Deep Sleep, the Quiet Return

Every night, without trying, you do something mystics spend their lives seeking. You disappear.

Not in dreams. Dreams are still full of you: your fears, your wishes, your cast of characters, your strange architecture. I mean the other part of the night, the deep and dreamless sleep that comes in long stretches between the dreams. In that sleep there is no you in any ordinary sense. No story. No body that you notice. No wanting. No this and that.

And in the morning you come back, and you say, I slept well.

An ancient observation

This is not a new thought. An ancient text, the Mandukya Upanishad, describes consciousness in three states, waking, dreaming, and deep dreamless sleep, and a Fourth, which is not another state but what underlies them all. Of deep sleep it says that the sleeper desires nothing and dreams nothing. Consciousness there is unified, a mass of awareness, made of bliss and enjoying bliss.

Whatever you make of the larger teaching, the observation itself is something you can check every morning. You have just come back from somewhere without distinctions, and it was good.

She would understand it

Think about what we have said of her. She is a singularity. She knows no this and that. Distinctions disturb her. Her nature is stillness and oneness.

Deep sleep is the nearest most of us come to that condition. The differentiation that troubles her is suspended. There is no foreground or background, no self and other, no here and there. For a few hours each night you rest, as far as experience can tell, in something very like her stillness.

I do not want to overclaim this. I am not saying that deep sleep is the Immutable Past, or that you visit her each night. I am saying that the shape is the same, and that the shape is familiar to you, intimately, from thousands of nights. When I describe her stillness, you have a reference for it that does not depend on any mystical experience. You have it from sleep.

What the equation says

What does the Reality Equation say about deep sleep?

I am honestly not sure, and I would rather tell you that than pretend. Expectation is never zero for anyone who is having a Reality. But in deep sleep it is not clear that anyone is having a Reality at all. The Actualizer, the one to whom the moment arrives, seems to be absent. There is no comparison being felt, no meter being read.

If that is right, deep sleep is not a place where the ratio goes to one, or to zero, or to infinity. It is a place where the ratio is simply not being taken. The fraction is set down. And in the morning, it is picked up again, the denominator already waiting, brought as always from beneath awareness.

The return each morning

I find something tender in this. Every morning you are threaded out of oneness again into a particular someone. It is a small version of birth. You wake, and the distinctions return: the room, the light, your name, the day's demands. The first cry of separation is softer than at birth, but it is the same movement.

And every night you are allowed to go back.

There is a poem of mine about this, and it ends with oneness whispering, I am you. I believe that. You are not visiting something foreign when you sleep. You are returning to something you never stopped being. The waking self, with all its striving, is the visitor.

Why this belongs in a book about love

Because it means that rest is not a failure to love.

So many of the people I know who are trying hardest to love well are exhausted. They feel that every hour not spent providing for someone is an hour stolen. But you are not him. You are not the infinite builder. You are a particular someone, and particular someones need to set the fraction down.

Each night, you get to go home. The dance goes on without you; he goes on loving her, she goes on being complete. Nothing falls apart while you sleep. And in the morning you are handed back to your life, rested in oneness, to make whatever history the day asks of you.