In the Mother's Light

Dreams

DREAMS are an index to the mystery of life. "Movies" from the unknown caves and hinterlands of our being, they flit past us in our sleep, announcing, if we have ears to hear, that there are more things in life than meet the human eye, and realms and realities that elude the grasp of the rational mind. Though many of their patterns appear to us rather chaotic or fantastic, there are some which are manifest marvels of symmetry and beauty. They have inspired many an exquisite artistic creation and exercised the thought and speculation of many a poet and philosopher and psychologist. There are again some dreams which, whether simple or symbolical, possess a prophetic character and reveal something of the future.

Modern psychology has been labouring with astonishing energy and perseverance to unravel this mystery of dreams in its own fragmentary, empirical way. Freud's analysis of dreams, though warped by certain unfortunate obsessions and prejudices, has yet uncovered some of the sinks and sewers of human nature and exposed to the light of day the festering seed-beds of many of the neuroses and abnormalities which afflict man-kind. But it has not advanced in the direction of the gleaming founts and crystal streams which feed and foster the Godhead in man and inspire the talents and the sterling qualities of his nature. Freud preoccupied himself with diseased and deranged human systems and built the imposing structure of his theories on the basis of the results his investigation of these systems yielded him; but the majority of mankind being neither hysteric nor neurotic, Freud's generalisations fail to apply to them, and stand convicted of a dogmatic narrowness and falsifying over- emphasis. Jung's researches on the same line have gone farther ahead, and his happy discovery of what he calls "Mandala" dreams is a remarkable contribution to modern dream-analysis. According to him, it is the very centre of the human personality that reveals itself in "Mandala" dreams-—the centre of light and poise and harmony, which is as far removed from the "Id" of

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Freudian psychology as the stars are from the slime of the earth.

But still it is only the fringe of the subject that has been touched; immense, immeasurable fields of the dreamland lie yet unexplored. Considering the fact, as the Mother points out, that "a third of our existence is passed in sleep" and that "whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always dreaming," it is essential and imperative that we should acquire a more or less accurate and active knowledge of dreams. "A coherent knowledge of sleep life, though difficult to achieve or to keep established, is possible.”¹

What are dreams ? Can they be classified ? Can bad dreams be avoided, combated or changed ? Are there dreams which we should cultivate as "precious auxiliaries for our work on our- selves and around us” ? Can we be conscious in sleep, and study and control our dreams ? How to achieve this consciousness ? These are the points we shall endeavour to touch upon here.

Dreams are a transcript of the activities of the suprasensible parts of our being in the state of sleep. "What happens in sleep is that our consciousness withdraws from the field of its waking experiences; it is supposed to be resting, suspended or in abeyance; but that is a superficial view of the matter. 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; but the inner consciousness is not suspended, it enters into new inner activities, only a part of which, a part happening or recorded in something of us that is near to the surface, we remember. There is maintained in sleep, thus near the surface, an obscure subconscious element which is a receptacle or passage for our dream experiences and itself also a dream builder.”²

When we sleep, our surface mind, which is mostly busy with the sense objects and the reactions produced by their impacts on us, falls into abeyance and our consciousness recedes into the recondite ranges of our or universal being and acts there or is acted upon or comes into contact with the activities of those regions. These covert happenings are recorded or transcribed, in its own diminishing or distorting way, plainly or in strange figures, images or symbols, by a part of our subconscious nature, which is close to the waking surface.

¹ & ² The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo,

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In some dreams, which are of a totally different order, the transcriber is not the proximate subconscious layer, but the subliminal, a much more faithful and efficient agent.

Dreams can be roughly classified under two heads :—(l) sub-conscious dreams and (2) subliminal dreams. Subconscious dreams can again be sub-divided into two categories. The first category is made up of the random impressions, fancies, impulses which sink down from the most superficial parts of our nature and have neither any coherence nor significance. They are a strange motley, a baffling triumph of inconsequential incongruity. "These dreams are almost always determined by purely physical circumstances, the state of health, digestion, position on the bed, etc.,” and occur like a fugitive phantasmagoria in states of drowsiness or half-sleep. "With a bit of self-observation and some precaution, one can easily avoid this class of dreams, as useless as they are fatiguing, by removing their physical causes.,”¹

