すべては現、すべては夢。

All is reality. All is dream.

A book I’m reading is about Tibetan Buddhism and its Dream Yoga Tantra. Tibetan Buddhism practitioners train themselves in order to liberate from their karma, or at least to travel the bardo (the intermediate state between death and new birth of reincarnation) safe and sound so that they get a closer-to-enlightened existence in the next life.

Their “training gym” is dreams during sleep. To precisely put, they first practice to control their mind while they are awake at the gross conscious level, such as meditation, breathing, yoga and mantra. Once they become capable of harnessing their mind at a certain degree while awake, they begin practicing to access their dreams while sleeping and learn a skill to maintain consciousness in it. In other words, a lucid dream as you know it.

The lucid dream is not easy to get in the beginning. Therefore, Dream Yoga teaches to establish the dream state while they are awake during day time in order to keep the same state in the dreams.

How? What they do is simply to perceive and capture everything as “dream”; psychological, mental, or materialistic phenomena;  tangible objects; and own physical body. Everything that happens in either the waking or dream state is dream. There is no difference in the waking reality and dream. Both are reality. And both are dream.

To me, living in Berlin is like having a dream in sleep. Everything is new, strange, unfamiliar, and alien. I sometimes fall into such a bizarre psychedelic state that I can’t fully grasp the fact that I walk down on a street in Berlin on my way home. It’s unrealistic! surreal! I was living in Japan. All of a sudden, I’m living here! Wow! How that happened?!? Did I really do it? Holy shit! I’m walking down a street in Berlin to go home and cook dinner!!!

Streets, buildings, trees, dogs, people…  All the scenes in this city are still so fresh to my eyes and cognition that it blurs me out and makes the reality dream-like.

I don’t have to go through a strict training but merely strolling in town gives me that precious state of mind. Lucidity. Alerted consciousness leaves tranquility to me. Pains that stem from my gross body float away and vanish. Eyes wide shut (the perfect phrase to describe this).

My everyday is indeed lucid. I’m straying into a maze of dream of reality…