An Advanced Starters Dream Yoga Journal

Hello Dreamviewers, I am going to start off this thread with some background and subsequent posts will be my journal and thoughts and implementations of the strategies that are stickied.

I have performed dream yoga twice before. I am doing this journal to help me learn how to do it every night. I have been lucid dreaming since about the age of 4 to today, at the age of 25. I remember my first lucid dream from back then, I dreamed I was Goku doing a Kamehameha at the world tournament. I lucid dream almost every night with out trying at this point in my life. I have been avidly meditating most of my life. 7 years ago I started learning about all forms of meditation I could and practicing and researching Buddhism. Mostly to help me understand the parts of my mind that had been exposed to in deep dreams, dreamless sleeps, and some other one off experiences through my life. Buddhism has a label for the mind in these moments, the very subtle mind.

I said earlier that I had achieved dream yoga twice. That was from my understanding of Buddhist literature I had read in the last few years; most of my attempts were around 5 years ago. Several years before that, in my young teens, I found my self in a life or death situation camping. I was freezing to death soaked to the bone in a flooded tent in a flooded valley in a massive storm. It was very cold that night. I told myself that my only chance of survival was to not fall asleep and focus on conserving my heat. I also had to hike several miles the next day out of the valley. That night I performed a type of dream yoga. I went several hours with out thoughts and only pure consciousness in a dreamless sleep. The next morning I wasn't tired, I remembered the entire night, and I was shocked by a deep experience of my very subtle mind that stuck with me to this day. My other successful attempts were quite nice. The first one I was in a pure white light seeing myself seated meditating the entire night. This is the longest I have ever gone with out a single thought popping into my head and I also maintained my sense of time all night. I went at least 4 hours with out any word, emotion, or other abstract thought. It was the best night of sleep of my life. The 2nd successful attempt wasn't as good. There was a lot more thinking through the night and I lost my sense of time towards the end. I do not meditate nearly as much as I did back then. At that point in my life I had maintained a 1 month all day awareness only interrupted by sleep. I had been practicing ADA very seriously for 3 months up to that point, for 4 months of strong practice. My ADA is introspective. I wasn't focusing on inputs but on the presence of mind. You can feel your very subtle mind at all times, it is always with you. Being aware of it is an unique sensation and maintaining it all day was my goal. ADA where I focused on inputs was something I had done a lot through my entire life. I would do this on long car rides as a kid for hours. In fact any time I was in a car I was doing this from about 4-12 years old. This particular meditation is called appamada.

As of writing this I have put in 2 days of practice from the materials I have read here. I have lost my sense of time both nights and eventually my memory too. I definitely achieved it the first night, I am not sure about the 2nd night. The first night I woke up about 3.5 hours later fully rested. I had a sense of time, memory, and most of the last 3 hours didn't have much thought going on. I got up and ate a small bowl of cereal had a bio break and went back to bed. I forgot to try to maintain awareness and fell asleep for nearly 6 hours. My 2nd night I lost awareness while I was vibing. I regained it at some point while I was asleep but my memory of it is poor.

When I first dedicated this week to this I understood a few important things. My main failure of dream yoga induction in the past was from poor WILD skills. I can easily be lucid in dreams just by feeling that I am in a dream it will trigger me to be lucid. I can WILD when I wake up and go back to sleep with almost 100% try rate. I can eject from dreams and do a WILD for a more powerful dream, but only when I am not trying. I have a hard time transitioning from full wake to sleep with out losing awareness though. I have also never experienced true sleep paralysis. I can recognize when my movements are suppressed but I can choose to move them with some small effort. In all of my dream yoga attempts I have had some form of rest leg syndrome effecting me. These things are probably related. This week I have found that I can encourage the strength of my sleep paralysis to achieve sleep faster. This is huge for me as it normally takes me 30 minutes to an hour to fall asleep, or more. I usually spend that time meditating. This has been an issue my entire life. I have experimented with many ways to get to sleep faster. Meditating is just what I do because nothing has worked and it seems to me as the best use of my time. The only thing I have learned, apart from this sleep paralysis method, that has helped is focusing on lowering blood pressure and heart rate through breathing exercises. To induce this week I have been focusing on my mantra, reducing my blood pressure and heart rate through breath, and increasing the sleep paralysis I experience. I have been to sleep in 20 minutes both nights now. My goal is to make this a 5 minute switch where I maintain awareness all night.

