Atman

The true, immortal self in Hinduism.

In Hinduism atman is the true self: the immortal core of every being, which is not born and does not die. It is not the body, not the thoughts and not the personality, but the consciousness that witnesses them. The Bhagavad Gita says: weapons cannot cut it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it.

In the Upanishads, and especially in Vedanta philosophy, one of the great insights is that atman and brahman, the all-encompassing reality, are ultimately one. The well-known saying tat tvam asi, that you are, sums this up. Moksha, liberation, is the realisation of that unity, whereby the cycle of rebirth, samsara, ends.

The Upanishads pay striking attention to dreams. The Mandukya Upanishad describes four states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep dreamless sleep, and turiya, the fourth, the pure consciousness that pervades the other three. In the dream state, according to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the mind creates its own world, with roads, chariots and joys, out of its own light.

For dream interpretation that means something special. A dream shows how the mind makes worlds, and invites you to ask who it is that dreams. A dream in which you see yourself from a distance, or in which you notice that you are dreaming, is sometimes read in this tradition as a glimpse of the witness, the self that does not change.

On Dreamkin Hindu readings often read dreams on several layers: as processing of impressions, as a possible message, and as an invitation to recognise the true self behind what passes by.

Whoever looks at a bad dream this way need not be carried along by it: the dream comes and goes, and the self that perceives it remains.