Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Night School: How to Meditate While You’re Asleep | Andrew Holecek

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

This is a fun, weird, extremely interesting and inspiring episode.It’s about lucid dreaming, something that people might perceive as hippie nonsense, but is actually deeply woven into ancient and time-tested Buddhist traditions. Our guest today has been studying and practicing Buddhism and what he calls nocturnal meditations for more than four decades. And he has remarkably simple and down to earth tips for doing this in your own life. He argues anybody can do this. And the proposition is pretty compelling. We’re asleep for a huge percentage of our life, and from a perspective of contemplative development, or training your mind, that’s a huge stretch of land that is lying fallow. Andrew Holecek is an expert on lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep and dream. He is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and the author of scientific papers on lucid dreaming. He has also written many books on the subject, including: Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep.In this episode we talk about:The Five Nocturnal Meditations, which include: liminal dreaming, lucid dreaming, dream yoga, sleep yoga, and bardo yogaWhy bother with these nocturnal practices in the first place?How these nocturnal practices might be the next phase of human evolutionThe problem of wake-centricityPractical tips for trying this stuff yourselfAnd if lucid dreaming is meant for everyone – including those of us with sleep issuesFor tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/andrew-holecek-620See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. This is a really fun episode, fun, weird, and extremely interesting and inspiring. I will say I had heard of lucid dreaming before the idea that you can wake up in the middle of a dream and actually make decisions in that dream and have agency, you know, go flying or whatever.

I was actually assigned once many years ago to do a story on lucid dreaming for nightline, but I ended up not being able to do it for one reason or another and some other correspondent took the job. And anyway, I walked away with the impression that lucid dreaming was just hippie nonsense. I did not actually have any indication at the time that lucid dreaming was actually deeply woven into some ancient and time-tested Buddhist traditions. So my takeaway was just another case of me being dismissive and judgmental.

My guest today has been studying and practicing Buddhism and what he calls not-turnal meditation, which comes in many flavors for more than four decades. And he has remarkably simple and down-to-earth tips that you can use to give this a try in your own life right away. He argues anybody can do this. And the proposition is pretty compelling. We are asleep for a huge percentage of our lives and from the perspective of contemplative development or training the mind, that's a huge stretch of land

that is lying fallow. If you have any degree of seriousness about progressing in meditation, you're leaving money on the table. That's probably not the best metaphor, but whatever. My guest is Andrew Hollacek. He's an expert on lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep and dream.

He is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the author of scientific papers on lucid dreaming. He's also written many books on the subject, including Dream Yoga, illuminating your life through lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep. In this conversation, we talk about the five nocturnal meditations, which include liminal dreaming, lucid dreaming, dream yoga,

sleep yoga, and barto yoga. We talk about why anybody would bother with these nocturnal practices in the first place, how these practices might be, and Andrew, by the way, is not alone in believing this, might be the next phase of human evolution. That sounds grandiose, but actually, there's some interesting evidence here.

The problem of wake-centricity, practical tips for trying the stuff yourself, and we talk about whether lucid dreaming really is for everybody, including those of us, myself included, who have sleep issues. Have you been considering starting or restarting your meditation practice? Well, in the words of highway build boards across America.

If you're looking for a sign, this is it. To help you get started, we're offering subscriptions at a 40% discount until September 3rd. Of course, nothing is permanent. So get this deal before it ends by going to 10% dot com slash 40. That's 10% one word all spelled out dot .com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription. Andrew Hollachek, welcome to the show. Dan is such a delight. I'm a big fan of you work. So I'm super psyched to spend some time with you today. Thank you.

Thank you. Likewise. Yeah, in preparing for this, I learned so much. I'm excited to learn more about the rich field of practice that is the nighttime and the kingdom of sleep. So let's dive in. I'm curious how you got interested in this, just reading a little bit of a short life. It seems like it involved a detour into dental surgery.

Right. I'd be really interested to hear briefly how you became interested in nocturnal meditation. Actually, my first background was as a musician, I was an aspiring classical pianist and still play a great deal of classical music. But difficult to make a living in that arena, I'd study some undergraduate physics and was deeply entranced. And so because of that, I came out here to the University of Colorado study physics for a number of years and then yeah, I realized

close but no cigar. And then my whole family's in the medical arts and I figured, well, probably ought to do something practical to pay the bills. And so I pursued a degree to get a doctor of dental surgery. And that in fact has served me beautifully for the entirety of my career up into this point. And now I've dedicated myself exclusively 100% to the pursuit of my writing and teaching along these lines. Geez, at this point almost 50 years ago, where I had an extraordinary experience, it lasted some two weeks, where, a long story short, where characterized this, I guess you could call out breakthrough experience,

was the virtual non-stop lucidity at night. So I started having lucid dreams. And for listeners who may not be aware of it, this is when you're dreaming, but something clues you into the fact that you're dreaming and you still stay up in the dream. So you're actually aware that you're dreaming and you're still in the dream.

And so I just found myself spontaneously having your constant lucidity at night. And then what became really interesting was my daytime experience became increasingly a lucery until I got to the point where was really cool at the outset, got a little disconcerting after two weeks where it became somewhat difficult to distinguish whether I was awake or asleep and dreaming. And so I kind of shut that experience down and then that launched a really quite deep concerted exploration of what

I've come to call the nctrl meditations. But the whole thing really took off when I did a three-year Tibetan Buddhist retreat, kind of a traditional monastic situation where I was introduced to the unbelievable practice of dream yoga. It was a little bit farther than traditional lucid dreaming. And that's when things really started to take off because it was like, oh my gosh, I had no idea that there was an entire psychospiritual path of

development in the nocturnal arena. So that's where things really started to take off. Very interesting to hear your background. All right, so let's get more detailed about nocturnal meditation. As we will discuss in a moment, there are five kinds, liminal dreaming, lucid dreaming, dream yoga, sleep yoga, and bardo yoga, we'll get into the differences among these categories. But let me just start on this level, which is why.

