Thread: Practicing illusory body for 30 days

I like it. I like it a lot! Even though I find the concept easy to grasp, putting it into an effective and meaningful practice, I'm certain, can be a stiff challenge. I find maintaining mindfulness for any length of time a challenge, though with practice I'm inching my way forward. As long as I'm mindful of being mindful I can do a reasonable job, however it's so easy to slip out of being mindful! Especially at work...

Conditioning is a tough nut to crack!

Good luck ThreeCat!
What you're describing sounds very much like the chaotic practice of metamorphosis of belief(in this case, changing your beliefs about the realness of life), although it seems like quite an advanced version. Lots of stuff seems to be linked together lately. I can't wait to see your results, both dream-wise and spiritual. Honestly I've never read anything about the experiences of people who undergo this kind of stuff, so I think your 'diary' will be quite informative for me

Thank you for the encouragement! I have had one LD since the beginning of the experiment proper, and in it, I simply knew I was dreaming. I think it was relatively close to the beginning of the dream, because I was walking in darkness for a bit. Whenever the visuals clarified, I knew what I was experiencing was a dream.

I will try to only bring up LDs that seem to be definitively a result of this practice. At the moment, my criteria is that awareness spontaneously occurs in the dream, as opposed to being a product of RCing or reasoning within the dream.

Cool. Be interested to hear how u get on. Alan wallace gives a great discussion of illusionary form and empty ness in "ðreaming yourself awake". After reading that I had a strong sense of how similar ðreaming is to waking state. Andrew holechek also gives good discriptions in dream yoga. He says the better you do at illusionary form the better you do at lucid dreaming and the other way around also..or something like that. I find it a hard one to keep up as a practice. I can cultivate the sense of illusionary form and see how this also is dreamlike. But shortly afterwards this is forgotten. With mindfulness it hard to maintain unbroken mindfulness in daily life, but easier to remember to be mindful often. With illusionary form I find it hard to maintain and also hard to cultivate the sense of it often... I'd be curious to hear what you actually do in this practice. Ie. Remind yourself often, this is a dream/use certain reflections to cultivate a sense of the dreamlike nature of experience/ sit with this as in a meditation/ do it often as an informal practice thro the day. Also curious how long you can stay with it. Good luck, hope it proves interesting and productive for you

Enjoy your dream milk in your dream coffee in your dream kitchen! (inside joke for those who've read The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep)!

I do this sporadically. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I was quite tickled to have "invented" this and then found out it was a "thing" after reading the aforementioned book.

As we all know: dreaming is perception unlimited by sensory organs, and perception is dreaming constrained by sensory organs. They're fundamentally the same experiences, so it's not actually such a big leap to come to this "unifying" point of view.

I'm constantly amazed at the dream experience, and how "waking" it feels. I had a dream the other night where I was absolutely, positively convinced I was awake.

edit: so isn't it a better condition for fostering lucidity to *know* you're always dreaming, instead? (Sageous: I know you disagree)

edit: so isn't it a better condition for fostering lucidity to *know* you're always dreaming, instead?

I think there comes a time when it does not matter, because your quality of awareness will not change from waking to sleeping: you go to sleep, remain aware in NREM and delta. Any dreams that arise from delta will be lucid by default--you will experience yourself become the dream. You then wake up. You won't need to reality check because you already know your state. And so on. I think that is one of the signs that you are doing it right (lol).

For most of us, though, reality checks are a good idea.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Enjoy your dream milk in your dream coffee in your dream kitchen! (inside joke for those who've read The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep)!

I do this sporadically. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I was quite tickled to have "invented" this and then found out it was a "thing" after reading the aforementioned book.

As we all know: dreaming is perception unlimited by sensory organs, and perception is dreaming constrained by sensory organs. They're fundamentally the same experiences, so it's not actually such a big leap to come to this "unifying" point of view.

I'm constantly amazed at the dream experience, and how "waking" it feels. I had a dream the other night where I was absolutely, positively convinced I was awake.

edit: so isn't it a better condition for fostering lucidity to *know* you're always dreaming, instead? (Sageous: I know you disagree)

I think sageous' issue is the the unholy marriage of illusory body with western reality checking. Perfectly right, if you have truly intuited the Tibetan epistemic then it would be disingenuous to affirm that all phenomena is as without substance as a dream, and then reality check anyway.

Sageous's objection would be (as it has in the past) I think trying to convince yourself of something (I'm dreaming) when you deep down in your SC know you're not, causing in the end false-lucids.

