Reality is for those who cannot endure their dreams. (Slavoj Zizek)
The school of the night is a bridge between dream and waking reality, between the perceived and the imagined, between the conscious and the unconscious. By thinning the veil between dreaming and waking, intentions and insight from our waking state can fertilise our dreams, and the honesty and radicality of our dreams can ignite and transform our waking consciousness. It is a preparation for dying: staying present and lucid, even when the body falls apart, remembering who you are…
In our dreams, we are in a non-dual state: the dream and the dreamer are not separate from each other. While dreaming, however, we forget this, until we wake up and realise that it was only a dream. Because we now see it was all in our mind, we can smile at the hardship we endured. According to Ramana Maharshi,“…it is the same in the waking state, for you are unable to doubt the reality of the world which you see while you are awake. How can the mind, which has itself created the world accept it as unreal?”.
In this line of research, we dive into the practices of dream yoga and lucid dreaming inspired by old Tibetan practices and recent scientific research on lucid dreaming, exploring our minds in moonlight vision. Our hypothesis is that developing clear seeing in the dream world translates into a deeper understanding of oneself and waking reality. In addition, transformation of the dream body by performing yogic techniques in our sleep may impact our subtle and gross body in our waking state.
Experiments start in 2023 and will happen during night time (as you probably figured out). There will be experiments combinable with your regular daytime (working) life, and more intense experiments with full day preparatory practices in the form of a (weekend)retreat.
In addition, we will gather online every Thursday (starting 5/1) from 18:30 till 19:30 to share and support each other in our practice.
Interested in joining? Please send us an email.