At this time when the transitional process of dreaming is appearing to me, I shall abandon negligence and the cemetery of delusion. With unwavering mindfulness, I shall enter the experience of the nature of being. Apprehending the dream-state, I shall train in emanation, transformation, and the clear light. I will not sleep like an animal, but practice integrating sleep and direction perception!
GURU RINPOCHE, Natural Liberation: Padmasambhava’s Teachings on the Six Bardos, translated by B. Alan Wallace
14
Advancing to Dream Yoga
First Stages and Practices
THE RELEASE OF a brilliant bolt of lightning requires the right atmosphere: the right temperature, the right altitude, the right humidity, the right electrical potential, and then suddenly, BANG, there’s a flash of lightning. Our approach to dream yoga in this book has been a similar process: we’ve gathered the right view, the right meditations, the right attitude, the right motivation, and the right preliminary practices so that one day the thunderbolt of lucidity will flash within your dreams. This approach is called “the gradual path to sudden awakening.”1
As we’ve seen, in Buddhism the preliminaries are more important than the main practice. For our purposes here, this means that if you do the preliminaries properly, dream yoga is more apt to “just happen.” It’s like when you go to sleep under normal conditions. You can’t will yourself to sleep. The effort keeps you awake, and the harder you try the more you stay awake. “Try to relax” is an oxymoron. What you do to go to sleep under normal conditions is create the proper environment. You turn off the lights, lie down, close your eyes, make yourself snuggly, and then wait. If the proper environment is there, assisted by fatigue of course, sleep “just happens.” With our dream yoga journey so far we’ve been creating the proper environment. And like the transition from effortful to effortless mindfulness, most of the effort comes up front.
Getting to a level where dream yoga “just happens” requires deep inner work and may be inconvenient. Spiritual practice is often unreasonable and inconvenient. It doesn’t always make sense from ego’s perspective, and it doesn’t always play into the hands of conventional reason. This is especially true for nighttime practice. Ego just doesn’t want to go there. As we’ve seen, darkness (ignorance) is where ego takes ultimate refuge and finds its deepest shelter. Piercing light can be irritating for that which lives in the dark. It requires advanced spiritual techniques to penetrate this darkness, the underground shelter of ego, and reveal that light. Dream and sleep yoga are therefore advanced bunker busters that the stronghold of ego may not welcome.
Because these practices are subtle, it’s easy to get discouraged. You’ll need to maintain an attitude of determination. (Advanced practitioners never give up. That’s how they advance.) You also have to become your own meditation instructor. Of course you can talk to other practitioners and dream yoga instructors, but this journey is a very private one. You have to be honest with yourself and be willing to go deep into the darkness of this truth-telling practice.
Some people are afraid of the truth even more than they’re afraid of the dark. Many of us are afraid to look into the truth-telling mirrors of our life because we’re afraid of what we might find. A psychologist once told me that alcoholics often can’t look themselves in the eye when they gaze into a mirror, because they can’t bear what they see. For many of us, we’re not just afraid of physical mirrors but also emotional ones — like what our intimate partners reflect — or spiritual ones — like being with a guru or spiritual community. All of these mirrors have the potential to reflect our neurosis and therefore help us grow. Dream yoga is another such mirror — “the measure of the path,” reflecting the measure of our spiritual practice. It’s a mirror that we may not want to see.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche said with frankness that if you are satisfied with being stupid, then don’t bother getting on the spiritual path. Just continue with your sleepwalking and pray that you don’t stroll off a cliff. But if you’re not satisfied with pain and suffering, and you prefer to wake up, sooner or later you have to face the deepest facets of your being. You have to bring up every hidden aspect of yourself, make friends with it, and then let it all self-liberate in the light of awareness.
The stages of dream yoga go right to the heart of this deep and dark place, working directly with ignorance (spiritual sleep), the root of all suffering. Ignorance is powerful because it’s so insidious. It’s hard to see. But it’s also the most active force in samsara. If you see things as solid, lasting, and independent, you’re under the attack of ignorance. It’s like a background roar that’s been going on from time immemorial, so you’ve adapted to it. Imagine being in a room for a long time with a huge ventilation system that is suddenly turned off. Until the background noise is extinguished, you have no idea it’s even there.
