Riding Inside the Tiger

 

I teach and learn by sharing stories and - especially when it comes to dreaming - I don't want to hear from educators and experts who don't share their personal experiences. In this respect Namkhai Norbu does not disappoint. Especially in his book on Dzogchen, The Crystal and the Way of Light (even more than in his book on dream yoga) he shares memorable dream experiences.
     The simplest and most endearing comes from very early in his life. When he was quite small, he dreamed many times that he was riding inside the belly of a roaring beast he thought must be a tiger. In those days no motor car had ever been seen in his remote part of Tibet. When he encountered automobiles years later, he realized what his dreams had prepared him for. I am so charmed by this tale that I have turned it into a drawing. 

When the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear 

Namkhai’s account of his dream education suggests a modification in a well-known maxim. It’s not just that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It’s also: when the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear.
     Aged sixteen, as a student teacher in China, Namkhai dreamed he met a very old man he knew to be a master. The master lived in a white Chinese-style cement house; the name Padmasambhava was written in Tibetan over the dor. The master chanted a mantra of Padmasambhava. Then he instructed Namkhai to go round the house to a great rock and look for the entrance to a cave. Inside the cave, he would find eight natural mandalas. The dreamer’s father appeared and chanted the Prajnaparamita sutra. Namkhai joined in chanting the sutra and they walked round the inside of the cave together. He could see the edges of the mandalas but not their full form before he woke up.
     A year later, back in Tibet, Namkhai heard a visitor talk to his father about an extraordinary old man who was living in a village of white Chinese-style houses in the region. He felt strongly this was the old man from his dream. Reminding his father of the dream, he asked if they could visit the old man in the white house. They set off on horseback and rode for four days. They came to a vialge of white concrete Chinese-style houses and knew the master’s house because mantra of Padmasambhava was over the door. The old man was Chamchun Dorje, a Dzogchen master; he became Namkhai’s primary teacher.[1]     

When you wake with a dream in your hand 

“What if you slept,” Coleridge wrote, famously, “And what if in your sleep you dreamed and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
and what if when you awoke you had that flower in your hand, ah, what then?”
     Coleridge’s question was answered for Namkhai in his early dream education. He learned that a certain kind of dream can spill over into the world. He woke with something he had dreamed in his hand.
     One of his uncles was renowned as a tertön, a "treasure revealer" of hidden texts that sometimes appeared as tiny scrolls in unusual places, apparently transmitted across generations by ancient masters. While staying with his uncle in a remote area, Namkhai dreamed he was visited by a dakini.
     She gave him a small scroll of paper containing a sacred text. She said this was very important and that on waking he should give it to his uncle. In the dream he knew he was dreaming. He gripped the scroll tightly in one fist and wrapped the other around it. It was not permitted to disturb his uncle until after his morning rituals, so he drifted off still with his fists clamped together.
     Waking at dawn, he opened his hand and found there really was a tiny scroll within it. He was too excited to wait. He woke up his uncle and presented the scroll. His uncle took it and said matter-of-factly, “Thank you, I expecting this” as if there had been a routine delivery at the door. [2]  

When you are called to travel to a deceased master 

When he was living and teaching in Italy, Namkhai’s guru, Chamchun Dorje, called him in a dream to return to Tibet. He traveled to his master in the dream. His guru told him that it was time for him to take up Todgal, a higher level of Dzogchen practice.  For this, he needed to go to another teacher, Jigmed Linba. 

I thought this was a very strange thing to say because I knew, of course, that Jigmed Linba was a great Dzogchen master of the eighteenth century who had been dead for many years. I thought perhaps I had misunderstood what my master had said so I asked him to explain, but he just said, “Jigmed Linba is up on the mountain behind the house. Go and see him right away.” [3] 

Disbelieving, Namkhai scaled a sheer cliff, noticing that the whole text of a tantra was incised on it, with the title of the text on a standing stone at the top, He found a cave where a beautiful boy with long flowing hair, dressed in a filmy blue garment, was seated. Could this really be the deceased Dzogchen master?  He clambered up on top of the rock and said to the boy, “I was told to come to you.” The boy motioned for him to sit, then took out a little scroll and began reading a Dzogchen text on the Four Lights of Todhgal.
     Look through the Tibetan Buddhist biographies in Serinity Young’s Dreaming in the Lotus and you will find that, again and again, gurus dream with their disciples and the masters appear in dreams to convey essential teachings.[4] This theme is well crystallized by Lama Choedak Yuthok: 

Some people actually gain enlightenment during dreams. Some practitioners while in the middle of dreams which they recognized as dreams, invited great lineage masters of past ages. They came and gave teachings, and some of these practitioners became enlightened as a result. There are a lot of whispered teachings like this. They are known as ‘near lineage’ teachings. Some practitioners who received these could write, teach and transmit the teachings with amazing eloquence. They did not have to bother about studying any texts. One master received three months’ worth of teachings in the course of a single three-hour dream.

