What dream work practices are people doing these days

[thelerner]

Dream work has been on my to do list for a long time. Unfortunately when I get serious about it, I end up with insomnia. Its also a mountain I'll have to climb one day. Ultimately it can become a portal to another world. Whether that world is 'just' internal or external I don't know.

 

What are you guys doing and how advanced?

 

 

Michael

[Yoda]

I do my best to put myself to bed with the highest vibration possible for the sake of nice dreams and a nice day to follow, but that's the extent of it. I usually do primordial and some gentle stretches right before bed and enjoy the buzz. Sometimes I'll do a few affirmations as I drift off. I don't meditate before sleep as the technique I use doesn't mix well pre-bed.

[Taomeow]

I practice deep, complete, dreamless yet conscious sleep, which is a form of meditaion. I have several techniques for this, to wit:

 

1. taoist: you start out by meditating on mud every night. The trick is to get comfortable mixing yourself with the yielding. Mud offers no resistance... and no support. It takes you to a place of self-reliance, which turns out to be devoid of dreams, and impenetrably dark.

 

2. yogic: you start out by practicing raja yoga, deep tenacious contemplation of any which subject you choose. The trick is to stay with this one subject, not let your mind drift on onto anything else. Think all you like, but think about just one thing at a time -- to exhaustion.

 

3. buddhist-hindu: you lie on your back and grow a lotus out of each of your big toes, a buddha is sitting in the center of each, a lotus grows out of each of her big toes, a buddha is sitting in each, a lotus grows... etc. This way your awareness grows upward, with extreme-yang focus on unstoppable upward dispersion and multiplication -- till extreme yang spontaneously flips over into yin and all the buddhas, lotuses and toes disappear into darkness whence they came.

 

4. shamanic: I take a "virtual potion." I start out by gathering the virtual herbs and minerals for it, then brewing them in a virtual pot, then telling everybody who is anybody exactly this: "If this world still needs me, someone or something will find a way to bring me back." Whereupon I drink the virtual potion of nonexistence, and cease to exist for the duration of the night.

[OfStrangeEons]

[Taomeow]

Speaking of movies/dreams, has anyone/everyone/ no one seen "Donnie Darko?" If you haven't, please do... I'd love to hear what taobums would think of it.

[thelerner]

Taomeow your mud idea is fascinating. You just bivouac in some warm muddy place? A year or two ago one of the European guys here talked about the spirituality of sleeping out doors w/out a tent. Sounds like you're taking it to a new extreme.

 

Michael

[OfStrangeEons]

Speaking of movies/dreams, has anyone/everyone/ no one seen "Donnie Darko?" If you haven't, please do... I'd love to hear what taobums would think of it.

 

 

"Your wierd."

"Sorry."

"That was a compliment!"

 

I loved the movie, and indeed owe it much. It was what first opened me up to...deeper thinking I guess.

 

I was a big fan of the time travel, and "gods plan"...but, if it was gods plan for Donnie to move withen the the preordained time line, why was he given the means, and indeed the choice, to step outside of it...and would the tangent time line/universe (same thing in my mind) have stabilized?...and why did they have to make Frank so fricken creepy!!! hehe

 

Personally I believe "God" did give Darko a choice..though, I wonder if his...gifts?...would have developed more during later life? ...and, maybe it was "Gods" desire to have the events taken place in the tangent universe, to occur...what would have the world been without Gretchen...that was her name...I think...

 

That was a concept that I had been privy to. What if one could see another in four dimensions. Wouldn't we be able to go back and pinpoint problems, budding cancer for example, before they grew out of hand...

 

And can you imagine the ramifications, just to ones idea of self, if there was a possibility of creating another tangent you? Not on an individual scale, but on mass...What would have happened if I took road/decision/pill A instead of B...I'm rambling again..

 

Anyway, besides loving the story and ideas, I'm not a fan of the assumption that there is just a single time line for all of the universe, and that a tangent would have been unstable...

[GrandTrinity]

Holy shit Tao meow, those are some incedible tips. How did you think of all that????

[MatthewQi]

I took Winn's dream class on CD a few years ago and did the practice for a while. Looking back now, I got more out of it than I realized.

 

As of late... I went to a class with Robert Moss - http://www.mossdreams.com/ - in addition to dream teachings, we did some shamanic journeying (much like what is taught in Chia's K&L or by Kenneth Meadows, and others). So the class has got me keeping a dream journal again which has brought the necessary focus to it to be able to get back in touch with this amazing practice. Moss' work imo is more practically oriented (but doesn't have to be necessarily) vs using the practice for deep spiritual awareness. Which, by the way I feel can be facilitated with a zen like koan meditated on prior to going to sleep - something like "what is always there whether I am asleep or awake?" perhaps do it every night and see! when you wake up in the middle of the night, ask yourself again, keep focus on it, and be aware.

 

A friend of mine did a practice that required setting an alarm clock to wake up at intervals to help to get in touch with being lucid or into another state somewhere between awake and asleep. This can take you also to "what is always there whether I am asleep or awake?"

 

Sweet dreams all!

 

Matt

[Taomeow]

Taomeow your mud idea is fascinating. You just bivouac in some warm muddy place? A year or two ago one of the European guys here talked about the spirituality of sleeping out doors w/out a tent. Sounds like you're taking it to a new extreme.

 

Michael

 

I would if I could, but I only use a mental image of it now -- however, it helps to have been there done that to get the image right... I had two muddy encounters in the past, one, getting lost in the Bryansk Forest, Belarus, and somehow surrounding myself with a swamp in every direction and spending some six hours there. As a Paul Simon song goes, "I should be depressed, my life is a mess, but I'm having a good time..." -- that's how I felt. The second one, I have pictures of, covered with Dead Sea mud head to toe and wearing nothing but... too bad I had too decent an upbringing to post them!

 

Outdoors without a tent, I wouldn't recommend, not in the wilderness in any event. If you're in the wilderness, there's animals, nocturnal hunters... and mosquitoes... and primordial urge for shelter. I've slept in a tent in the wilderness many times, but never had the desire to abandon it... this would be bad feng shui, far as I know. Of course if someone is after being shaken up in some unexpected and possibly scary way, this could be the way to go.

[Taomeow]

OfStrangeEons,

 

I really enjoyed your take -- and I think you're one of the few people among those I know to have seen the movie who got the same idea of "choice" out of it that I did. I play with "loopy time" all the time... and every time I do this, I get to a bifurcated place no matter where I go, a place from which there's this but not that way to proceed, or that but not this -- a Choice looming large, you have to make it... and once you've made it, what happens to the other side of the fork in the road, the one you haven't taken? Once you start thinking about it, you realize that you create and destroy worlds this way every moment, or at least often, way often. I have a niece who, the second she graduated from high school, married a Native American she met on the internet, who currently takes good care of their two cats... and this whole arrangement is a house of cards I inadvertently put together, for the niece exists only because once upon a time I introduced my high school girlfriend to my boyfriend's brother... and what would happen to those two Oklahoma kittens if I didn't throw that party many moons ago, thousands of miles away?..

 

Holy shit Tao meow, those are some incedible tips. How did you think of all that????

 

Thanks for noticing!

 

The first three are classics, I didn't make them up. The fourth is my creation, the idea came in a dream...

Edited April 18, 2007 by Taomeow

[Christoph]

Dream work makes me lose too much sleep...seems to train me to be in a meditative state when I need to be sleeping.