Daniel, I agree with @neko's view. In the books section of the Integrated Daniel site, you mention the author Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche (TWR). In his Tibetan Yogas of Dream and sleep he talks about "Clear Light Dreams" (CLDs). While the are occuring, there is an intense light pervading all sensate experience. The first time I experienced it, upon waking up I felt very unsettled simply because it was an experience totally outside my frame of reference. In response, my first thought was "what the hell was that!"

CLD eh?  Pretty funny.  Seeing bright light while sleeping is actually considered a very very classic sign of kundalini awakening in that community.

I was reading BAW's book on Dreaming Yourself Awake, which I enjoyed, but part of it was a bit strange...

I have no idea why one would call this the "substrate consciousness" or give it some special status, but the book seemed to imply it had it.

Anyone out there have any training in Tibetan Dream Yoga or know anything else about this?

CLD eh?  Pretty funny.

@Eva M Night,  a few questions, the first of which is, which community are you referring to when you say "that community"?

Secondly, just because kundalini awakenings can have lights associated with them and CDLs always has light associated with it, does not mean that the two experiences are once and the same.

Third, in Daniels first post on this thread he is reaching out about this term "substrate consciousness" as it relates to lucid dreaming. He is basically saying, look, I've had the following experiences myself and they are my best guess as to what BAW meant by the term, anyone else have any ideas?

Why would you expect my experinces to match up with Daniel's when Daniel is asking for different points of view on the subject?

Lastly, your tone sounds dismissive to me. I am new to the forum and you have clearly been around for a while. I am trying to understand, are you trying to encourage people to share their experiences or dissuade them?

-Sam

The Mind-System model and unification process help us understand one of the most profound Insight experiences, the cessation event. A cessation event is where unconscious sub-minds remain tuned in and receptive to the contents of consciousness, while at the same time, none of them project any content into consciousness. Then, consciousness ceases—completely. During that period, at the level of consciousness there is a complete cessation of mental fabrications of any kind—of the illusory, mind-generated world that otherwise dominates every conscious moment. This, of course, also entails a complete cessation of craving, intention, and suffering. The only information that tuned in sub-minds receive during this event is the fact of a total absence.

What makes this the most powerful of all Insight experiences is what happens in the last few moments of consciousness leading up to the cessation. First, an object arises in consciousness that would normally produce craving. It can be almost anything. However, what happens next is quite unusual: the mind doesn’t respond with the habitual craving and clinging. Rather, it fully understands the object from the perspective of Insight: as a mental construct, completely “empty” of any real substance, impermanent, and a cause of suffering. This profound realization leads to the next and final moment of complete equanimity, in which the shared intention of all the unified sub-minds is to not respond. Because nothing is projected into consciousness, the cessation event arises. With cessation, the tuned-in sub-minds simultaneously realize that everything appearing in consciousness is simply the product of their own activity. In other words, they realize that the input they’re accustomed to receiving is simply a result of their own fabricating activities. This has a dramatic effect. The sub-minds of the discriminating mind have the Insight that everything ever known, including the Self, was nothing but a fabrication of the mind itself. The sub-minds of the sensory mind have a slightly different Insight: the only kind of information that ever appears in the mind that isn’t purely mind-generated is the input coming to them directly from the sense organs.

If the sub-minds are receptive but there’s nothing to receive, can a cessation event be consciously recalled afterward? It all depends on the nature of the shared intention before the cessation occurred. If the intention of all the tuned in sub-minds was to observe objects of consciousness, as with popular “noting” practices, all that’s subsequently recalled is an absence, a gap. After all, if every object of consciousness ceases, and there’s no intention for the sub-minds to observe anything else, then nothing gets imprinted in memory. However, if the intention was to be metacognitively aware of the state and activities of the mind, we would remember having been fully conscious, but not conscious of anything. We would recall having a pure consciousness experience(PCE), or an experience of consciousness without an object (CWO).

To be clear, there is no actual “experience” of “consciousness without an object” during the cessation event, nor could there possibly be. That experience, like any other, is a construct of the mind, and in this case is generated after the cessation event has already ended. How the memory of a cessation event is interpreted retrospectively takes many forms, depending on the views and beliefs held by the person whose mind is doing the interpreting. Thus, the cessation event itself is not a mental construct, but the subsequent interpretations are entirely constructed.