All of these are forms of appamada. Appamada is normally taught as identifying all inputs as they come in and dropping them. These tasks have you interact with the inputs to handle more at once. It is actually pretty good brain exercise.

A NOISY WORLD:
I have done this a good bit through my life. I can do 6 sounds at once. If I am dropping inputs as they come and quickly scanning through them I can recognize more than 6. At that point you really are taking them all in, in true hyper awareness fashion.

AN INTENSE WORLD:
I normally do this in tandem with the sounds. Any time I am in a car not driving I am doing this. Generally when I am waiting for things I do this. I generally focus on tactile sensations over sounds when ever appamada strikes me because they are more subtle but you can more easily hold a lot of them in your mind for longer periods of time.

MIXING IT UP:
I haven't tried anything quite like this before. I like it. I was incorporating sounds, touches, tastes all at once. It was intersting.

DIFFUSE VISION:
I love this one. I have been doing this since early childhood. I first started doing this in dark rooms. I would notice that I would feel like I am staring through something instead of at something, my vision would diffuse, and if I focused on the sensation I would lose it. I was trying to extend the time I could do it. Most of this time I made very little progress. Fast forward to my intensive meditating years and I started practicing open eye meditation. You can not achieve proper open eye meditation with out this diffuse vision. I very quickly found that to extend the length of time you do this you just have to allow it to happen. You recognize it, don't focus on the sensation. Drop it and let it happen. After a couple of hours of doing it as a meditation with this advice in mind it became a switch I could just turn off and on. My mistakes previously were on focusing on the sensation would make me lose it. Becoming very skilled at this technique can make you see things that aren't there. This is normal. It has been documented by meditators for over a thousand years. The most common thing is just moving shadows at the corner of your vision. Going long enough will lead to full on phosophenes of intricate patterns.

To take this to the next level achieve diffuse vision and then focus on seeing parts of your vision. Focus on the right side of your vision or the left, or a particular object. Switch objects around. Eventually you can do this with out losing diffuse vision. When you are doing diffuse vision you are becoming intimate with the subtle mind (probably not the very subtle mind) which is important to maintaining awareness during sleep.

WANDERING MIND RECALL:
I did this a lot when I was first achieving all day awareness of the very subtle mind. As a way to extend my all day awareness all day. This is a good practice but you shouldn't stop here. You should go on to an all day awareness of your mind. Don't let it stress you out. If long periods of awareness are stressful you are focusing too much on the ongoings of the mind and not the very subtle mind. When you are dwelling in the very subtle mind instead of the forefront of your mind it is very peaceful. If you can not suppress the ongoings of the mind you should be more focused on that instead of an all day awareness, as you can't achieve a non stressful all day awareness with out being able to suppress thoughts. Doing both at the same time makes you MUCH better at both.

BE HERE NOW:
This is similar to all day awareness of just the surface mind. It is better to do it with out wordful thoughts. Basically everything I said about the previous technique I feel applies here. A really good twist on this is just to focus on accurately measuring the passage of time. When you feel like 5 minute has passed it better had been exactly 5 minutes. When I go to bed and I lay there 4 hours with out falling asleep I will wait until I am confident it has been exactly 4 hours and look at a clock. I am usually +/- 3 minutes. This is something I have been doing for decades, it didn't take that long to get good at. In the last few years I have started to be able to know what time it is when I wake up within a few minutes.

Make a habit of looking at clocks. When you do wandering mind recall ask yourself how long has it felt like it has been since I last looked at a clock, how far off am I based on the last time I remember looking at a clock. Then look at a clock.

