The intention of this dialogue was to focus on a far more delicate area including the three topics: sleeping, dreaming and dying. The participants brought to discussion those “marginal states” in which our habitual, reified sense of personal identity is challenged, and in which concomitantly a host of phenomena of great significance for human existence become intensified or are made manifest. Current knowledge (in 1992) about the strictly neuroscientific correlates of sleeping and dreaming were presented. However, the multi-dimensional nature of these states required other approaches of research which were presented as well.

In particular, participants drew on the insights of many years of clinical work in the Western tradition of psychoanalysis concerning dreams and their role in neurosis and health. Further, studies on lucid dreaming were introduced, together with the relevant practical applications and technological methods that developed in the West. These presentations were complemented with a description of the unique Tibetan tradition of dream yoga and “Bardo” teachings (on the intermediate state following death and prior to one’s next rebirth). Western clinical studies on so-called near-death states were discussed in connection with the above Tibetan teachings.