Where a Dream is the Price of Admission

In traditions where the importance of dreaming is understood, the right dream may be your price of admission to the good stuff.

It is common in Tibetan tradition for spiritual teachers to ask students to bring them a dream to determine if they are ready to receive important teachings. A student without a dream is regarded as blocked and possibly unclean. He is required to undergo purification and perform practices to reopen his connection with spiritual allies. He is not allowed to continue his studies until he can produce the right dream.
    Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche gives a personal example, from the time of his training with Lopon Rinpoche, in his book Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. The story is doubly interesting because it involves long-range dream precognition. At 13, as a student,Tenzin dreamed he was handing out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A written on them to people boarding a bus.       He brought this dream to his teacher, who did not comment, but allowed him to proceed to a further level of instruction. Fifteen years later, waking events caught up with the dream. Invited to travel to the West for the first time, Tenzin found himself assigned to hand out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A on them to people boarding a bus. These were to be used in a meditation exercise.[1]
    When the French ethnographer Jean-Guy Goulet told the Guajiro (a South American people also known as the Wayuu) that he wanted to live with them and study them, they replied that they would only allow him to live with them if he “knew how to dream”. [2]
    In 1994, a dream proved to be my admission ticket to the Dreaming of an Aboriginal people in my native Australia. I dreamed I was carried back to Australia by a sea eagle, to a reunion with my mother, and then guided into the hinterland of south Queensland, to the banks of a muddy creek. Something immense was thrashing and rising from the waters. Nearby were Aborigines painted for ceremony. An elder told me, "This is the first of all creatures. This is the beginning of our world."
    When my mother died suddenly, three months later, I was grateful that the dream had prepared me for this event, through our loving exchange in the dream itself, and by how it inspired me to reach out to her and heal some misunderstandings. I flew back to my native country. After the funeral, I went "walkabout" for a few days, and found myself at an Aboriginal housing co-op in a dusty town in the hinterland called Beaudesert. When I started talking about dreams, I was told I needed to talk to Frank. Who was Frank? "Oh, he's our spirit man." Frank's place proved to be three days bush walk away, so this lead seemed like a non-starter.
    But Frank walked in as I was getting ready to go; shamans are tricky. He invited me down to the pub to talk. He sipped orange juice and sniffed me, literally, checking if I was another white fella trying to rip off his people yet again. Then I told him the dream. His manner changed radically. He sat very still, his eyes blazing like fire opals.
   "Oh, I guess you've come to me for a reason, mate. You've just told me the start of the creation story of my people, the Mununjalli, as it is told to made men. That thing you saw in the water was the bull eel. We say it is the first of all creatures."
    Yet a dream had taken me deep inside the Dreaming of an ancient and indigenous people. Because of my dream, Frank volunteered to show me the place of the Bull Eel Dreaming. Skirting quicksand and snakes, after many hours I found myself on the bank of the muddy creek from my dream. No bull eel in evidence that day, which was fine with me.[3]

 References

1. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Boston: Snow Lion, 1998) pp. 12-13.
2. Jean-Guy Goulet, “Dreams and Visions in Other Lifeworlds” in David E. Young and Goulet (eds) Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters (Peterborough, Ontario; Broadview Press, 1994). p. 22.
3. The full story is in my book Conscious Dreaming. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996).

Tendrels of Dreaming: Shamanic Dreamers and Tibetan Buddhists

 

There is a fascinating ambivalence about dreams and dreaming in Buddhist tradition. On the one hand, Buddhism begins with a conception dream of the Buddha’s mother, Queen Maya, in which a numinous white elephant enters her body and is then born through her. On the other hand, ordinary dreams are often dismissed as the product of confusion and the work of the “three poisons” of desire, hatred and fear.

The dreamworld is a realm of illusion – but so is everything in the experience of a human who has not attained spiritual liberation. The great Tibetan lama Milarepa counsels his disciples that dreams are of no importance – and then instructs them to pay close attention to their dreams and tell them to him in the morning; his favorite pupil, Gambopa, brings a powerful prophetic dream that previews the spread of Buddhism in Tibet.

In Tibet, the Buddhist ambivalence about dreams is accompanied by a dynamic process of conflict and engagement over many centuries with indigenous shamans known as “heroes” and “invokers”. Dreaming is a basic mode of shamanic operations, a means of travel by which shamans interact with the powers of the deeper world and guide souls of the living and the dead. As mediators for the community, shamans meet and negotiate with the conscious, spiritual aspects of all life, including the Earth itself. By contrast, the first Buddhist rulers of Tibet planted twelve pagodas at strategic points on the body of the land, to “nail” and hold in subjugation the Earth Mother they characterized as a “demoness”.

