Lucid Dreams and Waking Life: Why Knowing Isn't Enough

A lucid dreamer can stand inside a dream, recognize it as a dream, and decide whether to keep dreaming or wake up. Ruben Hermsey, who has had this capacity since childhood, brought a sharp question to Swami Sarvapriyananda at the Vedanta Society of New York's Ask Swami Q&A, held on 15 June 2025: if he knows a dream is unreal while he is in it, why does the waking world still feel like the world that counts, and why does it still carry consequences? The swami's answer turns the lucid dreamer's experience inside out. Knowing that one world is false does not free you from it. What frees you is recognizing the one thing that was never a dream at all. Advaita Vedanta borrows the dream as a teaching device for the waking state, and in working through Hermsey's question the swami shows precisely where that device breaks down, which is where the real teaching lives.

What actually happens when a dream is recognized as a dream?

The swami begins by restating the ordinary picture before he complicates it. Inside a dream, he says, we have forgotten that we are sleeping. We see a world that looks like the waking world, we interact with people, and we are part of it. There is no question of whether we are dreaming. It is only after waking that we realize it was a dream. [1:30] His point is that the waking world is built the same way. The teaching is that waking life is also like that, and that you have to awaken from it into your real nature, which he identifies as pure consciousness.

This is the heart of the analogy, and it is easy to hear it as a comforting metaphor. The swami is pressing on it harder. Every dream feels complete while it lasts. The moment of recognition, which Hermsey experiences as a lucid dream, is a moment inside the dream, not an exit from it. That distinction becomes the key to the entire answer.

Why does a lucid dreamer still trust the waking world more?

Hermsey's frustration is precise. He describes the pattern: in a dream he knows it is a dream and watches it, then he wakes into the world he regards as real. "So always this happens and more and more I have become convinced the waking world is the real world," he says in the question. The swami calls this "a beautifully placed question," and says that for Hermsey the dream analogy ends up "simply reinforcing the reality of the waking world."

That is the paradox in a sentence. A tool meant to loosen our attachment to waking life has, for this particular mind, become one more confirmation that waking life is solid. The swami does not dismiss the experience. He points out that most people do not have the capacity for lucid dreaming at all, and he treats Hermsey's ability as an unusual vantage point rather than a failure of understanding. The question is what the vantage point actually shows.

Do consequences feel different in a dream than in waking life?

Hermsey's second point is that in a dream he can act without consequences, while in waking life actions carry them. The swami corrects the premise. In a dream, actions do produce consequences, but because you know it is a dream, those consequences are known to be false, so you are at ease with them.

"The difference is not the experience of consequences. The difference is in the truth and falsity of consequences." (Swami Sarvapriyananda, Ask Swami Q&A, 15 June 2025) [3:26]

Read closely, this moves the whole discussion. The waking-world consequence is not heavier in its experience. You see the same things, feel the same things, and respond with the same body. What differs is your belief about whether the consequence is real. In waking life you do not know it is false, so you are careful. The practical lesson is that freedom from consequence is not produced by changing the events. It is produced by a change in knowledge about what those events are. This is why the dream analogy matters at all: it isolates that knowledge, and makes its absence visible.

Where does the dream analogy break down?

The swami is explicit that the comparison "will not fit Advaita perfectly." The first mismatch is the transition itself. When we wake from a dream, we move from one state to another. We arrive in the waking state, we see our body on the bed, and we say we have just woken up. Dream and waking are two states we travel between.

Advaita, he says, does not work that way. [4:56] We wake from all of these states into an underlying reality. You do not wake from a dream into a waking state and then into one more non-dual state. Any state comes and goes. He even places extraordinary spiritual states, the ones the mind can reach through training and grace, in this category: they too come and go. Non-duality does not. "It is always there. It can be unrecognized, unknown or it can be recognized, known."

To anchor this, he cites a Tibetan Buddhist saying he has quoted before: "On the primordial ground of being appears the magical display of samsara and nirvana." [6:19] The ground is the same in both. If you do not know it, the display appears as samsara. If you know what it is, the same display appears as nirvana. The goal, in his framing, is to know Brahman, Turiya, or whatever name one uses for the state in which waking, dreaming, and deep sleep flow like images on a screen.

What does the movie-screen image reveal about awakening?

The swami then offers an image that is useful precisely because he tells listeners not to press it too hard. Going from dream to waking is like moving from one movie to another. That movie ends, its characters and plot vanish, and a new film starts. If you keep jumping between films, you will come to believe the longest or most continuous one is the reality and the others are dreams. But that film is still a film.

He compares the dreams to the trailers shown before the main feature in the old movie halls, the waking world to the main picture, and the screen behind them both to the self. "What is the screen? You are the screen." [7:15] The awakening he describes is not a move into another movie. "You have to awaken from this movie into yourself, not into another movie, into yourself, after which you will still play the movies." Switch everything off and you have deep sleep, which is the screen with no images on it. Awakening, in this account, is grasping that you are the screen, and it leaves the movies free to play.

This is a subtle position, and it answers Hermsey's worry directly. He wanted to know how to awaken from waking. The answer is not to find a better state than waking, nor to trust the dream more than the waking world. It is to recognize the substrate in which all states appear. Once that happens, the swami says, a person who has realized the self is always awake, in the sense that the awareness is not interrupted by the states that come and go.

Are you awake in deep sleep and in dreams too?

The swami draws out the conclusion that surprises many listeners. [8:40] In one sense, in Advaita, once you are enlightened, you are always awake. You are awake in deep sleep, awake in dreams, and awake in the waking state. Conversely, if we do not know our nature as pure consciousness, we are sleeping during deep sleep, and we are dreaming during dreams and during waking. He adds that Gaudapada speaks of two states rather than three, sleeping and dreaming, [9:10] so that once one awakens, one is always awake no matter what state comes and goes.

This is the teaching Hermsey's experience was pointing toward, even though his conclusion went the other way. His lucid dreams reveal that the dream is unreal from within. The swami asks him to take the next step: the waking world is unreal in the same way, and the thing that knows both is not a third movie. It is the screen. The practical question then is not how to move from a false state to a true one, but how to recognize, while the movies play, what they are all appearing on.

Where to go from here

If this exchange stirred something, the most useful next step is to listen to the full Ask Swami session, where Hermsey's question and the swami's answer sit inside a longer conversation. The swami's own topic index on the Vedanta Society of New York's website, at vedantany.org/by-topic, groups his lectures by subject, and the Ask Swami archive is at vedantany.org/ask-swami-qa. Notice where your own waking experience fails the test the swami sets: where you are careful because a consequence seems real, and whether that reality holds up once you ask what you are actually experiencing. Then try the image he offers. Sit with the sense of the screen that does not change as the films pass across it, and let the question of what you are awake to become more interesting than the question of which state is real.