Because ignorance is so constant, we never see it. We don’t have the contrast (generated by a temporary cessation) to see that we’re suffering from active ignorance. We don’t have any other state of consciousness that allows us to detect that we’re asleep. The master Orgyenpa said,
The waking experience has been going on since a period of time that never began and is never really interrupted except by the additional overlay of dreamtime confusion. We know that dreams are not real because we wake up from them periodically, and therefore have contrast. However, we have no such contrast by which to recognize the unreality of conventional appearances [emphasis added].2
In the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the cessation of ignorance is the equivalent of the third truth, “the cessation of suffering,” or nirodha (which means “cessation, extinction”; nirvana is a form of nirodha). With dream yoga, we develop the awareness that allows us to turn off the ignorance that we never knew was on.
If dream yoga is so subtle, you might ask, why bother? Well, most people don’t. They prefer to sleep. The reason dream yoga is worth bothering with is that everything you do on the surface of your life is dictated by these subtle deeper levels. As we’ve seen, we’re dealing with the tectonic plates of our lives here, and the tiniest movement “down there” can have enormous repercussions “up here.” When literal tectonic plates move just a few meters, the earthquakes on the surface can be monumental. The same small shifts at unconscious levels can have similarly potent effects on our conscious lives.
By bringing the unconscious processes that control our lives into the light of conscious awareness, we can become free of them. This freedom is what much of psychology is about; Buddhism just goes deeper. Both traditions show us how we sleepwalk through life, guided in our slumber by the force of the unconscious mind, and give us the choice of waking up.
In particular, the path of dream yoga can create that flash of spiritual awakening to illuminate the fact that we’re sound asleep.3 When we’re asleep, we don’t look at (and therefore see) our ignorance; we look through it (and are therefore obscured by it), like seeing through dark sunglasses we don’t even know we have on. In other words, we don’t see that we don’t see. We usually don’t see things because they’re too far away. But with our ignorance — or in the terms of dream yoga, our lack of lucidity — we don’t see things because they’re too close. It’s like trying to see the inside of our eyelids. What we’re doing with dream yoga is pulling our eyelids back so we can see exactly what it is that keeps us in the dark.
In our approach to the practice of dream yoga, we have moved from basic Western practices of lucid dreaming and on to forms of meditation and lucid dream induction, and beyond that to more advanced and subtle concepts of Tibetan Buddhism, such as the practice of illusory form. With the stage set, we are finally ready to explore the nighttime practice of dream yoga.
Phases and Stages of Dream Yoga
Traditionally, the practice of dream yoga is viewed as having three phases, and the practitioner usually moves through these phases in stages. The first phase is recognition. Recognize the dream to be a dream. The second phase is transformation, which roughly corresponds to stages 1 through 7 presented here and in the next chapter. The third phase is liberation, which relates to stages 8 and 9 in the next chapter. This numbering implies a developmental approach, but the practice is not necessarily linear. You can move back and forth between stages. Stages 1 through 7 can be viewed as somewhat dualistic; they involve working with the objects in your dreams. Stages 8 and 9 are more nondualistic, transcending any sense of subject and object altogether. From gross to subtle, from duality to nonduality, just like the spiritual path itself.
The stages outlined below are in general alignment with the classical stages, but the presentation is my own and the stages are more gradual and user-friendly than the traditional stages. Explore them and see what works best for you. You may have a strong connection or ability in one stage and no connection with another. You might skip stages entirely, or discover your own. How long you stay at a stage may also vary. Someone might stay at the first stage forever and make that their entire dream yoga practice. Others may systematically progress through these stages, spending weeks, months, or years on each one. Still others may bounce all over, one night finding themselves able to do some of the more advanced stages, and the next night coming back to stage 1. Some people might shift the order of the following stages, and start with a higher one.
At times I’ll work on the higher stages, and other times I’ll relax my efforts and drop back to early stages. At other times I’ll indulge my fantasies at the start of a lucid dream and then shift into practice mode. Some nights I don’t want to work at all and prefer to just sleep. Dream yoga has no hard and fast rules except this: go slow and easy. Your dreams are your own, informed by your personal background and expectations. Trust your experience and have fun. Everyone’s journey is unique.
From a psychological (lucid dreaming) perspective, the point of the stages that follow is reconciliation and integration with dream elements, and therefore with the elements of your unconscious mind.4 From a spiritual (dream yoga) perspective, the point of the practice is to gain mastery over the dream elements: once you recognize that you’re in a lucid dream, you add more advanced ways of working with the dream, with the ultimate potential of enlightenment. The final stages of dream yoga are aimed at cutting through your unconscious mind to the clear-light mind below.
