Lucid Dreaming vs. Dream Yoga: What’s the Difference?

Episode Transcript

Debra (00:00.794)
Hello, welcome to another episode of Soul Sessions. Hello, welcome to another episode of Jung On Purpose. My name is Debra Maldonado. And we’re so glad you’re here. And today we’re going to be talking about dream yoga, completing our series on dreams. Or some people may be familiar with the term lucid dreaming. So we’ll talk about that as well.

Dr. Rob (00:12.288)
I’m Dr. Rob, welcome to the program.

Debra (00:28.752)
But before we begin, I do want to request, do us a favor and subscribe to our podcast. If you’re listening to us on one of those podcast services, it really helps us out. Also, if you’re watching us on YouTube, click the subscribe button and the notification button so you can receive notifications of every new episode that comes live. So Rob, dream yoga. I always love that term. And I think of maybe going to a dream retreat and maybe the, you know, some tropical island and have a do yoga on the beach. Is that what we’re talking about? Kind of in our minds, right?

Dr. Rob (01:04.91)
Kind of, why not? Why not? Yeah. But yeah, traditionally, of course, yoga is the mind body discipline that is really aimed at self realization. In other words, the discipline. Yeah, it’s not just to get the yoga butt or or health.

Debra (01:23.524)
So it’s not just the yoga classes we take in the corner. The yoga bud.

Dr. Rob (01:33.435)
a spa-like experience, but to discipline the mind-body so that it’s ready to receive higher knowledge.

Debra (01:42.138)
So the body work with the yoga is just one aspect of yoga.

Dr. Rob (01:47.444)
Absolutely. And dream yoga, of course, includes this practice of looking at the dream world and the dream experience as a vehicle. And in other words, where the the yogi is recruiting the body and the philosophy of yoga for self-realization and actively cultivating

consciousness in the dream state.

Debra (02:21.592)
And so our logo, actually the icon, is based on the Aum symbol, which has four parts, the waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and pure consciousness, the little dot. If anyone wondered what that represented, it’s actually a modernized version of the Aum symbol. So let’s talk about Eastern philosophy in those four areas a little bit.

Dr. Rob (02:45.526)
Yeah. Yeah. So this is called Turiya. It’s kind of a funny Sanskrit word, but it simply means the fourth. So that if we we look at our states of mind, within a 24 hour period, all human beings go through a waking state, a dreaming state, a deep sleep state. And then Turiya is the one that

Debra (02:50.668)
I love that word.

Debra (03:02.234)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rob (03:14.894)
where these states of mind arise. So it’s that foundation, pure consciousness. So we can think of these three states of mind not as separate, right, or completely separate. They all have in common this consciousness, this turya, the fourth state, which is pure awareness.

Debra (03:18.106)
So it’s basically the foundation, right?

Debra (03:37.774)
And so it’s not just like, I’m in dreaming now, I’m awake now, I’m deep sleep now. There is kind of a gradation of levels of consciousness and even waking life. We daydream or we’re caught up in the world of life and we’re not really fully conscious. We’re caught up in the news or social media or watching a movie. It’s kind of a dreaming state. We’re not really fully awake. So what is the…

What is the goal of dream yoga? What is, mean, pure consciousness, in like, explain it to me like I’m a nine year olds, Rob. What is the goal?

Dr. Rob (04:16.653)
Yeah, when you’re already 10, right?

Debra (04:19.139)
Yeah, I’m 10 now, so imagine I’m nine.

Dr. Rob (04:22.605)
So let’s, let’s define it this way. Dream yoga trains us to become aware within the dreaming and sleeping states so that we begin to recognize that awareness is present across these changing states of mind. It’s always there. It’s the ever present awareness. Now, how do we do that? Of course,

It requires us to really discipline our mind and our awareness so that it can take us there. And one of the Yeah.

Debra (05:01.753)
So what’s the benefit of that though? why should I want to be in pure awareness? And also I think in that second part of that question is many people think it’s about escaping or withdrawing or being disassociated. why do we need to be like the witness and be aware of this other part of ourselves?

Dr. Rob (05:07.126)
Yeah.

Dr. Rob (05:18.445)
Yeah.

Dr. Rob (05:25.783)
Yeah, so in the Jungian model, which is a depth psychology model gives us a good basis to understand that because the idea in the Jungian model is that the more you integrate consciousness, in other words, the more you’re able to connect your conscious mind, meaning your everyday waking conscious mind with the unconscious mind,

deeper layers of the unconscious mind, including dreaming and deep sleep. The more you’re able to do that, the more holistic your experience of your human life becomes. In other words, you’re no longer relegated to only experiencing your ego state of mind in the waking state. And you’re believing that that’s all there is to my life, this sliver of awakeness that

I have every 24 hours, which is only about 12 hours. Well, I don’t know, depending on how much you sleep, 18 hours or so. The dream yoga then gives us a discipline to follow that helps us integrate consciousness, both conscious and unconscious mind together.

