Lama Surya Das is a fulltime teacher of Buddhist practice and the author of Awakening the Buddha Within and Awakening to the Sacred. On this 90-minute presentation, he shares the insights and techniques of Tibetan Dream Yoga. There are three types of dreams — ordinary, karmic ones arising from the day's activities; "clear light" dreams consisting of spiritual visions, blessings, and energy openings; and lucid dreams, which are characterized by the dreamer's conscious awareness that he or she is dreaming.
According to Lama Surya Das, cultivating the ability to wake up within a dream can increase clarity in everyday life; enable us to be sensitive to the dream-like nature of experience; unleash our innate creativity; reveal the process of death and rebirth; and help us to stop being victims of the circumstances and conditions of our lives.
Lama Surya Das outlines daytime dream yoga practices designed to prepare us to experience our dreams as vividly as we do our waking activities. He discusses wake-up practices to help us recall our dreams. And he closes with nighttime exercises that can lead to lucid dreaming and spiritual experiences while we sleep. An ancient Tibetan instruction that conveys the sweep of this form of yoga is "Do not sleep like an animal. Do the practice that mixes sleep and reality." A 22-page study guide accompanies these Tibetan Buddhist teachings about "the wheel of inner luminosity that turns day and night."