It arrived as a form of address. I was lucid, in that state where you know you are dreaming and can look around on purpose, and a phrase was spoken to me, then spoken again. Bardo Dao. A title rather than a name, and a serious one, the way surgeon or ferryman is serious: something you are because of what you do.
The dream was made of transitions. I moved between bodies. I kept passing mirrors, and the mirrors mattered: each one a checkpoint where the face had changed again and something underneath had not. There were figures, and they treated the phrase with a reverence that unsettled me. Some appeared to recognise that I was the one it belonged to, and to struggle with that recognition. It read less like disbelief than like shock, the collapse of some long-held expectation about who the holder of that title would turn out to be. There were passages that felt like tests. No one handed me the role or announced it; it seemed already demonstrated, by conduct, in how I moved through not-knowing, through changing form, through other people. The title carried weight, but the weight was closer to a job than to status. Power came bundled with responsibility, and with the expectation of harder work ahead.
Near the end I was in another body, in front of another mirror, and I did the most ordinary thing a person can do: I tried to look it up. I went to find that world’s internet and search for what Bardo Dao meant. Before any answer arrived, someone came and stood behind me. A presence, unmistakably loving, with a hand at my upper back and neck. The sensation moved through me in waves, and the waves pulled me up and out, back toward waking. I was carried more than woken.
So what do you do with that.
This takes the dream seriously without taking it literally. I am not claiming a rank, a past life, a lineage, or contact with anybody. What interests me is narrower and stranger: why a sleeping mind built a phrase whose two halves so exactly describe the thing it was showing me, and what the real traditions behind those halves already say about that territory.
A phrase that should not quite exist
There is no Bardo Dao. Searched as a spiritual term, the exact phrase returns nothing. No tradition, no primary text, no lineage, no teaching, no scholarship. It surfaces only as unrelated personal names and, absurdly, as two separate combat styles in an online martial-arts game. The nearest genuine titles are real Tibetan Buddhist books, Lama Lodö Rinpoche’s Bardo Teachings: The Way of Death and Rebirth and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche’s The Bardo Guidebook, and neither fuses bardo with Dao.
The honest form of that claim is “no established usage found.” Absence in English-language sources is not proof of non-existence, and private or non-indexed uses cannot be ruled out. But it settles the thing that matters: the phrase cannot borrow authority from a tradition, because no tradition is holding it.
Which makes the interesting question not is it real but why does it fit so well.
What bardo actually means
Bardo is Tibetan, written བར་དོ་, bar do: bar, “interval” or “between,” and do, “two.” Literally, between two. Its Sanskrit ancestor is antarābhava, “an existence between.” Used plainly it names the intermediate state between one life and the next.
Three things keep this honest. First, the concept was contested. Whether an intermediate state existed at all was a live dispute in early Buddhism; schools such as the Sarvāstivāda accepted it, the Theravāda and others rejected it. The bardo is not a pan-Buddhist given; it is school-specific, later elaborated in Tibetan tantra into a very precise technology of dying.
Second, the tradition counts six bardos: of this life, of dream, of meditation, of dying, of dharmatā (the luminosity of true nature), and of becoming. Ordinary waking life is itself a bardo. So is dreaming. A dream about moving consciously through transitional states is therefore not merely borrowing bardo vocabulary; it lands inside a category the tradition already has a name for.
Third, the heart of the Bardo Thödol, the “Liberation Through Hearing” revealed as terma by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century, is recognition. The visions that arise are projections of one’s own mind; to recognise them as such is to be freed, and to flee them in fear is to be driven onward. Recognition is the operative verb throughout.
The popular Western “bardo” (any limbo, any in-between) is a real but loosened descendant of this, refracted through Evans-Wentz’s Theosophy-inflected 1927 edition, Jung’s commentary, the 1960s psychedelic reading, and Sogyal Rinpoche’s bestseller. Fremantle and Trungpa did extend the word to mean any gap, even the one between two thoughts, “the immediate experience of nowness.” That extension is a teaching move, though, not evidence the tradition was ever vague.
