the preparatory work before you can do the graduate school work. But these higher levels, with increased clarity [and] increased stability—which again is what? What is that clarity and stability? It’s nothing more that the clarity and stability of your mind. That’s all it is.
As your mind becomes more clear, as your mind becomes more stable—and here, right away, you see how this applies to your daytime meditations—these stages become more available to you because it’s just that same mind being released in the medium of the dream. This is why advanced meditators, for them, these stages are no different than what happens during the day. In fact, as my teacher Kenpo Rinpoche says, the fruition of meditation practice is to show you that the highest levels of meditation—the tradition says—if you cannot practice in the dream as you practice in the day, your meditation is incomplete. So, that’s either incredibly inspiring or incredibly intimidating, but they’re really showing you that until your mind is so stable that there’s no difference between the way you’re relating to it in the sleep or dream state, your meditation is incomplete.
So with that said, stage nine—meditating in your dream. The reason it’s difficult is that one of the things—and any dream yoga practitioner or lucid dreamer will attest to this—one of the things that keeps a lucid dream going—and it’s one of the techniques I use as an antidote for when a dream is falling apart—is movement (i.e. also indicative is rapid eye movement). So, when your eyes are moving—someone’s looking at you or they’re measuring you, [or] you can look at your sleeping partner [and] you can see that their eyes are flickering back and forth—they’re dreaming. Their eyes are moving because their dream eyes are moving. So, that’s why Stephen LaBerge could move his dream eyes and move his physical eyes, and the scientists could measure it.
So, what happens is when you start to work with stationary meditations in the dream, you’re starting to work against the very process that keeps the dream going, which is movement. So you hold—in fact, it’s one way to end a dream, end a lucid dream, is hold your eyes on one object. You hold your eyes on one object, the REM literally stops, [and] it tends to pull you out of the dream. So that’s why this is very difficult.
What I recommend for an initial segue into this practice would be moving dream meditations. So doing walking meditation, doing tai chi, doing what I might traditionally call lu jong or trulkor—different types of body meditations where there’s still movement going on, but there’s a high degree of mindfulness associated with it. With some stability there, then you can work with actually focusing on a dream object, holding it, and then simply seeing what happens.
Usually, one of two things will happen at this stage. The dream object will fade—like you hold your eyes onto a dream chair; if you really try to hold your eyes steady, eventually, as I alluded to earlier, the dream chair tends to just fade away and you wake up. The other thing that happens with proficiency is that you will actually look at the chair, the chair will disappear before your dream mind’s eye, but your awareness of the lucidity of the dream altogether still remains. That’s not such a simple thing to do.
The very last stage, to me, is really in many ways, of course this is where you want to go. So again, we’re talking about post-doc—this is really advanced practice. But again, it shows you how much is available to you. Here, the tenth stage starts to bleed into—in fact, it is the platform into what’s called “lucid sleep,” which is maintaining full awareness in the deep dreamless state. This is not a particularly easy thing to do.
Parenthetically—this is I think very interesting to know about—is that from the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, in fact sleep yoga—what I call the clear light meditations—sleep yoga, it’s the main nocturnal meditation. That’s the main practice. Dream yoga is a secondary practice to sleep yoga. What this means is that if you can achieve sleep yoga, which I’ll talk a little bit about in a second, all your dreams are lucid. You have accomplished—it transcends but includes dream yoga. Sleep yoga, if you’ve accomplished it, all your dreams become lucid. You’re awake to all states. Then of course by further implication and extrapolation, you wake up, so to speak, to this waking world, and you’re lucid to all states here. At this level, what it means is this level of mind [is] never distracted, never strays, awake to the nature of whatever arises.
So, in the tenth stage of this—I say this and then we can maybe talk just very briefly about the depth of sleep yoga, just to give some people some idea. There are a number of ways to do it. In the way I present it in the book, one of the techniques that I have found most helpful—and I did this really by exploration. It was like, “Let’s just see what happens if I do this.” There are several ways to explore this.
One is when you’re in a lucid dream, a full-blown lucid dream—you’re aware, you’re awake, you’re in it—I do this when my dreams are really clear—like wow, this is a super clear, solid dream, so this is when I do this practice. You then close your dream eyes. You feel like you have a body in a dream, but of course you don’t. You feel like you have dream eyes, but of course you don’t. So, the practice is [to] close your dream eyes and then see what happens.
One of two things will happen. One is things will just go blank; you’re still lucid, but you’re not seeing anything. It’s like a lucid blackness and there’s still a very subtle sense of, “I am perceiving the black.” That means you’re still in a lucid dream, but there’s no longer any images involved. So, it’s like a black lucid dream.
