What Happens to You While You Sleep? | A Spiritual View of a Night's Sleep

OLOlya

What happens to a person during sleep in terms of their spiritual system, and where is their consciousness at that time?

AVAlexander Volchek

Dreams provoke a great deal of discussion in people's lives, of course, because they seem unreal in one sense, exotic. That makes them interesting to talk about: how you flew, traveled, or moved around. Or you might describe a bad dream and ask what it meant. The discussions people usually have create a certain fairy-tale quality, an illusory perception. Why illusory? Because people approach all these interpretations and discussions with a kind of childishness, without even understanding the basic system of a person's night, how the night works even materially, let alone spiritually.

As soon as you approach it from the spiritual side and point out certain aspects, people begin to close themselves off very firmly. If, during the day, you tell someone that they are outside awareness, outside the system of perception, that they do not truly hear, see, know, or understand what is happening, what can we say about the night, when they spend most of it completely unconscious? Interestingly, people analyze and interpret dreams that occur in a particular phase, when they can remember them. A person certainly does not remember every dream. What happens during the rest of the night? There is a very good exercise.

Ask someone to look back over their life, and they will generally begin remembering what happened during the day. Essentially, they will not direct any attention toward a third of their life. They will not feel it, see it, or look at it in any way. You can tell them, "When you look back, it is important to focus on the fact that you had not only days but nights." For example, I have just spent three weeks traveling in Europe. If someone asked what happened there, what it was like, imagine that I would recall and say, "I was in these countries on these days, in those countries on those days." I would not say, "I was in these countries at night, in those countries at night." Where was I, and what was happening at night?

That is a considerable amount of time, and it is incredibly important for a person. If we begin studying and interpreting dreams, if someone wants to approach dream interpretation at all, they should at least understand what happens at night in terms of the spiritual system. Why does the system fall asleep at night? What is that? What happens to the spiritual bodies, the etheric body, the astral body, the human I? What happens to the various spiritual processes at that time, and why is it needed, spiritually rather than physiologically?

Physically, physiologically, materially, we can say that the system rests at night and the body recovers. Can we say the same about the spiritual system? Does it recover, or does your spiritual being undergo certain processes in the spiritual world? Again, suppose you live with the understanding that the spiritual world is primary, that it provides the fundamental system, function, and states, and that the material world exists within it. We understand that a person's life is not limited to their current incarnation, their current embodiment. If that is so, it is in effect all the time, including at night.

Then what happens to a person at night from the perspective of the spiritual world? During the day, we can say we receive various impulses from our spiritual system and act in some way. What happens at night? This approach, this knowledge—or more precisely, this focus of attention—is extremely important. Understanding it is a major task, a serious meditative task. It is important to direct your attention that way and look at what really happens to a person at night. People often come to me and say, "We had a particular dream, and this is how it is interpreted."

"I heard this," "Someone said it," or "I read it somewhere." I always recall Rudolf Steiner, who said that, as a rule, you cannot interpret any dreams at all. It is an extraordinarily difficult task. The likelihood that what you are saying has any genuine, real meaning is very low. Otherwise, it is just discussion, strange interpretations. Imagine you dream something and say, "This means a guest will come today." Some interpretation like that. Who told you that your perception of a guest coming is connected to the dream, rather than to your simply sensing it intuitively and somehow attaching that intuition to the dream?

It is always interesting to investigate what comes first in terms of genuine seeing or perception. Could it be that when you see that a guest will come, the guest actually will not come? That you might instead block or restrict that energy? Interpreting dreams is not merely unnecessary, useless, or potentially misleading for a person. It also leads them away from genuinely serious observation of what happens at night. The nighttime process is critically important in terms of the spiritual bodies. The astral body and the human I separate from the physical and etheric bodies, and at that time the person is essentially unconscious.

There are very different states involving some degree of connection. The idea of connection is highly relative. What is a complete, one-hundred-percent connection, and what is a one-hundred-percent absence of connection? On the one hand, a certain kind of connection remains even when the astral body separates. On the other, what does it mean for the astral body to be one hundred percent present? To what extent is it present at all? Can this measure how conscious a person is, how they perceive their connection with the spiritual world? And how ready is the spiritual system for that person to perceive? People think they will grow and cultivate certain qualities in order to hear the spiritual world.

But within the spiritual world you have a spiritual being that may be entirely undeveloped in certain respects—although "developed" is not really the right word for fundamental spiritual existence. It is in the process it is in. You cannot even call it a level or measure it in parameters or percentages. Of course, you could make some imaginary analysis. A person is where they are. Whether they can consciously rise up from the physical world and somehow transform all these systems is a very big question. Is that possible? It is a broad subject for your own observation and study, for establishing your priorities or your points of support.

So the astral body and the I separate from the physical and etheric bodies. This is an important process, an important aspect of the spiritual world. It is needed for more than simply letting your physical body rest. This is how the whole human system works. Crucially, the physical body cannot live without the etheric body. Without the astral body and the I, it cannot live—or rather, it cannot perceive. That will not happen. To medicine, a person who has fallen into a coma has fallen into a coma. How can medicine explain it? It will describe something that happened to the brain or to the system's parameters. But can people truly observe what is happening at that moment to the person's soul and spirit, to their bodies?

Why did the physical system react in that particular way? If the astral body and the I suddenly left me now, I would switch off. I could not hold on to this state or stay seated. The system holds it all together by itself. It is not as though I walk around controlling it and deciding what to do or not to do. Do I really control it? Am I truly in charge of it? A person needs to ask themselves that question. For the spiritual world, this process is very significant in terms of processing everything that happened during your day. Can you understand what is really happening, where the astral body is, where the human I is? Can you imagine what dreams have to do with this?

And if they have something to do with it, what is the connection? If, during the day, a person does not truly feel or hear the world around them, if they define the entire world only through visual perception and the tactile sensations of the physical world, how can they perceive what actually happened at night? That is why the first focus of attention I mentioned, the exercise of looking back and remembering that there were nights too, recognizing that you lived through those nights, is so important. You can also add a serious meditative observation: throughout your life, at every minute, remember that you have a spiritual world that is alive at that moment, and you do not understand what is happening there.

That does not mean something important is happening there in terms of social structures, the material world, or a material discussion. Not at all. It does not mean something extraordinarily interesting is happening that needs to be brought out and displayed in the material world. But that world is alive. This is very important: it is not limited to your current consciousness, just as your body is not limited to the physical body. The physical body has its limits. People even devised an interpretation and called them the physical body, etheric body, and astral body. They began adding the idea that these are bodies too. But are they bodies? What are they really? Can the astral body be called a body?

You might somehow relate the etheric body to the idea of a body, although whether you can do so at all is a big question. But can you relate the astral body to a body? I am not sure. If you look closely at the terminology, it is essentially impossible to describe. Even personality: when someone speaks of a person's personality, how do you describe it? What is it? There are countless descriptions, interpretations, and details, but you could go on expanding the term forever.

It is like the modern term "artificial intelligence" in technology. Can you describe what it is? What actually lies behind those words? A program, a system, or certain realms? Or take the word "power." How do you describe that? The task, in relation to dreams and to a person's perception of every moment of the day, is not to confine yourself to false descriptions, false perceptions, and false beliefs, but to take a broader view of these processes.