Le Rêve (The Dream) is a 1932 oil painting by Pablo Picasso.
The select bibliography for “dreams and dreaming” is here
. What follows is material on dreams and dreaming from several civilizations, cultures, and worldviews, as well as reflection on same from sundry writers, psychologists, and philosophers. The hope is that these nuggets of analysis and insight will grant one a taste (rasa
) of the wonderful world of dreams.
“[D]reams are meaningful and dreaming a purposeful activity.”—Sudhir Kakar
“Dreams…are communications with the soma, psyche, polis, or cosmos of the dreamer.”—Sudhir Kakar
“Thanks mainly to Freud, the dream has been overwhelmingly in the hands of the psychologists. We cannot blame the psychologists for this, because they have proper business with the dream. But few humanist scholars have bothered to look directly at the dream as a subjective experience that has, however delusively, aroused in us all a sense of being alive in an unusual way. One scholar will write about Kafka and the dream, another about Mann or Strindberg and the dream, but few write about the dream itself. The average person is so used to dreaming that dreaming becomes as unremarkable as shaving or daydreaming on the bus. Yet for several hours each night, most of us invent and populate an outrageous world into which we are involuntarily projected to take our chances like the hero of a novel or a film. This is a staggering fact about human consciousness, this other reality….”—Bernard O. States
“Everyone approaches the subject, first and foremost, through their own personal dreaming. This is true for researchers and clinicians as well.”—Kelly Bulkeley
The most widely accepted facts about ordinary dreams are as follows: “(1) Nearly all humans remember at least some dreams. (2) A very small number of people report never dreaming. (3) Ordinary dreams are mostly visual and auditory, with some tactile sensations and very little smell or taste. (4) The whole range of emotions can appear in dreams but many dreams have no emotional tone at all. (5) High-level mental abilities for rational thought, decision-making, and self-reflection are active and normally functional in some dreams, but not in others. (6) Most dreams contain one or more characters other than the dreamer. (7) Many dreams involve speaking, listening and common forms of social interaction.”—Kelly Bulkeley
The following have been claimed as additional patterns in the form and content of ordinary dreams: “(1) Children dream more often of animals than adults do. (2) Women tend to remember more dreams than men do. (3) Men’s dreams tend to be more aggressive and sexual than women’s dreams. (4) Men dream more often of male characters than female characters, while women tend to dream evenly about male and female characters. (5) Falling dreams are much more common than flying dreams. (6) Some dreams include explicit reference to cultural symbols and metaphors. (7) The primary emotional concerns and activities of the waking life are accurately reflected in the frequencies of various elements of the dream content (the continuity hypothesis).”—Kelly Bulkeley
After Jung, we might make a distinction between “little” and “big” dreams. With regard to the latter: “(1) Many cultures do make a general distinction between significant and insignificant dreams, after casting it in religious terms (e.g., divine dream visions and merely human dreams). (2) Nightmares are an especially widespread form of highly memorable dreaming, with a high prevalence among the general population of two primal themes: being chased or attacked by another character (especially animals) and falling or losing control of one’s body (e.g., feeling paralyzed). (3) At the other end of the emotional spectrum, some highly memorable dreams involve feelings of intense sexual pleasure that carry over into physiological arousal on waking (wet dreams). (4) Among the most emotionally positive big dreams are those involving seemingly magical phenomena (e.g., flying, dead people appearing alive again), with qualities of unusually intense realism. (5) Other factors associated with big dreams include recurrence, aesthetics, bizarreness, temporality, and lucidity.”—Kelly Bulkeley
“At the farthest edge of speculation a science of big dreams allies itself with the study of other non-linear processes such as weather, quantum physics, star formation, and art, which spontaneously generate new clusters of emergent order. From this perspective the open-ended dynamism and chaotic creativity of dreaming can be seen as provoking the conscious mind into a greater understanding of itself and the world.”—Kelly Bulkeley
“…[C]ontemporary philosophical and scientific literature has affirmed [the] ancient notion of the dream as prognostication, if this is understood not merely as foretelling the future, but as giving shape to the reality that will come to pass.”—Elliot R. Wolfson
“In our times [the] quest for meaning is part of a larger Euro-American movement of investing dreams with existential meaning, which in turn occurs in the context of the erosion of the magical garden and the death of god.”—Gananath Obeyesekere
“The tales of dreams suggest…that dreaming and waking partake of the same reality, which is both spiritual and physical.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty
