Dreams and sleep meditation
Amthorn
Explorer
All of my life, I have been a very vivid dreamer. I have long, elaborate, sometimes epic dreams. I also have in past been subject to terrifying, horrific nightmares. I have long sought some meaning or purpose in them, either metaphysical or psychological, but mostly come up empty.
Which is exactly what they are.
This morning, in meditation, it came to me; dreams are nothing more and nothing less than ideas and feeling that arise and dissipate during sleep awareness, just as thoughts do during wakefulness. Deprived of the 5 physical senses due to unconsciousness, the mind becomes absorbed into these thoughts and feelings, attempting to construct them into logical patterns in order to process them. The less mindful we are in our lives, the more disturbing and intense these dreams might becomes.
Once upon a time, when I was much younger, I went through a period of regular yoga and meditation. I found myself with the ability to dream lucidly, to control the direction of my dreams and "fly" through my thoughts as if I were an explorer in a magical kingdom. As I grew older and fell out of practice, I lost the ability, and dreams became my enemy.
I now feel that dreams can become an amazing meditative tool. In a dream state, we are numbed to external stimuli to a large degree. This means that we can become especially mindful of our own minds, and learn to label our dreams as nothing more than conditional arising; not some magical phenomena that have some sort of mystical power of their own, but particularly strong images to which we can easily become immersed and attached.
If I can learn to reach a mindful state while dreaming, and learn to dream without judgement, then perhaps I can increase my mindfulness during waking life!
Comments
I am a lucid dreamer, so I have control over the outcome and progression of most of my dreams. I'm not sure it's made me more able to be mindful in regular life, though. I've had lucid dreams most of my life, and mindfulness has only crept in as I've become aware of how to practice and create it. It's to the point I can decide what I prefer to dream about, and achieve that most nights. I don't generally specifically say "I want to dream about a vacation on the beach" but I often look to dream about more vague topics "I'd like to dream about something I'd like to work towards." My dreams and how vivid they are often depends on my meditation and yoga practice during the day. the more focused I am on those things, the more focused and vivid my dream life is. I have a book called "the Tibetan Yoga of Dreams and Sleep" (I think that is the title) that is quite an interesting read.
It's interesting to learn how to control the conscience that way, but like I said, it doesn't necessarily translate to more control during the day. It's easy to lose oneself in mindfulness and outcome when you are soft and warm and sleeping. It's another thing to maintain that mindfulness when someone is actually yelling at you, or you have more bills to pay than you have money in the bank, or when one of your kids is having a serious medical problem, and so on. It's kind of like a game show. When you are watching from home, the answers are simple and obvious, and we yell at the contestants (dream world) when in reality, being in the situation makes it much more difficult to manage all the variables and deal with what is there (real life). If I run into a problem in a dream, I can just imagine the way out, whether it's logical or not. That doesn't really work in real life. I can't flap my arms and fly away from scary situations like I can in dream land.
So who or what is there during dreams? It's not the gross mind or the body, so I can't be either right.
Yet there's still an inherent attachment to body mind.
I just watched a NOVA documentary about dreams and dreaming, and the docu gave a compelling evolutionary 'reason' for dreams that caught my imagination, and seems reasonable.
We dream in both REM and nonREM sleep. The dreams in nonREM sleep are often 'rehearsals' and problem solving type dreams. Their locus in the brain on fMRI are in the parietal and occipital lobes, and they are generally pleasant or neutral. Subjects in the dream lab were woken up during and after nonREM dreams and in a written test chose 'positive' words over negative ones before the poor things could go back to sleep.
In REM sleep, your motor cortex is basically paralyzed (except for some unfortunates who sleep walk etc), but your amygdala is very activated. This is part of the limbic brain, or mammalian brain, dealing with what remains of our instincts and in general, the amygdala fires up for 'fight, flight or freeze' type reactions. People woken up after REM sleep were disoriented and irritable, or had anxiety 'for no reason'. They chose 'negative' words over positive ones in the written test.
Nightmares, especially in children, are believed to be evolution's remnants of preparing the organism for real life dangers, kind of like practicing running from hyenas lol. This really struck me. When my kids were very small, they had fairly idyllic lives, calm and stable, but they had the craziest dreams they couldn't have gotten from watching bad television, we didn't have cable TV and they were too little for video games. So apparently little humans who got to 'practice' running from predators during their sleep lived long enough to reproduce compared to their counterparts who did not have nightmares. Fascinating stuff.
I think dreams are provisionally meaningful, just like every day life. They are empty like everything else is empty, no more or less.
Dream yoga or lucid meditation whilst z z z might be of interest . . .
http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/dream-yoga.html
There's a really wonderful book called Conscious Dreaming, and it's filled with wonderful techniques about how one can better recall and keep vividfresh memories of the slumber time.
Of course, the guy who wrote the book has many inclinations about how you can interpret your dreams but he really leaves it up to the reader to decide that stuff. He mostly shares his own experiences in having very vivid native-american-life dreams and then actually going to find living native americans to help him figure out what they could mean.
Some of the techniques he talks about in the book are very helpful. Have you ever been in a room or a position with a thought and then moved away and the thought was gone? Have you ever had that happen and then returned to the first position or place and the thought came back?
Same is true of dreaming and posture! If you are freshly awoken and you get back into the posture you were in, a lot of the dream can come back to you. That was a fascinating discovery for me and lends more to the idea of an actual semi-structured prana flowing around and through. At least for me it does, you can draw your own conclusions (;
Another thing from the book I remember is that he encourages people to keep a dream journal. Now, with phones and stuff, it's just as easy to frantically type out what your dream was as you remember it in great detail. Reminding yourself to "dream lucidly" or setting a deep intention before you fall asleep is also a pivotal point and can help a lot.
Thanks a lot for your post, @Amthorn, it sounds like a very good realization to have. May you always rest in pristine awareness when you lay down to "sleep" (=
Definitely try and keep awareness without clinging as you drift off. It is easy to try and when you can just observe what happens you can learn a great deal about your mind