Here are some suggestions for how you can use Dream Yoga to speed your personal integration:

• Try to create a dream sociomatrix and the accompanying commentaries for at least one dream a month, emphasizing application. Team up with a Dream Yogan for mutual support and to share experiences.
• Apply the consensual recommendations in your daily life. Identify with dream group members in those waking circumstances which they recommend. If your group creates a dreamage, review it before sleep.
• Get help from other Dream Yogans in following through with recommended waking life changes.
• Participate in your Dream Sangha.
• Review the following common sabotages and eliminate as many as you can.

It is wise to know common ways you can keep yourself from reaping the powerful benefits of Dream Yoga in your life. Here are some of them and some suggested solutions.

"I don't remember my dreams."

Most of us want a good night's sleep. That means that we don't want our sleep to be disturbed. Remembering a dream, or even trying to remember a dream, disturbs our sleep. Consequently, we have a bias toward repressing or ignoring our dreams. With Dream Yoga, you don't have to disturb your sleep on a regular basis. All that is required is that you remember one dream every two weeks or so. Most people can do this if they keep pen and paper beside their bed, tell themselves before they go to sleep "I will remember my dreams," and decide they really want to. If all else fails, drink a glass of water before you go to sleep! When you wake up to go to the bathroom, you will have just finished a dream cycle, and if you focus on what you were feeling just before you woke up, you will probably remember a dream!

"But all my dreams are either stupid or unimportant. They're just about some show I saw on TV or some inconsequential event that happened to me yesterday. I don't dream anything worth remembering, much less work on!"

Even for experienced dreamworkers, many dreams that are remembered feel stupid or seem unimportant. Most of us have to deal with that prejudice by suspending our judgment and writing the dream down so that we will later have the option of seeing what it might have to tell us. YesterdayÕs events that show up in tonightÕs dreams are called "day residue." The question to ask yourself is, "Why did I dream about that particular event of my day or that show rather than some other? Why did that particular piece of nonsense, rather than some other, get picked to get dreamed about?" If you will learn to suspend judgment and ask your dream group members, you will probably be surprised at just how much relevance your dream has and how totally narrow and biased your judgment can be.

"I don't have the time for dreamwork."

We all have the same amount of time. We make different choices about what to do with it. "Not having the time" means "Dream Yoga isn't as important to me as everything else I do, including watching TV or going out to eat." Are you sure about that?

It takes maybe five minutes to write down a dream. That should be easy enough to do once every two weeks.

Using Dream Yoga on a dream does involve a serious commitment of your time. Every two weeks to a month, you will spend a couple of hours interviewing dream characters and another hour reviewing your application of their recommendations. A lot of people spend that much time just renting a video and watching it! Ask yourself, "Will this video offer me the opportunity to resolve some conflict that is blocking my success? Will it help me prevent problems in the future? Will it improve how I feel about myself?" It it won't, perhaps you will find yourself making more productive use of your time.

"It's too much work."

Make no mistake - we all have resistance to feeling better and being happier. There are parts of us that prefer to remain comfortably stuck. Otherwise, why wouldn't you stick with that diet or that exercise plan? Habits are strong. That's why it is so important to have someone guide you through the Dream Yoga interviewing process, that's why people need training in the method, and that's why it is so helpful to join dream sangha - a group of meditators who work with their dreams. Life changes are always much easier with a support group.

"I can't afford it."

We all have to decide what we want to spend our money on - things that give us temporary satisfaction but leave us thirsty, or things that really quench our thirst and have a long-lasting value. Many of us find that we end up paying for a lot of things that aren't really necessities, such as restaurants, movies, junk food, and possessions that get tossed in three months or three years. Most of us even change cars, houses, and jobs every three to seven years. So what can we spend our money on that will last? Meditation and learning to listen to our own inner support system are two areas that enrich our lives while providing lasting value. If you put your needs in a different perspective, you may find that you can't afford not to learn and practice dream yoga, that in the long run, it is money well-spent on something very worthwhile - building a consciousness that will serve you well long after you have left your body.

Wholeness is integration. Integration can be thought of in two basic dimensions.

First, you can be integrated now, in who you are. This means that there is a congruent and productive interdependence between your various parts, your physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, interpersonal and financial selves. You can be integrated now without being a saint. You can simply be adequate as a person for your present level of development - which is saying a lot!

We can easily imagine many people achieving integration on this level, and people in non-technological societies who lived 6000 years ago are as likely, perhaps more likely, to have achieved this type of integration as we are today. In fact, because life is more complex and we are aware of more parts of ourselves, there is more to get out of balance and more to integrate. It seems plausible that this task becomes more difficult as society becomes increasingly sophisticated and the elements of culture become harder to master.

