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Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOSEPH DILLARD

Dream Yoga: A Doorway to Evolutionary Emergence

The Dreaming Kosmos, Chapter 3

Joseph Dillard

The Flammarion engraving of 1888, the year my grandfather was born, is attributed to Camille Flammarion but inspired by medieval cosmology. It depicts a kneeling man lifting the edge of a flat Earth's sky, revealing a celestial realm of stars, angels, and cosmic order beyond the sensory world. His posture suggests reverence and curiosity, peering into a transpersonal dimension. This is a mythos that resonates with multiple aspects of Integral Deep Listening (IDL) as a doorway into The Dreaming Kosmos.

There are many pathways to harmony with evolutionary emergence, and the doorway proposed here is not meant to imply superiority or inclusivity of other paths. Rather, it is to be taken as emphasizing a number of principles that align with a naturalistic approach to life to apply according to your own preferences and experience. Identifying and specifying such a pathway moves The Dreaming Kosmos from the realm of abstract theory into practically addressing the adaptive challenges that we all face at every stage of our lives.

The Flammarion image suggests evolution as a sacred journey where awakening into a higher reality, beyond partial perceptions of nature, drives human progress. This aligns with The Dreaming Kosmos's view of consciousness as a dreamlike process, where IDL interviews with dream, waking life, and transpersonal elements, like Flammarion's celestial stars and beings, birth emerging potentials that drive human evolution. The act of lifting the sky evokes a fluid process of lifting the delusion of real but partial assumptions, transcending sensory boundaries, resonating with The Dreaming Kosmos' emphasis on the employment of attractors at the edge of chaos in addition to staying grounded in stable, adaptive attractors.

The kosmic explorer's dialogue with the beyond mirrors IDL's relational approach, fostering empathy with dream and transpersonal experience. This adventurer is acting on his own, reflecting IDL's role in self-organization of experience, a fundamental driver of evolution, yet existing within a collective, polycentric reality. Beyond the superficial dualism of the material and supernatural realms is the polycentrism of earth, tree, stars, sun, adventurer, angels, and heavenly wheels, clouds, and waters, a multi-perspectivalism shared with IDL. The medieval context balances spiritual insight with earthly existence, avoiding a linear march toward technology and personal benefit.

The singularity of the Flammarion print—one person transcending limits— at the same time reflects the interests and possibilities of humanity as a whole. This person is “every man,” embodying the emerging potentials within each of us. It also emphasizes transformation over healing, yet there is a balance between the worlds. The kneeling is a grounding in the naturalistic, “objective” world of the exterior quadrants of behavior and relationships/systems. Transformation rarely lasts due to our neglect of what needs to first be healed as well as the necessity of establishing a grounded balance. This explorer possesses that grounded balance.

The cosmic realm implies a shared transpersonal awareness, supporting polycentrism and collective harmony. IDL provides practical “sky lifting” tools. Becoming and interviewing figures from the motif, such as the angels or heavenly wheels, is metaphorically to bring down Promethian fire from heaven regarding the practical application of reframings of those life issues important to you today. While this vision may overemphasize spiritual transcendence, potentially neglecting material needs, it aligns with the focus on emerging potentials in The Dreaming Kosmos. Like Orpheus descending into Hades, Flammarion's print reflects emergence at the edge of chaos into the four quadrant components of evolution to generate harmony, framing evolution as a relational awakening.

Dream Yoga as a Catalyst for Healing, Balancing, and Transformation

Integral Deep Listening is the variety of dream yoga The Dreaming Kosmos uses to anchor evolutionary emergence to the concreteness of our individual lives. Its relationship to dream yoga in general, its characteristics, and its relationship to evolutionary emergence, while elaborated throughout the text, is summarized here to provide a foundation for understanding how personal practice is vital for collective evolutionary emergence.

Dream Yoga

A “yoga” is a sacred discipline. “Discipline” implies work on an ongoing basis as a life practice and commitment. “Sacred” implies that this work is taken on as a commitment to purposes that transcend your own needs and interests. Dream Yoga, as a discipline associated with an intrinsic state of human existence, dreaming, is not the property of any society, culture, time, space, methodology, or person. It is likely that our descendants will be exploring and utilizing it in millennia to come.

What are dream yogas?

Dream yogas are traditionally linked to lucid dreaming and dream incubation. In the Tibetan tradition, dream yoga is about using dream wakefulness as a tool for seeing through the illusory nature of life. It is also used to overcome ignorance and attachment as well as to train for death and navigating post-death Bardos. One can meditate, recite mantras, or visualize deities in dreams to deepen realization. Lucidity and stability of awareness are developed so as to realize the true nature of mind as illusory. In summary, the goal of Hindu and Buddhist dream yogas is liberation.[1]

For example, in The Life of Milarepa,[2] Milarepa, a Tibetan Buddhist yogi, masters dream yoga under Marpa the Translator. He learns to lucidly navigate dreams, transforming nightmares into teachings and achieving spiritual powers, called siddhis. One tale describes him encountering a demon in a dream, interviewing it to uncover its role as a teacher of compassion, thus dissolving fear. Milarepa's ability to engage dream figures lucidly mirrors IDL's interviewing of dream characters to access emerging potentials, emphasizing process over a fixed waking identity. Interviewing dream elements while dreaming is an IDL siddhi practice enabled by regularly doing waking interviews, in time generalized into interviewing while dreaming, like Milarepa did with his demon. A more advanced IDL practice is to become different dream elements, both animate, like people and entities, and inanimate elements, like fires and bridges, and to answer the questions in the IDL interviewing protocols (found in Appendix H), from their perspectives, while dreaming.

