Insight Editions · No. 181
Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty compares Hindu and other myths about dreams and illusion, showing how narrative treats them as problems of knowledge, perception, and reality.
A study guide to Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities: . Hindu and comparative stories treat dreams and illusion as ways of knowing, not only as errors to dismiss.
Dream and illusion as narrative epistemology
| Ch | Title | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction. Transformation and Contradic | ~5183w |
| 2 | 1. The Interpretation of Dreams | ~22860w |
| 3 | 2. Myths About Dreams | ~9813w |
| 4 | 3. Myths About Illusion | ~22826w |
| 5 | 4. Epistemology in Narrative: Tales From t | ~39343w |
| 6 | 5. Ontology in Narrative: More Tales From | ~26061w |
| 7 | 6. The Art of Illusion | ~18218w |
| 8 | Conclusion | ~4310w |
| 9 | Appendixes | ~2288w |
Introduction. Transformation and Contradiction
This is a book about myths, dreams, and illusion. It is about the ways in which they are alike, the ways in which they are different, and what each teaches us about reality.
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Introduction: Transformation and Contradiction
This is a book about myths, dreams, and illusion. It is about the ways in which they are alike, the ways in which they are different, and what each teaches us about reality. Transformations of one sort or another are at the heart of myths; Ovid called his great compendium of Greek and Roman mythology Metamorphoses.
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Transformations are particularly characteristic of the great Hindu myths, and here they may appear to take different forms: sometimes they are regarded as actual changes in the physical nature of the world, sometimes as illusions, sometimes as dreams, sometimes as temporary magic changes in the physical nature of the world, sometimes as the unveiling of another level of reality. If the storyteller sets out to tell a tale of illusion, various transformations may seem to take place, in waking life or in dreams, but in the end we cannot tell whether anything has happened or not.
If the storyteller sets out to tell a tale of dreams, he may relate events that seem to be physically unreal but turn out, at last, to be real. If he sets out to tell a tale of magic, he may describe some physical transformation that a magician or a god actually caused to take place. And if he sets out to tell a tale of revelation, he may describe events that peel back the physical veil to reveal another, more mystical, reality that was always there but not recognized.
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These stories tend to blend into one another; a story that starts out as a tale of magic, or even explicitly announces (as many do) that it is going to be a tale of magic, may be transformed into a tale of illusion. Sometimes it is only the genre of the story, marked by the presence of certain motifs conventionally associated with one sort of transformation or another, that lets us know whether the story is intended to depict a dream or a magic show.
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These interactions and interchanges are not the result of simple borrowing, back and forth, between related themes. One sort of transformation often becomes transformed, as it were, into another sort of transformation in mid-story because one of the points of the story is to demonstrate how difficult it is to tell one sort of transformation from another. The tales of dreams suggest, for instance, that dreaming and waking partake of the same reality, which is both spiritual and physical (chapter one).
That they do so is the point of the myths of shared dreams (chapter two). The tales of illusion go on to suggest that we cannot tell whether we are awake or asleep during our experience of many sorts of transformation, nor can we judge which half of the dream/waking experience is more real. This is the point of the myths of the mouth of God (chapter three).
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And the tales of magic may be given a twist at the end to show that the enchanted man, or the dreamer, cannot be certain that he has awakened from the last of a series of dreams within dreams. This is the point of the myths of the receding frame (chapter four). Finally, the dreamer who believes that he is in the last frame of his own dream may still be forced to consider the possibility that he is part of someone else's dream.
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This is the point of the myths of the dreamer dreamt (chapter five). The stories in this book are themselves examples of yet another kind of transformation, the transformation of human experience into words and images through narrative. Both dreams and myths draw their vocabularies from certain intense moments in actual human experience, but it is art that transforms those moments, bringing them from the private field of the dream into the public field of the myth.
Moreover, our awareness of the experience of art allows us to perceive ourselves as we become aware of the experience of life; art allows us to watch ourselves having the illusion of life (chapter six). One of the most intense mythic experiences is the experience of events that make us question our certainty about what is real and what is not. From the Indian point of view, the basic condition of human experience is the condition of illusion (chapter three).
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When we glimpse the power of illusion in waking life, we may resist it or misunderstand it; but when the barriers of rational thought are lowered during sleep, we dream about illusion-that is, we dream about things that turn out to be different from what they seemed to be, about things that seem to be transformed, back and forth, from one shape into another (chapters one and two). When we wake, we may subject these insights to various forms of tests, attempting thus to establish some relationship between the reality of the dream and the reality of waking life (chapter four).
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But whatever the results of these tests, we find ourselves ultimately facing an ontological cul-de-sac that renders the tests meaningless and requires a leap of faith if we are to guess what is real and what is not (chapter five). This leap is an imaginative, artistic act of creation and discovery (chapter six). Each chapter turns on its own set of narrative subthemes, though these often spill over into other chapters.
These themes include dream transformation-the adventure of the hero who flies or rides to the woman in the other world (chapter two); illusory transformation-change of sex or the creation of a double self or double world (chapter three); social transformation-the dramatic change in status of the king or Brahmin who becomes an Untouchable (chapter four); ontological transformation-rebirth as another person or an animal (chapter five); and artistic transformation-metaphor and simile (chapter six). All of these themes occur throughout the range of classical Indian texts, and chapters one, two, and three will provide the classical Indian treatment of them, beginning with the earliest recorded text (the Ṛg Veda) and continuing through the medieval Sanskrit Purāṇas into contemporary folktales.
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But in chapters four and five (and at scattered moments in other chapters as well) I will concentrate on one particular Sanskrit text, the Yogavāsiṣṭha, composed in Kashmir sometime between the ninth and twelfth centuries A.D. (Appendix Three provides a list of the stories from the Yogavāsiṣṭha that are cited in this book.) Although all of my main texts are Indian, my arguments rest on a comparison of Indian and non-Indian (primarily ancient Greek and twentieth-century European) approaches to dreams and illusion, and this often involves the citing of non-Indian texts and arguments.
Many Western parallels occurred to me as I wrote this book; others will, I am sure, occur to each reader. But I made a strenuous effort to leave most of them out of this final version, in order to highlight the Indian texts. I have had recourse to the Western texts that I have used, not in the hope of saying anything about them that has not been said before by scholars better versed in the Western tradition than I am, but as an aid to understanding the ideas expressed in the Indian texts.
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It is, in any case, impossible for us to ignore our own assumptions and preconceptions when we read foreign texts, and only by examining those assumptions, to see what it is that makes us find the Indian texts so puzzling, can we hope to understand why some Indians did not find them puzzling, while others did. The inclusion of these Western texts thus serves a kind of psychological or epistemological purpose: it helps us to understand how we understand the Indian texts.
But it is meant to serve an ontological purpose as well: to help us understand the actual problem set by the Indian texts. For our understanding of the Indian ideas is greatly enhanced when we reflect on the insights provided by some of our own sages who have thought long and deep about these same problems. Rather than muddy the waters by mixing together the Indian and non-Indian theories on every minor point, I have grouped the Western theories together at the end of each of the first five chapters, giving by far the greater weight to the Indian texts, which are lesser known by most people and better known by me.
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But I would encourage the Western reader to keep both approaches in mind simultaneously as much as possible, one hovering in the wings while the other occupies center stage, and to allow each one to come forth when it has something to say, like the little man and the little woman balanced on an old-fashioned weather-house barometer. It is artificial to go on separating the two approaches forever; I have treated both traditions, Indian and Western, together in the introduction and conclusion, in the final section of chapter six, and from time to time throughout the entire book.
Yet, though the two approaches to many of the same problems are, I think, mutually illuminating, they are never truly comparable; for even when the content seems superficially the same, the different cultural contexts often show us that the apparent congruences are the same answers to different questions-and are therefore not the same answers at all. The reader should also be warned that I have mingled not merely Indian and Western arguments and Indian and Western stories but stories and arguments themselves.
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I have made a general attempt to separate texts from arguments in chapters one through four, but in chapter five they are formally combined, and in fact there are arguments that link stories throughout the book. In this I am imitating the tradition about which I am writing; that is, the form of my book mirrors its content. Unconsciously, I found myself swinging between text and commentary, as the Yogavāsiṣṭha itself does (see chapter four), and as, in fact, all Purāṇas do.
This book may therefore be read as a kind of American academic Purāṇa, leading the reader from one story into another and another and another, with commentary provided as necessary. Moreover, like the Purāṇas, I have felt free to borrow from any tradition that seems relevant to the point, using not only classics from other countries but folk traditions, limericks, and children's books. That the classics are not only Indian ones does not, I think, nullify the Purāṇic nature of this book, for a Western audience would react to these classics as an Indian audience would react to the Indian classics usually cited in Purāṇas; the effect is thus comparable (though, again, not the same).
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Closing summary
This chapter gathers horse nature, Indian history, and storytelling into one comparative habit: follow the animal, the invaders, and the myths they leave when real horses are scarce.
1. The Interpretation of Dreams
The earliest Indian reference to dreams, in the Ṛg Veda (c. 1200 B.C.), describes a nightmare, but it leaves ambiguous the question whether what is feared is merely the experience of the dream (the process of having a bad dream) or the content of the dream (the events in the dream and the implication that it will come true): "If someone I have met or a friend has spoken of danger to me in a dream to frighten me, or if a thief should waylay us, or a wolf-protect us from that." Are the thief and the wolf part of the dream, too, or part of a contrasting reality?
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DREAMS IN VEDIC AND MEDICAL TEXTS
The earliest Indian reference to dreams, in the Ṛg Veda (c. 1200 B.C.), describes a nightmare, but it leaves ambiguous the question whether what is feared is merely the experience of the dream (the process of having a bad dream) or the content of the dream (the events in the dream and the implication that it will come true): "If someone I have met or a friend has spoken of danger to me in a dream to frighten me, or if a thief should waylay us, or a wolf-protect us from that." Are the thief and the wolf part of the dream, too, or part of a contrasting reality?
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But there is also a twilight juncture: the condition of sleep [or dream, svapna]. In this twilight juncture one sees both of the other conditions, this world and the other world. When someone falls asleep, he takes the stuff of the entire world, and he himself takes it apart, and he himself builds it up, and by his own bright light he dreams.
There are no chariots there, no harnessings, no roads; but he emits chariots, harnessings, and roads. There are no joys, happinesses, or delights there; but he emits joys, happinesses, and delights. There are no ponds, lotus pools, or flowing streams there, but he emits ponds, lotus pools, and flowing streams.
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The text does not pass judgment on the substantiality of the elements out of which the external world is built and the internal world is rebuilt; the same verb is used, here and throughout Indian literature, to denote one's perception of both worlds: one "sees" (dṛś) the world just as one "sees" a dream. Moreover, the same verb (sṛj) that encompasses the concepts of seminal emission (making people), creation (making worlds), speaking (making words), imagining (making ideas), and dreaming (making images) is also used for the simple physical process by which a turtle "emits" (i.e., stretches forth) its limbs, and this is one reason why God is often visualized as a turtle.
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The nature of dream experiences-their emotion and instability-is taken here as evidence of the inadequacy of dreams as witnesses of reality. Many later philosophers, including Śankara, continued to argue that dreams are less real than waking experience, though the unreality of dreams was taken as a clue to the fact that waking experience, too, is less real than Godhead. The four Upaniṣadic stages of being also suggest a technique of realization, a means of approaching enlightenment.
For if one understands that one is, in fact, dreaming when one thinks that one is awake, one can begin to move toward the true awakening that is enlightenment-the fourth stage. Thus, it is argued in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, when we take the material universe to be the ultimate reality, we make a mistake comparable to the mistake someone makes when he thinks he sees his head cut off in a dream,11 a traditional image in Indian dream books. The metaphor of the dream is further developed: When someone dreams while he is awake, as when one sees two moons or a mirage of water, that is called a waking dream.
