What happens to the mind when we sleep?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
What happens to the mind when we sleep? There are four states of consciousness. There is jagruti, which is the wakeful state, which is the state we all are in, hopefully. So, basically, there is the soul, there is the mind, there is the body.
I have a diagram of this in my book also, Incarnation. So, when the consciousness of the soul comes through the mind to the body to the outer world, that is the jagrut stage. Jagruti stage.
When the soul’s consciousness comes only up to the mind but is not expressed through the body, that is the swapna stage. When the soul’s consciousness is withdrawn in itself, that is the sushukti stage. And the soul’s consciousness is directed towards spiritual reality, that is the turiya stage or it is also called the samadhi stage.
These are four levels of consciousness. So, even when we are sleeping, the mind is active. The mind is always active.
The mind may be, see, even when we say I dreamt something yesterday, I didn’t dream anything yesterday. See, all that, when we say I didn’t dream anything yesterday, all that it means is that we don’t remember the dreams. Normally, it is not that in sleep we go to sushukti stage.
Most of us, in the sleep, we are in the swapna stage only. So, we do have dreams but we don’t remember the dreams. So, the mind is active going through various places during the dreams.
So, Baldevidya Bhushan in his commentary on the Vedanta Sutra explains that sometimes dreams are the ways by which Ishvara gives the results of minor karmas to us. Sometimes some people just have terrible dreams. You know, I met one person in, where was it? In Panama.
So, he said that I am afraid to sleep. People are afraid of so many things. Why are we afraid of sleeping? As soon as I fall asleep, I start getting nightmares.
So, the body needs sleep but a person is just not able to sleep. Because they get nightmares. So, what is happening over here is that actually good sleep is also a blessing.
Sometimes you feel I get too much of this blessing. I don’t want to sleep so much. But actually good sleep is a bodily necessity, it’s a psychological necessity and it’s also a blessing.
To be able to sleep nicely when we are able to lie down and sleep, that’s good. So, but the point is that different people, some people get nightmares. What is happening at that time is at the mental level certain reactions are coming.
Some of us have good dreams, some of us have bad dreams. Why is that? The mental level, the dream level is not entirely unreal. It is also real but it is far more temporary than the physical level.
And when we have good dreams, when we have bad dreams, we are getting the good reactions or bad reactions of minor karma. Some people get too many nightmares habitually. Then what is happening? Then that means that they are getting some karmic reactions at the dream level.
In the Vishnu Sahasrana, one of the names of Vishnu is said to be Duswapna Nashanam. That one who is the destroyer of bad dreams. So, if before sleeping we chant the holy name, we especially recite the Vishnu Sahasrana, then the bad dreams go down substantially.
So, the mind is still active in the dream state also and whatever we experience in the dream state, that is to some way we are exhausting some minor karmas at that time.