MY TEACHER Lama Yeshe Rinpoche once told me, in his characteristically blunt manner, “Some people have a lot of knowledge, a lot of wisdom. That’s not you! But you, you can actually do this practice. That is good.”
It is with those words still ringing in my ears that I approach this article. With so much brilliant contemporary scholarship on this subject from the likes of Glenn Mullin and B. Alan Wallace, among others, I have little to add insofar as academic reflection on Naropa’s instructions for using lucid dreaming for awakening. But what I can offer is an exploration of the essential core of this practice: What’s the point? How does it work? And how can we do it?
TRACING THE SOURCE
The notion that dreams have a role to play in the path of awakening has been a part of Buddhism from the beginning. In fact, the Buddha himself was attuned to the healing potential of mindful sleeping and lucid dreaming. In the Pali Vinaya, a kind of rulebook for monks and nuns, the Buddha instructs his followers to fall asleep in a state of mindfulness as a way to prevent “seeing a bad dream” or “waking unhappily.”
However, the first integrated Buddhist system of lucid dreaming—a form of mind training in which we become aware of the fact that we are dreaming while we are dreaming—was only created more than one thousand years later, amidst the flourishing of Vajrayana Buddhism, first in Northern India and then in Tibetan) and eventually formed part of the famous Six Dharmas of Naropa, a set of advanced tantric practices compiled by the Indian mahasiddha who is their namesake.
