Knowledge Derived from Nocturnal Dreams

Transcript

Welcome to a beautiful thought.

I’d like to talk to you about dream yoga, about knowledge that is derived from a nocturnal dream.

So I turned again to the Yoga Sutras and and I look at this 7 ways that’s listed in order to gain yoga.

This goal can be attained through breathing exercises like holding your breath before exhaling.

By contemplating things and impressions which promotes mental stability, that’s consolidation.

Or by contemplating the inner light that is free of suffering. That sounds like fun.

Or if what is mutable in human beings is no longer the handmaiden of desire. I will have to explore what that means further.

Or through knowledge that is derived from a nocturnal dream.

Or through contemplation of love.

So not going to claim to be an expert on Yoga or Dream Yoga. But it’s very interesting the 7 paths to yoga. One of them is the path of dreams, so I’ve looked at a lot of media, followed a lot of videos and articles and stuff about lucid dreams over the years.

When it started to click was a few months ago I stumbled on some speeches and interview from this fella named Robert Waggoner.

You can look at his speeches and interviews on YouTube for free and start to get informed about it. He also has a couple books on the subject, I’ve read the most recent one which is “Lucid Dreaming Plain and Simple” and this book is really amazing.

Previously after having explored the topic over many years and tried many times I didn’t have a whole lot of success. In Waggoner’s work is the first time I explored the concept that you can use lucid dreams for your own spiritual development.

Previously it had only been hinted at in the stuff that I’ve looked at. And there’s also they have a newsletter online I think you can download all of the back catalog for free where they’ve been interviewing people for 30 years or so talking about their experiences with lucid dreams, their techniques and what they hoped to achieve from it.

So this is very interesting in the book Waggoner talks about using dreams as a path for meditation and he cites a certain Tibetan monk Evo Morales who is knowledgeable about it and says that dream yoga is a path to liberation or enlightenment.

I was like “Wow, this is cool” so I started to focus on that.

One of the important things when you’ve been lucid dreaming or trying to have lucid dreams actually almost universally people agree that the most important thing is keeping a dream journal because you need to be able to record all your dreams in order to remember if you have a lucid dream.

By recalling them you begin to see the patterns and you start to recognize more when you’re actually in a dream.

You pull it out of the subconscious into the conscious mind that allows you to be a little more analytical about it.

As a result of reading that book and practicing I’ve had I don’t know maybe 8 lucid dreams in the last couple of months. It’s going pretty well, the most success I’ve ever had on this endeavor in my entire life.

And so I’ll tell a couple of things about what happened when I finally remembered my task in the dream.

I do remember I was in a sort of warehouse party so I come to in this dream. I don’t remember exactly how I became lucid but I remembered my task and I said “alright, I’m going to go over to this wooden pallet and sit down on it.”

I started to take my boots off so I could sit in the half lotus position and I said “Greater clarity now” and I said it a bit too forcefully so it’s a technique that’s explained in the book.

Its sort of like how you access the console and you can give commands to the dream in certain ways it will respond.

So when you say greater clarity now you’re making this amend to the dream so things start to come into focus. When things are a bit fuzzy in a dream you can do that and it will normally respond.

Like I said, I said it a bit too forcefully and that started to rattle the dream stability.

There’s a delicate balance when it comes to dream stability. You have to be aware of your emotions and this sort of thing. There’s probably a whole bunch of elements I still don’t know because I’m still relatively new with this.

But that disturbed the dreams stability and that dream ended. Soon after, I was lucid again in another dream. And I was in a sort of booth in a urban environment. This place kind of looks like Mexico City and in this abandoned booth like it would have been a police booth or toll booth next to the road.

I see this guy walking next to the booth and he has this strange hair that day. The previous day I had been thinking how strange Eva Morales hair looks. That’s a story for another time.

But this guy walks past and he’s got this strange full head of hair and I thought “Huh, that guy came from my imagination”.

I became lucid and I tried to fulfill my goal. I climbed up out of the booth and I said “greater clarity now but more softly”.

I thought this place looks like Mexico City, it’s not really safe to be sitting down in the middle of the street and meditating.

I kept walking around for awhile and thought I’m not going to find a safe place like this, because this is a dream. I dunno let’s fly to another place.

So I stuck out my arms in front of me and just flew up out of the atmosphere and then I started to get carried away.

At first I thought I was gonna come down on a different spot on earth and find it very peaceful and everything. Now I’m almost out of the atmosphere and I thought I could just head right up out of this world and that would surely be a peaceful place to meditate.

I kept going, I kept going and I went like right out of the dream. So that was another success in some ways, I went lucid and used a technique or two.

I was aware of some of the consequences of being in a dream but I didn’t quite achieve my goal.

Another time I remember, I think I had a few more failures on this front so I keep noting the errors or things I needed to improve every time so.

Every time I was saying greater clarity now I was doing so firmly but gently and also trying to stabilize the dream a little before I sit down.

The next time I did it I had it written in my book like “Sit down rapidly wherever I am.” So I sat down immediately but I sat down with too much force and destabilized the dream once again.

So the next time I was like I will make sure the dream is stable, make sure to look at my hands to really confirm it in my mind.

Your hands normally look weird in a dream so it’s a good idea to do a hand check. It’s also a good way to stabilize the dream a little.

So I look at my hands and I notice I have 6 fingers. I was like “Yep, alright. Definitely in a dream”.

So I sat down gently and slowly and I started to meditate and again I noticed this thing I hadn’t completely thought out. I was like “I’m going to focus on my breath” like I normally do in meditation.

That’s not really appropriate in a dream because that’s focusing on my physical body which is gonna bring my awareness away from the dream and I’m going to end up waking up.

So I started to do some mantras and I did a mantra that was given to me in Wat Tham Krabok. And my body was filled with light and was shimmering and tingling all through me and around me. It was wonderful.

Unfortunately it didn’t last very long it’s something I still need to learn but that’s as far as I got so far.

Hopefully I continue on this path. I think this is going to be of interest to a lot of you because it’s spiritual path but there’s also something just fascinating. A lot of people are interested in dreams, fascinated with lucid dreams and what you can do with them.

One thing you can do with them is know yourself, find greater self knowledge and tranquility and if you look through that book and interview with Waggoner he talks about many cases how people have healed physical ailments and found answers to questions that were bugging him.

There’s a whole bunch of things you can do with dreams so it’s pretty exciting stuff.

So that’s the knowledge derived from nocturnal dreams that I’ve managed to arrive at so far.

Thank you for exploring different states, different waves of consciousness to find wisdom and find greater self knowledge.

Thank you for continuing on whatever path your on to make this world a nicer place and to make your own experience with consciousness a more beautiful one.

Thank you so much, I’ll talk to you soon, have a fantastic dreamy day!