Dreams in Buddhism

Dreams appear in the earliest Buddhist writings, and played no less an important role in Buddhism than in our lives today. Being human, Buddhists have always slept; and when asleep, they dream. While dreaming they perceived the same disembodied shadows and disconnected images as we do. After waking they sought the meaning of their dreams. The diviners and prognosticators of India and China, being culture-bound individuals, interpreted the dreams according to the modes and methods available to them. Those methods were in some respects suggestive of methods used today, in some respects they were quite different.

For the Buddha, dreams opened a door into the ultimately empty and selfless nature of all dharmas. This emptying out of the self in turn made possible the liberating vision of Great Compassion, which sees all beings as sharing the same body and substance.

According to Buddhist psychology dreams are ideational processes which occur as activities of the mind. In considering the occurrence of dreams it is relevant to remember that the process of sleeping can be regarded as falling into five stages.

- drowsiness,
- light slumber,
- deep slumber,
- light slumber and
- awakening.

 It is categorically stated that dreams occur only in light slumber which is said to be like the sleep of the monkey.

 For Tibetan Buddhists, all experience is illusion. One way to achieve awareness of the illusory nature of reality is through work with dreams. Buddhism does not see the world itself as an illusion, but the emotions and concepts we hold which provoke our responses to the world are seen as the illusion. Therefore dreams are not thought of as being illusions, but depict the illusions of our everyday experience of life. The very nature of dreams are expressive of the complicated realm of fears, longings and mental concepts we are deeply enmeshed in. Nightmares especially show how deeply involved our waking self is with the internal world of passionate feelings and imagery.

 But then again, like most other religions, Buddhism also believes in prophetic dreams, dreams with significant meaningful interpretation and then the dreams that are meaningless and have no relevance whatsoever.