This book for sadhaks or seekers of Integral Yoga is based on the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is a practical guide for sadhana of Integral Yoga.
On Yoga
THEME/S
XXIV
It is a fact that most people, including the aspirants after spiritual life, spend almost a third of their existence asleep. Consequently the time devoted to physical sleep well deserves our keen attention and should engage our careful Scrutiny. For, Sri Aurobindo has reminded us that "sadhana can go on in the dream or sleep state as well as in the waking." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1481)
We deliberately used the expression 'physical sleep', for, as we shall presently see, it is wrong to assume that the whole of our being sleeps when the physical being goes into dormancy. Be that as it may, the question of sleep gains an urgency in the case of the sadhakas of the Integral Yoga who strive for a progressive inwardisation of their consciousness. We remember in this connection the following words of the Mother:
"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 what you have gained [during the day] — that is indeed painful — and a positive effect, you make some progress, you continue your progress." (M C W, Vol. 15, pp. 400-01)
But before we can hope to make a proper use of our nights, we must know what sleep and dreams really signify and what they are meant for. Well, simply stated, sleep is the periodic state of more or less complete unconsciousness, during which all voluntary activity remains suspended and the functioning of the senses and the cerebrum or brain proper appears to be naturally and temporarily held in abeyance.
Now, many a hypothesis (e.g., neural theories, biochemical theories, anaemia theories, etc.) has been put forward by the biological scientists to account for the state of sleep in its purely phenomenal aspect, but none has withstood the rigorous exigencies of experimental verification. As Kenneth Walker has so bluntly stated, "although there may be many theories; we are still uncertain as to
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the real nature and cause of sleep." N. Kelitman has gone so far as to state that "sleep is a positive act and not just a mere cessation of wakefulness."
In any case, no proposed or yet to be proposed scientific theory of sleep can do more than account for the bare physiological 'how' of the phenomenon. In the very nature of its field of investigation and of the physiognomy of its formulation, it cannot but leave unexplained the essential 'why' of the stale of sleep.
Yes, sleep is a positive act, but not in the superficial sense of an 'instinct' as some investigators would like us to believe. Sleep plays a much profounder role with far-reaching implication and importance. As a matter of fact, in order to know the exact nature of sleep- and of dream-phenomena, their process of origination and provenance, we have to approach the Yogis and mystics and learn from them the occult-spiritual view of these phenomena.
We have already remarked at the outset of this essay that it is a superficial assessment to suppose that our consciousness remains in total abeyance during the period of our physical sleep. "What is in abeyance is the waking activities, what is at rest is the surface mind and the normal conscious action of the bodily part of us..." (The Life Divine, p. 422) In fact, during this dormancy of our physical mind, our consciousness withdraws from its surface preoccupation and becomes instead awake and active in regions of our being as widely distinct as they are disparate in their consequences. Thus the body's sleep does not necessarily mean a state of blank and quasi-total unconsciousness. It is rather of the nature of a transference of wakefulness from outside to inside, a gathering inward away from conscious physical response to the impacts of external things.
As Sri Aurobindo has so lucidly explained, what happens in sleep is that our consciousness withdraws from the field of its waking experiences and enters into inner realms of our being, of which we are not normally aware in our waking state, although they exist all the time and continue to exercise their occult influences upon our life and thought and action. And this is so because "when we are awake,... all that is put behind a veil by the waking mind and nothing remains except the surface self and the outward
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world - much as the veil of the sunlight hides from us the vast world s of the stars that are behind it. Sleep is a going inward in which the surface self and the outward world are put away from our sense and vision ." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1023) Our consciousness participates during this period in new inner activities of which, alas, only an insignificant port ion - the portion actually occurring or getting recorded on the thresh old of our surface consciousness - we somehow remember as imperfect and interpretative dreams of our night.
