Do the Five Consciousnesses Exist in Dreams?

If the five consciousnesses are to arise, there must be the five sense objects (pañca-viṣaya); without the five sense objects, the five consciousnesses cannot be born. The realms in dreams are all subjectively imagined mental sense-object (dharma-viṣaya) realms; there are no relatively more real sense-object realms of the five sense objects, so there are no five consciousnesses. Because the five sense objects are lacking, the subjectively imagined realm is incomplete and deficient, and the mental objects (dharma-viṣaya) that the solitary consciousness (mano-vijñāna-eka-citta) alone discerns are not very clear; they are roughly illusory and unreal. Therefore, the mind consciousness and the manas do not necessarily discern the dream realm very clearly; errors are inevitable, and sometimes the errors are quite large, often mixing things up. In dreams, the discernment of the manas is dominant; when the manas encounters unfamiliar realms, its discerning wisdom is not strong and it lacks accurate judgment, so what it discerns is unclear; only when the manas possesses meditative concentration (samādhi) and wisdom, or when the realm is very familiar, can it discern things fairly accurately.

If there are five sense-object realms in a dream, the five consciousnesses would participate in the discernment, and then there would be no difference from the waking state, and there would be no such thing as dreams or sleep. When one sees rivers of blood in a dream and feels that the blood is red, it should originally be the eye consciousness that discerns the red color, but there is no eye consciousness in a dream—so who knows it is red? The Śūraṅgama Sūtra says 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. Then the five sense objects that the five consciousnesses should discern are also attended to by the manas, which has some rough discernment, knowing that what flows is red blood. But for some people, the manas in dreams does not know that blood or fire is red. The manas sometimes knows what the five sense-object realms are, and sometimes does not; sometimes there seems to be color in dreams, such as red firelight, and sometimes there is no color—clearly it should be a dream with very vivid colors, yet there is no color in the dream.

Beings in the human realm all have the supreme faculty (indriya); beings in the animal realm also have the supreme faculty. The physical bodies of animals, like those of humans, are flesh bodies constituted by real seeds of the four great elements; they have brains and supreme faculties. When pathological changes occur in the supreme faculty, animals can also become schizophrenic or mad. Due to karmic obstructions, the supreme faculties of animals are inferior to those of humans; they have great illusions when viewing people and things, and do not see the dharma as it truly is. But all kinds of animals have special strengths belonging to their own kind: for example, some animals have keen vision and can see at night, some have keen hearing, some have keen smell, some have keen taste, and some have keen touch. However, animals generally have very poor thinking ability of the mind consciousness, and even less logical analytical ability; they mostly rely on the intuitive power of the manas, so they appear rather simple. Apart from the killing karma committed for the sake of filling their stomachs and surviving, they hardly use their minds to commit other evil karma; they are beings that purely undergo retribution.

Because the living environment of the beings in the four formless heavens of the formless realm is formless, there is no material form (rūpa) of the five sense objects, and no physical body; therefore there is no supreme faculty, no inner five sense objects, no inner mental sense-objects (dharma-viṣaya), and no five consciousnesses; but they do have the mind consciousness, the manas, and the eighth consciousness. Their eighth consciousness and manas exist forever without perishing, and their mind consciousness also exists forever without perishing; what their mind consciousness discerns is the subjectively imagined realm within meditative concentration (samādhi)—there is no external mental sense-object, only the subjectively imagined realm. If the mind consciousness were to cease, only the eighth consciousness and the manas would remain, which would belong to the state of the cessation attainment (nirodha-samāpatti). Therefore, the mind consciousness of the formless realm devas also exists forever without perishing; there is no distinction between day and night, no need for sleep or rest, and they are forever in meditative concentration, facing the subjectively imagined realm.