Addenda to the Second Printing

Since this book first went to press, I have continued to think about dreams and to learn from responses to the book. These afterthoughts did not seem to me to call for a genuine revision of the book at this stage, but they may prove of interest to the readers of this printing. I have listed them below according to the pages to which they pertain.

p. 16

Several Upaniṣads refer to a “person inside the eye,” an image that suggests that the soul or godhead is the dreamer who sees and is seen within the organ of our own sight.

p. 22

McKim Marriott has discussed “coded substance” in several works, one of which is listed in the bibliography.

p. 26–7

The ancient Indian textbooks on dreams tell you how to make sure that you will have an auspicious dream (that is, one that will have a good result) and how to fall asleep at the time of night when the right dream awaits you; but they do not tell you how to act directly to have the desired result; they do not tackle reality head-on.

p. 77

Sudhir Kakar has pointed out that while the shared dream is what interests Indian metaphysicians, the sharing of the dream is what is of primary interest to Western psychologists: “It is not only the sharing of the dream with the analyst in the therapeutic situation where the dream narrative is actually sought to be constructed and understood by their shared labors, but also in other situations. For instance, husbands and wives often tell each other their dreams in order to convey information about themselves or their relationship which they cannot do otherwise” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago, a panel devoted to this book, December 1984).

p. 79

Sudhir Kakar sees this distinction between myth and dream as a factor that requires us to use some word other than “dream” to define the dream-stories in metaphysical texts such as the Yogavāsiṣṭha: “These dreams are not even invented dreams one is familiar with from literature and which stand midway between real dreams and imaginative creations. Invented dreams in literature can indeed be interpreted by paying very close attention to their context, to the dreamer’s feelings and thoughts at waking and to the associations of the audience or the analyst (in place of the missing associations of the dreamer, as in analytical practice). All these techniques which succeed in interpreting dreams in literature, at least to the analyst’s satisfaction, simply do not succeed with the Indian dreams. From the psychological viewpoint, they are not dreams but imaginative creations, conceits in the service of the metaphysical narrative, . . . in spite of their formal similarities to what we today call dreams” (ibid.).

p. 108

One modern retelling of the story of Viśvāmitra’s double universe states that the buffalo that Viśvāmitra created in place of the cow gave better and more milk than the cow, and that all the other creatures in that second heaven were better, too; people from the original heaven left it to go to the new duplicate heaven, which so frightened the gods that they allowed Triśanku to enter the original heaven and cancelled the duplicate one (whose inhabitants were sent to the first heaven or, in the case of animals, to earth). (Recorded by Carmel Berkson at Ellora in 1984.)

p. 122

Borges lists the double among his imaginary beasts, and cites examples from Plato, Rossetti, Dostoyevski, Egyptian and Jewish mythology, Wilde (Dorian Gray), and Yeats, among others. The myth of Tristan and Isolde, particularly in the detailed version told by Gottfried von Strassburg, gives Isolde two sexual doubles, one of whom (the maid Brangene) masquerades as Isolde in the dark and sacrifices her own maidenhead, while the other (Isolde of the White Hands) unknowingly serves Tristan merely as the ghost of the true Isolde and fails to move Tristan to take her maidenhead.

p. 203

Borges cites a Moslem tradition about an imaginary beast named the Bahamut (Behemoth): “God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues and feet. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach” (The Book of Imaginary Beasts, p. 25). As Borges remarks, “The idea of the crag resting on the bull, and the bull on Bahamut, and Bahamut on anything else, seems to be an illustration of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof argues that every cause requires a prior cause, and so, in order to avoid proceeding into infinity, a first cause is necessary” (ibid., p. 26). As we shall see in chapter 5, a related proof of the existence of God results when the imaginary beast bites its own tail. Another instance of this mechanism appears in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, when Emily imagines that her address is Grover’s Corners, Vermont, . . . the Solar System, the Universe, the Mind of God.