We must carefully note in this connection that it is not our thinking mind that sees dreams and is conscious in a rather incoherent way in sleep. No, if the waking mind were active in the body, one would not be able to sleep. Sleep and waking are deter-mined by the mind's waking condition or activity, or its cessation; when it ceases for a time, then it is the subconscious that is normally there on the surface, and there is sleep. It is this subconscient that becomes active in ordinary dreams. But in profounder dreams in which one goes out into other planes of consciousness, mental, vital, subtle physical, it is part of our subliminal inner being — inner mental, inner vital or subliminal physical - that is usually active. (What we mean by the subconscient, subliminal, circumconscient and superconscient part s of our being will be explained somewhat later on.)
At this point we must hasten to clear a possible confusion that may arise in our readers' minds. For they may have been struck by the queerness of our assertion that in some dreams the sleeping man ' s consciousness 'may go out into other planes. ' The y may wonder , 'Obviously this is an absurd statement, for how can there be other planes than the physical ?' Yes, however puzzling this may appear to be to the ordinary materially-minded intellectuals, it isan indubitable fact that-
"The physical is not the only world; there are others that we become aware of through dream records, through the subtle senses, through... intuition and vision. There are worlds of a larger subtler life than ours, vital worlds; worlds in which Mind builds its own forms and figures, mental worlds; psychic worlds which are the
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soul's home; others above with which we have little contact.... It is when we enter or contact these other planes that we come into connection with the worlds above the physical. In sleep we leave the physical body, only a subconscient residue remaining, and enter all planes and all sorts of worlds." (Ibid., pp. 1499-1500)
We are by now in a position to offer an occult-spiritual explanation of the phenomenon of dreams. In ordinary sleep, what hap pens is that our physical body falls into slumber for a period of time 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 the various above-mentiond planes and regions of our existence. "In each we see scenes, meet beings, share in happenings, come across formations, influences, suggestions which belong to these planes." (Ibid., p. 1500) When 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, in a state of sleep-wakefulness, receives and records and translates them more or less imperfectly, more or less coherently, depending on the state of development of our being, we are said to have dreams.
To understand properly our dreams and to derive maximum spiritual benefit from our dream-study, we must first be clear in more specific terms about the different spheres of our individual existence.
The very first idea that we have to instil in our consciousness is the fact of Yogic discovery that we are not only what we normally know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know. Our outwardly visible personality is no more than a mere bubble on the ocean of our total existence. As a matter of fact, there are broadly speaking, four clear and distinct regions in the totality of our being:
(i) the waking consciousness, (ii) the subconscient, (iii) the intraconscient and circumconscient subliminal, and finally (iv) the superconscient. Apart from a very small and restricted part of our waking individual consciousness, we are normally totally ignorant of the rest of our being — so appalling indeed is the extent
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and intensity of our present psycho-constitutional ignorance.
Our ordinary 'waking consciousness' is a limping and cabined surface consciousness shut up in the body limitation and within the confines of the little bit of personal mind. In this part of our being, we receive consciously only the outer touches and know things in ourselves and in our surroundings only or mainly by the Intellect and outer mind and senses. The ordinary man is aware only of this surface self and is quite unaware of all that functions from behind the surface.
The 'subconscient' part of our being represents an obscure unconsciousness or half-consciousness submerged below and inferior in its movements to our organised waking awareness. The subconscious is all the time "swallowing into its depths impressions of past experience as seeds of unconscious habit and returning them constantly but often chaotically to the surface consciousness, sending upwards much futile or perilous stuff of which the origin remains obscure to us, in dream, in mechanical repetitions of all kinds, in untraceable impulsions and motives, in mental, vital, physical perturbations and upheavals, in dumb automatic necessities of our obscurest parts of nature." (The Life Divine, p. 559)
The 'subliminal' proper in us comprises our inner being, that is to say, our inner mind and inner life and inner physical with the soul or the psychic entity supporting them. It is of the nature of a secret intraconscient and circumconscient awareness which functions behind the veil but is not at all of the obscure subconscious [character as depicted in the preceding paragraph. Rather, it is in possession of a brilliant mind, a limpid life-force and a clear subtle physical sense of things.