Tibetan dream yoga builds dream lucidity primarily via meditation, which generates less dream chaos and more coherence. Beginners often notice that dreams become less fragmented, anxious, or confusing when they meditate regularly. Meditation also improves attentional stability and emotional regulation during the day, which tends to carry over into sleep. Mindfulness practice strengthens awareness of awareness, called “meta-awareness.” This makes it more likely that, in a dream, you'll recognize “this is a dream,” leading to lucid dreams. Traditions like Tibetan Dream Yoga explicitly use meditation to cultivate lucidity in sleep.

Negative emotions, such as fear, anger, and shame, decrease in frequency or intensity due to meditation. Dreams often become more positive, compassionate, or neutral, reflecting changes in baseline mood. Meditators sometimes report archetypal or spiritual imagery: light, deities, teachers, or vast natural landscapes. If you practice loving-kindness meditation, dreams may include helping others, reconciliation, or affectionate encounters. If you practice concentration or mantra meditation, dreams may become simpler, with recurring sounds, symbols, or patterns of stillness.

Long-term meditators sometimes describe dreams that feel like continuations of meditation itself—calm observation rather than narrative. Meditation also alters activity in the default mode network and reduces mind-wandering. During REM sleep, similar networks are active. Training them through meditation seems to shift dream tone and structure. Some studies find more prefrontal activation in meditators' dreams, which may explain greater lucidity. IDL teaches the naming of thoughts, images, and feelings as a form of meditation designed to objectify all experience, including that of identity itself, as the second of its four transformational modules.

Dream yoga is also a sacred practice in the tradition of Aesclapian Greek dream incubation. The cadeucus, two snakes intertwined around the staff of Asclepius, Greek god of healing, anchors Western allopathic medicine to the practice of dream incubation in Ancient Greece. Intention is core to dream yoga, because it is a driver of behavior in all states, along with assumptions regarding our identity and worldview, as well as multiple biological and environmental factors. IDL teaches dream incubation as the fourth of its transformational modules as an effective method of aligning dream content, perception, and purpose not only with waking goals but more importantly with the priorities of one's innate life compass.

In current Western usages, dream yoga is more psychologically oriented, toward personal growth. Particularly in transpersonal approaches to healing and development, dream yoga is largely about cultivating dream wakefulness as a way to cultivate enlightenment. It can also be used as a form of “shadow work” to confront and neutralize conflict. By facing one's fears or practicing one's skill sets in a self-constructed environment, with no significant negative consequences, competencies carry over into waking life, a strategy very much in alignment with Milarepa's interviewing of his dream demon. In other more secular western approaches, dream yoga is used to increase waking control or creativity. It is also used for self-exploration, as in investigating states of consciousness. In this regard, IDL uses dream yoga as a gateway to the transpersonal and the four fundamental forces of oneness—with nature, devotion, the formless, and the non-dual.

There is of course the purely empirical study of the dream state, begun in earnest in the 1950's, carried forward by the twin strands of formal and phenomenological research. These studies, driven primarily by objective curiosity and a desire to base assumptions in sources of objective credibility to further both knowledge and healing, are essential for turning emerging evolutionary potentials into stable and grounded attractor basins that serve as foundational for further individual and collective development. IDL encourages research into the falsifiable premises of The Dreaming Kosmos and IDL itself.

What do dream yogas have to do with evolutionary emergence?

Individually, dream yogas focus on waking up, accessing states of oneness shared by all humanity, becoming lucid in all states, and moving toward transpersonal integration. Collectively, dream yogas focus on awakening from collective sleep, groupthink, and sleepwalking. In an evolutionary context, IDL supports self-organization, adaptation, and emergent forms of energy utilization on both an individual and collective level.

Evolutionary emergence includes the integration of waking and dreaming in a higher order synthesis. Humanity, by ignoring, dismissing, fighting with, or misunderstanding dreaming, stays in conflict within itself. It postpones integration of these two fundamental states of human experience. In order for that integration to occur, humanity has to stop projecting its meanings onto dreaming and instead listen to the meanings that dreams themselves express. This, rather than lucid dreaming, is a fundamental aspect of IDL dream yoga.

Why does dream yoga play a major part in The Dreaming Kosmos?

Evolution will occur with or without any understanding of or participation in a dream yoga. However, the practice of a dream yoga greatly speeds up the evolutionary emergence of humanity. It does so is through its ability to access, essentially on demand, the edge of chaos, where evolutionary emergence is most likely to occur. This is fundamentally different from access to the edge of chaos via meditation, mystical, psi, or near death experiences, which provide sporadic access to highly transformative states that are notoriously difficult to duplicate. By comparison, once the ability to lay aside waking identity and its biases and fully embody the perspectives of multiple others is learned in ways that both access the edge of chaos and have concrete, functional relevance to issues of major significance in one's life, possibilities for expedited personal and collective evolution open up. IDL teaches this ability.