“The dream ether is the warp that myths are woven on; the weft is individual experience and art. Myths reflect our desire to believe that people really can dream the same dream, a desire that is a deep hope—a dream, if you will—that we all share. The myths that describe such experiences are shared dreams about shared dreams.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty
“[O]ne can justifiably assert that Freud discovered psychoanalysis, or at least its central features, through his own dreams….”—Sigmund Freud
“[I]n spite of [the] self-criticisms, and in spite of the depression which followed the almost total neglect of the book by the outside world—only 35 copies were sold in the first six years after publication—The Interpretation of Dreams was always regarded by Freud as his most important work: ‘Insight such as this,’ he wrote in his preface to the third English edition, ‘falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.’”—James Strachey
“Anyone who has failed to explain the origin of dream-images can scarcely hope to understand phobias, obsessions or delusion or to bring a therapeutic influence to bear on them.”—James Strachey
“It may happen that a piece of material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state we do not recognize as forming a part of our knowledge or experience.”—Sigmund Freud
“[D]reams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life.”—Sigmund Freud
“Now most dream-images are unique experiences; and that fact will contribute impartially towards making us forget all dreams.”—Sigmund Freud
“[T]he emergence of impulses which are foreign to our moral consciousness is merely analogous…to the fact that dreams have access to ideational material which is absent in our waking state or plays but a small part in it.”—Sigmund Freud
“I have been driven to realize that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases in which an ancient and jealously held popular belief seems to be nearer the truth than the judgment of the prevalent science of today. I must affirm that dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible.”—Sigmund Freud
Regarding the psychological preparation of the subject for dream interpretation in psychoanalysis: “We must aim at bringing about two changes in him: an increase in the attention he pays to his own psychical perception and the elimination of the criticism by which he normally shifts the thoughts that occur to him.” [These are uncannily similar to preliminary practices for meditation instruction.]—Sigmund Freud
“I am far from seeking to maintain that I am the first writer to have had the idea of deriving dreams from wishes.”—Sigmund Freud
“[D]reams are given their shape in individual human beings by the operation of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currents or systems); and that one of those forces constructs the wish which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish and, by the use of that censorship, forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish.”—Sigmund Freud
“[A] dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.”—Sigmund Freud
A dream can both express and gratify a wish.
Anxiety dreams are a sub-species of dreams with a distressing content, the anxiety being superficially attached to the idea that accompanies it. Freud concedes that anxiety dreams are “dream structures unpropitious from the point of view of the wish-theory.”
“Freud eventually abandoned the idea that every dream was the gratification of a wish. In particular, he left open the possibility that a dream might be a manifestation—and representation of anxiety. And anxiety can be a realistic response to the world.”—Jonathan Lear
With regard to the manifest content of dreams: “(1) [D]reams show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days; (2) they make their selection upon different principles from our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important but what is subsidiary and unnoticed; [and] (3) they have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details from that period of our life which, once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long since forgotten.”—Sigmund Freud
Displacement refers to what occurs when “ideas which originally had only a weak charge of intensity take over the charge from ideas which were intensely cathected [charged with psychical energy] and at last attain enough strength to enable them to force an entry into consciousness.”—Sigmund Freud
“Censorship is served by processes such as displacement, whereby intensity and apparent importance are detached from a significant idea and passed along, by associative paths, to an insignificant idea. Displacement, along with condensation and other aspects of primary process constitutive of unconscious processing, are formal, syntactically characterisable operations. They account for the dream-work’s success in disguising desire, in the negative sense of making the content of wishes inaccessible.”—Sebastian Gardner
“Dreams are never concerned with trivialities; we do not allow our sleep to be disturbed by trifles. The apparently innocent dreams turn out to be quite the reverse when we take the trouble to analyze them.”—Sigmund Freud
The latent content of dreams refers to the “dream-thoughts” one arrives at through dream-work.
