Awakening to the Sound of The Bell

              During lunch today, I was talking to two meditation group members and close friends about the meaning of dreams. I asked them if they remembered their dreams, and we started to talk about the potential dream symbolism.

These days, I am not the kind of person who analyses his dreams so much.  But at one time, in my teenage years, I received a book as a birthday or Christmas present, Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. I will never quite forget that book. This book seemed to get me started on quite an interesting train of thought, because it introduced me to the idea of  the unconscious. I guess you have to picture it: a 16 year old guy who already had quite a few vivid dreams, now receiving a book which says that all dreams have a deeper meaning. And I started to feel that there are simply no accidents in life: everything has an underlying personal meaning that could be deciphered, given a bit of soulful archaeology. In my old journals, I wrote plenty of dream analyses, in the hopes of understanding what the dreams are trying to say to me. After a while, the notion of the unconscious started to look more and more like Melville’s Moby Dick, a kind of endless, gigantic quest that has no clear definition or end to it. I soon became weary, realizing that there are almost endless ways of interpreting our experiences, let alone our subconscious ones. And I also began to feel that interpretations are always tentative, and they are perhaps meant to enrich life rather than provide a definite, driving direction. Even dreams are impermanent. By the time I had reached my undergrad first year at York, dream analysis had fallen out of my radar, and I had started to look into other ways of seeing the world.

Recently, I have not been recollecting too many of my dreams. I am not too sure how to articulate it, but I stumbled upon an analogy of dreaming in the Surangama Sutra Part V, Chapter 3, which has helped me articulate my reluctance. The Buddha explains to Ananda and the congregation that sound does not depend on consciousness or sensory perception, but is the result of direct awareness. The example he uses is that of someone who is deep in a dream, and thinks he hears the sound of a drum beating. He wakes up, realizing that the sound is actually the sound of rice pounding, not the sound of a drum at all. Nonetheless, as the Buddha later concludes, this does not mean that the man was mistaken about the sound itself. He was, all along, able to hear the sound, only he had mistaken the source of the sound for something else. This goes to show that awareness is always operating truly and purely, even in deep sleep.

But from this example, I begin to wonder whether the sound is ‘really’ coming from the pounding of rice after all. From a Buddhist view, it is not. In fact, the sound always starts in mind, and becomes associated with the things that most occur along with that sound. But the sound always arises in awareness, not from an external object. Regardless of what objects come to mind when I hear the sound, the source of the sounds is the same. The point here is to suggest that dreams and waking life are not necessarily so different from each other. They both involve mostly unconscious associations between distinct objects that touch one deeply. But regardless, the story Buddha talks about suggests how easily the mind can associate distinct qualities with each other that aren’t related. For example, I might associate maple syrup with a bad childhood memory, whereas someone else might see it as a symbol of Canadian pride. Which of these is the ‘true’ and correct view? Both involve associations of some kind, some mutually agreed upon and others derived in total solitude. But these associations are also subject to change, just as the maple syrup might acquire a different significance in the future. Knowing these things to be impermanent, one can see that the symbolic elements that dreams point to are also impermanent. In a sense, this means to me that while one can learn something in dreaming life about one’s karma, the contents of the dream itself do not say much about the true self. The true self only arises when I start to see a little bit past the phenomena to point to that which is aware of the sound, sights, etc.  in the first place.

So nowadays, when I hear the alarm bell in my clock, I am more concerned with the sound of the bell than the dream from which it dragged me…

References

The Surangama Sutra: With Excerpts from the Commentary by the Venerable Master Hssuan Hua. A New Translation (2009) Buddhist Text Translation Society.