Dreaming as a Metaphor

   Just today, I had a beautiful 'text' conversation about William Faulkner's book As I Lay Dying, which I remember reading many years ago, if not as a teenager. What I recall about that book is how it relates the burial of the family matriarch, and how all these characters go about honoring their mother. One of the book's themes is about motivation: something that seems on the outside to be so pure might be motivated by very different things such as money, escape, or some wish to be glorified in some way. Each chapter is written from a very different perspective, and there are many characters to keep track of throughout the journey.
     In Buddhist teachings there is often the notion that we are 'talking about dreams while in dreams' (Shengyen, 2014, p.97). We think that one thing is only a dream while the other is 'real', but actually even that which one considers as real is part of a larger dream. In other words, one can never break out of the cause and conditioned life unless they realize that cause and conditions are not permanent, and they are experienced very uniquely according to the karma of the perceiver. At that point, the person can recognize that they are in a dream. I wonder if perhaps Faulkner's many-pointed perspectives also serves the same function: to show that everyone is functioning in a dream. Often, a person may go through life not even fully aware of her or his motivations. If people were so clear about them, perhaps they wouldn't even venture to do anything, out of fear that the motives are not pure.
    Faulkner's narrative is 'horizontal': rather than telling a story that has an upward trajectory for a single character, he moves between characters who are on a similar yet very different journey. By treating his readers in this way, Faulkner allows the reader to look at a situation from a multitudinous perspective, while not attaching to any one view as 'the real one'. It also describes how there is no idealized image of a family, because everyone is affected by very different things that are often outside the scope of a family. I haven't come across a narrative that is any better than this one for illuminating how conditioned people are to look at the present from the perspective of their own pasts. Here again is where the dreaming metaphor becomes an interesting point of view to help people see their own viewpoints as somehow relative and open to change. Maybe this would also give a person the humor and courage not to buy into a single story line which attempts to explain everything.

Shengyen (2014), Chan and Enlightenment.  Elmhurst, New York: Dharma Drum Publishing