Dreams and Their Meanings

To understand our dreams, it is necessary to understand where in our lives they come from. Buddhism has a concept called the Nine Levels of Consciousness that explains it quite clearly.

The First Five Levels of Consciousness
Each of our sense organs selects from our environment one kind of vibration and sends it to our brain for identification and interpretation. These sense organs are our (1) smell-consciousness, or ghrana-vijnana, (2) sight-consciousness, or chakshur-vijnana, (3) touch-consciousness, or kaya-vijnana, (4) hearing-consciousness, or shrota-vijnana, and (5) taste-consciousness, or jihva-vijnana.

The Sixth Level of Consciousness
Our sixth level of consciousness, called our mano-consciousness, or mano-vijnana, is our brain’s integrated acceptance and identification of that sensory information. Our mano-consciousness is the function of our intelligence or consciousness, and is the way we make inferences and judgments about the external world.

Our sixth level of consciousness is what is commonly referred to as our conscious awareness. These first six levels of consciousness describe how we respond to the external world.

The Seventh Level of Consciousness
The seventh level of consciousness, also termed mano-consciousness, or mano-vijnana, is a deep, unconscious awareness of the self. This is the level of our lives that maintains itself regardless of what is going on in our first six levels of consciousness. Our mano-consciousness is capable of perceiving truths that exist beyond our external physical world, those which transcend our day-to-day affairs. The existence of our mano-consciousness is reflected in our ability to focus and concentrate, our ability to reason, and is reflected in our wisdom. The function of our mano-consciousness is rooted in our first six levels of consciousness, and as a result, is always under its influence.

Our seventh level of consciousness is commonly referred to as our unconscious. Sigmund Freud erroneously thought that our dreams emanate from this layer of our lives.

The Eighth Level of Consciousness
Our eighth level of consciousness is our alaya-consciousness, or alaya-vijnana, and is the dwelling place or receptacle in which all of our thoughts, words, and actions are imprinted. These energies are collected every passing micro-second, and have the potential to influence our patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior in the present and in the future. These impressions are considered to be seeds, and so our alaya-consciousness is also described as our “storehouse consciousness,” or our “repository of seeds.” In other words, the seeds of our alaya-consciousness are the latent power of our actions to produce future effects. Another word for this latent power is “karma.” Our alaya-consciousness, then, is our life-current of karmic energy.

Our alaya-consciousness is also eternal, without beginning and without ending. There was never a time in the remote past when our alaya-consciousness was created, for it has always been. When we die, our first seven levels of consciousness die too. But our alaya-consciousness lives on, eternally spanning the past, present, and future.

Ancient Buddhist texts describe our alaya-consciousness as being like a rushing stream. If we could see this rushing stream with our eyes, we would see everything in the universe as a simultaneous, inexorable flow of life and death that transcends the past present, and future. We would see and experience the entirety of this timeless rush of energy as existing within a single micro-second, the thinnest sliver of time. And, within this thinnest sliver of time would be the entirety and the eternity of the vast, rushing stream.

Upon our deaths we instantly experience the entirety of our alaya-consciousness, and it is an exhilarating experience. People who are in the process of dying experience their alaya-consciousness when they see their lives flashing before their eyes. These people experience every thought, action, and feeling they had in this life, and they experience the totality of that rushing stream in the thinnest sliver of time.

Our alaya-consciousness transcends the limits of our own personal lives, and interacts with the karmic energy of all other beings throughout the universe. Our alaya-consciousness interacts with the karmic energy of all sentient beings throughout the universe, and interacts with the karmic energy of all non-sentient beings as well. The lives of sentient beings come into physical existence by way of their individual karmic tendencies, but non-sentient things such as rivers, mountains, and the planet Earth itself, derive their physical existence from shared karma.

Alaya-consciousness was described in small part by the notion of the “collective unconscious” as propounded by C. G. Jung. Jung believed that every human being possesses within his psyche the entire history of all other humans, past and present. In this way, Jung believed, every human shares with all other humans a common psychic base, which he coined the “collective unconscious.” Jung also believed that many of the images that appear to us in dreams have a common significance, arising as he claimed from our collective unconscious, and he referred to those collective meanings as dream archetypes.
Edgar Cayce said that our dreams originate from within an area of our lives that he termed our super-consciousness. Cayce’s idea of the super-consciousness coincides with the definition of our alaya-consciousness.

Our alaya-consciousness is morally neutral, and is the repository for the potential effects of all our actions, including those that make us feel good, and those that make us feel bad.
Other terms used to name our alaya-consciousness are the Source, the Universe, the Tao, the All-That-Is, the Pure Law, the God-mind, and the Law of Attraction.

The Ninth Level of Consciousness
Our ninth level of consciousness, called our amala-consciousness, or amala-vijnana, is the foundation of the first eight levels of consciousness. In Sanskrit, the word amala means “pure,” “unstained,” and “spotless.” This is because our amala-consciousness is untouched and untainted by the karmic influences of our alaya-consciousness. Our amala-consciousness is also untouched and untainted by the ceaseless stresses and back-and-forth struggles of gain and loss that are manifestations of our alaya-consciousness.

Our amala-consciousness activates the first eight levels of consciousness. The first eight levels of consciousness, therefore, are emanations of the vibrational energy that is our amala-consciousness. Our amala-consciousness is where our ego-self, or our inner being, becomes the greater self of the universe. Our amala-consciousness is the unchanging, eternal reality that reigns over all of life’s functions.

Our amala-consciousness does not exist remote from ourselves, but exists only within the mortal flesh of us ordinary human beings. But, it exudes from our lives into the whole rest of the universe.

Our amala-consciousness is another word for our Buddha-nature, our absolute nature of total enlightenment. Another term for our amala-consciousness is the Mystic Law.
(1) When we have dreams while we are sleeping, our dreams are emanations of our amala-consciousness. Every dream we have, therefore, is precisely the same as though we were having a conversation with the Buddha, except that we are the Buddha. (2) Whenever we use an oracle, such as playing cards, tarot cards, or the I Ching or whatever, the messages we receive through the oracle come straight from our amala-consciousness. In this way also, every time we do a divination it is precisely the same as having an impeccable conversation with the Buddha.
(3) Every time we encounter an omen, we are experiencing another environmental manifestation of our amala-consciousness. Nowadays, hardly anyone knows how to identify omens, much less make sense of them. Nevertheless, omens appear to people probably two or three times a week on the average.

It is by understanding the information we receive through these sources that our lives become significantly better aligned with the vibrational energy of our alaya-consciousness. The better this alignment is, the more successful, rewarding, and fulfilling our lives are.