“Lucidity is a code word for awareness.”Andrew Holecek

Lucid dreaming expert, author, “curiouist,” and integralist Andrew Holecek explains how lucid dreaming opens the door to a greatly expanded understanding of our minds, our perception of reality, and human potential altogether. If we consciously explore our night lives practicing dream yoga, we can learn how to discard our habits, purify our karma, and discover beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are co-creators of our experience. What we do in dream yoga is not limited to nighttime action; it weaves back into our daytime lives, and ultimately our experience of dying.

Andrew describes how dreams are a powerful way to discover emptiness and openness, and fall into reality—like falling into love—our primordial contraction cast away. Besides being a life-changing discourse on the incredible potential of dream yoga, Andrew Holecek’s cheerful, well-informed, easy way of talking and teaching about lucid dreaming—relating it also to the wisdom traditions, our sense of identity, lucid living, and human evolution—makes this a real pleasure to listen to.

Recorded on April 13, 2022.

Topics & Timestamps: Part 1

• Introducing Andrew Holecek, master of Dream Yoga (01:44)
• Andrew’s profound experience with lucid dreaming as a young man, with dreamtime becoming more real and daytime experience less real (04:08)
• Retrofitting his understanding over time to make sense of his experience landed Andrew in Buddhism (06:25)
• Buddha is literally the Awakened One in Sanskrit—awakened in relationship to what? (08:23)
• Nocturnal practices became a real practice, a unique form of night school and a pedagogy of the future (09:24)
• Overview of the 5 nocturnal meditations (10:55)
• Liminal dreaming: getting into the witnessing perspective and watching how the mind goes offline, the ego structure comes undone (11:25)
• Lucid dreaming: awakening to the fact that you are dreaming—used largely for self-fulfillment (12:44)
• Dream yoga is where it transitions to self-transcendence (13:42)
• Sleep yoga, or luminosity yoga, a primary practice of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism (14:30)
• Bardo yoga, the “dream at the end of time,” working with the mind to prepare for death (16:03)
• Where do you go when you die? You transition from one dream to the next: lucid dreaming leads to lucid living and lucid dying (17:52)
• If you don’t wake up and take control of your dream and finally your mind, your unconscious, your habits, will control your mind (19:17)
• Awake-centricity: in the West our understanding of mind and reality is derived solely from our experience in the waking state, versus the East’s more integral understanding derived from all 3 states, waking, dreaming, deep sleep (22:30)
• The “awakened mind” is a mind that is lucid under all conditions (26:25)
• The West has a single stage worldview—but multi stage cultures have a vastly larger understanding of ourselves and our reality; 90% of the world’s cultures are polyphasic (28:06)
• Mullah Nasruddin, the Sufi story of the lost key (30:12)
• Ignoring our circadian rhythms, we miss the opportunity the night offers to further our brain’s evolution (31:14)
• Dreams manifest along a spectrum, from meaningless neurological noise to ones that shed light on our lives, transcending our sense of self (34:09)
• Dream incubation practices: supplicating for guidance, for help (38:14)

Topics & Timestamps: Part 2

• How can one begin? First, realize the potentiality of lucid dreaming and become an oneironaut (01:40)
• The importance of intentionality, and, installing pop-ups in your unconscious mind (04:19)
• Meditation practice is a super technique to help attain lucidity at night (and in the daytime) (07:18)
• How you can purify your karma and habits in your dreams (09:51)
• Transforming the mother of all our habits: reification (12:40)
• Purifying habits by night purifies habits by day (14:44)
• His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s teaching on dream yoga (19:09)
• Dream yoga is a powerful way to discover emptiness, emptiness = openness = love; meditation habituates us to openness, and when falling into reality, the primordial contraction is removed (22:00)
• How the self sense comes undone when we fall asleep, a concordant experience with dying (26:11)
• Andrew leads a short (game changing) dream yoga practice: 3-fold impurity—and, where is the dreamer? (29:55)

Topics & Timestamps: Part 3

• What is our identity? Discovering the empty nature of reality (01:37)
• Our exclusive identification with form and extreme habituation to contraction (04:21)
• What we think of as self is really just a self-image (11:38)
• The transformation of consciousness into wisdom: not awareness of but awareness as (14:01)
• Where does the illusion of matter come from? These teachings are a radical challenge to our worldview, transcending but including our self-sense (15:29)
• Who are you really? Thou art that. This perception births tremendous love, tremendous altruism—when you realize there is no other (17:18)
• “Perfuming” your awareness with requests or questions to induce daytime popups, symbolic responses, and synchronicities (20:41)
• How lucidity relates to your sense of perspective (22:39)
• When the world becomes more porous, less reified (24:59)
• Realizing “I am a creative genius!” and a co-creator of our experience, and how we give away our power (27:41)
• Ontic plasticity: decentralizing and discovering the empty nature of our self (30:32)
• The filtering model: how we filter out aspects of reality that don’t feed us at our particular developmental level (37:22)
• Fear is the fundamental reason for our contraction away from wonder (39:13)
• Stage IV dream yoga is all about working with fear: fear of reality, fear of truth, fear of transcendence (40:11)

Podcast produced by Vanessa Santos
Image created via MidJourney

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