This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. Jung Su once asked... Am I a butterfly thinking I'm a person or a person thinking I'm a butterfly? Which is it? Sometimes it's hard to tell. When you're sleeping, you may be so involved in being asleep that you don't realize that you're awake. And when you're awake, sometimes you may be so involved in being awake that you don't realize it's like you're sleeping.

[01:01]

Both are true. And then Uman, another great guy, once said that the world is vast and wide. Why do you put your robes on in the morning when the bell hits? There are many answers to that question. One of them is a connection, not a division. When you hear the bell in the morning, you put on your robe. Two things, not one. If the world is vast and wide, it also has to be specific by a specific way of actualizing it. Now it gets complicated. I think I can look at my notes.

[02:17]

Most meditation traditions in a kind of more monastic situation have meditation right when they get up and right before they go to sleep to kind of mine that area between the waking in the sleep. Sleep or dream is kind of a... Dreams are kind of like a language, like the language of sleep. And when we're awake, we have a different language. It's not that one is better than the other, it's just it's best if they communicate with each other. If the dream part of you can hook up with the awake part of you, wow, the world is definitely vast and wide.

[03:19]

And this is a True, of course, of dark and light. We're getting to the darkest time of the year. I believe this might be the darkest Wednesday of the year. Certainly we're the whenest. And dark and light is like that too. In the dark, we can't distinguish very much. except really sharp distinctions. In the day, there's much more distinction going on. As is being awake and asleep. When you're awake, maybe sometimes you... Is this loud enough? Is it?

[04:30]

Good. Wow, two waters. A waterholic. It's like when you're awake and you're asleep. There's a kind of different tone maybe when you're awake and when you're asleep. When I was very sick and I wasn't sleeping much at all, I still had a feeling of when I was asleep, I was joining with everyone, with the bardo, with the collective unconscious, whatever you want to call it, with the whole, the undistinguished mass. And then I'd wake, and then it'd be me again, or some version of me,

[05:34]

eventually I had some insight that maybe that was a little bit like birth and death. Every night I'd go to sleep and die and then I'd wake up as a specific being again. I don't know if that's true, but I felt that it was true, which is also important. So this thing about the dream and being awake, about the world being vast and wide and finding a narrow way to, or a specific way to enact it, and asleep and awake, how would we know?

[06:42]

And is one right rather than the other? Are you a butterfly or a person? How would you know? You might experience being both. In fact, if dreams are kind of like a language, and our thoughts are another kind of language, being able to communicate in both languages is very important. because sometimes you can express one thing in a much easier way than you can express another thing. Su Tung Po, who's a famous Chinese poet, who in fact, his favorite part of the day was when he was one of the advisors to the emperor of China,

[07:49]

until the emperor didn't like what he said and banished him. But anyhow, before that time, every day he would get up, and he'd get dressed and washed, and then he'd sit on the porch in meditation, half asleep and half awake. And that was his favorite time of the year. He'd wait for the emperor's carriage to come pick him up. Isn't that kind of nice? Just kind of wait there. wrote this in his diary. One desires pleasures and fears a hard life. These are sentiments one entertains before leading the so-called pleasurable or hard life. After one is in it, one tries to think of the envy and the fear and finds that they are gone. Then where are the pleasurable and unpleasurable thoughts after they are passed? They seem to be like a sound, a shadow, a breeze, or a dream.

[08:54]

Even these four things are somehow more tangible. Besides, how is one ever going to find happiness by counting one illusion with another illusion? I wish I could express this deep truth to you, but I cannot. One desires pleasures and fears a hard life. These are sentiments one entertains before leading the so-called pleasurable or hard life. After one is in it, one tries to think of the envy and the fear and finds that they are gone. Then where are the pleasurable and unpleasurable thoughts after they are passed? They seem to be like a sound, a shadow, a breeze, or a dream. Even these four things are somehow more tangible. Besides, how is one ever going to find happiness by countering one illusion with another illusion? I wish I could express this deep truth to you, but I cannot.

