The next, extremely important thing is an insight into the architecture of sleeping similar to a municipal court building – it has completely unimportant floors of bureaucracy where you can be stuck for years; offices, basements, completely different buildings that are all called the same and too often with the same addresses. But they all always have one door and one room where you get all things done, from building permits to utility affairs. And it all usually comes at a price, as does our special room for success. And that price is knowledge, not what the bribe is, but to whom and how much you should give to get your stuff done. In other words, we need to know precisely what you are doing in your sleep, when you are sleeping, when you are dreaming, and when do you wake up; it is so necessary for us to find that one single door.
What is absolutely necessary is to understand that sleep does not have a homogeneous structure. It is a shift between two completely different states, which are distant from each other, almost as the waking state is distant from the darkness of deep and unconscious sleep. Our ultimate goal is certainly paradoxical sleep, that is, the REM phase – the name more widely accepted, although a case of misnaming to some extent. As the nature of such a state is truly paradoxical, I will use that term as well. There is nothing more magnificent than understanding the nature of that wonderful state of dreaming, which unlocks the depths of our being. The moment we are close to the tallest heights, we are completely stuck in the depths and darkness of unconsciousness; it is paradoxical that we touch God facing him with our backs. It is as if some tremendous force has left the gates of paradise open in human life but has tried to hide the path to that gate, to conceal this state, and drive it away from any conscious possibility of cognition. It is as if divine providence had hidden the best possible gift to its stellar child while forgetting where it had hidden it. That hiding is just a correct expression and reason for this whole paradoxical movement. In primordial times, man was most vulnerable while sleeping, so the reactive mind did everything to enable self-defense systems, making dreaming possible only when multiple protection structures were set. It took care of human sleeping consciousness for a long time, precisely because it wanted to make sure that the perfect place was found where the body would not be disturbed by predators, and only after some time actuate the process of dreaming together with another, the last system of self-defense – paralysis. Even today, we are left with these ancient mechanisms in a completely similar way – during the REM phase, there is atony with the body of an individual being paralyzed from the neck down – leaving only the basic survival mechanism to work; it can be said that the organism is paralyzed – during a brief appearance of the most vulnerable part of its existence – dreaming, i.e., a paradoxical state. And just then, the being chooses to pretend to be something predators usually avoid – a still dead corpse, and fearing infection; they give up eating or attacking such a body. An old saying that instructs a man to pretend to be dead and lay low if he encounters a beast casts a whole and true meaning upon this story. And just when the reactive mind has become convinced that a safe place was found, out of the reach of predators, after switching on the ultimate line of defense and deception in the form of paralysis of the body, it enters its actual state and ambiance of that same mind – a paradoxical dream of eating if hungry and being taken care of if it has any need. It flows from one reality to another, and like in a dream of Zhuang Zhou – one really cannot say which is real and which is unreal, as long as the mind is found in a certain reality, it is really not aware of the illusion which it is in. Except in one single case – when a lucid dream is being accomplished. It is an anomaly – a virus that attacks a reactive organism inherited for thousands of years; it is a shortcut that activates a new program inside a program that is of higher priority and over which the main program has no control or possibility of restriction. Its appearance is more magnificent precisely because it uses the resources of the parent program, together with the chief architect, it builds and helps build every corner of the prison for one reason only – to design a perfect escape plan. It has kept building that prison all its life and all the lives of all the generations who have walked the earth, and it has left an escape plan for each of them, in a straightforward way for every individual to use it. Yet that same architect, the reactive mind also has its trump card; by perfecting prison, it has perfected another element of our being – and that is the Ego, which, for all its complexity, cannot comprehend the simplicity of the escape plan that our being has left to ourselves. And we really can’t help but marvel at the fantastic extent to which a human being has complicated such a simple endeavor as lucid dreaming – from the wrong names of states, the wrong names of phenomena, the wrong methods, and the utterly wrong strategy; not only that we can no longer decipher the only map and plan of escape from the prison that we have made ourselves, but we also found a way to become satisfied in that same prison and, after all, completely unwilling to leave it at all. These two opponents – each in their own fantastic way – the reactive mind as a shadow, and the Selfness in the dream take on epic roles, and each uses the mechanisms through which they act in every aspect of a lucid dream, for which there will be some room to present later on.