Regardless of what does or doesn’t imprint in memory, every sub-mind tuned in to consciousness during cessation must assimilate the event into its own representation of reality. As with any Insight experience, the new information forces a reprogramming of how all future experiences are interpreted and responded to. Realizing that all phenomenal experience, including the Self, are mere mental constructs, and therefore “empty” of any real substance, radically transforms how the mind functions. We understand, more clearly than ever before, craving and suffering as the grasping after mere mental constructs—and the more sub-minds are tuned in during the event, the stronger that understanding will be. Of course, it’s not that hard to acquire a conceptual grasp of these truths. Many have done so. But only Insight can establish this understanding at a deep, intuitive level.

The transformative power of a cessation event depends on how unified the mind was. Unification determines the overall size of the “audience” of sub-minds receptive to events in consciousness. Only the parts of the mind-system that were tuned in during the cessation are affected. If the mind were completely unified, then every sub-mind within the mind system would be affected simultaneously, and there would be a complete Awakening of the entire mind-system. [Footnote: nirodha-samāpatti]

However, if the mind was only partially unified, there are two possibilities: no transformation, or incomplete transformation. This is because a certain degree of unification is needed during the event to reach enough sub-minds to make any tangible, lasting difference to the whole mind-system. With too little unification, a person may have a very memorable peak experience, but with little or no lasting effect. However, if the critical threshold is reached, the second possibility is an incomplete transformation of the mind-system, limited to those sub-minds that happened to be tuned in at the time. Complete transformation must await subsequent cessations or other Insight experiences that have a similar impact on the remaining parts of the mind-system. This incremental process of transformation explains why Awakening is traditionally described as occurring in a series of stages.

The essence viewpoint asserts three levels of mind: coarse, subtle, and very subtle.
- The coarse level pertains to mental content, such as thoughts, sense perceptions, and emotions.
- The subtle level is the fleeting mental activity surrounding sensory experience before that activity becomes full-blown mental content.
- The very subtle, or extraordinary, level is the level where impressions due to past actions are accumulated before these ripen in fresh experience. This very subtle mind is sometimes called the storehouse consciousness. The point of observation of this storehouse consciousness transcends our ordinary sense of self and individual consciousness. Like a vast ocean of awareness, this vantage point for the extraordinary meditation is typically referred to as the always-here mind or as awareness in and of itself. When the mind operates primarily at this very subtle level, the individual is significantly more prepared to realize the mind's primordial nature, which is always there, unaffected by all the mental activity at the coarse and subtle level. Thus, the essence perspective cuts right to the heart of the mind's natural state, and invites the practitioner to awaken to it in direct experience, the result of which is enlightenment.

Numerous sayings convey that the "real nature of the mind is said to be clear light." The term clear light means "pure, not obscured by the elaboration such as arising and passing away," and not particles into elements or aggregates. Clear
light has no impurities. It is like space, with aspects nowhere existent. So this explains the real nature, said to be like space and nondual.

The very subtle level of mind is very closely related to clear light in Mahamudra (I am too lazy to provide a quote for this).

Last but not least, in response to Eva's comments, the clear light of Mahamudra is mostly metaphorical, rather than an actual light that one sees, and is not related to the actual lights that are seen in phenomena such as A&P, Kundalini Awakening, or the Luminous Jhanas of Cualdasa:

It can, in my experience, be accompanied by a general sense of things being actually
more luminous and/or brighter, but that is by far not its most relevant characteristic.

From the Editor's Introduction to the 2005 edition...

Mr. Sekida draws a picture of the operation of the mind. His scheme is worked out in terms of nen, a Japanese word that has no precise English equivalent, which may be translated as "thought impulse" but which as somewhat wider meanings than that, since it can be used to denote (among other things) a distinctive type of action of the mind.

Neko, I agree with you that the Clear Light is most definitley not the same as a Kundalini Awakening.


Where I disagree with you is in the idea that "the clear light of Mahamudra is mostly metaphorical". In my experience with Clear Light Dreams, the light, luminosity, brightness, etc. is a salient feature of the experience. Other relevant features include those mentioned in my first post, namely an extreme sense of well-being during the experience and a possible after-glow when the experience is carried on to waking.

The practices of dream yoga are based upon a three-tiered
theory of consciousness. According to this view, the most coarse
and superficial level of consciousness is what we in the West
call the psyche. The psyche comprises the five physical senses
along with conscious and unconscious mental phenomena—
thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so forth. This is our ordinary,
conditioned mind. The psyche emanates from a deeper,
intermediate level, the substrate consciousness. This is described
as a subtle mind stream containing latent habits, tendencies,
and attitudes tracing back to previous lifetimes. The deepest and
most fundamental layer, primordial consciousness—encompassing
both the psyche and the substrate consciousness—is an ultimate
level of pure wisdom where the “inner” (mind) and “outer”
(phenomenal world) are nondual. The realization of primordial
consciousness is the gateway to full enlightenment.