In lucid dreaming we befriend; in dream yoga we transcend. One could argue that befriending is transcending, and is a more peaceful approach, while purely transcending is a more wrathful (cutting through) approach. From an integrated point of view, in which we can honor and incorporate all aspects of nighttime practice, they both have a place.5
Stages 1 through 5, discussed in this chapter, are the beginning and intermediate levels of dream yoga. These practices could easily constitute an entire dream yoga curriculum, and can lead to profound changes not only in your nightly experience, but in your daily life. For those who want to go even further, stages 6 through 9 in the chapter that follows will show you just how far dream yoga can take you.
Stage 1
Fly in your dreams. Once you become lucid, take off and fly. Go for a joy ride. Because I often trigger lucidity by doing the state check of jumping up, it’s natural to just keep going. This is a good first stage because it’s fun. It’s a bridge between standard lucid dreaming and dream yoga. Some traditional texts don’t recommend flying as a first stage because people might be afraid of flying or of heights. If that’s the case, then either don’t do this or else try taking one step into the air and just hover above the ground. If you are afraid, it’s a good way to work with fear, which would blend this stage with stage 4, as described below.6
Stage 2
Put your hands through things, walk through walls, or drop below the earth like a mole. This is a literal exercise in “cutting through,” or seeing through appearances. I’ve been doing dream yoga and studying the teachings on emptiness for many years. I’ll still approach a dream wall fully lucid, with the intent of putting my dream hand through the wall, and just not be able to do it. Even though I know I’m dreaming, I’ll still bump up against the dream wall and perceive it as solid. My habitual pattern of taking things to be real is still operative, and this habit is revealed at this stage of practice.
If I up the ante and try to walk through a wall, I’ll often bump my big dream nose against the dream wall and bounce back. Here’s a trick: if you want to walk through a dream wall, turn around and walk through it backward. Because you don’t know when you’re going to hit the wall, you might find yourself suddenly going through it! In my dreams the wall turns out to be made of strange Jell-O, a gooey substance that I eventually slog through. I continue to chuckle in my dreams when this happens, both at the pathetic power of my habit in reifying things, and the funny nature of this trick.
My friend Patricia Keelin, a seasoned oneironaut, shared this tip with me: “If you’re attempting to go through a wall or ceiling, try going hand-first. There’s something in our evolutionary makeup that warns us not to bump our heads too hard. In my experience, going hand-first usually buys my mind just enough time to fully accept the shock of comprehending the illusory nature of that wall or ceiling I’ve come up against.”
This stage starts to expose the strength of our habitual patterns. It’s a potent truth-teller. After doing this stage for years, I can put my hand through a dream wall more quickly than before. My habit of reification is softening, and therefore so is my wall. This carries a double meaning: I’m no longer as “walled in” by events in my life, and I can see through barriers more readily. I’m becoming softer — and so is my world. Truth-telling is not always bad. Dreams also reveal good habits that are developing and that can inspire us to persevere.
This points to how failures in dream yoga can lead to success, the success of insight. My inability to control aspects of my dream, at any stage of practice, shows me where I’m stuck. These failures help me become aware of deep habitual patterns that still rule my conscious and unconscious life. Failures can also point out the disagreement between my conscious and unconscious intents. My conscious mind may intend something but my unconscious mind may not want to go along. Exploring this internal conflict of interest is always fruitful. Is it out of fear, loss of control, or laziness? Is it due to opposing beliefs, desires, or the raw power of habit-karma? Maybe I still want to feel walled in. Maybe my ego feels safe when it’s surrounded by solid things.
This leads to an even deeper question: if the conscious dreamer isn’t controlling the entire dream, who is? You can learn a lot about your deeper self by observing the dream environment and your failure to control it. It’s your deeper self that creates the stage and truly runs the show. Until all the unconscious elements are brought into the light of consciousness, it’s still the “night” (the unconscious) that rules the day. These unconscious habits run very deep. If you believe in rebirth, they run lifetimes deep. It takes time, and therefore patience, to bring them to light and to be free of them.
Success and failure at conscious control in a lucid dream has immediate implications for control in waking life. How successful are you in daily life when your conscious goals are opposed by unconscious forces with different goals? For example, your conscious self may want to become enlightened, but your unconscious self may not. Deep down inside, do you really want to wake up? Part of you may not. Maybe this is why the spiritual path is littered with obstacles, and why so many people give up. Let your failures teach you.
