COACHING PHILOSOPHY

I practice and teach the closely related concepts of lucid dreaming, dream yoga, and reality shifting (see below for definitions of these concepts).  As your coach, I have three primary intentions:
• First, it is my desire to assist you in becoming more receptive to the constant flow of guidance that is being offered to you by your Inner Self.   In my experience, emotions and dreams typically serve as the easiest points of access to the Inner Self’s deep well of wisdom, creativity and guidance.
• Second, it is my desire to encourage you to explore how you can more frequently and consistently sense the dynamic and exuberant energy of your Inner Self flowing within your physical body.
• Third, it is my desire to broaden your awareness of your natural creative power to attract desirable experiences and relationships into your life.
The experience of daily life appears to involve solid objects, but this apparent solidity is an illusion caused by the blazing speed and ceaseless motion of the subatomic particles (energy waves) that whir around inside the atoms of every “solid” object.  The perceived physical environment that you see around you is actually a carefully and intensely orchestrated psychological or dream environment.  From the perspective of your Inner Self, the events of your life are a dream.  In fact, your current life is just one of many hundreds or thousands of “dream lives” (simultaneous parallel incarnations) that are part of your Inner Self’s vast scope of creative experience and expression.  For this reason, I refer to your daily life experience as your “physical reality dream”.  By comparison, dreams associated with the sleep state are “example dreams”.
In both your physical reality dream and your example dreams, you are the attractor of your experiences.  Although your actions play an important role in your creative process, you attract your reality experiences primarily through more subtle vibrational offerings -- your dominant thoughts, your dominant beliefs (habitual bundles of thoughts) and, especially, your dominant emotional states.  Your visually perceived reality experiences are always a steady and faithful, albeit time delayed, reflection of your inner reality.
Your reality experiences are dynamic and responsive, constantly shifting as you shift your vibrational offerings.  In response to every shift in your thought vibrations:
• The manifestation of emotional feeling in your body will shift instantly.  If you are not feeling good and you then offer new thought vibrations that are closer to the perspective of your Inner Self (e.g. “this too shall pass”), you will instantly feel better.
• The experiential content of your example (sleep state) dreams follows next, shifting relatively quickly on the heels of a shift in emotional feeling.
• Finally, the experiential content of your physical reality (day life) dream will shift as the last manifestation of a shift in your subtle vibrational offerings.  Your experience within your physical reality dream is affected by the buffer of time, a tool that serves you by giving you the ability to continuously sculpt your physical reality experience as it unfolds.

Lucid Dreaming: Lucidity in Your "Example Dreams"

The phrase “lucid dream” was coined in 1913 by Frederick van Eeden, a Dutch psychiatrist and novelist.  However, the phrase did not become widely used until van Eeden’s paper on lucid dreaming was republished later in the 1900s.  Based upon his own experience with hundreds of lucid dreams in his sleep state, van Eeden defined these dreams as ones in which the “the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition.”
The modern era of lucid dreaming was ushered in by scientific researchers, with Stephen Laberge being the most prominent pioneer, who demonstrated in the late 1970s that dreaming sleep lab subjects can, through deliberate eye movements, signal their conscious awareness while sleeping.
Frederik van Eeden, 1860 - 1932
A lucid dream signifies a dreamer’s growing ability to recognize illusion, overcome the veil of forgetfulness that characterizes dreams, and shine the dreamer’s light of consciousness into the dreamscape.  As you show more interest in lucid dreaming, your Inner Self will offer you dream scenarios that include more hints (“dreamsigns” or “lucidity cues”) to assist you in becoming lucid.  There is a very rich body of literature, both scientific and spiritual, about lucid dreaming which I explore with my clients as part of my coaching practice.  Lucid dreaming is a fun and enlightening skill that can be taught to anyone who is willing to commit time and energy to their dream practice. Attempts at description ultimately fall short, however, and there is no substitute for the direct experience of an ecstatic and expansive lucid dream.

