The greatest value of dreams is in the context of the spiritual journey. Most importantly, they may be used as a spiritual practice in themselves. They may also provide the experiences that motivate the dreamer to enter the spiritual path. Furthermore, they can be a means of determining whether or not the practice is being done correctly, how much progress is being made, and what needs attention.
As in the story I told in the preface, it is often the case that before giving a high teaching the teacher will wait for the student to have a dream indicating his or her readiness to receive the teaching. Other dreams may demonstrate that the student has accomplished a certain practice, and after hearing the dream the teacher may determine that it is time for the student to move on to another practice.
In the same way, if we pay attention to dreams we can gauge our own maturity in the practice. Sometimes in the waking state we think we are doing quite well but when we sleep we find that at least some part of us is still greatly confused or stuck in negativity. This should not be viewed as a discouragement. It is a benefit when different aspects of the mind manifest in dream and point out where we must work in order to progress. On the other hand, when practice becomes very strong, the results of the practice will manifest in dream and give us confidence, in our efforts.
EXPERIENCE IN DREAM
Experience is very flexible in dream and we are free to do a great many things that we cannot when awake, including particular practices that facilitate our development. We can heal wounds in the psyche, emotional difficulties that we have not been able to overcome. We can remove energetic blocks that may be inhibiting the free circulation of energy in the body. And we can pierce obscurations in the mind by taking experience beyond conceptual boundaries and limitations.
Generally, these tasks are best accomplished after we develop the ability to remain lucid in dream. It is only mentioned here as a possibility; in the section on practice there is more detail about what to do in the dream once lucidity is attained.
GUIDANCE AND GUIDELINES
Most Tibetans—high spiritual masters and simple, ordinary people— consider dreams to be a potential source of both the most profound spiritual knowledge and of guidance for everyday life. Dreams are consulted to diagnose illness, for indications that practices of purification or clarification are needed, and for indications that relationships to deities and guardians need attention. Such use of dreams may be thought superstitious, but on a profound level dreams portray the state of the dreamer and the condition of his or her relationship to different energies. In the East, people recognize these energies and relate to them as guardians and protector spirits as well as physiological conditions and internal spiritual conditions. In the West, with its much younger study of dreams, these energies may be understood as incipient illnesses or deeply rooted complexes or archetypes.
Some Tibetans work with dreams throughout their lives, as a primary form of communication with deeper aspects of themselves and with other worlds. My mother was a good example of this. She was a practitioner and a very loving and kind woman. Often she told the whole family her dreams in the morning, when we were gathered to eat, and particularly when the dream had to do with her guardian and protector, Namthel Karpo.
Namthel is a guardian of the Northern part of Tibet, Hor, where my mother grew up. Although his practice was known throughout Tibet, he was primarily worshiped in the village in which she lived and in the surrounding area. My mother did his practice, but my father did not, and often he would tease her after she recounted her dreams.
I clearly remember my mother telling us one dream in which Namthel came to her. He was dressed, as always, in white robes and conch shell earrings, and he had long hair. This time he looked furious. He came through the door and roughly threw a little bag on the floor. He said, “I always tell you to take care of yourself but you don’t do a good job of it!” He looked deeply into my mother’s eyes and then disappeared.
In the morning my mother was uncertain as to the dream’s meaning. But in the afternoon a lady who sometimes worked in our home tried to steal our money. She was carrying it tucked under her clothes but when she walked in front of my mother the money fell out, right there. It was in a bag identical to the one that my mother had been shown in the dream. My mother picked it up and inside was all of our money, about to be stolen. She considered this event an activity of protection on the part of her guardian and believed that Namthel caused the bag to fall to the floor.
Namthel appeared in my mother’s dreams throughout her life, always appearing in the same form. Though the messages he gave her varied, they were generally dreams meant to help her in some way, to protect her and guide her.