 

References 

1. Namkhai Norbu Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen ed. John Shank (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) pp.9-10.
2. ibid pp. 51-52.
3. ibid p.102.
4. Serinity Young , Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, & Practice (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999).
5. Lama Choedak Yuthok ed. Pauline Westwood, Lamdre: Dawn of Enlightenment. (Gorum Publications, 1997).

 

Illustration: “Riding Inside the Tiger” by Robert Moss

 

 

Materializing a dream, embodying a dream lover

 

The literature of India contains many versions of the story of dream lovers who find each other in waking reality, sometimes after a long and difficult quest. In a story in the twelfth century Kathasaritsagara (Ocean of the Stream of Story) King Vikramaditya sees in a dream girl he does not know, in an unknown country, and falls in love with her. As he embraces her, his pleasure is interrupted by the cry of a night watchman. The same night, in a distant land, Princess Malayavati – who had a horror of sex and avoided men – dreamed she had found the perfect lover and was lying with him on the connubial couch when they were interrupted by her chambermaid. After many plot twists, the dream lovers meet, recognize each other, and are united in their physical bodies as they had been in their dream bodies.
      The broader theme, pf materializing a dream, is also central to Indian accounts of dreaming. Roger Caillois observed that “India, which may well be considered the center of asceticism and moral discipline, has invested the dream with other powers again. The recluse, carried away by his meditation, gives a material existence to the images of his dreams, if he can only succeed in sustaining them with sufficient intensity. The dream then becomes lucid, deliberate and creative it becomes, in fact, a consciously willed effort that will be realized provided only that it is pursued sufficiently long and with sufficient vigor.”  [1]
    The biography of the famous poet Tulsidas, who composed an epic devoted to Hanuman the monkey god demonstrates the power and the process of this kind of yogic dreaming, . A tyrant imprisoned the poet in a stone tower. “The poet set himself to dream, to meditate, to dream again, to put to work all the resources of a mind straining to empty himself of all distracting content. Then from the dream arose Hanuman and his army of apes who overran then kingdom, seized the tower, and set the poet free.”

 

1. Roger Caillois, “Logical and Philosophical Problems of the Dream” in G.E. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois (eds) The Dream and Himan Societies (Berkeley; University of California Pres, 1966)

Upgrades for frequent dream fliers at Tibetan Airline

 

In a lighter moment in an otherwise very sober guide to the bardos of life, death and after, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche suggests that through the right practices, we can earn an upgrade on our ride to the afterlife. He writes in Mind Beyond Death that “the way we make any journey depends on the type of ticket we have…We may even have collected mileage points. We may be eligible for an upgrade to first class." 

He allows that advanced dreamers may have earned sky priority, and direct access to the "pure lands", including the realm created by the buddha Amitabha. If you have traveled this way before, and your heart wants to go there again, you may be able to project your consciousness there at the moment of death by "pure realm phowa." Another reason to deepen the practice of conscious dreaming. Here's the key passage:

“Pure realm phowa is connected to the practice of dream yoga. It involves directly transferring out consciousness at the time of death to one of the Buddha realms, such as the pure land of Amitabha or Akshobya, or to any of the sacred realms of the dakas, dakinis or bodhisattvas. The capacity to effect such a transference is developed through training in dream yoga. In that practice, not only do we learn to recognize the dream state, but also we develop the skill to transform our dream appearances. When we have developed that degree of control over our minds, then we can travel in our dreams to any Buddha field we wish.

"According to these teachings, if we can exercise that kind of power in our dreams, then we will be able to exercise the same power in this bardo [the Bardo of Dying]. We can use our understanding and experience of dream yoga to spontaneously transport ourselves to any sacred realm with which we have a heart connection. For example, you do not have to be a realized being in order to take birth in Amitabha’s pure land. Ordinary beings with a strong aspiration and good accumulation of merit can also take birth there. If we can achieve such a positive situation then we will have the optimum conditions to continue our spiritual training. Our practice will be supported by the blessings of buddhas and boidhisattvas."

Phowa (literally "transference" or "ejection") is the art of projection of consciousness from the body to another state at the moment of death. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche offers a brief introduction to five modalities, including deity phowa in which the practitioner seeks to merge with a yidam or god-form.

