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nical ecs
Sweden
3 Posts |
 Posted - May 30 2008 : 5:06:48 PM
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Dream yoga is not a conscious pursuit of mine, but it rears it head occasionally. More than a third of our life is spent in sleep, and since my dream life is vivid, both experientially and symbolically, I can hardly view dreams merely as a functional appendix to daily ambitions.
I would like to ask you all some questions about dreams and yoga. The questions are coming in after the links further down. Most of the introducing text gives my personal background for asking them, and it can be skipped for a lite alternative.
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Several years ago when I experimented with lucid dreaming I read Namkhai Norbus book Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. His Dzogchen approach involves maintaining lucidity through sleep and dream states, but is mainly about developing "natural light" by merging pure presence of awareness with sleep at the moment of falling asleep. My own attempts at lucid dream navigation were ultimately not gratifying. I found the ordeals too complex to be pleasurable and too abstract to handle for my psychic disposition at that time. From some other qualified source ( forgotten now) I picked up the advice to let all dream manipulation rest, since the risk of making dream life too similar to waking ambititions might disturb natural psychic processes, or corrupt the free-form naivety of dream behaviour.
At that time I did not practice yoga, and I never connected my lucid moments with witnessing silence, so this advice made me regard critically any dream-exploitative engagement, and I ceased altogether with attempting dream lucidity. Some years later, while experiencing a dramatic kundalini opening, much of the spinal fireworks involved was triggered during sleep. That outlet seemed inevitable, since I tried to "keep the rising down" in waking hours, due to fears, confusion and demands to behave socially normal during daytime. But several times "I" decided to "let it up" in a spontaneously lucid moment at night - and up it went. The surrender and trust in the surges thus came naturally in a way that my anxious waking ego would not have been able to achieve at that time. If "I" was the "guru within", daytime Me did not identify with him, but learnt to trust his/her impulses successively.
Then I found AYP and with pranayama and deep meditation things smoothed out and the fears subsided even more. When I added mulabandha to my practices there was no immediately noticeable effect. But suddenly "I" was back at the wheel, doing that light flexing of the anal sphincter involuntarily while I was sleeping. As always when spiritual intentions manifest unannounced while asleep the effect was so strong as to be almost scary. It caused a forceful spinal pinball effect ending in a more "dry" and "electric" inner headlight than my previous k-surges. The light lacked the warmth, the wavelike character and the magnificent expansion and imagery of my initial k experiences. This was more like percieving the raw mechanics of infrastructure. In lucid dream states attention and intention seem yogically ideal, even if inner witnessing silence is not explicitly manifest and there is no control, just intuition or instinct. Perhaps there´s nothing ultimately spiritually significant about such experiences if taken by themselves, since there´s always the dream-trap of creating an alternative foundation for the ego, scenery as it were. Maybe this particular sleep-yoga spasm just gave a brief look at what´s happening under the hood. A glimpse of some pipe-cleaning going on, from within.
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Here are some related forum topics about Lucid Dreaming, Astral projection and Flying dreams, Kechari stage 1 during sleep, respectively:
http://www.aypsite.org/forum/topic....TOPIC_ID=450
http://www.aypsite.org/forum/topic....OPIC_ID=1648
http://www.aypsite.org/forum/topic....OPIC_ID=1431
http://www.aypsite.org/forum/topic....OPIC_ID=1371
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These topics all related to my questions, and were good reading! Still i´d like to complement the picture a bit, so here we go:
- Do you experience that cosmic samyama and other attention-focusing practices naturally carries over to the dream-state in correspondence with how it carries over into everyday life, so that dreamlife is qualitatively effected, skills are developed? If so, how has this manifested for you?
- In his samyama book Yogani cautions against combining the practice of lucid dreaming with cosmic samyama, pointing out sleep disturbances as one of several risk factors. I wholly agree about not mixing methods, of course. Lucid dream practice is probably superfluous anyway if cosmic samyama is practiced. But speaking technically, and aside from the issue of not mixing practices, wouldn´t the lucid dream- state be the equivalent of yogic sleep, since both are defined by expanded awareness? Or is there a distinction between them based on quality or degree - like this: "it´s possible to have a false lucid dream, but an impossibility to have a false yogic sleep-awakening" - what are your experiences or viewpoints here?
- Personally, at least for now, I think about "the guru within" as the creative faculty of unconscious or automatistic discrimination, manifesting as moral (socratic inner voice), intuitive and aesthetic judgment, as well as through a certain spontaneity or flow in movements and thought. Generally I feel closer to this mode of being in dreams than in real life, almost as if I was two entities, identical in some respects but conditioned differently, as if for inhabiting separate worlds. How do you experience or define the guru within and relate him/her/it to the person expanding his/her awareness through Advanced Yoga Practices?
- Do you do AYP in sleep? Do you "do" something in yogic sleep?
Thanks in advance.
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Edited by - nical ecs on May 30 2008 5:10:45 PM |
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AYPforum
351 Posts |
Posted - May 31 2008 : 09:37:58 AM
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| Moderator note: Topic moved for better placement |
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Dream yoga and Yogic Sleep
