Dreaming Asleep and Awake

by Venerable Sheng Yen

The Buddha said that our consciousness of waking life is a dream. Especially if it offers contentment and happiness, perceiving life as just a dream may be difficult, No one wants to be awakened from a pleasant dream, let alone be told that life is an illusion. But how can we distinguish between dreaming and waking? According to the Buddha, sleep is made up of short dreams, whereas life is a long dream. You may awaken to the fact that you are living a dream, and then fall back into the dream once again. In Buddhism, awakening from the long dream of life means finally realising your self-nature. A sentient being who does not experience this realisation remains forever in a dream.

We think of our dreams as unreal and believe our waking moments to be reality. But when we recognise the illusory nature of the body, of the world, of life and death, we then see that both sleeping and waking are equally dreamlike states.

A famous Chinese photographer, Lang Jing-shan, takes pictures of the areas around the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, and makes them resemble Chinese “mountain and water” paintings. The whole image becomes an impression built from fragments. This is how our minds work. Our experiences are stored as fragments in the subconscious mind. We never remember experiences in their entirety, but rather in bits and pieces. At a certain time or place, the fragments may reappear in our consciousness. And so it goes when we dream.

We all have experiences of déjà vu and thoughts that trigger feelings and responses. But like impressionistic photographs, these responses are merely fragmentary, illusory reflections of our experiences, thoughts, and fantasies. Few people know when they are dreaming; fewer still want to wake up from a pleasant dream. Someone who has not yet seen their self-nature may think they are very much awake, that life is real and without suffering. When they recognise the illusory nature of the self, they realise they have only been dreaming a very long dream, one that is marked by suffering. But relatively few people appreciate that recognising the illusory nature of everyday life requires serious daily practice. It is not enough to merely listen to my words, read a book, or reach an intellectual understanding of the concept. Many have heard about Buddhist practice, but few want to really commit to it. Still rarer is the person who practices, awakens from the dream, and, rather than falling back into the dream, comes to realize his self-nature.

A well-known Chinese folktale, Dream of the Millet, tells the story of a young man who travelled to a capitol city to take the civil examination to become a government official. On the road he met an old man who was cooking millet. The old man saw that the young traveller was tired, gave him a pillow, and told him to rest. The young man lied down and fell into a long dream in which he achieved the highest score in the examination. In the dream, he married a princess and became the prime minister at the imperial court. He kept many concubines, and by the time he reached his hundredth year, had too many children to count. He enjoyed his long life and even in old age he did not want to die. But when the time came for him to die, two demons took him to the underworld because he had abused his bureaucratic power and embezzled court funds. He was punished by the judge of the dead and made to climb a mountain of knives, after which he was thrown into a vat of boiling oil. He felt a tremendous pain and screamed. Just then the old man woke him up and told him that the millet was ready.

It had only taken two hours to prepare the millet, but in the dream the young man experienced the passing of a hundred years. Time passing quickly is a common experience, not only in dreams, but also in daily life. Sometimes we have dreams that seem very long but which really last only a few minutes of waking time. Differing perceptions of time also occur when we do sitting meditation. If your legs hurt and you can’t concentrate, the time seems to crawl, but if your legs feel fine and concentration is not a problem, the time flies.

Dreams are by nature illusory and passing, and our consciousness of time and reality also passes like a dream. But it is a mistake to think that our actions in waking life are as inconsequential as those in dreams. We may not have to suffer the consequences of our actions in dreams, but we cannot avoid those consequences in waking life. Our actions and speech create strong and lasting effects that do not fade away as easily as dreams do. This is the principle of cause and effect, or karma.

Most people think that they are not responsible for their thoughts if they do not act on them. All of us have bad thoughts we never actually act on. Even the most devoted mothers sometimes think harmful thoughts about their difficult children. For the most part, we do not believe these thoughts break the Buddhist precepts, but for a bodhisattva, harbouring evil thoughts is tantamount to breaking the precepts. Few people think about striking or killing someone when they sit in meditation. But in their sleeping dreams and the course of daily life, violent and murderous thoughts may arise quite often. Anyone who practices regularly, who adopts the attitude of a bodhisattva, needs to let go of such ideas both in sleep and in daily living.

In dreams people often think non-virtuous thoughts or do non-virtuous deeds because such thoughts already reside in their minds. But truly advanced practitioners do not dream of wrongdoing, just as they do not break the precepts while awake. This equivalence is called correspondence of thought and action. Non-correspondence, on the other hand, implies that a person does not break the precepts while awake, but still has wrongful thoughts when dreaming. An anecdote offers a useful analogy. Several years ago, an electrical blackout plunged one of my classes into darkness. The students all began to shout and laugh, because in the darkness, their hidden minds emerged. They exhibited self-control in the light, but felt free in the darkness.

Although we may understand that our lives are vain, unreal, and dreamlike, we still bear responsibility for this sleeping and waking dream. Just as the activity of the body creates karma, so does the activity of the mind. For example, if you do not know someone is behind you, you might accidentally step on his foot and then apologise. In such a case you would not feel as though you had done anything particularly wrong. Likewise, according to a bodhisattva’s perspective, the acts of the body are not serious, but those of the mind are. For ordinary sentient beings, however, the karma of the body is more serious than that of the mind.

Because the bodhisattva way is based on mental realisation, we should understand that karma caused by the body means little compared to karma created by the mind. So, we should pay attention to our mental behaviour and take responsibility for it. We must make our minds simple, peaceful and tranquil. Sincere and rigorous practice lets us calm both body and mind, which in turn allows us, day by day, to reduce our karmic obstructions.