Weekly Wisdom: Wake Up and Understand the 5 Types of Dreams

There are five types of dreams. 

One dream is born of all your cravings. Unfulfilled desires come up in dreams as fulfillment. 

Have you experienced this?

You wanted to drink water, but you didn’t for some reason. You wanted to have ice cream, but you said, “Oh, not today.” You wanted pizza, but then you didn’t. 

Then you go to bed and in the dream you’re munching on or eating pizza and having a big scoop of ice cream, right?

You wanted to go for a walk with somebody, a boyfriend or girlfriend, and you couldn’t do it. In the dream, you find yourself going on a walk, on a boat, and skiing in the mountains. All of these things come from latent desires. 

Desires and fears come up as dreams. This is one type of dream. 

The second type of dream is a stress-relieving dream. Some stress release from your past experiences comes up. All that you’ve experienced in life comes up as the second type of dream.

The third type of dream is an intuitive dream. You get an intuition about the future in that type of dream. 

The fourth type of dream is a blend of all three: desire, stress relief, and intuition. 

The fifth type of dream has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the place where you’re sleeping. 

You’re sleeping in a hotel in Italy. In the dream, you experience the Italian language.

You hear dialogue, and it’s in the language of the place where you are.

You have no idea what is being said, but you still see things happening. This has to do with the place, the space.

So these five types of dreams can occur. The thing is, you don’t know which one is which. Usually, it’s the fourth type of dream where there’s a mixture of all the types.

So you can’t distinguish between them, or say that something is only an intuitive dream. It could be. It need not be. So a wise person would simply brush them all off. 

Anyway, it’s of no use. A dream is a dream. Even this waking reality is a dream. 

Now you’re all sitting here. Tomorrow you’ll be somewhere else. And next week, this will all be a dream. 

What you’ll do next week is a dream right now. Your mind is more dreaming than awake. 

Realize you’re dreaming and wake up

You have only two states of consciousness. One is deep sleep, and another is daydreaming—daydream, or night dream. 

The whole day, you sit and dream about what will happen to you next week. “Next week I’ll do that. Another week, I’ll do this.”

It’s building castles in the air. What do you call it? Castles in the air or in the sky? This daydreaming goes on and on. 

Once you know this is a dream, “Oh, I’m daydreaming,” that very moment, a gush of energy comes into you, and that alertness wakes you up to the reality that you’re awakened. 

That awakening is pragya. In that moment alone, you’re fully alive. Only then are you fully alive and awake to the truth of what is. 

The rest of the time, you’re asleep. So even knowing that you’ve been having a great sleep and in slumber, the realization that you’ve been dreaming wakes you up. 

Patanjali has done a marvelous thing just by quoting this one Sutra. 

The knowledge of sleep awakens you. 

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