The Appeal of the Manas

When the body gets cold while asleep in the middle of the night and needs a blanket, how does the manas express its demand? Because the manas cannot directly process sense objects and various problems, and can only resolve its own problems through the cooperation of the six consciousnesses, when the manas encounters a difficult problem, it will find a way to alert the mind consciousness so that it becomes aware; only after the mind consciousness becomes aware can it think of a way to solve the problem. Having fallen asleep in the middle of the night, how does it alert the mind consciousness? Only through dreams. What kind of dream can express that the body is cold?

Ru She: Give the mind consciousness a dream of freezing cold weather.

Ru Chun: Sometimes there may not necessarily be a dream; there may instead be a direct bodily reaction, such as: tightness in the chest, slight trembling of the body. When the mind consciousness feels the discomfort, it will wake up and go discern what the situation is, discover that it is too cold, and then go deal with it.

Zhi Qin: The manas can make an impression of the cold for the mind consciousness to interpret. Since there is no help from the eyes and ears, the manas can only hand the impression of the tactile feeling over to the mind consciousness, and the mind consciousness may then describe this impression as a world of ice and snow.

Jun Ruolan: Sometimes in a dream one steps into a rather cold river; sometimes in a dream one is blown by a cool wind.  Some people have high blood pressure, but in a dream they find themselves flying up—flying up means being high, so the manas uses spatial height to symbolize the rise in blood pressure.