The Manas Discriminates All Dharmas Within and Outside Dreams

If the dream realm while dreaming can connect with the realm outside the dream, it shows that the manas can perceive all dharmas both inside and outside the dream, and that it is the manas which first perceives the situations of the real world outside the dream; because it pays close attention to those situations, it turns the realm outside the dream into a dreamscape, letting the mind consciousness also participate in perceiving it.

Although a person's six consciousnesses have ceased while asleep, the manas can still rely on the tathāgatagarbha to perceive all dharmas. The voice of a Dharma lecture playing on a tape recorder outside can also be heard by the manas, but His wisdom of discrimination and perception is not that strong; since He is interested in the Dharma lecture, He creates a dream and lets the mind consciousness perceive the Dharma lecture within the dream. However, the manas does not perceive the realm outside the dream very clearly; although the dream is related to the external realm, there are still some differences, showing that there are many realms the manas has not figured out.

From this we know that whether awake or asleep, the manas knows all the dharmas among the realms of the six sense objects; the key is how detailed and accurate His knowing is. If it is something the manas has been extremely, extremely familiar with for countless eons, His perception is extremely fast and extremely accurate; if it is something not very familiar, His perception is slow and inaccurate, with many errors, and the dreamscape produced will differ somewhat from reality.

When I first encountered the Buddhadharma, one day at noon a video about deliverance rituals was playing at home. It showed several esoteric Buddhist masters performing deliverance rites for herds of cattle awaiting slaughter in Tibet. The number of cattle was enormous; the deliverance ceremony in the front was very solemn, while the cattle-slaughtering scene behind it was extremely tragic—blood flowed like a river, and the cattle, terrified, cried out miserably. The video played for roughly half an hour to an hour. Since I was not yet a complete believer in Buddhism, I fell asleep while the video was playing; while sleeping, I could still hear the sound of the video, and then the dream appeared. The dream I had was exactly the same as the content of the video playing outside—wherever the video played, the dream followed. In the middle I wanted to wake up but just could not. I also knew the content of the video; what appeared in the dream were all bloody scenes, along with the miserable cries of the cattle—some of the cattle even knelt down before people.

This dream was entirely induced by the manas. Although the six consciousnesses could not see while asleep, the manas was very interested in this matter and so produced the dream, converting the externally-presented image-realm (a dependent-on-objects realm) into a subjectively imagined realm, letting the mind consciousness also perceive it. The manas could simultaneously be aware of both the inner and outer realms: He knew the content of the video outside, and He also knew the dreamscape within the dream. The dream depicted the scenes of the deliverance ritual and the slaughtering of the cattle herds vividly and lifelike; the realms inside and outside the dream were almost identical. The mind also knew that those scenes kept changing one after another, yet wanting to wake up, I just could not.

When there is no connection between a dream and the external reality, it also shows that the dreamscape consists of content the manas was interested in, thought about, and paid attention to during the day; at night the manas produced the dream. As the saying goes, what one ponders by day one dreams of by night—the manas attends to it during the day and also attends to it at night, and that is why the dream appeared. From one's dreams one can judge the degree of a person's cultivation, so some dreams do carry a certain significance.