Stage 3
Change things. Turn a dream table into a dream flower; transform your boat into a car. Add and subtract things in your dreams, or shift their size. Expand your house into a mansion, then shrink it down to a doll house. Take that cactus and make five of them. What I often do is hold up my right hand and say to myself, “Let’s make three of these.” Just like with stage 2, it usually doesn’t happen right away. I have to stare at my hand, focus the intent to multiply, and eventually several more hands do appear. Why do you want to do this? Tenzin Wangyal says,
Just as dream images can be transformed in dreams, so emotional states and conceptual limitations can be transformed in waking life. With experience of the dreamy and malleable nature of experience, we can transform depression into happiness, fear into courage, anger into love, hopelessness into faith, distraction into presence. What is unwholesome we can change to wholesome. What is dark we can change to light. Challenge the boundaries that constrict you [emphasis added]. 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 ordering reality, of making meaning, of being trapped in delusion.7
While these practices are fun, they’re also foundational. By transforming your mind (what else are these dream objects made of?) in the dream, you’re learning how to transform it altogether. You’re literally learning how to “change your mind.” As Tenzin Wangyal suggests, the point is to take seemingly solid entities — which in the dream manifest as objects, but in life manifest as emotions, prejudices, attitudes, self-imposed limitations, biases, and so forth — and realize they’re not as solid as they appear.
Every time we change our dreams we increase our capacity to change our conscious experience while we are awake. TRALEG RINPOCHE, Dream Yoga, an audio course by Traleg Rinpoche
As the Tibetan master Padma Karpo said about this stage of dream yoga, we make big objects small and small objects big in order to realize “the nature of dimensions.” And we make one object into many and many objects into one in order to comprehend “the nature of plurality and unity.” In other words, through these practices we discover the empty nature of things — that dream phenomena have no inherent existence from their own side. If it were really real, I couldn’t change it. So this is another way to work with emptiness, the central theme behind all these stages.
Stage 4
Create frightful situations, then work with your fear. The pioneering researcher Paul Tholey suggests that if you want to grow, you should seek out threatening situations in your lucid dreams and work with them. If you’re already in a nightmare, work with the fear instead of running from it. This is an important and more advanced stage, for several reasons. First, because they’re so charged, lucid nightmares initially tend to resist modification, and therefore control. Second, who wants to voluntarily generate a nightmare, or stay with one? Stephen LaBerge counters the first reason by stating that fear in a lucid dream is a reflection of marginal lucidity. This resonates with my experience. If I’m barely lucid, fear takes over. If I’m very lucid (which implies more control), I take over the fear.
It is not the events in our nightmares that horrify us; it is our attitude of taking these events literally that scares the wits out of us. Once one realizes, “I am having a nightmare,” one is no longer having a nightmare. Lucidity calms the mind and body and makes dreams safe. Learning that dreams are safe, involves, in effect, learning not to fear one’s own mental activity [emphasis added]. This fearlessness should lead to a relaxation of defensiveness in encountering oneself. When students learn that the mind is a free, safe, and private “space,” permitting many options, they may use dreams . . . to generate new ideas and solutions to problems.8 JUDITH MALAMUD
When you become familiar with your mind in meditation, and therefore discover the basic goodness of your mind, you make that crucial step into learning not to fear your own mental activity — as it’s revealed in meditation, dream, or life. You learn that your dreams are safe and basically good because your mind is safe and basically good. You’ve made friends with your good mind. The master Tsongkhapa offers the essence of this stage:
Whenever anything of a threatening or traumatic nature occurs in a dream [or you generate it] such as drowning in water or being burned by fire, recognize the dream as a dream and ask yourself, “How can dream water or dream fire possibly harm me?” Make yourself jump or fall into the water or fire in the dream. Examine the water, stones, or fire, and remind yourself of how even though that phenomenon appears to the mind, it does not exist in the nature of its appearance. Similarly all dream phenomenon appear to the mind but are empty of an inherently existent self nature. Meditate on all dream objects in this way.9
In other words, realize that on an absolute level, you have nothing to fear. This practice connects to bardo yoga, where a central teaching of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is “Emptiness cannot harm emptiness.” You don’t have anything to fear with the “terrifying visions of the intermediate state” once you wake up to the fact that they’re all projections of your own mind — just like in a dream.
Fear is the primordial emotion of samsara. It generates the defensive self-contraction that gives birth to samsara, because fear gives birth to the defensive ego, the false contracted sense of self. When the Upanishads say, “Where there is other, there is fear,” the immediate implication is that “where there is self, there is fear.” You can’t have one (self) without the “other.” Self and other (duality) co-emerge. While we may not be working directly with this primordial fear at this stage of dream yoga, we are engaging an expression of it and beginning the path of transformation. We’re getting close.
