Thanks, I will put it on my list!
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hey Arthur, I lived in Belleville, Ontario for about 5 years (during middle school and the first year of high school). I work as a frontend engineer (with React). I’m creating a ‘blog thread’ in the general discussion forum since I’ve used that at other forums to intermittently share whatever comes up in practice, dreams or life.
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Thanks for setting this community up again after the Facebook interlude.
I took an online Tricycle Dream Yoga course from Andrew a couple of years ago and that has led to retreats with Andrew, Charlie Morley and most recently, Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche. My attraction to Eastern religions began in the 1960s and I’ve kept up my interest over the decades through the ins and outs of life’s blessings and family work requirements. I am a former Peace Corps Volunteer (Nepal), Air Force Vietnam Veteran, trained Waldorf teacher, retired University Professor and Vipassana meditator.
I had my first recognized lucid dream when I was 71 thanks to Andrew’s teaching and encouragement and I appreciate the amazing scope and depth of the resources being collected and distributed on this portal. I have enjoyed all the interviews/dialogues between Andrew and (AMAZING GUESTS), instructive Q&A webinars and the introduction to the many books and resources we have available to followup on our interests. I greatly appreciate the collective wisdom of so many wonderful NightClub participants and of those who will be contributing in the future.
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I’m excited for the opportunity to connect with like minded people. I have been a student of Eastern Religion, Advaita and Buddhism for many years. With the birth of my daughter and disruptions in my sleep each night, I started spontaneously having lucid dreams and then out of body experiences. For more than ten years I fine tuned an out of body practice where I explored other realms, met with loved ones that had passed and learned about the afterlife. All the while I was still looking for enlightenment through Eastern teachings and meditation because I thought that was where i would really experience my true nature. After reading the Uphanishads and Mahamudra I learned how the dream world and meditation were two sides of the same coin. Somehow that realization catapulted my experiences to a new level that I’m still integrating and adjusting to. When reading Andrews book, “Dream Yoga” I understood everything because I had already been practicing dream yoga, sleep yoga, and bardo yoga. All of my experiences happened before I had terms to describe them. It is through a handful of wonderful authors that I have been able to use their terms and language to describe what I have been experiencing. Thank you for allowing me to share. You can’t just share this type of thing anywhere!
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Ayo! My name is Braxton and I am grad student studying Mindfulness-based Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa in Boulder Colorado. I first started lucid dreaming as a kid when having some reoccuring nightmares. One was seeing a t-rex in a mall and the other was being kidnapped and carried into a bamboo forest but would wake up freaked out before entering. When I got lucid I decided to let him take me into it and when we got there the dream dissolved and it never happened again. Thus began my facination with lucidity, but nothing formal till I was about 18 or 19.
About a decade ago I started getting back into the western form of lucid dreaming and practicing meditation. Robert Waggoner was a huge inspiration during that time. I also spent a fair amount of time on retreat with Shinzen Young and various Theravada teachers, as well as working with Michael Taft and managing Deconstructing Yourself for a few years. Over the past three years I also have been studying Dzogchen with Tsoknyi Rinpoche and diving deeper into the Tibetan teachings on dream yoga. Very grateful for Andrew’s work as it’s been quite helpful for integrating these two worlds.
Very excited to dive in deeper here as the past month my dream world has been quite inspiring, insightful and fun! Look forward to connecting.
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Funny about your daughter. My kitten waking me up is what got me back into the groove of the wake back to bed method 
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Rich background, Braxton, and great current course of studies. Naropa is just down the road from where I live. Tsoknyi Rinpoche is a rock star, lucky you.
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That’s part of the spirit, to share with like-minded folks, knowing you’re not alone. Welcome to the Club!
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I actually already knew you were here after a funny experience. One time I came back from retreat and was having all these weird nyams related to feeling like I was dreaming while awake and you ended up being the dentist where I get my teeth done. I think I was ranting about my dreams to the dentist assistant and she said I should talk to you before I leave because you wrote books on dreaming :-P. Didn’t know you were a dentist or in Boulder at that time but had read your work.
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Hello everyone! My name’s Ken, I’ve been keenly interested (obsessed is probably more accurate) in lucid dreaming since 2013, when I started reading and following LaBerge’s ETWOLD. Before that, I had never had particularly good dream recall (I would remember maybe one dream every month or two, that was particularly emotional or significant) and didn’t remember ever having had a lucid dream. But that very first night of setting intention to remember and record dreams, I recalled 5 dreams over several wakings!
Ever since that first night, I have recalled usually several, and often many dreams every night (except in moments of extreme stress, sickness, or jet lag). Zero-recall nights are (thankfully) extremely rare for me.
