Interacting in Dreams

 A Chan practitioner was telling me the other day that she hardly gets angry with others, because she is aware that everyone is just interacting in their own dream with others, and thus people are only responding to the cause and conditions that came before. It has taken me a while to sort out the implications of this perspective, but I think that when I come to know that others are seeing their own ideas, I no longer take such ideas to be me. On the other hand, if I think that the person's ideas relate to a self, I will feel angry because I will want to control the other person's idea. In fact, nobody wants to be 'locked' in the mind of someone else.
  Years ago, I read a beautiful little book by R.D. Laing called Self and Others, and its opening vignette describes how two people may not interact with each other at all, but are often interacting only with the image they have of others as well as how they think they look in the other person's eyes. This kind of movie just goes on and on infinitely, with neither person realizing that they are interacting with the inner ideas they ingest about a person, but not the true person. The book uses a quote from Confucius, something to the effect of "If the way out is through the door, why do so few people take it?" Why indeed? Perhaps because the fantasies are so compelling that one wants so badly for them to be real, only to find later that the fantasies have congealed into nightmares based on misplaced ideals.