The process of condensation permits us to see how dreams are “meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts.”—Sigmund Freud
“[A] transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream formation, and it is a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the [latent] dream-thoughts come about.”—Sigmund Freud
“Dreams are completely egotistical” insofar as “every dream deals with the dreamer himself.”—Sigmund Freud
In describing the interpretation of dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” Freud is referring, in Jonathan Lear’s words, to “the conscious waking activity of interpreting dream-memories in the analytic situation.”
If one takes Freud’s principles of dream interpretation seriously, it “emerges that the interpretation of dreams is an ethical activity.”—Jonathan Lear
“More than any other psychic phenomenon, dreams reveal so regularly and so graphically the variety of unconscious forces, including the unconscious ego and superego as well as dynamic and genetic factors. As compromise formations rather than mere wish fulfillments, dreams prove crucial for indicating the nature of pathology and defensive structure.”—Patrick J. Mahony
“What is meant by lucid dreaming? The French dream theorist Michel Jouvet puts it thus: ‘A dream is lucid when the subject, while dreaming, knows he or she is dreaming. This peculiar state allows the dreamer a certain measure of control over the actual unfolding of the dream and a sense of freedom through being able to explore the dream world according to his or her own inclinations’ [The Paradox of Sleep (Laurence Garey, trans.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999: 761]. What is striking about lucid dreaming is that, like its Buddhist and Hindu precursors, it provides technologies for disciplining oneself in order to dream lucidly. A detailed account of these technologies is found in the work of an important theorist, Stephen LeBerge, whose pioneering work Lucid Dreaming  was followed by Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming , written with his collaborator Howard Rheingold.”—Gananath Obeyesekere
“In the West, mentions of lucid dreaming can be found in the writing of philosophers Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, Pierre Gassendi and the first mention in Europe was in a letter written by St. Augustine of Hippo in 415 AD.”—Fariba Bogzaran
“Perhaps the awareness of lucid dreaming in Western academic circles [first] occurred with the publication of Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822-1892), a Sinologist who published Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: observations pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations or often translated as Dreams and How to Guide Them). He documented more than twenty years of personal investigation into lucid dreams. Although working with dreams was not at the centre of his career, his book influenced and inspired many in the arts and literature including the surrealist André Breton. The name ‘lucid dreaming’ was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederick van Eden in 1913.”—Fariba Bogzaran
“Research and first-person accounts show that in lucid dreaming, different levels of intentionality can be carried out, such as transforming a self-image, ego-splitting; spiritual experiences; meeting the deceased; witnessing, entering hyperspace; healing, and encountering inner light.”—Fariba Bogzaran
“[W]hile lucid dream theory claims to have been influenced by Tibetan dream yoga, the latter has little affinity with lucid dreams.”—Gananath Obeyesekere
“The boundaries between waking and dreaming are more permeable in the Hindu, specifically Upanishadic thought.”—Sudhir Kakar
In the Mahābhārata, we find “a set of contrasting dreams on the eve of a great battle: nightmares in those who are about to be defeated, auspicious dreams in those who are about to conquer.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty
“[I]t is argued in the Yogavāsistha, when we take the material universe to be the ultimate reality, we make a mistake comparable to the mistake someone makes when he thinks he sees his head cut off in a dream, a traditional image in Indian dream books.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty
In the Advaita Vedānta
school of classical Indic philosophy, “a good deal of importance [is attached] to the phenomenology of dream consciousness [svapna-sthāna
] in order to show the continuity of consciousness and the persistence of self-awareness throughout all states of consciousness.”—Eliot Deutsch
“According to the Vedānta, the three kośas or sheaths associated with the dream state of consciousness and that constitute the ‘subtle body’ (sūksma-śarīra) of the self are the prānamayakośa, the sheath of ‘vitality,’ the manomayakośa, the sheath of ‘mind,’ and the vijñānamayakośa, the sheath of ‘understanding.’ [….] Both the manomayakośa and the vijñānamayakośa form the antahkarana or ‘internal organ,’ which is the psychological expression for the totality of mental functions in waking-dream consciousness, [and, as such, are subject to a pervasive avidyā (ignorance)].”—Eliot Deutsch
In addition to the states of consciousness associated with the waking state and the dream state, there is the third state of consciousness found in “deep sleep” (susupti). Only turīya (lit., ‘the fourth’), the fourth state of consciousness recognized by Vedānta, is characterized as the “transcendental” or a “pure” state of consciousness. Later in the tradition, we find not one but two states of consciousness beyond deep sleep: savikalpa samādhi and nirvikalpa samādhi, the former still a “determinate” spiritual experience, “but unlike in susupti, the deep-sleep state, the emphasis here is not so much on the absence of duality as it is on the presence of non-duality.” This might be described as a liminal state betwixt and between the jīva and the Ātman, the self poised on the precipice, as it were, of nirvikalpa samādhi, the awareness of nirguna Brahman. As Deutsch explains, the waking and dreaming states of consciousness correspond to the phenomenal world of gross and subtle bodies; the states of deep sleep and savikalpa samādhi correspond to saguna (‘qualified’) Brahman, while turīya or transcendental consciousness and nirvikalpa samādhi correspond to Ultimate Reality or nirguna Brahman (recalling the equation Ātman = Brahman).
