Dreaming of waking up
Last night Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, spirits soaring he was a butterfly (is it that in showing what he was he suited his own fancy?), and did not know about Zhou. When all of a sudden he awoke, he was Zhou with all his wits about him. He does not know whether he is Zhou who dreams he is a butterfly or a butterfly who dreams he is Zhou. Between Zhou and the butterfly there was necessarily a dividing; just this is what is meant by the transformation of things. (ch. 2, 61)

Everything in this world can be taken as real or not real; or both real and not real; or neither real nor not real. This is the Buddha's teaching. (MMK 18:8)

　　 The meaning of Zhuangzi's celebrated dream has been much debated and always will be, since the ambivalence of its meaning is clearly as much Zhuangzi's intention as the ambivalence of the dream. The central tension of the story is between Zhuang Zhou waking up and Zhuang Zhou wondering whether he has indeed awakened. What is the difference? The story does not want to persuade us that this world is a dream, but to raise doubts about whether this world is a dream. Evidently ignorance on this matter is more valuable than knowing the answer. Is that because ignorance is preferable, if we want to truly wake up and experience things as they really are? Or is ignorance itself waking up?

　　 Insofar as we try to understand Zhuang Zhou's dream, it is helpful to place it in context by considering the two other important passages on dreaming in the inner chapters.

How do I know that the dead do not regret that they ever had an urge to life? ... While we dream we do not know we are dreaming, and in the middle of a dream interpret a dream within it; not until we wake do we know that we were dreaming. Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream. Yet fools think they are awake, so confident that they know what they are, princes, herdsmen, incorrigible! You and Confucius are both dreams, and I who call you a dream am also a dream. (ch. 2, pp. 59-60)

　　 This dreaming is less ambiguous than Zhuang Zhou's. We are all dreaming, which we will realize when we finally awaken. This assertion must be understood in its wider context, which wonders whether we are wrong to love life and hate death. Perhaps those who do so are exiles who have forgotten the way home. If so, life itself is the ultimate dream and death the ultimate awakening.

　　 Despite Nagarjuna's unwillingness in the epigraph above to commit himself to one view at the cost of the other, there are prominent passages in the Mahayana scriptures which also unambiguously assert that this world is unreal and dreamlike. In chapter two of the Astasahasrika, for example, Subhuti declares that beings, all objective facts, and even the Buddha and nirvana itself are like an illusion and a dream. The Diamond Sutra concludes with the remark that we should view things as like a bubble, a lightning flash, a dream.

　　 There is one more important dream in the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi:

You dream that you are a bird and fly away into the sky, dream that you are a fish and plunge into the deep. There's no telling whether the man who speaks now is the waker or the dreamer. Rather than go toward what suits you, laugh: rather than acknowledge it with your laughter, shove it from you. Shove it from you and leave the transformations behind; then you will enter the oneness of the featureless sky. (ch. 6, p. 91)

　　 This dream is more like the butterfly dream; the speaker does not know whether he is awake or dreaming. But why is it so important for us to know that? What in us needs to know which is which? Instead of dreaming about waking up, perhaps we should consider why we are so afraid of dreams. What makes a dream a dream? Things in a dream are unreal in the sense that they do not have any objective stability or self-existence. They are constantly appearing, disappearing, and transforming into something else. Yet that is also true for this world, according to Zhuangzi and Nagarjuna! In which case the distinction between them becomes less important. To wake up, then, is to realize there is only the dream. To dream of waking up from that dream is to fantasize about attaining a Reality that will save me from my empty, unfixed, transforming nature, which makes me uneasy because I want to be self-identical. If so, to "wake up" from my constantly-changing nature (in which I become, say, a butterfly) is actually to fall asleep into the ignorance that thinks "I" am this body, this particular self within a collection of other discrete things. To dream I am a butterfly, etc., is to wake up to my selfless, endlessly-transforming nature.

　　 Like other dualistic categories, however, the concept of dreaming has meaning only in relation to a concept of waking up and leaving the dream-transformations behind. Yet the Zhuangzi says that the alternative to dreaming is not another world or higher dimension but "the oneness of the featureless sky." Such a featureless oneness is indistinguishable from no-thing-ness. It is important to forget oneself and experience this no-thing-ness -- to become no-thing -- because that extinguishes the self; and it is just as important not to remain in that featureless oneness because, in Buddhist terms, that is "clinging to emptiness". As the Heart Sutra puts it, form is not other than emptiness, but emptiness is not other than form. Their nonduality is the great dream which we awaken not from but to.