Are There Five Consciousnesses in Dreams?

For the five consciousnesses to arise, there must be the five dusts; without the five dusts, the five consciousnesses cannot be born. The realms experienced in dreams are all solitary shadow realms of the dharma dust, lacking the relatively substantial five dusts of the objective realm, hence there are no five consciousnesses. Due to the absence of the five dusts, the solitary shadow realm is incomplete, and the solitary mental consciousness alone discriminates the dharma dust in a vague, illusory, and imprecise manner. Therefore, the consciousness and the manas may not discriminate the dream state clearly, and errors are inevitable; sometimes the errors are significant, often leading to confusion or misattribution. In dreams, discrimination is primarily led by the manas. The manas lacks strong wisdom in discriminating unfamiliar realms and lacks accurate judgment, so its discrimination of dharmas is unclear. Only when the manas possesses concentration and wisdom, or when encountering very familiar realms, can its discrimination be relatively accurate, achieving about eighty or ninety percent correctness.

If there were five dusts in a dream, the five consciousnesses would participate in discrimination, making it no different from the waking state, and there would be no concept of dreams or sleep. In a dream, one might see rivers of blood and perceive the blood as red. Normally, the eye consciousness should discriminate the color red, but since there is no eye consciousness in a dream, who perceives it as red? The Śūraṅgama Sūtra states that when one cultivates to a certain level, the manas can substitute for the functions of the six consciousnesses. Generally, in dreams, the manas can also substitute for the functions of the five consciousnesses. Thus, the manas also contacts the five dusts that the five consciousnesses should discriminate and performs some rough discrimination, knowing that the flowing substance is red blood. However, some people's manas in dreams do not perceive the color of blood or fire as red. Sometimes the manas knows what the five dusts are in a dream, and sometimes it does not. Sometimes in dreams, there seem to be colors, like red flames, and other times there are no colors at all, even in dreams that should be vividly colorful.

Sentient beings in the human realm possess a superior sense faculty, and beings in the animal realm also possess one. The physical bodies of animals are like those of humans, both composed of substantial four-element seeds forming a material body, with a brain and a superior sense faculty. If the superior sense faculty becomes diseased, animals can also suffer from schizophrenia or madness. Due to karmic obstructions, the superior sense faculty of animals is inferior to that of humans, causing significant perceptual illusions when seeing people or objects, so their perception of dharmas is not truthful. However, various animals possess specialized abilities unique to their kind; for example, some have acute vision and can see at night, some have keen hearing, some have a sharp sense of smell, some have sensitive taste, and some have acute touch. But animals generally have poor mental consciousness thinking ability and lack logical analysis, relying mostly on the intuitive power of the manas. Thus, they appear relatively simple. Apart from creating killing karma for sustenance and survival, they hardly use their minds to create other unwholesome karma, belonging to sentient beings who are purely experiencing karmic retribution.

The sentient beings in the four formless heavens of the Formless Realm, because their environment is formless, lack the five dusts of form, lack a physical body, and thus lack a superior sense faculty. They also lack the internal five dusts and internal dharma dust, and lack the five consciousnesses. However, they possess mental consciousness, manas, and the ālaya-vijñāna. Their ālaya-vijñāna and manas exist perpetually without cessation, and their mental consciousness also exists perpetually without cessation. What their mental consciousness discriminates is the solitary shadow realm within meditative concentration, lacking external dharma dust, consisting only of the solitary shadow realm. If the mental consciousness ceases, only the ālaya-vijñāna and manas remain, which pertains to the state of the cessation-perception attainment. Therefore, the mental consciousness of beings in the Formless Heaven also exists perpetually without cessation. There is no distinction between day and night; they do not need sleep or rest, remaining perpetually in meditative concentration, facing the solitary shadow realm.