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dreams
does anyone else dream about buddhism related stuff? That's uuuusually what I dream about. My dreams often teach me. I wake up in the morning with a new understanding I got from a dream the previous night fairly often. I have read, though I can't find the source now, that the buddha promised that when you...(whatever I don't remember what he said and so I don't want to make something up nor do I want to claim to have done anything, i'm just curious about the dreams)your dreams will have to do with the buddha and you won't have bad dreams etc. I wish I could find where that was. Anyways, anyone know anything about it?
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lose ignorance, purify the mind, and there is quiet
I have seen the buddha say that bad dreams will go away at a certain point in the path, I haven't seen him say that all dreams would go away. Maybe, though.
Enlightened people have no dreams, apparently.
All people dream, if they have a normal sleep cycle of rem and deep sleep. And without that normal cycle, our health quickly deteriorates. That's why messing with a person's sleep cycles is classified as torture by anyone who knows that that really means.
Research shows that whether or not we remember a dream depends on when we waken in the cycle, and what we dream about is highly individualized. So if an enlightened person has normal rem type sleep, they're dreaming. What those dreams are about, or do their minds bother to remember the dreams, who knows?
Now I live a "normal" lifestyle, play video games, eat meat, watch violent films and only practice meditation for maybe 30 min- 1 hour a day and read for approximately 1 hour a day. My dreams are filled with non sense, violence, etc.
Occasionally I still have a dream of clarity if that day I had read allot and practiced meditation allot but it is much more rare.
This is from a wonderful article discussing different veiws on dreams from different spiritual practices. (Link below)
Here is a book on dream yoga. I have read the book and practiced it with mixed results. The MOST important thing you can do to remember dreams is to keep a pen and paper next to your bed and write down everything you remember every morning. Every night before you go to bed read your dream journal. Using this method alone I was able to recall 4-6 dreams every morning after a month of trying.
http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Yoga-Practice-Natural-Light/dp/1559390077
Shamanic Buddhism
Apparently, when it comes to dream work, East and West have very different notions of how to proceed and to what end-and I was beginning to wonder if ever the twain would meet. Tenzin Wangyal, still in his 30s, is considerably younger than Namkhai Norbu and, at least on some levels, more plugged in to Western culture. He not only teaches in the U.S. and Latin America but also runs a dharma center, called Ligmincha, in Charlottesville, Virginia, complete with its own World Wide Web site. Although he makes only a passing reference to dream yoga in his book, Wonders of the Natural Mind: The Essence of Dzogchen in the Native Bön Tradition of Tibet (Station Hill), Wangyal is currently assembling a book of his teachings on sleep and dream yogas that may include detailed instruction in the complex Tibetan techniques.
According to Wangyal, dream yoga begins with what are called the "four formal preparations," which can be practiced by anyone with the will and determination to do so:
1. Go through the day understanding all your experiences as being of the substance of dreams.
2. Apply rule number one to specific people, objects, or states to which you feel desire and attachment. By recognizing them as a dream, you can weaken your attachment to them. "We say everything is a dream," Wangyal adds. "Anything you're attached to, anything that holds your mind, we emphasize that those things are dreams. When you have a cup of coffee, it's dream coffee. Drive the dream car, meet with the dream boss, have a dreamlike problem. If you see everything like a dream, things happen to you like a dream, and what results will be like a dream too, and it won't have such a strong effect. It's a form of detachment. "
3. As you're lying in bed before going to sleep, review your day as if you were reviewing a dream. Observe how each action, person, object, or state of being-and your attachment to them-is like a dream. Then create an intention to stay aware during your dreams.
4. Immediately upon waking, review the night to see if you remember any dreams and whether you were lucid within a dream. If you were, try to generate a sense of joy and accomplishment about the practice. If you weren't successful, then generate an even stronger intention to be more consistent in the practice during the next night.
In addition, Wangyal suggests using certain breathing practices before going to sleep to calm and purify yourself, followed by guru yoga, a common practice in Tibetan Buddhism which involves merging your mind with the mind of the teacher. For more advanced students, he divides the night into four practice periods: one right before going to sleep, the other three following at roughly two-hour intervals. Each of the four segments involves one of four particular body positions, ways of breathing, and visualizations located in particular chakras.
Wangyal was trained by both Buddhist and Bön masters, and his approach incorporates the monastic discipline of the former with the latter's shamanic spirit. Born in Amritsar, India, after his parents had fled the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, Wangyal first began to experience the fruits of dream yoga at age 15, while studying at a monastery. But only in the past 10 years, he says, has it had a deep effect on his spiritual practice. Because he works both with individual dharma students and, in weekend and week-long workshops, with a wide range of European and American students, including a high percentage of psychotherapists and healers, Wangyal is well situated to observe the different ways in which Tibetans and Westerners approach dream work. "The goal of dream yoga is to achieve enlightenment," he says by phone from his center in Charlottesville. "That's very clear. And I don't think the goal of psychoanalysis is to achieve enlightenment. It's more like [trying to achieve] a healthy samsara."
