19. Ráma rejoined:—That of course cannot be admissible and reliable as true, which is liable to objection and exception; the sight of a dream is but momentary and falsified upon our waking; wherefore it cannot be alike to the waking state.
20. Vasishtha replied:—The disappearance of the dreamed objects upon waking, does not prove their falsity, nor make any difference between the two states of dreaming and waking; because the objects which one sees in his dream, are like those that a traveller sees in foreign country, which are lost upon his return to his own country, and the sights of this are soon lost upon his death. Hence both are true for the time being, and both proved equally false and fleeting at last.
21. A man being dead, he is separated from his friends, as from those he sees in his dream; and then the living is said to be awakened, as when a sleeper awakes from his slumber.
22. After seeing the delusions of the states of happiness and misery, and witnessing the rotations of days and nights, and feeling many changes, the living soul at last departs from this world of dreams.
23. After the long sleep of life, there comes at last an end of it at last; when the human soul becomes assured of the untruth of this world, and that the past was a mere dream.
24. As the dreamer perceives his death in the land of his dream, so the waking man sees his waking dream of this world, where he meets with his death, in order to be reborn in it and to dream again.
25. The waking beholder of the world, finds himself to die in the same manner in his living world; where he is doomed to be reborn, in order to see the same scenes and to die again.
26. He who finds himself to die in the living world in his waking state, comes to revisit this earth, in order to see the same dreams, which he believed to be true in his former births. (Hence the sleeping and waking dreams, that view the same things over again, are both alike).
27. It is the ignorant only, that believe their waking sights as true; while it is the firm conviction of the intelligent, that all these appearances are but day dreams at best.
28. Taking the dreaming state for waking, and the waking one for dreaming, are but verbal distinctions implying the same thing; as life and death are meaningless words for the two states of the soul, which never born nor died.