Dream Yoga

Awakening. In your dreams.

Each year we spend at least 720 hours dreaming. In fact, most of us spend about one-third of our lives asleep. Dream yoga is a unique and transformative practice that allows you to explore your mind while dreaming, so that this significant portion of your life is being used to your greatest advantage. In this six-unit course, you will learn about the mental and physical benefits of nocturnal practices and discover how awakening in your dreams can profoundly transform your waking life.

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For many meditators, dream yoga is a powerful supplement to everyday meditation, while for others it is its own spiritual path entirely. Andrew Holecek, a renowned author and expert on dream yoga, lucid dreaming, and meditation, will be your guide in this six-unit intensive. In each unit, you’ll walk through the successive stages of dream yoga and learn about its practical mental and physical benefits, which include:

  • treating depression and anxiety;
  • cleaning up bad habits and cultivating good ones;
  • reducing nightmares and reframing troubling dreams;
  • alleviating phobias;
  • processing grief and resolving interpersonal issues;
  • providing a space to rehearse challenging tasks and enhance performance; and 
  • boosting creativity and problem-solving skills.

In Dream Yoga, we will find out how to bring meditation into our nighttime routines without losing any beauty sleep. More specifically, Andrew will demonstrate how lucid dreaming leads to dream yoga. Because dream yoga works with a highly distilled form of consciousness, some meditation masters assert that the practices performed in the dreaming state can be far more effective than those done in the waking state.

With diligent practice and effort, plus the tutelage of an experienced guide, you can work toward maintaining deep awareness in dreamless sleep cycles, which can lead to sustaining a more advanced meditative state. Nocturnal meditations ultimately open up an entirely new field of practice, allowing you to go further on the path every night.

Dream yoga can be learned by anyone, and no previous experience is required to take this course.

Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition who leads seminars and workshops throughout the United States and abroad. As a longtime student of Buddhism, he frequently presents the tradition from a contemporary perspective, blending ancient wisdom with modern tools. Drawing on years of intensive study and practice, he has become an expert on lucid dreaming and teaches widely on opportunities found in obstacles, hardship and pain, and death and dying. He is an experienced guide for students drawn to the powerful nocturnal practices of dream yoga.

Andrew has authored several books, including The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardship into JoyPreparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist TraditionDream Yoga; Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of SleepMeditation in the iGeneration: How to Meditate in a World of Speed and Stress, and the audio program “Dream Yoga: The Tibetan Path of Awakening Through Lucid Dreaming.”

Curriculum


Andrew Holecek will begin the course by introducing dream yoga and how it can bolster your spiritual practice. Once you've got a handle on dream yoga basics, Andrew will draw from methods of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as well as principles of modern science to guide you through the steps of becoming lucid in your dreams. He'll then outline a practice regimen you can refer to when you achieve lucidity or encounter difficulties on the way to more advanced stages.

Here's what to expect:

Unit 1: Benefits of Dream Yoga

Unit 2: Remembering Your Dreams

Unit 3: The Sacredness of Sleep

Unit 4: What to Do When You're Lucid

Unit 5: Obstacles and Antidotes

Unit 6: Advanced Stages and Spiritual Benefits

You can digest the course material at your own pace, on your own schedule. Once you've enrolled, the course is yours to keep.

It has been said that dream yoga can lead all the way to enlightenment.



Neurologically speaking, dreaming of doing something is equivalent to actually doing it. Below, you’ll find some of the benefits associated with lucid dreaming.


Mental and emotional benefits:


  • Treats depression and anxiety
  • Greatly reduces nightmares and reframes troubling dreams
  • Alleviates phobias and helps you process grief
  • Provides a safe place to resolve interpersonal issues
  • Enables you to rehearse performances and challenging tasks
  • Boosts creativity and problem-solving
  • Helps prepare for death.

Andrew Holecek on the spiritual benefits of dream yoga


In spiritual terms, of the three principal states of consciousness—waking, sleeping, and dreaming—the coarsest state, or the one with the least potential for spiritual evolution, is the ordinary waking state. Because of its malleability, the dream state has more transformative potential. Dzogchen teacher Namkai Norbu Rinpoche says, “It is easier to develop your practices in a dream than in the daytime. In the daytime we are limited by our material body, but in a dream our function of mind and our consciousness of the senses are unhindered. We can have more clarity. Thus there are more possibilities. If a person applies a practice within a dream, the practice is nine times more effective than when it is applied during the waking hours.”

For those who relate to this sort of thing, you can also use lucid dreaming to prepare for death, purify karma, and prevent negative karma from coming to fruition in the waking state. In Western terms, karma is just another word for habit, which means you can clean up bad habits in your dreams. In the Buddhist view of mind, karma often starts to ripen in the subtle dream state before it manifests in the gross waking state, which means it can be purified at this more subtle level. In this regard, a sensitive relationship to your dreams can literally save your life, because you’re working with the blueprints of your experience before they become fully constructed in reality. There are countless stories of people having dreams of premonition, where the dreams did indeed come true. The basic principles of lucid dreaming can help you become more aware of these types of dreams and use them to guide your life.

You can even incubate lucid dreams—in which you deliberately dream about a particular topic—in order to receive guidance, a practice that goes back thousands of years, to the ancient Egyptians and then the Greeks. The literature is full of stories about people receiving messages and teachings in their dreams. This sort of thing is common in extended retreat, when the mind really opens up. Tenzin Palmo, a British nun, spent 12 years in solitary retreat in the Himalayas, often snowed in for months in a cave. She said that this was never a problem, because whenever she needed guidance or inspiration, she’d ask for it and get it directly from her dreams. When I did my own three-year retreat, I often did the same thing. I’d incubate a lucid dream, then get the information I needed.

You can also incubate dreams for others, and become a “surrogate dreamer,” receiving advice for other people. This is a common practice in shamanic traditions, and is frequently employed in Tibetan Buddhism. I’ve never actively incubated such a dream, but I have received such dreams serendipitously. When I shared them with the people for whom they were intended, the information did indeed bring benefit.

Testimonials


"This course was really well done. Not only was the teacher an extraordinarily compassionate, eloquent and experienced instructor, but the format was set up in very digestible bites."

"This is such an extraordinary offering, I am very grateful to Tricycle and Andrew for this course which I will visit again and again. This is a lifetime support."

"It has expanded my mind, helped my practice and I will definitely be going over all this material again and possibly again. You teach so well, making the material accessible without over-simplifying."

"This course takes one there and back again with all of the best Buddhist safety mechanisms in place to help ensure a merit-worthy journey. Profound, powerful, wise and compassionate; a deep bow to Andrew. Wonderful subject matter and it is beautifully taught."

"Great course! So much more information than I ever expected. This is a good thing. I will go over the material again as it was so interesting."

"Excellent course. Andrew makes the course material very concise and understandable, considering that the material itself is not mainstream by Western standards!"

Curriculum


  Unit 1: Benefits of Dream Yoga
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  Unit 2: Remembering Your Dreams
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  Unit 3: The Sacredness of Sleep
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  Unit 4: What to Do When You're Lucid
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  Unit 5: Obstacles and Antidotes
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  Unit 6: Advanced Stages and Spiritual Benefits
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  Resources
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