Dream One: All I Have To Do Is Dream. The real story is too good to be true, but it is true. Felice met Beaudeleau (pronounced “Bo-del-oh”) in an elevator, and says she knew at first sight that he was the love of her life. She was 16, he was 22. They worked happily together for the rest of their lives as the song writing team of Felice and Beaudeleau Bryant, the ones who made the Everley Brothers famous. They wrote “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up, Little Susie”. Felice wrote “All I Have To Do Is Dream” for Beaudeleau just before they married. It became, in the West, one of the most powerful popular icons of our modern culture. I’ve asked Colombians, Israelis, Germans and Swedes. They all know it. If we lost Felice’s dream, we would all be a little impoverished, which is the basis and the bearing of this essay. Felice and Beaudeleau are no longer with us, but her dream has endless lives, in the heart of everyone who heard the Everleys sing of her love, of her life-long dream come true.

Dream Two: Dreams as Illusions. As a Buddhist, am I to disagree, to say this is the falsest of the false, nothing but an egocentric expression of want and loneliness? Do we grab Felice and say “No, Felice, no. You have it all, you don’t need a thing. This is Maya got you down, dreams are illusions, like magic tricks. Face reality. Stop dreaming. Sit zazen and try to clarify your thoughts before you dream your life away. Next thing you know Bodelo’s on the down elevator and bye, bye, love; bye, bye, happiness. This is the mistake many American Buddhists can make when they tackle the word “dreams”. Do we mean “dreams” as we find them in used in the Dhammapada, or in the writings of Nagarjuna, where the word is usually followed by the catch phrase “or a magician’s illusion”. Is a “dream” mainly a rhetorical tool used by scholars to signify a non-real as against a real? Are they real places we go at night, created by some unconscious mind or simply by the sleeping brain? Are they “other consciousnesses” we can utilize for learning, astral travel, or even Dharma practice? Do you think we’ll get to the bottom of this in one article? “Dream on!” sings AeroSmith, our house band here in Boston, the second-lifetime rockers who woke up from a collective nightmare that was reality. and lived again.

Dream Three: Dreams as Preparation and Practice. In most schools of Buddhism, there is little reference to the phenomena which we refer to as “dreaming”, the local universe we are visiting when our eyes go into REM sleep. Buddhism uniformly teaches us to be attentive to the present moment, so the exploration of other realms is usually left to the third division of the sutras, the Abhidharma, which includes numerous discussions of esoteric philosophy. One of the few Buddhist traditions that does attempt to utilize the altered state of consciousness which we experience as a “dream state” is the Tibetan tantric tradition which utilizes practices described under the general category of night yogas.

Dealing expeditiously with dream states is considered especially important by manyTibetan Buddhists. Most stages of death leading to the “Bardo”, a two-week vacation from bodily existence during which we set the course for our next life, are under the general category of “dream states and other subtle consiousnesses.” It’s really important to get through the Bar-Do with one’s mind clear. Control over the mind during the chaotic mental experience of the collapse of waking consciousness during physical death can be crucial to future well being. It’s like racing downhill with a mountain bike head first at forty miles an hour, a real rock and roll heaven, but it’s all happening in your head. If you know what you’re doing, you grab the controls, head for Woodstock, swing right, and come out Uma Thurman. That’s called “the realm of the Devas,” and it’s some nice life. If we blow the Bardo passage, we could end up a welfare kid in a crack house or worse. If we really blow it, you may come back even less than human, and I’ve met a few of them too.

When H.H. the Dalai Lama taught at Harvard in 1981 after the Wisconsin Kalachackra, someone asked him why they needed sexuality in higher tantric practices. His reply was that there were four instances during which we all momentarily lose control of our minds. These four were “sneezing, falling asleep into a dream, moving from dream to dream during sleep, and during sex.” His Holiness made it clear that tantric practice was not going to enlighten anyone, per se. However, by training practitioners to gain clear, compassionate control over their minds during such extreme circumstances, they usually retain enough control of themselves under other circumstances that keeping Buddhist vows or precepts on a day to day basis becomes a piece of cake.

Needless to say, as a “fully qualified yogi” practicing since 1981, I’m familiar with all this. I would love to tell you how to use some of the Annatara Yoga practices but it’s one of those things you have to get an initiation for. If I tell you anything, I will return as a snail. I jolly well visited Mt. Meru once however, and it’s a fact that a distinguished Cuban official, imprisoned after a falling out with Castro, used similar dream yoga during some perfectly horrible conditions of solitary confinement to escape his body and visit many interesting places until he was finally released and brought to the United States. He gave a talk recently at the Harvard Kennedy School, and said he believed that it had saved his life and his sanity. He received a standing ovation.