Why would we want to be interested in this stuff at all? Yeah, that's a great question there. Like, why bother, right? My life is so full, so busy. You know, we put, we we and I mean by this developmentally ego puts a pretty major do not disturb sign when it comes to these sorts of practices. And so one reason we may want to be so-called disturbed or explore these, this is where it's really helpful to understand the unbelievable physical, technological, and spiritual benefits of doing these things, but just very briefly,

we spend about 25% of our nighttime in the dream arena. So that's about a month a year. That amounts to some seven years in the course of an average lifetime. And so if you can attain lucidity, awareness in the dream arena, and I sometimes playfully refer to this as a kind of night school, I mean, goodness, you can get a PhD in less than seven years, right? So I argue that these nocturnal practices represent the education or the pedagogy of the future. But if we can attain lucidity in the nocturnal arena, we have this extraordinary capacity to take advantage of this time. This otherwise lost to oblivion. And so the other thing that's really important to understand is that when one is working with

these practices, in a certain sense, we're working with the roots or the teconic plates of our being. And the classic Buddhist contras talk about the practices that one does, whatever you do in the dream, arena is seven to nine times more effective, more efficacious than what you do in the waking state. And whether that's an archetypal number or not, it's hard to say, but the principle is sound to me that when you're working in this really rare, refined, distilled arena where the conscious mind can face and transform the unconscious mind directly, hey, that's a small thing. So in my imaging here, when you're working with kind of self-help programs, you're working with

the leaves and the branches of your experience when you're working with traditional meditation, you're working with a trunk. And then when you're working with either really deep meditation or these nocturnal practices, you're working on the roots of your experience. And so what you do down there has immediate implications for what you do up here. And then secondly, the science supports this. Like I'm a pianist, right? So I'm playing the piano in my dream, which I do with some regularity. Well, if you're in a scanner, brain scanner, you're right hemisphere is activated in precisely the same way as if you were practicing in daily life, or if you're doing kind of a logical thing, your left hemisphere is

activated. So using the principles of what we all know now is neural plasticity, that what you do with your mind literally changes your brain, well, hey, you can engage in all these endeavors in the sanctuary of the nighttime arena and really accelerate your psychospirational development. And there's further scientific traction if you want to go in that direction. There's some really compelling neuroanatomical data and some comments by some really sophisticated neuroscientists that actually support this outrageous claim that these practices really arguably could represent the education of pedagogy of this future. Not only the education or pedagogy of the future, but some are even arguing and I believe

you're one of the people making this argument that it's actually the next step in human evolution. Yeah, like, like, right. Isn't it true? T.I.D. F. Shadan, the paleontologist who wrote to beautifully about the role of evolution in paraphrasing his extraordinary contributions, my language. Basically, what he showed is that evolution hasn't stopped. It's only moved indoors. And this is precisely where we go at night. If we don't violate the natural curfew of the night with artificial light, and there's really interesting things to say about how dangerous and damaging artificial light is, even to the ecosystem, to the planet, but even sequospircially, artificial light, as opposed to authentic light, draws us out in a way

when reality is inviting us in. When we're working with these extraordinary subtle dimensions of the mind, and again, a very brief, neuroanatomical interjection here, let's say Dan, if you could take your eyes, this I find it quite compelling, if you could somehow take your eyes right now and just roll them and look straight up.

You'd be looking at the part of your brain, which is the prefrontal cortex, which has within it the d which is the prefrontal cortex, which has within it the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the orbiterfrontal cortex. These are literally, not metaphorically, literally leading the edge of human brain evolution. And this is why if an ape was to look straight up, it's foreheads lobes back. It doesn't have these parts of the brain. Well, guess what? These metacognitive parts of the brain, and that's another way to talk about what a lucid dream is. It's a metacognitive dream where you're aware. Metacognition is being aware of awareness. So a metacognitive dream is another way to talk about lucid dreaming. You're

aware of the fact that you're dreaming. I mean, now, how interesting is that that these are the parts of the brain, literally, not metaphorically, leading the edge of brain evolution, that come back online when you're having a lucid dream. So more than anecdotal information in my regard. So do you think that lucid dreamers are going to start being selected for by natural selection and that those who can do it are going to have different skull structures over the coming millennia? That's actually a really interesting comment, Dan.

There's one supporting statement from a neuroscientist, Matthew Walker. He wrote this quite beautiful book, Why We Sleep, maybe some five years ago. He only relegates about three pages to elusive dreaming, but the fact that he says anything is amazing. But towards the end of it, it's such a compelling thing that I memorized it. He says it's entirely possible that elusive dreamers represent the next iteration

in Homo sapiens evolution. And so there's a lot of conjecture involved here. We can only make some educated guesses about the possibility of this, but both in the spiritual traditions and by some kind of brave, iconic, plastic neuroscientists like Matthew, there does seem to be some real traction

around this potentiality, and this is super important. Picking up what you said when you took it back to the sort of why would you do this? I'm hearing like a kind of elevated productivity argument, which is we get a limited amount of time on the planet. We spend a lot of that time sleeping, which from a psychospiritual standpoint may be

fallow, you know, we're not using it to our advantage. And actually we can and should. Yeah. Right. Well, there's that possibility. That's just one vector of why we might be inspired and kind of subsumed underneath that, Dan, is just let me give you a couple examples. For instance, just in the performance mode, like you said, anything you can do in the waking state you can do in the dream arena.

