🌙 Am I Dreaming or Awake?
Dream Yoga, Emptiness & the Playful Nature of Mind
A Contemplative Inquiry into Mind, Emptiness & the Dreamlike Nature of Experience
Inspired by Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche — Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness
This morning’s Random Book Selection opened to a passage that felt like a portal: Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche’s “The Dream Example”from Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness (pp. 43–47).
Before the “Dream Example” itself, my attention was drawn to the paragraph just before it.
“Quite a lot of modern scientists and philosophers think that the mind/matter dichotomy can be resolved…”
And from there, the passage widened into one of my favorite territories — the nature of perception, the discontinuity between experience and “material world,” and the question at the heart of so many spiritual traditions:
And what makes the waking world feel more “real” than a dream?**
Khenpo Rinpoche offers the dream as a direct means to understand the Chittamatra (“Mind-Only”) stage of realizing emptiness.
He invites us to look closely at how we distinguish waking from dreaming:
Is it the clarity of experience?
The continuity of time?
The apparent regularity of cause and effect?
The feeling of stability and solidity?
But as he points out, none of these are reliable. Some dreams are more vivid than waking life. Continuity in a dream can appear seamless. Dreams can feel as solid, emotional, and convincing as so-called “reality.”
And meditators — in samadhi — often report that days or weeks pass with no sense of time at all.
So what makes waking life “waking”?
“You believe you are awake because you want to feel secure… If you were to seriously doubt that you were awake, you would feel frightened and confused.”
This line felt like a soft gong in my chest.
We cling to waking-life solidity because it reassures us. We grant it a status we don’t offer to dreams.
But what if waking and dreaming are simply two flavors of the mind’s luminous display?
Decades ago, through the work of Dr. Stephen LaBerge at Stanford — one of the foremost researchers in lucid dreaming — I learned a simple but profound practice:
(LaBerge suggests an airplane)
and every time you hear or see it:
Pause
Close your eyes
Gently ask: “Am I dreaming right now?”
Slowly open your eyes
Observe if anything has morphed, shifted, expanded, or transformed
This playful questioning has followed me into the mountains, especially when planes pass overhead. Over time it evolved into:
“Am I dreaming? No? Well… am I awake?”
And the answer, in the ultimate sense:
Not fully. Not in the sense of pure awareness. Not in the sense of Buddha‐nature unobscured.
So perhaps this too — this moment, this scenery, this storyline — is a dream.
And if it is…
This inquiry loosens the grip.It opens the aperture of perception.Colors brighten.Experience softens and deepens.Life becomes more spacious, almost enchanted.
Milam — Tibetan Dream Yoga, taught for centuries as a path toward recognizing:
the illusory nature of phenomena
the continuity of consciousness
the potential for awakening in the dream
and eventually, awakening from the waking dream
Some modern oneironauts (dream explorers) who bridge ancient wisdom with science include:
Why This Matters
When we no longer assume the absolute reality of the waking world, something opens:
Playfulness
Flexibility
Creativity
Compassion
Curiosity
“Am I dreaming?” becomes less about proving anything and more about loosening the boundaries of perception — letting experience become more fluid, more alive, more magical.
Eventually, it leads to a deeper question:
How do we actually know when we are awake?
And… If all experience is dreamlike…
what does it mean to truly awaken?
May All Beings Be Happy. May All Beings Have Friends and a Home to Share and Be Together.
