On Dreams and Sleep

The grandsire had been speaking about the discipline of the body for a long while by then, about food gathered in alms and vows kept without display, and Yudhishthira had listened without interrupting. Bhishma lay where he had lain since the tenth day, on the bed his enemies had made for him out of their own arrows, and the sun was going north, and there was still a stretch of the road he meant to describe before he let go of it.

The next thing he described was sleep.

"The yogin who wishes to always practise sinless Brahmacharya," Bhishma said, "and who is impressed with the faults attaching to dreams, should, with his whole heart, seek to abandon sleep."

It is an odd instruction to hear from a man on a bed. It sounds at first like one more austerity piled on the heap, another comfort taken away from a person who has already given up food and house and company. But that is not what he meant, and he explained the fault before he prescribed the remedy.

"In dreams," he said, "the embodied soul, affected by the attributes of Passion and Darkness, seems to become possessed of another body, and moves and acts influenced by desire."

That is the whole charge against sleep, and it is a serious one. A man spends his waking hours learning to keep his hands off what he wants. He walks past the shop and does not stop at it. He sits down to bitter food and does not complain of it. And then he lies down at night, and something in him stands up in a second body that he did not build and did not consent to, and goes out and does every one of the things he spent the day refusing to do, and enjoys them, and wakes remembering the taste.

"In consequence of application for the acquisition of knowledge," Bhishma said, "and of continued reflection and recapitulation, the yogin remains always awake. Indeed, the yogin can keep himself continually awake by devoting himself to knowledge."

Not by fighting off drowsiness. By having something in the mind that does not go to sleep when the man does.

Yudhishthira did not have to ask the obvious question, because the question had been asked long before either of them was born, and Bhishma raised it himself in the form it had been given by the old enquirers.

"On this topic it has been asked," he said, "what is this state in which the embodied creature thinks himself surrounded by and engaged in objects and acts."

Put it plainly and it is strange enough to keep anyone awake. A man lies on a mat with his eyes shut. His ears take in nothing. His tongue tastes nothing. His hands are where he left them. Every instrument by which he has ever known anything at all has been laid down and is out of use.

"True it is," said Bhishma, "that the embodied being, with its senses really suspended, still thinks itself to be possessed of body with all the senses of knowledge and of action."

He walks in that state. He sees colours. He is spoken to and answers. He is afraid of a thing that is not in the room and runs from it on legs that have not moved. Everything he owns for knowing the world has been switched off, and the world goes on being furnished for him anyway, in detail, with him standing in the middle of it.

"As regards the question started," Bhishma said, "it is said that that master of yoga, named Hari, comprehends truly how it happens."

Hari is Vishnu, who is called the master of yoga because the sleep of the worlds is his own and he is not lost in it. The tradition does not claim that anybody else got to the bottom of the matter first. It says that this was explained by him, and then it says what the assembled sages made of the explanation.

"The great Rishis say that the explanation offered by Hari is correct and consistent with reason."

Which is the older way of saying that the answer was tested. It was not accepted because of who had given it. It was weighed against reason by men whose business was weighing things, and it held, and because it held it was handed down, and Bhishma on his arrows was about to hand it down once more to a king who could not sleep either.

"The learned say," Bhishma went on, "that it is in consequence of the senses being worn out with fatigue that dreams are experienced by all creatures."

That is the first half of it, and it is the half everybody knows. The eye has been open since morning and has had enough. The ear has taken in a day of noise. The body that carried them about is heavy and wants the ground. So the senses withdraw, one after another, the way servants leave a hall when the lamps are put out, and the doors by which the world comes in are shut for the night.

Then the second half, which is the part that matters.

"Though the senses are suspended, the mind, however, never disappears, or becomes inactive, and hence arise dreams. This is said by all to be their noted cause."

The mind does not get tired in the way the eye gets tired. The instruments stop; the operator does not. He is left sitting in a shut house with nothing coming in through any of the windows, and he does not sit still, because sitting still is not among the things he does.

Bhishma gave the comparison that settles it.

"As the imaginings of a person that is awake and engaged in acts are due only to the creative power of the mind, after the same manner the impressions in a dream appertain only to the mind."

Consider what a man does in broad daylight with his eyes open. He is walking to the river and he is not seeing the road. He is seeing an argument he expects to have this evening, and hearing his own answer in it, and watching the other man's face change. Nothing of that is in front of him. His eyes are working perfectly and are not being consulted. He is making a world and standing in it, and if you asked him he would say he was awake.

That is the same faculty, at the same work, by daylight. The only difference at night is that the senses are no longer supplying anything to compete with it, and so what the mind makes is all there is, and is therefore believed.

"A person with desire and attachment," Bhishma said, "obtains those imaginings, in dreams, based upon the impressions of countless lives in the past."

Not upon yesterday only. The materials are older than the man. Whatever he has ever wanted, in this body and in the bodies before it, has left something behind, and what he meets in his sleep is built out of that store.

Then he stated the rule that governs the store, and it is one of the hardest sentences in the whole teaching.

"Nothing that impresses the mind once is ever lost."

Nothing. Not the thing seen for an instant from a moving car and never thought of again. Not the face in a crowd. Not the small cruelty that the man who did it forgot inside a week and the man it was done to remembered for forty years. Every one of them went in, and none of them went out, and the fact that a man cannot call a thing up when he wants it is no evidence at all that the thing is gone.

"And the Soul, being cognisant of all those impressions, causes them to come forth from obscurity."

That is the operation of a dream. Nothing is invented. Something buried is brought up into the light, by a witness that has never once lost sight of it, and the sleeper who does not recognise the face he is looking at is looking at something he himself deposited.