And you can use this for physical improvement and skills. But then you have the kind of more traditional psychological benefits. And one would be working with nightmares. But just getting rid of or transforming our nightmares, geez, that's no small thing. But here's another one. Let's say you have a problem with someone, an issue with a significant other or a boss or whatever, and you go see a therapist. Well, wonderful. I work on, I sit hatingly with this capacity of my own development. When you think about it, the body of the person is hardly ever the problem.

It's our relationship to that person that's the problem. And so in other words, when you're in therapy even conventionally, the person you're having an issue with doesn't have to be there. They only have to be there phenomenally in your mind. Well, you can engage in kind of role play in your dreams. You can do a type of therapy within the context of your dreams, because again, a person doesn't need to be there, and you can resolve interpersonal issues in the context of your dream. This is totally fascinating. First, like you make a very compelling case,

at least to me, and second, a term that you invoke in your writing, which I thought might be worth just dropping here before we dive into the five categories is wakes and tricity. Maybe you can just describe what it what that means. Yeah, I'm so glad you caught on that. This is a big deal. This is a big deal. Because in the Western view, and this is now we're starting to go a little bit into the deeper end of the pool, one of the really amazing things that these practices do is they reveal our minds box. We think that the waking state, not only the only state, the supreme state. And this is why people just categorically dismiss lucid dreaming, let alone lucid sleep. Ah, it's just a dream. I mean, there's a dismissive

pejorative statement. Well, the wisdom tradition say, and we've got this completely backwards, the actual waking state is the most constricted state, the most myopic, the most limited. And as you actually wake, is actually go to sleep, in a very real way, if you are lucid, and this does not apply, if you are not lucid, but if you are lucid, as you descend, you're actually more in contact with reality in the dream state. And even Theroux said this, many others. And you're most in contact in the deep dream state. And so we've got to completely backwards according to the world's wisdom traditions.

Some neuroscientists, Bruce Lipton and others state powerfully that 95%, I think of these numbers, they are 95% of what we do is Decated by unconscious processes. I mean like are you kidding me? This again is where the spiritual Transitions psychospiritual kind of power comes from because you're dealing with such foundational dimensions a little bit like a near-death experience Right, I've never had one but you don't have to have more than one to have a change your life forever I mean look what happened to Evan Alexander Right countless instances people have one near-death experience. It changes them forever

Why? Because it's so foundational. It's so true It's it's so the roots of their experience and so when you have what's called a hyper lucid dream and maybe we can talk about what that means It's exactly the same thing. You can have one dream, and it will change the course of your life. Yeah, I mean, it sounds something like, I don't wanna overstate this comparison psychedelics in that there is a problem with psychedelics

in that people can have powerful experiences and then not be able to integrate it or operationalize those insights into their daily life, but some people actually have big experiences and really does uproot something in the software or upgrade the software and change them henceforth. I mean the work of Tony Bassa, Stan Groff and others psychedelic experiences are shown to like one session can remove all fear of death, right? That's no small thing. No, and so there was some connection between psychedelics by the way in lucid No. And so there was some connection between psychedelics, by the way, and lucid dreaming.

And so part of the curriculum here that's so fun, is you get armed with the skill set, you learn the tools, you learn the tips and the tricks, and then you just set out on this journey on your own. You become a psychoma, or specifically the term is onyronat, where onyrology is the study of dreams. And so you set off on this amazing internal adventure.

So, but is this really doable by, you know, I'm a busy person that I'm so-or-you, but this is really your focus. But so many people listening to this, this is, you know, that full time, right, or narrow knots or whatever the term is you use. Oh, and iron knots, yeah. Oh, and iron knots.

So is this stuff, even at the shallow end of the pool, you know, it starts with liminal dreaming then moves through lucid dreaming dream yoga, sleep yoga, bardo yoga, which again everybody we will unpack in a second. But is even starting with this doable for the average person? Oh, totally, 100%.

100%. Everybody can do this. Everybody can liminal dream. You can experience this when you're dosing on a summer day on the beach. You can do this when you're dosing on a summer day on the beach. You can do this when you're meditating and your mind gets soggy after a big meal. Once you start to bring lucidity slash awareness,

even into this entry level liminal state, and again, when people hear about this, they go, man, I had no idea. I could do this just by falling asleep. Well, you're almost tricking yourself in a really cool way because in the limited dreaming actually then doubles as what's called in the business lucid dream onset. In other words, you're actually bringing awareness from the

waking state into the dream state whether you know or not. Coming up, Andrew walks us through each of the five not-turnal meditations. the five nocturnal meditations. Let's start to intertwine the what and the how here. Let's start going through this schema that you've created of the five nocturnal meditations. And then I can ask you more of my pesky questions, but I love, I love them. As I've listed before, the five nocturnal meditations are liminal dreaming, lucid dreaming, dream yoga, sleepy yoga, bardo yoga. So let's start with liminal dreaming. What is that? Yeah, cool. So this is a term relatively recently coined by a friend of mine,

Jennifer Dupierre, a wonderful person. Previously, just to be a little geeky here, techno-speak, previously this phase was called, and I'll define this, so don't be intimidated for listeners, hypnagogic or hypnopopic states of consciousness. And basically, just what these terms hypnose means sleep, or in Greek mythology, hypnose refers to the god of sleep. Gojia means leading towards. So hypnogogic dimensions are literally leading towards sleep, or leading towards the God of sleep. I kind of like that. Hypnopompic is the back end. So, hypnogogic is what happens when you lie down to go to sleep at night. Hypnopompic means a way leading away from sleep is what you experience

when you wake up in the morning. I really like this term liminality and liminal dreaming because the word itself liminal means threshold. And what I really grew on term, liminality and liminal dreaming, because the word itself, liminal means threshold. And what I really grew on it is by working with liminal principles in the dimension of this liminal state of mind, you're also learning to relate and expand your heart and mind to engage liminal, phenomenal altogether. Everybody can do liminal dreaming.

