The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (21 page)

Dreams of the Buddha

O
nce, when asked, “Who are you?” by a bedazzled admirer, the Buddha replied simply, “I am awake.” This famous statement is often misinterpreted. While it speaks of his uncovering of the Four Noble Truths—of suffering, its cause, its relief, and the path to its release—it can make it seem as if the Buddha never slept, as if he never dreamed, as if perpetual alertness was his main attribute. The Buddha was certainly awake, but he was not on guard. He was attentive to all who came his way, alert to their traumas and to their reluctance to admit to their traumas, and he was equally attuned to himself. In awakening to his true nature, the Buddha did not neglect the reality of those around him. A concern for others defined his attention.

One of the most important steps in the Buddha’s awakening came in his sleep. Right after remembering his childhood joy under the rose-apple tree, after taking his meal of rice pudding and being abandoned by his five former friends, after throwing his begging bowl into the river and watching it float upstream, he had a series of dreams. They are recorded in one of the original collections of Buddhist sutras
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but have been given scant attention over the years. The dreams were catalytic for the Buddha’s growth and development. Not only did they reveal much about his own history of trauma, about who he was before his enlightenment and what he had to recover to get there, but they helped open him to a dormant capacity of his mind, one that he was then able to use to help others with their suffering. In dreaming himself into wakefulness, the Buddha remembered, and took possession of, a quality of human relatedness he had all but ignored previously. It was this recovery that made his enlightenment possible.

Dreams are dissociative by definition. They occur when the rest of the mind is shut down, and they allow difficult feelings to be expressed in symbolic form. In most cases, they are forgotten upon awakening or remembered only in bits and pieces, the forces of dissociation keeping the feelings disguised and away from waking consciousness. This was not the case for the Buddha at this crucial time in his life. In the process of turning his mind around, he became ready to face something he had been estranged from, and he needed his dreams to help him.

The Buddha remembered his five dreams and recorded them for posterity; he may even have been aware of them as he slept. The dreams put something to rest in the Buddha while also waking something up. They took away his need to
enact
his dissociated feelings, as he had done in his years of ascetic self-abasement, and they lucidly revealed something about himself he had been ignoring. Simply speaking, they showed him that he could be kind. In his years of spiritual searching he had perfected all kinds of esoteric talents. He could take his mind into spheres of nothingness, go for days and weeks without eating, and rend his flesh with the best of them, but he was still operating with barely disguised contempt, not benevolence, toward himself and his world. When the enlightened Buddha told his admirer that he was awake, it was this basic kindness he was pointing to. With the help of his dreams, he had awakened to his true nature, and his true nature, to his utter surprise, was a relational one.

The passage in the sutras that portrays the Buddha’s dreams is an interesting one. It begins by describing him as “not yet wholly awakened” but as a “being awakening” to whom there came “five great dreams.”
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The idea that there was a period in the Buddha’s life when he was in the
process
of awakening is special in itself. It is not universally accepted in Buddhist circles that such an intermediate period existed. There are whole schools of thought that have grown up around the idea of “sudden enlightenment” and others that defend a “gradual” one. But here is a clear reference to something in between. A special time in the Buddha’s life when he was
awakening
and one in which his struggle to awaken occurred while he was dreaming. The relationship of this to the movement from implicit to narrative memory is interesting. The Buddha’s awakening rested on his dream life, on a creative transformation of that which was lurking in his unconscious memory, on his ability to bring something unknown into awareness, to give it a narrative structure that could allow him to hold it in conscious self-reflection. This happened after his childhood memory, in which the Buddha began to take feelings seriously. Feelings led him to dreaming. And dreaming showed him how to relate.

The five dreams are all of a piece. They begin with one that immediately equates the awakening Buddha with an infant lying on his mother’s body, and they proceed to paint a developmental picture of the emergence of an interactive self. While the dreams are traditionally thought to foretell the future, they quite specifically evoke the Buddha’s dissociated past. In narrative form they link the Buddha’s solitary enlightenment, won by virtue of his own individual effort and intelligence, to a recovery of the interpersonal foundations upon which his emergent self depended. The dreams make clear that awakening was possible only when the Buddha’s inherent capacity for interpersonal relatedness could suffuse the entirety of his mental life.

As the sutra describes:

Just before the Perfect One, accomplished and fully enlightened, attained enlightenment, five momentous dreams appeared to him. What five? While he was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, the great earth was his couch; Himalaya, king of mountains, was his pillow; his left hand lay in the Eastern Ocean, his right hand lay in the Western Ocean, his feet lay in the Southern Ocean. This was the first dream that appeared to him, and it foretold his discovery of the supreme full enlightenment.

While he was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, a creeper grew up out of his navel and stood touching the clouds. That was the second dream that appeared to him, and it foretold his discovery of the Noble Eightfold Path.

While he was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, white grubs with black heads crawled from his feet to his knees and covered them. This was the third dream that appeared to him, and it foretold that many white-clothed laymen would go for refuge to the Perfect One during his life.

While he was only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, four birds of different colours came from the four quarters, and, as they alighted at his feet, they all became white. This was the fourth dream that appeared to him, and it foretold that the four castes . . . would realize the supreme deliverance when the Dhamma and the Discipline had been proclaimed by the Perfect One.

