First of all, let's test your psychic ability: Rate yourself on questions 1-6 below by choosing a number between zero and ten. "Zero" means "never" or "none" and "Ten" means "always" or "completely."

1. Do you love yourself?

2. Do you love other people?

3. Do you love your dream group members?

4. How's your luck?

5. Do you feel one with God?

6. How much of the time do you spend worrying?

Are you wondering what most of these questions have to do with psychic ability? If you scored a "9" or a "10 on the first five questions and a "0" or a "1" on the last one, you are already psychic. Congratulations! If your scores were lower, then you can learn some things from Dream Yoga that will help you to become psychic.

Were you hoping I'd teach you how to read minds or at least do lucid dreaming? Sorry. There are tons of web sites where you can go to develop in those directions.

Now, how do those questions relate to your psychic development?

1. Well, if you don't love yourself, you will seek psychic ability for power, out of a sense of separateness or weakness. Don't do it. It will only bring you trouble. If you DO love yourself, then your psychic abilities will develop appropriately according to the needs of your soul.

2. If you don't love other people - and by this I mean your boss, those thoughtless drivers, your in-laws, inconsiderate spouse, cops, and lawyers - you don't deserve psychic abilities. Sorry. You haven't earned them. If you have them but haven't learned how to love others, you are like a child playing with a loaded gun. Not wise. If you DO love other people, you know that as you treat them you are treating those aspects of yourself that each mirrors. You know that as you treat them you are treating those aspects of yourself that each mirrors. In that case, you may have the wisdom to handle psychic abilities wisely. Dream Yoga will teach you to love all others as yourself, and that is a prerequisite to earning psychic ability.

3. If you don't remember dreams or avoid working with certain ones, you probably don't love your dream group members. If you remember your dreams but don't listen to what your dream group members say, you probably don't respect them. If you listen to what they say but don't seek out or put into waking practice their recommendations, then you probably still aren't respecting them. If you don't love your dream group members, you don't love yourself, because whatever else they may also be, they are personifications of aspects of your own being. In addition, if you don't love your dream group members, you don't love others, because while you are dreaming, they are the perceived "other." As you treat them, you treat others. As you treat them, you treat yourself.

4. If your luck is good, your psychic ability is working, at least to some extent. Luck may be just a matter of staying well or getting the right job or meeting the right person just as easily as it may be avoiding a wreck or winning the lottery or finding that lost key. If your luck is bad, your intuition is off. Something is out of balance. Listen to your dream group members and they will not only tell you what is out of balance but how to go about fixing it.

5. If you feel one with God on an ongoing basis, you are one with soul purpose and you don't need to become psychic because you ARE psychic. You have identified with that part of yourself that is always and has always been psychic. If you feel out of touch with God, don't even think about developing psychically. Just get to know your dream group members. Listen to them.

6. Time that you spend worrying is time that you spend in fear. Psychic ability is about trust, openness, receptivity. If you are too open too early you may be invitiing psychic invasion. That is not a fun experience. If you want to develop psychically, first stop worrying. If you don't worry, then you are already on the way to developing your psychic ability.

"Psychic" means "of the soul." Psychic development is really about soul development. It is only superfically and tangentially about mind reading, psychokinesis, and developing "siddhis." Those things are mostly about power, sought by those who feel impotent in one way or another and taught by those who want you to think they are superior. If you don't feel weak, you won't need power so much. It's just not that high a priority. Now power can be a very good thing. And it can be a very dangerous thing. Jesus had the right idea when he said "Seek first the kingdom of Heaven." If you first seek the kingdom of Heaven within you, you'll find that you already have all the power you need.

Some Questions and Answers Regarding Lucid Dreaming

The following interview with Dr. Dillard was done for WellPlanet.com.

I have spoken with Dr. Stephen LaBerge about his research in lucid dreaming,but after touring your website I felt that your program "Dream Yoga", whileusing some of the same ideas and containing many of the same therapeutic and"world broadening" goals as lucid dreaming, seemed to be much more spiritualin nature. Am I correct in this assumption? Is Dream Yoga more of aspiritual journey than regular, old lucid dreaming?

Learning to be aware that you are dreaming can be a hallmark of transpersonal development. Lucidity is a one expression of the spiritual ideal of learning to be awake at all times and not just sleepwalking our way thorough life. Think of lucid dreaming as one skill, aptitute, or ability that most anyone can cultivate rather than as a spiritual path. Dream Yoga is about consciously using your dreamwork as a spiritual path. A person who practices Dream Yoga may not ever remember a lucid dream, but they can experience profound balance and integration. Little kids and criminals have been known to have lucid dreams. Although this ability remains rare, lucidity can be found in children , athiests, secular humanists, as well as ascended masters. In other words, just because you can wake up in some of your dreams doesn't mean you're a spiritual Big Dawg. Beyond lucid dreaming is lucid deep sleep, called turiya in Hinduism. As far as I know, only highly experienced meditators ever accomplish this.

