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What is Dream Yoga?
Dream yoga is a practice of working with dream and sleep that is common to both the monastic, yogic, and shamanistic traditions of Tibet. “Yoga” means to yoke, or unite. In this sense, Dream yoga is designed to integrate one’s experience of day and night, conscious mind with unconscious mind, and mundane ego with transcendent wisdom.
The purpose of these practices is to integrate lucidity and flexibility with every moment of life and to let go of the heavily conditioned way we have of seeing reality. Through Dream Yoga we discover the common threads that run through our every experience and we release them to find ease, joy, and compassionate connection.
Dream yoga is a way to discover in one’s sleep, a hidden space, in which to practice meditation —and further one’s spiritual development. Many people think, “I don’t have time to practice.” But if you use sleep and dream as a way of practicing, it is like discovering many more years of time in your life for practice.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche writes: “If we cannot carry our practice into sleep, if we lose ourselves every night, what chance do we have to be aware when death comes? Look to your experience in dreams to know how you will fare in death.” In the Tibetan tradition, the ability to dream lucidly is not an end in itself, rather, it provides additional context in which one can engage in advanced and effective practices to achieve liberation.
What is Sleep Yoga?
We spend one-third of our life, or an average of 20 to 25 years, asleep. Centuries ago, Tibetan yogis developed the practice of sleep yoga to transform these dark hours of ignorance into a path to enlightenment. A powerful tool for awakening, sleep yoga is more than a practice of the night. It helps us to integrate all moments — waking, sleeping, meditation, and even death — with the clear light of awareness.
What is a Lucid Dream?
A lucid dream is a type of dream where the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming. This occurs during REM sleep when the dreaming mind is activated in a way that is similar to the waking state.
Lucidity is not all-or-nothing, instead it occurs on a range that changes from dream to dream.
Pre-Lucid Awareness: the dreamer has the feeling that something is up, but does not fully come to realize the dream for what it is and continues to be bound to the situation and narrative of the dream.
Partially Lucid Awareness: the dreamer realizes they are dreaming, but does not have full awareness of the implications - they may still feel confined by the rules of the dream reality and not realize that they can change their circumstances or engage with total freedom.
Fully Lucid Awareness: the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming and has full agency over themselves and over the dream narrative and environment. They can remember their waking self and remember any intentions set before sleep.
What Can I Do with Lucid Dreaming?
Lucid dreaming is a natural human ability that no two people use in the same way. From having frivolous fun to paradigm-shifting realizations, what you do with this tool will depend on your needs, your motivations, and where you are on your journey.
You can use it to:
Solve problems
Find creativity and inspiration
Develop your inner intuition
Discover and overcome fears and obstacles
Heal physical and emotional trauma
Experience new or distant settings
Have encounters with others (real or imagined, dead or alive)
Have mystical experiences
Explore your personal identity
Engage in deep spiritual inquiry, rediscovering who and what you truly are.
Master your consciousness, e.g. abandon egoic motivation, cultivate dharmic activities and visions and practice within the dream.
Work within your dreams to increase freedom from hope and fear as you recognize dreams, all appearance, and experience as ultimately free of self-nature.
How is Dream Yoga different from Lucid Dreaming?
Lucid dreaming just means becoming aware within a dream. What you do there is up to you. With dream yoga, we engage in the practice with the specific aim of learning, growing, and healing. Instead of using your mind as an entertainment center, we turn it into a laboratory. You’re the experimenter and the subject of study!
The View of Dream Yoga: Life is “like a dream”
In dreams, we believe that everything we’re experiencing is fact. We’re bound to the limitations of the story, our feelings, and our experience of ourselves and others. But when we become lucid, we suddenly realize our tremendous capacity to change! This realization leaves us feeling light-hearted, energized, and transformed.
In waking life, we are also in a kind of dream. What we perceive is completely unique to ourselves and is shaped by our past, by our expectations, and by our limiting views. When we don’t realize this subjectivity, we take our perceptions to be fact. We get stuck in our stories and have a hard time seeing our situation from other perspectives. Everything seems very serious and unchangeable. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche calls this our “pain identity” - we hold tight to a self concept that is bound by limitation.
In this sense, during both the night and day, we’re in a dream. Both are expressions of our habitual mental and emotional energy. Healing happens when we uncover these habits and release them. Dream Yoga is not about judging or denying our outer situations, but instead, it’s about waking up to the limitless capacity we have to transform our experience of the world.
"Lightning. In the night sky, lightning flashes. Suddenly the mountains are illuminated, each peak seemingly a separate object, but what we are really experiencing is a single flash of light being reflected back to our eyes. Just so, the seemingly separate objects in a dream are actually the single light of our mind's reflection. The dream is a projection of our own mind. It is not different from the mind, just as a ray of sunlight is not different from the light of the sun in the sky. Not knowing this, we engage the dream as if it were real, like a lion snarling at the face it sees reflected in water. In a dream, the sky is our mind, the mountain is our mind; the flowers, the chocolate that we eat, the other people, all are our own mind reflected back at us."
~ Excerpt from The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep
Preparing For Sleep:
Our days are busy and leave us feeling scattered. Just like we might brush our teeth or have a shower before bed, we also cultivate good mental hygiene by intentionally creating space for practice. Here, we develop a habit or ritual for cultivating an atmosphere of relaxation, safety, and inspiration.
Sleep & Dream Practices:
There are hundreds of techniques from the Indian, Tibetan, and Western traditions that help us gain lucidity in the dream state and give us specific tasks or activities to do once we are lucid. Which ones are right for you will depend on your personality, preferences, sleeping habits, and free time. Approach this journey joyfully, as a lifelong practice of fine tuning and trial and error.
Waking & Journaling:
How we emerge from sleep is just as important as how we prepare for it. Here we cultivate a practice of waking up mindfully, paying attention to our memories of the dream and any hypnopompic images that flow into the waking state. We spend time journaling and setting intentions for the day.
Daytime Meditative Practices:
Both the Indo-Tibetan and western scientific traditions have a battery of practices for carrying our budding lucidity into the waking hours. From state checks, to prospective memory practices, sensory check-ins, and meditations, the practice of the day is a fundamental aspect of practice. Through it, we integrate our whole path and can come to recognize the creative awareness that is present in all states.
A daily practice of relaxation and stable attention (known traditionally as Shamatha or Shiné) will help you cultivate a stilled and settled state of mind that is able to recognize the dream state during sleep and able to live more lucidly during the day.
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