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In fact, the Upanisadic fourth stage, added to the triad, is the whole point of the original analysis; called simply turīya, "the fourth," it is, in a sense, "the first three all in all,"14 the true state toward which the other three point. And since all four stages are regarded as progressive approaches toward what is most real (Godhead), some Indian philosophers assume that dreaming is more "real" than waking. In dreams one sees both the real (sat) and the unreal (asat),15 and this liminal nature of dreams is the key to the material power they possess in later Indian texts.
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This text organized dreams with reference to the objective, waking world-for example, according to the physical temperament of the dreamer (fiery, watery, or windy), the time of night the dream took place, and so forth-but it was primarily concerned with the subjective symbolism of dreams or, rather, with the objective results of subjective contents. This is also apparent from the fact that the chapter on the interpretation of dreams is immediately adjacent to the chapter on the interpretation of omens or portents; that is, the things that happen inside people have the same weight as the things that happen outside them and are to be interpreted within the same symbolic system.
The first chapter of this text describes the dreams that people of particular temperaments will have. The fiery (choleric) man will see in his dreams tawny skies and the earth and trees all dried up, great forest fires and parched clothes, limbs covered with blood and a river of blood, gods burning things up, and comets and lightning that burn the sky. Tortured by heat and longing to be cool, he will plunge into forest ponds and drink.
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WESTERN ARGUMENTS
Pindar and Plato Our Western attitude to dreams is largely derived from traditions inherited from the Greeks (especially Plato) and from the psychoanalysts (especially Freud). Let us turn to them now, in part to use them as a touchstone against which we may understand the contrasting Indian view, in part to make us aware of the way our assumptions color our reception of the Indian texts, and in part to come to a better general understanding of the meaning of dreams by recalling what a few of our own greatest thinkers have understood about them.
A striking instance of the ambiguity in the Greek attitude to dreams appears in Pindar's tale of the taming of the winged horse Pegasus by Bellerophon: [Bellerophon] suffered greatly beside the stream in his longing to yoke Pegasus, the son of the snake-girded Gorgon, until the maiden Pallas brought him a bridle with a golden band. Suddenly the dream became a waking experience [hupar]. She said, "Are you sleeping, king, son of Aeolus?
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Come, take this charm for the horse, and sacrifice a white bull to the Father, the Tamer [Poseidon]." This is what the maiden with the black shield seemed to say to him as he slept in the darkness. He leapt to his feet and seized the marvel [teras] that lay beside him, and joyfully he went to find the seer of that land, the son of Coiranus. He showed him all that had happened, how he had lain down at night on the altar of the Goddess, as the seer had bid him do, and how she herself, the daughter of Zeus who hurls the thunderbolt, had given him the golden thing to tame the mind [of the horse].
This phrase is used in Homer sometimes within a dream and sometimes after a dream. In either case, it functions as a commentary, redefining what we thought was a dream and telling us that it was not, in fact, a dream. But Pindar tells us that Athena brought Bellerophon a bridle in a dream and that then the dream became a nondream; she spoke to him (in a dream, as her words indicate) and gave him not a dream bridle but a real, "waking," bridle.
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And when he woke up, though he regarded the bridle as a marvel (since it was the materialization of a dream image), he held it in his hand and used it. It is significant, I think, that the power of this dream bridle-like the power of all bridles-is not primarily physical but mental; the bridle tames not the body of the horse but the mind of the horse. Athena gives Bellerophon the mental power to tame the horse, and so she gives him a magic bridle.
The bridle is all the more appropriate for taming Pegasus because Pegasus himself is a dream figure; he is the winged horse who carries the hero into his dream in many myths of this genre, the magic creature who allows the hero to fly to the woman in the dream world. In the myth of Bellerophon, by contrast, the dream horse comes into the hero's real life and enables him to fly into battle with nightmare women-the Amazons and the fire-breathing Chimaera, whom Pindar goes on to tell us about in the next lines of the ode.
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The Greeks, too, speak with many voices. Plato provided several challenges to Heraclitus, and it is wise to treat them severally. In the Theaetetus, Plato challenges the idea that there is no permanent reality apart from our mental constructions of it.
The wise man, however, will never assume that he is truly awake. When we turn to the Republic, we find several different approaches to dreams. First, Plato implies (contra Heraclitus) that everyone in the world is actually asleep, with the exception of a few philosophers, who are awake.
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One of the qualities of dreaming that made Plato mistrust it was its association, in his opinion, with the lower animal instincts and emotions. (This attitude was by no means shared by all Greeks, but it was Plato who set the fashion, and so it is with him that we must come to terms.) The belief that dreams arise out of powerful and dangerous emotions is, as we will see in chapter five, characteristic of the Indian viewpoint (as it is of Freud's).
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The locus classicus for this argument is the beginning of Book IX of the Republic: There are superfluous desires . that are awakened during sleep, when the rest of the soul, the rational and gentle and dominant part, is asleep; but the part that is like a wild beast and untamed, full of food and wine, leaps up and throws off sleep and tries to get out and satisfy itself. Then he will dare to do anything at all, since he is set free from all shame and reason.
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We will see this in the tale of Triśanku in chapter three and in the myths of Lavaṇa and Gādhi in chapter four.) Plato then goes on to argue that when a man is drunk, or crazy, or in the thrall of erotic passion, he becomes like a tyrant; sleep releases the lawless desires that dwell in all of us, even those who seem to be most moderate. [The tyrant], being under the tyrannical sway of lust, becomes, always and waking, what he has been rarely and in dreams, and he will hold back from no terrible murder nor from any kind of food or deed.
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He said that his soul went out of his body and journeyed, with many others, to a place where they were judged, and they cast lots and chose the next life that they would have, as animals or humans, out of the great variety of lives represented in the lots. Yet the choice was both laughable and amazing, since most people chose according to the habits of their former life. The soul that had been Orpheus chose to be a swan, because he so hated the race of women-at whose hands he had met his death-that he did not want to be conceived and born of them.
And Er saw a swan changing into the life he chose as a man. When all the souls had chosen their lots, they went to the Plain of Oblivion and drank from the River of Forgetfulness, and then they all fell asleep. In the middle of the night, they were suddenly carried to their births.
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2. Myths About Dreams
In one type of romantic adventure the hero flies, or rides on a white horse, to another world, where he meets a princess. This romantic adventure becomes an explicit dream adventure when the hero finds his princess after falling asleep or when he visits her magically every night.
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INDIAN TEXTS
In one type of romantic adventure the hero flies, or rides on a white horse, to another world, where he meets a princess. This romantic adventure becomes an explicit dream adventure when the hero finds his princess after falling asleep or when he visits her magically every night. Implicitly, however, one might regard all "other worlds" as dream worlds and all romantic adventures as paradigms of the dream of sexual adventure.
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In these ways, the romantic adventure and the dream adventure often overlap; one such combination results in the myth of the shared dream. In some versions of the romantic adventure, the hero succeeds in rescuing the dream princess and bringing her back to his own world; the Sleeping Beauty is such a story, and the Brothers Grimm collected many others, in which everyone lives happily ever after. In other versions, however, the hero fails to keep his princess in the real world; the Swan Maiden (as in the ballet Swan Lake) is such a story,1 and many more are preserved in the Greek myths, which usually do not have happy endings.
We might view these two variants as representative of two attitudes to the reality of the dream world: the first regards it as a real world, from which one can bring back the princess and keep her, just as Bellerophon kept his bridle; the other regards the dream girl as a mere figment of the imagination, which fades when one wakes up, as the tiger faded from Ramakrishna's dream. In other words, if the prince regards his experience in the other world as a real experience, he brings back his princess; if he regards it as a dream, he does not bring her back.
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The Shared Dream In India, however, these two themes are combined, since there is no impermeable boundary between dream and reality. Here the hero acknowledges that his dream was "just" a dream-but he still succeeds in bringing back his princess. Indeed, when he finds her, he may find that she has been dreaming of him; the Sleeping Beauty may well have been also a Dreaming Beauty, dreaming that her prince would come to awaken her with a kiss.
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The story of the dream adventure may itself be subdivided into two variants. In the first, a man dreams of a woman he has never seen, searches for her, finds her, and marries her. This tale, probably originating in India, was carried to Ireland, Russia, medieval Greece, France, and Germany; Chaucer ridicules it in the tale of Sir Topas, who dreams that he is to marry the queen of fairyland and wanders off to search for her.
The motif, which Stith Thompson calls "Future husband (wife) revealed in dream," otherwise known as D 1812.3.9,2 is also related to "Youth makes statue of a girl and seeks a girl like the statue" (T 11.2.1.1). This is a popular romantic theme, with an Indo-European distribution pattern. But the second version of the story is, to my present knowledge, the special achievement of India and of the lands with which India had direct contact.
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was the handsomest man of his time, just as Odatis, the daughter of King Omartes, was the most beautiful woman among the Iranians. They saw each other in a dream and fell in love. The princess was invited to a great feast at which she had to make her choice and throw a goblet to the young noble who pleased her.
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Vikramāditya Finds Malayavatī A far more elaborate story of a shared dream is the myth of Vikramāditya and Malayavatī: A painter copied an image of a girl from a traveler's book. King Vikramāditya saw the picture and fell in love with the girl. That night he dreamed that he was making love to the girl, but suddenly the watchman woke him up.
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The king banished the watchman in a rage; he was convinced that the girl existed, though he despaired of finding her. He told his friend about his dream: "I crossed the sea and entered a beautiful city full of armed maidens who rushed at me, shouting, 'Kill him! Kill him!' Then a Buddhist nun took me to her house and said, 'This is a man-hating princess named Malayavatī; she makes her maidens kill any man she sees.' The princess entered the nun's house with her maidens, and I put on woman's clothing and came out to see her: she was the princess I had seen in the picture.
As soon as she saw me, she forgot her hatred of men and was overpowered by desire, even though I had the form of a woman. She took me back to her palace, where we played marriage games with her maidens; and when we had been married, that night we entered the bridal chamber. I told her who I was and revealed myself and embraced her, and she lost all modesty as I began to make love with her.
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As we were passionately united, that cursed watchman woke me up. Now that I have seen Malayavatī in a picture and in a dream, I cannot live without her." The king's friend, realizing that this was a true dream, told the king to draw a map of the city on a piece of cloth. He showed it to everyone, until one day a poet came from afar and told this tale: "In the city of Malaya, the king's daughter, Malayavatī, hated men until she saw in a dream a certain man in a Buddhist house, and in her dream she brought him to her palace and married him and entered the bridal chamber with him.
But just as she was making love with him in bed, she was awakened at dawn by her chambermaid. She fired the maid and vowed that she herself would die if she did not find that man in six months, of which five have now passed." When the poet had told this tale, with all of its striking agreement and similarity, the king rejoiced in his certainty and set out for the city. He found it just as the princess was about to enter the fire.
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These themes correspond so precisely in the two dreams, and there are, in addition, so many identical small arbitrary facts (such as the proper names), that mere coincidence is out of the question. King Vikramāditya is certain that his dream is real, and it is the dream, not the portrait of the princess, that convinces each of them of the other's existence. For the dream has many details that the picture lacked, and the princess, who had only the dream and no picture, believed it just as firmly as Vikramāditya did.
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The story thus takes the conventional motif of the lovers who fall in love as a result of seeing each other's portraits and brings it to another level of meaning. The king has yet another picture, the map, drawn after the dream, to back up his faith, and these two pieces of evidence supply physical corroborations for other people (the friend, the poet), who might otherwise have doubted the reality of the dream. Since Vikramāditya knows how to draw, he is able to turn his mental image into a physical object even before he finds the girl: he draws a map of his dream world.