Fear is also the active emotive expression of ignorance, so we can use fear as a way to transcend ignorance. As we saw earlier, it’s very difficult to detect ignorance directly. It’s a blind spot. While ignorance may be hard to spot, fear is not, so we can use fear to lead us to ignorance and help us transform it. Fear and ignorance are virtually synonymous. We’re always afraid of what we don’t know. For example, we might be afraid of going to a dangerous country, or having surgery, because we don’t know what might happen. Fear also manifests as anxiety. We feel anxious about a job interview, a blind date, a big trip, or a performance because we don’t know how it will go. With this stage of dream yoga practice not only are we able to transform our nightmares, we’re able to work with the essence of any nightmare (which is reification), and that includes the nightmare of samsara.
When you become lucid, arise as a deity, or whatever sacred image has meaning to you. See yourself as a sacred form. Unlike the previous four stages, which emphasize outer dream objects, with this stage you’re working directly with your dream body. For Buddhists who already do deity yoga, or generation stage meditations, this is a great way to extend that practice into the night. As a second step, if somebody else appears in your dream, transform them into a deity or sacred image.10
Guru Rinpoche said, “While apprehending the dream-state, consider ‘Since this is now a dream-body, it can be transformed in any way.’ Whatever arises in the dream, be they demonic apparitions, monkeys, people, dogs, and so on, meditatively transform them into your chosen deity. Practice multiplying them and changing them into anything you like.”11
Why do this? To change the way you view yourself and others — to elevate your sense of identity, and to actualize the divinity within yourself and others. This is called practicing the “pride of the deity,” and it’s a more accurate way to view yourself and others.12 We’re always taking ourselves and others down, exercising a poverty mentality. We constantly berate ourselves with self-deprecating “mantras” like “I’m a loser. I can’t do anything. No one will ever love me. I’m worthless.” And we often feel the same toward others. We malign people, gossip, and engage in all manner of criticism. We use our profane outlook to degrade ourselves and others.
Visualizing yourself and others as a deity in your dreams counteracts this destructive view. Instead of dragging everybody down, you lift everybody up. In Vajrayana Buddhism this is also called the practice of “pure perception,” or “sacred outlook,” where your normal poverty mentality is transformed into a wealth mentality. You practice seeing people and things as perfectly pure, as they truly are, which is what the deity represents.
This stage of dream yoga is a “fake it till you make it” practice. It’s hard to immediately see ourselves and others as deities, as expressions of perfect goodness (the clear-light mind), so we fake it. But we’re using an imaginary template that matches reality. This dream appearance is in harmony with reality. In other words, you really are a deity, and so am I. The world really is sacred. If you could see things in the light of the clear-light mind, not only would you see yourself and others as illusory, you would also see yourself and others as perfectly pure, like a deity. This practice helps us recover our true identity. It doesn’t mean people literally appear as sacred cartoon images or any version of what you think a deity might look like. It means that you see through their gross material forms and into their innate divinity. W. C. Fields once said, “It ain’t what they call you. It’s what you answer to.” This stage helps you answer properly.
With this stage of practice, we’re replacing our normal view of inherent existence, which stains reality and renders it impure, with the elevated view of inherent emptiness, which cleanses reality and reveals its intrinsic purity. In other words, spiritual purity (egolessness, or emptiness) means things are purified of inherent existence (ego, or thingness). That’s what it means to “wake up.” Buddhas wake up from the impurity of seemingly inherent existence and to the purity of inherent emptiness. The Buddhist scholar Christopher Hatchell says this about the generation stage yogas, or what is essentially “transformation yoga,” which is what we’re working with at this level of dream yoga:
Generation stage yogas are typically methods through which one begins to “generate” or “give birth” to oneself [and others] as a buddha. One method of accomplishing this is to transform one’s self-image: cutting off the idea that one is an ordinary, deluded, neurotic being. This ordinary self-perception is then deliberately replaced with the “divine pride” of being a buddha who is capable of performing enlightened deeds.13
At a book signing years ago I asked Ken Wilber, the most widely translated philosopher in America, this question: If you suddenly realized you only had a minute left to live, what would be the irreducible expression of your teaching? Ken is famous for his vast intellect and complex theoretical mind. What he said surprised me. “Hug the person next to you and realize you’re hugging a deity.”
