The Yoga of Sleep and Dreams

4

Sleep, Dreams and Sadhana

Sleep cannot be replaced, but it can be changed; for you can be conscious in sleep. If you are thus conscious, then the night can be utilised for a higher working - provided the body gets its due rest; for the object of sleep is the body’s rest and the renewal of the vital-physical force. ⁸⁸

SRI AUROBINDO

*

Sleep is indispensable in the present state of the body. It is by a progressive control over the subconscient that the sleep can become more and more conscious. ⁸⁹

THE MOTHER

*

If you want to remain conscious at night, train yourself to make your sleep conscious - not to eliminate sleep altogether, but to transform it. ⁹⁰

SRI AUROBINDO

*

How to make a heavy subconscient sleep light?

By calling in more consciousness.

I have noticed that even half an hour's sleep during

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day-time refreshes me more than five or six hours' sleep at night. What is the reason for this?

It must be because it is a different kind of sleep in the day­ time, less heavy, with less time spent in the subconscient. ⁹¹

SRI AUROBINDO

*

In the waking state you are conscious only of a certain limited field and action of your nature. In sleep you can become vividly aware of things beyond this field - a larger mental or vital nature behind the waking state or else a subtle physical or a subconscient nature which contains much that is there in you but not distinguishably active in the waking state. All these obscure tracts have to be cleared or else there can be no change of Prakriti. You should not allow yourself to be disturbed by the press of vital or subconscient dreams - for these two make up the larger part of dream­ experience - but aspire to get rid of these things and of the activities they indicate, to be conscious and reject all but the divine Truth; the more you get that Truth and cling to it in the waking state, rejecting all else, the more all this inferior dream-stuff will get clear. ⁹²

SRI AUROBINDO

*

When you practise yoga, the consciousness opens and you become aware - especially in sleep - of things, scenes, beings, happenings of other (not physical) worlds and yourself

in sleep go there and act there. Very often these things have an importance for the sadhana. So you need not regret seeing all this when you sleep or meditate.

But in no case should you fear. ⁹³

SRI AUROBINDO

*

Now the procedure to deal with dream and the dreamland. First become conscious - conscious of your dreams. Ob­serve the relation between them and the happenings of your waking hours. lf you remember your night, you will be able to trace back very often the condition of your day to the condition of your night. ln sleep some action or other is al­ways going on in your mental or vital or other plane; things happen there and they govern your waking consciousness. For instance, some are very anxious to perfect themselves and make a great effort during the day. They go to sleep and, when they rise the next day, they find no trace of the gains of their previous day's effort; they have to go over the same ground once again. This means that the effort and whatever achievement there was belonged to the more superficial or wakeful parts of the being, but there were deeper and dormant parts that were not touched. In sleep you fell into the grip of these unconscious regions and they opened and swallowed all that you had laboriously built up in your conscious hours.

Be conscious! Be conscious of the night as well as of the day. First you have to get consciousness, afterwards, control. You who remember your dreams may have had this experience that, even while dreaming, you knew it was a

dream; you knew that it was an experience that did not belong to the material world. When once you know, you can act there in the same way as in the material world: even in the dreaming, you can exercise your conscious will and change the whole course of your dream-experience.

And as you become more and more conscious, you will begin to have the same control over your being at night as you have in the day, perhaps even more. For at night you are free, at least partially, from slavery to the mechanism of the body. The control over the processes of the body-conscious­ness is more difficult, since they are more rigid, less amenable to change than are the mental or the vital processes. ⁹⁴

THE MOTHER

*

Sweet Mother,

Is it possible to have control Over oneself during sleep? For example, if I want to see you in my dreams, can I do it at will?

Control during sleep is entirely possible and it is progressive if you persist in the effort. You begin hy remembering your dreams then gradually you remain more and more conscious during your sleep, and not only can you control your dreams but you can guide and organise your activities during sleep.
If you persist in your wiII and your effort, you are sure to

learn how to come and find me at night during your sleep and afterwards to remember what has happened.

For this, two things are necessary, which you must de­velop by aspiration and by calm and persistent effort.
( l) Concentrate your thought on the will to come and find me; then pursue this thought, first by an effort of imagi­nation, afterwards in a tangible and increasingly real way, until you are in my presence.
(2) EstabIish a sort of bridge between the waking and the sIeeping consciousness... so that when you wake up you remember what has happened.
It may be that you succeed immediately, but more often it takes a certain time and you must persist in the effort. ⁹⁵

THE MOTHER

*

ls it useful to note down one's dreams?

