Dr.
Stephen H. Whiteman, DCH, studied with
Tibetan Buddhist lamas, and through
meditation and Tibetan Buddhist dream
yoga practices, he learned that lucid
dreaming is a perfect metaphor and
vehicle for spiritual awakening.
Jenee:
First of all, describe what
lucid dreaming is.
Steve:
Basically, it's when the more or less
ordinary 'you' that experiences waking
life consciously realizes that you are in
a night dream. For example, here I am
talking to you and your pen starts to
float off the table. Since these
anomalies don't usually happen in waking
life, you would suddenly realize that we
had this conversation three days ago, so
you must be at home in bed dreaming about
it.
Jenee:
I've had that experience
before. I remember thinking to myself
while dreaming, 'This is really a dream.'
Steve: The
question is, did your dreaming ego think
that, or did your ordinary waking self
think that?
If it was your
dream ego, we call that a 'pre-lucid
state.' That's when your dream ego
recognizes that you're in a night dream,
but you're still caught up in the dream.
If your ordinary waking mind recognizes
that you are dreaming, that's true
lucidity. Rather than slipping back into
ordinary dreaming, any useful,
emotionally healing experiences come back
with me, just as if I had experienced
them in waking life.
Most of your
waking experience is influenced by your
dreams at night, so having conscious
access to those dreams is going to have
an enormous influence over how flexible,
creative, and resourceful you are in
dealing with your everyday world. Almost
everyone is profoundly affected by their
dreaming experiences, but they don't
realize it. What I'm offering people in
my workshops is a program to bring their
waking consciousness to their dreams and
their dreaming consciousness to their
waking experience.
Jenee:
What do you mean?
Steve: One
of the regular practices of Tibetan dream
yoga is to recognize the dream-like
quality of waking experience, which
really is another level of dreaming.
So my workshops
have two goals. On one level, the
workshops teach people how to have lucid
dreams at night through various
techniques practiced while awake.
Simultaneously, the workshops help people
begin to experience waking reality as if
it were a dream, with the same
flexibility and aliveness and creativity
present in the lucid state. In class,
they will experience that they have just
woken up in a night dream and everything
around them is part of that - dream class
room, dream chairs, dream people. The fun
and aliveness that you can experience in
a lucid dream will become apparent to
them and become a part of their
experience in the room. I call this
'lucid waking.'
Jenee:
How did you learn to do
that?
Steve: Ten
years ago I experienced a profound
spiritual awakening and started waking up
inside my night dreams. Over the months
and years that followed, I began to
experience my ordinary reality as a
dream, literally. My dream characters
showed up in public and were witnessed by
other people. For a while, anytime I
closed my eyes, I would immediately be in
a lucid dream somewhere else. While I was
jogging, the landscape around me would
change, becoming vibrant and surreal, and
I would have to check to see if I was
dreaming.
Over time, I've
continued this merging or overlapping of
dreaming and waking experiences. Now, I
don't have to fall asleep to wake up
inside the dream. I've learned how to
cross over from ordinary experience into
that lucid space where I experience my
life right now like an incredible lucid
dream. And, through meditation and
Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga practices,
I've learned to stabilize this lucid
waking state, which as far as I can tell
is really a state of spiritual awakening.
Lucid dreaming is a perfect metaphor and
vehicle for spiritual awakening.
Jenee:
What makes lucid dreaming
so exciting?
Steve: Because
you experience phenomenal freedom. When
you become lucid, you're no longer caught
up in the dream and incredible
opportunities for learning and experience
are opened up. On one level, you can do
fun things like fly, walk through walls,
make objects float, travel to distant
places, or control some aspects of your
dream. You can have experiences that you
can bring back with you to help in your
ordinary life, such as receiving
life-changing messages from important
dream characters or talking to and
resolving issues with a deceased parent.
These experiences can all be very
valuable in your growth.
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