However in my non-lucids the last several months I really really really think I'm awake, so moving/returning more towards thinking the nature of reality is dream would be more helpful for me at this point.

I think Sageous has a good point, and think that is one of the pitfalls of this method. I also think that semi-lucids occur regardless in most lucid dreamers, so if illusory body transforms many of our NLDs to SLDs, I'm not sure if that's really a problem (I'm not bothered by it, anyway).

I would like to point out that RCing every now and again does not strike me as disingenuous; it rather strikes me as a support--the same way counting breaths in meditation is a support. We might experience something truly bizarre during the waking state, and a RC would be a fine idea at this moment. On the other hand, RCing constantly with this method (illusory body) would defeat the purpose. Awareness is what we are cultivating anyway; I think many of us have fallen into the trap of using the RC as a replacement for awareness, rather than a support, which results in some truly foolish dream scenarios. If we are practicing moment-to-momement awareness, with a focus on awareness of dream imagery, lucid dreams will occur. It's just a matter of how often this happens, and whether or not it outperforms constant RCing.

Had a really nice lucid last night. Early on, I thought I could hear wind outside my bedroom, and had thought of competing stimuli from waking and dream world, I really looked into the dream, and found myself saying, "this is a dream, weather waking or sleeping, it's spun by what I pay attention to". Felt like illusionary form practice, felt v lucid and clear...stabilised well by this

I think the main issue is with the word 'illusory'. This is a rather poor word for what the practice is getting at, what with its connotations of unreality. To say that the world, and the body, mind, everything, are illusory is not to say they are not real. The more appropriate sense of illusion would be that of something being concealed, the lucid buddha nature that is manifest in all phenomena but of which we are unaware. An even better translation would be 'emptiness'. Once again we should be careful not to confuse the concept with a western idea of nihilism, but, as Wallace articulates in the excerpt linked to in the OP, that things are empty of independent existence, everything 'interdepends' (for more on this see this article by Thich Nhat Nanh The Fullness of Emptiness -- Thich Nhat Hanh ? Lion's Roar). The implication of this that perhaps most applies to us as lucid dreamers is that phenomena is interdependent on mind, that the world as we experience it would not exist without a perceiving mind. I want to stress that I am not making some new age statement about consciousness as the substance of the universe, but that the world as it appears to each person cannot exist independently of that experience. This in fact lines up quite well with Sageous' formulation:

Self-awareness is nothing more -- or less -- than being aware that you are here, that you have an effect on everything around you, and everything around you has an effect on you.

So the aim is not really to 'convince yourself you're dreaming when you really know you're not' (a strawman, I know) but to realise that, on a phenomenological (that is, as they appear to us) level, the waking world and dreams are of the same nature.

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

So the aim is not really to 'convince yourself you're dreaming when you really know you're not' (a strawman, I know) but to realise that, on a phenomenological (that is, as they appear to us) level, the waking world and dreams are of the same nature.

In other words and as I understand this...

All experience is based on subjective perception, and it all happens between our ears. In that sense what we perceive is real because we make it real in our mind. That process is no different whether awake or dreaming except for many of the inputs...

Ctharlhie, that was very well-put: thank you for your explanation! Wallace reminds us in his (somewhat lengthy) exposition that Padmasambhava does not invite us to delude ourselves with this practice; rather it is an invitation to open our eyes to the "true" nature of phenomena. All experience is conditioned, and all phenomena are preceded by mind.

Week 1: I had four experiences this week; two were very low-level, though I was practicing illusory body in both (if I remember correctly)--saying, "This is a dream." I say they were low-level because I lost lucidity in both, and the memory was very fuzzy upon waking. The first involved sexual interactions (usually a sign of low lucidity for me) and the second involved me arrogantly laughing at positive reality checks (noses pinches) because I knew I was dreaming. I then lost lucidity.

The other two occurred this morning. One was a normal "something is not right here" followed by an RC. The other was a DEILD. During the DEILD, a false awakening occurred. I thought to myself, "It doesn't matter, this is a dream--" in the same way I would have said it in waking life. I almost did not RC, because I didn't care whether I was physically awake or asleep, but ended up doing so anyway. I will continue to post updates on the practice. Thank you for giving me a space to do this.

I only recently noticed this thread, but it seems I had quite a bit to say anyway -- pretty cool, actually, and quite the timesaver!

I hope you don't mind, 3Cat, if I throw in a couple more perhaps redundant comments, just to extend the interruption...

