Nidrā Yoga: the Yoga of Dreams and Conscious Sleep

More popular than truly known, the ancestral practice of Nidrā Yoga which originated in India thousands of years ago is a path using dream and sleep as tools for spiritual development.

An interview with Andre Riehl by Sophie Maegerlin
(as first appeared in “Recto-Aquarius” – Switzerland, Autumn 2003)

Q: One generally translates Nidrā Yoga by “the yoga of sleep and dream.” What do you think of this translation with respect to the practice?

Riehl: As for a great number of concepts concerning Indian culture, it is a literal translation which makes sense once placed in a traditional context. The symbolic representation of Yoga is personified by the god Shiva, the archetypical yogi, whose glance, characterised by a quality of sleep called Nidrā, created the world. The third eye, often represented on his forehead, indicates the extraordinary quality of this glance which is the origin of the continuous creative process and which suggests that a glance fixed on the world tends to modify it.

Brahmanism affirms that a non-localised activity in the universe dreams the world. We are, as well as all that surrounds us, the dream of this activity called Brahma (god).

Yoga tells us that in becoming attentive with the process of the dream (and not with the images of the dream), we can enter into the nature of the dreamer. This attentiveness belongs to a quality of observation whose single-minded intensity provokes a process of non-identification. The state of consciousness then experienced posesses a single and unique faculty, that of extending and propagating itself. It is this expansion which allows Brahma to leave his sleep and enable him to recreate the world.

The Mahabharata implies that Brahma dreams the world in order to remember it, because the moment of his waking is equivalent to a dissolution of the universe. He dreams the world in order to be able to create it anew.

In search of this quality of Brahma’s glance, Nidrā Yoga seeks to make possible a passive and dynamic state of observation at the same time. It transmits a method giving gradual access to a glance free from any reaction, any judgement, free from any interior response. It is a practice which urges the process of thought in order to defuse it.

Nidrā Yoga recognizes three great states of thought which are: the state of waking, the state of sleep with dreams and the state of sleep without dreams. In the west, it is considered that these three functions are separate whereas Yoga considers them connected.

Q: How does their connection take place and in what way are they connected?

Riehl: Before approaching what connects them, allow me to specify what these three states of thought are from the point of view of this tradition.

We should first of all understand that Yoga, in general, and Nidrā, in particular, regard thought as a function enabling the management of existential situations in a coherent fashion, but completely inefficient in approaching the domain of essence. Worse still, Yoga regards thought as the major hurdle with any relationship to the spiritual dimension of life! It insists on the pre-eminence of a paradox by stating that a fine observation of the processes of thought allow us not only to put order to it, but also to free oneself from it.

The first state, that of waking, gives us the feeling of being autonomous with respect to the events that occur in our life.

The second is the state of dream. In this one, we are to some extent controlled by the dream and have little or no autonomy. It is the subconscious which directs.

Inside sleep without dream, which constitutes the third state, what unfolds is so far from our ordinary consciousness, that we do not perceive it.

For example, let’s imagine that you are walking on railroad tracks. In the waking state, if a train arrives, you have sufficient consciousness to move aside. In the state of dreaming, you do not have this control in such a systematic way, and you can just as well be struck by the train, fly away or wake yourself.

In the state of deep sleep, you are not conscious of anything, you perceive nothing.

Between these three states, intermediate states insert themselves. They are subtle emanations of the principal states and at the same time are used as passages of one to the other. For example, between waking and dreaming appears an intermediate state which I call “revery,” where one is neither truly awake, nor truly asleep, and in which one starts to dream without being totally absent from the surrounding reality.

In its very nature, this state of revery is the energy which connects the conscious to the subconscious. It is an activity of extremely subtle, fleeting thought and often rebellious to study. Observation alone leads to consciousness of it.

Similarly, between the state of dream and that of deep sleep is another intermediate state, more subtle than the revery, connecting the subconscious to the unconscious.

Finally, there exists an intermediate state between sleep without dreams and the waking state, i.e. between the unconscious and the conscious.

At the margins of the three principal functions, there is a state which the tradition simply calls “the fourth state”, or “Turya” in Sanskrit. It is not really an additional state, but the simultaneous presence of the first three: conscious, subconscious and unconscious.

The energy of the fourth state is identical to that present in the intermediate states, but its intensity is much larger. It creates the bond joining together all states of thought. It reveals a very elaborate knowledge of thought functioning that is almost unknown for us in the west.