Debra (06:30.031)
18 hours.

Debra (06:50.947)
Well, let me try this on for the nine year old mind. I see the real benefit is that we are so when we’re in ego, we’re unintegrated, we do not know who we are and we live in the world. very, we’re focused on the external. So we focus on material things. We see ourselves as separate from everything.

We, things become really urgent, like finding a partner or making money. Those become really tangible fears. People like us, physical safety, all those things, political upheaval and the environment and all this stuff, we can get very externalized. And then also projecting our power onto others and feeling powerless. so Young’s work first is like integration of what we’re not conscious of, like on a personal level.

But with dream yoga, we enter a bigger picture because Jung also talked about the collective unconscious that we’re the two million year old man inside of us or woman, if you want to be or whatever non-binary person, human in us is there’s so much richness inside that we’re not tapping into because our mind is facing outward. so dream yoga, think the first step would be to

look at our dreams and start to see that, power, what the messages are from those dreams and the personal unconscious. And then eventually the more advanced young ins, like in our trainings, they go to that mastery level where they’re really seeing that everything is a part of them. Everything is symbolic. So it’s more that instead of giving all the power to the external, we’re turning the light inward and seeing like all the, we’re not,

rejecting the external, but we’re seeing we’re a part of it and that we it’s a dance. And that we’re also there’s another part of us that’s untouched by it. So that’s my, my, you know, maybe a nine year old wouldn’t understand. I don’t know. But I just tried to keep it real. Keep it practical. Let me know in the comments if you find my interpretation. So

Dr. Rob (08:56.14)
Well, yeah, we’ll have to try it and see if it makes

Debra (09:07.835)
So yeah, that like you, we say the powerful part of this is that we all believe that we’re the ego, that’s the biggest problem that we have to solve in the world. And dream yoga gives us a chance to transcend that ego. And it doesn’t mean get rid of it. doesn’t mean that you don’t cultivate an ego and have a healthy ego. But it means that that’s not the whole picture. And that’s it’s expanding our awareness beyond just the ego consciousness, not rejecting it.

but expansion.

Dr. Rob (09:38.915)
Yeah, so in the West, in recent years, there’s been an understanding and an appreciation of lucid dreaming. So lucid dreaming, we can think of it as being subsumed under the dream yoga term, right? In other words, dream yoga includes the understanding of lucidity within dreams, which means

This is a paradoxical state because it is a combination of both our ego waking state of mind and the dream state. So in other words, it’s beginning to merge there and people, many people have experienced according to research, they’ve done kind of population research and they find that, yeah, I had that as a kid then, or, know, I.

I had that experience, but I don’t know how to reproduce it. Or some people even say, yeah, I have lucid dreams all the time.

Debra (10:40.815)
Would that be like a dream of like, I know a lot of people tell me, I had a dream of flying a lot when I was a kid. Would that be a lucid dream? You’re kind of awake and you’re like having those flying dreams? Could be.

Dr. Rob (10:50.538)
It could be yes, it could be any kind of dream. It might be just a simple dream of being at work like you do every day. But you wake up within the dream. It’s almost like you become aware that you’re in a dream landscape. So that that experience is very disconcerting, because we’re not used to it. And we often wake up when we hit lucidity. And so it

You know, we’re not able to stay in that lucid state, which is an amazing state of mind, because then you can, you can work with the dream content. In other words, whatever you think in the dream content becomes reality. So a lot of people use it indeed as an escape or as a, an amusement park within the mind where they can experience all kinds of things that they usually don’t like flying or

creating sensual experiences that…

Debra (11:53.882)
We’re manifesting things in the, and I’ve had, you know, I’ve had lots of lucid dreams. I’ve dreams of me like flying through space and going to another planet and like in midair and being awake. And then I’ve had dreams, I think when I first met you, had a dream, I left our bedroom and I went down the stairs. And I remember being very conscious that I couldn’t touch the material. Like it was just made of air. And I was like, Ooh, this is curious. And I was just kind of exploring.