Until I was ten years old I was in a Christian school, after which my parents took me out and I entered the Meri Monastery. One of the monks, Gen Sengtuk, would sometimes tell me his dreams. I remember some of them quite clearly as they were very similar to my mother’s. He often dreamt of Sippe Gyalmo, one of the most important and ancient of the enlightened protectors of the Bon tradition. The practice of Sippe Gyalmo is also practiced in the other Tibetan Buddhist schools; in the Potala Palace in Tibet, there is a room that houses her shrine. Gen Sengtuk’s dreams of Sippe Gyalmo guided him in his life and practice.
Sippe Gyalmo did not appear in his dreams as the ferocious being that we see in paintings in temples and meditation rooms. Instead, he saw her as a very old, gray-haired human woman, in a body that was no longer straight, using a walking stick. Gen Sengtuk always met Sippe Gyalmo in a vast desert in which she had a tent. No one else lived there. The monk would read her expressions, whether her face was happy or sad, or if there was anger in the way she moved. And reading her this way he would somehow know what to do to heal obstacles in his practice or to change certain things in his life in a more positive direction. This is how she guided him through his dreams. He kept a close connection to her through dreams and she appeared to him in a similar manner throughout his life. His experiences with her are good examples of dreams of clarity.
I was a little boy then, and I can clearly remember one day when, listening to the monk recounting one of his dreams, it suddenly struck me that it was as if he had a friend in a different place. I thought it would be nice to have some friends to play with in dreams, because during the day I could not play much, as the studies were very intensive and the teachers strict. That was the thought I had then. So, you see, our understanding of dream and dream practice, and our motivation to do the practice, can become deeper and mature as we grow.
DIVINATION
Many meditation masters, because of the stability of their meditation practice, are able to use dreams of clarity for divination. To do so, the dreamer must be able to free himself or herself from most of the personal karmic traces that normally shape the dream. Otherwise, information is not obtained from the dream but is projected onto the dream, as is normally the case with samsaric dreams. This use of dreams is considered, in the Bon tradition, to be one of several methods of shamanic divination and is quite common among Tibetans. It is not unusual for a student to ask his or her teacher for guidance regarding an undertaking or for direction in overcoming an obstacle, and often the teacher turns to dreams to find the answer for the student.
For example, when I was in Tibet I met a realized Tibetan woman named Khachod Wangmo. She was very powerful and a ’’treasure finder” (terton) who had rediscovered many hidden teachings. I asked her for knowledge of my future, a general question about obstacles I would encounter and so on. I asked her to have a dream of clarity for me.
Commonly in this situation, the dreamer asks for a possession of the person requesting the dream. I gave Khachod Wangmo the undershirt I was wearing. The shirt represented me energetically, and by focusing on it she was able to connect to me. She put it under her pillow that night, then slept and had a dream of clarity. In the morning she gave me a long explanation of what was to come in my life, things that I should avoid and things that I should do. It was clear and helpful guidance.
Sometimes a student asks whether or not a dream that tells us something about the future demonstrates that the future is fixed. In the Tibetan tradition, we believe that it is not. The causes of all things that can happen are already present, right now, because the consequences of the past are the seeds of future situations. The primary causes of any situation in the future are to be found in what has already occurred. But the secondary causes necessary for the manifestation of the karmic seeds are not fixed, they are circumstantial. That is why practice is effective, and why illness can be cured. If it were otherwise, it would make no sense to attempt anything, as nothing could be changed. If we have a dream about tomorrow, and tomorrow comes and everything happens just as it did in our dream, this does not mean the future is fixed and cannot be changed; it means we did not change it.
Imagine a strong karmic trace, imprinted with a strong emotion, that is a primary cause for a particular situation, and it is coming to fruition. That is, our lives may be providing the secondary causes necessary for the primary cause to manifest. In a dream of the future, the cause is present and the trace that is ripening toward manifestation conditions the dream, with the result that the dream is an imagining of the results. It is as if we go into a kitchen and there is a wonderful Italian cook there, and the smell of spices and cooking food, and the ingredients laid out on a table: we can almost imagine the dinner that is being prepared, almost see the results of the situation. This is like the dream. We may not be completely accurate, but we might get most of it right. And then, when we are served the dinner, it will merge with our expectations, the differences will blur, and it will be the dinner we expected even if it is not quite the same.