Lucid dreaming is a part of your spiritual journey if it makes you more compassionate, wise, and at peace within yourself. There is no guarantee that it will. If you are doing it to avoid unpleasant dreams or to have fantastic sex, or because it's the latest thing since Madonna took up the Kabbalah, it's another ego trip. However, learning to know that you're dreaming can be very valuable. It mostly addresses the 'wisdom' part of the three-part spiritual equation I just mentioned. It provides experiences of witnessing which are a necessary part of waking up to our illusory attachments to life. Learning to witness your thoughts, your feelings, yourself, is a major part of spiritual evolution, but it is only a part. A person can be a great lucid dreamer and be out of balance in ethical, dietary, interpersonal, or sexual aspects of their life.

Everyone, it seems, is interested in their dreams and in interpreting themusefully. It's fun and interesting. But Dream Yoga seems like more workthan just that - it's actually like a "mind exercise program" and itrequires effort and dedication from the participant, right? What do you sayto people who may want to fool around with Dream Yoga just for fun? Do youinsist that people take it more seriously, or is Dream Yoga something youcan do for enjoyment?

We need to get over the mindset that dreamwork is some sort of personal development pasttime. The average person spends at least eight years of their life dreaming. Your dreams can cause you to get ill. They heavily influence your happiness and success in your life whether you ever remember a single one or not. A yoga is a discipline, and who likes discipline? Many of the really important things that we do, like get up to go to work in the morning, transcend categories of like or dislike. We do them because it's what we need to do. Dream Yoga is a discipline that is fun, intriguing, joyful, inspirational, profoundly insiteful, and immensely rewarding for those who stick with it.

Dream Yoga is about learning to listen to your soul as it is personified through your various dream characters. Do you really want to listen to your soul? Most people don't listen to themselves, nor are they really interested in what they may hear. They are sure that they already know. They've got themselves figured out, sized up. This is because they listen all day long to the voices inside their head telling them they should be thinner or go work out more or smile or get back to work. So who wants to hear more of that? The idea of spending time listening to parts of us that are personified by houses or our spouse or an evil looking snake is appealing mostly to those with an unbounded appetite for whimsy. Symbolic dream interpretation, on the other hand, is like dissecting a cadaver. I'm going to examine the brain and look up the names of its lobes in some dream equivalent of Gray's Anatomy. When we find a name that seems to fit, we think we understand a living brain when we don't even understand a dead one. People have been doing something similar with dreams since well before the Roman Artimidorus wrote his famous dream symbol dictionary Oneirocritica. What have we really accomplished other than project our own ego onto a dream? There is an important time and place for this in dreamwork, to be sure, but it is much less important than the mainstream books and teachers would lead you to believe. In Dream Yoga you are dealing with an alive, vibrant creature that can grow, transmute, and challenge. it can absolutely astound you and catch you off guard. It offers little of the sense of ego control that symbolic dream interpretation and lucid dreaming can provide. Are we really ready to listen to ourselves when it threatens the comfort, complacency, and control of our ego?

Think about it for a minute. Who is this 'I' that is waking up in your dream? Who is running the show? Do you really think your ego is capable of making intelligent decisions about how a dream should be changed? If you do believe your persona is that wise, why do you think so? How do you know this? Your ego is only one of the many, many subpersonalities that make up your larger identity. While it is just as much a manifestation of the divine as every other aspect of yourself, do you want to turn it into more of a dictator than it already is? Has it done such a wonderful job in controlling your waking life that you want to give it control over your dreaming life as well? Might it be better to humbly sit down and listen before the awe-inspiring creations of an inner intelligence that is much wiser, compassionate, and encompassing than your waking identity can begin to imagine? Ken Wilber coined the word pellucid to describe the state of simply being aware in a dream without attempting to change it. I like this concept a lot, and I aspire to this consciousness rather than to lucidity per se.

While Dream Yoga is a discipline, it is one that teaches you to laugh at yourself, including your efforts at discipline. I like to do stupid things with my dreams. I have had dreams that have told me not to take my dreams so seriously. I try not to make any of this stuff too profound, particularly the whole business of being on one's spiritual path. We laugh, we love, we cry, we die. So what? Dreams and the personifications that you get to know are way too alive and quirky to make into some sort of sanctimonious religious experience. Dreaming doesn't stop because you become an ascended master. Your need to dialogue with your inner self will never stop. But listening to your soul is optional and treating either the listening or your soul as serious is also optional. How much importance you want to give to listening to your soul using Dream Yoga is up to you. Combine it with meditation and you've got a winning combo. It will take you as deep as you want to go. I happen to have a great deal of fun with it. Kids take to this method easier than stick-in-the-mud adults, probably because they take themselves less seriously.

