The Dream of Eliminating Karma

Ru Chun: A while ago, I often had the same dream. In the dream, my entire chest cavity 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: while coughing in the dream, I suddenly vomited up a big mouthful of dark red blood, which drew an arc through the air, and the blood trickled down bit by bit. After that, the same dream never appeared again. Now my meditative concentration is quite good, and my health is fine. During the previous coughing episodes, I felt as if something was stuck very stubbornly and could not be coughed out. I wonder what such a dream might signify, and whether it has any guiding significance for cultivation? 

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

Ru Chun: The second dream was that I took a portion of chicken innards to rinse under the tap, and felt 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; the things I wanted to buy were not there, and I wasted quite a lot of time. When I wanted to go back, I found the road surface was very, very dirty (there was no specific dirty substance, it just felt dirty), and there was no way to walk across it, so I had no choice but to take a cleaner path beside it, and I walked that way.

The fourth dream was that someone wanted to talk to me, so I told her: Don't speak—speaking will attract demons. She still wanted to speak, so I moved off to the side. 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. So 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.

Comment: This dream indicates that you feel uncomfortable about the flesh of sentient beings, that your mind does not resonate with the karma of killing, and that you want to break free from the related karma. The third dream shows that you have begun to break free 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 like 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, just as one avoids demons.