Recognising the Dream as Dream

Dream yoga, milam, is one of the Six Yogas of Naropa and the Vajrayana discipline of carrying formal meditative practice into sleep, beginning with training the practitioner to recognise, while still dreaming, that the dream is a dream, a form of lucid awareness the practice then uses as a foundation for further training within the dream state itself: stabilising the dream, deliberately transforming its content, and using the dream's evident malleability as direct, repeated experiential evidence for the tradition's broader teaching that waking appearances are, in the same fundamental sense the tradition understands emptiness, equally lacking solid, independent existence, however convincingly solid they seem while being experienced. The practice is explicitly linked within the tradition to preparation for the bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth, since the dream state and the bardo are held to share important structural similarities, both being states in which the ordinary waking mind's usual anchors are absent and appearances are correspondingly more fluid and more responsive to the practitioner's trained recognition, so that skill developed recognising and working within dreams is understood as directly transferable to navigating the bardo skilfully after death.