Just as the dream state is “subrated” (disvalued, contradicted, and transcended) by the state of waking consciousness, so too nirguna Brahman, as “ultimate reality” subrates all prior experience, while nothing else is capable of subrating Brahman, defined as spiritual experience utterly bereft of distinction or determination (nirvikalpa samādhi), and described as an immediate (hence unmediated) consciousness or awareness on the order of complete or absolute self-knowledge and self-realization.
Vasubandhu, a Yogācāra
(or Vijñānavāda) Buddhist, argued that dreams were evidence of the possibility of experience without an external world. Śankara, the Advaita Vedāntin philosopher, “provides a refutation of this argument, based on its inability to meet the requirements (accepted by Vasubandhu) of the pramāna
theory for knowledge. Vasubandhu’s crucial move in his use of the analogy of dreaming is to point to the lack of externality in dreaming when the experience of dreaming otherwise resembles that of waking. Śankara points out a fallacy in this form of reasoning. In order to deny externality in dreaming, Vasubandhu borrows the concept of it from waking in the first place, and so cannot deny it altogether. [….] Śankara also has a wider argument against any idealist denial of externality in the account of experience. He points out that externality is a feature of experience [within the domain of ‘provisional reality’ in light of nirguna
Brahman], and while an idealist account may reduce every other feature of experience to a mental construct without losing its claim to be veridical, the same cannot be said of externality. Reducing the feature of externality to mental construction results in denying that that feature of experience is veridical. So experience cannot be entirely veridical in seeming to be of an external world, if the idealist is correct. But the idealist does want to say that experience is veridical, even if mentally constructed; in this he differs from a sceptic who denies that experience is veridical. Śankara’s argument shows that idealism cannot but collapse into scepticism about the external world. However, Śankara does agree that dreaming has a role to play: it alerts one to the possibility that this current experience may be overruled [‘subrated’] by some other type of consciousness [as we saw above]. [….] It has been observed that dreaming itself can make sense only in the context of being awake. There must in general be veridical experience for error to occur; there must be real coins for there to be counterfeits.”—Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
“Nothing that is available in our experience, that is to say, no knowledge-claim which can meet the standards of the pramānas, allows us to claim that what is currently experienced can never be invalidated. This is the real lesson of the analogy of dreams. Dreams teach us that even within a consistent system for the validation of knowledge-claims, nothing in what is experienced will license the non-invalidable assertion that what is currently experienced is the sole reality. Consequently, the soteriological claim, that this world is indeed subsumed by the reality of brahman, cannot be gainsaid. The system for the validation of claims arising from experience itself derives its authority from what is experienced. The system of validation is legitimately applicable so long as that to which it is applied is the very same experienced world from which the system’s authority is derived. Since the pramāna theory is understood as being about the world from which its causal authority is derived, the legitimacy of the theory is limited to the currently experienced world. If all claims are valid or invalid because they succeed in or fail the tests of the pramāna theory (the system of validation), the validity of experiential claims is circumscribed by their being about the world that is experienced. The reality putatively behind the world [i.e., nirguna Brahman] would legitimately and coherently be known only according to standards derived from it—but those standards, the standards of the liberated self [i.e., Ātman]—are currently unavailable to ordinary subjects.”—Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
“According to the Tibetan view of the human body dreams arise from the movement of consciousness through the body together with the life-sustaining breath. As some dreams are said to be the result of the blockage of different channels in which this breath is supposed to travel, which are in turn caused by humoral imbalances, the study of such dreams is of considerable diagnostic importance.”—Jan Westerhoff
, an eleventh-century Indian saint, “was known as a great scholar at the Buddhist university at Nālandā in northern India but also as a mahasiddha
, a tantric practitioner.” The Six Yogas of Nāropa include the well-known meditation practice of tummo
(inner heat) but also a practice concerning dreams (mi-lam
), “a set of exercises that are supposed to enable the practitioner to influence the contents of his own dreams. [….]
