The Trauma of Everyday Life

an unenlightened Bodhisatta, white grubs with black heads crawled from his feet to his knees and covered them. This was the third dream that appeared to him, and it foretold that many white-clothed laymen would go for refuge to the Perfect One during his life.
While he was only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, four birds of different colours came from the four quarters, and, as they alighted at his feet, they all became white. This was the fourth dream that appeared to him, and it foretold that the four castes . . . would realize the supreme deliverance when the Dhamma and the Discipline had been proclaimed by the Perfect One.
While he was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, he walked upon a huge mountain of dirt without being fouled by the dirt. This was the fifth dream that appeared to him, and it foretold that although the Perfect One would obtain the requisites of robes, alms food, abode, and medicine, yet he would use them without greed or delusion or clinging, perceiving their dangers and understanding their purpose. 2

    The dreams themselves are amazing, and the traditional interpretations neat, lyrical, and inspiring. But the emotional nature of the dream content is worth paying attention to as well. It does not seem as if the traditional interpretations, pointing toward the future, quite do justice to the dreamer’s emotional experience, linking him to his own personal history. In the first dream, for example, the sleeping Buddha is one with the universe. He is quite literally dreaming an oceanic feeling, with the mountains his pillow, the earth his couch, and his floating limbs supported by the water. He may well have been foretelling his enlightenment as the traditional commentaries suggest, but he was also telegraphing his recovery of the feminine, of his maternal aptitude. The earth as mother, the oceans as amniotic fluid, and the couch as her lap: These symbols would have evoked a maternal presence long before the advent of Freud. The Buddha’s dream was not just predicting the future; in its depiction of the redolence of the present moment it was also recalling the past. His memory of childhood joy had opened him to being, and it appeared to him in his dream in the symbolic form of the earth and its waters as mother.
    As if to prove the point, the Buddha’s second dream literally grows from his navel. Vines creep to the sky, connecting him to the clouds and, by inference, to the heaven realm in which his mother took refuge after her death. If, as the traditional commentary suggests, the dream is predicting the discovery of the Noble Eightfold Path, it is doing so by revealing that the path to awakening does not involve withdrawal from the world but affirms a profound connection with it. The vines entwine the Buddha with the universe. They grow from his navel, reestablishing his original connection with his mother and reaffirming the primacy of his relational nature. The simultaneity of difference and connection, of separateness and unity, is painted by the image. The awakening Buddha is dreaming of the connectedness that emerges when one’s primitive agonies are resolved, of the relatedness that takes the place of self-pity, of the inherently engaged nature of the self. He is dreaming of selflessness while revealing that there is no self apart from the world.
    The third dream is the most mysterious. White grubs with black heads crawling from his feet to his knees. To me, the grubs are like Winnicott’s primitive agonies or Eigen’s broken dreams: the leftover remnants of childhood experience that make our skin crawl. They make me think of the ascetics of the Buddha’s time, dedicated to self-mortification, and of the many people of our own time, tormented by self-hatred, who are as devoted to psychological self-mortification as those of the Buddha’s time were to the physical. The grubs are sinister, like maggots in the flesh of the ancient ascetics, but also redemptive, like cicadas, which in Japan represent rebirth, crawling as they do from the ground every summer to fill the air with their distinctive background song. In this imagery, the Buddha’s third dream aligns his awakening with therapists’ insights about aborted emotional experience. The dream suggests that agony, like the white grubs with black heads, can be a vehicle of awakening and that the broken aspects of our being have within themselves the template for wholeness. Each person who came to the Buddha brought his own