Does Dream Yoga give the participant access to their unconscious mind? Isthis what you mean when you say that it helps us to discover the truth andgoodness and inner peace that is within us? Or is there a less "clinical"explanation than the unconscious mind? Are you talking about something morespiritual, more mystical, more "otherworldly"?

Have you ever felt like your life was a hurricane of spinning pressures, responsibilities, thoughts, feelings, activities? Have you ever felt overwhelmed to the place where you felt you were in danger of flying apart? That's because you were at that moment identified with the storm. You were completely out of touch with the eye of the hurricane, which is completely calm. Yet the storm of your life cannot exist without its tranquil center! Now ask yourself this question: Is that eye more or less unconscious than the storm? Does a pilot have to enter another dimension to fly up and into the eye of a hurricane? No, I don't think so. Is the eye any less accessible or any less real than the storm? No -- not to those who know it exists and know how to find it. Just like the eye of a hurricane, there is nothing mystical, spiritual, or otherworldly about your soul. Every character in every single dream you have is a wormhole into the eye of your hurricane, a pathway to your soul, if you approach it with the proper reverence. Don't take my word for it. Anyone who applies the methods of Dream Yoga can test that statement for themselves.

I have read in the course of my research that Tibetan Buddhists have beenusing what they call dream yoga for thousands of years. How is your programdifferent (or, is it based on the Tibetan Buddhists principles and similarin many ways)?

Any approach to dreamwork which has as its purpose the integration of our waking identity with the divine is rightly called a yoga. I have called my work Dream Yoga, but it is in fact only one of many, many approaches that have been and will be developed to unite individual consciousness with spirit. My reason for using this term is not to draw comparisons to the profound but culturally dissimilar practices of Tibetan dream yoga. It is to encourage spiritual seekers to approach dreamwork not from an intellectual, analytical and mostly symbolic perspective, but as a balanced spiritual discipline that includes daily life application.

Do you have an example (an anonymous one, of course) of a case or a clientthat you worked with who achieved a goal, solved a problem, improved theirlife, etc. through Dream Yoga? Are successes like this what keep youworking on Dream Yoga? Or is it more of a personal quest?

I thought I knew a lot about dreams and dreaming before I developed this method more than twenty years ago. Now, every time I work with a dream using the methods of Dream Yoga I am humbled by the acceptance, compassion, wisdom, and inner peace that lie within me. I usually don't perceive these qualities within myself, I don't expect them, I don't understand them, and I scarcely believe that they could be there within me. Their presence, in the magnitude in which they are presented to me, continually blows me away. Before I developed these methods I thought dreamwork was about interpreting symbols and gaining insight into myself. Dream Yoga has taught me that what awaits disclosure within is much more profound, satisfying, and core to my being. When I apply these methods to one of my dreams or help another person in this fashion with theirs, it feels like I am kneeling with bowed head before my soul and being blessed with a gift I am not large enough to accept. The mystery, the intrigue, the whimsical fun draw me back again and again like a moth toward the light.

I discovered early on that my dreamwork became merely one more sophisticated ego trip if I didn't use it to help others. Over the years I have had the honor to serve as the catalyst for the spirit-directed transformation of many people using the methods of Dream Yoga. One lady had chronic agoraphobia for over a decade. She couldn't leave her house without becoming very anxious and having unexpected, unpredictable anxiety attacks. She happened to be an expert on agoraphobia and knew all the treatments and corresponded with many of the experts in the field. She had the courage and the persistence to trust the method and her own zany, bizarre inner voices as we worked through a series of her dreams over perhaps a year, applying the Dream Yoga process. She has now been symptom free for several years. I'm sure she got well out of a desperate desire to avoid having to talk to any more bizarre dream characters!

I hope that my comments have raised enough questions to inspire you to tour my web site, DreamYoga.com, and try a bit of the process on for size in the 'sample session' you will find there. Feel free to drop me a line at Joseph.Dillard@Gmail.Com. I teach students and I take on intrepid clients. Namaste -- The divine in me bows in reverence before the divine in you.

See our postings of psychic dream experiences. I invite you to send us your own for posting at Joseph.Dillard@Gmail.Com

If you choose to work toward certification in Dream Yoga, or if you simply choose to use it in a more informal fashion in your daily life, you will find yourself developing the greatest of all psychic abilities, the one which is the key to all the others: you will find yourself in the right place at the right time. You will find that you will say that which helps others. You will find that your life experiences today are just exactly what you need. They will feel rich and filling.