Dreamless Sleep Sets Free Spiritual Consciousness

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 9 pages

A short file with a single claim, stated in the abstract on its first page. When deep sleep comes we dream no more: the Higher Self absorbs the functions of the organs through his own consciousness and returns along the seventy-two thousand nerves from the heart to his divine abode. Set free from its earthly prison, the Higher Self enjoys his original state of absolute consciousness and confabulates with seen and unseen worlds.

The consequence drawn is that dreamless sleep is not the least conscious state but the most. Spiritual consciousness is active in it and acts independently; it never sleeps, being always in the Light of Reality — and what reaches the waking man of that activity survives only as impressions projected down to the lower self, which is the file's account of what conscience is. The Upanishadic image quoted for it is of a hawk or falcon roaming the sky which, growing tired, folds its wings and makes for its nest, as the infinite entity hastens to the state where, falling asleep, it cherishes no more desire. Two epigraphs frame the argument: Pindar's line that men are a shadow's dream, and Herder's that a dream is all our lifetime here.

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