[Nāropa thought of dreams] as the foremost of all the [twelve canonical] examples of illusion.”—Jan Westerhoff
“The study of lucid dreams in the Tibetan tradition is regarded by way of illustrating two important philosophical points: that of the insubstantiality of the external world, and that of the insubstantiality of the self.”—Jan Westerhoff
Prior to the practice of dream yoga
in the Tibetan (Vajrayāna) Buddhist tradition, one must perform both general
“tantric preliminaries.” The former is owing to the fact that the transmission of doctrinal practices is part of a living tradition in which one receives “initiation” (an ‘empowerment’) from a lineage master, meaning “the trainee must receive the tantric initiations appropriate to the system to be undertaken; second, the or she must become firmly established in the tantric samaya
or ‘sacred oaths.’ [….] The preliminaries specific to dream yoga are those of the Six Yogas system generally and “are comprised of two principal practices: the meditation and mantra recitations of Vajrasattva; and the practice of guru yoga, which includes the mandala offering symbolic of the universe. [….] What is unique in the Six Yogas system is the tradition of how the Vajrasattva and Guru Yoga practices are done in retreat or semi-retreat [a month to six weeks] as five sets of 100,000. These are comprised of 100,000 refuge mantras, 100,000 physical prostrations, 100,000 mandala offerings, 100,000 Vajrasattva mantras, and 100,000 guru mantras.”—Glenn H. Mullin
Lama Je Tsongkhapa
(1357–1419) taught dream yoga as one of the three stages of illusory body-yoga, the latter involving training on “how to meditate on all appearances as illusory; how to meditate on dream illusions; and how to meditate on the illusory nature of the bardo experience.”—Glenn H. Mullin
The meditation of dream illusions
in particular “involves four trainings: learning to retain conscious presence during dreams; controlling and increasing the content of dreams; overcoming fear in dreams and training in the illusory nature of dreams; and meditating on suchness [i.e., ‘emptiness’] in dreams.”—Glenn H. Mullin
Progress in dream yoga presumes accomplishments or energy control involving “inner heat” practices, and “most manuals on Nāropa’s Six Yogas place the explanation of dream yoga
in the section on the illusory body doctrine, and place the sleep yoga in the section on the clear light doctrine. Consequently, because the illusory body doctrine is generally presented in manuals prior to the presentation of the clear light doctrine, dream yoga often ends up taught before sleep yoga. However, in the actual training one would have to become proficient in meditating on the clear light of sleep before succeeding in the dream yogas.”—Glenn H. Mullin
(or ‘Many Achievements’) was the last geat chief of the Crow nation, a nomadic, hunting, and warrior tribe. His name was result of a dream-vision of his grandfather. “For the Crow, the visions one had in a dream could provide access to the order of the world beyond anything available to ordinary conscious understanding. Young Plenty Coups took the traditional resource of seeking a dream-vision, and with some help of the elders in the tribe, he put it to a new use. This gave the tribe resources for thought—for practical reasoning—that would not have been available to them in any other way.”—Jonathan Lear
“The Crow, like other American tribes, had a theory of dreams. They took dreams to be meaningful: revealing—often in enigmatic form—an order of the universe that was typically hidden from ordinary conscious life. They recognized that dreams were related to their wishes. Indeed, they sought dreams as a means of getting some authoritative word on whether or not their wishes would be gratified. According to Two Leggings, the Crow distinguished four different levels of dreams: (1) ‘No-account dream,’ in which one merely saw some incident. (2) ‘Wish-dreams,’ which saw some hoped-for circumstance coming true. These did have spiritual power—‘medicine’—but they did not always come true. (3) ‘Property dreams,’ in which a person would see horses, blankets, or the like, which he would later acquire through actual events. (4) ‘Medicine dreams’ or visions. These gave powerful insight into the future.”—Jonathan Lear
