When we work with dreams, we work “directly with the tectonic plates of our experience… The smallest shifts in tectonic plates have massive surface implications.” Here, we are working with the bedrock of our experience.

“When we relate to our mind in meditation during the day, we’re mostly working with surface levels of the conscious mind, which is as direct as we can get. It’s a start. But these conscious levels are projections of deeper unconscious strata that underlie all surface experience. If we can work with these unconscious levels directly, which is the rare opportunity provided by dream and sleep yoga, we’re now facing the mind point-blank.”

- Andrew Holocek

Dream Content as a Diagnostic Tool

“Where am I stuck and how can I move forward?”

Whether we dream lucidly or not, our dreams give us profound information about where we’re struggling. During the day, our limiting beliefs and pain identities are blindspots - difficult to see. But in dreams, they are laid bare.

To use our dream reports as diagnostic tools, we examine the energetic and emotional quality of our dreams with compassion and curiosity. In the Tibetan tradition, we often use the psychological framework of the Six Realms to better understand where we’re stuck and how we can grow.

In Buddhist psychology, there are said to be six “realms” of experience: Gods, Asuras, Humans, Animals, Hungry Ghosts, and Hellbeings. It is helpful to think of these as states of mind rather than places that beings go.

For example, someone consumed by anger could spend decades in a hellish rage, constantly seeking revenge, even while those around them experience happiness.

Someone consumed by addiction might experience the pain of insatiable craving that is often called the “hungry ghost realm.”

In fact, we all experience these realms story-by-story, day-by-day, as we go through different life stages and challenges. It’s a profound way to understand your own habitual energy. It’s important to remember that the descriptions of the experiential “realms” never carry judgement. You’re not a “bad” person for experiencing jealousy or rage and you’re not an inherently “good” person just because you’re experiencing the carefree apathy of the God realm.

Instead, these are descriptions of what it feels like to be in each state of mind. We use them to understand inner experience, not to judge it. Each “realm” has its own element of unsatisfactoriness and private suffering (even if it doesn’t look like it to the outside world) and each is worthy of compassion.

You can use this structure to better understand your dream content. Do you dream of being chased? Of being at war? Of being in competition? Or of unrequited love? When we see what realm we are dreaming and living in, we can begin to grow and heal.

This framework also helps us to better understand the people in our lives and what they might be struggling with. From this space, compassion and insight can grow, which is the greatest healing balm.

The Six Realms

God Realm:

A blissful state in which one is so lost in pleasure and privilege that they are oblivious to the suffering of others and to their own need for meaning and growth. It is a state of low motivation for change, because one’s current experience is just peachy. 

Dream Situations: Lazing on the beach; carefree indulgence of the senses; being surrounded by beautiful people; the dream might have no real narrative or purpose.

Antidote to apathy: developing compassion; connecting with diverse communities; meditative analysis of one’s own mortality; cultivating a personal mission or sense of greater meaning.

Asura (Jealous God) Realm:

Fueled by ego and pride, this realm is plagued by competitiveness, aggression, jealousy and ambitious striving. This can be striving for power, money, and fame but it can also be for things that seem virtuous, like being the best parent, the best meditator, or the most generous benefactor. When we’re here, we believe in a pecking order. Ego and pride makes us jealous of those we perceive to be above us, cocky and competitive with those on our level, and condescending to those coming up from below.

Dream situations: Fighting or sparring for victory; having a “showdown”; undermining your competitors; asserting your superiority; reveling in praise; bragging; recoiling from criticism; back-stabbing; taking joy in others’ demise.

Antidote to Pride & Jealousy: rejoicing in the achievements of others; practicing peacefulness; developing a sense of wholeness that isn’t dependent on outer situations; cultivating gratitude.

Human Realm:

The human realm is a mixed bag with constantly shifting circumstances: pleasure and pain, peace and strife, gain and loss, bliss and horror. The human realm is plagued by the suffering of change - nothing lasts, so there is deep longing for intimacy and belonging. This can manifest in sexual and relational dissatisfaction, clinging, and flightiness. This realm is the most existentially driven: there is a vague sense that there should somehow be more to life.

Dream situations: Lots of people talking; ever-changing scenes with hints of meaning; extremes of joy and sadness; unrequited love and missed connections; sexual anxiety; short bursts of lucidity that are quickly lost.

Antidote to desire & flightiness: meditations for relaxation, stability, equanimity, insight.

Animal Realm:

This is a realm of complacency, dullness, doubt, and ignorance. It is motivated by basic interest in survival in which we’re fixated on avoiding pain and seeking comfort. This realm lacks intellectual fire, curiosity, and the courage to rise to one’s full capacity.

Dream situations: mundane work situations; muted colors; fulfilling basic needs; making small talk and dull conversation; following orders; feeling like a cog in a wheel; feeling intellectually unchallenged, bored and confused.

Antidote to dullness: meditations/activities that develop clarity, insight, wisdom, and self-awareness; engaging in activities that inspire and challenge us to think outside the box (eg. studying philosophy, reading literature, learning an artform, practicing a martial art).

Preta (Hungry Ghosts) Realm:

Hungry ghosts are depicted with big bellies and tiny mouths, so that they are always hungry and can never get full - and that is what it feels like to be in this state. The Hungry Ghost realm is one of deep, insatiable craving, like an itch that can never be scratched; the pain of never feeling satisfied. This is a mindset that is fixated on lack. We may even have generosity, help, and bounty around us, but because of a deep fixation on what we don’t have, we are unable to see it or may even resent it.

