Thoughts on Lucid waking: exploring the inherently dreamlike nature of waking life

So you see dreaming as sort of the same “scaffolding” of waking life perceptions, only instead of being full of perceptions as it is in waking life, it is kind of partially full? I like it.

If I understand you correctly and can extend the metaphor, a lucid dream might be a sudden awareness of this scaffolding, which is easier to see in dreams because it is not filled up and covered/overcrowded with sensory input. A lucid waking state, then, would be an awareness of the same scaffolding only while you are awake...you see and understand the scaffolding despite the fact that in waking life it is coated with sensory input. This would be why lucid waking is rarer and more difficult to achieve than lucid dreaming....

Yes...I gather it takes advanced training, at least under the rubric of “dream yoga.”

I will need to think about this for a while. I will also look for the original in Classical Chinese. Many of the characters are similar enough to Japanese to puzzle out a little. It is a dense poem though so I probably don’t know enough Classical Chinese to read it right. Thanks for the challenge!

This is a great approach! You must be very good at it to get such a response like the dark hand. Does it ever torment you, or do you have control over your reactions to such visions?

Almost everyone knows the feeling of “mistakenly thinking I was awake, but really it was just a dream.”

How many, if any, have felt the opposite: “I thought I was having a lucid dream but actually I was really awake?” Sometimes in moments of shock or sudden great unexpected surprise people use this kind of image but do they really feel it, or is it just a figure of speech?

I have only met one person who claimed they suddenly “awoke” in the middle of daily life eating lunch and realized it was real life and not a dream, as they mistakenly thought the earlier part of the morning had been. He said he didn’t remember getting out of bed and getting dressed but somehow he found himself in the middle of the daytime going about his routine.

interesting bit from Wiki on one aspect of Dream yoga (Much less than 50%).
Source:
[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]

“According to contemporary Dzogchen teachers Namkhai Norbu, Lopon Tenzin Namdak and Tenzin Wangyal, the perceived reality and the phenomenal world are considered to be ultimately "unreal"—an "illusion" (refer Mahamaya): a dream, a phantasmagoria, a thoughtform. All appearances and phenomena are a dream or thoughtform..the dream of life and regular nightly dreams are not dissimilar, and that in their quintessential nature are non-dual. The non-essential difference between the general dreaming state and the general waking experience is that the latter is generally more concrete and linked with attachments...whereas, standard non-lucid dreaming is ephemeral and transient, and generally culturally reinforced as baseless and empty. In Dream Yoga, living may become the dream, and the dream may become the living.”

Have you tried Binaural Beats?

Actually I’ve tried that and lots of similar things. To be honest I never felt any noticeable effect different from listening to relaxing electronica or trance/drone while trying to sleep.

Spoken word lectures on any random topic send me to sleep the quickest: history, science, what have you. Lol.

”One of the reasons we don’t have the same capabilities in waking reality as we do in dreams is because we take waking reality to be real. When you truly wake up, the waking world is just as real—or just as unreal—as the dream world. You start to see that the waking state is fundamentally no different from the dream state. It’s the mind expressing itself in two different mediums.

For many reasons—fear being the primary one—we make this so-called waking reality more real than our dreaming reality. Reification is a way to create an egoic sanctuary, a place where the ego feels safe. When the world is seen as illusory, the ego freaks out. It has nothing to stand on. Therefore it sees waking reality as real and the dream world as unreal.

The fundamental charter of these practices is to see the one taste of all these different dimensions of the mind so we’re no longer privileging one state over another. We have a very powerful prejudice toward waking consciousness, and that wake-centricity is the source of so many problems.”
[link to tricycle.org (secure)]