Now about what we have termed the 'superconscient'. A whole line of beyond-mental spiritual experiences testifies to the exist-Type of a range of being superconscient to all the three elements e have so far spoken of. There is not only something deep within hind our normal self-awareness, but something also high above it. is there in this superconscient "we are inherently and intrinsically conscious of our self and spirit, not as here below by a reflection in silent mind or by acquisition of the knowledge of a hidden Being within us; it is through it, through that ether of
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superconscience, that we can pass to a supreme status, knowledge, experience." (Ibid., p. 561)
Now, as we have mentioned earlier, only a very small part of our complex total being comes into our conscious purview. The rest remains hidden behind and above, in the subliminal and the superconscient reaches of being. The ancient Indian wisdom expressed the same fact by dividing our consciousness into three, or rather, four provinces: jāgrat or 'waking state', svapna or 'dream state', susupti or 'sleep state', and finally tunya transcending these all. "... the waking state is the consciousness of the material universe which we normally possess in this embodied existence dominated by the physical mind. The dream state is a consciousness corresponding to the subtler life-plane and mind-plane behind.... The sleep state is a consciousness corresponding to the supramental plane proper to the gnosis.... The Turiya beyond is the consciousness of our pure self-existence or our absolute being..." (The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 498-99)
The sleep state and the dream state are thus seen to be the figurative names for the superconscient and the subliminal that lie respectively beyond and behind our normal waking awareness.
Now it is impossible for us in our normal awareness to get back from our physical mind into these sublimer planes of sciousness. But what is pleasantly striking is the fact that the sleep of common parlance proves rather to be an effective means in exploring these higher and deeper ranges of consciousness which are inaccessible for the moment to the reach of man's unregenerate waking awareness. Indeed, as Sri Aurobindo has aptly pointed out, the 'sleep state' and the 'dream state' of the ancient Yogic tradition "are so named and figured because it is through dream and sleep, — or trance which can be regarded as a kind of dream or sleep, — that the surface mental consciousness normally passes out of the perception of objective things into the inner subliminal and the superior supramental or overmental status. In that inner condition it sees the supraphysical realities in transcribing figures of dream or vision or, in the superior status, it loses itself in a massed consciousness of which it can receive no thought or image." (The Life Divine, p. 452)
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Such being the case it is not difficult for us to comprehend why the physical state of sleep does play or at leas t should play an important role in the sadhana-life of an aspirant. Of course, there is the physiological necessity of periodic sleep. For it is well acknowledged that in the prevailing economy of the interchange of energies with the universal forces, non e of the dynamic organs of the present imperfect constitution of man ' s physical being can function in a ceaseless way without succumbing after a lap se of time to a state of utter fatigue and dullness. And the cerebral activity of man proves no exception to this genera l rule.
This necessity for periodic rest for our physical and physiological system equally applies in the case of sadhakas. The Mother 'and Sri Aurobindo would normally recommend seven hours' daily sleep for the sadhakas of the Integral Yoga. This physiological necessity for sleep does not, however, constitute the whole truth of the sleep phenomenon. As we shall presently see, our body's sleep plays a much greater and profounder role than merely to help in the recuperation of our energies through the process of sustained relaxation. For our physical sleep becomes, or can be made to become, a highly valuable means of unloosening, however temporarily, the stone-grip of the ignorance of 'our waking that is sleep' and awaking instead in the superior states of consciousness and being. And herein lies the great role of 'sleep-trance' and 'dream-trance' — nidrā-samādhi and svapna-samādhi — to which we shall allude in the sequel.