Dream yoga can be more than a ticket to a world in your mind, it can also be a good place to catch up on Dharma practice. During a 1991 conference at MIT in Boston, His Holiness shared a panel with a number of distinguished mind scientists, At one point he remarked that dream yoga was a useful practice because one could simply go to sleep, and use dream yoga to get one’s practice done in the dream world before awaking the next day. The most distinguished neuroscientist on the panel, Dr. Joseph Schildkraut, wasn’t quite clear on the concept. “I can see that one can stretch the mind a great deal, “ he said, “But what would you call someone who was disconnected completely from his mind?” His Holiness chuckled and replied. “We would call that a dead person.”

Dream Four: Allan Hobson and the Hippocampus. The leading voice in dream research these days is Harvard neurophysiologist Alan Hobson. As I have been doing dream interpretation myself for friends since I was a sprout, I treasure a letter I received twenty years ago in response to some points I had made about a paper he had published. The controversy has generally been seen as a Freudian-Hobson mixup, between those who believe that dream images carry specific meaningful messages, and Hobson’s belief that dream scenarios are created extemporaneously as the dreaming brain tries to find images and scripts to account for the sudden appearance of a dream scenario to the dreamer, more as the result of a inadvertent static burst than anything else. If he’s right, Ebenezer Scrooge’s admonition to Marley’s ghost that he was nothing but “ a bit of underdone potato” may have the last word.

Although I am aware of how training can permit control over dream states, we are both on the same wavelength. The waking brain creates the mind on the fly, incidentally, and we’re in the middle of it. During sleep, certain systems are re-charging while others are resting. The structures in the brain responsible for abstract thinking, chronological timing, and a few other aspects of normal cognitive thought are off line. What seems to happen is that incidental bursts of static from the lower brain trigger dream scenarios which we then embellish with images we draw from our treasury of “everything we’ve ever seen” as well as “everything we’ve ever seen from every imaginable aspect”. With chronological time off, in a dream we are always in the middle of things with no reason to wonder just how we got here.

The important thing to remember is that these little electrical burps hit the brain's hippocampus as well as the visual cortex, giving dreams their emotional importance. Even if the initiation of a dream sequence is incidental, it sends a charge of wordless emotion over to the visual cortex and something that was on our mind is given a visual image pulled at random from the file. Anyone can be a crack at dream interpretation if they remember this: a dream is a visual depiction of something you’ve been concerned about, and if you can read the images, you can get some amazing insights. Why is this? Because the world of the dream must be entirely self-constructed. We have no way of getting anything past the skull and into the brain without using the senses, and so anything we are going to use for dream images has to come from inside our brain. Our eyes are closed and we’re not moving, in fact we’re unconscious. There’s nothing new coming in to tell us where we are in relation to the time and space we call the real world. We only have pre-recorded images from our versions of events to use for window dressings and plot embellishments. We have millions of them; all the images we picked up during our lifetime, and we can do anything we want with them. When I read about people who believe they’ve been abducted by UFO’s or floated out of their bodies and looked down on themselves as evidence of out-of-body travel I feel like letting them on a fact of life. They were dreaming. It’s no problem for a human brain imitate the Silicon Graphics workstations that made Toy Story, only it can do so a whole lot better.

The brain can take any image it wants, any thing we’ve seen in reality, on television, at a movie, or even create something original by changing perspective the same way a computer program can. It can do scenery with fractals, shrink, morph, enlarge or warp. It’s easy for my brain to scroll images of Cambridge past my sleeping visual cortex as if I were flying over them. Arcade games can do that, and that’s how the gentleman from Cuba went visiting and how I went to Mt. Meru. It’s true. Nobody has ever really left their bodies, but a lot have experienced some pretty wild examples of this ability of dream scenarios to provide us with vividly real thrill rides.

ince we are self constructing every part of our dream worlds from our own memories, every person we encounter in a dream must also to be constructed of memories of people, not as they really are but only as we have recorded them in our own memory. That’s all we have. We can’t actually have independent minds of other people walking and talking in our own dream. Maybe Bill Gates will come up with a “Mind Windows” some day, but so far, we only have ourselves to work with.