p. 240

The ambivalence of the dreamer within his dream, the author within his narrative, is often perceived as a conflict between omnipotence and impotence. The dreamer is all the personae, the time and space, the one who designs and controls all the action and gives the actors their lines. This apparent omnipotence makes the dreamer feel like a god and may be one of the sources of the belief that God is a dreamer or the mystic’s assertion that only when dreaming do you recognize your oneness with God. But sometimes the actors take over and do not say the lines that the dreamer has written for them; the dreamer loses control inside the dream and may indeed experience the nightmare of complete helplessness (he tries to run but his legs will not move). In fact, only after the dreamer awakens does he realize that he was omnipotent throughout the dream, that, in fact, he was the only one there; for during the dream he thought that there were other people there. If we translate this pattern into the metaphysical terms of the Indian texts, only after waking up (enlightenment) does the individual realize that all the people in his life were no one but God, or that he himself created his life and told himself the story of all the people in it. This is why the author/dreamer/god becomes helplessly entangled in his own projected images.

p. 244

As for the role of God as audience, as well as narrator, Swami Muktananda aptly remarks, “Most of the scriptures were narrated by God to His devotees, but the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha was narrated to God Himself. It is the teaching of the sage Vasiṣṭha imparted to Lord Rāma” (Preface to the Swami Venkatesan translation of the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha).

p. 245

Clytemnestra and Orestes do not share precisely the same dream of the suckling serpent, for she dreams that he is a serpent (which he confirms), but he refers to her as a deadly viper who threatens the lives of the eagle’s children, himself and his sister (Libation Bearers 247 and 994–96). Moreover, Clytemnestra’s dream that she gave birth to and suckled her serpent child is contradicted first by the testimony of the nurse, who says that she nursed Orestes (who, instead of drawing blood from her, peed on her; Libation Bearers 750–59), and then by the testimony of Apollo, who argues that the woman does not, in fact, give birth to the child, but merely harbors the father’s seed and then nurses the child (Eumenides 658–67). Thus Clytemnestra did not give birth to or suckle the serpent, but the predictive aspect of the dream is true: the serpent son does kill her.

p. 262

A basic Indian myth of a serpent that is transformed into a rope is the myth of the churning of the ocean of milk, in which the serpent Vāsuki serves as the rope of the churn, while the inverted mountain Mandara serves as the churning stick. In this cosmic image, the ouroboros encircles the upside-down mountain that is both the center and the periphery, and the ouroboros becomes a rope. (M 1.15–17; O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths, pp. 273–80)

p. 263

It is worth noting that when Aaron’s rod becomes a serpent, it then swallows up the serpents made from the rods of Pharaoh’s magicians. Here is another example of the receding frames of reference and of the ouroboros, one serpent swallowing another.

pp. 294–95

The foolishness of people who mistake clouds for other things is a persistent theme in Shakespeare’s plays. Antony says,

Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish;

A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,

A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock,

A forked mountain, or blue promontory

With trees upon ’t. . . (Antony and Cleopatra (IV. 14.)

And Hamlet teases Polonius:

Ham. Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Pol. By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.

Ham. Methinks it is like a weasel.

Pol. It is backed like a weasel.

Ham. Or like a whale?

Pol. Very like a whale. (Hamlet III.2.)

Alexander Pope mocks this theme in his “Hymn to Man”:

Lo the poor Indian, whose untutored mind

Sees God in the clouds, and hears him in the wind.

p. 340

Only now have I come across two fine articles by A. Syrkin on the symbolism of dreams in ancient India, one in Semiotics Unfolding, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1984), pp. 625–29, and one in Semantische Hefte IV (Heidelberg, 1979–80), pp. 167–96. He cites a rich bibliography in both Sanskrit and European languages, among which the more recent items are E. Abegg, “Indische Traumtheorie und Traumdeutung,” Asiatische Studien 12 (1959): 5–34, and J. Filliozat, “Le sommeil et les rêves selon les médecins indiens et les physiologues grecs,” in Laghu Prahandhāh (Leiden, 1974), pp. 212–32. He also calls attention to the theme of the dream within the dream in M. Lermontov’s “Dream” (which V. S. Soloviev called “a dream in cube”).