69. As the sage was sermonizing in this manner, the day departed to its evening service with the setting sun. The assembly broke with mutual greetings to perform their ablutions, and it met again with the rising sun, after dispersion of the gloom of night. CHAPTER XLII. PHILOSOPHY OF DREAMING. SWAPNAM OR SOMNUM. The man who is devoid of understanding, ignorant and unacquainted with the All-pervading principle, thinks the unreal world as real, and as compact as adamant. 2. As a child is not freed from his fear of ghosts until his death; so the ignorant man never gets rid of his fallacy of the reality of the unreal world, as long as he lives. 3. As the solar heat causes the error of water in the mirage to the deer and unwary people, so the unreal world appears as real to the ignorant part of mankind. 4. As the false dream of one’s death, appears to be true in the dreaming state, so the false world seems to be a field of action and gain to the deluded man. 5. As one not knowing what is gold, views a golden bracelet as a mere bracelet, and not as gold (_i.e._ who takes the form and not the substance for reality); so are the ignorant ever misled by formal appearances, without a knowledge of the causal element. 6. As the ignorant view a city, a house, a hill and an elephant, as they are presented before him; so the visibles are all taken only as they are seen, and not what they really are. 7. As strings of pearls are seen in the sunny sky, and various paints and taints in the plumage of the peacock; so the phenomenal world, presents its false appearances for sober realities. 8. Know life as a long sleep, and the world with myself and thyself, are the visions of its dream; we see many other persons in this sleepy dream, none of whom is real, as you will now learn from me. 9. There is but one All-pervading, quiet, and spiritually substantial reality. It is of the form of unintelligible intellect, and an immense outspreading vacuity. 10. It is omnipotent, and all in all by itself, and is of the form as it manifests itself everywhere. 11. Hence the citizens that you see in this visionary city, are but transient forms of men, presented in your dream by that Omnipotent Being. 12. The mind of the viewer, remains in its self-same state amidst the sphere of his dreams, and represents the images thought of by itself in that visionary sphere of mankind. (So the Divine Mind presents its various images to the sight of men in this visionary sphere of the world, which has nothing substantial in it). 13. The knowing mind has the same knowledge of things, both in its waking as well as dreaming states; and it is by an act of the percipient mind, that this knowledge is imprinted as true in the conscious souls of men. 14. Ráma said:—If the persons seen in the dream are unreal, then tell me sir, what is that fault in the embodied soul, which makes them appear as realities.