Speaker 1 · 0:03Hi, everybody. I'm really fascinated by today's expert and topic. Our friend Andrew Holicek is here. Andrew Holicek is an author and a spiritual teacher. He offers talks, online courses, and workshops all over the US and abroad. He's a longtime student of Buddhism. He frequently presents this tradition from a contemporary perspective, blending the ancient wisdom of the East with modern knowledge from the West. Drawing on years of intensive study and practice, he teaches on the opportunities that exist in obstacles, helping people with hardship and pain, death and dying, and also problems in meditation. Known as an expert on lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep and dream, he's an experienced guide for students drawn to these powerful nocturnal practices. Andrew is the author of many books and offers seminars internationally on meditation, lucid dreaming, and dream yoga. He's the author of Dream Yoga, Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming, and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep, the Audio Learning Course, Dream Yoga, The Tibetan Path of Awakening Through Lucid Dreaming, Dreams of Light, The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming, and The Lucid Dreaming Workbook, A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Your Dream Life. He's also a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the author of several scientific papers on lucid dreaming.
Speaker 2 · 1:57Welcome to everybody. It's a delight to spend some time with you sharing a topic that's, I suppose, a little bit on the esoteric side, but I think is I will try to show you has tremendous potentialities for pedagogy, for spiritual practices, for physical benefits. It's a really rich arena. And I have personally benefited from it extensively, starting in particular some 20 years ago when I did my three-year retreat, a little bit like Sean, I was a monastic for a number of years, shaved head, robes, the whole thing. And three years of intensive practice, where in the third year of our retreat, we spent a concerted period of time exploring these nocturnal meditations. This is my languaging. You will not find that verbiage anywhere else. It's a phrase I've used to refer to five particular types of practices. The idea is the more you respect your sleep, the more you respect your dreams, the more you honor your dream state, you know, we have such a dismissive relationship to the dream state, right? We say, oh, that's just the dream. I mean, that's a pejorative comment. And so it's unfortunately indicative of the way we in the West tend to dismiss the states of consciousness that fundamentally ego cannot fully experience. This has to do with a type of hubris, a type of wake-centricity that ego, this particular level of development, has towards states of consciousness it can't fully experience, like sleep and dream. And so I'll talk in a minute about what dream yoga, which is maintaining complete lucidity in the dream state. Sleep yoga, as unbelievable as it may appear, I'll mention more about this in a bit, maintaining complete lucidity in the deep dreamless state. Well, one of the biggest reasons that we in the West don't have access to these refined states of consciousness, which by the way, in Eastern philosophical traditions, these are causative states of awareness, consciousness. This is where reality actually arises from in Eastern philosophical traditions. So in a very real way, the West has it completely backwards. This kind of wake centricity that the only way we can explore mind, meditate, the only way we can know reality is through the waking state. Who says? And so Eastern philosophy, Eastern spiritual traditions draw on all three states, waking, dreaming, and deep dreamless sleep, to understand the nature of mind and reality. And so I'm going to give you a little bit of a survey of why this may be of some interest to us. Because, geez, like why bother with these things, right? My life is so busy. We put a do not disturb sign when we go to sleep, right? It's like you can rouse me during the day with your meditative psychological methodologies, but nighttime is my time. I'm going to crash out. So I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the benefits, some of the reasons why we may want, in fact, to be disturbed, so to speak. We may want to engage in these practices because the risk reward, so to speak, is very high for these things. But the idea here is that we turn the lens of the mind in, that's what happens when we fall asleep. First, we can't see a thing. When people start these practices, I can't see anything. I'm not having any lucid dreams. It's dark in there. A non-lucid dream is a dark dream. Non-lucid sleep is dark sleep. So when you first look in, you don't see anything. But guess what? You said patient, augmented with some of these techniques. And now, just like your pupils dilate, your consciousness dilates. So these practices are designed to open the aperture of your awareness, to open the aperture of your consciousness, so that you can start to see things you've never seen before. It's like they say in the Sanskrit tradition, there is no darkness within, there's only light unseen. And so that is in fact what these nocturnal meditations allow us to do. They turn on the night light. So we can see things, principally in the unconscious dimensions of our being that we have never seen before. And the more we do that, the more we're liberated from these unconscious