Just curious, how is metaphysics and interpretation of
dreams related to Buddhism? Isn't it confusing for beginners or
true believers of Buddhism? :)
Buddha himself interpreted several of his disciple Ananda's
dreams. However, at the same time, he discouraged monks to practice
dream interpretation (probably since dream interpretation does not
concern the main purpose of attaining liberation). Monks thus
should focus their energies on the main goal as a monk.
Dream interpretation is later factored into spiritual practices
in some form in Tibetan Budhdism. I'm not exactly familiar with it.
It is also heavily emphasized in certain part of Western Psychology
(i.e. Carl Jung).
However, Buddhism generally does not emphasize on dream
interpretation. Those who are interested may consult Longchen
privately to resolve them though. So far longchen was able to very
accurately tell what mental states or emotions I was going through
just by me telling him my dreams, so I think dreams definitely do
'communicate deep subconscious mind to the conscious mind of a
person'.
One of his articles:
My personal opinion is that dreams are a way for the deep
subconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind of a
person.
The way I see it is that consciousness is multi-layered or
multi-dimensional. The different layers of consciousness are well..
different from one another. For example, our personality self is
different from the subconscious mind.
My theory is that dreams are an intermediate state of
consciousness connecting the conscious personality self to the
subconscious layer of mind. Dreams arrange and display the content
and information of the subconscious mind into a format is that
understandable and cognizant to the dreamer’s conscious
mind.
To me, symbolism is a way for the deep subconscious mind to
enable the conscious mind to be aware of its inner workings.
Therefore dreams are a kind of symbolic playing/acting of deep
mind’s content.
By understanding the meanings of the dream via the
interpretations of its symbols, we are able to vaguely figure out
what may occur in the near future. How is this possible? There’s no
definite answer to this. My personal take on this is that many life
events are not really concidences. Instead they are the
manifestation of the dynamics that are working within the deep
subconscious mind. This inner workings step-down the
multi-dimensional concsciousness and eventually manifests as events
in our physical world. Dreams, are the intermediate layer of
consciousness between conscious personality self and the deep
subconscious. As mentioned earlier, dreams are a symbolic
representation of deep mind’s inner workings. So, by interpretation
of the dreams, we can roughly deduce deep subconscious mind’s
dynamic around that period of time. By the time, the dreams are
being dreamt, the deep subsconscious mind’s dynamics have already
started the stepping down process into physicality.