Hi Luminessence, Laniburger and maybe other frequent LDers,
I am definitely not an expert in meditation, so don’t take what I write for granted, but I studied a lot about it, especially in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, so I will try to explain what Tibetan Buddhists kinda understand meditation to be.
To understand traditional meditation in a Buddhist context, you first have to understand a little about the Buddhist paradigm (view of reality).
Buddhists believe that, although we have many pleasurable moments, our lives are controlled by suffering: we can get (or are afraid of getting) sick, we can die (or are afraid of…), … And they believe the cause of this suffering is our mind and only our mind.
Freeing ourselves from suffering is thus to be found in freeing our mind from causing more and more suffering: controlling our mind, knowing our mind, transforming our mind and in the end overcoming our mind. Meditation is the key practice on this path.
The first stage of meditation is single pointed meditation. The theory is: our minds produces suffering, if we can calm down this mind by blocking his operation, we go beyond suffering. Blocking the operation of the mind can be achieved by concentrating on one single point and keeping this for an hour, hours, days…
The most known technique is to focus on your breath, the best technique (that’s my opinion) is to focus on your breath gliding through your nostrils, in and out. It helps to try to be aware of the temperature of the air (it is slightly fresh when it enters your nose, slightly warm when it leaves your noise). I read here that many lucid dreamers practice this, but more as a relaxation technique (it is indeed very relaxing), with single pointed meditation it goes much further than that.
First you have a general, rather broad focus, the whole area around your nose. Very often your thoughts pull you away, so you have to be aware, and if you notice your attention is slowly directing to something else, you just bring it back to your nose. While you get better and better in this, you notice that the thoughts are not the problem, it is our mind following them that breaks the meditation. Meditation is NOT being free from thoughts, it is being free from following thoughts, distractions, sounds, …
If you get better in this (it takes training) you can focus more precisely, first to one of your nostril (I always choose the one that has the most freely throuhpass, there is always one that breathes more freely), then to a very tiny point in the middle of that nostril, it’s like zooming into that point and yet always focusing on a smaller point, until your mind goes kinda like trough that point and then becomes completely silent, after this it’s like your awareness starts to broaden although your mind stays compelety still. If you can get this far you feel some sort of bliss, and you can stay in this state for hours without effort.
Most types of meditation just aim for this bliss. True, if you can experience it, you have no suffering anymore at that moment, in the contrary you feel very good, blissfull, but if you stop meditating, suffering is back there, so buddhists don’t ever stop there, they continue to the next stage.
The second stage of meditation is insight meditation. First you settle your mind in a very calm state (see above), then you start to analyze in order to develop wisdom. With wisdom and only with wisdom you can escape from the suffering outside of the meditation. It seems awkward to analyze while meditating, but you have to understand it is no intellectual analyzing, but rather realizing things with whole your body and mind. The purpose is to slowly change your view, your mindset to a more enlightened mindset. It is very hard to explain this, you will have to understand the notion of enlightenment for this, and this is something not easy to understand. Anyhow, at this stage you normally need to study about buddhism, non-duality, emptiness and things like that, in order to be able to discover this knowledge in yourself. If you don’t like this, you can stick to single pointed meditation, as long as you know this is not the end, and don’t get addicted to it, you will progress automatically to wisdom in the end.
You find these two types of meditation in every kind of buddhism. But there is one buddhism, the one that is practised in Tibet, that goes even further. Depending on the school (there are 4 main schools) one calls this even more advanced technique Dzochzen or Mahamudra. In Dzochzen/Mahamudra (the most direct path to enlightment) the former two types of meditation are united in one.
You don’t meditate on breath, a candle, a chackra, or something that is out there, you just focus on mind itself. You just try to become aware of awareness itself, to the essence of your mind, which is according to Tibetan buddhist the clear light: empty, yet appearing, the basis of everything. This is even harder to explain, because intellect cannot grasp this, it has a non-dual characteristic, and our intellect can only think dualistically (this opposed to that, me opposed to you, good opposed to bad, inside opposed to outside). In the clear light there is no inside, no outside, no good/bad, no me/you, there is only pure awareness that is aware of itself, and pure bliss (the highest bliss possible). You can never understand this, grasp this with your intellect. You can only experience it, and if you do, consciously and for some lengthy time, naturally you break through suffering forever.
It is said that you get a spontaneous glimpse of this when you die, and when you have an orgasm and (if you would be able to stay conscious) in your deep sleep without dreams.
This is only a very brief explanation and I could be expressing it wrong, I am not qualified to explain all this, I just want to share what meditation is, like I understand it to be in a Tibetan Buddhist context. Just to have an idea what possibilities it has, much more than the relaxing possibilities where meditation in the west usually ends. Even if this “liberating from suffering”-thing doesn’t appeal to your life and mindset, you could learn from Buddhists that meditation has much more deeper levels then relaxation alone, it can give you great bliss, wisdom, strength and turn your life in something much more valuable, meaningful and easier to cope with.