One way to directly enter lucid dreamless sleep is to close one’s
eyes during the activities of normal lucid dreaming.

In Natural Liberation, Padmasambhava presents an advanced
practice for recognizing pristine awareness in the dream state.
Utilizing this, students who have already fully accomplished
shamatha and vipashyana may be able dwell in rigpa, or pristine
awareness, in the dream state. However, a person lacking
these prerequisites may also attain glimpses of primordial consciousness
by allowing awareness to descend into the substrate
consciousness, using the methods presented in chapter 4 (closing
ones eyes during a lucid dream, falling asleep while meditating
on a visualization at the heart chakra, and practicing
awareness of awareness). When you release the dream but
sustain your lucidity and your awareness dissolves from the
psyche of the dream consciousness into the substrate consciousness,
obviously that is an opportunity for directly realizing the
substrate consciousness. But you may, in that state, practice
Dzogchen in the lucid dreamless state. And by releasing all
grasping in this panoramic, 360-degree open awareness, your
awareness may break through the substrate consciousness and
be realized as pristine awareness. It is clear from some of the
earliest teachings by Prahevajra on the Dzogchen practice of
trekcho, of “breakthrough,” what you are actually breaking
through is your substrate consciousness

In Natural Liberation, Padmasambhava presents an advanced
practice for recognizing pristine awareness in the dream state.
Utilizing this, students who have already fully accomplished
shamatha and vipashyana may be able dwell in rigpa, or pristine
awareness, in the dream state. However, a person lacking
these prerequisites may also attain glimpses of primordial consciousness
by allowing awareness to descend into the substrate
consciousness, using the methods presented in chapter 4 (closing
ones eyes during a lucid dream, falling asleep while meditating
on a visualization at the heart chakra, and practicing
awareness of awareness).

So the procedure seems to be. 

• 1. Lucid dream
• 2. Close your eyes
• 3. Experience substrate consciousness (the intermediate level)
• 4. Start to meditate using the awareness of awareness technique
• 5. Wait for the dream to fade
• 6. You find yourself in rigpa / pristine awareness.

And I guess this last step is a clear light dream or lucid dreamless sleep or something like that. I am starting to think that a clear light dream might be sort of "lucid dreamless sleep + rigpa", by the way, so I would say that you get a clear light dream this way.

I was reading BAW's book on Dreaming Yourself Awake, which I enjoyed, but part of it was a bit strange.

In his book, he mentions that if you are lucid dreaming and manage to close your eyes in the dream, you will see the "substrate consciousness".

Well, being a pretty good lucid dreamer, I have managed to do this twice, and here is what I saw.

Both times, what I saw was in garish 3D, like what you see through a stereoscope or when you are looking at a Magic Eye poster.

The first time, the images I saw were of this flat wall with a shifting, largely regular, clear pattern of orange, yellow and purplish shapes that interlocked, like tesslations, in the shape of something like horizontally oriented-skeleton keys.

The second time, I saw this gigantic, featureless white room with my wife standing at the far wall.

I have no idea why one would call this the "substrate consciousness" or give it some special status, but the book seemed to imply it had it.

Anyone out there have any training in Tibetan Dream Yoga or know anything else about this? I was underwhelmed.

I was reading BAW's book on Dreaming Yourself Awake, which I enjoyed, but part of it was a bit strange.

In his book, he mentions that if you are lucid dreaming and manage to close your eyes in the dream, you will see the "substrate consciousness".

Well, being a pretty good lucid dreamer, I have managed to do this twice, and here is what I saw.

Both times, what I saw was in garish 3D, like what you see through a stereoscope or when you are looking at a Magic Eye poster.

The first time, the images I saw were of this flat wall with a shifting, largely regular, clear pattern of orange, yellow and purplish shapes that interlocked, like tesslations, in the shape of something like horizontally oriented-skeleton keys.

The second time, I saw this gigantic, featureless white room with my wife standing at the far wall.

I have no idea why one would call this the "substrate consciousness" or give it some special status, but the book seemed to imply it had it.

Anyone out there have any training in Tibetan Dream Yoga or know anything else about this? I was underwhelmed.

When one realizes the substrate consciousness by the achieving shamatha...