And then the next stage that I had a lucid dream where it was all black and I was in this like, almost like theater, like almost like I felt like the theater of the mind and everything was black. And I said, I want to, I want to, I said, my God, I’m awake and I’m in this place. I want to create a tree. And so the tree appeared and I was so excited that I was awake and created the dream.

that I started like kind of like getting excited and going, my God, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming. then I woke up, I’m like, I couldn’t hang on to it. So it’s like a cultivation of that skill. I wanna ask you this, this is what I would think the benefit of lucid dreaming is, is that we wanna eventually be in the waking life, bringing in dream like experience. So we’re like in the dream, we’re waking up in the dream.

And it’s almost like when we’re awake, we want to bring the dream like experience into our waking life. we’re, we want to merge those two because that’s really like a kind of a higher level of consciousness that we’re interacting with a material world. It’s not as solid as we think. So is that what the goal is really?

Dr. Rob (13:35.637)
In dream yoga, yes, the goal is to understand the inner, the inner experience of our consciousness, right, not just the content. In other words, the content in the West, in Western psychology in general, we’re very focused on the dream content. In other words, we want to interpret what are these symbols that appear in the dream mean?

And so that’s one of the uses of lucid dreaming and dream yoga that we can, for example, if I want to work with a mother archetype or the father archetype or any archetypes, I can call up those images as correspond to the archetypes in the dreaming state and actually interact with them and ask them questions very much like we do.

in our active imagination practices.

Debra (14:36.931)
I was thinking that sound. So let me ask this then if someone practices active imagination, like we teach in our programs, this really deep practice of interacting with archetypes and understanding our shadow cells and someone who’s actively doing that, they could probably be priming themselves for a lucid experience because you’re training your mind to think in that spontaneity and interacting with this kind of

false or mythological world or this kind of imaginary world and stimulating the imagination, I would think that imagination and cultivating that would be a key to lucid dreaming to be able to cultivate that. is that something neurologically from the neuroscience perspective, that when we are more imaginative, there’s something change in our brains? Is this a way we can help our brains be more attuned to this type of dreaming?

Dr. Rob (15:35.001)
Yeah, absolutely. Because if we think about our waking state, what is active is our rationality, right? And that understanding of space time, very logical. The past is in the past, the present is right now, and something’s going to happen, which is the future. So it’s linear, linear understanding of space time. The unconscious doesn’t care about

that it doesn’t it doesn’t read space time is that way. It reads it as everything is happening right now. And anything is possible. So so the merging of these two states is what feels so special to us when we become lucid in in dreaming is that now both elements coexist. I am thinking in rational terms, but I am in

Debra (16:13.327)
I love that,

Dr. Rob (16:32.704)
a landscape, a dream landscape that does not follow those rules. Anything is possible. Therefore, my thoughts can immediately materialize and I can direct this dreaming state in unique creative ways.

Debra (16:50.169)
There’s a movie back in probably the 90s called What Dreams May Come with a

now I can’t think of his name. I know who he is Robin Williams. And I found that so fascinating when I watched that movie of because I was like starting to explore my own spiritual understanding of consciousness. And I thought, well, that’s kind of how it should be. You’re in this space where you think of something and it creates itself. And, and it was such a cool way, exploration of even the darkness and how you can get caught up in the darkness and then also

the light and the happiness and what you carry with you and the perspective that you create around you. you know, he, his wife had committed suicide and she had, he had to go and find her in this dark place. And really, you know, so it’s not just all the happy dappy, like we’re, our state of mind is very important to explore this. So we could be in a lucid dream and it could be very scary, couldn’t it? In a way, if we’re, if our mind is like,

Dr. Rob (17:55.118)
Yeah, I-

Debra (17:55.842)
in a fearful state and we have these, we talked about nightmares in our last episode. So just wondering how that works in that way.

Dr. Rob (18:05.772)
Yeah, can be. But the more practice in perhaps maybe maybe even with guides, maybe, you know, like a Jungian coach that is

Debra (18:20.623)
kind of working with your shadow, right? You’re kind of doing your shadow work and kind of on that journey.

Dr. Rob (18:21.538)
cognizant of dream work. can use this blending, this state of mind of being conscious of your unconscious mind, like Jung says, making the unconscious conscious is one of the aims of individuation. To further that state, in other words, to understand the contents of your shadow or your

conscious mind, your personal unconscious, in a better way in a more practical way, because we dream every night, imagine having the ability to interact with your dreams in a conscious way, where you’re asking questions, and you’re able to receive those messages messages directly from the unconscious. Now, of course, in dream yoga, what the monks or

the people that practice dream yoga are doing is working on at a much higher level. Now they’re integrating higher knowledge in this lucid state of mind. They’re able to generate dream states that are spiritual.

