Ráma rejoined:—O sage, how could you hold your conference with the incorporeal maid, and how could she utter the letters of the alphabet, without her organs of speech?
2. Vasishtha replied:—The incorporeal or vacuous bodies, have of course no power or capability of pronouncing the articulate letters of the alphabet; just as dead bodies incapable of speech.
3. And should there even be an articulate sound, yet there can be no intelligible sense in it; and must <be> unintelligible to others; just as a dream though perceived by the dreamer, is unknown to the sleepers in the same bed and side by side.
4. Therefore, there is nothing real in a dream; it is really an unreality and the ideal imagery of the Intellect in empty air, and concomitant with sleep of its own nature. (i.e. Sleep and dream are twins by their nature).
5. The clear sky of the intellect, is darkened by its imageries (ideas), like the disk of the moon by its blackness, and as the body (face) of the sky by its clouds; but these are as false as the song of a stone, and the sound of a dead body.
6. The dreams and images (ideas), which appear in the sphere of the intellect, are no other than appearances of itself; as the visible sky is nothing else, than the invisible vacuum itself.
7. Like the appearance of dreams in a sleep, doth this world appear before us in our waking state; so the invisible vacuum appears as the visible (sky to our eye). So the form of the dame was a shape of the intellect (i.e. that is a creature of imagination only. Gloss).
8. It is the very clever intellect in us, which exhibits all these varieties of exquisite shapes in itself; and shows this world to be as real and permanent as itself (though in truth, they are as unreal and fleeting dreams).
9. Ráma rejoined:—Sir, if these be but dreams, how is it they appear to us in our waking state; and if they are unreal, why is it that they seem as solid realities unto us?
10. Vasishtha replied:—Hear how the visionary dreams, appear as substantial worlds; though they are no other than dreams, and never real, and in no way solid or substantial.