A series of versions of another myth of this type demonstrates some of the ways in which the storytellers continually juggled the details relating to the physical verification of the shared dream. At first the emphasis is on the physical reality of the dream lover; then it shifts to his mental reality, then to the physical proof of that mental reality, and finally to the philosophical implications of that proof. Although this development is not strictly a chronological one, since some of the more subtle details appear in texts that are apparently older than those that contain simpler accounts, it is perhaps best to begin with the less elaborate versions of the myth and add details as they build up, bearing in mind that we are dealing with a fluid oral tradition that may be rather misleadingly and arbitrarily fixed in written texts from time to time.
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The myth is the story of Uṣā and Aniruddha, and it is told in several Sanskrit texts. It is retold often, in part because it is an integral part of the much-loved saga of Kṛṣṇa (for Aniruddha is the son of Kṛṣṇa's son Pradyumna, whom we will encounter in chapter three in a tale of magical doubles), and in part because it is the kind of story that Hindus like to tell, a story about dreams that come true. It is useful to regard this tale together with the story of Vikramāditya and Malayavatī, because it presents a kind of mirror-image of that myth.
Vikramāditya's story is told from his point of view, and the woman is depicted as bloodthirsty and causelessly violent toward him; but Uṣā's story is told from the woman's point of view, and the hero's entrance into her bedroom is seen, in some versions, as a bloody and violent rape. The Rape of Usā The simplest (though not the oldest) variant tells the story in considerable detail: The demon Bāṇa had a daughter, Uṣā, who, though a virgin, dreamed that she made love with a man she had never seen or heard of before.
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WESTERN ARGUMENTS
Shared Dreams and Archetypal Myths What is the meaning of the shared dream? How can it happen that two people share the same dream? Why do people write stories about people who share the same dream?
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He may be referring to the most baroque Hindu variant, in which Aniruddha's dream precedes Uṣā's, or to the underlying pattern that persists in atavistic details even in variants of the tale in which Aniruddha does not, in fact, reciprocate Uṣā's dream. Roger Caillois has described the appeal of the shared dream: Nothing is more personal than a dream, nothing else so imprisons a person in irremediable solitude, nothing else is as stubbornly resistant to the possibility of being shared. In the world of reality everything is susceptible to universal test.
The dream of Vikramāditya and Malayavatī partakes of both aspects: at first, it is only their mutual love that binds the two dreamers, but when both of them make public their dreams, a general belief in the truth of the shared dream arises in the public at large. The dream of Kipling's lovers remains private forever, for they are English. At the other extreme, certain philosophical Indian texts that we will encounter in chapter five use the motif of the shared dream as the starting point from which to develop a variant of the argument of pure idealism: the world that we regard as public (shared) is in fact merely the manifestation of a single mental image, a private dream dreamed by God and shared by all of us.
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These texts thus invoke an outer frame that is soft-like the theological frame invoked, in a far weaker way, in the second version of the tale of Uṣā and Aniruddha-in order to harden the reality of the shared dream. The words of the god corroborate the images of the dream; one does not need a dream to corroborate the reality of the god. The hypothesis that there may be dreams that are shared by a number of different people (the "multitude" of which Caillois speaks) underlies a phenomenon found throughout the world: the use of "dream books," that is, textbooks or codebooks that decipher the meanings of dreams, of which we have seen examples in the Hindu texts.
The fact that generalizations of this sort can be made at all implies an awareness that certain themes and motifs recur in dreams recorded at different times and in different places. It also involves the implicit assumption that these dreams will in fact be recorded, that they will be told.
Though Freud and Jung differed considerably about whether the same dream, dreamed by two different people, had the same meaning (or was, in a deeper sense, the same dream at all), both admitted that there are, indeed, typical or perhaps even universal dreams and that these pose special problems of interpretation over and above the problem of relating the dream to the life of the specific dreamer. These universal dreams, the stuff that dream books are made of, are shared in quite a different sense from the shared dreams of the Indian lovers.
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The universal or archetypal dreams are shared because different people have dreamt the same things and have told one another about it; the lovers' dreams are shared because different people have dreamt the same things and have dreamt about each other. This true reciprocity is further enhanced by a far greater amount of detail in the Indian stories than in the archetypal dreams. The universal dreams share a few basic motifs, which are explained either by universal human experiences or (in the Jungian system) by the inheritance of a few archetypal symbols arising out of those experiences.
Indian philosophy includes within its expansive bounds several concepts quite comfortably compatible with a theory of archetypes. The extreme form of Vedānta, which maintains that no physical matter is real, is particularly amenable to such an interpretation. For if there is a rope on the path, there is no need to invoke archetypes to explain why we might mistake it for a snake; a snake does look very much like a rope.
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The Rêve à Deux in Psychoanalysis When we contrast archetypal dreams with our Indian narratives of shared dreams, we see that what the lovers share are not, in fact, archetypes but manifestations; that is, what they share are not general symbols or even the learned symbols of their shared culture but, rather, a number of striking, cumulative, exact details. These shared dreams are not "parallel" or "complementary" dreams, for one lover sees the exact buildings, the exact clothes, hears the exact same words, and spends the exact same amount of time in the adventure as the other sees, hears, and experiences.
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An explanation of this phenomenon was suggested by the psychoanalyst Jules Eisenbud, who interpreted what he called "a telepathic rêve à deux" dreamt by two of his patients. The first dreamt that she was walking in a heavy downpour and took shelter at the home of her neighbor; the second patient dreamt, on a subsequent night, that the first patient sought refuge in her home from a heavy downpour. It might well be argued that there is so little detail in the coincidence of the two dreams that they qualify only for the more general level of our theme, the basic sorts of things that people tend to dream about: rain, night, and being lost.
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Since the analyst is the only one who can understand the two dreams, he is evidently the master spy, the double agent, the one who (through transference and countertransference) has mediated between the two dreamers, allowing them to dream of each other through him. In this way he provides the outer frame for their dreams, just as God provides such a frame for the Indian nested dreams. In medieval Indian theology, God is inside the dreamer in a way similar to the way that (in the myths) lovers are inside each other or that (in the psychoanalytic scenario) the analyst is inside the patient.
God is the witness of all dreamers, and he is the dreamer of the universal dream, on the outside; but he participates erotically on the inside as well. He is an actor in the drama-a character in the dream-as well as the author-the analyst of the dream. An even more explicit example of the role of the psychoanalyst as a medium for telepathic dreams-or as a god-comes from Géza Róheim, one of whose patients reported having dreamt the following dream: "I am still at home .
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and I am in time for next day's analysis. I have had a dream which I am going to tell the analyst. The dream was this: A white dove alights on a pink cloud.
I see this, and the sky is blue. I come into analysis, enter the room, but the couch stands crosswise. You begin to talk instead of letting me talk, and you say, 'I dreamed that a white dove alights on a pink cloud.
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3. Myths About Illusion
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INDIAN TEXTS
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I will concentrate on one particular version, recorded in a medieval Sanskrit text, in which Nārada tells his own story: One day I went to play my lute for Viṣṇu and found the god joyously engaged in erotic play with his wife Lakṣmī. As soon as she saw me, Lakṣmī vanished from my presence. I wondered at this and remarked to Viṣṇnu, "I am an ascetic, not a lecher; I have conquered illusion." Viṣṇu reminded me that a woman is never allowed to remain in the presence of any man but her husband; he also warned me never to say that I had conquered illusion, since no one, not even the gods, could conquer illusion.
I then begged Viṣṇu to show me what illusion was, and he agreed to this. He took me to a beautiful pond and invited me to bathe in it. I entered the pool as Viṣṇu watched me, and in it I left my male form and became a woman.
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Viṣṇu picked up my lute and went away, and I forgot all about my former body. A king named Tāladhvaja ["Palm-Tree Banner"] came by; he married me, even though I confessed my total ignorance of my past, and he gave me the name of Saubhāgyasundarī ["She whose beauty is her good fortune" or, as we might say, "The woman whose face is her fortune"]. Then the king, who was a past master at the erotic skills, abandoned all his royal duties and made love to his queen night and day, losing all sense of time, drinking wine and immersing himself in pleasure.
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I, too, for twelve years that passed like a single moment, forgot my former body and former life as a sage. I became pregnant and had eight sons and then many grandsons. Sometimes I was happy, sometimes saddened by the quarrels of my sons and daughters-in-law; sometimes I was sick and in pain.
One day an enemy attacked the kingdom, and all of my sons and grandsons were killed. As I lamented in an agony of grief, Viṣṇu took the form of a Brahmin and came to me and said, "Why are you so sad? This is just a mistake [bhrama] and a delusion [moha].
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Who are you, and whose sons are these? Do not weep, but pull yourself together and perform the rituals for the dead, beginning with your own ritual bath." Then the king and I and the other relatives went with the Brahmin to the lake that was called "Male-ford" [Puṃtīrtha], and the Brahmin said, "You have had millions of sons who died in life after life, and millions of husbands and fathers, too. It is all a mistake that arose in your own mind, like a dream." At these words, I entered the ford and instantly became a man, and Viṣṇu put my lute back in my hand.
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The experience in the illusory world is a nightmare from which one wishes to escape; this is in keeping with the mokṣa-oriented argument that it is sorrow that enlightens and, finally, awakens one from the nightmare of existence. The story demonstrates the illusory nature of apparent happiness and the enlightening power of apparent sorrow. Yet the version of the story with which we began seems at first to characterize Nārada's illusory world as sensuous and joyous, despite its sad ending, and this is in keeping with much of the folk and Purāṇic tradition, which is grounded in the saṃsāra-oriented point of view.
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The insidious dangers of sexual intoxication become evident after Nārada has been transformed; he forgets his true nature and loses all sense of time, because he is overpowered by sensuality. When Nārada loses his awareness of who he is, he loses his lute, which is the symbol of his "real" persona-of his art, his learning, and his religious work; for Nārada is always depicted as a homeless, wifeless sage, a wandering singer who carries a lute. In another version of the tale, when Nārada emerges from the water on the occasion of his retransformation, from a woman into a man, he still holds his hand above the water; it remains the hand of a woman, holding a mango.
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This text, which reflects the Vedic and Purāṇic values of bhakti-passionate devotion to the god-regards both sexuality and femininity as positive factors. The story, like our first version, is narrated by Nārada: Viṣṇu told Brahmā to bring me to him. As I went to bathe in a lake, I came out on the bank as a woman among other women.
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When they asked me who I was, I replied, "Who I am, and where I came from, and how I came to have the form of a woman-all of this seems like a dream, and I have no idea about it." One of the women said to me, "This is Vṛndā, the city of Kṛṣṇa." Then I went with the women to Kṛṣṇa, who could take the form of a woman. When he saw me, he said, "My darling! Come and embrace me!" I made love with him there for a year, and then Viṣṇu spoke of me to the goddess Rādhā: "This creature [prakṛti] used to have the form of Nārada, until he bathed in a lake of ambrosia.
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Significantly, Nārada remembers his previous existence as a kind of dream. The vision of sexual gratification that began the tale of Nārada as Tāladhvaja's wife but in that text quickly soured here encounters no obstacles at all. What sorrow there is in the story is simply the implicit sense of loss that Nārada feels when he leaves Kṛṣṇa and comes back down to earth-to an earth that he now realizes is not as real as he once thought it was.
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For Greek myths generally describe transformations that occurred once, long ago, in illo tempore; transformations of this kind serve to explain how things have been forever after: the human woman who spurned Apollo or provoked Hera's jealousy was changed into a tree or a flower, and ever since then we have the flower, not the woman. Indian myths, by contrast, describe transformations analogous to the change that turns a caterpillar into a butterfly: we keep having caterpillars, and they keep changing into butterflies.