Debra (19:37.84)
So instead of like being in a playground and maybe having a sexual experience and, you know, I’ve read books or people that are like, oh, and we went and we had sex with each other in the mutual dream. Like, oh, that’s great. But what is that really helping me? Like you said, it’s not a playground for wish fulfillment. You know, it can be, but but there’s like, you can meet guides in the dreams that lucid dreaming state and like not guides, but like wise archetypes and.

the deeper collective unconscious in those states as well? Is that what you’re saying?

Dr. Rob (20:11.352)
Yeah, it involves some of that because you think about it, if anything is possible, the people that have passed can be present and you can have conversations with them. Also, some practices involve like generating a state of mind of pure light within the lucid state or dream yoga.

Debra (20:39.939)
I just know after lucid dreaming, even if it was like a brief moment, there’s some the next day, I felt this high that I’d never felt, didn’t feel before. And I wonder if in deep sleep, and then you’re awake and within that deep sleep, there’s like, you kind of bring some of that numinous energy with you in the waking life. I don’t know, like it absorbs more into your physical body. But I don’t know what that is. But it felt like

the most high I’ve ever felt this the next day, just this openness and space and joy, like I was floating on a cloud.

Dr. Rob (21:16.92)
that’s another aspect of dream yoga is that you get to experience states of mind and states of mind body of course because you’re activating the whole system that are we could say transcendental aesthetic pure bliss all these states of mind that we don’t experience in our waking life because we’re

we’re focused on the rationality of space time. When in our waking state and the dream state, like I said, those do not apply and therefore we have a lot more access to mental states.

Debra (22:01.519)
Well, in deep sleep, we are entering the bliss state, but we don’t remember it. And so that’s what I was thinking that when you have a lucid dream, you’re kind of bringing, you’re kind of more aware of that bliss state that the depth, deep sleep can go to, which is like extraordinarily powerful. It’s not an ordinary just meditating and going to a beautiful place.

Dr. Rob (22:24.556)
Yeah, and those states of mind most likely have therapeutic healing effects on our mind body. Therefore, a lot of the shamanistic traditions, for example, talk about using the dream state as a healing practice. And you can see why because these states of mind then allow the

Debra (22:35.023)
I’m sure.

Dr. Rob (22:52.034)
both the shaman and their clients or their patients to tap into these resources in the.

Debra (23:01.431)
And so what would be like the possibility for like the conscious personality to use lucid dreaming? what would be possible for someone? Let’s say you’re kind of working on breaking free of a pattern of like say relationships and you wanted to find the love of your life, which is one of our first clients that we’ve worked with and they’re developing themselves spiritually. They want a spiritual partner.

How can dream yoga help them, you know, kind of integrate this into their conscious personality for them to have a, you know, physical experience of true love in their life?

Dr. Rob (23:44.377)
Well, one of the points that we make in helping people realize their potential, whether it be in relationships or abundance, is that the answer is within them. And so facing those elements that are in the unconscious, like shadow work, is one of the prerequisites for being able to

to manifest the whole potential, the total potential in your being. so lucid dreaming, dream yoga can help an individual kind of encounter those things in a more realistic way that the dream will help them because it will present the images that they need to

come to terms with in a very friendly way. Our dreams are very supportive. They’re usually trying to help us become ourselves, realize our true potential. And therefore, we’re simply going to the next level that instead of just waiting for us to remember a dream clearly and to work with it and symbolically, that it can show up to for us almost like being present.

because we’re awake in the dream and we’re able to call in these figures which will help us integrate those aspects of ourselves.

Debra (25:21.411)
I’ve noticed when I was single, I had a lot of dreams when a relationship was about to end, you know, I was serious, but like, you know, you’re dating. And I would have a dream that that person was saying goodbye. And it was almost like the dream world was saying, this is over, this is done. And then it would end in real life. And I was almost like preparing me for the next stage. And so I find that sometimes they’re, they’re intuitive. I mean, definitely intuitive, but almost like I said this before in our other episodes, it feels like you have a

ally inside of you that’s like walking with you through life. And it’s this wisdom that we have access to through dreams. So when we think about dream yoga, how can someone prepare spiritually for this journey of like really understanding the dream work in less than Oh, I just want to find out what my issues are in my shadow, I want to really have a spiritual evolution with dreams.

What would be some things that people can do waking to be aware of, like in their waking life, what kind of practices really help?

