Vipassana Dreams (very NSFW)
(Please be advised that this post is going to be very NSFW. It will deal with themes like incest, hentai/penetration, child sexual exploitation and voyeurism, and plain old missionary. Read on if you can stomach such topics.)
I recently completed my first 10-day Vipassana meditation course at the beautiful Dhamma Sineru site.
Having close friends who have attended Vipassana, I am happy to have attended and finished my first sit. I fully intend to attend a 10-day course every year because I identify with and fully support the ideas underpinning all the esoteric implementation details of a Vipassana course but I'll go over the theory behind Vipassana elsewhere.
This post is about a topic seldom covered by other bloggers writing about their first brush with Vipassana, namely the dreams they saw during the course.
Background
Due to a series of events which may or may not be linked to my general disgust at a certain individual who likes to grab women by the pussy, I decided to uproot my steady, somewhat dull life in the United States. The sale of my house closed on August 16th. Since that date, technically, I have been homeless living for a few weeks with friends, and then relocating to India to live with my parents.
The upshot of this change is that since I'm now dependent on the kindness of friends and family for a roof over my head, I have not been inclined to spank the monkey. It feels icky.
For those who get off (hah!) on numbers, it's been more than a hundred days since August 16th.
Back to the camp
The Vipassana camp started on Nov 16th and for the next 10 days, we were expected to live as literal Bhikkhus. And if you guessed that an ordained Buddhist monk is expected to maintain a strict vow of celibacy, you'd be absolutely right.
Now that my role was of a true Bhikkhu, I felt it even more important that I continue my self imposed prohibition on onanism.
99
The first significant dream during my Vipassana stay was one where I came to realize that the number 99 is extremely poignant. It was either a harbinger of finality if the series were to terminate at 100 or the last number where I had hope that the series would end soon. Regardless of whether the series were to end at 187 or 22908, the number 99 ceased to mean much once 100 was breached and the series marched on.
At first, I didn't give much thought to this dream but I later connected some dots which I'll share towards the end of the post.
The craziness begins
The second dream I remember was absolutely crazy. It was so out there that it made me question my sanity. I'm quite hesitant to mention it here but then I'm taking heart from the shows like Six Feet Under which dealt with similar themes. I guess art leads real life in this regard.
The dream had my sister exposing herself to me in a sexual manner. It is most certainly not a conscious desire of mine and I woke up from the dream in a state of absolute panic which made me wonder if Vipassana was exposing some latent incestuous tendencies in me.
I took solace in that I didn't actually wake up with anything remotely like arousal.
And continues
My next memorable dream was that I had grown a vagina and my female partner was penetrating me with a penis shaped like an elongated shaving brush. Oh, there's more.
While my partner and I were having sex, we were being watched by naked minors.
My biggest relief from this dream is that even when my brain is trying to mess with me, it did not cross the line into actual pederasty and pedophilia. Small mercies I guess.
Well, this dream soon morphed into something a little more tame
Tamer...only by comparison
In this dream, I saw myself having sex with that same penis-like-a-shaving-brush woman except that this time we were spooning with me as the big spoon and instead of climaxing, I...peed...inside her. (Dude, I know how crazy all this sounds.)
Once I'm done peeing, the girl turns around and tells me that if they had known that peeing was my fetish, they wouldn't have bothered videotaping the previous sexcapade.
Segue
It's only now that I started to draw the connection between my now 95 day streak of celibacy and these increasingly bizarre dreams I was having. Was my brain trying to figure out what exactly would make me break my streak? Was it voyeurism where children watched my having hentai sex? Was it incest? Was it some strange water sport? Confirmation came the next night.
Back to basics
The next night, I went to bed with some trepidation. Was I going to discover another aspect of my sexuality that I had not been aware of?
This time, it was so boring that it was practically PG-13. I dreamt that I was "making love" to Steffi Graf. I put that in quotes because that's what it felt like. And anyone who knew me as a kid can vouch for how much I had the hots for Graf.
And this time, the dream was broken not because I was so shocked by it but because I felt a strange sensation of flapping downstairs, as though someone was patting my penis.
Welp, given that I was sharing my cell with another guy, I woke up with a start half expecting to have my hands down my pants vigorously kneading the rope.
But, praise be Allah, my hands were nowhere near my pants!! I've rarely felt as much relief at waking up as I felt that moment.
Conclusion
Anyway, that flapping sensation was the clue I needed. It made me pretty certain that each of those dreams were attempts by my brain to actually induce sexual release.
100
This is when I made one final connection. The tenth day of the camp happened to coincide with the hundredth day of my celibacy. Ignoring the intricacies of months of different length, August 16th to November 16th is ninety days. Ten days of camp would make it a round hundred. The "99" dream above was just my brain asking my if I intended to carry on after 100 or not.
The climax
Sorry, I had to title this subsection that because what's life without a few puns.
I have had extended bouts of celibacy before but I think Vipassana may have exacerbated some of the crazy. I heard other practitioners at my camp talk about their vivid dreams though we obviously didn't discuss their content.
The purpose of this post is to publicly share my experience with Vipassana dreams and hope that others are encouraged to share their own stories.
For people who don't know me from Adam, if you read this post in isolation and conclude that I am some sort of pervert, that's your prerogative. I'd invite you to see things as they truly are™ by reading other posts on this blog. In fact, this is exactly what the word "Vipassana" means.