tension and stress Loosen habits and make us more open, attuned, and flexible Unleash and mobilize creativity Bring repressions and denials into consciousness Clarify and dispel confusion Solve problems Reveal the process of death and rebirth Heal and relax us Expose fantasies Unlock aspirations and potentials Facilitate direct encounters with our shadow nature Provide spiritual blessings, visions, and guidance Help open our innate psychic capacities Remove hindrances and obstacles Help prepare (rehearse) us for death and the afterlife Awakening within the dream The seminal Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly. Upon awakening, he wondered whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Chuang Tzu's musings underscore a fundamental truth: life is like a dream. Spiritual life is about awakening from the dream of unreality. The word Buddha itself is from the word bodhi, "awakeful." Buddhist wisdom and practice help us to awaken to who and what we truly are, and to recognize the difference between the real and the unreal in our daily life. All of our spiritual practices are designed to awaken us from the daydream of illusion and confusion, where we are like sleepwalkers, semiconsciously muddling our way through life. Self-knowledge through spiritual awakening helps us become masters of circumstances and conditions, rather than victims. This is why the Armenian spiritual master George Gurdjieff said: "Contemporary man is born asleep, lives asleep, and dies asleep. And what knowledge could a sleeping man have? If you think about it and at the same time remember that sleep is the chief feature of our being, you will soon understand that if man wishes to obtain knowledge, he should first of all think about how to awaken himself, that is about how to change his being." South American shamans call this awakening from the dream of life "shapeshifting": entering into a spiritual journey with the explicit purpose of transformation. Shapeshifting and other forms of conscious dream-work can, through regular practice, help us experience other realms of existence, visit our dear departed, and achieve spiritual mastery. Australian aborigines say we all live in the dreamtime: we are like dream characters, living out our lives beyond the illusion of being born and dying. Tibetan masters call this dreamtime the bardo, or intermediate stage. Bardos exist between the ending of one state and the beginning of another, such as birth and death - or death and rebirth. Dreaming, too, is a bardo, marking the seemingly unstructured zone between waking and sleeping. Tibetan Buddhism is unique among Buddhist schools in teaching us how to awaken within the dream and how to practice spiritually while sleeping. This is the essence of Tibetan dream yoga, and the focus of all the practices associated with it. The Yoga of the Dream State, an ancient Tibetan manual on the practice of dream yoga and lucid dreaming teaches that we can learn five spiritually significant wisdom lessons through assiduously practicing this path of awakening: Dreams can be altered through will and attention Dreams are unstable, impermanent, and