What is "Dream Yoga"?

​“Dream Yoga” is a phrase that I borrow from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.  The simplest Western phrase to describe dream yoga is the idea that “life is a dream”.  When we awaken from a sleep-state dream, we understand that the dream took place in a mental environment and that symbolic meaning can be attributed to many of the people, animals, places, and events that were encountered in the dream.  A “dream yoga” worldview looks upon our so-called waking reality or physical reality the same way.  There is the understanding that, upon our death (or sooner, in some cases), we will “awaken” from the dream of physical life.  Given this, we can interpret the animals, people, places and events that we encounter in physical life as having symbolic meaning, just like a sleep-state dream.

The Tibetan dream yoga tradition is richer and more complex than the foregoing snapshot description.  You can check out some of the books quoted below if you want to explore the idea further.   I also want to emphasize, however, that there are many other historical, cultural, literary and philosophical sources for the proposition that life is a dream.  I’ve outlined some of these in the quotations and descriptions set forth below.

• Tibetan Buddhist “Dream Yoga” Tradition.  Oral tradition goes back approximately 1,000 years.

“Upon waking in the morning, think to yourself, ‘I am awake in a dream.’  When you enter the kitchen, recognize it as a dream kitchen.  Pour dream milk into dream coffee. . . . In this way a new tendency is created in the mind, that of looking at experience as insubstantial, transient, and intimately related to the mind’s projections.” - Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (1998)

​If one’s dreams are clear, but one is not lucid within the Dream State, then with great determination train the mind by thinking “all daytime visions are a dream.”  Continually remind yourself that all that you see and all that is done is none other than a dream. . . . If you concentrate a great deal during the day, imagining that you are living a dream, then during the night the dream itself will also seem less real. - Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (1992).

“Our waking reality . . . is like a nonlucid dream, from which we awake only when we recognize the extent of our participation in the creation of the world we experience.” - B. Allan Wallace, Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation (2012).

• Physicists

​​“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” – Albert Einstein

“Everything that we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” – Niels Bohr

​"Atoms consist of particles and these particles are not made of any material stuff.  When we observe them, we never see any substance; what we observe are dynamic patterns continually changing into one another -- a continuous dance of energy." - Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (1975)

“When we recall that numerous physicists maintain that each so-called real object exists as a conglomeration of energy, of spinning atoms rotating in a field of space, we begin to see that our perceived reality exists as a version of reality – one perspective of reality, one sense of reality.  In a manner of speaking, our experienced reality is the one largely predicated by our senses.  It can hardly be considered the only reality; rather; it is a sensed, mentally mediated reality – in many regards, much like a dream.” – Robert Waggoner, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self (2008).

• Greek Philosophy - The Allegory of The Cave.  Plato, The Republic (380 B.C.E.)

Glaucon:  You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Socrates:  Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

• Taoist Tradition – The Zhuangzi (3rd Century, B.C.E.)  

​Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He did not know that he was Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and was palpably Zhou.

• Rumi, 13th Century Sufi Poet

​This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.
Then death comes like dawn and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.

• Shakespeare

​The Tempest (1610)
Prospero: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

As You Like It (1599)
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts

• William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

​Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”

​• Edgar Alan Poe

Dream Within a Dream (1849)
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
. . . .
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

• Nursery Rhymes

​Row Row Row Your Boat (first published in 1852)

• Children’s Literature

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871).
Alice (Chapter 12): “Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that— as if Dinah hadn’t washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course— but then I was part of his dream, too! was it the Red King, Kitty. You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know— Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! I’m sure your paw can wait!”

• Carl Jung (1875 – 1961)

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (published 1963)
“But then I saw that on the floor in front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi in lotus posture, in deep meditation.  When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: ‘Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.’ “

• Paramahansa Yogananda (1893 – 1952)

​"You are walking on the earth as in a dream. Our world is a dream within a dream.”

• Channeled Wisdom Teachings.