Since it’s all taking place in our own heads, every person in our dreams is also a version of ourselves, and every event pertains only to us. This can be a little overly solipsistic, but it is a grand way to view ourselves from the inside out without the strength of the so called “real world” trying to fit us into some sort of context. In a dream, our personal emotions are right on, face to face. If we dream about being naked in class, something has us worried. If we dream about love and happiness, we are reminded of it, expecting it, or having it. For the same reason, dreams can have only so much predictive power. They’re all being spun out of our own inner world and can’t take in outside information. Still, they are very good for an unvarnished look at our bare emotions, even if they are dressed up in a sometimes bewildering variety of images including locations, scenarios, costumes, and characters.

Hobson has kept a dream journal on and off since 1973. He tries to avoid pinning any specific interpretation on the act of dreaming, believing that most dreams will appear spontaneously and will be always interpreted best by the dreamer. Others, perhaps influenced by a Protestant work ethic that has us working to improve ourselves during the day, also believe that dreaming is a restorative effort performed by the brain nightly as a psychological as well as biochemical replenishing. One advocate of this position is Rosalind Cartwright, Chairman of the Dept. of Psychology at Rush University in Chicago. “In dreaming, we update the programs of who we are every night,” she says, “If nothing much has changed in your life you might get a night off to play or tell jokes, or you just have a dull night of not much going on. But when you’re going through crises, you need to revise who you are and you have to update that program in a dramatically new way.” Cartwright is not alone in her belief that there is a meaning to dreaming that extends beyond the happenstance of neural interference.

Hobson believes that it’s static in disguise, while Cartwright points to well conducted research showing how therapy can dramatically change both the duration and the nature of dreams. The answer probably lies in the area between the two, so that meaning there if we look for it, but we mustn’t be too literal. For example, when I can remember a dream, it’s almost like a prize ball. “Hmm, I was in this new fighter jet but the gas tank fell off and the ejection seat is held together with rubber bands, but in fact, (dreams are always headlong) it seemed that that by skimming over the next mountain ridge, the plane was just even with a plateau like in those Arizona deserts, and so the jet only drops about a foot and plowed to a stop on the plateau. I got out and awoke.” A quick interpretation would be something like “I’m going forward too quickly in a project with a technological feel to it, and I’m afraid I’m going to be left without support, but in fact I’ve got nothing to fear and if I forget anything, it’ll be something minor and I won’t crash”. Skimming the mountain scene was courtesy, I’ll bet, of Slim Picken’s just missing the Russian mountain in his B-52 in Dr. Strangelove; the Arizona desert courtesy of a million views of mesas from car ads. In this manner, dreams can be very useful predictors of our emotional states, although they cannot guide us into interactions with other individuals or events.

Two very important concepts from Buddhist philosophical writings come immediately to mind. First, the dream world of the dream state is similar to some coma states experienced during early brain death in nearly every form of normal dying. Would control over dream states, then, lead to the ability to endure, and perhaps even help guide, a return to mental simplicity that we must experience during death but before death itself? Second, the world with which we interact with each waking day is, we know as Buddhists, a rather warped version of what may or may not be happening, bent by our vast assortment of predilections, likes, dislikes, habits, desires, ignorances, and sub-human drives. That’s why we are Buddhists and not Buddhas yet, n’est pas, and the idea for Buddhists is to get the ego block out so that we can live in the world as it is, rather than by means of our illusions, our fantasies, or our dreams. In fact, simply because the waking world is so generally perceived by so many people at the same time, we are tricked into thinking that it is more real than the world inside our heads.

This really cannot be because everything is taking place in the screen of the mind, inside our heads, some microseconds after it happens in reality. No sense gets to the mind on time, in that sense, and so our waking consciousness is just a much more enhanced, more chaotic self-constructed reality. It is, however, the only dream that we share with others, as against our own dreams, which we share with nobody else.

Still, it is because this waking dream is so much closer to what we imagine reality to be that we are attracted and pulled by worldly images of wealth, gratification, and self indulgence. Just as our normal waking consciousness is made less authentic by the veil of our own illusions and daydreams, the night dream is made less practical by it’s lack of shared context. Neither one is totally real, but neither one is totally a dream. We spend our lives waking up again and again to this reality. Was it a dream? Did I love her? Did he love me? Was I once that scared person? Have I made it? You may ask yourself, “Is this my house?” You may ask yourself, “Is this my beautiful wife?”. You may ask yourself, “Is this quoted from “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads? But still, it’s appropriate. What is a dream? If you dream of me, am I doubled? If millions have me in their minds, and I die and they don’t know it, do I live?

