Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 4, Brahmana 3. The self-luminous Self: waking, dream, and the light of man
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Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
The golden person, the lone swan
On this there are these verses: Striking down the bodily by dream, himself sleepless he watches over the sleeping senses. Taking the light, he comes back again to his place, the golden person, the lone swan.
Here the Upanisad shifts to verse. By means of dream the self lays the gross body to rest and, itself never sleeping, looks down upon the senses that have gone to sleep. Carrying the light of awareness with him, he returns again to his own place (waking). He is called the golden person (hiranmaya purusa) and the one swan (eka-hamsa) that moves alone.
In the commentaries
Sankara reads the "lone swan" and "golden person" as the self that is ever-awake consciousness: even when the body and senses sleep, it does not sleep but illumines them, moving alone through the states while remaining unattached and self-shining.