Dream Yoga: Many flavors of dreams
I hate dream analysis books. They’re such crap. Some symbols are fairly commonly understood within a culture, but personal experience can distort them to mean something slightly different or completely different, so a book someone else wrote isn’t going to tell you what your dreams mean. A lot of the time, they don’t mean anything at all.
Tibetan Buddhists have methods of cultivating awareness of dreams, called Dream Yoga. The idea is to remain awake through all of your sleep cycle and to use the dream state for meditation and other practices. As soon as I heard about this, I was hooked. Just one time, I was actually able to stay aware all night. I fell asleep, observed six distinct dream cycles, and when my body was done resting I simply opened my eyes. I wasn’t groggy, though I felt like I should have been. I had been ‘awake’ all night, after all. It was strange, but very cool.
In Dream Yoga, ‘karmic dreams’ are just impressions and memories you’ve gone over in the last few days, affected heavily by repetitive thinking and based heavily on what you experience in Samsara. These are relatively easy to deconstruct, and when you log them regularly they can be quite telling. They can either be a ‘Hey! You missed this!’ message or just another version of the broken record. They don’t hold much meaning, at least not in the way most people think of dream interpretation. For people that pay attention and want to develop a good recall for their dreams, these are really useful. They are so common that when you plant triggers to wake in the dream state, called lucid dreaming, they are more easily accessed. It’s also easier to slip into the subconscious dream state when everything seems fairly normal, so there’s the flip side to that.
I studied dreams and their meanings extensively a while back, when I was researching a malady I suffered from frequently at the time, called Sleep Paralysis. It’s basically the opposite of sleep walking. Sleepwalkers don’t produce enough of a certain chemical that your brain releases in REM sleep, one that keeps them from acting out their dreams. Others, like me, produce way too much and can wake up unable to even flutter an eyelid. While this is pretty terrifying all by itself, the mind has his lovely habit of ‘filling in the blank’ with intensely vivid hallucinations that are almost always a representation of your worst fear. It happens to everyone a few times in their life and are usually written off as a really realistic nightmare. I had a pet theory that most bedside alien abductions are actually instances of SP, and when researching SP for Examiner I discovered that some scientists agree, which is pretty cool. But I digress.
Reflection Nebula NGC 1999
My point is, I began to study dreaming and sleep cycles. I started keeping a dream log and began to see patterns, symbolism and real messages from the store consciousness. It’s not like your deep mind is a separate entity that communicates to you, but anything related to your conscious life is stirred up and more easily accessible when you sink out of the conscious mind and into the store consciousness. Your linear mind, though it’s a light influence in dreams, explores these fractured memory-tags.
Dreams that seem full of meaning and hold a greater state of awareness probably are a direct representation of something that’s been bubbling up in the store consciousness, something that’s been suppressed but the conscious monkey mind can’t hold back in the dream state. They’re called ‘dreams of clarity’. Interpretation can apply to these, though not always in an obvious way, and the only way to understand them is to remember as much as you can and reference the events and components according to your own inner encyclopedia. The exception is color, which seems to be pretty universal. If you dream in color, try to remember the colors as best you can, but even they have to be read within the context of the dream. (There’s a chart/key for interpreting color here, if anyone’s interested.)
Each dream is a very personal thing, very individual. Someone who doesn’t know you is unlikely to understand what each component of your dream means. My sisters both call me to interpret their dreams because I know them extremely well, but I wouldn’t be very accurate with an acquaintance and abysmal with a stranger. My own dreams are a pretty obvious affair.
So most dreams fall into these two categories. Most karmic dreams, I discovered recently, are banal representations of everyday life- washing the dishes, driving to work, that kind of thing. this was revealed to me while discussing dream logs with a few friends of mine. Previous to this conversation, I had been trying to figure out where these dreams I have fit into the schema, dreams which I call ‘movie dreams’. They run like full-length films, complete with exotic landscapes and fully developed characters with complex relationships to each other. I’m almost never me in these dreams, and the only things that repeat are the landscapes.
These dreams didn’t seem to fit into either category- they had nothing to do with my everyday life, and were definitely not dreams of clarity. After this conversation, in which I learned what ‘normal’ is for most people, it clicked into place- my ‘movie dreams’ were my karmic dreams. I’m a very visual learner, which is why I read so much. When I write, I think in pictures; it makes sense that my impressions are interpreted as narratives. The relatively static landscapes, even though they are bizarre, are recurring issues and the narratives that play in them are my thoughts, represented by characters that embody their essence.
