Remembering our dreams

The art of dreaming is one of the many pathways to enlightenment. The art of dreaming, is the art of changing dreams. 

But why would we want to change our dreams? The advantage that a dreamer, who mastered the art of dreaming has, is that they can change dreams at will. If they find themselves stuck in a certain level of attention, stuck in a certain way of seeing life, at will they can change that. It’s like changing the channel. Everyone else has to just watch the same channel. But you can change the channel. A very advanced dreamer, of course, can not only have access to thousands of different realities but can go beyond all static realities, to infinite consciousness, to the superconscious awareness from which all these things come forth to the source. 

“That is the art of dreaming, you see, to be awake in the dream.” 
                       – Dr. Frederick Lenz, Rama

 In the yoga of dreaming, in which there are two primary stages, we begin by learning how to dream. At night, when we go to sleep, we meditate first and we plan to wake up in the dream, to become conscious during a dream that we’re dreaming. You’ll be asleep and you’ll be engaged in a dream, perhaps you’ll be walking through Times Square in New York City or visiting a friend’s house. And of course you’re unaware that you’re dreaming. Then suddenly, you say, “Wait a minute! This is a dream! I’m dreaming. I know my body is lying asleep somewhere and this is a dream. And as a dreamer, I can now change realities at will. Now that I’ve brought my attention into this dream and I’m no longer locked into the movie where all I’m aware of is what’s on the screen, I can actually realize I’m sitting here watching it. I can change movies.”

It’s like being in one of the Cineplex theaters where they have eight different movie screens, eight different little theaters, and you can get up and leave the theater and walk into another theater. And then another and another. You can choose what you want to dream. That is to say, you can travel and have conscious experiences in the dream state.

In the first step of dreaming, we set up dreaming. Oh, there are dream exercises that you can practice to help. Before you go to bed, you should sit up and meditate on something that you’re going to do in dreaming.

Meditate for a while and have a nice meditation, and perhaps at the end of meditation, and perhaps for a few minutes at the beginning, you’ll think of a place that you’d like to go in dreaming, where you’ll become conscious. A power place perhaps, where you’ve been, and you’ll go there in dreaming and become conscious that you’re dreaming. You might go and meet someone in dreaming and you’ll think to yourself, “Well, I’m going to go see so and so in dreaming and wake up in my dreaming when I meet them.” Focus on your third eye, the agni chakra.  Dreaming needs to be a way of going beyond dreams. That’s the yoga of dreaming.

Finally, we reach a dream that’s so subtle that there’s very little difference between that dream and the waking state because it’s the dream of the waking state, and then we move into the waking state, which is the superconscious awareness. That’s the yoga of dreaming.