It follows that a dream is not an accident and is not a visitation. It is an inventory. A man who wakes disturbed by what he did in the night has not been slandered by his sleep. He has been shown a page of his own accounts, in his own hand, from a ledger he did not know was still being kept.

This is why Bhishma had begun with the yogin who fears his dreams rather than with the yogin who fears his enemies. The enemies are outside and can be met. What comes up in sleep was put there by the man himself, over lifetimes, one impression at a time, and it will keep coming up as long as there is a night to come up in.

The images themselves have a colour, and Bhishma named what determines it.

"Whichever among the three attributes of Goodness, Passion, and Darkness is brought about by the influence of past acts," he said, "and by whichever amongst them the mind is affected for the time being, in whatever way, the elements, in their subtile forms, display or indicate accordingly."

The subtile elements are the stuff the dream is built out of, and they take the tint of whatever quality is uppermost in the mind at the hour a man lies down. And the tint is not decoration. It decides the end of the dream.

"After images have thus been produced," said Bhishma, "the particular attribute of Goodness or Passion or Darkness that may have been brought by past act rises in the mind and conduces to its last result, that is, happiness or misery."

So the man in whom Goodness is uppermost is not merely dreaming pleasanter scenes than his neighbour. He is coming out of his sleep with something, and the neighbour is coming out with something else, and both of them were asleep and neither was choosing.

Bhishma added the class of dreams that cannot be dealt with by good intentions at all.

"Those images having wind, bile, and phlegm for their chief causes, which men apprehend through ignorance and in consequence of propensities fraught with Passion and Darkness, cannot, it has been said, be easily discarded."

The three humours of the body are in that list on purpose. Some of what a man suffers at night is coming up out of his own disordered flesh, and no amount of reflection will argue it away, and the teaching is honest enough to say so rather than blame the sleeper for everything he sees.

And then the sentence that closes the circuit between the day and the night.

"Whatever objects a person perceives in the mind while wakeful, through the senses in a state of perspicuity, are apprehended by the mind in dreams while the senses are obscured in respect of their functions."

Nothing gets in at night that did not come in by day through an open door. The yogin who guards what he looks at is not being fastidious. He is deciding what will be available to him at midnight, when he will have no say in the matter.

"The Mind exists unobstructedly in all things," Bhishma said. "This is due to the nature of the Soul. The Soul should be comprehended. All the elements and the objects they compose exist in the Soul."

Having said that, he went past dreaming altogether, to the state below it that has no images in it at all.

"In the state called dreamless slumber, sushupti," he said, "the manifest human body, which, of course, is the door of dreams, disappears in the mind."

The door of dreams. The body is what a dream is made in the likeness of, and a dream is a body walking about, and where there is no body there is nothing for a dream to be. In deep sleep the manifest body is folded up and put away inside the mind, and the whole machinery of second bodies and their desires has nothing left to work with.

And here the teaching turns over, because what happens next is not a deeper darkness.

"Occupying the body, the mind enters the soul, which is manifest, and upon which all existent and non-existent things depend, and becomes transformed into a wakeful witness with certainty of apprehension."

A wakeful witness. In the state that men name by its emptiness, the state they describe by saying that they knew nothing and were not there, something is awake, and it is awake with certainty, and it is not guessing. The sleeper is at his least conscious of the world and his nearest to what he actually is.

"Thus dwelling in pure Consciousness, which is the soul of all things," said Bhishma, "it is regarded by the learned as transcending both Consciousness and all things in the universe."

This is why the yogin who abandons sleep is not being asked to hate sleep. He is being asked to notice what is already happening in it every night without him. There is a witness in that house who does not lie down when the lamps go out and does not stand up in a borrowed body either. The whole of the discipline is the attempt to be that, on purpose, in daylight, with the eyes open.

There was a caution to be given before the end, because a man who hears all this begins to want things.

"That yogin who in consequence of desire covets any of the divine attributes," Bhishma said, "should regard a pure mind to be identical with the object of his desire. All things rest in a pure mind or soul. This is the result attained to by one who is engaged in penances."

Knowledge, renunciation, whatever the seeker has fixed on as the prize he means to win, he is to stop treating it as a thing standing somewhere apart from him and waiting to be fetched. Clean the mind and he has it. There is nowhere else it was ever kept.

"That yogin, however, who has crossed Darkness or ignorance," Bhishma went on, "becomes possessed of transcending effulgence. When Darkness or ignorance has been transcended, the embodied Soul becomes Supreme Brahma, the cause of the universe."

Then he set the three attributes out one last time, and he sorted the worlds by them.

"The deities have penances and Vedic rites. Darkness, which is pride and cruelty, and which is destructive of the former, has been adopted by the Asuras. It should be known that the qualities of Goodness, Passion and Darkness belong to the deities and the Asuras. Goodness is the attribute of the deities, while the two others belong to the Asuras."

And having divided everything above the earth between the two parties, he said what neither party owns.

"This, that is, Brahma, which has been said to have Knowledge only for its attribute, is difficult of attainment by either the deities or the Asuras. Brahma transcends all those attributes. It is pure Knowledge. It is Deathlessness. It is pure effulgence. It is undeteriorating. Those persons of cleansed souls who know Brahma attain to the highest end."

Yudhishthira had asked for a road and had been given one that the gods themselves have not finished walking.

"One having knowledge for one's eye can say this much with the aid of reason and analogy," Bhishma said. "Brahma, which is indestructible, can be comprehended by only withdrawing the senses and the mind from external objects into the soul itself."

The senses go in by themselves every night and nothing comes of it. The whole difference is in going in awake.