MANTRA AWARENESS:
This is super important. Mantras are powerful. Using mantra I can quickly achieve many different types of trance states. My mantra pops in my head through out the day to keep me mindful and moral. I picked my mantra many years ago from transcendental meditation. I would be one of those fools who didn't pick their own. Let me tell you about how to pick a mantra. It should be personal to you. If you hear hypnogagnic images when falling asleep it should be one of the words you hear often in those moments. It should be something that is one or two syllables. It should be something that if you say it a few times it feels like it has lost meaning. Also called semantic satiation. This is how you pick an effective mantra. My mantra already has a strong effect on my mind and reminds me to be aware so I have not changed my mantra. I am now being very serious about doing my mantra meditations when I am falling asleep with the goal of WILD. Both nights it has made me regain awareness when I had lost it during the vibes. Solidifying this into my sleeping mind is probably going to be the biggest factor in reliably achieving sleep yoga.

MUDRA AWARENESS:
While I am quite good at energy manipulation trances and meditations, I do not put much stock in them. The closest thing I do to mudra is focusing on smiling. Maybe in the future this is something I will do.

VISION:
This is something I have done for years. Normally when falling asleep. In the last few years when I focus on this I get very complicated geometric patterns and fractals like the mandelbrot set. It only takes about 5 minutes of focus for this to happen now. It makes me uncomfortable so I do it infrequently now. This phenomenon is called phosophenes. Most of my phosophenes are blue, but they can be any color. I am also color blind, I have seen phosophenes of color I have not seen with my own eyes.

TOUCH:
This is a good one. Mastering this will allow you to easily enter into the first Jhana. Advanced practice and introduction to the first Jhana: imagine an intensely pleasant sensation on the top of your head. Feel it as an energy. Try to grow it from the top of your head all the way down your body like a body scan. It will ebb and flow like diffuse vision. You have to encourage its existence, allow it to exist, and not focus on it at the same time. Like the diffuse vision. But instead of it happening by itself you also have to create it at the same time. For me when I get to my shoulders it gets much easier. If you can reach your toes you are crossing into the first Jhana. Crossing through the Jhanas requires a strong sense of the subtle mind. You may not make it further than this step if you can't do the other things in these posts. That's okay, the pure bliss of the first Jhana is its own reward.

This is a weird one. I have done it a few times over the years. It is a very transient phenomenon where you doubt you felt anything at all. How often do you dream where you experience movement? Or experience falling as you fall asleep? Those feel much more real than the created ones for some reason, at least for me.

These are good for training your mind. There are a lot of these you can do. I usually do one where I form energy into a ball with my hands until I can feel it as pressure pushing against my hands and then I grow the ball. I don't put much stock into energy based meditations because I have a poor understanding of what is going on when it happens. I assume it is an element of the mind and not a spiritual phenomenon. It is good mental practice.

This is the most important skill. It is the skill all your other practice should build to. More so than the dream yoga itself. It is in this moment of non thought that you directly experience the subtle mind by itself. You are the subtle mind. Being able to go through activities in your life seated in this presence of self is incredibly important spiritually and as a dreamer. The only tip I have is to practice this while doing mantra meditation. Let the mantra be the only thing in your head and increase the length of time between each repetition of the mantra. Eventually do this with out the mantra at all. I can do 5 minutes on a good day, 30 seconds on a bad day. If I do it for a long time, like an hour I can reach longer than 5 minutes. When I dream I can also do longer than 5 minutes. If you can do 30 seconds you are doing very well.

I have been putting off writing this update because dream yoga has shifted my perspective thoroughly. I want to start by recanting some statements from my previous posts. First suppression of thought may not be more important than dream yoga. While it is a useful skill for waking life, dream yoga has taught me a great deal about the observer with in us. More than a quiet mind has in the last few years I have practiced it. I also said that accurate measurement of time is important. It is not. My first few nights of dream yoga I lost all perception of time, but maintained awareness. When I would finally fall asleep while practicing dream yoga I would feel like waking up came instantly, but not that I ever lost awareness of myself. After coming to terms with this reality I started to play with my sensation of the passage of time, and it is a wonderful thing. My drive to and from work feels short, in the best way. Long drawn out talks both feel full of time but not long enough, in amazing ways. When I sit idle in meditation it doesn't have to feel like I was there as long now, and the same when I am idle with out meditating.