In an excellent and very readable scholarly study, Angela Sumegi explores the creative tension between Tibetan Buddhism and shamanic dreaming. In Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism, Sumegi demonstrates how, while retaining its philosophy of transcendence, Buddhism in Tibet has adopted many of the characteristic techniques of shamanic dreamers, healers and diviners. She explains that she was drawn to this theme by records of the highly shamanic visionary experiences of the Fifth Dalai Lama who once, during a serious illness, invoked a fierce deity who projected a scorpion inside his body that proceeded to devour his organs until he seemed to burst into flame; his illness then passed.

I interviewed Angela Sumegi on my “Way of the Dreamer” radio show in 2010, when her book came out. There was a little magic in play that day. I rose on the morning of the interview with two fragments from the hypnopompic zone, the intermediate state between sleep and full waking. In a vivid dream scene, I watched Central Asian riders gallop across a great plain where everything was verdant green. Above them, thunderheads came rolling across the sky. When I looked at the lightning, I suddenly saw it as the riders did – as a fiery god, resplendent in red garments, hurling thunderbolts as he rode the sky on a great charger.

When the scene receded, a word came into my mind with quiet insistence: Kalachakra.

I thought these scraps from my dreamlife might be a rehearsal for my interview. Prior to recording the radio show, I took Angela’s book along to a conference at a medical center, where I was kept waiting for much longer than expected. This gave me a chance to re-read sections of her book, including a discussion of the concept of tendrel to which I’ll turn in a moment. The person who cleared the logjam at the doctors’ office was a very efficient and pleasant Jamaican. His origin interested me, because I had noticed that Angela Sumegi was born in Jamaica, though she migrated to Canada many years ago and now taught at Carleton University in Ottawa. I had not met anyone from Jamaica for many years. Now, in the space of a few minutes, I was going from one Jamaican to another.

This seemed like a meaningful coincidence. It also felt auspicious, in relation to the interview, since the first Jamaican had played such a helpful role. Might this be an example of the workings of what Tibetan Buddhists call tendrel?

I put the question to Angela Sumegi on the air. She reminded me that the word tendrel is a contraction of a longer phrase referring to the Buddhist doctrine of “dependent origination”, according to which all phenomena arise “dependent on causes and conditions”. It is also used to mean “sign” or “omen”. So the word applies both to the practice of reading signs in coincidence, natural phenomena, divination kits and dreams - and to a deep philosophy of hidden causes. Tibetan paintings show the twelvefold manifestation of the principle of dependent origination around the Wheel of Life: old age and death arise from birth, etc., etc. As Sumegi explains in her book: “The principle that all phenomena arise interconnectedly and interdependently applies without exception to every existent, linking them throughout time and space; what appears to be a random or chance occurrence can be analyzed in terms of its connections.”

We agreed that my Jamaican sequence might be an example of tendrel at work in the divinatory sense of an omen that felt promising. It also hinted at hidden patterns of causation and connection.

We were already deep into the practice of dreaming. In dreaming cultures, dreams are not isolated from “signs” in the way of Western dream analysis. You read signs in dreams; you also look for dreamlike symbols in the midst of everyday life.

I told Angela the fragments from my dreams and asked her what the Tibetan mind would make of these. She went to the right place (from my point of view) immediately, by telling me that Tibetans would want to know my feelings around the dreams. I am firmly convinced that the first thing we need to know about a dream is how the dreamer felt about it, on first waking. My feelings around the dream scene of the horseman on the verdant plain were of excitement and driving energy, which Angela proceeded to confirm in commenting on the positive energy she felt in the horses and the lush green of the landscape.

What about that word, Kalachakra?

“It’s the great Wheel of Time,” Angela explained, “and the most complex and profound of the approaches to Tantra. It is also the name of a ritual His Holiness the Dalai Lama conducts frequently.”

As we discussed the Kalachakra ceremony, we noticed that it features dreaming. Monks hand out sheaves of kusha grass – long blades to place under the mattress, shorter ones to tuck under the pillow. Grass to dream on, and to invoke only good dream experiences.

Angela suggested that the way the word “Kalachakra” had come to me might be an example of what Tibetan Buddhists call a dream of “permission”: an invitation to proceed to a deeper connection with a practice or a deity.

By now, I was enjoying our conversation hugely. I knew already the depth of Angela’s research, including the years she has spent in India studying with Tibetan religious communities and learning the languages. She now confirmed her credentials in the way that dreamers instantly recognize, by sharing a night vision from her childhood in Jamaica in which a huge figure with three eyes and fearsome weapons entered her space. She was able to identify this entity many years later, as she embarked on Tibetan studies and first saw images of the deity known as Mahakala (the “Great Black One”).

Picture: 12th century Tibetan Mahakala in Rubin Museum of Art

News from Tibet: if dreams are illusions, so is life, so dream more!

I am always astonished when Westerners drawn to Buddhism tell me that in what they know of that tradition, dreams are regarded as illusions from an unclear mind, for which the Rx is to cleanse and purify the mind, in order to dream no more. 