I put LaBerge’s recommendations and exercises into practice (also following from his A Course In Lucid Dreaming, companion booklet to ETWOLD), and recall grew along with dream vividness and clarity. I also read the archives on the Dreamviews site voraciously, looking for that “perfect recipe” for lucid dreaming. I enrolled in the Dreamviews DILD course, posting my progress and getting advice and encouragement from the instructors there. 30 days after beginning, I had my first lucid dream towards the end of an extraordinarily vivid dream: the thought “I’m dreaming!” entered my dreaming mind, and I took my first steps into a much larger, more exciting world!
About 9 months into my LD practice I encountered the concept of mindfulness, and added that to my LD toolbox. I had about 54 lucid dreams in the first year of practice. I was now frequently giving advice to new members, and a few months in to my second year of practice I was made (and still am) a DILD co-teacher on the Dreamviews DILD course. Somewhere along the way I discovered The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (TYoDaS). I found that my advice to new practitioners was starting to congeal to a core set of principles I was frequently repeating, and in 2015 I codified these as my “Unified Theory of Lucid Dreaming” (link: https://www.dreamviews.com/attaining-lucidity/158958-fryingmans-unified-theory-lucid-dreaming-pay-attention-reflect-recall-both-day-night.html), where I state that what’s really important are: paying purposeful attention to present moment experiences, frequently reflecting on these experiences (to determine waking/dreaming), and practicing recalling these experiences, and doing exactly the same thing both day (waking experiences) and night (dreaming experiences) – with the conclusion that the day practice supports the night, and the night practice supports the day.
At some point I discovered Andrew Holecek with his 2016 book Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep, and found so many of Andrew’s framings of the ideas around lucid dreaming resonated strongly with the ideas I had about lucid dreaming. It was a very motivating book for me.
I practiced more or less consistently (particularly dream recall) for 3 years, with amazing nights full of epic, vivid dreams, and accumulated 225 journaled lucid dreams. I even got in a few dream yoga exercises into a few LDs (alternately making a wall be solid & transparent [sticking my hand through it]).
But in 2016 I lost my wife to cancer, which was a massive blow to me and put my dreaming practice on hold. I still have daily recall but usually only short fragments, and epic non-lucids and LDs are very few and far between. Life slowly got better with time, and I made a few half-hearted attempts at a dreaming comeback, but they never really took off.
About two weeks ago I made a decision to fully dedicate myself to resurrecting my dreaming practice. I really miss the long, vivid, present, alternate-life-level epic non-lucids, and of course the lucids as well. I really want to progress through the dream yoga exercises, and achieve as best I can, continuous lucidity throughout the night and the day, allowing me to thoroughly explore my dream worlds and to fully appreciate the beauty of the waking world as well. I don’t consider myself Buddhist per se (I follow a different faith), but many of the Buddhist ideas resonate very strongly with me. TYoDaS (along with ETWOLD chapters 1-3 and Andrew’s book) are by far my favorite LD texts.
One of the things that I miss is the LD community – unfortunately, Dreamviews has become a bit of a ghost town over the last several years. In my first 3 years of practice, the site was very active with all levels of LD practitioners from newbie to master. I was recommended Andrew’s Night Club and decided to join, as one way to affirm my commitment to making a full come-back. Here, I hope to participate in a community of like-minded practitioners supporting each other on our journey, fill my toolbox with practices that support lucidity (and defeat middle-of-the-night insomnia, my long-term LD practice nemesis), and to have access to Q&A with Andrew. I also want to finally make solid progress on WILD (I’ve always been crappy at it – insomnia) with the dream yoga night-time practices. I’m really happy to be here!
p.s. I am also very interested in electronic LD induction projects, having consulted on several over the years, and even started my own (not completed).
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Just wanted to send a brief note to Andrew here saying that is great that you have built this community. Appreciate your effort bringing people and resources around lucid dreaming together.
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Hello! My name’s Jared. I did a Dream Yoga retreat with Andrew a few years ago. I struggle with insomnia, both falling asleep and staying asleep. I mainly practice Brahmavihara meditation as taught by Bhante Vimalaramsi. Sometimes I lucid dream and when I do I default to doing metta meditation. I am interested in doing walking meditation inside a lucid dream. I am also curious about sleep yoga. I’m a beginner to the nocturnal practices.
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Ditto for me on your second and third sentences. Good to have you here.
