Quick Answer
The book for the lucid dreamer who has learned the techniques and wants to know what they are for. Wallace takes LaBerge's research and the Tibetan dream yoga of Naropa's lineage and lays them side by side, then insists that neither works well without a trained attention, and teaches the training. The synthesis is honest about where the two traditions part ways, which is at the question of what a dream is. It asks for a daily meditation practice and does not apologise for that.
Key Takeaways
- Attention first. Shamatha is the foundation and the book will not let you skip it.
- Lucidity is a beginning, and dream yoga is what the Tibetans do after it.
- The daytime practice matters as much as the night.
- The dream is a rehearsal for the bardo, and the book says so plainly.
- Read Tenzin Wangyal alongside for the tradition unmixed.
16 min read
What This Book Is
Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation was published by Shambhala in 2012. It is a practical manual of around two hundred pages, edited from Wallace's retreat teachings by Brian Hodel.
Its structure follows its argument. First the foundation: attention training through shamatha. Then the two approaches to lucidity, Western and Tibetan, presented in turn with their techniques. Then what to do once lucid: stabilising, transforming, and finally recognising the dream's nature. Then the extension into dreamless sleep and toward death.
It is a book to practise from, with exercises at each stage, and it is also an argument about what dreaming is for.
What it assumes. The book assumes you will meditate daily. Not as an optional supplement, but as the base on which every dream technique rests. Readers who want lucid dreaming without that commitment will find the LaBerge material useful and the rest inaccessible, and the book is clear that this is by design.
Who Alan Wallace Is
B. Alan Wallace was born in 1950, trained in physics and philosophy of science, and in the 1970s went to India and Switzerland to study Tibetan Buddhism. He was ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama in 1975 and spent fourteen years in robes, studying under Geshe Rabten and others and serving as interpreter for the Dalai Lama.
He returned to lay life, took a degree in physics and philosophy at Amherst, and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford. He has written and translated extensively, founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies in 2003, and led long shamatha retreats, including the Shamatha Project, a scientific study of intensive attention training.
His particular project is the meeting of contemplative practice and empirical science, and this book is that project applied to dreams. Readers of his The Attention Revolution will recognise the method: attention first, then whatever the attention is for.
Two Traditions, One Phenomenon
The book's premise, stated at the outset.
In the West, lucid dreaming was established as a scientific fact by Stephen LaBerge at Stanford in the late 1970s, when he had lucid dreamers signal with pre-agreed eye movements from inside REM sleep. A research literature and a set of techniques grew from that.
In Tibet, dream yoga had been practised for a thousand years as one of the Six Yogas of Naropa and in related Bon and Dzogchen lineages. It begins with the same phenomenon, knowing one is dreaming, and uses it for ends the Western research does not contemplate.
Wallace holds that the two traditions describe the same state, that each has techniques the other lacks, and that the Tibetan tradition has a clearer view of what the state is good for. The book is his attempt to put them together without pretending they agree on everything.
Shamatha as Foundation
The claim the whole book rests on, and its most distinctive contribution to lucid dreaming literature.
Shamatha, calm abiding, is the Buddhist training of attention: learning to rest awareness on a chosen object, the breath or the mind itself, without distraction and without dullness, for progressively longer periods, until the mind becomes stable, clear and pliant.
Wallace's argument is that lucidity in dreams is an attention skill. To notice that you are dreaming, you have to be able to notice at all, and the ordinary mind, distracted by day and swept along by night, cannot. A mind trained in shamatha carries its stability into sleep, recognises the dream more readily, holds the lucidity longer, and can do something with it.
The Western literature has techniques for inducing lucidity. Wallace's position is that the techniques work far better on a trained mind, and that most people who fail at lucid dreaming fail for lack of attention rather than lack of technique.
Settling the Mind in Its Natural State
The specific shamatha practice the book teaches, and the one Wallace has made his own.
After mindfulness of breathing as a preliminary, the practitioner turns attention to the mind itself: observing thoughts, images and feelings as they arise, without following them and without suppressing them, letting them come and go while awareness remains still. The object of attention is the space of the mind and whatever appears in it.