[09:56]

August 5th, 1088. Students and teachers, gods and Buddhas, flowers, grasses, sanctuaries, acceptance or rejection, each moment the seed is planted and a flower blooms. Is there anywhere else to look? so in Zen usually we don't talk about dreams too much except for Kazon who talked a lot about it but we don't talk about dreams too much and we don't talk about visions too much because we want to keep you grounded supposedly but I think

[11:06]

They think they're important. It's not that they're so important, it's just that they're as important as they are. They're not more important than we think they are or less. Do you have any dreams? Oh no, I actually have a dream I wanted to share with you. Which is... maybe 10 or 12 years ago. Maybe it was longer than that, I'm not sure. When I was practicing here, I had a dream that I was on the third floor in an elevator. I know there's not an elevator, but in my dream there is. And there was a fire. I know you're not supposed to go in the elevator when there's a fire, but it doesn't matter, this is my dream. And I was moving from one floor to the other.

[12:08]

And the elevator was full of furniture and stuff. And then I tried to get in, but I had a scrunch like this to get in. And then I said, this is uncomfortable. I guess I could stay like this so I could just wake up. And I didn't wake up right after that. There was a little bit of a pause when I thought about that. Then I woke up. So I don't know what was communicated in that dream. I don't know if I could have gotten it any other way. So I won't try to explain it because it won't work. Thoughts, dreams, comments? Richard.

[13:16]

You sit in the morning, and it's real. Meditation makes things more real. At the end of the day, as you've discussed, many Buddhist meditation or Zen traditions do this. Sit in the morning, you meditate, things become clearer, theoretically. You sit at the end of the day, things are clear again. So in the middle, it seems to be more like eternal world to me. Life is so busy. It's more of a, it's difficult. I mean, it seems to be the exact opposite of what maybe the tradition intends. Or is that, am I looking at this backwards? Well, I'm not sure. I think you are looking at it backwards, but sometimes it's good to look at it backwards. I think, I know when I wake up in the morning, I'm often kind of like that. In the evening I'm much more... In fact, most people, at least a lot of people like to sit before dinner because their mind is racing and it's very entertaining.

[14:32]

In the morning it's not so entertaining, really. I don't know. I don't know if it's backwards or not, but I think it's different. notice its difference in most of the problem is preferring one over the other if we prefer one over the other it's not so good I think yes Tim agree.

[15:54]

Well, I think it's a little more complicated here in the city than it is in Tassajara. Tassajara, in fact, we push lack of sleep in order that we work on our dream life when we're awake. Now, you don't want to do that too much in the city because you get hit by a bus maybe, but I think that there is some benefit to... But you have to set up the whole situation. You can't just have deep sleep. So that's why at Dragon Sleep we get up a little bit later. We get up at six because we're not, you know, we're in the world a little bit more, maybe, whatever that means. But I do think this pushing sleep deprivation is actually a good thing, except the surround has to be in lockstep with it. How was that for the last Wednesday? Yes.

[17:14]

That's one thing that kind of worries me about just my general mental health. If I push sleep deprivation. Yes. Well, you have to know about yourself and you have to look at it. So, maybe because you like, I don't know, I could make up all kinds of stories, but there are a couple of stories I can make up. One is that you like to sleep so much that the demons come to wake you up. Another could be that, I don't know, that's one I'll stay with for a while. But it could be that, you know, each one of us has a different sleep cycle. One of the things about Zen practice is that we all try to do the same thing, right? Pretty much. And then we learn what our dream cycle is. That's very good for learning what it's like to be anyone, but learning what it's like to be you is also important. And that may be that I need shorter sleep or longer sleep or whatever.

[18:31]

So you have to learn that about yourself. And Zen training can often teach you what it's like to be anyone, but not necessarily who you are. That you have to learn in a different way. Michael? Hi, I'm sorry. I don't have any questions about sleep. I have a question. Don't be awake. Lots of questions about being awake. Yes, that's the difficult part. Sleep is easy. Sleep is quite easy. OK. One classic Jungian thing, I'd go into the house and look in all these different rooms, and then there'd be a strange room I didn't know, and there was a young Japanese man in shirt sleeves and pants, and he said, come in.

[20:18]

And he was sitting in Zazen behind his shirt and he screamed, and there was something weird. And I kept having this recurring dream about this peaceful space. I think sometimes our dreams are kind of, in our awake life, are in some kind of a relationship. So if the dream life is too... removed, then there's not enough relationship to the conscious, etc. But I think actually we just don't have one unconscious and one conscious. Each one of us has a kind of slightly different arrangement.

