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This is a book about the myths, dreams, and illusions of India and what they teach us about reality and the “flow of powers” between male and female, mortal and immortal, human, animal, and divinity. From the Indian point of view, the basic condition of human experience is the condition of illusion. The Indian approaches to the problem of reality evolved from a tradition that spans three thousand years and reached its climax in the masterpiece of Indian philosophical narrative, the Yogavasistha. This consists of about 55 adventure stories and parables built on certain standard Indian narratives of illusion and dream.
In the Western tradition of the Greeks, “a dream that wanders in the daylight” can lead only to the world of unreality and madness. But O'Flaherty demonstrates how in India the dream that wanders in the daylight does not fade but instead makes daylight all the more luminous to show us shadows brighter than the light. This is facilitated by the knack of Asians to make full use of the power of serendipity as opposed to the obsessional and scientific approach of the Western intellect. The author presents the essential continuities of the real and unreal by comparing shared dreams of different individuals, archetypal myths, and the concepts of Karma and rebirth.
Karma is depicted as the classical Hindu explanation for the phenomenon of deja vu. The karmic traces produce a kind of half-recalled memory from past lives; if you think you have been somewhere before and know that it was not in this life, it was in a preceding life. But this concept of Karma may be too simplistic a means of relegating all that is creative or as yet unfathomable to mystic realms of past lives. O'Flaherty goes even more overboard by her serious postulates about the relationship between our dreams of God and God's dream of us. But these are realities for many