Within the Mahāmudrā tradition, so‑called “advanced” practices such as dream yoga and sky gazing are not separate tracks but refinements of the same basic work of recognizing mind. Foundational techniques—often framed as shamatha and vipashyanā applied to mind itself—train the meditator to observe thoughts, emotions, and sensations without grasping, and to discern the empty, luminous, space‑like quality of awareness. This establishes a stable familiarity with awareness as such, rather than with its changing contents. Without this grounding, more specialized methods tend to devolve into mere altered states or conceptual exercises, lacking real liberating power.

Dream yoga extends this same recognition into the dream state. The dream is understood as a display of mind in exactly the same way that waking experience is a display of mind. Lucidity—recognizing “this is a dream”—allows the practitioner to apply the same non‑grasping observation used in waking meditation, seeing that dream images, like waking thoughts, lack fixed reality. By working with dreams in this way, deep habits of taking appearances as solid and self as fixed are weakened, and the insight into emptiness and insubstantiality gained in basic practice is carried into subtler layers of experience.

Sky gazing, or space‑gazing, similarly builds upon formless mind‑awareness by using the open sky as a support that mirrors the inner, sky‑like nature of mind. Resting the gaze in vast, unobstructed space, with minimal visual reference points, allows thoughts and emotions to arise and dissolve against a backdrop of felt expansiveness. This strengthens the recognition of awareness as open, boundaryless, and not confined to a location such as “inside the head.” The same unfabricated clarity and emptiness discovered in basic sitting practice is thus experienced in a more explicit mode of spaciousness.

Taken together, these methods form a continuum rather than a ladder of unrelated techniques. Basic sitting practice cultivates recognition of awareness under ordinary conditions; sky gazing emphasizes that this awareness is vast and without fixed center; dream yoga demonstrates that the same awareness pervades waking, dreaming, and the dissolution of ordinary bodily reference. In each case, the “object” is not the sky, nor the dream images, nor even the stream of thoughts, but the nature of awareness itself. Advanced practices simply bring that recognition into increasingly varied and subtle conditions, fostering an unbroken, condition‑independent familiarity with mind’s empty, luminous display.