Lucid dreaming around the world – sangomas, shamans and lucid lamas
Now that we’ve explored the West, let’s take a look at a few of the rich lucid dreaming practices found in other parts of the world.
At the end of my teens I formally became a Buddhist by taking refuge with a Tibetan Lama named Akong Rinpoche.1 Once I’d started going on meditation retreats I began to hear people use the term ‘dream yoga’. On one such occasion a monk was explaining how this is the name given to a series of dream, sleep and out-of-body experience practices found within Tibetan Buddhism that have lucidity training at their core.
The monk told me how dream yoga is used to practise meditation within the lucid dream, to train for the dying- and-death process, and even to gain insight into the very nature of waking reality. We spoke of meditating yogis entering the dream consciously and of lamas using the lucid dream state to eject their consciousness out into the pure realms. I was transfixed.
I began to devour books on the subject and learned how lucid dream training is used to prepare us for the ‘after-death bardo2 state’ – the dreamlike hallucinatory experience that we enter into once our mindstream has separated from the body at the point of death. Apparently, if we can truly master lucid dreaming then at the point of death we can become lucid within the dreamlike ‘after-death bardo’, recognize the nature of mind and reach full spiritual enlightenment. Lucid dreaming within Tibetan Buddhism is taken very seriously.
So let’s hear more about this subject from my teacher, a Tibetan dream yoga master named Lama Yeshe Rinpoche. I interviewed Rinpoche at Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland, where he lives as the Abbot, and began by asking him about the role dream yoga plays in Tibetan Buddhism.
‘Dream yoga is an essential practice for our lineage,’ he told me. ‘Within our tradition we have something called the Six Yogas of Naropa, which is seen as one of the most profound sets of practices. One of these Six Yogas is dream yoga.
‘In dream yoga we learn practices to help us recognize the dream and become lucid. Once we’re lucid in the dream anything is possible, so we can learn to travel to different planets, we can manifest one thing into a thousand and a thousand things into oneness.’
I then asked him about the relationship between death and lucid dreaming.
‘Death and dreaming, it’s all the same, just different interpretations. Once we achieve stabilized lucidity in dreams, when death comes we can see the death bardo as a dream too. This leads to fearlessness of death because we know that we can recognize the death bardo and achieve full awakening.’
‘Why do you think there’s so much interest around lucid dreaming nowadays, Rinpoche?’ I asked.
‘The West is ready for these practices now because in these modern times everybody is so concerned with themselves – with the “I” – and this makes everything seem so solid and real. But in lucid dreaming the sense of “I” is less solid, less real.
‘Because in the lucid dream you’re everything; it’s all mind?’ I interjected.
‘Yes! Of course! So lucid dreaming helps to free us from the solidification of “I”. And if there’s no “I” then there’s no suffering, because there is no “I” to suffer. Lucid dreaming cushions us – it shows us the lack of self and acts like a safety net to help us practise for the dream everyday life.
‘Through lucid dreaming we come to see that our everyday life is also like a dream, a longer dream but still a dream. There is no actual reality. If we can know this then our everyday life becomes far less solid and we see that the essence of everything is based on the pure nature of unconditional compassion – just like a dream.’
Visit www.samyeling.org for more information about Lama Yeshe Rinpoche and the Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery.
In some schools of Tibetan Buddhism it is advised to sleep sitting upright in meditation posture all night as a way to maintain lucid awareness throughout sleep. If that seems a bit extreme, then you might like to just try a higher pillow than usual as a way to help maintain clarity.
Apart from Tibetan Buddhism, the other ancient dream lineage I’ve had the most personal experience of is the Toltec-Mexihca tradition. At the time of writing, I’m halfway through the Lucid Dreaming World Tour with my friend and teacher Sergio Magaña. Sergio is the author of The Toltec Secret, and in 2013 he was named the UNESCO representative for the preservation of the Toltec-Mexihca tradition.
I picked Sergio’s brains about the origins of his dream-work tradition, and this is what he told me: ‘There are two versions to explain where the dreaming practices in the Toltec-Mexihca tradition originated. The oral tradition says there was a group of dreamers named “the people of the halo of the moon” who lived in a place called Teotihuacan 50,000 years ago, and that they were the first dreamers. These people created two different lineages of what’s called nahualism: the ancient dreaming knowledge of Mexico.’
‘One of the lineages was that of the Mexihca (the people of the moon), who would use plants like the hallucinogenic peyote to open their awareness, along with specific shamanic formulas like ingesting the powdered body of a snake in order to invite the spirit of the serpent into dreams. The other lineage was that of the Toltec, who focused more on breath-work techniques based on the mathematics of the universe, and the use of ritual dances too. It’s from these two lineages that the modern Toltec and Mexihca cultures of the past thousand years took their names.’
