Fest things first. I am neither a cognitive neuroscientist nor a professional lucid dreamer. Nor can I claim to be a serious practitioner of dream yoga. My only qualification in presenting the ideas in this book is my deep inclination to understand my own being since my childhood. I was always amazed at my own consciousness that many a time gave me moments of epiphany, some extraordinary, which I tried to write off as reveries but again and again they happened - sometimes taking me to the peaks of altered conscious states. These experiences have left me wondering about the epistemological issues concerning the external world, the experiencing self and their mutual relationship. I was always amused by the nature of consciousness and how it vacillates in the three states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep. I had natural inclination towards ancient Indian wisdom and felt a deep 'inner connect with Tibet. This led me to read Upanisads in my early age and later, the Vajrayana texts of Tibet. The study of Bardo Thodol was a real eye opener for me and it gave me all the connecting links that I was seeking all the while.
One of the most inspiring statements that left an indelible impression on me was the teaching of the great Guru Rinpoche (Guru Sri Padmasambhava) in the Bardo Thodol: 'whether in waking, dreaming or in disembodied state, we are always swayed away by the karmic currents and losing the awareness of the self and finding no place to rest, we wander in samsara relentlessly just as a dry leaf is swept and carried away by a strong gale'. I am of the conviction that unless we understand the import of this teaching and wake up to this predicament of ours, that there is any redemption for us here and hereafter.
This book is a modified version of my doctoral thesis titled 'Ontological and Epistemological Study of Dream State with Special Reference to Vajrayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta submitted to Swami Ramanand Teertha Marathwada University, Nanded, Maharashtra which awarded me with a PhD in 2017. During the course of my research, I came across several impressive books that gave me much insights into the nature of dream and sleep. Of the many, I cannot resist myself from making special mention of three brilliant works that have completely overwhelmed me: Are You Dreaming? Exploring Lucid Dreams: A Comprehensive Guide by Daniel Love, Dreams of Awakening: Lucid Dreaming and Mindfulness of Dream and Sleep by Charlie Morley and The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. In fact, 1 was so impressed and influenced by the ideas presented in these books that I took the liberty of profusely citing from them. I have no hesitation in admitting that a great extent of form this book took is shaped by these three books. I took the liberty of using the ideas presented in these books as the starting point at many places and took off from them to put forth my arguments. Hence these three authors in particular, and many others, deserve more credit than I could give them. I wanted this present book to be more like a collection of related ideas from great individuals that eventually evolve and converge into profound and inalienable truths, rather than limiting it only to my ideas and views. I wanted to start this journey of understanding dream and sleep states from a general layman's inquisitiveness and move on to more refined objective perspectives of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, before presenting to the reader the epistemological and ontological conundrums arising out of normal dreaming and the authentic lucid dreaming experiences, and finally ending it in the yogic insights that would culminate in the Upanisadic wisdom of Advaita. The scientific view of dreaming and deep sleep is great, but it suffers from the inherent limitations of objective approach that is unsuitable to understand the subjective experiences such as dreaming and dreamless sleep. One requires the insider's view to understand the states of consciousness and their corresponding experiences.
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