How is Integral Deep Listening a Dream Yoga?

IDL is a yoga in that it is a sacred discipline, a life-long practice. It is a dream yoga in that it uses dreaming as a vehicle for waking up out of states of delusion in any state. It uses interviewing of dream elements, personifications of life issues and transpersonal experiences to cultivate “empathetic multi-perspectivalism,” which decentralizes the self, opening it to transformational reframings of experience. IDL and Tibetan Dream Yoga share a common interest in using dreams and dreaming as laboratories for awakening. IDL and Greek incubation share a common interest in using pre-sleep suggestion for healing. IDL and Western approaches share a therapeutic focus, use of psychological tools, and a focus on practical outcomes.

IDL is a dream yoga that involves listening as a fundamental demonstration of respect, a value that is not overtly emphasized in most other approaches, although it is implied in Tibetan Deity Yoga and Greek dream incubation. IDL is a dream yoga that involves deep listening in that it focuses on disidentification followed by the embodiment of perceived others, like dream snakes or Orpheus's lyre. IDL is integral in that it is cognitively multi-perspectival, in that it takes into account developmental stages and lines in addition to quadrants and states.

IDL is a transpersonal dream yoga in that it takes into account prepersonal, personal, and vision-logic perspectives while recognizing the evolutionary emergent importance of the four fundamental experiences of oneness—with nature (psi included), devotional, formless, and non-dual. It is also transpersonal in that it embraces absurdity and allows it to transform itself into trans-rational wisdom.

Unlike most other forms of dream yoga, IDL is phenomenalistic, meaning it surfaces and tables assumptions that otherwise might block awakening by acting as filters. IDL amplifies rationality through asking questions to gain information rather than assuming that the truth is already known due to personal experience or authority. It sees questioning and the gathering of information as pre-requisite foundations for any authentic transpersonal yoga. This process of interviewing, tied in relevance to ongoing personal life issues, generates an intrasocial sangha, or interior sacred support community. The generation of this interior collective drives both integration and polycentrism, gradually reframing identity as co-extensive with the Kosmos.

What are the major characteristics of IDL?

The journey of the Flammarion man from a bounded Earth to cosmic awareness parallels IDL's three domains. These are 1) healing, including eliminating toxic scripting, dysfunctional drama, and reframing delusions, 2) balancing by aligning personal goals with the priorities of life compass, assertiveness in the three realms of relationships, thinking, and dreaming, and triangulation for improved problem solving, and 3) transformation with interviewing, meditation, pranayama, and setting clear intention pre-sleep as dream incubation. These domains are reflected in the transcendence of the Flammarion adventurer, akin to Milarepa's demon interview, Greek incubation's healing focus, and the emphasis on practical applicability of Western approaches to dreaming and dream yoga. Their purpose is to further personal and collective evolutionary emergence.

Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of IDL dream yoga that differentiates it from Tibetan, Greek, and contemporary Western approaches is its emphasis not on lucid dreaming but on lucid wakefulness. It generalizes the characteristics of dream experience to more clearly explain not only fundamental evolutionary elements shared by both states but also to show how similar the dreaming and waking states are, when viewed from the perspectives of interviewed elements, regardless of their source.

IDL applies respectful and empathetic listening to all states and others, both real and imaginary. Because IDL views life as dreamlike, it interviews waking life issues, historical and current events, fiction, near death and mystical experiences, as well as synchronicities and psychic experiences of all kinds. It treats all of these as neither more nor less real than dream elements. It allows interviewed others to define where on the subjectivity-objectivity continuum they place themselves. Do they see themselves as self-aspects? Autonomous? Both? What aspects of the interviewed character does the dreamer represent?

Interviewing of life issues is primarily related to the reframing of issues of importance to the dreamer in order to make the process personally relevant and objectively falsifiable. How do interviewed elements view our failures and goals? Are there differences? If so, why, and what is their significance?

Interviewing dreams is primarily a form of biofeedback, related to accessing the agendas of emerging potentials at the edge of chaos that point the way toward personal healing, balancing, and transformation.

Interviewing our own dreams, life and transpersonal experiences is primarily related to validation and verification of the methodology in our own lives. It addresses the important and fundamental question: “Why should I listen to imaginary dream characters? How do I know if their perspectives are relevant and useful for my own life?”

Interviewing others, as distinguished from self-interviewing, is primarily related to transforming the socio-cultural commons by aligning it with authentic priorities of the collective life compass of humanity. We thereby support evolution beyond groupthink and our deeply embedded, scripted assumptions that blind us to our potentials as well as block creative solutions to our common problems.

IDL dream yoga is based on a pragmatic theory of truth. Why should you embrace any theory unless it makes sense and improves your life? IDL Dream Yoga recognizes that you can be exposed to multiple scientific studies, but unless they are relevant and helpful, based on your own personal experience, how important and meaningful will they be for you? How easy will it be for you to dismiss them if they do not validate your worldview? To this end, IDL emphasizes application in the form of testing recommendations made by interviewed members of your developing intrasocial sangha. “Intrasocial” refers to interior and subjective societies which nevertheless can serve as important sources of objectivity. If interviewed elements produce positive and beneficial changes in your life, then theory has moved to grounded conviction, increasing your trust and motivation. In addition, empirical research studies need to be conducted in order to demonstrate the validity of IDL. Solutions can be personally useful and effective and yet not be collectively valid. Proposals for research are discussed in our final chapter.

