Dream: On the back of a whale in the middle of an impossibly blue ocean, I was riding high, slapping high fives with the fins of great white sharks and taunting a giant squid. It was an amazing dream.Yet moments before, I’d been locked in a recurring childhood nightmare, the one in which I tumbled into the jaws of the sharks. This time everything was different: Still asleep, I realized I was dreaming and turned the scary dream into something beautiful. I awoke exuberant—and the nightmare never came back.
That was the first time I experienced a lucid dream: a dream in which the dreamer is aware of being asleep and can control the script. Lucid dreaming, also known as dream yoga, is gaining attention in the West. But the practice has been refined over the centuries by Tibetan Buddhists and Taoists, who use it as a tool for reaching enlightenment. Yogis, believing that the “dream body” is better able to feel subtle channels and chakra, have also used lucid dreaming to perform physical yoga and meditation, and to communicate with spiritual teachers. But the main point is to help you see that “reality” is like a dream—constructed in the mind. If you can see through the illusion of your dreams, you can more easily see through the illusion of reality, too. (more)
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