"Pure lands" or "buddha-fields" (Sanskrit buddhakṣetra) are especially important in East Asian Mahayana Buddhism. When we study the accounts of how such realms are created through the will, merit and imagination of superior beings, we may have an Eastern model for reality creation in the imaginal realm.

In my Active Dreaming approach, we do not use the symbols, postures, mantras or guru devotion of dream yoga as practiced in Tibetan Buddhist lineages and others, though we respect these. However, Active Dreaming, like dream yoga is a discipline that requires practice, practice, practice. Like yoga, Active Dreaming is a science of consciousness. It trains you to raise your awareness, play witness to yourself, go beyond consensual hallucinations, and enter the limitless field of nonlocal mind. It will certainly earn you frequent flyer miles, and maybe even premier status for the Big journey.

Art: "Night Airport" by Robert Moss

How Dreamers Earn Upgrades on the Flight to the Afterlife

 

In a lighter moment in an otherwise very sober guide to the bardos of life, death and after, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche suggests that through the right practices, we can earn an upgrade on our ride to the afterlife. He writes in Mind Beyond Death that “the way we make any journey depends on the type of ticket we have…We may even have collected mileage points. We may be eligible for an upgrade to first class." He seems to be telling us that advanced dreamers may have earned sky priority, and direct access to the "pure lands", including the realm created by the buddha Amitabha. If you have traveled this way before, and your heart wants to go there again, you may be able to project your consciousness there at the moment of death by "pure realm phowa." Another reason to deepen the practice of dreaming. Here's the key passage from Mind Beyond Death:

Pure realm phowa is connected to the practice of dream yoga. It involves directly transferring out consciousness at the time of death to one of the Buddha realms, such as the pure land of Amitabha or Akshobya, or to any of the sacred realms of the dakas, dakinis or bodhisattvas. The capacity to effect such a transference is developed through training in dream yoga. In that practice, not only do we learn to recognize the dream state, but also we develop the skill to transform our dream appearances. When we have developed that degree of control over our minds, then we can travel in our dreams to any Buddha field we wish...

If we can exercise that kind of power in our dreams, then we will be able to exercise the same power in this bardo [the Bardo of Dying]. We can use our understanding and experience of dream yoga to spontaneously transport ourselves to any sacred realm with which we have a heart connection. For example, you do not have to be a realized being in order to take birth in Amitabha’s pure land. Ordinary beings with a strong aspiration and good accumulation of merit can also take birth there. 

A few comments:

1. Phowa (literally "transference" or "ejection") is the art of projection of consciousness from the body to another state at the moment of death. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche offers a brief introduction to five modalities, including deity phowa in which the practitioner seeks to merge with a yidam or god-form.

2. "Pure lands" or "buddha-fields" (Sanskrit buddhakṣetra) are especially important in East Asian Mahayana Buddhism. When we study the accounts of how such realms are created through the will, merit and imagination of superior beings, we may have an Eastern model for reality creation in the imaginal realm.

3. In our Active Dreaming approach, we do not use the symbols, postures, mantras or guru devotion of dream yoga as practiced in Tibetan Buddhist lineages and others, though we respect these. However, Active Dreaming, like dream yoga is a discipline that requires practice, practice, practice. Like yoga, Active Dreaming is a science of consciousness. It trains you to raise your awareness, play witness to yourself, go beyond consensual hallucinations, and enter the limitless field of nonlocal mind. It will certainly earn you frequent flyer miles, and maybe even premier status for the Big journey.

Image: The Western Pure Land of Amitabha, distemper and gold on cloth, Central Tibet c.1700.  In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. There's a lot going on here! At the bottom are courtyards, giant lotus flowers, and pools from which the purified are being reborn.

Sleeping Tiger, Flying Sage

 

Chen Tuan (871-989) was a renowned Taoist sage who lived a secluded life in mountain caves in western China, where he created kung fu and a method of conscious dreaming. He was an ardent student of I Ching. He reputedly wandered the country in disguise, and sometimes provided warnings of impending events such as the flooding of the Yellow River.

Legend has it that Chen Tuan won Mount Hua  – sacred to the goddess, and a center of Taoist practice up to the present day – in a chess game. He defeated Zhao Kuangyin, who later made good on his promise to deliver the mountain if he became emperor of the Tang dynasty, which he did in 960-976. Chen Tuan presided over a revival of Taoism, and is especially famous for his dream practice. He spent his later years in a cave at the Jade Clear Spring Monastery. Today it is a shrine with a statue of him in a classic pose of the dream adept known as Sleeping Tiger. He lies on his right side, with his right hand cupping his ear. His followers claimed he would lie in this position for days or even months while he traveled beyond space and time in his subtle body.

