Dreaming Reality
Maya and the Virtual World: Part III
This is Part III in a series about maya and virtual technology. Read Part II and Part I.
Welcome back to the world of maya. In this post we will explore a classic metaphor for the illusory nature of the world: the dream. Once I’ve unpacked the teaching of world-as-dream, we will see what advice dreaming has to offer for navigating virtual technology.
Maya as (cosmic) dream
The world is a dream, and our purpose here is to ‘wake up’ from it. This is a popular metaphor in Buddhist thinking, exemplified in the well-known verse from the Diamond Sutra:
Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream; Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream. So is all conditioned existence to be seen. —DS 30, trans. Alex Johnson
‘All conditioned existence’ is Buddhist code for the relative world, or everything in the world, including the world itself. Listen to a beautiful sung adaptation of this verse in Sanskrit here.
Over in a Hindu creation story, the universe comes into being as the dream of Lord Vishnu as he sleeps on the body of the mythical snake Sheshanaga, who is floating on the endless Ocean of Milk. And in Daoism we have the famous tale of Chuang-tzu and the Butterfly:
Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea that I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu?
Whether the dream is cosmic or personal, this teaching gives us clues to many aspects of life:
A dream is not ultimately real, but when we are dreaming, it feels real.
A dream emerges seemingly out of nowhere, and yet we know we are (co-)creating it ourselves.1 If you believe in the laws of cause-and-effect, aka. karma, this is how the world works. We are confronted by what we have created, and every act creates the future world. Even in a cosmic dream, each of us is a character with a role to play, who interacts with and influences the dream world.
When we are dreaming, we have some amount of agency to respond and influence events, but we are not completely in control of whatever is happening. In other words, the dreamer is both an active participant and a passive recipient within his or her dream—just like we are in our lives. This is also (a mature understanding of) karma.
All of us ‘wake up’ from our dreams every morning—and all of us have the opportunity to ‘wake up’ from the dream of waking life in any moment. This point and the one above are the premise for the practices of lucid dreaming, or dream yoga.
A novel and potent explanation of the dream idea can be found in this masterful video featuring the voice of Alan Watts and clips from the movie Inception.
Two streams
In my life and in this post, I draw from two different perspectives on dreams: tantric philosophy, and Jungian depth psychology.
The Tantric View
Indian philosophy, specifically Vedanta, talks about four states of mind: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the mysterious fourth state, turiya. The dream state is regarded as a microcosm of the waking state, a miniature illusion that we enter and leave each night. It is to be used to liberate yourself from the relative world, as in the practices of lucid dreaming or dream yoga (more on these later).
Unlike in depth psychology, there isn’t as much focus on the content or the purpose of dreams, or on interpreting and analysing them. This parallels the tantric approach to the content of mind in general (thoughts, emotions etc.) It is not as much what you think or feel that matters, but the changes in your awareness or the quality of your mind, ie. how you approach your thoughts and feelings, and the impact they have on your being. While there is some value to understanding your own mind, for a tantric practitioner it is not as important to analyse and dissect your beliefs, thoughts and inner narratives, as it is to ground them in a deeper level of awareness or to transcend them as an observer.
The Jungian View
Generally speaking, Western psychology places more importance on the content and form of thoughts, beliefs and mental phenomena. Psychological and therapeutic interventions such as positive thinking, affirmations and even CBT, are mostly about understanding and changing the nature of your thoughts and beliefs. It’s a deconstructive, analytical, mechanical approach—dissect the parts, discard some, replace others and build something new. In contrast, the tantric spiritual approach is more organic—zoom out and get some space; dive under and change your perspective; go through, absorb fully, let go; and see how things evolve.
More specifically, the Jungian depth psychological view is that when we dream, the characters and landscapes we encounter are part of our (subconscious) self. These parts are dormant while we are awake, but come to life at night when the boundaries between conscious and subconscious mind dissolve. In dreamwork, we learn to understand and embrace this cast of characters and integrate their wisdom into our conscious self. A fantastic place to get started with dreamwork is this book, this podcast and Dream School.
The Whole View
I believe the two approaches complement each other very well. Depth psychology operates on the relative (‘zoomed-in’) level to interpret the forms and content of dreams. The Eastern spiritual approach operates on an ultimate (‘zoomed-out’) level, providing perspective on states of mind and where mind and dreams fit in to the overall picture of life. Because relative and ultimate flow into and out of each other, you can start anywhere and as long as you go deep enough, you’ll reach the other side.
If the world is a cosmic dream, then the places and people we encounter in waking life are parts of the cosmic Self. This is a beautiful way to live because it opens everything up to be appreciated as part of the dream, and turns every experience into an opportunity to ‘wake up’.