Memory, awareness, and intellect are 3 different aspects of your humanity. We use them together frequently; our collective word of consciousness often is used to describe all 3 at once. Breaking them down into separate parts allows us to better see the true nature of being as the intrinsic observer. Being rooted in the observer is the primary factor of all lucid dreaming and dream yoga.

I am still taking a long time to fall asleep and I have been having a harder time keeping concentrated on doing dream yoga. I have gotten pretty good at inducing sleep paralysis, but I can still break it on a whim and then I have to kinda start over. Lowering my heart rate and blood pressure is actually harder than this aspect. Often times my body is mostly ready for sleep but my heart is too active to induce the transition to sleep. Inducing the transition isn't hard, but getting to the point that I am actually asleep is. I think it is mostly because my pulmonary system isn't relaxed enough. I most likely should stop nicotine and caffeine all together to help this. The 2nd half of the last week I have not been reaching the deep sleep I was reaching the first half, I think mostly for this reason.

Repeating my mantra has been huge to keeping awareness during the transition. It is necessary for me at this point. I think once I get faster at relaxing my entire pulmonary system I will be closer to making dream yoga a switch.

Dream yoga is far more substantial to my spiritual growth than lucid dreaming was. I was getting to the point with lucid dreaming that it was boring. I would just go entirely with the flow and pay little attention as I did. It is very peaceful which I liked. When I wake up from the deep timeless dream yoga sleep I feel so much more awake. I get out of bed almost instantly. I feel more awake all day. My all day awareness is MUCH stronger.

If you are reading this and having a hard time making the transition from wake to sleep while maintaining awareness try some guided meditations. I did this breathing practice at the end of this video the other night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g-SlFKBmOM and I was able to very quickly induce sleep when I went to bed. The increased blood flow to my brain that this breathing practice brought didn't seem to effect relaxing my pulmonary system either, but I need to try it a few more times to be sure.

Edit: The time it takes for me to induce sleep has been greatly diminished. I am now at about a 30 minute on average time. My longest time to fall asleep has been an hour and a half. I think for most people that is long, but it is very good for me. I had one night where I felt like I didn't sleep at all. It was a very light sleep and I had substantially more alertness then when I normally get 0 sleep. That was a fairly special day. I had an intense realization where I identified strongly with the internal observer and then, out of induction of the qualities of the internal observer, everything around me. I could feel the life with in me, was truly the life outside of me as well. That powerful unity kept me from reaching full sleep that night. It lead to about a 30 hour period of constant unbroken awareness of my true nature. That was on the night of the 23rd. It has faded a considerable amount but it is still there. I am still working on understanding this. Hopefully on my next update I will be able to speak on it more fully.

Last night I was able to very quickly induce sleep while maintaining awareness. I made myself breath "like I was asleep" until it became involuntary. This is hard to describe. Watch someone sleep, record yourself sleeping, or something and look at the respiratory rate and deep breathing of someone who is asleep. Then I just watched it and repeated my mantra. I didn't get distracted by HH or the vibes or anything else so they passed a lot faster into actual sleep.

I have a new method that is working very well for me. Before bed I start to practice Isha Kriya. After about 10 minutes I lay down and focus on breathing like I am asleep (like my previous post) while still doing Isha Kriya. Very quickly I start to feel sleep coming on and I let it happen while I focus on the mantra. Once I reach hypnagogic imagery I let go of the mantra and focus on being aware. At the very least I fall asleep quickly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxgD9En6Vso

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Appamada

This is a weird one. I have done it a few times over the years. It is a very transient phenomenon where you doubt you felt anything at all. How often do you dream where you experience movement? Or experience falling as you fall asleep? Those feel much more real than the created ones for some reason, at least for me.

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They can become very vivid. If in quiet mind you can feel wind lifting you up, then in a dream you can enhance you flying dream with creating this sensation. Many other examples are possible.

You will always be able to break sleep paralysis because you have maintained consciousness. It should feel a bit like narcotic where moving take specific effort. Best to leave it alone and not test it. Even if it has been achieved you end up breaking it n attempting to check it.

So Kriya and Kundalini? We seem to be very like minded. I am sure you recognize that these are also designed to lead to either of those?