Dream yoga

32 teachings in the library are about this.

Afternoon Session Charlie Morley · 200 minutes · recorded January 31, 2026
Charlie leads two guided rehearsals of Guru Rinpoche's nighttime dream yoga practice: falling asleep as a chosen deity, head resting in the guru's lap, attention on the throat centre, and a repeated affirmation to recognise the dream state. He covers sleep position, why Chenrezig needs no empowerment, and dream planning, deciding in advance what to do once lucid. Questions touch on hypnagogic imagery and insomnia. He closes the two-day course with a dedication and retreat details.
Morning Session Charlie Morley · 185 minutes · recorded January 31, 2026
Charlie opens with a short guided breathing exercise before turning to the theory of dream yoga, Milam Naljor: its four stages of recognition, transforming fear, multiplication and unification with a yidam such as Chenrezig. He explains why the practice is considered a rehearsal for death and introduces illusory body yoga, treating waking life itself as a dream. Discussion covers finding a teacher, how this differs from Western reality checks, and how ego motivation can cut a lucid dream short.
Afternoon Session Charlie Morley · 186 minutes · recorded January 24, 2026
Charlie teaches reality checks and the "weird technique" for building daytime awareness that carries into sleep, then walks through the sleep cycle to show why lucid dreams grow easier in the night's second half. He leads a guided lying down rehearsal of four hypnagogic affirmations, among them a bodhicitta version and a Toltec warrior affirmation, before wake back to bed, a technique shown to sharply raise lucid dream frequency. Discussion covers napping, shift work and dream recall.
Morning Session Charlie Morley · 181 minutes · recorded January 24, 2026
Charlie Morley opens with a short grounding practice, then explains what lucid dreaming is: prefrontal cortex activation, neuroplasticity, and evidence from his trauma study, where most participants dropped below the clinical threshold for PTSD in a week. He teaches four techniques, dream planning, recall, diaries and dream signs, then leads a written dream planning exercise, coaching participants on their plans. Questions cover false awakenings, anxiety, grief, and REM sleep behaviour disorder.
D8S3 - Distinguishing Mind from Primordial Awareness Lama Alan · 72 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan lays out three ways an ordinary mind gets mistaken for pristine awareness, from simply observing thoughts to resting in a substrate consciousness that feels blissful and still but is not yet realisation. He uses lucid dreaming to explain how recognising appearances as empty works the same way, then turns to the difference between conditioned and primordial consciousness, weighing in on the debate over what happens to an arhat at death.
D5S4 - Galileo's Moons, and a Realisation Not Yet Stable Lama Alan · 59 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan uses Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter to show the difference between shamatha, simply noticing, and vipassana, noticing with inquiry into how something arises and fades. In the guided practice we extend this inquiry to thoughts and emotions arising in the mind. Returning to the text, he examines Dudjom Lingpa's admission that his realisation kept slipping, steady in practice but lost when he was frightened alone in the wilderness.
D6S3 - Why Dzogchen Practice Is Simply Waking Up Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan traces how mental afflictions such as anger and pride do not simply vanish upon realisation but melt into the five wisdoms, and offers a third translation of Dzogchen, the Great Encompassment, alongside the more familiar Great Perfection and Great Completion. He describes the false cave of appearances, likening ordinary experience to a non-lucid dream, and says the entire task of Dzogchen practice comes down to one thing: waking up.
D6S2 - Merging Mind with Space, and What Shamatha Requires Lama Alan · 91 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
A guided practice of releasing awareness into open space, drawn from Dudjom Lingpa's Dzogchen texts, continues the sequence from the day before. Lama Alan describes the lasting effects of achieving shamatha, from vivid perception to lucid dreaming, and what it requires: a quiet environment, few desires, few activities, and companions with a similar practice. He ends by describing a Scottish property that could become a retreat centre.
D4S3 - Vase Breathing, and What You Bring to the Practice Lama Alan · 159 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan teaches the gentle vase breathing that accompanies settling the mind in its natural state, then reframes the practice around a different question: not how the session went, but what you brought to it. A guided meditation follows, alongside an account of the vivid, strange experiences, nyam, that can arise as the mind settles. He closes with the point that nothing arising in the mind, thought, memory or image, can actually harm you.
D4S2 - The Five Powers and Dying Lama Alan · 86 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Accumulating merit and purifying obscurations by the four remedial powers, why Atisha counsels offerings to spirits, which Lama Alan Wallace defends by arguing that the physical world is not hermetically sealed against the non-physical, and offerings to the Dharma protectors. Then the five powers for one life and the same five for dying, of which Atisha says there is no more wondrous counsel on dying than this. Questions on brain and mind correlations, lucid dreaming and whether the self is a composite. No guided practice.
D2S1 - View All Phenomena as Dreamlike Lama Alan · 86 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Ultimate bodhicitta, and Atisha's aphorism that all phenomena are dreamlike. Lama Alan Wallace takes apart naive realism and metaphysical realism, arguing that colours, sounds and thoughts are nowhere in physical space and that quantum physics has already discredited the world we assumed was out there, with lucid dreaming as the working example. In the guided practice we observe the sixth domain, mental perception, then follow the Buddha's counsel that in the seen there be just the seen.