What Dao actually means
Dào (道) is “way,” “path,” “road,” “method,” and also “to speak,” “to guide.” Concretely it is the road you walk; philosophically it is the self-generating course of things. Its most famous line, the opening of the Daodejing, dào kě dào, fēi cháng dào, is close to untranslatable because the middle dào is a verb: the way that can be spoken is not the constant way.
The best guard against sentimentalising this into “cosmic energy” is Roger Ames and David Hall’s rendering of dào as way-making: an interconnected, dynamic process of transformation rather than a static entity or a fixed route. Dao is verb-shaped.
In the Zhuangzi that becomes wùhuà, the “transformation of things.” The butterfly dream, Zhuang Zhou unable to say whether he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he is a man, is the classic statement of how provisional any single identity is across states. The practices match: xīnzhāi, the “fasting of the mind” (“the Way gathers in emptiness alone”), and zuòwàng, “sitting in forgetting,” dropping away limbs and intellect until one is “one with the Great Thoroughfare.” An empty, mirror-like responsiveness to cultivate, not a doctrine to recite.
Put the halves together and you get something like the way of the in-between, or a practice of conscious passage through transitional states. Which is, almost word for word, what the dream was doing.
The seduction of synthesis
Bardo and Dao slide together so smoothly that the compound feels discovered rather than invented. That smoothness is the trap, and I want to name it before it gets me.
Blending distinct Asian traditions into one undifferentiated “mystical East” is a well-documented Western habit, running from Theosophy through the Evans-Wentz edition into New Age publishing; Donald Lopez’s Prisoners of Shangri-La is the standard account of how Tibetan Buddhism in particular was remade in the Western imagination. And the systems really are different. The bardo sits inside anātman (no-self) plus karma and rebirth, aimed at liberation from saṃsāra; even the mind-continuum crossing the bardo is explicitly not a permanent soul, which rules out the tidy reading of “the same me wearing different bodies.” Daoism has no rebirth architecture of that kind, and aims at alignment with the way rather than escape from a cycle. The Bardo Thödol is a ritual technology with maps and days and instructions; classical Daoism is anti-systematic and suspicious of exactly that.
A phrase can be beautiful, coherent, and historically groundless all at once. Saying both is the price of saying either.
Where they genuinely rhyme
And yet the resonance is not merely verbal, which is what keeps this interesting rather than empty. Both traditions make transition central rather than incidental: the bardo as the moment of maximum opportunity, transformation as the basic texture of the Daoist world. Both relativise fixed identity: the bardo by teaching that appearances are mind, the Zhuangzi by refusing to privilege waking over dreaming or life over death. Both prize awareness inside flux: the bardo’s recognition of luminosity, the Daoist clear-mirror mind. And both use dreaming as a laboratory: the bardo of dream is a formal category, and Daoism’s most famous passage is a dream of transformation.
Two traditions that never coordinated their stories, agreeing that a dissolving identity, consciously met, is a doorway rather than a disaster. That is the kind of agreement worth trusting: convergence rather than any single authority.
Mirrors, bodies, and recognition
Dream research records the mirrors and the body-swaps directly. Antti Revonsuo cites a dreamer who looked into a mirror and had become “a blond, strongly built woman,” and the wider work on self-representation and autoscopy finds the dream body-image characteristically unstable. The sleeping brain renegotiates its own body-schema as a matter of course. So a changed face in the mirror is something the system does on its own. Whatever the dream was doing with those mirrors, it was working with standard equipment. (The brain region most implicated in that bodily self-processing, the temporoparietal junction, is also where the most recent lucid-dreaming EEG work locates altered activity, which is suggestive without being more than that.)
But mechanism is not meaning, and the dream was asking a real question: what stays recognisable when the appearance changes?
Two traditions answer in nearly the same voice. Zhuangzi’s transformation of things says the essential “I” cannot be carried across phases by clinging to the features of one form. Derek Parfit, arguing from teletransporter and split-brain cases, concludes that personal identity “is not what matters”; what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, and identity itself is a matter of degree.
