It is important to differentiate between classical vajrayana, or Tibetan Buddhist, dream yoga and the non-sectarian, psychospiritual, and contemporary discipline of Dream Yoga. Tibetan dream yoga, which dates back to at least the 8th century, attempts to achieve rigpa, or non-dual enlightenment, in all states of consciousness by practicing specific yogic disciplines designed to cultivate lucid dreaming, a state in which you not only know that you are dreaming, but then proceed to alter your dreams according to your intentions. The presumption is that because life itself is a dream, by awakening within them we will penetrate life’s dreamlike nature and wake up, or become enlightened, in our waking life.

Examples of classical dream yoga injunctions include comprehending the nature of the dream state as illusory by the powers of resolution, breath, and visualization. In the first, one resolves to maintain unbroken continuity of consciousness while both awake and asleep, remembers always that all things are of the substance of dreams, and prays to one’s guru before sleep that they will be able to comprehend the dream state. To comprehend the illusory nature of the dream state and awaken within it by using the power of breath, “Sleep on the right side, as a lion does. With the thumb and ring-finger of the right hand press the pulsation of the throat-arteries; stop the nostrils with the fingers (of the left hand); and let the saliva collect in the throat.” To comprehend the illusory nature of the dream state and awaken within it by using the power of visualization, imagine that you are the deity Vajra-Yogini; visualize in the throat chakra the red and radiant syllable AH, the embodiment of Divine Speech. While concentrating on the radiance of AH, recognize all things to be like forms reflected in a mirror. Practice “pot shaped” breathing seven times upon awakening in the morning. Try eleven times to comprehend the nature of the dream state. Then concentrate your mind upon a white, bone-like dot between your eyebrows. If you are still unsuccessful, try twenty-one breath repetitions and twenty-one attempts at comprehension before sleep. If you are dreaming and are about to recognize that you are dreaming but wake up instead, eat nutritious food and exercise until fatigued to deepen your sleep. Meditating on recurring dreams, resolving to comprehend their nature while using “pot-shaped” breathing and visualization of the dot between the eyebrows will also help to prevent this “spreading out” of awareness.

The contemporary transpersonal integral life practice of Dream Yoga was developed by Joseph Dillard in 1980. Growing out of the sociometric work of a younger contemporary of Freud’s, J.L.Moreno, creator of psychodrama and precursor to Perl’s Gestalt therapy, it assumes that suffering is perceptually based and caused by habitual identification with limited and dysfunctional self-definitions. Healing, balancing, and transformation occur naturally when one learns to identify with self-aspects that personify relatively objective perspectives and ask them for diagnostic and treatment advice. This creates a polycentric and transpersonal rather than an egocentric and personal self-sense. Because of the arbitrariness of all these identities, they are further deconstructed into anatma, or “no self,” via an injunctive and experientially based discipline of successive disidentification with your immediate sense of who you are in favor of identification with broader, more inclusive and deeper definitions of self. Because the feedback of self-aspects is intrinsic, relatively objective, and arising from multiple sources, it carries an innate authenticity, autonomy, and credibility that minimizes the classical challenges of projection, interpretation, dependence, and eventual disillusionment that generally occurs for those who entrust their lives to a parter, a spiritual teacher, a visualized deity, or a skilled healer. Dream Yoga views all such perspectives as valuable, yet conditioned. Students of Dream Yoga first learn through personal experience that all perspectives are arbitrary and are best chosen in consultation with transpersonal self-aspects according to pragmatic issues of what is most effective in the moment in order to manifest core characteristics of spirit. In Buddhism this is called upaya,“skill in means.” These core characteristics of spirit include but are not limited to confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing. The assumption is that when one is consistently experiencing life from high levels of all of these core qualities at once, healing, balance, and transformation occur spontaneously.

Because witnessing and disidentification with self are core meditational practices, Dream Yoga is an effective transpersonal adjunct to meditation. It is best used as a central component of any integral life practice because such a practice is then regulated by a polycentric transpersonal agenda rather than by personal and waking preferences and perspectives. Meditation using Dream Yoga involves not watching one’s breath, the method by which Buddha is said to have used to attain enlightenment, but becoming one’s breath, and thereby immediately moving into a causal, formless perspective while in meditation. It also uses identification with other energic (psychic level), subtle, causal, and non-dual perspectives to provide meditators with the experience of the target states of consciousness which they seek in meditation. Dr. Dillard has written eight texts that accompany training programs for Dream Yoga Practitioners, offered in Arizona and Germany.