The power of this stage of dream yoga became apparent to me about twenty years ago when I was studying Carlos Castaneda. I was reading about “inorganic beings,” those otherworldly creatures in the world of Don Juan (Castaneda’s teacher) that feed off of fear. One night I had a dream where I was standing on the shore of Lake Michigan, on the beach where I grew up. As I was looking at the lake, a chilling and unusual offshore breeze whipped up. The wind was blowing off the land and out onto the water. I became lucid because this was a dreamsign. Winds don’t normally blow this way. The gale churned up whitecaps, and an eerie feeling came over me. I knew something bad was about to happen. As I looked across the lake, I could make out the form of something about to emerge from the water. Suddenly this hideous monster appeared, like a creature from the black lagoon of my mind, and came directly toward me. I backed away from the shore terrified, and as I did so the creature came at me faster. It was then that I realized this was an inorganic being who was feeding on my fear.
Because my lucidity was fairly strong, I had the presence of mind to visualize myself as the wrathful Tibetan deity Vajrayogini, and I morphed my dream body into this wrathful form. Vajrayogini is a major deity in Kagyu Buddhism, and it was a deity yoga I had been practicing for months. As I arose in that wrathful form, a sense of immutable strength arose with it, and the inorganic being who was now just a few feet away dissolved before my dream eyes. At that moment I woke up. My heart was pounding from the mixture of fear and the thrill of my inner sense of power.14 I woke up and realized that there’s an indestructible aspect of my being, the Vajrayogini within, that nothing can harm.
I have no idea if that was an inorganic being (I doubt it, because I don’t believe in them) or merely an aspect of my unconscious mind arising in that terrifying form. It doesn’t matter. What matters was what I was able to do with my fear. Even though I backed away from it initially, I took my stand and faced it directly with a truer aspect of my being — the indomitable Vajrayogini within me.15
On a more earthly level, another aspect of stage 5 is to exercise flexibility in identity. So in addition to morphing your body into a deity, morph it into any other body. Then take that dream body and make it tall, short, fat, or skinny. Once again, becoming more flexible is the product of good yoga.
In daily life you can be many things to many people. Depending on the situation, you can “arise” as a father, husband, son, brother, uncle, nephew, boss, employee, friend, or enemy. This happens instantaneously. You can be manifesting as a husband to your wife when your child approaches. In an instant, you transform into a father in an effort to relate better to your child.
This capability to manifest in whatever form is needed is the essence of the Buddhist concept of upaya, or “skillful means.” Upaya is the ability to see others eye-to-eye, to meet them where they are, instead of where we want them to be. George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” If we want to reach somebody, let alone teach them, we have to connect. That won’t happen if we talk over their heads and preach our ideologies, or talk below them in a patronizing or condescending way. If we have the flexibility to manifest in a way that speaks to someone, we can truly help them. This often means becoming more like them. For example, to communicate with a child, we temporarily become childlike; to relate to an executive, we become more professional; to connect to a blue-collar worker, we speak their language.
Dream yoga can show you that you’re not just one fixed being, but a spectrum of beings. By imagining yourself as another being in your dreams — not even a deity, just another persona — you’re exercising your ability to present yourself differently. Dreams can therefore open us to seeing things, and expressing ourselves, in ways that we might never conceive of in the rigid waking state.
In our context, “persona” — and its cognate, “personality” — refers to all the different masks, or forms, we put on the formless awareness of the clear-light mind. We don these different masks anyway as we walk through life — why not take control over the ones we put on?
Changing our body in a dream has another application on the path. One way to dissolve a singular sense of self (ego) is to don multiple selves, and to therefore witness how fluid, and therefore erroneous, our solid, lasting, and independent sense of self truly is. Like a good actor, we take on the roles necessary to live successfully on the stage of life. In a lucid dream, we can switch our entire body as quickly as we switch thoughts, and we can therefore see just how malleable and expansive our sense of identity is.
This malleability is an expression of emptiness, or egolessness, which has the potential to be anything. When you realize the no-thingness of your self, you can express that no-thingness voluntarily into any thing (form) you want, which is what’s exercised at this stage of dream yoga. The delightful Lama Yeshe, upon hearing that one of his students was a filmmaker, said to him, “Oh, you make TV, movies? I good actor. I best actor!” he laughed. “I can be anything, you see, because I am empty. I am nothing.”16
So when a moment of poverty mentality sweeps over you, remember that you’re not a loser, a failure, or any other derogatory epithet you fixate upon (and therefore continue to reify) through habitual patterns of negativity. You’re a buddha, a deity, or any other nickname for the divine. You are divinity, period. You just don’t know it. This stage helps you to know it by removing the fixations you have about yourself.
Change the way you see yourself. Expand your sense of identity.17