Yes, for more than a year I applied myself to this kind of

self-discipline. I noted down everything - a few words, just a little thing, an impression - and l tried to pass from one memory to another. At first it was not very fruitful, but at the end of about fourteen months I could follow, beginning from the end, all the movements, all the dreams right up to the beginning of the night. That put you in such a conscious, continuously conscious state that finally I was not sleeping at all. My body lay stretched, deeply asleep, but there was no rest in the consciousness. The result was absolutely wonderful; you become conscious of the different phases of sleep, conscious absolutely of everything that happens there, to the least detail, then nothing can any

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longer escape your control. But if during the day you have a lot of work and you truly need sleep, I advise you not to try!
In any case, there is one thing altogether indispensable, not to make the least movement when you wake up; you must learn to wake up in a state of complete immobility, otherwise everything disappears. ⁹⁶

THE MOTHER

*

During sleep one has often the impression of entering into a region of light. of higher knowledge. but on waking up one brings back only the impression, the memory. Why?

That is because in the ladder of being which climbs from the most external to the highest consciousness, there are gaps. breaks of continuity, and when the consciousness rises, descends and goes up again, it passes through some kind of dark holes where there is nothing. Then it enters into a sleep, a sort of unconsciousness, and wakes up as best it can on the other side and hardly remembers what it has brought back from above. This is what happens very frequently and particularly in the state called samadhi. People who enter into samadhi find out that between their active external consciousness and their consciousness in meditation, there lies a blank. Up there, they are almost necessarily conscious - conscious of the state in which they find themselves - but when coming down again towards their body, on the way they enter into a kind of hole where they lose

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everything - they are unable to bring back the experience with them. Quite a discipline is needed to create in oneself the many steps which enable the consciousness not to forget what it has experienced up there. It is not an impossible discipline but it is extremely long and requires an unshakable patience for it is as if you wanted to build up in you a being, a body: and for that you require first of all the necessary knowledge, but also such a prolonged persistence and per­severance as would discourage many. But it is altogether indispensable if you want to take part in the knowledge of your higher being. ⁹⁷

THE MOTHER

*

Can one learn to control one's subconscient as one controls one's conscious thought?

It is especially during the body's sleep that one is in contact with the subconscient. In becoming conscious of one's nights. control of the subconscient becomes much easier. ⁹⁸

THE MOTHER

*

Sleep, because of its subconscient basis , usually brings a falling down to a lower level unless it is a conscious sleep; to make it more and more conscious is the one permanent remedy: but also until that is done, one should always react against this sinking tendency when one wakes and not allow the effect of dull night to accumulate. But these things need

alway a settled endeavour and discipline and must take time, sometimes a long time. It will not do to refrain from the effort because immediate results do not appear. ⁹⁹

SRI AUROBINDO

*

The consciousness in the night aImost always descends below the level of what one has gained by sadhana in the wak­ing consciousness, unless there are special experiences of an uplifting character in the time of sleep or unless the yogic consciousness acquired is so strong in the physical itself as to counteract the pull of the, subconscient .inertia. In ordi­nary sleep the consciousness in the body is that of the subconscient physical, which is a diminished consciousness... not awake and alive like the rest of the being. The rest of the being stands back and part of its consciousness goes out into other planes and regions, and has experiences which are recorded in dreams such as that you have related. You say you go to very bad places and have experiences like the one you narrate; but that is not a sign, necessarily, of anything wrong in you. It merely means that you go into the vital world, as everybody does, and the vital world is full of such places and such experiences. What you have to do is not so much to avoid at all going there, for it cannot be avoided altogether, but to go with full protection until you get mas­tery in these regions of a supraphysical Nature. ¹⁰⁰

SRI AUROBINDO

*

The l'oga nf /eep and Dream

The difficulty of keeping the consciousness at night hap­pens to most - it is, because the night is the time of sleep and relaxation and the subconscient comes up.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. When the subconscient is en­lightened and penetrated by the true consciousness this obscurity disappears, ¹⁰¹

SRI AUROBINDO

*

At night when one sinks into the subconscient after being in a good state of consciousness we find that state gone and we have to labour to get it back again. On the other hand, If the sleep is of the better kind one may wake up in a good condi­tion. Of course, it is better to be conscious in sleep, if one can. ¹⁰²