processes. This is what it means to be awake in the deepest spiritual sense. In the West, we have a pretty gross relationship to consciousness. It's either yes, no, dead, alive, awake, asleep, right? Black and white. It's a little bit like light switch model. We have a binary Boolean approach to consciousness. On, off, yes, no, dead, alive. Well, what these eastern traditions do with these meditations is they replace the light switch, the binary light switch model with an eastern dimmer. And so instead of just awake, asleep, you're just simply going from gross to subtle to very subtle. And so these practices install that dimmer of consciousness that allow you to keep a few photons of awareness on, so that when you actually fall asleep in the mind of an awakened one, there is no unconscious mind. They literally do not fall asleep. The mind stays on at these very subtle kind of bandwidth of consciousness, 24-7 kind of awareness. And therefore, that is a result of having brought all these unconscious processes into the light of consciousness, and therefore that's real freedom, that's real liberation. And again, there's a great deal to say here for those who want to explore this with a little bit more rigor. One is working them, this is more standard lucid dreaming, an incredible rich array of benefits associated with this. One is lucid dreaming, studies have actually shown that it's been effective in working with things like depression. The thing that I find perhaps most fruitful for people is how you can work with lucidity in terms of reducing or alleviating nightmares altogether. One of the things that lucidity can help you do is a couple things. Either reframe the nightmare itself, or if you have the conviction to work with the lucid dream more overtly, this is actually a formal part of dream yoga practice, is working with frightful situations. What you do here is whenever you're experiencing a nightmare, in fact, once you're sensitized to it, you can use fear itself as a kind of dream sign. Whenever you wake yourself up from a nightmare, that's actually a moment of lucidity. There's something in that moment that says, Hey, wait a second, this is a bad dream, and you're going to wake yourself up. Well, as a lucid dreamer, dream yoga practitioner, what you do is you take that spark of lucidity, say, hey, wait, this is a bad dream. And instead of waking up, you stay in the dream. And why would you want to do that? Well, several reasons. One is that the vast majority of our nightmares, not all of them, but the vast majority of our nightmares are brought about by refused, rejected, unwanted experience. In other words, what we tend to refuse in conscious experience, out of sight is not out of mind, out of sight is into the unconscious mind. And so, therefore, a great deal of nightmarish instances, especially when you're being chased by a demon, are basically disenfranchised, dislocated, refused aspects of your identity coming back for integration and wholeness. And so, what I've discovered that if you keep running, they keep chasing. Why? Because again, what's a dream made of? It's made of your mind. And so it could be an entirely possible that these nightmares experiences that are chasing after you are simply calling for integration, calling for wholeness. If you keep running, they keep chasing, and nightmares keep coming back. If you actually have the wherewithal to realize, hey, wait a second, wait a second. This is just a dream. It may be a bad dream, but this is just a dream. Then what you do is you stop the demons chasing you, whatever. You stop, you turn around, and you face the dream, nightmarish figure directly. My dear friend Charlie Morley did a 10X clip on this. You can find his talk. He concludes his presentation with exactly this type of experience and practice, which I completely echo. I've had exactly the same thing. And so then what this does is it allows you to reintegrate to allow that particular dream image. When I've done it, very often the demonic figure will either disappear overtly, or sometimes I look into its eyes and it will melt. The dream figure will melt and actually dissolve into my dream heart. And I often awaken from these experiences with my heart pounding, but not out of fear, but out of sense of power that I have the capacity to work and to integrate these unwanted, rejected aspects of my experience so directly. Partly because I've been doing this practice, I haven't had a nightmare in probably 25, 30 years. Bad dreams don't exist for me anymore. I have no doubt whatsoever that this type of practice has been associated with that. So another thing, again, there's so many, but another really good one that I work with personally. So this is also in the literature, and I'm sharing the ones I've had the most direct personal experience with, is the ability to resolve interpersonal conflict and even so-called therapeutic concerns. Because when you think about this, when you're having an issue with someone psychologically, it's usually the phenomenal experience and not the physicality of the person itself that's the problem. And so, in other words, when you're in a therapist's office, the other person you're having a problem with does not have to be there physically for you to resolve the issue. The issue is a phenomenal issue. They don't have to be there physically. You can resolve the issue by talk therapy with your therapist. Well, in exactly the same way, you can engage in role play and kind of therapeutic playing in your