We have come to know by now that during our body's sleep different parts of our inner consciousness travel to various supra-physical planes, participate in their happenings and bring back their records which, if we remember them aright, we call 'dreams'. Now, believe it or not, this dreaming process continues almost throughout our sleep-period although when we wake up, we remain 'bliss-fully' ignorant of this uninterrupted phenomenon. At most we retain a conscious recollection of a tiny number of dreams which have occurred just before our actual time of waking. For the rest of the seven-hour period we erroneously claim that we have had a 'dreamless slumber ' . This so -called 'dreamless slumber' is very often no more than a state of dream-consciousness of which all record has
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been wiped away from the memory of the waking physical mind. And this obliteration may be due to any of the following reasons:
(i)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 the 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." (Letters on Yoga, pp. 1493-94) 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 every-thing experienced in sleep recedes from the physical conscious-ness leaving a state of blankness behind.
(ii)Plunge into subconscience: There is another and most usual blank state, the state when one goes 'deeply and crassly' into the subconscient. 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 of which no record reaches our waking awareness.
(iii)Absence of link bridge: In sleep our being passes through a succession of states of consciousness; it does not normally dwell permanently in one particular state. Now, so long as the sadhaka has not been able to develop by sadhana an integral and synthetic awareness encompassing the whole field of sleep, these different states of fleeting consciousness appear each with its own order of realities, so much so that in our passage through them through 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 vaguely caught in memory, seem odd and uncertain and hence forgotten in no time.
(iv)Sachchidananda immobility: Given the most favourable circumstances, when the sadhaka is in a highly developed consciousness, he may pass in sleep through a succession of states of progressively deepening sleep-consciousness to reach at last what
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Sri Aurobindo has termed as "a pure Sacchidananda state of compete rest, light and silence," a state of "susupti in the Brahman or Brahmaloka" (Ibid., p. 1484), 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 dream-less slumber rest", the Mother says, "you can hardly call it sleep, for it is extremely conscious". But she warns that this state of Sachchidananda immobility of consciousness cannot be attained in sleep by chance; "it requires a long training".
Apart from the four principal factors of oblivion elaborated above, there are a few other reasons which militate against the successful retention, in our waking memory, of the dream experiences we may have had during our body's sleep.
During sleep the inner being becomes consciously active but the waking being coming to its own at the end of the sleep-period fails to retain any memory of these activities of the night. In any case, the higher and deeper dreams are remembered only under three situations:
"(i) if they are strongly impressed on the recording conscious-ness; (ii) one wakes immediately after one of them; (iii) one has learned to be conscious in sleep, i.e., follows consciously the passage from plane to plane." (Ibid., p. 1494)
The discussion so far must have made it abundantly clear that our sleep-field is not a simple blank tract but is rather rich with variegated phenomena. Our dreams are not of one kind or of one quality; they range over a very large spectrum. Often in the same night we may have several dreams which belong to widely different categories and thus have different intrinsic values so far as the aspirant's sadhana is concerned. Therefore the very first part of the discipline of the night should naturally deal with the question of how to recall and recognise our dreams and how to distinguish between them.
As regards the multifarious natures and provenances of the dreams a sadhaka is to encounter in his sleep-life, we are quoting here two passages from Sri Aurobindo' s writings. These passages — one from The Synthesis of Yoga and the other one from Letters
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on Yoga—summarise the situation in a most comprehensive way. Here are the passages:
"The dreams of the physical mind are an incoherent jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches from the physical world round which the lower mind-faculties disconnected from the will and reason, the buddhi, weave a web of wandering phantasy, partly of disordered associations from the brain-memory, partly of reflections from the soul travelling on the mental plane, reflections which are, ordinarily, received without intelligence or co-ordination, widely distorted in the reception and mixed up confusedly with the other dream elements, with brain-memories and fantastic responses to any sensory touch from the physical world." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 500)