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Aloha! My name is Matt and I was born and raised here in the islands
I’ve been pretty lucky dreaming wise. I started randomly having my first lucid dreams when I was in my early teens, and they’ve kept up with some regularity ever since. However being that young I was immediately blinded by the fun and pleasure seeking aspects of it and essentially got stuck there for the next 15 or so years. Then in 2013 I found out about Dream Yoga and the Western approaches to lucid dreaming and realized how much more the practice could be. Then as I started having more meaningful experiences it really peaked my interest and I’ve been digging ever since. Also just in the last year I’ve started giving little talks and presentations on the topic and in the process discovered a real love for sharing and spreading the practice.
Thanks for putting this stuff together Andrew I love your work!
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Hiya!
Just joined after much deliberation. I wanted to ask the boss via email if this would be useful for me - for what my intentions were. I have also been putting off talks on his main website, which I’ve finally started. What came up is in the talk on Importance Of View, around 26:25, Andrew says “Mind is public domain.” Having an experience of such, and the last public webinar on Fear, I figured what the heck. My “story” will unfold via other posts.
I was warned against “looking to get” vs “let the practice work you.” I’m looking to get. But I have no qualms about ever being able to lucid dream - at least in my current state. I just want to get to know myself right now, and dreams appear to be the only way. (see my profile picture - yep - I’m sharing all my embarrassing stuff lol!)
Keenly interested in the psychological, buddhist, and medical aspects for the moment.
Was surprised Daytime Practices and (forget right now the other track) were the 2 recommended tracks for newbs. I thought sleep hygeine and medical aspects were going to be first, as the ground. Curious.
Holecek’s passion when he talks is so inspiring, and his knowledge is vast. (sorry, teacher terror: I always refer to my fave teachers as their last name for some reason!) No way will I ever know that much, I’m running out of time! For example, I’ve had “intention” glued to “hope/fear”. But he enacted what setting an intention might look like, in a previous public webinar. Huge AHA for me.
mycoses - my kryptonite. Literally.
- Courtney
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Hi Allison,
My name is Linda and I’m new here. My experience with lucid dreaming is unusual. In my early twenties I was a student of Kundalini Yoga and their practices threw me into lucid dreams. There was no guidance about how to respond to them, so it was just a fun trip until it wasn’t. I got into some very scary ground, and dropped out because I felt I had no protection. After that I resisted the lucid state when it happened and stopped meditation. Many years later I met a Tibetan Lama who encouraged me to start meditation practice again. He did something to protect me and not only did the episodes completely stop, but I had no recollection of my dreams when I woke up. There was a brief interlude when I did a Dream Yoga Retreat with another Lama, but then things reverted back. Then recently I began reading Longchenpa’s Finding Rest in Illusion, and doing those practices started me having vivid dreams that I could remember In the morning. I started keeping a journal and got Andrew’s new book to support the changes I see happening. None of the material is really new, because my background in Tibetan Buddhism goes back a long ways, but I like the Western perspective that he adds and I’m really happy to have a community like this for support.
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What a journey! Have you read the other two books in that trilogy or just this one?
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Hi there Kirsten from Seattle here,
I’ve been navigating here through these comments for a while but have not introduced myself, so thought it about time. I have studied and practiced Tibetan Buddhism for over twenty years. It’s been a great journey of self discovery. I learned about Andrew through a Tricycle course - Navigating the Bardos - and have been following many of his teachings since then. Dreams have been interesting to me, I guess I’ve always thought there was something to learn from them. I haven’t actively pursued dreams by following any protocols, I have let them reveal themselves. I’ve had some really powerful ones, especially when on retreat. I guess the quiet meditative setting and practice sets me up for them.
Along with the Dreams of Light book discussion group, I’m reading Why We Sleep. So fun to learn about something so integral to my life, yet so underappreciated - sleep. In any case, my dreams are there and sometimes I’m able to write them down. I’m working to cultivate better sleep habits and am thankful for my cat who wakes me up every day somewhere between 3 and 5 am for his extra nosh (doesn’t matter how much was out at bedtime, he wants more). I’m then ready for my early morning REM dreams. I’ve had some success. It would be great to be able to order up some dreams, but I know that isn’t how it works.
I’m looking forward to learning more from many of you in this group of dreamers.
I confess to being a little overwhelmed by the amount of information and commentary there is so if anyone has hints on how to manage the information oveload I’d be very appreciative.
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I also found my way here through one of Andrew’s Tricycle Courses (Dream Yoga) and I agree, there is so on this site that it can be overwhelming. One thing I found useful is to Bookmark posts you want to reread or that you know are significant for you but just not at this time. Attending the Webinars is also a great way to get into the flow of information and experiences readily shared 24/7.
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