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.
Guarding the lower nest
Guarding the lower nest by the breath, the immortal moves about outside the nest. Immortal, he goes where he will, the golden person, the lone swan.
While the self dreams, it keeps the body, the "lower nest," alive by leaving the breath (prana) on guard, and itself, deathless, roams outside that nest. Being immortal, it goes wherever it wishes. Again it is named the golden person, the one swan that travels alone.
In the commentaries
Sankara takes "immortal" and "outside the nest" to mark the self's independence from the body: it sustains the body only through the breath while it ranges free in dream, so its life and consciousness do not depend on the body it tenants.