Now here's where I think it gets interesting.  The only time I remember clearly, the dissolution of the dream world was rather terrifying.  In that dream, I was on my bed and I stopped doing everything and I sank through the bed into the holodeck world, which was accompanied by harsh sounds similar to an industrial/noise song and a feeling of drowning.  I only stayed in the holodeck world, which I'll assume for now really was bhavanga, for a few seconds.  I'm not sure if the fear I experienced was due to the suddenness of the transition, which might fade if the bhavanga stabilized, or if it was inherent in the bhavanga.

Eva Nie

It's super common for those doing OBE and LD stuff often to early on encounter some kind of fearful experience.  It's commonly believed it's just a manifestation fo your own insecurities and indeed once you kind of learn to control that fear, the experience will typically no longer be a problem. It's just a matter of learning about your own mind.  OBE/LD tends to amplify all aspects of self both joyful and fearful.  It's so very common, I would not worry that you have any specially fearful kind of nature.  We all have insecurities and at times have to work on them.  What you describe is very common and the feeling of sinking through the bed is also very common.  ;-P
-Eva

...
...

If there was not a complete sense of discontinuity and if it makes any sense to think of time, space, perspective or memory continuing across the gap, write it off immediately as something other than emptiness. On the other hand, if the only way to remember what happened involves remembering just forward to the end of the particular door that presented and then remembering back to when reality reappeared, well, keep reading. --MCTB Was that Emptiness?:

That's the interpretation that I was leaning toward, that the fear I experienced was similar to that from going downhill on a roller coaster, and not something inherent in my bhavanga.  I believe I've been through first path dukka ñana stages, and no great terror was uncovered then, so it seems like a stretch to assume that a not-so-subtle undercurrent of terror pervades every moment of my experience.  Have you had a smiliar dream-world collapse?  Whatever's left, if not bhavanga or something fundamental to the mechanics of experience, certainly is strange.

Eva, has your practice with LD & OBE been in pursuit of awakening or more for novelty, enjoyment, or something else?  Do you think awakening similar to that from insight practices is practical through LD practices?  It would be great to make use of all the time I spend sleeping!

-JJ

...

MCTB says fruition can only be "remembered" as a gap in memory, whereas Caladusa seems to say that the mind can encode the non-experience of a fruition into memory in a way that it can be remembered as an experience. 

Edit:  fixed link

Eva Nie
Probably the only 2 experiences I have that seemed very obviously more 'core' was one where I didn't have much access to thought or memory, I was in my kitchen out of body looking at all my stuff but the memory and understanding of what the things were was so far away, I would justd look at them and see round red things, tall blue things, etc.  I had to struggle very hard to remember the identity of just one thing.  So it was like maybe what a baby sees, just visuals and sensation without knowledge.  Not sure if such is called anything in Buddhism.  

Eva Nie
The other one was once I saw the Aum place/thing/experience.  I guess they call it Brahma or something, but I did not experience it like a god, more of an amazing plain of something (I almost want to plain of existence but that seems not quite right).  I go the sense it was massive, complex, etc. I existed there but did not think and could only process a tiny tiny tiny bit of it into waking consciousness.  To be there is some kind of nonthinking state.  I got the knowledge that it exists underneath EVERYTHING with a big E.  And that it is always there, it's just a matter of if attention is turned there ore not.  And there is a sound of AUM, not sure why it would have that sound, maybe we interpret it as a deep vibration.  That one has been spoken of in Advaita some, and can be nailed down better since it conveniently has a particular sound to it, although most of the info is in regards to a meditation of the same name.  But I think all that talk probably originally stems from the real experience/place of it, not sure if repeating the sound will do anythign special though, any more than mimicking wind noises makes wind come.  Ironically, I had before that had little regard for any potential significance of 'aum' other than as a chant that I did not put much stock in. But apparently it's a real kind of thing down there underneath it all.  I don't think I'd call that substrate consciousness though, it's more like underneath or before that, because it's not like the consciousness of any one person, or like what I'd call call my consciousness exactly.  But the Aum thing seems more of an Advaita thing, I haven't heard anything about it in Buddhism so far.    