The other thing that can happen is that it can drop you into the lucid sleep state. This becomes a little bit more difficult to describe because now you’re starting to talk about nonduality. What happens here is if you close your dream eyes and it doesn’t just go black, what will happen is your sense of self dissolves into this kind of black light. It’s the light of the mind, actually. It’s the luminosity of the mind; that’s why it’s called—you’re dipping into what’s called a clear-light mind. It’s not light in a physical sense; it’s not like looking at a streetlight. It’s the luminous nature of the mind itself.
Again, we can toss this in as a sidebar. During the course of the day—again, you start to see how profound this is. Now you’re starting to get towards nonduality; now you’re starting to get to the very bottom of the whole shebang. You might ask yourself, just as a very interesting exercise, when we see something during the course of the day—this is again a slight intimation of what exactly this clear-light mind [is].
When you see something during the course of the day, you see it because light rays are reflecting off the object. If there wasn’t light, you wouldn’t see. In a dream, you still see objects, yes? Where’s that light coming from? Where is that light? Is there some external light in the dream that illuminates the dream objects that you seem to see? There’s no such light. The objects come up—and again, you start to see how subtle this gets—they come up illuminating themselves. This is the clear-light mind being reflexively aware. The objects just illuminate themselves. They just know themselves.
It’s a very profound, subtle discovery of how it is that we know things in our mind. Even when you have a thought—when you have a thought, where does the light come from that helps you see the thought? It’s actually the light of the mind itself. So this is where we’re going with the clear-light mind sleep practice.
So stage 10, what I do—let me tie this in to what I do. This is what I discovered with trial and error. I’m in a lucid dream, I close my eyes, and then what I do is I plunge through whatever dream floor I may be in—and there are reasons I mention in the book why you do that; kind of inner subtle body physiology reasons why you do that.
Very often what will happen is I’ll find myself kind of dropping—a sense of literally falling. Interesting when we talk about the colloquialism of “falling asleep.” In the inner yoga points of view, the mind actually falls from the head to the throat to the heart. There’s a sense of, I close my eyes, I feel the dream floor, and with intention, I’m going to say I want to drop into this floor, heading towards my heart center. Then very often, when I do that, I will feel this kind of dissolution of any sense of identity.
Nonduality is very difficult to talk about; it’s kind of a disintegration of any level of form, where my mind just releases this contraction into this vast, open, luminous space of the clear-light mind. Little bit difficult to talk about; I do my best in the book to refer to other sources that mention it, [as well as] a few of the experiences I’ve had.
From there, just very briefly, what do you do there? Unlike the stages of dream yoga, with sleep yoga, you don’t do anything. It’s paradoxically what makes it so hard. You simply rest in the vast, open freedom of this innate divinity. The Buddha within, the god within—whatever metaphor you want to use. You simply bathe—it’s like you’re recharging, you’re resting in this quality of mind, which of course the awakened ones never leave.
Then the real practice—we’ll pause and we can talk about this. The real practice then is to keep that light on. So you fall into deep, dreamless sleep lucidly; the practice then becomes [to] bring that light with you. Not the dark, which is what we usually do. When we wake up in the morning, we bring the darkness of non-lucidity with us. We bring the darkness of ignorance with us. Now you’re going to bring the light of the clear-light mind which never turns off; the great Eastern sun in Shambhala Buddhism. You bring that light back with you.
The minute you do that, you re-enter the dream state, [and] all dreams are lucid by definition. You come up one more time in the morning, you wake up into this so-called world, [and] all this entire world is seen in a lucid way. And how does it appear at that level? It in fact appears as illusory form.
So, now you start to see how illusory form is both the pre- and post—it’s the practice and the performance. The practice is faking it; coming out, you’ve made it. You’ve actually come back into the world, and now the world spontaneously appears like a dream, spontaneously appears like illusory form. You’ve developed these X-ray eyes that cut through everything.
TS: I have one final question for you Andrew. Are we dreaming?
AH: If you see me different from you, then we’re snoring. Yes. This is the classic dream sign: if you see the world as solid, lasting, and independent, that’s a dream sign that you’re asleep in the world of samsara. So, we can use that as a very humble recognition of, “Wow, I didn’t see that I didn’t see.” But now we’re bringing our ignorance into the light of consciousness and for the first time, we have the ability to transform this relationship to our non-lucidity. In a nutshell, that’s what these practices are about. So, that’s the ride into the dark and back out.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Andrew Holecek. He’s the author of a new book called Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep. He’s also created an audio series on Dream Yoga. I’ve enjoyed this two-part conversation so much, realizing that honestly, we’re just getting started with what I think we need to call “night school.” So, Andrew, I want you to bring night school to the Sounds True audience, and we’re going to figure out how to do that.
AH: Let’s do it, Tami. It’ll be great fun. Thank you so much, really. As usual, fantastic questions, and in fact it’s always a delight to spend some time with you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening—and have a good day, and a good night.