‘And what about the other version?’ I asked Sergio.
‘The other version, and the more official one I should add, is that a nomadic group named the chichimecas, the “people of the double power”, awake and sleeping, who lived in the USA and Mexico, began these practices about 4,000 years ago. These dreaming practices are almost extinct now, though. I’ve only found four people in the whole of Mexico who know deeply about them. This is because there was a command from the last Aztec ruler to hide the treasures – the Spanish thought this was gold, but actually it was knowledge of the dream practices. It was then prophesied that, with the dawning of the sixth sun, these treasures will return. The time of the sixth sun began in 2012, so now is the time to reveal these ancient practices once more.’
I asked Sergio how he’d first come into contact with these practices. ‘My nanny was actually one of those four people who really knew about the dream practices. She was the daughter of a well-respected healer, or curandero, of an indigenous group called the otomíes. She had some knowledge and so that was my first meeting with the dreaming world. Then I found my teachers many years later.’
Sergio went on to explain some of the lucid dreaming techniques within his tradition. ‘The main techniques are certain breathing exercises that we do before sleep in order to plant dreams and to encourage lucid dreaming. There are also some more sophisticated techniques like the chac mool, which involves breath work that actually changes your reflection while you gaze into an obsidian mirror.
‘As you do this you can command how you would like to appear in the dream world, depending on what aspect of your life you want to work with: healing or abundance, for example, or whatever you wish.
‘We also look for the spirit of the sun, moon, and stars in our dreams. Before this we would do a full-moon ceremony involving many dreamers in which the dreamers who become lucid can appear in each other’s dreams.’
For more information on Sergio’s work, visit www.sergiomagana.com or check out his new book, The Toltec Secret.
There’s a great story about a journalist who was studying indigenous tribal cultures around the world. When he introduced himself as an American to the leaders of the various tribes, on three different occasions three different tribal leaders from three different corners of the world all asked him: ‘You’re an American? Do you know Stanley Krippner? He lived with us before.’
I had the honour of meeting the legendary octogenarian anthropologist at the Gateways of the Mind Conference in 2013 and have since had the chance to speak to him about shamanic lucid dream practices from around the world.
Dr Krippner began by telling me what shamans actually are: ‘They are socially sanctioned practitioners who obtain information in ways not accessible to their peers. This information is used to heal or help their social group. Lucid dreaming is one source of this information.’
‘So lucid dreaming plays a central role in some shamanic traditions, then?’ I asked.
‘One shaman I spoke to in Brazil told me that “anyone who dreams partakes in a bit of shamanism”, although I don’t know of any shamanic traditions where lucid dreaming plays a central role. But there are, of course, individual shamans who use lucid dreaming as a central focus. One of my students wrote her dissertation on a Native American medicine man called Rolling Thunder who was a “dreamwalker” with the ability to enter other people’s dreams and offer them healing.
‘And as you know, lucid dreaming is cultivated by many Tibetan lamas, and that tradition goes back to the Bon tradition, which grew out of shamanism.’
I asked Stanley why lucid dreaming was so important to some shamanic practitioners.
‘Lucid dreaming was, and still is, important in these traditions because dreaming is felt to be a portal into other worlds. If one can control one’s dreams, this portal can be accessed more directly. Also there are practical benefits: the shaman can dream about which herbs are needed to heal sick people or what rituals can be conducted to produce rain.’
‘It seems as if the shamans use lucid dreaming in a much more practical way than is done in the West, where it’s often used as a form of recreation,’ I remarked.
‘Oh yes, and many scholars of comparative religions make the point that Eastern practitioners of lucid dreaming use procedures that are far more complex and sophisticated than those recently adopted by Westerners too.’
Finally, I couldn’t resist asking the man who’d been so instrumental in spreading awareness of plant medicine to the West whether the lucid dream experience could be compared to the plant-medicine experience of ayahuasca.
Also known as yage, ayahuasca is a blend of two plants – the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and a shrub called chacruna (Psychotria viridis), which contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine (DMT). It forms part of the ancient medicine lineages of the Amazonian region.
‘Although some anthropologists speculate that the development of lucid dreaming is a cognitive development that may change the actual neurology of the dreamer – which can be seen to resemble initiation into ayahuasca use – the only direct connection between ayahuasca experiences and lucid dreaming is that many people claim to have lucid dreams immediately after their ayahuasca experience is over. But this is anecdotal. No studies have been done on this topic.’
Visit www.stanleykrippner.weebly.com for more information on Stanley Krippner’s work.