You can work with a greater appreciation about liminal experiences, liminal phenomena, liminal beings. And so for instance, liminal places. So a liminal place would be any place of transition like an airport, hallway, workplace, after hours, empty auditorium, empty theater, funeral home. Liminal places are those places that feel just a little bit odd, a little bit uneasy,

where you're not quite there, you're not quite here, you're kind of floating in this fluid kind of plasma dimension. And then liminal experiences are like, hey, I just came back from a long trip in the mountains. I step in the door. I'm not quite home. I'm not quite at work. I'm not in the mountains anymore. And so that's a liminal experience.

And so when you understand liminal principles, you realize, hey, wait a second. I'm experiencing liminality all the time. But in particular, the way this works into the dream arena, and I've discovered this over the last couple of years because I've always felt that this particular state of consciousness was skipped over. It's like everybody in the lucid dreaming and even dream world, dream yoga world was like

skipping over to get to the goodies. Let's go right to lucid dreaming. Let's go right to dream yoga. I was the same. But I started back off a little bit and say, hey, I'm going to explore this, this kind of on ramp or off ramp, whichever matter for you want to use. And so what happens here is so cool. So you lie down and basically, you know, your senses, your physical senses are shut down.

And as we all know, you lie down and your mind stands up. You know, your senses are turning off, but your mind is turning on in a certain way. You lie down, you're ruminating throughout the day, all the experiences that happen to mind stands up. Well, if you bring a quality of witness awareness here, and this is where the meditative mind really comes into play, where what you do with liminality is you cultivate what's referred to as an observational intent, which is exactly what it sounds like. You cultivate this intent that, hey, I'm going to witness.

I'm simply going to step back in a mindful capacity. And this is where myful meditation comes in. And I'm just going to watch my mind as it starts to come offline. So, okay, you're sitting down and it's thinking, thinking, thinking, well, eventually you'll notice some gaps in your thoughts that itself is very interesting. If those gaps weren't there,

you would not fall through one of those gaps and you wouldn't fall asleep. That's insomnia. So you're thinking thinking thinking gap thinking gap thinking gap and then what happens is thinking starts to morph into imaging. So it's thinking thinking gap thinking gap thinking image. This is actually called in the hypnagogic world, it's called thought image amalgamation. A very interesting domain because what's happening is our thinking is starting to transform into imaging pictures, Autosambolic phenomena, and then that's going to even transform further into the dream. So you're actually watching your mind transition from thought to thought image to dream. It's a form of dreaming cabation. You can actually watch how a

thought seeds a dream. A Tartantuco Rinpoche, a great Tibetan master, has this wonderful little line here. He says it's like holding a thought by the hand, and you hold it with the hand of mindfulness, and leading it into the dream arena, releasing it. These only lasts three, four, five seconds. I'm sure many listeners have had this and they're going, whoa, I'm already having lucid dreams. I just didn't know it. It's because the lucid dream is so short.

It's usually too short to do anything with, but you can watch it, and you watch these things evolve. Well, I believe you, but I'm still pretty confused. Well, let's clear it up. Okay, I get that liminal dreaming is different than full on lucid dreaming, but it can lead to lucid dreaming. And you're saying how to do it is to just be as awake and aware and mindful as possible as you're falling asleep and coming out of sleep. And I've been meditating for a little bit of time and I've done a bunch of meditation retreats and I've never been able to be awake or aware as I'm falling asleep or coming

out of it. And I feel like if I was trying to be awake and aware while I was falling asleep as somebody within somebody, I wouldn't be able to fall asleep anyway. Right. Well, first of all, I'll spy it on with a summary. You got it. But a couple of things is,

until one is introduced to these potentialities and some of the techniques, no surprise that some of this has not become your overt experience yet. And so, let me address the issue by insomnia in relationship to this practice. And this again is another reason why these practices can be a little bit more advanced because they're so subtle. As you know, Dan, in the

meditation world, there's this really common maxim, right? Not too tight, not too loose. If you're too tight, you wind yourself up, you're trying too hard, the mind goes crazy, it's like a saddle that's too tight. If you're too loose, you're trying too hard, the mind goes crazy, it's like a saddle that's too tight. If you're too loose, you're not an educated, you're just vegetated, you're hanging. And so the Buddhist tradition in particular, you know, they talk about the middle way, you know, one way the middle way applies here is not too tight, not too loose. And so one of the things that we discover when we do these practices, and let me say at the outset, at first everybody fakes it. Everybody,

you don't know what you're doing in the dark. You're stumbling, you're fumbling, you're falling, you're tripping, you're going, I'm, how you doing this right? You're doing, I'm doing, you're faking it. Everybody does. Why? Because the territory is so unfamiliar. Hence, meditation, what is it to become familiar with? We're not familiar with these dimensions of mine as they go offline. But if we start to hang with it, we start to become increasingly familiar. And then we can start to walk with trial and error because we fall off, it's like a tightrope. When you're walking into these internal dimensions at first, there's a little bit of a balancing

act going on. You know, if you're too tight, I, your mind goes ballistic, you are going to be in some the act you're never going to fall asleep. If you're too loose, you're going to fall into the contents of your old habitual patterns, you're just going to crash out. And so what happens is knowing that everybody fakes it and fakes it. It's like one of my wonderful teachers can't put on the chair, caught. I love this line.