Originally Posted by FryingMan

I'm constantly amazed at the dream experience, and how "waking" it feels. I had a dream the other night where I was absolutely, positively convinced I was awake.

edit: so isn't it a better condition for fostering lucidity to *know* you're always dreaming, instead? (Sageous: I know you disagree)

You're right; I do disagree. Unless you have chosen a religious belief whose tenets describe the universe as nothing but a god's dream (see Sivason for a better description of this, and the feeling), you really will be lying to yourself if you attempt to "know" that you are in a dream while every cell in your brain knows damn well it is waking-life.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

However in my non-lucids the last several months I really really really think I'm awake, so moving/returning more towards thinking the nature of reality is dream would be more helpful for me at this point.

I personally think that sense of really, really thinking you are awake stems more from your disconnect with memory than it does from perception, or the quality of the dream. Your unconscious is very good at creating the impression of reality in a dream, especially because you cannot question that reality when not lucid, so anything presented seems just as real as real can be and, more importantly, is recalled that way upon waking -- no matter how unreal it was at the time.

For example: you could maybe have a NLD about, say, playing ping-pong on the moon with Jesus. Even if the actual imagery is vague and all wrong, you are led to believe -- through lack of memory for reference -- that everything is perfectly real and sensible... not just the scene itself, but all your senses will feel like they are firing just fine, because your dreaming mind told your dream-body self they were, and you had no memory available to correct this. So, when you wake, all you will remember is how real everything felt, because that is what you remember.

Because of this, I don't think attempting to "know" that waking-life is a dream will transfer any new perceptions into your dreaming. Instead, you will likely eventually just wander your dreams imagining that everything around you is a dream.

That said, I really do not have a problem with 3Cat's plan, because he seems to be working from an eastern, sleep yoga perspective, and the sleep yogis really aren't telling themselves that reality is a dream (hopefully that won't draw a surly retort from Sivason). Also, Ctharlhie's note here clearly (as usual -- wish I could do that) states everything we've been saying with pinpoint concision:

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

So the aim is not really to 'convince yourself you're dreaming when you really know you're not' (a strawman, I know) but to realize that, on a phenomenological (that is, as they appear to us) level, the waking world and dreams are of the same nature.

That realization -- that our ultimate perception is the same in both worlds -- is the basis of this practice, I think.

Again, sorry for the redundancies from my earlier points, if there were any, and good luck with your project 3CAt; I hope to read more about your progress.

Well, here's the relevant text from the book (The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep). I think there is perhaps more than one way to interpret it, but the main point does seem to be the second one (that all is in fact, dream). The question that is more relevant in my mind, though, is if the "secular" interpretation ("recognizing the dream-like nature of life") result in the clarity of awareness able to recognize the dream state resulting in lucidity while dreaming?

A version of the first foundational practice is rather well known in the West, because dream researchers and others interested in dream have found that it helps to generate lucid dreaming. It is as follows: throughout the day, practice the recognition of the dream-like nature of life until the same recognition begins to manifest in dream.

Upon waking in the morning, think to yourself, "I am awake in a dream." When you enter the kitchen, recognize it as a dream kitchen. Pour dream milk into dream coffee. "It's all a dream," you think to yourself, "this is a dream." Remind yourself of this constantly throughout the day.

The emphasis should actually be on you, the dreamer, more than on the objects of your experience. Keep reminding yourself that you are dreaming up your experiences: the anger you feel, the happiness, the fatigue, the anxiety – it is all part of the dream. The oak tree you appreciate, the car you drive, the person to whom you are talking, are all part of the dream. In this way a new tendency is created in the mind, that of looking at experience as insubstantial, transient, and intimately related to the mind's projections. As phenomena are seen to be fleeting and without essence, grasping decreases. Every sensory encounter and mental event becomes a reminder of the dream-like nature of experience. Eventually this understanding will arise in dream and lead to the recognition of the dream state and the development of lucidity.

There are two ways to understand the declaration that everything is a dream. The first is to look upon it as a method to change the karmic traces. Doing this practice, like all practices, changes the way one engages the world. By changing habitual and largely unconscious reactions to phenomena, the qualities of life and dream change. When we think of an experience as "only a
dream" it is less "real" to us. It loses power over us – power that it only had because we gave it power – and can no longer disturb us and drive us into negative emotional states. Instead, we begin to encounter all experience with greater calm and increased clarity, and even with greater appreciation. In this sense, the practice works psychologically by altering the meaning that we project onto what is beyond conceptual meaning. As we view experience differently, we change our reaction to it, which changes the karmic remnants of actions, and the root of dreaming changes.

