Question from the dream bardo

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Is it feasible to build another room on this club…or premature?

I wondered this in my sleep as I dug through my bag of dreaming toys and found nothing I wanted to play with.

The dream toys I have mostly involve activity, motion, physical skills, plot lines, intellectual feats, and cinematic special effects. None of those play a big part in my waking life, so it’s not surprising they also don’t sparkle in my sleep.

Call me an old fuddy duddy, but I’m interested in digging through the toy box that’s filled with the rest of the brain’s tricks: sensory and non-sensory perception, emotion, awareness, space and non-verbal nothingness. It’s all in there, and I’m feeling like a bear in a virgin dump.

I know there’s plenty of nice smelly garbage in this landfill. I’ve had glimpses for 60 years of disembodied emotion, sensation detatched from any story, form existing by itself in dream space…but I’m a novice at moving into and through those dreams.

I know. Can’t run ‘til you walk. Can’t play sonatas ‘til you play scales.

Breath meditation is like walking and scales, though. I’m not talking about levitation (running, sonatas) in the room I’m proposing. I’m asking if there’s a critical mass of us here playing with the basics of non-programatic dreaming. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to explore meditation in deeper dream states…yet…only wanting to look at non-physical, non-active dreaming in the more shallow states.

Does that make any sense at all?! I’m having trouble articulating what I’m imagining. Help!

Are there enough people here yet interested in that world to get a side conversation going?

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Hi hi Alan -

I think you’re talking about the more advanced, Sleep Yoga and Bardo Yoga, yes? “Dreams” of the Clear Light mind? Non-dualistic awareness?

I might suggest that you start a fresh topic (“room”) within the Sleep Yoga or Bardo Yoga section of the Club. Seems ripe for this kind of discourse and you can start any new topic you’d like, ask questions, share thoughts - whatever you’d to do build your proverbial toy chest.

What do you think?

http://community.nightclub.andrewholecek.com/t/sleep-yoga-introduction/111

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I don’t think what I’m talking about occurs in deep dreamless sleep. It is only a different kind of regular dream…a formless sort. I don’t experience this in the other sleep stages, so don’t believe it falls under the category of “sleep yoga.” God knows I’ll never be that evolved!

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Might you share an example of one your formless dream experiences? I’d love to hear about it…

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Can’t say I could. It is formless, after all!

It is not a place of nothingness, though, and I’m drawn to it…far more than I am to dreams with form.

As a child, I experienced it as pure emotion without cause, and that was scary until I learned how to play it without losing myself. Now I find it fascinating and beguiling…and no longer about emotion but about being.

In fact, when I woke this morning I wanted to make that distinction in my first post, then forgot. I felt that our discussion here is largely about lucidly doing, whereas these dreams are about lucidly being. I wondered if I could at least partially describe it, others might chime in.

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Here’s a really crazy thought, arising with the yeast as I make bread, but I’ll throw it out there anyway: Is it possible that our “dreamless” nights are filled with dreams of being rather than dreams of doing, and if we learn how to become lucid to being-dreams, we find that maybe those nights are not so dreamless after all? Could it be not quite so simple as, “I don’t remember them?”

During daytime consciousness, we tend to equate “just” being with nothingness and regard only activity and drama as worthy of notice. Play is not work and the playground is not school. Our other perversions of thought carry over into our dreams…why not that?

As a former dream group devotee and journaler, was I adding plots to the being-dreams just so I could comprehend them with my limited conscious awareness and share them with others…and with my conscious self? (It sure as hell felt like that sometimes, which is why I ran away from it for 40 years.) Dramatic dreams incorporate sensory inputs. Perhaps a being-dream substrate turns into one of those inputs when we demand our dreams have stories and action, and access to that substrate is granted when doing-dream expections are allowed to fall aside.

I warned you it was a crazy thought, but sleep on it!