The Destiny of the Body

Chapter VII

The Mastery of the Nights

Sadhana can go on in the dream or sleep state as well as in the waking.

(Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 1481)

To make use of the nights is an excellent thing, it has a double effect: a negative effect, it prevents you from falling backward, losing whatever you have gained — that indeed is painful — and a positive effect, you make some progress, you continue your progress.

(The Mother, Bulletin, Vol. XII, No. 4, p. 91)

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo has for its goal the total transformation of our nature as well as the complete liberation of our being. But in our normal waking state we are conscious only of a very restricted field and action of our nature, the rest of it remaining and functioning behind the opaque veil of our surface personality. But, since all that we 'become and do and bear' in our outer life is prepared and governed by these concealed zones of activity subconscient and subliminal to our waking awareness, it assumes an "immense importance for a yoga which aims at the transformation of life to grow conscious of what goes on within these domains, to be master there and be able to feel, know and deal with the secret forces that determine our destiny and our internal and external growth or decline."¹

Now, as we have noted before, sleep like yogic trance opens the gate to these subliminal worlds and allows us an entry into the more significant realms of our existence. And although it is a fact that in the ordinary undeveloped state of our consciousness most of our sleep-experience remains unknown to our cognition and even the little that manages to reach our recording surface does so in the form of dreams and dream figures and "not in that condition which might be called an inner waking and which is the most accessible form of the trance state,"² through a proper and methodical

¹ Letters on Yoga, p. 994.

² The Life Divine, p. 426.

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self-disciplining we may grow in consciousness in sleep itself so much so that in the end we may follow in uninterrupted awareness our passage through various realms of our inner being and the return journey therefrom. "At a certain pitch of this inner wakefulness this kind of sleep, a sleep of experience, can replace the ordinary subconscious slumber."¹

It is then that we have veridical dreams, dream-experiences of great value, conveying truths that are not so easy to get in our ordinary waking state. Thus problems are solved in our dream consciousness, which our waking consciousness could not possibly cope with; we are provided with warnings and premonitions and indications of the future and with "records of happenings seen or experienced by us on other planes of our own being or of universal being into which we enter."²

Our sleep-existence, if we are conscious in it, renders us another valuable service in the exploration of our subconscient nature that contains much that is obscure in us but not distinguishably active in the waking state. A conscious pursuit of the subconscient wanderings of our sleep-consciousness brings to our notice a class of dreams that "arise from the revenge of our inner being freed for a moment from the constraint that we impose on it. These dreams often allow us to perceive some of the tendencies, tastes, impulses and desires of which we would not otherwise be conscious so long as our will to realise our ideal held them down, hidden in some obscure recess of our being."³ For it is one of the most disconcerting discoveries made in Sadhana that what we have thought to have settled and done away with in the upper layers of our consciousness are obstinately retained by our glutinous subconscient. And just for that reason, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, these dreams provide us with a useful indication, for "they enable us to pursue things to their obscure roots in this underworld and excise them."⁴

Hence we see that the fields of our sleep if properly cultivated can yield us a great and effective aid on our road towards self-knowledge and self-mastery, also in the pursuit of our nature-transformation. But how to acquire a cognition of the activities of our

¹ Letters on Yoga, p. 1024.

² The Life Divine, p. 424.

³ Words of Long Ago, p. 36.

⁴ Letters on Yoga, p. 1490.

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nights? How to transform the nature of our sleep?

The procedure to deal with sleep and the dreamland may be said to have three main limbs: (i) how best to enter the state of sleep? (ii) how to remain conscious in sleep itself? and (iii) how to retain the memory of our dream-experiences even when we come back to the waking awareness?

In our quest for the answers to this triple query, to whom else would we turn than to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the supreme masters of the fourfold worlds of our being, jāgrat, svapna, suṣupti and tūriya? So we make no apology for quoting in extenso from their luminous writings in an attempt to offer some hints to aspiring seekers.

How Best to Enter the State of Sleep?