Dream Yoga: Lucidity in Your "Physical Reality Dream"

I borrow the phrase “dream yoga” from the Buddhist traditions that engage in the practice of experiencing and examining life as a dream.  As you tune more frequently to the guidance and energy being offered to you by your Inner Self, you gravitate toward the Inner Self’s life-as-dream perspective and your daily living experience becomes more fluid and dreamlike.  Signs of this shift include:
• bodily sensations (variously experienced as refreshing, thrilling, or ecstatic) associated with the emergence into your awareness of the subtle energy (prana, ki, chi, life-force) and subtle energy hubs (chakras) which serve as the underlying scaffolding for your “physical” form;
• greater frequency of coincidences and experiences of being in the right place at the right time;
• greater frequency of precognitive dreams; and
• faster manifestations of your dominant thoughts, beliefs and emotional states.
Dream yoga practice is analogous to physical yoga practice.  Whereas physical yoga practice results in a more flexible and relaxed body, dream yoga practice results in a more flexible and relaxed mind.  Your physical reality dream is intended to be experienced by you as a creative, playful, and very malleable dreamscape.  In comparison to your example (sleep state) dreams, the experience of your physical reality dream is much more intricate and complex.  Your physical reality dream unfolds in slow motion, as it is affected the buffer of time and involves the divine orchestration of the lives of billions of simultaneous dreamers.  Our physical reality dream always serves us, notwithstanding the perspective of mass consciousness, which frequently perceives our experiences as working against us.
“. . . .whatever appears in awareness is only the reflection of our own mind.  In lucid dreams, we practice transforming whatever is encountered.  There is no boundary to experience that cannot be broken in dream; we can do whatever occurs to us to do.  As we break habitual limitations of experience, the mind becomes increasingly supple and flexible.  First we develop lucidity and then flexibility, and then we apply this flexibility of mind to all of our life.”  Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (1998).
Since I’m borrowing the phrase “dream yoga” from the Buddhist tradition, I should disclose here that I am not a practicing Buddhist.  Instead, I’m more of a philosophical melting pot.  This website describes my personal approach to dream yoga.  If you are interested in exploring the traditional Buddhist approach, see the Faculty Lounge section of this website for some recommended reading about traditional Buddhist dream yoga.  The idea that life is a dream is certainly not unique to Buddhism.  It is characterized by deep and diverse philosophical roots.
From Greek philosophy, there is the Socratic dialogue from Plato’s The Republic (which dates to approximately 380 B.C.), commonly referred to as the “Allegory of the Cave”:
Glaucon:  You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Socrates:  Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
From the Taoist tradition, there is the famous story of the butterfly dream from the Zhuangzi (an ancient Chinese text, believed to date back to the 3rd Century B.C.):
Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He did not know that he was Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and was palpably Zhou. He did not know whether he was Zhou, who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou.
For centuries, poets and playwrights have intuitively grasped the dream nature of reality.  Rumi, the great 13th Century poet of Islam’s Sufi tradition, offers us this:
This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.
​Then death comes like dawn and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
As a more “recent” example, we have the famous monologue from Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It (historians date its writing to 1599):
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts
In the last year of his life, Edgar Alan Poe mused "Dream within a Dream" (1849):
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
Screenwriters, the playwrights of the modern era, have offered us a profusion of movies that creatively play with this ancient philosophical concept, including The Matrix (1999) and Inception (2010).   Here are some great lines from The Matrix:
Morpheus (to Neo): This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Reality Shifting: The Art of Living Consciously

When you consciously change your thoughts and emotions during an example (sleep state) dream, your dreamscape will immediately respond.  In a lucid dream, you can literally change a cloudy day into a sunny one.   Your example dreams are microcosms of your physical reality (day life) dream and provide you with opportunities to practice the subtle art of consciously shifting your reality experiences.  The first step in the process of consciously shifting your reality is taking ownership of your experience, saying: “I am the absolute attractor of my experience within this physical reality dream.”  Through journaling your experiences, you can gain conscious awareness of recurring thoughts, beliefs, and emotional responses that are operating unconsciously in the background of your life.  Once you assume ownership of these elements of your inner reality, you empower yourself to change them. You have the power to consciously choose your dominant thoughts, your dominant beliefs and your dominant emotional states.  Since your physical reality dream responds slowly to shifts in these elements of your inner reality, it takes some time to see the fruit of your inner work.  But there is tremendous joy once you turn the corner, having demonstrated beyond doubt to yourself the solidity of this relationship between your inner reality and its reflection.