Through meditational practices, Tibetan dream yoga aims to facilitate the cultivation of enlightenment by demonstrating the illusory nature of reality. This is clearly a thoroughly Buddhist conception, though I think it can be viewed from both a spiritual and philosophical perspective. In many ways, Buddhism is more a form of psychotherapy than a religion or philosophy (the objective of Buddhism is freedom from suffering; isn’t this really what psychotherapy is also about?).
By contrasting dreaming experience with waking experience, dream yoga aims to develop the your ability to realise that the perceptions you have right now are created by you. The phrase ‘life is but a dream’ is literally true when we consider experience itself to be dreaming. Your memory of yesterday is then no different to the dream you had last night; they are both experiences you have had and are now remembering.
In this way of looking at things, dream reality is different to waking reality only because we have access to different experiences in dreaming than waking. One way of putting this is to say that the sources of information are different but what we do with the information is the same; dreaming is then the process of creating a holistic experience of reality out of the information we have available.
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