Airing and airing, I walk the unairing path. I just love that. Or a mistake after mistake, I walk the un-mustake and path. And so we pang off these extremes, we fall, we stand up, but eventually I guess what happens? You find your balance. And then when you find your balance, then you can start to actually, again,

witness your mind, you're more aware of when you're too tight, you're more aware when you're too loose, and you're able to find to, and you're able to find your sweet spot. And then eventually, what happens is because we're entering into domains of mind that are actually quite natural, once we become familiar with them, just like with anything else, it does get easier. It's the first kind of the loading dose, the front end, that's always the most difficult because there are so many forces, my language, and forces of the dark side, right? There's so many forces of the unconscious mind, there's so many forces of our, are really

a fundamental lust for non-lucidity. But these practices are really revelatory. They are revelatory. And soon or later, they're going to point out to you a bunch of blind spots. And people have to have kind of a playful, curious, but determined intent to stay with these revelations, dance with them, play with them, and learn from them. I think what you're saying is the first step in this first step of liminal dreaming is just to set the intention to be as mindful as possible, going into sleep and coming out of sleep without getting so tight that you make sleep impossible.

Exactly. Exactly. So this observational intent is huge. And the whole notion of intent itself, Dan, is so key here. And let me just toss in one very brief comment. I went to a dream yoga training a couple of years ago where they're pretty lofty. In fact, you may know him, Sognary Rinpoche, who wrote the book.

Yeah, I know. So he's been on the show. Yeah, I Bichet, who wrote the book with Daniel Goldman. So I went to one of his dreamy logigigs and it was amazing. The only induction technique he gave was intention. That was it, intention. And so this narrative of intention is really key. The word literally means to stretch towards. And what we are doing here is stretching the conscious lucid mind into previously non-lucid domains. It's really a form of consciousness hacking if you want to use contemporary terms.

And so it's just like you said, you know, with liminal dreaming, you start with this observational intent. And it's really as simple as this. You go to bed at night, and as you're lying in bed, you're going, you know what? I'm setting the intention. I really want to observe my mind. And it's a very open-ended thing. But part of the beauty and maybe frustration at the beginning with liminal dreaming is the

open-ended quality of it. That it really is, I wouldn't say it's a free for all, but it's the most playful. It's like you become an artist of consciousness itself. By that, what I mean, you set the observational intent to just witness your mind, just step back in a kind of meditative, mindful way, and simply just bear witness to what your mind is doing. That alone, from that intention alone, these insights, phenomena, experiences will start to reveal to some stupid, because you're starting to transition from this non-lucid, you know, basically I'm just going to lie down and crash.

Hey, I'm saying there's nothing wrong with that. But if you really want to bring these dimensions of your experience into arenas of psychospersial development and revelation, this observational intent alone is huge. It may seem facile, patronizing, but it's not. Simply set that intent, go, work with it when you're lying in bed for three, four minutes a year. Really want to watch my mind,

or really want to watch my mind. Yeah, so what are the other aspects of the how here? Like a beyond setting the intention, what else can we do to boost the odds that we'll be able to experience limital dreaming and maybe even lucid dreaming? Yes, spot on. So the single best thing is I've intimated, but now let's put an exclamation point on it is meditate, meditate because again, what we do with standard meditation here, here's a wonderful line. This really has some traction from arguably the, the, the most influential

academic scientist in the world of lucid dreaming in the West. You may know of him, Stephen the bearer, your friend of mine. He says this. It's lovely. He says that thoughts are to waking consciousness, as dreams are to dream in consciousness, that if you start to work with your mind in the arena of meditation during the day, you're actually starting to work with a lucidity principle. You're starting to work with this because when you're falling asleep, what is sleep and dream and everything else

made of? Well, it's made of your mind. It's just mind manifesting in these more subtle dimensions. And so to establish a more nuanced relationship to this mind, the daytime adaptations are absolutely key. And this is right off the bat. One of the things that differentiates Lucid dreaming from dream yoga, dream yoga, and let me just say very briefly about this distinction because it's helpful to understand that lucid dreaming in my language saying largely psychological in nature. I'm not at dismissive statement is super important, largely about self fulfillment. Dream yoga is more spiritual in nature and more about self-transcendence.

And so by working with these practices and setting proper intentionality, we're working with these subtle dimensions of our mind during the day and meditation, and then guess what happens. The same principles of lucidity start to manifest in the dream and sleep arena, and also in the liminal spaces. You simply will naturally start cultivated, again, boosted by this observational intent. You then have a little, just added impetus in your corner in terms of how to relate to these.

