The Destiny of the Body

Chapter VII

Dreams and the Dreamland

None knows himself well who does not know his free activities of the night and no man can call himself his own master if he is not perfectly conscious and master of the multifarious actions which he performs during his physical sleep.... Uncultivated fields produce weeds. We do not want weeds to grow in us, let us then cultivate the vast fields of our nights.

(The Mother, Words of Long Ago, pp. 37, 41)

We pass in waking into nescience of our sleeping condition, in sleep into nescience of our waking being. But this happens because only part of our being performs this alternative movement and we falsely think of ourselves as only that partial existence: but we can discover by a deeper psychological experience that the larger being in us is perfectly aware of all that happens even in what is to our partial and superficial being a state of unconsciousness; it is limited neither by sleep nor by waking.

(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 575)

We have had occasion to mention more than once that our body's sleep by no means connotes the sleep of our whole being nor the total abeyance of all consciousness. As a matter of fact our inner being is always awake and it is only the surface physical mind's waking activity or its cessation that determines the waking or sleep of common parlance.

Thus, in ordinary sleep, when this activity ceases for a period, our physical body falls into slumber and only a subconscient residual consciousness is left in it. The rest of the being stands back and a part of its consciousness goes out into various planes and regions of existence. "In each we see scenes, meet beings, share in happenings, come across formations, influences, suggestions which belong to these planes."¹ When these experiences of the wandering inner consciousness get transmitted to the obscure layer floating over the deep subconscience in which our physical being seems submerged for the time being and our physical mind,

¹ Letters on Yoga, p. 1500.

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in a state of sleep-wakefulness, receives and records and translates them more or less perfectly, more or less coherently, depending on the state of development of our being, we are said to have dreams.

When we come back to our waking consciousness at the termination of the period of sleep, we may at times retain the memory of these dreams and at other times not. But since the movement of our consciousness in the state of our physical sleep is ceaseless and uninterrupted except for that occasional and brief interregnum when our being retires into Brahmaloka, into "a sort of Sachchidananda immobility of consciousness"¹, we are always dreaming at the time of sleep irrespective of whether we are mentally conscious of it or not.

In fact, what is sometimes erroneously called dreamless slumber is very often a state of dream-consciousness of which all record has been wiped away from the memory of the waking physical mind. And this obliteration may be due to any one of the following reasons.

Sachchidananda immobility: Given the most favourable circumstances, one passes in sleep through a succession of states of progressively deepening sleep-consciousness to reach at last "a pure Sachchidananda state of complete rest, light and silence"², a state of "suṣupti in the Brahman or Brahmaloka"³ and retraces one's way, after a brief stay there, to come back again to the waking physical state.

Referring to this state of "luminous and peaceful and dreamless rest",⁴ the Mother says: "There is the possibility of a sleep in which you enter into an absolute silence, immobility and peace in all parts of your being and your consciousness merges into Sachchidananda. You can hardly call it sleep, for it is extremely conscious. In that condition you may remain for a few minutes, but these few minutes give you more rest and refreshment than hours of ordinary sleep."⁵ But the Mother warns that this state of Sachchidananda immobility of consciousness cannot be attained in sleep by chance, "it requires a long training."⁶ We

¹ Letters on Yoga, p. 578.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid., p. 577.

⁴ The Life Divine, p. 425.

^{5 6} The Mother, Conversations, pp. 27-28.

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pass on then to the consideration of the second factor giving rise to the phenomenon of apparently dreamless sleep.

Turn over of consciousness: Our waking consciousness is ordinarily externalised and gazes outward while our inner dream consciousness has its eyes turned inward. Thus the transition from the sleep state to waking state is very often associated with a reversal, a turning over, of the consciousness in which "the dream-state disappears more or less abruptly, effacing the fugitive impression made by the dream events (or rather their transcription) on the physical sheath."¹ If the return to waking consciousness is more composed and less abrupt, then perhaps the memory remains of the last of the dreams or of the one that was the most impressive during sleep. Otherwise everything experienced in sleep recedes from the physical consciousness leaving a state of blankness behind.

