"Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty . . . weaves a brilliant analysis of the complex role of dreams and dreaming in Indian religion, philosophy, literature, and art. . . . In her creative hands, enchanting Indian myths and stories illuminate and are illuminated by authors as different as Aeschylus, Plato, Freud, Jung, Kurl Gödel, Thomas Kuhn, Borges, Picasso, Sir Ernst Gombrich, and many others. This richly suggestive book challenges many of our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and our world."—Mark C. Taylor, New York Times Book Review "Dazzling analysis. . . . The book is firm and convincing once you appreciate its central point, which is that in traditional Hindu thought the dream isn't an accident or byway of experience, but rather the locus of epistemology. In its willful confusion of categories, its teasing readiness to blur the line between the imagined and the real, the dream actually embodies the whole problem of knowledge. . . . [O'Flaherty] wants to make your mental flesh creep, and she succeeds."—Mark Caldwell, Village Voice Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty  is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School and a professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was. Dreams, Illusion, and other Realities By Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 1984 University of Chicago All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-61855-5 Contents ILLUSTRATIONS, GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION AND TERMINOLOGY, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, INTRODUCTION. TRANSFORMATION AND CONTRADICTION, 1. THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, 2. MYTHS ABOUT DREAMS, 3. MYTHS ABOUT ILLUSION, 4. EPISTEMOLOGY IN NARRATIVE: TALES FROM THE Yogavasistha, 5. ONTOLOGY IN NARRATIVE: MORE TALES FROM THE Yogavasistha, 6. THE ART OF ILLUSION, CONCLUSION, APPENDIXES, NOTES, BIBLIOGRAPHY, INDEX OF NAMES AND TERMS, SUBJECT INDEX, ADDENDA TO THE SECOND PRINTING, CHAPTER 1 The Interpretation of Dreams The Western assumption that dreams are softer (more subjective, false, private, transient, and illusory) than the hard facts of waking life (which we think of as objective, true, public, permanent, and real) is an assumption that is not shared by Indian texts devoted to the meaning of dreams. Indian medicine and philosophy do not recognize the distinction between two aspects of dream analysis that is made by Roger Caillois, who speaks of "two types of problems concerning dreams that have always puzzled men's minds." The first is the meaning of the images inside the dream; the second is "the degree of reality that one may attribute to the dream," which depends on our understanding of the relationship between dreaming and waking. The two aspects of dreams merge from the very start in India, since one word ( svapna, etymologically related to the Greek hypnos ) designates both the content of dreaming—i.e., the images in the dream, the actual dream that one "sees"—and the form of dreaming—the process of sleeping (including the process of dreaming), which involves the relationship between the dream and the waking world. The first is what we would regard as the soft or subjective aspect of the dream, visible only to the dreamer; the second we think of as the objective or hard aspect of the dream, visible to other observers. The first is what we examine on the psychoanalyst's soft couch; the second we analyze with the hardware of the sleep laboratory. INDIAN TEXTS DREAMS IN VEDIC AND MEDICAL TEXTS The earliest Indian reference to dreams, in the Rg Veda (c. 1200 B.C.), describes a nightmare, but it leaves ambiguous the question whether what is feared is merely the experience of the dream (the process of having a bad dream) or the content of the dream (the events in the dream and the implication that it will come true): "If someone I have met or a friend has spoken of danger to me in a dream to frighten me, or if a thief should waylay us, or a wolf—protect us from that." Are the thief and the wolf part of the dream, too, or part of a contrasting reality? A different sort of ambiguity is posed by the waking dream, which is mentioned in the Rg Veda as an evil that one wishes to visit on one's enemies. Yet another Rg Vedic verse tells of an incubus who bewitches a sleeping woman in her dream. He shades off into the actual person who rapes the woman, either by transforming himself when she is awake or by manipulating her mind when she is bewitched by the demonic powers of illusion: The one who by changing into your brother, or your husband, or your lover lies with you, who wishes to kill your offspring—we will drive him away from here. The one who bewitches you with dream or darkness and lies with you—we will drive him away from here. These scattered references reveal an assumed link not only