Real and Really Real

 

There is a yawning gap in understanding between mainstream Western psychology and neuroscience and the oldest and continuing indigenous understanding of what goes on in dreams. It is understood in every indigenous tradition I have heard about - and no doubt by all our ancestors if we go back far enough - that the dream world is a real world. Compare the view of the yogis, and you look in a mirror: for those who practice the yoga of illusory forms, waking life and dream life are equally illusory; for dreaming cultures, they are both real. 

Some dreaming cultures say more. The Seneca Iroquois say that the dream world is the real world. An Aboriginal people of the Western Desert say that the dream world is “really real”.

If you know that the dream world is a real-life world, as opposed to a rummage sale in the basement of the personal subconscious or a chemical wash in the brain, then you know that what happens in dream time does not stay in dream time. There are consequences. You bear responsibility for what you do and do not do. You are in a field of interaction with other folks, some alive in both worlds, some dead in one. You encounter beings other- than-human. 

You may walk with gods of the upper air, you may fly as a swan, you may prune rose bushes in the garden of the home you will inhabit in your next life. You may eat a peach in an orchard of tigers, you may find the girl with apple blossom in her hair,  you may study with a master who died on Earth millennia ago or has yet to be seen down there.

Illustration: Fig Tree on Magic Island. RM with NightCafe

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)