The Buddhist practice of dream yoga includes lucid dreaming as a main technique. But dream yoga also exists within a larger philosophical framework. Tell us about some of the main ideas of the dream yoga practice, and how they assist the lucid dreamer.
Dream yoga is a collection of transformational lucid dreaming, conscious sleeping and what in the West we refer to as ‘out-of-body experience’ practices aimed at spiritual growth and mind training. Lucid dreaming may form the foundation of dream yoga, but through the use of advanced tantric energy work, visualizations of Tibetan iconography and the integration of psycho-spiritual archetypes or yidams, dream yoga goes way beyond our Western notion of lucid dreaming. If we translate the Sanskrit word yoga as meaning ‘union’, we get a clue as to what dream yoga is about: the union of consciousness within the dream state. It is a yoga of the mind that uses advanced lucid dreaming methods to utilize sleep on the path to spiritual awakening.
The most far out aspect of dream yoga is that within Tibetan Buddhism, the main purpose of these sleep and dream practices is preparation for the dreamlike after-death bardo state. Each time we fall asleep and dream, we’re getting a trial run for death and dying, so every time we fall asleep consciously or have a lucid dream, we’re training for the conscious recognition of the death process and the dreamlike after-death state called the bardo. The after death bardo is like an in between place which our mind stream enters into after we have left our bodies at death but before we have been reincarnated into a new body.
According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, if we can manage to recognize the dreamlike hallucinations of the after-death bardo state as manifestations of the mind, we have the possibility of experiencing full spiritual awakening. The ancient texts say that even if a yogi has practised meditation for a whole lifetime and still hasn’t attained full realization, he has one last shot at it: death.
My guru and dream yoga master, Lama Yeshe Rinpoche, once told me, ‘If you want to know how your mind will be during death, look at how your mind is during dream. If you can remember to recognize the dream consistently, then death means nothing to you, because you can recognize the death bardo as a dream, and then you can be with Buddha.’ When it’s 4 a.m. and my alarm has gone off, reminding me to write down my dreams and to get lucid it’s those words that spur me on.
In the Buddhist practice of dream yoga and lucid dreaming, the fundamental goal involves enlightenment within this lifetime. But from a western perspective, your average person still has to work through their stuff – like shadow issues of denied, ignored or repressed issues, limiting beliefs and also unhealthy mental habits, etc. – before they have much chance of going deeper. Does the dream yoga tradition address dealing with your ‘stuff,’ or does it simply encourage you to seek enlightenment?
Absolutely. Enlightenment is a process, not a light switch. The spiritual path starts where we are which for most of us is neck deep in our own bullshit, so yes absolutely we work through our stuff, we examine our neuroses, we embrace our shadow (Tibetan Buddhism is all about shadow work in fact) as a way to gradually enlighten our minds to our full potential. This potential may well be full spiritual realisation in the end, but perhaps simply being more balanced, kinder and more real while we get there is actually the more important aspect.
Lucid dream work is said to be a very powerful tool to use along this path to enlightenment though. In fact, doing spiritual practice in the lucid dream state is said to be so powerful that we have the potential to reach full enlightenment while we sleep. The first Karmapa, the spiritual head of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism of which I am part, attained full enlightenment at the age of 50 while practising dream yoga. So we shouldn’t think that spiritual practice in the lucid dream state is somehow second best to waking practice – it can be even more effective.
Did you have any lucid dreams which helped you see yourself more clearly and work through shadow issues or limiting beliefs? Did these lucid dreams help you along the path towards the larger goal/s of dream yoga?
Totally. Shadow work is one of my main practices. My book contains lots of reference to shadow work and in fact my relationship to my shadow can be charted through my lucid dreams. It’s pretty powerful stuff though so you have to have a kind of ‘warriors mind’ if you are going to enter the darkness fearlessly. Not a warrior that fights of course but the peaceful warrior who rides into the bad-lands with a flag of union, not war. I also had quite a lot of dreams encouraging me to teach, which I ignored of course until I was actually asked to teach and then they seemed to make some sense in retrospect.
As I recall, you follow the Kagyu branch of Buddhism, and its long tradition of dream yoga practice. Many of us have read Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche’s book, which offers the Dzoghen Buddhist perspective on dream yoga. Do the Kagyu and Dzoghen practice have any broad differences in their approach to dream yoga? Or do most of the differences involve fine points of philosophical distinctions?
Yes, there are lots of differences (and it would probably make quite boring reading for most people to explore them here) but both schools are essentially offering tools with which to gain lucidity and then spiritually beneficial practices to apply within the lucid dream state. There are many differences between the dream yoga practices of each school of Tibetan Buddhism let alone between those of Tibetan Buddhism and the BonDzogchen approach of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.
However, one of the standout features of the Karma Kagyu lineage is that dream yoga teachings are usually reserved for those on a 4 year retreat so although I am not teaching full on dream yoga it is interesting that the Lama’s are allowing us to explore these practices more freely outside of retreat nowadays.

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay
Your Buddhist master has authorized you to teach dream yoga, right? Tell us a bit about that and your experience as a teacher of lucid dreaming.