He taught that to dream well, we want to develop the practice of shifting attention from the physical to the subtle.  For neophytes, this is best attempted when you are not so tired you’ll just crash. Preparation includes releasing negative thoughts and  emotions and bodily complaints. There is a Taoist technique for that which centers on directing an “inner smile” to complaining parts of the body.

When we dream, the Taoist master taught, we enter realities beyond the physical. The core practice is to remain conscious as you relax your body in sleep position. You issue yourself a “sleep command” directing where you intend to go and what you intend to do. And you arrange your body in bed in the posture of a sleeping tiger.

The instructions for that can be given as follows:

Lie on your right side. Extend your left arm along your left leg. Your right hand may be cupped over your right ear, or tucked under the pillow. Bend your right knee. Leave your left leg  loosely extended. This posture shifts breathing to the left nostril and this is believed to activate right brain activity, facilitating strong visual and intuitive experiences and smoothing the way to states of brainwave activity associated with dreaming or meditation.

This posture is not unique to Taoists; it has been widely adopted and recommended in many dreaming traditions, sometimes as an ideal posture for entering death. The Buddha, at the moment of death, is depicted in Asian art as lying in the posture of the sleeping tiger.

Like tigers, a dream master may take plenty of “power naps” in the course of an day. This was a preferred technique of Chen Tuan. He would keep visitors waiting while he grabbed fifteen minutes in the sleeping tiger mode.  Chen Tuan is revered in Taoist tradition as “Ancestral Teacher”. He liked to call himself  Fuyao Zi, which means “one who soars high through the sky”, like a dragon or flying tiger.

News from Tibet: If dreams are illusions, so is life, so dream more

I am always astonished when Westerners drawn to Buddhism tell me that in this tradition, dreams are regarded as illusions from an unclear mind, for which the Rx is to cleanse and purify the mind, in order to dream no more.

Serinity Young, a leading scholar of Buddhist dreamways, observes in Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, and Practice, “without dreams and dreaming there would be no Buddhism”. It was a dream of Queen Maya, the mother of Gautama, that announced his coming and his nature. In her dream she saw a white elephant with six tusks enter the right side of her body. This was interpreted to mean that she had conceived a child who would be a world conqueror or a buddha.  

Especially in Tibetan Buddhism, dream yoga is a practice for raising and focusing consciousness, and a training ground for death and the afterlife journey.There is a most instructive episode in the life of the great Tibetan spiritual teacher Milarepa (1040-1123), who has been described as “the greatest poet-saint” in Buddhist tradition.  He instructed his disciples to report their dreams. “Remember your dreams tonight and report to me tomorrow. I will then interpret them for you.”  He cautioned his followers to cleanse their minds of “habitual thoughts” that would carry over into the dream space and confine them to deceptive and illusory experiences.

In the morning, he asked his disciples to report their dreams. The most interesting narrative came from Gambopa, Milarepa interpreted Gambopa’s a rich and complex dream, explaining that it foreshadowed Gambopa’s future role as a great teacher and his spiritual heir.

Despite this revelation, Milarepa cautioned his followers not to assign excessive importance to dreams, since dreams partake  of “the illusory nature of all beings. Yet he applauded Gambopa for dreaming well: “Your dreams were marvelous, wondrous omens foretelling things to come.”

Milarepa delighted in recounting his own numinous dreams portending the growth of his lineage. “Last night I dreamed that an eagle flew from here to Weu and alighted on the top of a precious gem. Then many geese flocked around it…They disperse in different directions, each goose again gathering about five hundred more companions.”

His essential message was that dreams may be illusions, but probably less so than ordinary life – so go dream some more!

 

Milarepa quotations are from Garma C.C. Chang,  The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa: The Life-Story and Teaching of the Greatest Poet-Saint Ever to Appear in the History of Buddhism.

Text adapted from TheSecret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

Image: Stupa drum panel from Gandhara (modern Pakistan) showing the Dream of Māyā. Māyā lies on her left side, right leg flexed, head high against one or two pillows. The dream elephant is wholly enclosed in an aureole except for the tip of its trunk. Dtaed 2nd/3rd century BCE. In British Museum,

Yoga of Consciousness in the Place between Sleep and Awake

"You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you. That's where I'll be waiting."