Serinity Young, a leading scholar of Buddhist dreamways, observes in Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, and Practice, “without dreams and dreaming there would be no Buddhism”, since it was his mother’s dream of the six-tusked white elephant that announced both his coming and his nature. Especially in Tibetan Buddhism, dream yoga is a practice for raising and focusing consciousness, and a training ground for death and the afterlife journey.

There is a most instructive episode in the life of the great Tibetan spiritual teacher Milarepa (1040-1123), who has been described as “the greatest poet-saint” in Buddhist tradition.  He instructed his disciples to report their dreams. “Remember your dreams tonight and report to me tomorrow. I will then interpret them for you.”  He cautioned his followers to cleanse their minds of “habitual thoughts” that would carry over into the dream space and confine them to deceptive and illusory experiences.

In the morning, he asked his disciples to report their dreams. The most interesting narrative came from Gambopa, Milarepa interpreted Gambopa’s a rich and complex dream, explaining that it foreshadowed Gambopa’s future role as a great teacher and his spiritual heir.

Despite this revelation, Milarepa cautioned his followers not to assign excessive importance to dreams, since dreams partake  of “the illusory nature of all beings. Yet he applauded Gambopa for dreaming well: “Your dreams were marvelous, wondrous omens foretelling things to come.”

Milarepa delighted in recounting his own numinous dreams portending the growth of his lineage. “Last night I dreamed that an eagle flew from here to Weu and alighted on the top of a precious gem. Then many geese flocked around it…They disperse in different directions, each goose again gathering about five hundred more companions.”

His essential message was that dreams may be illusions, but probably less so than ordinary life – so go dream some more! 

Milarepa quotations are from Garma C.C. Chang,  The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa: The Life-Story and Teaching of the Greatest Poet-Saint Ever to Appear in the History of Buddhism (Boston: Shambhala, 1977)

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image: Milarepa

Tibet; 18th century
Ground Mineral Pigment on Cotton Rubin Museum of Art
Gift of Shelley and Donald Rubin)

 

When dreams are passports

In traditions where the importance of dreaming is understood, the right dream may be your price of admission to the good stuff.
   It is common in Tibetan tradition for spiritual teachers to ask students to bring them a dream to determine if they are ready to receive important teachings. A student without a dream is regarded as blocked and possibly unclean. He is required to undergo purification and perform practices to reopen his connection with spiritual allies. He is not allowed to continue his studies until he can produce the right dream.
    Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche gives a personal example, from the time of his training with Lopon Rinpoche, in his book Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. The story is doubly interesting because it involves long-range dream precognition. At 13, as a student,Tenzin dreamed he was handing out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A written on them to people boarding a bus.  He brought this dream to his teacher, who did not comment, but allowed him to proceed to a further level of instruction. Fifteen years later, waking events caught up with the dream. Invited to travel to the West for the first time, Tenzin found himself assigned to hand out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A on them to people boarding a bus. These were to be used in a meditation exercise.
    I remember an occasion when a dream proved to be my admission ticket to the Dreaming of an Aboriginal people in my native Australia. I dreamed I was carried back to Australia by a sea eagle, to a reunion with my mother, and then guided into the hinterland of south Queensland, to the banks of a muddy creek. Something immense was thrashing and rising from the waters. Nearby were Aborigines painted for ceremony. An elder told me, “This is the first of all creatures. This is the beginning of our world.”
    When my mother died suddenly, three months later, I was grateful that the dream had prepared me for this event, through our loving exchange in the dream itself, and by how it inspired me to reach out to her and heal some misunderstandings. I flew back to my native country. After the funeral, I went “walkabout” for a few days, and found myself at an Aboriginal housing co-op in a dusty town in the hinterland called Beaudesert. When I started talking about dreams, I was told I needed to talk to Frank. Who was Frank? “Oh, he’s our spirit man.” Frank’s place proved to be three days bush walk away, so this lead seemed like a non-starter.
    But Frank walked in as I was getting ready to go; shamans are tricky. He invited me down to the pub to talk. He sipped orange juice and sniffed me, literally, checking if I was another white fella trying to rip off his people yet again. Then I told him the dream. His manner changed radically. He sat very still, his eyes blazing like fire opals.
   ”Oh, I guess you’ve come to me for a reason, mate. You’ve just told me the start of the creation story of my people, the Mununjali, as it is told to made men. That thing you saw in the water was the bull eel. We say it is the first of all creatures.”
    Not for the first, or the last, time in my life, it seemed that a dream had taken me deep inside the Dreaming of a Native people. Because of my dream, Frank volunteered to show me the place of the Bull Eel Dreaming. Skirting quicksand and snakes, after many hours I found myself on the bank of the muddy creek from my dream. No bull eel in evidence that day, which was fine with me.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Making Songlines" by Robert Moss