Now, what has all this to do with lucid dreaming?
A lot!
Meditating in dreams is said to be very powerful.
The Tibetans developed a whole system called dream yoga, to train yourself to become lucid and use this lucidity to transform your mind.
They say that whatever meditation you do, if you do it in a dream (while conscious) it has 10, 100 to 1000 times more effect. Why, because our biggest problem with meditation is the limitations of our body. Mind has no limits, but connected with the body it is very hard to use these limitless capabilities. While we are awake, our mind is very gross, very heavy. While we dream, it is much more subtle, light and free, and while we deepsleep without dreams even more subtle, light and free.
So when you practice single pointed meditation, insight meditation or Mahamudra/Dzochzen in a lucid dream you get much more benefit from it.
But how to meditate in a dream? I don’t know, I have not enough lucid dreams and not enough stability in lucid dreams to try it out. But I have some ideas:
-single pointed meditation: difficult, because if you focus too much on one point this wakes you up, doesn’t it? I think you need more Mahamudra meditation (a special form of single pointed meditation).
-insight meditation: perfectly possible in a dream. Just trying to find out: are you the central DC, the dreambody you experience or are you the dream or are you even more than the dream. In lucid dreams, this can be a very active meditation, because all is happening in your mind anyhow, so analyzing in the dream is testing things out, like making this dreambody very, very large, then making it very, very small, multiplying yourself in many dreambodys, making yourself disappear, transforming yourself in an animal, in multiple animals, in a house, a lake, a mountain, … I am not fantasizing, believe me, this is dream yoga: experimenting with this “you”, the center of your experience, in order to disassociate mentally from being or belonging to a body. Actually you are the whole dream (even more than that), but because we are so used to be “some body” we mentally project a dream body and experience all the rest as outside us. Doing all this strange things in dreams is to get used to you being mind, limitless and endless, not that limited, isolated, small creature we mostly feel we are. If you can realize this (not just intellectually, but from very own experience) this should also have great (positive) impact on your normal waking life. Meditating like this is transforming your mind towards enlightenment.
-Mahamudra: try to be aware of your awareness in the dream, this is maybe difficult to understand, it is like taking a meta position. You are not just experiencing what is happening (we do this all the time, in dream and in waking life), but you are experiencing that you are experiencing. Where you dissociate from your dreambody in insight meditation, in Mahamudra you dissociate from mind itself. When you would be able to do that, your dream should end (when you are aware of awareness itself, there is no need for external stimuli anymore, nor real, nor dreamed ones), but you should stay asleep and consciously. You would experience the clear light, the most subtle state of your mind, the basis of everything.
Concerning the last state, the clear light, a specific author of many books on Tibetan Buddhism, and also on lucid dreaming states that you get to this state of clear light in a dream just simply by closing your dreameyes and staying aware. But I don’t believe it can be that simple. Maybe it is, if you could stay aware, without waking up, but this will be the difficulty. It is easy for us to stay aware when we see things happening in the dream, but when we stop this (by closing our dreameyes) we normally or fall asleep or wake up. But neither of this two should happen. Just staying aware in total darkness, nothingness, emptiness.
Sorry, very, very long post. But hey, you can’t talk about this in a few sentences.
What I really, really would love that you frequent lucid dreamers would try, is two things:
-The active insight meditation: maybe just start with changing your size, or if your already experienced this, multiplying yourself.
-The closing of your dreameyes while in a lucid dream and trying to stay aware without wanting to have external stimuli.
Off course I want to try out this all myself, I have to, meditation is only possible by own experience, not by reading or hearing the experiences of others, but I first have to get more lucid dreams. Because these things need practice, and repetition, and this is very hard with only one or two LD’s a month. I mostly end up doing stupid things, just flying around, because it has been so much time since my last LD.
I once sat in meditation posture (not needed by the way) in a LD and closed my eyes, but I was not very high lucid, I couldn’t maintain my awareness or something, I just woke up. If you only have one or two LD’s a month, that really sucks. So I am very hesitant to try it again, unless I hear from your experiences that it can lead to something.
It’s just a request, see if you like it or not, maybe it is a new challenge and maybe it can greatly help and especially stimulate others, but maybe not. Anyhow, it helped me a lot writing about this to arrange my own thoughts about this subject. I know now perfectly clear where I am after with LD’s in the long run.
[b]Sweet dreams 
DreamyStivi.[/b]
. Ignorance is 100% tolerated here, as long as you are not arrogantly correcting or making claims about the theories and suggestions people voice. 