IDL uses interviewing to help identify and eliminate toxic aspects of our biological, familial, and socio-cultural scripting, when and how we slip into toxic emotional drama and then to help us extract ourselves from it. It also identifies ways of thinking that keep us trapped in psychological geocentrism and heliocentrism. These are cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies. It also uses interviewing to help us to align our goals with the priorities of our life compass, develop assertiveness in relationships, our thinking, and in our dreams, and improved problem solving. A third area in which it uses interviewing is transformation via meditation, pranayama, and dream incubation. Growth in all of these areas facilitate waking up in our daily lives, which then is reflected by greater lucidity in our dreams. However, this dream lucidity is defined by IDL not so much as knowing that we are dreaming as clearer decision-making and awareness, such as staying out of drama in dreams or not regressing to chronic scripted reactions to dream events, like helplessness or reactivity.

Despite the many benefits meditation has on dreaming, our waking worldview, even for advanced meditators, still acts as a filter through which we perceive our dreams. For example, Tibetan non-dual lucid dreamers and meditators will still see their dreams through the worldview of Tibetan culture. They will project the assumptions of their culture, as will you and I, onto the dream because that is their frame of reference. This conclusion is both realistic and unavoidable until and unless a polycentric self-definition is developed, demonstrated by an ability to take the perspective of other dream elements while in a dream and express more or less autonomous perspectives.

Why does IDL focus on processes?

The reason IDL focuses on process over “things” is because dreams are fundamentally processes, not things. The memories, emotions, and thoughts that are the “ingredients” out of which dream images are woven are primarily processes, not things. Neither are the dreamlike things in our waking life we take to be solid, real, and separate things or entities.

An emphasis on process reflects the natural order as disclosed by evolutionary science, systems and chaos theory and reflected by the best accounts of reality that we presently have. If we are to arrive at a naturalistic foundation for what appears to be supernatural, we will do our best to ground our approach in what we know about the workings of the natural world. Processes contextualize things; things don't contextualize processes. However, this grounding in process is co-created by the necessary adaptive stability that differentiating “things,” “others” and “self” provides. Therefore, in The Dreaming Kosmos, reality has two faces, one is that of process and impermanence, linked to the edge of chaos and our emerging potentials, and the other that of stability and adaptation, linked to the delusion of permanence.[3]

We will see how a naturalistic grounding of dreaming and experience in general is supported by neurology and cognitive science. For example, look deeply into any individual or thing and you will find process that generates stability and the illusion of “thingness.” For material objects we find it in electrons and molecules. For life forms we find it in the biological processes that create and maintain the structures that we name. In biology, while structures make processes visible and support their development, the “life” is in the processes. The structures are the forms the processes take.

An example of the partial delusion of permanence co-creating evolution with impermanence is seen in the relationship between the adaptive necessity of experiencing the sun rising and setting, generating seasons, temperature fluctuations, and nocturnal and diurnal preferences. The less delusional reality of the impermanence of life, dependent on solar energy in one small solar system in the vast reaches of space is hardly relevant for day to day life, but provides the entropic and negentropic processes that make life possible.

Process and substance are two poles of one evolutionary process, the first necessary primarily for creativity and growth and the second necessary primarily for the generation of the stability required for development. We see this polarity reflected, on the one hand in attractor basins approaching the edge of chaos in dreams, creativity, in humor, as well as in the elaborations of interviewed alternative perspectives, and on the other in the dominance of stable attractors in both waking and dream life.

What is “Waking Up” for IDL Dream Yoga?

While most dream yogas focus on waking up while dreaming, or lucid dreaming, IDL focuses on waking up out of the dream-like delusions of waking life. To the extent that our identity and worldview is based on unrecognized delusional assumptions, those misguided perceptual framings are carried over into our dreams, lucid and non-lucid. The result is not deep and integral listening to the elements in our dreams but projection of our assumptions and preferences onto our dreams and their characters. For example, we assume dream monsters, space aliens, and tsunamis are threats to defend against because we tend to see threats as things to defend against in our waking lives. That is therefore the most likely assumption we will make toward a dream attacker. Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome will most likely be triggered and we will fight or flee in the dream. We are unlikely to interview the tsunami or to become the space alien. We thereby colonize the dream state with our own waking perspectives. If we are lucid and know the monster is self-created, that is still a perceptually self-centered assumption. How do we know that the monster is self-created unless we ask the monster? While it may be lying, how is its perspective not relevant?

Waking up for IDL is not primarily about self actualization or enlightenment but about balance and integration with transpersonal experiences of oneness. It is supported by accessing emerging potentials at the edge of chaos. This is because otherwise the arc of our life is largely defined by our waking scripting, our entrenched attractor basins, and their inertia, stabilized far from the edge of chaos. Waking up moves us from an emotional and cognitively biased stance to one of open neutrality, as defined by our willingness to suspend our feelings and assumptions and instead ask questions to gain information on which to form more objective and informed opinions on how to act. Beyond that, waking up is empathetic multi-perspectivalism, operationally defined as our ability to take the perspective of the other and answer in ways that it deems accurate and authentic.

