Nothingness And Sleep

[Marinus]

So when you are sleeping, either you experience dreams or nothing in my experience. I can't explain experiencing nothingness while sleeping, but I know that their was nothing happening. When I would wake up and fall asleep again without dreaming my sense of time is gone, though the time has passed an hour. Also since starting to dive into enlightenment I had some weird dreams. In my dreams I got lectured by something/someone/myself/ego about some rules on how to do something. This happened twice. I don't remember what it was about and I never had this before and I remember a lot of dreams.

1. Could my dreams be related to wanting to be enlightened? 
2. Can you be aware of the moment of nothingness while sleeping?
3. Or does the brain kick in when you wake up and you forget about being aware of nothingness and return to your ego? 
4. How is this for enlightened people?

[Joel3102]

I recall Ken Wilber explaining in one of his audiobooks that advanced practitioners can maintain perfect awareness during all three states that we go through. Not exactly sure what an experience of deep sleep would be like...but I'm open to the possibility to maintain your awareness of being aware in deep sleep. Rupert Spira has some amazing videos on deep sleep and dreams if you haven't come across them already. 

[Marinus]

1 minute ago, Joel3102 said:

Rupert Spira has some amazing videos on deep sleep and dreams if you haven't come across them already. 

No I haven't, thank you!

[Joel3102]

 

[bobbyward]

i have been aware of nothingness while alseep after taking 5meo dmt. also a few times being aware of this nothingness continued when i woke up for maybe 10 seconds.

its very hard to remember nothingness, its like trying to remember a dream you had months ago. the mind cant make sense of it

words that come to mind to explain nothingness. bliss, infinity, energy, freedom. eternal. 

Edited September 6, 2017 by bobbyward

[Azrael]

17 hours ago, Marinus said:

Could my dreams be related to wanting to be enlightened?

Probably. Your dreams work through unconscious stuff. If you think a lot about enlightenment, you'll dream about it. Just as with anything else.

17 hours ago, Marinus said:

Can you be aware of the moment of nothingness while sleeping?

Yes, you can become completely absolute in that state. Happens sometimes after you've taken 5-MeO.

17 hours ago, Marinus said:

Or does the brain kick in when you wake up and you forget about being aware of nothingness and return to your ego?

You don't forget to be aware. You are still aware when the ego kicks in, as you say. It's just that the content of awareness changes when ego is there. It's like you put on a suit through with you perceive the world.

17 hours ago, Marinus said:

How is this for enlightened people?

When an enlightened man thinks, there is no make-belief fake persona in the back of his mind that says: "Yeah, baby". No one, who is excited, no one who is sad. There might be thoughts, might be excitement, might be sadness, but no one who suffers from them. That's why on one level the experience of the enlightened man is exactly the same as of the unenlightened while being completely different at the same time. For the enlightened everything still happens the same way, it's just that there is no one there who experiences it.

[Grasshopper]

On 9/5/2017 at 4:49 AM, Marinus said:

1. Can you be aware of the moment of nothingness while sleeping?

There is no nothingness that happens when you sleep. If you are aware of a "nothingness", then it's not nothing -- it's "something" because you are aware, even if it's minute. You are never not-aware.

Also, that question comes from the perspective of the mind. You are asking the mind what happens when you sleep (e.g. "what happens between 10pm and 7am?"). Instead, look from the perspective of awareness (the above Rupert Spira video elaborates this quite well). For example, "what does my stream of consciousness experience before, during, and after sleep?" The body goes to sleep, but awareness doesn't. It's always awake to the next conscious moment.

[Marinus]

@Grasshopper To my mind it is like time travel. Now I try to associate more with my awareness and I can't explain this but it feels very weird, when I think about it my brain hurts.

I noticed that when I dream I live a different life, when I'm awake I only have vague memories, but the presence of awareness is there in those dreams. Just like watching a movie, dreams are movies, and reality as I know it doesn't seem different. Reality as I know it seems to be effected by laws of nature, this phenomena and my  awareness  about that is absent in my dreams. Sometimes my dreams feel more real than reality.  

While sleeping my sense of time doesn't exist, I don't know how late I dream or just sleep. At the moment I wake up time is very different and it seems to go slow, because I wake up a lot. Having no perceptions while sleeping still feels like a perception.