Thread: Intent in Lucid Dreaming; Break that Dry-Spell, Escape the Technique Rut

I get what you're saying. The quote from the Dream Yoga book seems pretty clear, though (dream kitchen, dream milk, dream coffee). What, Sageous (or Ctharlie, or anyone), do you think the dream yogis would say in response to your warnings of false lucids from this practice, and from it being counter to the goal of achieving lucidity?

Here it is again for convenience:

Throughout the day, practice the recognition of the dream-like nature of life until the same recognition begins to manifest in your dreams. Upon waking in the morning, think to yourself "I am awake in a dream." When you enter the kitchen, recognise 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.

And let me say that I have had maybe 1 or 2 false lucids, maybe. It is not a problem I have. My problem is t hat my "powerful unconscious" is just not cooperating and is keeping me non-lucid for very long periods of time. I just need that nudge, that hint, and boom, I'm lucid. So small a thing, yet so elusive, for so long. That's why I keep my mind on dreaming all through the day.

Maybe that's why I stopped before, I just couldn't maintain the enthusiastic illusion for long. ("The hell it is!").

But yeah, I definitely needed to shake things up.

Oh and I saw a dream crab last night (well, I saw a crab in a dream and said "oh look there's a crab", I did *not* think "there's a dream crab") after seeing a giant crab shaped cloud IWL previous in the evening and thinking "dream crab!"

Originally Posted by FryingMan

I get what you're saying. The quote from the Dream Yoga book seems pretty clear, though (dream kitchen, dream milk, dream coffee). What, Sageous (or Ctharlie, or anyone), do you think the dream yogis would say in response to your warnings of false lucids from this practice, and from it being counter to the goal of achieving lucidity?

I think the dream yogis would shake their heads and say, "Well, everything is a dream, isn't it?" The dream yoga perspective is drawn from a religious metaphysics that assumes that the world we encounter in waking life is not the real world, but a construct just like that of a dream, so it follows for them to assume that dreaming life is exactly like waking life, metaphysically speaking, and that you should approach both with the same non-dualistic perspective.

Also, I think lucid dreaming is very much a side-effect of dream yoga practice, and not its goal. That goal is essentially preparation of the mind for sleep yoga, which involves maintenance of consciousness in any physical state including death, as well as understanding the world through which that consciousness moves, eternally and non-dually. Or at least that's a brief summary of what I think the dream yoga perspective is, and I likely made a hash of it. If you're really curious, ask Sivason....he might even be able to tell you what I mean!

Though I admire the non-dualistic dream yoga approach to establishing your Self in dreams (where "reality" is non-dualistic), I am not a complete fan of the religious side of their practice... our physical world is one of energy and matter, and it moves along just fine without us, whether we like it or not. So I will find myself (often reluctantly) attaching mundane, probably unavoidable problems to some dream yoga practices, like pointing out that a mentally healthy person cannot truly convince herself that she is in a dream while awake; I think even the dream yogis probably spend much time doing this convincing.