"You must lie flat on your back and relax all the muscles and nerves...to be like what I call a piece of cloth on the bed, nothing else remains. If you can do that with the mind also, you get rid of all stupid dreams that make you more tired when you get up than when you went to bed. It is the cellular activity of the brain that continues without control, and that tires much. Therefore a total relaxation, a kind of complete calm, without tension, in which everything is stopped. But this is only the beginning.

"Afterwards, a self-giving as total as possible, of all, from top to bottom, from the outside to the inmost, and an eradication also as total as possible of all resistance of the ego, and you begin repeating your mantra—your mantra, if you have one or any other word which has power over you, a word leaping from the heart, spontaneously, like a prayer and that sums up your aspiration. After having repeated a few times, if you are accustomed to it, you get into trance. And from that trance you pass into sleep. The trance lasts as long as it should and quite naturally, spontaneously you pass into sleep. But when you come back from this sleep, you remember everything, the sleep was but a continuation of the trance.

"Fundamentally the sole purpose of sleep is to enable the body to assimilate the effect of the trance so that the effect may be accepted everywhere, to enable the body to do its natural function of the night and eliminate the toxins. And when it wakes up, there is no trace of heaviness which comes from sleep and the effect of the trance continues.

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"Even for those who have never been in trance, it is good to repeat a mantra, a word, a prayer before going into sleep. But there must be a life in the words, I do not mean an intellectual signification, nothing of that kind, but a vibration. And on the body its effect is extraordinary: it begins to vibrate, vibrate, vibrate...and quietly you let yourself go as though you wanted to get into sleep. The body vibrates more and more and still more and away you go."¹

How to Retain the Awareness of Dreams?

The first part of this discipline should naturally deal with the question how to recognise our dreams and, above all, to distinguish between them; for as we have noted before, they vary greatly in their nature and quality. Often in the same night we may have several dreams which belong to different categories and thus have different intrinsic value. Now, as regards the procedure which we should adopt to retain the memory of our nights, let us listen to the words of the Mother:

"...There is almost always a considerable divergence between what our mental activity actually is and the way in which we perceive it, and especially the way in which we remain conscious of it. In its own sphere, this activity determines what vibrations are to be transmitted by repercussion up to the cellular system of our cerebral organ, but in our sleepy brain, the subtle vibrations from the suprasensible domain can only affect a very limited number of cells; the inertia of most of the organic supports of cerebral phenomena reduces the number of their active elements, impoverishes the mental synthesis and makes it unfit to reproduce the activity of the internal states other than by images, oftenest very vague and inappropriate....

"The cerebral rendering of the activities of the night is at times so much distorted that a form is given to phenomena which is the exact opposite of the reality....

"[But] if one knows how to translate in intellectual language the more or less inadequate images by which the brain reproduces these facts, one may learn many things which the too limited physical faculties do not permit us to perceive.

"Some even succeed, by a special culture and training, in acquiring

¹ Bulletin, November 1960, pp. 87-89. (Italics ours)

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and retaining the consciousness of the deeper activities of their inner being independently of their cerebral transcription and are able to recall and know them in the waking state in all the plenitude of their faculties....

"How [then] to cultivate this field of action? how to acquire a cognition of our activities of the night?...

"The same discipline of concentration which enables a man no longer to remain a stranger to his inner activities in the waking state, also furnishes him with the means of removing the ignorance of those, still richer, of the diverse states of sleep.

"Usually these activities leave only rare and confused memories behind them.

"One finds however that at times a fortuitous circumstance, an impression received, a word pronounced is enough to reawaken suddenly to consciousness the whole of a long dream of which the moment before there was no recollection.

"From this simple fact we may infer that our conscious activity participates very feebly in the phenomena of the sleeping state, as in the normal state of things they would remain lost for ever in subconscient memory....

"One who wishes to recover the memory of a forgotten dream should in the first place fix his attention on such vague impressions as the dream might have left trailing behind it and follow the indistinct traces as far as possible.

"This regular exercise would let him go farther every day towards the obscure retreat of the subconscient where the forgotten phenomena of sleep take refuge and thus mark out a route easy to follow between the two domains of consciousness.