As we have already said quite clearly, our sleep consists of two different states – sleeping and dreaming, where dreaming is cushioned in periods of complete unconsciousness which serves no purpose at first glance – and is referred to as the nREM phase. The whole misfortune is that it is the reactive mind that takes up the first 90 minutes of the nREM phase after we have fallen asleep. In fact, dreams do not start immediately, but only when this ancient mechanism has been really convinced that we will not be disturbed. And in those 90 minutes, while descending deeper and more confidently into the pits of unconsciousness, we are entirely left without any chance to take a part of ourselves into that world that we will build after those 90 minutes. Entering the dream, we enter it completely deprived of Self, carrying with us only unconscious and basic needs and fears, neuroses, and phantasmagorias. And just when the brain nests inside the dormant realm, it comes out of it and becomes unconscious again for 90 minutes, after which it enters the same mechanism of dream and comatose creativity just to be again obscured by the darkness of the previous nREM phase and prevented from realizing it is dreaming, during 15 minutes of paradoxical sleep. It is as if this game of light and shadow of the mind is an utterly offensive joke, in which a child who is mocked does not even understand how mean and corrupt the game of their friends is. If we compare the change of these two states with the correlation of brain activity, we get approximately the following plan of human dreaming:
As can be seen, paradoxical sleep lasts only 90 minutes after the brain has fallen asleep. It is very short, after which a long phase of dreamless sleep occurs – nREM phase, after which paradoxical sleep comes again, this time for a little longer. The closer our ultimate awakening after the usual 8 hours of sleep is, the longer and more paradoxical dreaming is – it is getting closer to the waking state, but the more we sleep, the more vivid dreams are, and the deception and lies of our sleep get more real. This is where we come to the ultimate essence of our endeavor – which is by no means the beginning of sleep or evening exercise session, but the complete opposite of that. In most cases, we wake up very close to the REM phase, or paradoxical sleep – whether due to an alarm or a habit, we enter a conscious state in which our brain operates in the Beta frequency, which we call the waking or “normal” state. It is this moment of awakening that represents almost the only link when the waking state is on the very border with the neighboring paradoxical state – without an excessive boundary of unconsciousness or interruption of consciousness. Because both the waking and the paradoxical state have a completely similar mechanism and frequency of wakefulness – with the paradoxical state, i.e., dreaming being more awake than wakefulness, so unconscious of the fact that it is awake – from which the notion “paradoxical” derives its meaning. It is this transition between dreaming and waking – which we call the process of waking – that contains this brief, phenomenal element of the overlap of these two states, in which we are equally awake and equally asleep. We have mentioned with the extreme tendency that this is almost the only link because there is another, a completely extraordinary circumstance where the waking state directly relies on a paradoxical sleep – and that is during an afternoon nap, which we will take special care of and take enough time for in the course of this study. Therefore, all the illusion that this state can be reached through meditation, visualization, imagination, and all other “usual suspects” is, in fact, a complete detour – it is far from saying that we won’t be able to reach the goal this way, but it is completely desperate to accustom your own lovely nature to a ridiculous clay uphill road when there is such a smooth and spacious meadow in front of it, which it has already been walking along so perfectly and with such ultimate pleasure. Our nature has done everything to completely cover these few moments with the fog of the ordinariness of life; we get up as soon as possible to look at what time it is and turn off the alarm, we get out of bed mechanically even if we have nothing to do, we get out of bed as soon as if it were the cause of all our doom or root of all our fears, or as if it were a trap from which we must wriggle out as soon as possible. We are further and further away from the most sublime state that the human brain can ever realize by each millimeter of the body movement and every second of time since the moment of awakening. This state is so contrary to all our habits – those that have contributed to us being where we are; it is on the brink of the abyss of insanity as those few seconds of our lives which are uselessly thrown away are the spot in front of which lies the most precious miracle of the human existence. This state is not “somewhere” but “sometimes”; the paradise to which we all aspire so much is a moment of time, not space. It is a moment that lasts only a few seconds after our awakening, which is all the difference between the Adept in lucid dreaming and an utterly untrained mind. The difference between the two is not in the grades that last for years or decades or in Asana and Dharana, which requires us to go to the distant caves. All the difference is in those few seconds after we have woken up, especially once we have added a few more tricks to it.
Haron-press 