Sleep and Sadhana

What happens when we sleep? Where does the consciousness go? For most people, sleep is a blank state. We have little awareness of what goes on during sleep, except for times when we are having a dream in a state near enough to the waking state that we actually remember details from the dream. We may try to interpret and understand the dream. We believe there may be some significance to it but we are not quite sure.

Western scientists, trying to study sleep, have identified several types of changes in the brian waves generated during periods of sleep and they have tied them to periods of waking consciounsess, dream state, light sleep and deep sleep. However, they bring us no closer to an actual understanding of sleep itself, its purpose, and what takes place in the consciousness during sleep.

There are many things in the world which we cannot directly observe, but which we interpret by the effect they have. Electricity is one of those things. We don’t see the electricity, but we experience its results. Similarly, we can begin to understand what happens to us during sleep by our experience after waking.

Sometimes we wake up groggy and tired. Other times we wake up energetic and can’t wait to start the day. Sometimes we are disturbed by some kind of dream, chaotic, or alarming, or satisfying or uplifting. Clearly the consciousness does not simply stop when we sleep, we simply do not pay conscious attention to it.

During sleep our body uses the time to regenerate itself, resetting a lot of the body’s functions, repairing tissue, balancing out the body’s response, relaxing the tension of the prior day. But sleep obviously is much more than dlown-time aimed at the body’s regeneration needs. There are also vital worlds we enter, or mental worlds. Some even meet spiritual teachers and undergo various forms of spiritual growth while they sleep. It is a well-known phenomenon that someone can go to bed with some certain conce
or problem and wake up the next morning with the solution at hand.

There are a number of methods that spiritual practitioners use to make sleep conscious. This does not mean trying to stay awake, as some people have interpreted it. Rather, it is to build a bridge between the waking awareness and the sleep state so that the experiences in dream can be brought consciously into the waking state, which implies the sleep state begins to gain a conscious element. while the deep sleep state still takes place. Another practice uses affirmations and various forms of focus or preparatoin of the mind through aspiration, prayer, consecration, etc. to ensure the consciousness does not drift downwards toward darker and denser levels that could otherwise drag down the spiritual sadhana.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “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 nights to accumulate. But these things need always 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.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 5, Physical Consciousness — Subconscient — Sleep and Dream — Illness, pp. 97-98