Target Practice

I’ve been looking at the Shambhala Sun website a bit lately, reading some of Pema Chödrön’s articles. She has some helpful (and alarming) things to say about working with anger. She points out that, metaphorically speaking, no one can hit the target with an arrow unless we have set a target up, and since we put the target up ourselves, we’re the only ones who can take it down. She also says that when we get in the habit of reacting with irritation, lo and behold, many, many arrows will head our way, and next thing we know, we’re ticked off all the time and no one wants to be friends with us.

Her advice is not to repress anger, which I often try to do (not particularly successfully), nor to act on it (which I also often do, though I think somewhat less often as the years go by), but to sit with the unpleasant feelings. Even doing that for two seconds helps to break that entrenched pattern, which is the encouraging part.

Oddly, I find it extremely difficult to identify the sensations associated with anger. Sadness is glaringly obvious to me, and ditto fear. With anger, try as I might, the only really noticeable thing is the lecture unspooling in my head: what I’d like to say to so-and-so, just exactly what I won’t put up with and what any person in her right mind shouldn’t put up with, etc. I do know that anger is often triggered by fear. I’m working on trying to feel the anger directly, and also, if I’m lucky, to catch the moment of anxiety or sadness that triggered the defensive angry reaction.

So, anyway, I was thinking of maybe subscribing to Shambhala Sun ("today's best-selling and most widely-read [sic] Buddhist magazine"), and decided not to, because I already have too much stuff to read even without library books, and then, next thing I knew, I had rushed to their website and typed in my credit card number. I got an email back saying my subscription would start with such-and-such issue, and then, irrationally, went looking for the current issue, the one before the first one I’ll get as a subscriber.

They didn’t have it at the newsstand at First and Market, and I firmly told myself to forget it: Why on earth do I suddenly need a particular issue of a magazine I wasn’t even planning to subscribe to, even if I did end up subscribing to it after all?

Then I was at Rainbow, waiting in the checkout line, and my fell right on that earlier issue, so of course I bought it, and a couple of days later, I was reading the letters to the editor in the front.

The topic was killing insects in our homes and one letter began something like, “I don’t knowingly kill creatures in my apartment,” and I thought, “Yeah, same here. And I kind of like the way he/she said ‘creatures’ when we’re just talking about bugs.” Well, it turned out that letter was from me, something I posted on a forum on their website, so that was a very nice welcome to Shambhala Sun. (I didn’t know posting to the forum constituted sending a letter to the editor.)

Shortly after that weekend when my sleep got all thrown off, I had another night where my lucid dreaming project kept me up for several sleepless hours, and I started to entertain the idea that this isn’t my lifetime for lucid dreaming expertise, but then I found a lucid dreaming website with extensive forums where I picked up a couple of good ideas, and decided to forge ahead, but in a much more relaxed manner—I’m not on a deadline here.

It takes some people months or a year to have their first lucid dream, while I had three within my first month, plus a couple I’ve had in the past (like, literally, two), so I clearly have the potential ability to do this.

To recap, LaBerge says three things are needed to learn lucid dreaming: good dream recall, motivation, and consistent practice of effective techniques. I finally figured out the latter is the problem: I am not actually practicing the most effective way to induce lucid dreams, LaBerge’s MILD process, which you’re ideally supposed to do when you wake up from a dream during the night, just as you’re falling asleep again.

One or the other of these things happens every night: 

1) I don't wake up from a dream during the night at all. I wake up just before my alarm goes 
off and remember multiple dreams, usually, but by then it's too late to do MILD and have 
another dream.



2) I wake up during the night from a dream, do MILD, and then can't go back to sleep.



3) I wake up during the night from a dream, but it doesn't cross my mind to do MILD. 
My memory is not good.



4) I wake up during the night from a dream, and next thing I know, my alarm is about to 
go off; I fell back asleep without remembering to do MILD.



Numbers 1 and 4 happen most often, so my current goal is to improve my ability to wake from dreams during the night and make a few notes; I'm not even going to worry about MILD for 
the time being, but when I get back to it, I will only do a few repetitions if I can see it's waking me up too much.