“So the Crow, like Freud, thought that dreams were responses to human wishes. They also, like Freud, thought that the deeper meaning of dreams was often not transparent—and thus that important dreams required the interpretation of wiser, older members of the tribe. Within the context of our inquiry, the most important difference between Freud and the Crow is that Freud thought humans were alone in the universe, and the Crow did not and do not.”—Jonathan Lear
“What is striking about young Plenty Coups’s dream—and the interpretation the tribe gave to it—is that it was used not merely to predict a future event; it was used by the tribe to struggle the intelligibility of events that lay at the horizon of their ability to understand. Dreams were regularly used by the Crow to predict the future. [….] Plenty Coups’s dream was of a different order. It did not predict any particular event, but the change of the world order. It was prophetic in the sense that the tribe used it to face up to a radically different future.”—Jonathan Lear
“Plenty Coups had his dream in the context of a communal sense of anxiety. A way of life was anxious about its ability to go forward into an unfathomable future. The dream was a manifestation of radical hope—in that it enabled them to go forward hopefully into a future they would be able to grasp only retrospectively, when they could reemerge with concepts by which to understand themselves and their experiences.”—Jonathan Lear
Early Islamicate societies shared the assumption found “in many pre-modern cultural settings…that dreams constituted a potential means for the communication of truth,” as well as the belief that dreams revealed the “possibilities of an insight into an unseen world, of contact with those beyond the grave, of visions of the afterlife, of communications from forces and beings invested with supreme, transformative wisdom and truth.”—Louise Marlow
“[J]ust as prophetic hadīth
established the veracity of Prophetic dreams [ru’yā
], dreams could affirm or reject the authenticity of hadīth
“A widely circulated prophetic hadīth
states that the vision of the Prophet [Muhammad] in a dream is deemed equal to his actual appearance.”—Leah Kinberg
A “theology of dreams,” and the proliferation of dream manuals as a consequence, was made possible by the fact that dreams were considered “first and foremost as successors of Qur’ānic revelation” in the Islamic world. “Reports of dreams are common in different genres of medieval Arabic literature: biography and autobiography, history, hadīth
collections and manuals of dream interpretation.”—John C. Lamoreaux
According to Abū Hamīd al-Ghazālī
(d. 505/1111), “Sleep and dream are guarantors of the reality of prophecy. A prophet is one in whom the inner eye [beyond the senses and intellect] has become fully open and who sees what others cannot. He sees with the ‘eyes of the heart.’ The inference is clear: we who are not prophets still possess a token of that visionary state in our dreams. In sleep we all become, momentarily, small prophets.”—Eric Ormsby
“The vast corpus of mystical literature in general, and Sūfī biographies in particular, are replete with dream-related allusions, often in direct interaction with both learned and popular exegetical literature.”—Mohammed J. Mahallati
“Some medieval thinkers asked: Is our mundane life a dream in itself? According to hadīth
stemming from the Prophet Muhammad, and frequently alluded to by major Sūfī figures, this seems to be the case.”—Mohammed J. Mahallati
I neglected to cite the titles from which some of the above material was taken but which are not found in the bibliography (most of them I was able to read only after formatting the bibliography and so they will be included in the next draft):
- Deutsch, Eliot. Advaita Vedānta: A Philosophical Reconstruction. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii, 1969.
- Lamoreaux, John C. The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
- Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
- Marlow, Louise, ed. Dreaming Across Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands. Boston, MA: Ilex Foundation/Washington, DC: Center for Hellenistic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2008.
- Mullin, Glenn H., tr. and ed. Readings on the Six Yogas of Naropa. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1997.
- Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Awakened Ones: The Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
- Tsongkhapa Lobsang Drakpa (Glenn H. Mullin, tr.). The Six Yogas of Naropa: Tsongkhapa’s Commentary…. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2005.