The dream staged precisely that. The figures recognised me by conduct, not by my face, which kept changing. That is a Parfitian criterion and a Daoist one at once: continuity as a matter of how one behaves, not what one looks like. It is also the only criterion that would still work in a world where the body is not stable, which is the world the dream had built.
A title that is a job, not a rank
If Bardo Dao is a title, the dream was careful about what kind. It was acknowledged rather than conferred, recognised for conduct already demonstrated, and bundled with the expectation of harder work.
That is the grammar of the rite of passage. Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner describe the liminal phase in which the initiate is “no longer classified and not yet classified,” betwixt and between, stripped of the old status, not yet granted the new. Turner treated that middle as one of the most creative and sacred spaces in social life. Read that way, the title names a task: the responsibility of behaving well precisely when structure has dissolved.
The dream also handed me the exact material that ruins people. To take Bardo Dao as election, a cosmic promotion, a chosen-one status, is what Jung called inflation: the ego over-identifying with an archetype. Marie-Louise von Franz warned that the Self’s dark side can set people spinning megalomanically, convinced they have grasped the great secrets.
I keep turning one detail over: the figures held reverence and disbelief together, some visibly struggling to accept that the person in front of them could be the one the title belonged to. At the time it felt like being doubted. Reading it back, it looks more like a built-in antidote: even inside the dream, the title was not simply swallowed. The ordinariness of the holder was part of the structure, not an insult to it. A dream that wanted to inflate me would not have written that in.
The presence that pulled me back
The last movement is the one I care about most, and it is also the best-documented.
The “sensed presence” is a real, studied phenomenon. J. Allan Cheyne’s three-factor analysis of sleep-paralysis experience identifies an “Intruder” factor “consisting of sensed presence, fear, and auditory and visual hallucinations,” which he elsewhere calls “both numinous and ominous”; later work places tactile cues, the sense of being touched, inside the same complex. Olaf Blanke’s team went further and induced a feeling of a presence in the lab through robot-controlled sensorimotor conflict, showing that the sensation of someone nearby when nobody is can be manufactured out of the brain’s own body-processing. A caution in the other direction: Michael Persinger’s claim that weak magnetic fields reliably evoke a sensed presence failed independent double-blind replication by Granqvist and colleagues, who traced the reports to suggestibility. Neither mystify the presence nor over-trust a tidy neural switch for it.
So I know the mechanism exists. I also know two things about this presence resist the standard script. It arrived through touch, then full-body waves, the tactile and vestibular registers the literature describes. And it was loving. The sleep-paralysis literature overwhelmingly foregrounds fear; the benign, tender version is the rarer detail, and here it was the decisive one.
A cause is not a debunking; explaining the mechanism of an experience of love does not refute the love. What the dream insisted on was the valence: this threshold was crossed under the sign of care, not dread.
And the ordering was almost comic. I went looking for a definition on an in-dream internet that did not have one. The answer that came instead was a hand on my back.
An ethics of the in-between
Strip away the supernatural readings the dream seems to offer and something more useful is left standing. Every well-evidenced strand (Turner’s liminality, the bardo-of-this-life teaching, Daoist responsiveness, Parfit’s continuity-not-identity) converges on one livable idea. Taken not as a rank but as a discipline, Bardo Dao can be defined like this:
The practice of remaining conscious, responsive, and humane while a former identity has dissolved and a new one has not yet formed.
That is an ethics, not a metaphysics, and it applies exactly where people actually live: grief, divorce, migration, illness, conversion, the loss of a job or a role or a faith, the long middle months of remaking yourself. Its virtues are the ones the traditions already name. Recognition without panic; responsiveness rather than forcing; continuity of conduct rather than clinging to appearance; and care for others crossing the same thresholds, which is the honest, non-supernatural residue of the psychopomp: someone who helps another across.
Held that way, the title becomes portable and humble: this is how one behaves in the between, not I am something.
