Customer Reviews

The Yoga of Sleep and Dreams

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I picked this book up at Auroville near Pondicherry in Southern India. It was easy to carry and read as I travelled - and travelling does provide a lot of quiet reading time.

We all sleep - of that there's no doubt. Probably we all dream - although some people claim that they don't. I suspect it's more likely that they just don't remember.

This book of quotes from Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, founders of Auroville, all related to sleeping and dreaming are full of advice about how to get the most from sleep and from the dreams that come to us during sleep. It helps to identify deeply significant dreams from those caused by the body rather than the mind.

This is not so much a book, but a long collection of short quotes by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, all of which are thematically linked in that they relate somehow to sleep or dreams.

While the quality of any given quote varies quite a bit, overall the book is a fascinating look at these two states of mind from the Neo-Vedanta perspective that Aurobindo helped promulgate. His notion that most dreams are essentially your own internal concerns or noise, but that some are truly 'divinely' or cosmically inspired seems spot on to me. He also claims that the well-trained yogi, after long experience with meditation, can maintain conscious awareness through ALL the sleep stages, continuously, and not just in lucid dreams. If true this is an incredible fact and should be looked into. The more I play with lucid dreaming, the more I seem to retain memories of what feels like 'lucid sleep,' which Aurobindo claims is a possibility. There are precious few sources for accessible information on this kind of thing, and this is a great one.

A very nice collection, well-edited and well-presented. Highly recommended for people with a strong interest in sleep and dreaming but who want to go beyond the mostly New Age drivel that surrounds these topics.

A better book about dreams, perhaps even the best. Sri Aurobindo's very rich but long, dense sentences put me to sleep though. The Mother's are shorter and sweet. Both give incredible and fascinating perspective on the nature of dreaming.