wake up in dreams, wake up from The Dream

lucid dreaming

“Questioner: What do you do when asleep?

Maharaj: I am aware of being asleep.

Q: Is not sleep a state of unconsciousness?

M: Yes, I am aware of being unconscious.

Q: And when awake, or dreaming?

M: I am aware of being awake or dreaming.

Q: I do not catch you. What exactly do you mean? Let me make my terms clear: by being asleep I mean unconscious, by being awake I mean conscious, by dreaming I mean conscious of one's mind, but not of the surroundings.

M: Well, it is about the same with me, Yet, there seems to be a difference. In each state you forget the other two, while to me, there is but one state of being, including and transcending the three mental states of waking, dreaming and sleeping.”

– "I Am That" by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly …. soon I awaked, and there I was, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

– Zhuang Zi

Dharma tends to first start knocking on the door in the form of suffering. Or maybe you — what you take to be you — starts knocking up against the door of the cage of delusion, while simply trying to stand up to your full height. Same difference.

If realization had a defining flavor it’d be a sense of boundlessness. As described in the famous Bahiya sutta: “When you are not 'in that,' then, you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering."

With realization, there is no boundary between inside and outside, between “here” and “there”. But something that is not talked about as much — and is absolutely profound and a very promising thread to tug on – is that it is also seen that there is no boundary between dreaming and waking.

I’ve written down my dreams for a long time, starting many years before any awakening. Over that time, I noticed that the more connected to my dreams I feel when awake – the more easily I remember them, the more I can relate them to what is happening in my psyche or day to day events – the more I have an overall sense of wholeness, satisfaction, and flow in life.

So it would follow that lucid dreaming takes this kind of connection a big step further, has the potential to create a more high-resolution, higher-bandwith bridge between waking and dreaming life. I experimented with lucid dreaming much in the past without much luck, but in this spirit I’ve been trying again.

A fundamental tool for lucid dreaming is reality testing: training the body-mind to do reality tests during the day so that it starts doing them while asleep. You can reality test for example, by looking at a digital clock, then looking again to see if the numbers look changed and distorted. If it did, you are dreaming. If you realized you are dreaming, you have just become lucid, have woken up in the dream.

Many have pointed out that the body-mind gets caught up in dreams while sleeping much like it gets caught up in what it takes to be reality during waking life. The difference is more a matter of degree of the stability of the dream, rather than a difference in kind.

Really waking up means waking up from the delusion, the dream, that arises from constantly getting caught up in phenomena. The end of the path is to be simply always awake (non-duality fans might recognize this as the name of Angelo Dilullo’s youtube channel). No separation between sleep and wake, no separation anywhere.

---

Free Mini-Book. Untie the Knots That Blind: Release Emotional Reactivity and Wake Up to Reality, available on Amazon.

Please consider leaving a review here: https://amzn.id/reactivity-review. It helps more people discover it.