When I first got authorised to teach, although I had been into lucid dreaming and Tibetan Buddhism for years, I was nonetheless, a 25 year old Londoner making my living as a rapper in a hip hop crew! So it was a totally bizarre situation! I guess the teachers could see that I had some potential though and that I could help people learn how to have lucid dreams. And for them that was all that mattered I guess.
‘Authorisation to teach’ is kind of like a formal seal of approval given by a Lama in order to allow a person to teach at Buddhist centres and temples.
It’s not something that’s given very often and it’s definitely not something that’s usually given to a 25 year old rapper whose only experience of teaching is running drama workshops for Young Offenders! So I felt totally out of my depth, but somehow I trusted that although I might feel utterly under qualified, Lama Yeshe Rinpoche and Rob Nairn (my teachers) seemed to think that all this was for the best. The good thing about feeling out of your depth of course is that you get to see how well you can swim, so I was forced to start studying and practicing lucid dreaming (and Buddhism in general) to a level which would keep my head just above water at least.
Also, you have recently signed a book contract and will have a book on lucid dreaming published. What is the name of your upcoming book and when will it be out?
Yes, it’s called Dreams of Awakening and it’s published on worldwide release by Hay House in the first week of November this year. It’s available on Amazon now so any readers who might be interested, you can pre-order your copy now! I also have a CD called ‘Lucid Dreaming, Conscious Sleeping’ which launches in November too, also through Hay House. It’s a collection of guided meditations into the hypnagogic, lucid dream, and conscious sleep states. It’s also got some nice heavy beats on it too, not all pan-pipe hippy stuff! Ha ha!
In the book, do you include any personal lucid dreams that truly blew your mind? Could you give us an idea of one, and what it meant to you?
Yeah man, there are over 20 of my most mind blowing lucid dreams featured in an appendix at the back of the book. There are some really far out ones including healing myself of ear infections through lucid dreaming, doing spiritual practice, and deity manifestation in the lucid dream, having Locale 1 OBE’s, and receiving teachings from within the lucid dream too.
I had one particularly far out one when I went into the lucid dream and started chanting a Tibetan 100 syllable purification mantra, just to see what would happen. Suddenly hundreds of projections of monks and nuns flooded into the dreamscape and started chanting with me. Then my guru appeared. Then all these shadow aspects appeared, attracted by the manta and started to be integrated and transmuted.
And finally at the end of the dream I sang a song of love to all these hundreds of projections of both my inner darkness and Buddha nature and they all joined in too! It was mind blowing! They say that saying just 1 mantra in the lucid dream state is worth masses in the waking state so that was a very beneficial lucid dream to have had apparently.
Awakening to a larger realization seems a primary goal of Buddhism. In your mind, how does lucid dreaming help us ‘awaken’? And in what ways, do your Buddhist practices help you awaken more deeply?
In a lucid dream we become aware that what we believed to be real (the dream) is not real but instead in part a mental projection. So by becoming lucid, we see through our mental projections, and each time we do that we are creating a habitual tendency towards seeing through our mental projections in the waking state too. In the Freudian sense, as you know, ‘projection’ describes a psychological defense mechanism in which we unconsciously project our own unacceptable qualities onto others.
In fact, what annoys us most in other people is often a trait we are working hard not to recognize and accept in ourselves. Once we establish a stabilized lucid dreaming practice, however, we are engraining a new power of recognition that can ‘see through’ projections, not only of the dream type but of the waking type too. This is how we begin to wake up and live lucidly, because we start to recognize our waking psychological projections in the same way as we recognize our dreams.
From a Buddhist point of view as well, every time we lucid dream we are experiencing a new perception of reality, one in which we are the co-creator, and the more we experience this, the more we may also perceive waking reality in a similar way. Each time we do this we are creating a habit of recognition. It is this habit of seeing through illusion that forms the crux of lucid living and plants the seeds of awakening in our daily life.

Image by Alexander Lesnitsky from Pixabay
When you think about your life as a hip hop dancer, performer, and all, did you ever imagine becoming a Buddhist teacher of dream yoga? What advice do you have for beginning lucid dreamers?
No way man, it was never even on my radar! It’s been a crazy journey up to here and its only just beginning too, I hope. All I know is that I am so grateful every day for this life that I now lead and I am so thankful for everybody who has ever come to a talk or attended a workshop because they each made this dream a little bit more possible.
For those dreamers just starting off on the path, my advice is to train hard but know that it takes time to master. Lucid dreaming is like surfing. First we just have to play around in the white water, learning to get up on the board, having fun. Then we start to drop in on waves from point break, often as many as we can as fast as we can, like we think the waves are gonna run out or something! But then after a few years of surfing we learn to pick our waves carefully, drop in smoothly and have long intense rides that not only do justice to us a surfer but do justice to the wave too. Happy surfing! https://www.amazon.com/Dreams-Awakening-Lucid-Dreaming-Mindfulness/dp/1781802025
Charlie’s first book Dreams of Awakening is available from Hay House, Amazon, and all good book sellers from November 3rd 2013. For more information on Charlie’s courses see www.charliemorley.com