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ARGUMENTS
Indian: The Meaning of Illusion (māyā) The two attitudes to reality and unreality that we have characterized as saṃsāra-oriented and mokṣa-oriented grow out of the rich ambivalence that is built into the doctrine of illusion as it has developed over the centuries in India. The more extreme form of the doctrine suggests that we all invent the same mental images (māyā) and project them on an empty reality-empty, that is, but for Godhead (according to the Hindus). The modified form of the doctrine would distinguish a particular mistake (bhrama, of which the classic example is mistaking a real rope for an unreal snake) from the more general illusion (māyā)-the illusion that there is anything there at all.
According to this second form of the philosophy, God the magician makes the illusion; man the dupe makes the mistake. Implicit in the idea of the mistake is the belief that there is something there, for the term bhrama more precisely indicates mistaking one thing that is there for something else that isn't there. Within the entire illusion, there are many kinds of mistakes, but Indian philosophy always distinguishes between illusion or appearances within human experience-bhrama, which can always be corrected through further experience and hence might be called empirical illusion-and the transcendental illusion, or māyā, which is the gap between all experience and the transcendent reality of Godhead, brahman.
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Transcendent illusion can never be disproved or verified by any experience, for it is, by nature and definition, outside experience. Both of the general forms of the doctrine of illusion, one extreme and one comparatively mild, are reflected in the myths of illusion and dreams, often within a single text. The extreme form of the doctrine places the burden of proof on the side of reality: one has to prove the reality of any phenomenon in time and space, for any phenomenon is presumed illusory until proven real.
In this form, the doctrine maintains that the external world does not exist at all; this is the position, broadly speaking, of various Buddhist schools, such as the Yogācāras, Mādhyāmikas, and "No-Mind" movements. In denying the existence not only of gross material objects but even of God and the soul (the two things regarded as real by even the most extreme Hindu idealists), the Buddhists struck a truly radical position. It would take us too far afield to analyze these complex philosophies (which differ significantly from one another, as well as from various Hindu schools of idealism), but it may prove useful to summarize some of the basic forms of the Indian doctrine of illusion in order to provide a background for the spectrum of idealistic concepts that emerges from the myths.
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Nāgārjuna himself, and others of his school, asserted that the distinction between saṃsāra and mokṣa (or nirvāṇa) is ultimately invalid; when you see the truth, you see that there is no distinction. This twist in the logic of idealism finds a parallel in another famous Buddhist paradox: it is necessary to give up desire, but then that means that you must also give up the desire to give up desire. In the end, we come up against a kind of relativity of illusion once more: if you perceive a barrier between saṃsāra and mokṣa, there is one, and it behooves you to struggle to stay on the right side of it (whatever you regard as the right side).
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If you perceive no barrier, there is none, and you are in mokṣa even while you are in saṃsāra. There is, moreover, another way in which Indian idealism blurs the distinction between bhrama and māyā, between the assertions that there is or is not something there after all. If you think that the world is actually made out of mind, as many Indian philosophers do, then, when you mistake your own idea (of a snake) for a thing (a rope), you are experiencing not an illusion but a mistake; for although the snake for which you mistake the rope may not be real, and indeed (in the extreme doctrine) the rope itself may not be real, your mind, which makes you think you see a rope or a snake, is real.
Therefore, the mistake (bhrama) consists in mistaking a real thing (mind) for an unreal thing (a rope or a snake). In this view, the reality status given to the mind first reverses the terms of the mistake and then erases the distinction between the mistake and the illusion. There is nothing but degrees of mistakes, and everything is real because everything is made of mind.
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The first describes the universe in the Vedic world-view; the second, the universe in the Vedāntic world-view. The first is saṃsāric; the second, mokṣic. In both cases, māyā can often best be translated as "transformation." Arthur A.
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4. Epistemology in Narrative: Tales From the Yogavāsiṣṭha
The King Who Dreamed He Was an Untouchable and Awoke to Find It Was True Let us begin with the story of King Lavaṇa. In the lush country of the Northern Pāṇḍavas there once reigned a virtuous king named Lavaṇa, born in the family of Hariścandra.
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INDIAN TEXTS
The King Who Dreamed He Was an Untouchable and Awoke to Find It Was True Let us begin with the story of King Lavaṇa. In the lush country of the Northern Pāṇḍavas there once reigned a virtuous king named Lavaṇa, born in the family of Hariścandra. One day when Lavaṇa was seated on his throne in the assembly hall, a magician entered, bowed, and said to the king, "While you sit on your throne, watch this marvelous trick." Then he waved his peacock-feather wand, and a man from Sindh entered, leading a horse; and as the king gazed at the horse, he remained motionless upon his throne, his eyes fixed and staring, as if in meditation.
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His courtiers were worried, but they remained still and silent, and after a few minutes the king awoke and began to fall from his throne. Servants caught him as he fell, and the king asked, in confusion, "What is this place? Whose is this hall?" When he finally regained his senses, he told this story: "While I was sitting in front of the horse and looking at the waving wand of the magician, I had the delusion that I mounted the horse and went out hunting alone.
Carried far away, I arrived at a great desert, which I crossed to reach a jungle, and under a tree a creeper caught me and suspended me by the shoulders. As I was hanging there, the horse went out from under me. [See plate 4.] I spent the night in that tree, sleepless and terrified.
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As I wandered about the next day, I saw a dark-skinned young girl carrying a pot of food, and, since I was starving, I asked her for some food. She told me that she was an Untouchable [a Caṇḍāla] and said that she would feed me only if I married her. I agreed to this, and, after she fed me, she took me back to her village, where I married her and became a foster Untouchable.
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[See plate 5.] "She bore me two sons and two daughters, and I spent sixty years with her there, wearing a loincloth stinking and mildewed and full of lice, drinking the still-warm blood of wild animals I killed, eating carrion in the cremation grounds. Though I was the only son of a king, I grew old and gray and worn out, and I forgot that I had been a king; I became firmly established as an Untouchable. One day, when a terrible famine arose and an enormous drought and forest fire, I took my family and escaped into another forest.
As my wife slept, I said to my younger son, 'Cook my flesh and eat it,' and he agreed to this, as it was his only hope of staying alive. I resolved to die and made a funeral pyre, and, just as I was about to throw myself on it, at that very moment, I, the king, fell from this throne. Then I was awakened by shouts of 'Hurrah!' and the sound of music.
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This is the illusion that the magician wrought upon me." As King Lavaṇa finished this speech, the magician suddenly vanished. Then the courtiers, their eyes wide with amazement, said, "My lord, this was no magician; this was some divine illusion sent to give enlightenment about the material world that is a mere mental delusion." The king set out the very next day to go to the desert, having resolved to find once more the wasteland that had been reflected in the mirror of his mind.
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With his ministers, he wandered until he found an enormous desert just like the one he had known in his thoughts, and to his amazement he discovered all the exact details he had imagined: he recognized outcaste hunters who were his acquaintances, and he found the village where he had been a foster Untouchable, and he saw this and that man, and this and that woman, and all the various things that people use, and the trees that had been withered by the drought, and the orphaned hunter children. [See plate 6.] And he saw an old woman who was his mother-in-law.
He asked her, "What happened here? Who are you?" She told him the story: a king had come there and married her daughter, and they had had children, and then the drought came and all the villagers died. The king became amazed and full of pity.
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[See plate 7.] Gādhi asked to see Viṣṇu's power of illusion, and Viṣṇu promised him that he would see illusion and then reject it. After Viṣṇu vanished, Gādhi came out of the lake and went about his business for several days. One day he went again to bathe in the lake, and as he went into the water he lost consciousness and saw his own body dead in his own house, being mourned by his wife and his mother and all his friends and relatives, and then he saw them carry his body to the burning grounds and burn his corpse to ashes.
Then, as he remained in the water, Gādhi saw himself reborn as an Untouchable [a Pulkasa] named Katañja: he saw himself squashed inside the disgusting womb of an Untouchable woman, then born, and then growing up as a child. He went hunting with his dogs, married a dark Untouchable woman, made love to her, had many children, and gradually became old. Then, since he outlived all his family, he wandered alone in the wilderness until, one day, he came to the capital city, where the king had just died.
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The royal elephant picked him up with its trunk, and he was anointed King Gavala in the city of the Kīras, since no one knew that he was an Untouchable. He reigned for eight years, until one day an old Untouchable saw him when he was alone and without his regalia; the old man addressed him as his friend Katañja, thereby identifying him as an Untouchable, and this encounter was witnessed by several people. Though the king repudiated what the Untouchable had said, all his servants refused to touch him, just as if he were a corpse; the people fled from him, his Brahmin ministers all committed suicide because they had been polluted, and the city was in chaos.
Realizing that all this was his fault, Gavala decided to immolate himself along with his ministers. As the body named Gavala fell into the fire and became a tangle of limbs, the painful spasms of the burning of his own body in the fire awakened Gādhi in the water. Gādhi came to his senses and got out of the lake, but he was puzzled when he recalled the wife and mother who had mourned for him, since his parents had died when he was an infant, and he had no wife, nor indeed had he ever seen the true form of a woman's body.
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He went home and lived as before, until, after a few days, a Brahmin guest came to his house and casually mentioned that in the Kīra country an Untouchable had been king for eight years until he was discovered and immolated himself, together with hundreds of Brahmin ministers. Gādhi asked him many questions and verified all the details, in amazement and dismay. Then he went to see for himself, and he found the country that he had thought of in his mind: the Untouchables' huts and all the rest.
He asked about Katañja and was told that he had outlived all of his large family, left the village, and become king of the Kīras for eight years, until the citizens unmasked him and he entered the funeral pyre. The Brahmin Gādhi spent a month in the village and learned all the details from the villagers, just as he had experienced it. Then he journeyed to the city of the Kīras and saw all the places he had seen and experienced, and there too he asked and learned about the Untouchable king, who had, they said, died twelve years ago.
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Seeing the new king, as if he were seeing his own former life before his own eyes, Gādhi felt as if he were experiencing a waking dream, an illusion, a magic net of mistakes. Then he remembered that Viṣṇu had promised to demonstrate the great power of illusion, and he realized that his enigmatic experience had been precisely that demonstration. He went out of the city and lived for a year and a half in mounting curiosity and puzzlement, until Viṣṇu came to him and explained the nature of his illusion.
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It may seem perverse to combine two stories each of which is challenging enough on its own; in particular, it may appear to be asking for trouble to explain the story of Lavaṇa by having recourse to the story of Gādhi, which is so complex that the story of Lavaṇa seems a mere anecdote by comparison. Yet, when we set the stories side by side, they produce a double image of mutually illuminating similes, each standing for the other. Comparison of the two stories is justifiable on the grounds that the Hindus themselves would have been likely to compare them.
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INDIAN ARGUMENTS
Ways of Knowing for Sure: Authorities In all of the versions of the stories of Lavaṇa and Gādhi, different and often directly contradictory points of view are presented. Sometimes one will be chosen over another, and the grounds for such a choice are the degree to which each argument rests on one or more of the traditional Indian authorities-not authorities in the sense of persons but in the sense of types of evidence. (Authoritative persons are merely one of the several types of evidence.) The choice between several points of view, bolstered in this way by traditionally accepted ways of knowing, is further complicated by the fact that these ways of knowing are themselves hierarchically ranked, and ranked differently by different schools of epistemology.