Sufism is a mystic aspect or dimension of Islam3 that has strong threads of dream work and lucid dreaming running through it. The Spanish Sufi Ibn al-Arabi said that ‘a person must learn to control his thoughts in a dream. The training of this alertness will produce great benefits for the individual.’4 He also encouraged people to learn lucid dreaming by saying that ‘everyone should apply himself to the attainment of this ability’.
I interviewed Nigel Hamilton, the UK representative of the Sufi Order International, about lucid dream practice within his tradition and he told me that ‘although the Arabic Sufi orders talk about revelations being received through dreams it’s the fact that these can lead to waking-state visions that is seen to hold the most potential’.
He added that ‘due to the interaction between Sufis and the Indian yogis there are some lucid dream practices found in Sufism that came originally from the Indian Vedanta tradition. One of these involves meditation on a red dot in the third eye chakra, which seems to be similar to certain Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga techniques too.’
Since its formation over 1,400 years ago, the whole of Islam – not just Sufism – has had a close relationship with dreaming. The Prophet Muhammad himself used his dreams to advise on both military and religious matters, and much of the Koran was revealed to him through his dreams. There is even a line from the Koran that says that dream work is ‘the prime science since the beginning of the world’.5
The Prophet would ‘ask his disciples every morning about their dreams and offer interpretations of them’.6 Interestingly, the famous Islamic call to prayer (adhan) was instituted by Muhammad after one of his close disciples dreamed of such a thing and shared the dream with him.
There’s a framework of formalized dream practice in Islam, too, called ‘Istikhara’. In this, specific prayers are recited during the day as a way of receiving a sought-after dream of guidance that night.7
I’ve known South African sangoma John Lockley for a few years now but recently I asked him to help elucidate the dream work practices of the Xhosa (pronounced K’ozza, with a click on the K if you’re brave enough) tribe of South Africa, of which he is part.
John began by telling me how the Xhosa sangoma culture is an ancient oral tradition with teachings and practices passed on from one generation to the next.
‘The Xhosa tribe is connected to the Khoisan (Bushmen) people, who are known to be the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa. They were hunter-gatherers who intermarried with the Xhosa people from the 1700s onwards, and it’s thought that some of the dream practices that the Xhosa sangomas now work with came originally from the Khoisan people.’
I asked John how well known the Xhosa dream practices are these days. ‘The practices are well known among Xhosa sangomas and their apprentices, as well as sangomas from other lineages,’ he told me. ‘I’m currently trying to help promote these indigenous dream practices around the world. However, it seems there is little awareness of these ways in the Western world at present.’
I continued by asking him how he’d got into indigenous African dream work, especially growing up as a white South African during the apartheid era.
‘I had a dream when I was 18 years old in which I was called to become a traditional sangoma medicine man,’ John replied. ‘I was told in that dream that if I accepted the calling I was going to get very sick. This sickness is known as the “twaza”, or “illness of calling”, and it’s very common among sangoma initiates.
‘My “twaza” illness was really debilitating. I had fevers, night sweats, anxiety and depression. It led to a huge flush of electrical energy through me. In South Africa we call this flow of nervous energy “umbilini”. It’s similar to the concept of kundalini in the Indian traditions.’
‘So what happened next?’ I asked.
‘Well, as a white man I wasn’t allowed into the segregated black areas so I couldn’t find my sangoma teacher. But my dreams soon guided me around this obstacle. They first showed me to Zen Buddhism and guided me to work with a Zen master out in South Korea. I then returned to South Africa in 1994, when Mandela became president and apartheid finally ended. I found my sangoma teacher a few years later and she confirmed my dream experiences and taught me the ways of her people.’
I asked John what those ‘ways’ were, exactly.
‘Essentially there are three main practices that stimulate our dreams and help us gain clarity in our everyday lives. These are rhythm work, medicinal plants and ancestral prayers. The sangoma rhythm is a particular heartbeat rhythm and it’s played on a large drum called an “isiguba”. We dance to this rhythm.
‘Then there’s the use of medicinal plants, which are used to help cleanse the body both internally as drinks and externally as washes applied to the skin. Generally, non-hallucinogenic plants are used.
‘And finally, prayer is of course essential to the path. Sangomas pray to their ancestors, guardian spirits and uThixo – the Great Spirit. They pray in a particular, rhythmical way, allowing the prayers to move up from their bones and blood. All this has a big effect on your dreams.’
Check out www.johnlockley-sangoma.com for more information about John’s work around the world.
Inspired by those amazing lucid dream traditions? Then let’s get back to the one tradition found within them all: doing the practices!
TOOLBOX 5: ACCESSING THE ICEBERGOur toolboxes are filling up fast, so let’s look now at a classic lucid dreaming technique found in many of the dream traditions we learned about in Chapter 6. This technique allows us to access the iceberg of the unconscious directly, without losing conscious awareness.
