Dreams - A tool to understand spirituality

Dreams are an integral part of our lives and We have dreams every day. Psychologists tell us that dreams are a way to express our unfulfilled desires. There is a whole body of knowledge which claims to interpret dreams. The ancient rishis of India also saw dreams and analyzed them. However they analyzed it from the perspective of understanding spiritual concepts and their sheer brilliance in explaining spirituality using the dream analogy can be seen in the grandeur of the Mandukya Upanishad. We have talked about consciousness and God earlier. We have said that God is someone or something that is beyond anything that we can imagine. However for people like us with limited ability to grasp such magnificent topics, the sages helped the understanding through the dream analogy. I will try my humble best to summarize the dream analogy to explain spiritual concepts. 



  Let us say I have a dream in which I am travelling in a car and have come to a crowded place. I am unable to manoeuvre in the crowd and let's say I injure someone in an accident. The cops have come and arrested me for negligent driving and have put me in jail. I am deeply sad and fearful of my fate in the jail.Now who am I for real? I am Shashank, who is sleeping on bed. But in my dream , I am a dream character which I will designate with small cap, shashank. In addition I have a car, there is a crowd, the cops, the man I injured, the accident, the jail etc. What are these animate and inanimate objects including shashank really? All these are in essence nothing but elements of the mind of the sleeping Shashank. Through Shashank's own power of projection, I have created a whole new world. Now, in this created world, if someone who is enlightened were to come and tell the character shashank that this is all an illusion and in reality, the character need not worry about the jail, would the character shashank believe this? The character shashank in the dream would just ask the wise man to shut up and keep grieving over his fate in jail. 

Now, let us apply this to consciousness. As indicated earlier, the only reality is consciousness or God as one may wish to call. Just as Shashank with his power created a dream world including himself, through the power of consciousness which is called as Maya, this whole phenomenal world is created. Just as the dream world and events appear very true to the dream character shashank, all that we we see and experience appears true even though it is an illusion created by maya.Let's continue with the same dream. The judge has sentenced that I should be thrown to the lion as a punishment. I am in a ground and the lion is rushing towards me and springs on me. At that instant, shaking in fear, the real Shashank wakes up in bed. Once Shashank wakes up, the entire dream world, the sorrow, the fear as also the lion which caused me to wake up, all are gone.Similarly, in this world of phenomena we do not realize it is an illusion and believe it is reality. Only when a Guru with a powerful message acts like the dream lion, we will wake up to the reality that this whole world is an illusion and in reality we are nothing but the supreme consciousness. Just as the lion which woke me up also disappeared on waking up, even the spiritual message which can deliver us from this illusory world will disappear once we wake up to the reality of consciousness.

 Now, let us take this study further. I am the dream character and I keep on praying to God to get me out of the trouble that I am in. but then who is the God for this dream character? It is me Shashank sleeping in my bed room. There is absolutely no chance for me the God for this dream character to go into the dream and save the shashank who is a prisoner.  So, in our illusory world where we all live, how logical could it be to offer money in hundis to God or perform archanas or special prayers to rid us of the problems we face? At no point do I wish to say that prayers should not be done. Prayers have a healing effect on the emotion. So long as a prayer gives us the ability to focus on something much higher than our own limited ego, it serves its purpose. But just as absurd it is to imagine that when the dream character shashank prays, the God of the dream the Shashank in the bed room will somehow go into the dream and relieve the pain, similarly, in my humble opinion, doing a prayer or a donation to the hundi hoping that some unseen God will come and remove my pain is pointless. However, if the dream character shashank just realizes that he is an illusion and his pain will vanish when the real Shashank wakes up, in our day to day existence, we should  realize that once we get realization, all our pains will vanish. 

Now, who created the dream? Me, that is Shashank. Each of the characters in the dream are nothing but Shashank. Secondly there is no difference between the car in the dream or the cop in the dream or the lion in the dream. All of them are nothing but Shashank. Using this analogy, a spiritual school of thought declared that all souls are the same and each soul is nothing but the supreme soul.Now, when a dream ends, what is happening? Each of the characters are merging back into me, Shashank who woke up. It can be argued that the dream characters do not become me. So another school of thought said, each soul is the same and they merge into the supreme soul, but do not become the supreme soul.
 Thus it can be seen how using the dream analogy, some of the very difficult concepts of spirituality become clear.