The Bardo of Dream
There are three bardos of life and three bardos of death. In previous articles I covered “Bardos in General” here , and the first of the six bardos: “The Bardo of this Life” here. The other two bardos of life are the Bardo of Dream and the Bardo of Meditation. In this article I will cover the Bardo of Dream.
Waking, Sleep and Dreaming
The Bardo of Dream covers the interval between sleeping and waking. The general pattern is to go from being awake, to being asleep, to having dreams before making our way back to being awake again.
Sometimes, in a dream when we wake up, we find we have only awoken into another dream. These are dreams within dreams. We realize this when we wake up from that second dream and find ourselves in our waking world again, assuming, this time, we are back in the “real” world.
But we can’t be sure. We don’t normally think, “I am awake” as we go about our waking life business. We take it for granted that we are. We make the same assumption in our dream state. Normally we take our nighttime dreams as real until we wake up. So, how do we know when we are truly awake in the “real” world?
Rinpoche claims,
“From the absolute, or enlightened, point of view, our experience of this life is definitely not…