Wallace explains that this practice is uniquely suited to dream work, because a dream is the space of the mind with images in it, and a person who has learned to observe mental images by day without being carried away is practising, in effect, the recognition of dreams while awake.
The practice is taught in detail, with the common obstacles, and it is the part of the book most readers will spend the longest on.
The sequence Wallace proposes is a reversal of how most people approach lucid dreaming. The usual order is: learn a technique, try it at night, hope for lucidity. His order is: train attention for weeks or months, observe the mind's images by day until the observing is habitual, and then find that lucidity begins arriving on its own, because the mind that watches images by day does not stop watching when it sleeps. He is candid that this is slower. He argues it is the only way the results last.
The LaBerge Techniques
The Western material, presented competently and without proprietary claim.
Wallace gives the standard methods: dream journalling and the identification of dream signs; reality checks during the day; MILD, mnemonic induction, the setting of a firm intention before sleep to recognise the next dream; and WILD, wake-initiated lucid dreaming, the passage from waking into a dream with awareness unbroken. He explains the sleep cycle and the timing of REM, and the wake-back-to-bed method of exploiting the later REM periods.
Readers who know the standard lucid dreaming techniques will find nothing new here and will find it accurately stated. The value is in the framing: each technique is presented as an application of attention, and the connection to shamatha is made explicit.
The Tibetan Techniques
The traditional methods, given as taught in the Naropa lineage.
The core practice is visualisation at the throat centre while falling asleep: a red lotus with a syllable, traditionally AH or OM, at its heart, held in attention as sleep approaches. The throat is understood as the centre associated with dreaming, and the visualisation is meant to carry awareness across the threshold of sleep.
Alongside it Wallace gives the practices of prospective memory, the firm resolve to recognise the dream, which corresponds to MILD; of illusory form by day; and of the specific prayers and reflections the tradition uses to prepare the mind for sleep.
He is careful to note that the visualisation practices belong within a larger system of Tibetan tantra, and that he is presenting them in a form suitable for practitioners without that background. Readers who want the full tradition should go to a teacher within it.
The Daytime Practice
The part of dream yoga most neglected in Western accounts, and one Wallace gives its due.
The Tibetan tradition holds that lucidity at night follows from a particular attitude by day: regarding waking experience as dreamlike, questioning its solidity, noticing how appearances arise and dissolve, and repeatedly asking whether this, now, is a dream. This is not a mental trick. It is the cultivation of a view about the nature of experience, and the night practice is its extension.
Wallace connects this to the reality checks of the Western method and shows how they differ: the Western check asks whether I am dreaming; the Tibetan practice asks what the difference would be. The second question is the one the tradition cares about.
The Common Obstacles
A section that runs through the book rather than sitting in one chapter, and worth gathering.
Wallace identifies the failures that stop most practitioners. Poor dream recall, which he treats as an attention problem and addresses through journalling and through the shamatha practice of noticing mental images by day. Excitement on becoming lucid, which ends the dream and which stability training addresses. Dullness, the sinking of attention into a comfortable haze that passes for calm, which he regards as the most insidious obstacle in both meditation and dream practice, since it feels like progress. And the loss of motivation when results are slow, which he meets by reframing the whole endeavour as the training of a faculty rather than the pursuit of an experience.
The treatment of dullness is the most useful. Western lucid dreaming guides say little about it, and meditators who bring a habit of pleasant drowsiness to their practice will find the book's insistence on clarity, alongside calm, a correction they need.
Stabilising the Lucid Dream
What to do in the first seconds, when most lucid dreams end.
The book gives the standard techniques for holding a lucid dream once it begins: remaining calm, engaging the senses, rubbing the hands, spinning, and above all not becoming excited, since excitement wakes the dreamer. It connects each to shamatha: the stability that keeps the mind on the breath is the stability that keeps it in the dream.
This is where the shamatha argument is most convincing. Anyone who has lost a lucid dream to the surge of recognising it will see why a trained attention would help.
Transforming the Dream
The stage at which dream yoga goes beyond Western practice.