The weird part is that recently, my family have been popping up in my movie dreams. That’s odd, for me. My grandfather was in one earlier this week, and I haven’t dreamed about him since he died six years ago. He was talking animatedly to some people, splayed in a large papasan chair and his body was withered and his arms at strange angles. I asked him if he was okay, that his aura was gray, and then pirates invaded and everyone turned into screaming little girls because they were being sold as sex slaves. I had a transmitter in my tooth that told me when this really badass pirate was coming and managed to save one girl as I fled. I had to shoot a few people (very graphic) and jumped off the ship, which turned out to be off the coast of Africa in shark-infested waters. Then, last night I was on a spaceship with my beloved and we were going to crash it into something that was threatening earth (something to do with lava, can’t really recall) and there was this woman there, hugely pregnant, who kept slamming beers one right after the other. I wanted to kill her… I might have actually even done so, I’m not sure. (See what I mean? Movies.) there have been others like that recently too.
But the family is present, which is pretty odd. Plus, they all end in violence or death, which I didn’t realize until this moment. I still feel pretty effed up from my ‘Sexless‘ revelation last week, so there’s been elements of that too. The upside of studying your dreams is that once you view them clinically- a scientist observing phenomenon, just like in meditation- nightmares aren’t scary any more. There have been dreams involving serial killers that devolve into long conversations with what is instantly recognizable as a fear or buried tendency for anger or violence. I’ve caught myself cataloguing possible connections while still in the dream state, tags which I remember when I wake up. You’d think that would trigger a lot of lucid dreams, but it doesn’t. Not too much, anyway.
But maybe these recent dreams have more to do with fear and vulnerability. The careless pregnant woman… the screaming little girls… referring any sexual tension in the dream off to someone else (“You should really meet my sister!”)… that makes a lot more sense. And of course my family keeps popping up, since the bonds of love we share have always been strong and are an obvious recourse when I’m triggered by vulnerability.
I get the ‘Rigpa Glimpse of the Day‘ emails, and it’s usually eerily applicable to whatever I’m working with. This mornings’ quote was poetically relevant:
Whatever you do, don’t shut off your pain; accept your pain and remain vulnerable. However desperate you become, accept your pain as it is, because it is in fact trying to hand you a priceless gift: the chance of discovering, through spiritual practice, what lies behind sorrow.
“Grief,” Rumi wrote, “can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.”
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Emily,
You ought to write a book on dreams.
While I was reading this, I thought I was reading a magazine article, wanting to know more and more about dreams and your dreams in particular. Wow, what vivid dreams you have.
Who wants to be conscious when they can have so much fun and adventure in your dreams!
Thanks for a delightful and informative piece.
michael j
Michael,
Thank you!
I’ve written short stories based on dreams, but I don’t really feel experienced enough to write a book on dreams themselves. Yet.
There are regular Dream Yoga retreats at various practice centers- there’s one in Virginia and one in Mexico that I know of offhand. They’re called ‘dark retreats’, in which you are literally in the dark for several days. I hope to attend some of those eventually and learn from experienced practitioners.
Soon I’ll write another post about Dream Yoga (just the basics), for those who are interested. I’ll dig up some of my dream journals and post some of those too- some are really wild.
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I agree that it’s better to include your personal experiences in your dreams rather than to rely totally on dream dictonary type interpretations – so that the same symbol means exactly the same thing for every person. A dream dictionary is more like a jumping off point.
When you say that you stayed awake through your dream cycles, did you mean that you were lucid dreamng – dreaming but remaining aware that you are dreaming and possibly able to control the actions in your dreams?
My understanding is that dream yoga is a form of lucid dreaming.
I agree that your dreams probably have a lot to do with your “sexless” post. Dreams about family could have to do with thoughts about your ability to have children and “continuing your line” (esp. the dream about your dead granfather”). The little girls who are sex slaves in the dream are females who aren’t fully functioning sexually because of their age, but are expected to have sex. Pirates traditionally fight with swords (surgery?)
And, of course, the pregnant woman in the dream.
Thank you for your comments!
No, my pirates were modern ones- I took one of their rifles and shot a few people as I escaped. But the point is taken. Actually, I had just finished reading a book about historical pirates, who were actually not generally known to be heterosexual; for some of them it was a way to live the way they wanted to freely. They chose ‘messmates’. So, though the connection is still nebulous (and I think more to do with having just read the book) the atmosphere was one of fear. My dreams tend not to be so literal as sword=surgery; you’ll notice that my interpretations tend to be soft or conceptual in nature. The narratives are too abstract and yet developed, so that’s where I tend to look. There are exceptions, of course.
Dream Yoga is not a form of lucid dreaming, but lucid dreaming can sometimes occur as a side effect. There are levels of awareness even in dreams, just like you work with in waking meditation. The point is initially to simply remain aware of the dreaming state- not always ‘thinking/lucid’ but definitely aware. You can tell if this is happening by how many dream cycles you can recall upon awakening. Plus, your content recall will be about the same as when you are awake during the day. But during the day we are often not aware of what we are doing- ever had a moment when you drove to work and not remembered the drive there?
It’s a different beast entirely. If you work with dreams (I can tell you do!) you should definitely look into it.