ADVAITA-L Digest - 25 May 1996 to 27 May 1996

[Srinivas Sista]

>
>         Regarding the svapna debate, I have a question based on lucid
> dreaming. Most of the times when I dream, I am aware that I am dreaming.
> That is, if I see myself being attacked by a tiger, I know that it is not
> real and that I am sleeping on the mattress and nothing will happen to my
> body. This is mostly consistent with the term lucid dreaming { i heard of
> this term only recently, so don't ask me too much about it, except that I
> read the FAQ on it :-)}. Do vedantic philosophers handle this type of
> dream ? In my opinion, GYAnis regard the waking state as a dream and
> perecive it to be not real, while being established in the SELF, while in
> lucid dreams one is able to perceive that a dream is not real, while
> being established in the mattress :-)
>
> Giri
>
> PS : I am aware that lucid dreams spoil the fun of dreaming to a certain
> extent :-)
>

I used to have occasional lucid dreams few years ago(after my 12th, when
I read about astral travelling). I dont have them anymore. They used to
be lot of fun. You can do some outrageous things like fly, go through
walls, jump off cliffs and smoothly land on the ground ..etc
Sometimes, such outrageous events used to give me the knowledge that
I am dreaming (this is by deduction within the dream).
For me, the waking/dream state equivalence comes from the understanding
of how I put together objects and events. Also the perception of water
in a mirage gave me lot of initial push towards that understanding.
I feel that (just my feeling), for a gnani, the world appears like
water appears to us in a mirage (it appears quite real). But once
the unreal nature of the mirage is understood, the water there loses
its reality (that doesn't mean that water doesn't appear anymore :-) ).
So objects are put together by associating different sense perceptions.
But we know that all the objects and events in dreams are not perceptions
of 'external' objects (after waking up of course). So on what basis can we
classify objects as external and internal (all of them being products of
the mind)? Even if there exist external objects, we can only have their
internal representations. So there is no external and internal but
only 'one'. The external and internal are only concepts.

Srinivas.