Once stable in a lucid dream, the Tibetan practitioner deliberately alters it: multiplies objects, changes their size, turns one thing into another, flies, passes through walls, transforms their own body. This is not entertainment. The purpose is to demonstrate to the dreaming mind, by direct experience, that the dream is malleable, and therefore that its apparent solidity was never real.
Wallace gives the traditional sequence of transformations and the reasoning behind them. The exercises are among the most enjoyable in the book, and they have an intent that the enjoyment can obscure: every transformation is an argument about the nature of appearance.
Recognising Emptiness
The goal, in the tradition's own terms.
Having seen that the dream can be transformed at will, the practitioner is led to see that the dream has no existence independent of the mind that dreams it. And having seen that, the tradition says, the practitioner is in a position to see that waking experience is the same: appearances arising in awareness, without the independent solidity they seem to have.
This is the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, taught through the dream rather than through philosophical argument, and Wallace presents it as the point of the whole practice. The lucid dream is a laboratory in which the mind can verify, for itself, what the philosophy claims.
Readers outside Buddhism can take the exercise without the doctrine. The book is written to make the doctrine available, and it does not hide that.
The Dream and the Bardo
The final purpose, stated without softening.
In Tibetan teaching, the state after death, the bardo, is dreamlike: the mind, freed from the body, experiences appearances that arise from its own tendencies and takes them for real. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a guide to recognising those appearances for what they are. Dream yoga is the rehearsal.
A practitioner who can recognise a dream as a dream, night after night, is building the habit that will let them recognise the bardo as the bardo when it comes. That, and not the pleasure of flying, is why the tradition took the trouble.
Wallace states this plainly and does not argue for it. A reader who does not accept the bardo can still see what the tradition thought it was doing, and why the practice was pursued with such seriousness.
Sleep Yoga and Dreamless Sleep
A brief final chapter on the practice beyond dreams.
Sleep yoga, in the tradition, is the maintenance of awareness through dreamless sleep: not lucidity in a dream but lucidity in the absence of any dream, resting in the clear light of the mind's nature. It is regarded as more advanced than dream yoga and Wallace treats it briefly, as a direction rather than a set of instructions.
The chapter connects to his interest in the nature of consciousness, and readers of his more theoretical work will recognise the claim that awareness persists in the absence of content. It is the least practical part of the book and the most suggestive.
The Science and Its Limits
A fair accounting, since the book invokes science throughout.
The lucid dreaming research is solid. LaBerge's eye-signal studies, the REM findings, the efficacy of MILD, the physiology of the sleep cycle: these are established and Wallace reports them accurately.
The claims about shamatha are partly supported. The Shamatha Project found improvements in attention and wellbeing with intensive training. The specific claim that shamatha improves lucid dream frequency has not been tested and Wallace presents it as the tradition's view and his own experience, which is honest.
The claims about emptiness, the bardo and the nature of consciousness are contemplative, not scientific, and the book does not pretend otherwise, though its framing sometimes lets the two blur.
Beside Tenzin Wangyal
The comparison every reader of this subject makes.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, from 1998, presents the Bon tradition's dream and sleep yoga directly, from within, by a lineage holder. It is the tradition unmixed, and it is the better book for the tradition itself.
Wallace's book is the better bridge. It explains the Western research, connects it to the Tibetan practice, and supplies the attention training the tradition assumes and Western readers lack. A reader coming from lucid dreaming will find Wallace the easier entry; a reader coming from Buddhism will find Wangyal the fuller one. Serious practitioners read both.
The Objections
Three, and readers within Buddhism raise the third as often as those outside.
The demand. A daily shamatha practice is a real commitment, and the book offers no path for those who will not make it.
The blur. Wallace's contemplative-scientific programme sometimes lets contemplative claims borrow scientific authority they have not earned.
The extraction. The Tibetan practices are lifted from a tantric system that traditionally requires initiation and a teacher, and presented for general use. Wallace is careful about this, and the caution does not fully resolve it.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have learned lucid dreaming from the technique books and want to know what a thousand-year tradition did with the same state.
Read it if you meditate and are curious about extending the practice into sleep.
Read it if the techniques have not worked for you, since the book's diagnosis, untrained attention, may be the right one.
