Materializing a dream, embodying a dream lover

 

The literature of India contains many versions of the story of dream lovers who find each other in waking reality, sometimes after a long and difficult quest. In a story in the twelfth century Kathasaritsagara (Ocean of the Stream of Story) King Vikramaditya sees in a dream girl he does not know, in an unknown country, and falls in love with her. As he embraces her, his pleasure is interrupted by the cry of a night watchman. The same night, in a distant land, Princess Malayavati – who had a horror of sex and avoided men – dreamed she had found the perfect lover and was lying with him on the connubial couch when they were interrupted by her chambermaid. After many plot twists, the dream lovers meet, recognize each other, and are united in their physical bodies as they had been in their dream bodies.
      The broader theme, pf materializing a dream, is also central to Indian accounts of dreaming. Roger Caillois observed that “India, which may well be considered the center of asceticism and moral discipline, has invested the dream with other powers again. The recluse, carried away by his meditation, gives a material existence to the images of his dreams, if he can only succeed in sustaining them with sufficient intensity. The dream then becomes lucid, deliberate and creative it becomes, in fact, a consciously willed effort that will be realized provided only that it is pursued sufficiently long and with sufficient vigor.”  [1]
    The biography of the famous poet Tulsidas, who composed an epic devoted to Hanuman the monkey god demonstrates the power and the process of this kind of yogic dreaming, . A tyrant imprisoned the poet in a stone tower. “The poet set himself to dream, to meditate, to dream again, to put to work all the resources of a mind straining to empty himself of all distracting content. Then from the dream arose Hanuman and his army of apes who overran then kingdom, seized the tower, and set the poet free.”

 

1. Roger Caillois, “Logical and Philosophical Problems of the Dream” in G.E. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois (eds) The Dream and Himan Societies (Berkeley; University of California Pres, 1966)