Does that help with that lend with you a little bit? Yes, and I think there is a lot more to say about the how here, but just stepping back for one second, I worry a little bit that maybe for the listener we haven't drawn bright enough lines between liminal dreaming, lucid dreaming, and dream yoga. Yeah, I think we should do that. I completely agree. So, I wanted to emphasize the liminal dreaming because again, I think it's the most accessible. But basically what happens in the classic dream arena, the liminal dreaming in a certain

way, at least in my mapping, is kind of the new kid on the block. It's a way to grease the skids for lucid dreaming and the ways I suggested earlier. But the main players in the natural arena of natural meditation are indeed lucid dreaming and dream yoga. And so basically, as I mentioned earlier, lucid dreams are a really cool state of mind, hybrid state of consciousness,

where one wakes up within the arena of dream understands that they're dreaming and all the stuff we talked about can take place in that dimension. So by that what I mean is lucid dreaming transcends, it goes farther than liminal dreaming, but it also includes it as a platform. Dream yoga transcends but includes both lucid dreaming and liminal dreaming, but it goes further, includes ambacles further, same with sleepy yoga, same with Barty Yoga. And so like I mentioned, the real benefits

start to shine, at least in my experience, when you start working with dream yoga, because this is like kind of the good news or bad news thing in the world of lucid dreaming. Whenever intention is involved, even at the level of a dream, now this does not apply to standard non lucid dreaming, where there's no fundamental intention involved. It's just your habitual patterns being revealed without overt intentionality. without overt intentionality. But when you have intentionality, even in the dimension of the dream, habits are created or in Eastern language, karma is created.

And so this is interesting in the world of lucid dreaming. It's one of the reasons it's a bit sexy and it sells. The marketing is, you know, fulfill slightly exaggerated, but fulfill your wildest fantasies and the privacy of your own mind. Well, hey, that's great to a point, but it doesn't say it should be in the fine print that whenever intention is involved, again, karma habit is created.

And so that's either bad news or good news. I mean, this is one reason why, to the best my understanding, one of the most sophisticated dreamers of the last century, Carl Jung, was very hesitant to endorse lucidity because he realized the potential for self-inflation, for self-aggrandizement. And so he was hesitant to endorse it. So this is good news or bad news. And by that, what I mean is, if you're just cultivating narcissistic,

completely indulgent activities on the world of lucid dreaming, hey, those habit patterns, again, using the principles of what you do with your mind changes your brain or a plasticity, you're actually cultivating these negative habit patterns. That's the bad news. The good news is when you understand this, and this is where Dream Yoga really comes in, you realize, hey, I can really clean up my habits in the world of natural meditation. Not only can I clean up my habits, I can replace them with good habits, and then fundamentally I can get rid of all habits period.

And so one way, at least within the Buddhist world, and that's where these practices, that's the way I learned them in the rena of Tibetan Buddhism, one way to look at the whole thing, at least the way I see it then when I look over the whole business from 50,000 feet, is the process of the path is to transform bad habits into good habits, I'll eat bad karma into good karma, and then eventually transcend karma habit altogether. And that's what the awakened ones are. That's what the Buddhas are literally the only ones that are habit-free. So in the world of dream yoga, then what do you do? In the nine stages of dream yoga practice, you work with these habit patterns. They are revealed to you within the context of the dream,

and then with your lucidity, you start to transform those habits. And then very briefly, just to complete the picture, and then we can go anywhere you want with this, with some facility in dream yoga, then you progress into graduate school practice, which is sleep yoga. It's called luminosity yoga and Tibetan and Sanskrit. The fruition of what's called yoga, need draw. And this is really where it gets profound. This is

where you can cultivate and it may seem like an unbelievable assertion for those of us in the West. You can maintain complete lucidity in the deep dreamless state. Now, these other lucid dreaming has been substantiated scientifically proven since 1975, and in England, 77 in Stanford, ever since then, it's been proven over and over. Scientists are now actively working to substantiate this outrageous claim. Are you telling me that I can be awake and sound asleep at the same time? Yes. And so just to show you the scope of when this will be proven

because labs are working on it with relief administrators, Thomas Metzinger, arguably one of the world's leading philosophers, has said that when this is in fact substantiated, it will be a revolution in the mind sciences. So there's so much to say about that, but I'm going to pause has said that when this is in fact substantiated, it will be a revolution in the mind sciences. So there's so much to say about that, but I'm going to pause to just go to the very last one, and then we can focus on any one of these that you please, you see how much is here. So with some stability in sleep yoga, now we're entering postdoc. And again,

these are all elected. You do not have to go to this deepest end of the pool. But really, the fruition, and this is where I really started getting excited about this, because I write and teach a lot about death and dying. In Bartolome, Bartolome is a Tibetan word that means gap transitional process in between. And it fundamentally refers to the archetype of the gaps if you believe in this sort of thing, which is the gap between lives. And so the way this ties into the Neutrional Meditations is, when you're working with sleep yoga, it's one reason it's difficult for the untamed mind to recognize, you're working

with extremely subtle, formless dimensions of mind. Well, formless means deathless. And this is exactly where sleep yoga leads to barrio. So fundamentally, what these practices will reveal. And this is also suggested in Greek, mythological, and intellectual history when you realize that the God of sleep is hypnosis. The God of death is thonatos. How are they related? They're not even just brothers. They are twins. And so therefore, in the classic wisdom traditions, using sleep, especially deep sleep, to work to prepare for what is literally called the dream at the end of time. And one comment

here, and then I'll pause, we can take any of these in a it. But the Tibetans talked very compellingly about three different types of dream. The nighttime dream is so provocatively called the double delusion or the example dream. Now, how interesting is that? What it implies is you can use the insights gained from the nighttime dream during practices like Dream Yoga, you can extrapolate those insights back to the second type of dream, which is this so-called waking reality. This is what's called a primary dream. This is what the Buddha literally, his name means the awakened one.

