The Mystery

It is said that the practice of dream yoga deepens our awareness during all our experience: the dreams of the night; the dream-like experience of the day; and the bardo experiences after death. Indeed, the practice of dream yoga is a powerful tool of awakening, used for hundreds of years by the great masters of the Tibetan traditions. Unlike in the Western psychological approach to dreams, the ultimate goal of Tibetan dream yoga is the recognition of the nature of mind or enlightenment itself. Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is an acclaimed author as well as a highly respected and beloved teacher in the Bön Buddhist tradition to students throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. Fluent in English, Tenzin Rinpoche is renowned for his depth of wisdom, his clear, engaging teaching style, and his ability to make the ancient Tibetan teachings highly accessible and relevant to the lives of Westerners. https://www.youtube.com/embed/tKjD7uddaXk

Dreaming is different from waking consciousness. First, the dreaming brain cannot access and incorporate complete episodic memories (i.e., memories of actual events in our lives), so the associative exploration of dreams is limited to semantic and nondeclarative memories (i.e., memories related to general world knowledge and those acquired and used unconsciously, respectively). In other words, while imagining and planning during wakefulness is normally based on recalled events, narrative construction during dreaming is based on semantic associations of these events, giving dreams their metaphorical quality and allowing for a more expansive investigation of associative links.  Second, the neurochemical modulation of the brain is altered during sleep, and especially during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when the release of norepinephrine and serotonin in the brain is shut off while levels of acetylcholine reach their peak in regions such as the hippocampus. These shifts bias memory netw

In the book 'When Brains Dream', dreams appear to be part of this ongoing memory processing, and their occurrence and content can predict subsequent memory improvement. While there is a vigorous debate over whether the actual conscious experiencing of dreams while they occur serves a function, we believe that it does, and that it is similar to that proposed for waking consciousness. Antonio Damasio, in this 2000 book 'The Feeling of What Happens', argues that consciousness provides two critical functions to the human brain: to construct narratives and to feel one’s emotional response to them. Together, they give humans (and presumably other conscious animals) the ability to imagine possibilities, evaluate them, and thereby plan future actions. Our NEXTUP model of dreaming (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities) proposes that dreaming serves a similar function. Specifically, we argue that dreaming allows the sleeping brain to enter an altered state of conscious

That the brain produces consciousness appears, simplistically, as an elegant solution to the problem of the origin of consciousness. Given its enormous complexity and the apparent association of brain topography and activation with discrete mind states and functions, this is virtually self-evident to most of our scientific and popular culture. However, the simplicity of that solution starts to dissolve when one considers the brain from an evolutionary point of view. It is not as though brains suddenly popped into existence prepared to produce mind, after all. Evolutionary biologists approach the question meaningfully by looking for simpler structures from which brains evolved, recognizing that in lower order living beings there are neuronal structures that, while not as complex as our brains, perform less complex but similar versions of the functions of consciousness. Some of these are central nervous systems, but some of them are disseminated through the body rather than being concent