How does IDL support evolutionary emergence?

Interviewed emerging potentials are less constrained by waking concerns, such as survival and social norms, space, time, life and death, and biological, familial, cultural, and social conditioning than you and I are. This is because they are imaginary, aligned at different positions than we are on the subjectivity-objectivity continuum. This freedom allows them to reflect unique perspectives that align with the three noted evolutionary mechanisms of self-organization, adaptation, and energy capture and utilization.

Self-organization at the edge of chaos is not primarily dictated by adaptive and largely fixated foundational attractor basins, such as our hunger, impatience, fears, preferences, or intentions. Consequently, these emerging potentials are not primarily concerned with shadow work, nor are they primarily the manifestation of psychosocial conflicts. Instead, self-organization occurs at the edge of chaos in a radically non-self and non-organized context, relatively non-embodied and unconditioned by space or time. We can think of the edge of chaos as a relatively objective space analogous to leaving earth and moving into the vast and timeless reaches of interstellar space. In such circumstances the normal rules of adaptation no longer apply. The result is that non-scripted intentions and priorities can surface as transformational reframings of life experience.

The emergence of creativity does not occur due to any plan, purpose, or divine teleology, but because of an intrinsic evolutionary drive toward self organization, itself caused by naturalistic responses to excess energy leading to its dissipation through more efficient organization. We shall see that this is now well-established science based in part on the ground-breaking work of Nobel prize winner, Ilya Prigogine.

There is no guarantee that existence at the edge of chaos will be productive or creative. All interviewed dream elements are not transformational. However, almost all will be found to have practical, applicable, appropriate perspectives on life issues that matter to you due to their embodiment of relatively non-conditioned perspectives. They may be so radically “other” that their perspectives are difficult to assimilate, very much like typical dreams. Or, also as with typical dreams, we may miss the point entirely, drawing conclusions based on what we know, on our assumptions, preferences, and what validates our self-image.

This is why we are dependent on perspectives that are children of the edge of chaos. Their interpretations are much more likely to reflect evolutionary emergence than are our own. If we listen to them we are likely to shortcut our adaptational blindness and support alignment with the priorities of our life compass. This is a falsifiable hypothesis. Do your own interviews, operationalize the recommendations of your choice, and draw your own conclusions.

IDL is phenomenological

Surfacing and tabling assumptions in IDL interviewing mirrors Husserl's phenomenological reduction (1913), where preconceptions are bracketed to access raw experience. For example, IDL does not assume that dream characters are self-aspects. Instead, it encourages interviewed perspectives to define themselves.

To not take a phenomenological approach is to not surface and suspend our assumptions, meaning our projections define our reality, reinforcing our self-centeredness. Our projections act as filters that result in confirmation bias, a cognitive bias that causes us to see what we are looking for and to ignore information that conflicts with our assumptions. This produces validation that can easily reinforce our stuckness rather than move us into greater life balance based on the integration of broader relevant factors. We do not recognize the limitations of our projections until we take alternative perspectives and test their recommendations. While these interviewed perspectives may indeed prove to be impressively autonomous, creative, and transformative, they are not all-knowing deities, but instead reflect limited perspectives with distinct preferences.

IDL surfaces and tables assumptions at the beginning of any IDL interview by asking for the dreamer to share their associations, which are their projections onto the dream. Tabling assumptions also acts as a pre-test by which we can compare our assumptions/interpretations regarding the dream/life issue/transpersonal experience with what we learn during the interview. This is important because a normal response to IDL interviews is, “I already knew that.” That is of course true, since the information is subjectively generated from perspectives that are intrinsic to our identities. However, if we already knew it, why didn't we state it in our pre-test assumptions? The fact that we didn't reveals a disconnect between our waking priorities and those of interviewed characters. That disconnect points toward alternative interpretations that may provide creative reframings to our life issues, understanding of dreams and transpersonal experiences. During the interviewing process itself, interpretations are provided by the interviewed characters, not by the dreamer or interviewer. After the interviewing process, interpretations are provided by the dreamer and then by others.

The result of accessing multiple reframings based on relatively non-embodied perspectives on the edge of chaos is a gradual decentralization of identity and a relaxation of the fear-based contraction we call the self. This relaxation occurs because the suspension of assumptions associated with identification with our core identity attractor basin allows identification with less personalized and drama-invested emerging potentials that resonate for us as true and authentic. Because these perspectives are imaginary, they are neither alive nor dead, and subsequently will be found upon interviewing to generally have less fear. Identifying with less fearful perspectives reverses fear-based contractions of the self, producing greater openness, receptivity, and trust.

What is IDL interviewing and how does it differ from role playing?

Role playing has a long and illustrious history, which partially explains why many people, when encountering IDL alternative perspective interviewing say, “That's role playing.” Taking on roles has long been understood to have cathartic value. Most civilizations have had rituals and festivals in which participants wore masks and assumed roles. Then, in the 20th century C.G. Jung developed active imagination and shadow work, and J.L. Moreno developed psychodrama, a progenitor of Perl's Gestalt Therapy and multiple “action” methods of psychotherapy. From this sprang various schools of “parts” “sub-personality,” and “self-aspect” interviewing, including Wilber's 3-2-1 Shadow work. So most people assume that any interviewing process in which one takes the perspective of some other element or personality is role playing and either a form of shadow or “parts” work. While IDL grew out of an intimate background with those schools of thought and therapeutic practice, it is fundamentally different, while incorporating important aspects of them.

