Lecture Notes on the Sūtra of the Collection of the Father and Son (104)

Only the foolish and deluded take dreams to be real

When we hear a beautiful sound and feel very comfortable and happy inside, this is actually just like a dream—both are illusory and unreal. When we hear beautiful music in a dream and feel delighted, this is even more illusory and unreal. A dreamscape is a subjectively imagined realm, a state of objects grasped by the manas through its imputed nature (parikalpita-svabhāva). The tathāgatagarbha, in accordance with the manas's craving and attachment, directly transforms mental sense-object realms out of karmic seeds for the manas to discern. Since the manas cannot make detailed discernment, it allows the mind consciousness to appear and discern together with it. Thus the mind consciousness engages in attention, contact, feeling, perception, and deliberation (manasikāra) toward the musical sound, giving rise to sensations, finding it beautiful and pleasing to the ear, and the mind becomes joyful and happy. In all of this, the manas is conjured up by the tathāgatagarbha, the dream music is conjured up by the tathāgatagarbha, and the mind consciousness is conjured up by the tathāgatagarbha—not a single dharma is real and imperishable. All are illusory and unreal, cannot be relied upon, and are neither the self nor possessed by the self.

After waking up, the dream music vanishes without a trace, the solitary consciousness (mano-vijñāna-eka-citta) also ceases, and the solitary consciousness's sense of happiness no longer exists—there is not a single dharma that can be taken as real. The beautiful music, sounds of praise, beloved people and things heard in a dream, the delightful dreams—after waking, there is nothing at all. Although these phenomena exist in the dream, they are all illusory, false, and unreal. If a person takes the people and things he dreamed about as real, believes the dream he had at night to be true, and keeps fantasizing about it, reminiscing about it, giving rise to attachment and craving, remaining immersed in the dream state and refusing to come out, then this person is truly foolish and without wisdom. Taking a dream as real while dreaming is already delusion and inversion; still taking it as real after waking is even more inverted.