dreams in exactly the same way because a dream person, they don't have to be there in your dream. They just have to be there phenomenally as a dream appearance. And your ability to resolve interpersonal issues at the level of the dream becomes completely available to you. You can work with resolving grief because while death is the end of a body, it's not the end of a relationship. And so I personally had some unresolved issues around the death of my father. Very often when people die, then you have heightened incidents of dreams with them. I was able to transform some of these dreams into lucid dreams, able to share some things that I regretted I hadn't been able to share during my life, and was actually able to resolve some issues around unfinished business with my own father. That's another thing you can do. Very similarly, lucid dreaming, and the studies have shown this, have a heightened problem solving capacity. This is actually very interesting because very often when we're struggling with a problem, this is one reason why that liminal space is so compelling, how you can resolve so many issues in that liminal space. I mean, not issues, but come to insights in that space, is that very often when we're having a problem, it's because we're too close to it, we're too embedded in it. And part of what defines a non-lucid dream is just that. Part of a non-lucid dream is being too close to the dream. You think the dream is real. That's being too close to the dream, you're lost in it. Lucid dreamers actually cultivate a heightened sense of perspective. In fact, in integral theory, increased perspectives are characteristic of human evolution. Again, to put another exclamation point on this idea that lucid dreamers could represent the next iteration in Homo sapiens evolution. Perspective, increased perspectives, pluralism, integral approaches, is actually suggestive, indicative of higher evolutionary bandwidths. And so what happens, and again, some very interesting studies have shown that lucid dreamers are better at problem solving because they have the ability to step back, see things that they were previously too close to see. That in itself is the very gesture of lucidity. The next one I continue to do a lot. This one is really one of the main benefits I continue to reap from lucid dreaming. And that is your capacity to rehearse things in the dream, like performances and lectures and the like. I'm a pianist, my first degree is in classical piano. I have had lucid dreams, literally, where I've played entire movements of Beethoven sonatas in my dream. The literature, again, is replete with this. Arthur Rubenstein, for instance, the great pianist, he had an uncanny ability. This is irrespective of lucidity, but you get the idea. He had the uncanny ability through the powers of his imagination to conjure up a keyboard and literally practice in his mind an entire composition, and then perform it without ever having touched the piano. And so, in exactly the same way, where is the power of imagination more vivid and clear than in a lucid dream? So you can rehearse physical activities, you can rehearse musical performance situations or whatever. Anything you can do in waking life, you can do in your dream. And so here's what's truly amazing about this, in my estimation, is that the biological, and again, studies have shown this, the biological and physiological effects on your body and your brain of the actions you perform in a dream are virtually identical to the effects of doing these actions in your waking life. In other words, dreaming of doing something is neurologically equivalent to actually doing it. Let me say that again. Dreaming of doing something is neurologically equivalent to actually doing it. Your brain can't tell the difference. And so, for instance, they've shown this as well. If you're in a lucid dream and you elect to work on some kind of logical mathematical problem, your left hemisphere is going to be activated in the dream state exactly as if you're doing that same thing in waking life. If you're in a dream and you want to practice the piano like me, your right hemisphere is going to light up exactly as if you were doing that particular activity in waking life. And this therefore engages this foundational principle of neuroplasticity, that what you do with your mind changes your brain. And so, therefore, what you do with your sleeping, dreaming mind changes your physical brain. Talk about pedagogy, talk about bringing additional kind of, in this case, neurological footing to what you do in the dream state. I find this highly compelling. But even better, even further, it's not just your brain that can improve, but the actual physical performance in your body. Because what you're doing with these particular activities doesn't just stay locked in the neural components, it actually can be downloaded into physical proficiency in your very body. And so I wanted to share with you in the journal of sports science a really interesting article by the dream researcher Kelly Buckley, where he talks about four incredibly interesting implications of proficiency in lucid dreaming. In fact, I had a pitching coach from the New York Mets reach out to me a couple months ago discussing possibilities of working with lucidity to help professional athletes. So this is what Kelly came up with through his work. Lucid dreaming can provide a safe arena in which high performance athletes can practice dangerous moves and risky routines, developing skills at the