And it’s up to you how you do it—you could awaken by becoming a lucid dreamer, or by examining the depths of your subsconscious mind and recognizing how you project its content into waking life. You could also make it a practice to remember the dreamlike nature of life: that nothing is as substantial as it seems, and that there is a wild, unpredictable, creative energy behind everything, including you.
Dreaming Virtuality
To extend the metaphor of maya, the virtual world is a collective dream world, or a dream within the larger dream of life. Both streams of thought from above—dream yoga and Jungian psychology—give us clues as to how to approach and handle virtual technology.
Zoom In: Depth Psychology
Two ideas from depth psychology play out clearly in the virtual world.
projection: a quality or characteristic that we see in others as a result of our own subconscious conditioning, but that they don’t actually have. Projected qualities can be both positive (as when you idolise someone) and negative.
Technology quite literally projects us to each other as images or text on a screen. Beyond (or perhaps because) of this literal projection, I believe that the virtual world increases the degree and severity of psychological projection. How else to explain the bizarre and extreme behavior of people online? We project all the time, but the absence of physicality, and therefore of limits, makes us more prone to both assuming the worst of others and demonizing them (eg. trolling), and/or seeing only the best in others and idolising them (eg. fangirling).
Projection is a very sticky psychological issue and unfortunately doesn’t have a clear or easy solution. It requires inner work and awareness to recognize and admit that it’s happening and liberate yourself from it. It’s important to know that you’re not doing it on purpose, and you may not be in control of it—but it is still your responsibility to deal with it.
Another, more familiar idea from depth psychology is also clearly visible online.
persona: a face worn to show others, or the mask that actors wear to become characters. Different from the Self, which is the true and whole identity of a person, and also different from the ego, which is a more limited, subjective sense of self.
The self we present to others, both online and offline, is usually not our whole or truest self. There are many reasons for this, including some that are healthy, some that relate to the social context and culture, and some that are unhealthy or even pathological. A huge part of depth psychology is the recognition that you are not (only) your persona.
The problem with virtual technologies, especially social media, is that they continually present us with other people’s personae, while deliberately encouraging us to fixate on our own persona instead of the deeper self. The constant mirroring of the persona back to us in the form of photos, videos, reels etc. is a form of self-obsession through endless self-observation.
Another place we can get trapped in loops of self-reflection is during meditation, when ‘watching your mind’ turns from self-awareness into self-consciousness. Chogyam Trungpa talks about it in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism:
It is as though somebody is standing behind you with a sharp sword. If you are not meditating properly, sitting still and upright, there will be someone behind you just about to strike. Or if you are not dealing with life properly, honestly, directly, someone is just about to hit you. This is the self-consciousness of watching yourself, observing yourself unnecessarily. Whatever we do is constantly being watched and censored. Actually it is not Big Brother who is watching; it is Big Me! Another aspect of me is watching me, behind me, just about to strike, just about to pinpoint my failure. There is no joy in this approach, no sense of humor at all.
You are so concerned about watching yourself and watching yourself watching, and watching yourself watching yourself watching. It goes on and on… What is really needed is for you to stop caring altogether, to completely drop the whole concern…You must remove the watcher and the very complicated bureaucracy he creates to insure that nothing is missed by central headquarters. Once we take away the watcher, there is a tremendous amount of space, because he and his bureaucracy take up so much room.
This is from the 1960s, and he’s talking about internal experience. But doesn’t it sound like the experience of being online nowadays (especially my emphasis in bold)? I see this pattern playing out on many levels, personal and social included. It’s as if the less self-aware we are, the more self-conscious we become; and that imbalance is then projected into the public sphere in the form of surveillance and censorship.
In essence, virtual technologies lead us to: (1) become overly fixated and conscious of the mask and (2) lose touch with real people and the true identity underneath. The combination of these two factors explains why more and more people feel anxious about having face-to-face interactions with others2, and why many increasingly default to being passive consumers of other people’s interactions (whether staged or unstaged) in the form of TV shows, podcasts, interviews etc.
What’s the solution? Taking advice from Chogyam Trungpa, we have to let go of the watcher, both internal and external, and rediscover space. Outwardly, this could mean letting there be time and space in your life where you’re not consuming virtual media and not plugged in. (The book Digital Minimalism is a good place to start if you’re serious about curating your relationship with technology.)