SRI AUROBINDO

*

…it is a well-known psychological law that what is sup­pressed or rejected in the waking state may still recur in sleep and dream because they are still there in the subconscient being. But if the waking state is thoroughly cleared, these dream-movements must gradually disappear because they lose their food and the impressions in the subconscient are gradually effaced. This is the cause of the dreams of which you are so much afraid. You should see

that they are only a subordinate symptom which need not alarm you if you can once get control of your waking condi­tion. ¹⁰³

SRI AUROBINDO

*

The sleep consciousness can be effectively dealt with only when the waking mind has made a certain amount of progress. ¹⁰⁴

SRI AUROBINDO

*

It is usually only if there is much activity of sadhana in the day that it extends also into the sleep-state. ¹⁰⁵

SRI AUROBINDO

*

About unconsciousness coming in in leep: This is quite usual. Consciousness in sleep can only be gradually estab­lished with the growth of the true consciousness in the waking state. ¹⁰⁶

SRI AUROBINDO

*

If one is more conscious in the day, one will have dreams of a good kind?

It is very difficult to say on what it depends.

It happens that when you need to dream of something, so

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that it may enlighten you on a point of your nature, give you an indication about the effort you must make, it comes.

It depends perhaps on a consciousness that watches over everyone; and provided one is just a little open, it can guide him and give sure indications.
I think there is an entire category of dreams which are absolutely commonplace, useless and simply tiring, which one can avoid if, before going to sleep, one makes a little effort of concentration, tries to put himself in contact with what is best in him, by either an aspiration or a prayer, and to sleep only after this is done... even, if one likes , try to meditate and pass quite naturally from meditation into sleep with­out even realising it. .. Usually there is a whole category of dreams which are useless, tiring, which prevent you from resting well - all this might be avoided. And then, if one has truly succeeded well in his concentration, it is quite possible that one may have, at night, not exactly dreams but experiences of which one becomes conscious and which are very useful, indications, as I just told you, indications about questions you asked yourself and of which you did not have the answers; or else a set of circumstances where you ought to take a decision and don't know what decision to take; or else some way of being of your own character which does not show itself to you clearly in the waking consciousness
- because you are so accustomed to it that you are not aware of it - but something that harms your development and obscures your consciousness, and which appears to you in a symbolic revelatory dream, and you become clearly aware of the thing. then you can act upon it. It depends not on what one was during the day, because this doesn't always have

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much effect upon the night, but on the way one has gone to sleep. It is enough just to have at the moment of sleeping a sincere aspiration that the night, instead of being a darken­ing of the consciousness, may be a help to understand some­thing, to have an experience; and then, though it doesn't come always, it has a chance of coming.
There is also, you know, a whole lot of activities of the night which one doesn't remember at all. Sometimes when one has awakened quite slowly and quietly, when one hasn't jumped up while awakening, when one wakes up quite gen­tly, quite slowly, without stirring, one has a vague impression of something that has happened which has left an imprint on one's consciousness - you have your own way of waking up - particular, sometimes even strange. And so if you remain very quiet and observe attentively, without moving. you notice a kind of half-memory of an activity that took place at night, and if you remain concentrated on it. still motionless for some time, suddenly it may come back like that, like something that appears from behind a veil, and you can get hold of the tail of a dream. When you hold the tail - just a little event - when you hold the tail, you pull it, like this, very gently, and it comes. But you must be very quiet and must not move. And usually these dreams are very interesting; these activities are very instructive.
One does lots and lots of things at night which one doesn't know, and if one learns, you see, when one becomes conscious, one can begin to have control. Before being conscious you have no control at all. But when you begin to be conscious, you can also begin to have a control. And then if you have control of your activities of the night, you can sleep

much better: for the fact that when you wake up you are of­ten at least as tired as when going to bed and have a feeling of lassitude shows that you do any number of useless things during the night: you tire yourself running around in the vi­tal world or moving in the mind in a frantic activity. So when you get up you feel tired.
Well, once you have the control you can stop that com­pletely...stop it before going to sleep... make yourself like a vast sea, that is, it is completely calm and still and vast... well, you can make your mind like that, vast, calm, like a flat, motionless. surface; then our sleep is excellent.
Of course, here too it is a question of people going in their sleep to places of the vital worlds which are very bad, and then, when they return, sometimes, they are more than tired, at times they are ill, or they are absolutely exhausted. This is because they were in bad places and had a fight. But this surely has something to do with the state of the consciousness­ during the waking hours. If, for example, you have been angry during the day, you see, there are many chances that at night you'll be in a vital fight for some time. This happens. ¹⁰⁷

THE MOTHER

*

To sleep welI the vital and physical and mind also must learn how to relax themselves and be quiet. ¹⁰⁸

SRI AUROBINDO

*

I would like to know why I had such a disturbed night.