furthest edges of their abilities. End quote. Who knows if he could sustain, in effect, enhance his proficiency as a golfer through doing that? Number three, it could enable underprivileged athletes to engage in effective practice of their sports, even if they have limited access to physical facilities. And number four, lucid dreaming could give athletes at all levels a powerful psychological means of focusing their minds for optimal game day performance. You see this, like you know, for instance, when you look at I'm a skier as well, I always find it very fascinating. You see these racers at the top of a slope, right? They're up there and you can see them doing all this visualization. They're turning and they're moving, they're imagining themselves going through those gates. Well, I mean, there's no greater kind of replication of the power of imagination than in the lucid dream, the ability to really create that as powerfully as one possibly can. And then the last thing, and this one's a little bit more in the realm of I wouldn't say conjecture because there's some preliminary data here, but it's not as established as these others, is the ability to use lucid dreaming for healing. My friend Robert Wagner has done a lot on this. He's published, Claire Johnson has worked on this and published. And this can be done in a number of different ways. And again, I will share personal experiences with you. In fact, let me just share one right off the bat. I had an incredibly powerful dream, and two things happened that woke me up from the dream. First of all, I had a back injury at that time, and so my back was really sore. And so that woke me up from the dream. Like, oh man, my back's hurting. This is such a great dream. And so what I did was I went back into the lucid dream and I said, I'm gonna relax this muscle using my dream. And I went back into the dream and was somehow able to relieve the discord in my back that allowed me to stay in the dream. And there was another similar condition that happened at the same time. There was another particular physical thing I was going through that kept popping me out of the dream. And so I would go back into the dream and actually try to resolve it at the level of the dream. And so the work of Dr. Carl Simonton in cancer research, somewhat connected to this, he's shown through his work that people who work with visualization practices, imagery and whatnot, in augmentation with chemo and radiation therapy survived on average twice as long as other people using the power of active imagination. And when is active imagination the most strong? And we can't get any stronger than when we're in a lucid dream, right? And then, you know, lastly, and I know some people are already working with this, including me, lucid dreaming is like a virtual reality lab. One of the papers I published with a cognitive neuroscientist was on VR and lucidity principles. And so, just like working with virtual reality, I mean, what's more real than a dream? It's so real we get lost in it and take it to be literally real. Writers, musicians, artists, innovators can use lucid dreams as a way to enhance creativity and then actually tap into creative impulses as they're arising from these deeper dimensions of mind before they become overtly registered in conscious awareness. And so the five practices altogether, the first one is called liminal dreaming. This is the one that is the most accessible for us. Previously, this particular dimension of awareness, mind, kind of more academic scientific languaging, was called either hypnagogic or hypnopampic sleep. And it's very interesting. Hypnose is the Greek god of sleep, literally means sleep. Hypnogogia means toward sleep. So this is that dimension of mind that we all experience the minute we hit the pillow till we actually fall asleep. We are in that hypnagogic space. That's also a liminal space. Liminality literally means threshold. On the back end, when you wake up, or if you wake up in the night, but let's say you have a perfect night's sleep, you sleep all the way through, you wake up in the morning. On the back end, that's called hypnopampic state, leading away from sleep, leading away from the god of sleep. The next practice, and this is the one that probably has the most traction in the West at this point, lucid dreaming. That was scientifically proven in 1975 by Keith Hearn in England, and in 77 by my dear friend Stephen LeBerge at Stanford. This is that marvelous state where one wakes up within the context of a dream, realizes that they're dreaming, and stays within the dream. They're fully awake within a dream. And it's getting more and more kind of mileage these days as the mindful dreaming. It's literally called mindful dreaming. With some proficiency, lucid dreaming can progress into dream yoga. With even more proficiency, dream yoga can mature into sleep yoga. In Buddhism, it's called luminosity yoga. Somewhat connected etymologically, at least in terms of the name, to what's called yoga nidra, because nidra means sleep in Sanskrit, but it's not the same thing. Yoga nidra is actually, for the deeper divers listening, yoga nidra is actually more associated with liminal dreaming. But sleep yoga, which is now actually being studied actively, I'm involved with some labs around the world helping design studies to prove this. Lucid dreaming has been proven, lucid sleep has not yet been scientifically proven. And so there are some really sophisticated scientists, lab technicians around the world