Hi there. If you would like to support my work, everything I do is supported just by

donation. I don't charge for anything I do. So the Venmo is Darmapunks with an X, NYC. PayPal and

Patreon are on the website, or you can look under Patreon and find Dharma Punk's NYC.

So thanks for your support.

They would keep me going.

And tonight, we're going to be talking about what dreams are, the role they play,

why they're important, and also how we can in meditation

actually leverage some of the attributes, the advantages that dreams provide us.

So I would like to acknowledge first is that there's been, of course, a lot of theories into dreams throughout history.

The earliest interpretations were mystical.

Dreams were considered to be messages from the gods or portents about the future.

And certainly in the Polycanon, there is a wonderful suta, the Supina Suta,

which is basically a list of all these, sometimes even rather disturbing dreams that the Buddha had,

scary animals crawling up his legs and mountains of excrement and stuff like that.

It's kind of wonderful how it just doesn't hesitate to go into some of the more disturbing images.

And then it goes into these kind of interesting mystical interpretations

about how they were indicating Buddha's disenchantment with his life

and his future role as an awakened bodhisattva.

Yeah, you can check that out. I'm not going to really dwell

too much on that, but just wanted to note that dreams are very often throughout history

interpreted as some kind of or tense or vehicles by which gods express their desires to us.

And another notable theory was, of course,

...