I remember an example of this from when I was young. It was a day called Diwali in India, traditionally celebrated with firecrackers. My friends and I did not have money to buy firecrackers, so we looked for ones that had been lit but had not exploded. We gathered them and then tried to relight them. I was very young, four or five years old. One of the firecrackers was a little wet, and I put it on a burning coal. I shut my eyes and blew on it and of course it exploded. For a moment I could not see anything except stars, and right then I remembered my dream of the night before. It was exactly the same, the whole experience. Of course, it would have been much more helpful if I had remembered the dream before rather than after the event! There are many cases like this, in which the causes of future situations are woven into a dream about a future that is likely to, but will not necessarily, unfold.
Sometimes in a dream the causes and results affecting other people can be known. When I was in Tibet, my teacher, Lopon Tenzin Namdak, had a dream and then told me it was very important that I do a particular practice connected with one of the guardians. I began to do the practice for many hours every day while I traveled, trying to influence whatever he had seen in his dream. A few days after his dream, I was a passenger in a truck traveling on a tiny road high in the mountains. The drivers in that part of Tibet are wild, nomadic people with little fear of death. Thirty of us were crowded into a big truck with a lot of heavy luggage when the tire hit a hole and the truck tipped over.
I got out and looked down. I was not particularly afraid. But then I saw that one small stone held the truck up, preventing it from sliding down into a valley, a drop so far that a stone tossed over the edge took what seemed to be a long while to reach bottom. Then my heart started to bang around in my chest! Then I felt the fear, noticing that one small stone was all that stood between us and death, that kept my life from ending as a short story.
When I saw what the situation was I thought, “That’s it. That’s why I had to do the practice of the guardian.” That was what my teacher saw in his dream and why he told me to do the practice. A dream may not be very specific, but still can convey through the feeling and images of the dream that something is coming that needs to be remedied. This is one kind of benefit we can receive from working with our dreams.
TEACHINGS IN DREAM
There are numerous examples in the Tibetan tradition of practitioners who received teachings in dreams. Often the dreams come in sequence, each night’s dream starting where the previous night’s dream ends, and in this way transmitting entire, detailed teachings until a precise and appropriate point of completion is reached, at which point the dreams stop. Volumes of teachings have been “discovered” this way, including many of the practices that Tibetans have been doing for centuries. This is what we call “mind treasure" (gong-ter*).
Imagine entering a cave and finding a volume of teachings hidden inside. This is finding in a physical space. Mind treasures are found in consciousness rather than in the physical world. Masters have been known to find these treasures both in dreams of clarity and when awake. In order to receive these kinds of teaching in a dream, the practitioner must have developed certain capacities, such as being able to stabilize in consciousness without identifying with the conventional self. The practitioner whose clarity is unobscured by karmic traces and samsaric dreams has access to the wisdom inherent in consciousness itself.
Authentic teachings discovered in dream do not come from the intellect. It is not like going to the library and doing research and then writing a book, using the intellect to collect and synthesize information as a scholar might. Although many good teachings come from the intellect, they are not considered mind treasures. The wisdom of the Buddhas is self-originated, rising from the depths of consciousness, complete in itself. This does not mean that mind treasure teachings will not resemble existing teachings, for they will. Furthermore, these teachings can be found in different cultures and in different historical periods, and can be similar even though they do not inform each other. Historians work to trace a teaching back in time in order to point out how it was influenced by a similar teaching, where the historical connection took place, and so on, and often they find such a link. But the underlying truth is that these teachings arise spontaneously from humans when they reach a certain point in their individual development. The teachings are inherent in the foundational wisdom that any culture can eventually access. They are not only Buddhist or Bon teachings; they are teachings for all humans.
If we have the karma to help other beings, the teachings from a dream may be of benefit to others. But it may also be the case, if we have karma with a lineage, for example, that the teachings discovered in a dream will be particularly for our own practice, perhaps as a specific remedy to overcome a particular obstacle.