The second way of understanding the practice is to realize that waking life is actually the same as dream, that the entirety of normal experience is made up of the mind's projections, that all meaning is imputed, and that whatever we experience is due to the influence of karma. Here we are talking about the subtle and pervasive work of karma, the endless cycle of cause and effect that creates the present from the traces of the past, which it does through the continual conditioning that results from every action. This is one way of articulating the realization that all phenomena are empty and that the apparent self-nature of beings and objects is illusory. There is not an actual "thing" anywhere in waking life – just as in a dream – but only transient, essenceless appearances, arising and self-liberating in the empty, luminous base of existence. Fully realizing the truth of the statement, "This is a dream," we are freed of the habits of erroneous conception and therefore freed from the diminished life of samsara in which fantasy is mistaken for reality. We are necessarily present when this realization comes, as it is then true that there is no place else to be. And there is no stronger method of bringing consistent lucidity to dream than by abiding continuously in lucid presence during the day.

As stated above, an important part of this practice is to experience yourself as a dream. Imagine yourself as an illusion, as a dream figure, with a body that lacks solidity. Imagine your personality and various identities as projections of mind. Maintain presence, the same lucidity you are trying to cultivate in dream, while sensing yourself as insubstantial and transient, made only of light. This creates a very different relationship with yourself that is comfortable, flexible, and expansive.

This is an absolutely fascinating thread. I would like to point out that it was quite plausible that cave men and cave women may have viewed life as a lucid dream. There's no proof either way. We know the Australian Aborigines view life on Earth as more of a dream than non-Aborigines. Therefore, seeing the world as a lucid dream of stupendous complexity and concreteness would be natural for them and they wouldn't have considered it odd or strange to say "I am awake in a dream" upon rising from slumber.

Thanks for posting Wangyal's explanation of the practice, FM. His is much more succinct than Wallace's--gets right to the point. Your question about the difference between "this is a dream" and "this is dream-like" is probably one for Sageous, but I will try. My feeling is that "dream-like" will lack a certain amount of realization that is necessary for recognizing the dream state. "This is dream-like" seems to imply "this is not a dream." Self-awareness is, of course, key: but if one was truly self-aware, they would not say "this is dream-like" in a night dream--they would just say, "this is a dream." So I do not think they would work the same way.

The second way of understanding the practice is to realize that waking life is actually the same as dream, that the entirety of normal experience is made up of the mind's projections, that all meaning is imputed…[snip karma stuff]

I will note that "same as dream" does not mean "I'm in the dream state". So this I think does leave open the door to a non-self-deluding interpretation.

^^ But do you want to leave that door open?

Now comes the part where I throw a wrench into my own arguments (even the ones I wasn't here to make), and make it look like I'm totally flip-flopping like just another damn mystic who hates realizing what's really being discussed after he righteously yammered on in the other direction (which I sort of did):

For this exercise to work, I think that you probably must hold to the "I'm in the dream state" attitude, and be willing to honestly self-delude yourself. Honest self-delusion might sound like an oxymoron, but so too does being awake while you're asleep, and none of us have a problem with that, right?

"Huh?" you ask? Well, if you have a minute:

If you are observing that "this is the same as a dream," but can easily acknowledge that it is not an actual dream, then you will likely not be making the necessary long-term adjustments to your mind that you are seeking, and that Wangyal points out above. Instead you might just be making an intellectual observation about the nature of your perception, which is (still) fine, but really will not make the "hardwire" adjustments to your mindset that you seek. In other words, come dreamtime, your dreaming mind will have no problem handling your intellectual observation, for instance by giving you a schema that includes a decidedly non-lucid discussion about the importance and quality of: "Dreaming is perception unlimited by sensory organs, and perception is dreaming constrained by sensory organs," perhaps even with LaBerge himself (as has happened to me, BTW). Intellectual observations are not too terribly conducive to inducing lucidity.

In order to truly work your mind into a place that is willing to see the waking world "only as a dream," and thus welcome lucidity during dreams because it is living that assumption at all times, you really should take the plunge and convert the real world to dream in a visceral ("I'm in the dream state") rather than intellectual ("this is the same as dream") manner.

