Now when the bardo of dream is dawning upon me,

I will abandon the careless, corpselike sleep of delusion

And enter the abiding state with undistracted mindfulness,

Holding dreams, transforming emanations, purifying in luminosity.

Do not sleep like an animal, but treasure

The practice that mingles sleep with direct perception!

The bardo of dream includes both dreaming and dreamless sleep. It lasts from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up again.

As we fall asleep, we go through a process analogous to death, as the perceptions of waking consciousness dissolve and fade away.

We consider this to be falling into a state of unconsciousness, but really the mind is resting in its most profound, natural state, which we are unable to recognize as such because of our confusion.

According to the teachings of Natural Liberation, the instructions concerning this bardo are in three parts:

(1) Illusory body,

(2) Dreaming, and

(3) Luminosity (or clear light).

The practice of illusory body trains us to see waking life as a dream and to realize that our whole subjectively experienced world is the creation of the mind, just like a magician’s illusion, insubstantial and impermanent. This realization is fundamental to all practices related to the bardos.

It is a particularly necessary preparation for working with dreams, because dreams arise from karmic traces deeply imprinted in the mind, and so they are very hard to influence directly. Only after our intense attachment to our ordinary concept of reality is loosened does it become possible to perceive the world of dreams, too, as our own creation and to control it.

The practice of luminosity is simply to recognize and rest in the basic nature of mind itself, in its emptiness, radiance, and clarity. A momentary glimpse of luminosity appears at the moment of falling asleep, just as it does at the moment of death, but ordinarily we are unable to recognize it or even to notice anything at all.

Traditionally, there are two methods of approaching the dream practice.

One is through an intense wish and determination to remain aware during sleep, assisted by certain meditations. This is a difficult and unreliable method, although it can occur naturally under certain circumstances.

The other is by training in the completion-stage yogas and applying them here. As we fall asleep, we recognize and retain awareness of the state of luminosity, and then transform the dream experience into the illusory body of the practice. This is particularly recommended in order to gain confidence that we will be able to apply the same techniques at death.

In the verse, “holding dreams” means first recognizing the dream as a dream the moment it arises.

This leads to the ability to cultivate lucid dreams and remember them.

Gradually one learns to hold the clear awareness of dreaming so that one can transform one’s emotions and reactions and control the dream events in various ways.

Practitioners who achieve control over their dreams can transform whatever appears, changing its shape, color, and size or multiplying it into countless numbers.

Then they can create emanations and go anywhere they wish in any form.

All this activity takes place within the awareness of luminosity, out of which all appearances arise and into which they dissolve again.

Through this practice, one gains insight into the illusory nature of all phenomena, in waking life just as in dreams.

In commenting on the bardo of dream, Trungpa Rinpoche emphasized the dreamlike nature of ordinary life: how we continually create an imaginary world out of our concepts and desires, our hopes and fears.

The key to finding the gap, the intense in-between quality of this particular state, is to feel vividly the confusion between waking and sleeping and to catch a glimpse of our own uncertainty about what we really are.

Dreams seem absolutely real while we are dreaming, so how can we be sure that waking life is not the same as a dream?

Perhaps dreams are more real than waking life! This kind of uncertainty can act as a sudden inspiration to let go of all fixed concepts, and it may enable us to break through for a moment into the open space of luminous emptiness, whether we are awake or dreaming.

The three remaining bardos are concerned with the process of dying, the period after death, and the approach to rebirth.

Source: Based on Fremantle, Francesca. Luminous Emptiness. Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

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