I think we could argue the ultimate Lucid dreamer. This is what he woke up to. He woke up. He discovered that what we know or we think of as reality is just a type of dream. Now what that means, boy, we can talk about that. But the last one in that applause, the third type of dream that to Ben's refer to is the dream at the end of time. And that's death. And so what the Bartolittor says is that the type of experiences we have in the nighttime dream are highly concordant or similar to their virtually identical according to that tradition. The types of experiences we're going to have at the end of life. And so therefore, if you believe on this sort of thing, you can use the arena of the nighttime dream I mentioned earlier,

lucid dreaming leads to lucid living. Well, it's not just the two for practice. This is a three for practice. You're getting three for the price of one because lucid dreaming also leads to lucid dying. And so I'll pause for a second because these are I'm opening up a lot of doors here and I just want to make sure we walk through the right one. Coming up, Andrew shares some starter moves for bringing lucid dreaming into your life. And we also talk about whether this is a safe practice for people like myself who have a fragile relationship to sleep. I think given that we have limited time, I want to focus on the shallower end of the pool and how can we get into lucid dreaming.

But let me see if I can sum it up. So liminal dreaming, which is the first, you know, way station on your map, is basically just being aware of this sort of transition between the waking state and the sleeping state. Lucid dreaming is when you actually wake up in a dream and have some agency within the dreams. Dream yoga, it's like you're not just awake and making decisions about flying or having sex with somebody you've long fantasized about. You're actually using the dreams to create good karma. It's a kind of form of meditation at night. Sleep yoga is when you're awake, when there's no dream at all, and that's pretty

out there as a notion. And even further out there is Bart O Yoga, where you're awake, I guess, in the liminal state between being alive and being dead or being alive and being dead and being alive again. But anyway, if that's reasonably accurate, let's go back to lucid dreaming. So what can we do? Let's give people some starter moves they can make at home to see if they can get there. Yeah, love it. Love it. Yeah, let's go here. So, yeah, so here's a deal with the ways to bring about lucidity in the dream state. There's a marvelous set of contributions, both from the so-called East and the so-called West. My approach is a little

bit this kind of integral spirit. I'll take truth and skill sets from wherever I can get it. And so one of the really cleverest ways to bring about lucidity, slash awareness in the dream state, is to work with this playful thing of dream signs and state checks. And by this, what I mean is, when you get the hang of it, these are really intuitive, they're easy, and they're actually kind of fun.

And so the way this stuff works is, when you're in a normal non-lucid dream, what the dream researcher Paul Toley talked about, no critically reflective attitude. And what that means is you're hanging around in your non lucid dream and a pink elephant arises. You just accept it. It's like, okay, whatever. I mean, thoughtable because you're not really saying this, you're just like whatever weird thing happens in the dream. And isn't that largely what constitutes our dreams or weird events

in Congress disjointed just literally dream like events? Well, if you just go blindly, just not questioning the status of authority in a certain way, like whatever weird thing happens in your dream, you just go with it, hey, that's what's going to keep you in a non-nose state. And so what you do with the practice of dream signs and state checks, it's kind of cool. As let's say here, I'm chatting with you in a bird, smacks into my window here, right? Well, that's a little bit unusual. Or even, you know, even more, I have my door open and a raccoon walks in, right?

That's a bit weird. That's just different. And so what one does is you start to condition yourself that whenever anything weird happens, and once you start to do this kind of conditioning, you start to realize, whoa, there's weird stuff happening all the time, you want to conduct what's called a state check, a reality check. And what that means is a very simple playful test to determine like, Hey, am I awake or am I dreaming? And so let's say, okay, I'm sitting here, I'm talking to you and a bird

smacks into the window. Well, what I do, this is just one of many, is I will literally just jump up off my seat. And it's like, okay, okay, why are you doing that, Andrew? just one of many is I will literally just jump up off my seat. And it's like, okay, okay, why are you doing that Andrew? Well, because if I jump up and I come back down, hey, I'm awakened this reality. But if I jump up and keep going, wait a second, wait a second,

I can't do this in awakened reality. I must be dreaming. And so this gets really cool. So I've conditioned myself every single time, something in congruist, something dreamlike, something disjointed happens. I conduct a state check. So this is habit patterns, kind of carmic predispositions. I'd like to refer to them as popups. You're fundamentally with this practice installing a bunch of pop-ups during the day, just like these annoying pop-ups on your computer. You're installing these pop-ups during the day that guess what? They are going to pop up

when you're dreaming. So tonight I go to sleep. Some weird thing happens in my dream because I practice state-check streams on practice all the time. Guess what? I'm going to conduct a state check. I'm going to jump up. And because I've done this for so long, it's like half the time when I initiate a lucid dream, it's because I do so when I'm flying it. I'll jump up something weird happens. I mean, it's like happens all the time, right? In the nighttime dream, I keep going. And so then I just start flying and I go, wait a second, this is so cool. I'm back in a lucid dream.

And then I go for a joy ride. So even if I'm doing kind of more discipline, traditional dream yoga, I almost always these days start with a little bit of fun. I'll do a little joy ride or whatever, and then I'll go to work. Another really key thing, really key technique, Stephen LeBarris discovered this.

His studies have shown that people that engage in this following one have a 1,600% as a 16 fold increase in chances of lucidity is called the Waken Back to Bed Method. And you just play with this. Set your alarm to go off around two to three hours before you'd normally wake up. Depends on your person's habits so you have to three hours before you normally wake up. It depends on a person's habits.

So you have to experiment and play with this. What you want to do is stay up anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes or even a bit longer. Don't go to your computer. Don't turn on any lights, work with some induction methods, work with some meditation. And basically his studies have shown that this raw interruption of sleep and nourish sleep patterning can really heighten lucidity because the farther you go during the night, the more you enter REM sleep, which is when we dream, right? But I move in sleep.