Role playing is something the self does to either strengthen its identity and control, as a normal part of childhood development and throughout life as a way to develop new skills and adopt new perspectives. As entertainment, as in professional acting or carnivals and holidays, role playing frees imagination and encourages catharsis. Role playing also challenges entrenched self-definitions and thereby create room for therapeutic advancement. As a treatment modality, role playing has many strengths, particularly in the realm of unearthing and resolving internal conflicts.

Role playing supports a self-centric identity by strengthening identification with your core identity attractor basin. For example, when a child incorporates the language and gestures of her parent she is building her sense of self. Role playing can also strengthen a SELF-centric identity, for instance by a student identifying with a spiritual guru or personification of a strength of divinity, as Tibetan Deity Yoga does when it teaches becoming Avalokiteshvara or Manjusri, Buddhas of enlightenment.

IDL dream yoga character identification, while superficially resembling role playing, has different purposes. It is interested in thinning and broadening the self, not on strengthening either the self or Self. It is also not focused on providing entertainment or catharsis, although both may be present. IDL interviewing is fundamentally a process of dissociation from identity in order to destabilize rigid attractor basins and move toward the edge of chaos, where emerging potentials and creativity naturally occur. Its intention is not for the self to take on any role but instead for our self-sense to be incorporated into other identities that are less identified with scripting or embodiment, in order to generate polycentrism.

Polycentrism decentralizes identity, control, and organization and weakens identification with entrenched attractor basins. It does so through the application of interviewing to develop empathetic multi-perspectivalism regarding core issues of healing, balancing, and transformation. IDL interviewing is a dual practice of disidentification and identification, of decompensation and higher order compensation, of dissociation and integrative synthesis linked to reframing life issues or our understanding of transpersonal and dream experiences. Our willingness and ability to let go of our sense of who we are largely conditions our access to relevant and valuable reframings, determining the clarity and utility of what unfolds.

What is the function of dream yoga in The Dreaming Kosmos?

The role of dream yoga in The Dreaming Kosmos, is to 1) Wake up out of delusion in all states, beginning with the waking state. Building on what science tells us is fundamental to this process. 2) Anchor theory to practical application in order to test the method in operationally-defined, falsifiable ways, primarily in your waking life. 3) Develop empathetic multi-perspectivalism by expanding your sense of self to include all others through experience based on respect, trustworthiness, empathy, and reciprocity. 4) Serve humanity by helping others to create personal and collective culture that is aligned with the priorities of intrinsic life compass. While these forms of waking up can be practiced in the dream state and IDL encourages same, its focus is on evolving ourselves and the collectives to which we belong in our everyday cultural and social environments.

How does IDL dream yoga interface with healing, balancing, and transformation?

IDL applies the recommendations made by interviewed perspectives to address life issues in three domains of healing, three of balancing, and four of transformation. Regarding healing, these are 1) surfacing and reframing biological, familial, cultural, and social scripting, 2) escaping toxic drama in relationships, thinking, and dreaming, and 3) surfacing and reframing cognitive distortions, biases and logical fallacies. Balancing is facilitated by 1) aligning goals with life compass priorities, 2) developing assertiveness in relationships, thinking, and dreaming, and 3) improving problem-solving. Transformation is supported by 1) interviewing, 2) effective meditation, 3) pranayama, and 4) clarifying and focusing intent, particularly with pre-sleep dream incubation. Interviewing accesses attractor basins at the edge of chaos. Those perspectives, reframings, and recommendations are then leveraged to produce healing, balancing, and transformation, in coordination with what the objective world tells us.

Naturalistic assumptions generate a different approach to therapy

Because IDL is naturalistic, it builds on what has been discovered by evolutionary science, systems and chaos theories. While this foundation can be applied therapeutically for great advantage, it is fundamentally different from starting with a psychological approach to dreaming and transpersonal experiences, which generally focuses on personal development, conflict resolution, and improving interpersonal relationships. When evolutionary science, systems and chaos theories are taken as the starting point, very different assumptions are made about the nature and purpose of dreams and dreaming as well as how they interface with our personal and collective development.

For example, instead of focusing on self realization or enlightenment, IDL dream yoga focuses on generating a polycentric identity, accessed through practicing empathetic multi-perspectivalism. Polycentrism is naturalistic because it reflects the organization of the universe as disclosed by cosmology.

Instead of assuming interviewing is about resolving interior conflict or integrating “parts” or “self aspects,” IDL views those as waking filtering assumptions to surface and suspend in order to listen to interviewed perspectives in a deeply connected, empathetic way. This approach is naturalistic because it focuses both on supporting adaptation and evolutionary emerging potentials through interviewing them and applying their recommendations. Therapies, even transpersonal ones, generally are less naturalistic because they are centered around increasing waking competencies, building a strong self, or shifting identity from self to Self, rather than focusing on both the construction of an identity oriented not to the priorities of “normalcy” or “adjustment but to the priorities of one's innate life compass, and, at the same time, shifting of self from identity to a useful tool. However, many therapies have strong naturalistic strands, such as art and play therapies. Almost any therapy can be adapted to these different priorities.

