dream yoga. first attempt. wow.

First off, don't laugh, this is serious. I was reading in tricycle magazine the other day that for about 1000 years, some Buddhists have been using their dreams to move closer to enlightenment. The basic premise is that by training your brain the warp the world around you in your dream state, you begin to understand that it is based on illusion. By allowing yourself to drown in your dreams and be eaten by animals as apposed to running from them, you learn that your fears are unnecessary. What happens if a dream lion eats a dream elliott? Nothing, neither exist. I guess from this you are supposed to move this great understanding to the real world. If everything we perceive is just sensory and just in our minds, then what is the difference between anything we perceive, dream, real, fake, the sensations are the only things we have to go on and the sensations are all the same. The differences between these states and their relative importances are just fabrications of our mind. Yeah, it's kind of like some matrix type stuff, but that's how this world is.

Last night was my first attempt at entering a dream state fully conscious. I thought it would be fairly easy. I have been practicing vipassa (sp?) or mindfulness meditation everyday for a few months and really about a year off and on. There are times when I feel that I am about to sleep and I just focus harder and snap out of it. I figured I could just allow it to happen while maintaining consciousness, then wait for the dream state to come while I am fully aware. So here is how it went:

I'm lying in bed, back against the mattress, no pillow, hands folded over my chest. My eyes begin to close and I start the usual process: 5 deep breadths, a reflection on the reasons why I meditate, then move into the focus of the breath and the emptying of the mind. This time, I can't seem to get to sleep... Okay, a few relaxation techniques and I'm on my way. I could actually sense myself falling asleep. My feets went numb, not cold just lacking sensation, then my legs. I had a sense of the bed and my head and body and all the relations in the room, but they all started to dissolve. My head didn't spin, I just had no concept of where or in what orientation I was in. Was I floating in the room, standing, sitting upside down, I couldn't tell. All the while, the lack of sensation kept creeping in. My waist had no feeling, my chest had no feeling, my arms felt cold and numb...damn. I began to sink into the mattress and fall through the floor. I fell into the darkness of my closed eyes. hold on, am I breathing? I can't tell if I am breathing or not, wake up elliott, WAKE UP ELLIOTT!! Then I wake, sensation returns, I feel a rush of air into my lungs so clean I am alive again.

Seriously, I felt like I might have been dying. It was one of the most terrifying experiences, and I couldn't let go fully. I tried again, this time maintaining my focus on the breath and I couldn't reach that point again. I guess you aren't allowed to take your breath into the dream world. I am actually afraid to try it again. I need some sort of guide or something... damn.