Question: “Lately I have been experiencing weird dreams. 1st I always see my grandmother & aunt they passed away years ago I was raised by both. My grandmother had spiritual gifts she knew things w/o u telling her. My dreams are not bad but I notice they have a lot do to w my awake life. I miss my family & it makes me feel i should push harder in life when i see then. What defines dreams to a Buddhist? What are does it mean to see passed loved ones in ur dreams?”
Different schools of Buddhism have different approaches to what dreams are or aren’t. But generally dreams are a simile for emptiness; messages/teachings from gods, ancestors, or bodhisattvas; recalling experiences during the day; or could be a test to test the person’s (bodhisattva) vows.
In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha taught: “All conditioned dharmas, are like a dream, like an illusion, like a bubble, like a shadow, like a dewdrop, like a lightening flash; you should contemplate them thus.”
To reiterate from an article on Urban Dharma: Dreams symbolize the changing and impermanent nature of all things known to the senses. Sights, sounds, smells, flavors, sensations of touch and thoughts are all dream-like, fleeting, and ultimately unobtainable. By pursuing and grasping material things or ephemeral states, we create the causes for misery and suffering. Those desire-objects are not real and permanent. When they break up and move on, we will experience grief, if we can’t let go. The hallmark of living beings is that we are “sleeping, “ unawakened to the truth of the emptiness and impermanence at the nature of conditioned things. This covering of sleep and lack of awareness is called “ignorance,” and it makes us in our waking state, from the Buddha’s viewpoint, look as if we are dreaming.
Bubbles burst, shadows run from light, dewdrops vanish by noon without a trace, lightning roars and vanishes, and dreams leave us at dawn. To continually perceive such things as real locks us into the endless cycle of birth and death. The Buddha was not simply giving us an evocative metaphor, a literary device or a philosophical point. He felt related to all beings, and in his compassion he was pointing out to his family a way to escape the prolonged misery of affliction and death. The dream simile occurs over and over in the sutras to teach about emptiness.
As messages, or teachings, dreams can be a way to give information to the dreamer or to even test them if they are retreating from the path of Enlightenment.
Dreams are most commonly known for recalling our day’s experiences and gives our consciousness a way to put it into images. Dreams, although considered as empty and false can still produce a physical reaction, as when a dream-vision of a romantic encounter can produce a wet-dream in sleep.
And finally, Dream visions of suffering, such as the sight of beings in the hells will move a true Bodhisattva to make compassionate vows to rescue those beings. Great Bodhisattvas would sometimes send dreams on purpose to novice Bodhisattvas, to stimulate them to make the great Bodhi Resolve. If a Bodhisattva cultivates compassion in a dream, then the dream vision of rescuing from suffering may return to him/her when he/she is awake. The dream reminds the Bodhisattva of his/her ability to endure suffering on behalf of others.