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The text deals at length with this and other forms of validation. When Vasiṣṭha tells Rāma that Lavaṇa was able to establish his kingship through an imaginary consecration, Rāma is puzzled by the implicit paradox. He asks Vasiṣṭha, "What authoritative way of knowing for sure [pramāṇa] could there be for this consecration, since it was achieved through a magic web of imagination?" Vasiṣṭha said, "At the time when the magician arrived at the palace hall of Lavaṇa, right then I myself was living there and saw it with my own eyes.
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Pratyakṣa is therefore what is most profane and most material and hence, in Indian terms, least real. The concept of authority may seem an inappropriately culture-bound criterion to interject into a scientific argument. But Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have shown how deeply social influences predetermine our construction of reality, and Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated the social nature of much of the inspiration (and proof) of scientific theory.
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Finally, since scripture is regarded as embodied in persons of known wisdom-Brahmins or yogins-the ultimate authority is a combination of perception and scripture: it is the direct perception of a man deeply versed in scripture. Unreality-Testing But this proof-the authoritative person's eye-witness account (pratyakṣa)-is, after all, a subjective one: "I saw it with my eyes," says Vasiṣṭha. And it will be the ultimate work of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha to undermine the value of both personal perception and corroborating witnesses as proof.
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And the key to this quandary is whose eyes have witnessed the events; what matters, in the end, is the spiritual authority of the corroborator. Karl Potter has discussed the ways in which Advaita philosophers like Śankara approached the problem of testing reality. In discussing this same topic, I have often used the instance of the snake and the rope, but Potter uses the classic example favored by Advaita, where someone sees a piece of shell and mistakes it for a piece of silver.
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For the Advaitin, gaining knowledge is like finding that silver is really shell, or like waking up from a dream. It is important to ask how we know we have discovered an object to be more adequate than another. What is the test of the relatively more true (real, adequate) according to Advaita?
It is not at all obvious that the correction of common illusions like the shell-silver case is the same process as correcting dream-illusions. To test the former error, we bend down and reach for the object; if we are still deluded, we carry it to the market and try to get a metallurgist to assay its worth. When do we perceive our error?
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Testing a dream or the all-encompassing Illusion is quicker, but it is also harder; there are no other people to whom one can appeal. Is there, nevertheless, a relationship between the process of correcting a mistake and the process of emerging from an illusion? Indian tradition suggests that a person who becomes aware of a minor distortion, such as an optical illusion, may be unwittingly taking the first step on the path toward becoming aware of a more general kind of distortion that is built into all experience.
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Unexpected results in the trivial sphere may occasionally inspire a reformulation of the values implicit in one's definition of reality; a mote that troubles the mind's eye may eventually shake the entire edifice of perception. Within the entire illusion that the Yogavāsiṣṭha depicts there are numerous mistakes. The characters in the drama are at first aware of neither the mistakes nor the illusions; they come to recognize that there must have been some mistakes; finally, they recognize the entire illusion.
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WESTERN ARGUMENTS
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The Chinese and Japanese stories were based on tales carried to the East by Indian Buddhists, and the Spanish stories were retellings of tales brought by Islamic traders from India. This is, at heart, an Indian theme. However, it is a theme that serves a different purpose in India and the West.
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The story of the dream adventure was regarded in the West primarily as an exotic and rather off-beat delicacy, an appetizer to titillate the mind for a while before getting down to serious philosophizing. In India, however, it was the main course, philosophically speaking; it was taken very seriously indeed, as an elusive clue to a real truth. Moreover, this truth was stated far more positively in India than it was in the West.
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One good reason why such stories about the reality of dreams occupy a less respectable place in Western culture than they do in India can be surmised when we look at the common-sense view that dominates (though it never entirely permeates) Western thought. The empiricists and realists have been quick to label nonempiricists and nonrealists as lunatic dreamers. The leader of this group is Sir Karl Popper, whose reaction to idealism was the typical Western abhorrence of solipsism: "To me, idealism appears absurd, for it also implies something like this: that it is my mind which creates this beautiful world.
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If I, left alone in the world, and knowing myself to be alone, should believe in a fact, I would still claim universal acceptance for it. I may rely on an existing consensus, as a clue to the truth, or else may dissent from it, for my own reasons. In either case my answer will be made with universal intent, saying what I believe to be the truth, and what the consensus ought therefore to be.
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What happens if a whole group corroborates a delusion? This is the apparent situation in the story of Lavaṇa. It is also, as we shall see, the situation of those scientists who are locked into a Kuhnian paradigm and of the people in Festinger's study of cognitive dissonance who prophesied a doomsday that did not take place: The individual believer must have social support.
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Such phenomena include, according to Thomas Kuhn, scientific theories. It was once generally held that scientists were led to change their paradigms when they were faced with disconfirming data; Kuhn has argued, with a qualified success, that scientists hold on to their paradigms despite almost any amount of disconfirming data. The first view involves bhrama: sooner or later, the evidence convinces us that the snake is in fact a rope.
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In Kuhn's view, what is involved is māyā: no amount of evidence can convince us that the rope exists. The first view is generally held (especially by scientists) to be scientific; the second is religious. The Yogavāsiṣṭha demonstrates that science is useless in addressing the problem of reality.
Yet, when we look more closely at science and religion, we find that their difference is generally a matter of degree: at some point, some weight of data becomes decisive for most people. At least for some, long practice at eliminating errors eventually leads to an understanding of the truth. Scientists like to think that they have a lower "disconfirmation" threshold than religious believers have, and indeed this may be the case.
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Even when they share dreams-or scientific hypotheses-they may all be sharing a false dream. From the materialist point of view-what the Indians call the vyavahārika or practical level-our definitions of reality are functional; they help us to avoid bumping into things. Sir Karl Popper defends his faith in the validity of testing thus: The disappointment of some of the expectations with which we once eagerly approached reality plays a most significant part in this procedure.
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THE RECEDING FRAME
The technique of the tale within a tale, like nested Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, allows the storyteller to dramatize the closely related theme of the dream within the dream: Someone, in a dream, wakes up-or rather believes that he has awakened, although he continues to dream-and now lies expecting another awakening, which this time may be real but may also be as illusionary as the first. In this way he will be transported from one dream to another, from one awakening to another, without ever being absolutely certain whether he has finally arrived at the true awakening, the one that will restore him to the world of reality.
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The joker in the deck of unreality-testing is the level of the frames: within the dream or vision it is always possible to prove that something is real, but all the author need do is to point out that the whole dream is an unreal part of something else, and all subproofs are then rendered irrelevant. One cannot win the game of unreality-testing, for it is always possible that someone will come along and change all the rules. The reality of the world is not a falsifiable hypothesis.
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Even when scientific principles are applied inside a paradigm, faith encompasses the paradigm on the outermost layer-or, rather, on what appears, at any given moment, to be the outermost layer. Not only can we never know when we have awakened from the last frame; we can never know how we might go about trying to awaken from it even if we did know that we were in it. As we have seen, the hypothesis "This is real" can be falsified (when we wake up) but not verified, while the hypothesis "This is a dream" can be verified (again, when we awaken) but not falsified.
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To this extent, if we accept falsification as the only reasonable criterion (as Popper would have us do), we are doomed to realism, to the only falsifiable hypothesis. Although one's mistakes may be subjected-successfully-to scientific falsification, this test does not verify or falsify the reality of the life of the scientist (the Brahmin or king) who is inspired to seek that proof. The extreme form of Indian idealism regards tests such as Lavaṇa and Gādhi carried out as a mere arbitrary construction of reality, the conjuring-up of just one more set of mental images to set against the given set of mental images.
When Gādhi was finally convinced by the report of his Brahmin guest and the testimony of the Untouchables and the words of the people in the city of the Kīras, he thought his dream was real. But then Viṣṇu came and told him not only that his dream was not real but, indeed, that the people who had corroborated his dream, who had witnessed his test-the Brahmin guest, the Untouchables, and the Kīras-were all equally unreal. By implication, Lavaṇa's second trip to the Untouchable village did not really prove that he had been there before, since that trip, too, might have been a dream-this time a dream that his courtiers happened to share.
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(This is a view of scientific method that might be regarded as an extreme reduction of the attitude of Thomas Kuhn.) The more moderate and realistic form of Indian philosophy, on the other hand, regards the testing as an actual attempt to seek data whose existence is predicted by the hypothesis, data that either do or do not exist; and whether they do or do not exist is a question that will be decided one way or another by the experiment. (This is a view of scientific method that bears the same general relationship to the theories of Sir Karl Popper that the first view bears to those of Kuhn.) In the case of Lavaṇa and Gādhi, the hypothesis is that the visionary experiences actually did take place.
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It is impossible to verify the reality of the scientist verifying the test; it is also impossible to verify the reality of the lives of us who listen to his story. This must be taken on faith, and the Yogavāsistha argues for such faith, though it also argues against it and implies that there is no reason to believe that our lives are real. It presents both the argument for the destruction of faith and the argument for the creation of faith.
The original complacency of Lavaṇa and Gādhi is undermined; they are taught that reality is not as real as they thought it was. This was the message of the myths of the mouth of God, too. But in the outer frame, Rāma is taught that reality is realer than he thought it was, or at least that it can survive in a contingent fashion; he is convinced of the necessity of carrying on with a life whose intrinsic vanity he has, correctly, perceived.
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This was the message of some of the myths of the king and the Untouchables. The first argument, undermining the reality of waking life, is mokṣa-oriented; the second, affirming the reality of dreams, is saṃsāra-oriented. The shock of enlightenment comes when the text suddenly changes the lens on the telescope through which the story is being viewed, drawing back and bracketing (as the phenomenologists say) the entire action that has led us to suspend our disbelief.
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A striking example of the way in which the frame can be removed from a test of reality in order to negate everything that has preceded it is provided (unconsciously) by Sigmund Freud. Having stated his hypothesis that all dreams are wish-fulfillments, he begins to defend himself against his critics, among whom are several of his patients: A contradiction to my theory of dreams produced by another of my woman patients (the cleverest of all my dreamers) was resolved more simply, but upon the same pattern: namely that the non-fulfilment of one wish meant the fulfilment of another.
One day I had been explaining to her that dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Next day she brought me a dream in which she was travelling down with her mother-in-law to the place in the country where they were to spend their holidays together. Now I knew that she had violently rebelled against the idea of spending the summer near her mother-in-law and that a few days earlier she had successfully avoided the propinquity she dreaded by engaging rooms in a far distant resort.
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And now her dream had undone the solution she had wished for; was this not the sharpest possible contradiction of my theory that in dreams wishes are fulfilled? No doubt; and it was only necessary to follow the dream's logical consequence in order to arrive at its interpretation. The dream showed that I was wrong.
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The memory of a non-wish-fulfilling dream dreamt before we encountered Freud might be taken as counterevidence; but this Freud cannot provide, because anyone who tells him a dream is telling it to him. We might do it, of course; but now we have read Freud . In fact, the Freudian frames recede still farther.
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In its simplest form, idealism says: the world (which includes my present audience) is just my dream. Now it is clear that this theory (though you will know it is false) is not refutable: whatever you, my audience, may do to convince me of your reality-talking to me, or writing a letter, or perhaps kicking me-it cannot possibly assume the force of a refutation; for I would continue to say that I am dreaming that you are talking to me, or that I received a letter, or felt a kick.
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Yet, like the Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark ("What I tell you three times is true"), Popper hopes that, by affirming again and again that he does not care if the frame recedes from him, he will convince us that it has not, in fact, receded. By defining reality only in terms of value, he sidesteps the ontological issue; he shuts his eyes and hopes that the problem of the receding frame will recede. Yet Popper does trip himself up in the inward-spiraling loops of his own ropes when he tries to tie down his idealistic opponents.
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5. Ontology in Narrative: More Tales From the Yogavāsiṣṭha
One myth in the Yogavāsiṣṭha tackles this dilemma more directly and powerfully than any text I know. This myth builds our minds-the minds of us, the audience, as we listen-into the story, and it does so by drawing us deeper and deeper into the tale within the tale.