The second category comprises dreams taking place on the deeper levels of the subconscient. They are of many kinds. Some reflect the confusion of our thoughts and ideas or the splash and sway of our surface emotions. Some reveal our raging or repressed desires, our passions, tendencies, tastes and dominant or dormant impulses, our complexes and tangled associations. Because the controlling and coercive will of the waking mind is suspended in sleep, these seething or suppressed elements rush up, as if in revenge, and try to possess our nature. The common experience of a quiet and peaceful day followed by a dismal night of disquieting dreams, foul or ugly, can be safely attributed to the upsurge of the simmering scum from the nether lands. Saints being surprised by ravenous desires self-satisfied honesty outrage by heinous acts of fraud and perfidy, long records of love and friendship blackened by incredible betrayals, are occurrences in sleep, not at all infrequent, which substantiate some of the discoveries of modern psychology. No man can call himself pure until he has swept and scoured and lighted up these obscure caves of his subconscient being. His ethical or pietistic purity is but a veneered or pretentious

¹ Words of Long Ago by The Mother,

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impurity. It is only in such subconscious dreams that he can discover his real nature,—not certainly the essential, spiritual nature into which he has to grow, but the actual,, dynamic nature which dominates and dictates most of his characteristic life-movements. "You will easily understand", says the Mother, "that, rather than let them {the dark hidden elements of your nature) thus remain unknown, it is better to draw them out boldly and courageously into the light of day and oblige them definitively to leave us.” Most of such dreams are, therefore, indicators of our real psychological state, and it is only when all our dreams mirror a pure and peaceful nature, untroubled by desires and unperverted by passions and mean self-interests, that we can be sure of having achieved some substantial purity, and not before that.

The subliminal dreams are a class apart. But before we try to observe something of their nature and function, let us turn to the subliminal itself and have a cursory view of its vast terrain. "Our subliminal self 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. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction of the first inconscient world-energy or a natural developed functioning of our surface consciousness or a reaction of it to impacts from the outside universal Nature,—and even in this construction, these functions, these reactions the subliminal takes part and exercises on them a considerable influence. There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct contact with the universal, unlike the mostly indirect contacts which our surface being maintains with the universe through the sense-mind and the senses. There are here inner senses, a subliminal sight, touch, hearing; but these subtle senses are rather channels of the inner being’s direct consciousness of things than its informants; the subliminal is not dependent on its senses for its knowledge, they only give a form to

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its direct experience of objects...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 Super conscience...Our waking state is unaware of its connection with the subliminal being, although it receives from it—but without any knowledge of the place of origin —the inspirations, intuitions, ideas, will-suggestions, sense-suggestions, urges to action that rise from below or from behind our limited surface existence...The subliminal ...is the seer of inner things and of supraphysical experiences, the surface subconscience is only a transcriber. ”¹

When the subliminal becomes active in our dream consciousness, "there is sometimes an activity of our subliminal intelligence,—dream becomes a series of thoughts often strangely or vividly figured, problems are solved which our waking consciousness could not solve, warnings, premonitions, indications of the future, veridical dreams replace the normal subconscious incoherence. There can come also a structure of symbol images, some of a mental character, some of a vital nature : the former are precise in their figures, clear in their significance; the later are often complex and baffling to our waking consciousness, but, if we can seize the clue, they reveal their own sense and peculiar system of coherence. Finally, there can come to us the records of happenings seen or — experienced by us on other planes of our own being or of universal being into which we enter: these have sometimes, like the symbolic dreams, 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; but sometimes they have no such bearing and are purely records of other organised systems of consciousness independent of our physical existence.”²

¹ The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.

² ibid.

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In sleep sometimes we reach a state which seems to be dreamless. The fact of the matter is that our consciousness sinks so deep into the subconscient or travels so far afield in the subliminal that the recording apparatus loses all touch with it and in our surface consciousness there is the impression of a dreamless sleep, an unfilled void. But the dreams take place all the same, and the deeper layers of our consciousness participate in them. But it is possible, as the Mother says, "to have complete sleep, without dreams; but to plunge our mind into a repose analogous to that of our physical body, it is necessary to attain a per feet mastery over the mental being, which is not an easy matter.”¹ This state of repose can hardly be called 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.”² It is also possible that in what we call a dreamless sleep, we fall into the torpid depths of inconscience. It is an experience which is "almost death—a taste of death ”, and we return from it weighed down with a heavy dullness and fatigue.

The interpretation of dreams is a rather difficult matter. There are numerous possibilities of error involved in it. First of all, the transcription of a dream may leave much to be desired—it may be vague or blurred or inadequate or even distorted; it may be in peculiar images or symbols. These symbols and images do not obtain universal currency, but convey different things in different cases; they have an uncanny individuality which baffles all rules and systems and belies all sweeping generalisations. In fact, "generalisations made from certain interpretations which might have been quite correct for the one who applied them to his own case, give rise only to vulgar and foolish superstition.”³"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.”4 We are, therefore,

¹ Words of the Mother.

