The Dream of Ravan

About this book

Ravan, the mighty antagonist of the Ramayana, becomes the starting point for a meditation on the structure of consciousness. The tale's familiar figures open into questions about mind, self and the illusion of separateness.

This anonymous work uses Hindu philosophical ideas to read the epic as an account of inward experience. Dream and waking life are examined as different conditions of awareness, each raising questions about what the observer can truly know. The book is dense in places, but its central experiment is unusually bold: turning an ancient story into a map of the mind.