D6S3 - The Brain Cannot Generate Consciousness, and Eva Natanya's Path Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 86 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Closing questions, then a final guided practice. Lama Alan argues that emergent properties of physical phenomena are always physical, so there is no evidence that the brain generates consciousness, and that technological access to the substrate consciousness would liberate nobody. Eva Natanya describes her path from Zen through the Gelug tradition into Vajrayana. She closes by leading his fourfold vision quest: what you long to become, what help you need, what must change in you, and what you will offer.
D7S4 - Open Presence and the Rainbow Body Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The final session opens with Lama Alan Wallace objecting to open presence being flattened into bare attention, a practice he says a marmot could manage. A silent 24 minute period builds through shamatha and vipashyana into open presence itself. He then reads Padmasambhava on entering lucid dreamless sleep with attention at the heart, the elements dissolving as sleep comes, and how the clear light of sleep prepares one for the clear light of death, closing with the levels of rainbow body.
D7S3 - Nighttime Dream Yoga Lama Alan · 80 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Yangthang Rinpoche's pointing out instructions are completed and then practised, awareness resting in open presence, body relaxed, voice silent, mind unmodified. Lama Alan Wallace then takes up Padmasambhava's stages of dream yoga, beginning with falling asleep in the lion posture, Padmasambhava at the throat and a request to recognise the dream. Recall and vividness come first, then the dream is transformed, one thing multiplied into many. Last comes seeing through it, by jumping into a river.
D6S4 - Searching for the Mind Lama Alan · 63 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
A second pass at vipashyana, this time following Padmasambhava's Searching for the Mind: is the mind that is placed the same as the one placing it, has it any location or size, and is it an emptiness that is nothing? Lama Alan Wallace then draws out what a basis of designation is, teasing one participant over whether a waving hand counts as seeing his body. He argues that the close applications of mindfulness are phenomenology, and belong with the ontology of the perfection of wisdom.
D5S5 - Prospective Mindfulness, and Questions on Karma and Free Will Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The session opens with a silent period, with a choice of methods and two combinations Lama Alan Wallace likes, earth and wind and earth and sky, mindfulness of breathing leading into settling the mind or into awareness of awareness. He reviews prospective mindfulness: resolving to notice an anomaly or a dream sign and do a state check, and catching the moment of waking so the dream can be re-entered. Questions follow on free will, whether an android could be conscious, and whether watching an affliction arise accrues karma.
D5S4 - Probing the Mind as Agent Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Consciousness is defined as luminous and cognizant, and Lama Alan Wallace turns Padmasambhava's next phase inwards: who or what is it that concentrates and releases the attention? In the guided practice we keep the oscillation going and probe the sense of being the agent, which he says can cut through to pristine awareness. The Heart Sutra and the Diamond Cutter Sutra follow, where even nirvana is like a dream, the Dalai Lama on why that turns sympathy into compassion, and lucid dreaming as the footstool into dream yoga.
D5S3 - Awareness of Awareness Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace takes up shamatha without a sign, awareness of awareness, which the Buddha counted among the ten kasinas and the subtlest of the methods Padmasambhava teaches. We use an oscillation of arousing the attention and releasing it into space, and three things mean you are doing it incorrectly: distraction, grasping, and losing clarity. Conduct between sessions follows: rely upon unwavering mindfulness, picking thought up and putting it down like a knife and fork.
D4S5 - Why Shamatha Cannot Be Skipped, and Questions on Dying Lama Alan · 82 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace sets the physics notes aside and gives the rest of the retreat to Buddhadharma. He recounts asking the present Dudjom Rinpoche why hardly any Tibetans really teach shamatha, and is told they get bored and Westerners come for empowerments. Lucid dreaming that never questions the daytime reality changes nothing. No practice tonight: the hour goes to questions on karma in dreams, near death experience and dying sedated, closing with a burning coal melting through a cone of snow.
D3S5 - False Awakenings and Dream Karma Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Thoreau on going to the woods to front only the essential facts of life, read out in full, then an unguided period, offered as half subduing thoughts breath by breath and half settling the mind in its natural state. The questions that follow take in false awakenings, one dreamer waking nine times over, and people certain they have achieved shamatha. Lama Alan Wallace gives the Buddha's answer on whether a non lucid dream accrues karma, and the experiment he wants run on where memories are held.
D2S5 - Evening Questions on Mind and Memory Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
One silent period, each person following whichever method of mindfulness of breathing benefits them most. The rest of the evening goes to written questions. Lama Alan Wallace argues that memories are stored in the substrate consciousness rather than the brain, since your apps are not stored in your keyboard. He gives consciousness two defining characteristics, making appearances manifest and knowing, and calls panpsychism, integrated information theory included, the last gasp of materialism.
D2S3 - What Materialism Cannot Explain Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The Burmese method of mindfulness of breathing, attention on the rise and fall of the abdomen, chosen here to enhance stability without losing the underlying ease. Lama Alan Wallace tells how Stephen LaBerge's recurring dream monster kept coming back until he gazed into its eyes and thought, you're just like me, wishing for happiness, at which it dissolved into his heart and never came back. Most of the teaching is a case against materialism: no theory of consciousness in 150 years, and the luminous ether as his parallel.
