Interesting experience to share

["David Yeh" <ldreamr@...>]

Hi, I just thought I'd share this experience I had this morning. 

To preface: I've been really working on emptiness or vacancy of mind, 
and also thought discipline in everyday life. I've been finding it 
pretty difficult.

Lately, to add to that, I've been eating a lot of sugar, and just 
sitting around, which I think contributed to my mental agitation and 
restlessness. It has made for difficult meditation -- it's hard to 
even pay attention to how my mind likes to be distracted.

I woke up at 4:30 to go to the bathroom and my mind was so jerky that 
I couldn't get back to sleep until around 6. When I finally did 
drift back to sleep, at some point I found myself in a lucid dream.

I've had lucid dreams before, but at the point in my life when I was 
really trying for them -- when I really put a lot of myself into the 
effort -- they tended to be very short and also very sexual, in a 
knee-jerk way.

This was pretty different. The dream-situation was fairly normal -- 
just walking around in a public area. But this time I was relaxing 
into it, which I usually forget to do. For the first time I had a 
sense that I could keep myself from waking up, by relaxing. I 
attribute this to the practice of meditation, making me more aware of 
how I tense up and am afraid all of the time.

Well, I was walking around, and I had a few different kinds of 
experiences.

Every time I saw a woman that I was sexually attracted to, and 
started thinking, hey maybe I'll try to have sex with her, she 
started to fade and the dream went all hazy, as it does just before I 
wake up. So I tried to relax away from that desire. Then it 
happened a few more times, and I realized what was happening: my 
desire was causing tension in me.

A little bit later, I was walking down a road and somehow I had a 
garland of flowers around my head. Then suddenly it was a vine of 
some evil plant that started biting me. I tried to get away from it, 
but the more I resisted, the more surrounded I was by trees and vines 
that were biting and snapping at me. Again, I realized what was 
happening, and I stopped resisting. I let them bite me. It hurt for 
a few more moments, and then they all vanished.

I realized then that any kind of ATTACHMENT caused me to tense and 
grasp the object of attachment, or push away from it, depending on 
the nature of the attachment. And that caused the reality of the 
dream to fade. Conversely, when I was NOT attached, I couldn't
believe the clarity of the dream. I could see details of leaves on 
trees a hundred yards away. So this has definite analogues to 
physical vision, too. Everything become so real and vivid -- until I 
got attached to something else, which was pretty frequently.

I thought that this experience really strongly illustrated the effect 
of attachment on consciousness. I've heard and read Tibetan 
Buddhists saying that the lucid dream state is the fast track to 
enlightenment, and I can see why. The effects of attachment were so
immediate; it's necessary to cultivate a deep presence and attitude 
of nonattachment in order to even stay in the dream. And, there are 
so many opportunities for immediate gratification.

In addition to having "enlightenment" possibilities, experiences like 
this seem to give really good feedback for what needs to be worked on 
in terms of soul mirror stuff.

So, just thought I'd share. I don't have many lucid dreams anymore 
but I guess that one was brought on by insomnia. Maybe I should do 
that more often. :)


Thanks,
David