[21:19]

So it's good to know about it. Sometimes when we talk about the collective unconscious, we think it's everybody's got the same one. Now, I'm no expert on the collective unconscious or anything, but I kind of think that there's also a more individualistic kind of relationship going on, as well as the general. Is that clear? Clear enough? Yeah. Well, of course, we could talk about dreams for a long time, and lucid dreams and insomnia are big side shoots of sleep.

[22:23]

And I think insomnia is often about loss of control. So you want to stay awake. Some part of you wants to stay awake, some part of you doesn't want to give up. I know when I was a little boy, my parents would ask me to go to sleep, and they'd say, I'm not tired, and I'd keep my eyes wide open, and I was dead tired. I don't know what that has to do with anything, but I thought I'd throw it in. Insomnia, and what was the other thing? What? Oh, lucid dreams, yeah. You know, lucid dreams is when you push your dreams to be a certain way. And I think that's okay, but I think it can often lead to trouble because you're trying to be in control, another control issue, rather than really all Buddhism is about being in relationship with things, interaction of things.

[23:30]

It's not about you controlling the world or the world controlling you. We're not victims or rulers. We're in dialogue with things. We're in communication. But what do you say? I don't think I've answered Mimi's question, or have I? Well, it's just interesting the kind of insomnia that I have is not so much not going to sleep but waking up in the middle of the night. not being able to go back to sleep. And actually that feels like out of control, you know, because I want to go to sleep. Yeah. Well, it could be the opposite, too. It could be that there's stuff coming up in your unconscious that you can't deal with right now since you wake up. And then also there are sleep cycles of three and three and a half hours. I often wake up at the end of one sleep cycle in between. I don't, you know, I give these answers as if I know what's going on.

[24:34]

But I just have some idea, and I hope it's helpful, that's all. In June, my first time, and within a week, I had dreams. I hadn't dreamed for a couple of years. I had dreams I'd never had before that I termed dharma dreams. And so then I would say, I have these interesting dreams. And then people would say, yeah, this place isn't where you're going to have dreams. Do you know anything about Tassajara and it being a special place where you have? Because there seemed to be the rumor like, oh, yeah, it's the place where you're going to have dreams. So. Well, I would imagine that most people have a lot of dreams at Tassajara. I actually think that any time you're out in nature, that's my experience. When I'm camping or hiking or when I was at Tassajara, I had many dreams.

[25:37]

I was more aware of the dreams that was happening. Even though sometimes I knew I was dreaming, but by the time I woke up, I forgot most of them. But still, I found that being in nature was very much kind of... I was very much in tune with it in my dreams. Much more anyhow. Does that help? Going once? Going twice? No, it's all too loud. Okay, my first reaction is kind of to say, don't do that.

[26:52]

My first reaction is to say, don't try to control your dreams or your weakness. But just be aware. aware of what's going on. If you feel like you're dreaming, say, oh, I'm dreaming. It's kind of dreamlike. Or this is very sharp. Or rather than to try to turn one into anything else. The more you can be and be with things as they are, the less you want to manipulate them and change them. That may not have been the purpose of your question, but anyhow, that's my reaction. Sure. Sure. I'm sure there is. Mm-hmm. I think that there are times when lucid dreaming can be very good, and I agree with that, but it's still, many people who do have lucid dreaming have that other concern.

[28:43]

And of course, just like visions, etc., we don't encourage visions so much in Zen, but Visions can be very helpful. And just like we don't encourage dreaming so much, it's just because we see the near enemy of them, like the near enemy of lucid dreaming. It doesn't mean that for a specific thing lucid dreaming isn't good, like I think you had a good example. And then of course, there are all kinds of contradictions Of course in Zen we don't emphasize dreams, but Dogen and Kezon and all kinds of people had dreams which they confirmed their practice. In the stories of the Buddha there were many dreams which he had. So when I give a reaction, I give my take on it.

[29:59]

It may not be quite right. It may not be completely rounded. It may not be completely true. Just like she gave a good example of where I said, I didn't like to lose the dreaming so much, and she gave me an example where it's very useful. I think that's true of almost any teaching, that you can find a usefulness. I'm just giving you my, on the top, response to it, and it may sometimes be too impulsive. Good being here. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[30:57]

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