-          

                  - Tinker Bell to Peter Pan in the movie "Hook"

I have been following these fairy directions for a very long time. If you can train yourself to maintain a state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, you will notice that you may be receiving a whole menu of possibilities for lucid dream adventures. Images, faces, landscapes rise and fall. When you learn to hold one of them in focus, it may become the portal for a conscious journey.
    The Parade of Faces is a frequent phenomenon in this state. You may feel you are among a crowd of people, with faces and figures rushing by. Sometimes one may turn to look at you, which can be an interesting opportunity to enter a shared experience with another dream traveler you may or may not know in ordinary reality.
    Sometimes the images rising and falling before you look like a child's sketches, or cartoons.
    A frequent sighting for me, in this in-between state, is of what initially looks like the weave of a carpet or the mesh of a net. I have come to recognize this as a kind of border between states of reality and consciousness. With intention, I can part the strands and find myself in another order or reality.
    The liminal state of hypnagogia, which I often call the Twilight Zone, is a good place to become aware of your ability to travel beyond the body. I often find myself lifting out of the body quite effortlessly in this state, without bumps and grinds. Sometimes, when tired, I simply rest half in, half out, of my physical form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. Quite often I go flying, like a bird, over my sleeping city and to places far away.
    As Tinker Bell counseled, the Place Between Sleep and Awake is, above all, a wonderful place to rendezvous with other beings and other intelligences. It is a state in which we often become away of the psychic activity around us.
    Often, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in my default reality.
     I frequently have inner dialogues in the Place Between Sleep and Awake, with sources of knowledge I have come to trust. This is a time when I can often receive streams of counsel and information from inner guides. In Dreamgates, I record some of my conversations with the intelligence I decided to call "G2". He carried the vocabulary and knowledge of a great Western Mystery order. I felt he was a transpersonal figure, though in no way alien to me. Many others have come to me in this liminal state. The most important of these inner guides is certainly no stranger; he is a self who observes and operates on a level of reality above the one I inhabit while living on this Earth in a physical body.
    In the history of creative breakthroughs in every field, including science and technology, the hypnagogic state has been of vital importance. In this liminal zone it is easy to make creative connections, which often involves linking things that seem to the routine mind to be unconnected. Many inventions and discoveries attributed to dreams by over-hasty writers - like Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring - are actually gifts brought through from hypnagogia, to such an extent that I call this zone of consciousness "the solution state" in The Secret History of Dreaming.

        It is surprising that so little has been written about the nature and manifold possibilities of this liminal state in the literature of sleep and dreams. Greek Cypriot author Andreas Mavromatis wrote the only book I know entirely devoted to this liminal state of consciousness, marrying scientific data to rich accounts of creative and visionary accomplishments in this zone. In Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep, originally published in 1987, Mavromatis writes that

“Hypnagogia…facilitates the emergence into consciousness of material that might otherwise remain unconscious. It might, thus, also constitute the platform onto which is periodically raised the substratum of continuous but not always conscious mental activities taking place throughout life. As such, it opens great vistas of psychological exploration. Its introspective study may furnish the individual not only with the benefits of an integrated personality but also with the means of discovering new or little known modes of experiencing which will undoubtedly enrich him/her as a psychological entity.”  

    The Place Between Sleep and Wake can be the very best place to go on with a dream or go back inside one. You may want to practice dream reentry to clarify information from a dream, or get to its full meaning, or continue a conversation with a dream character. You may need to reenter a dream because there are terrors to be overcome, or a mystery to be explored, or simply because you were having fun and adventure and would like to have more. Or because Tinker Bell is waiting for you.
    The Place between Sleep and Awake is the best place to develop the continuity of consciousness prized by advanced practitioners of the yoga of sleep and dreams. I am talking about growing your ability to maintain awareness and witness perspective as you move back and forth between sleep, half-sleep, dream, lucid dreaming, what Sri Aurobindo called “the sleep of experiences” and the dream of everyday life.


Art: "The Victory" by René Magritte (1939)

The Place Between Sleep and Awake

"You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you. That's where I'll be waiting."

