Dream
And the dream state, if you ask? At the time of sleep, by the impressions left from what was seen and heard while waking, a world appears. That is the dream state. The Self, taking the subtle body as itself, is called taijasa.
What is the dream state (svapna)? At the time of sleep, the impressions (vāsanās) of what was seen and heard while awake give rise to an apparent world. That is the dream state. The Self, identifying with the subtle body, is here called taijasa.
- svapna
Dream is set beside waking here. What is the teaching pointing you toward by naming the two?
- That waking is real and dream is false, so trust only what you see by day
- That one unchanging witness lights both worlds, while the worlds themselves come and go
- That dreams foretell waking events through the impressions they carry
- That the subtle body is more real than the gross body it leaves behind
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The world you make in sleep
Ask what the dream state is, and the answer is plain. When sleep comes and the senses close their doors, the mind does not go dark. It takes what the day left in it, all that was seen and heard, and out of those traces it raises a world. People walk in it, places open in it, things happen in it, and while it lasts it is simply the world. Only on waking do you call it a dream.
Notice what this means. Nothing fresh comes in from outside; the eyes and ears have gone still. The whole scene is woven from impressions already stored, the vāsanās of waking life turned loose. So the gross body is not the maker here. It lies on the bed. What acts is the subtle body, the mind and its powers, and the Self mistaken for that subtle body is given a name: taijasa, the knower whose field has become this inner light.
It would be easy to take the lesson as a ranking, dream below, waking above, the one a passing show and the other the solid ground. That is not where this leads. Set the two states side by side and what stands out is not which world is firmer but who is present to both. By day you took yourself for this body among other bodies. In dream that body lay still and you moved through another, in another place, as someone almost unrecognizable by morning. Across that whole exchange one thing did not waver: the one who saw. The worlds came and went; the seer did not.
So the dream is set here not to be doubted and dismissed but to be looked through. It shows the witness loosened for a moment from the body you usually call yourself, lighting a world out of nothing but its own held memories. If you can be so wholly inside a world that is only the mind's own making, and step out of it whole, then perhaps the standing assumption, that you are simply this body in this one waking world, deserves the same second look.
The passage names the states and the witness; whether the waking world stands on firmer ground than the dream, or only seems to, is the question the later inquiry into the real and the unreal takes up.
When the dream ends and you find the body that never left the bed, which of the two did you more truly take to be yourself?
In the commentaries
Dream is the mind set loose from the outer senses, lighting up a world of its own out of the traces (vāsanā) that waking left behind. Nothing new enters from outside; what was seen and heard by day is recombined by night, so the subtle body alone is at work here, and the Self mistaken for it is named taijasa, the one whose field is now this inner light. The lesson is not that dream is flimsy and waking firm. It is that the same witness shines steadily through both, while the worlds it lights come and go. By day you took yourself for the body among bodies; in dream that body lies still and you walk in another. What does not change across the shift is what you are; what changes is only what you wear.