These conclusions are based on changes in the lives of countless clients and subjects over four decades. Fortunately, they are falsifiable and you are encouraged to take up the yoga and test them for yourself in your own life. In addition, collective studies obviously are necessary to move evidence beyond the realm of the anecdotal and personal.

Why does The Dreaming Kosmos and IDL focus on four relational qualities?

The four relational qualities are respect, trustworthiness, empathy, and reciprocity. As we shall see, these four qualities show up in simpler forms all the way down the evolutionary ladder, implying that they have particular evolutionary significance. They are important for IDL as characteristics of interviewing and for supporting development toward our life compass.

Why is empathy particularly emphasized?

In The Dreaming Kosmos and also for IDL dream yoga, listening in a deep and integral way is central to accessing evolutionary emergence, whether in the form of creativity, psi, transpersonal, or mystical experiences, or accessing the trans-cultural attractor basin and lost knowledge. We have seen that this deep and integral listening involves a two-fold process of constructive dissociation from who you are and identification on a deep and empathetic way with the other, whomever or whatever it may be.

As described below, the variety of empathy cultivated by The Dreaming Kosmos is not feeling what we assume someone else is feeling. It extends to their thoughts, worldview, and intentions as well, and then has to be validated by the other. It is not enough to mirror what we think someone else is thinking or feeling, although that is indeed an important initial step in the cultivation of empathetic multi-perspectivalism.

Why the development of empathetic multi-perspectivalism is essential to human evolution

Empathetic multi-perspectivalism is a powerful and effective demonstration of respect for the other. It assumes the ability to disidentify with our assumptions, worldview, and sense of self and a demonstrated ability to identify with those of the other. Empathetic multi-perspectivalism moves beyond intention driven by self and its interests to collective interests. This is in alignment with principles of evolution, which is primarily driven by collective survival, not by individual survival.[4] This conclusion is supported by research on group selection[5] and cooperative behaviors in early humans.[6] The prioritization of collective survival is an emerging potential of humanity. To this end, empathetic multi-perspectivalism supports cooperation, altruism, and polycentrism as evolutionary drivers.[7]

An example of an IDL interview

IDL demonstrates that from a functional, pragmatic point of view, it does not matter if an interviewed alternative perspective originates from a dream or waking, is imaginary or real, sacred or secular. All of these are important sources of interviewing, and each category provides unique support to evolutionary emergence. As an example of a spontaneous interview of something objectively real and secular, I see a pair of old work blue jeans hanging up in front of me. When I interview them, what will they say? As always, interviews begin with establishing orienting intent by stating three life issues. In my case, these are preparing for an upcoming IDL seminar, balancing pool chemicals, and organizing this text. Here are the answers the blue jeans provide to questions in the interviewing protocols found in Appendix H.

“I am old but still serviceable, durable and comfortable. I am hanging on this peg, waiting for the time when I will be once again of service. I like that I am useful; I have a stoic attitude toward my age. Yes, I am wearing out, but my marks of heavy usage denote the value I have provided. I represent similar aspects of yourself—old and wearing out, but valuable in the services that I have rendered. I am content to stay as I am, existing within the constraints of time and space. I cannot and will not reincarnate as a new pair of pants, since I have no intrinsic self identity, but functionally, on a collective level, I live on as a form of utility that reincarnates continually and never gets old. In that way I am like all other individual elements that serve a greater, collective purpose.”

“I score 10 in confidence, 0 in compassion, 0 in wisdom, 10 in acceptance, 10 in peace, and 0 in witnessing. The polarity of my scores reflects the reality of what I am: you, with your mind, memories, and lived experience, and on top of that, my own unique perspective.

If I lived your life I would focus on being of service when I can be helpful and then, when not, being irrelevant and non-invested. That wu-wei polarity will maximize your life. Regarding the IDL seminar, continue with your ongoing preparations, which are appropriate and effective. I can help out in a lot of ways. Regarding balancing pool chemicals, I don't know anything about that. Good luck. Regarding organizing this text, I don't know anything about that either, except to the extent that you include my perspective in it.”

“My function in your life is to remind you of the value of mundane service, independent of age or ability. It is also to remind you of the importance of work and rest, activity and regeneration, and to make use of both. I would recommend you become me, take on my perspective, when you want to focus on either of those two areas. You can always monitor your ability to remember to do so by scoring yourself in these areas at the end of each day. How complete is your focus when you work? How complete is your focus when you regenerate? From my perspective, you can do better in both, but particularly in regeneration: your ability to become completely inert, like me, hanging on a peg, totally irrelevant.”

From the above we can see that the value of such an interview lies not in its ability to produce revelatory insights or transformations but rather to move our perspective toward the edge of chaos, toward a timeless, spaceless approach to life that is more closely aligned with collective goods than personal benefit. In this case, there is also the expansion of a selfless approach to service, as these jeans have none of our normal investments in scripting, survival, security, or identity. However, this perspective remains hidden and non-disclosed until and unless we take the time to practice a phenomenological and transpersonal dream yoga.

