I teach yoga and philosophy and I'm a writer. I've been lucid dreaming on and off for a while now, starting in childhood with spontaneous lucid dreams and daydreams that allowed me to appreciate that what I was experiencing was being viewed through a veil of perception that was coloured by my own expectations of what I might see, as well as by my family's influence, my education and all the other things that go into making our point of view and the filters that colour it.
Now, after a few years of more focused interest in lucidity, I've begun to use my dreams as an opportunity to practice remembering student names (something I've been really challenged by in the past), to practice what I will teach (exploring ideas, as though walking through the forest of my own neuronal connections, seeing alternative pathways to the inevitable highways of daytime thoughts, patterns, samskaras, and travelling through hidden tracks that lead to different connections between ideas that come from the past), or from what I've currently been studying, but that come together in quite surprising and often delightful ways.
Attunement to compassion is a huge focus for me, and exploring travelling through time to see what happens before the beginning and after the end, to explore my own capacity to understand Now Here, or nowhere, is a key element of my practice and exploration, awake or asleep.
When I practice sequences of asana, or yoga nidra, for instance, during the day, I don't necessarily get into the positions, or follow the same routes, that I've explored at night... but I'm more likely to try different sequences and experiences based on what's happened, and also more likely to create sequences and then to attune to compassion, and see what love needs to happen in a particular circumstance.
Stepping back and knowing that I am not the driver, I am the observer, and my observation is the point of the practice, staying aware, and awake, and watching with compassion to see what opportunities then emerge, has been the most important lesson for me.
Thanks for this opportunity to share some of what I've been learning about lucid dreaming to date.
This article was released in issue from
December 2020
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