From the article Dream Work with the Dying, by Jeremy Taylor.
- “All the sacred traditions of the world give an especially privileged place to dreams and dreaming as a means of self-understanding and communication with and from the Divine.
- “In addition, every culture of the world reveals some version of the ancient archetypal metaphor: ‘sleep = death’, and ‘dreams = the experience of the afterlife’.
- “Tibetan Buddhists even go so far as to say that what we experience as ‘dreams’ when we are alive and in our physical bodies is exactly what the discarnate entity experiences after death and in ‘the Bardo of Dying and Preparing for Rebirth’.
- “This belief is the primary reason for their focused attention to lucid dreaming; if a person can become proficient in recognizing consciously, ‘Oh, this is a dream…’ while asleep, then that person will also be very likely to be able to do the same thing in the midst of the ‘Bardo of Death and Becoming’, after separation from the physical form. In this way, he/she will be able to traverse the complexities of that post-mortem existence with calmness and clarity, or as they would say, ‘with wisdom and compassion’.”