Dream Five: Wake Up Little Susie. Time is a time bomb. Like the explosive charge that scatters the flashing stars across the night skies on the 4th of July, so does time scatter us from each other as our universes expand. But each past moment remains there, in our memories, where we make our dreams and our nightmares. Time does not exist in the mind. It remains eternally as it was. I will never forget an event which, for me, was one of the more fundamental realizations of my entire life.

I was at Camp Red Cloud only three years, during the time my mother was spending time in a hospital for tuberculosis. We had spent previous summers at our house on Cape Cod, near a private beach and a yacht club, and so to myself and my brothers Red Cloud was more like Stalag 17 than Super Camp. I was stepped on, thrown, kicked, and bitten by horses, mosquitoes, and campers, but we survived. In retrospect, however, and even at the time, there were rich and memorable experiences. A part of me will never forget “Capture the Flag” on the grand scale, and my cornering of the bait clam market became part of a business textbook used by students from Berkeley to Boston. So it was not surprising one morning to rise from a particularly vivid dream in which I had returned to Camp Red Cloud.

In my dream, the camp had been closed for ten years and it looked it. The dining hall was in disrepair, the red paint was flaking and fading wherever I looked. I walked up the to the assembly hall and stepped through the door. There was one broken upright piano at the end of the room, the stage was half gone and there was wind coming through some broken panes. I walked up past the Junior's cabins to find my brother, but hearing voices in the wind, over from the bay, I awoke.

Initially, I was fascinated by the clarity of the dream. Things are not often quite so linear and cohesive. Could Red Cloud really be in such a decrepit condition? I asked a friend, and was told in fact the camp had been shut down and bulldozed flat years before. I was amazed. First, my brain been had been able to pull up thirty year old images of Red Cloud that were so good I could take a walk through them, as real as any dream scenario could be. More amazing, my mind had “morphed” each and every image, aging them twenty five. Each building was in the same state of aging and abandonment, but the details were completely cohesive. There was the flaking paint, holes in a roof, the piano in just the right level of abuse and damage, all woven together seamlessly. And most amazing of all, this all happened a decade after the place ceased to exist! It was done entirely in my mind, done just for me, and done without any magic or mysticism.

After that, I didn’t care if people said they’d had dim sum with aliens or gone midnight rollerblading with angels. We live completely within the mind we make at the moment, and it may or may not have anything to do with reality. Out of body experiences, near death experiences; they were all the same. If my mind could have created a perfectly aged Camp Red Cloud out of nothing but thirty year old memories, it could have me floating to China in a teacup if it wanted. The hitch is that we have to use our own memories, and we lose touch with each other. Sometimes this can be reassuring. For example, in my dream, had I walked over that virtual hill past the stables to the road around the cove, as I was passing kids doing a bay test I would have seen a blond counselor with a cap and a lanyard keeping them in line. That’s the time bomb effect of time, because only a month ago some group of Red Cloud Groupies started using the national phone pages to get us together and they sent me a newsletter.

The feature was a selection of memories of Susie Stout, the one with the pith helmet and the lanyard, the blond no-nonsense counselor. I had been eleven, so to me she was pretty formidable, but she was really friendly, if a little firm. In the newsletter I learned that in fact Susie had died at the age of 25, over 20 years ago. I was suddenly chilled because in my memories and all my life, Susie Stout had never died. She had always been alive because I never knew, any more than I had known that Red Cloud was no more. So the loss hit me like a child again, because I was only eleven then. It yanked me back forty years and I cried for Susie because I liked her. It was good to hear, and it was hard to hear about reality. It was like a little tiny letter bomb, and one of those stars winked out.

Sometimes reality bites, and the dream beckons, but that’s the tug of life, and so we go forward. I always liked Susie Stout, and now I’ll miss her. I was, in fact, the luckiest, to know her for years and years in my mind, years longer than those who knew her best. She was always there, in my memories, in the happiest summers of her life, still taking care of her campers, a transplanted spirit alive in my dream lands for longer, it seems, than she lived on this earth.

That alone, to me, is a close to endless lifetimes as we get, to live happily forever among all those who still don’t know. There must be hundreds of us who are still ignorant, still dreaming. I hope they dream on forever. I wish I hadn’t woken from that one, but life’s like that. It ends, like a dream, and we end, in a dream, and this essay ends, in reality. No magician’s illusion here.