Secondly, you can be integrated in the sense of realizing your potentials. This is the integration of prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal developmental levels and it's the sort of integration that Buddhism and most other religions are interested in. Being one with God or attaining Nirvana, as different as they are, remain similar in that both assume prerequisite changes in consciousness. This sort of integration is a matter of becoming someone radically different from who we are right now, even if to the exterior world we only "chop wood and carry water."

Far from being incompatible, we believe that these two types of integration, together with disintegration, create a dynamic for further development. The first consolidates and accepts; the second transcends and transmutes. Disintegration is absolutely necessary if a higher level of integration is to emerge. These two types of integration are manifested by dream group members in thesis and synthesis sociograms, and disintegration is manifested in antithesis dream sociograms. The integration seen in thesis sociograms is hardly of the full-blown type described above; there is indeed internal conflict preventing full-blown agreement in these groups.

Ken Wilber refers to the first type of integration as translation . It creates a platform or structure which through consolidation provides a stable foundation for further development. The second type of integration Wilber calls transcendence, a going beyond a previous level of integration and moving to a higher level of development.

Wilber also describes the self as a holon expressing itself developmentally in four different ways. Holons are "whole/parts," entities which are wholes but yet part of larger wholes. A holon might be considered to be integrated when the development in each of these four quadrants is congurent and productive and interdependent, regardless of the stage of development. Then again, a holon might be integrated if in some way it has completed its development in all four quadrants.

The four quadrants are called by Wilber interior individual (upper left), exterior individual (upper right), interior-cultural (lower left), and exterior-social (lower right).

Here is a summary of characteristics associated with each quadrant:

Interior individual (upper left)

• intentionality
• the direct experiencing of subjective interiors
• consciousness studies; the evolution of consciousness
• the cognitive developmental spectrum from prehension through Piaget's stages and beyond
• psychic development
• lucidity training
• illustrative thinkers:Freud, Jung, Piaget, Auobindo, Plotinus, Buddha

The interior individual quadrant is itself the holon in which dreaming, dreamwork, and dream research naturally occur.

Exterior individual (upper right)

• the evolution of form
• the study of exteriors, objects, the objectified other (including internal body parts)
• Empiricism, physics, biology, neurology
• monological, positivisic
• illustrative thinkers: Watson, Skinner, Locke,

Interior-cultural (lower left)

• cultural
• interpretive
• hermeneutic
• ethics, religion, values
• the study of the meaning of interiors
• dialogue, not monologue; intersubjective
• the evolution of hermeneutics & the expression of value
• illustrative thinkers: Kuhn, Dilthey, Gebser, Weber, Gadamer

Exterior-social (lower right)

• group processes and structures; social psychology, sociology, economics, politics
• the evolution of social organization
• the study of exteriors as group phenomenon
• systems theory
• illustrative thinkers: Parsons, Comte, Marx, Lenski

Different approaches to dreamwork emphasize different quadrants of the dream holon, a subset of the internal-individual holon of the individual.

Lucidity training such as LeBerge's offers an interior individual approach to dreamwork. Approaching dreams as real, interdimensional experiences, (Castaneda), is an interior individual approach to dreamwork. Using dreamwork to wake up from our waking dream, as taught by the classical Dream Yoga of the Yogacarins and Tibetans such as Milarepa, is an interior individual approach to dreamwork.

Scientific investigations of dreaming addressing REM vs. NREM mentation, brain correlates of dream mentation, and physiological explanations for dreaming (Hobson, Crick) are exterior individual approaches to dreamwork. So might those approaches which emphasize application over meaning and use the dream as a vehicle for some objective change. In this regard, Perl's Gestalt addresses the exterior individual aspect of the dream holon.

Most approaches to dreamwork have been interior-cultural, in that they ask, "What does this dream mean?" Schools of symbol interpretation, whether Freudian, Jungian, ancient Egyptian, Artemidorus, or works like, "1000 Dreams Interpreted" are all interior cultural. They assume a set of meanings and project them on to the dream.

Exterior-social approaches emphasize group dynamics among dreamers and the process of dreamwork in a group or the content of dreams among groups of dreamers. Van de Castle's Content Analysis of Dreams and Ulman's dream group processes are examples of approaches that emphasize this quadrant of the dream holon.

All of this is important in order to orient you to understanding where Dream Yoga fits in relationship to various other approaches to dreamwork.

It is interior individual in its emphasis on intentionality (eliciting and collecting preferences in the sociomatrix and commentaries), in its receptivity to psychic development, lucid dreaming, and meditation, both in the dream state and while awake. The truth test here is clarity of consciousness, as determined by both internal and external dream sanghas.

Dream Yoga is exterior individual in its emphasis on empirical testing of dream group member recommendations in one's waking life. The truth test here is waking effectiveness for oneself and others.