-                           -  Tinker Bell to Peter Pan in the Hollywood movie 

I have been following these fairy directions for a very long time. If you can train yourself to maintain a state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, called dormiveglia in Italian, you will notice that you may be receiving a whole menu of possibilities for lucid dream adventures. Images, faces, landscapes rise and fall. When you learn to hold one of them in focus, it may become the portal for a conscious journey.
    The Parade of Faces is a frequent phenomenon in this state. You may feel you are among a crowd of people, with faces and figures rushing by. Sometimes one may turn to look at you, which can be an interesting opportunity to enter a shared experience with another dream traveler you may or may not know in ordinary reality.
    Sometimes the images rising and falling before you look like a child's sketches, or cartoons.
    A frequent sighting for me, in this in-between state, is of what initially looks like the weave of a carpet or the mesh of a net. I have come to recognize this as a kind of border between states of reality and consciousness. With intention, I can part the strands and find myself in another order or reality.
    The liminal state of hypnagogia, which I often call the Twilight Zone, is a good place to become aware of your ability to travel beyond the body. I often find myself lifting out of the body quite effortlessly in this state, without bumps and grinds. Sometimes, when tired, I simply rest half in, half out, of my physical form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. Quite often I go flying, like a bird, over my sleeping city and to places far away.
    As Tinker Bell counseled, the Place Between Sleep and Awake is, above all, a wonderful place to rendezvous with other beings and other intelligences. It is a state in which we often become away of the psychic activity around us. We may receive visitors, and we will want to learn to screen and discern who we are letting into our space. 
    Often, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in my default reality.    The 3rd century philosopher Iamblichus counseled in his treatise On the Mysteries that we should pay special attention to “god-sent experiences” that become available in the “condition between sleeping and waking”. He observed that “when sleep is leaving us, and we are beginning to awake...voices are heard by us” and “sometimes a bright and tranquil light shines forth".
     I frequently have inner dialogues in the Place Between Sleep and Awake, with sources of knowledge I have come to trust. This is a time when I can often receive streams of counsel and information from inner guides. In Dreamgates, I record some of my conversations with the intelligence I decided to call "G2". He carried the vocabulary and knowledge of a great Western Mystery order. I felt he was a transpersonal figure, though in no way alien to me. Many others have come to me in this liminal state. The most important of these inner guides is certainly no stranger; he is a self who observes and operates on a level of reality above the one I inhabit while living on this Earth in a physical body.
    In the history of creative breakthroughs in every field, including science and technology, the hypnagogic state has been of vital importance. In this liminal zone it is easy to make creative connections, which often involves linking things that seem to the routine mind to be unconnected. Many inventions and discoveries attributed to dreams by over-hasty writers - like Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring - are actually gifts brought through from hypnagogia, to such an extent that I call this zone of consciousness "the solution state" in The Secret History of Dreaming.
    The Greek Cypriot author Andreas Mavromatis wrote the only book I know entirely devoted to this liminal state of consciousness, marrying scientific data to rich accounts of creative and visionary accomplishments in this zone. In Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep, originally published in 1987, Mavromatis writes that

“Hypnagogia…facilitates the emergence into consciousness of material that might otherwise remain unconscious. It might, thus, also constitute the platform onto which is periodically raised the substratum of continuous but not always conscious mental activities taking place throughout life. As such, it opens great vistas of psychological exploration. Its introspective study may furnish the individual not only with the benefits of an integrated personality but also with the means of discovering new or little known modes of experiencing which will undoubtedly enrich him/her as a psychological entity.” 

    The Place Between Sleep and Wake can be the very best place to go on with a dream or go back inside one. You may want to practice dream reentry to clarify information from a dream, or get to its full meaning, or continue a conversation with a dream character. You may need to reenter a dream because there are terrors to be overcome, or a mystery to be explored, or simply because you were having fun and adventure and would like to have more. Or because Tinker Bell is waiting for you.
    The Place between Sleep and Awake is the best place to develop the continuity of consciousness prized by advanced practitioners of the yoga of sleep and dreams. I am talking about growing your ability to maintain awareness and witness perspective as you move back and forth between sleep, half-sleep, dream, lucid dreaming, what Sri Aurobindo called “the sleep of experiences” and the dream of everyday life.
     For me, it is less interesting to wake up to the fact that I am dreaming than to be able to observe myself and be fully aware that at every turning in any state of being and consciousness, I have the power to choose what I will do and to test the limits of any reality.

Image: album cover for "Dormiveglia" (8 Tracks Radio)

Dreaming beyond the body we find worlds beyond the body

The excellent new sci-fantasy film "Dr Strange" gives us memorable images of adventures in the astral body. Actually, we go traveling in our astral bodies in dreams almost every night, whether or not we are remotely aware of what we are doing or where we are doing it.
   When we become conscious that we can travel beyond the body in this way, we are poised to recognize that if consciousness can travel beyond the body during life, it will also survive physical death. With this awakening, we are ready to practice the everyday dream yoga of becoming lucid in dreams and embarking on conscious dream journeys. This approach is central to Active Dreaming. It is the most important and most accessible source of direct knowledge of the survival of consciousness after death and conditions in the afterlife.