Abraham (Esther Hicks)
“You get to write all the parts.  You get to write the parts of everyone who plays with you.  And how they respond to you.  And how they feel about you and how you feel about them.  But, you do it with your vibrational language, not your language of word or action. . . .The other day, Jerry awakened from a dream with a powerful awareness formulated within him.  And he said to Esther, as they were eating breakfast: ‘It occurred to me that, as I dream, that I am the creator of everything in the dream. I wrote in all of the characters. I put the words in their mouth. If someone is treating me badly, I have given them those words. If someone is treating me sweetly, I have given them those words. I am the writer of all of the parts.’  And Esther said, ‘That’s what Abraham has been saying about every aspect of our life experience.’  What I think and feel and what manifests in my life experience is always a perfect match.  It is true of dream state.  It is true of wake state. You are the orchestrator.  You are the creator.  You are the bringer-about-er of every bit of all of it.” – Workshop recorded August 18, 2001 (San Francisco, CA)

---

​Seth (Jane Roberts)
“In your system of reality you are learning what mental energy is, and how to use it. You do this by constantly transforming your thoughts and emotions into physical form. You are supposed to get a clear picture of your inner development by perceiving the exterior environment. What seems to be a perception, an objective concrete event independent from you, is instead the materialization of your own inner emo¬tions, energy, and mental environment.”  - The Seth Material, Chapter 10 (1970)

​Bashar (Darryl Anka)
“Are you telling me physical reality isn’t mystical?  Is that what you are saying? . . . . The idea of going to those [altered] states is to let you understand how to view physical reality in the same miraculous, mysterious way . . . . Physical reality is a mystery school – very magical, very mysterious, very powerful.  You just need to learn to define it that way and you will experience it that way . . . . It’s just that you don’t think physical reality is a dream . . . . You have to know it’s a dream and you have to allow yourself to realize it’s a dream. . . . And when you become lucid in physical reality, you can also change physical reality in miraculous and magical ways because you know it is a dream and you are lucid in it. - “Cycles of Nine” Workshop Recording (2013).

• Shamanic Traditions.

​Carlos Castenada, Journey to Ixtlan (1972). In one dialogue, Don Juan (shaman) instructs Carlos to “stop the world” or achieve “non-doing”.

​Don Juan (page 211): “For instance, our rings of power, yours and mine, are hooked right now to the doing of this room.  We are making this room.  Our rings of power are spinning this room into being at this very moment.”
Carlos: “Wait, wait.  This room is here by itself.  I am not creating it.  I have nothing to do with it.”

• Near Death Experience Literature.

“For me, it felt as though when I “died,” I woke up from a dream. It didn’t feel as if I went anywhere, but as though I’d awakened and had omni-visual senses—that is, 360-degree vision and complete synesthesia, or simultaneous perception of the senses. I could see, hear, feel, and know everything that pertained to me! I was living my past, present, and future simultaneously. I also knew what was going on beyond walls and space, as long as it related to me—hence the visuals of my doctors’ conversations, my brother on the plane, and so on.”   Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me (2012)

​“The place I went was real.  Real in a way that makes the life we’re living here and now completely dreamlike by comparison.”  - Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven (2012).

​• Some Other Contemporary Sources

“Think about all the things that take place in the one-third of your life while you sleep.  There is no time, no cause and effect, everything you experience is created by your imagination.  The people and events are all illusions, simply figments of your imagination.  There is no beginning, there is no end, no linear progression, and it all seems to make perfect sense as long as you are in the dream state.  I’m reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s observation that: ‘Our truest life is when we are in [our] dreams awake.’  It seems logical to me that if during one-third of our life on planet Earth we are capable of manifesting anything we place our attention on without having to expend any physical effort only by allowing ourselves to transcend time and space, then why not in the other two-thirds of our life.”  - Wayne Dyer, Wishes Fulfilled (2012).

“When death approaches, we may look back on our life and wonder if it was just another dream. Even now you may look back on last year’s vacation or yesterday’s drama and see that it is very similar to last night’s dream.  There is the dream, and there is the dreamer of the dream. The dream is a short-lived play of forms. It is the world – relatively real but not absolutely real. Then there is the dreamer, the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the person. The person is part of the dream. The dreamer is the substratum in which the dream appears, that which makes the dream possible. It is the absolute behind the relative, the timeless behind time, the consciousness in and behind form. The dreamer is consciousness itself – who you are.  To awaken within the dream is our purpose now.  When we are awake within the dream, the ego created earth drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises.  This is the new earth.” – Eckhardt Tolle, A New Earth (2005).