anyone have any daytime tips on dream yoga? everytime i dream i wake up when i go lucid anyone have a way around this?

Howdy Grant,
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche wrote a great book about sleep and dream yoga which is available online or as a buyable book.  My limited experiments with lucid dreaming were improved with the waking practice of continually asking myself throughout the day whether I was actually awake or dreaming.   This repetition naturally flows into ones' dream states and so you will find yourself asking yourself the same question within your dreams.  The nex step, and more specifically to your question is avoiding the freakout which disturbs the subtle dream state.  This was, for me, a matter of practice combined with waking affirmations to greet the realization with calm interest.  Other affirmations during the day (or right before sleeping!) about specific but increasingly complex goals of your journey are very helpful.

A simple beginners excercise is to look at your hand.  Easy enough during waking life...a bit harder in the early stages of lucid dreaming but easily doable.  So as soon as you find yourself in the lucid state, your affirmation to look at your hand should com into play.  Over time you will be more at home in that state and can willfully act in your new world.

I had a friend who was so gifted with his ability to "dream travel" that he had to supress it.  It came upon him at a young age and never left him.  He did not have to cultivate anything.  He had some remarkable experiences and knowlege he could not have had were his conciousness were bound to his body in bed.

Have fun.

tom

Spend some time in the afternoon doing a physical task, like washing dishes or cleaning, and try to stay completely involved in what you are doing.  Don't try to concentrate so much as try to be undistracted, or simply "here and now" in a gentle effortless way.  After an hour or so, go lay down somewhere comfotable and close your eyes.  You'll need to be sleepy, so maybe do this every day for a week or two so you aren't too excited.  As you feel yourself falling asleep, try to maintain that gentle awareness.  Little flashes of images will appear in your actual eyesight, often leaving blue-green after impressions.  If you can maintain awareness as you get sleepier, these images will become more involved and you can slip right into a lucid dream.

Also, if you have awareness on your mind all day, and every time you think about it you take a moment to be aware, you will have many lucid dreams.  They call this "all day awareness" on the lucid dreaming forums - it's just the best way to get them.

I have to stress that this isn't a concentration exercise, though.  You don't have to try to "be here now" because you always already are here and it's already now.  All you need to do is become aware that you are here now.  This is as simple as making sure you're actually seeing what you're looking at, or hearing what your ears are registering.  There should be an instant clarity when you move out of your thoughts and into nowness (nothing spectacular, just a, "oh, I wasn't actually looking and now I am").  It's a very everyday thing to do.  Imagine you suddenly saw a mouse run around the corner and you need to make sure it's actually a mouse.  You move out from seeing what's in your imagination to seeing what's in the real world in front of you.  Very simple and gentle and effortless. 

This is also a tranquility exercise, so don't be suprised if you feel rather good all the time as well.

If you're waking up it just means you're getting excited.  This is perfectly natural.  The best cure is just to have lots of lucid dreams happen so you aren't as excited, haha.  Coming back to awareness during the day will make them happen all the time.

Actually, the reason it works so well is because, when we are imagining things during the day, that is very similar to the dream state.  By getting out of our head, we are becoming lucid during our waking hours - so it's a directly relevant practice.

So, what's the difference between normal lucid dreaming and milam/dream yoga?