Some rise like the lark at early dawn, oth­ers keep late vigil like the owl, but all of us spend a great part of our lives asleep. Insom­nia has emerged as a dis­ease of civil­isa­tion, while the ancients knew both the idea and the prac­tice of heal­ing sleep.

Although we do not dream every night, dreams per­haps hold great­er sig­ni­fic­ance than we, in an enlightened age, would think. Tra­di­tion­al cul­tures all attached great import­ance to dreams, and in our own age it is through psy­cho­logy that interest in them has revived. ‘The motto Where there’s a will, there’s a way is the super­sti­tion of mod­ern man – writes Jung. – Mod­ern man pays a very high price for hold­ing on to this belief: he lacks intro­spec­tion. In his blind­ness he does not see that, for all his ration­al­ity and effi­ciency, he is pos­sessed by forces bey­ond his con­trol. His gods and demons have not dis­ap­peared at all, but have merely been given new names. They drive him into rest­less­ness, vague fore­bod­ing, psy­cho­lo­gic­al dis­orders, an insa­ti­able hun­ger for pills, alco­hol, nicot­ine and food – and above all into neur­os­is.’

Unlike the quack­ery of vul­gar dream-read­ing, Jungi­an sym­bol­ic dream inter­pret­a­tion greatly helps one find inner bal­ance and spir­itu­al peace. Accord­ing to the tra­di­tion­al philo­sophy of yoga, dream­ing is one phase of the mind’s work­ings. In the wak­ing state the intel­lect is turned towards the outer world and the senses are at work per­ceiv­ing, a state com­mon to every human being, and so it is called the uni­ver­sal state of con­scious­ness.

In sleep and dream­ing this dir­ec­tion is reversed, the intel­lect turns inward, only the inner sense, the mind, is at work, and the other senses rest. This phase is called the radi­ant, for in a dream any­thing is pos­sible, and it is said – dreams do not lie…

In his dreams man is cap­able of any­thing, he can leap across space or time alike – be older or young­er – and choose cer­tain situ­ations without ever think­ing that this is impossible. Why are we not cap­able of this in the wak­ing state as well? Is it because the idea is truly impossible, or because we have always heard so and there­fore believe it without ever put­ting it to the test? Ingrained pat­terns? Do we limit our own belief and our abil­it­ies, our pos­sib­il­it­ies, because we accept without ques­tion when we are told: impossible? What if we are incap­able of some­thing only because we have been trained to believe it can­not be done?! Would real­ity be only what we were taught to believe, and noth­ing else? (Dénes Vida, 1992)

The next phase of the mind is the state of deep, dream­less sleep. At such times man feels no desire and sees no dream, yet his con­scious­ness may even be cap­able of mys­tic­al com­mu­nic­a­tion, and so this phase is called the know­ing. Finally, the fourth state of con­scious­ness is the tran­scend­ent plane, when the intel­lect is turned neither inward nor out­ward, but man’s soul, by its own spir­itu­al insight, per­ceives the Abso­lute.

Sci­entif­ic obser­va­tions, too, reveal facts much like those of the ancient sys­tem, like­wise dis­tin­guish­ing four bands of brain waves. The Beta level, vibrat­ing at 14–30 hertz, is the wak­ing state, when atten­tion is turned to the sur­round­ings; the 7–14 hertz Alpha state is the inward-attend­ing state of light rest or relax­a­tion; the 4–7 hertz Theta level is the state close to sleep, com­par­able to deep med­it­a­tion; and finally the Delta state, vibrat­ing at 1–4 hertz, is deep, dream­less sleep, akin to trance and deep hyp­nosis.

Rest­ful sleep is not merely a thera­peut­ic factor. The world of dreams is unex­plored ter­rit­ory, an untapped pos­sib­il­ity of con­scious­ness, the gate­way to a subtler world.