Controlling and Respecting Dreams
by TENZIN WANGYAL RINPOCHE,
Excerpt from The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, pp. 131-133
Controlling and Respecting Dreams
by TENZIN WANGYAL RINPOCHE,
Excerpt from The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, pp. 131-133
Some schools of Western psychology believe it is harmful to control dreams, that dreams are a regulatory function of the unconscious or a form of communication between parts of ourselves that should not be disturbed. This view suggests that the unconscious exists and that it is a repository of experience and meaning. The unconscious is thought to form the dream and embed in it meaning that will either be explicit and obvious or latent and in need of interpretation. In this context, the self is often thought to be composed of the unconscious and conscious aspects of the individual, and the dream is thought to be a necessary medium of communication between the two. The conscious self can then benefit by working with the dream or from the balancing of physiological processes through the dream-making activity.
Understanding emptiness radically changes our understanding of the dreaming process. These three entities – the unconscious, the meaning, and the conscious self – are all entities that exist only through imputing reality to that which by itself has none. It is important to understand what is being said here. The concern that the encroachment of the conscious mind upon the unconscious is damaging to natural processes makes sense if you posit the elements of the situation as discrete elements of the individual, working in cooperation with one another. But this view understands only one dimension of the individual’s internal dynamics, often to the detriment of a more expansive identity.
As mentioned earlier, there are two levels of working with dreams. One involves finding meaning in the dream. This is good, and it is the level of most of the Western psychologies that accord value to dreams. In both the East and the West, it is understood that dreams can be sources o creativity, solutions to problems, diagnosis of ills, and so on. But the meaning in dreams is not inherent to the dream; it is being projected onto the dream by the individual examining the dream and then is “read” from the dream. The process is much like describing the images and they seem to appear in the ink-spot tests used by some psychologists. The meaning does not exist independently. Meaning does not exist until someone starts to look for it. Our mistake is that rather than seeing the truth of the situation, we begin to think that there really is an unconscious, a thing, and that the dream is real, like a scroll with a secret message written on it in code that if cracked, anyone could read.
We need a deeper understanding of what the dream is, of what experience is, to truly utilize dreaming as an approach to enlightenment. When we practice deeply, many wonderful dreams will arise, rich with signs of progress. But ultimately the meaning in the dream is not important. It is best not to regard the dream as correspondence from one another entity to you, not even from another part of you that you do not know. There is no conventional meaning outside of the dualism of samsara. This view is not a giving in to chaos; there is no chaos or meaninglessness either, these are more concepts. It may sound strange, but this idea of meaning must be abandoned before the mind can find complete liberation. And doing this is the essential purpose of dream practice.
We do not ignore the use of meaning in dreaming. But it is good to recognize that there is also dreaming in meaning. Why expect great messages from a dream? Instead penetrate to what is below meaning, the pure base of experience. This is the higher dream practice – not psychological, but more spiritual – concerned with recognizing and realizing the fundament of experience, the unconditioned. When you progress to this point, you are unaffected by whether there is a message in the dream or not. Then you are complete, your experience is complete, you are free form the conditioning that arises from dualistic interactions with the projections of your own mind.
Most of dream practice is done while the practitioner is awake in order to influence the dream. It is not about directly controlling the dream. The aspect of directly controlling the dream, and the one that more people may be concerned about, occurs during lucid dream. Multiplying yourself in a dream is an example, as is transforming or creating dream entities. The teaching says that doing this is a very good thing, as the capacity to do these things means that flexibility of the mind is being developed. Furthermore, the same kind of flexibility and control is to be brought into waking life; not in order to fly, but to understand the constructed nature of experience and the freedom inherent in that understanding Rather than being controlled by feelings you can change yourself and the story that you tell about yourself, and do what is truly important rather than remaining stuck in a nightmare or an endlessly shifting dream or even a pleasant fantasy.It is not different than waking life. Karmic tracks cause dreams, and our reactions to experience create further karmic traces. During the day it is better not to be controlled by thoughts or emotions but to respond to situations fully from our awareness.
We want to influence our dreams. We want them to be clearer and more integrated with our practice, just as we should want these qualities for every moment of our life. There is no danger in this of disrupting something important. All we disrupt is our ignorance.
TENZIN WANGYAL RINPOCHE, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, pp. 131-133