Read Wangyal beside it, and if the tradition draws you, find a teacher.
The book's quiet argument is that the difference between a person who dreams lucidly and one who does not is the same as the difference between a person who notices their thoughts and one who is carried by them. Lucidity is attention, and attention is trained. That reframes lucid dreaming from a trick to a skill and from a skill to a discipline, and it explains why the Tibetans put it in a system with meditation at the base and death at the summit. You can take the trick alone. Wallace's case is that the trick, taken alone, will not stay.
Lucid dreaming, Tibetan dream yoga, and the attention training that makes both work.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our reservations about the blurring of contemplative and scientific claims are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Dreaming Yourself Awake about?
A practical guide that combines Western lucid dreaming techniques, mainly from Stephen LaBerge's research, with the Tibetan Buddhist practice of dream yoga, and grounds both in shamatha, the meditative training of stable attention.
Who is B. Alan Wallace?
An American scholar and meditation teacher, a former Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by the Dalai Lama, with a doctorate in religious studies from Stanford and a background in physics, who founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies.
What is dream yoga?
One of the Six Yogas of Naropa in Tibetan Buddhism: the practice of becoming lucid in dreams and then using the dream state to recognise the illusory nature of all experience, waking as well as dreaming, and ultimately to prepare for death.
How does it differ from lucid dreaming?
Lucid dreaming is knowing you are dreaming while you dream. Dream yoga begins there and goes further: transforming the dream deliberately, recognising it as empty of inherent existence, and carrying that recognition into waking life and toward the moment of death.
What is shamatha?
The Buddhist practice of calm abiding: training attention until it can rest on an object without distraction or dullness for long periods. Wallace argues it is the necessary foundation for both lucid dreaming and dream yoga.
What techniques does it teach?
Mindfulness of breathing and settling the mind in its natural state; LaBerge's reality checks, MILD and WILD; the Tibetan practices of visualising a syllable at the throat, prospective memory, and daytime illusory-form practice; and methods for stabilising and transforming lucid dreams.
Is it for beginners?
For beginners in lucid dreaming, yes. For beginners in meditation, only if they are willing to commit to a daily practice, since the book's approach depends on it. It is not a quick-technique book.
What does it say about death?
That dream yoga is ultimately a rehearsal for the bardo, the intermediate state after death, which in Tibetan teaching resembles a dream. The practitioner who can recognise the dream as a dream can recognise the bardo as the bardo.
How does it compare to Tenzin Wangyal's book?
Tenzin Wangyal's The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep is the Bon tradition's dream yoga presented directly. Wallace's is a synthesis with Western research and a stronger emphasis on preliminary attention training. They are complementary.
Is the science reliable?
The lucid dreaming research Wallace draws on, chiefly LaBerge's work at Stanford, is well established. His claims about shamatha and consciousness are more speculative and reflect his own contemplative-scientific programme.
What is the daytime practice?
Regarding waking experience as dreamlike throughout the day, questioning its solidity, and doing reality checks with real curiosity. The Tibetan tradition holds this to be as important as anything done at night.
Who should read it?
Lucid dreamers who want to know what the Tibetan tradition does with lucidity, meditators curious about dream practice, and anyone who has found the technique-only approach to lucid dreaming unsatisfying.
Ask the second question
The Western reality check asks: am I dreaming? Do that, and it will help. Then ask the question the Tibetans put after it: if I were, what would be different? Sit with that one in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, with the solid desk and the solid coffee and the solid sense of yourself, and see how long it takes to find an answer you are sure of. Wallace's book is built on the suspicion that the honest answer is longer coming than it should be, and that the night is where you find out.
Sources & References
- Wallace, B. Alan. Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation, ed. Brian Hodel, Shambhala, 2012.
- Wallace, B. Alan. The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind.
- LaBerge, Stephen and Howard Rheingold. Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming.
- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep.
- Mullin, Glenn, trans. The Six Yogas of Naropa.
- MacLean, K. A. et al. "Intensive Meditation Training Improves Perceptual Discrimination and Sustained Attention", Psychological Science, 2010, from the Shamatha Project.