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Obviously you did not quiet your thoughts before going to sleep. At the time of lying down one should always begin by quieting one’s thoughts. ¹⁰⁹

THE MOTHER

*

There is no end to the discoveries that you can make in dreams. But one thing is very important: never go to sleep when you are very tired, for if you do, you fall into a sort of unconsciousness and dreams do with you whatever they like, without your being to able to exercise the least control. Just as you should always rest before eating, I would advise you all to rest before going to sleep. But then you must know how to rest.

There are many ways of doing it. Here is one: first of all put your body at ease, comfortably stretched out on a bed or in an easy-chair. Then try to relax your nerves, all together or one by one, till you have obtained complete relaxation. This done, and while your body lies limp like a rag on the bed, make your brain silent and immobile, till it is no longer conscious of itself. Then slowly, imperceptibly. pass from this state into sIeep. When you wake up the next morning, you will be full of energy. On the contrary, if you go to bed completely tired and without relaxing yourself, you will fall into a heavy, dull and unconscious sleep in which the vital will lose all its energies.

It is possible that you may not obtain an immediate result. but persevere. ¹¹⁰

THE MOTHER

*

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At night, you have to pass into sleep in the concentration - you must be able to concentrate with the eyes closed, lying down and the concentration must deepen into sleep - that is to say, sleep must become a concentrated going inside away from the outer waking state. If you find it necessary to sit for a time you may do so, but afterwards lie down keeping the concentration till this happens. ¹¹¹

SRI AUROBINDO

*

I have noticed one thing: When I sit for a few minutes and make an effort to concentrate before going to sleep, the next day I wake up quite early and am quite fresh. I concentrate on the tiny luminous tip of an incense-stick. But how is it that I wake up early because of that? There is no relation between these two things!

On the contrary, there is a very concrete relation. When you concentrate before sleeping, then in your sleep you remain in contact with the Divine force; but when you fall heavily to sleep without any preliminary concentration, you sink into the inconscient and the sleep is more tiring than restful, and it is difficult to come out of this sluggishness. ¹¹²

THE MOTHER

*

At times I talk in my sleep. It is a sign that the mind lacks control, isn't it? So what should I do to keep it quiet at night?

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Generally when the body is asleep at night, the mind goes out because it is difficult for it to remain quiet for a long time; and that is why most people do not talk.

But your mind seems to remain in your body, so you must ask it to remain perfectly quiet and silent so that your body can rest properly. A little concentration for that, before going to sleep, will surely be effective. ¹¹³

THE MOTHER

*

[To be conscious in sleep:] You have to start by concentrating before you sleep always with a specific will or aspira­tion. The will or aspiration may take time to reach the subconscient, but if it is sincere, strong and steady, it does reach after a time - so that an automatic consciousness and will are established in the sleep itself which will do what is necessary. ¹¹⁴

SRI AUROBINDO

*

Sweet Mother, to profit by one's nights, to have good dreams.is it necessary that one should have done nothing very intellectual late at night, or that one should not eat too late at night or do anything external?

This depends on each one; but certainly if you want to sleep quietly at night, you must not study till just before sleeping. If you read something which requires concentration. your head will continue to work and so you won't sleep well. When the mind continues working one doesn't rest.

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The ideal, you see, is to enter an integral repose, that is, immobility in the body, perfect peace in the vital, absolute silence in the mind - and the consciousness goes out of all activity to enter into Sachchidananda. If you can do this, then when you wake up you get up with the feeling of an extraordinary power, a perfect joy. But it is not very, very easy to do this. It can be done; this is the ideal condition.
Usually it is not at all like this, and most of the time almost all the hours of sleep are wasted in some kind of disordered activities; your body begins to toss about in your bed, you give kicks, you turn, you start, you tum this way and that, and then you do this (gesture) and then this... So you don't rest at all. ¹¹⁵

THE MOTHER

*

What is the way to take rest before going to sleep?