Absence of link bridge; We have stated that in sleep our being passes through a succession of states of consciousness. Now, so long as there is not the integral and synthetic awareness, these different states of consciousness appear each with its own realities, so much so that in our passage through them from one state to another, the consciousness of the previous state of things slips away from us and its contents are altogether lost or, even when caught in memory, seem illusory and uncertain and hence forgotten in no time.

Also, there is the fundamental disparity between the recording surface subconscient left in the sleeping body and the deeper realms of our consciousness. Thus when we enter in sleep our subliminal mental, vital or subtle-physical, the experiences therein are for all practical purposes lost to our waking consciousness because of the absence of any active connection with the surface parts of us. "If we are still in the nearer depths of these regions, the surface subconscient...records something of what we experience in these depths; but it records it in its own transcription, often marred by characteristic incoherences and always, even when most coherent, deformed or cast into figures drawn from the world of waking experience. But if we have gone deeper inward, the record fails or cannot be recovered and we have the illusion of dreamlessness; but the activity of the inner dream consciousness continues behind the veil of the now mute and

¹ Letters on Yoga, pp. 1493-94.

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inactive subconscient surface."¹

Plunge into subconscience: There is another and most usual blank state, the state "when one goes deeply and crassly into the subconscient."² The heavy and inert and altogether unrefreshing 'subterranean plunge' of our outer consciousness into the black pit of a complete subconscience leads to a state of "absolute unconsciousness which is almost death — a taste of death."³

These then are the principal contributing factors at the basis of the phenomenon of so-called dreamless slumber, and, except for the first one, — the Sachchidananda immobility, — which alone is a state of veritable dreamlessness and an achievement of profound value, the other three signify undesirable imperfections that must be remedied if we would establish a mastery over our dream-world. Especially so is the last one, the abysmal plunge of the body-consciousness into the torpid depths of the subconscience, and along with it its allied manifestation, the dream-wanderings of our inner sleep-consciousness in the dark and dangerous regions of our being where

There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,

Inhabitants of life's ominous nether rooms,

A shadowy world's stupendous denizens.

................

The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

Lie bound in the subconscient's cavern pit

And the Beast grovels in his antre den:

Dire mutterings rise and murmur in their drowse.⁴

As a matter of fact, apart from those vague incoherent and insignificant dreams that are occasioned by 'purely physical circumstances such as the state of health, digestion, position on the bed, etc.,' most of our ordinary sleep-existence is made up of dreams of which the subconscient is the builder. Now, as we have noted before (Chapter III), this subconscious in us is the extreme border of our secret inner existence; "it is the Inconscient vibrating

¹The Life Divine, p. 423.

² Letters on Yoga, p. 1484.

³The Mother, Conversations, p. 27.

⁴Savitri, Book VII, Canto II, p. 480.

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on the borders of consciousness, sending up its motions to be changed into conscious stuff, swallowing into its depths impressions of past experience as seeds of unconscious habit and returning them constantly but often chaotically to the surface consciousness, missioning upwards much futile or perilous stuff of Which the origin is obscure to us".¹

Now what happens ordinarily is that during the state of our body's sleep the surface physical part of us, which is an output from the inconscient, sinks back from the waking level and relapses towards the originating Inconscience. In this movement of retrogression it invariably enters into the subconscient substratum where "it finds the impressions of its past or persistent habits of mind and experiences, — for all have left their mark on our subconscious part and have there a power of recurrence."² The effect of this subconscious resurrection on our waking self is simply disastrous. For, as the Mother has pointed out,

"All the desires that have been repressed without being dissolved, — and this dissociation can only be arrived at after numerous analyses demanding a comprehensive rectitude of a high order, — try to seek satisfaction when the will is asleep.

"And as desires are veritable dynamic centres of formation, they tend to organise in and around us an assemblage of circumstances most favourable to their satisfaction.