BA Wallace, Vacuum States essay 
[Describing bhavanga, from the Theravada view]
The cognitive basis of all mental activities and sensory perceptions is the bhavanga, literally, the ground of becoming, which supports all kinds of javana, as the root of a tree sustains the trunk, branches, and leaves.2 This is the resting, ground state of consciousness, withdrawn from the physical senses. While all mental and sensory processes are conditioned by the body and the environment, in the Buddhist view they actually emerge from the bhavanga, not the brain. Described as the natural, unencumbered state of the mind, its innate radiance and purity are present even when the mind is obscured by afflictive thoughts and emotions.3 The bhavanga may be characterized as a “vacuum” state of consciousness, voided of all manner of javana. Generally speaking, it is indiscernible while the mind is active, for it normally manifests only in dreamless sleep and during the very last moment of a person’s life. Indeed,

[and later, describing  aliyavijnana, the Tibetan equivalent, emphasis mine]
The subjective consciousness of this mental vacuum is called the substrate consciousness. In the natural course of a life, this is repeatedly experienced in dreamless sleep and finally experienced in the moment before death. A contemplative may consciously probe this dimension of consciousness through the practice of meditative quiescence, in which discursive thoughts become dormant and all appearances of oneself, others, one’s body and one’s environment vanish. At this point, as in the cases of sleeping and dying, the mind is drawn inwards and the physical senses become dormant. What remains is a state of radiant, clear consciousness that is the basis for the emergence of all appearances to an individual’s mind-stream. All phenomena appearing to sensory and mental perception are imbued with the clarity of this substrate consciousness. Like the reflections of the planets and stars in a pool of limpid, clear water, so do the appearances of the entire phenomenal world appear within this empty, clear substrate consciousness. Contemplatives who have penetrated to this state of consciousness describe it as “an unfluctuating state, in which one experiences bliss like the warmth of a fire, luminosity like the dawn, and nonconceptuality like an ocean unmoved by waves.”

I wonder if that was the substrate consciousness.  BAW speaks of it as being beneath the level of self-identification, even beneath the level of being human.  He's emphatic about that, saying that bhavanga is not a human experience.  His three descriptors for the state are bliss, luminosity, and non-conceptuality (basically a lack of discursive thinking).  I'm not too sure how one would  know if they felt "luminosity".  Here he describes the state a little more detail, though still far from a complete phenomenological description:

re: Eva Nie (1/30/16 6:42 PM as a reply to Jhana . Junkie)

[. . .]  Gethin also points out that bhavanga, from a careful reading of the sources, actually refers to a wide range of different flavors of citta, depending upon the exact nature of the death and rebirth consciousness, vastly different in the cases of an animal, one in hell realms, a deva, or a human with well developed paramis (getting closer to awakening).  For instance, if one is skilled in jhana, and enters it at the last death-consciousness, this generates abhavanga at the Brahma level at rebirth. (Jhanic absorption occurs at a "change-of-lineage" javanna /i mpulsion in the cognitive series of the citta. This, or whatever is in the mind at the moment of death, determines the new, rebirth bhavanga.)

When you (Eva Nie) mention "Maybe someone else could get there that way though, we are all different" it's like a passage in Gethin's essay where he interprets bhavanga as not having a standard, uniform quality, but actually that which makes each individual individual, so it has infinite possible forms.

*http://www.shin-ibs.edu/documents/bForum/v3/02Gethin.pdf

bhavaṅga is the passive, inactive state of the mind-the mind when resting in itself. Ordinary waking consciousness is to be understood as the mind continually and very rapidly emerging from and lapsing back into bhavaṅga in response to various sense stimuli coming in through the five sense-doors and giving rise to sense-door consciousness processes; these will be interspersed with minddoor processes of various sorts. In contrast, the dream state is understood as essentially confined to mind-door processes occurring in what the texts, following the Milindapañha, call “monkey sleep” (kapi-niddā, kapi-middha, makkata-niddā).15 In deep sleep, the mind rests in inactivity and does not emerge from bhavaṅga. [Gethin, 1994, p16]

So bhavanga is usually below the level of awareness, like in deep sleep or between sensations or thoughts.  It makes sense that the collapse of the dream state, i.e. stilling the "monkey sleep" mind, might leave only bhavanga, yet with enough residual clarity or awareness to actually be able to recall the experience later. 

If the lucid dream collapse is not an entry into bhavanga, maybe that only leaves contemplative practices as a route to experience bhavanga. This is probably much more time consuming, and of questionable utility if awakening a la vipassana is the goal, although it might happen on its own somewhere along the way--I've heard of advanced practitioners that say they are always aware during sleep (see this post by Chuck Kasmire).

