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A version of the first foundational practice is rather well known in the West, because dream researchers and others interested in dream have found that it helps to generate lucid dreaming. It is as follows: throughout the day, practice the recognition of the dream-like nature of life until the same recognition begins to manifest in dream.
Upon waking in the morning, think to yourself, "I am awake in a dream." When you enter the kitchen, recognize it as a dream kitchen. Pour dream milk into dream coffee. "It's all a dream," you think to yourself, "this is a dream." Remind yourself of this constantly throughout the day.
The emphasis should actually be on you, the dreamer, more than on the objects of your experience. Keep reminding yourself that you are dreaming up your experiences: the anger you feel, the happiness, the fatigue, the anxiety – it is all part of the dream. The oak tree you appreciate, the car you drive, the person to whom you are talking, are all part of the dream. In this way a new tendency is created in the mind, that of looking at experience as insubstantial, transient, and intimately related to the mind's projections. As phenomena are seen to be fleeting and without essence, grasping decreases. Every sensory encounter and mental event becomes a reminder of the dream-like nature of experience. Eventually this understanding will arise in dream and lead to the recognition of the dream state and the development of lucidity.
There are two ways to understand the declaration that everything is a dream. The first is to look upon it as a method to change the karmic traces. Doing this practice, like all practices, changes the way one engages the world. By changing habitual and largely unconscious reactions to phenomena, the qualities of life and dream change. When we think of an experience as "only a
dream" it is less "real" to us. It loses power over us – power that it only had because we gave it power – and can no longer disturb us and drive us into negative emotional states. Instead, we begin to encounter all experience with greater calm and increased clarity, and even with greater appreciation. In this sense, the practice works psychologically by altering the meaning that we project onto what is beyond conceptual meaning. As we view experience differently, we change our reaction to it, which changes the karmic remnants of actions, and the root of dreaming changes.
The second way of understanding the practice is to realize that waking life is actually the same as dream, that the entirety of normal experience is made up of the mind's projections, that all meaning is imputed, and that whatever we experience is due to the influence of karma. Here we are talking about the subtle and pervasive work of karma, the endless cycle of cause and effect that creates the present from the traces of the past, which it does through the continual conditioning that results from every action. This is one way of articulating the realization that all phenomena are empty and that the apparent self-nature of beings and objects is illusory. There is not an actual "thing" anywhere in waking life – just as in a dream – but only transient, essenceless appearances, arising and self-liberating in the empty, luminous base of existence. Fully realizing the truth of the statement, "This is a dream," we are freed of the habits of erroneous conception and therefore freed from the diminished life of samsara in which fantasy is mistaken for reality. We are necessarily present when this realization comes, as it is then true that there is no place else to be. And there is no stronger method of bringing consistent lucidity to dream than by abiding continuously in lucid presence during the day.
As stated above, an important part of this practice is to experience yourself as a dream. Imagine yourself as an illusion, as a dream figure, with a body that lacks solidity. Imagine your personality and various identities as projections of mind. Maintain presence, the same lucidity you are trying to cultivate in dream, while sensing yourself as insubstantial and transient, made only of light. This creates a very different relationship with yourself that is comfortable, flexible, and expansive.