"One practical remark to be made from this point of view is that the absence of memory is very often due to the abruptness with which the return to consciousness takes place. At this moment, in fact, new activities break into the field of consciousness, drive out forcibly all that is foreign to them and afterwards make more difficult the work of concentration necessary to recall the things thus expelled. This is facilitated, on the contrary, whenever certain mental and even physical precautions are observed for a peaceful transition from one state to another."¹

¹ The Mother, Words of Long Ago, pp. 38-44. (Italics ours)

Cf. Sri Aurobindo: "[The disappearance] of the dream consciousness [taking] away its scenes and experiences with it...can sometimes be avoided

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Thus, the slipping away of the memory of our nights can be greatly remedied and a power developed of going back in memory from dream to dream, from state to state, till a sufficiently coherent knowledge of our sleep life is built up.

But this training of the faculties of memory, as we shall presently see, does not prove sufficient to link the totality of our sleep-existence with our waking awareness. For that we have to grow conscious in the state of sleep itself.

How to Grow Conscious in Sleep

The training of our physical memory to follow back the thread of our dream-activities fails to give its full dividend for the simple reason that in this way we are "able to transform into conscious phenomena of the waking state those alone which were already so, be it most fleetingly, during sleep. For where there was no consciousness, there can be no memory."¹

We should therefore seek, in the second place, to extend the participation of consciousness to a greater number of activities in the sleeping state. Now, "the daily habit of going with interest over the various dreams of the night, thus transforming their vestiges little by little into precise memories as well as that of noting them down on waking are very helpful from this point of view.

"By virtue of these habits, the mental faculties will be induced to adapt their mechanism to the phenomena of this order and to direct upon them their attention, curiosity and power of analysis.

"It will then produce a sort of intellectualisation of dream, achieving the double result of interspersing the conscious activities more and more intimately in the play, hitherto disordered, of the activities of the sleeping state and of augmenting progressively the scope of these activities by making them more and more rational and instructive.

"Dreams would then take on the character of precise visions and, at times, of dream revelations."²

But along with this participation of mental consciousness,

by not coming out abruptly into the waking state or getting up quickly, but remaining quiet for a time to see if the memory remains or comes back." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1494.)

¹ Words of Long Ago, p. 44. (Italics ours)

² Ibid., pp. 44-45.

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this revelatory intellectualisation of dreams, we must try to cultivate a still higher and deeper mode of consciousness in sleep. In fact, our sleep-life should be as much a part of Sadhana as the waking one, and the developing consciousness that we attain in our waking state through spiritual endeavour and aspiration should extend itself fully and continuously also to the sleep state. It is true that at the beginning and for a long time it becomes difficult to maintain the consciousness at the same pitch at night, for "the true consciousness comes at first in the waking state or in meditation, it takes possession of the mental, the vital, the conscious physical, but the subconscious vital and physical remain obscure and this obscurity comes up when there is sleep or an inert relaxation."¹ But with the growth of an intense Sadhana in our waking state, when we develop our inner being, live from in without and our subconscient is enlightened and penetrated by the Mother's light, this disparity and this dislocation of consciousness disappears, and our "sadhana goes on in the dream or sleep state as well as in the waking."²

The Lure of the Dream-Consciousness

At this point of our discussion we would like to address a note of warning to the seekers after the mastery of their nights.

Through a proper cultivation of the fields of sleep-existence, when the inner sleep consciousness begins to develop and along with it appear dream experiences as distinct from ordinary dreams, there is often an irresistible pull on the consciousness to withdraw from its waking status, go within and follow the development there even when there is no fatigue or need of sleep — so alluring are the experiences of dream-consciousness, so overwhelming is the charm thereof!

But this attraction of the sleep-world must not be allowed to encroach on the waking hours and the "wanting to get back to something interesting and enthralling which accompanies the desire to fall into sleep"³ should be effectively curbed. Otherwise there may be an undesirable unbalancing and "a decrease of the hold on outer realities."⁴

¹ Letters on Yoga, p. 1480.

² Ibid., p. 1481.

^{3 4} Ibid., p. 1025.

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