The sheer number of dreams that she highlights from the biographical sources goes a long way toward demonstrating this contention. Young shows how, throughout the sacred biographies considered, dreams allow people to experience other realms as well as the future in order to understand a higher reality and achieve enlightenment. Dreams represent an accepted mode of cognition in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism . Dreams provide a significant mode of acquiring knowledge about the nature of reality at various levels, including death and waking reality. The types of dream control related to religious authority include the ability to interpret correctly one's own and other people's dreams, the power to cause other people to dream, the capacity to dream solutions to problems and answers to questions, and even the capability to control the events of one's own dreams.
Some dreams confer the charisma associated with religious authority .
Young illustrates how Buddhist saints narrate their dreams as a way of revealing who they are and their understanding of the dream world. This dream-related charisma of the saints stands in sharp contrast with others portrayed in the Buddhist biographies who require the advice of an expert to decipher the meaning of their dreams. Dreams play an essential role in the genre of sacred biography in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism . Young underscores the prophetic role of dreams in these biographies that permits both continuity with the early Indian tradition and innovation in Buddhist beliefs and practices. Young notes that the dreams preserved in the biographies of the Buddha provide a map of the Buddhist dream world for those who would follow the same path, such that all buddhas, whether past, present or future, have the same life story and therefore the same dreams.