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.
Dream, the meeting-place
This person has just two places: this world and the world beyond. The dream state is a third, a meeting-place. Standing in that meeting-place he sees both, this world and the world beyond. Now by whatever approach he reaches the world beyond, taking that approach he sees both, the evils and the joys. And when he falls asleep, he takes some material from this all-containing world, strikes the body down himself, builds the dream himself, and sleeps by his own radiance, by his own light. Here this person becomes self-luminous.
A person has two dwelling-places, the waking world and the world after death; dream is a third, a junction (sandhya) between them, where he can see both. Whatever path leads him toward the next world, by approaching it he glimpses both its sorrows and its joys. When he falls asleep he takes a little material from this all-containing waking world, sets the gross body aside, and builds the dream out of himself, lit by nothing outside him, sleeping by his own radiance, his own light. Right here, in dream, the person becomes self-luminous (svayam-jyotih).
In the commentaries
Sankara takes the dream state as the decisive proof of self-luminosity. In dream the sun has set for this person, the body lies still, the outer organs are folded away, and the lamps of the world are gone; yet he does not lapse into darkness, for he himself becomes the light. Carrying off only a trace of the all-embracing waking world, he projects out of his own brightness the chariots and roads and joys of the dream. Because the seeing continues when every external aid has been taken away, Sankara concludes the seer must be luminous by its own nature and not by any borrowed lamp.