Eva - solid pointers on how to conduct the lucid dream collapse again.  I think setting my intention by rehearsing or running through a game plan is a great strategy.  I've found that years can go by between lucid dreams, but as soon as I start just thinking about them a lot I'll usually get one or two--I attribute this to intention.  You also said "If you get good at remember stuff that happened when you sleep, I think you might be able to remember bhavanga.".  I've been thinking that sharpening my memory skills could help in other areas too--sometimes I come out of deep concentration and I'm a little confused about where I've been.  It could be what Thanissaro Bhikku's teacher Ajaan Fuong called moha-samadhi.

Just theorizing now, but I suspect a number of things decide what you are able to recall.  I think a big one though is what your wakign mind is willing to accept.  If waking mind has narrow opinions and desires and lots of mistaken assumptions that conflict with an experience, then IMO  you are unlikely to be able to remember that experience because the experience conflicts with your waking thoughts and emotions in some way.  Another factor I think is interest level, if interest is strongly drawn by other things like keeping with the kardashians, or probs at work or that girl  you are after, then you won't be paying much attention or having much desire to remember subtle states of sleep consciousness.  And I also think assumptions can be a huge prob, any assumptions you have that are not based on experience will not accurately describe the experience so best to try to not have any opinions, expectations, etc, they will all be at least partly wrong.  But the more you have no expectatoins, then the more the wierdness can just unfold naturally and easily without obstacles.  ;-P  So makes sense you are now more interested and giving more focus and attention, so are remembering more.  I also suspect strongly it's not just about getting lucid but about remembering. 

For instance, a few days back, I remember I got lucid but I can't remember much about what I did then.  And I barely remembered the event to start with.  So I think I do maybe get lucid maybe even often, but may not remember, especially if it happens in the middle of the night and not right before I wake  up.  So it's been making me think more and more about memory and how things are and are not transfered to waking memory access.  If  you think about it, all these various mental states, bhavanga, etc happen at night, probably lots of jhanas and all kinds of other things too.  So you ALREADY know how to do all of that stuff,  it's as natural as pie, yet why can't we do it in waking state?  And since you already do them, doing them is obviously not in itself the path to enlightenment since you always had that skill every single night. 

Seems to me maybe the main issue is integration with sleep state self when all kinds of more right brain oriented situations happen, logical brain is torpid and emotions are high in dreams but also other states that are just weird but still often with minimal to no earth logic brain present (mostly), compared with waking state where earth logic brain is much stronger and emotions more controlled.  So if you want to experience a state with little 'thinking' via earth logic brain, then IMO lucid dreams are a good launching point for any of that since earth logic thinking is already weakened so the jump is much shorter.  Just pick via intention and planning what state you want and if what is left of your earth logic brain is free of blocks, then you can experience it.  If your earth logic brain still has some blocks, IMO then you will either fail or you will not remember what happened, it will be blocked from memory.  IMO, the earth logic mind is protected or protects itself from anything that it is not ready to handle via refusing to process it into memory.  The more you remove blocks, the more you can remember of dreams and of your own amazing other powers.  So I think very important is to always be hunting for the blocks you still have that are stopping you.  The blocks both tie up energy and prevent you from seeing and remembering.    

What I take from the first paragraph above, in a way that's easier for me to see quickly, is that memory dependens on at least these factors:

• acceptance - as opposed to opinions, desires, and assumptions which limit what we can take in

In general, whether dreaming or not, I suspect what you wrote points to something really profound about how we create our perception of reality.  I literally cannot attend to something that is so discordant with my conceptual frameworks that phenomena go unnoticed or are just ignored by the mind, fitered out before they make it to my awareness.  I've noticed particularly in regards to things that irritate me, there's usually something outside of my field of awareness or below my consciousness that I'm unwilling to consider.  And paying close attention to the quality of attention when I'm deliberately looking at something I'm averse to, it seems like the attention naturally wants to slither away from the object, onto something sweeter.  This is difficult to look directly at, almost like catching glitches in the matrix when my eyes and ears are designed to shut when the matrix has glitches, but I think there's a lot here,

and I think uncovering it more fully will come as the appreciation of emptiness--or that experience is largely constructed by the mind--matures.  I think the Buddha's teachings on dependent origination cover all this, and I'm willing to spend a couple of years or decades slowly absorbing it

Eva, back to the topic at hand, I wonder if in dreams there might be all this crazy stuff happening, and my mind is literally paying no attention "oh the moon just exploded and its raining corn chips on the freight train to Home Depot.  Yawn."  The air-head dreaming mind doesnt think to question the reality of this, or even if it does and becomes lucid, it doesnt think it's worth being interested in.  I wonder if this can be trained.  Can the mind be primed to record dreams to memory, or is just developing interest and intention while waking the best I can do in the short term?