Yoga Nidra, Lucid Dreaming, and Paying Attention to Wacky Buddhist Teachings

As a child, when I'd have nightmares, I'd get up in the middle of the night, wake my mother, and tell her about my dream. She and I, together, would imagine a pleasanter ending to the dream, and she'd send me back to bed with the instruction to dream the dream that way.

Sometimes it worked, and I learned to develop a little bit of lucidity in my dreamstate.

As I grew up, I lost that ability, and was interested in recent years to find the practice referred to in yogic and Buddhist texts. In the past week or so, I've rediscovered the exercise.

Its resurfacing started several weeks ago. I was talking with one of my yoga students about why I include savasana (corpse pose) practice at the end of every practice. I made a veiled reference to the interesting mind states that can arise in the practice, and he responded by describing the odd dream/wakeful state that he experienced. After doing some reading of others' experiences with approximately the same experience, I've come to refer to that condition as "yoga nidra." I tend not to discuss it with students or fellow practitioners as learning of it can easily lead to grasping and seeking, two states that tend to work against its occurrence. In my experience, it occurs when we engage in withdrawal of senses, moving inside our minds. It can produce visions, sometimes impenetrable imagaic states, sometimes incredibly meaningful and moving ones. There is, in yoga nidra experiences, sometimes a little volition, sometimes a lot, but engaging the normal controlling state of mind that we usually consider a part of daily consciousness seems to dispel the entire experience. So I've learned to watch and perceive, rather than to try to control or steer the experience.

Anyway, when my student mentioned his experience with yoga nidra (though he called it "weird half-sleep"), it reminded me that I hadn't engaged in it for many months. When I've practiced it in recent weeks since then, I've rediscovered the potential in yoga nidra for simultaneous dream-state and lucidity and consciousness.

That, in turn, seems to have dribbled into my otherwise normal sleep conditions, and several times in the past week, I've found myself drifting off into sleep and dream, while retaining some degree of consciousness. From that condition, it's very easy to release the consciousness and to move completely into the subconscious dream state. The first time this happened, I was napping one Sunday afternoon in a room where other family was still moving around and talking, so I had a stimulus to keep me from going completely out. But a couple 0f days ago, it happened as I was going to sleep one night, and it occurred again, yesterday, while I was in the hospital, following a shoulder surgery.

I remember reading a Buddhist teacher (I forget which one) encouraging a student to be aware of his mindstate, and when the student responded that he was generally aware, the teacher asked him to describe exactly what his mind was doing when he fell asleep. When I read that, I thought that the teacher was just playing with the student -- asking the impossible to keep the self-assured (and maybe overly self-confident) student working hard. Recalling these experiences, I can remember exactly what my mind was doing when it transitioned from wakefulness to lucid dreaming to dream state.

Now I wonder at what other teachings I've missed because I didn't take them as seriously as I should have.

Everywhere, all the time

This morning’s meditation: I started with a lovingkindness practice. When that was done, I shifted into regular vipassana meditation. I noticed that the practice was easier and quieter than usual. The standard naming practice wasn’t needed, as I could simply watch the memories and thoughts arise without engaging with them. While I sat in the relaxed quiet, I perceived simultaneously both the deeper mind conditions that I usually can only explore through pratyahara practices as well as the more focused attention mind conditions that occur in vipassana meditation.

That perception was the essential experience.

From there, my mind elaborated on the recognition: I tend to experience the world in discrete and segmented ways. As I enter a meditation, I tend to close the door to non-meditation life behind me. As I move from seated meditation, which requires the involvement of my senses to maintain my vertical posture, to reclining meditation, which allows me to withdraw my awareness from my external senses entirely, I engage in another shift of mind geography. When I lie down at night to sleep, I shift my mind into sleep mode, excluding even the remote awareness of reclining meditation. Exploring each of those mind modes separately has allowed me to encounter aspects of mind that I had not perceived so clearly without the exercise of the specific disciplines that allow me to access them. So I have continued in those practices in varying degrees for the past several years. This morning’s meditation, though, suggested to me that while the distinctions and separations may be a useful didactic tool, just as isolating an exercise for biceps and another one for hamstrings can be useful, there is a fuller state of integration possible, where simultaneous engagement of each segment allows for exploration of things impossible in single-mode exercise.

Perhaps it’s not entirely coincidental that in yoga practice last night, I found myself in a pose sequence that, without the specific and separate muscle group work I’ve been performing for the past couple of years, I’d never have imagined possible. The sequence (that I did badly, but recognizably, despite my incompetence) is a flow of poses (from top to bottom, above) from twisting prayer, to side crow, to scissored side crow, to hurdle, to scorpion. Without the hours and months of devotion to isolated strength work on abdominal muscle groups, spinal muscle groups, and shoulders, and on hip flexibility, the sequence would scarcely have been imaginable, let alone possible (albeit clumsily) last night. But with those isolated exercises, I found last night a tiny glimpse of the integration of dance that is enabled by the work.

So back to this morning’s meditation… At odd moments during the day, I’m reminded that all levels of my perception and mind are available at any moment. That feels a bit like the sense I’ve had since the day I perceived that prana is continually flowing into each of us. It’s a little bit vertiginous, but liberating. It feels a bit like the fulsome connectedness of intense spiritual experiences – a flowing of all levels of mind/body/spirit into present focused awareness.
And the all-levels-at-once experience suggests to me potentials for mindfulness that are analogous to the perception of one pose flowing into another suggests the potential for vinyasa.

Waking Up

This morning I woke up.

Several times, in fact, before I stopped going back to sleep.

So what? This: for reasons I haven't sorted out, I noticed exactly when I woke up, of the change from dream to awakening to awake.

It happened three times. Narrative dream, creating and exploring a story. Awareness of the dream-ness of the dream. Awareness of the awareness of being awake and conscious. And awareness of the empty simplicity of the transition between them, umarked by thought, desire, aversion, self, or Self. Just experience, transformed consciousness, and awareness.