While he was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, he walked upon a huge mountain of dirt without being fouled by the dirt. This was the fifth dream that appeared to him, and it foretold that although the Perfect One would obtain the requisites of robes, alms food, abode, and medicine, yet he would use them without greed or delusion or clinging, perceiving their dangers and understanding their purpose.
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The dreams themselves are amazing, and the traditional interpretations neat, lyrical, and inspiring. But the emotional nature of the dream content is worth paying attention to as well. It does not seem as if the traditional interpretations, pointing toward the future, quite do justice to the dreamer’s emotional experience, linking him to his own personal history. In the first dream, for example, the sleeping Buddha is one with the universe. He is quite literally dreaming an oceanic feeling, with the mountains his pillow, the earth his couch, and his floating limbs supported by the water. He may well have been foretelling his enlightenment as the traditional commentaries suggest, but he was also telegraphing his recovery of the feminine, of his maternal aptitude. The earth as mother, the oceans as amniotic fluid, and the couch as her lap: These symbols would have evoked a maternal presence long before the advent of Freud. The Buddha’s dream was not just predicting the future; in its depiction of the redolence of the present moment it was also recalling the past. His memory of childhood joy had opened him to being, and it appeared to him in his dream in the symbolic form of the earth and its waters as mother.

As if to prove the point, the Buddha’s second dream literally grows from his navel. Vines creep to the sky, connecting him to the clouds and, by inference, to the heaven realm in which his mother took refuge after her death. If, as the traditional commentary suggests, the dream is predicting the discovery of the Noble Eightfold Path, it is doing so by revealing that the path to awakening does not involve withdrawal from the world but affirms a profound connection with it. The vines entwine the Buddha with the universe. They grow from his navel, reestablishing his original connection with his mother and reaffirming the primacy of his relational nature. The simultaneity of difference and connection, of separateness and unity, is painted by the image. The awakening Buddha is dreaming of the connectedness that emerges when one’s primitive agonies are resolved, of the relatedness that takes the place of self-pity, of the inherently engaged nature of the self. He is dreaming of selflessness while revealing that there is no self apart from the world.

The third dream is the most mysterious. White grubs with black heads crawling from his feet to his knees. To me, the grubs are like Winnicott’s primitive agonies or Eigen’s broken dreams: the leftover remnants of childhood experience that make our skin crawl. They make me think of the ascetics of the Buddha’s time, dedicated to self-mortification, and of the many people of our own time, tormented by self-hatred, who are as devoted to psychological self-mortification as those of the Buddha’s time were to the physical. The grubs are sinister, like maggots in the flesh of the ancient ascetics, but also redemptive, like cicadas, which in Japan represent rebirth, crawling as they do from the ground every summer to fill the air with their distinctive background song. In this imagery, the Buddha’s third dream aligns his awakening with therapists’ insights about aborted emotional experience. The dream suggests that agony, like the white grubs with black heads, can be a vehicle of awakening and that the broken aspects of our being have within themselves the template for wholeness. Each person who came to the Buddha brought his own individual anguish along, and each such person, in harnessing his capacity for remembering, let that anguish crawl upward.

I thought of this dream during a workshop I was teaching a little while ago. A handsome young man was sitting all the way in the rear of the room, twenty or thirty rows back. He was one of only a few African Americans in the workshop, a man of about thirty, confident in his bearings. He wore a knit cap on his head and commanded the attention of all as he spoke. “I’ve been struggling with something all day,” he began. “When I meditate now, I am filled with a feeling of loss. It has to do with my father, who left when I was young. There’s a lot of anger, and I can feel myself wondering if it was my fault, even though I know that’s ridiculous. But when I stay with it more, I just feel it turning into a kind of deadness: a lethargy, as if nothing matters. I feel myself sinking into the feeling and it feels dangerous, as if life has been stripped of meaning. What would you suggest?”

I was struck by his sincerity and his courage in speaking of something so personal in front of such a large group. I could feel him missing the father he hardly knew and turning that pain against himself, as if he were broken or cursed. I thought of the Buddha’s loss of his mother and of the process of recovery that his dreams signified. And I remembered how the Buddha, like this man, first sank into nothingness and then willed himself toward deadness. His third dream, in which there is some kind of creative emergence from the grubby ground, gave me the inspiration to respond.

“These feelings of rage and distress and despair that you talk about,” I said, circling something I knew I would have trouble articulating. “They only exist because of your original love for your father. They are like signposts back to that love. His leaving took that love with him, or appeared to, but you will see, if you stay with your meditation, that all of that love is still there in you. From the infant’s perspective, it’s directed at only one or two people, but even if they failed you, that capacity for love is still there in you. It’s too bad for your father that he didn’t get to know it—but there are plenty of people now who will be grateful for it. There’s a whole roomful right here.”

There was a danger of glibness in my response, but I think the gentleman in the workshop felt the intention of my words. While they were framed around notions of love, they were also drawn from our discussions of Buddhist and Western psychology. As long as he was locked into the self-image of being a fatherless child, cut off from the one whom he needed, this man was caught in his presumed identity. He was aware of his trauma, but he was using it to distance himself from life. He had a story about himself but no access to who he might have been before his trauma derailed him. I was trying to use his feelings of deprivation as a means of bringing him back in touch with a more fundamental truth about himself, to guide him back toward—or at least help him to visualize—the intrinsic relational foundation of his being. By not fighting with his internal wounds, by not insisting on making them go away, by not recruiting everyone in his intimate life to save him from his feelings of abandonment, by simply resting with them the way we do in meditation, he could learn, as the Buddha did, that he already was the love he thought he lacked.

The fourth dream, of the four birds coming together as one, speaks of the sense of internal cohesion that comes when the self is no longer held hostage by the traumas of childhood or the conflicts of adult life: When the self, in all of its multiplicity, is known as one. The four birds of different colors, reflective in the traditional accounts of the four castes in Indian society, are also suggestive of dissociation and estrangement. However it may be conceived, the traumatized self is fragmented, divided into parts, unable to hold the entire range of its history. Experience is constricted because the full range cannot be tolerated. The ground for holding it is not strong enough.