It also sits very close to two things already on this site. The twelfth house is the house of dissolving, the art of putting down. And the descent nobody calls spiritual argues that the hard move is not rising out of a life but coming back down into one and staying. My dream ended by pulling me back into a body, through love. I think that is a coincidence not in the mystical sense but in the more interesting one: separate routes arriving at the same instruction.
What I think this was
The name is invented. I am fairly sure of that. What I am less willing to throw away is the shape, because the shape turned out to be accurate. A phrase built in sleep out of two borrowed words described, with unreasonable precision, a territory that Tibetan Buddhism, classical Daoism, anthropology, philosophy of identity, and sleep science have each mapped independently.
So the most defensible reading is also the least dramatic, and it is still worth something: not a discovered doctrine, but a well-made instruction. Stay awake. Stay kind. Keep faith with who you have been by how you act, not by what you look like. And help other people across.
Call it Bardo Dao if you like. The name is mine and it is made up. The practice isn’t.
References
Primary texts and translations
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo, trans. Francesca Fremantle & Chögyam Trungpa (Shambhala) — the six bardos and the recognition teaching. On the text’s history, see Bardo Thödol. Also The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation, trans. Gyurme Dorje, ed. Graham Coleman (Penguin, 2005).
Zhuangzi, trans. Burton Watson (Columbia UP) and Brook Ziporyn (Hackett, 2009) — the butterfly dream, wùhuà, xīnzhāi, zuòwàng.
Laozi, Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation, trans. Roger T. Ames & David L. Hall (Ballantine, 2003) — the “way-making” rendering.
Buddhism and Daoism
Francesca Fremantle, Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Shambhala, 2001) — the development of the bardo concept and the enumeration of the six.
Donald S. Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (University of Chicago Press, 1998) — how Western reception reshaped the tradition; the ground for “the seduction of synthesis.”
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Snow Lion, 1998) — dream yoga as rehearsal for the bardo of death.
Anthropology
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Cornell UP, 1967), ch. “Betwixt and Between” — liminality, “no longer classified and not yet classified.” Building on Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909).
Philosophy of identity
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford UP, 1984) — psychological continuity, and “identity is not what matters.” Overview: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Personal Identity”.
Sleep and consciousness science
J. A. Cheyne, S. D. Rueffer & I. R. Newby-Clark, “Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations during Sleep Paralysis,” Consciousness and Cognition 8(3):319–337 (1999). doi:10.1006/ccog.1999.0404
J. A. Cheyne, “The Ominous Numinous: Sensed Presence and ‘Other’ Hallucinations,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7):133–150 (2001).
J. A. Cheyne & T. A. Girard, “Paranoid delusions and threatening hallucinations,” Consciousness and Cognition 16(4):959–974 (2007). doi:10.1016/j.concog.2007.01.002
O. Blanke et al., “Neurological and Robot-Controlled Induction of an Apparition,” Current Biology 24(22):2681–2686 (2014). doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.049
P. Granqvist, M. Fredrikson, P. Unge et al., “Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields,” Neuroscience Letters 379(1):1–6 (2005). doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2004.10.057
M. Raduga, O. Kuyava & N. Sevcenko, “Is there a relation among REM sleep dissociated phenomena, like lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences, and false awakening?”, Medical Hypotheses 144:110169 (2020). doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2020.110169
G. Mainieri, J.-B. Maranci, P. Champetier et al., “Are sleep paralysis and false awakenings different from REM sleep and from lucid REM sleep? A spectral EEG analysis,” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 17(4):719–727 (2021).
“Body Schema Self-Awareness and Related Dream Content Modifications in Amputees Due to Cancer,” Brain Sciences 11(12):1625 (2021). doi:10.3390/brainsci11121625
Depth psychology
C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz on individuation, the Self, and the danger of inflation.
One figure deliberately not claimed. Commonly repeated prevalence numbers for tactile hypnopompic hallucinations (often given as 25–44%) could not be traced to a named primary study, so no figure is asserted above.