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INDIAN TEXTS AND ARGUMENTS
One myth in the Yogavāsiṣṭha tackles this dilemma more directly and powerfully than any text I know. This myth builds our minds-the minds of us, the audience, as we listen-into the story, and it does so by drawing us deeper and deeper into the tale within the tale. In this way it embodies, as well as talks about, the paradox of the author who is a character in someone else's story, the dreamer who is a figure in someone else's dream.
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The Monk Who Met the People in His Dream Once upon a time there was a monk who was inclined to imagine things rather a lot. He would meditate and study all the time, and fast for days on end. One day, this fancy came to him: "Just for fun, I will experience what happens to ordinary people." As soon as he had this idea, his thought somehow took the form of another man, and that man wished for an identity and a name, even though he was just made of thought.
And by pure accident, as when a crow happens to be under a tree when a palm fruit falls from it and hits him, he thought, "I am Jīvaṭa." This dream man, Jīvaṭa, enjoyed himself for a long time in a town made in a dream. There he drank too much and fell into a heavy sleep, and in his dream he saw a Brahmin who read all day long. One day, that Brahmin fell asleep, worn out from the day's work, but those daily activities were still alive within him, like a tree inside a seed, and so he saw himself, in a dream, as a prince.
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One day that prince fell asleep after a heavy meal, and in his dream he saw himself as a king who ruled many lands and indulged in every sort of luxury. One day that king fell asleep, having gorged himself on his every desire, and in his dream he saw himself as a celestial woman. That woman fell into a deep sleep in the languor that followed making love, and she saw herself as a doe with darting eyes.
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That doe one day fell asleep and dreamed that she was a clinging vine, because she had been accustomed to eating vines; for animals dream, too, and they always remember what they have seen and heard. The vine saw herself as a bee that used to buzz among the vines; the bee fell in love with a lotus in a lotus pond and one day became so intoxicated by the lotus sap he drank that his wits became numb; and just then an elephant came to that pond and trampled the lotus, and the bee, still attached to the lotus, was crushed with it on the elephant's tusk.
As the bee looked at the elephant, he saw himself as an elephant in rut. That elephant in rut fell into a deep pit and became the favorite elephant of a king. One day the elephant was cut to pieces by a sword in battle, and as he went to his final resting place he saw a swarm of bees hovering over the sweet ichor that oozed from his temples, and so the elephant became a bee again.
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The bee returned to the lotus pond and was trampled under the foot of an elephant, and just then he noticed a goose beside him in the pond, and so he became a goose. That goose moved through other births, other wombs, for a long time, until one day, when he was a goose in a flock of other geese, he realized that, being a goose, he was the same as the swan of Brahmā, the Creator. Just as he had this thought, he was shot by a hunter and he died, and then he was born as the swan of Brahmā.
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One day the swan saw the god Rudra, and he thought, with sudden certainty, "I am Rudra." Immediately that idea was reflected like an image in a mirror, and he took on the form of Rudra. This Rudra indulged in every pleasure that entered his mind, living in the palace of Rudra and attended by Rudra's servants. But the Rudra that he had become had a special power of knowledge, and in his mind he could see every single one of his former experiences.
He was amazed by the hundred dreams he had had, and he said to himself, "How wonderful! This complicated illusion fools everyone; what is unreal seems to be real, like water in a desert that turns out to be a mirage. I am something that can be thought, and I have been thought.
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There happened to be a soul that, by chance, became a monk in some universe, and he experienced what he had been thinking about: he became Jīvaṭa. But because Jīvaṭa admired Brahmins, he saw himself as a Brahmin; and since the Brahmin had thought about princes all the time, he became a prince. And since that prince was inclined to do things in order to run a kingdom, he became a king; and because the king was full of lust, he became a celestial woman.
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And that fickle woman was so jealous of the beautiful eyes of a doe that she became a doe; and the doe became a vine that she had noticed, and the vine saw herself as a bee that she had observed for a long time, and the bee was trampled under the feet of an elephant that he had seen, and he wandered in and out of a series of rebirths. At the end of the round of a hundred rebirths is Rudra, and I am Rudra, I am he, the one who stands in the flux of rebirths where everyone is fooled by his own mind.
For my amusement, I will raise up all those creatures who are my own rebirths, and I will look at them, and by giving them the ability to look at the matter as it really is, I will make them unite into one." When Rudra had decided on this, he went to that universe where the monk was sleeping in his monastery, like a corpse. Joining his mind to the monk's mind, Rudra woke him up; and then the monk realized the error he had made (in believing his life as Jīvaṭa to be real).
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And when the monk looked at Rudra, who was the monk himself and was also made of Jīvaṭa and the others, he was amazed, though one who was truly enlightened would not have found cause for amazement. Then Rudra and the monk went, the two of them together, to a certain place in a corner of the space of the mind where Jīvaṭa had been reborn, and then they saw him asleep, unconscious, still holding a sword in his hand: the corpse of Jīvaṭa.
Joining their minds to his mind, they woke him up, and then, though they were one, they had three forms: Rudra and Jīvaṭa and the monk. Though they were awake, they did not seem to be awake; they were amazed, and yet not amazed, and they stood there in silence for a moment, like images painted in a picture. Then all three of them went through the sky to the place, echoing in the empty air, where the Brahmin had been reborn, and there they saw the Brahmin in his house, asleep with his wife, the Brahmin lady, clasping him around his neck.
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They joined their minds to his mind and woke him up, and they all stood there, overcome with amazement. Then they went to the place where the king had been reborn, and they awakened him with their mind, and then they wandered through the other rebirths until they reached the swan of Brahmā. And at that moment they all united together and became Rudra, a hundred Rudras in one.
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A shorter myth, though with a longer chain of rebirths, appears elsewhere in the Yogavāsiṣṭha: An ascetic named Long Asceticism [Dīrghatapas] died, and his wife committed suicide. One of their two sons, named Puṇya [Merit], was immune to grief, but the other son, named Pāvana [Purifying], was not. To assuage Pāvana's grief, Puṇya pointed out that, if Pāvana wished to be consistent in his mourning, he must mourn not only for his recently deceased father and mother but for all the parents he had had in his other lives, and Puṇya reeled off the list: Pāvana had been a deer, a goose, a tree, a lion, a fish, a monkey, a prince, a crow, an elephant, a donkey, a dog, a bird, a fig tree, a termite, a rooster, a Brahmin, a partridge, a horse, a Brahmin again, a worm, a fly, a crane, a birch tree, an ant, a scorpion, a tribal hunter [Pulinda], and a bee.
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Puṇya added that he himself could clearly recall his own births as a parrot, a frog, a sparrow, a Pulinda, a tree, a camel, a lovebird, a king, a tiger, a vulture, a crocodile, a lion, a quail, a king, and the son of a teacher named Śaila. [See plate 12.]3 Difficult as it is to tell when people of another culture are joking or serious, it does seem that there is at least an element of humor in Pāvana's list.
For Hindus were so familiar with the motif of the chain of rebirths that they could poke fun at it, just as they could satirize the theme of the double universe in the Hindi tale of the pot, recounted in chapter three. Whether or not they believe in it, Indians have a joking relationship with illusion. The theme of the dream of the chain of rebirth was mocked by the poet Rājaśekhara in his play Karpūramañjarī.
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WESTERN TEXTS AND ARGUMENTS: THE FURIES AND THE RED KING
What would the story of the monk's dream be like if it were told in the West? Like the doctrine of illusion and the theme of the dream adventure, the paradox of the dreamer dreamt is known in the West. Recently the theme of the dreamer dreamt has been taken up by surrealist artists like René Magritte, surrealist playwrights like Pirandello (with his characters in search of an author), and writers like Jorge Luis Borges,79 as well as by popular authors like Ursula LeGuin, Tom Stoppard, and John Barth and even by the creators of science fiction and comic books.
Jung claimed to have dreamt of a yogin whose dream Jung was. Yet when we weigh the attention paid to this theme in Western literature, it appears to have been tackled only intermittently and rather nervously. Aeschylus provides a very early example both of the treatment of this theme by a major writer and of the problems that it has raised for subsequent Western readers.
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A complex circle of shared dreams occurs in the second and third plays of Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, which retells the myth of the betrayal of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra. Aeschylus makes use of two closely related dreams, one explicit and the other, I think, partly explicit and partly implicit. In the first, Clytemnestra dreams that she has given birth to a serpent; when she offers it her breast to suck, it draws forth clotted blood with the milk.
Orestes, her son, interprets the dream: "Since she has nursed this horrible portent, she must die violently. For I have become a serpent, and I will slay her, as this dream says." Orestes knows that he is the serpent, and Clytemnestra concurs in his interpretation. When Orestes says that he is going to kill her, she cries out, "Oh no!
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In the concluding episode of the second play, Orestes, who has just killed Clytemnestra, cries out, "Look! There they are, covered with serpents!" When the chorus insists that what he sees are just his fancies (doxai), that he is out of his mind because there is blood on his hands, Orestes answers, "You don't see them, but I see them. They aren't just fancies to me.
The chorus, which at the end of the last play consisted of old men, unable to see the avenging females covered with serpents, now consists of that very group of females: the chorus that we, the audience, now see is the group of Furies that was invisible to everyone but Orestes at the end of the second play. Moreover, everyone agrees that they are asleep82 and that they are dreaming of Orestes. This is evident from the passage in which the Furies cry out in their sleep, "Grab him!
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But this is not the only circle. The ghost of Clytemnestra appears, sees the Furies, and sees that they are asleep.
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Just as Clytemnestra dreamed of her murderer (Orestes), who would avenge the man she had murdered (Agamemnon), so she dreams of the Furies who are to avenge her death (at the hands of Orestes). George Devereux argues this point: The Erinyes [Furies] are, in a sense, Klytaimnestra's ghost and, in another sense, a product of her shed blood. This leads to the seemingly perplexing insight that the dreamed Klytaimnestra is a product of her own products: of the Erinyes.
Her vengeful "ghost(s)" dream(s) of her vengeful double.87 Thus we have still another shared dream. People here are dreaming of one another as Vikramāditya and Malayavatī dreamed of each other. Nor is this merely a shared dream; it is also a circular dream, in which people conjure up people who conjure up the first dreamers.
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The ghost of the murdered woman haunts the son who murdered her; Clytemnestra is Orestes' nightmare. The human Clytemnestra and Orestes share the dream of the non-human Furies even as they shared the dream of the suckling serpent. The Furies are thus mediators between the mother and the son; they are the supernatural place where the two dreams meet, and they, in turn, dream explicitly of both the mother and the son.
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THE DREAMER DREAMT
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We have a picture of a man watching himself have an illusion. The paradox of mutual hierarchy-the relationship between two things, each higher than the other-is an old one in India, and we have already seen several different instances of it, on several different levels. In chapter two we saw lovers dream of each other; each regarded the other as part of his or her mind, and each was right.
On the formal level, too, myths and dreams gave rise to each other. In chapter three we saw stories in which each of two people regarded the other as an illusory figure who had entered the real world and then vanished. In chapter four we saw how Untouchables and Brahmins mutually polluted each other; here, too, we saw folktales and court literature giving each other mutual feedback.
And now in chapter five we have encountered people and worlds who not only dream of each other but create each other. Again and again we have been thrown back into the paradox of the chicken and the egg; but we have seen how some people are able to get real eggs from their illusory chickens. It should be noted that mutual influence of this kind produces a true paradox only on the level of creation.
