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Lucid Dreaming
& Meditation
Since the ancient Grecian times, philosophers were aware of
the likelihood of lucid dreaming – i.e., realizing that you
are having a dream while in the dream phase - and theologians
from St. Augustine’s time have known of such dreams also.
However, it was just around the 1980s that the concept of
lucid dreaming came into the realm of genuine scientific
inquiry, principally because of studies that Stephen LaBerge &
other psychologists carried out at Stanford University. These
studies have brought to light a great deal of information
regarding the lucid dreams’ nature and have presented several
practical techniques for finding out how to bring on such
dreams and raise their occurrence, length, and clarity.
However, such research was heralded and in several ways
outdone centuries back by Buddhist thinkers in Tibet. Well, as
Stephen Laberge says, “On the ‘rooftop of the world,’ it was
in the early half of the 8th century A.D., that the Tibetan
Buddhists practiced a type of yoga intended to keep one
completely conscious during the dream phase. With these
Tibetan dream yogic experts, we for the very first time
discover a people who have an experientially founded and clear
comprehension of dreams as exclusively the mental conception
of the dreamer. Now this indeed is a concept totally at par
with our latest scientific and psychological results.”
Now in Tibetan Buddhism, practicing dream yoga is followed
within the broader context of striving to comprehend the
intellect and the real, inner sources of both pain and true
happiness. The 4 Noble Truths are the total structure of the
Buddhist theory & practice - (1) realizing the actuality of
pain, (2) removing the basic, internal reasons for pain, which
are recognized as desire, antagonism, and delusion, (3) being
aware of the likelihood of the end of pain and its cause, and
(4) pursuing the path of holy cleansing and change that leads
to such freedom.
Ethics is at the core of all Buddhist traditions, which can be
summed up as “do not cause pain to others or yourself, and be
ready to serve when the occasion arises.” The subsequent stage
of practice is studying how to steady the psyche, and the one
key aspect of such cerebral training is the fine-tuning of
attention. This covers methods for improving the steadiness
and intensity of attention, soothing the mind in order that
one can keep a constantly focused, lucid consciousness. As the
Buddha stated, “The mind that’s founded in balance comes to
understand actuality as it is.” This kind of a steady mind is
then employed to look at the makeup of the intellect and the
sources and capabilities of human awareness.
This is precisely where the early ritual of dream yoga makes
its presence. Experimental physicists carry out their
investigations in labs that are totally made up of physical
phenomena. In the same way, Buddhist thinkers who become
skilled in field of dream yoga have the ability to employ the
dream phase as the starting point for exploring the intellect,
and their lab is totally made up of creations of
consciousness! The initial step in such procedure is to find
out how to be aware of the dream phase for what it actually is
while one is dreaming. At first, one’s lucid dreams indeed are
likely to last for a brief period, as one turns so keyed up
that one hastily gets up!
However, with practice and time, one finds out how to steady
the mind and maintain clarity, and this presents several
possibilities for studying the dream phase. The initial thing
to examine is: to what degree can one alter the contents and
incidents in a dream randomly? Buddhist thinkers have
discovered that the sole restriction on the pliability of
dreams lies in the range of one’s imagination. In addition, as
one gets more knowledge about the character of dreams, one
finds out that nothing that a dream contains can hurt one.
Everything is just an expression of one’s own psyche, and
perhaps even the most appalling pictures and incidents are no
more hazardous than optical illusions or mirror reflections.
An additional step in practicing dream yoga is permitting the
dream to disappear, but without shaking off the lucidity of
one’s consciousness. During a dream, all the physical senses
are closed down already, so that when the dream pictures
vanish, it disappears into the empty, bright space of
consciousness itself. Now this is a remarkable chance to
examine the “lucid glow of sleep,” where one experiences
awareness without the sensory visions and conceptual creations
being superimposed. Like this, one can start to survey the
nature of awareness itself and see how it assumes various
forms and modalities as one’s cognitive abilities and physical
senses are stirred.
Contemporary lucid dream researchers clearly distinguish
between the dream phase and waking state, and acknowledge that
this distinction performs a vital part in their methods for
bringing on lucid dreaming. However in certain ways, waking
awareness and dreaming are far similar than we believe. As
Stephen LaBerge says, “dreaming can be regarded as the unique
case of insight without the restraints of outside sensory
input. On the contrary, perception can be regarded as the
unique case of dreaming that the sensory input controls.” Now
the similarities between dreaming and waking are delved into
exhaustively by the Tibetan Buddhists, who’ve come to the
conclusion that, in comparison to holy enlightened beings,
ordinary people live their lives largely in a dreamlike phase.
When questioned whether he was god or man, he answered simply,
“I’m awake,” and this is the real meaning of the term Buddha:
“one who’s awakened.” |
