This dream occurred when I was nineteen or twenty years old. I found myself in some kind of temple—something like a church, yet not a church. In the altar area lay a book, and someone was meant to read from it. However, the reader never appeared. Then I felt that perhaps I was the one who had to do it—it was a strange sensation, as if I were waiting for myself.
I stood up, approached the book, and stood facing the people, with my back to the altar. I opened the book and prepared to read. And the moment I tried to read, everything around me began to change, as if another dimension were unfolding. What happened next I cannot describe. I cannot find words for it, nor can I shape it into any form.
I saw that everything that exists is unreal. It was as if this world had been turned inside out, like a stocking. I saw that nothing exists. Everything is illusion. I, all of us, the Universe—all of it does not exist. There was only a solitary totality. There were no images, no visions, no dreams, no concepts of the world. For the mind, perceiving this is unspeakably painful, because for it, this is the end.
And within this totality, I felt someone’s presence. I do not know who it was. He was simply there, beside me—that was all. He seemed to be a witness to my experience, or perhaps something else; I do not know.
I have had many different dreams. If I were to write them down, more than one book could be written. Some dreams felt like an entire lifetime. Later, in meditation, I saw how dreams are dreamed—how the images of dreams are created on the screen of inner vision. These are all workings of the mind. Yet everything that happens in life is also the mind, and only in meditation and samadhi, where the realm of the mind comes to an end, can one be free from images and ideas.
Thus, like everything else, dreams are part of our life, and they are of many kinds. In dreams, messages from past lives may appear; there may be glimpses of what has not yet happened. But often, dreams are simply the mind and its illusions. There are special dreams that remain in memory for a lifetime. In one of them, I saw my Guru.