That's a running theme with Wangyal, who says that the main problem of Western dream work is that it tends to reinforce our distorted view of reality. In fact, in the Tibetan scheme of things, learning to be lucid or aware within one's dreams is merely "a beginning stage, very basic." Part of the difficulty, he says, is that LaBerge and Garfield "talk about all the adventures you can have. You can have sex in a dream. You can improve your health in a dream. If you have a mathematics problem, you can work on that in a dream. They go into all the worldly aspects of dreaming. They don't look into the spiritual dynamic of dream yoga. When we are awake, we do so many things to mess up ourselves; they're learning to do the same thing in dreams."
Both Wangyal and Norbu distinguish between different kinds of dreams. The most common variety are those that derive from "karmic traces," the residue of mental tensions and entanglements that arise in the course of the day. These dreams spring from events, according to Norbu, that "touched the person deeply and left traces of the tension, fear, or other strong emotion." The more significant variety are "dreams of clarity," which arise as a result of clearing away the distraction of karmic traces through the persistent practice of dream yoga, and breaking through to a level of direct spiritual insight or teaching. To Wangyal, dream yoga is all about learning to achieve those dreams of clarity. "When the dreamer is freer of karmic traces and the dream comes from a deeper part [of consciousness]," he says, "there's a chance to have dreams that are purer, and one of the ways these dreams manifest is in teaching." One of the goals of Tibetan dream yoga, then, is the same as that which Sufis like Vaughan-Lee seek to achieve in a much less elaborate fashion: the reception of dream teachings.
http://www.natural-connection.com/resource/yoga_journal/dream_yoga.html
I recall alluding from a famous book, not persuasion.
I used to develop my ability to lucid dream and you know what happened? Terrible scenarios of hypnagogia, hypnopomp and false awakening that sometimes felt like they'd lasted for hours. You're lying on your bed, unable to move, struggling to moan something for someone to hear while something from the dream world is causing you distress yet you appear to also be in the waking world like some odd astral moment. You may have been traveling through labyrinths of 50 dreams or so just to get to that moment, when you finally wake up, you cannot convince yourself of being awake easy. It's severely distressing, it doesn't happen too often fortunately but more importantly, I never have nightmares of any kind while sleeping until I lucid dream.
Although once when I was lucid dreaming nearly a year ago it occurred to me that I could utilise the moment to seek enlightenment, I mean, what better place to meditate on the non-dualism of reality than in a very dream itself? I began levitating and rotating and my body unsprawled itself and my vision filled with white light and I swear it was as if I was having some epiphany in the dream, some nonverbal understanding, I believed I was finding enlightenment. Then I woke up.
Sleep paralysis is paralysis associated with sleep that may occur in normal subjects or be associated with narcolepsy, cataplexy, and hypnagogic hallucinations. The pathophysiology of this condition is closely related to the normal hypotonia that occur during REM sleep.<sup id="cite_ref-0" class="reference">[1]</sup> When considered to be a disease, isolated sleep paralysis is classified as MeSH D020188.<sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference">[2]</sup> Some evidence suggests that it can also, in some cases, be a symptom of migraine.<sup id="cite_ref-2" class="reference">[3]</sup><sup id="cite_ref-3" class="reference">[4]</sup>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis
EDIT
As a follow up, lucid dreaming exercises may lead to many disturbing experiences. This does not mean that it should not be practiced by serious contemplatives it just means that if you are a serious contemplative practicing dream yoga or lucid dreaming exercises you should have a teacher that can give you support and advice.
I had a similar experience when I began lucid dreaming often. There are two methods I developed. One is when having a ngihtmare confront it with loving kindness. This has worked for me in several occasions. There second is if loving kindness does not work imagine yourself as a powerful God or divine being that can do anything you set your mind to. When confronted with monstrous entities I have in my dreams recited Om mani padme hum, wrestled them to the ground, slain them, or obliterated them in white light. Once you realize that it is your dream and you are in control you can handle the nightmares in whatever way you want. I often just fly up as fast as I can and break the dream then enter a new one. Of course these are all personal experiences and I have no idea of knowing how common or easy they are to replicate.
Sorry, I was speaking for the Enlightened Masters of my own school of Buddhism. When they sleep, they sleep. When they eat, they eat. The concept of a transformed mind that no longer needs normal sleep isn't part of our teaching.
In many of my dreams, Im a religious leader like the Buddha, have magical powers, and am one kickaxx martial artist who never looses a fight, translating that into this reality, my awake state, is humbling. I believe many of my dreams are out of body experiences and are happening somewhere in some realm in real time, I also believe when I die, I may be able to simply go out of body and into a dream that becomes my next life or incarnation, don't take your dreams lightly treat your dreams like they are reality, but please don't treat reality like its a dream, that could backfire,
sincerely john
With this in mind, when people lucid dream, do they ever feel compelled to do things they'd otherwise regret after waking, more primitive, mundane things that shed light on who you truly are in the pit of your mind?
If so, and considering what dreams may come might that become your hell?
From a biological prespective, sleep is basiclly a self cleaning process and a way for memories to be processed into long term storage. So often an idea or problem will be clearer in the morning after a good sleep.