   Wherever spirituality is truly alive, this is is understood. In the language of the Makiritare, an indigenous dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for "dream" is adekato, literally a "journey of the soul". Even St. Augustine – who had problems with dreams when he abandoned his lover for the church and decided that sex was disgusting – recommended paying the closest attention to dreams in which the dreamer is conscious he is outside his body. In a letter he wrote when he was working on The City of God, Augustine quoted the experience of one Gennadius, “a physician of Carthage”. 
   In a dream, Gennadius encountered a radiant young man who led him to an otherworldly city where he heard singing “so exquisitely sweet as to surpass anything he had ever heard”. Waking, the doctor dismissed his experience as “only a dream”. His radiant visitor returned the following night and asked Gennadius whether he had been asleep or awake when they had met before. 
   At this point, the doctor became aware that he was dreaming. When his guide asked him, “Where is your body now?” he became aware that he was also having an out-of-body experience. This was the preliminary to a teaching session in which he learned that the soul’s condition after death is similar to its condition in dreams, and he lost his doubts about life after life.
    The story of Gennadius finds echoes in the experiences of conscious dreamers today. In the wake of Raymond Moody's Life after Life (1975), there have been a flock of accounts of visionary journeys reported during "near-death experience" (NDE). It is not necessary to suffer life-threatening illness to make a conscious journey to explore the conditions of the soul after death.
    In a dream that was the gateway to many further explorations, I found myself in a large room where people in a circle were waiting for me. An electric blue fire burned in an alcove. A radiant guide indicated that I was to lead them through it. As we danced into the fire, my guide asked, "Where is your body?"
    Now aware that I was dreaming and out of the body, I was briefly tempted to rush back to check on the inert form on the bed. But I managed to stay with the dream and was shown a number of places of teaching for people who seemed to have passed on. At one of these teaching facilities, students of all ages joined their voices in songs of extraordinary beauty. The chorus of one of these songs stirs in me now:

What cannot be seen in the dream
cannot be seen in its glory

Behind the singers rose the buildings of a beautiful university. I have been able to visit this wonderful place of higher learning, meet some of its faculty, and audit some of its classes. For me it is the true Alma Mater, the school of Mother Soul.

Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss

Photo: Dr Strange is knocked into his astral body by the Ancient One in the Marvel film "Dr Strange". 

Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Your Launch Pad for Lucid Dreaming

The easiest way to embark on lucid dreaming is to practice maintaining awareness as dream images rise and fall during twilight states between sleep and waking.The twilight zone offers optimum conditions to develop your ability to make intentional journeys beyond the physical body to learn the nature and conditions of other orders of reality. 

     As you spend more time in the twilight zone, you will discover a notable increase in both your creativity and your psychic awareness. Going with the flow of spontaneous imagery in the twilight zone puts you into the stream of the creative process. It puts you in league with your creative source, mediated by mentors who appear to you in the half-dream state, or coming through cool and clear as a mountain spring. It is no accident that highly creative people — from Einstein to the romance writer and the powerboat designer I met on recent plane trips — are very much at home in the twilight zone

      In the language of the sleep scientists, the twilight zone is the realm of hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences. Hypnagogic literally means “leading toward sleep”; hypnopompic means “leading away from sleep.” But these terms do not take us to the heart of the matter. You may enter the twilight zone before and after sleep, but you may also enter it wide awake, with no intention of sleeping.
      It is not the relationship to sleep that defines the twilight zone; it is its character as a border county. It is the junction between sleep and waking, certainly. But more than this, as Mary Watkins wrote beautifully in Waking Dreams, it is “the plane of coexistence of the two worlds." In this borderland, you will find the gates to other worlds opening smoothly and fluidly — if you let them and are prepared for what may follow.
      When I allow myself to drift through this frontier region with no fixed agenda, I have the sense of leaning through a window or a doorway in space. Sometimes this feels like hanging out of the open hatch of an airplane. I have come to recognize this as the opening of a dreamgate. Depending on circumstances and intention, I can step forward into the next dimension or haul myself back into physical focus.

      From this departure lobby, the great explorers of the imaginal realm have used many gates and flight paths. This is why the twilight state has such vital significance in dream yoga, in shamanic training, in the Western Mystery traditions, in the “science of mirrors” of the medieval Persian philosophers, and in other schools of active spirituality.