Dr. Rob (26:27.138)
Yeah, so because reality, we can say is, is a symbolic experience, very similar to dreams. And this is, this is actually the neuroscientific perspective of many neuroscientists now. It used to be like that we thought of dreams as, they’re just this electrical activity that’s going on during the night.

and the brain is simply making trying to make sense of these chaotic firings. No, we’re starting to understand that our very waking life is dreamlike. It’s simply like a controlled hallucination. And so if our waking life is symbolic, and pretty much is appearing in our mind as an internal dream,

then that means that we can, we can start to understand our life very much the way we understand our dreams, that they, that everything contains a message for us, but we need to interpret it that way. Instead of just thinking of our, the things that we experienced in our waking life as separate from us, the, in Eastern philosophy, they say,

Most people experience their external life as it’s as if it has an independent existence on my mind. That’s a total illusion. The external that you are perceiving is not independent of your mind. On the contrary, it is very dependent on your perception. In other words, it appears to you, particularly design and package for your consumption.

Debra (28:17.881)
So.

Dr. Rob (28:25.657)
so that it appears to you to make sense, to have meaning, to have order.

Debra (28:33.015)
And it’s like our own individual world because no two people look at the world the same. And so we always joke with our clients that when something happens in life, what does that say about your mind? What does this say about my mind? When you have something happen, I had some kind of a dispute on my credit card and I said, what does this say about my mind? Like, why did this weird thing happen? This charge happened. And I wasn’t super triggered, but I was kind of annoyed and I was like, hmm, I wonder what message this is.

Life stops becoming so serious. And so a battle between the other and you and you say like why is it just get curious really about Be curious and non-judgmental as Walt Whitman said we get curious about life and the conflicts that show up and the obstacles that show up and even You know in disagreements with people and we start to think there’s something here for me There’s some message or some this is symbolic in a way

Also just events that happen, how can we see it in like almost like a metaphor for something that’s going on internally? Really, really powerful. I mean, a lot of people talk about the body, know, like my throat, I have a sore throat. I haven’t been speaking up for myself lately or some other kind of, you know, problems in the body, the knees, humility. Yeah, there are different areas. know Louise Hay talked about that, but kind of seeing everything connected.

Dr. Rob (29:40.495)
Yeah, and then…

Debra (29:58.741)
And when we start to see that, we start to reclaim our power versus everything’s externalized.

Dr. Rob (30:05.039)
That’s perfect, right? Because then we start to see, what effects does this have of seeing, as Jung calls it, entering the symbolic life? What is the benefit of that? One of the great benefits is that you start to accept responsibility for your life. Because if the external appearance of our personal lives,

is really a reflection of our psyche. Well, that means that it’s me that I’m seeing in these external events. If we see them as external to me, then I’m not really accepting responsibility. I’m saying things are happening to me and I have nothing to do with it. we’re, yeah, we’re absolving ourselves of any responsibility and that’s a very disempowering state of

Debra (30:52.909)
Not through you, but to you.

Dr. Rob (31:02.287)
In other words, you don’t have it.

Debra (31:02.615)
It’s sort of like a primal, primordial way of being like a primitive way of seeing the world is this very things outside of you and outside of your control. And it can feel that way with with our lives and we see the world and things that are happening and we feel like the world’s out of control and how can we use this? How can I grow? How can I look within where where’s the storm within myself? Where’s the battle within myself?

So, yeah, I mean, I really loved this dream series. We did it to introduce our new dream app, Youngin Dream Oracle, that’s available on both Google and Apple mobile. It’s, and tablets, if you have a tablet, you type in your dream. It gives you a beautiful young in interpretation, young in coaching, very positive, non diagnostic. It’s really about empowerment. And then if you upgrade to the

the premium, can actually interact with the AI and give it more data and say, this is what I’m challenged with. And it will come back to you and give you some framework around it to help you. We always suggest you get a coach, but if you’re just intrigued by Young’s philosophy and you want to test it out and see if it’s right for you, it’s a great starting point and it’s absolutely free. The premium is only $59 a year, but you can just do the free one.

as long as you like. And there’s some meditations in there that are really cool. our podcast is in there too. So you can do it all together. And what I love about it too, Rob, is that people can put their things that happen in their life as if it was a dream. We had one of our students do that. He had a very tough experience happen in his life. And one of the other students said, why don’t you put it in the dream app? And he did. And it had all this symbolic meaning. So

If you are interested in exploring dream yoga, that would be a really great place to start.

Dr. Rob (33:03.951)
Absolutely. So stay tuned.

Debra (33:06.904)
Yes. So thank you again for joining us. We are going to introduce our next series next week. And we have some guests showing up on our podcast that we’re going to interview. So we’re excited for that. And have a great rest of your day. And hope you enjoy today’s dream yoga class. And as always, if you need us as questions, post them below and we’d love to answer them. Take care. Bye bye.

Dr. Rob (33:32.783)
See you soon.