that is one of the best answers i ever heard. Means this is a great thread with a live question, and the responses are all gorgeous. I'm a shitty dreamer myself, always have been, despite massive amounts of freudian, jungian, and even jungian senoi time put in, grinding, always grinding. i hate to admit it, but my dream journals, when i kept them, bored me. I might as well have been sifting my shit, for all i got out of all that effort. Not my gift, clearly.


Be still, my heart!!!

love, tim

This is my experience of the last few years. The illusion of agency seems as gone from dreams as waking reality. Moreover the idea that lucid dreaming was ever anything but a fantasy seems prevalent. Now I also seem to have increased bleed through - when I wake up and dream-like structures seem to transition into the waking moments during the night - something like hypnogogia? I used to dismiss the dreaming/semi-waking state as unreal, but I've been working to just accept what is happening in any of these moments are "real" rather than reifying some moments over others.

Cue Advaita/Namkai Norbu reading list here.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

   aloha ed,

   Try just sitting peacefuly and letting it all go.

   Keep trying.

terry

Hi Ed,

I am really sorry that your experience with a spiritual teacher and dreams was so difficult. In the Tibetan Kagyu tradition, one of the 6 Yogas of Naropa is dream yoga. It involves learning how to lucid dream, then after you become aware that you are dreaming in the dream, guiding the dream in the direction of meditation practice. No spirit guides, though they may show up in the dream, but because you are aware that you are dreaming, you can deal with them however you chose. And you can deal with nightmare characters by asking them what they want to communicate to you rather than running from them or fighting. Andrew Holecek's book is a good reference if you want to try it, and Andrew (website here) holds online courses in dream yoga periodically. I took one and liked it but, alas, was not any more successful at lucid dreaming than before, though some people in the class did much better. Andrew studied with Khempo Rimpoche, a Tibetan Kagyu lama, so his credentials are sound.

For myself, I have never been very good at lucid dreaming and have tried it many times. And since dream yoga is the next step after lucid dreaming, I've not been able to do it. I am not sure why, but I either wake up when I become lucid or decide to slip back into nonlucidity and see how the dream comes out rather than try to control it. But periodically, I find that paying extra attention to my dreams, particularly when there is a life transition ahead for me as now (I am semi-retiring) is helpful. One of the insights that came out of the investigation I describe at the beginning of this thread is that the third person view develops when I am interacting with other dream characters, and sometimes the viewpoint switches between first and third person. I realized that this is basically how I interact with people during waking life. I am sort of constantly checking "How am I coming across to this person? Am I getting the message across that I intend to?" etc. then I will switch back into the first person viewpoint as I talk with the other person. This doesn't happen often when I am awake, the third person viewpoint happens much more often when I am dreaming. So it had nothing to do with screen time, which was my original premise.

Terry's advice upthread is also good, if you have a meditation practice keep at it. All the best.