A Dream of Dissolving Karma

Ru Chun: For a while recently, I kept having the same dream. In the dream, my entire chest felt extremely itchy, and I started coughing violently, until I coughed myself awake. After waking up, I checked and my throat and chest were neither itchy nor painful, but the sensation in the dream was very real. Today I had the same dream again, but this time it was different: in the dream, while coughing, I suddenly vomited up a big mouthful of dark red blood, which traced an arc through the air, the blood trickling down bit by bit. After that, the same dream never appeared again. Now my meditative concentration is quite good, and my health is fine. In the previous coughing episodes, I felt as if something was sticking very stubbornly and could not be coughed out. I wonder what such a dream might signify—does it have any guiding significance for my practice? 

Assessment: This has to be judged based on your current state of meditative concentration and the condition of your chest; only with complete and sufficient information can an accurate judgment be made. Generally speaking, such dream messages only appear when the Qi meridians are opening the heart chakra, or when the adjustment of the chest through the chest is about to be completed. Afterward, the Qi meridians pass through the chest, the blockages and stagnation in the chest are cleared open, and the excess karmic obstruction qi is expelled. Coughing up blood in a dream indicates that a certain karmic obstruction has been eliminated and that your practice has passed through a barrier. Previously being unable to cough it out indicated that your karmic obstructions still had stickiness and could not be eliminated, and that your practice had not yet passed a certain barrier.

Ru Chun: The second dream was that I was rinsing a portion of chicken offal under the tap, feeling very uncomfortable. Just then someone came along who also wanted to wash this, so I quickly handed what was in my hands to him to make up the count. The third dream was that I went to a food market, but the things I wanted to buy were not there, which wasted quite a bit of time. When I wanted to go back, I found the road surface extremely dirty (no specific dirty things, it just felt very dirty), and there was no way to walk across it. Fortunately, there was a cleaner path nearby, so I went that way.

The fourth dream was that someone wanted to speak with me, and I told her: Don't speak—speaking will attract demons. She still wanted to speak, so I moved aside. She then came over, pressed my head down on the table, and shouted twice into my ear, "General Moses," saying that a demon was coming. I took a plaid umbrella to block it, and another friend told me to take one more, so I took another umbrella, a red one.

Assessment: This dream indicates that you feel aversion toward the flesh of sentient beings, that your mind does not resonate with the karma of killing, and that you wish to break free from the related karma. The third dream shows that you have begun to free yourself from defiled karma, are gradually ceasing to resonate with the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion, and have come to prefer pure karma. The fourth dream shows that you love purity and do not want to listen to people talking—especially to voices of speech tinged with the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion—and you try every possible means to avoid them, as if avoiding demons.