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.
They see his sport, not him
They see his sport, but no one sees him. Therefore they say, "Do not wake him too suddenly," for it is hard to set right one whom this one does not enter again. But others say it is just the waking-world place, for whatever he sees awake, those he sees asleep too. Even so, here this person becomes self-luminous. "I give you a thousand cows, sir. Speak on, for the sake of liberation itself."
Others can see the effects of his dreaming, but no one sees the dreamer himself. So people warn, do not wake a sleeper too abruptly: if the self does not re-enter the body properly through its channels, the person becomes very hard to cure. Some object that dream is really only a continuation of waking, since whatever one sees awake one sees again in dream. Even granting that, Yajnavalkya holds, here in this state the person is shown to be self-luminous. Janaka, won over, says: I give you a thousand cows, sir; now speak further, toward liberation (vimoksa) itself.
svayaṃ-jyotis
self-luminous. The Self that shines by its own light, needing no other lamp; in dream it lights its own world, and in deep sleep its seeing never fails though there is nothing to see.
In the commentaries
Sankara uses the popular caution about waking a sleeper to confirm that the self truly withdraws from the body in dream, and answers the objection that dream merely copies waking by holding that even so the dreamer's seeing, lit by no outer light, establishes self-luminosity; Janaka's plea now turns the dialogue from analysis toward liberation.