"It is a very small number of dreams that can be so explained [that they arise by external stimuli] and in many cases the explanation is quite arbitrary or cannot be proved. A much larger number of dreams arise from subconscient impressions of the past without any stimulus from outside. These are the dreams from the subconscient which are the bulk of those remembered by people who live in the external mind mostly. There are also the dreams that are renderings of vital movements and tendencies habitual to the nature, personal formations of the vital plane. But when one begins to live within then the dreams are often transcriptions of one's experiences on the vital plane and beyond that there is a large field of symbolic and other dreams which have nothing to do with memory.... there are also prophetic dreams and many others." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1496)
As the Mother has pointed out, although there are dreams which are "merely the malignant informers of our weaknesses or the malicious destroyers of our daily effort for progress", there are others "which should on the contrary be cultivated as precious auxiliaries in our work within and around us."Vol. 2, p. 32)
Thus, although it is a fact that apart from those vague, incoherent and insignificant dreams that are occasioned by 'purely
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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. This too is a fact that during the period of our physical sleep our consciousness may move on the profounder reaches of our being and this subliminal exploration of the inner planes provides us occasionally with dreams from these planes — or should we not rather say ream-experiences'? — for these are really transcripts direct or symbolic of what we actually experience in us or around us while dwelling in these subliminal realms of our existence. Immense is the value of these subliminal dreams. To quote Sri Aurobindo:
"If the subliminal thus comes to the front in our dream-consciousness, there is sometimes an activity of our subliminal intelligence... problems are solved which our waking consciousness could not solve, warnings, premonitions, indications of the future, veridical dreams replace the normal subconscious incoherence." (The Life Divine, p. 424)
A few words may be said here about 'dream-formations' and actual 'dream happenings'. Some dreams are very obviously mere formations, devoid of any reality, which one meets mostly on the vital plane, at times on the mental plane. Sri Aurobindo has this to say about these 'dream formations':
Sometimes they are the formations of your own mind or vital; sometimes they are the formations of other minds with an exact or modified transcription in yours; sometimes formations come that are made by the non-human forces or beings of these other planes. These things are not true and need not become true in the physical world.... The proper course with them is simply to observe and understand and, if they are from a hostile source, reject or destroy them." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1488)
'Dream happenings' are of a different nature altogether. These dreams are records of actual happenings seen or experienced by us on other planes of our own being or of universal being into which
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we enter during our body's sleep. "These have sometimes...a strong bearing on our own inner and outer life or the life of others, reveal elements of our or their mental being and life-being or disclose influences on them of which our waking self is totally ignorant..." (The Life Divine, p. 424)
There is also a category of dreams which may be called 'pre-monitory' or 'previsional'. If there is no interference of the constructing mind and its imaginations nor of the vital being and its interpretative preferences, if the recording consciousness remains sincere and passive, then these premonitory and previsional dreams can reveal to the sadhaka important events of the future and these can help him in two distinct but equally fruitful ways. In one of her Wednesday class talks the Mother clarified what these two different ways signify in their practical consequences. Here is a relevant passage from her talk:
"When you have control over your nights and are conscious of your sleep and your dreams..., you see the difference between the two: what is given to you as a warning so that you may intervene, and what is given to you as an intimation so that you may take the right attitude towards what is going to happen. It is always a lesson, but it is not always the same lesson. At times you can act with your will; at times you must learn the inner lesson which the incident is about to give you so that you may be ready for the event to have a full y favourable consequence."
Finally a word about 'symbolic dreams'. At times there is a great divergence between what is sought to be conveyed through a particular dream and the actual figure and imagery that the dream-consciousness adopts to convey it. The meaning is quite often wrapped up under the inscrutable cover of its symbolic representations. For others to attempt to decipher a sadhaka' s dream is often a vain enterprise. The clue remains hidden in the sadhaka 's own consciousness. It is he and he alone who has to develop his intuitive-spiritual consciousness to unravel the mystery of the meaning. At this point, it will not be inappropriate if we sound a note of warning to the sadhakas: they should not seek to "psychoanalyse"
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their dreams following the tenets of the now fashionable scientific discipline. And the reason is not difficult to comprehend. However, we do not want to spend any time in unravelling these reasons here.