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There is nothing peculiar about chickens being born out of eggs (an egg, it has been said, is just a chicken's way of making another chicken), but the riddle goes, "Which came first. ?" Similarly, to have two people dream of each other is not logically troubling, though it challenges our concepts of the possibilities of certain types of mental communication. It is when two dreamers create each other in their dreams that the problem becomes a logical paradox: which of the two dreamers is the first dreamer?
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In a way, these paradoxes constitute an attempt to force the reader or watcher to construct a proof of the existence of God. Similarly, the tales of illusion force the reader or listener to imagine that he is part of someone else's dream. The apparently self-created object must be created by someone else; someone outside the frame and inside it must be drawing the picture or dreaming the dream.
Other minds-or Another Mind-may be dreaming us. Hofstadter's solution to the puzzle fails because it can still be outflanked by another move: the receding frame (which now encases the Strange Loop) can be turned into yet another Strange Loop by twisting the new outer frame back in upon itself. Though Hofstadter rightly senses that the Buddhists have thought long and hard about the same paradoxes that he has chosen to tackle (he cites several Zen koans), he does not really understand how much farther they have gone than he has gone.
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He states one of the rules of his game: Inside a fantasy, any theorem from the "reality" one level higher can be brought in and used. It is as if a "No Smoking" sign in a theater applied not only to all the moviegoers, but also to all the actors in the movie, and, by repetition of the same idea, to anyone inside multiply nested movies! (Warning: There is no carry-over in the reverse direction: theorems inside fantasies cannot be exported to the exterior!
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God is in our mind while we are in His. The final twist that closes the paradox up again is implicit in the myths of the mouth of God (chapter three): Yaśodā is inside Kṛṣṇa, and Kṛṣṇa is inside her; Mārkaṇḍeya is inside Viṣṇu, and Viṣṇu is inside him. The relationships between these two pairs do not seem to be precisely the same: Yśsodā and Kṛṣṇa create each other, while Viṣṇu and Mārkaṇḍeya are dreaming of each other.
But in terms of the Indian equation between mental creation and physical creation, between dreaming and being reborn, finding and making, we can see that they are, after all, the same. Mārkaṇḍeya and Yasodā at first think that God is their son and that he is inside them, just as the world-soul (brahman) is identified with the individual soul (ātman) and, more particularly, as a child is contained inside the seed or womb of the parent. Both of them come to learn that God is their parent and that they are inside him.
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Yet this second vision does not replace the first view; it supplements it. God is both inside and outside them, is both their child and their parent. This image of mutual parenthood, each one creating the other, is basic to Indian thinking.
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6. The Art of Illusion
Projection in Art and Reality The phenomenon of projection-imposing the images of the mind on the world outside, or creating a world outside by projecting images out of the mind-is used by many Indian texts as a clue to the nature of illusion, both in art and in life. We have seen the level of experience known as pratibhāsika (a word that may be translated either as "reflected" or as "contradictory") explained as the superimposition of a mental image on a kind of Rohrschach test posed by the phenomenal world.
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INDIAN AND WESTERN ARGUMENTS
Projection in Art and Reality The phenomenon of projection-imposing the images of the mind on the world outside, or creating a world outside by projecting images out of the mind-is used by many Indian texts as a clue to the nature of illusion, both in art and in life. We have seen the level of experience known as pratibhāsika (a word that may be translated either as "reflected" or as "contradictory") explained as the superimposition of a mental image on a kind of Rohrschach test posed by the phenomenal world.
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Indeed, we have seen the quandary of the Buddhist idealists, who deny the existence of both the Artist (brahman, the Godhead) and the viewer (ātman, the self). Let us glance for a moment at the conventions with which illusions are painted. As compared to depicting things commonly seen, is it harder or easier to depict realistically something no one has ever seen?
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This time, Nārada himself is not transformed; in fact, he does not even appear in the story of Cūḍālā and her husband at all. But the artist depicts Nārada nevertheless, since the idea of Nārada among the nymphs is true-true to type (Nārada is often seduced by nymphs) and true to the image that Queen Cūḍālā projects in order to enlighten her husband. All the illusions experienced by King Lavaṇa and the others are depicted with the same artistic conventions used for the "real" frame of the illusion-the life of Rāma at court, for instance.
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The scene in which Lavaṇa enters the Untouchable village for the first time (plate 5) and the one in which he returns later with his courtiers (plate 6) are evidently by two different artists, and there are certain interesting differences between them. The first scene is more highly colored than any other illustration in the manuscript; the blood is red, the skins of the Untouchables are dark, and the characters are also more highly emotional than in the other scenes: the girl is adoring and anxious; the mother is greedy and curious, with a child straining hungrily at her breast; the father is ill at ease; and the king evinces repulsion.
This is a highly dramatic moment, infused with all the vividness of a dream. By contrast, the second scene is painted in pale colors; here there is no blood or gore, and the Untouchables are not so dark; the mother-in-law is now much older than she was in the first scene (perhaps this reflects the passage of time), and Lavaṇa is emotionless. Reality here is noticeably vaguer and hazier than in the dream scene.
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In contrast with the vividness with which the illusory dream experiences are painted, there were different conventions the artist could use to convey things that were really illusory (including illusory demons as opposed to real demons). For instance, the artist depicts the personification of the demonic desires that kept the Brahmin Vasiṣṭha's spirit trapped in his home (plate 13). The Brahmin's desires hover over the house where he lived until he experiences (in imagination) his unfulfilled cravings.
To show this, the artist uses the conventions of altered perspective and size, a floating cloud (rather like a Gandharva city or the "balloon" of thought in a Western cartoon), and a hazier palette to indicate the different ontological status of this group of demons. In a similar way, Western artists used such devices as halos, exaggerated size, and translucent images to indicate the divine or illusory nature of certain subjects. Sir Ernst Gombrich has remarked on a series of luminous dots that cause us to project a supernatural element into an otherwise largely realistic painting: But how else could art suggest what is in fact unrepresentable, the idea of the infinite?
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By neglecting to use the available techniques to differentiate between the scenes-the techniques that are used, for example, in the single illustration of the Brahmin's incarnate desires-the artist of the Yogavāsiṣṭha manuscript may be making a serious (if perhaps unconscious) statement about the equal validity of the experiences of Lavaṇa in his court, in the Untouchable village, and in his consecration sacrifice and the equal validity of Rāma's conversations with Vasiṣṭha and Queen Cūḍālā's tall tale about Nārada and the nymphs. True, it is always dangerous to argue negatively, and this danger is compounded in the present instance by the fact that the Yogavāsiṣṭha manuscript was illustrated by several different artists, all of whom were working within the constraints of conventions inherited from non-Indian painting traditions (there are Persian and even some European influences) that used precisely the same techniques in depicting everyday, waking experiences and divine or magical illusions.
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We can do it by consciously suspending our critical judgment of reality-not abandoning it altogether, but letting it hang in limbo between cynicism and faith. The observer of an illusion (in this modified sense) knows that, in spite of appearances, what seems to be there is not, in fact, there. The observer of a delusion (moha, or bhrama, mistaking a rope for a snake) believes that what seems to be there is in fact there.
In artistic illusion, the observer is aware from the very start that everything is illusory; in divine illusion, even though the observer may know that everything is illusory (for every Hindu cuts his teeth on Vedānta in some form), he does not feel his life to be illusory. The Yogavāsiṣṭha uses artistic illusion to suggest the feeling of divine illusion in life. Max Black treats the difference between illusion and delusion as a matter of "as if": we see a picture of a poodle "as if" we see a poodle.
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Dream compare 52
Dream hub 53
Dream cycle 54
Dream flow 55
Dream ladder 56
Conclusion
Dream compare 57
SERENDIPITY AND OBSESSION
Dream compare 227
As for its connotations in English, the closest Indian equivalent term would probably be "crow-and-palm-tree" in the folk version: good luck that comes unexpectedly and rarely. Serendipity was thus originally the privilege of South Asians-the mythical princes of Serendip. Obsession, on the other hand, is a peculiarly Western gift.
Dream hub 228
When we select a group of myths to talk or write about, our mind delimits the text and thus creates it. But if we keep finding the stories that we are looking for, it is because they are there, like Mount Everest or Mount Meru. The stories in this book are real-as real as the events that happen to us.
Dream cycle 229
Dream flow 230
It was then that I decided to write an article about Lavaṇa. When I was asked to give the Sir George Birdwood Memorial Lecture in London, in May, 1980, I used this manuscript as my theme; and it struck me then that the writings of Sir Ernst Gombrich (who was in the audience) would provide an ideal springboard from which to understand the visualizations of illusion and art. Then I began to see that in order to understand the story of Lavaṇa one needed a great deal of background, of four basic sorts: one needed to know more stories of the genre (kings and Untouchables); one needed to know more about dreams; one needed to know the rest of the Yogavāsiṣṭha; and one needed to know more Indian philosophy than I knew then.
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This led me into that long process of scholarship (or "normal science") that is powered by obsession and sparked by serendipity. I spent a summer reading Plato and Polanyi and Popper and Potter and Proust. I read through the mythological texts, and I read the Yogavāsiṣṭha with my Sanskrit students.
As I came up short, again and again, on the question of scientific testing, I recalled my work as a teaching assistant in Leonard Nash's course on the history of science at Harvard in 1963; I wrote another article on Lavaṇa, for Quadrant, from this point of view. I gave courses on Indian and Western theories of dreams and on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, on paradigm clashes in science and myth, and on illusion in Indian philosophy. I lectured on all aspects of the project to anyone who would sit still and listen,7 and they gave me comments, arguments, questions, enthusiasm, offprints, criticisms, and more things to read.
Dream compare 232
I started to put together my ideas about the Indian concept of the shared dream for an issue of Parabola devoted to dreams. Other stories from the Yogavāsiṣṭha then began to capture my imagination, particularly the tale of the monk's dream; I wrote another article for Daedalus about the monk's dream. And all this time I kept finding more stories about illusion and dreams.
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One day my son Michael brought me the tale of Shlemiel and Chelm. This started me thinking about the difference between Indian and Western attitudes toward the hypothesis of multiple universes. Then I realized that I had missed the most important point in the myths of the mouth of God, the peculiar Indian twist in the complex tale of the dreamer dreamt: the concept of the universe as the dream of God and the body of God.
Dream hub 58
THE DREAM THAT WANDERS IN THE DAYLIGHT
We emerge, appropriately enough, with a paradox. On the one hand, it seems that very few people have ever been able to take seriously, for any length of time, the belief that the entire universe is illusory or that their lives are just part of their own dream or someone else's dream. But many myths have been fueled by just such a belief, and most Indians find it inescapably a part of their perceived world.
Dream cycle 234
Why do people tantalize themselves with an idea that is so disturbing? One answer to this question is that certain aspects of the doctrine of māyā are more comforting than disturbing; it might even be said (and it often has been said by Indian philosophers) that māyā is disturbing only to those who do not understand it, who are not enlightened. Indian philosophers were well aware of the fact that most people are disturbed by the implications of the theory of illusion; this resistance was one of the main obstacles to enlightenment.
To those who had an incorrect view of the self, the implications of the illusory nature of the self may well have been not merely disturbing but terrifying; but to those with the right view of the self, such an implication was not merely comforting but a great relief. Some people, as we have seen, preferred saṃsāra to mokṣa, and some chose to abandon saṃsāra and seek mokṣa. The first of these views seems more natural to most Westerners and needs little justification, but the second has often been misunderstood.
Dream flow 235
There are two different reasons for choosing mokṣa, one negative (a turning away from saṃsāra) and one positive (a turning toward mokṣa). Even the negative reason has a positive as well as a negative aspect: many people distrusted saṃsāra not because the world was full of pain but rather because it was so wonderful that one could not bear to be parted from it over and over again at the end of each life, to be torn away from all the people one had come to love.