     According to Tantric teachings, it is by learning to prolong this “intermediate state” and to operate with full awareness within it that you achieve dream mastery and, beyond this, the highest level of consciousness attainable for an embodied human. The Spandakarika of Vasagupta, which dates from the tenth century, recommends the use of breathing exercises to focus and maintain awareness as you move from waking into the twilight state. The dreamer is urged to place himself “at the junction between inhaled and exhaled breaths, at the very point where he enters into contact with energy in the pure state.” This is the entry into conscious dreaming, whose gifts (according to Tantric text) could be immense: “The Lord of necessity grants him during dreams the ends he pursues, providing that he is profoundly contemplative and places himself at the junction between waking and sleeping."

     The aim of the practice is to achieve continuity of consciousness through sleeping, waking, and the intermediate state. When this is attained, the practitioner has ascended to the mystical Fourth State — the turiya of the Upanishads. This is the highly evolved consciousness of a person who has awakened to the reality of the Self; it now infuses his awareness at all times.

     In the Greco-Roman world, the twilight zone was a place of rendezvous with divine messengers and even the gods themselves. Iamblichus, the author of an important book on the Mysteries, urged the need to pay special attention to “god-sent dreams” in the intermediate state, especially after waking:

“They come when sleep is leaving us, or we are just waking. We may hear a certain voice that tells us concisely what needs to be done. Sometimes we feel surrounded by a presence that cannot be perceived by the sight, but is sensed in other ways. The entrance of the spirit is accompanied by a noise….But sometimes a bright and tranquil light shines forth.”

From the ascent to the Fourth State to a walk-in by a spirit or daimon, there is clearly no ceiling on possibility in this area. But first and last, experiment in the twilight zone is wonderful fun. Think of this as your cosmic playground. 

Adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing: "The Moon Is At the Foot of My Bed" by RM

Dream an upgrade for your flight to Paradise

In a lighter moment in an otherwise very sober guide to the bardos of life, death and after, Dzogchen Ponlop suggests that through the right practices, we can earn an upgrade on our ride to the afterlife. He writes in Mind beyond Death that “the way we make any journey depends on the type of ticket we have…We may even have collected mileage points. We may be eligible for an upgrade to first class." He allows that advanced dreamers may have earned sky priority, and direct access to the "pure lands", including the realm created by the buddha Amitabha. If you have traveled this way before, and your heart wants to go there again, you may be able to project your consciousness there at the moment of death by "pure realm phowa." Another reason to deepen the practice of dreaming. Here's the key passage:

“Pure realm phowa is connected to the practice of dream yoga. It involves directly transferring out consciousness at the time of death to one of the Buddha realms, such as the pure land of Amitabha or Akshobya, or to any of the sacred realms of the dakas, dakinis or bodhisattvas. "The capacity to effect such a transference is developed through training in dream yoga. In that practice, not only do we learn to recognize the dream state, but also we develop the skill to transform our dream appearances. When we have developed that degree of control over our minds, then we can travel in our dreams to any Buddha field we wish. "According to these teachings, if we can exercise that kind of power in our dreams, then we will be able to exercise the same power in this bardo [the Bardo of Dying]. We can use our understanding and experience of dream yoga to spontaneously transport ourselves to any sacred realm with which we have a heart connection. For example, you do not have to be a realized being in order to take birth in Amitabha’s pure land. Ordinary beings with a strong aspiration and good accumulation of merit can also take birth there. If we can achieve such a positive situation then we will have the optimum conditions to continue our spiritual training. Our practice will be supported by the blessings of buddhas and boidhisattvas."

A few notes: 1. Phowa (literally "transference" or "ejection") is the art of projection of consciousness from the body to another state at the moment of death. Dzogchen Ponlop offers a brief introduction to five modalities, including deity phowa in which the practitioner seeks to merge with a yidam or god-form. 2. "Pure lands" or "buddha-fields"  (Sanskrit buddhakṣetra) are especially important in East Asian Mahayana Buddhism. When we study the accounts of how such realms are created through the will, merit and imagination of superior beings, we may have an Eastern model for reality creation in the imaginal realm. 3. In our Active Dreaming approach, we do not use the symbols, postures, mantras or guru devotion of dream yoga as practiced in Tibetan Buddhist lineages and others, though we respect these. However, Active Dreaming, like dream yoga is a discipline that requires practice, practice, practice. Like yoga, Active Dreaming is a science of consciousness. It trains you to raise your awareness, play witness to yourself, go beyond consensual hallucinations, and enter the limitless field of nonlocal mind. It will certainly earn you frequent flyer miles, and maybe even premier status for the Big journey. Art: The famous Thaima Mandala, woven in Japan in the 8th century, showing the "pure land" of Amitabha, who appears as a giant figure at the center, projecting new features of this realm through the remarkable light emanation above his head.