The Trauma of Everyday Life

relatedness he had all but ignored previously. It was this recovery that made his enlightenment possible.
    Dreams are dissociative by definition. They occur when the rest of the mind is shut down, and they allow difficult feelings to be expressed in symbolic form. In most cases, they are forgotten upon awakening or remembered only in bits and pieces, the forces of dissociation keeping the feelings disguised and away from waking consciousness. This was not the case for the Buddha at this crucial time in his life. In the process of turning his mind around, he became ready to face something he had been estranged from, and he needed his dreams to help him.
    The Buddha remembered his five dreams and recorded them for posterity; he may even have been aware of them as he slept. The dreams put something to rest in the Buddha while also waking something up. They took away his need to
enact
his dissociated feelings, as he had done in his years of ascetic self-abasement, and they lucidly revealed something about himself he had been ignoring. Simply speaking, they showed him that he could be kind. In his years of spiritual searching he had perfected all kinds of esoteric talents. He could take his mind into spheres of nothingness, go for days and weeks without eating, and rend his flesh with the best of them, but he was still operating with barely disguised contempt, not benevolence, toward himself and his world. When the enlightened Buddha told his admirer that he was awake, it was this basic kindness he was pointing to. With the help of his dreams, he had awakened to his true nature, and his true nature, to his utter surprise, was a relational one.
    The passage in the sutras that portrays the Buddha’s dreams is an interesting one. It begins by describing him as “not yet wholly awakened” but as a “being awakening” to whom there came “five great dreams.” 1 The idea that there was a period in the Buddha’s life when he was in the
process
of awakening is special in itself. It is not universally accepted in Buddhist circles that such an intermediate period existed. There are whole schools of thought that have grown up around the idea of “sudden enlightenment” and others that defend a “gradual” one. But here is a clear reference to something in between. A special time in the Buddha’s life when he was
awakening
and one in which his struggle to awaken occurred while he was dreaming. The relationship of this to the movement from implicit to narrative memory is interesting. The Buddha’s awakening rested on his dream life, on a creative transformation of that which was lurking in his unconscious memory, on his ability to bring something unknown into awareness, to give it a narrative structure that could allow him to hold it in conscious self-reflection. This happened after his childhood memory, in which the Buddha began to take feelings seriously. Feelings led him to dreaming. And dreaming showed him how to relate.
    The five dreams are all of a piece. They begin with one that immediately equates the awakening Buddha with an infant lying on his mother’s body, and they proceed to paint a developmental picture of the emergence of an interactive self. While the dreams are traditionally thought to foretell the future, they quite specifically evoke the Buddha’s dissociated past. In narrative form they link the Buddha’s solitary enlightenment, won by virtue of his own individual effort and intelligence, to a recovery of the interpersonal foundations upon which his emergent self depended. The dreams make clear that awakening was possible only when the Buddha’s inherent capacity for interpersonal relatedness could suffuse the entirety of his mental life.
    As the sutra describes:
Just before the Perfect One, accomplished and fully enlightened, attained enlightenment, five momentous dreams appeared to him. What five? While he was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, the great earth was his couch; Himalaya, king of mountains, was his pillow; his left hand lay in the Eastern Ocean, his right hand lay in the Western Ocean, his feet lay in the Southern Ocean. This was the first dream that appeared to him, and it foretold his discovery of the supreme full enlightenment.
While he was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, a creeper grew up out of his navel and stood touching the clouds. That was the second dream that appeared to him, and it foretold his discovery of the Noble Eightfold Path.
While he was still only