I had a dream!
Dreaming is the product of the monkey mind, the rattling and noise of a frenetic animal's inner world even during deepest sleep. Give its products no thought, for if you are deluded in waking time, imagine how much worse it is in sleep, when mindfulness, awareness and perception are dormant! The guard dogs are sluggish during the heat of the day, but at night, they slumber in oblivion.
Dreams are noise.
Occasionally however, one visits, makes a good point. It's a message, a statement in symbolic form of a problem. The symbols, situations and characters are so developed, so interrelated to one another that the effort to weave them into a vivid tapestry requires our attention.
The ants in your yard build their homes as mounds, at least in my part of the world. If one day, you spy a ziggurat in miniature in the front yard and see thousands of ants working industriously to complete it, then there is something more here than the mindless workings of nature. For Jung, these special dreams are built not from stone, but from symbols and models crafted in the forge of biological evolution. We piece them together as we would a puzzle because the pattern – the message – is there, but the letters are all scrambled.
Our default setting as moderns is to be deeply literate. Each of us is dependent on reading and verbalizing to survive in day-to-day life, even if we hate reading, or find its demands a harsh discipline alien to our monkey mind. This literacy infects our lives now since in the modern age, in the modern West, everything related to techne is built on the foundation of letters and digits. The symbols of language are of human convention, the constructs of waking intention. Maybe one can claim these are derivatives of unconscious processes, but this is to make a very big stretch.
Our poignant dreams have a language, a grammar all their own which escape the literate person. They can also be given a value they really don't deserve.
For Theravada and the early works sourced from the historical Buddha, dreaming is not a thing. They are not given any weight and if mentioned, are listed along with fortune telling and other delusional activities of mortals. For good reason.
Other lineages understand them as a laboratory for seeing how the mind fabricates reality. Every dream you dream comes from you. It is wholly and completely the product of khandas, of impermanent objects which are phenomenal, illusional, the most fleeting of all things. You are made up of aggregates – heaps of volitional residue and habits – and so naturally your dreams are made of the same wispy material. More so, which is why we speak of "dream-like" states. To give them a higher respect than they deserve is problematic since they can easily become objects of craving and desire. Or fear and anxiety.
A recent dream I had was for me helpful, but it required remembering it, which wasn't difficult since it had the symbolic quality that made it stand out. I'm not going to relate it here since the message was for me and me alone. I can say at a high level, the dream addressed my laxity in practice and, interpreted through the lens of dhamma, was citta's way of saying I was drifting on a plateau, out of gas without any sense of urgency. Just getting by, trying to make my prison cell in samsara a bit tidier, a bit more comfy. This is something that happens with practitioners, where they make great progress and get stuck. I've been stuck for a while now, camped out at the base of the mountain I was supposed to climb, drinking coffee from a tin can heated over a campfire, and looking out at the view, admiring the ascent so far...
"Oooooh, that's a nice sunrise over that hill..."
The dream was a stark reminder of my real situation, a vivid critique of my laziness, inertia, even despondency. Feeling stuck can last days, weeks, years. It becomes a Real Thing because it seems permanent. It's a giant boulder blocking the path, but it isn't real. Stuck is just another fabrication, a story about me, myself and I. There is no one who is stuck, there is no deity granted oversight of the Stuck portfolio. Like everything, stuck is a mental state requiring a dhamma antidote made up of equanimity and energy.
I used AI to work the dream symbolism, having to reinterpret the dream significantly for the AI. What AI gives you is erroneous, or misses the mark maybe in key points because it is operating with a non-individualized context. You go back and forth, providing your own take and it will work with you. Is this creepy? Probably at first, but I asked for specific texts from the Nikayas to understand the issues presented by the dream. Is this a kind of fortune telling? It could be seen that way, maybe by a more experienced practitioner or someone ordained.
We've never had the ability to contextualize a dream however with technology, telling a non-human instrument that passes the Turing test, that we have this thesis about its meaning while asking for feedback. The danger here is that the process of dream interpretation can lead to I-making, my-making. We believe the luminous, numinous, woo-minious dream is worthy of value. Maybe it comes from the heavens, from a deity, to help us along the path. In the case of AI, it's tempting to think of it as providing spiritual direction. We catch ourselves, pull back and start thinking, "Oh no, it's starting to take over!"
I tend to be very pragmatic, not all that woo-woo. Sometimes a clear warning delivered in a dream is just that – a clear warning. I could sit around craving dreams because they make me feel special, singled out for special messages. That hasn't been the effect of this incident and it won't be in the future. Maybe I have no other luminous dreams ever. You, dear reader, may get a dream that stands out. It's not a special message – it's a warning, a corrective, the heart/mind telling you that something is out of whack in your life. From this Jungian perspective, dreams are a natural activity, just like dying and being reborn. Meaning, death and rebirth are nature at work, helping. In Buddhism, there is no nature/supernature distinction, so the non-mundane experiences of samsaric existence are still compounded, created, not real. They are not me, they are not mine.
If a practitioner were to experience a flood of memories from past lives – recall – would we look upon that as superior to the one who is taking a dream as a corrective warning about trying to make nice with samsara? To be subjective means other people are only going to relate to your experience up to a certain point. Go too far, you stop getting invites to normal social gatherings and will end up instead flying to Las Vegas for "gatherings" of more relatable people.
The NDE who meets Jesus, the Buddha and Lao-tzu on the other side will have had a profound experience. But what you will never hear from the experiencer:
It was another sankhara, a fabrication, my trip to the other side. Citta is wild ain't it?
This is one of those facts about the Path that instills confidence in me. I don't have any doubts about it, its truth or where it leads.
The NDE, the heightened dreamer, the alien contactee, the channeler: these folks can easily get stuck in the experience, never question its permanence, its dukkha, its entangling. I am not saying there aren't practitioners who have had an NDE, or encountered a gray alien, and then said, "Yeah, it was another fabrication and it was disappointing in this respect..." They don't show up on my radar because their framing of it would throw cold water everywhere. "OH! So you admit it was a fabrication!" It would be spitting in the eyes of the pro and con crowds alike.
The whole spiritual experiencer industrial would collapse if people said this. It's not food for I-making, this nonsense about NDE being an elaborate product of mind.
Seasoned meditators have the same challenge: You can get bamboozled by certain experiences which stem from it, thinking these mean you are on the cusp of a great breakthrough. You could be. The Buddha reminds us that we should have confidence in our efforts, that the Path delivers tangible fruits. But every fruit, no matter how sweet, has dukkha. You can become sedated by the fruit, made passive and like the heavenly beings, lose sight of the brute force fact that you are not free of the cycle of birth and death. Like technology, a problem overcome just unveils more obstacles.
More often, the experiencers write a book, go to conventions organized by other experiencers, do a YouTube interview. I'm not knocking them since post-mortem experiences happen and I'm sure they can overwhelm. The Tibetans were prudent enough to document the transition between lives as a preparatory measure, so that the more advanced would have a shot at escaping its snares. Bardo and 40-day interim periods between lives is not part of the tradition I follow, but I understand the gist.
One of the reflections that has come to me of late is the problem of being hostile towards samsara. I used the word "prison" earlier in the post and it is a prison, no doubt. If you see yourself as "imprisoned," but don't connect this perception to the jailer – which is you – then you can end up mired in disaffection, alienated from the practice. You may become tepid about it because that's what a prisoner who is imprisoned by other people would do. You have been locked you up in a cell and given awful food against your will. That can be an enticing narrative. Maybe you would get good food and relaxed rules, but you would know deep down that you're still a prisoner and would resent it.
