Five Types Of Dreams

Excerpts from Gurudev’s discourse on the Patanjali Yoga Sutras

- Gurudev

This is very interesting. You sleep all your life but have never met your sleep. This is the irony. It is like a person who had lived all his life having millions with him but who did not know how to spend them and lived in poverty. It is like a person who is sitting at a dining table with a very delicious meal but who does not know that it is a meal. He does not know how to eat it and he is starving to death. The same is true with our life, too. There is sleep here but we do not know what it is. We dream every day and we have not known what dreams are.

What happens when you sleep? You let go of everything. If you hold on to even one thing, you cannot sleep. In sleep all your identity disappears. You are neither a male, nor a female. There is no male sleep or a female sleep. There is no rich man’s sleep or a poor man’s sleep. There is no intelligent person’s sleep or a stupid man’s sleep. Sleep is just sleep. In sleep you let go of all your identity; of all your likes and dislikes. You cannot carry anybody into your sleep. However dear somebody is, you cannot take them with you in your sleep. In your sleep, you are devoid of all your identity, your cravings, your aversions, etc. You let go of them all and just rest. You do not do anything.

This is exactly what meditation is – when you do not do anything. In meditation you do not do anything even for God or for yourself. You just let go of everything as you do when you sleep. The knowledge of sleep leads you to samadhi.