But, even if we leave this question of psychoanalysis behind, the fact remains that a proper and systematic dream-study is always a very important part of the sadhana-life of the aspirants. At first consideration one might think that the subject of dreams is an altogether secondary one; for this -nightly activity generally seems to have very little importance compared to the activity of our waking state. But if we examine the question a little more closely and if we have carefully followed. all that has been written in the preceding pages of this essay, we cannot fail to see that this is not at all the case. For the sadhakas a clairvoyant cultivation of their sleep-life and a judicious study of their dream-experiences become an essential part of their spiritual effort, for one can learn much by controlling one's dreams. As the mother has said, "It is a tremendous field of observation — there is no end to the discoveries you can make in you dreams." (M C W, Vol. 15, p. 349)
All dreams do indicate something, and dream-experiences can convey truths that are not so easy to obtain in the waking state. In the waking state one is conscious only of a certain limited field and action of one's nature. In sleep one can become vividly aware of things beyond this field — a larger mental or vital nature, or else a subtle physical or a subconscrient nature which contains much that is there in one but not distinguishably active in the waking state.
Some dreams are manifestations of the erratic activities of certain mental faculties which associate ideas, conversations and memories that come together pell-mell. Such dreams, if recalled with accuracy, are apt to reveal to the sadhaka the confusion that Secretly prevails in his mental being when the latter is not subject to the control of his will.
Yes, it is the waking mind which thinks and wills and controls more or less the life in the waking state. During the body's sleep that mind is withdrawn and there is no possibility of ordinary control. As a result, a sadhaka may act or react in his dream unfoldment
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in a way totally foreign to what he is accustomed to in his waking period. Hence it is sometimes said that it is only in a man's sleep that his true nature is revealed. The knowledge of this spontaneously operative subterranean nature will immensely help the sadhaka in detecting and then eradicating the still existent weak points of his unregenerate nature.
We must therefore learn to know all our dreams whatever be their quality, nature or field of origin, and derive the necessary lessons they are capable of offering. But for that we must first learnfour essential things: (i) how to reduce the number of ordinary, futileand tiring dream s; (ii) how to cultivate the significant dreams worth having; (ii i) how to recall on waking all the important dreams we may have had during our sleep; and finally (iv) how to maintain an uninterrupted 'witness consciousness' throughout our sleep period without disturbing in the least our body' s restful relax at ion.
But all these depend fundamentally on the art of entering the state of sleep. It will not do for the sadhaka to get to his bed without proper psychological preparation, then roll there for some time, and finally go into sleep one knows not how and when.
How Best to Enter the State of Sleep
On many occasions the Mother has referred to this very important question of rightly getting into sleep, and has given detailed instructions as regards how to do it. We summarise below her observations in this regard:
"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, [what is needed is] 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
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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 that sums up your aspiration. After having repeated it a few times, if you are already accustomed to it, you get into some sort of a 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...
"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." (Bulletin, November 1960, pp. 87-89)
We have just now talked about how to enter the state of sleep. There is a right procedure for waking up too. We have already seen that during our body's sleep different parts of our consciousness travel to different supraphysical planes of being. One must allow all this consciousness to return to the body before one attempts to come out of sleep. This is what the Mother has advised the sadhakas to do:
How to Retain the Awareness of Dreams?
"One must never startle anyone out of his sleep because he must have time to get back into his body. It is not good, when getting up, to jump out of bed — hop: One must remain quiet for awhile, as though 'one were bringing oneself back into oneself in quiet movement. One must try to gather one's consciousness, and all the nightly experience, in one's body. One must remain very quiet for a while, with eyes closed, in a mood of inner assimilation, and when it is done properly And one feels that everything is
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there, one gets up quietly, composedly." (Questions and Answers 1955, p. 136. Adapted.)
'One gets up quietly, composedly': that is all right so far as that goes. But the matter does not end there for the sadhaka of the Integral Yoga. For he has to remember all his dreams and know clearly all the experiences he had during his sleep.
