Śaṅkara’s philosophy of dreaming: Constructing an unreal world

ABSTRACT This article analyzes Śaṅkara’s use of dreaming in Advaita Vedānta. For Śaṅkara, dreaming functions philosophically as a direct phenomenal inquiry into mind and consciousness. Dreaming also functions as a syllogistic illustration. While dreaming, we experience unreal objects that do not exist apart from our minds. Dreaming thus illustrates the waking world’s nonrealism despite perceiving it as real, and that waking objects are consciousness alone. However, the dream illustration raises several questions: In what ways does illusory dream reality extend to waking objects? And does Śaṅkara view the objective waking world as the individual’s cognitive construction similar to the dream, or as īśvara’s cosmological construction? This article argues that for Śaṅkara, the individual’s waking cognitive construction is primarily epistemological rather than an external ontological power akin to a creator deity; however, distinctions between individual and īśvara are ultimately indeterminable and lose meaning from the standpoint of nondual brahman.