Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c16.s2.9

c16.s2.9

There is also given out in a late chapter a theory of dreams, which describes six kinds of men who experience them, he who is of a bilious, windy or phlegmatic humour, he who is influenced by a god, he who habituates himself, and he who does so in the way of prognostication, the last sort only of dreams being true. The prognostication comes about not by the action of any person, god or man, but it enters the mind of the sleeper of itself, and is explained to him by one skilled in omens, just as such a person prognosticates from external signs such as pimples. Dreams take place in ‘monkey-sleep’, a state between waking and deep sleep. But the theory, naïve in its acceptance of popular belief in divine action and in the autonomy of prognostication, is interesting incidentally; it is explained that there is no dream in deep sleep for thought (citta) has then entered into, and become one with the Bhavaṅga, and in that state thought does not act, and, being inactive, it does not experience pleasure or pain, and dreaming is impossible in such a condition. The Bhavaṅga, or stream of being, is a conception barely known in the Abhidhamma, and there not explained, but it evidently has already here the sense of a continuum which is not conscious, but from which consciousness emerges, and which may therefore be reckoned as sub-conscious.¹