Now, with all that said, keep in mind that this is not a change of heart on my part. Nor is it a separation from what I've been arguably repeating dogmatically here since day one, that you truly cannot imagine the waking world as a dream because you will always unconsciously know that the waking-life world is real, and that it will remain intact after you leave the room. Instead, it is simply a clarification that, in case you choose the illusory body path, you must follow the rules of that path or it will fade quickly; ideally you would need to approach your work as an almost religious confirmation -- an act of faith -- that starts with the knowledge that everything in your waking life is a dream, and works away from that by explaining to yourself why this is so, all with your mind in a very dreamlike attitude.

This process will regularly encounter unavoidable critical moments, like when you choose not to cross the street in front of an oncoming bus because you understand the real nature of that bus, or you choose to actually swim when you enter the deep end of a pool because you understand the nature of drowning -- and you understand that the nature of both those things rests well outside your perception of them. But even those critical moments can be tossed aboard your dream train, after you rationalize why you simply chose not to step in front of the bus... and the dream yogis will likely confirm that you can of course take that step without fear, which sort of makes my point for me (and might also point out why there isn't a population problem among dream yogis).

This is a very difficult task to do correctly or successfully, and may rely heavily on the faith innately held by the practitioner: for instance, when reading that Wangyal passage FryingMan posted above (now, and years ago), I have to smile a bit, because I can spot Wangyal's (perhaps accidental) assumption that this sort of imagining is not very difficult to do. That's because it isn't, if you are a Tibetan lama.

As full disclosure, I wandered this path for quite a few years, and believe that a part of me still does. However, I could never get the impact of that approaching bus fully out of my mind or abandon the humbling notion, in this context, that the real world keeps right on spinning, whether I'm on it or not. The notion of the real world being real is simply too well hardwired into my western mind; I would welcome the abandonment of that notion, BTW, if I ever manage to prove to myself the The Dreaming and Reality are interchangeable in more than just a perceptual manner (which I believe is the root of this exercise). [Also, if you haven't read it yet, I suggest you scare up a copy of Illusions by Richard Bach. Illusions is a simplistic, stereotypically '70's New Age review of mysticism in general and this exercise in particular, but it also offers a clear description of how a Western mind responds to eastern religious tenets or notions. ]

But then, you say there's this from Ctharlhie:

So the aim is not really to 'convince yourself you're dreaming when you really know you're not' (a strawman, I know) but to realize that, on a phenomenological (that is, as they appear to us) level, the waking world and dreams are of the same nature.

To which I responded with this:

That realization -- that our ultimate perception is the same in both worlds -- is the basis of this practice, I think.

I still agree with that, believe it or not... I think that the only usable aspect of this exercise is that realization of the nature of perception (and it too should be visceral, and not intellectual, BTW), and I also think that Wangyal may actually have been leaning in that direction as well, because he was, after all, writing a book for a group of people (namely us Westerners) who do not have the couple thousand years of mental, spiritual, and religious genetic memory necessary to fully grasp the notion of "All the world is a dream." I'm sure there are exceptions (Sivason comes to mind), and I am always working in that direction myself, but that bus still looms large.

And yes, I still disagree with this, FryingMan, as you correctly predicted I would:

...so isn't it a better condition for fostering lucidity to *know* you're always dreaming, instead?

Perhaps I disagree not because it isn't a better condition, but because this "knowing" is a condition which might resist acquisition ... but do I say that it shouldn't be attempted? No, I don't... go for it, but be aware that you will likely always mind those approaching buses.


tl;dr: Counter to pretty much everything I say about this stuff, FryingMan (& 3Cat), I think that you really must go with the "I'm in the dream state" attitude with this exercise, because just intellectually considering the phenomenological similarity between waking and dreaming perception will probably not get you where you want to go, namely practicing an illusory body exercise. Contradictions are my life.

That's OK. I only *ride* buses or vehicles in dreams, I never find myself walking in traffic.

Maybe this was said before but I think you're not "faking" the belief that you are dreaming, you actually believe that life as a whole is a dream (a long stable illusion), not an actual dream dream.
(Ignore if this was said already, I'm planning to read this thread in two days.)

With this technique, while awake, you're trying to make everything possible remind you of dreaming so that eventually you'll notice things that remind you of dreaming while you're dreaming. You're trying to make life itself your dream sign.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Understood... and sorry about that!

That's OK. I only *ride* buses or vehicles in dreams, I never find myself walking in traffic.

That was just an example, which I'm sure you understood, but it is amazing that you never have a need to cross a street in waking life!

Oh I do cross streets in waking life, all the time, but since I don't in dreams I can keep the two separate