² ibid.

³Words of Long Ago by the Mother.

4 ibid.

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counselled to take "great intellectual precautions in the interpretation of dreams”, and above all to exhaust all possible subjective explanations before attributing to them the value of an objective reality. ”¹

What should we do with our sleep and dreams ? Should welet them have their own way ? That will certainly preclude all possibility of self-mastery. "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.”² The vast fields of sleep have, therefore, to be carefully cultivated, for they are capable of yielding a golden harvest as well as the fields of our waking activities. What we have to do, first of all, is to be conscious in sleep. This consciousness is not to be brought down from somewhere or transferred from the waking state—our normal consciousness has only to be extended into the depths. The surface active consciousness, which is all we command in our normal state, is a petty, limited portion of our total consciousness. Below it and behind and above are infinite ranges with incalculable possibilities and powers which have to be annexed to our waking consciousness, if we want to be integrally conscious. This extension of our consciousness and its free functioning in our sleep can be effected by a steady exercise of concentration, which is the one universal key to all conquests and achievments. "The practice of concentration should bear at the same time on the special faculty of memory as well as on participation of the consciousness in the activities during the sleeping state.”³ An unrelaxed practice, continued from night to night, will help us extend the frontiers of our consciousness and make us conscious of our nights and their activities as much as we are conscious of our days. This consciousness will not only make it possible for us to watch and study all our dreams, but also control them and change their course and character, if they seem to oppose or retard

¹ Words of the Mother.

² Words of Long Ago by the Mother,

³ ibid.

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our spiritual progress. It will even enable us to participate in the activities of the remote levels of our own or of the universal being and retain an unclouded memory of them in the waking state, independently of the cerebral transcription. Elimination or conversion of unhelpful and undesirable dreams and a conscious fostering of those which help our progress will be a natural corollary to this conquest of the fields of sleep.

But before one is conscious of one's nights, what should one do to recover the dreams that have almost faded from one's memory ? And unless they are recovered, how can they be analysed and studied ? The discipline of concentration which opens to us the realms of sleep will help this recovery. We have to concentrate on the indistinct scraps and fading vestiges of the dreams and follow them up unremittingly till the whole dreams come sailing back into our memory. What the psycho-analysts attempt by free association is something—though not quite—like this. A regular and intelligent practice of concentration in this direction will facilitate the recovery of dreams, and even enable us to track them to their "obscure retreat" in the subconscient "where the forgotten phenomena of sleep take refuge".

It may be feared that if we begin to concentrate on the activities of the night, our sleep will be disturbed and we shall lose the rest and relaxation our physical system so much needs. But the fear is unfounded. What disturbs our sleep and saps our rest is the subconscient. It is the chaotic, squalid and un- shapely subconscious dreams that disturb and depress and fatigue us. An intensive purification of the lower nature in the light of our experiences in sleep as well as in the waking hours of the day will culminate in a thorough catharsis of the subconscient—sustained personal effort led and progressively replaced by the Force of the Divine alone can accomplish this difficult work—and the subconscient dreams will then give place to subliminal dreams, which are restful, helpful, and revealing. "If our night granted us the acquisition of new knowledge, the solution of an absorbing problem, the establishment of contact in our inner being with some centre of life or of light, or even the

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accomplishment of some useful work, we should always get up with a feeling of vigour and well-being.”¹

If we desire a complete purification of our nature and a freedom from the thrall of our primitive appetites and ungodly instincts, let us analyse and study our dreams, and expose their roots to the transforming light and force of the Mother. Every man, if he is keen and steady, "can study his own dreams, unravel them and find out their meaning. The daily habit of going with interest over the various dreams of the night, thus trans- forming 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.”² We have to remain conscious all through the night even as we are conscious during the day—a full, unabrogated state of consciousness is the sole condition of perfect self-mastery. It is unconsciousness that harbours beings and forces which imperil our spiritual progress and keep us chained to ignorance and suffering.

But the most effective means of cultivating the fields of sleep, as, indeed, of achieving any abiding perfection in life, is a complete, confident and dynamic surrender to the Grace of the Divine. Here, as everywhere, it is always the Grace that finally conquers and triumphs, our personal effort, sincerely and persistently made, only prepares our being for its right reception and unimpeded action in us.

¹ Words of Long Ago by the Mother.

² ibid.

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