Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities

“A brilliant analysis of the complex role of dreams and dreaming in Indian religion, philosophy, literature, and art. . . . This richly suggestive book challenges many of our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and our world.” —New York Times Book Review

In Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, one of the world’s great scholars of Indian and world mythology, offers a dazzling analysis of scores of stories from the Puranas, Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Yogavasishtha, among other texts. In doing so, she examines our myths, dreams, and illusions, and what they say about our reality, our selves and non-selves, about how we see the world and how the world sees us, and about our dreams of God and God’s dream of us.

“In [Doniger O’Flaherty’s] creative hands, enchanting Indian myths and stories illuminate and are illuminated by authors as different as Aeschylus, Plato, Freud, Jung, Kurl Gödel, Thomas Kuhn, Borges, Picasso, Sir Ernst Gombrich, and many others.” —New York Times Book Review

“This title promises a mental roller-coaster ride, and the test does not disappoint. . . . O’Flaherty uses her encyclopedic command of the literature on dreams and illusions (both Eastern and Western) to take us on a dizzying spin through multiple levels of reality. . . . A marvelous book recommended to students of religion and philosophy, to devotees of the metaphysical brainteasers offered by Douglas Hofstadter and Raymond Smullyan, or to any reader who enjoys a challenge.” —Booklist

“Dazzling analysis. . . . The book is firm and convincing once you appreciate its central point, which is that in traditional Hindu thought the dream isn't an accident or byway of experience, but rather the locus of epistemology. In its willful confusion of categories, its teasing readiness to blur the line between the imagined and the real, the dream actually embodies the whole problem of knowledge. . . . [O’Flaherty] wants to make your mental flesh creep, and she succeeds.” —Village Voice