Dream situations: addiction; painful yearning for a person or a thing; striving endlessly for something that feels utterly hopeless; something being just out of reach; fixation on what you don’t have; inability to see what is good or bountiful in a situation.

Antidote to hungry grasping: Generosity of mind and material goods; looking within for satisfaction; generating compassion and forgiveness for oneself and others.

Hell Realm:

This is a claustrophobic experience of negative emotion. We are tormented by the intensity of our anger and hatred. When this state arises in us - towards a person, a group of people, or even towards ourselves - it destroys our connection to peace, joy, and happiness. We suffer most in the fires of our own rage.

Dream situations: fighting; a rage or rampage; feeling under attack and retaliating; destruction; acts of violence; war.

Antidote to anger: Practices that cultivate patience, forgiveness, love; acts of kindness;

Recognizing Recurring Patterns in Dreams

Journal Your Realms:

• On waking, ask: “what realm was most active in my dream(s)?

• Make a note on each journal entry

• After a week or a month, tally up your notes

• Whichever realm has the most hits, is the one that is most active for you right now

Examine the Parallels to Waking life:

• Are these energies showing up in my waking life?

• Are they also present in my relationships?

• Are they suppressed in the daytime and only surfacing in dreams?

Be Compassionate as you Explore:

• This is not an exercise in judging yourself or feeling you’re not where you should be. There is no wrong place to be on a personal journey.

• This exercise helps to shine a light on where you might be getting stuck and what practices might help you move forward.

• It is ok even to say, “I’m fully unaware of where I might be getting stuck. I feel lost right now, but I’ll continue to look.” That is a significant insight.

• Let your discoveries develop into compassion for yourself and for others living in their own limited realms and pain identities.

Recognizing Recurring Patterns in Waking Life

Choose a Limiting Situation:

First, target a specific situation in your waking life in which you feel stuck, helpless, or limited - something that feels like a real obstacle.

Examine the Story:

• What do you say to yourself about the situation?

• What words do you use to confirm it to yourself? eg. “I deserve to feel like this”, “It will never change” , “This is the way it is”

• How does it feel in your body to sit in this story?

• What emotions arise in your body, mind, heart?

What realm is most active?

As you examine the emotional tone of this story, what characteristics seem strongest? Remember, the felt energy of the situation is more important than the outer details.

• Anger/Hatred - Hell realm

• Compulsive Attachment/Fear of lack - Hungry Ghost

• Doubt/Ignorance - Animal

• Relational clinging/Craving/rejecting - Human

• Pride/Ego/Jealousy - Asura

• Lethargic Pleasure/Apathy/Self-absorption - God Realm

*Note: Fear is an underlying root of all realms. It is an impulse to flee what is coming up underneath. Dig into the heart of fear to learn more about it: eg. Fear of losing what little you have (Hungry Ghost); Fear of being abandoned (Human); Fear of not being the best (Asura).

Find the Dream-Like Nature of the Story:

This recurrent energy - this “realm” - is like a dream. It’s a lens through which we filter experience and it limits the full expression of our potential, just like in a dream. But it is also an opportunity - wherever you are stuck, there is the doorway to healing

• Deeply sense “the limitations of this situation are like a dream”

• Imagine becoming lucid in this situation, as if you just became lucid in a dream

Transform the Limitation:

• If this were a dream, how might you re-structure the problem, re-imagine the obstacle or loosen how serious it feels knowing that it is a creation of mind?

• Practice applying one of the antidotes to your specific situation, eg:

  • In anger, offer compassion, love, patience

  • In compulsive craving, imagine doing an act of generosity

Dream State as a Laboratory

“How can I use the lucid state to learn and grow?”

If we are able to become lucid in a dream, we can use the vivid landscape to run experiments that help us move past fear, transmute limiting emotions, and integrate insights about the nature of our minds. Dream Yoga teachings prescribe tons of experiments that one could carry out in the dream. Below are a few that you might be interested in trying for yourself whenever you have a lucid dream.

The following are some of the dream experiments prescribed in classic Tibetan Dream Yoga traditions. They are for use whenever you become lucid in the dream. They can also serve as powerful pre-sleep intentions: “tonight I will become lucid and experiment with transforming dear” Lessons learned in the dream laboratory will follow you into waking life, giving you a sense of agency, lightheartedness, and possibility.

Transforming objects

When lucid in the dream, experiment with transforming objects. You can turn a dream table into a flower or transform your boat into a car. The texts encourage you to play with changing the size, quantity, quality, or speed of dream items. Why? Not only does it hone your ability to stay lucid for longer, but as Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche says: “Just as dream objects can be transformed in dreams, so emotional states and conceptual limitations can be transformed in waking life. With experience of the dreamy and malleable nature of experience, we can transform depression into happiness, fear into courage, anger into love, hopelessness into faith, distraction into presence. … Challenge the boundaries that constrict you.”

Transforming Fear

“Another practice is to create a frightful dream and then work with your fear. If you’re already in a nightmare and you become lucid, relate to your fear instead of running from it. This practice can show you that it’s not the contents of the nightmare that scare you, but rather your habit of taking the events to be solid and real. Discovering that dreams are safe—which is brought about by waking up to their illusory nature—is essentially discovering that you do not need to fear your own mind.” - Andrew Holocek

Transforming The Self

Another profound practice to try when you are lucid is transforming yourself, the dreamer. Once you’ve experimented with shifting your outer situation, turn the experiment on your sense of self: how does it feel to be someone or something else? Try transforming your identity, gender, age, or species. You can even become an inanimate object. The dream yoga traditions also encourage you to try “emanating” yourself - duplicating yourself so you can have the mind-opening experience of being in 2 or more places at once.