But what is normally observed is the regrettable fact that except for the last or the most impressive dream, a sadhaka, on waking up, appears to have clean forgotten all other dreams and all that has occurred during the period of his sleep. Now the question is, how to cure this disability. On this point too the Mother has spoken a lot and that too on many occasions. In order to recall the vanishing and the already vanished dreams, the Mother would advice the sadhaka to adopt the following procedure:
"One must first remember that the absence of the precise memory of the dreams is very .often due to the abruptness with which the return to waking consciousness takes place. The recalling of the dreams is facilitated if certain psychological and even physical precautions are observed for a slow and peaceful transition from the sleep state to the waking state.
Therefore, as a practical measure, the sadhaka, before going to sleep, should make a strong formation in his mind that he should not get up abruptly from the sleep state, and in the morning, on waking up, he should take good care not to make any abrupt physical movement like moving his head or even opening his eyes, because if one makes any abrupt movement, immediately and automatically the memory of the dreams vanishes.
The sadhaka must remain with the head absolutely motionless on the pillow, without stirring, until he can quietly recall to himself the consciousness which went out, and recall it as one pulls at something, very gently, without any knocking and without haste, in a state of attention and concentration. And, then, if one remains quite motionless, very quiet, and does not begin to think of all kinds of things, the returning consciousness will bring back first a vague impression and then an indistinct memory, sometimes a frag-
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mentary memory. But if one remains in that same state of expectant and receptive immobility, then it can become more and more a distinct memory. But for this one must have sufficient time at one's disposal.
One must try to follow the trail of vanishing dreams and recall them one by one . For this the sadhaka, [as we have indicated before] should keep his head exactly where it was at the moment of waking up, not open his eyes, and then make himself like a tranquil mirror within and concentrate there . He will perhaps catch just a tiny end of the tail of his last dream. He should catch it and start pulling gently, without stirring in the least. Then first one part of the dream comes, a little later another. One tries to go backward; the last comes first. Suddenly the whole dream appears.
The sadhaka repeats the dream to himself several times until it gets fixed in all its details. Once that dream is settled, one continues not to stir and tries to go further in, and suddenly one catches the tail of something else. It is more dist ant, more vague, but one can still seize it. And here also one hangs on, gets hold of it and pulls , and the sadhaka sees that everything changes and he enters another world. All of a sudden one has an extraordinary adventure: it is another dream. One follows the same process . And once this second dream gets fixed in memory, the sadhaka begins to penetrate still more deeply into himself, as though he was going in very far, very far. And the operation continues." (Adapted from the Mother's Entretiens 1953, 1955)
Thus , the slipping away of the memory of our nights can be greatly remedied and a power develop of going back in memory from dream to dream, from state to state , till a sufficiently coherent knowledge of our sleep life may be built up. But this daily 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 dreams alone which were already conscious during sleep . For where there was no consciousness, there can be no memory.
The sadhaka should therefore seek now to extend the partici
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pation of his consciousness to a greater number of activities in the sleeping state. The Mother's injunction to the sadhakas is: "Be conscious! Be conscious of the night as well as of the day." And Sri Aurobindo assures us: "It is even possible to become wholly conscious in sleep and follow throughout from beginning to end, or over large stretches the stages of our dream-experience..." (The Life Divine, p. 425)
There is indeed a great need to remain conscious in sleep it-self and change by degrees its ordinary nature of tamasic absorption into that of a luminous and blissful exploration of the inner and higher worlds of our being; for only in that way we may hope to bring back to our waking consciousness the sublime and fruitful experiences we may have had in sleep.
How to Grow Conscious in Sleep?