We can also see that the question as to how “spiritual” or “real,” or self-generated, the responses of Jeans are is largely irrelevant. They have little bearing on the nature or utility of what Jeans are or communicates. We can conclude that what Jeans says reflects my level of awareness, since the interviewed Jeans are an aspect of myself, and that in addition, it adds a perspective that is different from my own in ways that are significant. I haven't previously associated wu-wei with my jeans, and to do so is novel to the point of bizarre, yet it fits. To that degree, we can speak of the degree of autonomy of the perspective of the Jeans, even if the Jeans are inanimate and mundane. Its perspective cannot be reduced to projection or a self-aspect without ignoring, minimizing, or discounting its relative autonomy on the subjectivity-objectivity continuum. However, projection and self-aspect are also elements that generate its responses.

Ideas for Application

The only way to know if dream yoga, and in particular, this approach to dream yoga, is effective, is to test it yourself in your life. This essentially means interviewing dreams, life issues, and aspects of transpersonal experiences that you have had, remembering that if you do not fully embody the perspective of the interviewing character you will be role playing, speaking from your waking perspective through a mask. You will be unlikely to move to the edge of chaos and access emerging potentials.

Certainly scientific studies are important, but they are easy to dismiss. It is more difficult to dismiss positive life changes that are predicted by a theory or model, applied in your own life and in the lives of those you know.

Healing: Overcome toxic scripting, drama, and delusions, such as self-doubt, guilt, and addictions, by applying the recommendations emerging from IDL interviewing, like Orpheus harmonizing Hades's chaos.

But remember: real changes take time and repetition. Transformational experiences typically fade quickly. You are likely to forget all about your interview because speaking from another perspective means you left your core identity attractor basin and took up another one. When you go back to your normal self, information that is not congruent with it will soon be forgotten, ignored, or dismissed unless you 1) reread your interview, preferably before sleep; 2) enlist the support of another student of IDL to make yourself accountable and stay on track.

NOTES

1. A good example of cutting edge contemporary approaches to lucid dreaming that blend Tibetan, Western, and neurological approaches to dreaming is the work of Andrew Holocek, a respected scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and lucid dreaming. He holds roles such as Resident Contemplative Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies and is a research consultant for Northwestern University's Cognitive Neuroscience Program. His background spans classical music, biology, and a doctorate in dental surgery. He's completed traditional three-year meditation retreats and is deeply engaged in integrating ancient wisdom with Western scientific perspectives. His key expertise includes lucid dreaming, dream yoga, sleep yoga, and bardo yoga, which he teaches internationally through books, seminars, and audio programs.
2. Holecek builds upon the scientific foundation of lucid dreaming and then expands it into a spiritual, meditative path rooted in Tibetan Buddhism.
   For Holocek, dream yoga is more than experimenting with dreams; it's a disciplined path to wakefulness. He describes it as a mental yoga, one that stretches and deepens awareness rather than the body. Through dream yoga, practitioners “wake up” in dreams and use that awareness to explore consciousness. He outlines a progressive sequence:
   
   -Lucid Dreaming: Recognizing that one is dreaming.
   -Dream Yoga: Training lucid awareness within dreams.
   -Sleep Yoga (Luminosity Yoga): Accessing awareness in dreamless, deep sleep.
   -Bardo Yoga: Exploring consciousness through phases of death and transitional states.
   In Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming, he presents techniques called “Illusory Form”—daytime exercises that replicate insights from nocturnal practices, helping cultivate awakened perception even when you're awake.
   Holecek emphasizes that lucid dreaming and dream yoga can profoundly reshape waking life, awakening dormant resources and deepening daily awareness. Though rooted in Vajrayana Buddhism, his work is highly accessible, blending traditional Tibetan practices with Western lucid-dreaming techniques and scientific understanding. Holecek also supports dream yoga communities such as the “Night Club” Sangha, an online practice group where practitioners share, learn, and reinforce their nocturnal meditation practice.
   In summary, Holecek places lucid dreaming in the context of meditation for enlightenment, in line with Tibetan dream yogas.
3. 12th century, recorded by Tsangnyön Heruka
4. Systems theory (e.g., von Bertalanffy, 1968) supports process primacy. So does Stuart Kauffman (At Home in the Universe, 1995). Terrance Deacon in Incomplete Nature (2011), views life as emerging from thermodynamic processes without teleology. Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality, 1929), where reality is a flux of events rather than fixed entities, does so as well. from structural biology, where substance (e.g., protein folding) enables process. However, DNA is a molecular structure that produces processes and protein folding does as well. Mainstream biology, as in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, 1976 still prioritizes stable structures (genes) as evolutionary units. In the enactivism of Varela, physical structures enable cognitive processes, which is fundamental to the concept of evolutionary embodiment. Maintaining a balance based on utility reduces the likelihood of generating another dualistic hierarchy of “higher/better” and “lower/limited.” Therefore, we might best think of the relationship between process and structure as reciprocal and interdependent.
5. Regarding empathy's impact on group cohesion, see Singer & Lamm, 2009.
6. Wilson & Sober, 1994.
7. Tomasello, 2009.
8. This conclusion does not ignore or minimize the well-established importance of individual adaptation and fitness for collective evolutionary emergence. Instead, it argues that nature places a priority on collective survival, as can be seen in the production of an over-abundance of offspring in seeds, ovum, and sperm, with the implicit decision to sacrifice individual gene carriers to increase the odds of collective survival