The Second Yoga of Naropa: Dream Yoga

The goal of this practice is to have lucid dreams. Many Tibetan texts have been created by Tibetans dreaming and communicating with deities. Tibetan literature is believed to be a creation between the tantric deities and the Tibetan masters.

Dream yoga is an ancient practice based on the idea that gaining lucidity or awareness that one is dreaming while one is dreaming provides a quantum leap of awareness. The practitioner uses self-suggestion until lucidity occurs and success is said to provide great spiritual and health benefits to the practitioner. Like all Asian arts, dream yogic practices are transmitted in a teacher to student lineage, usually with an initiation ceremony of some kind.

In Tibet, it could be argued that dreams within dreams are from other dimensions. Skilled practitioners can communicate with enlightened deities, ancestors, etc. and bring this information back as powerful teachings.

Many Western scholars ignore the influence of dreams and their consequences within shamanic cultures. Western society has lost the ability to use dreaming as a survival tool. Hunter-gatherer cultures are essentially based on the visions or dreams of the shamans who function as intermediaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It is normal for example, within a hunter-gatherer culture, for individuals to be guided by dreams with either ancestors or animal guardians. Similarly, in China, many of the meditation lineages in both Buddhism and Taoism consider consciousness projection to be one of the results of successful energy cultivation. The founder of the water-boxing martial arts system, Chen Tuan, was known to leave his body for 100-day periods. Here once again we have the primordial archetype of a shaman who can hibernate like a bear while he travels out of body for three months intervals; during this time fellow practitioners were guarding his body.