"Thus is destroyed in a few hours of the night the fruit of many efforts made by our conscious thought during the day."³

Faced with this unpleasant situation of nightly falling down of consciousness below the level of what one has gained by Sadhana in the waking state, seekers of self-perfection are sometimes impelled, in a mood of desperation, to effect a drastic cut in the hours of sleep and keep awake at night. But this is a highly inadvisable procedure, the suggested remedy proving worse than the malady. For, unless and until our body becomes altogether transformed in all its functionings, a sufficient but not excessive amount of sleep, in the same way as the intake of food and water, is absolutely essential for its proper maintenance. Hence the injunction of the Gita to eat and sleep suitably — yuktāhāraḥ yuktanidraḥ

¹ The Life Divine, p. 559.

² Ibid., p. 423.

³ The Mother, Words of Long Ago, pp. 34-35.

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— when one does Sadhana, also that of the Upanishad to take a moderate quantity of easily digestible food and satisfy the body's indispensable need of sleep, samāpayya nidrāṁ sujīrṇālpabhojī.¹

In fact, scientifically conducted experiments on the subject of sleep privation have shown that after about 60-90 hours of enforced wakefulness, the most prominent effects observed are "muscular weariness,...irritability to the point of irascibility in normally even-tempered subjects, and a mental disorganization, leading to dreaming while awake, hallucinations and automatic behaviour, occasionally bordering on temporary insanity."²

In any case, the suppression of the needed sleep ration makes the nerves morbid, weakens the brain, strains the physical system and renders it unfit for the necessary concentration during the waking hours. And since the body and the nervous envelope form the twin plinth of our Sadhana, the prospect of their decay and degeneracy through ill-advised deprivation of sleep cannot certainly be nonchalantly viewed.

But what then is the solution to this insistent problem of nightly fall, what the procedure to counteract and annul the subconscient wanderings of our consciousness during the period of our body's sleep ?

As we shall see a little later on, in the prevailing conditions of our untransformed body and physical being, the right way is not to suppress sleep, the great restorer of our energies, but to transform its character. And this can be done only by becoming more and more conscious in sleep itself. "If that is done, sleep changes into an inner mode of consciousness in which the Sadhana can continue as much as in the waking state, and at the same time one is able to enter into other planes of consciousness than the physical and command an immense range of informative and utilisable experience."³

This last possibility opens up before our view a great line of the movement of our consciousness, — other than the subconscient one, — during the period of our physical sleep. This subliminal exploration of the inner planes of our being provides us occasionally with dreams from these planes, — or should we not rather say dream-experiences? — for these are transcripts direct

¹ Saubhagyalakshmi Upanishad, Kandika II.

² N. Kleitman, "Sleep", in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 20, p. 793.

³ Letters on Yoga, p. 1479.

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or symbolic of what we actually experience in us or around us while in those subliminal realms of our existence.

The subliminal in us, as we have mentioned before (Chapter III), is our concealed inner being comprising an inner mind and inner life and inner physical with the soul or psychic entity supporting them all. It "is not, like our surface physical being, an outcome of the energy of the Inconscient; it is a meeting place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution.... [Thus] the subliminal has the right of entry into the mental and vital and subtle-physical planes of the universal consciousness, it is not confined to the material plane and the physical world; it possesses means of communication with the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in its passage and with all corresponding planes or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience."¹

Now, sleep is one of the means — the other two being 'inward-drawn concentration' and the 'inner plunge of trance' — that give us an access to this large realm of interior existence that ordinarily functions behind the veil and thus remains mostly unknown to our waking consciousness. Although our dreams are very often constructions of our subconscient, when our inner being develops by Sadhana and we live more and more inwardly away from the madding to-and-fro run of our surface existence, a larger and richer and nobler dream-consciousness opens before us and our dreams take on a subliminal character.

When the subliminal thus comes to the front in our dream consciousness, "dreams would then take on the character of precise visions and, at times, of dream revelations. Then onwards it will be possible to acquire useful knowledge of an entire order of important things."²

But to gain this mastery of the sleep-world, to tap the resources of our subliminal dream-realms, to make our nightly sleep-existence as profitable as our waking one, what should we do and how should we proceed ?

¹ The Life Divine, p. 425.

² Words of Long Ago, p. 45.

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