Q: In this ensemble, can you specify the place of the dream? Its functions? Is the dream a tool, a springboard, an obstacle, or something else whose dynamics would have a new direction?

Riehl: The dream is all that and still other things.

Like the waking state, the dream consists of images, a layout of forms and colours, words and sounds, and sometimes more rarely, of tactile feelings, olfactive or gustatory. We must understand that what differentiates dreams are neither the images nor the sounds, but only the perception that we have of them.

It is precisely here where the difference between psychology and spirituality appears. Nidrā Yoga belongs to a great corpus - Yoga - whose path is above all a quest for the sacred dimension of life.

As for psychology, it can be regarded mainly as an investigation of thought, of the psyche. Nidrā makes dream a tool for the search of spiritual awakening. What concerns it is above all the dreamer, because it is at the origin of the images, the sounds, the feelings…

The dream is only one mental projection, generally uncontrolled, coming from the dreamer. The path of Nidrā consists in seeking the very nature of the dreamer. Who dreams?

The “me” is that which manufactures the dream; it is also he who builds and organizes daily activity. This “me” - the dreamer - is changing, impermanent. He identifies with the experiences which he lives. And the dream is only one form of experience among others. Nidrā is interested in the close relation between the dream and the dreamer, so difficult to perceive. The problem could be summarized in the question: what is the nature of this relation?

The changing “me” lives these dreamlike experiences; it is still he who tries to give them sense, to categorize them. He passes in turn by different states: the dreaming me, the waking me, and the me in deep sleep.

Q: Can we speak about these categories according to Nidrā?

Riehl: Initially, there is the ordinary dream which we all know. It interests us more often in the waking state when we seek to understand its symbolism. This research does not have great interest for Nidrā because it is carried out using our reasoned thought and our memory in connection with an object which is already from the past and of which we have already lost the “savor”. It is this savoring connected to an immediate understanding which is precisely included in the second category called “lucid dreaming.”

It is in the very interior of the dream that there is a sort of understanding in the process of living itself out. What empassions us is no longer the images but this state of clarity which enlarges our perception. Something is understood and something understands! Generally, the images and the words become more intense. This sensitivity can cause an interior event which one could call an “experience”. For example, I dream but I know that I dream; or I am conscious of the room, of the person who sleeps beside me and those which sleep in other rooms….The dream transcends the usual functions of time and space. I am in the process of dreaming something which is going to happen or which has happened and about which one has never spoken….It is not the fact of having a premonition which motivates us here, but of being in this state of premonition. When the experience is repeated often, little by little one spots this state and it is that which takes primary place. It is not about using the faculty of premonition. It’s about spotting the energy which makes this state of premonition happen.

The third category is that of the revelatory dream. By revelation, one understands a greater intensity of clarity where what takes place is a perfect appropriateness between what is lived and the truth of what is lived. The abolition of all distance enables the emergence of a state of joy.

Q: Is this state of joy the finality of Nidrā Yoga?

Riehl: No. It is only one of the qualities necessary to enter into the most interior aspect of the process. It would be more correct to call it a state of satisfaction (“sântosha”). This satisfaction emerges in the dream of revelation. But above all, it is a door in the sense that it also opens on the perception of the energy of connection, that which is present in the intermediate states about which we have already spoken.

Let us remember that this energy of the intermediate states descends in three different intensities, according to the activities of the thought which it connects. With these three intensities are associated what defines the state of Yoga (the state of unity or union), namely “Sat” (to be), “Chit” (consciousness) and “Ananda” (bliss).

In the fourth state, Turya, these three states are simultaneous; one then describes it as “Satchitananda”.

It is uniquely Turya (or Satchitananda) which one can consider the finality of Nidrā Yoga. More precisely, the end of the effects of the transmission of the teacher towards the pupil.

Because there is a last stage called “Turyatita” and which is the stable and permanent establishment of Turya. This no longer depends on the teaching, but uniquely the practice of the pupil, and also, I believe it is necessary to be precise, of something other which we could call “grace” which surpasses all comprehension.

With respect to Patanjali, Turya is what is called “Samprajnata Samadhi” and Turyatita what is called “Asamprajnata Samadhi” in the Yoga Sutras.

In other words, Turya is a state of conditioned awakening and limited in a measurable time-space. Turyatita is free of time and space, non-conditioned and without limits. It is the ultimate finality, not only of Nidrā Yoga, but also of all paths. It is said that it is in itself the end of all questioning and of all suffering.