Since the ancient Grecian times, philosophers were aware of the likelihood of lucid dreaming – i.e., realizing that you are having a dream while in the dream phase – and theologians from St. Augustine’s time have known of such dreams also. However, it was just around the 1980s that the concept of lucid dreaming came into the realm of genuine scientific inquiry, principally because of studies that Stephen LaBerge & other psychologists carried out at Stanford University. These studies have brought to light a great deal of information regarding the lucid dreams’ nature and have presented several practical techniques for finding out how to bring on such dreams and raise their occurrence, length, and clarity.

However, such research was heralded and in several ways outdone centuries back by Buddhist thinkers in Tibet. Well, as Stephen Laberge says, “On the ‘rooftop of the world,’ it was in the early half of the 8th century A.D., that the Tibetan Buddhists practiced a type of yoga intended to keep one completely conscious during the dream phase. With these Tibetan dream yogic experts, we for the very first time discover a people who have an experientially founded and clear comprehension of dreams as exclusively the mental conception of the dreamer. Now this indeed is a concept totally at par with our latest scientific and psychological results.”
Now in Tibetan Buddhism, practicing dream yoga is followed within the broader context of striving to comprehend the intellect and the real, inner sources of both pain and true happiness. The 4 Noble Truths are the total structure of the Buddhist theory & practice – (1) realizing the actuality of pain, (2) removing the basic, internal reasons for pain, which are recognized as desire, antagonism, and delusion, (3) being aware of the likelihood of the end of pain and its cause, and (4) pursuing the path of holy cleansing and change that leads to such freedom.

Ethics is at the core of all Buddhist traditions, which can be summed up as “do not cause pain to others or yourself, and be ready to serve when the occasion arises.” The subsequent stage of practice is studying how to steady the psyche, and the one key aspect of such cerebral training is the fine-tuning of attention. This covers methods for improving the steadiness and intensity of attention, soothing the mind in order that one can keep a constantly focused, lucid consciousness. As the Buddha stated, “The mind that’s founded in balance comes to understand actuality as it is.” This kind of a steady mind is then employed to look at the makeup of the intellect and the sources and capabilities of human awareness.

This is precisely where the early ritual of dream yoga makes its presence. Experimental physicists carry out their investigations in labs that are totally made up of physical phenomena. In the same way, Buddhist thinkers who become skilled in field of dream yoga have the ability to employ the dream phase as the starting point for exploring the intellect, and their lab is totally made up of creations of consciousness! The initial step in such procedure is to find out how to be aware of the dream phase for what it actually is while one is dreaming. At first, one’s lucid dreams indeed are likely to last for a brief period, as one turns so keyed up that one hastily gets up!
However, with practice and time, one finds out how to steady the mind and maintain clarity, and this presents several possibilities for studying the dream phase. The initial thing to examine is: to what degree can one alter the contents and incidents in a dream randomly? Buddhist thinkers have discovered that the sole restriction on the pliability of dreams lies in the range of one’s imagination. In addition, as one gets more knowledge about the character of dreams, one finds out that nothing that a dream contains can hurt one. Everything is just an expression of one’s own psyche, and perhaps even the most appalling pictures and incidents are no more hazardous than optical illusions or mirror reflections.

An additional step in practicing dream yoga is permitting the dream to disappear, but without shaking off the lucidity of one’s consciousness. During a dream, all the physical senses are closed down already, so that when the dream pictures vanish, it disappears into the empty, bright space of consciousness itself. Now this is a remarkable chance to examine the “lucid glow of sleep,” where one experiences awareness without the sensory visions and conceptual creations being superimposed. Like this, one can start to survey the nature of awareness itself and see how it assumes various forms and modalities as one’s cognitive abilities and physical senses are stirred.

Contemporary lucid dream researchers clearly distinguish between the dream phase and waking state, and acknowledge that this distinction performs a vital part in their methods for bringing on lucid dreaming. However in certain ways, waking awareness and dreaming are far similar than we believe. As Stephen LaBerge says, “dreaming can be regarded as the unique case of insight without the restraints of outside sensory input. On the contrary, perception can be regarded as the unique case of dreaming that the sensory input controls.” Now the similarities between dreaming and waking are delved into exhaustively by the Tibetan Buddhists, who’ve come to the conclusion that, in comparison to holy enlightened beings, ordinary people live their lives largely in a dreamlike phase. When questioned whether he was god or man, he answered simply, “I’m awake,” and this is the real meaning of the term Buddha: “one who’s awakened.”