Sleep and Consciousness
Development of Pure Consciousness from Lucidity
I argue in my book Control Your Dreams that with the growth of self-reflectiveness in dreaming it moves toward lucid dreaming and onto witnessing dreaming and witnessing deep sleep. Here's an example of witnessing deep sleep from a mathematics professor who has been meditating for twenty years on a regular basis. He describes it in this way, "one experiences oneself to be a a part of a tremendous composite of relationships. These are not social or conceptual, or intellectual relationships, only a web of relationships. I'm aware of the relationship between entities without the entities being there. There's a sense of motion, yet there's no relative things to gage motion by. . .it's just expansiveness. There're no objects to measure it. The expansiveness is one of light, like the light of awareness. Visual, but not visual; more like a light in an ocean. An intimate experience of light."
I don't want to say that you have to be lucid in order to witness, some people get so attached to lucidity that they find they need to let go of lucidity in order to eventually develop the detached perspective of the witness. You can become as attached to knowing you're dreaming while you're dreaming as you can to anything else. After all there is still an object of awareness while lucid in dreams - your dream.
There are several lines of evidence both biological as well as psychological that support this developmental model or at the least that there is a relationship between these states of consciousness in sleep. I have summarized this research in a book I coedited, Dream Images: A Call to Mental Arms. I shall briefly highlight some of it here.
It has been found that increases in REM density have been associated with both the lucid state in nonmeditators and for meditators who claim witnessing half the night or more. Alpha brain waves are experienced in early and pre-lucid episodes and they're associated with witnessing dreams and sleep. A model which has nicely pulled some of this EEG work together is that of Fred Travis. He argues that in meditation you have moments of this transcendence or unity, which isn't to say that you might not also have it when you're running or crocheting or nursing your baby. What these and most of lives activities may have in common is a focused sense of total connection, total communion. Travis and others have measured those experiences in meditation and it turns out that they're identical to to your EEG every time you change states of consciousness. That is move from sleeping to waking to dreaming sleep. The implication is that perhaps there is a state of consciousness which underlies waking, dreaming, and sleeping which I have called pure or transcendental consciousness.
Building on Travis's work is a recent dissertation by Lynn
Mason. In a sophisticated sleep laboratory study she found that
the:
experimental subjects [meditators] reported experiencing a quiet peaceful inner awareness and alertness during deep sleep. Experimental subjects displayed a unique electrophysiological signature. . . These findings support the primary criteria of higher states of consciousness as the maintenance of transcendental consciousness along with deep sleep.