For many people falling asleep consciously, or FAC, is the Holy Grail of lucid dreaming practice, but it’s really not such a big deal. Although it can take a long time to master it, I’ve taught hundreds of people this technique and seen them apply it successfully within a few weeks – or even on the first night of practice.
FAC combines elements of a well-known lucid dreaming technique called WILD (wake-initiated lucid dream) with a few of my own methods and a twist of meditative awareness. The aim is to pass through the hypnagogic state and enter REM dreaming sleep without blacking out or losing consciousness. FAC is both incredibly simple and often incredibly elusive, and involves letting your body and brain fall asleep while part of your mind stays aware.
I advise that you practise this technique after briefly waking in the last few hours of your sleep cycle, when you will enter REM dreaming straight from the hypnagogic state. As we learned in toolbox 2, when you first fall asleep it may be 80 minutes before you enter your first dream period but if you wake yourself in the early hours (either naturally or with an alarm) and then fall back asleep you’ll enter dreaming within about 15 minutes. For this technique it’s a case of the more direct the entry into the dream state the better.
I have three favourite versions of the FAC technique that I teach. Let’s look at each one individually.
To enter the dream state lucidly, be like a surfer. Paddle through the hypnagogic imagery and ‘drop in’ to the wave of the dream lucidly. If you have a good sense of mental balance and awareness then this is the technique for you!
If you have good body awareness (perhaps you like to dance, or do body work or yoga), you may find that this version of the FAC technique is the one for you. It involves scanning your awareness through your body as you drift into sleep and enter the dream lucidly.
This version of the technique isn’t particularly meditative, and it doesn’t call for much body awareness either, but it does require the ability to maintain a sense of reflective awareness as you abseil down into the dream. By combining counting with a repeated question (or reflection) as you go through the transition from wakefulness into dream, you can maintain your awareness fluidly.
It’s been noted in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that if we fall asleep once a night and wake up once in the morning, we’re only giving ourselves one opportunity to fall asleep consciously – one opportunity to recall our dreams and one opportunity to engage the lucid dreaming techniques. But if we wake ourselves up and fall back to sleep three times a night then we triple our potential success rate! This idea forms the basis of the multiple wake-ups technique.
The first four and a half hours of sleep are when we get most of our deep, restorative sleep, so we don’t interrupt those, but the second few hours, as you’ll remember, are when we start to have longer dream periods, with the last two hours of our sleep cycle being the prime time for dreaming.
And don’t worry, if we time the wake-ups to coincide with our 90-minute sleep cycles, we won’t feel any less rested the following day.
On the lucid dreaming retreats I run we usually do wake-ups at 3.30 a.m., 5 a.m., 6:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. after a 10:30 p.m. bedtime. It’s like a nine-hour spiritual slumber party each night!
Here’s how it’s done. Set your alarm so that you wake up after at least four and a half hours sleep and then, once you’ve written down your dreams for five to ten minutes, reset your alarm for 90 minutes later and fall asleep practising your chosen lucid dreaming technique. Repeat as required.
Now that you have five toolboxes full of techniques to work with you’re going to start having lucid dreams very soon (if you haven’t already, that is) so let’s turn our attention now to how to stay in the lucid dream state once we get there.
As I mentioned in Chapter 1, the most common form of lucid dream for newbie dreamers goes something like this: they’re dreaming away, totally unaware that they’re dreaming and then suddenly something weird happens and they think, Hang on, this is a dream! I’m lucid dreaming! Oh my gosh! This is so…
And they then find themselves instantly woken up by the sheer excitement of it all. Excitement and awe are two of my favourite emotions, but if we want to stay lucid for more than a few seconds we need to learn how to keep them in check. The man who taught me how to do this is one of the leading authorities on lucid dreaming – Robert Waggoner – so I thought it’d be great if he could teach you guys how to stay cool too.
You’ve done it! You’ve become lucidly aware. Incredibly, you stand (or float, or hover) in a dream, knowing it as a dream. It’s an amazing feeling.
However, one important element may pull the plug on your lucid adventure, and quickly make it all disappear – your emotions. Almost every lucid dreamer learns that too much emotional intensity will pop you out of the lucid dream. So probably the first thing that you need to realize as soon as you become lucid is this: keep calm and carry on.
The amount of emotional intensity differs from lucid dreamer to lucid dreamer. You may find yourself able to deal with a surprising amount of joy, euphoria and glee before you trigger the lucid ejection button. At some point though, you will likely discover that limits exist to the amount of emotion you can feel in a lucid dream.
Robert Waggoner is author of the acclaimed book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self and co-editor of the magazine Lucid Dreaming Experience. He’s a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and conducts workshops around the world on his life’s passion, lucid dreaming.
