In Deep Sleep We Confabulate with the Stars

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 19 pages

The fuller companion to the short Dreamless sleep earlier in this section, and it begins further back — with long kalpas of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy, preceding the self-consciousness that now alternates between waking and sleeping. Sleep is called the shady nook in the sunlit valley of life. The ordinary sleeping man has no experience of any state of consciousness beyond those emerging from his brain and the ever-deceiving physical senses.

The mechanism is stated carefully. In deep sleep ideation ceases on the physical plane and memory is in abeyance, because the organ through which the Ego manifests ideation and memory on the material plane has temporarily ceased to function — which is not the same as consciousness ceasing. Spiritual consciousness never sleeps, being always in the Light of Reality and acting independently of the sleeping man, and the impressions it projects on the brain may survive as conscience. The occultist, knowing his divine Self never sleeps, holds that during sleep his mind may catch glimpses of the Light revealed by Divine Thought which were hidden from it while awake. The last section places the perceptions of the Higher Ego beyond space and time, those being the illusory perceptions of its worldly shadow whether waking or asleep.

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