Dream Yoga is interior cultural in that dream group members hold and recommend values, interpret experience, and form dream group cultures. The process is interior cultural when it is interpretive, as when the commentaries are translated into "I statements" or dream group members are asked to reflect on what part of the dreamer's consciousness they most closely personify.

Dream Yoga is exterior social in that it works with both internal and external dream groups (internal and external dream sanghas) and studies the dynamics of the former in sociogram patterns of preference.

The purpose of Dream Yoga may be said to be the integration of these four quadrants on the current level of functioning of the dreamer, in the belief that by so doing a higher level of integration on all levels will be made available. The bias here is to focus on translation, believing that doing so will foster transformation. It assumes that emphasizing transformation tends to push development of the interior individual quadrant at the ezpense of the others, creating imbalances that actually impede higher level integration. This assumption may in fact be mistaken, but it is a fundamental premise of Dream Yoga, and you deserve to know, as best as can be communicated, the biases and prejudices of any approach you explore.

What is spiritual development and how does Dream Yoga support it?

moving from karma to grace

Karma is about experiencing the consequences of past choices. Dream Yoga gives us an opportunity to participate in these consequences before they manifest concretely and externally in our waking life as disease, abandonment, or as accidents. To avoid such consequences by understanding and changing is to live in a state of grace.

living in the now rather than the past or future

If there is an ultimate reality, it is now. It is not only impossible to move out of the present moment, it is destructive to try. Living in the past creates regret, guilt, and resentment. Living in the future creates fear, anxiety, and worry. Does this mean we should forget our past? Hardly! Our responsibility is to learn from it yesterday and to venerate it as a great teacher. Does this mean we should not plan for our future? Planning and goal setting are essential. Then we need to let go and affirm that we are who we need to be, doing what we need to be about, right now.

When you are dreaming, you are in the now. When you are identifying with a dream group member, you are doing so in the present moment. This very act is therapeutic, in that it takes us out of the past and the future and into the spontaneous, unlimited here and now. At the moment of identification we die to ego and experience some degree of liberation.

problem solving which includes a trans-rational perspective

There are many approaches to problem solving. Rather than preferring one over all others, we need to cultivate versatility and familiarize ourselves with a variety of strategies. Some dream group members will exemplify trans-rational problem solving strategies, such as unconditional acceptance, clairvoyance, precognition, metamorphosis, and compassion. As we identify with them, we come to enlarge our waking identity to incorporate those abilities into our sense of who we are.

expanding self-awareness to include all

As we identify with more and more aspects of our larger identity, we integrate fragmented self-aspects into ourselves. Or, to put it another way, we deconstruct our limited definition of ourselves and replace it with a continuously broadening sense of who we are. Both internal and external "others" are seen to equally mirror a progressively more transparent and formless identity.

uncovering and ending self-deception and illusion

There are many common myths that Dream Yoga naturally and experientially deflate. Here are some of them:

"I am unlovable."
"No one cares what I do or think."
"My thoughts have no real repercussions for my relationships."
"I am what I do."
"I am a specific identity."
"I know who I am."
"I can treat others as I wish and avoid consequences."
"There exist people and objects that are fundamentally other than who I am."
"There are things that are not possible."
"I can be hurt or destroyed."
"I can hurt or destroy others."
"I am not responsible."
"I am responsible for everything and everybody."

You will undoubtedly have your own list of myths that your dreamwork deflates, and we encourage you to add it to ours.

loving others as we would be loved

As you treat your dream group members so you treat those aspects of yourself which they personify. This truth quickly becomes evident in this process. Because we now have a direct and personal experience of this truth, treating others as we wish to be treated is seen as practical and a matter of common sense rather than some impractical and idealistic precept. Because Dream Yoga makes this truth so self-evident, it provides an excellent way to ground children in this powerful and central moral precept.

spiritual attunement

Spiritual attunement is mostly a matter of staying open, of surrendering boundaries without destroying them. As you identify with dream group members who are better at this than you are, you will find that you naturally possess that which you seek, that you don't have to force yourself to be attuned, but rather to simply open to that within you which already knows and already is who and what you wish to be.

cultivating the witness, mindfulness, and the hallmarks of meditative consciousness

Every dream group member is a guru for those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. It is amazing what can be learned about meditative attunement from dream rocks, trees, oceans, skies, caves, and other dream group members. The process of successively identifying, then disidentifying with various aspects of self will teach you to take the perspective of the witness toward youself, to learn to literally watch the drama of your life, with all of its roles, go by. This rememberance is a form of mindfulness, not so unlike that practiced in meditation. Expect the depth and satisfaction of your meditations to increase.

identification with spiritual potentials

Who knows what you are capable of? Would you like to find out? Your dream group members will show you, educate you, and teach you how to become the spiritual potentials that are innately within you. When you get off course, they will give you guidance about what needs to be done. This is discriminating wisdom borne of discernment, a worm-hole to enlightenment.