that are now actively trying to prove lucid sleep. And Tom Messinger, who's one of the leading philosophers on the planet today, he goes so far as to say that when lucid sleep is substantiated, it will be a revolution in the mind sciences. And I have no doubt. I mean, like it's complete oxymoron. How can you tell me that someone is actually sound asleep? They're in deep delta, you can't fake it, they're absolutely clinically sound asleep, and yet phenomenologically, they are awake. This is something you can train in. The sleep yogas are designed to do this. And then the last practice, I probably won't say much at all about this because this is pretty esoteric, but I have written some books on this topic, is really very near and dear to my heart. This is how you can use the nocturnal practices as a way to prepare for the end of life, as a way to prepare for death. This is what's called bardo yoga in Tibetan, where bardo b-ar-do is a word that means something like gap transitional process in between. For those of you who are interested in using a full kind of integral broad spectrum approach to prepare for the end of life, bardo yoga may certainly be something that you want to explore. But there is a particular narrative with all these practices that's worth stating at the outset. And this is this notion that each practice transcends but includes its predecessor. And by this, what I mean is that lucid dreaming, the second of the five, transcends liminal dreaming, goes beyond it, but it also includes it. Dream yoga is the same. Dream yoga transcends but includes both liminal dreaming and lucid dreaming. Same with sleep yoga, same with bargayoga. And so it has that particular narrative or that kind of linear progression. And even though there is some linearity involved in exploring these practices, they're bidirectional, tri-directional. They all bootstrap each other. So the better you get at liminal dreaming, the better you're going to find yourself getting with the other nocturnal practices and vice versa. So they kind of lift each other up. And then also there is a monumentally important daytime practice called the practice of illusory form. I did this extensively in my three-year retreat. 12 hours a day, I did the practice of illusory form, which is a really sophisticated way to add a little bit onto normal mindfulness. So just briefly what this practice is about. In addition to simply being present and mindful throughout the day, at every moment of mindfulness, one is really exhorted to work with contemplating the illusory nature of reality. And this is where these practices go very deep in the end of the pool, where you can use, especially dream yoga, sleep yoga as profound mediums for exploring the nature of mind and reality. But here's the image that I've come up with that may be of some resonance to you about how these practices actually work. So imagine that you're in a bright room wherever you are, right? So imagine just turning every conceivable light on that you have in your room. So flood your room with light, make it as bright as you possibly can. And so imagine you do this for, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, super saturated light. And then you decide to take a break. You want to step outside just to get a breath of fresh air. So you step outside, and we all know this experience, right? At first, you can't see a thing. I mean, you step outside, it is pitch black. Why? Well, because your eyes are so constricted. This is really interesting. Metaphor, your eyes are so contracted, your pupils. The light contracts your pupils, right? You can't see anything. Well, if you're patient, if you just hang out in the dark for a while, you know what's gonna happen. Your eyes relax, they dilate, and you start to see things you've never seen before. They've been there, but they've been hiding in the darkness. The darkness is brought about by contraction. And so to me, this is exactly analogous to what happens with these nocturnal practices. When you first, in this case, step indoors into the darkness, where darkness is code. Darkness is a code word for the unconscious or even ignorance. These practices really, one of the reasons they're somewhat more advanced and subtle is because they're working with sub and then unconscious dimensions of our being. And what we're trying to do with these practices is bring these unconscious processes into the light of consciousness so that we can establish a healthier relationship to them and eventually be free of them. Because whether we know it or not, I mean, what did Christ say? Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. 95%, minimum, 95% of what we do is dictated by the unconscious mind. Think about it. Only 5% of what you do is brought under volitional conscious control. 95%, I mean, Freud talked about this with his iceberg model of consciousness. 95% of what we do is dictated by the backstage mind. Backstage leads on stage. And so we're working with these practices so many different levels. Sometimes I've talked about it as a self-help. There's more going on than meets the eye here. Fundamentally, what we're doing with these nocturnal meditations is we're using lucidity, the lucidity principle, where lucidity again is code words, code language for awareness, mindfulness. So a lucid dream is an aware dream, a mindful dream.
Speaker 1 · 27:31Thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate all your insights. I really appreciate your support today. Thank you very much.
