Within the natural bardo of this life, we experience a rhythm of waking and sleeping. Each day, our mind slips from the (1) state of waking consciousness into the (2) state of sleep, and from sleep into the (3) state of dream.

While we are in this intermediate state, we are either completely unconscious or only dimly aware of floating through visionary worlds where we have little or no control.

Then the process reverses and our waking consciousness re-emerges and connects us back to the “real” world.

We are alternately delighted, mystified, and terrified by these experiences.

The transitions from waking to dreaming and back are not always so clear and definite. We may have had dreams where we recognize that we are dreaming and wake up; but then we realize that our waking up was also a dream. We were not really awake; we were just dreaming that we were awake.

Right now, we believe we are awake, but we are not thinking, “Yes, I am awake.” We are rarely conscious of it.

When we look carefully at our experience, we can see that we often function as though we were half-asleep; we simply react to whatever is in front of us, just as we do in dreams.

From the absolute, or enlightened, point of view, our experience of this life is definitely not the awakened state. It is a dream—a longer dream—that we call samsara.

What we usually refer to as a dream is actually a “double illusion” or a “double dream,” and our everyday, waking life is the primary illusion.

The teachings of Padmasambhava provide us with instructions for working with the intermediate state of dream, which is the second bardo; these practices teach us how to recognize and transform our dream state into the experience of genuine wakefulness.

The bardo of dream is the time in between the dissolving of the appearances of one’s present waking state and the arising of the appearances of the next occurrence of the waking state.

In other words, we fall asleep today and, in a sense, we “leave this world” and enter the bardo of dream. Tomorrow, when we wake up, the appearances of the world manifest for us once again.

Between falling asleep and reawakening, we experience the state in which dreams occur. Sometimes, we can also enter this state when we are daydreaming.

Source: Based on Ponlop, Dzogchen. Mind Beyond Death. Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

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