There are many methods, but I will give you one. First, your body must be comfortable, on a bed, in an easy-chair - anywhere so long as it is comfortable. Then you learn how to relax your nerves one after the other, until you achieve complete relaxation. You should relax all your nerves - you can relax them all together, but perhaps it is easier to relax them one after the other, and this becomes very interesting. And when that is done, you must make your brain quiet and silent and at the same time keep your body like a rag on the bed. You must make the brain so still and absolutely quiet that it is not aware of itself. And then, don't try to sleep, but pass very gently from this state into sleep without

being aware of if. When you wake up the next morning you will be full of energy. But if you go to bed very tired and without even trying to relax, to calm down, you will fall into a heavy, dull and unconscious sleep and the vital will lose all its energy. Perhap, this won't have any immediate effect, but it is better to try it than to plunge into sleep when you are very tired.

lf you relax very gently before going to sleep, you will feel great pleasure in going to sleep. If you manage to relax the nerves, even of only one arm or leg, you will see how pleasant it is. If you go to sleep with your nerves tense, you will have a very restless sleep and change position very of­ten during the night. That kind of rest is no good. ¹¹⁶

THE MOTHER

*

Why does one wake up tired in the morning, and what should one do to have a better sleep?

If you wake up tired in the morning, it is because of tamas, nothing else, a formidable mass of tamas. I myself noticed it when l began to do the yoga of the body. It is inevitable so long as the body is not transformed.

[When going to sleep] You must lie flat on your back and relax all the muscles and all the nerves - it is an easy thing to learn - to be like what I call a rag on a bed: nothing else remains. And if you can do that with the mind also, you get rid of all these 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 one much. So, a total relaxation, a sort of complete calm, without tension, in which everything is topped. But this is only the beginning.

Afterwards, you make a self-giving as total as possible. of everything, from top to bottom, from outside to inside, and an eradication, as total as possible, of all the resistance of the ego. And you begin repeating your mantra - your mantra, if you have one, or any word which has a power for you, a word leaping forth from the heart spontaneously, like a prayer, a word which sums up your aspiration. After repeating it a certain number of times, if you are accustomed to do so, you enter 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 like 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 received everywhere, and to enable the body to do its natural nocturnal function of eliminating toxins. And when you wake up, there is not that trace of heaviness which comes from sleep: the effect of the trance continues.

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

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more and more, more and more, and away you go. That is the cure for tamas.
lt is tamas which causes bad sleep. There are two kinds of bad sleep: the sleep that makes you heavy, dull, as if you lost all the effect of the effort you put in during the preceding day; and the sleep that exhausts you as if you had passed your time in fighting. I have noticed that if you cut your sleep into slices (it is a habit one can form), the nights become better. That is to say. you must be able to come back to your normal consciousness and normal aspiration at fixed intervals - come back at the call of the consciousness. But for that you must not use an alarm-clock! When you are in trance, it is not good to be shaken out of it.
When you are about to go to sleep, you can make a formation; say: "l shall wake up at such an hour" (you do that very well when you are a child). For the first stretch or sleep you must count at least three hours; for the last, one hour is sufficient. But the first one must be three hours at the minimum. On the whole, you have to remain in bed at least seven hours ; in six hours you do not have time enough to do much (naturally I am looking at it from the point of view of sadhana) to make the nights useful.
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 - that is indeed painful - and a positive effect, you make some progress, you continue your progress. You make use of the night, so there is no trace of fatigue any more.
Two things you must eliminate: falling into the stupor of the inconscience. with all the things of the subconscient and

or an aspiration in accordance with your nature, to ask for the consciousness and peace and to be protected against all the adverse forces throughout the sleep, to be in a concentra­tion of quiet aspiration and in the protection; ask the Grace to watch over your leep; and then go to sleep. This is to sleep in the best possible conditions. What happens after­wards depends on your inner impulses, but if you do this persistently, night after night, night after night, after one time it will have its effect.
Usually, you see, one lies down on the bed and tries to sleep as quickly as possible, and then, that's all, with a state of total ignorance of how it ought to be done. But what I have just told you, if you do that regularly it will have an effect. In any case it can very well avoid the attacks which occur at night: one has gone to bed very nicely, one wakes up ill; this is something absolutely disastrous, it means that during the night one has been getting infected somewhere in a state of total inconscience. ¹¹⁸

THE MOTHER

*

May I try to make my nights conscious? I pray for guidance.

1. A short concentration before going to sleep, with an aspiration to remember the activities of the night when you wake up.

   2. When you wake up, do not make any sudden move­ment of the head and keep still for a few minutes, with a concentration to remember what happened during your sleep.

   Sleep, Dreams and Sadha110 ⁷⁹

   3. Repeat these exercises every day until you begin lo

perceive a result. ¹¹⁹

THE MOTHER

*

All dream or sleep consciousness cannot be converted at once into conscious sadhana. That has to be done progressively. ¹²⁰

SRI AUROBINDO

*