Internally, it could mean dropping your persona for a while and resting in space, or rediscovering spontaneity. What would you like to do just for the sake of doing it, or if no one (including you) was watching? What does it feel like to do things or go places without recording yourself and posting about it online? The most subversive way to do this would be to practice doing nothing at all—which is actually a classic Mahamudra meditation instruction:
Let go of what has passed Let go of what may come Let go of what is happening now Don't try to figure anything out Don't try to make anything happen Relax, right now, and rest —Tilopa's Six Words, trans. Ken McLeod
Zoom Out: Lucidity
Dream yoga, like all forms of yoga, is concerned with states of mind and how we shift between them. As a practice, it’s about deliberately bringing your waking awareness into the dream state, and sustaining it there for as long as possible. When you become lucid in a dream, it’s very common to wake up almost immediately afterwards. But the point of dream yoga is to remain in the state of dreaming-yet-aware, aka. lucidity, without flipping into unconscious dreaming or returning to the conscious waking state. When you are able to do this, you enjoy a heightened experience of connection and power.
In the brief flashes of lucidity that I’ve experienced, I feel amazingly transparent, ‘in but not of’ the flow of the dreamworld. Everything is more vivid but less solid at the same time. The world is shimmering, at play; I am part of the game, able to feel and shape its energy. It’s hard to describe if you’ve never felt it, so I’m hoping you’ve had at least one lucid dream in your life. If not, you might have one soon, since the idea has now been planted in your mind by reading this post.
When you return to the waking world after a lucid dream, it’s common for everything to appear dreamlike and wondrous. You become curious and slightly disoriented, and you often wonder, like Chuang Tzu, if you’re still dreaming.3
The purpose of dream yoga is twofold: (1) to awaken inside your dreams and (2) to recognize the dreamlike nature of the waking world. It is meant to blur the boundaries between the waking and dreaming states, in order to refine and cultivate your awareness.
Translated to virtuality, the key is to become aware of which world you are in, what it feels like, who you are in it, and what other worlds exist. Are you relating with your fully-aware self, or are you being sucked in unconsciously? If you’re able to remain lucid in your interactions with technology, it becomes a gift as incredible as a dream, and you develop the power of discernment even as you enjoy the spectacle.
Conclusion
In this post I’ve drawn many parallels between dreams and virtual technologies. The wisdom of dreams and dream states has much to offer our ongoing experiment with the virtual world, not least the simple question: are you aware—or I should say, lucid—right now?
I think it is possible, but not easy, to stay sane between the online and offline worlds. Part of this comes from the skill of separating them from each other and giving each their own place, just as we delineate waking from dreaming. But a deeper part is to learn to integrate them into a framework that makes space for both, which is where dream-related practices can help.
The insanity of the world today is at least partly because the space between online and offline is collapsing, and we don’t know how to either separate or integrate the two properly. In this chaos, we get confused (even self-deceptive) about who we are, where we belong, and what really matters to us. I hope this exploration of dreams and their relationship to virtual technology brings clarity and lucidity to this issue.
Let me know in the comments what you thought of this post, your experience with dreams, and how you stay sane online.
In my next post, I will explore one final metaphor for maya: play, and its relationship to ethics.
After that, I plan to start a new series exploring the nervous system from an embodied perspective. So far that includes: an embodied guide to anxiety; a post on the connection between flow states, mindfulness and meditation; and a post about how to live your daily life in-tune with your own nervous system. Subscribe if you’re interested. If you appreciated this post or any other one, consider upgrading to paid.
Some cultures regard dreams not as self-created but sent to us from another plane or a divine source. In Eastern traditions, receiving such messages in dreams is considered a special power or a siddhi, or sometimes an act of divine grace.
The culmination of this trajectory was described by Isaac Asimov in his short story, The Naked Sun. Humans in this tale live completely isolated from each other on large, distant estates, communicating solely through various forms of technology. They consider being in physical space with others repugnant and avoid face-to-face interactions wherever possible.
This is why lucid dreaming is not recommended for those who suffer from delusions or hallucinations, or those who do not have a well-developed and stable sense of self. It’s too destabilizing.
Thank you for this thoughtful and well researched essay on dreams. It is my understanding that the yogis teach that dreamless sleep is what we aspire to. How do you think this fits with your studies?
Aloha Sista🌺
Mahalo nui loa fo yur good works.
I’m gonna read it serval time’s as there’s a lot ta assimilate. AND!! Here I am on line 😂😂 , ya shared in da article bout dis. I find myself doin it a lot more than I used ta. AND!! I lv readin wa ya have ta share. Appreciate cha. Yur works are on da top of my list of da shared wisdom yuv cultivated along yur journey’s.
Yes! There’s a lot ta take in .
Word up🙏🏼
Guidance an protection 🦅