D2S2 - Falling Asleep and Becoming Lucid Lama Alan · 65 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In Asanga's approach to mindfulness of breathing we attend to the sensations throughout the whole body correlated with the rhythm of the respiration, relaxing more deeply with every out breath without losing clarity. Lama Alan Wallace then offers it as a way to fall asleep, practised in the shavasana until the waves of drowsiness come in, rather than reaching for medication. He goes through the three researched routes into a lucid dream, and what to do when one starts to fade: rub your body, spin.
D7S1 - Padmasambhava's Pointing Out Instructions, and Innate Ignorance Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The Dzogchen day. Lama Alan Wallace settles body, speech and mind, then reads Padmasambhava's pointing out instructions from Natural Liberation while we rest awareness in the space in front, without a meditative object. He separates the ignorance we are born with from the acquired kind, such as racism or materialism, and quotes one of the masters whose texts he translated in Open Mind: the awareness of which you are aware can be viewed as a ray of pristine awareness, and walking up that ray gets you to the sun.
D5S1 - Watching Thoughts Like a Cowherd Lama Alan · 96 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In settling the mind in its natural state, eyes softly open and the gaze vacant, we watch whatever rises in the space of the mind from the stillness of awareness, as Dudjom Lingpa's cowherd watches cattle from afar. Lama Alan Wallace reads Lerab Lingpa on what the practice yields, empty forms and a non-conceptual sense that nothing can harm the mind, and warns with the story of the student who reached shamatha and did nothing but enjoy it, before mapping the four kinds of mindfulness that lead there.
D4S1 - The Sautrantika View, and the Instruction to Bahiya Lama Alan · 95 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The guided practice is the Buddha's instruction to Bahiya, in the seen only the seen, carried through sight, sound, touch and mental events, and we ask whether we are found by way of them. Lama Alan Wallace sets it inside the Sautrantika account of perceiving the world by way of appearances, and is precise about what is refuted: a self that is autonomous and substantial, running body and mind like a chief executive. The day's task is to notice the thought of I and check its referent.
D2S1 - State Checks and Dream Signs Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The first full day opens with a detailed preamble: Lama Alan Wallace asks how anyone can be harmed inside a dream, and answers that we identify with what is neither I nor mine, and reify everything. A guided practice of settling body, speech and mind in the natural state follows, ending in self-knowing awareness. He then turns to Stephen LaBerge's research: the three requirements for lucid dreaming, state checks such as jumping or reading a text twice, and a dream journal to find your own dream signs.
D1S1 - Are You Human? The Three Poisons and the Substrate Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The opening evening is teaching only, with no practice. Lama Alan Wallace starts from a Pali Canon exchange in which the brahmin Dona asks the Buddha whether he is a god, a spirit or a human, is told no to each, and hears the reply, I am awake. He works through the three poisons of the mind, and the dualistic grasping that is the taproot of craving and hatred, runs the ten Buddhist analogies for illusion, and lays out the substrate and substrate consciousness.
Guided Meditation - Visualisation for Dream Yoga, Orbs of Light at the Throat and Heart Lama Alan · 21 minutes
Lama Alan Wallace teaches two visualisations for the night. You place a small, deep ruby red orb of light inside the throat and let your awareness descend into it and take its form, a gentle shamatha weighted towards relaxation and stability rather than vividness, which you carry into sleep for lucid dreaming. Lama Alan then moves the orb down to the heart as deep sapphire blue, for lucid dreamless sleep, closing with a dedication of merit.
Workshop Part 2 Charlie Morley · 209 minutes
Charlie Morley tells the story of Namgyal Rinpoche, the Canadian who founded what became Samye Ling and was the first Western tulku, and his advice on purification, merit and dream recall. A thirty minute yoga nidra follows, thanking skin, flesh, bones, blood and heart while awareness is held in the hypnagogic state. Everyone then writes a dream plan. The final practice taught is Lochen Dharmashri's white AH at the heart centre, for those with the Vajrasattva empowerment. He then runs back through the whole day.
Workshop Part 1 Charlie Morley · 214 minutes
For practitioners who have taken refuge, Charlie Morley's workshop opens with refuge and works through the four stages of dream yoga: recognition, transformation, multiplication and unification. He teaches the Chenrezig dream practice, which needs no initiation, and Akong Tulku Rinpoche's three word instruction, walk through wall. After the break comes Padmasambhava's dream yoga from Natural Liberation, with a guided rehearsal of falling asleep in divine form, focus drawn to the throat centre.
Boundaries Glen Svensson · 85 minutes
How a line drawn to make sense of experience is turned into a boundary, and the six step process by which that grasping becomes attachment, aversion and suffering. Glen Svensson works through the two extremes of existence and non-existence towards Nagarjuna's middle way, and uses the lucid dream as his analogy for realising emptiness while awake. The session opens with a practice on the body as a dependent arising and closes by looking for the me in the flow of body and mind.

Dream yoga

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