Quote Originally Posted by ZenMan12 View Post
"Free from attachment, I seek nothing. No state needs to be maintained as all things are impermanent. Everything is allowed to come and go. I'm no master, for my art requires nothing to master. I simply am."
I've been on the internet for a long time, joining a lot of forums and communities in my time. One thing that's always irked me is when people quote someone and don't mention who they're quoting. All too often the poster is quoting themselves, even going so far as to make up something on the spot, think it sounds cool, and put it in quotes. I'm not saying that you did this, but a Google search turns up nothing close to your quote. Please attribute your quotes so we can understand them in context.

Is it a dream within a dream? Who are the dreamers? And who truly are Awake?
First, no, it isn't a dream within a dream. Dreaming is a normal part of the working of the brain. In other words, dreaming is a physical process. We do not wake from dreaming into the real world, we always exist in it. If there is an afterlife or hyperlife or what have you, that doesn't make reality a dream. In other words, you can't take the language of dreams, apply it to the real world, and then conclude that there's a new life you can 'wake up' to. If that was valid, then I could simply state, "Fool! The new life you have woken up to is nothing but a meta-life, you need to wake up to super-life-3!"

Second, the people who are asleep and dreaming are the dreamers. Why even ask the question, except to reinforce your idea that reality is a dream and all the awake people are actually dreaming. If you want to continue with this metaphor, then at least point out a way in which we can gain insight from the mental exercise, instead of going off on "the world is a pickle, and we are all the jar!" and pushing the job of making sense off onto your readers.

Third, the people who are not sleeping are the ones who are truly awake. If you're going to have insight, please state what it is. Who do YOU believe are truly awake, and why? Note that your follow up does not answer this question, though you seem to feel it does:

Poor enslaved "lucid dreamers." Having that burden truly sucks. Most will be afraid to leave what they had behind. Only a few will do this. Which allows them to go beyond anything they can imagine.

To give it a category would be to confine it. To give it name would be to mislabel it. There is a way to be awake through every moment in your life including dreams. But even this statement will make the foolhardy turn it into a goal and a form of control. Through direct experience it is realized.
A zen master is you!

Dreaming is simply a mental process, and the things we imagine happening in our dreams are determined by what we believe can happen in them. By becoming lucid, and practicing mental discipline, we realize that we are dreaming and that the dream objects are not burdened with the laws of physics. How is it that realizing the nature of you mind is a "burden", and how it is that having your imagination burned by imaginary physics is some sort of freedom?

Oh yeah, thinking is somehow control, and control is always bad:

So many work for control of their dreams believing that they momentary freed themselves only to find themselves controlled [by] many things--including the desire to control. Ego, desire, lust, which happened in previous dreams, now take the form of conscious effort. Which isn't different then say, how people live the lives "awake" in the daytime. Mind in always in the past or future, never here--now.
You equate lucid dreaming with control, which isn't completely true. Or, perhaps you equate this website's view of lucid dreaming with control, which its own introduction states is untrue. Further, you equate any form of conscious effort with control, and your post just oozes with the notion that control is BAD (while strangely pointing out how dreamers are controlled by desires... so you want us to not be controlled, but also not take control?). By definition, I control my body. Can you provide a viable alternative? Note how I use the word "viable" there: I mean it. Can you propose a way to not control your body which still allows you to live?

Your mind is an intrinsic part of you, and it doesn't make sense to allow direction of one's waking thoughts and then turn around and say that it is "foolish" to direct those same thoughts while you sleep. You bring up "ego, desire, lust" as moral wrongs; this strategy works on a certain level, because there's a lot of people who will object to the notion of 'lucid dream sex'. Let's say I agree with that for a moment. Does that mean that all control of thoughts is therefor bad? It does not follow.

But I put this here to give so called "Lucid Dreamers" something to think about.
Then actually give us something to think about. All you've said so far can be summarized thus:

1. Zen masters believe in doing absolutely nothing.
2. There might be another reality, of which this is just a dream.
3. And you've actually found it!
4. Lucid dreamers are foolish because they actively think while they are sleeping.

Tell me how what think.
I think that you have an interest in lucid dreaming, maybe some experience in the matter, and you think you're pretty good at it, so you found this site to talk with others about it. Okay, same here! But you want everyone here to know that you are a dream master, and you've decided that the way to do that is to show them how wrong they are using Zen-like quotes and language which may or may not actually reflect Zen teachings. Grow up, or GTFO my internet.