Tibetan dream yoga

Dream yoga is a set of practices within Tibetan Buddhism in which recognising the dream state is a step on a contemplative path. It substantially predates the Western study of lucid dreaming, and it is where a good deal of modern technique quietly comes from.

The practices

The family of methods will look familiar to anyone who has read the induction pages:

• Daytime recognition: treating waking experience as dreamlike, repeatedly, throughout the day. Structurally this is reality checking, with a different rationale.
• Intention before sleep, held as the last thing in mind.
• Attention at sleep onset, maintaining awareness through the transition, the ancestor of WILD.
• Stabilising and transforming the dream once recognised, including deliberately changing dream objects.

The purpose, which is the part usually dropped

In the tradition these are not techniques for enjoyable dreams. Recognising the dream as a dream is training for recognising the constructed, dependent quality of ordinary experience, and, in the fuller teachings, preparation for the transitional states around death.

Modern lucid material borrows the methods and discards the frame. That is not illegitimate; techniques travel. But it is worth naming, because material that presents dream yoga as an ancient hack for flying has removed the thing the tradition considered the point.

What this section does and does not claim

This page describes a living tradition on its own terms. It does not claim that its metaphysical framework is correct, and it does not claim that dream yoga is a validated induction method. No induction method has strong evidence, this one included.

What is fair to say is narrower and still notable: practitioners were systematically cultivating dream awareness centuries before it had a name in the West, and several methods that turn up in modern practice have recognisable antecedents there.

If you want to read further

Read a source from inside the tradition rather than a summary aimed at lucid dreamers, which is why the citation below is what it is. A practice removed from its purpose is easy to describe and easy to get wrong.