The training of our physical memory to follow back the thread of our dream activities has now to be supplemented in the second place by the process of extending the participation of conscious-ness 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 twill 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 them produce a sort of intellectualisation of dream, achieving in the process 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..." (The Mother: Words of Long Ago, pp. 44-45)
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But along with this participation of mental consciousness, this revelatory intelectualisation of dreams, we must now try to cultivate in sleep a still higher and deeper mode of consciousness. 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 aspiration and endeavour 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." (Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 1480) But with the growth of an intense sadhana in our waking state, and when we develop our inner being, live from within outward, and our subconscient is enlightened and penetrated by the supernal light, this disparity and dislocation of consciousness disappears, and the sadhaka' s sadhana goes on "in the dream or sleep state as well as in the waking." (Ibid., p. 1481)
But it is worth reminding the sadhaka that the cart should not be put before the horse and the sleep-sadhana should not take precedence over the sadhana during the waking state; the case is the other way round. As Sri Aurobindo has so trenchantly put it:
"The sleep consciousness can be effectively dealt with only when the waking mind has made a certain amount of progress. It is usually only if there is much activity of sadhana in the day that it extends also into the sleep-state. Once one is in full sadhana, sleep becomes as much a part of it as waking." (Ibid., p. 1481)
Once the sleep-sadhana is undertaken in right earnest, as a natural complement to the sadhana of the waking state, and as the sadhaka becomes progressively conscious and master of his sleep-activities, he achieves many interesting results of which a few may be mentioned below to satisfy the curiosity of the readers.
(i) There can be created a separation, even in sleep, between
'Prakriti' and 'Purusha', that is to say, between the executive Nature part and the detached and observing 'Witness consciousness' (sāksī-cetanā). (ii) One can know, while in the act of dreaming, that one is indeed dreaming. One can then organise one's dream-phenomena and exercise a good control over the actual course and the denouement of any particular dream, (iii) One can maintain a continuity in one's sleep-life; that is to say, each succeeding night one can take up and carry further a past continuous sleep-experience of the previous night, (iv) Even during one's sleep-period, if, for whatever reason, one wakes up, one can go back to sleep and continue the same dream from the point where one had left it. (v) One can exercise one's conscious will-power to prevent undesirable dreams from coming in and invoke, instead, good and instructive dreams to fill the sleep-existence, (vi) One can build up bridges of communication between different states through which our consciousness moves during the same night, and thus maintain a conscious and continuous recollection of all the sleep-experiences, (vii) One can deliberately build up during one's sleep beautiful formations and then help them to be realised in waking life at some future date, (viii) By sustained practice one can, in sleep, pass from consciousness to deeper consciousness in a long succession until one reaches the psychic and rests there, or else from higher and higher consciousness until one attains rest in Sachchidananda silence and peace. (ix) One can progressively change one's sleep into a yogic repose and transform one's dreams into various dream-experiences or, even, into svapna-samādhi, 'dream-trance', (x) And many others.
Two more points and we have come to the end of our essay on Sadhana during our body's sleep.
The first point concerns a possible doubt and fear that may arise in the mind of some of our readers that any attempt at the conscious utilisation of the nights may affect the depth of the sadhaka' s sleep and thus deprive him of the efficacity of his nightly rest, which may prove in the long run detrimental to the maintenance of his physical health. But this sort of fear and doubt has got no basis in fact. For, as we have already pointed out, it is not with the waking mind's physical consciousness that one seeks to be
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conscious in sleep. It is another and a higher order of consciousness that the sadhaka cultivates while, at the same time, leaving the body and the brain profoundly and peacefully asleep.
The second point is in the nature of a note of warning. Through a proper cultivation of the fields of sleep-existence, when the in ner sleep-consciousness begins to develop, and along with it appear striking dream-experiences as distinct from ordinary dreams, the sadhaka may feel like withdrawing from the waking status, go within and follow the development there even when there is no fatigue or need of sleep — so alluring become the experiences of dream-consciousness, so overwhelming the charm thereof.
But this attraction of the sleep-world must not be allowed to encroach on the waking hours; it should be kept at its proper place and time and confine its operations to the normal hours of sleep. Otherwise, as Sri Aurobindo has warned us, there may be an undesirable unbalancing and a decrease of one's hold on outer realities.
An assiduous sadhana during the body's sleep is richly rewarding from more than one point of view. But the requisite mastery over the nights cannot be acquired in an easy canter. It requires patience, perseverance and an untiring zeal. But the mastery is worth acquiring and the sadhakas of the Integral Yoga should on no account ignore it.
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