Dream ladder 236
These people feared re-death, not rebirth. But others feared rebirth itself and hated saṃsāra more directly; they could not stand the thought that they would die only to be reborn. They anticipated with dread the physical discomfort of the embryo squashed in the womb and smothered in disgusting body fluids; they pictured the embryo as already full of chagrin and remorse in the knowledge that the new life about to begin would bring the same failures, losses, embarrassing mistakes, and ruined opportunities that had plagued the countless lives of the past.
And, finally, people might choose mokṣa not because they feared re-death or rebirth but simply because they wanted mokṣa, which they perceived as a state of eternal and infinite joy. The doctrine of illusion did not imply that, if you left saṃsāra, you would go out like a candle; you left it to enter bliss (ānanda), variously not-described. Awakening from the dream of saṃsāra did not mean entering into a stage entirely devoid of experience.
Dream compare 237
Dream hub 238
On the one hand, you could regard saṃsāra as a necessary trial, an experience through which you earned your right to mokṣa. Or, if you liked saṃsāra, you could postpone your efforts toward the inevitable encompassing goal of mokṣa; like Saint Augustine, who prayed to God to give him chastity-but not yet, the Hindu could strive for mokṣa-but not yet. Another answer to our paradox becomes apparent when we turn the question upside down and ask, not why people believe that the universe is just a dream, but why they believe that a dream could be the universe.
In this way, the glass is half full, not half empty. Though the idealistic hypothesis does seriously undermine our basic, common-sense, everyday assumption that our lives are real, it offers in place of that jeopardized assumption the suggestion that something else that we instinctively value deeply might in fact be more real than common sense ordinarily allows. As children, we believe that our dreams are real, objectively real; in most societies we are forced to give up that belief, though it lingers in our myths.
Dream cycle 239
Even as adults, however, and even in the soi-disant most rational societies, we come to value our dreams as purveyors of another kind of reality, not objectively verifiable but still strangely persuasive: the reality of feelings we normally hide from ourselves, of memories that we have lost or suppressed, and of insights into a nonmaterial world that our everyday activities screen from us. By granting to dreams the status of a kind of reality, we affirm values that we cherish. Yet to retreat entirely into our dreams is to retreat into solipsism or even madness; we long to have company in our private worlds.
Dream flow 240
The myths of dreams that turn out to be real are attempts to bridge this gap, to people our lonely fantasies. We tend to confuse reality and illusion in both directions. On the one hand, what makes fantasy potent is the possibility that it might become real; that is why we prop up our dreams with the bric-a-brac of everyday life.
It might happen, we assure ourselves; I might awaken and find my dream lover still beside me. On the other hand, what makes reality beautiful is the possibility that it might become unreal; that is why we pepper our perceptions with flashes of imagination. It might happen, we assure ourselves; I might leap into the air and find that I can fly.
Dream ladder 241
Many artists and saints have been willing-or perhaps forced-to sacrifice the comfort of the fellowship of the objective world, the confirmation that comes from surrounding ourselves with other people who assure us that we are in fact real, in order to gamble on the unverifiable reality of the world of dreams. Some have tried to hedge their bets, to have the best of both worlds, to speculate about a dream universe that is in fact verifiably real in every sense of the word.
From the Western point of view, such people are selling out reality and objectivity, but from the Indian point of view they are enriching objective reality by infusing it with the values of the world of dreams. We reach out to grasp hold of our dreams at different times and in different ways. When life-saṃsāra-becomes too full of suffering, or even too full of happiness, we tell ourselves, "This must be a dream," hoping in this way to transform the all-too-real into what we define as unreality.
Dream compare 242
For both of them load the dice in favor of unreality, the first by undermining waking life, the second by preserving sleep. But there is always a voice in us that speaks in defense of reality, defining the dream as (merely) a dream and defining what appears to be waking life as reality. This voice is the nagging whine of common sense.
Dream hub 243
There is, however, a more insidious imbalance implicit in our use of the two phrases ("This is just a dream"/"I am awake"): the first occurs far more often than the second. We often discover that we have been dreaming; we realize this every time we wake up. But we seldom discover-or tell ourselves-that we are awake.
We assume that waking reality is our fail-safe position, the resting point to which the gravity of our common sense invariably returns us. We do not, therefore, have to keep telling ourselves that we are awake. The burden of proof then falls upon unreality, and its advocate is myth.
Dream cycle 244
If common sense reassures us that we are awake, it remains for myth to remind us that we may be asleep-listening or reading in our sleep, as we know that we sometimes talk in our sleep. Common sense is always on the qui vive against the night raids of myth: "It's only a story," it murmurs to us as it feels us slipping away from its stranglehold when we are drawn into the truth of the narrative. But we can, and do, steel ourselves against the comforting, seductive drone of common sense.
Something inside us tells us that what we read in the New York Times is not true, not only in the superficial sense that conscious political distortions, misprints, and poor reporting have intervened between the event and us (i.e., newspapers are full of mistakes, or bhrama), but in the deeper sense that no event can ever be truly witnessed or recorded (i.e., words are full of illusion, or māyā). And something inside us tells us that Anna Karenina is true. Though we may read certain kinds of narratives-and not merely escapist or fantasy literature-in order to escape from reality, we also read in order to find reality and to bring it from the page back into our active lives.
Dream flow 245
Dream cycle 59
Dream flow 60
Dream ladder 61
Dream compare 62
Dream hub 63
Dream cycle 64
Appendixes
Appendixes 1. THE EROTIC DREAM IN CHINA The physical proof of a magical flight to the woman in the other world is described in a Chinese text1 in which a man dreams that he has had intercourse with a beautiful woman; he wakes up and she is not there.
Dream flow 65
Dreams Illusion and Other Realities
THE EROTIC DREAM IN CHINA The physical proof of a magical flight to the woman in the other world is described in a Chinese text1 in which a man dreams that he has had intercourse with a beautiful woman; he wakes up and she is not there. But "on waking, he found that he had had an emission. He was struck by the experience but attributed it to mere coincidence.
Dream ladder 246
However, when he had the same dream the following night, and again for three or four nights in succession, he became alarmed and went to bed without extinguishing the candle light, maintaining a state of vigilance." Though he guarded himself against the succubus, she came to him again. This time he awoke "in the midst of disporting himself with her and, opening his eyes, he found the girl, beautiful as a fairy maiden, actually in his arms. 'How violent you are,' the girl protested.
'It is a good thing that I took the precaution of coming to you in your dreams.' . Later, when they extinguished the light and went to bed, the young man found her no different from ordinary living humans. There was always a wet spot on the bedclothes afterwards." Eventually he brought her into his waking life; she exhorted him to become a devout Buddhist, and they lived together happily for many years.
Dream compare 247
What is particularly notable about the story is that the physical proof that convinces the young man that the girl truly exists (a proof that he at first dismisses as "mere coincidence," as if it were indeed a puzzling fact) is his own orgasm. THE DREAM ADVENTURE IN CHINA AND IRELAND There is a Chinese story that bears a striking resemblance to the tale of King Lavaṇa. It is the story of King Mu: In the time of King Mu of Chou, there came from a country in the far West a magician who could enter fire and water, .
Dream hub 248
who rode the empty air without falling. He not only altered the shapes of things, he also changed the thoughts of men. King Mu built himself a mansion seven thousand feet high, called "The Tower in the Middle Sky," filled with beautiful virgins and fine foods.
One day, the magician invited the king to come with him to his palace in the Middle Sky, above the clouds; in the distance it looked like a congealed cloud. When it seemed to the king that he had lived there twenty or thirty years without thinking of his own country, the magician took him on another excursion, to a place where they could not see the sun and moon above them, and the king became terrified and asked the magician to let him go back.
Dream cycle 249
The magician gave him a push, and the king fell through space and awoke to find himself sitting as before in his own palace, with his attendants waiting at his side. His wine had not yet cooled, the meats had not yet gone dry. When the king asked where he had been, his courtiers answered: "Your majesty has only been sitting here absorbed in meditation." From this time King Mu was not himself, and it was three months before he recovered.
Dream flow 250
He again questioned the magician, who answered: "Your Majesty has been with me on a journey of the spirit. Why should your body have moved? Why should the place where you lived be different from your own palace, or the place of our excursion different from your own park?
Dream ladder 251
It is impossible to draw this conclusion within the metaphysical framework of Taoism, which assumes . that the visible world is more real than the Tao, the Nothing out of which it emerges. Nevertheless, the idea that life is a dream appears occasionally in early Taoism, not as a metaphysical thesis, but as a fancy exciting the imagination.
Dream compare 252
The story of Mu and the magician plays on the glories of magic in an idealistic way; the text seems to say that it is more impressive that the magician can alter soft reality, psychological reality-can change men's thoughts-than that he can manipulate hard, physical reality-"the shapes of things"-as well as pass through fire and water, like any true shaman. The author also juggles the levels of reality: King Mu's palace is called "The Tower in the Middle Sky," and it is a real palace; but the magician's palace actually is in the Middle Sky-if, indeed, it is a real palace at all.
Dream hub 253
Moreover, it appears that the story of Mu ends on a Buddhist note, with the king disenchanted with worldly life; for the text states, "He ceased to care for state affairs, took no pleasure in his ministers and concubines." But the king is not (or not yet) truly disillusioned; he simply wants to go on another journey. The story continues: King Mu gave up his thoughts to far journeys. He gave orders to yoke his eight noble horses in two teams.
They galloped a thousand miles and . then he was the guest of the Western Queen Mother, who gave a banquet for him on Jasper Lake. The Western Queen Mother sang for the king, who sang in answer; but the words of his song were melancholy.
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He looked westward at Mount Yen, where the sun goes down after its daily journey of ten thousand miles. Then he sighed and said, "Alas! I, who am king, have neglected virtue for pleasure.
Will not future generations look back and blame me for my errors?" Thus, either by resisting the queen's wiles or through weary satiety, the king comes to understand the nature of (Buddhist) virtue and the duties of kingship (Confucian duties, one assumes, rather than the Hindu virtues of the Sanskrit text). The Taoist background of the text interacts with the Buddhist and Confucian values to leave open several of the possible moral implications of the tale; so, too, as we have seen, the Vedic and Vedāntic values underlying the Sanskrit text give both a positive and a negative value to the life that the king experiences in his dream world.
Dream flow 255
Dream ladder 66
Chapter Five
62-69 207 Puṇya and Pāvana: Yogavāsiṣṭha 5. 9-30 209 Queen Ahalyā and the pimp Indra: Yogavāsiṣṭha 3. 89-90 226 The girl inside the stone: Yogavāsiṣṭha 6.
56-94 234 (The death of the Brahmin Vasiṣṭha: Yogavāsiṣṭha 3.
Dream compare 67
Dream hub 68
Dream cycle 69
Dream flow 70
Dream ladder 71
Dream compare 72
Main Points
1. Dreams are socially interpreted, not only privately decoded. 2. Myths about dreams stage shared and contested night knowledge. 3. Illusion myths make maya a plot engine, not a slogan. 4. Yogavasistha nests worlds until epistemology becomes storytelling. 5. Transformation and contradiction open the book as method. 6. Wake tests never fully stabilize which world is baseline. 7. Comparative dreams show cross-cultural silk with local weaves. 8. Appendix materials support rather than replace the main tales. 9. Narrative epistemology is the book's lasting tool. 10. A closer look: do not flatten all Hindu thought into one illusion doctrine.
Frameworks
| Name | What it says | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Nested worlds | Tale inside tale tests knowledge | Yogavasistha chapters |
| Shared dream | Culture supplies symbols | Interpretation fights |
| Illusion plot | Maya as narrative device | When doctrine appears as story |
About this book
Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, 1984. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions