I’ve mentioned numerous times the importance of the period spent falling asleep and waking up, and I want to provide a section with methods to practice with this. I remember when I first started practicing the occult as a teenager and was obsessed. I read a book about Dream Yoga or something. I don’t recall now but I remember it was Tibetan, and one of the exercises was to visualise a Tibetan letter in light at the throat chakra while falling asleep. The first night I did this, I was falling asleep at night visualising the letter. All of a sudden, I was bathed in a white, all-encompassing light and rested in a state of inner-peace for what felt like thirty minutes, and when I opened my eyes, it was daytime; thirty minutes was eight hours and I felt so awake, clear, like I’d just been born.
Unfortunately I’ve never been able to replicate it. I mention it now to underscore the opportunity for practice during this time. I have had many other supernatural experiences during the period, waking up with very strong ‘knowings’ or ‘intuitions’. When I say ‘very strong’ I mean almost being pulled off the bed. I’ve also maintained consciousness numerous times, exiting the world directly into the astral light (my own impure Pure Land) in this period.
Of course, a core instruction can be to simply fall asleep in Nembutsu, holding the central image of manifestation, which includes an intention of awakening. As the last thought falling asleep, this is very powerful. The thing with any night practice is to get the balance of energy right. Too much effort causes sleeplessness, and so it’s more a ‘sublime abiding’, the most important thing being a high mood, but not too high (not too much energy) obviously. The attitude needs to be very relaxed. If any night practice like this ever causes sleeplessness, then either lighten it up, or stop. Don’t let anything interfere with your sleep cycle.
Beyond a core practice like this there are many other ways to experiment with concerning specific intentions/manifestations. One mystic who understood the importance of this period was Neville Goddard, actually a Christian although he got my attention once when I heard him talking in a lecture about an experience of visualising the Buddha spontaneously and realising it was him, essentially Nembutsu. I like his other ideas around this practice also. He taught to make small mental sequences that repeat and illustrate the ‘wish fulfilled’, i.e. what would happen if a goal has manifested. Make a small, ten second mental scene involving movement (to feel yourself into the mental body) and fall asleep looping this (rather than a long, drawn out story that can lead to distraction). He considered the state between waking and sleeping, a drowsy, trancelike state, to be a border between the two worlds and two minds, which my own practice has confirmed. He called the state ‘state akin to sleep’.
The term ‘state akin to sleep’ is a bit misleading for what I want to write about now. Another way to describe it would be BETA STATE, when the mind is more suggestible. What that means is that as you edge towards sleep, parts of the brain quieten down, become less active, and that includes the reasoning, critical faculty. By the time you are asleep and dreaming it is completely suspended, and so you can live in the surreal world of dreams and the whole dreamworld seems real and natural. If you wake up and daydream the same ‘impossible’ scene, then the ‘realness’ or ‘naturalness’ would be gone and the daydreams would be just that, daydreams.