What dreams are made of

A dream is a false reality that we can wake up from.  Only then do we realize it was all a dream.  However, without waking up we go from one dream to another.  There is never a waking up, so to speak.  

Our life (maybe I should say lives) is a series of dreams that we never, actually, wake up from.  Only a Buddha is awakened from the dream.  Not even death can be thought of as the end of dreams in which we see true reality for the first time.  Death, itself, is part of the dream; so is rebirth.  

While it is true that awakening is waking up from the kleshas, the Sanskrit term klesha or in Pali, kilesa, is not so easy to define.  This term means affliction or torment.  Defining klesha as defilement seems to be inaccurate.  We can think of klesha as arising from our deep involvement in the dream that we believe is our life.  Thus, we can suffer from the kleshas of desire (raga), anger, delusion (moha), arrogance (mâno), and pride.  We might call these klesha essential dream-enforcers whose job it is, is to make the dream seem real and to keep the Buddha’s truth from us.

When we normally dream, our dreams, as a rule, seem so real at the time.  We even experience some of the kleshas, and more.  Waking up from our dreams in which we just dreamed that we flunked out of college—what a relief to know we graduated with flying colors!  The brief pain we felt in the dream is completely erased.  When we awaken from our very life to discover it is just a dream we see our dream as a formation of mind-stuff, to borrow Kingdon Clifford’s term.  To this formation there is only name and form.  We only know this having penetrated through the name and form veil, meeting with ourselves—our real nature—for the very first time.  We are awakened at this point because we see what dreams are made of.

 

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[Ambassador]

"You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric
of this vision,
The cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

William Shakespeare - The Tempest (4.1.146-58)

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"Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream. "

(Nursery rhyme, children's song)