That's what I playfully refer to as primetime dream time. That's why we remember most of our dreams later in the morning. What are you talking about there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So set your alarm to go off. I would usually recommend three hours before you wake up because if you set it too much later than that, chances are good, you're not gonna go back to sleep. But this is something you have to play with. You wake up, do it a little waking back to bed methods or there's kind of doubles with that technique.

And then reset your intentionality. This is a great thing to do throughout the day. Let me just say this. Tonight, I'm going to have many dreams. Tonight, I'm going to remember my dreams. Tonight, I'm going to wake up in my dreams. That's the intentionality. So that's the perfume that's going to be sublimating everything you do. So you reinstate that as you're going to sleep, you reinstate that in the middle going to sleep, you reinstate that in the middle of the night, and then you basically just go back a bit and then just see what happens. I worry as somebody who has a fragile relationship to sleep generally in that,

I sometimes struggle to get enough that if I tried to set an alarm three hours before I wake up, that I wouldn't fall back to sleep and I'd just be fucking miserable. hours before I wake up that I wouldn't fall back to sleep and I'd just be fucking miserable. Hey, this is a new arena, man. This is the wild frontier. I mean, it's a frontier in implementation strategies in the Western world. And for people like you and me 30 years ago, I mean, this is the wild frontier, right? So we're going to be struggling and experimenting and hacking. That's the way evolution progresses. You know, it's as if you're hacking and you're chopping through the underbrush and you're learning your way. And so what you do, this is why it's a little bit more advanced, you become your own

meditation instructor here. You become your own guide. And some people like they love that, they like that. Oh, wow, you know, agency economy. I'm going to do my thing. Other people want to be handheld. And for them, this set of practices just simply may not be for them. That's cool. You don't have to do these things. But the idea is slightly more advanced in the sense that nobody knows your mind better than you. Nobody knows your vicissitudes, the way you roll better than you. And so the way the stuff works and this again is so cool. This is why you're going to really learn about yourself. You go in there, you go into this kind of darkness of the unconscious mind, armed with some of these tools. You learn the tips and tricks and the basic parameters and the guidelines and then what? You said I was like inward bound, right? When you're

doing outward bound, you know, you get all your goodies, you get your backpack, you get everything and you go out into the wilderness. Same thing here, but now it's inward bound. And so you have to have this slightly intrepid and curious approach, and you go on, you just explore, you see what works for you, you see what doesn't work. And again, I mentioned this earlier, but let me put an exclamation point on it. That's why there's so many different techniques. Unless you're teaching, the point is not to master the techniques. The point is lucidity, not what gets you there. And so you'll find your sweet spot.

You just have to hang in there, you experiment, trial and error, you check it out, you see it works, you see what doesn't. If you can't go to sleep after waking up with the three-hour thing, don't do it. Then try something else. And then sooner or later, something will work for you. You'll find that little avenue of sweet spot in and that's your ticket in.

And then all the other techniques just fall away. You just take that ticket and that's your way in. Andrew, before I let you go, if people want to learn more from you about how to do this stuff, what are the resources you've put out there books and otherwise? Oh, you're very kind. Well, I have three books on the topic. Entry Level book is a workbook called the Lucid Dreaming Workbook. By Harbin Tupras, that's a really great intro. All the benefits

are in there, all the induction techniques are in there. It's a great intro. And then the second book in this trilogy is literally Dream Yoga, illuminating your life through Lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep. This is a deeper dive where I do a survey through the nocturnal meditations with a pretty heavy emphasis on Dream Yoga, but also a chapter or two on Sleep Yoga and Bardi Yoga. And then my deepest dive, which came out a couple years ago, the third book in the trilogy is called Dreams of Light, the profound daytime practice of lucid dreaming, where I introduced this breath taking me brilliant topic of the daytime practice of a lucid reform, which

we haven't even touched on, which is a marvelous unique contribution to dream yoga to work with the illucirinate or reality that when we say reality is a dream, what does that really mean? So those books are great, but we also started four years ago, Dan, this, for exactly this reason, because this is a very solitary adventure, it's really kind of alone. We started this platform called Night Club. It's within my website, AndrewHallcheck.com, where it's an international community where we have a really rich array of amazing, like the world's greatest experts on scientists and scholars and kind of mystics and practitioners in the world of natural meditation, all kinds of webinars,

meditation things, super dream sharing group, science group, really active community with a number of events going on every week. And it's a really fun place where people, like mindy people, can get together and support each other. And again, we designed it particularly to help people with this venture because, hey, where else do you go to get this kind of support? So thanks for the opportunity to riff on those. They're pretty cool gigs. And we think they've been of some benefit. Thanks for coming on. This was utterly fascinating.

Yeah, thanks for the really great questions. I'll probably didn't boil you over with my enthusiasm. I mean, once I get going on this stuff, I get so jazzed, super excited to spend this time with you. And thanks again, Drew. You're just terrific questions. Thanks again to Andrew. Thanks as well to you for listening.

Go give us a rating and a review. I know every podcast host asks for that, but there's a reason because it really helps us with the algorithm, so please do me a solid. And thanks finally, and most importantly, to everybody who works so hard on the show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson.

DJ Kashmir is our senior producer, Marissa Schneidermann, is our senior editor, and Kimi Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio, and we get our theme music from Nick Thorburn of the great Indy Rock band, Ilands. Nick's got a new album coming out,

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